The Joe Rogan Experience - #2492 - Ari Shaffir
Episode Date: April 30, 2026Ari Shaffir is a comedian, writer, and host of “You Be Trippin’.” His seven-episode live storytelling series, “The End,” is available now from YMH Studios.https://theend.ymhstudios.comwww.yo...utube.com/@youbetrippinpodwww.youtube.com/@arishaffirwww.arishaffir.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at drinkag1.com/joerogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Joe Rogan podcast, checking out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
What you are on my phone?
What?
Ari the Wanderer.
That's a new phone number.
That's not bad.
That's the new number.
Because that's what you are.
I was telling you last night that I thought it was in Mexico City,
but we had a report that you were at an Oasis concert in Mexico City.
And he said, no, it was in Rio.
Sao Paulo.
Oh, Sao Paulo?
Yeah.
So it was in Brazil.
So we know and knew where you were.
You were gone for how many months?
Six.
Seven.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
How many times have you done that now?
I guess three, although when I went to Ecuador, I was very much in touch with everybody.
So it was like.
That was a halfway.
That was a halfway.
But you were there.
You were kind of checked out.
I was gone for six months.
But I was in touch.
I still had numbers.
I was still like doing like podcasts and stuff.
What are you doing remotely?
Doing remotely.
Yeah.
I would do one with Big J. and Soder.
We did a 21 Jump Street breakdown podcast.
Yeah.
We were so bored during the pandemic.
We're like, let's find a show and just let's get together.
I watched 21 Jump Street.
First we chose sex in the city.
And then found out gay fucking Ian already had a Sex and the City podcast.
Ian Fideon?
Yeah.
Did he really?
Dude, that guy blows dudes.
Obviously, he loves sex in the city.
Well, I guess so.
So we're like, we don't want to step on his toes.
Like, let's pick another.
He seems like he's straight sometimes.
He does.
It's weird.
Like, is he only gay?
No.
No, he fucks.
He fucks better than we ever did for women.
Women?
Yeah.
Okay.
He gets it.
So, and then, but then he went to guys?
He's a new breed.
He's a new breed of just like.
When did he go to guys?
Is that a new thing?
I think he battled with it for a while.
Oh, okay.
So he was fucking girls but hating him?
God, I wish you were a guy.
Like that kind of a deal?
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess.
And then he went to glory holes and he was saying he wasn't gay.
I'm like, bro, that's one of the biggest signs of a gay.
So you just stick your hole, your dick in the hole or you suck the dick that comes out of the hole?
Like, was he the glory giver or the glory taker?
You're asking questions, I don't know.
I always assumed in my head.
It was he was sucking dudes off.
But I'm actually not sure.
Yeah, interesting, right?
It's interesting.
Yeah, because if the dick comes through the hole, if you like, you ever want to suck a dick but I don't want to look a guy in the eyes, I just want to know what it's like, see if I'm good at it.
I don't want to be embarrassed in front of anybody.
They can recognize me later.
I just want to work on my technique.
Yeah, I just want to find out if I'm right.
Yeah.
I need more research.
Not enough data points.
Yeah, because so you didn't even ask him which side of the glory hole he was on?
I think I was so overwhelmed by this heterosexual dude who was telling me he goes to glory holes.
And so then he was heterosexual.
This was back in the day.
We did a podcast, my old podcast, on the way down to like somewhere.
This is a skeptic tank?
Yeah.
And he was telling me that, but he was telling me he's not gay.
I was like, how do I say that?
Wait.
And I was like, buddy, I think you are gay.
He goes, why?
I'm like, the glory hell stuff.
It's a big sign.
And he goes, wow.
Do you think?
I was like.
Do you think?
I was like.
But you didn't even, that's the crazy thing is you didn't even ask whether he sucks or gets sucked.
I was lost in it.
You're right.
As an interviewer, I didn't do my job that day.
Obviously, that's a major question.
It's a one and two chance.
Yeah, right?
How do you not know?
How do I...
It's like very important to know.
It is because there is a percentage chance.
It might be a chick blowing you.
There's no percentage chance.
There's zero percent chance that this dick blowing you.
Is a vagina.
Zero percent chance.
It's 100 percent a guy or a guy pretending to be a chick.
I bet there's a ton of those dudes who have wives, you know, who live in that world.
Like, I always thought it was a woman.
Like, shut up.
Yeah, right.
Shut up.
Yeah.
Plausible deniability.
Possible deniability.
Yeah. So then he just decided to just go straight gay?
No, he's every.
He does everything.
Oh, now he's like Miami gay.
Bisexual.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, so we did the 21 Jump Street podcast.
And I would do it sometimes.
I'd get on.
They'd be like, are you drinking a coconut with a palm tree behind you?
I got out of a coconut.
I was like, oh, it's just a Tuesday, guys.
What's going on?
I really milk it.
Because you're in Ecuador.
Because I was in Ecuador.
It's having a good time.
What is like that gay tea you drink?
Mate?
Shirba.
So you just got into this.
It's literally a jar of hay.
It really is.
You pour hot water and there's so much hay in there.
It's so much.
It tastes.
You tried it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It tastes like just kind of ass.
Yeah, just hay.
I don't understand.
It's like a ritual.
It's all the gauchos in Argentina and then spread to Chile and southern.
And so it's just a bunch of leaves that are in a Yerba tree.
Yerba mate.
Yeah.
But that drink is like different.
I've had that stuff.
I think it's different.
Really?
Yeah, I think it's about as much as like what Willie Nelson's like drink is actually weed.
Oh, Willie Nelson's drink is weed.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
I take it back then.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know what the legality of that is.
And I don't want to throw anybody under the bus.
But Ron White brought a bunch of it to the mothership.
And it's very legit.
Yeah.
It's all dose dependent.
I think one glass is like five milligrams or one shot is like five milligrams.
But if you drink a glass of that shit, yeah, you're going for it.
You're going to go into that weird dimension.
You know that weird dimension where you're like, I think this is Earth, but it doesn't seem like Earth anymore.
Thumbs off.
It's like a facsimile of Earth.
Try to look at people like you see what I'm seeing?
Yeah.
I remember one time I was doing Fear Factor, and we were in San Francisco.
And back, this is the unregulated edibles days, you know, because this is before marijuana was legal, but you could get a prescription.
Do your joke?
Can I do your joke?
Which one?
The X?
Oh, yeah.
I'll do it.
You'll be embarrassed.
This is early days.
And by the way, it was just like, there's banana bread going around.
Right.
Now it's killing people.
It's great.
Not killing people, but like destroying people.
Yeah.
It goes, they came in these doses, one X, two X or three X.
The problem is X didn't equal any number.
Yeah.
So it was just some guy mixing up his bathtub full of fucking whatever, like weed-infused cookie dough and deciding what's X to him?
That's not a mathematical equation.
Yeah, X had no number value.
So it's one times this.
What's this?
Right?
Yeah.
Well, I had the joke, too, about the gummy bear.
The guy literally said that to me.
I go, how much should I tell?
He goes, just a leg.
Los Gumes are minus.
Yeah.
I go, just the leg.
I go, why the fuck are you selling whole bears if I should only eat it?
Because it's only that big.
Like, no one's into eat just the leg.
It's a crazy dose.
Half a cookie is the right.
That's not all cookie is a dose.
So back in these days, we were doing Fear Factor, and we were doing it, it was, we were doing it off of an aircraft carrier in the Bay area.
And so we had to take the, you know that one train?
I forget what it is, is it the Bart that goes under the water that goes under the Bay between Oakland and San Francisco?
The Bart.
Yeah.
Bart, whatever it is.
No, I called the bar just to fuck with them.
So I took this edible, and it was an unregulated edible, so I have no idea.
And it was way too strong.
And I was like, why do my ears feel weird?
And they're like, because you're under the ocean.
And I was like, no.
It was like the longest 20 minutes of my life waiting to pop out on the other side.
Where I was like, we're under this.
How long has this fucking subway been under the ocean?
Like, how long has this existed?
Like, what are the odds?
This thing is still good.
Is anybody out there diving, checking on the tube, making sure there's no holes in it?
You know, in this fucking...
You started doing all the research in your head.
And it was like, I felt like I was talking to people, but what I was seeing was a two-dimensional,
like, you know, like those stand-ins, like, when you go to the movie and it's like, you know,
a person standing there, like, thumbs up.
But it's like just a two-dimensional cardboard cutout.
That's what everybody looked like to me.
It was like a two-dimensional carboard.
cardboard cut out, but occasionally I'd see their soul peeking around their shoulder.
It was so heavy. I don't know what the number was.
Don't you miss how many X's.
That kind of high? I don't get that kind of high or drunk anymore.
Well, that kind of high is really fun.
It's so fun.
After it's over. After it's over.
When you look back.
When it's happening, it's terrifying.
Oh, that is the best.
I remember a guy did jihitsu with, he made pills.
He made THC pills because he was like, when I was, like, when I was, like, when I was a
one of those all day guys.
He was just high constantly all the time.
And so, yeah, the dab guys.
But this is pre-dabs.
And so this guy made pills, THC pills.
I go, how many should you take?
And he goes, you should probably start off with one, but I take two.
So I took two, because I'm an asshole.
And I wound up having this conversation with this guy, and he was weirding me out.
It was at a jiu-jitsu tournament.
I was like, why is this guy so weird?
Turns out the dude eventually got arrested for him.
rape and not just arrested for rape but he was on the run and he was on the run and couldn't
stop doing jujitsu and the way they caught him was he went to like seattle or somewhere like
because this was in california he's signing for classes and he was just rolling but he was killing
everybody and i was like who is this fucking guy like why is this guy so good and then eventually
they realized it was him they go oh my god this guy's wanted for rape wow he was a crazy
person. And when I was like super
high in these pills, I could see all the crazy
in his eyes. Like it's
like he didn't say anything crazy.
Dude, you can. When you're on drugs, you can see through
people. Yes. You can.
You can. You can see their soul.
It's fun. It's interesting. It is.
You really can see it. It's not one of those where I'm like,
no, it was just the drug fuck with me. You can
tell. And so this is like
a year or so later, he gets
arrested and winds up
fleeing. I think he maybe was out
on bail or he was wanted and
fleeed and went to the Pacific Northwest.
But I remember when I heard the story, I was like, oh, that makes sense.
Because he had the weirdest energy, just like this dark energy, like creepy dark energy.
Sometimes if you're on like a psychedelic and then someone's not on with you, you know,
but they're around you, you're like, hey, you got to go.
You're freaking me up.
Like, I don't know.
Your energy is not of this.
I don't know if you're looking at me, but like you got to take off.
Yeah.
You can see like motivations.
You see everything so clearly.
I know.
It's weird.
But it's not reliable.
It's not like I'm about to go into a meeting with this defendant.
I need to know if he's actually innocent or guilty.
So I'm going to take five grams of mushrooms.
I stare through his soul.
Me and Big Jay were leaving a blues fest in Ottawa once.
It's like a city festival, but then you wander into what used to be the safest city in Canada.
So you're all fucked up.
It's great.
and as you're leaving you just see who's on what drug like you just can tell like mushrooms acid weed drunk mollie
yeah you just see it all you just see through everybody they're just sitting there talking yeah i don't
i wonder what's going to happen now that this uh thing happened at the white house first of all i thought
you know i'm out on the news so i'm hearing stuff little by little about everything yeah i thought it
It was just Iba gain, which is like, great.
Those people need that.
And then, and then, I mean, Ed Clay has been telling me about that for so long.
Well, Ed Clay, I talked about him on the podcast because he was one of the ways that I found out about it.
Yeah, yeah.
Nashville.
Yeah, right.
And he would tell you, he's like, you should get on it.
It helps the addiction.
I'm like, I'm loving what I'm doing right now.
I don't want to get off this.
I don't need to fuck up my high.
But like, I'm like, this makes sense.
And then, oh, fine, great.
You got that.
And then I find out it's also, I mean, the best.
Hippy flip. You got that MDMA and boomers and shrooms. And psilocybin. Yeah. Well, it's because MDMA and psilocybin, MAPS was already doing MDMA studies with veterans. So for people that, you know, watch a bunch of people get blown up and lost their friends and come back. MDMA was one of the best therapies for helping them overcome PTSD. So MAPS had already pushed that through. And Johns Hopkins had already done these studies with psilocybin. So they already pushed these things and they were already
already on the way to getting approval through the FDA.
But the problem was nobody wants to stick their neck out and sign off on it.
It's a problem with, with politics, if you're running, we talked about this.
If you're running for an office and the opponent can say he wants drugs legalized, then you're fucked.
So it's like it really binds your hands.
Right.
Well, that's funny because that's kind of what Dan Patrick did in Texas about marijuana.
But to his credit, Dan Patrick met with Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard, the guys that passed
this Texas Ibigan initiative.
And they convinced him of what this stuff actually is.
And so they've donated.
So he's allocated, rather, $100 million in Texas for the Ibegain initiative, which is amazing.
But that's a sign of an intelligent man.
Like this Dan Patrick guy had this stance on weed.
There's like, weed's bad.
It's ruining and everything.
And then they come to him.
He's like, I'm staunchly opposed this.
And they sit down with him.
He explains, Brian Hubbard explains, and he's very eloquent, explained what Ibegain does.
It's not recreational at all.
and he hears it and he hears how much it'll help, particularly veterans that come back, they're addicted to opiates and they're all fucked up.
And even CTE, even like brain injuries from getting blown up.
It's neuroregenerative somehow.
It's a crazy plant.
And so he, to his credit, he signed off and they allocated $100 million for the Texas Ibigan initiative, which is amazing.
Wow.
But it's like all these people have these ideas in their head, but it's all because of Nixon.
All of it goes back
The Nixon administration
This is evil
This is you'll get stuck that way
Kind of stuff
I think some people do
This is what's important
About these studies
Yes
This is what's important about these studies
Like I think this is important
About weed too
You know I'm very adamant
That it's not for everybody
I think there's a lot of things
So strong
Some of it's so strong
And some people are already
On the way to schizo
They're already on the way
There's schizophrenia
And their family
There's like they just
That's not a good thing
for them. Well, what's making a comeback, luckily,
is, like, Mexican wheat.
It's like the 12%
THC, where it's like,
it's just get a bit, I just want to get high
dude. The old days. I'm trying to bury myself
and miss this movie again. I don't want to go to Pluto.
Yeah. Is there anything?
Is there, what's the shot? I want to be
in the clouds right above the city. That's it.
What's the shot in a beer of weed?
I love that. That's it. Right.
Yeah. Right. I don't want to fucking dab.
I see these dabbers.
Oh, I asked for medicine a dispenser.
They're like, what are you, what?
Mids?
What is that?
Mids, yeah.
They're all so hardcore.
I remember the early days.
It was like Zen dispensed.
One of the early ones and I was like, just getting into it.
Atari hooked me up.
Remember that guy with like weed?
And it was like, okay, so now I'm into it.
And I went to Zen and I was like, listen, I like to smoke cigarettes while I write.
I'm off cigarettes now, but it's a habit.
So I need something.
But if I smoke a joint, I'm done writing.
Right.
And that's what they say.
Oh, you want Mexican weed.
We can do that for you.
Oh, just something.
It's just like, yeah.
It's like going to a powerlifting gym and saying, do you guys have yoga classes?
It feels so wrong to say, get the fuck out of here.
Got the fuck out of here.
Got the fuck out of here to get checked.
Yeah.
They did that in Ecuador.
There was a city I was there when I did ayahuasca.
And it was a guy from the tourism board.
And he said, what's going to, there's three cities that are like on the border to the Amazon.
And, and, you know, you can go in from any one of them.
And they go, what's going to separate our city from all these other Amazonian cities?
And they go, let's be the ayahuasca city.
Ooh.
And everyone else on the tourism board said, no, we are not getting a bunch of fucking hippie backpackers in here to be drug addicts in our town.
Like, that's not what we're looking for at all here.
That thing sucks.
Yeah, it did.
You just filled it up.
I'm not.
There's a lever on it, too.
I don't know.
And he goes, okay, fair.
But he goes, can I take you on an ayahuasca trip to each member?
Each member was like, you know, they're half indigenous.
They're like, sure.
Right.
And then one by one, they all go, oh, this isn't an addictive thing.
Right.
So I had the wrong idea in my head of what this was.
You come once, you don't come back for a year.
Yeah, everybody had that thing from the Nixon administration.
It's the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
And that thing, it's really nuts.
But for 56 years, we've been living underneath that.
It just becomes a given.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
You don't think to reevaluate any knowledge that's in there already.
I know, and it's like so many people.
Just a little microdose of shrooms.
It'll change your fucking life.
It would help so many people.
There's so many people that are stressed out for no fucking reason.
It really does give you such a reset.
100%.
And Molly, too.
I know that's why I talk to you.
The MdMA maps people will always like, please start calling it MDMA.
When you call it Molly, it becomes a party drug.
I'm like, well, I do it at parties.
So that's what it is for me.
The problem with what they're saying by saying that is like, no, because it is a party drug, too.
It's also just like, what are we going to call whiskey?
We're going to call it, you know, alcohol by volume.
Are you going to have a technical term for what whiskey is?
Fuck off.
It's whiskey.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's why people like it.
Like you call it that if you want.
Yeah, you do whatever you want.
I'm going to call it Molly.
Fuck off.
Fuck off.
I don't know about you guys, but with spring here, I am ready to go outside.
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Fuck off with all your rules.
That's a good ringtone.
But it's because they've spent so much money
and so much time and so much effort
trying to get this stuff passed through.
It would be so huge if you could just go get some mushrooms.
Oh, it'd be so huge.
And why can't you, if you can go to Costco
and just buy a jug of whiskey and drink yourself to death?
It also, so like in Edinburgh, they have a season for it,
and you can go through the meadows or any of these fields
and just, like, pick mushrooms.
Right.
But if it's on your shoe, it's fine.
And if it comes off your shoe,
It's illegal.
Oh, that's hilarious.
But it's just like growing there.
You know where Duncan used to live in Asheville?
They started giving the cows like a certain type of feed that had antifungal properties to it.
What?
So, who knows what it did to the cow's gut?
You know, how it ruined the cows.
