The Joe Rogan Experience - #1941 - Bridget Phetasy

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

Bridget Phetasy is a writer and stand-up comedian. She is the host of the podcast "Walk-Ins Welcome" and YouTube program "Dumpster Fire," and co-host, along with her husband Jeren Montgomery, of the podcast "Factory Settings." www.phetasy.com

the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day hello what's happening my friend I'm back you're back with the baby again just momming and working he's any sleep? I don't look like it. I'm like, how do I get rid of these circles under my eyes? Not really, because I try to work and write in particular after she goes down for, she's sleeping, which is great. Right. It's weird how like, is she sleeping?

That's the, you know, everybody asks you that question when you have a kid. Yeah, well, once you have kids, you realize like's for the first x amount of days or years like you're just in a fog yeah where you just you don't know what's going on because you're just that mommy brain thing's real it is and it's the sleep deprivation like i i think you pull your head out of your butt in different ways. So I feel like I just came to a bit and I'm like, what's going on with my business? I ended up having to pay this ridiculous, I can't even get into it because I'll burn the whole thing down. But it was a ridiculous tax that you're generally exempt from if you file by a date, which why do you even have this rule that punishes small businesses who are usually drowning and it's easy to miss this stupid arbitrary date. And so the city of L.A. came after me and they basically shook me down for like four thousand dollars.

And I was like, I can't. This shit keeps me up at night. I just can't. Is it just an L.A. thing? It's a city of L.A. thing. Yeah. They have their own business tax renewal. You have to get a license that you renew.

Even if you make under $300,000 as an artist, you're exempt from this, which I'm exempt from this. So I'm like, why do I have to pay? So then it's penalties and fee. I cannot. I can't tell you. I can't tell you how this, like I will stare at my ceiling in bed just enraged. And it's most, as a business owner, I'm like, I've got it.

The buck has to stop with me. I want to blame everyone. And sure, this is a bullshit, bullshit law. And maybe my tax guy should have been more aware of this. And I love him, though. I'm not blaming him either. And it has to stop with me. And so this is one of those things that probably just fell through the cracks because I had a baby. And so the tax guy didn't know about it. He did. But so I'm I'm not exactly sure why why we thought we were filing for that exemption in time.

And it might be because they were sending me, because before I incorporated, I was just self-employed. And so I had to file as a self-employed worker. They kept sending me a little card to renew my license, but it was to me personally. So he very well could have thought that we were renewing it, but it wasn't for the corporation. It was to me personally so he very well could have thought that we were renewing it but it wasn't for the corporation it was for me personally it's like such a it's i can't it's i'm not i'm not a rich person you know that's like and it's money that could go i was like i was

saying to my husband like i'd rather go give that $4,000 to a homeless person under the freaking highway than the city of LA, which is just going to set it on fire. The way they shake things down. So all the different taxes and regulations. It's a mafia. You don't realize how bad it is until you get away from it. It's legalized mafia, though. My friend has been out of California for five years and they're coming after him for back taxes.

Oh, my God. And they'll just take it out of your, they'll like garnish your wages. Well, did you see the thing that they were trying to do where they were trying to tax people once they leave California? Yeah, they were trying to pass out a lot. Yeah, which is so wild. Even if you left, you still owe us money. Yeah. That you would have spent if you were here. But you're not here.

But so what? We want the money. Because it's a mafia. It's just slimy. It's just bureaucracy. This is legalized mafia tactics, though. And there's no recourse. There's really nothing.

I called. I talked to a very nice woman. I never blame the people who are just enforcing these ridiculous laws. And I was like, is there anything I can do? And she said, well, you might be able to apply for an exemption on your penalties. You get a one-time kind of exemption. And I was like, what about all of the taxes, which I would be exempt from? And she's like, there's absolutely nothing you can do. It's like once it's set in stone.

I'm like, how is anyone doing this as a small business? Because anyone who has a small business knows you're always, particularly when you're not making millions of dollars and have lots of people doing this stuff for you, you're always trying to just keep up with all of the things that you have to manage. Well, it's so different than any other business, like running a state, because any other business you would say, well, where are our necessary expenses? We need to pare them down. We had to figure out like what, what, what makes things profitable,

what's necessary, what's not. And with bureaucracy, they don't do that. Instead, what's necessary, what's not. And with bureaucracy, they don't do that. Instead, they have so many people, we need to figure out new ways to suck money out of these poor people that are stuck, rooted, literally rooted in this state. So let's just like figure out ways. Let's raise the taxes.

So they raise the taxes. Estate taxes now are 14%, which is so high. That's crazy. So high when you could just go to Nevada and it's zero. I know. You just drive over there four hours and you don't have to pay anything, which is like a lot of my friends did. I have a lot of friends that moved to Nevada. I actually know a lot of people, too.

That's been one of the big exodus states. Nevada is actually nice. It is. If you live outside of the Strip, like Henderson and there's a few of those other towns, they're nice towns. They're really nice places to live. Yeah, there's really beautiful kind of up in the hills area. Oh yeah, gorgeous.

Hiking and mountains. That's the same as Vegas. There's a lot of nice hiking. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about Vegas. Oh yeah, I thought you were talking about Reno. No, Reno too. Reno, yeah. I thought you were talking about Reno. I was thinking- No, Reno too. Well, Reno, you have Tahoe.

Yeah. You have a lot of beautiful areas that's near Lake Tahoe. I don't know why I was thinking Reno. No. But Vegas itself is, you know, it's gross in the strip. Yeah. Because the traffic and all the gambling and all the gambling and all the people just trying to do coke and party and lose all their money.

I get spiritually sick when I go to Vegas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I always joke. I know where all the great chicken noodle soup is on the strip. I end up like the sad girl always in Vegas. Even when I was using drugs and drinking, I would end up in a hotel room looking at all the fountains and all of the lights, just sick. And as we would be driving there, I would be getting just a fever more and more sick. I swear to God, I get like a soul sickness when I go to Vegas. If I wasn't in the business that I'm in, I probably wouldn't like to go there at all.

But, you know, I go there for fights because there's fights there all the time. It's one of the best places in the world for fights. And then I do shows there. Yeah. So for me, it's just I just go to dinner. There's all amazing places to eat there. Yeah. Good shows.

Yeah. Great shows. Yeah. I have fun when I go and do. I think the last time I was there actually was to do a show. It was like that midnight show that they do kind of off, late back. It was fun. It was a good crew.

I like that you get a mixed crowd from kind of all over America. I think the crowds are there to have fun and laugh. Yeah, and they're on vacation most of them. Yeah. Yeah. And even the locals are cool. I've had some dark times there, though, too. Well, it's definitely a dark city in a lot of ways.

I mean, when you have a city that's advertised as, like, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Yeah. Like, that was the whole thing with them for the longest time. Are they still? Is that they're still? I don't think they abandoned that once the internet came along. They went, actually, it doesn't really stay here. So one time I lost a shoe when I was in Vegas.

And I went down to the, I forget where we were staying. It was one of the big hotels on the Strip. And I went down to Lost and Found to see if they had it. And this place was like, it was insane. There were just lockers and it was a little old woman with this huge giant ledger that looked like something out of a movie. And I went in there, I was like, oh my God, what's the craziest thing anyone has ever left here?

And she didn't even hesitate. She said, someone left their prosthetic leg for three days. And she didn't even hesitate. She said, someone left their prosthetic leg for three days. For three days they're hopping around on crutches going, what did I do with it? Amazing. Didn't even hesitate. She had an answer to it immediately. That's hilarious.

I know. I was like, the stuff you must get that gets lost here. Oh, my God. Yeah. Imagine he's just, I just, I immediately in my mind went through a montage of like him at the strip club without his leg and him being like, bro, where did I leave my leg?

I like how you assume it's a guy. It had to be a guy, right? I feel like. Yeah, I feel like women would be keeping track of their leg. I don't know. Women lose their purses all the time. Isn't that easier to lose, though?

A guy losing his leg makes a guy. I just feel like guys would be more blackout drunk. I feel like she told me I was a man. I don't think I assumed his gender. I think she said a guy left his leg here for three days. Yeah, it's not a place that I would move to, but I'm there so often, I've thought about buying a house there.

I thought about because I'm always staying in hotels. I'm like, maybe I would enjoy the Vegas experience more if I had a house outside the strip. If I had money, I would have houses everywhere just so you didn't have to pack. I fucking hate packing. Just show up and have your clothes there. That's worth money. It is nice getting on a plane with nothing but your wallet and your phone. Yeah, when I dated the rich guy, he just was like, he refused to pack basically. That's worth the money. It is nice getting on a plane with nothing but your wallet and your phone. Yeah.

When I dated the rich guy, he just was like, he refused to pack, basically. So he just was all about like, I'm just going to buy a place in Maui. I'm going to buy a place in London so that I don't have to pack. Wow. Yeah. I mean, he was very wealthy. That's ballers. But if I had that kind of money, absolutely. Yeah, but the problem is then you have to think about this fucking house that's baller. But if I had that kind of money, absolutely. Yeah, but the problem is then you have to think about this fucking house that's over there and shit that's going wrong with it.

You do. Trust me, you do. You can outsource people to think for you. Yeah, and then you have to make sure they're doing a good job. Trust me. One of the most baller things I ever saw was one of my friends, very wealthy, got a new house. And they just had the people make sure that everything was stocked. So he, he basically went, made sure they were doing all the things

that he wanted them to do to the house and then showed up. And it was like Christmas for me when I was opening all the cabinets in the kitchen. I'm like, how did they know? And his whole kitchen was stocked with everything, his refrigerator, every, all the linens i'm like this is this is baller just being able to like show up in a house and have it set up for you like the whole thing is like a christmas present yeah there's pros and cons i guess to that yeah the the cons is you're dealing with a bunch of people as long as you have a bunch of people that are good at their job yeah yeah that'll be good but then you have to think about them. You have this ecosystem that you're responsible for. I like how I'm not like I would save lots of poor people.

I'm like I would have a house everywhere with my own clothes. So I don't know. I just hate packing. Even for this trip because now I'm packing for a little one and we're in a hotel which I don't know if you've ever lived in a hotel with a under 10 month old but it's challenging when it comes to nap time and you don't have like an extra room to go in so we're like what are we gonna do I guess we're just gonna like sit here and read yeah but you can't even really read other than on a device because you have to keep it dark. And so we're feeding her and I brought I had to pack like a little drying rack for her bottles.

And it looks hilarious in there. I'm like, we're going to make do. We brought her little like tray for her for her stroller and we're feeding her. And it's fun. Reading on a device is the way to go anyway. I don't I need to read books. Yeah, but you know those books like those, what are those? The Kindles? The Kindles, when it looks like paper? Those things are the shit. My husband's all about his Kindles.

It's so much better because you could keep 150 fucking books on this little tiny thing. Yeah. And the battery lasts forever. And anytime you want a book, you get it instantly. Yeah, Jaren, that's pretty much how he only reads on his Kindle. He loves it. I like the paper books, but it's probably why I don't read as much as he does. Yeah, but it is great.

I mean, paper books are cool. It's like having a physical thing is nice and turning pages is nice, but there no like especially if you're traveling there's no better thing than a kindle when i used to travel and backpack my half my stuff was like books i'm like why why am i doing this there's there's ways to minimize the amount of books i'm lugging around but part of it was fun you would leave a book here and take a book and like the little hostels or wherever you stayed bless Bless you. Thank you. That was a good one. That was one that stressed my back. I actually saw that.

Did you? Yeah. Thank God we're not in the COVID days. Remember during the COVID days, someone would sneeze and everybody would panic? No. No. God, they mind-fucked us.

People are still like that in LA. Oh, my God. I saw somebody walking across the street yesterday with a mask on out here. I try to be good faith, benefit of the doubt like maybe they have a cold and they're trying not to spread it yeah maybe we're just more more aware of that stuff now if you're sick you're just trying not to get other people sick yeah yeah well listen um i freak out when it's like cancer parents like real yeah immun-compromised.

There's a guy in our neighborhood who from, I had this conversation with Jaron again. I was like, look, because he was like, he's in a mask walking. Why? And I was like, hey, look, maybe. And I just listed all the things I listed to you. And he was like, no, because he wasn't like that before the pandemic. I used to see him all the time. I was like, damn it.

Well, there are a lot of people like that. There's a lot of people like that. They just never came back. They just, they're committed to this idea that, it's also like there's this narrative that was being established that if you're wearing a mask, you're a good person. Yeah.

And despite all of the evidence, it shows that they don't really work, especially when you walk around with those stupid surgical masks on. Remember the cloth ones? Yeah. I think I wore a bandana for like the whole early part of the pandemic, which has just made me look cool, but did nothing. Well, it's good because you can keep it around your neck.

Yeah. And it's not horrible. And they just pull it up when you have to. But people realize it was just, well, we were like signaling, right? We were signaling, hey, we're trying to be a good person. We know this is weird times. You know, we're all right. But then there was a few of us that had COVID and were like, hey, this is crazy.

Like, this is not much different than having the flu. Like, we never do that with the flu. If you go, it used to be that. And you probably should with the flu. Yeah. Way more likely to kill children. Way more likely to affect pregnant women. Yeah. Well, old people are much more affected by covid covid is rough yeah it's rough on fat people rough on

old people the fats and the olds yeah that's those the ones that got it and and people with bad vitamin d and bad immune systems and you know and poor diet and the thing is the the crazy thing is like all these people wanted to fix it with a drug. You know, that was the conversation that I had with Peter Hotez on the podcast when I asked him, like, do you take care of yourself? And it turned out he didn't at all. Like he eats junk food. He doesn't take vitamins, barely exercise. He would walk a little bit. Isn't that what they're trying to do now with like obese kids? Recently came out they're like you can get surgery for these kids who are under 12 12 years old and it's like or tell them to go get their fat asses outside and play doing that to a child doing that surgery to a child is fucking criminal like there's a way

to avoid this this idea that you can't avoid this by giving them healthy food is so fucking stupid it's so mind-blowingly stupid. And I don't understand it other than money. I mean, I'll try to be as objective as possible. Maybe there's a reason why they're doing this, but there's not. There's no reason that makes sense other than they're doing this because of money. They want to make money. Yeah, they want to make money. There's money in medicines. That's why they keep pushing the semaglutide now. You see that everywhere. Yeah, I've heard about it.

Yeah, we talked about it on the podcast. 34% of what you lose is muscle, bone mass, and connective tissue. Literally, 34%. No. It's crazy. I mean, there might be a way to mitigate that with weight training while you're doing it. I don't know. It kind of makes sense.

Like if you're doing that and you're also weight training. But there's no free lunch. There's no biological free lunch when it comes to a quick fix for something that has to do with you're putting the wrong things into your body. Your body's reacting in a very negative way. It seems dangerous to try and make people think that they can just take a pill or have a surgery to fix their problems. It is dangerous, but it's also it's a sign of being captured by an industry. There's an industry that relies on human beings and their illnesses in order to generate vast amounts of wealth. Yeah. And that's what they're doing. They're further feeding this.

And this this industry was propped up during COVID in a massive way. The amount of money generated during COVID for the pharmaceutical industry was fucking tremendous. And so when they're trying to figure out new ways to expand their income, this is a way to expand their income. Look at all these obese people that were unnaturally or disproportionately affected by COVID, why don't we figure out a way to fix them with drugs and then we can sell them the drugs? And that's what they're doing. Or sell them the surgeries or sell them the treatments.

And the treatment is don't eat fucking horrible things. I know. And people will say food deserts and all these other problems. But I still think it's easy. I mean, I don't know. I it's it's easier to eat well it just takes a little bit more time generally it just doesn't taste as good that's what it is like if you really want a milkshake and a fucking big mac and fries that's what you want right and then if instead you're eating a salad with grilled chicken on it you're like fuck this i don't i was i was a weird like drunk person who craved salads so i i would be like i want a greek salad right now it's just a i i was that's why you're not fat i mean i i think

we got a lot a pretty healthy dose of fat shaming growing up. Just in our family. It was just around from the grandparents. Grandparents fat shamed? They didn't fat shame specifically. It was more just the, you know, like my grandmother had a pillow. You can never be too rich or too thin. And it was just an embroidered pillow that she had. But I'm like, I wonder what that imprinted in my young mind.

You could definitely be both of those things you could be too rich if you're too rich then you're some fucking alien that no one can relate to and everybody's mad at you for having all this money yeah or any of those guys bezos yeah bill gates any of those people that have insane amounts of money you're a fucking target yeah you know and when you're having bridges taken down because your yacht is so big you can't pass through the bridge we cover that on dumpster fire all the time apparently they abandoned that idea well because they were throwing eggs at him and his yacht and stuff like that and the people were very angry and they were not having it i don't i don't know what they were thinking'm like, didn't they take this into account when they were building this thing?

Or did they just assume that they could take it down because he's the richest guy in the world? I wonder what the conversation was. I wonder if he said, hey, I want the most baller yacht ever. And they're like, we got you, fam. And that was the end of the conversation. And then they're like, we're going to have to disassemble this bridge. And they're like, it'll be fine. And he's in his office like, they're going to do what? A bridge. Well And they're like, it'll be fine. And he's in his office like, what? They're going to do what?

A bridge. Well, I don't want to know about it. Like, hopefully nobody will notice. I think these guys are really truly, and I did see this even when I was with the wealthy guy I referenced earlier, just you get so used to getting whatever you want and never hearing no. It, like, damages your brain. you want and never hearing no it like damages your brain yeah there's it's not good to never hear no in your life even as a child and even as an adult yeah you know you have to there need to be there when was the last time you heard no joe all the time yeah i feel like i feel like you hear

i feel like you're pretty grounded like somebody. But again, you aren't like multiple billionaire. No, I ground myself too. This is very important. You hang out with the poors. Yeah, hang out with the poors. And also, even though I'm wealthy, I don't live like that for the most part. I'm not going to those parties and jetting around. There's a thing that people do

where they get in that those the groups of people and then those are their new that's their new ecosystem they're around those people all the time that's that's their community yeah and then you're keeping up with the Joneses and oh I'll never forget being in San Tropez and being with that guy and he was the the so wealthy from my perspective, who was like a backpacker with a car that was leaking in my garage and maybe $7 in my bank account. And he felt poor in San Tropez looking at all these yachts coming in because when you're a couple, a hundred millionaire, it's still nothing compared to Billy. What's that? There's that comparison. That's like a million dollars. I always botch this. It's like, what's that there's that that comparison that's like a million dollars i always botch this

it's like what's the minutes yeah a million dollars is like 14 minutes and a billion is 33 years or something like that what is it like a dollar a minute or something like that a thousand dollars a minute whatever it is you mean you add it up trillions or many, many years. Years. Yeah. And these are multiple billionaires. So it's just another. We were, he was like looking, yacht shopping. And it was ridiculous. I've got to do really crazy things for a poor. I always joked it was like visiting the zoo of the.001%.

