The Joe Rogan Experience - #433 - Duncan Trussell, Chris Ryan

Episode Date: December 24, 2013

Duncan Trussell is a stand-up comedian, and host of his own podcast “The Duncan Trussell Family Hour”, available on Spotify. Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. is a psychologist, speaker, and author of New York Times best seller "Sex At Dawn".

Boredom, you were saying, Duncan Trussell, is a form of anger? Yeah, I was listening to this Jack Kornfield audio book, and he was saying that boredom comes from anger because it's resistance to what is. When you're bored, you're resisting what's happening, and it's a form of anger. It's in the family of anger. Tell it to the dude who's been in solitary confinement for five years. I'd be fucking pissed yeah yeah i think that guy needs to stretch out that that definition a bit a little bit there's some reasonable boredom you know have you ever had taken an ear beating from somebody that's not anger that's you're bored oh look man it's it's totally real but it's always resistance like if you're experiencing boredom, you're resisting what's happening.

You don't want to be there. That's what boredom is. But isn't resistance sometimes exactly the right thing to be doing? I mean, there's a passivity at the heart of some Buddhist scholarship that I find irritating. That is something I used to think, and I disagree with that now. Because I think that you definitely, it's not like suddenly you're like, I'm just going to be in every situation that I'm in. It's just that instead of being in a situation experiencing that, what you're saying is the idea that the only thing that will motivate people to change is pain.

And the idea is like, no, that's an illusion. That's not what you need. You don't need pain. If I'm in a house that's on fire, I'm going to get out of the house before the fire burns me. I don't need a physical experience of pain. And boredom, desire, anger, all of these things, if you really feel them, it's not the greatest feeling. It's never a great feeling. It's like an itchiness or a sense of just wanting to get out of where you're at.

But if you really want to get out of where you're at, the best thing to do is to calm yourself so you can get into a nice tranquil state and then get out of the situation. You don't need the addition of a kind of psychic heartburn, which is what boredom is. I'm full of psychic heartburn. Me too, man. I'm the worst.

When people are giving me ear beatings and I know I could be doing something more pleasurable, I just can't take it. Yeah, and that's exactly like the idea is if we, if you can, if we can dissolve that, that sense of resistance, then it doesn't mean that you're going to be getting ear beatings from now until infinity. It's just when the ear beatings come, you only be experiencing the pain of the ear beatings and not the internal mirroring of that pain as you desperately try to get out of the situation by saying you have to use the bathroom for the ninth time and some people at the comedy store think i have like a serious bladder issue

because like i gotta piss dude can you excuse me i gotta piss do you. Can you excuse me? I got a piss. Do you know who Juliette Binoche is? French actress, beautiful French actress. No. You've seen her. You would recognize her. I know the name. She was in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I think it's one of those names that I've never actually heard said out loud, but I've only read it.

In my impeccable French accent. Beautiful. Wasn't that beautiful? Binoche. Binoche. I don't think i've ever seen seen i've only seen it written down yeah well anyway i met her in this uh weird story i was speaking at this uh event like a ted style event in toronto it's called idea city and uh the day i

was supposed to speak deepak chopra was there all these big shots the day i was supposed to speak i told my wife casilda i'm just gonna sleep in today me sleep. You go ahead, go to listen to the lectures, whatever, and I'm going to hang. Okay, fine. So she goes down. 10 minutes later, she's back up from the room. She says, Juliette Binoche is downstairs having breakfast and she wants to meet you. Like Juliette Binoche wants to meet me? Are you kidding? No, no, really. So I get out of bed. I don't brush my teeth or anything. I go downstairs. And I immediately sense that she doesn't really want to meet me. What she wants to do is sleep with my wife. And my wife has completely misinterpreted everything.

And I'm barging in on this thing. And I start talking to her about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, this great film she was in based on an amazing book and how this book sort of changed my life because it got me this job and all this weird shit and as i'm telling the story she reaches over she's looking right at me she reaches over and she just touches her blackberry and 30 seconds later it starts ringing and she picks it up and she goes oh i'm sorry i have to take this wow and i was like oh yeah okay i you know fine right i'm not offended whatever i would

have done the same thing but i was would you would have done the same thing, but I was on the wrong end. Would you have really done the same thing, though? Oh, yeah. I wouldn't have said, like, I got to go pee for the ninth time this hour, what Duncan's talking about. Yeah, this way you don't seem like you're throwing you under the bus. What? No, no. I'm just saying it's the same phenomenon, and I was on the other end of it, and it was just at a different level.

Yeah, it's escape hatches. Exactly. Built in boring conversation apps. I know I'm going to be talking to this dummy so I'm just setting this for 30 seconds. I'm sure it exists dude.

But you need like a subtle three button click or like five clicks or just two taps. Up down with your volume and it starts calling you in 30 seconds. You would know. You just get busted immediately. Everyone would know. Like, wait a minute.

What was that? Did you just fucking? Don't touch your phone when I'm talking to you. Yeah, right. Ultimately, it could never really truly be successful. Because if it became successful, people would resent it. Everyone would know and it wouldn't work anymore and you have to stop. Well, wait a minute.

Okay. You program it yourself. That way, it's a, people would resent it. Everyone would know and it wouldn't work anymore and you have to stop. Well, wait a minute. Okay. You program it yourself. That way it's a different pattern all the time. Nobody would know. Or a key word that Siri hears you say. Eventually phones are going to be so smart that it's going to not want to get an ear beating. Like it's going to call you and be like dude we gotta get out of here man this is horrible oh i thought you meant from you no the phone itself was gonna

go hey fuck all the phone would be like dude yeah really what did you think we were saying that's what i thought you were saying hilarious would be smart enough to be tired of listening to your stupid shit no that's that that's what I feel like with the NSA. It's like, whoever's monitoring me is getting what they fucking deserve. Every fucking morning, they wake up and look at a gun and then go to work.

I've got to listen to them yap and watch them jerk off to fucking porn all day again. Are you seriously assigning me to this horrible idiot? The idea that there is one person that's actually watching everyone live their lives is not mathematically possible. The idea is that they're storing it.

But it is a dirty thing to do to just store everyone's everything in some database somewhere. It's a dirty thing to do and not tell people that you're doing it to. It promotes this massive state of paranoia, almost instantaneously because you're doing it without letting anybody know that you're doing it. And then you're denying its existence and it's ultimately proved to be true. All of those things are very bad for public confidence.