Just because so many kids were picking mushrooms off of the cow shit, they, we're going to put a stop to this.
In Thailand, it's the elephant shit.
And the guys who ran the elephant, like abusive centers, whatever.
so you can ride them and make them play harmonica.
Stuff is natural in the wild.
Oh no.
Oh, no, guys.
Elephants love painting you a picture.
We wrote them when we were in Thailand.
Did I go back my second time?
And everyone in the hostel was doing that.
And then I was like, no, I already did it.
And they go, humane or non-humane?
I'm like, oh, definitely the humane one.
They're like, did you ride them?
That's inhumane.
I'm like, oh, yeah, inhumane then.
Well, the elephants wanted you to ride them.
They don't mind.
Like, because you weigh nothing and you feed them first.
and you give them an offering, right?
So, first of all, you wash them and you feed them.
So you feed them, like, you give them sugar cane.
And you have to develop a relationship with the elephant before you ride it.
Like, these people were all, they were all free-range elephants.
They're all rescue elephants.
So the elephants would come in out of the jungle.
They weren't in cages.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
It was wild.
And they let you get a saddle on them?
Uh-huh.
Well, you don't, it's barely a saddle.
You just kind of climb onto them.
and there's like a thing that you hold on to.
And they're totally cool with it.
And then at the end, you go to this like pond and you wash them.
And so it's like, they could kill you anytime they want to, you know?
So it's like it's a relationship.
And it's not, they're not prisoners and they're not abused at all.
The people that are running this, the place that I went to.
But even then, I did a video with it and I said, you know, you could ride them.
I go, I wrote them.
I don't recommend it.
I don't think you should do it.
I would never do it again.
I would never ride them again because it just feels.
I'd rather just feed them and pet them and say, you're nice.
I don't need to go through the jungle.
Yeah, but also like, you wrote them.
I did.
So, like, if you hadn't wrote them, you'd be like, I've never ridden an elephant.
I wouldn't have done it at all if my family didn't want to do it.
They wanted to do it.
So I said, okay, let's go.
And they enjoyed it.
It was a good experience.
You know, the kids are, they're little and were taking them through Thailand.
Yeah, it's wild.
I wonder sometimes that these kids, I was talking to tell me about it, like, if they'll know later in life.
how cool their experience was.
Like it'll be till like that 35 or 40.
They'd be like, oh, I had a great child.
I didn't understand the coolest things I did.
Yeah, I think my kids are pretty aware of it.
But anyway, they had these hippies would go over the encamp and pick out mushrooms from elephant patties.
And then eventually the people, the herders were like, why do these fucking dreadlock people keep coming in at night and like sniffing around our shit?
And then they realized what it was.
And they go, oh, no, no, no.
sell this. Oh, so they sell it.
Is it illegal in Thailand? Like, what is the
legality of mushrooms? Now, I don't know, because I think
they just legalized weed in Thailand. Did they
really? Yeah, but back then, when
it was illegal, there were
bars that sold your joints, and those are the bars that paid
the cops. And so, for all
intents and purposes, you're fine.
Bro, I would not fuck around with drugs in another
country.
Lame.
Yeah, me. That's me.
Super lame.
I mean, talk to Brittany
Griner. How'd that work out?
Not good.
Do you think when she was in jail, the guards were fuck with her and show videos of her missing?
Like, how come you miss?
How come you miss this shot?
Return new breakdowns.
You eat too much pussy?
You smoke too much weed.
You miss this shot.
She was in jail for a long fucking time.
She was in jail for a while.
I think she was in jail for like, wasn't it like six months or something like that?
I knew someone who worked at the agency she was at, the sports management agency.
Mm-hmm.
Every day they started with 15 minutes of like,
hey, before we get into anyone else's business,
how are we getting around?
10 months.
Almost a fucking year in jail in Russia.
That's crazy for a rape cartridge.
Nine years in a penal colony.
That was a funner because they just told America,
like, hey, guys, keep quiet.
We can get her out.
She's a nothing asset.
Just everyone to be quiet.
And the liberal, angry housewives are like,
no, I want to say something.
And they all just kept talking.
Eventually, Russia was like,
oh, is this an important one?
Oh, really?
Oh, we'll keep her in.
Is that what happened?
Yeah, I think so.
I think it was Biden was like, just shut up.
We'll get her out to shut up.
And they made it into a bigger thing.
So that they could get the merchant of death released.
We are the worst at hand.
Americans are so bad at handling things they don't know how to handle.
They just rush in full bore going, I know how to fix it with no knowledge of it.
Well, it's also once a story gets out in any form, influencers cannot help talk about it.
It's their currency.
There's no way they're not going to talk about it.
Same a little late night guy.
They knew after Trump won that, like, talking about him helps him.
Before we said we're trying to take him down.
But now we've seen the research.
We know it's helping him.
I'm still going to do it because it's my money.
Yeah.
They can't help it.
They can't help it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's like CNN's most of their ratings were talking shit about Trump.
Like, every time he did something outrageous, they would talk shit about them and they
would have them on and it just made them more and more popular.
Because I don't think they understood how much America's design.
Americans despise them.
You know, they thought, we're CNN.
We are the news.
We're CNN.
And then because the fact that Trump was opposed to them and they just kept showing him, they're like, oh, he must be good because you guys suck.
Right.
You ever hear the theory that terrorism and the U.S. are symbiotic?
What's the theory?
How's it work?
Terrorism can't exist without the U.S. dominating their countries.
Oh, yeah.
That makes sense.
And the U.S., they can't keep funneling money to weapons without terrorists.
Well, U.S. and Israel.
I mean, that's the thing with Hamas and Netanyahu.
He famously said they were funding Hamas.
We need them.
When we fund Hamas, we can control the height of the flame.
Or 9-11, like, it popped off a little high, but there was like, we need something to be like, hey, we're all against that.
And then those countries are like, look, they're all against us.
So they just like they need each other to keep growing.
Well, it makes sense.
And also, you need an enemy in order to get higher military contracts, higher budgets.
I mean, if you don't have terrorism, how can you justify a trillion-dollar military budget?
So you need to, like, say, hey, they're a real threat.
I'm like, that's a 30-person group.
Yeah.
They're not coming for us, but like, we've got to take them down.
Look at the training they're doing.
You ever see Shane's bit?
A monkey bars.
They're all monkey bars doing their training.
I love that bit.
I love that bit about how bad they are at Jumping Jacks.
It's what fat people do to get in shape of the biggest loser.
Yeah.
And they're stuck over there.
Like, shut up.
Yeah.
They're not going over there.
It's, and then I always wondered why we left behind all the shit.
Like, cynically, I'm like, do we leave that stuff behind so that they could use it?
The older I get, the less I think there's accidents.
There's an aptitude for sure.
But there's also, like, we've done the research.
We know.
Yeah.
At some point, you know.
There's bad moves you make here or there.
I mean, we left behind tanks and Black Hawk helicopters.
Like, what, we couldn't get those out?
We had to leave right now.
We were there for 20 years.
Also, we got to get out right away.
You don't want to put a grenade in each one first before you go?
Like, what do you mean?
And also, those are still good.
Yeah, we didn't get out like Vietnam.
Park them in a field and drop a fucking bomb on it.
Yeah, you don't have to leave it there for the enemy.
It's for the Taliban so they can keep the people under their thumb forever.
Yeah, if you were treated last second, I could see it, but it wasn't that.
And then you're like...
They didn't have to leave the way they left was insane.
When you see those ships, the planes that are flying away
and people are hanging on to the wheels of the plane
and falling off because they don't want to be left behind.
Because they know.
There's so many people that work with the Americans.
You said you'd protect us over and over again.
And then you're like, yeah, we've done this over and over again.
We'll just say it.
It says that it was equipment we gave to the Afghan state.
So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't U.S. equipment.
any longer.
And it's already given over to them?
We gave it to the Afghan state, but not the Taliban, the national defense and security forces.
Right.
And then there was not that many of them.
And so the moment that we left, the Taliban just took everything.
There's also like, what is the Taliban?
We have this word on it.
It's like an evil word.
But are they just like the government in a lot of these places?
Like the cartels in Colombia, they like build schools.
They do bad shit, but they also are the government.
They make sure the businesses run okay
And so you have this idea of cartel
It sounds like that but it's like it's more than that
I wonder how much the Taliban is actually into terrorism
And how much is like just running day to day stuff
Well that's a good point because in America
I mean what are the pharmaceutical drug companies
I mean how many people have we talked about this the other day
It's like 70,000 people died of opioid overdoses in America in 2024
70,000 70,000 so like and a lot of
A lot of that is probably cartel fentanyl, but a lot of it is like flat out old school oxycodone.
So it's like, what are they?
What are they?
And how much are they donating to political campaigns every year?
Right.
But they thought, you saw, the most effective thing of that Sackler with Ferris Bueller, that documentary series or whatever.
Yeah, painkiller.
Is they started every episode with a real person talking about how their son is dead.
Yeah.
Or, you know, something like that.
Yeah.
And then they can you're like, oh my God, this makes.
is so real.
Pain killer, that's what's called.
Yeah.
It was so good.
That's Peter Berg's.
Yeah, we talked about that the other day.
It's an amazing series.
Amazing series.
Like that, that, Matthew Broadwood plays such a good fucking creep.
He did such a good job.
God, that fucking, that show's so disturbing because it's based on true story.
And he show a guy falling into the despair from being fine.
Yeah.
To just like, oh.
We all know somebody who got hooked.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's so potent.
It's so powerful.
And they told doctors, they told people, they told everybody that wasn't even addictive.
They knew it was addictive.
They knew it operated on the same path.
I mean, that's in the painkiller series.
Yeah.
That it operates on the same pathway as heroin.
Like, you're saying that this is not addictive.
This is a lie.
Yeah, what they did there was go, if that movie is completely accurate.
It's like, okay, so this is for heavily cancerous, like, bedridden people that have a pain threshold of eight to
10, like it'll be good for them.
Why don't we just extend the pain threshold to 3 to 10?
Yeah.
And that allows a lot more people in.
If you're at a 9, it doesn't matter if I get addicted.
My life is awful right now.
Right.
If you're at 3, like, walk it off.
Exactly.
I talked about when I got my nose fixed
when the doctor tried to give me two different opiates.
And I was like, it was nothing.
I mean, it didn't even hurt.
It was just mildly uncomfortable.
And that was also because it was stuffed up with gauze.
Like those, it wasn't even gauze.
It wasn't even gauze.
Like, these phones.
things with a tube that they stuff in your nose to keep your nostrils open while it's healing.
But, you know, he gave me two different opiates.
And I was like, is it going to get worse than this?
Because I don't, I'm fine.
Yeah, they don't tell you, but be careful I would not take unless you absolutely need it.
No, they don't tell you any of that.
They want you to do it because they're financially incentivized.
I got a whizum tooth out.
And the dentist was like, I was like, hey, I don't want to like.
Why did you get a wisdom tooth out?
Did it hurt?
I don't remember.
It was so long ago.
It was like 815, 18 years ago
What's the logic on that?
Are you supposed to get wisdom teeth taken out?
I've had both out
Because I've heard people say you shouldn't
Like there's no reason to take them out
Why do you that?
They get impacted or something?
I don't know
Often they grow in
They're growing in wrong
And they cause problems
With other teeth
It had to be that
But he gave me this thing of Vicodin
And I was like
I don't want to
And he goes
You're friends with comedians
Right?
And I was like yeah
He goes
Your friends will want it
Whatever you don't eat
Whatever you don't eat
I'm sure you can find
He was joking around, but he was right.
I have tons of addict fronts.
Of course.
They are all like, nice.
Yeah.
Advising me to take aspirin and not use up one of those precious vicos.
I took that stuff once when I had my first ACL reconstruction.
And it was it made me so stupid.
Vikin.
I think it was Vicodin.
It was either Vicodin or Percocet.
I can't remember, but I think it was Vicodinin.
But I wound up selling it at the pool hall.
Yeah.
Sell it.
Give some money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do those right thing.
The only time I would advise taking Vicodin it is if you have like two beers.
And really want a good night.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Those go so well with liquor.
Is Vicodin an opiate?
Is it the same thing as oxycodone?
Like, what is Vicodin?
It's a downer.
I don't know what Auxi does.
You're a downer.
It's a, it combines hydrocodone and Tylenol.
Oh, Tylenol.
Tylenol and hydrocodone.
A lot of people die from that shit, too.
Yeah, I was reading this sad story once about this lady who she had COVID and she was in so much pain from COVID that she kept taking Tylenol and she died of a fucking liver failure.
Because the Tidaminophen killed her liver.
Sometimes you see people dying.
You're like, what a loser way to die.
Oh, yeah.
You can't ever tell anybody.
There was no victimhood.
Aspirant overdose.
Dork.
That's crazy.
How much aspirin do you have to take before you die?
That seems nuts.
I feel like all these middle school girls would try it before they would actually.
sister stuff.
Really?
When they just want to be
Drama queens.
Like, I took a whole bottle
of assholes.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I knew a girl
did exactly that thing.
Exactly that in high school.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, she took aspirin.
But it's like,
that's not going to do it.
But your call
for attention is there.
She was also crazy
annoying.
Like, let me tell you
how to actually do it.
But she had big tits
and she fucked everybody.
She was nuts.
And I'll accept it.
This girl was a fucking freak.
She fucked everybody.
She was an animal.
Catholic school girl.
I just thought across
something weird.
What?
I just typed in Tylenol deaths and this thing came up.
The Chicago Tylenol murders.
Ooh.
It seems like it's an unsolved case.
Yeah, there was tampered Tylenol that people bought that was potassium cyanide.
Seven people died.
Yeah, they broke.
That's when they started doing the seal on top.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember this.
I remember this.
This is when I was in high school.
Do they know why?
Investigation suspects.
I wonder what the.
conspiracy. What's the tin foil hat? Someone recently was arrested. No suspect has been charged as of
2026. Whoa. So a bunch of people died and they just got away with it. Yeah. Wow. Someone was convicted
of extortion sending a letter to Tylenol manufacturer claiming responsibility and demanding a million
dollars. If I remember right, they said they said we found out the problem with one plant that
had whatever and we've we've got and someone else's like well okay I bought this bottle before that happened so
this should be safe.
And then it wasn't.
And then it was like Tylen or whatever was like covering up how bad it got.
Welcome aboard via rail.
Please sit and enjoy.
Please sit and sit.
Play.
Post.
Taste.
View.
And enjoy.
Via rail.
Love the way.
Instead of going, recall everything.
Estimated 31 million bottles were in circulation with a retail value of over $100 million
equivalent to $334 million in 2025.
The company also advertised in the national media for individuals not to consume any of its products that contained a cedometifen after it was determined that only these capsules had been tampered with.
Wow.
There's other ones in California that's tricnite in them.
Wow.
So that's probably one of those things too.
There's copycats, right?
Like one person hears about someone buying poison Tylenol.
I want to do that.
Yeah, I want to poison people in Ohio.
Hacks.
Yeah.
Fucking hacks.
Get your own shit.
Fucking hacks.
Just be original.
Be awful.
Evil, but be original.
There's so many those, like the Tylenol, we're like, wait, were you guys
evilly covering this up and resulting in more deaths that I found out down there was like
Coca-Cola, Dole.
We're like, oh, these are like evil corporations.
As soon as they realize that they're, you know the Pinto story?
Uh-uh.
So Ford found out, let's, let's research this to make.
sure this is true because someone brought it up on the podcast they were blowing up and they realize
it's cheaper to just pay people off that died from their car being blown up than it is to recall
all these Ford Pinto's because the Pinto had like the gas station the gas tank rather was in the back
yeah something like that there was something about the design where if you got rear end that it would blow up
and it was just did a dollar value on it yeah somebody did I want to say for I want to you know you
say Ford but really it's a person
It's not the Ford of today
It's some guy
Would that be a big
Pre-production Crash Test?
Yeah, investigators in lawsuits
showed that pre-production
crash tests had already revealed
this vulnerability
Wow.
But the car still went to market
largely unchanged.
Yeah, who told us about this?
Yeah, I'll check.
I kind of remember that.
It's one of our guests
explained that to us
and it was just like, oh, God.
Wow.
It's so dark.
It's such a fucking dark,
evil thing to do
to say, well, people are going to die,
but we'll just pay them off.
What's the number?
Yeah, what is the number?
First of all, the car sucked.
Why'd you make it in the first place?
It's a terrible.
It's so ugly, too.
That kind of looks cool now, but...
No, it doesn't.
It's got that sun deck in the back.
Garbage. Garbage car.
So Coca-Cola would have people just like,
if you were like a leftist leader running for whatever,
they were worried that if that person got in power,
they would unionize their population,
and that would cost them more money in the plants.
And they would just have people.
People straight killed.
Straight up, get them out of the way.
Coca-Cola had people whacked.
Dole used to be the American Fruit Company.
Have a Coke and a smile?
They had people whacked.
James, I mean, look it up.
But like, you start looking at.
When we say Coke, it's probably an executive somewhere.
Probably an executive.
They didn't drew a big, like, vote.
Who had some guy who was a fixer for him.
Right.
And he's like, look, these motherfuckers are causing problems.
And this guy was concerned with his job
as whatever, CEO, executive.
But it's happened over a long period of time.
They were given money to, I think, FARC or something in Colombia.
After they were already labeled like a terrorist organization,
they're still given them money.
For decades, Coca-Cola's faced several severe allegations
regarding the murder and intimidation of union leaders
at bottling plants in Colombia and Guatemala.
They hired paramilitary death squads to suppress labor activism.
That's like, oh, what?
They want an honest, like, days pay?
get rid of him
you know do you remember when
Ross Perrault was running for president
you were too young I barely remember but sort of
I was just starting to be aware
of how fucked up politics were
and because he was on television
explaining about the world trade
organization about when they were going to
start opening up plants in Mexico
and moving jobs to Mexico
he's like what you're gonna
hear is a giant sucking sound
where all the money
and jobs are going to go down to Mexico.
And what we allowed during that time was essentially what the labor unions were doing in this country was making sure that people had a great wage because the corporations were getting paid well.
So the CEOs wanted all the money like they always do.
The corporation wanted all the money.