And when he was yacht shopping, actually abramovich is that huge he's you know had the biggest yacht kind of traditionally in the world for a long time and it came into the san trope like harbor or whatever and it dwarfed these mad and when you're actually down on a boat when this thing comes in it is it's like a it's like a tanker it's huge yeah and i can you can almost like hear all of the the erections just deflate of the guys in the yachts around i feel like you could just feel that well the problem is with those people it's like that is their currency their currency is like how they define themselves as being successful. It's all numbers. So if you're playing that game, like the more numbers a person has, they win.

Even if you have all the trappings of wealth, all the beautiful stuff, you could eat wherever you want. You can fly wherever you want. You have a wonderful time. You can relax. You don't have the stress of having to pay your bills. Or pack. Yeah, or pack. You know, when you're playing that game, the people that have more win. And so you're always like in this weird fucking game where you're trying to keep up with the most wealthy people on the planet. But if you go on vacation, like we went to Italy, and you see some of these yachts that are like outside of these islands. And, you know, it's crazy. It's crazy to imagine that these people feel poor compared to someone who pulls in with a bigger one.

Yeah. And insecure. Like, oh, I'm not making enough. It's crazy. Right. And you've got a gold digger with you and she might jump ship in the middle of the night and swim over to the other boat.

You wake up, you're like, Ursula? Where'd she go? She had a bikini on that big yacht. Motherfucker. And it's Leo. You're like, damn it. God damn it. Leo struck again.

Well, if she's over 30, you don't even have to worry about Leo. Over like 23. Yeah, 30. 30 is like over the hill. Remember the photos of Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend? Yeah, she was like smiling at him. And then Jeff Bezos like was joking around about pushing him off a cliff. Like, yeah, you don't have to worry about her, bro.

She's 50. Yeah. And you could see him do it. You'd see her doing like the cost benefit analysis like Leo or richest man in the world. Well, also, like, can you even keep Leo? You're not, that's not going to work. No, you need to be like 19. Well, even if you're 19, as soon as you hit 24, he's going to be shopping.

Have you seen like all the stuff, this is where the internet is so glorious. They make these like charts and graphs of every single one of his ex-girlfriends and when they broke up, what age and it's always like 23 he's like oh sorry well they probably want to do something with their life or they want to get married or they want to settle down or they just want to find meaning we were joking on dumpster fire about how i my theory is that's how he feels he's like how because i'm like he's this like eco warrior on his yacht which don't get me started but i was like, he's this eco-warrior on his yacht, which don't get me started. But I was like, maybe he feels like by taking their fertile years, he's diminishing the population.

They're still fertile. No, they're still fertile. Yeah. At 23. There's no, he's having fun. And you're allowed to have fun. Of course. What's fascinating to me is that people get mad at him for dating 19-year-olds.

Because he's 50 or whatever he is. He's close to 50, right? He's 50. Yeah, he's close to 50. What's fascinating to me is that people get mad at him for dating 19 year olds because he's 50 or whatever he is. He's close to 50, right? Yeah, he's close to 50. He's 46, 7, 8, something like that. That's a big difference. It's a giant difference, but here's the thing. I've been there. If it was the other way, if it was a 19 year old guy and a 48 year old woman ever be

able to be like, you go girl. Nobody would be upset at all. Well, I think there is an example of this in Hollywood, and I do feel like people also are like, that's gross to her, too. I can't remember who it is. Doesn't stick. Doesn't land with you? No one's feeling bad for that dude. No, no.

No one is feeling bad for a 19-year-old guy dating a 50-year-old woman. And I don't think people are feeling bad for these 19-year-old girls, either. I think more they feel like the older person is a bit of a predator so i i think that i know she gets called a predator this woman that i was reading about yeah who i who her name escapes me because i know you're talking about yeah yeah i was like it's kind of i i mean i've been in that age gap before and it's i was my editor and i were talking about it uh for spectator he and i were like going back and forth because he's like oh what's the big deal like it's kind of gross like not i was like 23 i don't have a problem with because but for some

reason 19 i'm like that's teetering on yeah if it is what it is though it's like really though yeah would you want no i definitely would not want my 19 year old dating a 50 year old billionaire. But it's the thing about even a billionaire. I don't know. Is he? I don't know what he's worth. I mean, not that that would matter. He's probably pretty close. But it doesn't. It doesn't bother me the way it bothers some people. Because I feel like I mean, it depends on who the guy like you know if you're dealing with some sort of a situation where you feel like that person's being forced to do things or being exploited or you know right no I mean they're just all having fun together like I'm not sure no I know Kate Beckinsale doesn't she date a bunch of really young guys? I mean, she was dating Pete Davidson. Yeah, she was dating some other guy that I know, and he was really young too, but fucking handsome guys, and everybody's like, you go, girl.

Yeah. No, I was thinking about this, and I don't know why 19 is different for me than 23. It was like he was kind of bordering on Dirty Old Man, and I feel like 19 tips you into Dirty Old Man and that age gap. And I was saying to my editor, I'm like, I don't know. There was just always this moment when I was with guys who were that much older than me when I distinctly remember it, when I noticed the elasticity of their skin or the lack thereof. It was like this weird thing where i was like what am i doing

elasticity the skin isn't it funny because that's biology yeah that's your body saying like this guy's got bad loads he's gonna he's gonna give me a fucked up kid with his bad loads just it was something it's something no matter how much money and how handsome and how successful they were, there was just something where I'd be like, and maybe it's just me, but I was in my prime. I'm not in my prime anymore. But when I was, everything was like taught. And when a woman's in her prime, it's so fun. It's just such a fun time to be a woman, especially in the West. And, you know, girls going wild. It's just such a fun time to be a woman, especially in the West.

And, you know, girls going wild. And I just remember being like, I don't know if I can. It's a weird time now. This is a long-term thing. With social media, it's weird now because, like, people actually make a living by being in their prime. Like, if you're a woman in your prime, now there's OnlyFans and there's all these different social media stuff. Fucking strange. You know, influencers and... I'm grateful.

I think of how glad I am that I came of age. I'm so worried about... I'll probably be turning to you later in life when I'm like, how do you navigate this with girls? Because I don't know how you do so that you keep them somewhat innocent, somewhat protected, somewhat. How do you keep them from like really thinking that this is the messaging they're getting is like, who's the biggest star? Kim Kardashian is the person that is is making tons of money and all these women are making so much money on only fans and how do you tell your daughter how do i tell

my daughter like there's that's not necessarily a way you want a path you want to go down yeah it's it's very tricky because also working in an office all day doing a job you hate, being exhausted at the end of the day and being drained and making very little money is also not a path you want to go down. But that's a traditional path. Right. And it's obviously it has nothing to do with the way you look and, you know, your pictures on Instagram. Like that's not generating you. It's not like you're a sex object that's generating you this money. But if you're a woman that is, if you're any person that's doing

a job that you hate, and it's incredibly time consuming and taxes you emotionally, you're there all day, you're working in this very bizarre power structure where you have to adhere to certain social rules and regulations. And it's your whole life because it's most of your day. The idea that it's only eight hours a day is not true. You also have commuting and most of these people that if you work in a significant job, you probably have to work overtime or you're on salary. So you're working on weekends. You have projects you have to work on.

You have to work put together. I have friends that have worked in Hollywood, you know, like in studios and stuff like that. And that work is never over. No. You take it with you on the weekends. Yeah. You're always exhausted. So you're telling me that they should probably sign up for OnlyFans?

Well, it's like, what do you want to do with your time? I mean, you can, look, Kim Kardashian is a good example. Kim Kardashian, as much as people like to give her a hard time she's worked very hard to get innocent people released from prison no i she's done a lot of positive things yeah she really has no i'm i'm i'm just wondering about the the culture well just it's when i was pushing back and like showing my boobs online one of the things i hated was that you can't this idea that you can't be smart and naked for a woman. I always push back against that. Like stupid.

It is stupid. Yeah. You can't be an intellectual and you can't show your boobs. You can you can be both. I and a lot of men have pushed back and said, well, boobs are a sexual thing. It's not the same as men. And that's a whole other discussion. But I still I think there was a moment where I was doing a little bit of both like boobs online and waiting tables.

And there was something waiting tables was soul crushing in a different way. But I didn't feel there was something you wouldn't didn't feel exploited. It wasn't I was I would be guilty of self exploitation. If that's even a thing which feels like a weird thing. But I think you can exploit yourself. Sure. And and I don't feel like I was necessarily exploiting myself. But then when I saw, I don't know.

My husband and I were just talking about this. We started a podcast called Factory Settings. And we were just having a discussion about porn. And I was like, every time I look at porn, I feel like there's something in me that I feel. It's like going to Vegas. I feel like my soul gets a little bit sick or something. I can't explain it. It's just a feeling.

And I feel like on the other side of that, even if I was like, oh, this is just tasteful nudes, there's still random guys jerking off to that out there. And what cost does that have on my spirit or my soul? Isn't that weird? That's a weird thing to even think of. Like it's the whole porn discussion is very strange, right? Because everybody wants to have sex. People enjoy sex.

It's a biological urge. But filming it and then showing it to other people is where the real problem comes in. Yeah. And I, again, there seem to be kind of grades of it. You know, it's like what I was doing online would be like positively adorable by today's standards. It's like boobs and bum shots. You're never going to find a picture of my vajayjay out there. But isn't it funny that there's's something about that like that part show the vagina and then all sudden oh like that was hustler yeah there's a thing about playboy didn't show pussy that you really yeah

you just saw like that kind of the door yeah the pussy you never got to open the door and see inside the house the hustler was like let's turn all the lights on and let's come inside let's see your womb literally yeah yeah no it's some it's like i'm so thinking about all this because i'm trying to write a book and it's all about like i don't know if how to explain my life to my daughter and how do I have conversations with her about sex and love and marriage and um this in particular is I don't think and then I wrote that piece that I regret being a slut and got a lot of pushback from people sluts um I got a lot it's your personal feelings there's nothing how can someone give you push it's your personal feelings. How can someone give you pushback from your personal feelings of what you regret? Well, the argument is that did I regret it at the time or am I only looking back at it and regretting it now that I'm older?

But I'm like, that's the nature of regret. You're not usually regretting things like in real time. But isn't that about the way society, our society, Western society, particularly American society, criticizes that? Because in European culture, sex is looked very differently than we look at it. Even in Canada, they look at sex very different than we look at it. It's not shameful for girls to engage in sex or want sex. Yeah. And a lot of countries, it's totally normal and natural.

Right. And they have completely different thoughts about it. Like in some countries, they'll show porn late night on television. Right. I remember that. I was watching porn. God, I forget what country I was in. It might have been Germany. Probably Germany.

I was flipping through the channels late at night and there was porn on TV. I was like, this is crazy. Like, this is wild. It's like regular TV, but it's normal for them, you know? But it wasn't crazy porn. It's just people having sex. Yeah. So do you think that we just have a more unhealthy relationship to sex? We certainly do. Yeah, we do. We have a Puritan, I mean, our society was founded with those sort of Puritan values, right? And those, the echoes of those,

they reverberate for generations and generations. Of course. And it affects, you know, because your grandparents had a thought about it and your parents had a different thought about it. And it's slowly, you know, we're having conversations about it and it sort of changes the way the overall culture views it and thinks about it.

And some people think it's empowering for a woman to do something like OnlyFans because you can make all this money and it's a business and why shouldn't you capitalize on that? And you're not being exploited. You're exploiting yourself and you're doing it willingly and you're making all this money and isn't that better than working at wendy's and you know there's there's those those kind of arguments i mean those aren't the only two options you know it's not a binary wendy's are or i i don't yeah that's i think a lot about this because there seems to be kind of a pornification of everything. So I don't know if it's an overcorrection. One of the things I did push back against when I was when I was posting nudes online was this kind of Puritan ideal that we have about sex and in a particularly like a woman sexuality.

I think there's been a lot of progress in that department, but is now an overcorrection because there's this idea of luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson writes a lot about this. It's brilliant. And when I interviewed the Women's Liberation Front, when they came on my podcast, they were talking about, we look at what people who consider themselves allies do with their own kids as opposed to what they say. So I think it's very easy to be like sex work is work. Everybody should be able to do that. It's like Megan was writing about that recently.

Oh, really? Murphy. Yeah. Megan Murphy wrote something about this whole idea of calling it sex work instead of prostitution. Like she wrote about it very recently. Okay. Because, you know, she had that debate with that woman who was on Lex Friedman's podcast. Aiea?

Aiea? I don't know. He said it. I thought I was pronouncing it one way and then I heard Lex say it and I realized I must have been saying her name wrong. Yeah. That's a tricky one, you know, because like, I feel like people should be able to do whatever they want to do. Like if you want, look, if you can have sex

with someone for free, why can't you have sex with someone for money? I just, I don't think that anybody should be able to tell you what to do. But as soon as that happens, then you open the door to pimps. You open the door to your predators that are exploiting women and selling them and taking all their money and becoming very wealthy from them. It almost always hurts poor women. So when you sit in your mansion and say, yeah, let's let men self ID into women's prisons. That affects a population of women that you don't really give a shit about or have to worry about. This is never going to affect you. That's the wildest shit that's going on with the transgender movement.

This idea that you can murder women, be self-identified as a woman, and then you don't have to even take hormones. You get erections. You have sex with women in prison. It's crazy. I think Constantine had a really funny tweet about that where he's like, I would like someone to do a study on how many people experience gender dysphoria in the courtroom when they're being sentenced. It's probably pretty high.

Yeah, like, excuse me, I'm a female now. You're dealing with liars and murderers and con artists and criminals. And of course, they're going to find a way to exploit this little loophole and this new loophole that didn't exist a decade ago. Yeah, I think people who are voting for these, in particular in California, you're seeing so many of these policies get put into law and they're going to have long term effects. And Abigail Schreier just did a whole long form article on where was that? She just was writing about how they've kind of decriminalized prostitution, basically. So they've made it harder for the police to if they see some something, a young girl who looks like she might be pimped to actually intervene and stop.

And she and her article is like, who is this even helping in this in this law? But again, she mentions this in her article. It's generally hurts poor women who don't really have a voice these laws. So and this is this idea of luxury beliefs. You can you can afford to have this belief because it's not really going to affect you or your daughter. As the women from Women's Liberation Front said, are these women who are out there saying sex work is work? Yes, queen, go do it. Are they encouraging their daughters to go into sex work?

No, they're encouraging them to go to USC and become a filmmaker. They're encouraging them to get into Harvard. They're encouraging them to go. Don't you think a lot of the people that are saying that don't have daughters? Oh, that's a good point. I think there's a lot of that. I think there's a lot of this. Like older liberal women. Yeah. This view of things, it's like sort of based on, you don't have a stake in the game. Yeah. Yeah. I see a lot of that with older liberal women that have children, that have these views on things. They do have children or don't have children?

Don't have children. Yeah, don't have children. Don't have children, I meant. Like you see, I've seen some of those arguments about drag queen shows for kids, like family-friendly drag queen shows, which is a very bizarre thing. It's very bizarre that that's not a singular event not a singular event. There's a lot of that going around. And I've seen this argument where people are saying like, you know, I would want my, you know, child to grow up and know that you can express yourself in any way possible. Okay, well, how would you feel about family-friendly strip shows? Right. Where you have biological

women that are sticking their ass out and put a put a dollar in her g-string billy you know like you would be weirded out by that right well it's not much different because it's sexualized like a drag queen show in a lot of ways is sexualized and so you're you're sexualizing this idea of these men many of them have autogynephilia. They get a sexual kink out of dressing up as women. And then they're doing that in front of children. And then the children are, like, it's one thing to say, hey, they should be able to do whatever they want.

People love drag queen shows. You should definitely be able to do that if you're a grown man. You should definitely be able to do that if you're a grown man. But it's another thing to say, let's take children to see this and encourage this and also encourage these children to participate and to go and give them money. or a drag, I don't know how they identify, but with a G-string and high heels with stars covering their nipples, and they have giant fake tits, and they're holding hands with this little child, and everyone's cheering, and they're walking the little child around and showing them how to twerk.

I'm like, this is fucking wild. Because it's only sexual. So you're sexualizing this in front of these children, which is very weird but i feel like okay so there's drag queen story hour and then there's this is a different thing right this isn't like this is just people going to drag queen shows having drag queen shows for children there's just been a lot of you know a lot of the far right people the far right a lot of, you know, a lot of the far right people, the far right. A lot of, you know, Christians were protesting against this and they find it offensive. And libs of TikTok will, you know, find these videos and post it.

And the thing is, it's like it's not one. It's not just one instance where some wacky community thought it was cool to do this. It's like, why is this happening and why was this never happening before? It was cool to do this. It's like, why is this happening and why was this never happening before? And is this a side effect of openness and tolerance where because we're, you know, more open-minded towards people that are trans or drag queens or what have you, and that there's going to be like some outer limits of this push, you know, like what? So. You've seen that, right? Yeah right yeah yeah i've seen it i i think it's it's always interesting because like lives of it's easy to like cherry pick one or two

things and like you said there's many instances of this and i've seen them and i don't understand like bringing your child to something like this i I don't know how like common that is or if it's a cherry-picked instance that now gets picked up by everybody as kind of chum and passed around and it's something that happened once and now it seems like, oh, everyone's doing this. It's not everyone, but the thing about the internet is there's so many instances.

There's so many of them. And then people see those instances and they duplicate it, which is right. It becomes acceptable. Right. So I guess the pushback I've heard from my whole question is like, how did Drag Queens story hour? Let's just talk about story hour become a thing. When what do you mean by that? Like Drag Queens story hour. So that? Drag Queen Story Hour. So it's drag queens reading stories to children. Yeah, and the pushback is... History 2015 in San Francisco. Drag Queen Story Hour started in 2015 in San Francisco.

