The Joe Rogan Experience - #288 - Greg Proops

Episode Date: November 22, 2012

Joe sits down with Greg Proops.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Powerful Greg Proops. Dude, great to see you, man. Thank you very much for coming down and doing this. Awesome to be here, Joe. You said the Dickens before. You're the only person I even know that can say the Dickens,

and it sounds perfect. It fit right in there. It meant to be said that way. The Dickens. I'm as loud as the Dickens. Nobody uses the Dickens anymore, and it's quite a good one. It's got Dick in it,

which makes it king right off the tip. And you can sneak Dick in. Exactly, dude. It's like showing bunt and swinging away as Dickens because it comes back on you. Really? If you say to someone, you know, loud as the Dickens, they can't say anything.

Like, you'd say that to your grandmother. Oh, yeah. Children. That's amazing. You little Dickens. That's so strange. Oh, yeah. It's weird that certain sounds that are, like, super offensive, and if you sneak one out.

I mean, we still agree to that. Oh, yeah, we do. It's so preposterous. Isn't it? It's so fucking silly and why grant words that much dominion over your emotions and stuff like just the trigger of a sound is enough to make you fucking lose your shit and like protest or write a letter yeah it's like what we we're almost agreeing that the heights that you could reach at your worst at your nastiest the way you feel

about someone is not really reached with regular language. We have to reserve those extreme moments for one extreme word. And if we don't do that, we're never going to adequately portray how fucking mad we are. True. So if you use it too much, I guess that's what's going on. I'm guilty of that.

As much as any other comic. I'm profane and I will say fuck too many times. Especially though during the setting of a nightclub comedy act. That's when you're having a few drinks, you're unwinding and you're like,

fuck this, man. That's where it's supposed to come out. I think so too. I had to do like a classy gig in Chicago a couple years ago.

I was playing at Zany's and they go, do you want to do this Chicago theater gig? The Trib puts it on. Stedman's going to be there. And what's his name from Styx? You know, fucking Dennis, right?

From Styx? I don't know if you know Styx, but you remember Styx, right? Yeah, I do remember them. I can't remember. What was it? Demo, I already got to miss. And then they did Lady, when you're with me. And so Styx, the dude shows up from Styx.

He has a fantastic, he used the word preposterous a minute ago. He had a preposterous wife. His wife was wearing a bubblegum pink and had a funny Penelope Pitstop hairdo and giant lips and earrings and was like a delightful cartoon of what a rock star's wife would be in a comic book, you know, like in a picture, in a cartoon. And he was cool, you know, he looked good. And I would get in there to do it,

and I'm being interviewed by the theater critic from the Tribune, right, as an artist, right? Because, you know, this is a newspaper event. So, you know, Joe Rogan, let's talk about your acting. You know, it's that, and it's polite company. And then I have to do five. And I realize, as I look through my act frantically outside, I am profane in every setup.

I'm going to have to calculatedly think and work really hard to remove the profane from every single line. Then, of course, I did it, and I don't think I slipped, but I did a joke about Obama or something, and they were a little more rich than that at one point and i went that joke's really funny if you're blue collar and then they laughed at that the acknowledgement that that's gotta suck man that feeling well there

was a nice crowd and i thought i'm an intelligent act you know what i mean i'm very right why can't i lay five minutes of philosophy on these fuckers instead i oh shit you know when you go to the fucking thing you know like you think really that's you know yes because i'm playing a club yeah that's what you're well that's why i i can't do anything other than the stand-up like i won't do stand-up in any other form i don't want to do it on a talk show i don't want to do it it just doesn't seem like that although i appreciate there's a different art form to crafting a really nice seven minute set for like a tonight show set or something like that i mean i know a lot of guys who are awesome at that for me i can't i can't it doesn't represent me it doesn't represent i think it's fantastic that you have that point of view i've done them over the years and it's never the best way i'm

on tv yeah for four minutes i think I'm perplexing. You know what I mean? Like, why? Well, I think it's an awesome opportunity for comics to get seen, and for the longest time, it was like the best one. Like, if you could get on Carson,

and Carson, have you come down, sit next to him on the couch, like, you were a fucking winner, man. And you could pack comedy clubs from that. Yeah, but this is sort of a different time, and now it's a very limiting thing and it seems silly it seems the whole pageantry of it seems silly the band playing when people walk out and sit down and in this weird conversation in front of people i mean i know i enjoy doing them but they're an odd art form there's an odd fakery weirdness to the whole thing

that's not necessary anymore. Well, there's almost a 50s-ness about it. It's one of the first TV shows, you know? Yeah. Because I don't know that there were lots of famous chat shows on the radio. There was lots of famous variety shows and every other kind of show, but I don't remember hearing about ones where people sat around and talked. It seems to be a function of television because it's so cool, as they say, right?

That you're, because you're kicked back and detached and watching it and you can sit and watch people just go, blah, blah, blah, my book, blah, blah, blah. We shot a movie in Ireland. It was really hard. And that's entertainment, but it has been, didn't like, I don't know. I would say Steve Allen kind of pioneered making it a thing on TV, that exact format with the band and comics and sketches. Yeah. And they've just stuck to it.

You know what I mean? It's variations within a theme. Everybody's done one. Yeah. Like you say, it's funny. In your show, when you come on, maybe there's music, a song you like or whatever. We have theme songs for our shows on the podcast.

But when you come on on tv and they play a little joe rogan he's gonna be playing tuskees yeah in omaha yeah you're like really okay this is big this is i should have shined my shoes yeah what is that hokey fake thing that we do with that the hokey fake thing political guys do and they give speeches yeah they're like fake i love that though the whole pageantry that's really old to me the hokey fake thing of this political speech is that now you're going back to the dawn of man right the first person that got up in front of everybody and went all right all right you know like it's been a craft for so long and it's been refined in so many cultures

that the idea of putting forth this, I got the word sophistry thrown at me yesterday. I don't, I'm not, I don't kick it. Well, what is that word? It's a,

it means a false philosophy used using big words. Like I'll throw an idea at you and back it up with a bunch of shit, but it's not true at all. That's my whole life. Exactly. The guy tweeted me and said, cause I do definitions of of my show like lately i've been doing political ones like democracy and you know like let's talk about with the and feminism things like that like people say it a lot you hear it a lot but not everybody knows what it actually the the defend you know the dictionary definition like where we're supposed to start with it

right so he wrote, how about sophistry? And I wrote back, what are you implying? Right? Because I looked it up and went, you fucking dick. Don't shoot one in my heart.

That's a brutal one. Yeah, it is. That's a clever person. You could run into those clever fellows online. And they're always waiting out there for you. I get emails. I make mistakes on my show right and people and i read the corrections people send me like i called jengis khan jengis

khan jengis khan because i'd read this book where it said it was kind of pronounced like that and the dude wrote me who had lived in mongolia and he broke it down and gave me the syllable by syllable it's like chingis khannor whatever oh he said it's more complicated but like ching as in like you know ka-ching yeah you know like he broke the hole and then like yeah i lived in ulamba tour i taught french to the you know or whatever like so you never get away with anything unless they've come up with some wild fantasy that they've committed to an email it doesn't seem like people would i trust that most people are telling me the truth yeah i uh i've always been fascinated by the noises that

people make in their languages like something like that like something like english that can that can be a word it's so it's so alien from the the english way of styling words it's so it's so strange there's so many varieties all over the planet. That's a really psychedelic thing. When you're in another country and you're around a bunch of people and they're saying things and you don't understand. Like Japan. Japan was very psychedelic.

Because you're just in another, your other all the time. Completely. And you don't know the key because you don't even understand one sentence. You don't know anything about their culture either. Their culture is completely different than ours. It's like things that we accept, they don't. It's very odd walking amongst them. It was really strange.

It was like that's a truly different culture that just sort of evolved over there. Do you think it's an island thing? I mean, certainly could have been. But they're starting to figure out now that there was so much travel that even Neanderthals were using boats and that they might have even been using boats before people, before Homo sapiens. I subscribe to that, and I will further that theory

and say that I think that all the preconceived notions about people not intermingling with each other and meeting each other are nonsense, and that people did it since people could make a boat, basically. And that the coastlines of all the continents have risen. They were lower tens of thousands of years ago, and people lived in those places, and those places are covered with water,

so we cannot find all the stuff that was there. I know I'm sounding like a kook, but I mean... It's not kooky at all. The world is covered with water, so we cannot find all the stuff that was there. I know I'm sounding like a kook, but I mean, the world is covered with water. You know, remember Contiki and all that, where they took the boat from Africa to South America to prove you could do it? You know, they made a reed boat in, like, Egypt, and Thor Heyerdahl sailed it to South America.

He did it a few times. But when you think about, like, even the conquistadors or whatever, those little caravels they ran or whatever are not that seaworthorthy and in about three or four weeks they would make it and then they kind of you know get in and you think if they did it everybody did it the polynesians went all the way up right to hawaii which is not near anything but trade winds blow to it right so they could they took the trade went in and they gathered water on sails, right? At night with a gourd underneath. It dripped down.

That's how they got fresh water? Oh my God. On the road. Oh my God. And they brought pigs and whatnot. Jesus Christ. On giant catamarans. What a fucking crazy experience that must have been.

Those people had balls. You want to talk about balls. Dude, she lost a lot of people on the way. It took a while to get that established. Yeah, you couldn't just get that the first shot. You're going to fuck that up. Yeah. Someone's going to die of thirst the first time.

Or their son's going to kill them. Or the shark eats them. Or her boat tips over. Or there's a squall. Because it's the Pacific. The South Pacific, man. The squall because it's the South it's the Pacific the South Pacific man the squalliest stormiest

fucking yeah I've seen some fucking crazy storms in Hawaii yeah no they they're because you know

I was in New Zealand and the Maoris came down there and wiped out whatever was there before them in the Middle Ages and then the white people

came after them but they traveled extensively I mean and Polynesians got around town they traveled extensively i mean and polynesians got around town they're like all up and yeah yeah yeah fucking yeah they were crazy loked out people they make boats out of trees just chop a fucking tree down hollow that bitch out navigating the navigating they knew the currents they knew they could read the breeze you know yeah it's fucking how the air

tasted they must have had to pass that shit down from generation to generation too it's an extraordinary no one talks about that people talk about the explorers exploring which is is extraordinary but what the people who settled hawaii or any of those far-flung places like that is an undertaking yeah what fucking badasses. What fucking incredible badasses. That's why Hawaiians are so tough. Yeah, they are. Like, Hawaii is one of the last places

where people have regular street fights. They film them all the time in Hawaii. You see fights in a restaurant. You'll be sitting, and two guys are like, Hey, you want a mix? They're aggressive, man. They're aggressive. You have to be to get in a restaurant. You'll be sitting and two guys are like, hey, you want a mix? They're aggressive, man. They're aggressive. You have to be to get in a fucking boat

and row out to the middle of the ocean hoping you're going to find something. Those are the most loked out people alive. With your little idol on your deck singing songs and shit. Paddling. Fucking casting for fish, right? Trying to catch fish as you go to the ocean.