And all of those things, when they take place, what's gross about it is that you did it. You had the possibility to do it. That's technological. That's unavoidable. But you did it. You went and just copied everybody's everything and stored it.

And then you denied it when it came out. In principle, it's a fascinating trend because it's a trend of the dissolution of boundaries, the connection between a person and an idea, a person and a piece of information is becoming more and more instantaneous, whether it's a Google search. And I think that this is just a subtle victim of this overlying trend in technology of bringing people and information closer and closer together. It's almost unavoidable. But it just sucks that it had to be done by the people that are supposedly protecting

us, supposedly watching over us. But wait a minute. How old are you, Joe? You don't believe they're protecting us and watching over us? No, of course not. Who does? But it's the narrative.

I mean, it is the narrative. It is the narrative. They propel. Yeah. I mean, that narrative comes up every four years. It comes up in various speeches when the president gives speeches and people will pretend on Fox News and CNN. All these poor dudes with

no legs are heroes. They're pretending these are legitimate conversations. We're all on the mainstream news sources. You almost have to address it in a way. You almost have to at least pay it some service just to diffuse it. Did you see that the

NSA logo that went flying around fucking they're like not trying to pretend they're protecting us they're like no it put a evil octopus devouring earth that would be our logo fuck you Snowden yeah it's a fucking demon octopus it's a Kraken from space yeah a space Kraken oh Could you imagine if there were space krakens? Could you imagine if we had been all this time, we had never been found, but the universe is literally like an ocean, and it just takes time for one of those fucking flying fish

to realize, oh, I can eat this one. Just sucks us up. And just starts sucking things out of the atmosphere. So we're like a speck of plankton. Yeah. We find out we're actually in an ocean. Dark matter is just water. We're in some strange state of universalton. Yeah. We find out we're actually in an ocean. Dark matter is just water.

We're in some strange state of universal ocean. And that's the wave motions. Yeah. There are less believable scenarios I've heard. There's not real water, but there's dark matter water. Nothing is beyond our reach. Jesus Christ, that's weird. That's so weird. But maybe it's fake.

Is that phony? Because that went flying all over the place I like it because People at the NSA are like You know what? Let's just fuck with the stoners Let's do it They're already paranoid Let's make them super fucking paranoid

Well there's already a bunch of shit That gives fuel to the super paranoid Like the fucking eye on the dollar bills All that weird Egyptian Iconography shit It gives fuel to the super paranoid, like the fucking eye on the dollar bills. Right. All that weird Egyptian iconography shit. Yes. All that, the Mason stuff, all that weirdness, man.

Yeah. E pluribus unum. Yeah. There's a lot of weirdness on just money itself, you know? And it's hilarious because all, I don't know what it is, but having been on your podcast enough times and rambled about Freemasons, inevitably some loon will send a message or post something on my board that's like, are you a pawn of the New World Order, Duncan? It's like, I know I'm not a pawn of the New World Order, but it's funny to think, oh, wow, what that weirdo is doing to me, I'm doing to the government, you know? Like, it's all just this endless state of, like, we'll never figure it out. You'll never figure out who's behind the whole thing. But it is funny how easily people will assemble idiotic bits of information.

Like that shit with Terrence McKenna being in the fucking CIA. Are you kidding me, man? Really? Terrence McKenna? Mushroom McKenna? God of mushrooms? The CIA is like, let's use this guy as our spokesperson. Well, you know, there was a CIA guy going around helping with distribution of LSD early

in the 60s. Without a doubt. There's been a lot of CIA people that were in the psychedelic community. Without a doubt, there's been a lot of CIA people that were in the psychedelic community. The problem is that Jan's statements about McKenna have been dismissed by everyone who's listened to the recordings that has half a brain. He was joking. It was a sense of humor. He was talking about alien intelligence and the mushroom and the mushroom recruiting him as a spokesperson. That's what he was talking about.

I hadn't heard it. Jan's take on his literal yon's take on his recruiting for the fbi which look i don't know you don't know but if you have to look at is what is most likely well if that's your only piece of evidence if i listen to that most likely i would say that he's joking around he's talking about the mushroom but Jan is one of those weird dudes that has been like researching this shit forever

did he say anything about Gordon Wasson he knows yeah Gordon Wasson was in the CIA yeah there was some connection

with Gordon Wasson hey if the CIA is hiring people to smoke DMT and talk about aliens I will take that job I'm in I'll send you my resume

I'll fax my resume to you. I think the CIA, like, you know, SeaWorld, it's not 100% evil. There's probably a bunch of people there that are training dolphins that really love dolphins. Right. It doesn't stop the institution from being evil just because of a few of the people that are involved in it. You guys know about John Lilly, right? Sure.

Yeah, yeah. Was he in the CIA? Of course he was. But he was into hallucinogens and dolphins. That was the connection, yeah. We have the documents. I don't know if Jan's right or wrong, quite honestly. I don't think he does either.

But if you look at it, most likely that's not what was going on. Most likely Terrence McKenna was a hippie. And he uses also one point in his argument for saying that he was in trouble with the FBI and he got out of trouble, like seemingly out of nowhere. But that's all documented by Dennis and Terrence. They talked in depth about him turning himself in and them offering him some sort of a plea deal. Dennis sent me the email. I could read it, but I don't have his permission. But, yeah, I don't think Terrence McKenna was in the fucking CIA.

Also, isn't it ridiculous? I mean, i mean or fbi or whatever the fuck they can use you without you ever even knowing you're being used yeah sure like a lot of peace corps people well i think you know were used as uh listen anybody and i really mean this anybody who listens to mckenna talk about ci talk about psychedelics anybody who listens to McKenna talk about psychedelics, anybody who listens to that and is not intrigued is a fucking idiot. And I think that includes people that are in the CIA, people that are in the FBI, just because people are square on paper and just because they're supposed to abide by the schedule one rules of the United States government. Human beings are individuals and individuals have autonomy, a certain of it at least when it comes to their own thoughts And when you listen to a guy like Terrence McKenna and you go well whose side do I take the evil?