It was created by Michelle T. T-E-A. Then the executive director of the non-profit Radar Productions. Non-profit, LOL. The first events were organized by Julian Delgado Lopera and Virgie Tovar. T, who identifies as queer, came up with the idea after attending children's library events with her newborn son and finding them welcoming but heteronormative. She imagined an event that was more inclusive and affirming to the LBGTQ families.

First event was held, the Eureka Valley Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library, LBGT Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and featured drag queen Persia as well and was well received by that community, I guess. And other DSH events in San Francisco featured several drag queens of color, including Honey Mahogany, Yves Saint Croissant, and Panda Dolce. As of February 2020, there are 50 plusplus official chapters of DSH spread internationally, as well as other drag artists

holding events at libraries, schools, bookstores, and museums. October 2022, a non-profit organization officially changed its name to Drag Story Hour to be more inclusive and reflect the diverse cast of storytellers. Or queen. Yeah, queen. Can't say just queen.

Well, so. I'm a drag king. I know. I think even Sarah Silverman did a whole video about this, but she was saying, what's the difference between a drag queen and a clown reading to your kids? And I mean, clowns are fucking creepy.

They're fucking creepy. Yeah, those are weird too. So I'm actually maybe more inclined to be creeped out by a clown than a drag queen. Depends. It depends on what's going on at the show. If it's just a person who's dressed up like a woman who wants to read things. So I think this is where two things are getting combined as one. Drag queen story hour is like you go to a library and there's a drag queen reading a story to your kid.

Right. The drag queen shows that we're seeing kids taken to, I don't know what that is. Well, I think that's what comes out of drag queen story hour when people take it to the next level. Okay. I think that's what people are concerned with. Like the slippery slope?

Yeah. Drag queen story hour. Someone's dressed like a woman and reading the, who cares? Like, what's the big deal? Yeah, I mean, I understand the intent behind starting that yeah for sure if you're a part of an lbgt family and you know your your kids are only used to seeing a traditional father mother relationship and you know they have two moms or they have two dads yeah that's that could

be fucking weird and this would be like a nice little thing to make them feel comforted. Right. That like it makes them feel part, like there's other communities other than these traditional, you know, communities that have been depicted in the media for decades and decades. Right.

Yeah, makes sense. But I mean, I guess this is the, this is the conservative kind of slippery slope argument for like gay marriage is, oh, when you start normalizing things like drag queen story hour, then you have drag queen strip club hour for the kids. And now you have, you know, degeneracy. Yeah, but that argument against gay marriage is preposterous. It doesn't make any sense because what percentage of people that are involved in a gay marriage

or adopted or surrogate children that come along with that are involved in these things? It's probably a tiny amount. But the problem with something like Libs of TikTok, not even the problem with them, but the problem with the internet in general, is that you have literally billions of people. And of those people hundreds of millions of posting things and out of those hundreds of millions you're gonna get thousands of things that some people are gonna find questionable but what percentage of that exists in your community very very few but the problem is when you broadcast that and then put it online then it sort of becomes a thing that exists out there

in, you know, the zeitgeist. Right. But who's actually putting it in the zeitgeist? Right. The person who is broadcasting it. There's a person who's putting it out there the first time. But what really gets it in the zeitgeist is when you use it as a flashpoint for the culture wars right so suddenly now all of conservative media has a video and it's like chum in the water so you're just feeding and both sides do this you know you can take cherry pick some right-wing chud and be like this is representative of all the right-wing chudsuds. And I feel like this is the downfall why things like your podcast and podcasts in general are good, because you actually get to tease apart some of these things instead of it just being like, this is representative of every liberal that you know.

Right. Yeah, that's preposterous. It's people having an objective assessment of what's really going on is very important. I mean, I've definitely, you mentioned like surrogacy. I think one of the things I've, I feel the most confused and uncertain about now in my adult being a mom life is surrogacy. I don't know how, it's like one of those things where if someone said, what have you changed your mind on? I don't know that I've changed my mind. I don't know if i how i feel about it anymore it's a weird issue i have a these friends of mine back in la that are gay couple that hired a woman to become a surrogate and she decided to keep the kid oh really you can do that yep it was well

it was her egg because they were gay. Oh, because it's usually not their egg. Yeah. And she kept the kid. I don't know if they decided to fight it or they just let it go, but she was so broken up. Like when the baby was born, she was so attached. Was it her first kid? Yeah, I believe so. Oh, see, because the one-

You know what? I should not say that. I'm not sure. The one good thing is, well, one of the things that I've learned as I've gone down this rabbit hole is that in most states, many states, you have to have at least had a child before. So it's not totally like, how can you consent to something that you don't know? Right. Like, how can you consent to giving up a child if you've never had a child?

So I think usually there's a law in place that you have to have had a child. And look, I've heard many stories of like, oh, my friend had a friend had cancer and I had the baby for her. And people are like, if it's, you know, the free market, if a gay couple wants to get an egg from somewhere and then they want to have a mother incubate that egg, what's the problem? But I'm like, yeah, but there's a third individual in this free market transaction, which is a child. And that's where I've become very like, OK, but what about the kid? It depends entirely about who the parents are, right? Like, okay, but what about the kid? Well, it depends entirely about who the parents are, right?

But they still have some kind of, they don't have any say in the matter. But I guess I just have an issue talking about kids as if they're like a commodity. Yeah, but you also never have any say of who your parents are in the first place. You could be born to crackheads. Should we stop crackheads from having babies? We don't. Right. Do we stop alcoholics and people who smokeheads from having babies? We don't. Right. You know, do we stop alcoholics and people who smoke cigarettes from having babies? We don't.

It's like it's very complicated because you could definitely see a place where that would be a beautiful gesture. Like what you're talking about, someone has cancer and they can't have a baby or they lost their womb or whatever. And then someone says, I'm your friend. I'll have the baby for you. And they act as a surrogate. You can see a lot of positives and people that would be great parents. And I know many gay couples who would be great parents. But then I wonder what it's like for the kid. What's it like for them on Mother's Day? What's it like for them when they're, I don't know, it's something i never really

thought about until i had a child and then i saw how much she needs me the mother like yeah they're just so they so want their mom yes um that is a weird one with gay couples that have surrogates it's weird yeah and i i definitely have the like women and me issue of using women for their parts and again i know these women have consented and all this stuff but it's still um still questionable to me because you're using all these women for their parts and then the women is kind of like a race like you see these pictures of men in hospital beds with their baby that they got the egg from someone and they used the body of some other woman and there's no fucking women in the picture.

That's fucking bizarre. Like I want to scream, women! Every time I, where all, it took multiple women to make this possible. Multiple women, usually. And there's not a woman in sight. Right. But if a gay couple hires a surrogate and they want to take a photo together with the baby and you see that, you're only seeing like one little tiny snapshot of a moment where this gay couple has this child together. Yeah. And they're there. And you're upset that there's not a woman

in the picture. Like, does a woman have to be in every picture with a gay child? No, that's fair. The gay couple holds a child. I mean, that mean that's again just me probably cherry picking one thing that i see on social media and it it tickles my like bias and i'm like fuck this i i but then once you go down the rabbit hole and look at how women in ukraine particularly like again poor women are exploited in this industry badly and it is an industry that is ripe for exploitation and then if you talk about the slippery slope did you see that whole article about the woman who posited using brain dead women to incubate bodies she's like some researcher and she put this out there that um brain dead women could be used to basically gestate babies.

Like, why not? Zombie kids. Yeah. I mean, what kind of interaction doesn't there's there's a thing that happens when the child's in the womb where they're they're they're getting emotions. And there's there's all sorts of like weird interactions between the mother that we haven't really quantified. There's so much of this stuff but again that brings me to the point so you can just take a baby away from the mom and then be like see ya once they're born ridiculous so i'm very i'm very clearly i'm very um i'm i'm very open to this discussion i like to

hear everybody's side of the perspective because I never even thought twice about it. I was like, surrogacy, whatever. And then the more I learned about it, the more I was like, okay, there's some stuff that's kind of fucked up in this whole entire industry. There definitely is. It's a very odd thing. Jamie, can you look something up for me, perhaps? Did Italy just ban the ability to use women outside of Italy as surrogates? Many, many countries have a law against surrogacy. We discussed this on a podcast recently because we were talking about Ukraine. And there's one of the very few countries where you can use women as surrogate mothers. Most countries have it illegal, I believe.

Yeah, there were. Surrogacy ban. Italy planning a blanket law against procreative tourism. Oh, it's banned in Italy. Okay. Offenders to face $1 million. Hard right. Oh, is this the hard right?

Is she actually hard right? Maloney? Or is she just considered hard right? Just fucking throw those things around. Yeah, who even knows? That hard right shit. Did you see the fucking article today? There was a thing on the CBC

and it was talking about the word freedom and that the word freedom is being used many times by far right activists. Freedom. Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie, because this is so fucking, Canada is so fucking wild right now. It's

such a really crazy place. Here it is. Why the word freedom is such a useful rallying cry for protesters. The word has become common amongst far right groups. So by putting that far right in there, far right like there's no indication whatsoever that those truckers in canada were far right a lot of those are working class people that just did not like the idea that they were being forced to do this medical procedure in order to keep their job and so they label them as far right yeah trudeau personally labeled them as racists and misogynists just like just so he could disparage them. Just so whatever they say doesn't mean anything.

So this is what they're doing here. The term freedom, which is like one of the most basic tenets for human rights. Your liberty as a human being. Your ability to express yourself. Your ability to talk about things. To protest. To do what you want. Freedom is so fucking important.

Inherent in the idea of a free country is the right to protest. Right. They go hand in hand. That's why that headline is beyond parody. But it's actually something that's being pushed on the CBC, which is really crazy. Well, it's sinister. They're setting you up for this idea that you requesting freedom, it's like it puts you in the category of anti-vaxxers or racists or far-right people. It's just these weird ways that mainstream media has fallen into labeling people in order to pass an agenda and to put this narrative out there.

an agenda and pass this, to put this narrative out there. But the fact that they're willing to do it with something that is so important, like freedom. Like protesting. Yeah. Protesting is fundamental to freedom. So to say that using the word freedom is something that protesters use, you're basically, this is like China stuff. But not just protesters.

Far right protesters. Because you get a far left protest protesters and that's not being talked about. Like freedom is very fucking important. They don't want freedom. The fact that they're saying that there's an actual article disparaging the concept of freedom. It's really crazy. It's scary as fuck.

And I never would have thought before the pandemic that that would have happened to Canada. I thought Canada was this like really friendly, cool place where they kind of got it. Like Canada was kind of better than the United States, in my opinion. I would go up there. I'm like, people are friendlier. They're nice. It's like, I would say with Canada, I would just use this term. It's 20% less douchebags. Yeah. Because that's what it's like. But now under Trudeau, it's like it's become this very weird thing. Have you seen, they're trying to push for a digital ID now. Yeah. I mean, I have a friend, Anna Slats.

She is the founder of Redux, the website that does, she covers a lot of the gender stuff because she's just like a feminist who's on it and she's Canadian and I asked her about this and that there's no way I'm going to be able to I would butcher her explanation but she has a really interesting explanation for why

Canada has gone in this direction and I wish I was as smart as her and articulate but she i i was trying to paraphrase it what do you mean it was it was essentially something about the way that canada is found was founded so how i wish i could remember it it's i just don't know enough about canada they don't have a first amendment up there first of all that's that's a giant factor but something they don't have it's like borderline corporate.

It was interesting. I don't know enough about Canada, and I was reading it, and I told her she should- What is her name? Anna Slats. Does she have an article about this? I told her she should write one about it because I think it's a really important insight that she has, and she should put it out there. Because I was like, how?

Because it seemed very liberal to me. So how is this what seemed like a very liberal, tolerant, open society slipped into what seems like totalitarianism or, you know, slipping into it? They just seem like the entire culture is open to being like free, anti-freedom, which is strange to me. I always thought of Canada as like, hey, cool, man. Well, they're being sold a pile of bullshit. And the pile of bullshit is you must give up your freedom in order for others to be equal. You must give up your freedom in order for society to function in the proper way. You must give up your freedom in order for society to function in the proper way. You must give up your freedom in order for things to be equitable and inclusive and fair.

And it's horseshit. And it's a mindfuck. And it's a mindfuck that you hear coming out of the WEF and Trudeau echoes it and they say the right words and use the right phrases. And at the end of the day, what's happening is you're going to lose your ability to protest. You're going to lose your ability to express yourself. You're going to lose your ability to have your say when things start moving in this general direction towards the centralized government being able to control various aspects of your life. One of the things that we found out during this protest, the trucker protest protest was they froze their fucking bank accounts.

I know that was nuts. That is fucking nuts. I mean, that is some dictator third world banana Republic bullshit. Yeah. And the fact that that was going on in Canada and they justified it and they didn't just freeze their, their, their money, the people that were protesting, they froze the bank accounts of people that were donating. yeah that was the fucking insane yeah it was really really insane so that's what comes when you start using terms like you know freedom and connecting it to the far right yeah but they it seems like everything

like aren't they connecting like being healthy to the far right now? I've seen so many articles of like exercise. Oh, the like far right obsession with being in shape. Like it's a bad thing somehow. I don't. Well, because there's a giant percentage of our population that is really lazy and fat. And if you want those people on your team, you have to say there's nothing wrong with being lazy and fat. on your team, you have to say there's nothing wrong with being lazy and fat. And in fact, not being lazy and fat is actually connected to misogyny and racism and fascism and the far right.

And then people are like, oh, great, let's eat donuts and just fucking vote blue. But I feel like lazy and fat is pretty bipartisan. That's why I always joke America's too fat for a civil war. It's not just people on the left who are lazy. I would like to see a breakdown of who is the most obese by party. Well, not just obese, but obese and lazy. Because there's a lot of fat people that work really hard. They just eat like crazy and they drink a lot. You know, humans vary wildly. Of course.

And there's a lot of people that are just really fat people that work hard. I just don't think, I don't know that like the, do you think they have the like, the lazy fat population? Well, who's pushing for universal basic income? Who's pushing for redistribution of wealth? That's all the people on the left. And the people that are pushing for redistribution of wealth and universal basic income, if they can say that you shouldn't be forced to work and that your needs should be met by a society that has exorbitant wealth and that the way to have a more equitable society is to have these people with exorbitant wealth that, you know, they got this wealth by exploiting the middle class and the lower class and that should be redistributed. That's where it becomes an issue because that's all being, that narrative is being pushed by the left almost entirely.

And that's one of the ways that you could say, like, if you wanted to reinforce the idea that, you know, not working hard and not struggling and really like putting in an immense amount of effort in order to succeed and, you know, pushing this idea, this capitalist narrative that, you know, that all that stuff is in fact negative and that all that stuff is in fact connected to the far right, connected to people that want to suppress other people's rights and take away a woman's right to choose and all these other different things. You could do that far easier by promoting that idea to the left. Yeah. I'm not sure how I feel about universal basic income either, because I don't know enough about it. I do know some of the studies they've done, people generally, if they

are given like a baseline that doesn't make them lazier, they actually work harder and it's enough to help them pull themselves up out of that. Well, you talked about this. We talked about the Stockton experiment where they did it in Stockton. It's a small amount. It's like $500 a month, I believe, but it had an overall net positive effect. And a very, very small amount. It was like $500 a month, I believe, but it had an overall net positive effect. And a very, very small amount of that money was spent on things like drugs or alcohol. And most of it was spent on rent and food and improving people's education opportunities. It seems like a little bit of money for low-income families is a very good thing. Oh, yeah. Even with the child care money that they were giving out and then they stopped that that had huge effects 50 increase in uh or 50 decrease rather in in

child uh malnutrition poverty uh children not having enough food like 50 yeah i don't know why they stopped that i guess maybe because they want to keep us at each other's throats. I mean, the overall net positive that it's like, if you can find something that has an overall net positive, that seems like that should be talked about on television. And we should talk about trying to figure out other ways to implement that in society. I agree. There's without doubt people in this society that need help. There's without doubt people in this society that need help. And to say that all those people that need help are lazy is crazy because people do not start at the same spot on the race. No.

If you have a race, the finish line or the starting block is different for different people. Yeah. Depending on where you're born, the neighborhood you live in, the family you're from. And the idea that we can't have a way to sort of balance it out. It just becomes a point in like at what time are you going to stifle people's desire to improve their position because you're going to take away money and de-incentivize people from being successful? That's what people on the right are worried about. That's what people that are like hardcore capitalists are worried about. Yeah, and I think there's got to be some middle ground.

We don't we have social safety nets in America. And I don't think people I mean, you know, enough comedians who are like one freaking injury away from financial ruin. I don't think that like our health care in this country is a disaster. And it's been my second largest expense after rent for decades, always. And now I have a child. And even having a child and then seeing just the kind of lack of support that there actually is. You know, you get maybe six weeks and then you're supposed to put your kid in daycare or go back to work when you're just you're barely done. So I feel like there has to be there's got I don't want to be so cynical that I'm like, oh, well, I guess it's like

we either have this free capitalist society where clearly that will just only try and make money for money's sake. And a lot of people do end up getting left behind or we have this free handouts for everyone and people aren't incentivized to go be small business owners or take risks or go start their own thing and pull themselves up and you know I I think you and I share that like I didn't have the like ideal background and I didn't go to college and I pulled myself up and made my own way and overcame addiction so I have a lot of empathy but I also am like hey get your shit together you know I know I know it's possible to pull yourself up and and and make something of yourself there's a lot of people that don't know how to do that. That's part of the problem. I think it's overwhelming. You know, when you're stuck

in survival, that's why I think something like universal basic income or something like, like those, the minimum that you can give people, it, if it can lift you out of like going from surviving to thriving is something that my therapist and I have talked about for years, but that's a very hard transition to make. When you've been in survival mode forever, you're just, how do you even envision a different life if you've only known that hustle and you feel like you're drowning? And I know how, and pretty average middle, I just know how it feels to feel like you're drowning. And I know how, and pretty average middle, I just know how it feels to feel like

you're finally making headway and then you get hit with a tax bill from the city of Los Angeles. Or you get hit with a car repair. Or somebody in your family gets injured and now suddenly you are back to where you started. It's so hard to get ahead. So yeah, there's gotta be, there's so many people

who are struggling and the cost of living is fucking insane right now. Yeah. It's not just financial help. It's, it's also giving people the tools and giving people an understanding of what's required in order to get better, to, to improve your position in life. Like financial literacy? Financial literacy, for sure, but also telling people what you can do in terms of improving your position in life. And also, that's one of the things that drives me nuts about this idea that there's nothing positive about being healthy and being in shape because having more energy will allow you to be more productive and being healthier will allow you to think clear. It'll allow you to make better decisions. You'll have less stress and anxiety that allow you to

make a better, more well-informed choice in terms of what you decide to do with your life. It's so important. It's not universal. It doesn't apply to it's not like an instant fix. But there's they need people need education, they need tools, they need they need something to help them. And the idea that we exist as a community, until people are in trouble, and then you're on your own is crazy. Yeah, it's, it's so I mean, even being sober and getting rid of drugs and alcohol, it's given me such a different view on what I put in my body in terms of food. So when I'm eating really well, I feel I actually feel mentally much better.