Hoping the water holds out out you find a fucking island and there's no islands between hawaii and anything it's about what 2500 miles from the nearest oh landmass 2500 miles going how fast too oh yeah can you even go you better catch the fucking wind and you better have it at your back you're just sort of floating around out there. You're not really going to get any good pace going. How long does it take to get a sailboat across the... Like the modern sailboats, they can do it fairly quickly. I'm reading this Columbus book to be the complete bore about it. And they said he got over in four weeks on the last one, on the fourth journey in like 1502 or whatever.

Four weeks. Holy shit. In a carabelle. Four car three four carabelles and um he uh the author says uh a sailor today would be hard pressed to make that kind of time like he's made time because that thing they said about columbus for all of his shortcomings and and you know his ego uh he could dead reckon like like, nobody in the business. Like, he didn't use instruments. Instruments, according to this author, fucked him up. He'd take out the sextant, and he couldn't do a good reading,

and, like, then he'd go, like, north by north, and they'd fucking, whoa, they'd catch him. You know, like, he was that navigator. He found thousands of islands in the Caribbean. Like, he found every island in the Caribbean. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yes, just by fucking sailing every night to a different place. thousands of islands in the caribbean like he found every island in the caribbean really yeah wow yes just by fucking sailing every night to a different place like he

was that how much do we know about the the accuracy of the horrible things that were said about him like the the most recent stuff like when we were in high school we never really heard anything bad about columbus or his missions but then i when I was in college, I had heard something about there was something about bashing babies and killing babies and all the different things that they did to the Native Americans.

They definitely burned people and hung them and stuff. After you fucked them, you didn't want to see them around anymore. Well, there's that. They certainly did that. There's certainly that. Within a couple generations, they'd killed every Indian in the Caribbean. There are no Indians in the Caribbean like they were in South America and Central

America. They just showed up and just started ganking people. I mean, what happened? Did they find conflict with the Native Americans, or were they just assholes? He was not a great administrator, and he was not a great empathetic reader of people. Like, his skill was that he had unshakable faith in his mission, right?

But everywhere he ran into with the Indians and stuff, he was contrary, right? Sometimes he was beneficent and gave them gifts. Other times he'd, all right, everybody bring me gold, and everybody has to wear a necklace to say they brought me the gold. you have to bring this much a month or i'm gonna fucking beat you and make you a slave whoa he did that to a whole island of people and then 50 000 indians by some count historical count uh committed suicide rather than be under the spaniards dominion and this is before there's even colonies there's like his,000? This is the beginning of it all. And then they were sending them back to slaves.

I mean, imagine though, the high point of his life is obviously, after the first one, they were about to mutiny, right? And they saw it in the night and he was a dick. A sailor on one of the other vessels saw it first and he claimed he saw the light at the same time. There was a light on an island and they'd been at sea for like three or four weeks and the guys were kind of flipping out because no one had ever been over the edge of the world, right?

Right. They're the first boats that went over the edge of the world. Like they were going west. Right. West. West. Who knows what the fuck's up there. If we don't, we have China.

That's what they thought, right? So he gets back after that mission, leaves a bunch of guys there.'m not kidding on the first mission leaves like 40 guys in in hispaniola oh my god off back to spain what happens to those guys they all died the indians killed them all man they started raping they started raping the women and taking guys as slaves they started like but the cultural exchange and the eco exchange begins immediately, right? They had hammocks. We'd never seen a hammock.

They'd never seen a candle. They had tobacco and potatoes and tomatoes and, you know, turkeys. They changed the world, right? And the Europeans had, you know, guns and steel and pigs and disease. How long did it take after they arrived before the Indians killed them all? Well, on that one, they left them there and went back to Spain. So those guys just kind of had a drunk village for a while,

and then the Indians kind of got them. And then there were Koreans there who ate people. It's still so weird that they say Indians. It's such a programmed thing. Well, he gave them the name, right? Columbus gave them. That's still so weird that they say Indians. It's such a programmed thing. Columbus, that's his legacy, man. He's so powerful, whether he's a villain or whatever. And of course he is a villain, obviously, in some ways.

But if it wasn't him, this is a terrible excuse, but someone was coming. Yeah. Someone was coming. Because within 30 years, everybody came. Isn't it crazy how much more... And then the Dutch and the French. How much more gangster one part of the world was? There was race, baby. everybody came isn't it crazy how much and then the dutch and the french and then you know how

much more gangster one part of the world was uh there was a race baby they were racing and it was really for like in like a roman ideal of like for the bounty man yeah bounty for the glory of the empire in the church and for fucking find whatever you can and take it in our name. And gifts with welcomeations. The king and queen of glorious Catholic Spain, welcome, you know, join us. That's what they were. And then, of course, it always goes horribly wrong. Always goes horribly wrong.

The greed. They wanted gold. Even Columbus wanted gold. And they wanted gold. And there's no gold in the Caribbean. It was always those scenes in the movies where a guy would ride up on a horse with a decree

and they'd open it up and then they'd have to figure out and then they killed him and then they were at war. What a bunch of crazy assholes people are. Isn't it? It's nuts when you really stop and think about what they were doing.

But that's how the new and the old world came together. That's what fascinates me. I mean, it's not so much that I think Columbus is the greatest person ever. It's the exchange, right? This is the first big moment. Yeah, the Vikings came over. They did.

And maybe even St. Patrick. Who was it? Some Irish saint came over in a leather boat, they said. A leather boat? Yeah, a leather boat from Ireland, caught in the wind and fucking hit Canada. Oh, my God. A leather boat. The Vikings, you know, Ireland, caught in the wind and fucking hit Canada. Oh my God, a leather boat. The Vikings, you know, could do it,

because the Vikings were mad sailors. You know they could have made it to North America. And they made some pretty fairly sophisticated boats for the time. And they could go rows and sails, right? You're never becalmed. You can fucking crack out the rows. Jesus Christ. Little crafty boats.

The only danger is, of of course getting wiped out you know in a storm they would take them over land when they'd invade places they like dragged them into Russia and then went up

to fucking Volga to Moscow and stuff they yeah the Vikings captured Paris they went up the Seine

oh can you imagine what that time must have been like people just boats full of gangsters would show up. With belief systems and, you know.

And mushrooms. I was going to say, the Vikings are definitely the most psychedelic of all the Arab tribes. Do they know what mushroom they took? Yeah, I'm sure they do. We could look it up, probably. I want to say that it was the Amanita Muscaria, that one that always gets connected to religion and Santa Claus and all that,

that red and white one. I want to say that's that one. Is it a little cap with a white top? No, it's a big red thing with white spots all over it. It's a Mario Brothers. It looks like Santa Claus. Yeah, it's Mario Brothers.

It looks like Santa Claus. Do you know the correlation between the Amanita Muscaria and Santa Claus? No, please. Oh, you've got to see this. Brian, just pull up Amanita Muscaria and Santa Claus just for an image of what the mushroom looks like. People haven't seen it before. It's bright red and white.

And in the eyes of many people who have examined it, it represents Santa Claus. And the reason why Santa Claus has this red and white outfit is because that's the colors of the Amanita muscaria mushroom. The reason why the Christmas tree, which is a coniferous tree, has these brightly covered packages underneath it is because these mushrooms have a mycorrhizal relationship with these trees. And they look like bright packages. And they show up in their bright, shiny packages of red and white underneath the trees. The way they dried them out was they would either pick them off and put them in the tree. So they would dry in the sun, which is just like decorating a tree.

Or they would hang them in front of the fireplace to dry them out. Which is exactly what the stockings over the fireplace, and why the fucking stockings are red and white. That's the mushroom. Did it pull up? You just had an image of it, right, Brian? Yeah. That's it, right?

Yeah, there's a bunch of images, the older images of Santa Claus with that mushroom. You see that? The older you go, when you go back to really ancient depictions of these mushrooms, the older you go, the more often you see these mushrooms around elves in Christmas tree, Christmas cards and things along those lines. These mushrooms around Santa Claus. So it was a direct connection.

They were drawing fucking mushrooms and elves for Christmas cards. So at one point in time, people were still connected to this idea, but they've lost it. The Amanita, what do you call it? Amanita Muscaria Mushroom. Wow. It had to be the one the Vikings were taking, right? They have the tree worship and all that, too.

There was a scholar named John Marco Allegro, who was one of the guys who was a decipher of the Dead Sea Scrolls and he wrote two books about it. One of them is called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth and the other one is called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross and it's all about how the

entire Christian religion was based on psychedelic mushroom eating and sex rituals and fertility rituals. Quite right. Now you had eating and sex rituals and fertility rituals. Quite right. Now you had me at sex rituals. It was all that mushroom. That mushroom was on the cover of the book, the Amanita Muscaria mushroom. Really?

Yeah, that this mushroom, they would find out about how to use it and they would find out about how to prepare it and then it would give them this unbelievable psychedelic experience. So they hid all of the ways of preparing it and finding it. And apparently it's a very tricky mushroom. It's variable genetically. It's variable seasonally. It doesn't always give you the experience.

So you have to figure out how to find it from what area. Some of them will knock your dick into the dirt. And some of them do nothing but make you sweat. It's a weird mushroom. So the idea is that they hid all the information inside these old stories. Can I ask a question? So when you say all Christianity,

do you mean like European Christianity where that mushroom exists? Or did it exist in the Middle East as well? Well, this is the Dead Sea Scrolls were all found in Qumran. So that's where they were writing this stuff, supposedly. So at least in that area, in what is Israel, they were taking mushrooms. According to Allegro. But see, Allegro was the only scholar on the list of scholars that were hired to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He was the only one that was an agnostic. He was an ordained minister, but then in studying theology, he just said, well, this is kind of silly. Obviously, there's some just crazy stories, and let's just get to the root of all this and find out where this all comes from. By chance, was he also the only professor that also took mushrooms? I don think he did the crazy thing is i don't think he did he was a really a straight-laced scholar how did they get to santa claus joe well santa claus being how does it get all the way down to the well i mean i understand that the colors and the tree and everything is he they always give us this bullshit story about St. Nicholas who's from Turkey. Yeah, like Wikipedia and everything says there's a couple different versions.

And one is from Germany, one's from... Yeah, the Siberian one, the reindeer. The thing about the reindeer. One of the things about the reindeer is that reindeer love to eat aminated muscaria mushrooms. Really? So much so, yeah. So much so that when they have shamanic rituals in the sweat lodges

and they will have these rituals and they'll take these mushrooms and they'll step out to urinate, the reindeer will knock them over to get at their urine snow. Wow. Yeah, they love it. And why the fuck are these reindeer flying?

But deers probably also like to eat poop. Why are they flying? He's the shaman who is red and white, like the Amanita muscaria mushroom, is sitting in a carriage, and he's fucking flying with a bunch of deer who are on mushrooms. How clear do they have to make the myth

that these reindeers are high? I have to read this now. How clear? What was his name? John Marco Allegro. Allegro. Wow. I have to read this now. How clear. What was his name? John Marco Allegro. Allegro. It's really hard to understand. I don't have any background in languages,

so in listening to, or reading how he broke it all down, apparently it's very controversial. Yes, I can imagine. Yeah. But the fact remains, like, this guy was a, you know,

he was a legit, brilliant scholar, and an agnostic. And if you have one guy out of a list of religious right kooks that are reading ancient shit hoping to find you know jesus's special friends list or whatever he's on the graph yeah they're not gonna watch they're not gonna be willing to consider anybody's alternative ideas i don't know if he's right but it's fascinating it is fascinating i mean because i was in that i i've you know i've you know heard about the saint nicholas and all that and i and i was at that little chapel where he supposedly was and everything and i was like you don't get a big santa claus wintertime you know ho ho ho drink a coca-cola feel yeah i said to me the leap is really

you know other than he was the local guy who gave gifts and whatnot. Yeah, who the fuck knows where all those stories came from? It's so fascinating. I thought Flying Reindeer were an invention of, what's his name, Clement Moore or whatever, who wrote Night Before Christmas. Could have been. But maybe he was tapped into something that he knew about flying reindeer. Well, I think... Maybe he'd heard a story from Europe.