But you really can't make a Mustang unless you have the people that are on the assembly line.
unless you have the people that are doing all the hard labor and all the work, and they should get compensated correctly.
And so the auto unions workers organized it and they went on strike and they did what they had to do.
And they were making a great living.
They were making a great living.
And these people had a nice house and they had a car and a garage.
And it felt good that they were getting paid really well.
And so a lot of people thought, well, they're getting paid too well.
And this is fucking up our profits.
Wow.
And so what, and I'm simplifying this.
You're a historian.
And a historian.
Instead of like the top guys to make a million less.
What they did is just open up a plant in Mexico and pay people fucking slave labor.
And they go over there and they pay them slave wages.
And these people are making cars for like fucking how much a dollar a day or something like that.
Instead of getting health care and retirement and, you know.
And so that's what we're talking.
The free market says go to Mexico.
The moral market says, no, no, no, no.
Hold on.
Let's just pay people what they deserve here.
But it's not just that, but they destroyed Detroit.
That's right.
That's Roger and me, that documentary, Michael Moore's greatest documentary, is all, his first
one is his best one.
Yeah.
Because it's really documenting an horrific attack on Detroit and Flint, Michigan and all those
places up there where there's all these auto plants and they all just went away, man.
And those jobs went away and now Detroit is, Detroit's kind of bouncing back now.
It's kind of back.
Danny was talking about it.
Brown where he was like just before COVID it was like starting to be like some cool new restaurants and like
really coming back then COVID kind of nailed it down again and now it's I think back back going back up
again have some cool stuff in there I mean there's there's a bunch of companies that are like proudly
like made in Detroit underrated pizza yeah Detroit pizza oh really square yeah it's really good square yeah it's
really good yeah crispy like on every bite at every slice oh okay because it's not thick crust
square it's like that thin crust square it's just really good it's isn't funny that we want it in a
circle. I want it in a circle. Why? I don't know. Odd. It's weird. You get committed to it. Like,
we don't get committed to that with a sandwich. Like, if I go to a Jewish deli and I get a square
sandwich, I don't say, no, I want it like a hoagie. I want it to look like a submarine.
Doesn't look right. Right. You know, like, no one cares. No one cares. The shape. No. It's a really
good sandwich. But some people do. Like, if you give them a cheeseburger, but it's on bread,
they're like, what is this bullshit? Square bullshit. I want a round bun, mother. I like that. I don't.
fucker. Yeah, on rye bread.
Yeah, what is this?
Rye bread is for pastrami.
Don't give me rye bread with her fucking cheeseburger, you communist.
Is my name Rubin?
Then why you give me something like looks like a fucking Rubin?
Yeah, what is this?
Like if you buy an Italian sandwich, it has to come on a big old fucking hoagie roll.
A chabata!
You know, one of those big fucking seeded?
Yeah, that's what you want.
All bread.
It's weird that we want our pizza to only be circular.
And then what's weird, too, is you're not eating it in the round version.
Right.
You're eating it in this weird triangle.
Right.
You're eating in a wedge.
Just an edge of round.
That edge could be...
You know what I've seen?
The deeply disturbs me?
Oh, no.
When people take a circular pizza and then they chop it up into a bunch of squares, I'm like, what have you done?
No, that's the Ohio style.
Is that what it is?
Really?
Or pub style.
Oh, okay.
So you split it up a lot?
Yeah.
That makes kind of sense, but not for...
You bring one pizza into the bar, and now fucking ten people can get a bite as opposed to...
I guess the only other way is to make slices like that thin.
like real thin like long but that's not fun we also have edge to edge toppings how many pizzas
has dave portnoy sold if you really stop and think about it a lot d' portnoy is probably responsible
for more pizza sales in this country than any other living human being yeah probably yeah because
i watch his pizza reviews i want to go get a pizza he gives it to you honest yeah oh he's very good
at it yeah i mean he really loves pizza too like though you could tell like this is a he's not making
any money off of that. No, he's really not.
No, it's like some views. It's a labor of love.
He likes it. It's fun for him and it's
become a thing. And he gets
arguments with pizza places sometimes.
Like they yell at them. He yells at them.
You can't film in here. They throw shit at them.
It's like really kind of crazy.
That's so great.
But I've gone to places because he
recommended him. Like if I find out that
I'm in a town and I know that there's pizza there
I'm like, what is Portnoy think?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You want a local wreck.
No one's done that with anything else.
Like, what other celebrity has done that with any other kind of food where they go places and review it?
There's a guy in New York, not a celebrity, but his goal was to search out every single slice in New York.
It took him years and then named the best ones.
Boy, how would you know?
How are you going to compare a slice to a slice you had a year ago?
Right.
I guess you got to, yeah, you're really going to know.
How are you going to know?
You can instantly go, no.
But, yeah, anything that's good, you've got to go back and forth.
Plus, it's super subjective.
Obviously.
Yeah.
You got to go cheese.
Yeah.
You got to pick out cheese to cheese.
Right.
It has to be just plain cheese pizza.
Which is a classic.
It's so good.
I mean, other pizzas are great, but man, a really good plain cheese pizza is fucking phenomenal.
Yeah.
Especially if it's done well.
Fresh out.
Here's the secret too.
If you're in New York, underrated tip.
I told Ruddy this.
He's going to New York.
Fat guy.
So he's going to want to, like, get some tips.
I was like, no matter what you were going to get, just say.
Do you have anything fresh coming out?
And they say it's going to be like 10 more minutes.
It's okay, I'll wait.
That's what you want.
It's like when you go to Krispy Cream
and they got the served, the hot donuts,
they're coming out hot.
Yeah, the lights on.
With that lights on.
If I'm thinking about having it
when I used to live in L.A.,
there was a Krispy Cream down street,
like it was on the way home.
And if I drive by,
if that fucking hot,
the hot light was on,
I'm like, I'm pulling in.
I'm getting a hot one.
So much better.
They're warmed up.
It's so much better.
Like when they come right out.
out in the glazed ones that are coming right out hot.
They just dissolve in your mouth right there.
And good for you.
Oh, yeah.
It's better than vitamins.
Look at that.
It cures diabetes.
You have all dough and you're like, let's put some with sugar in it.
Like let's put your sugar on top.
Let's fully overwhelm your system.
I remember I would eat them and then I'd go back to my house and I'd go, what's, what's wrong with you?
What did you do this?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
We've all been there.
You fucking idiot.
The fuck's wrong with you.
You feel so bad.
Because I would eat like a half a dozen, too.
I'd eat like six donuts.
I'd get a, I'd always buy like a box, and I'd eat half the box.
I'd buy like a box of a dozen, and I'd buy like chocolate cream filled and all the different ones.
And I eat like six of them in my car.
Right away home.
And then I'd get home, and I'm like, oh.
Erding.
Just poisoned.
An adult has learned nothing about his body.
No, 39 years old
Sitting on the couch
When you have that after 23 years old
You're like, when you're hurting you're like
I just have to let this pass
I have to just like for an hour
She's like what a fucking loser
You're like a fucking loser
You ate yourself into feeling bad
I do that all the time
Drinking I get sneaks up on you
I eat when if I go to New York
Every time I go to New York I eat myself into a coma
I eat myself way too
Just way too fat
I get hurting
Like where my stomach stretched out so much it hurts because I've got so much food in there
I really can't fit any more food and I look pregnant.
My stomach sticks out.
You got burnt belly.
You look so awful and it's all swollen and bloated because it's all the pasta and bread.
It's all the water and the wine.
It's making it expand.
Can't even think straight.
Your body's like bring everything into the stomach right now.
Yeah.
You have no like if I had to pass a spelling bee, I'm fucked.
My IQ dips by like 40 points.
Yeah, it's terrible.
I'm a glutton, too.
I have a real problem with, like, volume.
I just, when I start eating, I'm like a dog.
I just keep eating.
I just can't stop.
Like, I'm good at not eating.
Like, I can not eat for, like, 12, 16 hours.
But when I sit down for a meal, I just, or when I'm ordering.
I think it comes from being poor when I was a kid, too.
So it's like there's something about, like, wanting everything.
I want it all.
I want steak.
I want pasta.
I want this.
I want that, what that, that.
and then after like you never learn you fucking idiot yeah and you're like I patted about enough
and then you're like one more bite and then you're like and now if we're talking I'm gonna eat like
two more full plates worth as we're talking I remember we were in Atlanta once this has happened more
than once but this one lady in Atlanta was like almost arguing with me too much food yeah we went
to a diner in Atlanta after our show and this I ordered two things I ordered like meatloaf and I
order a steak.
And she's like, oh, honey, that's too much food.
I go, no, it's not.
I go, I'm going to eat it all.
And she's like, that is too much food.
I go, you don't know me.
You don't know you.
You don't know me.
I can consume.
I will consume all of this.
This is not a, I need this.
Yeah, when it's time for you to eat, you eat.
Especially also after shows, dude.
Oh, God, you do fucking long-ass shows.
I brought you and Goldie once a hot dog.
I was just like, I was doing the early days of yours.
Not early, but like mid-level.
days and then high level days.
So I remember having more access than anyone could really get anymore.
Oh, yeah.
You were behind me in the...
When the camera was on you and Duncan, so you guys made out.
We were bored.
They timed it.
And we noticed the camera.
We were sitting right behind you.
So the way, they could see the monitor.
So they were sitting behind me, so they knew what the camera was capturing.
So we're on that camera, that guy's camera.
And so they waited.
and then it's got it right here.
And in the middle,
so there's the camera's on.
You guys just like...
Frosty died.
Oh, my God.
This is the early, early days.
This is probably like 2002 or something like that.
That was way back in the day.
So, first we're giving out of...
So Dunk was being accused of being an Illuminati a lot then.
So he goes, oh, there's a camera.
I mean, I got to do this thing.
He goes, what?
It's just to stoke the flame.
So he'll just do this.
triangles. At some point we made a big triangle
with both our hands. And then
I think he said it. I don't know.
It doesn't matter. One of us said it the other
reacted. Oh, hey, next time we got a kiss and it was like,
fuck, yes.
I appreciate you're stuck in. God damn it. Yeah.
You're right. We do.
It was like, this is going to be awful, but you have
to. I didn't know about it until
after it was over. People were like, your
friends were kissing on camera.
And I just, I literally couldn't
breathe. I was like, oh my God.
Oh, my God. I go, show it to me.
Show it to me.
I, like, made the guys in the truck show me the video of it.
I'm like, oh, my God, this is so funny.
There was also, like, a wrestling moment, or it was.
There was a lot of wrestling in that fight.
If I remember right, it's a long time ago.
But there was a blog from, like, an MMA blog,
it's like, two bored bearded dudes making out during a UFC fight.
Dude, you give a comic a camera on you, and we're like, let's go.
We got to do something.
Especially, like, you have six hours.
Six hours of fights.
So there's all this time to think.
And they're not all exciting.
Some of them are fucking boring.
And when they're boring, you've got to come up with different ways to entertain yourself.
Yeah.
What you're going to do?
Yeah.
It was so fun.
You could see the one that was on it.
So like when those fighters are in front of us, this is got to, I'm going to fix this.
Like, it wants to work.
It wants to work.
What is this one works?
Those are fun times.
That was back when the UFC was like, no one was watching anyway.
You could just do it everyone.
The Wayans was the best.
We had a way in in in Florida, and it was just like, only the camps kind of came in.
And the tap out guys, rest in peace, they'd come in there.
We'll just one rest in peace.
Yeah.
Live well.
But it was just like you'd be in there.
And I remember once you were like, hey, all right, maybe I'll call you up to Way in.
And you could, you just could.
And you're like, you want to go now?
All right.
It was like, there was no real rules that.
It was pretty wild.
No one knew what was going on.
Ari Shafir.
And you would just walk out.
Yeah, you could do anything back then.
That was also a real way in.
That was when the guys actually would get on the scale.
Now it's a ceremonial way in.
Oh, really?
Yeah, because now they weigh in in advance because they want to give them more time to recover.
Oh, right.
The whole thing's gross.
They shouldn't be weighing in.
They shouldn't be cutting weight.
That's a casual fan.
It's the most obvious one.
Make them weigh in at the event.
It's crazy.
I mean, we've had to be a lot.
I had long discussions.
I had a discussion recently with Hunter Campbell
where we're trying to figure out a way
to blow up all the weight classes
and make people fight it
what their actual weight is.
But you'd have to like show up in camp.
Like, you know...
Get to the right exact right weight.
We weigh them...
A pound or two below for safety.
But it would have to be random.
Like they couldn't know you were coming.
Oh, like the whole way through
it has to be at that weight.
Just show up.
What do you weigh?
Get on the scale.
185.
Bro, you're supposed to be fighting at 155.
How the fuck are you 185?
It's done because you're not actually, it's like having field goals decide like an NFL game.
It's like this is not, this is like a minor part of the sport.
Right.
So that's like you're having a 185 or fight against a 160 pound.
So you're not actually saying who's best at your class.
In the elite levels, they're all doing it.
So it's everybody's cheating.
It's sanctioned cheating.
It's not cheating because it's legal.
But it's rewarding guys who know how to cut better than guys who don't.
And as a casual fan, that's not what we're into.
It's also very biological.
So some people can cut weight very easily and some people it's a fucking grind and it's way more of a grind for women
Women hold on to that water weight a lot harder than men do
So when a woman has to lose like a woman has to cut like 20 pounds
It's yeah man they cut weight
But apparently it's way more brutal for them
Interesting yeah it's fucking terrible they should they should it should have never been in there in the first place and
They should figure out a way to get it out of high school
wrestling when people fight it like 112 that's just your weight or do you cut in the day right the way in the day up
but it's still you're still cutting weight i i weighed i used to wrestle at 128 and then i roused
28 for a grown man i mean a high school oh okay and then uh 134 and then i because i couldn't really make
128 anymore and then when i started fighting in taigwendoe i fought my first fights were at 140 that was when i was
like 15, 16.
And then by my last fight at 140, I was 17.
And I was not 140.
And I was starving myself.
And I was cutting a bunch of water weight.
And then I would fight dehydrated.
Like fighters.
But I only did it one year.
I only did it one year.
And then I went up to 155, which was much better.
That was easy because I didn't have to cut any weight.
And I was way better then.
But that thing where they do in wrestling, you're not getting hit in the head in
wrestling, right?
So it will deplete you.
And so you have to make a decision like how much.
How much am I going to be depleted and want to be the size bully and have a bigger frame and utilize it, but have depleted performance?
Like how good a shape would I have to be in where that depletion only takes out a certain percentage of my ability.
And so it's like this calculated thing.
Like Kurt Engel, for instance.
Kurt Engel, when he was Olympic gold medalist, he didn't cut any weight.
And he was a phenomenal wrestler.
Kurt Engel was a fucking monster.
and he was beating guys way bigger than him.
But he had so much energy because he didn't cut weight.
And so he was wrestling against guys that did cut weight.
And he was dominating him.
Yeah, because he was full strength.
But they were bigger than him.
They were bigger than him.
But he had incredible skill, also strong as fuck anyway,
and had no depletion of his resources.
Like his body was working at full capacity.
It's like Greg Fitzsimmons is in the prime.
He would just fight anybody.
He would just fight anybody.
Oh, tiny little man.
Fight anybody.
He got attacked on stage at Stitches.
The guy...
Wrong guy to rush.
Attacked him, and they fucking...
Some brawl broke out, and the bouncer got in.
They take the guy away.
And then Greg gets on the microphone.
Didn't even end the show.
Gets on the microphone, he goes, anybody else wants some of this?
God's done laughing.
It was great.
He finished his set.
Wow.
He finished.
Great composure.
Kept it together.
Finished his set.
A fucking fun, dude.
Wow.
Yeah, but they should, they really should ban weight cutting.
But the only way they're really ever going to be able to do that is to make more weight classes.
There's not enough weight classes.
And then you'll have the, I don't understand enough to talk about it.
I think boxing has 18 weight classes.
Yeah, don't you have like some like who cares weight classes?
Yeah, so there's sort of.
And if you really want to get known, you got to move up or down to like one of the majors.
Well, you know what's weird?
Like 160s, a huge weight class, 147, huge, well, well, well,
are way, huge weight class, big, giant fights.
Cruiserweight, which is like, between light heavyweight and heavyweight, no one gives
a fuck about.
Wow.
Why?
It's weird.
It's just weird.
Nobody gives a shit about the cruiserweight champion.
Like Ussick, before he became the heavyweight champion, was the cruiserweight champion,
and people cared about him just because he was so skillful, but he had to go up to heavyweight
before people cared.
But if he was a light heavyweight, he would have been huge.
Be on.
It's weird.
Very weird.
But I think boxing.
How many weight classes is boxing have, professional boxing?
I want to say there's 18, whereas in the UFC there's only eight.
It's a big difference.
It's a big difference.
And you can follow champions better.
Yeah.
But it's also, it's like...
Even when Mighty Mouse came in, it was like, you have this dominant guy coming in to really
launch the weight class.
But people are like, we don't know those weight class.
So we're less interested in you that we should be.
Well, people have a thing about tiny people.
They look at a small guy who's like 5'3 and weighs 125 pounds.
and like, nah, we don't care.
17 here.
17.
Red Ben said the 135ers and 125ers, they should have to come into the octagon on little
mini horses and ride around a couple times.
That's so rude.
That's so rude.
What's also interesting is like flyweight women, like Valentina Shepchenko,
it's one of the premier weight classes in the women's division.
Because that's heavy?
For a woman, it's like normal size.
125 is like a normal weight.
It's like a man fighting at 160 or 170.
It's normal.
Weird.
Yeah.
It's weird. But there's not enough weight classes.
And they should have fixed that a long time ago.
There's giant gaps.
Like the gap between 185, which is middleweight and then 205, which is light heavyweight.
That's crazy.
That's a giant leap.
And then everything else.
Well, not even.
That's what's even stupider.
You get to heavyweight at 265.
That's the cutoff.
for heavyweight. So you have to weigh
265 or under. That's my
favorite weigh-ins because they're still wearing their jeans.
They're like, I'm inside
a range. Yeah, they don't give a fuck.
But the, so ceremonial
weigh-ins is what we have now. So when
someone weighs in now, they've already weighed
in the morning in an official scale
in front of, you know, doctors
and state reps.