And if I'm eating like a lot of sugar and carbs and kind of like cheese, which if I'm just not watching what I'm eating, I feel like depression creeping in. For sure. You're tired. Yeah, I can actually feel it. I feel like it's in my body. I feel inflamed and I'm so sensitive to that now because I don't have anything else kind of clouding my vision. And I know when I'm eating like shit, I start thinking like shit. Yeah, that's a hundred percent real. And you have less resources. You're tired. Your body doesn't function as Yeah. That's a hundred percent real. And you, you have less resources. You're tired. Your, your body doesn't function as well. You're not going to make as good decisions. Yeah. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. That's a real thing. And so then it gets back

to like the cost of food, food deserts, and the prevalence of fast food. We should really have a conversation about the prevalence of fat food, fast food should be fat food but it's really what it is it's like you're you're when people have a small amount of money and the best way to get calories is to eat at these places they give you things that are literally going to lead to disease and yeah it's terrible for you i know isn't it something like only the food that's on the outside of the grocery store is real and everything else basically on the shelves is not. For the most part. I mean, there's stuff in the middle. There's canned stuff.

Canned stuff. But it's something like 70%. Yeah. It's mostly you want real food. And real food goes bad. Real food, the food that you get the most amount of nutrients from is vegetables and meats and eggs and things that are on the outside because they're perishable. Eggs.

Yeah. They're so expensive. Yeah, what's going on with eggs? I think it might be coming down. Did you see that fire that happened in the eggplant? Yeah. All the chickens got killed. And then people are reporting.

The problem, too, that I have with the media ecosphere right now, which is vast, is that in the vacuum of information, there's only left conspiracy theories. And people are trying to fill that and say, here's what they're not telling you for clicks. And sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not. And you can't really know. I don't know what the deal is with the eggs i know um i i don't know if there's somebody i've heard there was an avian bird flu they had to kill a

bunch of chickens you heard i it was in an article that i i think i read from this was actually i think reported let's find it i i believe it was um an article that says that the reason why there's a lack of eggs is because they had to kill the chickens because of a bird flu. Avian bird flu. I didn't hear that. You didn't? No, I didn't hear that. And then I heard that people who have chickens, they're not able to give them their Purina feed.

They stopped laying eggs for some reason. This is another rumor that I've seen going around egg Twitter. So here it is. Avian, this is 2023, January 11th, avian influenza outbreak reduced egg production. So highly pathogen avian influenza. Click on that link, please. So scroll down, scroll down so I can read that. Highly pathogenic avian influenza, a disease infecting birds and poultry, struck egg-laying hens throughout 2022.

As a result of recurrent outbreaks, U.S. egg inventories were 29% lower in the final week of December 2022 than at the beginning of the year. By the end of December, more than 43 million egg-laying hens were lost to the disease itself or to depopulation since the outbreak began in February 2022. Losses were spread across two waves from February to June, 30.7 million hens. And then from September to December, 12.6 million hens. On constrained supplies, wholesale egg prices, the prices retailers pay to producers were elevated throughout the year. The HPAI reoccurrences in the fall further constrained egg inventories that had not recovered from the spring wave. So, yeah, it seems like you're right. So that could be it.

That might be exactly it. But that's a part of the problem with factory farming. That could be it. That might be exactly it. But that's a part of the problem with factory farming. You know, when you have factory farming, like all of these things like the swine flu and the avian flu and those come out of factory farming. Yeah. Those come out of those horrible settings where you have these animals crammed in together in unsanitary conditions. I feel like I read that and that's why. But then I heard from some farmer who was saying that it was actually the grocery stores. They were just taking advantage of the fact that the supply was low and they weren't passing that off onto the farmers. They were just jacking up the rates. So I don't know.

I'm not smart. I try to keep track of these. It's like I've been trying to follow this ohio train derailment which by the way it was infuriating to me because we have a an administration that is constantly threatening us with climate change disaster and everything we do needs all of these policies need to be for climate change and the green initiative and there's an actual ecological disaster unfolding. And you don't hear a fucking word about it on CNN, on any of the major mainstream media. So why do you think that is? I mean, I would I guess the cynic in me would say that it's because the railroad is owned by companies that advertise on CNN.

Also, the administration, and I'm not an expert on this at all, I was reading about how they busted a union. So the union was fighting for something and then basically they busted the union fight for more days off. And then this occurred after one of the rail workers was saying something like this was bound to happen

because they're all sick and overworked and this was actually like the the biden administration we just heard from pete secretary pete today about it which is crazy do you know that he gave a speech the other day about how there's too many white people working in construction sites where these construction sites are set up in these communities, where the people in the community could benefit from it, which shows a profound lack of understanding of skilled labor. Because if you're talking about people that are carpenters, and people that are plumbers, and people that are electricians,

and people that are framers and roofers, that's skilled labor. You have to hire people that are really good at that. And if they don't exist in that community, you have to hire them from outside that community. That's why those unions are important. That's why it's important that, look, if you see what happens

when you have unskilled labor and unskilled people working on buildings, you have fucking disasters. Yeah. Yeah. And overworked and overtired. But the fact that he talked about that and he didn't talk about this derailment. This derailment should be.

But the derailment is a colossal failure on the part of the transportation department. Yeah. And I don't know what caused the derailment. But there's a lot of derailments that are occurring in the United States due to sabotage. There was one in Houston the other day, too, I think. And a lot of them are sabotage. Because you get, the thing about trains is, like, you have tracks, right? And they run for miles and miles and miles.

No one's monitoring every fucking mile of those tracks. Yeah. So some fucking crazy person could come along and do something to those tracks and cause trains to derail. And it happens. It's not a one-time thing. It's happened multiple times. Tucker Carlson just did a thing about it where he talked about train derailments. Okay.

Where he talked about people sabotaging trains and people derailing trains purposely. Is it like just bait or is it actually something that's true? Well, it's true. I mean, there are people that have derailed trains on purpose. Right. So the fact that that's a vulnerability. Right. And the fact that you're transporting hazardous waste on these trains.

Now, I don't know if they have to take additional precautions due to traveling with hazardous waste and whether or not those precautions were or were not taken. traveling with hazardous waste and whether or not those precautions were or were not taken. That's what I'm hearing about this case, is that this is something that they were trying to cut money by transporting these things that are hazardous waste in a way that perhaps maybe they shouldn't have been transported that way, or maybe the regulation should be different. I don't know if it's even hazardous waste, though. I think it's just chemicals that we use in plastic. Oh, it's very hazardous. It's not waste. Right. Hazardous materials. Right, right. It's very hazardous material. I don't think it's like a byproduct. Yeah. No, it's it's very dangerous materials. But that's why there's this one kid, Nick Drom,

who's been doing these amazing TikToks that I'm obsessed with because it's that he's like a chemist. And he's great. He's great. He's actually taking what the APA is releasing and he's trying to make sense of it. And he's like, why am I the person who's doing this? Why am I the person who's asking these questions? Because what he mentions is when you look at the manifest of the chemicals that were on there, what we're looking at is they're doing what's in the air,

but also he was saying there was petroleum, so we're talking about an oil spill too, but no one's talking about that. Well, let's play what he has to say. Rewind that, Jamie. He has a bunch. He has a bunch. I don't know what's happening. Well, just play this one.

Play the one you have in front of you. Okay. And rewind that. Hold on. Stop. Sound. Play. Yeah, I don't know if that's his tiktok hasn't been very good so let's talk about the trail derailment in east palestine ohio east palestine's about an hour north of

pittsburgh almost halfway to cleveland norfolk southern has a rail line that goes right through town and this derailment happened right on the edge outside of town on the border of pa and ohio the cars that crash fine for of them contained vinyl chloride. It's a monomer used to make PVC. Some of the reporting on this has gotten vinyl chloride confused with polyvinyl chloride, the polymer made out of vinyl chloride. Now the reason that this distinction is really important is vinyl chloride is very hazardous and very flammable.

Polyvinyl chloride is a plastic that's used in like everything. The other thing about vinyl chloride is that it boils at eight degrees Fahrenheit, so it's shipped in its liquid form. Meaning that when these trains crashed and these started leaking, they weren't just leaking liquid, but they were spewing boiling gas. So vinyl chloride is really toxic. OSHA has the permissible limit of how much you can be exposed to it during an eight-hour shift as a 1 ppm part per million, average over eight hours. So prior to this the biggest spill of this chemical was in New Jersey where one train car and about 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride were spilled

but it didn't catch on fire. Now this crash in Ohio has five train cars. These kinds of tanker cars can carry between 25 and 33,000 gallons. Let's call it 250 to 250,000 pounds of vinyl chloride. That's per train car, five train cars. There's maybe a million pounds of this toxic chemical spilling into the ground and also boiling off into the air. But then it caught on fire. I think this is where the reporting is really bad because no one is mentioning what the byproduct of vinyl chloride burning is. Of the many byproducts of burning vinyl chloride, one

of them is hydrogen chloride. Hydrogen chloride is really unstable and latches onto water, like just water vapor in the atmosphere, and that turns into hydrochloric acid. So right now government officials, officials from the railroad, both the governor of Pennsylvania and Ohio are calling burning off the million pounds of this stuff a success, but not mentioning that it means that we have hundreds of thousands of pounds of acid in the air, potentially. Now ever since engineering school, I've studied a lot of industrial accidents. I just find it really fascinating, and organizations like the Chemical Safety Board, NTSB, and OSHA all have like really good reports available to the public. I think as

a designer, it's really good to learn about mistakes. When looking at these kinds of industrial disasters across time, there are a couple things that are pretty universal across all of them. of industrial disasters across time there are a couple things that are pretty universal across all of them one the responsible party in this coast norfolk southern railway always plays down the reality of the situation politicians also just repeat the same lines and then news outlets just repeat the same so all we're hearing is the responsible party's word this hasn't been getting so jamie i also sent you a video that shows what it looks like in the area where these clouds are passing over. And it is horrific. It's apocalyptic. It's so terrible. There's a man who's on the ground who's screaming that these aren't storm clouds.

These are the clouds that of this shit that they're burning from East Palestine. And he's freaking out. And, you know, like animals are dying. Pets are dying. Fish are dying in the rivers. It's the idea that they only evacuated a small area. Yeah. You're talking about like miles and miles away from this. Yeah.

Animals are dying. This is it. Look at this. Play this. Go full screen with this because it's so great. These aren't storm clouds. Play this. Go full screen with this because it's so great. These aren't storm clouds.

This is the fucking shit that they burn off. The fucking shit they burn off in East Palestine. This is not fucking storm clouds. Look at this. I know. Look at it. This is over Darlington. This is fucking insane if you if you're just listening what we're looking at is just intense black clouds covering this area and it's daytime yeah and you can't see shit you the sky is

completely covered in black. Give me the volumes. Shit! From East Palestine! They're fucking controlled burn! Yeah, it's fucked up. The idea that it's a controlled burn is so crazy. Well, I guess because they were worried that it was going to explode. That's why they felt they had to burn it. But it did explode, right? No, they felt it was going to

be a massive explosion and this would have happened anyway but there's no other options they like in one of that kid's tiktoks later on he talks about how they just buried it and so people are saying they did this just to get the trains running again basically which again the cynic in me wouldn't doubt but i don't know i I just sent you a text from my editor, Joe Donatelli, who I loved from Playboy. He now lives in Ohio and he's on, does local news. And I will say local news has been great on this. They're actually reporting. And like he said to me, you have to be able to like muster the resources, fact check things. It isn't as fast as the internet where there's a void of information that gets filled and he did a long thread about what they've learned

in his at the local news station where he is that's really good and i recommend people go check it out because i think local news is actually pretty good on this but some people in ohio are saying they didn't even know about it. There's like people who you'll see online. They're like, I'm in Ohio and I didn't hear about this, but maybe they don't watch local news. Okay. He says, Joe Donatelli says, okay, let's do this again. We reported from East Palestine yesterday. We're doing more today. Brief aside, I keep hearing from people, how come nobody's covering this story? Many local news outlets are, and they're doing a good job. What I think people are really saying is the cable network I watch isn't covering it,

or it's not on a national newspaper's homepage, or my social feed. All may be true. But to say it's not being covered is wrong if you know how to Google. Let's get to the late. Yeah, but I mean, that's kind of important. No, it is important. Massive places like CNN, the New York Times. I was on the plane yesterday for two hours.

The guy in front of me was watching CNN and all they talked about was UFOs. They did not mention this once. Yeah. Well, that's more sexy, right? We now know more than the other hazardous materials that the train was carrying, including some not mentioned before. Reports from Tara Morgan TV, the EPA, released a list of Norfolk Southern, from Norfolk Southern, of flammable gas and liquids and their status in the rail cards when the train derailed on November 3rd, sending a toxic black... February 3rd. Excuse me, February 3rd.

Later sending a toxic black plume over the village. The materials included vinyl chloride, ethylene, glycol, mono, butyl, ether, ethyl, hexyl, acrylate, isobutylene, and butyl acrylates, said one expert we spoke with. Some of these are known carcinogens, so of potential future risk if we get contaminated water long term. Unfortunately, the reality of these types of chemicals is that we have contamination of our air and water. They can cause long-term health issues of the population they affect. ABC News reports the EPA is monitoring air quality. So far, so good. What the fuck are you talking about? Well, the EPA also said 9-11. It was fine after 9-11. So I'm not exactly sure how much I trust them. We're seeing beyond what residents have

been saying. The train derailment and spillage of toxic chemicals has resulted in the deaths of 3,500 fish. Ohio DNR estimates across a population of 7.5 miles of streams. Norfolk Southern has laid out steps it plans to take to clean up the site. According to the plan, work has already been done to collect pooled liquids into a vacuum truck and prepare them for disposal. Surface water flow has been rerouted away from the derailment site and underflow dams are in place. The plan states that 180,000 gallons of liquid have been removed from the area. Additional work currently being done is air quality monitoring with soil and surface water sampling pending. Well water too. The results of those tests are not available yet. We're working to learn more about what happened, the impact on the residents.

Okay. One of the things that Nick Drum was saying was that they haven't done a water test since February 4th, which is weird. Why are we 10 days in with no water test? Because they don't done a water test since February 4th, which is weird. Why are we 10 days in with no water test? Because they don't want to know the results. Yeah, I mean, it's such a—I just—it frustrates me, because if you really do care about the environment, this should be plastered on every single news channel all the time, not to mention all these people being displaced, not to mention how much of the soil these rivers go into the Mississippi. You could be contaminating

farmland for thousands and thousands of miles. I mean, we don't fucking know. No, we don't fucking know. And on top of that, this is now an open and publicly referenced vulnerability. So the problem with that is if someone was a bad actor that wanted to do more of this and have this happen more often, now you have this thing that's, I mean, if someone was going to, if that was an attack, it's an enormously successful attack. I mean, people are calling it a Chernobyl-level event. Was it an attack, though?

No, I'm not saying it was. No, okay. I'm saying if it was. If someone wanted to do that. If someone found where their- Let's not give them ideas. Well, they already got these ideas. If someone found where they're transporting these hazardous chemicals and they decided

to derail purposely, we're fucked. And the fact that this is how they transport these things on these unmonitored steel bands where a train going at high speed is vulnerable for derailment. There's something too about the brakes. I know that there... There was a loose wheel or something and they called it...

They couldn't stop it in time, I believe, is how this one happened. Yeah, and then there's something about these... There's a whole situation around the brakes that the trains use, and they're trying to upgrade to another certain kind of brakes that I was reading about, and this is part of the whole conversation that was supposed to be happening, and then they didn't, and I'm not sure.

Again, for all of the talk about the environment, you would think that this would be on the top of everyone's radar. The problem is it's such a colossal failure on the part of the regulatory bodies, the government, the company that's shipping these things. How can you ship that many? When you look at the manifest, how can you ship that many toxic chemicals on one train? Well, here's the real question. How often is this being done? Yeah, a lot.

Is this happening every day? And this is just the only time that it ever went wrong? I mean, how much of that vinyl chloride do we need? I mean, I bet we need a lot of vinyl chloride to make PVC. Where does it even come from? I know nothing. It's like when something like this happens, I'm like, I am so oblivious to the things that make this country work. And to the thing, I'm just so, I start going down the rabbit hole i'm like i know nothing about the union i know nothing about these these

chemicals where do these chemicals even come from i know nothing about the railroad apparently these companies are owned by big corporations who are like the evil corporations behind everything because that's just the conglomeration that we live in and this this kind of stuff makes me more um left like this is when my left lefty really comes out because it is like where's the some things do need to be regulated we can't just have an unregulated society where you can just well is it this not regulated or are they moving things in a way that's unethical well one of the things somebody did a video about how i believe this there's something about this that was regulated and then during the obama era and then i think it was Trump who took the who deregulated it deregulated some aspect of this

but again regulations for environmental shit like this is super important I don't I don't know and I have to I just wish I was smarter I just I wish I could remember things and have that steel trap memory for when you go down a rabbit hole at like 1 in the morning and you're reading everything you can about it. And I just need to start like bookmarking all this stuff. I can't go down a rabbit hole and stuff like this at night. I won't sleep. Yeah, I know.