There's so many connections between this mushroom and Santa Claus. It's almost silly. Yeah, but there's things like if you think about the Pink Floyd Wizard of Oz shit. Yeah, totally right. It's the same shit. If you obsess about something, you're going to find something in anything. That's so true. But this one is really... The whole story, like Santa Claus It's the same shit. If you obsess about something, you're going to find something in anything. That's so true. But this one is really, the whole story, like Santa Claus climbing down the chimney, that's

how the shaman used to get into the houses when they made the shamanic rituals illegal. Really? They used to sneak in because everybody was on the ground watching the door. So they would throw their fucking sack of mushrooms over the chimney and they would climb down into these people's houses. Yeah, I mean, there's so many connections between the whole Santa Claus myth and this mushroom,

the ritual of taking this mushroom, especially in Siberia, which is the fucking North Pole. Yeah. Essentially, that's what people look at it as. Yeah, the end of the earth, no question. If you were living in Siberia and you found a mushroom

that would make you trip your fucking balls off. Oh, dude, what else is there to do except try to stay warm? Yeah, life would be so much more awesome if you were living in siberia and you found a mushroom they make you trip your fucking balls what else is how much stay warm yeah life would be so much more awesome oh my god the trees and the birds oh yeah that's that's what kept them alive they were they would trip their balls off every few months yeah it seems like a desperate it always seemed like the most desperate place i mean when you when you lend your name to the bad patch of land in everybody's mind even when you go to a restaurant i bad patch of land in everybody's mind, even when you go to a restaurant, I know my wife, if they put us somewhere bad, I'm like, hey, why are we in Siberia? It's always Siberia.

It's always Siberia. Yeah, anytime it was a Russian movie, like a James Bond movie, and a Russian spy got sent to Siberia, yeah, fucked out there. That means you're going to die. Yeah, if you could have a nice mushroom trip every couple months, keep you going, though. And dig those eight tiny reindeer. Yeah. They. Save the dolphins.

Exactly. Fucking. How cold does it get up there? It gets. Really cold. 100 degrees below zero, right? Yeah, it's horrible. And they're swimming in oil, so they've saved themselves, you know.

You saved yourself, but you're stuck up there. Yeah. But you know what? There's a great documentary. I say that, but there's a great documentary. I just take that back. I have to take it back. Werner Herzog's Happy People, Life on the Taigao, I think it's called.

And it's about these people that live up there in Siberia, and they're all trappers. Right. And like they're like all healthy everyone's happy there's no no one has all day running around yeah exercising no one has any like depression no psychological disorders it's a real happy culture and they they showed them all get together and they followed them on the camera and they followed them to their their trapping roots where they would stay by themselves for months and they were all fucking really happy it was like it was weird they'd get together they would be eating and laughing and all happy and at the end of the day if we really are temporary beings they're they are actually doing it right yeah we're doing it wrong well they don't ever come

home and go i can't believe i got fucking passed over for a promotion yeah yeah i need a xanax and a wine yeah yeah i want to win wine i want to watch a fucking real housewives yeah fucking dexter no no they don't do that and they live forever and they probably drink moderately and probably are exercising all day every day. Yeah, and they're eating caribou. They're eating the healthiest shit you can eat, like fresh game and vegetables that they grow. It's fascinating, man. They're so fucking healthy.

I haven't seen that one, but I did see one recently that my wife rented, and I can't think of the bloody name of it. Oh, you might have to look it up, Brian. name of it oh you might have to look it up brian it's about uh the caves in uh france where the all the prehistoric paintings are the ones they found like 20 years ago you know that have the horses that are the ones that predate yeah like and they're in motion you know yeah one room is like one guy's left hand like a zillion times he put it everywhere and it pops up a few other places in the cave and they're extensive and uh they found them by accident and all this but herzog goes in because they're closing them off except for study and he so his crew goes in and he uh yeah he shoots it and it is

you know i'll give him what oh what's the name of the uh it's is it what they call the cave of dreams that's it is that it yeah the cave of dreams but i'm always trying to talk uh think you know suppose about you know, suppose about it. You were saying, what was it like to live when gangsters came up in boats? Imagine, I don't know, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 years ago. And you were living in a cave. And you were much like those choppers in Siberia. Because now you're down to, you know, you're in a boat.

You probably have fire. Maybe you have. But to see the sophistication of the drawings, the animation and the depiction of the animals and the imagination, and to see this on a wall from 30,000 years ago, it's the connection that, you know, it is just yesterday, and it's never different. Yeah. All this technical stuff and all the wonder of your phone and the apps that you can download is nothing uh and i don't mean that you should

just not use it i mean the connection of of people like you say uh to what's happening is is a little more profound than and that's what always gets overlooked it's always like oh well that was then and people don't even want to know about a couple of years ago. Yeah, no kidding. I don't think you should dwell on the past, but of course I do. But I really found it fascinating to see the human touch. That's what gets you. But I don't think a guy like you or a guy like me would be happy if all of a sudden we had to live like a Siberian trapper.

Oh, no, man. Are you kidding me? I'm such a sissy. No codeine, no, man. Are you kidding me? I'm such a sissy. But I... Okay, no codeine, no cologne. Wouldn't we want to do the thing that seems to make you the most happy? Not now. We're not like that anymore.

We can't do it. We've been to Paris, you know what I mean? We have cell phones. Yeah, yeah. God gave us clothes or whatever. Is there no looking back? Is that what it is? We ate the apple, man.

It's over. There seems to be no looking back. It's like we want to. We want to drive old cars oh they're fucking cool imagine a day 68 corvette like people stop and look at it as it goes by it's like a time machine you're looking at a time machine we we want to but we wouldn't be happy back then no i always say it wasn't better no it was just then but those taiga people are right now absolutely they are but they're living like cave people people who live on an island in greece who purportedly live to be 100 and all it turns out of course they'd

inflated their age when the study was done years ago but they are living to be 90s and close to 100 almost all of them and it's you know they go and visit each other they don't watch a lot of telly they fucking eat olive oil they lightly have a glass of wine at sunset you know like walking around the garden oh it's hilly as fuck yeah and they're old and they can their ass up the hill right all the time i bet that's big in and of itself just walking up hills yeah it's the village is there and you that's fucking exercise people don't realize like you you had to like it's not they're not going hiking that's their life and they're doing it every day you go to see your friend and they have tea or whatever or coffee and then they they have

vegetable gardens and whatnot and he was like they were describing the life and it was like the kind of thing you pay for to go away with your wife on a weekend you know yeah that has to look at the mediterranean and drink wine at sunset and you're like i'd kick around in the garden if that was part of it but do you think you'd be happy living there no i'd be bored senseless after a while you'd have your studies right and you'd have your you know your computer if it worked if it worked there on a remote island in the mediterranean but you would have to be into like either starting a cult or doing some hardcore drugs. That's the only way you would really...

Write the book, Joe. That's where you write the book. Yeah. Fuck. Who's going to read it? You're trapped. Well, you have to leave. You have to get someone to deliver the book for you.

Have you been following the John McCaffrey thing? No. Do you know what that is? No. McCaffrey is the virus king, the guy who created McCaffrey antivirus. Well, he apparently is quite a character. And he started a business.

This is the beginning of it. Started a business where he had low-flying planes. They would do this sport where they would fly, like, really low to the ground and maneuver around. Well, yeah, one of the planes crashed. Somebody died. So he got rid of all of his assets in America and transferred them over to Belize. So he's in Belize now.

He lives in Belize, and he has a compound in Belize. And in that compound, he cooks up bath salts. So, you know, there's different chemicals that are being sold as bath salts, these various legal forms of some sort of crazy drug. They're legal by loopholes. He's cooking them and freebasing them and getting them down to like, he's purifying them and doing all these. No, no, he has labs.

He has labs in his jungle. He has photos and he takes photos of all this shit and puts it online and he keeps a blog on too i i'm sorry everybody i don't know something from the hinterland or something like that is the blog and he just started the blog it's fascinating because the dude is on the lam because his neighbor is dead his neighbor got shot in the head and his neighbor who he believes, McCaffrey believes this neighbor poisoned his dogs, because he had a bunch of

dogs that would bark all the time. So he shot him? So he believes, I don't know if he shot him. He says he didn't. But the Belize government says he did. And he says that this is not about that. This is just, they're a bunch of criminals, and they're corrupt, and they're going after him

for no reason and he had nothing to do with it and he was fearing for his own life. He thought they were out to get him before they shot his, they think that he set, they set him up.

They killed his neighbor to set him up. Wow. That's his take on it. But, it's no doubt about it that the dude is cooking bass salts. He's,

he's got a 17 year old girlfriend. No, he doesn't. Yes, he does. All right, all right. He's 62 or something like that.

This is some deep outlaw. He's crazy. He is Breaking Bad. Yeah, he's fully Breaking Bad. He's a character in Breaking Bad. Wow. He's a character. Now I have to go look it up.

It's a fucking amazing story. I'm looking it up now. He's still in the country. He's hiding. He's on the lam. They're trying to find him and try him for murder and he's blogging

at the same time. Right. And a compound in Belize with a 17-year-old girlfriend cooking salt. Well, he escaped that compound. Oh.

He got out and now he's on the lam. They don't know where he is but while he's out he's blogging. I didn't even know that you could take bath salts really. I've used them so didn't even know that you could take bath salts, really.

I've used them so frequently in my bath. You know the bath salts. Do you know the common... Do you know what that is? Well, I hear about people taking them and committing dreadful acts and whatnot. Well, it's just... They've taken some form of meth or some intense form of narcotic drug, something. And they'll change it, like change a molecule, add an oxygen molecule,

do whatever to it that they have to do in order to make it a different chemical classification. Then it becomes legal, as long as they sell it not for human consumption. So they sell it as bath salts. So they sell it, and everybody knows what they sell it and you know everybody knows what the fuck it really is but what is it it's some meth like drug oh so it's speedy yeah it's it's not like dmt or something no no no no no it's horrible it's it's a terrible drug supposedly supposedly but that was the other thing um mcafree was talking about how his form of it that he's been cooking up makes for hypersexuality. Oh, God, no.

Yes, he was talking about people rubbing their penises raw. Oh, no. And then just having monkey sex for hours and hours. So you picture this cracked out 60-year-old dude hanging with a 17-year-old girl in the jungle on this fucking insane drug concoction that he's cooked up in his own lab. And he's a brilliant guy. It's like he's a brilliant guy gone mad. It's really fascinating, man. That is.

That's extraordinary. Yeah. man that is that's extraordinary yeah let me let me pull up what this drug actually is just so we substituted cathinones which have similar effects to amphetamine and cocaine the white crystals resemble legal bathing products like epsom salts and are called bath salts with the packaging often stating not for human consumption in an attempt to avoid the prohibition of drugs, but chemically have nothing to do with actual bath salts. Yeah. So it's just something they've created in a lab.