Overlord that I fucking work for that pays my bills and couldn't give two fucks about me or the psychedelic bard who? Might be on to about a million things that I've never even considered Once might be correct about this idea that he's preaching about psychedelic drugs being the very reason why human beings exist in the first place and our lack of use of them today is one of the reasons why we're so disconnected from nature. Like we just shot into space and then we lost our core that connects us. We lost whatever the connection was to how we got there. Sounds ridiculous when it comes from a guy like me.

When you hear McKenna talk about it, when he's talking about climatological changes and about how the hominids moved out of the trees to experiment with new food sources as the rainforest receded into grasslands. I mean, this is like well-documented shit. And then also the positive attributes of psilocybin, the increase in

visual acuity, the fact that it makes them hornier. So you would get like monkeys that were horny that could see better if they ate these mushrooms. And then the transcendent experience that comes from them. Like all those together can't be ignored. as the reason why we're not monkeys anymore is only because enough people or too many people are ignorant about it and because the propaganda involving these drugs has been so strong that whether or not you believe that it's had any positive influence

on anybody you know, you can't deny that that experience is fucking mind-blowing. Like legitimately fucking mind-blowing to the point where if you haven't had it, you wouldn't believe Fucking mind-blowing. Like legitimately fucking mind-blowing. To the point where if you haven't had it, you wouldn't believe it's possible. And then when you do have it, the world is never the same again.

Because you believe anything's possible. How the fuck could anybody ignore that? How could you ignore that as a possibility for cognitive enhancement? When you're looking at a primate, a thinking thing that discovers this mind-altering, insanely powerful drug that happens to grow the fuck everywhere. In shit. It grows in cow shit. And they're following these monkeys clearly tipping over cow patties and pulling out worms. They're experimenting with food sources constantly. If this stuff was there, and it was, if they ate it and they did, of course that's it.

There's a doubling of the human brain size over 2 million years that directly coincides with this receding of the rainforest in the grassland and experimenting with all these new food sources. What do you think of that? Anybody that listens to that. I think it's very interesting. I, you know, having studied this kind of stuff for a while, I'm very to say that's it but i would certain because everything ends up being multi oh yeah a lot of other shit involved right like i'll tell you here's a really interesting here's a well that's the whole man the hunter thing throwing arm yeah but here's a really interesting theory that that i don't hear spoken about much that sort of corresponds to this a little bit same time period of course uh people were running under hot sun because of the receding forest it was

savannah and one of the ways of hunting is to run the deer down right because we can persist much further than they can they're faster but only over 200 meters and then they get tired they don't sweat right exactly so they can't yeah so so these dudes are running it's hot lots of sun the brain gets overheated and so evolutionary pressure is on creating redundancy in the neural networks of the brain as a as a benefit as a as a sort of insurance policy against overheating right and so what happens is we develop all this surplus neural tissue that then gets wired into one thing, as opposed to, it's like having a spare tire

and suddenly your car has now five wheels. You know what I mean? It like, the evolution took advantage of this thing that was made for something else, which is a very well-known concept in evolution. It's called a spandrel. It's something that seems like it was designed to do that, but in fact, it's called a spandrel. It's something that seems like it was

designed to do that, but in fact, it's a byproduct of something else. And ultimately, of course, every result is a combination of things coming together and creating this one thing that we think of as like, oh, human beings, human beings, human consciousness, the evolved human consciousness. But when you think about all the possible factors that came into play and all the different things that must have happened and selective breeding and how people figured out who to mate with. And aliens. Yeah. What about the lizard? What's this lizard thing?

Well, that's David Icke. Right, David Icke. I would like to have him on the podcast, but I think apparently he doesn't like talking about that lizard thing anymore. Oh, really? He doesn't like talking about the reptilian thing anymore. He's moved on? It feels like it's a distraction. From what?

I don't know. I mean, maybe he's abandoned the idea, but I've heard he got mad at somebody for talking about it. I think it was like a Jesse Ventura show. Do you know?

Do you know? He might have got mad at Jesse Ventura. I think that was it. I think they got in an argument and Jesse Ventura was calling him a fraud. Yeah, I saw that.

I saw that episode. He, like, ambushes him and then he like really lets him have it. And then it was uncomfortable. There's a, you know, there's a fucking, there's a, there's a good point there. You know, when you, when you say something like someone's a reptilian, like everything else that you say, I have to go, come on, man. Fucking, you get, you're going to show the first instance Of something that's able to change Back and forth Not just morph

That's the idea It's not just like you're a caterpillar You're a butterfly You're back to a caterpillar That's what they're saying You can change back and forth There's nothing that does that You've got to have a video

You've got to have something You've got to show me some fossils you can't just go around saying people are reptiles man yeah you know you just can't do that because that means you're thinking sucks and I can't trust you to be the guy that talks but snakes used to be a huge huge problem for us right isn't that why there's like still are I mean yeah but it's not back then it was like a big fucking like now snakes are a problem. Right.

But you're not going to run into a snake. Dude, I ran over. When I'm getting coffee at a Starbucks, I'm not going to like, a snake's not going to bite me. More than five million years ago, snakes must have been such a problem that humans, chimps, and bonobo infants all recoil at an image of a snake. Yeah. Even if, you know, Eskimos, who are never going to see a snake, right? Eskimo kids will freak out if you show them a picture of a snake. It's like Enos.

So that reptilian thing is like a reflection of this weird, residual, neural horror story that got imprinted into our brains. And so now when people like David Icke are just trying to make evil or categorize evil or in the book of Genesis, what's the evil thing? It's the serpent. It's just a symbol that's supposed to embody ultimate evil, it seems like. Well, every animal besides us is compassionless. They are compassionless, especially of other animals.

They just don't. It's not a part of the wild community. Well, not every animal other than us. Chimps. Dolphins, chimps, bonobos. Intelligent ones. Some puppy fox. Come on.

You've met his dog, right? Well, even foxes. Have you ever seen foxes where people, they start living in the woods near foxes and the foxes eventually gain their friendship and then they become like their pets. It's very, very common for foxes to do that and to become almost like dogs and become really friendly with people. But ultimately, what makes us human, one of the big things that makes us human is this insane level of understanding we have for what we are and what our place is and constantly recognizing it, constantly either coming up with some way to justify it and some self-righteous position to take, or coming up with some way to try to fix the damage we've done, or coming up with some, where you're just trying to at least understand it.