This is a scary one. It's really scary. This is – I mean we really don't know the impact and they're going to hide it. They're going to pretend it's not as bad as it is. There's no way they're going to give you a 100% accurate assessment of all the environmental damage that's being done to all these people, all the health consequences. You know, we've talked about this before with coal plants. We had a guy on where we were talking about coal plants and the areas around these coal plants and how toxic it is. This is in Indiana.

and the areas around these coal plants and how toxic it is. This is in Indiana. These people have soot on their cars. The rate of respiratory disease around these areas is much higher than normal. And you're breathing in coal dust. The particulates in the air are fucking horrible for you. And we want to pretend that this doesn't exist, that this doesn't get highlighted. Yeah, and then even just the long-term effects, how long will it be uninhabitable?

Didn't they have to move all those people out of that community? And then they're like, it's fine. You can come back because the air is cool. But what about the water and soil? Yeah. They had to move them back. And there was like a feel good article about welcome back to the community. This is like Aaron Brockovich shit. Yes, it is like Aaron Brockovich shit. You know? I feel the community this is like aaron brockovich shit yes it is like you know i feel like it is like that there was a movie that i sent you that thing

on netflix that came out about this this they were the people in this community were extras in this movie isn't that train getting derailed they had to evacuate jesus christ yeah yeah they did a whole movie about this jesus christ it's crazy it is crazy i was wondering too oh yeah this dead fish and chickens as authorities say it's okay to return oh god i wouldn't return but what do you do if that's your home and you don't have any money you have to to return. Well, and then there was like, do you sign the help that you're getting? Because oftentimes when the company comes in and says, hey, we're going to help you, just sign this. And you're signing away your right to ever sue them if you get cancer and your kids get cancer.

Right. And you get a $1,200 check. Yeah. So what are you supposed to do? I was wondering, I have a question. What, after our last session, we were talking about the red wave and we, I was with you. I thought there was going to be a red wave when there wasn't a red wave. Do you, what do you, what do you attribute to that? Do you, do you even like reflect on why, why there wasn't,

or are you just like, no i reflect on it i think there's a there's a lot of blue no matter who people and we don't talk to those people i think there's a lot of i think do you think roe v wade had a big impact yeah a huge i feel like we underestimated that huge impact and that was one of the articles that I read that was talking about young women and how many young women voted exclusively Democrat and will continue to do so no matter what. Yeah. And that's a big factor. I wonder, you know, I look at my own bias and kind of echo chamber and what I'm listening to. And I just think because I was in California and the lockdowns were so stringent and I was so I disagreed with generally the way that it was handled. I, I, I underestimated the tolerance that most people had for the lockdowns that they experienced in their state. So I thought it would be a much bigger response.

Like in Michigan, they had a lot of stringent lockdowns, and it was very blue. So I guess that's one area where I've learned of, like, I'm applying my own lack of tolerance for these lockdowns and seeing how harsh it was on the kids and on small businesses. And I'm applying it to everyone. But a lot of people think that they did the best they could with the information that they were given and that it was handled. They were OK with with the lockdown. Well, I think if the vote came during the lockdown, things would be very different. But people have very short memories. And once things are back open, like I have friends in California that were talking about moving out of California and they're like, well, you know, things are kind of almost back to normal now.

So I think I'm going to stay. So there's a lot of that where people think, you know, better this than having some fascist Republican run things and take away abortion rights and take away this and that. And so I think that's part of it is that most things have kind of gone back to normal and people do have short memories. And once they're working again and once society's the wheels of society start turning again, they kind of forget about how bad it was in 2020 when everything was just fully locked down and all these businesses went under and 70 percent of L.A. restaurants. And yeah, it was in 2020 when everything was just fully locked down and all these businesses went under and 70% of LA restaurants. Yeah, it was pretty, I mean, I think too, and it wasn't as bad in some states as it was in California, but I think most people in California were pretty on board

with, obviously, clearly they were based on how they vote. I think they were, they're pretty on board with it, you know, for the most part. Well, I think it's blue no matter who in California, California and particularly Los Angeles and San Francisco. Good fucking luck. Yeah. Republican into office there. I mean, good fucking luck. It's actually becoming more like the Democratic Socialists got two people on the board in the city of L.A. I think it's becoming more socialist. You know, I read a whole article on, I think it was Jacobin, about how it's a good time to be socialist in Los Angeles. The unions are getting stronger and it seems like it's going more to the left. It's interesting.

Yeah, I guess what that and I'm not sure if it was in that article, but it seems like Texas has become redder and Los Angeles has become or California has become bluer. So they're they're becoming more entrenched in there. Well, the people that left California to come to Texas realized the folly of the ways of California. Yeah, they traditionally people were worried about, like, don't California, my Texas. ways of California. Yeah, they traditionally people were worried about like, don't California my Texas. But when you actually pull the people who move to Texas from states like California, they tend to vote more red because they're like, we we know what this leads to. Yeah, I have some friends that were hardcore lefties that voted all red. Oh, wow. Yeah, they were hardcore lefties before the pandemic, like hippies. Yeah.

Like literal hippies. And they're like, fuck these people like this. What they're doing is they're taking away people's ability to make decisions for themselves. Yeah. And, you know, if they were personally affected by it, it's varying degrees of, you know, whether or not you're going to act or do something about or whether you're just going to stick with your ideology. Yeah. And I wonder, too, if there was no real red wave because a lot of the people who might have voted red in these places left those places and went somewhere red. Well, also, how much do you believe in voter fraud? How much do you think that there's manipulation? How much do you think that there's it's like we've talked about this before that it's not zero percent yeah i don't i mean it's not zero i don't believe the election was stolen you know i'm not i'm not i'm not anywhere

near that level i do think with mail-in ballots in particular, there is, and like ballot harvesting being allowed, that seems like a weird thing to me. The mail-in ballots, I think it's like I'm torn about it. On the one hand, I'm glad that people who, it might be they're elderly, it might be hard for them to get to the polls that they can vote. But on the other hand, I think there's so much room for fuckery fuckery yeah what do you think about the arizona thing um carrie lake oh i don't know i'm not i i'm that's a weird one right because she was a denier of the the election the the presidential election with trump she was saying that trump won and then you know then it happened to her so it's like it's set up oh I thought she said that he won she said he won Trump that he should have won

that he got fucked over and now she's saying that she got fucked over yeah but she underestimates how many people like McCain and she said if you like McCain don't come vote for me and maybe they didn't like she talked shit about McCain in Arizona. So I think she talks shit about McCain because she's like a Trump loyalist. Right. But you he's from Arizona. People love him. They were there.

There is a realm of possibility where they were like, OK, crazy. I'm not going to vote for him. Yeah. For you. Well, she represents, you know, she's a Trump person in a lot of people's eyes. She represents that. And there's people that even if they're red, they don't want that. You know, there's, you know, you're hearing election denying. Yeah. Crazy people. Yeah. You're hearing rumblings of that now with the upcoming future presidential

elections. You're seeing some pretty staunch Republicans that are saying we need a sensible person that can do eight years, which is a thing saying that, you know, we don't want Trump. Right. Well, there's still a lot of never Trumpers. But do you think that DeSantis will even go up against. Do you think he'll even go up against Trump? What the fuck do I know? Well, we know nothing. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. It seems like Trump thinks he is. Yeah, but I don't know if the sandwich would. Trump's been truth-socialing about it.

Yeah, has he? Yeah. Yeah, he did it about it. He said that he doesn't think about it at all. He calls him Ron DeSanctimonious. Oh, he needs to come up with another. It's not a good one. I feel like he's losing his touch with the nicknames.

Well, there's not a good one that you can come up with another it's not a good one but the problem is he's losing his touch with the nicknames well he just there's not a good one that you can come up with for ron because ron is he's too good with that base yeah and his success in florida is crazy pretty unparalleled yeah yeah i mean i don't i don't know if i if i were him i don't know why i would why would I risk running up against the MAGA Republicans? And when I could just be in Florida and do a great job. And come in in 2028. And wait. Yeah. Because he's a young guy. Yeah. He certainly could do that. He's so young. He's like my, I think he's younger than me. He's like my age. Yeah. I met him. Met him in Florida. Oh. Yeah. I met him at one of the UFC events. Oh, okay. Yeah. Literally in between fights, I ran back. He wanted to meet me, and Dana said, do you want to meet Ron DeSantis?

I'm like, okay. So I ran backstage to meet him real quick. And is he a politician? Well, you know, he basically said, you know, we can't, you know, the way he always talks, like we can't take away people's freedoms, you know, very brief interaction, shook his hand, pleasure to meet you, that kind of thing. I read a long form New Yorker article that profiled him and I feel like it was meant to be disparaging, but it didn't seem like they could come up with that much that was like, oh, he worked really hard in college and didn't like talking to people.

And he's a veteran. Yeah. And his wife, he supported his wife while she had cancer. And yeah. It's tricky because he's a very good candidate. He's very disciplined. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. That's for sure.

And if Trump decides to attack him, you're going to lose a lot of Republicans that are on his side. Yeah, but Trump, I mean, what I've heard from people who know way more than me about this is that he doesn't need that much support to get the nomination. So do you risk alienating people who will vote for you four years from now and go, I mean. Here's the real question. Does he go go with Trump does Ron DeSantis and Trump come in as the vice president I think he's savvy enough he seems like he's used his support when it benefits him and he distances himself from him when when it benefits him but wouldn't it benefit him if he became the vice president and Trump was successful and he would be the balanced reasonable person and then it would set him up in 2028.

I mean, there's some truth to that idea that everything Trump touches dies. Like, I don't know if you want to necessarily sully yourself because he will not go out on a limb for you. He'll let the frickin insurrectionists come try hang you yeah if you go out on a limb for him so i don't it seems like i would be very unsettled by his level of self-centeredness this is trump's this is not a person who if you go out on a limb for him that's going to be reciprocated we're gonna find more than likely he'll like saw the freaking tree off the branch well there's not much time left i mean it's already 2023 we're here now it's in february

you're you're we're really dealing with a year from now i'm not ready really really ramp up i'm not ready i'm not ready for this yeah we have 12 months before things get crazy do you think it's going to be like a i don't know do you do you feel that the you're you're a hall monitor of the culture wars not really but i mean you observe that you're an observer of them you're you partake do you feel like things are getting better or worse like right now today what is your general on valentine's day happy valent now today, what is your general on Valentine's Day? Happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. What's your general feeling?

Are you optimistic? I think there's a massive benefit in Elon Musk owning Twitter. I really believe that. If we're going to get a balanced perspective, having someone own Twitter who's not going to allow one individual narrative to be broadcast only. Right. And that is what we found with Twitter. And that's what you're seeing with the Twitter files. I'm still being suppressed. Are you?

Just flatline. Maybe I just suck. I was joking about this the other day. But what makes you say you're suppressed? Maybe not suppressed. I joked the other day it's not flat line. Maybe I just suck. I was joking about this the other day. But what makes you say you're suppressed? Maybe not suppressed. I joked the other day it's not the algorithm. I just suck. But I have not moved in like a month.

I think I've lost followers, maybe gained some, but it's just been a very flat line. And I will take responsibility. This could be me like i i think a lot of people think they're being suppressed i think i joke all the time because on youtube we were like uh it's such a struggle with dumpster fire and i never know if it's something that we're saying on dumpster fire because we don't hold back and censor at all and but i was like it could just be that we suck at YouTube. Well, YouTube is very tricky because YouTube definitely doesn't support independent media. They support mainstream media.

And, you know, I've talked about this with Kyle Kalinsky. Yeah, he had something interesting to would get caught in those levels that he just talks about. 100%. 100%. And your take on things is humorous and you're making fun of the powers that be and you're not a mainstream. Yeah, and yourselves. But I mean, that's, it's humor. And it used to be that those things could get magnified and that people would get recommended them

and that you'd grow and it would be sort of, you'd be on the positive side of the algorithm. And now it seems like all those independent shows get stuck. Any independent covering of news gets stuck in this like sort of non-broadcasted, non-promoted. It's crazy. Avenue. Because we get when you look at what the ratios are, the number of comments that we get on a video, just when from what we've studied about ratios of comments to how many views something has.

We should have hundreds of thousands of views based on just how many comments we'll have on something and it just it doesn't seem like it gets pushed and we were doing really well we were like cruising along getting a couple thousand subscribers every month on YouTube and then it was like I don't know what tripwire we hit but it took us a year to get a thousand more subscribers and then only after I came on after the last time here did we get like four thousand more and then we've just been flat ever since so we hit some weird we just keep hitting like I'm like it's like it's so weird to

being in this space because it's hard not to be, I am a very much like take full responsibility person. So I like plateaus. I've talked to Constantine about this. They're good because you can look at what can we do better? What can we improve? What can we streamline? The show that we've been making is,

we treat it like a show for television. We need to treat it like a show for YouTube so that we can people so what's the difference we have credits at the end and stuff like that it's just because it's all kind of fun we think it's funny but people aren't people want to be able to bounce to the next video so it's little things like that that we can tweak that will probably make a small or maybe large difference see. We don't, people spend so much money and effort into the title cards and what the title says versus, and we haven't, yeah, we haven't really done that.

We're like, what's a funny line from our episode? Let's do that. We're like, we always joke that we're like, our card's galore. That would be fun. Yeah, so, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time thinking about that. I'm putting out so much,

I have found my sub stacks growing, which is awesome. I'm a writer. I love it. That's where Jaron and I started Factory Settings, a podcast, which is so fun. We basically sit down and we talk about media bias and like our own biases. But it's just fun because we were like, we feel like we just turned date night into a podcast because we can't have a date anymore now that we have a child. And we'll just pick a topic like this today's was love and romance. And then we just talk about like our factory settings, you know, our default kind, whatever was kind of put into our brain, whether it was for media or family and people like the comments. It's it's so inspiring and I love it. It really makes people think about their own. We've done it on addiction. We've done it on willingness, on gratitude. We just like pick a word and then discuss it.

And that's been getting just so much nice feedback. And I feel like people are it makes people think about their own stuff and men seem to really respond Jaron's just such a like grounded individual much more grounded than my crazy ass and people seem to respond to that so I think that it's it's like I'm I just feel so happy to be able to be able to like create content and do what I love. I always joke like on Twitter and, and on YouTube, we're just happy to be there. You know, I'm, I'm grateful that I even have a presence, but it is frustrating when you feel, because it's hard not to become paranoid when you're like, I'm being oppressed. Well, we have a, we have a lot of people that follow us

on YouTube. I think we have 14 something million, but that hasn't really grown. Grows every month by a lot. By how much? But has it grown? Tell them to follow us. Here's the thing. Here's the problem. I don't pay attention.

Yeah. But this is my thing from the beginning. I don't want to pay attention. I don't look at what the numbers are. I don't either. I don't want to. the numbers are i don't i don't either i don't want to just do the show and then i have people are like have you considered shuttering walk-ins welcome so what did we gain 278 000 in the last month okay i'm wrong see but this is the problem with me i don't pay

attention yeah no i look at the number i think i thought it was always like 14 million yeah what it used to be 10 million right around the time we went to Spotify. Oh, okay. I wish I paid attention more. No, I shouldn't. I probably don't wish I paid attention more. It's probably good that I don't know that it continues to grow. I don't want to pay attention.

So don't pay attention. It's stuff that affects my... But is it helping you pay attention? Well, if there's things that I can do to make the product better, then I guess I should pay attention. But is that what it is? Because I feel like to make the product better,

you should do the product that you want to do. Well, I agree. That's what I've been doing. But that's the only way, I think. At a certain point, I can't blame the algorithm. Maybe it's like my joke. It's not the algorithm. I might just suck.

I don't think you just suck. I think one of the things that we're very fortunate about is that we got into this a long time ago. And there's a thing that happens where you just get overwhelmed with choices. There's so many fucking shows. Yeah. And this is one of the things that I try to tell young comics that are starting podcasts. I'm like, you have to be very consistent. Yeah. You have to be consistent. I'm very consistent. And you have to put them out all the time. Yeah. And this is one of the things that I try to tell young comics that are starting podcasts. I'm like, you have to be very consistent. Yeah, you have to be consistent and you have to put them out all the time. You have to put out multiple ones and then you got to trust the process that it's just going to grow and it can grow organically. But coming into the game today, if a comic tries to start a podcast in 2023, you have to understand you're coming into a game that has five million players. But yes. Versus when I first started.

Of course. That doesn't necessarily make me feel better. But I'm like I'm so grateful for the audience that I have. But it is like you said a very crowded field. However when I was talking to Chris Williamson on my podcast. He was like not many people make it past four podcasts. So even of those five million, I don't know how many. It's something like you're in the top percentage of podcasts if you manage to make it to like 20 something podcasts.

So I'm not sure how many of those five million are even making it to 20 episodes or whatever. Because people don't have structure because they quit. Yeah. I mean, I'll never. There's a lot of people that had good podcasts back when I was doing it in the beginning that had pretty good podcasts that just teetered off. And they're like, I'm bringing back the podcast. I'm like, it's kind of a tough time.

It's a tough time to bring back a podcast. I'm not going to shutter it, Joe. No. You don't have to shutter it. Jesus Christ. No one's telling you to tough time. It's a tough time to bring back a podcast. I'm not going to shutter it, Joe. No, you don't have to shutter it. Jesus Christ. No one's telling you to do that. No, I mean, someone did ask me to consider it. The more time that you spend just doing what you want to do and trying to make it the best version of itself versus doing something that you think will attract more people. Oh, no, I don't do that. We just try and figure out if we're doing something that is impeding our ability to attract more people that could easily be remedied.

Like there's something you guys probably naturally do it or you have people who are thinking about doing this for you that you can do your product. And then they put the right card at the end on the video so that it gets shared or they roll to the next video like there might be simple things that we're not doing so it's one of those things it's like i don't know but i don't i've never advertised this show i've never promoted it i've never done anything other than do it all i do is just keep doing it yeah but i think that you're yeah i i, that's been my mantra. I just keep doing my, I do, my problem is probably many things, but I do have, I have a lot of different projects. Like you do one thing really well. And I do, I have three podcasts now. So I mean, I'm sure someone like you would advise me to maybe focus on one.