It's like they figured out a way around it. It's amazing, man. People are gross. People are so gross. They'll spend their time to come up with some new form of meth and then just release it in some legal loophole and like laugh all the way. Those are fucking demons. People who sell that are demons.

Yeah. That was the, isn't that all the, um, people have psychotic episodes and go furiously mental and kill people and bite people's faces off and shit. Well, they, they said that that guy, they said he tested positive for marijuana marijuana that was one of the things that they were saying which i found uh hilarious because the what they didn't say it's which is really kind of fucking creepy they didn't say in the news report that they can't really test for bath salts like most most bath salts they don't they don't have like they don't have a marker for them. There's a bunch of different kinds, too.

So it's like, just because he didn't test for heroin or didn't test for crystal methadone, whatever it is, it doesn't mean he wasn't on basalts. They said he wasn't on basalts. They said he was on marijuana. But that's such shitty reporting. You have to tell the truth. It's hard to find out if people are on this shit.

I thought the rumor or the accepted knowledge was that he was on D'Ascense. And that's why he was so psychotic. Yeah, but that's not what they got when they did the chemical tests on him after his death. Well, if it doesn't show up, it's not going to be... Brian doesn't think the cop should have killed the guy, right? Isn't that the one that we disagreed when the guy was eating the guy's face you didn't think that the cop should have shot him was it you or was it duncan it was duncan it was a duncan might have been duncan didn't think that the cop should have shot the guy i was like you eat someone's face man that's

called murdering somebody sorry yeah that's murdering somebody not only that like that is such a fucking creepy way to go about it. Eating someone's face. I think that cop's allowed to shoot you. That's me. I'm old school. Yeah. If it's happening to me, let me put it that way. Please go ahead and...

Shoot that guy. Yeah. Jesus Christ. He's eating faces. Might be good. So this John McCaffrey guy, he's actually got a blog while he's on the lam. So there's this crazy government in Belize is looking for him. Like they're sending, like according to him, they send soldiers to his house.

I don't know, man. I don't know what. Because he's got money. Yeah. I don't know how it works. Belize has been a haven forever for people from the States. Has it really? A lot of expats?

Yeah. I think Confederates, that type of thing. It's a drum runner kind of. I think you can end up in Belize has been a haven forever for people from the States. Has it really? A lot of expats? Yeah, I think Confederates, that type of thing. It's a drum runner kind of. I think you can end up in Belize. So it's just like one of those wild places? I mean, I've been once, but I didn't really go to Smuggler's Cove. This story is so fascinating. It is.

It's amazing. When a really smart guy goes off the rails. You're waiting for Bill Gates to build a giant veranda. Have you ever seen the descriptions of Gates' home? Oh, yeah, right? It's insane. His home is incredible. Right.

And everything tacked to the maximum. You can just go, brr, and shit flies around. He puts a clip on when he walks in. And as he enters into rooms, they adjust to his liking. Yeah. That's fucking, that's gangster. Yeah, it is.

That's really gangster. When you're Bill Gates, though, anything less would be ridiculous. Yeah, no, he has to do it. Yeah, he's the technology king. William Randolph Hearst or whatever, building a giant palace for yourself. Yeah, but how much do you bet

his toilet crashes all the time? His Twitter crashes? Toilet. Oh, toilet crashes? Yeah. Why do you think you bet his toilet crashes all the time? His Twitter crashes? Toilet. Oh, toilet crashes? Why do you think that? Because it's all this shit like windows and stuff, so it's all probably just fucked up. Toilet crashes. It's actually toilets. The shower's stopped, honey.

It's got a virus. He's someone though, like if your computer fucks up, and having him in the house I think would be super handy. It would definitely help. Because he would be like, oh, let me just... Call somebody. Yeah, instead of you going, fuck, how come my email's not working for a day? He's just like, buy a Mac. The number of viruses that exist, computer viruses that exist, are fucking terrifying.

If you really stop and think about how many assholes out there figured out a way to crack into people's computers. Like how many hundreds of thousands of people did it? And you're, I still. There's schools of it. Yeah. You get scam emails, you know. Yeah. Hey man.

From my friends. Yeah. That's happened recently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I've gotten them from me. I've gotten emails from me. Right. What is this? That's weird. It's so crazy. What were you doing then? What was I doing? Why'd you send yourself that? I don't know. I was just sitting there. Maybe I was weird. It's so crazy. What were you doing, man? Why'd you send yourself that?

I don't know. I was just sitting there. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I went crazy. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just sitting there. I saw emails from my website. I was like, how is that even possible?

That's crazy. I don't know what it actually says when you look into it. I don't click on them. But the idea that someone can do that. Let me ask you something about this John McAfee thing. Would you want to end up riding wild in some tropical place at the end of your... Fuck that. Cooking up drugs. That doesn't seem like fun.

No, it seems like a novel. Yeah, that seems like you are just trying to burn out. That you're trying to just fizzle out. Blaze. Yeah, you're just trying to... You realize the end is near and so you're just gonna go out guns blazing rubbing your dick raw right smoking bath salts banging 17 year olds i mean it's pretty wild though it's the stuff of legend it's it's like one of those things are if uh i if i didn't know

about it i'd be angry if you knew about it you didn't tell me i want to i want to know what he's doing right you know he's a crazy guy and he's a fucking really rich guy, too. He sold his company to Microsoft for over a billion dollars. Oh, my God. So he's just funded. Yeah. So this crazy asshole had, like, this compound, and he was having low-flying planes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, just stop and think about how fucking bananas you have to be. Right, right. And then, of course, someone dies. Someone dies, yeah. And then they're suing him, so he just fucking bolts. He's nuts, man. He's... I don't know if he killed his neighbor but he's nuts it's probably pretty obvious

the Colonel Kurtz thing well I think whenever a guy starts his own thing in a small country and picks a 17 year old as his companion that's freaky yeah that's you you're really you're going for a low bar son yeah you're no no no you're that's out of bounds and yeah that's you're really old for a 17 year old man that's kind of you're old for 17 year old

if you're 25 man yeah that's kind of crazy well it's just one of those stories that i just i'm fascinated by people off the rails yeah when when we realize that these patterns that we file that we don't have to follow them and oftentimes people just say fuck this and just completely exit the normal train of behavior well don't you think that's why we're fascinated by uh all the dictators sure yeah because they don't there's no rules. They kill people personally in front of other people

and then go, this is how it goes and then that's how they start their gig and then you take over and you punish and you whatever. Yeah, we're always fascinated

by the ones throughout history and the most recent ones like Hussein and his sons used to scare the shit out of me. When you would hear the stories of what they did and you know that all scare the shit out of me. When you would hear the stories of what they did, and you know that all those stories are not made up. No.

Feeding people to dogs. Oh, dude. It's old time stuff. Yeah. They would take people, just random people, and like girls were about to get married, they would steal them from the guy, throw the guy, feed him to dogs,

fuck the girl, rape her, and then feed her to dogs right they like horrible they did shit like that on a regular basis they had dogs that were eating people yuck motherfuckers man i mean that that something can happen in in the human mind where it allows them to become so vicious and detached from other people suffering to the to the point where they actually enjoy it like that scares the fuck out of us absolutely and it that power that that informs all that you have so much power that no one can fucking gainsay you i'm gonna do that kind of shit yeah and if you don't like it yeah it's fucking crazy that we could go that way it's it's like the human brain needs a really good directions manual you know a really good one that you have to like get a degree in

before you can live you know i mean really should we should take all babies and quarantine them from the rest of society and raise them raise them to their 10 and then people get their kids on an amity amicus amicus yeah mushroom farm and while while the kid is going through school the parents are being reconditioned reprogrammed yeah to learn how to fly like a reindeer and then run in the jungle later with the young. I think there's probably a bunch of cultures, a bunch of ancient cultures that did a lot of mushrooms. If you really look at cattle worship and stuff like that. I would think psychoactive substances were instrumental in almost every,

not to be boring, but I just read about in the Columbus book, the Taino Indians used to powder a certain seed and put it in a pipe and blow it up each other's nose and have mystical trance experience, psychedelic experiences. What was the stuff? If I could remember, I would tell you, Joe. It's some seed that grows on the islands in the Caribbean. I could email you later when I go back and look at the book,

but the Spanish took note of it and their ceremonies and how they danced and what they wore and how they conducted these giant things with the priests. They were taking drugs in front of them. You blew it up your nose, and once you got a big hit in each nostril, you know. Yeah, there's other cultures that have done that too. They take tubes and they stick them in each other's nostrils

and they'll blow this stuff into each other. Really like a poof. And it's like a super painful experience. Right. But it goes right to your brain. Yeah. And apparently some of them are DMT based. Really?

Yeah. Some of them are having, I think it's called Ikuhay is one of those nasal blasting drugs. And the problem is with the deforestation in the Amazon, that these people that know how to make that stuff and know exactly what the lore behind it all is, they're going away. Oh, yeah. They're being pushed out. There's so much logging going on.

And it's really insane to watch. And the Amazon's the source of all of that. Yeah. Everything. And all the psychoactive drugs are there that can help us and cure us and make us... At least make us have a good time yeah at least i think america i think the whole continent uh was took psychoactive drugs oh without weed and you know but definitely mushrooms and i did a tour of chichen itza with a professor and uh it was really cool because uh they you could hire a

local professor and he uh one of the things that he talked about that I'd never heard anybody, like a real scholar, talk about was how actively they took psychoactive drugs. And he was talking about how they had a chamber. And he said they would go in here and they would take various psychoactive drugs. And he thinks that some of them were mushrooms. Some of them were – there was a root or something that contained lysergic acid there's a few different ones that they had figured out could make you trip but they would have regular psychedelic rituals and to us that sounds ridiculous because it's like listen stop all that bullshit what you need to do is you need to go to fucking school and you need to get to go to college get a good job what we don't

understand is there was no school before this you're talking about people that literally created the first structures as far as we know that were like that near them and the way they were inspired might have been through psychedelic drugs it might be that these people were were given these ideas through these drugs and that's why they're so similar to other cultures, where they also use psychedelic drugs and make these crazy stone structures that mimic the cosmos. It's really fascinating. Well, I think it does, and I think that's why it's such an integral and profound.

That's why it's always part of the religious culture, too. It wasn't a recreational thing like, let's go get fucked up. The Indian societies are completely prescribed by religion. The drum went off in the morning and everybody got up and people went to religious school and priests were the hierarchy. And the things you're talking about with those, the taking the mushrooms, I think that the intuition that they derived at the very beginning when they first took them and how they were able to refine it and cultivate it,

like you say, and find out which ones did which thing, absolutely leads to the creative process. And that's why they incorporated it into their system, you know? It's amazing. And Europeans just don't, you know, it was alcohol by then. By the time they met in the Middle Ages, it's...

That's why they were so savage. That alcohol-based culture. Guns and liquor, baby. Guns, liquor, and conquer. That's a totally different attitude than the psychedelic cultures. Although I'm sure Europeans took them too. Guns, liquor, and conquer. That's a totally different attitude than the psychedelic cultures. Although I'm sure Europeans took them too. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Druids certainly get it going. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of mushrooms in Europe. Apparently, I think anywhere where it rains a lot. Oh, yeah. And then if it doesn't, I don't know. I mean, I was in Morocco, and I didn't get that they were,

I'm sure they had psychedelics, but you could eat hashish or whatever. You know what I mean? If you really want to have a mind-altering experience that's easily doable. Everyone, I think, in the whole country has access to mad amounts of keef and marijuana and hashish and different grades and different places.