But all those things are going on all at the same time. Looking for validation, is my idea right about this? Anger at this guy in traffic. It's all this big sea of shit that goes on at the same time so to compare that to anything else that exists it's like it's one of the weirdest animals that we've ever seen ever and it's us yeah we're the weirdest shit ever if we didn't exist if we we like found us like objectively found us and started analyzing our impact on our environment. This ultimately colossally catastrophic effect of us even existing on everything else around us.

Just annihilates the ocean of fish to the point where tuna are coming back radiated. And there's fucking a massive patch of garbage in the middle of the ocean. And the numbers of fish are down so radically that people are worrying that within 100 years there won't be any wild fish in the ocean anymore. Within another 100 years, we'll have cleaned out the ocean. Coral reefs getting wiped out all over the world. Destroyed.

If we watched us from afar, objectively, we would be like, oh my God. Fungal outbreak. This is insane. Yeah. Planetary athlete's foot. Let's get that shit off of there. Super AIDS. More like super AIDS. Not just athlete's foot. There's no Lamisil that's going to get rid of people. But we do spread.

You know what I mean? If you looked at it historically, you'd see these little sores and then rashes spreading out. Super AIDS. We're about to take over. Super Aids. Oh, man. We're about to take over. We're about to eat the host.

It's like before humans, planet Earth fucked some disgusting other planet. There's some like- They caught people. They should have worn a condom. Yeah. Yeah. Humans is herpes. Yeah.

Well, maybe so. Or maybe we got offloaded or something or you know maybe it's just some something that was on a craft so what what did mckenna say about this right because along with the the theory you were talking about earlier he's got the the the mushroom spores going through the outer space because they absorb cosmic rays and they're they can last forever that to me that's one of the more compelling parts of that whole thesis he's got. Well, allegedly, it's also the chemical composition of psilocybin in the first place. Psilocybin, which is very closely related to neurotransmitters, dimethyltryptamine. It's actually, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but it's something like

4-fox-4-oloxy-N-N-diamethyltryptamine. So it is literally like the same compound as a human neurotransmitter, and it's mixed in with something else. And this phosphorus in the 4 position, this 4-fox-4-aloxy, whatever the fuck it is, is the only compound like that on the planet. And they don't know what the origins of it was. They don't know where it came from.

It doesn't mean that it couldn't have been just a unique fungus. I mean, funguses in and of themselves are incredibly fascinating and closer to human than they are to plant. Funguses are weird. I mean, they're a strange sort of karma-free life form that just doesn't hurt anybody and just eats shit. Literally eats shit and exists in shit. Well, fungus attack us though, right? Jock itch? Isn't that an attacking fungus? Is it really attacking you or are you just a dirty bitch?

You're a dirty bitch. I found a good spot to live. You can call me whatever you want, but that is definitely attacking me. It's to encourage cleanliness. It's to encourage you to wash your balls. Here we go. I'll never. Wash your balls with tea tree oil, please.

Not during the holidays. Or we will grow. An itchy taint is God's way. Well, I think it's much more that there is no good or bad when it comes to the natural kingdom. That's much more of what it is. Even though it's karma-free, it's like the idea that it exists on your balls and it drives you crazy. It might be bad for you, but ultimately ultimately in the universe it just sort of balances out you know i met this you can have a little itchy ball so that it can live you got like pets on you

that's what you're saying like as a charity you should let yeah because otherwise you're murdering your pets it's like those guys in india who wear a filter over their mouth so they don't accidentally inhale an insect yeah and. And they walk back in. They're the Janes. Yeah, they're killing anything. So I don't know what they would do about jock itch. That's fascinating, isn't it? It's an interesting discussion.

I met a guy. You're talking about balancing out. I met a really interesting guy in Mozambique last week. I had dinner with him. And he has a thesis that each life has just like, you know, the, the,

the conservation of energy in the universe and energy is never made, created nor destroyed. You know, everything balances out in the end. Right. So his thing was each life has a balanced amount of suffering and pleasure. And the more you suffer, the more pleasure you'll get somewhere else. And

that these things always equal out to zero. And our great mistake as a civilization is thinking we can increase the amount of pleasure without compensating, without having an increased amount of suffering as well. And so we're running around chasing that pleasure without realizing that we're also accumulating and creating suffering. That makes sense to me, man, because the people that I know that have the hardest time keeping it together emotionally are people that don't work out. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but the people that I know that have the hardest time emotionally are people that don't work out. And the people that I know that do work out, especially the ones that work out hard, they expel these big giant bursts of energy where your body is like almost dying. You're heaving.

Your heart's pounding in your chest. You're barely able to lift this piece of metal up again. You're barely able to jump up on this box again. You're barely able to. And by putting yourself in that intense form of stress, it makes regular life more peaceful. It's the yin and the yang. You do see that when professional athletes are being interviewed interviewed like NBA dudes they all seem so high those guys

are high as fuck those guys get high they they actually keep marijuana off there or they did for the longest time off their drug list of the things that get tested because they all like to play stone that's cool hell yeah I mean what's more fun than that being a giant throwing a bouncy ball around some polished arena? That's a blast when you're high. Well, I think marijuana gives you a certain sensitivity to things. Yeah. It gives you a certain sensitivity to art.

The art that you make gives you a certain sensitivity to physical movements. A lot of guys love to do jujitsu. Can I throw something out here? Sure. physical movements. Like, a lot of guys love to do jujitsu. Can I throw something out here? Sure.

When you get really high, do you kind of see things, like, become a little more orangey? Does that happen to you? No. Because that does happen to me. Like, when I get really high, things seem to take on, like, a basketball orange tint. It's like that same kind of, like.

The rose-tinted glasses. How high are you getting, son? Very high. You're scaring me just sitting across the table from you. That's because, Duncan, normally he starts getting high about 4 p.m., and then the sun starts going down, and everything gets golden. That's the sunset in Duncan. Well, yeah, but I definitely get high before 4 p.m. Orange.

Well, this whole room is orange. Maybe that's just making you think that. He just shifted the lights. Well, this whole room is orange. Maybe that's just making you think that. He just shifted the lights. Well, you're near this orange, and you're also near the orange of that. I remember when I was in high school, getting in a conversation with someone I was with, it was really stoned. I'm like, you see orange dots everywhere? The two must have shit his pants.