I don't know about that. I would advise you to do whatever you enjoy doing. That's what I just like it because Walk-Ins Welcome is so like I get to talk to people and it's more, it's just different. It's a different part of my personality. I feel like they all exercise parts of my personality that, and Dumpster Fire feels always like I'm doing stand-up. We do Dumpster Fire live streams now and it feels so like i get that same rush because it's a live stream and i'm

like i don't fucking know what i'm gonna say half the time when i'm doing that favorite of your podcast thank you it's fun yeah and you're hilarious but it's one of those things where if you do all these and you count the views from all of them, do you think you would have all those views on one channel if you only did one? I don't know. I mean, they attract what I like about it is they attract different people. Like not everybody, not everybody likes Dumpster Fire. A lot of people love Walk-Ins Welcome and not everybody. There's a whole new audience that we're getting through factory settings because I think it's nice to have like the male influence and and people just like the conversation so I I don't I don't I think if I

put it all together on one one show or something it would be kind of weird well you should do what you want to do and if you want to do multiple shows you should do multiple shows that's what I'm doing what I think is is interesting is the Substack audience. Because Substack is fascinating to me. The growth of Substack has been really, it's been surprising and very welcome. I love it. I love Substack. I love the fact that independent journalists now have massive platforms.

Yeah, massive. And honestly, it's just beautifully designed. And I love how easy it is to share the work. And I started doing on my sub stack, like I wanted to just force myself to do a writing prompt every day. So I just started doing it. But on on right club on my sub stack, and people are joining in, and then they post their writing prompts and such a like fun, interactive thing. and they introduce a chat function so you can chat with your audience which is really cool and there's video now so yeah I think I think the like sky is the limit really for I I really love that platform and as a writer it

just speaks to my soul just how easy it is for me to post a very beautiful looking blog. No, I think it's great too. And also there's a built-in audience now because people have found that Substack is a great place to get real independent journalism. Yeah, it's so good. And mainstream people, people like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, big names. Glenn's left though, I think. Did he?

Yeah, he went to Rumble and then... Oh, he's exclusively on Rumble now, even with writing? I think as I understand it, that part of the deal is that he has to put his writing on Locals now. Interesting. What do you think? Did you see the Seymour Hersh thing? No. Seymour Hersh on his sub stack posted about us blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline. on his Substack posted about us blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline. That's crazy. Has that been actually confirmed?

Well, Seymour Hersh has said it, and he's documented his sources and discussed what happened. And the fact that someone like Seymour Hersh is publishing, and a guy who really hasn't been working, is publishing on Substack. What's crazy to me is i i asked my friend i'm like wasn't this am i mistaken or was this like a a conspiracy theory that got you labeled as like a putin apologist it did yeah not too long ago well biden said that it was russian disinformation that you know we had anything to do with it that it was russian disinformation and now it's coming out that, or it's alleged?

I mean, I'm not the guy to tell you. This is one way it's worded online. Cy Hersh swings and misses big. Careless claims that the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipeline cover for the real scandals of the Biden administration. Oh, I like Tablet. Tablet's good. Interesting.

What are they saying, though? Go back to that. What are they saying that it covers for? The most astounding claim in the blockbuster new article from Seymour Hersh alleging that the U.S. is responsible for sabotaging two of Russia's natural gas pipe natural gas pipelines is that the Biden administration is led by a no nonsense crew of highly capable tacticians. Huh. Forget what you've heard about the secret classified documents turning up in various Biden residences. But first of all, those Biden residences, that's documents from when he was a vice president. That's really not applicable for this current administration. And Hersh is telling that the Biden White House practices exceptional operational security. You're talking about different administrations.

Also, you're talking about something the vice president took with him to his home. And it would need to because according to the single anonymous source on whom Hersh bases his piece, the Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea. Pulling off a plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines between Germany and Russia would require not only vision and leadership, but sophisticated cover. So what kind of highly advanced self-technology did the Biden team employ to cloak the underwater operation? In fact, they did just the opposite. They hid the plot to start World War III in plain sight. According to the source, who had direct knowledge of the operational planning, writes Hirsch, a team of U.S. Navy divers planted the explosives in June 2022 during an annual NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, while tens of thousands of naval personnel from allied countries on site and hundreds of thousands more were monitoring the exercise remotely.

That is, according to Hersh's source, Team Biden thwarted the Russian's superb surveillance by planting explosive before the eyes of an audience of military and intelligence officials from the European countries that depend on Russian gas carried through the pipelines. Right. But what Seymour Hersh is saying is they planted it months in advance and then detonated it remotely. So saying that this is sort of, I don't think this is that good. Because someone could do that. You could plant something in front of everyone, but nothing happened. And then it gets detonated remotely months later. So to prove that they did it during that time.

It's like if all these people are monitoring it and they were there and they just blew it up. Well, obviously they did it. They were there. They blew it up. And you could say, you know, these people were monitoring them. They caught them doing it. But if some, if these people were there and no one knew that a team of divers planted this, no one's monitoring the bottom of the fucking ocean. You're not having people monitoring whether or not people are planting explosives that will be detonated remotely three months,

four months in the future. So they're saying just because no one was monitoring it, that's why it's not true? Well, I don't know. I mean, people have to read that whole article. People write articles and they have narratives, but I don't like the way they're phrasing it. They're saying that the Biden administration is inept because you're seeing these classified documents show up in Biden's home because that's all stuff that was from many years ago when he was the vice president. Yeah. I don't I don't I don't know enough about the Nord Stream thing. I just know that if it is, in fact, true, it's another instance where people were labeled conspiracy theorists. And then five, three or four months later, it's like, oh, just kidding. This is true.

Moving on. This is something that Tucker Carlson talked about on his show. You know, he bought into this, whatever Seymour Hersh was saying. I don't know. You know, it's hard to it's hard for us to really know. We really don't know. So to say we know is kind of crazy. But the idea that they're a bumbling administration because they found these classified documents at Biden's estate just doesn't seem accurate.

Not only that, my suspicions when they found all these classified documents and these documents were released by his aides was that they probably are concerned with Biden wanting to run in 2024. The fact that they released that, me, my conspiratorial mind was like, they're trying to sink him. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that that's even a conspiracy. I think they polled the party and it's something like only 37 percent wants him to run again. But they don't have another viable candidate. I mean, it could be.

That's what's fucked. Imagine if everyone leaves California and then we get Gavin Newsom. I doubt. It's the Peter principle. I doubt it. You rise to your level of incompetence. He's like, and now for my final act, I will destroy America. Yeah, I doubt it.

I doubt it, but I'm not sure. Who else is viable? I mean, Michelle Obama. People love Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama could be president. I really firmly, absolutely believe that. However, would she want to do that? After experiencing everything that they experienced, all the racism, all the attacks over the eight years that Obama was in the White House.

Why would she want to subject herself to that when she's escaped from it? And you're free. Not just free, but celebrated. Yeah. They make exorbitant amounts of money. They did the Netflix show. They do their Spotify show. They do all this different thing.

They speak. You're making plenty of money. You have plenty of influence over the party. Yeah. Would they want to? Would she want to do that again? I don't know i mean i feel like if if she did do it it would be either out of she doesn't strike me as someone who'd do something and i don't know anything about her but my general impression is

that she's not really uh like maybe she has maybe she wants the power and the is it the power or what if you wanted to make a difference what if you really wanted to put the country on the right track is like maybe it's a true act of service now i know saying this there's going to be a million people who are like the obamas are the reason america is where it is today sure well i think no one does a great job as president because i don't think it's possible by the time you get to that position i feel like you've become so corrupted. Even if you have ideals, you've had to sell them out in order to try and make sense of all of it. Yeah.

I don't know. It's unfortunate. I think in these leadership positions, you want people who don't want to run. You really want leaders who don't want the job, actually. Maybe that's her. Maybe. She could win. I think she could win handily. I really believe that. And then we'd have another Biden, and then we'd have another Obama administration. Would that be better? Would that be better than what we've got

right now with her at the helm? I mean, certainly we'd be better in terms of the way we view the presidency. Because the thing about Biden is we view him as being this compromised, like mentally compromised, incompetent, bumbling guy who slurs his words. He can't get sentences out. Everyone knows there's something wrong. Is Fetterman still in the hospital? I don't know. That poor guy. Imagine if he ran.

That'd be amazing. They're just clowning us. They're trolling us. That poor guy. Imagine if he ran. That would be amazing. They're just clowning us. They're trolling us. At this point. When he beat Dr. Oz, Dr. Oz has got to be like, what the fuck, man? I can't beat that guy. I mean, it seems like I will be happy if we don't elect any more olds in the next presidential election. Yeah, that would be nice.

It would be nice. Trump is basically the same age as Biden. Yeah, he's old. next presidential election. Yeah, that would be nice. Trump is basically the same age as Biden. Yeah, he's old. He's old. Yeah. I mean, there's no offense to the 80 year olds out there, but it's time. I just laugh like the boomers just are clinging with those gnarled and arthritic fingers to power. Well, they're deeply entrenched in the system, and it seems like the system rewards loyalty and rewards, you know, being a part of the party. We need some Gen Xer to run, though. Fuck that.

They're not going to do it. No one wants that job. That's also part of the problem. The attacks that you get, the way it tears your life apart. That's why I really would be, I'd question DeSantis going up against Trump because of the unhinged attacks that you're subjecting your family to from the crazy, like, Trumpalites.

Right. And, you know, the people, they're going to call him a pedophile or something. Something's going to, some QAnon-type deal's going to happen. I mean, you're already going to be dealing with, like, the left calling you a Nazi, and then you're going to be dealing, you're're gonna be getting in two-pronged attack but he's

so measured and yeah but that's why i feel like he'd if he was very smart and measured it's it's hard it's hard because he's right at the he's kind of at the you know the buzz is all around him so do you harness that energy and say like lereroy Jenkins fuck it let's do this. Who's Leroy Jenkins? It's that famous video on the internet where it came out and I'm going to like spoil this for everyone that it was fake.

It's just a meme. It's just a meme. What is it? It's an old meme. I'm dating myself now. 2005. What's the meme though? He's going to play it for you. Is it bad? No it's just. It's an old meme. I'm dating myself now. 2005. What's the meme, though? He's going to play it for you. It's tough. Is it bad? No, it's just...

It's stupid. It comes from a lot of places. It's like an onion. It's layers and layers and layers deep. If I even start explaining it, I'm going to get lost and I'll be wrong. I don't understand it. It's internet talk. I don't know.

It's something people say. Why is Leroy Jenkins so famous? Because this... The character became popular in 2005, his role in a viral video of game footage where, when having been absent during his group's discussion of a meticulous plan, Leroy returns and ruins it by charging straight into combat while shouting his own name as a battle cry. Play the video. You have to play the video.

It's so good. Please. So what game is this? Okay, guys. These eggs have been lost So what game is this? Okay, guys. What game is it? World of Warcraft. Does anybody need anything off this guy, or can we bypass him? I think Leroy needs something from this guy.

Oh, he needs those devout shoulders? Isn't he a paladin? Oh my god, these dorks. Yeah, but that'll help him heal better and have more mana. Christ. Okay, well what we'll do, I'll run in first, gather up all the eggs so we can kind of just blast them all down with AoE. I will use Intimidating Shout to kind of scatter them

so we don't have to fight a whole bunch of them at once. When my shout's done, I'll need Anthony to come in and drop his shout too so we can keep them scattered and not have to fight too many. When his is done, Bass, of course, will need to run in and do the same thing. We're going to need divine intervention on our mages so they can AE, so we can, of course, get them down fast because we're bringing all these guys. I mean, we'll be in trouble if we don't take them down quick. I think it's a pretty good plan. We should be able to pull it off this time.

What do you think, Abdul? Can you give me a number crunch real quick? Yeah, give me a sec. This is amazing. I'm coming up with 32.33, repeating of course, percentage of survival. Repeating of course. It's a lot better than we usually do. All right, chums, I'm ready, guys. It's a lot better than we usually do. Alright, drums up.

Let's do this. Leroy! Dragon! Oh my god, he just ran in. He gave him. Oh, just stick it clean. Oh, Jesus. Let's go, let's go.

Oh, so Leroy wasn't paying attention to their plan. He just came back from taking a shit. Give me my intervention. Hurry up. You think I can't count? And that's Leroy. They all die. Everybody dies? Yeah.

Oh, okay, the plan went awry. How funny is it that out of all the people playing World of Warcraft, this one thing where he says Leroy Jenkins becomes famous. Well, we came famous and then I think the most heartbreaking thing that i ever heard was that it was it was wasn't it didn't come out that it was like planned it was something that was uh it wasn't organic it was something that i don't know i feel like i i had my heart broken when i found out that that was something that was like uh it was planned it wasn't it wasn't something that was just like someone got. I don't know.

I've been saying it for years. I love it. So it wasn't just a guy coming back not paying attention? I feel like I'm going to break hearts because I'm not sure that ever. You're not going to break hearts. No one even knows. How many people know about this? So many people know about this.

It's huge. You guys are so much more deep into the internet than I am. No, no. Most certainly are because you know about Leroy Jenkins. I didn't know about it until just's huge. You guys are so much more deep into the internet than I am. No, no. Most certainly are because you know about Leroy Jenkins. No. I didn't know about it until just now. I'm in a chat and these women are so deep. They're at the end of the internet.

They're so deep. I don't understand like 90% of the shit they talk about. Do they have families? Yeah. That's what's weird. The World of Warcraft abandoned children. Do you know how many people are super, super, super addicted? Duncan had to put it away.

He was just lost. He was lost with it. That was one of my favorite South Parks where they made fun of all the World of Warcraft and the kids just got super fat and bad acne and they were just taking a shit in a bucket in their room. Those games are so addictive. It becomes your life and it's constantly thrilling and it's filled with engagement and it's filled with these little exciting moments.

Have you got, has TikTok captured you yet? No, I don't even touch it. I've never been on it. I was watching those videos and I'm convinced now that there's like one, there's so many people in China. I think each Chinese person or like 300 million of them are assigned an American. What makes you say that? I'm just kidding. I feel like it would just be a funny, it's like a funny idea that there's like someone

who's like got me and their job is to get me to sign up for TikTok. And they're trying to like find the stuff that appeals to me. And they're like, oh, I almost had her. And then I'm like. That's just the algorithm. They don't have to do that. Because it's so addictive. It's a funny idea of like someone's got you and they're like, Joe Rogan, he's defeated me.

He won't sign up. The job is to get every American on TikTok. So all of our brains can collectively melt and become pudding. Isn't it like the number two? What is it now? What's the number one social media platform in the United States? I think TikTok is on the rise. Adam Curry had a very interesting perspective on this whole Chinese spyware thing.

He thinks it's bullshit. He thinks they're all doing it. He said they're all like scooping up your data and the idea that China is doing it differently than we're doing it. He says it's bullshit. He doesn't believe it. He thinks what's happening is they're using that and they're saying that because China is so successful with it. The way they're doing it is so successful. So they want to ban.

They're trying to say it's Chinese spyware. And they're trying to kill the competition. Oh, that's interesting. This is his perspective. Okay. And he said they're all trying to emulate the success of TikTok, which is true. Which is why Instagram has gone to Reels. And they're favoring Reels.

And even Twitter now. If you notice, when you play a video on Twitter, if you swipe, it'll show you another video right away. Oh, I mean, I know they have the new thing on, what is it, Shorts or whatever? YouTube. Yeah, they're doing that. But that's like you find that in your YouTube feed and you click on them, but then when you click off, it just goes back to regular YouTube. It doesn't just direct you? Yeah, it goes right back to the video that you were watching.

Oh, okay. It just goes back to regular YouTube. It doesn't just direct you? Yeah, it goes right back to the video that you were watching. Oh, okay. I think they're all trying to emulate the success of that model of showing you video after video after video. You open it up, it immediately starts playing things. Yeah.

I've seen my kids. They're a fucking hook, line, and sinker. Yeah, my nephews. But what's fascinating is they're hook, line, and sinker with very different things. One of my kids, she is the one that tells me all sorts of interesting facts. And her feed is very different things. One of my kids, she is the one that tells me all sorts of interesting facts. And her feed is very different. Like she told me, like we were having a conversation and I said, do you know how the American education system was established? She goes, yes, I do. It was established in order to make people into good factory workers. And so she gives me the whole Rockefeller breakdown of the origins of the American education system.

I go, wow. I go, that's from TikTok, huh? Yeah. So she starts telling me about all these different facts that she learned on TikTok. And she's becoming educated from TikTok. They also think that Helen Keller wasn't blind and that it's a conspiracy theory. Not my kid. No, not her.

But I'm saying there's a dark side to this. What I'm saying is my other kid is the opposite. My other kid is just getting funny videos and funny dances and makeup tutorials. And this is what I do when I'm going out. This is what I do at the gym. So she's getting what is interesting to her, whereas my youngest is very, she's very interested in subjects and interesting things and details. And she has an incredible memory. And she pulls up these things.

She always wants to tell me about stuff that she learned on TikTok. So we have these really interesting conversations. And she laughs about how different her feed is than her sister. Yeah, yeah. So it really curates what you're actually interested in. No, I heard the algorithm on TikTok is amazing. The difference in our algorithm versus the Chinese algorithm is where it gets really weird. Because with ByteDance, what they've done in China is it favors athletic accomplishments, science achievements.

It favors martial arts, traditional dance. It favors very positive things. And ours is like, here's a gender transitioning person losing their mind. Right. But if you're into that, it'll show you that. Like, they're not showing that to my kids. It's showing that to people that click on that and become engaged with that. And then it highlights the things that you find that you're interested in.

But what if you click on it just out of curiosity, then does it keep feeding you that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then you get, well, you're curious, right? That means you're interested. It doesn't know why you're interested. It just knows you're interested. Yeah. What do you think about all the AI advancements lately? Scares the fuck out of me. The chat GPT thing is bananas. Did you see that Shapiro deep fake that someone did recently that was so creepy? Well, there's crazy deepfakes. There's one that Duncan put up.

Go to Duncan Trussell. Well, no, actually, Duncan used one minute of Biden talking. And he wrote this ridiculous plot and then used a deepf fake of Biden's voice with an animated character of Biden, pull it up off of Duncan's Instagram because it's amazing. So this is one minute. A thing we don't know. An Uncone thing. They said, you're going to do a down of the vehicle silver craft. They said it's the size of a car. I said, show me a picture of it. Well, when I was a kid, it would be the size of, well, a tenth of a card. I'll tell you a story. A kid's size of a pebble, just this big,

kid's size. Only had a slink shod, and they said to the kid, you won't be able to get him down. The kid was Daniel, and he took out Beleth. And that's what it's about in America. I ordered a shoot down. Now it's down. Problem solved. Thank you. And that's what it's about in America. I ordered a shoot down. Now it's down. Problem solved. Thank you. That's amazing. That's one minute of the shit. Yeah.