They're not a booze culture. They're a dope culture. And that doesn't mean you're non-violent. I think that's always a funny joke, because it's true that stoners don't commit violence. But I would think Rostas and gangsters disprove the theory that you yeah you can be high and be stoned and still fuck people up hawaiians like to smoke i was gonna say people's houses they'll get high yeah maybe they're nicer than they would have been if it wasn't for the weed

the weed just certainly they're to stop after and get something. Yeah, they won't kill you. They won't beat you to death. They'll let you live. The Hindus had something called Soma, which to this day they don't know exactly what it was, but it was so important to them. They had all these beautifully written texts on how great Soma was.

Really? Compared it to all these other things. Better than Indra. Better than Brahma. All these different things. Soma was the best psychedelic drug. And no one knows what the fuck it is. Really?

Yes. It was so important to them. But it's written of. Written of, but they don't know what was inside of it, whether it was a combinatory thing. They know that people would mix things together. Sometimes they would mix certain psychedelics. They would mix different things, even bad ideas.

People have mixed mushrooms and ayahuasca, and apparently that's not a good idea right that really fucks you up but they uh they don't know what the combination was they don't know what soma meant but whatever it was it was the profound to them it was unbelievably profound it was like it was one of the most important things that that existed in the world and we don't know what the fuck is this you know good question i don't know what the fuck it is how far back is this? that's a good question if I could tell you that if Duncan Trussell was here he would snap that shit off

I forgot the name of the plant that the Tinos snorted up their nose there's been so many throughout history but for us in this day and age it's fascinating to me that as far as we know we're the furthest along without any catastrophe.

We've managed to evolve culture to this crazy point of infinite information, the distribution of it instantaneously. And yet we still, at this day and age, ridicule that idea. We ridicule these incredibly potent creative inspiring experiences mind and life changing experiences and as a culture we belittle them we we make it down to like a joke you're high yeah and if you talk about it you're a silly person you're not to be taken seriously right you know i've i've had conversations with people where they you know they said well what has really changed the way you look at life the most? And I'm like, psychedelic experiences.

And they look at you like you just said something fucking, you're doing heroin. Yeah, you're smoking meth and running into the wall. Like, you're an idiot. Like, oh, God. Did you just really just say that? Like, it's not even something people, most people are ignorant to what the the true experience is really all

about and ignorant to how long they've probably been a part of human history and what they've probably shaped of human history there's no quite that's true i don't know though i find too that there is a huge resistance toward it i talk talk about it sometimes, and I've done them. And once you've done them and seen the alternate reality that exists and kind of come in touch with that, it does change your point of view because you realize that everything is so fluid and it's levels of consciousness and not just the one horrible one that we're stuck in all the time now

where we're prodding each other. There's varied levels of consciousness, and not just the one horrible one that we're stuck in all the time now, where we're prodding each other. There's varied levels of existence. It's a real uncomfortable idea for a lot of people, Joe. Yeah. Because it fucks up their well-ordered life, or their belief system, or whatever it is they're going for. And people prefer faith-based stuff, which is weird to me, because... It's easier to just accept. Well, I mean, it doesn't require a gyration i guess

as much but i i i hadn't quite considered as much as you the idea that psychedelic drugs shape so many ideas but now that you mentioned it of course it's true you don't need an alien invasion you can get an alien invasion in an hour and 20 minutes okay yeah seven grams go in an isolation tank you'll have a fucking alien invasion well and it'll happen yeah it'll happen in your brain it'll in an hour and 20 minutes, okay? Yeah. Seven grams, go in an isolation tank. You'll have a fucking alien invasion. Yeah, you will. And it'll happen. Yeah. It'll happen in your brain.

It'll really, it'll be real. Yeah. Like, whether or not it's actually physically happening, who cares? It's happening. Well, that's the subjectivity of it. Oh, it's just a hallucination. Says who and who cares, okay?

Because either way, it's happening. Whether or not you want to say it didn't really, it wasn't really happening, or whether you want to say it wasn't really happening or whether you want to say that you really were experiencing something that was real that you could only see while you're under the influence of the mushroom, but it's real and around you all the time. Whichever one that is, either way you have the experience

and the experience is incredibly powerful and beneficial to you as a human. I think it is because it opens up your mind. I think people are terrified to lose their ego. You know what I mean? Of course. Because if your ego dissolves, then you're in another state

where you can't control your emotions. And then all the things that you're repressing and suppressing come rushing back. And for some people, they're tenuously clinging to reality at all times anyway and a push like that uh threatens them and and like you say it gets lumped in with heroin it's not actually you know like we always argue that marijuana is is a mild hallucinogenic and you know therefore uh a safer and funner alternative to being drunk necessarily or blah, blah, blah.

As Louis Armstrong said, it's worth 100 assistants. Worth 100 assistants? Assistants, yeah. He said, I don't know. Oh, no, he would have said it's better than 100 whiskeys, sorry. He said he always considered it a friend and assistant. Oh, that's funny. Which I thought was really funny.

But psychedelics are like, if you say, if you check psychedelics uh people go you know you're a drug addict yeah well if you smoke weed you're a pothead you know when i found out i i am as well but when i found out that you were uh i i thought uh when i found out that you were the one who actually did you introduce doug benson to marijuana that's the legend. If you saw that Werner Herzog movie, it's written on one of the cave walls. There's a petroglyph of Doug and I. Stylized, of course. You can't hardly recognize

this. You can see my glasses. It's from hundreds of years ago. Doug and I were in San Diego at the Pacific Beach Improv, if you remember that one. No, I don't. What year was this? 58. We had just finished doing a roast at the Friars. No, we were playing San Diego,

and he claims that he had smoked before but not got high. You know what I mean? Right. He'd had some. Because a lot of times, you know, you have to get high a few times before it kicks in. And then I brought a bunch of weed. And I remember, what i remember is the

condo was near the beach and we were just fucking doofuses and you know we would just go to the beach every day and get high and then when we weren't at the beach we would watch mtb's beach party oh my god i remember him laying on the couch laughing hysterically at one point and kicking his legs in the air and i was like let's go get fish tacos and he was like dude you know and like it was just that stupid of a right right right a weekend we let's fucking and then at night we'd go do sets yeah we're working at the improv right and uh he claims that was where he started and i guess the carefree lifestyle that we were living that week seduced him so hard because of its beguiling poetry that he realized as an independent soul

he could finally take control of his own destiny but i had a kid say to me once where I was on the road and like Addison, Texas or something. And the guy was working with a nice fellow and he would go out and he'd buy like peanut butter and like cereal that you'd see on TV and stuff, which made me laugh. Cause I'm from San Francisco, you know, and like he would come back with like a shopping list you'd see on television, like Wonder Bread. And, And he was a nice fellow. And he would run and whatnot. And I remember what year it was. I was watching the Anita Hill hearings on TV.

And there was a Raiders game that weekend, or a Niners game, and there was a fire in the East Bay, and you could see the fire over the campus. What year was that? 90, 91, somewhere in there. Wow. Laying on the couch smoking weed, and he goes,

you gonna smoke pot all fucking day, Proops? And I go, let me ask you something, whatever his name was, Danny I go, let me ask you something, who kills every night? And you do Alright You have your program I was bored too, I was trapped

in the condo, there was no, it was one of those ones that wasn't near anything, I think a waffle house or something. But if you wanted to be technical about a comic's time creating, it's all day. And it's all day watching TV. You could be scanning for something that

inspires you enough to be your next closing bit. So you're actually working. So even when you're lounging, you're working. I think of stuff in bed. I lay in bed and if I wake up in the middle of the night, I go, I need to do a thing tomorrow. I have to think of this, and then I think of it. You know, I would argue that the creative process,

you can manufacture it. Yes. But it works better if you don't, I think. Yeah, it's... And everybody goes dry. Sometimes you go dry. Also, working hard makes you not go dry. That's true, too.

It's a muscle. Yeah, I think there's like a vibe that you get into when you're really writing a lot. And that vibe sort of like, it becomes like a part of your consciousness. And then the more you feed it, the more you do it. I think that's the thing with everything. Everything that a person does, whether it's an art form or a musical instrument. But if it isn't an art form, it's not important, Joe. But go on.

It's true. It is true. Yeah, the idea of the creative process is something that's always been so fascinating to me. And I love listening to how other people do it, especially comics. Some of them are just fucking, they just sit down and put in the time. They just put in the hours. Yeah, they do. And some of them just sit around and watch things all day

and scratch their head and look at the internet and just poke around and prod. And then some of them, they just write in stand-up form. Some people write in blog form. Don't you love when you think a joke springs fully formed from your breast and you haven't thought of it. It just comes out, and you do it, and it's perfect. And you go, like people always say, whatever, the Beatles.

How did you write that song? And sometimes they'll go, honestly, I sat down, and it, you know what I mean? I had it. I didn't write it. It came out. And every once in a while, there'll be a joke that you think of, and it's just the right one. And it may even not be genius or anything.

It's just that feeling that your subconscious pushed it out and you weren't fucking with it in any way, and therefore its perfection is different than something you worked on. Yeah, there's this weird thing of, of again it goes back to the ego this weird thing of what whoever the fuck you think of yourself as you know this self-defining sort of image that you know you put up as like sort of a wall of protection very much yeah and when you want to take credit for the idea what what the way creativity comes it comes when you're in the state of like like open when you're open to receive it when you're really thinking about

things like completely all your resources are on the thing not about the bullshit not about like trying to craft an image on stage or trying to formulate something that you think is going to make the back of the room laugh instead of that it's it's all coming from like a true openness and then they it just comes like as you sometimes it's just like moments you know these bursts of ideas will come to you and they are just gifts from the universe and they hit you like waves and you can't even write them down quick enough and you're giggling while you're writing yeah it's like a gift it's like a gift for thinking the right way or a gift for approaching it with the correct respect, like realizing that you are the lucky one

to be able to tune into this. It's not that you're this fabulous person who is so awesome because you say funny shit. No, you're the lucky one that has found this ability to tune into these ideas and you should praise these ideas and honor these ideas. That's true.

I think just pushing yourself to think of something i repeat myself a million times but to think of something new when you're riffing yeah it's how hard yeah it's really hard like on the podcast i uh i'll just attempt things sometimes that aren't that funny but i'm like trying to you know like disconnect so that you're you're kind of trying to automatic write if you can do you do your podcast entirely by yourself yeah wow that's awesome i talk to the crowd and i i you do it in front of a crowd always wow yeah so always live whoa i want the live vibe when i want to do it where do you do it at i i i it makes me more

perform you know i want to perform more and also no i'm sorry where where do you do it at? What do you do it at? It makes me more perform. You know, I want to perform more. No, I'm sorry. Where? Where do you go? Oh, thank you for asking. I'm at the Bar Lubitsch tonight, for goodness sakes. I do it at the Bar Lubitsch in LA, and I do it all over the world.

The Bar what? I love that place. It's over in West Hollywood. It's on Santa Monica. What is it called? The Bar Lubitsch? Lubitsch. Like Ernst Lubitsch.