He's like, that kid's crazy. I thought he was my friend. Now everyone's crazy. You ever have a friend go crazy on you? Yeah. I've had friends that legitimately lost their mind. I can't talk to them anymore. You would talk to them about events,

and his version of events was just so not what actually happened. Oh, this is a person that's lost their marbles. Yeah, it happens. You can temporarily lose your marbles. Or permanently. Or permanently, yeah. But I think that, yes, permanently, it happens. You can temporarily lose your marbles in this dimension. Or permanently, yeah. But I think that like, I mean, yes, permanently, of course. I'm not saying through psychedelics either.

No, I know what you mean. I'm just saying people that just can't keep it together anymore, and for whatever reason, whether it's a combination of life stress and biological situation, whatever the fuck they've got going on, uniquely in their own brain. But some people just all of a sudden, there anymore not keeping it together do they think they're keeping it together sometimes yeah i mean there's broad you know broad range right there's all kinds of yeah it sucks man people the brain is an organ and it malfunctions and and sometimes you go nuts and that's and you get stigmatized for it, which really sucks.

Because if you like – because that just adds to the problem. Like if you – you see somebody in a cast and you're like, oh, what happened to your arm? And they'll tell you, oh, whatever, I fell down. But you talk to someone who's been hospitalized for a few weeks and they tell you, yeah, I had to go to the hospital. I had a nervous breakdown. I went crazy, shit my pants, threw my dog through a window. You're like, you know, you want to be compassionate, but there's some part of you that's like, oh, now this is a crazy person. It's like, it's just something happened. The operating system temporarily

crashed. And quite often, I think that could be a very good thing. I think that having your personality or your ego crash can often mean that you were trying to be somebody that you aren't. And some people invest so much energy, so much energy. Self-defining. Yeah, they just want to be something. Since they were a kid, their mother was telling them you should be like this. And then they try to be like this and they hold up this thing. They're always working to hold up this giant tail feather and their arms start shaking and they can't hold it up. And that's when they have like anger outbursts or suddenly like their friends are like, you turned into someone that I've never met.

I don't even know who that is. It's like, no, that I've never met. I don't even know who that is. It's like, no. That is, you met them. You met underneath the tail feather, the seething sea of anger and disappointment and sadness. You met that thing that they're trying to avoid by looking up at this mask

that they're holding up to the world. But that fucking seething sea of disappointment and anger and horror and sadness, that's where it's at, man. You got to go into that thing. And for some people, the only way they can go into that is by having a full-scale nervous breakdown because then they can have permission to dive into that awful vortex of darkness. Because underneath that vortex of darkness is paradise. Underneath that, that's love and happiness and joy and connection and

tranquility and all that stuff. And everyone thinks that the way to get to that point is by avoiding this awful black forest that surrounds the Garden of Eden, which is inside everybody. It's inside everybody. It's there. It's there. And it doesn't matter. You can work out, and that will definitely give you a temporary good feeling. But until you address the internal structures that you haven't acknowledged, you're always going to go back to that place where you find yourself morose and depressed and angry, and you don't know why. You always go back to that place until you sit with the sadness inside of you. You have to do that.

What you're describing is coming out of the closet. Yeah, for a lot of people, that is what it is, man. It's coming out of the closet. And there's a lot of closets, man. There's a lot of closets, exactly. There's not just the gay closet. There's all kinds of closets. There's the artist closet.

Some people are fucking accountants. They're wearing suits and their tie's on tight and they're fucking organized and disciplined. But inside, they're probably painters organized and disciplined. But inside they're probably painters. They probably want to fucking paint. They want to paint day glow mountains down at the beach. That's what they really are. But their daddy or their mommy wanted them to be a good little businessman. So they became this thing that's the opposite of what they are. This is the verse in the Bhagavad Gita. God forgive me because I've quoted it way too many

times, but it's, it's better to be an honest street sweeper than a dishonest king. It's better to be a happy guy brushing fucking leaves up the street than it is to be some zillionaire who inside is dying or numb or miserable. Mostly numb. Numb's the word. Most people are just numb. But as long as these people can quantify on paper, I still have a X million dollar home. My car still costs X thousand dollars.

This suit is an X suit. I am still ahead. I am not going to abandon all these things. As long as they don't see through the bullshit of the game they think they're winning. They have to fall. Yeah, it's almost like you have to fall to really. You've got to appreciate those moments when it all falls apart on you because that means you've got an opportunity to try it again. Let's take a new, fresh perspective.

This is a cool thing at this retreat I went to. This guy Jack Kornfield said, which I really loved. What a great name, by the way. Yeah, with a K. Not a C, Jack Kornfield, Mortal Kombat, K, Jack Kornfield. But he's really cool, man. But he was talking. With a K.

Cool with a K. Yeah. Like the cigarette. And corny. No, this guy was awesome. And he was, one of the things he talked about is in some religious tradition, how they like hold the scriptures. A rabbi like had his students hold the scriptures over their heart. And when they were memorizing them and they

would say why do we do this and he said so that when your heart breaks they'll fall in and it's a beautiful idea which is that heartbreak is actually your ego cracking and the moment that cracks you're in the experience of truth and when you're in the experience of truth that's when you can really become who you are but but to get to who you are it's like when you know a bone heals the wrong way like that's what a lot of people's entire personality is it's like a bone that grew the wrong way and that needs a fucking a snap a crack you know and we you get that you need that that initial fucking thing and it's a beautiful analogy and it hurts it hurts but we're

pain avoiding creatures so we think that so we're always running away from this pain but the problem is as we're running away from pain we're still exactly in pain it's basically like being on fire and running away from water you're just running away from the water because you for some I don't know that's a stupid analogy actually for great up until that point. You had a lot of great points. It's true. There's the monster in the dark, and the faster you run,

the more likely you are to run into something that's actually going to hurt you, as opposed to turning around and saying, oh, fuck, there is no monster. No monster. But you're never going to know that until you stop and turn around. In some cases, people don't have the discipline or the assistance or the balls to stop and turn around, so they have to trip over something. And then there's like, oh, look. That's it. That's a great way to put it, man.