Yeah. They're also using deep fakes of people to make ads now. And that's become an issue where they're using people's voices. Yeah. I was reading. And video as well. Something about in the art world, you have to be careful when you sign contracts in Hollywood or somewhere where they're kind of building in the ability to use your likeness in deep fakes and AI. and an AI.

So you have to make sure when you're signing your contracts that you're not signing away the rights to use your likeness or image or voice. Oh, it's with voiceover people. That's who it's with. Makes sense. Because if you've, say if you've done voiceover for a book,

they don't need you anymore. They've got you. If you've done a book that's so many hours of audio, we're good. We're done. We'll just give you a check for all future books and you no longer need to... I got you. If you've done a book that's so many hours of audio, we're good. We're done. We'll just give you a check for all future books.

Yeah. And you no longer need to. You've said all the words. Yeah, you said all the words. Yeah. That's, it's real weird. And illustrators are fucked. Because people that used to do animation for, you know, animated shows and things like that, they no longer need artists.

I know. They no longer need artists i know they no longer need artists for advertisements they can make i mean we we highlighted uh our i highlighted on my instagram someone did they did the art of alex gray and they did a series of images in the art of alex gray and they look exactly like something alex gray would do and they probably generated them in a couple of minutes instead of months and months of Alex Gray laboring and painting by hand. And obviously it's not as valuable or as interesting because it's not coming out of an individual's hands. And that's what we like about art. Like Taylor Bowes made this painting of Mitzi Shore.

That painting is very, very important to me because I love Taylor. He's a great guy. He's a friend of mine. And he's an artist, a real artist. And he made that. And he also made the Jimi Hendrix that's out there. Yeah, I love that one. I love it too.

But it's like someone could make art in the style of Taylor Boss and do it that way. Yeah. And it would be indistinguishable. Yeah. I mean, that's a very strange thing for illustrators and for artists. And you're seeing these artists rallying against this, rightly so, because it's probably going to take work away from them and it's probably going to devalue their contributions. Yeah. And not to mention the fact that they're scouring the Internet learning from them. them, you can have a combination of Jackson Pollock and Alex Gray. You could combine things. It's writing stand-up. It'll write stand-up in the style of Mitch Hedberg or write stand-up in

the style of Bill Burr. I'm done. I mean, I'm a writer. I could just be like, write a blog with this topic in my voice if I give it enough information. I'm sure people are doing that already. And people are definitely writing term papers and definitely like cheating on high school exams with it. The Atlantic had a whole article about like how it's the death of homework, basically. Yeah. Because you can get an individual, completely original essay every time. It's not like it'll write the same one. And if you put your enough of it's it's I don't know. It's strange, though. I wonder I wonder what the reaction will be to that.

If it will become a hyper authenticity, you know, people will become more. There's always a blowback. So will people be craving more authenticity? Well, there's definitely going to be people that cherish authenticity. The problem is we're only dealing with chat GPT 3.5. I know. This is a singularity. We're on the direct ascent portion of this.

We're past the curve. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Well, have you talked to Lex Friedman about it? Are you friends with Lex? I wish I was. I'll connect you guys. I love Lex.

You'll become friends while you're here. I love him to death. I just love how much love he puts out into the world. That's really who he is. It's not bullshit at all. He's a fascinating and wonderful person. I love him to death. I would love to talk to him about this. I love him to death. He's one of my favorite people. I love talking to him. He's so good even in the face of attacks and criticism. He got so much shit for a stupid book list that he put. The internet is such a bully. Yeah.

Like you're just bullying this guy for putting out a book list? Well, they were bullying the idea that he could read these books so quickly. They could read a book a week. There was that, but they were also bullying the book list itself. They're like, this is like a basic high school book list, but I haven't reread a lot of those books since high school. That's the thing. He's rereading them. Yeah.

These are all books that he's already read, but I agree that you can't read War and Peace in a week. I don't know if he wrote War and Peace in that list, but some of, I think. You could read Animal Farm in a week. You could read On the Road in a week. Yeah. You know, he wrote it in a day on Benzo or whatever. Like he wrote it in a week. Was he on Benzos when he wrote it?

Have you ever seen the original? It's like one long sheet. He wrote the whole first draft on just a long spool of paper that it's like straight. The guy was, I love Kerouac though. I love, I love, I love all, all of his stuff. I don't think I've read that since I was 18. It's so good. It really is.

When you read it, you're like, yeah, this is why, this is why it's a classic. I, one of my favorite books and the reason I always wanted to learn Russian was Crime and Punishment. It's just so brilliant. I think that was on his book list too for a week. Okay. That's a tough one to read in a week. It's just, that's a scroll.

Oh my God, look at it. That's crazy. What a wild dude he must have been. No, what a nut. Look at that scroll. Look at it. That's something if I had billions of dollars, I would want to own. Oh my God.

How much is that worth? I don't know. Maybe it's like in a library somewhere. It's got to be in a museum somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, who owns it? It's so crazy. Just imagine that.

Type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type. On a typewriter. $2,200,000. It's not that much. Jim Irsay, owner of the Colts. Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team. Well, he's probably just some baller who owns a bunch of shit. Come on my house, I'm going to show you a saber

toot tiger head. That's like this there's a writing desk that I wanted so badly with and it had a backgammon table underneath it. It was so freaking cool and I was so poor and oh my gosh, why am I completely

Robert Downey Jr. Swept in with his bags of money and bought it. It was down the street, this little place. And I was, like, going to try and do it on layaway because I knew the woman. And I was so broke and I wanted it so badly. And I went in and I was like, here's my contribution to this bag. I would go in and look at it every day. How much was it?

I'm sure it was nothing. It was probably a couple thousand dollars, but this was like 2008, 2009 when I literally too poor to buy shampoo. Was it famous for some reason? No. What are you talking about then? It was just a... Just a table?

It was like a writer's desk with a backgammon table underneath. It was just cool. It was like a nice piece desk with a backgammon table underneath. It was just cool. It was like a nice piece. And it was in just a little local. So you're just complaining about being poor? No, no. I'm complaining about Robert Downey Jr. sweeping in with his bags of money and stealing.

But it's not a thing like that. It's one of the things. No, it's not. It's just something. It reminds me of something that I wanted. It's one of the things. No, it's not. It's just something.

It reminds me of something that I wanted, and I really someday feel I'm going to play Robert Downey Jr. backgammon on that someday. You think so? I don't know. Okay. I'd like to. I'd like to just take a look.

I bet the thing that bothers me is that I bet it's just sitting in some house somewhere collecting dust. I don't know. I don't know if you should think that way. I mean, it's his prerogative. Yeah. Worry about that with everything that people buy? I'm not worried about it. I'm just joking.

But owning like old things like that Kerouac thing, that's where things get fascinating because that is really a part of literature history. You know, it's like that's kind of an important piece. Like you could make the argument that that kind of an important piece. Yeah. Like you could make the argument that that should be a museum somewhere. Yeah, it's valuable. Yeah, not just valuable,

like culturally very significant. Like you wouldn't want it to be hidden from people. Obviously the original work you could buy in a book form and that's readily available everywhere. But the original piece, like for people that are fans of literature.

Yeah. It's something I would definitely purchase if I had, like you said, just tons of money and could buy cool cultural things like that. Well, that's a weird thing that people do when they have tons of money. They buy things that are illegal.

Like they buy like Egyptian artifacts and stuff that was like pilfered from Iraq. You know, that was a thing with artifacts, like Sumerian artifacts from Iraq. Like when the fall of Iraq, once Saddam Hussein went down, a lot of that stuff was like pilfered and stolen. One of my favorite stories when I was in Alexandria in Egypt and we were going on tours around and there was a garbage man because there were just antiquities everywhere. They're like in everyone's backyard in Egypt. It's just stuff you find when you dig.

And it was like a burial site with tons of mummies in it. And that's what we were looking at. But the story is this guy who is a garbage man was taking the mummies out and he was selling them on the black market for underneath all the garbage and he got busted in his 80s because they were like how is this garbage man like worth millions of dollars like he got extremely wealthy and it turns out he was on top of a whole like it was this whole i don't know how many mummies were in there it's crazy it's a funny it's just like one of those stories that stuck out to me.

How bizarre would it be to go over someone's house and they have a mummy? And that's a crime. You know, that's in Egypt. You can't, they don't want their antiquities leaving Egypt. They've lost enough. Well, they've lost so much. That's what's so fucked in terms of Egyptian history is that so many of those tombs have been raided over the years. And long, long ago to the

point where you're never going to find that stuff and who knows where it is now who knows what whether it's been melted down the gold's been melted down i just wrote about this when i was in egypt and i was staying in luxor and it's right across from the valley of the kings and i had like the it was one of the writing prompts and And the question was, do you believe in reincarnation? And I was like, I think I had like a past life regression in Egypt. But it was crazy. Just the Egypt is nuts. Have you been there? No. It's we went, I went right after the revolution. So it was empty. So there was it was almost like getting a private tour of this place that's generally filled with tourists. We had no line to see King Tut, no line to go into the Great Pyramids. It was like on our cruise down the Nile, there were supposed to be, I think, 100 and some odd people on the cruise.

And there were 14 of us. People were like, why are you here? Because it was right post the Arab Spring. Oh, my God. And it was right after they had voted, so they all had their purple stamp on their finger, and there was all this optimism, and it was before they realized that it all kind of went back to normal,

and they had to choose between two. What is this, Jamie? I've never heard of any of these things. I found something that said they had unwrapping parties in Victorian times, so I Googled mummy unwrapping parties and then stumbled across, why did people start eating mummies? Ew. What? So they would not only unwrap them, they would eat them because they thought that it would cure stuff.

What? What? What? What? The royal and socially eating mummy seemed a royally appropriate medicine, as doctors claim mumia, M-U-M-I-A, was made from pharaohs. Royalty ate royalty. Oh, my God. By the 19th century, people were no longer consuming mummies to cure illnesses,

but Victorians were hosting unwrapping parties where Egyptian corpses would be unwrapped for entertainment at private parties. Napoleon's first exhibition into Egypt in 1798 piqued European curiosity and allowed 19th century travelers to Egypt to bring whole mummies back to Europe brought off the street in Egypt. They recently found one in someone's attic in England. Look at the picture. Scroll it.

Look at that fucking picture. Oh, God. It's so bizarre. This is the most rich person shit I've ever heard. God, that's so creepy. That's so creepy.

Dinner, drinks, and a show. We're going to unwrap the mummy after cocktails. And eat it. They found a head in someone's attic recently. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

Yeah, because there was like a real big Egyptian kind of fetish that was happening during when they were, when they opened up to going into Egypt and exploring. And it became kind of all the rage. And I think in like European culture, they became all obsessed with it. When you went there, how many days did you spend? God, I was there a little over two weeks. Wow. Yeah, it was amazing. We did, I kind of, we started in Cairo and then stayed right by the pyramids and Sasakara.

We went down to Luxor. There's tons to see in Luxor. Took a Nile cruise, which I would do again in a heartbeat. It was amazing. And you just kind of float down the Nile and then stop. And there are all these amazing artifacts that you stop and see and get off. And then we stopped. and stop and there are all these amazing artifacts that you stop and see and take get off and um then we stopped uh we went to nubia and then flew down and saw um the big oh i'm blanking the big ramses um they're huge what's the name of it it's um south and then flew back and went to

alexandria which i loved there's just something very cosmopolitan about alexandria and we were with a bunch of locals my one of my mentors in cairo was um henny rest in peace he he was an artist and had all these young art students who lived in Alexandria. And they took us out and we played dominoes and like the Egyptian dominoes and the drinking tea and went to this amazing Mediterranean restaurant and ate. There's just so much history there. It's so wild. And just Alexandria feels like one of those cities that's just been burned to the ground. And it's like Barcelona in that way.

And the crossroads of all the cultures mixing. It was it's yeah, it was I definitely felt the most like oppressed as a you know, you have to cover up as a woman and keep a scarf on. And when you're going into certain places and you feel that that true kind of patriarchal society that exists was it that way at the pyramids um yeah i mean it's it's just in the air you know it's it wasn't like it was more so i think when we got into the smaller towns and then it was in like the bigger city, Cairo is nuts. Cairo is madness. The trap people, people, it's like L.A. traffic.

It's just but crazy. People are driving everywhere. It feels very at that point, too. There was no one really in charge. So it felt very crazy and lawless. And in Egypt at that time, it was 20. What did it feel like to be around the structures? So my reason that I think I had my little past life regression is I stepped out on the balcony.

It was when I was with a very wealthy man, and we got the King Farouk suite at the Winter Palace, which is right where we start the cruise. And I stepped out and looked at the Valley of the Kings. And I was one of those kids that was just obsessed with Egypt from the time that I was a little girl. I just was always obsessed with all things. And I stepped out and I felt this weird like, bong, bong, like a pulse hit my heart.

And they'd given us a biscus tea. And I thought maybe there was like something in it. I'm like, maybe I'm just dosed or something. And I'm about to have a crazy acid trip. And I ran to the bathroom, threw up. I started like it was weird. My body reacted. I started shaking uncontrollably and I could not leave this balcony for like a day. I was just shaking and I kept feeling this weird pulse. And I like I've been here I know I've been here I know I've been here in my in my life many lives maybe probably as like not a not a rich person

probably a like a someone who is a tomb raider or maybe just as someone who dug the ditches but I just felt like I had been there before and it was almost like going back to where it all that's how it felt to me this sounds crazy I know but it doesn't sound crazy it felt like I had been there before and it was almost like going back to where it all that's how it felt to me this sounds crazy I know but it doesn't sound crazy it felt like this is where it started well this is where it started for human civilization and I saw all these crazy things in my life like all these other people in my life and how they were connected and how I had met them before in different places in my life and then but I had kind of a panic attack and thought I was going to lose my mind and end up in a straitjacket in an Egyptian mental ward. And luckily, the guy I was with, he could have been an asshole. And he had seen some like weird,

sixth sense witchy stuff for me when we were in New Zealand. So he kind of was like, all right, she's a little touched. She's she's there's something off with this one. We'll let her like work through this and we had a couple days before we had to go on the cruise but I wasn't sure I was even going to be able to function I couldn't eat anything and the hotel was so nice they brought up a table

and brought us this nice soup from this very fancy French restaurant that was there and they were very sweet and I finally stopped shaking after like three days and I started I was just like doing yoga trying to come back into my physical body I felt like I was out of my body and at night I would have these horrible night terror dreams where I could swear people were in the room like robbing us or burgling us. It was very strange for days.

And then I feel like I get like anxiety when talking about it because I really felt like I was having a panic. It was like I had a panic attack. And I don't know what it was. I still to this day think it's the weirdest. It's one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me. And then we went on the Nile and things kind of calmed down. But it was a very strange, very strange. I loved being around all of those places.

There's just so much history. And the craziest thing and most revealing thing was how our tour guide, you look and it's like one of the hieroglyphics and pictures that we saw was what their medicine looked like. And it was a picture of basically no difference between a surgeon's table today and what they were using then. It was a bone saw and all. It looked exactly like if you took a picture of a modern surgeon's, you know, little tray that they have. And I asked her, I'm like, what happened to this? And she said it literally got buried under the sand it just got buried under the sand and we went into another cycle of kind of

superstition and conspiracy and dark ages and did what randall carlson and graham hancock have talked about all this it's all the younger dryas impact theory you don't know about this i haven't i've been i've been hearing i was reading something Impact Theory. You don't know about this? I haven't. I've been hearing. I was reading something that the Egyptians are mad about this. The Younger Dryas Impact Theory is backed by real hard science. And this real hard science is done through core samples and through a knowledge of when we pass through comet storms. And they believe that somewhere around 12,800 years ago,

the world, like 30% of the world has evidence of this, that we were hit by multiple chunks of rock from space. And that ended the ice age. It flooded North America, removed the ice caps that covered half of North America was covered in a mile high sheet of ice 12,000 years ago. And it all almost instantaneously went away. On top of it going away, it left behind the Great Lakes, all this melting, all this massive erosion. And when they do core samples, when they dig in through the Earth, at that period of time, at 12,800 years ago,

you find levels of iridium, which is very common in space but very rare on Earth. You also find evidence of these nanodiamonds, these micro diamonds that occur on impacts. They're called tritonite. They're the same diamonds that they found during the Trinity explosion or trinitite, I think it's called. But this is direct evidence that the world was hit and that civilization was most likely reset, that there was a very advanced civilization. Egypt is the best example of that because to this day, they don't know how they built

those fucking things. They don't know how they moved those rocks. They have no idea. They have rocks that were thousands of tons that were moved from hundreds of miles away. They really don't know what they did. They don't know how they cut them. They don't know how they placed them. They really don't know.

And what these Egyptologists and these archaeologists that have this alternative view of history believe was that there was a thriving, incredibly complex society that existed prior to 12,800 years ago, and that they were hit. And that our thoughts of civilization emerging around 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Sumer, that that was a reemergence of civilization after thousands of years of barbarian life. Because the survivors of this impact, the United States was, you know, whatever, whoever lived in the United States at that time, the evidence of it was almost completely wiped out. And then the people that lived in Egypt, they were almost completely wiped out.

And that what you get after that is people sort of reimagining what life was like and trying to duplicate it. The newer stuff in Egypt is much poorer design than the old stuff. And they really don't know how old the old stuff is. stuff and they really don't know how old the old stuff is like the idea of the pyramids being 12,000 or uh 2,500 bc that's just based on some carbon tests that they've done excuse me on little particles they found inside the cracks of the stones but the problem with that is they've recovered those stones they did a lot of work on those stones many times. Like there's many, like that doesn't mean that they were built at that time. They can't carbon date the exact time that those things were constructed.

They can just carbon date some of the artifacts they find in that area that are from biological materials. Yeah, I definitely, you should go. I mean, it's so worth it. No, I definitely you should go. I mean, it's it's it's so worth it. No, I definitely would go. But these guys and, you know, this guy from Bright Insight and Ben from History X, we've had podcasts about this where they discuss like their trips there. And the real evidence that shows that this Younger Dryas impact theory is most likely correct. So what's controversial about their theory? Why do they get, because I know I've read a lot of Egyptologists and Egyptians get very mad about it. I'll tell you.