Lubitsch. Yeah, Lubitsch. Bar Lubitsch. Yeah, L-U-B-I-T-C-H. Dude, that sounds so hip and awesome. It's fun. It's like at the front of a bar that backs a nice little stage.

Yeah, Greg Proops will be performing there. You're doing your fucking podcast in front of a live audience. So explain this to me. I need to watch this now. I do it live, and this week I'm for London, and I'm going to do it in Dublin this week

and London, England, at Whelan's Pub in Dublin and the 19th on the Soho Theatre in London on the 2nd and then then I come home

and I go to Bloomington, Indiana The Attic which is supposed to be a very nice club and I'm going to do the podcast there I try to do it

at every place I go Wow and I do it live I take questions on the air never in LA very much I've done it but I don't do it that much.

But on the road always. One part of the show is people get to get up and ask me questions. The show is called The Smartest Man in the World. It's a joke. I don't think I'm the smartest man in the world. But you go on the radio and people go like, so are you really the smartest man in the world? You're like, no.

Are you the biggest douche in the world? Who would do it? It's a joke, obviously. Yeah, obviously. I have an attitude and I have a place I'm coming from. Yeah, that's part of your comedy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, duh.

So I take questions. And then I also take email questions. And I read them and I don't read them beforehand. Oh, that's great. I read them on the air. So people will write me. And now, because it's been a couple years now, it'll be like Proopadopolis

you know dear Proop of the sun you know Proopindicular you know like they try to think of these lengthy so that part's fun and then I'll read it back to the audience and then I'll try to answer it on the air so I got one once and I can't remember what it was

oh and it was a great question I can't remember who wrote it Matt or or some short one-syllable name. In any case, it was Beards, period, never, question mark. Beards, period, never, really, question mark. And I went, that's not a question. That's a series of extremely short sentences. And then I went into maybe 25 minutes on this novel that I would write

if you were with me and how we would go to Mendocino and get high and the whole going shopping and having a barbecue and drinking later and then that's why I wouldn't wear a beard because I would be scruffy

at the end of four days and I would be trying to write my novel and you'd be refuting my novel as I read it to you. First, I wouldn't read it to you my novel and you'd be refuting my novel as I read it to you. First, I wouldn't read it to you. I'd be too precious. And then upon demand, when I read it.

And this all came out of nowhere. I have no intention of doing any of this. And to me, that's the jumping off point, right? Right. And it was the shortest, stupidest thing. And it was only because I'd said I didn't like beards on the show.

And I said, I don't like hats. What is it? There's a few things I don't think men you know or what is it there's a few things I don't think men should wear like what hats and beards

and why hats I don't I don't look good in a hat for people who look good in it I say wear a hat so but what if men want to wear a hat

because they just don't feel like combing their hair they just that's what I think most guys who wear baseball hats I'm not judgmental about right just wear it

just throw it on. I have a hat. Brian, you have a hat on right now. And a beard. You're cool. That's the way he said that. You were attacking him. You're also at your show.

If you were going to go out with a girl, would you wear your baseball hat? Yes. You would dress exactly that way. This is exactly what I do. I don't like... Don't you want them to like you?

I like to hide. They like them. Listen, trust me. I like to hide very easily. I don't like to look at people. If somebody's bothering me, I don't want to deal with like you I like to hide they like them listen trust me I like to hide very easily I don't like to look at people if somebody's bothering me I don't want to deal with them I can cut them out

I get that now the kid does extraordinarily well well okay see my game's wrong it's just his game is being him it's like your game is you

but your game is funny when you shit on other people who aren't doing your game one of the slogans of the show is I'm bound to shit on something you like. Yeah, and what's wrong with that? Why does everybody have such a hard time with that?

Everyone's so goddamn sensitive. It's so silly. If you can't laugh at someone making fun of you, you're being a silly person. I agree. So that's how we do it, and it's great fun. Sometimes the people ask questions that I have no idea what they're going to say. That sounds amazing. I've got a couple running jokes

that devolved out of nowhere, just shit that I like to talk about. And one of them is, for some reason, the Negro Leagues, right? I'm a fan of baseball, and I started talking about Satchel Paige and Negro Leaguers. And I play in Scotland a year ago,

and they don't know what the Negro Leagues are, you know. And a guy at the end of the show, we're doing questions, and he goes, what about Satchel Paige? And you're like, then, you know, you cry a little. A little tear goes down my cynical face. You've made a connection. Podcasting is the coolest thing that comics have been able to do in my entire career no question tv cooler than i mean i love the stage you know you can't pull

me off the fucking stage right i'm a ham bone but i mean podcasting by by a long mile is the most creative outlet i've had the most challenging Right. Doing it by myself with the crowd has been something I think I needed to do forever, and I didn't know that I needed to do that. That sounds amazing. The way you're doing it sounds really fun because it's like people have a chance to see different ideas explored every week,

and doing it live in front of an audience like that, getting to see you riff and just completely go off the cuff, and knowing that it's absolutely completely off the cuff. That's so fun. I mean, I read poems and newspaper articles and whine about shit. You know, it's one of those. Right, right, right. There's a boring preachy part.

And then there's the questions and, you know. Yeah, the podcasting thing is done. It's the only thing that's like, in opinion is truly complimentary to the stand-up. Yeah. Because it really gets you to see the way a guy's brain works. Like one of the things I love about guys coming on that I haven't talked to before like you. We might have said like ten words to each other ever. Yeah, we had a couple conversations.

Just like, hi, what's up, man? What's going on? Everything cool? 10 words to each other ever. Just like, hi, what's up, man?

What's going on? Everything cool. You know, um, is that, uh, when you, uh, get to compare and,

uh, and, and, and like see the different, it's very inspiring to listen to other people's creative process. Oh, well that's, it is.

I think it's, I have been on so many different, uh, comics podcast. And that's the other funnest part of podcasting is it's giving the audience something that they never had before when we were young and we would listen to comedy albums or even guys get interviewed occasionally on tv or the radio yeah yeah in exchange of ideas between comics you don't fucking hear it you never fucking heard it it was never a craft until now people say

podcasting's radio yeah it is It's an audio format Except for Hi I was looking at the camera How's it going You handsome bastard Sophisticated motherfucker If I was you I'd hug you Could you imagine we had

Audio of like Kinnison Having a conversation with Hicks Right that's what I mean We didn't get that This is the dressing room Could you imagine if we had audio of Kinnison having a conversation with Hicks? Right, that's what I mean. We didn't get that. This is the dressing room for the world, finally. And that there's a lot of funny people who can express themselves in this format. And that because it's like, you know, whatever,

there's enough rules that make it work. Because it's mics and it's audio and it has to be a certain length. It can't be seven hours, you know, unless you're making a, right. You know, the Fossbender. The thing is though,

those people listen to them at work a lot. You could give them really long ones. We do like three hours all the time. Oh, I, I've been, I do an hour and a half at two, two and the two ones i think are a

little long because it's just me like i said it's just me so after you know come on after an hour really yeah dude you're like okay yeah uh but people say to me oh i love the long ones because i i drive three hours to work or i'm on the train for two hours Why'd you do a fucking one hour and 10 minute one? I needed a one hour and 48 minute. And I think the other thing that's really cool is that they're free. Like that's a really cool thing for people. Integral. Like that's the connection that we get to do with this. TV is wonderful.

And one day I'll be on it again. But I think that the connection that we get with this is just a different thing altogether yeah yeah I completely agree it's so immediate and you get to see what the dude is really like I meet

well I'm sure you do too you work live all the time but I meet at my podcast way different than I would approach stand up stand up show I go I'm backstage I look at my podcast way different than I would approach standup. Yeah. Standup show. I go, I'm backstage. I look at my notes of,

you know, drink, whatever, go on, do it. Uh, and then go back or maybe say hi to a few people at the podcast. I go out in the audience before the show and talk to everybody.

Wow. And then sometimes after the show too. So it's more of like a town hall meeting. Right. So when the show starts, it's not Greg proofs is coming into the building and i fucking have met you right and like you go to england and english people sometimes are a little reticent you know they're not ready for you to come up and go hi and i'll say this is your punishment you have to meet me before i go up there and then they

you know and then but afterward they're like that was really different yeah that he came up and talked to us and I don't spend a year with everybody I go hi thanks for coming how are you and but I touch everybody and and it's made a huge difference to me as an a performer to like that connection is something I never had with the crowd before i was never the touchy high five anybody dude really no i mean i'm lovable obviously i'm i'm almost obviously irresistibly engaging joe i think you found that over the last two and a half hours but uh and your audience of course is i think fell in love right away yeah they fell in love right away um they that's a great idea though and it's contrary to the the standard thing that

they would always preach us which was you know magic yeah keep them you don't want to see don't let them see you don't let them see you you're the wizard of oz yeah like i started uh introducing my friends at the shows like we would do so there you are first and i would yeah and i would get on the microphone they would go don't you don't you think it's better if they hear your voice for the first time when you're on stage stop the crazy thinking that that all that ain't coming to see you yeah yeah they're not gonna be disappointed they're glad to hear you're there and that you support the other people in the act it makes a yeah it makes a connection yeah it does instead of you know he plays clubs and colleges and then you come out i said c c c rider you know i can scarf in a grain, you know, he plays clubs in colleges and then you come out. I said, see, see, see you later.

You know, I can scarf in a green elevator. You know, I mean, I love glamour. I really do. And I like to dress up a lot and everything. But I think like you say that, that old paradigm of show business where it's, you know, that we're saving you as the special treat. I bought the ticket to see you, man. I know you're playing.

I saw you outside smoking a joint. It's not that mystifying. We're not... I mean, in stand-up it works because you have to have... Ooh. I like that. In stand-up it works because that's cool. I think he's got a remote control.

No. No? You just touch him? Some of them are on remote control. Something just did something. Brian's a silly goose. Anyway, No? You just touch him? Some of them are on remote control. Something just did something. Brian's a silly goose. Anyway, I do that, and I never would have done it before. And I played the Bell House in Brooklyn, and I'm there again in January on the 19th, if you're listening.

And there's about 350 people, and it's nice. Wow. I've done this 100 fucking years. And I can't draw big crowds anywhere in the world you know like i play around the world but i don't get a thousand people ever you know unless i'm with you know you know someone huge but to get that many people to come to the podcast and that's all it was and i did an hour and they're 45 whatever you know it was long enough to fucking charge people 20 bucks or whatever and uh i met everyone before and then afterward i talked to almost like everybody that wanted to talk and i stayed for hours like babe ruth and just fucking

you know hey and people give you pictures and they talk to you and you talk about yeah and shit and i thought i would have never cared this much before well now it is i'm middle-aged you know i'm and i love comedy what you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I want to be a comedian. Not that I didn't ever want to, but... But you're really enjoying it. I don't know, Joe.