That's the classic story of someone hiding a secret and going completely out of control because of the pressure of hiding that. Like that's the Ted Haggerty, who's the secretly gay guy who's preaching against gay people. Oh, Ted Haggart. Ted Haggart, yeah. Yeah, in Colorado. Yeah, that guy. Who was snorting meth off his gay lovers. Oh, Ted Haggard. Ted Haggard, yeah. Yeah, in Colorado. Yeah, that guy. Who was snorting meth off his gay lovers. Yeah, yeah.

Woo-hoo! He was just going so far the other way. He was just so off the rails crazy. He was being himself. He was being himself. He was a guy who likes to snort meth off of cocks. He likes to do a little meth, and he likes to suck a few cocks. But I would say he wasn't being himself.

What I would say is that his behavior was so extreme because he was seeking balance between that and the other bullshit in his life. Whereas if he weren't living that, he'd be right in the middle. Right. Yeah. But to get to the middle, you know, the way to get to the middle, weirdly, is whatever the behavior is that you're doing that you're so horrified about and terrified of. Sometimes the really weird ideas, this is like something that I like that Ram Dass says, which is like, if you don't feel like meditating, don't meditate. Don't force it. Don't impose this on yourself. Keep doing the thing you're doing that's upsetting you so much. Have the balls to keep doing the fucking thing that you're doing. Keep doing it. Society is going to tell you, don't be like this.

Stop being like this. You have to change. That's what your parents always say. The idea is like, no, sink into what you are right now. Just be that thing. Stop resisting. Exactly where you are right now is perfect. And that's a hard truth to grasp because you think right away you think

yeah what about fucking jeffrey dahmer is he perfect well what about the leopard when you're seeing a leopard rip apart a creature is that thing per is that a perfect moment i don't think the leopard fucks them and then kills them but you know what ducks do ducks are necrophiliacs are they fucking evil creatures yes i think they are they are. Well, yeah, they are. They made that Phil Robertson guy a very famous person. He invented a call for them. And now poor gay people have to hear that a man's anus is not as good as a woman's vagina. Can you imagine if you made the choice for a man's anus and you hear this fucking big bearded fashionista with his camo on, a bandana?

He's an absolute fashionista. That's so weird. I never thought of that. Big beard. He's an absolute fashionista. That's so weird. I never thought of that. Big bearded Christian Bible slinging fashionista. And he tells you that your choice was incorrect. That in fact, the woman's vagina is the better choice. The man's anus. I mean, come on, guys.

But how can you say that if you haven't experienced it? Maybe he has. I think he has. Again, the balance theory. I think he's so outspoken on that issue, like most of these homophobes are, because they're home jerking off to gay porn. You know, otherwise, you just don't give a shit. It just doesn't actually matter. Right.

You know, it doesn't come up in a GQ interview. It's a duh thing, right? It's like, duh already. Yeah. If you really care if people are gay, duh. Yeah. If you really care the two guys love each other, are you against love? You only like love if it's a man and a woman?

What the fuck, man? Really? It's a duh thing. It is duh. It's duh. If you're talking about men's anuses in GQ, maybe you've got some issues to think about. Shouldn't we just be talking about ducks? Ducks' anuses?

Isn't that your whole show? Do you know ducks' penises? You shoot ducks all the time, right? That's your thing. Let's talk about that. Just talk about murdering ducks. Yeah, why you got to talk about men's butts? Why are you talking about asshole quality?

Why are you dragging this into butt sex? Ducks' penises are corkscrew shaped. Think about that. Oh, yeah. The wonders of nature. Evil nature is such a cunt. Nature is such a, oh, you're going to fuck, and you're going to keep it in there, too.

How about that? How about it turns into a root? Do you know why dogs stay stuck together when they fuck? Yeah, they have a bone. No, it's the head

of the dog's penis blows up like a ball. And it just gets trapped. And the female can hold it so he can't get the ball out. And it takes time for the ball to go down so he can actually

get it back out. That's why they're stuck. What is that? How does that help anything? Well, most penises have bone. I forget what the baculum, I think it's called. We are so lucky. We are very unusual that we do not have a penis bone.

If we had like a rhino horn that never got tired, there would be so many people that you'd have to climb over people to get where you wanted to go. We would have to figure out a way to carry our own shit with us at all times. It would be really rude. And then we would have to meet in shit

depositing spots and places where you get food. And you'd just be crawling over. And people just fucking along the way with their rhino horn. Or you could get a compound fracture. What about that? What if somehow a stripper sits on your cock the wrong way? That can happen.

Guys get broken dicks all the time. It bends badly. It actually starts bleeding. They have to go to the hospital and get it repaired. If you have like a big, strong, crazy girl, like a volleyball player perhaps, you don't let her get on top. It's very important. A volleyball player? Yeah, like a really strong woman.

You got to be really careful. What about equestrian sports? Is that all right? No, no, no. Those girls are too strong in the legs. Really? Too strong in the ass and legs because they can squeeze too tight. Yoga teacher?

It's just a girl who can generate too much force. Because if she gets on top and she's going crazy, some of them will get crazy. So a small volleyball player is okay. You've got to make sure you always keep an underhook no matter what. Keep an underhook. You want an underhook and you want to control her hip. So you never let it go to you. Because if she's just one of those mad dog dick riders that just wants to pretend she's at the rodeo, she could break your dick, man.

Yeah. Especially a big girl. Wow. A girl with some stout bones, make you a strong child. See, this is the stuff that you need to talk about on the news. Good breathing, strong teeth. They don't tell you about this on Fox News. There's no warning.

They're scared of the truth. Mike Huckabee doesn't say this. He should be saying this. Did you see... Public service announcement. Did you see Lee Camp? Do you know who Lee Camp is? No.

He's a stand-up comic who was on Fox News. And they were talking about something. And he just goes, can I just ask you a question? He goes, what is Fox News? He goes, this is just a parade of ignorance. Yes, it's a festival of propaganda really Yeah, I'm not sure I might have switched the parade and festival, but those are pretty much paraphrasing his words here We'll play it here because it's kind of fun Sure what what is Fox News? It's just a parade of propaganda and that it's just died

It's just a festival of ignorance what why a it? It's just a festival of ignorance. What? Why, a million people are dead in Iraq. Come on, this is ridiculous. What's the point of this? This is insane. Go out, people at home, go outside. Go hug your children. Lee, you should be more...