Because first of all, people have staked their career on a specific timeline. The specific timeline was the construction of the Great Pyramids, 2,500 years, along with the construction of the Sphinx and all these different things. And so they've been teaching lectures, writing books. And this is something that these archaeologists have said, we know this is a fact. But they don't know it's a fact. And one of the things that they said back then when they were challenged, because there's a guy named Dr. Robert Chalk from Boston University. And he's a guy named Dr. Robert Chalk from Boston University, and he's a geologist. And one of the things that he said is there's very clear water erosion around the temple of the Sphinx

that indicates thousands of years of rainfall. The problem with that is the last time there was heavy rainfall in the Nile Valley was like 9,000 years ago. So that would fuck with any timeline that placed the construction of that at 2,500 BC. Okay. So they think it's thousands and thousands of years old. So this is hard science in terms of geology and erosion. And these water fissures indicate thousands of years. So it would have to have been thousands of years older than then.

Right. So when you go 9,000 BC or 9,000 years ago, you got to deal with thousands of years of rainfall prior to that to create this kind of erosion. And so when they went to these Egyptologists and they presented this data, they mocked them and said, what evidence is there of an advanced civilization from 10,000 years ago? There was none at the time. But then they found Gobekli Tepe. And Gobekli Tepe is in Turkey. And there's this massive stone structure of enormous stone columns and pillars that were absolutely dated to around 12,000 years ago. Wow.

So they know that at that point in time, when they thought that people were just primarily hunters and gatherers and that's it, they built these immense, complicated structures, thousands of tons. So they complicated structures, thousands of tons. So they don't know thousands of tons of stones arranged in these circles and concentric circles. Is that like Stonehenge, too? Much more complex. But they don't know about how Stonehenge. They don't know how Stonehenge was built either. Yeah.

But this is much more complex and much larger and enormous. And on top of that, only 5% of that area has been excavated. They've found tons of them that exist around that area that haven't been dung up yet by use of LIDAR and all this different stuff they used to find, things that are under the surface. I wonder what they'll find after this horrific earthquake. Yeah. Well, I think— Have you seen the videos of the cracks? The, like, where the earth just—

No, no, I haven't seen it. I'll send you some. It's just like entire olive orchards and just a huge scary shit it's so scary i know i was like i've got to get out of california so this is the pushback is that these archaeologists who have staked their careers on this very specific timeline they don't want to accept new information so they're being very dogmatic about it oh okay and it's a lot of ego-based stuff because they are the ones who are in possession of the truth. They're the ones that tell people what the age was.

They're the experts. Right. But it turns out these experts are being challenged, like in many other places, by people that are independent researchers that are objective and open-minded and are just dealing with the evidence. On top of this, the Younger Drives Impact Theory, you have a specific set of scientists that only study impacts that are absolutely convinced that this happened based on real hard physical data.

Okay. So there's real hard physical data that around 12,800 years ago, the earth was hit in multiple places. Again, there's evidence of this. 30% of the earth was hit. I want to go down there's evidence of this 30% of the earth was hit. I want to go down the rabbit hole. I'm going to have to watch that. Oh my God. There's so many of them, but Randall Carlson's the best at it. Yeah. I definitely, yeah.

Him and Graham Hancock and Graham Hancock's Netflix series is based on that. Oh, okay. The Netflix series is called Ancient Catastrophe. Okay. And it's amazing. And you see evidence of this stuff all over the world that they can't really explain. Yeah. They don't know how they have this sophisticated technology to cut these stones, to move them into place. It's crazy.

They don't know who the people were. Oh, it's amazing. It was one of my favorite trips of all the places I've been. It was definitely, definitely yeah there's something that you just feel there i'll send you some videos and you'll go down the rabbit hole and you will get freaked the fuck out i'm already freaked out because the real problem is it happens every year in june and november that we pass through these these comet storms and you know most of the time you just hit meteor showers and you see them in the sky

but every now and then we get whacked and we get whacked on a regular basis and there's plenty of evidence there's 5 000 years ago um outside of australia we got hit yeah there's uh evidence that antarctica in antarctica they found recently found a crater this massive crater that indicates that that got hit. What's that? I didn't know the sound was on. What are you playing? There's a meteor that just came in France two nights ago or something. Oh, is that the comet?

Well, they also think that... That was the green... It was like the green comet. They also think that... Look at this. Or the meteor. Oh. They also think that this was responsible for that meteor that hit Siberia in the early 1900s. Okay.

You know, this was the one that was Tunguskun. I didn't remember all this stuff. But that was a big one that it flattened and it exploded in the atmosphere above the forest and flattened millions of acres. And to this day, they're still fucked. I mean, we don't know anything. And it also happened during the same time of acres. And to this day, they're still fucked. I mean, we don't know anything. And it also happened during the same time of year. So during the time of year that we believe, that they believe

rather, this Younger Dryas impact theory happened. Okay. Not only do they think it happened at 12,800 years ago, Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson also believe it may have happened again at about 10,000 years ago. So these people had like a chance to regroup and then boom, got rocked again. Well, that's what she said when she said it literally got buried under the sand. I was like, how? That's it. And she was like, well, you know, she's kind of. They don't know.

They don't know. Yeah. And it's weird. You'll see one of the cool things in some of the places where you go and look, you'll see where like the Coptic Christians. Am I saying that right? Coptic. Coptic. I'm not sure. is where you go and look you'll see where like the cope the copic coptic christians am i saying that right coptic coptic um sure the they they defile like the old they'll like scratch out the eyes but it's all along the top because there was so much sand and all of the you can see like most

of it was buried well not only that only that, there's different layers. There's old kingdom stuff. And the old kingdom stuff appears to be even more sophisticated construction methods with larger stones. And that's below some of the stuff that they think is more modern. And again, a lot of that is buried in sand and they have to dig it out. They don't even know if there's more stuff there that they haven't discovered yet. It's crazy. know if there's more stuff there that they haven't discovered yet. It's crazy. But when you hear Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock, these guys that have dedicated decades to discovering this, they think that this is very clear evidence that humanity is, that human beings are a species with

amnesia and that we don't, we think that we are on a linear time path of progression and technological evolution. And he doesn't think so. And he thinks that there was a completely different path of technology that existed back then and that they were using something to move these things, whether it's sound or some hereto unknown technology currently, that they use this to move these rocks and cut these things and put them in place in this incredible precision that we don't even understand today how they did it that's what's so crazy it's amazing amazing and the fact that these people even if it happened at 2500 bc it's still

fucking amazing that 4500 years ago people were that sophisticated yeah that's what was that was the thing that struck me the most when I was there, was when you actually see that stuff in person, you're like, how did we know how to do this and forget? Yeah. Well, you know, there's also some stuff that's even more, that's insanely complex, that is almost impossible to imagine how they did it,

is these vases. They made these vases totally out of stone, and they're perfectly symmetrical. They're so symmetrical that the distance between them, the variation, is like one-seventh of a human hair. Yeah. And they have handles on them. So they don't know that they didn't turn them on a lathe because they have these handles. It's one piece of stone that they carved into these perfect vases.

And then there's also these statues that are perfectly symmetrical. So these carved statues where the distance between the eyes, the distance of the cheeks, the nose, everything's perfect. And it's carved out of stone. Yeah. Like how the fuck did they do this? That was like the, I want to find the name of the place that i went it was it was um with the ramsey statues because they had to move it it's unesco world heritage site and they had to move it because of the dam yeah so they had to cut them

and but they had to replace them in the right precision because the way it was lined up it was lined up with like the equinox or something that perfectly hit i'm like how how how yeah how did they do that abu simbel thank you yes the temples that moved yeah they had to move them that place is amazing it's all incredible the fact that this existed thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago when we thought of people of being just like using fucking copper tools and no like shooting at each other they were were doing surgery like we're doing it today. I mean, it's crazy. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah. I've never been to Israel. I really want to go there too. There's just that whole region. It does feel just like that place is really worth it. It's like a day flight that you take down there, but it's well worth it. It's the beginning of human civilization as far as we know it. And most likely that's what's left because it's the most immense and the most complex and the most timeless structures.

Because even if the earth is fucked and covered in dirt, those things are made out of stone. Yeah. And 2,300,000 stones in the Great Period. They weigh tons. I know. And they're moved from quarries hundreds of miles away that weighed tons. I know, it's crazy. And they're moved from quarries hundreds of miles away to this incredible precision. Yeah, it's crazy. They think that human civilization at one point in time was very, very, very sophisticated and very complex.

And we were much more advanced than even we are now in terms of our construction methods and our ability to move things and that they had some different kind of technology. I wonder what it was. our construction methods and our ability to move things and that they had some different kind of technology. And if we think of our technology currently, right, and compare our technology currently to the technology of just 500 years ago, which is nothing back then, the distance in time, it's unrecognizable. 500,000 years ago or 500 years ago, you have no internal combustion engines. You have no machines and trucks and no cranes and you have no video. You have no cameras. You have nothing. You have nothing that we enjoy today that we think of as sophisticated modern technology. So all this stuff can emerge so quickly today that if you imagine, they used to think that human beings in this particular form, the way we are now, we're only like 50,000 years old or 100,000 years old.

Now they're going back 200,000 years ago, 300,000 years. It might be a million years. Yeah. So that's so much time for people to innovate in advance. Yep. And advance to a point in a different way than we have advanced today. Yeah. That's what's so nuts.

I just love this stuff. I love it too. But I also love it because it's a big warning that our life is very fragile. Yeah, it's so fragile. Look, the power went out in Texas because it was 33 degrees and raining. And the trees first. I know. 33 degrees.

That ain't shit. Right? And everything was fucked. Imagine something catastrophic like meteor impacts no i know everywhere all over the earth instantaneously like passing through a shower of comets that slam into the earth most of everything you'd lose most of everything yeah that's like that the show last of us yes i it's there there's that one scene where she's like oh you got to go up in the sky and it's like don't spoil it i where she's like, oh, you got to go up in the sky, and

it's like, they lost. Don't spoil it. I haven't gotten that far. Oh, well. I'm only on episode three. Stop. Okay, sorry. Everybody wants to spoil alert shows that are new.

No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You son of a. I'm only saying it was a moment where I'm like, you can lose everything. You can lose everything so quickly. I mean, you can lose everything in a hundred years. That was really the end of my spoiler. Look, if you've ever seen, there was a National Geographic show, I think, that they had like Earth Without People, like what would happen if we died? Yeah.

Like how long would it take before nature would overcome us? Oh, yeah. There's a great book about that. It's not long. It's called The World Without Us. Yeah. world without us. And he talks about it from kind of an environmental, you know, talking about it, looking at all the harm we've caused environmentally, say, how long would it take for the radioactive waste and CO2 that's in the oceans, et cetera. And it's not by Earth's standards that

long. And then you look at what we leave behind and it's not really that great. Well, the thing is what we leave behind, if you think of our sophisticated structures like the World Trade Center, the new tower, like that would be gone in a few thousand years. It would rot away and it would fall to the ground. It would get assimilated back into the earth. But the stone structures of the pyramids wouldn't and won't. And that's the difference. And that's why we know if the ancient Egyptians didn't construct the pyramids, if they didn't make those things and they got hit, like say if they were at a level of sophistication of like the 1800s people, there would be no evidence. There would be nothing. for a very long time that just got destroyed. And then you see when the Taliban goes into places, they'll start blowing up all of the antiquities

because apparently life doesn't exist before, you know. Yeah. Well, it's against their religion. Yeah. They're like Buddhist things. Yeah, there's always going to be people that destroy the past. There's always going to be people that think that their current ideology is the only one and that the people of the past were devil worshipers or Satan. That earthquake.

Yeah. I keep looking at the videos of it. It was a big one. So you can find some pictures of those earthquake fissures. But we're so vulnerable. We're so vulnerable to natural disasters. We're so vulnerable to super volcanoes. We're so vulnerable to – but the big one so vulnerable to super volcanoes. We're so vulnerable to...

But the big one is impacts. So here's the fissures. Drone footage shows the wide fissures. There are some ones that I saw, like this olive. And this is nothing for the Earth. These little hiccups, these little movements that destroy and kill thousands of people. Yeah. Big cracks. That's nothing for the Earth. Yeah. They're the big cracks.

That's nothing for the earth. I mean, you look at mountains. Those mountains exist because of volcanic activity. That's why I love Joshua Tree. I think these cracks are something like 200 miles long or something. Yeah. Jesus Christ. And there are some that are super deep.

Joshua Tree, the rocks that are kind of exposed, they're like half the earth's age old whoa yeah that's why it's my favorite place and they and it took them i'm like talk about patience to come to the top of the earth but they they have their it's crazy the geology in that park is nuts well our ideas of the the earth is stable or so preposterous. We're so foolish. And we look at in terms of a lifetime of a timeline, you know, which is just a blink of an eye. It's nothing.

It's just nothing. And we don't know. I just, I, I, we just don't know. We don't know. I,

I recently had a friend who found it's a sad story. So, but she found out she had this very rare cancer and she's gone in two months and she's four my age two kids doctor healthy like a doctor yeah but it's super rare you would miss it it's um i can't remember the exact name um but it's it presents as like a bruise often in your extremities. And it was just like, it's just super fast. And no indication. They were planning their trips. It's so sad.

We don't know from that big perspective, but we don't know from that perspective too. You know, you just... Then we get caught up talking about drag queen story hour. You know? Yeah. I mean, we get trapped thinking about these... Stupid. We get caught up talking about like drag queen story hour. You know? Yeah. I mean, we get trapped thinking about these stupid things. No, I mean, it's like truly.

Presidential elections and, you know, the right versus the left and the culture wars and all the stupidity. Having a baby really made me not. It made me care less about the culture wars. I just in a weird way, I think I'm going to probably have to fight more. It's like I want I want a good life for her. I want her to have the ability to be free and pursue what she wants to pursue. is and anything that takes away from the people that you love. And we're not here for that long. We're not here for that long. We're just not. We're not.

And that's assuming that you live an average lifespan. Yeah. That's not assuming that you have something tragic happen. So I think. That's why I try to impart. It's an important perspective. Into comedians that are constantly engaged in conflict. I'm like, you're wasting time. Yeah. That's why I started i'm like let's create i want to just that's why all that's why when you say do what you want to do i am doing what i i love making people laugh

about the news cycle because it's absurd i love absurdity i love pointing it out i love having interesting conversations with smart people who know way more than me i heard you recently say in many ways your podcast has been like an education for you. And that's how I feel about mine. I didn't go to college, but my walk-ins welcome feels like college to me. For sure, right? And I love being able to just put out creative. It's so hard.

It's so easy to destroy and easy to go online and toss bombs and easy to. And I feel like a lot of those people, it's like take that energy and go create something. The problem with creating is creating leaves you vulnerable, whereas destroying you're constantly on the offensive. It's easy to do, but it doesn't do anything other than get your attention. And I don't think it's that fulfilling. Oh, it's definitely not. Well, they all become damaged. All those people that attack people constantly online, they're all psychologically damaged.

And a lot of them fall off after a while because they can't take it anymore. Do you think that the comics who are engaged in lots of drama, is it just a way to distract from having to do any work? Well, there's that. And they're all mediocre. One of the things you notice about the comics that are constantly engaging, attacking people, they're not very good. Right. They're not successful. They're not that good.

But do you think they could get good? Yeah, sure. Anybody can get good. It's a matter of remapping the way you think. Yeah. And changing the way you view the world and changing how you express yourself and also being a little bit more self-aware and a little bit more aware of how other people view things. And whether or not you can contribute in a positive way instead of a negative way. Yeah. little bit more self-aware and a little bit more aware of how other people view things and whether or not you can contribute in a positive way instead of a negative way yeah and the people resonate

towards positivity they really generally do there's there's definitely uh like a sideshow effect or like a car crash effect of negativity yeah people like want to look at it but they don't get engaged and like really really attached to it. With you, with what you do, the fans that you have are fans because they enjoy what you're doing and they go to it to get more of that. They get more positivity and fun.

And you're really good at pointing out those absurdities. It's a fun place to go to get a hilarious perspective on these troublesome issues. Because it's easy to get lost hilarious perspective on these like troublesome issues because it's easy to get lost in it all like you said and and then we forget we're blips we're like a half of a breath's worth of light of life and all of this is kind of absurd yeah well there's a lot of people that don't see it that way and they're Yeah. But it's easy to take yourself very seriously because then you have to feel important.

But I, I don't, I don't know. I feel like it's much easier if you go through life and you realize like you're going to die. This is all kind of absurd. Do what you can love as hard as you can. And yeah,

it's definitely better for you. Again, those, those people are probably very frustrated that they haven't achieved what they want. And that's one of the things you see in comics in particular. As they get older and they're not doing well, they become very social justice-y. Because you can get a lot of attention by pointing, you get engagement by pointing out certain things and saying certain things in a very specific way. But it's really, a lot of it is distraction.

You're not really fixing the world. All you're doing is like patting your own ego. And you're attacking people because you think that these people haven't passed your purity test. But what's hilarious is when that purity test comes back on them. And they get fucking devastated. And it will. It always does. It will.

And you can't lose yourself to bitterness. And that's like we were talking about earlier. It's easy to believe that you are being suppressed or like the algorithms against you. But that lends itself to falling into a trap of thinking that you're a victim, people are getting more attention than you and you feel like you deserve more and you get attack those people that get attention instead of doing something that's positive and worthwhile and that resonates with people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bridget, we just did another three hours. Oh, wow. It always goes so fast like that. I always feel like we're just catching up. Yeah, we are just catching up but it's always great to talk to you too thank you for having me i appreciate you very much and i appreciate your perspective you you have a very unique and hilarious perspective on current events and i don't think you get enough credit for it oh i i mean i joke a lot where are my accolades on on dumpster fire where are my accolades but it it's always like a joke. I don't, I just love people. You know, your audience is awesome because so much of your audience has, so much of my audience has found me through you, obviously. And they are such good people.

I will say like the stuff I've seen in my subscriber community is people rallying together and donating and supporting each other. It's like you attract good people. That's awesome. Yeah. I appreciate it. I appreciate you.

I appreciate you too. All right. Goodbye, everyone. Kisses. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Happy Valentine's Day. music music music music