You know, I did the first one. Matt and Ryan, who produced Doug Benson's show and Jimmy Pardo's show, came to me and said, do you want to do a show? And I was like, well, what do I do? And they go, well, you know, and I said, well, no one will listen. They go, people listen. And then we decided want to do a show and i was like what do i do and they go well you know and i said well no one will listen they go people listen and uh and then i we decided not to do interviews

uh i'll do it on my own because i had done this audible show previously like in the old days when we were overfunded on the web audible.com yeah they had a bunch of those yeah they had a bunch and i got to do one and they paid me good money and the whole thing and nobody listened because no one had phones then right it was 2000 till 2005 yeah they were real innovators so they nobody had a no one even had mp3s

I mean like they had iPods but you'd have to down you know Steve Marmel had some sort of a deal with them when he was doing like oh Steve Marmel did it too

five minutes of new content right me too I did it every like me Steve I know they wanted you to do it too at the time I thought it was crazy though to put that much new stand up content

so I did that for fucking five years wow so I thought it was crazy though to put that much new stand-up content So I did that for fucking five years. Wow. So I thought, well, I'll just do that but like in an expanded but let's make it fun and have drinks

and so the audience can have a drink and we all fucking... How do you handle photographs before the show? At the podcast? Yeah. Nobody really wants

to do them before. They kind of want to do them after. Really? Yeah. Usually I think it feels like as soon as i don't like it at a stand-up show as much i mean after i'll do it afterwards

after yeah i uh let me unwind for a fucking minute will you i always uh say hi to i have like a big line of people after show of course they love you man you have to have a taste i don't hear anybody else that that does that i love hearing that you do that well i do it at the podcast for sure a stand-up show i, you may not be so lucky, but... I do it at almost every stand-up show, unless there's something going on. Yeah, but you're like a gentleman philosopher. Your job now is so important for what you've been doing,

and it's the culmination of all... The TV and all that, this is the reward. You know, like you're saying you're rewarded by i guess yeah you want to talk to everybody at your show man they want to talk to you that's how important you are to them yeah i know i just i don't think of this as a reward i think this is just uh i just found like a real cool spot to expand all right then it's the it's the culmination of uh yeah uh of of all your thoughts well just fortunate that something came along that would lend itself to someone who has so many different weird ideas in their head that you can't ever do in the form of like a radio show

they haven't caught up to us yet we're still running wild we're still running wild man this is still gangster pirate stuff and everybody thinks it's all you know the 30-somethings who who cover us yeah uh are already hip to the jive but they don't realize that the whole world doesn't know about podcasting at all the whole world doesn't it's huge coming up they're blowing up and you know what else is happening podcasts are feeding other podcasts they're finding about like we have had so many guys come from this podcast and then start their own and then we help push their podcast yeah that's what i mean it's an amazing branch people your circle is uh uh you know well they always say uh uh every scene needs a clubhouse and this is the clubhouse, right? This is the Ice House. For your scene. Yeah, the Ice House is such an awesome place, too,

because it's been around since like 1961 or something like that. Oh, I played here in 54. They have this feeling. If you go into the Ice House, like you step into that showroom, that's a feeling. Like that place has been performed in for decades. You feel it. It sounds crazy.

I know it sounds crazy, but there's a happiness in that room, man. And by the way, we have a show there tonight. Joe Diaz is going to be there. Sam Tripoli, Adam Hunter, the guy who got me in trouble for saying his joke on an FX UFC fight. Greg Fitzsimmons, did I mention him already? Who else? So you're having trouble booking? Some other people.

Got some solid fucking performers. Oh, Tom Segura's going to be here too, ladies and gentlemen. You don't want to miss that. So it's tonight at 10 o'clock. So am I here for three hours then? No, buddy. We're just chilling. Oh, okay.

We've got to wrap up soon because Brian has to head down to San Diego where he is going tonight. I've got to go work tonight too. Brian is with Doug Benson, your buddy, tonight at the... American Comedy Co. It's at 8 o'clock. Tickets still available

at AmericanComedyCo.com. Surely not. And if you've never been there, it's an amazing little club. I have not been there. What's it like? San Diego is a beautiful place. I fucking love San Diego.

Great. What's it like? I love it. I love it. The American Comedy Company is a real low ceiling, tight seating. We'll go downstairs to go see it. Let's go.

Very solid. I really wish them all the best. And apparently there's another place called Madhouse Comedy. Yeah, down the street. Is that an old town? Yeah. I don't know. The area where people walk around.

American Comedy goes at Gaslamp in, I don't know where the other place is. It's the shit. San Diego is awesome. It's really a badass city. I haven't been there in ages. It's just too close. It's funny. 20 years ago, or 50 years ago when I first started,

that was a road gig we always did. There was a million gigs in San Diego. We always played La Jolla and fucking... You started out in San Francisco, right? Yeah, yeah. And our road gigs are all Bay Area and Northern

you know in Oregon Reno that kind of I started my show business career in San Francisco as well where Fisherman's Wharf I was 8 years old

I had a magic show really yeah that was my that's where I started sweet I did I said I had a magic show

somebody gave me a magic show like a thing a little top hat and shit. So I'd go out and get donations. It was ridiculous. Why? Were you living in San Francisco?

Yeah, I lived in San Francisco when I was a kid. From age 7 to 11. Oh, that's cool. Fascinating times. It was right when the Vietnam War was ending. Really interesting. Living in San Francisco, that young of my life during that era in the 70s really shaped my... I was going to say, it didn't influence you at all.

It did a lot. There was a lot of, especially with my attitude towards gay people. I've never understood. I grew up with gay people. So like, to me, it was always normal. And by the way, it was always something that you can make fun of as long as you're not being a dick about it. You can make fun of everything. And by the way, it was always something that you can make fun of as long as you're not being a dick about it. You can make fun of everything. And the idea of homophobia, I didn't even know it existed until I was about 13 or 12. I was in Florida. Right. Hanging around with my cute... Comes the dawn. My parents moved to Florida.

We moved from San Francisco to Florida. And this Cuban friend of mine, his dad fucking threw the newspaper on the table. I can't fucking believe this shit. He was so mad. And he and he goes they're gonna let these faggots marry each other and i remember i was i was like 12 years old i was like what the fuck do you care like what what are you nuts yeah you're going you're why do you care yeah like gay guys want to marry each other like what it was weird i was like this poor guy's like he something. I was like, this is my friend's dad. What an idiot. And I remember thinking, it took me a while to realize it,

but I was like, wow, people are way stupider in Florida than they are in San Francisco. It was like going from a completely different world. San Francisco is in a very unusual place. It poisons you. Because I've never dropped the attitude from there. All the information I believe the attitude from there. I've never, they, all the, all the information I believe in is from there.

Yeah. I don't, uh, it was a, it's a huge rude awakening when you get into the world and realize that it ain't that way. It ain't that fucking way. It's amazing how places like San Francisco evolve.

Like you have these weird pockets of like really smart people and really cool people. And it's, it's like that whole area, the, you know, the, the tech area with you know

like where all those rich dudes live and like palo alto and atherton and stuff like that that area is filled with intelligent people it's really amazing it's a hotbed of interesting intelligent people it's weird and therefore the demands are different you're going to go to a place and they're going to have artisanal bread yeah and excellent cheese and awesome wine i realize it's also an economic thing yeah but it's it's a cultural thing too uh um it the sensitivity like you say i didn't i didn't realize how redneck-y the world was. And I used to say it years ago on stage when I played in England and stuff. I'm always looking for a place that's not redneck-y,

but I never find it. And I don't know if that's still true, but you're just going to run into it. It's just going to happen. There's going to be a yang. Well, yeah. There's always going to be a yang. I can't believe they're going to let faggots marry.

Yeah. What was Chris Cluie, the punter, just said? That's not going to make you a raging cock monster. Monster, yeah. Well, I always said the people that are worried about gay marriage are either really dumb or secretly worried that dicks are delicious. Yeah. And there's no other options.

No. It's like, why else would you care? It's such a silly, silly one. That one is a baffling one. But you know what? I think that recently, I don't want to ascribe too much to the last election, but the last election was definitely a forum on that

as well as about a million other issues. But that was an issue that did get acknowledged. The gay senator in Wisconsin, and there's a bisexual congressperson, which is hilarious. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. And there's also a Buddhist from Hawaii. Really?

Yep. Interesting. And I think that really speaks to what's happening now. I hope so. It's incremental, but it happened. I feel like the gay marriage thing has always been like sort of a beach ball that gets tossed in the air to distract people which is why it never gets resolved no and bush didn't want to resolve remember 2004 was about the sanctity of marriage and then he didn't do shit yeah like he didn't do shit about abortion or anything else he actually didn't really do anything about any

social issues other than make people wildly angry was he the first guy that let you really clearly see that the the presidency is not real and then like all those decisions are being made by other people well i wasn't old enough to be with it i mean i was a teenager or you know a young beautiful teenage boy with legs like a slender impala as i slid through life and my adidas um i like the Wind in the background right yeah and I've got a long way to go such a long way to go thank you

I'll do Michael McDonald all day long and yeah I went through Watergate when I was you know like an early teenager and I remember it and I remember the cynicism even even a 12 or 13, 14-year-old, like, okay, the president can be brought down. The press has this power. The respect that that got in this country, the ending of the war. And then watching the late 70s where we thought we were going to have the Equal Rights Amendment.

We thought black people were going to be equal. We thought Indians were going to get a piece of the pie. And then Reagan came along, and all that kind of 60s stuff got washed in the U-tick mushrooms bath, and everybody, the media and the corporate entities and whatever, that was, I think, when I first, I was probably 19 or 20, when Reagan got elected.

To me, he was the first one I thought, you're not up to the job mentally, but we're going to have you do it, and you're just going to be this sort of beautiful mountain of reassuring pudding forever. It was a creepy moment because it was the first... Mourning in America. Do you remember that?

Which one? Fucking mourning in America. That's what he called his presidency because Carter had such a bad recession and couldn't get anything done and the Democratic Congress defied him and it kind of all went to shit by the end of the term, right?

And the hostages. The hostages that they capped and who knows what fucking happened, right? Whether Reagan got them released out, blah, blah, blah. In any case, having said all that, he called his first term mourning in America like we've been in the darkness you know after it was clear that 12 years of republican 14 years republican presidency in

vietnam was the root of yeah what had turned everything horrible the corrupt cia and the drug dealing and the yeah he had canary such narrative. Well, and then like, so Bush for eight years of snatching, grabbing, making illegal war and fucking horrible fundamentalism and narrowness in the national dialogue. And then, you know, the last four years, people kind of, okay. And then the last election was like,'s clear again yeah that the big paradigm is um shifting in the right direction well something's gonna have to happen i think socially it's certainly in the right direction or what republicans are gonna have to embrace gay marriage and medical marijuana those things are going to happen yeah well it should be it should be legal

marijuana because you know what it benefits everybody you don't think it does because you don't know how to use it. It's really that simple. It's like saying that fucking saw shouldn't be legal because some people are going to cut their feet off. Well, you know, stop.

And it doesn't necessarily mean a crime wave. That's the misunderstanding. It's going to be less crime. That's what I say. People are going to be nicer. Yeah. What people don't understand is that marijuana

unquestionably increases sensitivity. It changes the way you feel about things. It makes you more sensitive. It makes food taste better. It just changes the whole dynamic of life. And when something like that gets introduced in your system, it gives you a new sense of understanding. And that can help you and push you to evolve your personality. It can be a good thing.

And even like when people talk about paranoia, like they take it and they get paranoid, it's not a bad thing to be paranoid every now and then. Just get an accurate assessment of how fucking vulnerable you really are and how lucky you really are. And maybe just turn that around and use it to be thankful

and to push out positive energy because of that fucking paranoia. Don't be scared of weed, is what I'm trying to say. They need it. Caesar don't fear the reefer. He doesn't. Nor the wind, nor the summer wind.