They give them a chance to come back again. The athletic commission
checks them out. And so then they
just suck a bunch of water down
and electrolytes and they slowly rehires. And they slowly
rehydrate over the four or five hours.
Yeah.
They have to do it slowly.
The science is so crazy behind it.
The heavyweight division is older than the United States.
Wow.
Officially?
1738.
Whoa.
Weighing as much as they want.
Whoa.
Is that real?
So heavyweight was weighed 160 plus.
16 plus?
Yeah.
People were tiny back then.
Oh, yeah.
You know, Rocky Marciano was like one of the great heavy weights of all time.
Yeah.
He weighed 185 pounds.
So Rocky Marciano, the heavyweight champion of the world, one of the greatest of all time,
weighed 15 pounds less than me.
Wow.
Yeah.
Isn't that nuts?
It's so different.
If you ever look back at a fat guy from like Chris Farley types or whatever and you're like,
you're not even, you're just a little big.
Yeah, it's like normal fat.
You're like Steve's Simone body.
Look at these guys back then where they wore diapers and shit.
Like what's that, what are you wearing?
What's that thing around your waist?
What is that?
It's a wipe of blood?
And they all fought bare knuckle back then too.
Quick fight.
Well, they just broke their hands a lot.
They threw a lot of punches to the body back then
because they didn't want to break their hands on people's heads.
That was the biggest defense back then,
the Brian Denahe thing,
lower your head and make a punch you on the head and break.
Just lower your head.
And they all boxed like this too.
Well, they would throw their knuckles out like that.
Wow.
Because if you just blast someone,
you could blast someone like that
if you have gloves on and hand wraps.
Stockton slap would have gone a long way back then.
Oh, yeah.
They would have been legendary.
Slap them.
Yeah
It's
It's funny how
Things change
And then how they go back to it
Because now bare knuckle boxing
Is making a huge comeback
Yeah
See chess boxing?
Oh yeah
I've seen that
Yeah it's ridiculous
It's pretty fun
Beat the shit out of each other
And then play chess
If you're a good boxer
Like you have a massive advantage
A guy just got a concussion
He doesn't even know
What the knight does
He's like
You can't move that
I'm like uh fuck
I'm gonna
Who's idea that was
What kind of fucking psychopath
Who wants to combine those things
Yeah
It'd have to be people that aren't that good at boxing
And aren't that good at chess
Because if somebody flatlines you and sends you to the hospital
You're not playing chess afterwards
So it has to be people that kind of suck at boxing
Because if you really like
Mike Tyson somebody
You fucking kale them and they have to get carried out in a stretcher
Well then you by fault
By default won the chest as well
Because they can't even play
Yeah just dusty boards
You have to take them to the hospital
How are they gonna play chess?
I don't even understand the rules there
You have to have a minimum of 1800 in chess to be a competitor.
What is that?
What's 1800?
I would imagine pretty good.
Is that a score?
What does that mean?
The scores in chess?
Like a golf handicap.
Yeah, it's something like that.
Wow.
So what is like Magnus Carlson, the guy that was on the podcast?
What does he have?
What's his rating?
Let's see.
I just type that.
He plays poker too.
Does he?
You'd be in the top five to 10 percent of player.
Yeah.
He's a math guy.
He's one of those dudes you talk to him.
Like, there's some guys you talk to him.
Like, oh, there's a lot working on behind those eyes.
It's like, if you were,
high around that guy, he'd probably get weirded out.
He'd read my soul. You're an alien.
He's a 2840.
Wow.
Way better.
What is the highest ranked chess player alive today?
Good question, Joe.
Thank you.
That'd be him.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he peaked at 2882, the highest in history.
That's crazy.
That is crazy.
Wow.
What about that schizo-Jew turned Arab, whatever his name is?
Which guy?
The fucking boy.
The boy who went schizo.
Schizo Jew turned Arab.
Yeah.
Wasn't there some...
Bobby Fischer?
Are you talking about?
Bobby Fischer, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had to translate it.
Oh, yeah.
He became, like, very anti-Semitic, right?
I don't know.
Very close.
2785.
So Magnus is better than him?
Yeah.
I mean, if Magnus is the best ever.
Yeah, Maxis ever.
Oh, okay.
He's a fucking super genius.
So what happened with Bobby Fisher?
This actually has him rated maybe one point below Magnus's peak,
2881, one-year performance, it says.
Body Fisher?
Yeah, it's based off of who you're playing,
when you're playing them,
and how, like, you know, a good day or at the time.
That's like golf.
It's like who's in the tournament.
Yeah.
Yeah, but that happens.
Like, Poole has ratings.
They have a Fargo rating.
And they also do it per game.
Like, there's this guy, he just died recently.
Changchung Lin,
and he's this dude from,
from Taiwan.
And he played at a thousand,
a thousand.
was his for one game.
He couldn't get a game. Not for one game, excuse me, for like one match.
What would he have to give?
To you or to me?
Oh, it would be pointless.
He just destroyed us.
Just as soon as you...
He never missed.
He'd be like, make a ball and you win?
There's another guy, this guy who's also from Taiwan,
Koping Chung, and he played an entire match where he never missed a ball.
He won 11 to nothing against another world-class player.
Who lost a coin flip to start?
Yeah, he lost their lag.
The lag.
And I think
That's it.
The guy didn't touch the cue.
He broke and left a long shot on the one ball.
And the guy missed that and he never made a ball.
He didn't make one ball.
The entire, there was a couple times.
Winter goes first, yeah.
It was a couple times.
It was winter breaks.
So every time he broke and he was making the one ball on the side like every game.
And every time he didn't have a shot, he would just play a lockup safety.
And the guy would kick and then leave a shot and then he would run out again.
He just got in the zone.
So he played at a 1,000 Fargo for the entire match.
That's crazy.
That means he never missed a ball on four-inch pockets.
Oh, really?
Tiny little pockets.
There's people that are like...
It's amazing how big pool is, too, across the world, and billiards, too.
Oh, yeah.
In Asia, it's huge.
Asia's huge.
Do you find people just an overhang just so it doesn't get wet, and they're all out there playing and just, like, flip-flops?
Well, we're losing a lot of the top.
Taiwanese and Chinese players to a game that they play in China now where it's like a snooker table.
It doesn't look like a pool table.
Like the pockets aren't cut the same way.
They're rounded.
But they're playing nine ball.
And they're playing with like purses for like top top purses like $600,000 for a tournament, 700,000.
So they're all going over there and playing in that because you can make millions in a year instead of a couple hundred grand, which is like what the best players make in America.
That's why women were going to fucking rush it to play basketball.
Until now.
Until now.
Well, just don't bring weed.
I mean, just don't bring weed.
The thing is like, but also, I think they were all doing it.
It helps basketball a lot, apparently.
I'm not a basketball player, clearly.
You couldn't keep score.
Me and Mugsy Boggs.
Yeah.
All right, that's a good reference.
Yeah.
Nice.
But weed apparently is phenomenal for basketball players.
Like, they all talk about it.
Like, I've talked to basketball players, but weed, they say, I can play way better.
when I'm high.
Well, they had the collective bargaining, not a late one, but like 20 years ago, and
they're like, we can test for drugs, but they fought back.
They go, not weed.
So if you get caught with weed, sure, you can suspend us, but you can't test for it.
Because why we're all doing it.
Yeah, they're all doing it, and it helps the game.
Yeah.
Like, it helps their feel.
It helps pool for sure.
It helps poker for sure, for sure.
Oh, I'd imagine you read people's tells.
Yeah.
According to World Snooker Tour figures, more than 24.5.
million unique viewers watch the third session of the final alone in China and during the whole
2025 tournament headed a cumulative audience of 180 million in national broadcaster.
That's like an NFL playoff.
24 million watched the finals of this.
It's like a billion for Super Bowl, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But like a playoff game.
But that's snooker or like the English call it snooker.
So snooker is very different.
And it's on a 12-foot table.
It's a huge table.
And the balls are very small.
all and they don't have numbers on them. It's just like red, black, pink. It's mostly red. There's
red that's in the stack. And then you have black, pink, brown. And I think there's another one. I've
never played the game. I've fucked around with it when I was in Scotland. They had a table and I was
like shooting balls on it. It's interesting. In Colombia, they all play this thing. And it's
three cushion billiards. Yeah. And they take their cue and move a thing over, like a scoreer over. And they
keep playing and move one over. And they're all playing it. And they're just kind of casual bars,
but it's like 20 tables and they're everywhere.
And this is where there's no holes in the table, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's called three cushion billiards.
I'd sit there and watch and drink.
It's a fun game.
I don't know how to play it really well.
Strategy.
It's hell of strategy.
It's definitely strategy.
But it's really understanding angles.
It's understanding how to kick and how to like, when I say kick, what I mean is like go
off a rail and hit another rail and then collide with the ball.
So three cushion billiards is you have three balls in the table.
That's it.
And so you have the whole.
table, it's like a big ass pool table, but there's no pockets and you have three balls. And so what
you have to do is hit one ball and then go three rails at least, three cushions and then hit the
second ball. Yes. But also put yourself in a position where then you can make another shot
afterwards. Right. Or play safety. It's a complicated game and it's different because it's a lot of
it's spin and the harder you hit it, the shorter the angle is. And if you hit it with English,
It spins out wider or shorter, depending upon what you're trying to do with it.
But if you get good at it, it really will help your pool game.
Because you'll really have a much more deep understanding of how the ball moves around the table with different speed and side spin and all that kind of shit.
I've only fucked around with it, though, and not in a long time.
We had a table at executive billiards and White Plains.
We used to have one three cushion table that they would fuck around on.
I just play for laughs.
I couldn't do it.
I want to see the balls go away.
It's nice.
I want to see, when I fire ball in, I want to see it, go down that hole.
Bye, bye.
I want to clear it out.
I don't want balls linger and just staring at me.
Like, do it again.
Do it again.
Do it again.
I'm still here.
Do it again.
It's funny that that became a bar sport.
It's really just darts in that became the sports at bars.
Sure.
And the table takes up a lot more space.
The dart board, yeah.
Dartboard, sure.
but the pool table, you need some actual space.
Yeah, and that space is totally not usable other than that.
That's where it is, unless a girl's dancing on it.
I went to a, there's this like poolhole slash samba place in somewhere in Brazil.
What?
Pool and samba?
Yeah, it's like daily, it's a pool hall, but then at night it turns into samba
and the highest level guys coming, their capital and their music capital.
It's so fun, but these guys don't stop playing.
pool. And so everyone's dancing. It's so packed
and crowded as, excuse me, and you're like, the etiquette is
you just know when you're a bar, like, all right, all right.
But you want to be like, bro,
it's packed. You can't
play pool here. Yeah, you can't play pool there.
But they were doing it. Well, there's a place in the
Bronx that is this Dominican pool
room where they gamble
big money, big money.
And they stream some of the matches on
YouTube. And it's
fucking bananas. Because people
are just talking constantly. They're
yelling at each other in Spanish.
You know, Dominican people are having fun.
They're having fun.
There's all these Spanish speaking and they're yelling and they're all very flamboyant and having a good time.
And they get people to go over there and play like pros and they get so rattled.
They're not used to that.
Right.
Wow.
Play on this turf.
Right.
Not only that, but the guys can play and they're accustomed to that culture.
So they're accustomed to all the yelling and all the craziness and guys standing in front of the hole while you're shooting at it,
which is a no-no and regular pool.
Oh, that's like high school.
Yeah.
Do it then, do it.
They don't do it that bad.
It's not that bad, but there's plenty of guys moving around the table.
They're all talking.
Everyone's yelling.
The table's next to you are yelling.
They don't care if you're betting $30,000 on a set.
Dominicans are having so much fun, they're allowed to use the N-word.
Blacks are like, you know what?
They kind of rule.
Give it to them.
Just Dominicans.
They're dark enough.
Let it go.
Let it go.
But it's really interesting because I've watched guys who are like top pros go over there and fucking lose to guys that they're not supposed to lose to.
And the reason why they're losing is because they're just rattled by the environment.
And so what a lot of these guys will do, they'll put AirPods on.
So they'll put AirPods in with the noise canceling.
So they try to take away some of the fucking sound and just focus.
But you're really going to be playing at like 60% of your capacity because there's just too much chaos going around.
If you're playing a real legit pool tournament, everything.
I think's dead quiet while the guy's down on the ball.
And then they clap when someone makes the ball,
and then he moves to the next shot, they stop clapping.
Yeah, too respectful.
Yes.
Yeah.
But not these fucking pool.
And these guys are playing for big money.
They're playing for tens of thousands of dollars,
and they're just getting sharks and rattled.
Stealing their blood.
I watch guys, like, I watch this guy, Oscar Dominguez play this dude.
Oscar's a top pro.
He was on the Moscone top cup.
He was on the Moscone team for the U.S.
And he was over there playing this dude.
I was like, how did they get him to go there?
Wow.
I'm talking to my friend Jeremy Jones.
I'm rep, too.
It's like the guys who do Burning Man.
The DJ's like, I'll play for free.
It's just like it's a rep thing.
Well, I don't think it's that.
I think it's the money.
Well, Oscar loves to gamble and he's going to a place where someone's willing to gamble him from a lot of money.
Wait, you say this thing about Jones.
I'm going to listen while like, go to piss.
Go piss.
We'll pause.
We'll pause.
We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm not going to stay the whole thing.
We'll pause.
We're back, folks.
We're back.
So what I was saying is my friend Jeremy Jones.
who was a U.S. Open champion.
He said he went to that pool hall once
and he said, I'm never going back.
Too much.
It's too much.
And he's also said that the neighborhood is like...
Dang.
Things can go sideways.
It's a neighborhood where like,
hey, you might go there three nights in a row
and you have a good time.
Fourth night, four people get shot.
You know what I mean?
That was always the problem with underground pool,
I mean, poker rooms.
You play at commerce or a place like that's legit, it's fine.
You go underground and like, there's not...
There's a guard there.
Right, and you're walking out with a lot of money.
I remember when you were struggling in the early days of comedy when we kind of first met.
And you were making your money by winning pool tournament or poker tournaments.
Yeah.
You would go to these.
Yeah, you would go to these casinos and make, and you would play it like a job.
You'd be like super serious.
I read books on it.
Yeah.
The best book.
I thought there's tells and this strategy.
The best, my favorite book is this guy, Mike Caro.
It's a book called Mike Carrow's book of poker.
I managed to use one of them once in a world series event that if this is the one
where it goes if someone looks at your chips it's because they have a killer hand and
they think those chips are theirs and there's a it's just like you know when you lie
you look away a little bit that's like a tell we all kind of know so you look at the
chips you look at it just for a second you're like it's because you're like those are
you're not worried about your chips because you know your chips are staying you got a
full house you know those are safe but you're looking at those like how much of that
can I extract.
So I was throwing a bluff down against a pro at the World Series.
It was like, whatever.
And I was like, I think he must have read this book.
And so I'm banking on that.
So I'm holding my bluff nothing hand.
And I just kind of do a very subtly, just do one little.
And he goes, yeah, right.
He chucked his hand away.
Wow.
Yeah.
He thought he had me read.
But the best thing about Mike Carroll's poker tells.
Oh, that's interesting.
You double crossed.
I double crossed.
I double crossed.
Clever.
Thank you for recognizing that.
I love that.
Love a double cross.
I love that.
That's so cool.
That's the cool thing about poker.
That it's like a lot of it's bullshit.
You're bullshitting.
You know, you're bluffing.
The best thing about the poker tells is written in the 70s.
And there's a bunch of race-based tells.
Really?
Yeah.
Like, if a-
Which ethnicities?
All of them?
If an older white man re-raises you, get out.
That guy doesn't bluff.
He's just trying to play.
You know, his wife died years ago.
He's just trying to extend.
They're like, if you're playing against a Mexican, find out when payday is.
And if it was this Friday, they're bluffing, they're just throwing in anything, they just want to play, they're going to part with their monies.
There was a whole thing on blacks.
I forget exactly what they were saying on that.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
What year was this written?
I think in the 70s.
Interesting.
Back when you could be honest.
Yeah.
And he was like, I don't know.
I was telling you how to win.
All in the family days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could get away with a lot of, like, honest observations about different cultures.
Oh.
Mike Carroll's Book of Poker Potatels.
Orientals.
Oriental.
Are either very skillful or very luck oriented.
I like it says it now Asian Americans.
Like, what happened to Oriental?
What happened to Oriental?
Someone told me that Oriental is like a slur now.
But it's actually the right word.
Is it?
The Orient.
It's people or goods from the Orient.
You know what the opposite is?
What?
You and I, Occidental.
People or goods from, I guess, not the Orient.
Really?
We're Occidentals?
Mm-hmm.
You know what's also interesting?
It's like Asian.
Asian is so much of the world.
Yeah.
Like Asian includes India, which is Asian.
Nah, if I was president, executive order.
That's, no, no.
That's not who we're talking about.
That's not who we're talking about.
Is it Pakistan in Asia?
Yeah, right.
That's Middle East.
Fuck off.
Fuck off.
You know, Israel's also Asia, by the way.
But it's also like the Philippines is Asia.
That's Asia.
I'll give you that.
Okay.
But it's way over there.
It's way over there.
And then you got China, and then you got Japan, and then you got Korea and South Korea and North Korea.
Okay.
Let's be real.
China and Japan are the obvious ones.
Yes.
That's Asia.
Those are the big ones.
The further you get, the more.
Korea.
Korea is also a big one.
Korea, okay.
Vietnam, you're still in the gold.
Vietnam gets a little...
Mongolia?
I don't know.
Hmm.
Well, they're almost Russian.
Saudi Arabia is Asia.
Fuck off.
We're talking about China and their subsidiaries.
Look how big Asia is.
Cambodia.
Okay.
sure, all the jungles.
Wow.
So Russia's technically Asia?
That's Asian Russia.
Israel is the craziest one.
Yeah, we cut off right here because they're like European Russia too.
Oh, okay.
So there's Asian Russia.
So that would be Siberia, right?
The Maldives are.
But that would be like Mongolia for sure.
Kazakhstan is Asia.
Wow.
Yeah.
Mongolia.
But a lot of the Kazakhstan guys look Asian.