Robots malfunctioning. Listen to the girl. You should be more worried about that. Watch this, though. This is where it gets great. Look at this. This is Saturday morning. We're having some fun. Hello. Welcome.

How are you? Okay, their friend Bones, you know him as Dr. McCoy, just wrote a new book on Captain Kirk and the way he was able to woo beautiful women like this. It's all coming up soon. Oh, that's hilarious. Jesus Christ. Wow. They proved his point.

It's almost like it's scripted. It's almost like simulation theory is true and we're living in a goddamn Coen Brothers movie. Yeah, it does seem like that, doesn't it? It really does. It's beautiful, though. I think there's something beautiful about that. It does feel like there's a narrative at work here.

Yeah. Well, the only way you can live that fake life is if it's fake. This puritanical ideal that they've held up, it's not natural. And they haven't been really living it anyway. They've been pretending to be living it, being freaks in this sort of a rebound sort of a way to balance everything out. And I think that ultimately that's being exposed over and over and over and over again to the point where it's not going to be a viable option anymore. Like powdered wigs aren't a viable option anymore. You can't wear a fucking powdered wig, you know, and you can't pretend you're this, you know, Rick Santorum guy that, you know, just is a good man who believes in the Bible and doesn't want to see gays get married, doesn't want to ruin the institution of marriage with homosexual activity that's been shunned upon in the Bible.

May I quote? And you're like, oh, fucking criminy. What's going on really? What's going on behind the scenes with you, Kat? What is in your head man i keep waiting for it to get to that point where anybody who's got a big problem with homosexuality is by default admitting to their own homosexual life but i've been waiting 30 years for america to go come on this is too silly to be real ronald reagan are you kidding that guy was such a joke but you know he's saint ronald and the seeds

he planted 30 years ago well even then well even then i was in college with dudes who voted for him but do you remember the criticism though it was pretty open there was a lot of people that didn't like him i remember when he was in but not enough that he didn't win 49 out of 50 states in his re-election oh well listen man i'm not saying that you know he didn't dominate the vast majority. I mean, there was a lot of idiots back then. But the difference between the way people look at him now and the way people looked at him then, now it's almost all glowing. When people talk about Reagan, I hardly ever hear any criticism.

Yeah, you don't hear about Iran-Contra and Nicaragua and El Salvador and all the crazy shit. You don't hear about Oliver North and all that craziness and you know yeah but my point my point is that this idea that suddenly we're going to wake up and realize how ridiculous it is and it's rick santorum is too ridiculous to be real fucking what's her name sarah palin you know i i am amazed that how flexible the reality muscle seems to be that people are willing to accept this stuff that Frank Zappa was laughing about 40 years ago. I wonder if they're accepting it, though. I think that you watch these shows enough and it creates the illusion of acceptance,

but then if anywhere on the internet you just see this constant rebellion against that kind of square, mainstream, homophobic, angry personality. But you watch Fox News, and yeah, you watch Fox News, or you watch anything on TV, and it's an illusion. You know, you watch the commercials. Everything's this big illusion.

You watch the commercials, and it's like people go in and buy a car. It seems normal. It seems totally normal that people are going in to get deeply in debt to the banks. That all seems incredibly normal. It seems totally normal that people are going in to get deeply in debt to the banks. That all seems incredibly normal. But then more and more on the internet, you see like people rebelling against this and showing how the bankers, like the whole system is this fucked up thing and emerging things like Bitcoin, which are like slowly moving the energy away from it. I don't know. I know what you mean. I don't think it's going to be a sudden thing i think it's going to be more like a just a gradual shift as people just stop watching tv that's that's going to happen people are just going to you know i drive down the street

billboards for fucking um like amazon.com shows you know like billboards for shows that aren't really controlled by these big networks netflix yeah Hulu. Yeah. But isn't Amazon just another big network? I mean, it doesn't matter if it's a network or it's an international conglomerate or whatever it is. It's big money. It is, but you're right. But that's just the billboards. The reality is it's not.

Yeah, but it's not. It's not right because the media is a very different thing. The media, when you're talking about television, you're talking about a very hard thing to get into. The media, when you're talking about the internet, you're talking about an incredibly easy thing to get into. Literally open to almost anyone with an internet connection. You can make a YouTube video. It doesn't cost you a goddamn dime.

If you have a laptop that has a camera on it, you talk into it, you can make a YouTube video. Yeah, that's a big change. That's not just a big change. That might be the biggest change in human history. It might be the biggest change since the monkey ate a mushroom right or certainly since the printing press the printing press was a major for sure giant you know and similar in the sense that it took the power of communication away from very few and gave it to a lot more right so and that's

sort of one of the more fascinating things about this is that even if Amazon does put something online, it's no better than iJustine who has like 45 fucking billion followers and every video she puts. There's people like that that just became famous through the internet. Jenna Marbles is another one, right? She's got like millions and millions and millions of hits. Okay, yeah. Here's what it is. Here's what it is, because I've just been reading Sheldrake's new book, Science Set Free, and he talks about morphic resonance or something. And I know you have some I think you're skeptical about Sheldrake, but it's like when you just have TV, TV is a tuning fork. And when there was no Internet and it was just TV and it was a depiction of here's what a family looks like, here's what people tend to, it's a corporation saying,

here's what people do when they're healthy. And that creates a tuning fork effect, which is like, if you're watching it enough, you're going to either resonate with it or, or, or, and feel like, yes, I'm doing great. I have a wife and a house and a car and a job, and that's great. I'm in tune with what everyone else is doing, but that's great. I'm in tune with what everyone else is doing. But that's an illusion. That's never been what everyone else is doing. It's just what massive conglomerates are sending out there, either in the form of hypnotic content that keeps you glued to your seat as you watch corporations try to get you in debt to buy cars. You know, it's generally, it's just, the whole thing is just tuning all of society in a way that society maybe isn't meant to be tuned at all. And so with the internet now, you have all these different smaller tuning forks, you know.