I don't think that's what they said. Isn't it? I don't know, maybe. It would have been a better song. It is now. It would have been a better song. There's not that many really powerful songs about weed except rap songs.

You have to go to Cypress Hill if you really want to get a powerful song about weed. Here's a fat swaller one uh i dream about a ray for five feet long a little bit hot but not too strong you'll be high but not for long if you're a viper what is that fat swaller yeah who's he fat swaller was a songwriter and from harlem uh in the uh 20s and 30s i guess he died but world war ii he's pretty pretty young. And he wrote Honeysuckle Rose, and he wrote I Hate You Because Your Feet's Too Big, and he had a bunch of weed songs, though. Dude, you know so much

about so much weird shit. Well, I was going to say you do. I mean, I've never heard about Jay McCaffrey and your insane historian who dissected the Dead Sea Scrolls, who's an Ingersoll. John Marco Allegro.

Allegro. Why can't I think of Allegro? These are just repeated subjects to death to me it's so funny when I can explain them to somebody who's never heard them before because I'm such a dork that's all I think about is that right and all I think about is the stupid shit I think about it is funny how you can get on these like crazy paths of knowledge and just store weird shit that comes out and people look at you like yeah like what the fuck do you know that for man right people say why do you know things,

which I always think is funny. Because the answer's easy, because I'm learning about it. Yeah, well, for some people, you can get stuck in a bad situation where you're showing up and you work with a bunch of dummies, but it's a good job, and so you're on that vibe, like, every day, that's talking to dumb, uninterested people,

bored people, and then you go home. What do you do? You watch TV? It's hard to find a good conversation sometimes. It is. And that's the thing about the podcast that makes it so interesting. I meet a lot of weirdos,

and people who come to my show, sometimes it's a specific thing they want to talk about, sometimes it's more general, but there's no lack of points of view and yeah, you know, fields of interest. People are throwing things at me all the time that I should talk about that. I don't know anything about,

you know what I mean? Right, right, right. And then we get string theory and David Foster Wallace and you know, this and that. And I'm like, I don't fucking know anything about that.

And, but you're the smartest man in the world. So I try to learn something sometimes, but I don't also don't fucking know anything about that but you're the smartest man in the world so I try to learn something sometimes but I also don't want to be the person with a little bit of knowledge about something

and he gets everything wrong because that's more annoying than my usual pedantic I know everything about everything right yeah if you if you pretend you know

more than you know and you get shit wrong it's very bad you're shot down immediately too by a million people right now it's not good. You can't do it anymore.

You should just Google it. You should Google it. Well, no one can Google anything. That's what I find so funny about the interwebs. Everybody has a phone on them all the time and yet no one will look up. No one will click past the first link. Yeah. Well, especially if you're asserting something silly.

Yeah. This is, I don't know, it's a real exciting time i think this uh the the ability to to have things like your podcast now where you could just it just gets released out into the world and then just picks up you know new viewers and you do something like this and i'm sure this is gonna have a bunch of people uh download it now from itunes and get hooked on it. It's such a beautiful and neat path. It's all so clean. It's like direct to the artist. Greg Proops takes it.

Greg Proops puts it online. You download it. You're connected with one step to you putting it up there. It's free. Yeah. And you can listen to it at your discretion. You can fast forward it. You can burn it.

You can copy it and send it to someone else I'm sure people do it with you every once in a while this guy from Sweden or something and I don't know how he found me he's on Facebook, he'll do a mix where there's music behind a part of it and you go, that's really cool I wouldn't have thought of that

videos of rants have gone on becoming these really inspirational videos where someone's spliced in music and Eisenhower speeches and fucking crazy shit people that connect to something on the internet so we live in strange times Greg Proops

that's the exciting part I'm ready for a lot of the old stuff to go away yeah I think I mean I have tradition obviously i write with a piece of paper and a pen you know do you really i feel like i can't write as fast that way so ideas slip away from me but i do um write it down before i go on stage because when i especially new stuff i feel like if i don't physically write it down with a pen and a paper i don't remember it the same way

that's exactly what i was going to say, Joe. I've done a survey of every comic I've talked to in the last two or three years. Every club I've played, I make everybody get their book out and show me. I go, where do you keep your ideas? And everybody... Yeah.

Book. A little book with your lists on it. Yep. Mine are on hotel room stationery. Thousands of them. Yep. Thousands of pieces of paper. Mm-hmm.

And I say, why do you do it that way? Do you ever write it on your phone? Yeah. If I think of a one-liner, I write it, you know,

da-da-da-da. But do you write your whole act on the phone? No. In the end, I have to put it on a piece of paper and write it.

Right, yeah. And I just think it's a mental... Yeah. That's the really old-fashioned part of performing. I have note lists

of set lists on my phone that I'll go to like right before i go on stage sometimes if i want to make sure that i remember some new shit that i'm working on but when i write i go when you go into that like trance i can do that so much better when i'm typing because i can the words just appear like i can type a word in a second whereas it takes but can you remember it if you type it? No, but I can write better. So I get the trance out and I can get more information out as I'm writing.

But then I go back and I'm like, did I fucking write that? I don't even remember writing that. I'll laugh at some of my own shit and then I'll go, okay, I got to keep that part. Because I don't even remember writing it because out of five hours of writing, how much do you actually remember?

But the act of actually scribing it into a paper, a piece of paper, there's something about that that's like it just really like res it's it just stores in your memory yes like it's like a we humans have been doing it that way for so long it's like it's the bridge for me yeah it's been five seven ten thousand years since people started writing yeah I think it there's a real profound connection with the paper. Yeah. Have you ever thought about releasing those with a special? When you release a special, release your notes as well?

Wow, no, I haven't. One time I did a fun article for Filter Magazine. The guy came over to me and he said, he saw me fumbling with my notes. And I said, it's all different pieces of hotel stationery. So I asked my wife to pick it. He goes, well, that'll be the article just I want a picture of these you know

notes, a set list and I said to my wife you pick it out I gave her the folder full of shit so she picked out four random ones it was one from like Paris, one from Minnesota one from a place I didn't remember being it was like the double tree in somewhere and then there was another one

and then it just said like clinton you know what on the like you know corn whatever the fuck was on the list oh olsen twins and i kind of went through the list as the article and just went like yeah i was doing clinton jokes in paris you know i well i think i suddenly it's always 92 when i rock the mic rock the mic or whatever know, like, there is a weird insight into kind of like what's going on exactly then with all your set lists because the different notes

you make on them and stuff. I don't know that there's that much to be garnered from, I mean, I could probably remember some of the bits and some I couldn't. I think it might,

so just something that might be cool, like if I was a fan and I could, you'd like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

definitely. To see my old set lists? Yeah, like maybe like put it up online or something if you just put the photos online

well you ever see that a website called letters of note no and there's another one something of note but letters of note is

letters people wrote to each other or even I think there's one called lists of note and the list of note is just different lists that famous people wrote.

Or any, you know, notable. Like, the one I remember is Thelonious Monk. Because I read it on my show. Thelonious Monk, you know, he had different mental problems and stuff. You know, if you've ever seen him play, like, he'd play and then he'd sort of get up and walk around the stage, you know.

Oh, really? Yeah. And he's extraordinary. And then he was given drugs and they didn't quite work out. But in any way, he's a genius. And he could both compose and arrange and extemporize. And his band was kind of put in the position of having to deal with his personality, right?

Because he wasn't like a regular guy who, hey, let's all be there at five. He had to kind of be pushed around to places. But then when he could play, he was... So he wrote a note. And on the note, it says, how do we dress tonight? he could play, he was, so he wrote a note, like, and on the note it says, how do we dress tonight? Sharp as possible,

underlined, right? And then, if you're the drummer, think of something. You know, like, there's all this cool, like,

really broken down, like, the thoughts you have before you go on stage, like, about the band, and how you wanted the band to play, and look. And I would,

I would read that out sometimes, and so I would say on the show, how do we dress tonight? Sharp as possible. Oh, that's badass. Yeah, right? So, there's's lists of note and there's letters of note and then the last letter of note someone sent it to me uh was um jackie robinson went to a luncheon or a dinner at ike was speaking at right and jackie was an executive yeah jackie robinson was an executive a chock full of nuts coffee right like he got a job in the corporate world because he was an intelligent capable and famous person he became

an executive at chock full of nuts new york and so he went to this like banquet and eisenhower spoke and there was a lot of black people there who were in business and eisenhower said you've got to be patient right your time will come and all that this is the fitties wow so jackie wrote him a very respectful letter but also very pointed um about your patience you know and i'm not doing it any justice which is you know dear mr president having recently attended the lunch you're out i have to say that on behalf of myself and my race the time for patience is long past. You'll find that over the past several hundred years

we've endured nothing but countless indignities. And then the repast is the next letter. Eisenhower wrote him back. Dear Mr. Robinson, thank you for your letter. I take on board what you said and I profoundly, you know, blah, blah, blah.

This exchange in a very civil and highfalutin language not the language that we use now but like formal letter writing language uh with the idea very explicitly expressed that he no longer had the patience to wait that he felt that why should he wait right and why should he have to go to a dinner where the president told him to wait when he'd been the first fucking black guy in the big leagues and then get a job in fucking business and trying to run his life and shit right and Eisenhower

like well you know one day schools will be integrated and you won't have to drink in another faucet and you know you don't want to hear that and so those kind of letters I think to me are like fascinating so letters of note and lists of note are quite good if you want to just you mean you don't have to read everything on it but it's it's different letters to people and dude that's fucking badass yeah

i will check but nobody writes letters anymore in the future it'll be your set list of note and your emails of note and your blog of note the probably be a letter yeah it's going away the physical act of writing is going away if i didn't have to write my set list down or occasionally fill out a form like when I go to Canada or something like that, I don't really write anything anymore. I do. I mean, I write on my computer too.

I write on my computer. But I write in a book too because it's funner. Greg Proops, you're a bad motherfucker. You're a bad motherfucker, Joe Logan. Thank you for coming on the podcast, man. Thank you, brother. It was enlightening. It was fun.

I wish we had more time, but we don't. No, we have to go. We have to go. Let's do this again, man. Yes, please. Oh, awesome. Thank you for having me on. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's the end of the show. Tonight, Ice House Comedy Club in Pasadena. Joe Diaz, Sam Tripoli, Greg Fitzsimmons, Tom Segura, Adam Hunter, and me, you dirty bitches. Can I plug mine does this go out before 8 o'clock tonight it's going out right now it's live as shit

of course it is tonight at 8 o'clock the Bar Lubitsch on Santa Monica Boulevard you'll find it boom find that and tonight

in San Diego California at American Comedy Co it is Doug motherfucking Benson and Brian motherfucking Red Band oh yeah and that is a what time show

8 o'clock be there bitches and no undercover cops that shit's greasy Motherfucking Benson and Brian. Motherfucking Red Band. Oh, yeah. And that is a what time show? 8 o'clock. Be there, bitches. And no undercover cops. That shit's greasy. Okay? We'll see you fuckers next week. Next week, we got Shane Smith.

We got Monday, Duncan Trussell will christen in the new studio. And Wednesday, Ari motherfucking Shafir. Holla. Shalom