Like this guy, Shafkat, Rangmanov.
Who fights in the UFC?
Well, Mongolian accent is crazy because it really is.
It sounds like half Chinese, half Russian.
You know, they look Chinese speaking like the Russian accent.
Hard people, bro.
Hard people.
Kazakhstan, India.
Iran?
Iran is Asia?
Wow.
Israel's Asia.
Israel's Asia.
Israel's the edge.
Yeah, basically everything that's...
All those people are Oriental.
Orientals.
Next time I go to Jerusalem.
I'm going to call them all orientals.
Look how close Yemen is to Ethiopia.
It feels like you could swim there.
Yeah.
We really were motivated.
Damn.
Yeah, if you want to, you just go to a pool also.
You don't really have to.
Hey, look where Israel is.
No worries.
Look where Israel is.
That's so interesting.
See how they split shut up?
Israel's like, that's what's nuts.
You ever see the border between Egypt and Palestine?
That border is none.
What do you mean?
Oh, my God.
It's the most fortified border you've ever seen in your life.
You think the border between Israel and Palestine is rough?
Really?
Yeah, the border between Egypt and Palestine is way harder to get through.
They do not want those people in there.
They do not want those people over there.
You ever see it?
No.
Fucking rolls of barbed wire.
It's crazy.
Yeah, look at that.
What?
Was that guy just catch a baby being thrown over?
Click on that one, please.
The one that says the Arab Weekly on the top.
Yeah, right there.
Look at that.
Look at that.
Wow.
Like, you ain't getting through that.
What a nice place to stroll for those two guys.
Just a relaxing afternoon near the Gaza wall.
Look at that.
That's crazy.
Sad times.
Oh, the saddest.
The saddest.
Peace in the Middle East.
Yeah, good luck.
Yeah, they're all nuts.
It's even more nuts now.
Look what's happening in Lebanon.
Now they're bombing Lebanon, too.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Israel's bombing the shit out of southern Lebanon.
Lebanon.
Lebanon.
Yeah, I was reading about this.
Ryan Grimm was covering this Lebanon reporter, this reporter in Lebanon that Israel killed.
They followed her with drones.
They bombed a car in front of her.
She ran into an abandoned building, and then they bombed the shit out of the building.
And this took hours.
And all the while, she was contacting, like, whoever runs Lebanon.
and they were contacting Israel and saying,
hey, this is a reporter.
And so then they got text messages between,
like this,
someone from the IDF had been saying to them,
we're going to kill you.
And then they got the number from her phone
and contacted the person from the IDF.
And they were saying, hey, she works for Hezbollah.
And, you know,
fuck you and you're naive.
It's crazy.
Like, they're just openly killing journalists.
You know what they did a good job in when I was traveling?
Is they got it more than up here?
separating Israel from Jew.
They really were like,
we don't have any problem with Jews.
But they would be very staunchly, like,
anti-Israelis.
Yeah.
Well, if you live in Israel,
you have to do military service, right?
So everyone who lives in Israel
is a part of the military in their eyes.
Like, everyone who lives in Israel
has served in the military.
It's interesting, though,
it's like a lot of those kids
and then turn into adults are, like,
very against what they're doing.
Oh, yeah.
It's like an uncovered, I think,
like part of it.
They're like, yeah, we don't like this.
I mean, half this country or more even didn't vote for Trump, didn't vote for Biden.
So they're like, well, I don't like this, but they're still like, you have to like be pro everything about this thing.
Even though you're like, you can not like certain things.
Right.
The idea that like all Israelis have a single hive mind.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
That's not the case in any country ever.
It's not the same in any crowd.
Especially a democracy because Israel's like literally the only democracy over there, really.
Yeah.
And they have parliament too.
So there's a lot of choices.
And they're trying to, like, prosecute Netanyahu while all this is going on.
Who is the Israelis?
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, this was one of the things that most people aren't aware of, but that before October 7th,
there was hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in Israel protesting Netanyahu.
We talked about it the other day because they were trying to expand.
But this was before the war.
Right, right.
So they were trying to expand what they can do in terms of, like, with their constitution.
We talked about it.
What was the exact?
Jamie, do you remember?
The exact thing that they were disputing over.
But it was expanding the power that the government has.
And so people were protesting that.
And then,
and then, no way.
October 7 pops off.
Pow.
Yeah.
And then, you know.
So I happened here at 9-11.
It became like, if you say anything bad now,
you're like a traitor instead of just like,
well, I was already saying they have issues with, you know,
police overstepping or whatever.
You're like, but now you can't say that for about,
three years. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So before October 7th, Israel experienced nine months of massive
sustained protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, largely driven by opposition
to proposed judicial reforms. These demonstrations were included hundreds of thousands of participants
accused the right-wing coalition of undermining democracy, weakening the Supreme Court and attempting
to interfere with Netanyahu's ongoing corruption trial. Yeah, and so that's the same as here, where it's
not about like are you pro gay marriage or not or are you pro like peace with
Palestine or not that's just people taking power right and so that goes beyond the
right or left and just go no no that's an overstep yeah yeah it's
but it's fucked it's fucked because it's not gonna get any better it's not and they've
destroyed Gaza Gaza's just a wasteland now it mean someone um
got to get a chance recent video of Gaza like what it looked like now like right now
They sent a drone or something to get video footage
of what Gauze looks like.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
It looks like they dropped a nuke.
They just did it slowly.
Instead of dropping one nuke,
they did thousands of fucking conventional bombs
and did the kind of destruction that nuke would do.
It's interesting if you ask people how it's like polarizing,
everybody got it polarized,
then you couldn't just be like,
any suffering's wrong.
But like, I could show you a dead baby.
and a lot of people will go,
well, I got to know what their last name is first
before I can tell you if I feel bad or not.
Right.
Yeah.
Instead of just like, that's, I don't know, clearly wrong.
I know.
That's what's so dark about it.
Yeah.
As is so dark.
And then if you talk about like what's happening in Gaza,
people say, well, October 7th shouldn't happen.
Like, okay, you're right.
It shouldn't have.
But guess what?
Those kids that live in Gaza, they didn't do October 7th.
They didn't do it.
So.
Like, well, they're on their team.
It's like, I don't know.
What we did to Iran?
What if Iran nukes New York City?
Those kids that live in the Bronx, they had nothing to do with what happened in Iran.
So, like, is that okay?
Like, what are we talking about?
It's all the mess.
It's fucking nuts.
Tribal warfare is fucking bananas that it's still going on in 2026.
Well, I was talking to people when I knew like cousins and stuff in the military and they had just gotten out.
And they were like, we're all now.
This is before October 7th.
It's a few years before, maybe 2018.
They're like, we're talking now because we have the internet now.
And we're like, this isn't sustainable.
And we don't want to keep doing this.
We've got to start figuring out a peace thing.
And then that's all gone now.
It's all gone.
Yeah.
Nono is it all gone, but now that they've started bombing Lebanon, everybody's really terrified
because they're like, well, where is this going?
Because they're bombing Christian villages in Lebanon.
And there's video of them destroying these solar panels that these Christian villages have in Lebanon
where they're just plowing over and using like tractors to take down these solar panels.
Part of me goes to like...
This isn't the military.
Like, what are you doing?
Yeah.
It still goes back to like Wesley Clark, if I got that right?
where they're like the seven countries and Iran was on there and we just hadn't gotten there yet oh yeah but that was always like that's not a new thing that was just in the works for a couple decades just waiting for the time is right yeah they wanted to do it within five years it took 25 took long yeah the Wesley Clark thing is funny because you know Dave Smith had a debate debate with Coleman Hughes about that and Coleman Hughes is like but Wesley Clark never said he read the memo he said someone told him about the memo because any historian when
not even be able to use that.
Oh, I thought they said they had, they...
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't think so.
I think the way Coleman was describing it.
But the reality is, okay, yeah, you might be right.
Maybe because he hadn't read it, any historian would not have been able to use it in the book.
But the fact that it all took place exactly how the memo stated, that seems relevant.
And that came up before.
So you're like, hey, we're going to Iran soon.
And then it's like, they did.
Syria.
They kept trying.
Syria was the best to me because when Obama was doing it.
And I don't care who's in charge.
They're all doing the same shit to me.
But they go, we got to go in there to overthrow this dictator.
And then people would just come off the whole Middle Eastern War.
Like, no, we're done.
And so they couldn't justify it.
And then they go, hey, this is an insurgent group.
And they're going to get out of hand.
We've got to go in and control them.
And then it's like, wait, you want to go fight the guy who's fighting against Assad?
And then that ended.
And they go, no, we got to take down Assad.
And it's like, you really seem like you guys want to go into Syria.
Looking for any sort of excuse.
It's all crazy
I have politics is stupid
Let's move on
It's just evil
It is gross
Yeah
Yeah your perspective is probably the healthiest
Stay out of it
Stay out of it
Leave me alone
Fuck you
Live my life
But the thing is like
Some of it does affect your life
Like this psychedelic drugs thing
Okay so in that moment
Where you got fucking
Maybe hopefully shrooms legalized
You know
In an ideal world
Is a very rare case
of someone who can actually accomplish change.
And you were at a higher level
than most people in terms of influence,
both personally and, like, broadly.
But also the individual, like him.
Like, most people wouldn't do it that way.
Like, if I was friends with Obama,
there's not a fucking chance in hell.
I could have gone to Obama and say,
hey, dude, you know it would be cool?
If you got Ibegain legalized,
it would keep all these people that are addicted to...
He could have done that decades ago.
Everyone could have done that.
They've known about Ibrahimine forever.
And they've also known about the pill crisis forever.
So all this stuff was common knowledge amongst plenty of people.
I mean, John Hopkins has been doing these studies.
John Hopkins has a playlist for Shrooms, an MDMA.
They make a playlist for you.
They do?
That you can like, this is a good MDMA or, I forget which one, Shrooms playlist.
Is it like John Hopkins, like, sanctioned it or someone who a student there?
No, no, no, no, a professor or something like that.
In the psilocybin reason, it was all psilocybin, right?
And not Molly.
Hopkins was still a, John Hopkins was all siloicin.
Yeah, they all kind of led the way.
They have a playlist so you can get.
It's on Spotify or whatever.
These people have been aware of it for so long, you know, inside the John Hopkins
Silocybin playlist.
Wow.
This is 2020.
Dude, I'm always amazed when my memory turns out to not be false.
Look at that guy.
He looks like he's tripping.
He looks like he trips.
He's like an old dude's tripped balls.
Just hug people.
Look at his smile.
Bill Richards.
That guy's not working for insurance company.
Loosing his tie.
Bill Richards, look like he's tripped.
Psychologist and researcher.
They should put researcher in quote.
Psychologist researcher and former dead head.
Yeah.
I think of it as nonverbal, a nonverbal support system, sort of like a net for a trapeze artist.
If all's going well, you're not even aware the net is there.
You don't even hear the music.
But if you start getting anxious or if you need it, it's immediately there to provide a structure.
Oh, Bill, you trip hard.
When I was doing ayahuasca, this guy was like, this shaman guy was like,
beating a drum very lightly and when you come out of it whatever the slow like boom boom
it would kind of like pull you back into it mm mm mm seven hour and 40 minute playlist
boy those guys go hard make sure put that on loop symphony of sorrowful songs hey don't do that
don't give me sorrowful songs on tripping you're trying to have a bad time yeah i want to hear
i want to you're thinking about your grandmother's death no no not grandma
People always ask me about mushrooms.
Like, is it going to be this emotional, like, spiritual thing?
I'm like, that gets hyped more.
You're going to laugh with your friends.
Yeah.
That's the main thing.
There's going to be, I mean, it depends on the dose, right?
Mm-hmm.
Like, a heavy dose will bring you to a very strange place.
Dude, I had a best mushroom trip of all time on this trip.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Of all time.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe, maybe the first one.
The Muhammad Ali of mushroom trips.
Yeah, and it wasn't like it was crazy hard.
It was just they were fresh.
and it was just like the thoughts
and it was just in places where nobody really gave a fuck
so you didn't feel like you were like a drug addict
and just like yeah just seeing everything so clear
Mushrooms fucking rule
you just see everything so clear
it kills the you in your brain
it kills the bullshit part
yeah and so you go like look at this behavior
and it's same as analyzing someone else's behavior
or your own there's the same
that's a part of one of the problems
that comes with living a stressful life
is you get really wrapped up in
yourself like you're managing yourself you're managing your thoughts you're managing your whatever
you're trying to do and that you think so much about you that a thing like that can take you out of
that and you go oh what am i wasting my thoughts on this for why am i wasting my energy on this it's so
pointless it's not helping me at all and you see people i saw my father for like who he really is now
just like a loving caring granddad and they're like oh what a fucking cool guy that i always saw is
like this guy I grew up with and then just like man yeah and just like realizing like I'm doing
this time stuff he did like going you know starting a new life mm-hmm he did the same shit coming
to America and it's like wow what a look at it separately from your father like that's a cool
guy you talked about having your father come on this podcast to talk about his experience as a
Holocaust survivor he would how old is he now it's about to be 90 still with it though he's not like
a feeble that's awesome yeah would he do it
He would do it.
He loves getting the word out.
How old was he when he was in the camps?
Young, single digits.
Wow.
And maybe up to, I think maybe released at 12.
Yeah, he would do it.
He would love it because he works at the Holocaust Memorial as a docent or something.
He has a tattoo and everything.
Does he have a tattoo?
I don't think so.
No.
He wasn't in a death camp.
He was in a work camp.
I believe, this is all shit.
I believe my grandfather, his dad was liberated for him.
and was liberated from a death camp.
But yeah, you should talk to him.
He would actually love it.
He loved getting the word out.
I've seen him make speeches before.
And there's all these inner city kids
from like Kansas City, you know?
And then when they hear him talk,
it's just this moment you realize like,
oh, this isn't a story.
This is like...
His life.
Yeah, it's a real thing.
Yeah.
Like a till of the Hun, you're like,
that seems like a fictional character.
Yeah.
Because they're so removed from it.
And this is just the borderline of that.
Dude, he would, yeah, you should do it.
I would do it.
I'd love to have him on.
Talk to him.
It's a weird.
time with...
It's a weird time.
With anything that has anything to do with people being Jewish.
Because they conflate Jewish people with the Israeli government, the Netanyahu government
and what they're doing in Gaza and what they're doing all the other places.
And it's also, it's like, there's a weird time now where people, people are enjoying questioning
the numbers of people that died in the Holocaust.
It's an internet.
Yeah.
It's just kind of like...
But just like, but there is some weirdness to it.
And one of the weirdness to it is, like, there's some photos of, like, Auschwitz and a lot of these other camps that they took after the camps were liberated.
And they had people go there and they took photos of them, like, pretending that these people were at the camps.
And they weren't.
They were done after the fact.
Yeah.
But there's also tons of videos.
It was only one million?
Right.
So that's okay somehow?
You want to justify it in your head?
Yeah.
That's where it's weird.
I don't know.
If it was 600 people, it'd be like, ugh.
Right.
Well, it's clear.
there was a lot of people.
It was, I don't know what the number is.
But if it was $6 million or if it was $1 million or $3 million,
it's like to catch people like, nah, you guys said it was six.
Like, and then the thing is like, it's the 30s and 40s.
So it's like, I don't know how to, we're guessing.
We don't have to, we don't have to wear with all.
And you asked somebody in the Holocaust,
they go, well, I was only in my one camp.
I can't tell you what was going on Bergen-Belsen.
But there's people that are like equally sure that it was $6 million.
And then there's people that are equally sure that it was like three.
300,000 or 600,000 or whatever the fuck they think it was and it's like this weird
argument back and forth I mean you have to see how many Jews were in Europe
Period right right yeah be more it's funny you see like if you have a stat like that like
separated from this like in a as in Peru we were hiking much to Macha Picchu
You know Neil oh we gotta talk about that and and and and and they're like it's fucking pouring
rain and everybody there they're not liberal or conservative they just go it's been raining
earlier than it should be.
And they don't know about the word climate change.
They just know, we're told November 1st
is when you plant. After that, you're in a risk.
Now, this is mid-October, and I don't know
what's up.
Well, there's going to be climate change, whether
human beings are here or not. That's the reality
of the Earth. The Earth's temperature
and climate has never
been static. And
the real problem with climate change is
not recognizing that human beings are having an
adverse effect on the planet, because we certainly are
in terms of pollution and particulate release.
but that people like Al Gore and a lot of these fucking these greenies,
they're profiting off of this concept of climate change.
And then also using it to clamp down on people's rights.
There's that too.
Like we talked about people taking money from a good cause and just like, so it's like for every good thing, they'll be like, somebody's going to misuse it.
100%.
For every good thing.
But then it becomes a thing where like, you know, when I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast, he was like talking about.
And I was like, and I said to him, I go, problem with climate change is not just that the climate is changing because it always has.
But the people are having to affect on it because they definitely are.
But it's that there's a lot of money.
There's money.
There's money.
There's money.
The whole concept of climate change.
The fake.
The fake.
Ground landfills.
And then you're like, but it's better than nothing.
Like, no, it's equal to nothing.
Well, it's all, not only that, but you fucking made people feel like they were doing good by throwing their fucking water bottles and a blue thing.
It's such an odd.
It's just, it's all kind of crazy, but.
We're gross.
Yeah.
People are gross.
But it was cool to see people's perspectives that were like away from political and just
their observations about stuff.
Recognize that things change.
Yeah.
But look, sub-Saharan Africa used to be lush greenlands.
I mean, they find, they find whale bones in sub-Saharan Africa in the desert.
In the desert, they find whale skeletons in the desert.
Way before there were cars.
Right.
Okay.
Way before they were.
plastic and power plants.
So the earth's climate has never been static.
But the Machu Picchu thing is I really want to go there.
My friend Luke Caverns, she's been on the podcast before.
He's studied a tough.
It's been three times.
Has he really?
But as a kid, that's what I meant like.
Oh, yeah, families.
Yeah, so they're like, it's a one-hour flight from Lima and then just take the train.
But like, yeah, it's pretty wild.
So you're saying that it wasn't even the Aztecs?
Is that what you told me?
Well, that's the Incas.
You're talking about the Incas, Incas, Incas.
Yeah, it wasn't.
They don't think it was.
They think the initial monolithic structures or megalithic structures were an earlier previously
unknown civilization because the size and scope of their structures, the way they build it.
And Graham Hancock has gone over this as well is so much different than the stuff that's on top of it.
So what happens is you have this old stuff that's enormous stones that are cut.
like jigsaws, right?
Yeah.
And almost like it's melted, like the way it looks.
You can't put a piece of paper through it after 200 years of like breakdowns.
You still can't put it.
It's thousands of years.
But the thing that's really nutty about it is that design is because when they have earthquakes,
that way it won't fall off, right?
It disperses the energy better as opposed to just stacking stuff on top of each other.
That stuff falls.
But when it's all interlocked in these weird forms, like that shit.
That, yeah.
So Che Guevara talks about a little bit where he goes, so Cusco is the gem of South America.
It was the border of the Andes where people would come in and do trade and everything.
And you see this and the Christians would come in, take over and build like facades on it and put a cross on top to be like look what we did.
We're more dominant these people.
And then an earthquake could come, facade would fall and this would just remain.
Over and over and over again.
These aren't even squares.
Look at that.
It's like Tetris.
Yeah, it's so cool.
And that was on purpose.
They did that because that would survive.
But if you look at the stuff above it, that's the stuff that the ink is made.
So the Incas made this stuff.
It's all just stacked.
It's not as sophisticated.
And also not as large because they didn't have the technology.
Whatever the fuck these people had that was in the name.
Huge.
I mean, hundreds and thousands of tons.
I mean, these things are fucking enormous.
The really crazy one is the Lebanon ones.
In Lebanon.
I've been there.
Wait.
No, I'm Jordan.
Jordan, I'm talking about it.
So in Lebanon, they have these massive stone.
What do they call, Jamie, the Trilathon stones?
So there's these stones that are like more than a thousand tons.
And they're like several meters above the ground placed.
And then on top of them, you have these Roman structures.
Oh, right.
So if you see like there, like that clicked where you had your cursor.
Yeah.
Look at the size of that guy.
Wow.
And look at the size of that stone.
Like, and then you see the stuff on top of it is smaller.
It's not as sophisticated.
And then you had the Roman, now the thing about the Romans is Romans had meticulous record keeping.
And they talked about all the construction of all the different things they had.
They don't even mention those stones.
So they don't mention how they mean.
No, I don't think it was them.
I think it was a previous civilization.
Look at that fucking thing.
Oh, bro.
I'm about to, you know, NASCAR lines?
Yes.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
I saw him.
Oh, did you?
Yeah, I flew over him.
Bro, how weird is that?
They're so big.
The pictures won't do it justice because you'll see like a road.
They didn't know because from the ground level you can't see any of it.
And so they just build these roads through the desert.
And so you can see a car sometimes like so this for perspective.
And you're like it's this dot on this giant monkey in the middle of the desert for however
many hundreds of years.
Yeah, they don't even know how long.
They're crazy.
Weird.
And they're all like signals to something.
There's all these theories on what it is.
Something from the sky.
you have to see them from above.
You can only see him from above.
That's nuts.
Pilots would go over there and then somebody's like, what's that?
I go, oh, yeah, we don't know.
We just kind of go over.
Well, they've found a bunch of them now because of AI.
You know, they've, like, scanned the areas
and found a bunch of previously undiscovered NASCAR lines.
Wow.
Yeah.
And the weird thing about it is that's also the place
where they find these people with elongated skulls.
They find, like, these weird skulls that have additional capacity.
So they have, like, 30% more capacity.
And they don't have the same lines in their skulls that we have.
have like when we're babies.
You know, we have these, what are they called?
Sagital.
I forget what the lines are called.
Saginal crest.
These lines that we have in our skull, you know, like your skull's not just one piece, right?
It's like, there's a bunch of pieces.
The Inkers you should tie them off so they get longer as a sign of like.
Yeah, but some of these skulls don't have the same structure as ours.
They're human skulls, but they're longer.
They have more capacity, the 30% larger capacity.
and they don't have those lines that we have.
So it's like, what was that?
Were there different kinds of humans back then?
Like, is this?
Were they flying around?
Were they flying around and making these fucking structures?
Were they responsible for Soxie Hualman and Machapichu and all these other places?
And they just died off.
And all we have left is like some skulls that we can't totally explain.
We know how the means to explain it yet.
Right, because if it was 20,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago,
go, whatever it was that these people were ruling back then, what would be left?
Fucking nothing.
Nothing.
Very little.
I mean, you look at Ankhrawat where it's like, yeah, if you didn't see it.
It's shocking.
Any of it remained.
Yeah.
Well, Ancar Wat's crazy.
And how about that other one in India where the entire temples carved out of one stone?
Or the one in Jordan.
Let's see.
What is it fucking?
What does those play?
The Indiana Jones one.
What's that called?
That's right.
I went with my brother.
Yeah, what is it called?
What is it, Jimmy?
Petra.
Petra.
It's nuts.
You come through this canyon
and it's just in a mountain.
Yeah.
A giant three-story
temple that is just
carved out of the mountain.
It wasn't added to.
Right.
And where's the stone?
Would you put the stones?
What'd you do?
That view, coming out of the middle one,
coming out of that cavern
and seeing it after about an hour hike.
That's crazy.
It doesn't even,
you have to see a human.
See how small that person is in the middle?
That is so crazy.
So like,
What?
Right.
Have you ever heard of Darren Kuyu?
No.
In Turkey?
This is crazy.
You want to hear this one?
It's a place or a person?
It's a place.
So, I think they found this because someone was doing, like, construction on a house.
Yeah.
And they found a pat.
Oh, so this is what it was.
So a guy kept losing his chickens.
They would go through a hole and they would never come out.
So this guy was like, well, where the fuck of these chickens going?
So they broke down the wall.
to figure out where the chickens go.
And they found an underground city
that can hold 20,000 people.
Turkey?
With many, many levels.
Wow.
Like many levels deep into the ground.
Wow.
It's fucking bananas.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's like an ant-hill.
I watched a documentary.
Wow.
Like, you see the way where you,
could you please go back to that one image with the houses?
Yeah, like that.
Like so this guy
It was like behind a fucking wall in a house
So these chickens would go into the hole
And they would just disappear
So it's like where's my fucking chickens
So the guy starts digging around
To try to figure out where the chickens go and they found this
And I want to say they found this in like the 20th century
I think it was the 20s I just saw
1920s
Like 29 maybe
Wow so no they forgot about it
Nobody knew about it
Nobody knew who made it
There was no record
of it and it's so big and it can house 20,000 people in there.
What was it for?
No one knows.
Right.
No one knows when.
No one knows who.
No one knows nothing.
There's other ones they found in China.
They found this fucking insane one in China that also has no records.
It's enormous, like enormous caverns with giant columns.
It's all carved out of the stone.
They moved millions of tons of rocks out of there.
No record.
No one knows where the stone went.
I'm staying with the Lacondins,
Mayans, whatever.
And we were on a hike
and there was this little, like,
abandoned temple,
just the size of this room.
And so the guide was like,
so now there's a tunnel in here
to like the main temple.
It's about a mile and a half away.
And there's a tunnel where you can go through it.
A mile.
It takes a couple hours to walk.
Fuck.
And he goes,
my brother once.
He goes, I'll never go back.
It's so frightening.
And there's fucking Puma's around.
And you don't know.
Puma's in the tunnel.
Yeah, you're like,
you can't see shit.
He goes,
it's a bad place.
underground tunnel that was made however long.
What the fuck?
This is the one in China.
This is one of the caves.
So this is one of these caves in China.
By the way, no record, no historical record of when it was created or who created it.
And this is another one that they found.
In 1992 they found it.
Four farmers in Longyu found the caves and they drained the water from five small ponds in their village.
The ponds turned out to be five large man-made caverns.
Further investigation revealed 19.
more caverns nearby.
They've been determined to be more than 2,000 years old,
and their construction is not recorded
in any historical documents.
Like, look how crazy.
Please show some of those images.
Yeah, it's only one on this page.
It's fucking bananas.
So they're just guessing that it's 2,000 years old.
They don't know.
Right, right.
They're just like, because there's no record.
There's no record of it.
But it's bananas.
And they've also, those carvings, they think, are post.
Later people.
Yeah.
It came in a post discovery.
That's their way of doing.
Yeah, because you see how, like, those lines on the walls, that's how everything looks.
It's just those carved straight lines.
And it looks like the other stuff was, like, more modern that they carved in it.
You think those lines are so that the erosion wouldn't hurt it as much?
I don't know.
I mean, that might have been how they did it.
They might have had some sort of a device that they carved the stone out with.
But the thing is, it's like, these are...
Where's this on a map?
Show me where Long Yu was in a map.
Yeah.
I want to visit a lot of China.
There's some, a lot of places in there that I'm, like, don't know about.
China's a big ass play.
Back out, back out.
China's so big.
Longue caverns.
Keep going back.
Do do, do, do.
Keep going back.
Let me see in context.
Do, do, do, do.
Oh, my God.
That's pretty deep in there.
Good luck.
It's near Wuhan.
Look.
Yeah.
Take a train to Wuhan.
Catch a bug.
Yeah, go eat some armadillo.
Pangolin.
Pangolin.
That's how you got leprosy eating armadillo and pangolin.
You're really not supposed to eat those things.
Go back to the images, please.
The images are not.
Nuts, man.
It's like, what were these people doing?
Like, why, who made this?
I love standing in a place like that and just like you just instantly get connected to the history of it.
Could you imagine it's 1992 and you're just draining a pond?
You're a farmer.
And then you drain the pond and you go, oh, there's a lot of cave in here.
Open to find some nickels.
And you go and you see this shit.
And no one knows who made it.
And China, again, China has extensive historical.
records because China has existed for thousands and thousands of years. It's one of the few countries
that's essentially been just China for 5,000 plus years. Bananas, man. Aquarium for Real Dragons
Just.
Yeah.
People somewhere.
Well, I mean, who made it and how did they make it? Like, how did they do that?
For what?
For what purpose? How did they make that 2000 plus years? And by saying 2000 is like, you're just,
2000 means so there's a there's a Joan Didion or a piece on El Salvador from a long time ago and she goes they don't use numbers the way we use numbers they say 50 it means a bunch oh like 72 virgins yeah I mean just a bunch an amount yeah like bro he he went there a million times tons of tons of like what is a tonne that oh bro I smoke tons of joints yeah there's not
break it down so perplexity our AI sponsor says no one knows for certain who created the long UK
Archaeologists agree they are man-made and probably over 2,000 years old, but there's no record of their builders or patrons.
That's crazy, dude. That is so crazy. Oh, pottery and other finds inside date roughly to the late Quinn or Western Han period around 200 BCE, suggesting they were excavated at or before that time. But the thing is that pottery, but that pottery could have been someone who just left pottery later. It's like if you leave behind a,
cell phone in Egypt and 5,000 years from now, people say, oh, well, this is an iPhone 16.
This must be from...
But that means it has to be at least that old or older.
Yeah, at least that old or older.
So it's at least 2,000 plus years old.
But how crazy is there there's no known records?
Should go in quick and just bury some, like, shit from a long time ago.
Get some artifacts and just leave it in there.
How much shit like that is still out there in other parts of the world where they don't know about it?
And no one's found it yet.
That the Mayan guy said.
He was like, yeah, no one knows.
He goes, me and my friends know about it.
Fuck.
So it's just like everywhere.
Well, we were talking about the Aztecs, about how the Aztecs, and this is another thing that I found out through perplexity when I was just, I was writing this thing about Mexico and about how crazy the history of Mexico is.
And, you know, that the Spaniards came over with essentially like 12 muskets and took over the whole country.
But when they, when the Aztecs were living in these temples, they didn't build them.
They called them the place where the gods were born.
So they found them.
So there's a previous civilization that like Teotokan and all these other beautiful pyramids and temples.
They don't know who fucking made them, man.
So they don't know who made them.
That cave in Vietnam was found in 1991.
Oh, I saw the 60 Minutes thing on that.
Did you see that?
Look at that.
That dude from 60 minutes, like a dude and a lady from 60 minutes, went and visited this cave.
And I was like that, that's one cool thing about something like 60.
minutes that they would do something like that because it's a long journey.
Wow.
You have to fly in, drive a long distance, then hike a long distance.
Yeah, some of these places aren't any, nothing's there.
You can fit skyscrapers inside of these caves.
Wow.
They have their own ecosystems.
Like there's clouds in there.
It probably fucking rains inside the caves.
There's insects as animals that live in these caves that have over time lost their ability
to see because they didn't need it.
So their hearing goes up.
Their sight goes down.
There's like bugs in like Thailand and like Sepong and like,
that where it's like, oh yeah, these places, these animals only exist here.
To hear you breathe and leap up.
There's a salamander in Barton Creek Springs.
Yeah, special salamander.
Really?
It only lives there?
A bit of salamander that got mixed with weird people swimming in the creek.
Yeah.
Oh, whoa.
They survive on chicks with arm hair.
It's only able to survive here.
Hippy menstrual cycles.
Yeah, I was doing bottom of the barrel last night and somebody brought up that there's,
like, there's nude beaches at Lake Travis.
And I'm like, what is it like?
Barton Springs.
No, no, no.
Barton's topless.
You know, when you take a, well, maybe.
Is it?
When you take one of those boat rides out.
Chicks, they show the...
Bro.
It's nois.
Noice?
Yeah.
Noice?
It's nice.
Hippy tits?
Some of them were gross hippie tits, but some of them were like real tits, dude.
Real ones.
Influencers go there, too.
Oh, like, girls have too much ayahuasca and they wear wooden beads and they want their tits out?
Dude, so I was in a Patagonia.
Hippy Hollow Park.
4.6 stars.
That's a lot.
Not bad.
I was asking people, it was a rafting thing.
and I was like, who's the worst?
I always try to do this,
especially at comedy clubs, too,
who's the worst person you've ever had here?
Right.
So there's like, which country,
which people are the worst?
And they go, I don't know.
I'm like, listen, I'm from Jews,
so you can, it's Jews, right?
And they go, I mean, they want freebies for sure.
But like, we're trying to get which country's or something.
He goes, well, the worst, overall, though, is influencers.
And they have no country.
But they make everything about them.
They make you pause too long to take their shots.
They make you get out of their shot.
Oh, yeah.
We're all just trying to raft.
They think they're there for them.
Yeah.
Ugh.
Ugh.
Ugh.
One of the influences got arrested in Korea.
Johnny Somali, do you know who that guy is?
He was in Korea.
And apparently they have some statue that is about, I think it's something about sex slavery or something like that.
So he was like kissing the statue and being rude to people.
And they just sentenced him to, he did a bunch of shit over there.
They sentenced him to six months of hard labor in Korea.
We need some of that here for.
for influencers.
Quit doing
fucking selfie talking
while you're walking.
You're not a black lady.
You don't get to talk to your phone.
Black ladies get to talk to their phone.
Oh, they love speakerphone.
Why do they do?
I don't know.
It's just black ladies.
Like,
it's like,
and it's like,
why do you think they like that?
Why did they like it?
They want everyone to hear their conversation.
Maybe because their fucking nails
will cut up their face if they bring it too close.
I'm trying to think of possible reasons.
It is weird where certain cultures gravitate towards certain behavior and activities.
It's new racism.
It's fun because it's like this isn't in the books.
This is a brand new observation.
Speakerphone is like, I remember being outside of Rosco's chicken and waffles and saying like,
how come so many black guys are on speakerphone and people like, that's racist?
I'm like, no, it's not.
No, it's an racial observation.
Observing.
I'm not mad at them.
Yeah, I don't care.
Like, why is it worse that I hear both sides of the conversation versus one side?
Like if someone's just talking on the phone, why is that less offensive than someone talking to a speaker phone?
You can observe. Why do the Hasidic Jews always talk on flip phones all the time?
And you're like, there's something up.
Do they?
Yeah, there's some where it's like, why do the people used to ask me that when I do Jew and A's when it's doing the Jew hour building it?
So they'd ask questions.
Doing a check drops.
I'd be like, ask questions.
And I'll build my material that way.
Oh, that's smart.
But one of them was like, why do they all wear matching clothes, the daughters?
Or like, if one's 10, one's eight, why do they wear matching stuff?
that's the only one I couldn't figure out
until I finally figured it out
it's two for one sales
United threatens to kick off passengers
who don't use headphones
Yeah good
Oh well that's because people are like listening
To like loud YouTube videos right next to
Bro all over South America
It is scroll
Instagram videos loudly
There's no even thought
We were in an overnight bus once
And there was a guy listening to like
Best Hollywood screams
And it was like dude we're sleeping
Oh God
It's crazy
They just don't do it
And you want to be like
Be quiet
But they're like
Why?
It's not part of our culture
It's like the Dominican pool hall
Yeah exactly
This is how we do it
That is used to chaos
It is weird
That people get used to
A certain amount of chaos
You know
And that's just normal
Yeah
New York is a normal
Jack Hammers
Like right
Nothing
Yeah if you live in New York
You're totally accustomed to
Oh that was what I wanted
To send you Jamie
I don't know
Maybe I did send it to you
The other day
About where they figured out
That there's a part of your brain
that recognizes when birds aren't chirping.
Ooh.
And you kind of freak out.
Because there should be some background noise.
Right.
Well, if birds aren't chirping, it generally means that predators are nearby.
Oh.
Their brain is a circuit doesn't know you live in a city.
Its only job is to monitor where the birds are still singing.
Right now in this room, it's on.
The circuit predates primates.
Whoa.
Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continually as a predator detection system for roughly 200 million
years. Bird stops singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of the
mammalian history, the forest full of song meant that no large predator was nearby and the
cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software. A loud, quiet.
And you're like, something's up. The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants,
six minutes of birdsong, dropped anxiety with a medium effect.
size. Six minutes of traffic
noise raised depression
with the same. The effect worked
on subjects who lived in dense urban
environments and had no regular
contact with nature. The brain
still ran the check.
Listen, I'm a hippie. I live in
New York and it's like, I gotta get to nature
once in a while or all go crazy. That's why
we have to protect the parks. That's why we have to
protect the parks. We have to. Tomorrow.
Tomorrow we're protecting the park.
Tomorrow we are. Yes. It's back.
Fucking, this new guy.
Listen, I'm a one-issue voter.
I'm not a voter at all.
But if I was...
Yeah, and it's this.
We saved another park, Elizabeth Street Gardens.
Classical park.
And they go, no, the other guy was like,
we got to tear this down for low-income housing.
And then Lower East Side in the East Village,
that's a community-oriented place.
They take care of shit on their own.
Always have.
They made the...
It's a parks district because they were like,
these buildings collapsed,
and they're just like, let's build it into parks.
And then the city, when it came back,
they're like, let's take those back.
Like, no, no, no.
Oh, fuck that.
We made these.
East River Park's massive.
But the Little Street Gardens is tiny.
And the other guy, the black guy, whatever his name was.
Eric Adams.
Eric Adams.
He goes, I'm going to protect that park.
And I'm going to protect all the park.
Parks got nicer.
They redid them all and they painted all the pensions.
I liked them.
And he goes, okay.
So this community goes, we will find you another place to build low-income housing.
And they did.
They had this whole platform.
And they go, we can do it on this block, down the street there and there.
It's actually more houses than you were planning a building.
Okay.
And now this fucking new guy goes, no, we're going to raise that to the ground.
What?
And they're like, no, no, we did it.
We found another place.
I thought he was for the people.
They keep trying to get him to like, just say you're going to protect it.
And he's pretty much like, I won't.
I won't.
Elizabeth Street Gardens is fucking gone if I have my say.
Really?
Yeah.
And I'm like, dude, come on.
You're supposed to be of the people.
See, again, single issue voter.
I don't know about the rest.
You got to protect that park.
So do you think that there's some sort of,
a financial interest.
Someone's getting, someone's always getting this.
Someone's always getting that.
But you would not think it would be him.
He's the Democratic socialist.
There's a non-capitalist
reason why green spaces
are important. It doesn't bring in money.
They try to fuck up with this one.
Central Park. They try to fuck this one up.
Zilker? Yeah, with underground
like garages and stuff and like totally redoing it.
Ew.
The people won. So it didn't happen.
But like there is a thing that helps all of our
level of life, level of joy.
Central Park is a genius idea.
It's a genius idea.
It would never do that now if it wasn't already done.
Yeah. We were talking about this with Brian Simpson.
I was like, if I lived in New York City, if something happened and I had to do J.R.E.
from New York City, I would have to live near the park because I would have to have my dog.
I'm not going to get rid of my dog.
Yeah.
So if I'd have to take, I just have to like have a place where I 100% were able to take, I'd have a routine where I'm taking him to the park every day.
Central Park rules.
And you see somebody playing saxophone
or you feel like you're in a Woody Allen movie.
Bro, Central Park's incredible.
It's so big, too.
When you stay in a hotel that, like, looks over the park,
you really get a sense of the scope, the size of it.
Fly over it.
The scale of it is incredible.
It's so, and by the way, they would love to sell that off.
Oh, yeah.
And just start stacking it up, make it look like China.
You know, like one of those big cities that they have over there.
You need green spaces. They are important to our way of life.
Yeah.
It's good for your dome, obviously.
It's good for the fucking mind.
Yeah.
It's healthy.
But even Central Park, it's like it's not as good as like real willness.
Real.
Yeah.
Central Park will buy me two days of sanity.
I got to get to the actual woods and then I get a week or two.
Central Park will balance you out.
Yeah.
It'll balance you out.
Like, it's way better than no.
And it seems like people are cooler there.
Like, every time I've been in Central Park, people seem like a little nicer.
Like, if you run into people on Broadway, they don't seem as nice as people that you run into in Central Park.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's also that thing with like, hey, no smoking in here.
Like, I'm really sorry.
And then you put it out, and I'll light it up as soon as you're gone.
But like...
You can't smoke in Central Park?
Nothing.
Really?
You do, but weed.
But cigarettes, I get more mad at it.
But also, like, yeah, if I got a cigar and I'm with a friend, I'm smoking.
Yeah.
Well, I could see how that would annoy people.
Sure, but also chill.
But you can walk down the street in New York and smoke a cigarette, right?
Or joint, yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
It's still weird to me when I see a black guy on a stoop rolling a joint.
And I'm like, what do you do?
It's legal.
You're gonna go to jail, but it's right.
I know it's totally legal.
Well, now it's different nationwide,
because Trump just changed it to Schedule 3.
Again, this is something that Obama could have done,
Biden could have done, Clinton could have done it.
Trump 1 could have done it.
Yeah, and now it's Schedule 3, which is still not good.
I mean, it should be just like alcohol,
but at least it's getting close.
It's getting close.
Did I had moments out there of nature
where like you're in the middle of nowhere
and you really do feel rejuvenated like that?
Where you're like, you're not even,
it's not even hiking,
culture. So it's like you're not passing anyone. Right. For hours and hours and hours. You're a
peace. You're just at peace. And whatever that thing is that they've just discovered about birds,
there's a similar thing that your body recognizes when you're actually in real nature. It feels
different. There's no cell phone signal. You know anything about grounding? Yes. What's your,
what's your take on it? Well, Huberman believes it's a real thing. And so I always trust Huberman because he's very
objective about all this kind of stuff.
Electromagnetic waves coming off the ground that you need to get in touch with.
It does feel good.
When I take the dogs out in the yard and I walk around barefoot, it feels good.
I mean, I'm just judging it based on how it makes me feel.
It's like that word tree hugger got a bad rap, but it's like, it comes from like, touch that.
They're in the ground so you're connected to the ground.
Probably comes from people that were tripping balls.
Because if you're tripping balls, those trees hug you back.
I've been there.
Yeah.
Those trees hug you back.
They talk to you to like your face on it.
Hello, Ari.
You can feel the cells.
I'm an oak tree.
I've been here for 300 years.
I've been here before this was America.
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
When I go to the mountains, especially like the elk hunting mountains, because it's so hard to get there.
When you get there, there's no cell phone service.
And when you're up there, you feel different.
You just feel different.
You just feel better.
You really do.
Feel more relaxed.
My brain was firing in a way that it hadn't fired in so long.
It was just like all the.
the shit holding you down just like pulled off.
And after not very much time, it was just like,
just thoughts, creative thoughts were just like pouring out of me.
So in the six months you were gone, no social media, no, nothing.
I took, I took YMH's on a piece of paper,
a couple people from YMH's emails.
I got two months ahead on my ads and my podcast on you be tripping.
So I'm like, you guys are set for two months.
You don't need me.
And then after...
So did you record a bunch of episodes in advance to release them?
I did my work.
Oh my God, that's crazy.
Yeah, they're all Evergreen episodes.
How did you do that?
I, one, worked hard, two, loved hearing about travel.
I love it.
So, like, it wasn't much work for me to come in and be like,
tell me about Cambodia, tell me about Thailand, tell me about Taiwan,
tell me about, you know, Uruguay.
Well, that's not I feel about podcasting in general.
Yeah, you like it.
You'll have here or there.
Like, this guy was sucked.
I wish I should have stayed home.
But generally, like, that's really interesting.
Yeah.
So I love it, and I just got way ahead.
It's funny when I, like, Danny Polshek, I put out an episode.
He goes, did we do it like two years ago?
And I'm like, I wasn't time yet.
I don't know.
Oh, wow.
Or I'll save it for if a comic has a special.
Like, let's just record it now.
In nine months, you'll have a special.
How many do you have banked?
Through July still.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
So how many did you do a week?
Sometimes none.
Sometimes, like, six or seven.
I was very, on you be tripping, dude, I see every mistake I made for the skeptic tank,
and I was like, let's avoid that.
Like, what kind of mistakes are you making?
So, like, minimum of effort on my part technologically.
So I, YMH is my Jamie.
Right, right, right, right.
Here's the footage.
Handle.
By the way, settle down because they're not.
They're my version of Jay.
This is the only, this is the goat.
Well, I have 15 people doing one Jamie job.
Yeah, so.
That's the problem.
Like, when people talk about, like, who should I hire?
I'm like, I don't know what to tell you.
You need a guy on the spectrum.
But yeah, but I did I did that I just kept record and sometimes about two a day for four straight days
And any comic who goes hey, I'm sorry, I'm busy, I'm like buddy, let's reschedule this isn't supposed to be stressful
Right, let's do it when you have time
There's no chill, no big deal. That's the way to do it and and when you're ahead you can afford a week with nothing and it wasn't like I gotta find someone
We gotta do this now. Yeah, that's out. Yeah, that's out all the music choices they used to make I'm like that's a lot of work
Yeah
Well the music thing is the problem is like you get flag
now.
We used to be able to play music on YouTube all the time.
And now everything gets flagged.
You got to be real careful.
We used to play songs almost every episode.
Full song.
Yeah.
When there was nothing, when the show made zero money.
It was the wild west.
It was so fun.
You're actually making a fun thing.
It was so outlaw.
It's a little more corporate now, which is sad.
But also, fine, it helps people a lot more now.
But, man, podcasting was just do whatever the fuck you want.
Well, we were at the early, early days.
Like when I started this thing, it was 2009.
It's almost 20 years old, which is so nuts.
Have you figured out a way to monetize it yet?
Not yet.
I'm working on it.
I think I'm going to sell rubber pussies.
You were for a bit.
Yeah.
You were for a bit.
That was my first sponsor.
Only sponsor.
I don't need another one.
We're good.
It was funny because Sam Harris was like one of his requests when he first did my podcast.
Please don't mention pussy.
He wouldn't let me do an ad for the fleshlight.
I said, okay.
Okay, it doesn't matter.
Like, it's not like it's paying a lot of money.
It was just fun more than anything.
Yeah, but so I would wait.
So after two months, I go, hey, I need the next months of ads.
And I would say one day, I would just do all the ads and the bumpers.
Like, this guy's got a new special.
Here's his tour dates.
I'd find a waterfall or something, and I would do it in a fun place.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I was just like, let's do it fun.
If I'm going to do remote, let's be remote.
Yeah.
How did you do it?
Do you do it video as well?
Yeah, iPhone.
So just.
Jamie told me this a long time.
My first trip to Southeast Asia, I was like, hey, I need a pocket camera.
Like, what's the best?
And he was like, bro, you're not going to want to hear this.
It's the iPhone.
Yeah.
It's the best one.
Or a galaxy.
Like any modern cell phone.
It's 2017, but yeah.
Any modern cell phone, the video's fucking incredible.
Stabilizers.
Yeah, the video stabilization's amazing.
And all you do is you set it up on a little tripod and it'll go for fucking hours.
Yeah, so I'll put it on a tree far away.
I did one for a Danny Brown episode in like Sukray Bolivia.
in front of the statue of Sukre.
Oh, wow.
And it's just like...
You guys were in Bolivia?
That was everywhere.
Wow.
Dude, I saw an inauguration for the first president they had in 20 years.
Where?
In Suu Kroi, in Bolivia.
Whoa.
They had the old guy...
Who was running things for 20 years.
Okay.
A crazy dude that everyone hated.
He said farming is more important than industry here.
So we should give the farmers two votes per person.
And the cities get one.
now they also run the media there
so everyone in the farmlands
in the you know the heartland
they didn't see any of the problems
city shit so they'll go
I don't know everything on the radio
says the guy's doing a great job
let's vote him in again
he's doing great I listen to the radio
the guy's doing a great job
and everyone in the city is like
oh no he's lying
so everything went to shit
20 years
like well let's turn on the radio again
let's turn on like Trump
Trump news
and see what Trump is saying
about Trump.
It's going to be pretty good.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
There I am.
Is this the video?
Oh, wow.
I pretend to be talking my cell phone because it's so embarrassing.
Wow.
So I pretend to be talking my phone, but I just have a cordless mic.
Is Danny still sober?
I think he's back on weed, but like, yeah, he's off.
The alcohol was the issue.
Yeah.
Last time we did a podcast, he got obliterated.
He's sober.
Nice.
Yeah.
Good for him.
He's doing great.
Bolivia, is there like, it was always Bolivia and marching
powder. It was when I was a kid, what people would call cocaine. Interesting. The salt flats were
really cool there. Yeah? Just like miles and miles of salt fields. Oh, there's me and O'Neill in Peru.
Look at you guys. Were your stupid hats on? Yeah, I were just trying to find weird spots and like,
I don't know, let's just film something. Why were you wearing those hats? It's Peru. Those are the
alpaca hats that keep you warm. Oh, I went hunting my first time hunting. I wore those hats.
They're great. And Steve Ronello was saying that's a very left, left one.
wing hat. I'm like, why? Why is it left wing? It's warm. It would. So I don't know about your hat.
I'm like, what's wrong in my hat? Leave it alone. I'm about to kill something. Steve, chill.
I'm about to murder something. I killed that deer with that fucking my left wing hat on.
But that's all I would do. I just weigh in once in a while, get my months worth of stuff and then
go back to disappearing. And I'm telling you, buddy, my brain was so alive. I would just,
like, you just don't realize what you're dealing with responsibility was all the time. And then when you have none,
It's like you just kind of be yourself.
I came up with this whole, my storytelling shows out.
I came with this whole, like, how to frame it all, how to do everything.
I had a vision of like this prologue that I want to bridge the gap.
It's called The End.
It's out now.
And this is, and then did you film all that with your mom's house studios as well?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah.
They might be the only group like that that's actually good.
Tom was like, how much do you have?
I'm like, I have about 80% of it.
He goes, I'll put in the rest.
I'll supply all the,
all the people you need to make it happen.
And then he's not a network.
He's Segorah and he's a fucking dirtbag.
So he's like, say whatever you want.
There's no censoring when it's Seguro, you know?
Well, it's also like Tom has made so much money
that he's out.
You know what I mean?
He'll do whatever the fuck he wants.
Yeah.
You can't stop him.
He's gonna do whatever he wants now.
Yeah.
Oh, nice.
Look at all these episodes.
Miss Pat, the Stefano.
Look at that.
Duncan did a great one.
Nice.
Bobby Shane.
Shane, Bobby Kelly.
Big J
Yeah, we made the show again
And Vargazzi
And then this prologs
It's something I had a vision of this
On that mushroom trip
Oh wow
About how to frame like
What happened to this is not happening
And what is this thing now
And how to like go through it
And then I talked to a bunch of artists
While I was gone
And some made pictures
And this guy William Child
He actually did a Danny Brown video
He's just
Shit I don't want to ruin this
Where'd you film these?
The box in New York City
Place where Chappelle would have
His comedian balls
Just get that gay outfit.
The gay outfit, Joe, is from, do you remember a show called This Not Happening?
Yes.
I did. I'm completely legally unrelated to this new show.
You can say whatever you want, but I cannot.
But that was a comedian telling stories in a strip club.
This is a strip club with a comedian telling stories.
The first year, they go, hey, you got to wear the same outfit every day.
And I go, no, that's fake.
They go, no, but we got a mission match day.
so we got to do it.
Oh, why?
Is anybody going to tune out?
Because they see you a different outfit on?
No, it'll be like it's weird
or suddenly you're hosting a different thing.
So I'd start wearing ridiculous suits
I made in Hong Kong, you know?
Oh, yeah.
And then my final year, I had this Indian outfit picked out
that I went and sourced in L.A.
and had this cool Indian outfit.
All right, now it's cool.
I thought it was gay.
And I saved it for seven or eight years.
But that show got taken away from me.
I was like, if I ever do this again,
I'm wearing this fucking outfit out of respect to,
to overcoming.
Those days were very fascinating
the days where
Comedy Central is trying to force you
into doing a Comedy Central special,
but you had a deal with Netflix.
And even though it was completely legal
and contractually legal
for you to do a comedy special
with Netflix, Comedy Central
was strong-arming you
into doing it on Comedy Central
and canceled your fucking show
because you wouldn't do a special with them.
So you got a successful show on...
People don't understand.
know how gross Hollywood can get?
Ari had a successful show that was doing very well on Comedy Central, and they canceled
it because he wouldn't do a comedy special on Comedy Central.
It was one of the early ones.
Paid for my own special.
And then I said, I got to figure out where it's going.
And they go, it should be here.
And I go, no, no, I don't think it should.
It also was a double special.
And it needs to be on a streamer more than a network.
And then I was like, no, I'm going to Netflix.
And yeah, and they were like, let's go blackmail then.
It's crazy.
I get it from their perspective.
No, I don't.
They're like, hey, we can't be losing power.
And they never really, they always thought it was an open mic.
But it's, it was not losing power because the reality is that would just bring more people to the comedy century show.
And Netflix back then was so much bigger to do a special.
When I did that 2017 special on Netflix, I was the mayor of New York for like three weeks.
Everywhere I'd go, I'd bike at a red light, three people would recognize you.
It was a different time for specials then.
And of course, that was the biggest thing.
I'm gonna do that.
Yeah.
Well, it's still pretty big.
Netflix is pretty big, but not Jew.
Comic specials.
They picked it up.
Oh, that's right.
They picked up Jew.
Yeah, it's on Netflix right now.
Nice.
But yeah, and so people ask me with this show, like, why don't you go to Netflix or like, I'm
like, dude, networks killed me.
Not only that.
I don't want to, I'd rather just go straight to the people on this one.
Why do it?
It's like there's no reason to at this point, especially like Comedy Central doesn't even exist
didn't exist.
That's what's nuts.
It was a wild time.
You said you would host for free.
I was on the phone with you crying.
I was like hearing it that they're taking away in the moment.
Tell them, I will host it for free.
Because you were going to take out a loan to pay off all the crew.
Because all the crew had signed on for, you know, X amount of episodes and it was going to cost
them money.
And you were like, I'm trying to figure out a way to keep us on the air.
I go, tell Comedy Central, I will host it for free.
You were already, it was 2017.
this podcast was already going.
Oh, yeah, it was huge by then.
Yeah.
But it was number one in 2019 is when it started being number one.
But it was probably top four.
You were, had pedigree on the show.
You've done two stories.
One you liked, one you hated.
But the one you liked was a great story.
That's a great one.
That's a great story, Dolham, Alabama.
Yeah.
And I was like, oh, he's part of the show.
This kind of goes.
If someone's got to do it, let's, and he'll do it for free.
You're saving money and getting a much bigger host.
They just wanted to fuck you.
They just wanted to fuck you.
Anyone I suggested, they said no.
I said, Ali Sadeek should do it.
They said no.
Yeah, but at least they went with Roy.
Roy was really good.
Roy was great.
But it only lasted like a little bit.
It was over after that.
But that show could have gone on a long fucking time.
It was such a great idea.
It was great execution.
It was fun to do.
It was real in a moment where alt comedy and the ironic distance was getting bigger.
Yeah.
This was a more real thing.
Yeah.
And people responded to it.
And I'll listen.
But it just shows you the grossness of the business sometimes when these people who are just gatekeeping executive assholes.
They're really saying, or you're not on the list.
Yeah.
And they don't exist anymore.
That's what's what's most amazing.
Well, that's cool thing.
You can go to Tom.
You can go to a guy like that or whatever.
And he goes, no, I love the show.
It made me bigger.
Let's get it going again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's also like nine years later, like the internet is completely taken.
taken over. It is drowned out all of those comedy networks. They don't exist anymore.
Yeah. You need some level of curation or you're lost in a sea of content sometimes,
but there's people you can trust, you know. If you want meditation, that guy, Sam Harris,
is that the meditation guy? You know, whatever he's going to say, you're probably going to believe
it, meditation-wise, you know? If you need some, to hear an MMA fighter, like, really speaking,
This is a great source for that, this podcast.
She needs some curator, but I mean, like, I'm the guy.
I'm that for this show.
I'll make it quality.
I'll make it look right.
You can always trust me to do that.
So come to me for that show was the coolest stand-up show of all time.
It was a fun show.
It was a really good show.
And it was a show that I remember you created from scratch.
I remember when you were doing it at the lab, at the improv, that tiny little room.
You were doing it for free.
And I was like, what are you doing?
basically the same way that you were talking to me about my podcast, like, what are you doing?
That's what you were saying?
What are you doing, dude?
It's a fucking show for 20 people.
I'm like, this is so weird.
I'm like, Ari's telling the stories.
But I thought about it.
I was like, it's probably a good idea to develop material that way.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of people was like, hey, we're doing a show.
It's about heartbreak this week or this month or it's about drugs, whatever.
And they go, all right, let me, I have a story.
Let me get all my thoughts down, you know, all the metaphors and stuff, the flowery stuff you put on them.
that Jay is so good at and stuff
but like then they became a lot of people
was like that's my closure in my special now
I had no bit I thought of it because of this
it became you know the biggest thing
I had in my act
it's nuts it's nuts
because I loved giving people an excuse to like
write something it was also such a fun show
because it was comedy outside of like regular stand-up
it was like another avenue
and and it was a really fun thing to do
you know and the thing about like
the gatekeeping
of it is like those people had nothing to do with it and they had all the power.
They had all the power.
And by just exercising it in that way and then everybody talking about how gross it was,
nobody ever trusted them again.
And the thing is some of the stuff they do, though, like we need some diversity.
And it'd be like, I don't think you're wrong.
I think you don't want it to be all the same thing.
But there's something me and Eric Abrams came about with is it's a diversity of experience
is bigger.
Two white dudes is not what we're talking about.
If it's like Ali Sadiq's life, closer to Gary Owen's life than mine.
Mm-hmm.
You know, Gary Owens and Ali are closer to each other than me or Gary, you know?
Right, right, right.
So that's what I want, different, whatever.
And they have these checklists you would go to in L.A.
Here are the gays.
Get one of these seven.
Here are the black.
And it was like, well, I'm not going to fuck on my product.
No way.
At the end of the day, it has to be a meritocracy.
So then we would just work harder, which a lot of people aren't willing to do.
And it's like, well, there's a great black woman in Indianapolis.
She's not in LA or New York, but let's get her.
She has great stories.
Miss Pat.
There's a great black comic in Houston, and he has these great stories about prison.
Let's get him.
They're not on these lists.
Yeah.
You just gotta work a little harder to make your shit.
You know, it's like Seinfeld letting everybody else shine.
Right.
But it's like forced diversity without the merit, without good quality comedy.
Yeah.
But it's just gatekeeper.
is fucked themselves, really, because now that we don't need them anymore, like, they're,
what do those people do?
Well, the thing is, they were running Comedy Central, what do they do now?
There's no jobs.
Well, the thing is, with, like, where the cabs overstepping that made Uber possible, you know?
So, let's focus on the positive of this.
And then the Uber people kept robbing and murdering people.
Yeah.
So they just got Waymo's.
Yeah, exactly.
They'll be gone, too.
Take advantage.
Yep.
Yep.
How many Coke addicts do you need driving?
You're like, bro, that's a red light.
Please stop.
I mean, they barely fucking vet those people.
Yeah.
But the cool thing is, because it's easier to film and because I have friends that are
fucking billionaires, you know, it's like we can actually get it done now.
It's a golden age for this.
It is.
To be able to make a TV show level thing on our own.
Well, look at even movies.
Like Theo and David Spade made a fucking movie.
On their own.
Self-financed it.
And it's doing well.
They go, we know how much it's going to cost.
We'll do it.
We're rich.
It's incredible
It's a cool time
I mean we made our budget back day one
That's awesome
On a massive project
Flying in 23 comics
You know putting them all up
Paying them all
They're cutting in on the shares
We've never done that before
So are you going to do that in the next season as well
I don't know if there's going to be a next season
A lot of this was just a
There was a hole in my
In my resume
Where the show didn't end
On the terms it should have ended on
And that's why it's called the end
Yeah
Yeah, it's a play on words for story titles too, you know, like the end.
But like, so I just had to get it done right.
Nice.
Nice.
And then all these huge, like Shane Gillis, who when he was like, open micer was like, all these guys, like, I want to eventually do that show.
Yeah.
And the show went away.
Right.
In the interim, he's like supplanting the Philadelphia 76ers so he can keep coming, you know.
But he's like, I'd love to do that show.
Dude, I have four people take private jets to come to do the show.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Fuck yeah, dude.
It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was,
like, oh, this is like, not just something you did.
This is like a TV show.
Yeah, we, it's like, I'm so happy.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
I love it.
I'm so happy to hear that, dude.
And there's that, that prologue that that guy did, you should, I'll send you, I'll send
you a $2 off.
Um, um, I'll just pay.
Yeah.
Yeah, we said we had to figure out a way, me and O'Neill and Abrams, we all are like writing it.
We're like, I have to figure out a way to bridge the gap of this not happening to the end and what happened and everything without being too woes me.
And so we got this claymation guy who was like, yeah, let's just fill it with fucking punchlines.
So it doesn't become that like, I love Schultz, but a little like, they couldn't keep us down.
Like, I don't want to do any of that.
I don't want to be earnest.
Right, right, right, right.
So let's bridge the gap without ever being serious.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it was like a three-minute prologue you get for free.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's William Child.
That's Tim Key's video.
Oh, wow.
How did they do that?
Did they use real claimation?
Oh, yeah, dude.
In a time of AI where everyone's doing the easy stuff, he is painstakingly.
It takes him a day to build each one of those characters.
That's three-day work.
And then the backdrop takes another day or two.
And how long does it take to actually do the animation?
A long time, all day long.
So if you have notes, you're like, dude, I need the little.
notes before I start filming. This is click move click move click move click move you got
go back and erase the stuff that you know the wires and shit too are they wires
or just moving the clay has to be held up because clay would fall right right right
well there's wires in the arms yeah yeah I mean you don't necessarily have to have
wires like to make it stand what is it going on with his tits well it's in that
bowl ew he's making a this looks like a turd he won't get locked into that
He did a trippy red video
That's really good
That's awesome, dude
That's cool that people are still doing
Stuff like that
Like the old school
The way they did King Kong
Well here's what I noticed too
When you start talking to some of these artists
You know
Like some of my stage designs
And stuff like that
Like for America's weird art
What I had was like
This idea that like
What if we left society
How long till nature
Would just take back over
And we're like let's do that with plants
And then the first ones are like
So expensive
They're like oh I can't
Okay I gotta rethink
I can't
That's far far
I'll spend a lot, but not that much out of the budget.
But then you tell these people, like, well, here's what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to say, you say the whole thing.
Like, here's what I'm trying to get across.
Here's what I'm trying to say.
Like, we're too caught up in the news and stuff.
And if we all just like, whatever.
And then they go, fuck, dude, that's a good.
Okay, we can do it at cost.
And then him, Anthony Shepard, they were both like these great artists.
They were like, fuck, they stole your fucking show from you.
Hold on.
That's fucking bullshit.
I can bring my cost way down.
We can do this.
Still very expensive, but they're like, I want to be part of something.
That's dope.
You know, if Tarantino was like, you're going to hold a boom mic, I'm like, yes, I would do that for you to be part of something.
Yeah.
There we go.
That's fucking dope, dude.
It's what?
William Child, that's his Instagram account.
Whoa.
That's me.
Look at you.
He can't deliver me a message.
Oh, you're an asshole king.
You know what that is?
She told me that I was a favorite.
Look at that.
Dude, that's real.
You have to play that.
I don't know.
February 18th, 2010.
The show was born
at the third most vapid city in America.
Me and six comedians
telling stories about psychedelic drugs.
Only 14 people showed up.
But God damn, it was the best show I'd ever seen.
That's awesome.
With a lot of hard work completely on my own
with help from no one,
I got a TV deal.
And that helped launch the careers
of so many great comics.
Fat ones who lost weight.
Fat ones who somehow keep getting fat.
Fatter.
Men will go on to influence a legend.
Don't think you're like Trump.
This pet, she could molest it.
And then with a lot of hard.
Out an ending.
That's awesome.
The irony's sicken me.
Wait, wait, watch this part.
You're in it.
Hold on.
I mean, it might have been the drugs.
Without an ending.
The irony is sick.
Right after this. Hold on.
I don't play.
I mean, it might have been the drugs.
It's about an end.
Wait.
I think there's nothing yet.
It's only clips of it, I guess.
There's a moment where I have to go, I realize it had to be a man and not just a man who would go on to tap Shane Gillis twice with witnesses, by the way.
And then you and Norman raising your head.
It's like, I witnessed it.
I'm like, let's just have some fun, dude.
Let's have some fun.
I got Duncan to do a theme song on the way out of his episode.
Oh, really?
His story is about taking his kids to a Taylor Swift concert film and how awful is.
He thinks she's a 15,000-year-old vampire.
He has this long song.
He goes, you can see it.
She's feeding off them.
She gets bigger as they start cheering.
It's so funny.
And it's Duncan.
He's so out there.
And I'm like, hey, Duncan, he does this, like, song.
He breaks down every one of her songs.
He goes, it's just this.
And I was like, you know those crazy garage band songs you've made it for 25 plus years?
You want to do the theme song just for that episode?
Just the, and he goes, yeah, 100%.
So it's this, like, demonic song about being a 15,000.
year old vampire. It's a Taylor Swift's original
song. And you don't have to okay it with a network.
You're like, let's just do it.
I was like, what do you need your credit? He made up some crazy
credit for his band. That's awesome.
That's amazing. Nobody's embraced like that kind of AI
technology more than Duncan. He's always
sending me things that he's working on.
Always use technology. He does it all day long.
Those garage band songs used to make.
It was just him coming up with crazy weird stuff. A long time ago.
Yeah.
The sunset days. Yeah. It was like,
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
That's awesome, dude.
Okay, so that's, it's available on arishefirr.com.
Arir.com.
What happens to $5.99?
What happened to Ari thegreat.com?
That went away.
People didn't know how to find it.
But is it still there?
Like, if you go to Ari the great.com, does it take you to R.Shafeer.
If I know anything about me, there's no way I'm going to pay those fees every year.
If I know anything about me and my people, I doubt I still have that.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd let the YMH staff.
I had a production card.
You know, you need a production card.
production card at the end.
One of them says YMAH.
Then Eric Abrams,
direct it's his.
And I was like,
the one I was using
was just a still frame from this not happening
with just my dick pixelated.
And I was like, put my thing on that.
I hate,
I'm not a producer or whatever.
And I didn't have it.
And then we couldn't use anything
with this not happening.
So it's like, don't.
And I was like,
fuck,
I need another one.
I'm off in the jungle.
So I told YMH.
I was like,
guys, you guys are all fucking idiots.
Make me whatever production card you want.
And I will use it.
And then they were like, we're going to make seven.
I was like, all right.
And I've seen a few of them, and they're all so retarded.
They're all so weird.
One of them being bringing a giant coin out of my fucking giant nose.
It's just so retarded.
Oh, I love working with people I like.
Yeah, Tom's awesome.
It's nice having a guy like that that's like really just acquired an enormous amount of funds.
Yeah.
It does whatever the fuck he wants.
Fun funds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And his Netflix show is fucking great.
Oh, it's so out there.
It's so crazy
But it's like perfect for him
It's like his mind
Alright
Let's wrap this bitch up
Tomorrow, protect our parks
First Protectile Parks
In quite some time
Dude I would get recognized
Here or there when I was traveling
Not much
I'll tell you a couple things I saw
One
People know Shane Gill's name
Except in Brazil
And then they only know
Rolfi Bostos's name
Oh really?
That's the only comic they've ever heard of
He's a big comic over there
Yeah I had him on the show
Really? Yeah he rules
Good dude.
But I'll tell you this, though,
there's a lot of business and shit
that gets caught up in this,
who's interviewing which politician
and all this guy's doing this
or he's friends with this guy
and all the money and everything
and like, am I doing well enough?
People try to do that keep up game.
This guy's getting more views on his clips.
I should start doing shorter stuff.
Anyone I told,
that didn't recognize me
when it came up what my job was,
first I'd try to avoid it.
But if I kept person,
like, no, no, no, for real,
what do you do?
I'm like, all right, well,
I'm a stand-up comedian.
I mean, this is 10 for 10 countries.
Everybody would be like, what?
What do you mean?
I'm like, I'm a stand-up comedian.
And they go, like, as a hobby, I'm like, no, as a living.
They're like, what?
Grandma, come here.
This guy does stand up.
Like, what do you mean with the microphone?
I'm like, yeah, he goes, that's so cool.
That's so cool.
I'm like, weird, just in New York?
I'm like, I'm like, and the world, really.
Like, what?
You pay your rent on this?
I'm like, yeah.
And then some.
Like, no fucking way.
They couldn't get over how cool it was, and they didn't know if I'm successful or not.
They just know I do this.
Bro, we have the coolest job, and I've tested this, in the world.
There's no cooler job you could tell people that they'll be like, that reaction.
They start smiling just that the idea of the job can actually exist.
Wow.
And that's what we do.
And the high-level ones and the low-level, we're all doing the same shit.
We're all just coming up with a better dick joke to just entertain some strangers.
Even gay Ian sucking dicks.
fucking Ian.
Blowing a dude.
And they go, oh, I just got an idea for a bit.
That's cool.
Let me, hold on.
I got to write this down.
Hold on.
I'll jerk you while I write it down.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it's an amazing job.
It's kind of incredible.
We live a very blessed life for sure.
Yeah.
It's just, yeah.
It's just, I don't know.
I mean, yeah.
It's fun to just focus on some positives and realize the negatives are nothing compared
to the positives.
The keeping up with the Jones's stuff and the paying attention to the numbers.
I mean, obviously that's easy for me to say.
that you shouldn't do it,
but you shouldn't do it.
Well, there's this thing.
Just concentrate on what you're doing
and enjoy it.
I was talking to Maddie Wiener's
really funny comic,
and she was like,
you know, all these people
and everybody really like,
she's going to be a star.
And she was like,
all these people are getting clips,
these crowd work,
I don't do crowdwork.
And it was like,
well,
that you shouldn't do those clips.
Your road's just going to be
a little longer than them,
but don't think about it like that.
Like, just do the shit
you're good at.
Yeah.
You know?
And then eventually you'll get found out.
I mean,
just do whatever you'd,
Whatever you want to do, but don't let them decide.
No.
I need to write an under 60 second bit.
It's got to have a punchline at 59 seconds, or I can't put it on YouTube shorts.
Like, that's a dumb way to be building your stuff.
Absolutely.
Big J does kind of crowdwork that no one's ever done.
Long form crowdwork with, like, but it's not clipworthy.
He's also been doing it for so long, and he has that kind of personality and, like, easy-going style that makes it, it makes it work.
You see Big J.
at like
when somebody heckles him, like
an angry heckle, not just like a, I'm gonna be part of it.
They're like, you fucking suck.
He doesn't, I get worked up.
He just goes, oh, what,
what was it that you don't like?
Like, almost as if he's on mushrooms.
He's like, no, yeah, I could see that.
But what specifically?
He's an easygoing guy.
Yeah, he's just like, let's mind this for laughs.
I'm like, I get caught up screaming.
Well, he's also done so many shows in New York
where that must happen so often.
You develop strategies.
Yeah.
You got practice at it.
Big Jay, my co-host, the Legion of Skanks.
All right, that's right.
You're back.
Legion of Skanks.
You're running it now that Dave Smith has decided to be a political commentator.
Well, it's three for life.
I'm not running it.
I'm just part of it.
No, no, no, no, you're running it.
Print it.
Joke world.
I heard that you were the leader of the Legion of Skanks.
I am the leader of Skanks.
Well, I'm the president.
In the past, you already, like, you ran for president.
I think you won.
Yeah, I won.
Dude, one day on one of these podcasts,
we got to talk about the presidential election.
It was a three-month process
of just non-stop
creativity and stupidity.
We'll talk about it tomorrow.
Okay. Oh, Shane was involved?
Yeah. She's my vice president.
There you go. All right. Let's wrap us up.
I love you. I love you too. It's great to see you back
civilization. Yeah, you too.
Dude, there's a bunch of times where I thought
about you out there where I'm like, you would love
NASCAR lines was one. I'm like, Joe Rogan
would love the Mayan temples, you would love it.
I went to Cheech Nietzsche once, way back in the early days.
El Salvador you would have loved?
I'm sure.
Just with like for the stuff you're into.
There were so much.
Anyway, I love you, buddy.
I love you too.
Jamie, I love you as well.
We love you, Jamie.
We love you, Jamie.
Bye.