Your podcast is a tuning fork. People tune into the stuff that you talk about. And the different people that you bring on the podcast send out information that causes a new kind of tuning to start happening. So that's why when you watch Huckabee, you'd really feel like you're listening to somebody sing off key. Because you're not resonating. You're not resonating. You've been tuned into a whole different thing,

which is what the Internet's, I think, one of the major things the Internet has done. You get these communities, Reddit. You can get tuned into the Reddit frequency quite easily where suddenly it all just starts making sense. And that is why, you know, the Duck Dynasty guy or any of these weirdos who are just ultimately just angry people, that's why they seem so fucking crazy. Or they play angry people on TV, right?

Because I think a lot of these people aren't even, you know, like the Raymond Politician. That doesn't work with the Duck Dynasty guy. The Duck Dynasty guy has been giving speeches like that for years at these biblical retreats and stuff. He's been doing that for, there's videos. Oh, that's his real shtick. He's a fire and brimstone, God-fearing Christian man who was living on the wrong side of the law and Jesus at one point in time and then turned it all around and wants to let everybody know about the evils of sin he's an old dummy that's what he is he's an old dummy that loves a scientific name for him he's an old dummy that probably just one time sucked a dick

and liked it way too much if someone sucked his dick and it's his favorite moment he looks back on his childhood and he's turned it into you know a career I bet he was hunting ducks when it happened I bet he was in that duck it happened. I bet he was hunting. They're in that duck blind. They're all liquored up on moonshine. He wasn't hunting ducks. I bet right when he came into, like, some guy's mouth years ago out in the fucking desert, he saw a duck.

That's why they call it a duck blind. Yeah, he saw a duck and the combined pleasure and shame mixed inside him. He's like, I'm just going to kill ducks from now on and never think about this. Ducks, you didn't see shit. Your mother didn't see shit. Your father didn't see shit. Nobody saw shit.

Can you imagine if that's really what it was all? It was just a duck saw him get his dick sucked by a guy and he's like, fuck that. It didn't happen. I need to kill ducks. I think that's something like that happened man it's something like that happened yeah but you know man like what you do with with you know sex at dawn creates a resonance where it's like it's a it's a shame reliever it's

a shame reducer man because your book i think it has been it's such a compassionate book for people who are stuck in monogamous relationships and feel guilty about the fact that they are attracted to other people and that's like that guilt used to be a normal guilt that was actually considered like oh something must be going wrong with your relationship if you're thinking about fucking other people and your book make shows like no actually that's just nature happening through you you don't have to feel guilty about it or like something's off balance in you it's just completely normal it doesn't mean you have to go and fuck other people but at least now you don't have to feel like i must not love

her anymore or she must not love me anymore what's that have to do with fucking ducks country music songs that's the glue yeah the glue that connects These two Fucking ducks And the sadness you have For not wanting to be monogamy Yeah Country music Country music You're right

That's the glue Yeah That keeps it all together It's the glue that holds That's why you need to listen To Phil Robertson And that That god damn

Communist A&E That puts them on Is that what it's on Is it on A&E I think it's A&E Isn't that hilarious It's on A&E

A&E used to be like Fucking masterpiece that what it's on? I think it's A&E. Isn't that hilarious? It's on A&E. A&E used to be like fucking masterpiece theater and shit. Yeah. They used to have like arts and entertainment. They used to have this interesting, fascinating programming that stimulated the mind. That don't sell cars. Not anymore. Now it's anal entry. Yeah.

Now it's fucking people that found a storage box. What's in this storage box? Well, I bet there's a lot of good stuff in there. I bet there's nothing in there. More after the break. Yeah. How much do you take for that? $500?

I can't give you $500. I can give you $300. I got to get at least $400. I don't know. Cut to commercial. The narrative arc. I'll tell you, this is my last offer, and I'm being serious. Cut to commercial. Wow, I wonder tell you, this is my last offer, and I'm being serious. Cut to commercial.

Wow, I wonder what his last offer is going to be. He got him down to three. I wish I could say there hadn't been many times. You're guilty of this too, dude. Fuck yeah, I love it. I just last, sorry to interrupt you, don't get it. No, go ahead. But last week I was in Mozambique, and where I was staying,

they had one of these satellites with 700 channels, and I was scrolling through, and who do I come upon Joe Rogan fear factor yeah some there was some thing shooting fish through the air and some woman in big waders had to catch the fish I wish I could remember it it was another that wasn't your favorite episode well we did 148 of them. Jesus. More, actually, because we did seven or six, six I think. Six more upon return. That's nuts. So we did, yeah, we did a full season, like the biggest

time was like 34 episodes, 34 one hour shows. Were you having fun? I mean, are you contractually prohibited from discussing it? No, not at all. No, I mean, it wasn't like doing stand-up or it wasn't like working for the UFC or anything like that, but the people were really nice that worked on the show.

They became good friends, and they were fun folks. We had fun. You know, like, it was a real nice crew. Yeah, that's cool. And when you have that, it's like, that's like the most important thing about working on a show.

It's a family, right? You're with the same people all day. But ultimately, the product itself, like, you know, I mean, it's mindless entertainment. You know, it's a competition, a ridiculous competition that's good to distract you if you're looking for some distraction. Yeah. But it's junk food. It's junk food for the mind. Not that it's anything, nothing bad about it, but nothing good about it either.

There's no reason to think that it's going to elevate anything in any way. But it's better than arguing over how much you're going to pay for a container. Maybe, I guess it is. But there was real human drama in Fear Factor. It was undeniable. People really shit their pants when they were forced into certain stunts and height stunts and

ridiculous things they had to eat. It's a miracle nobody got fucked up for real on that show. I was just talking to my good friend David Hurwitz who will be, we're going to figure out a day to put him on the podcast. He was the executive producer of the show. One of the executive producers.

Him and Matt Kunitz. And we were talking about it on the phone the other day. We were like, I told him, I go, I want to be honest with you, man. I'm glad they ended the last season. I go, because I think it was like on its way

to being... It was so ramped up. With the stunts getting more and more risky? Way more risky. Well, I don't want to say risky, because it's... I would be ignorant to say that. I'm not a stunt man. I'm not a stunt designer. I don't know what's dangerous and what's not. I don't know what just looks dangerous which is actually pretty sick.

But all I know is they were starting to get more and more spectacular. Like we had these people attached with a bungee cord to a helicopter. And I mean, the helicopter was like 200 yards away on this enormous bungee cord. And their partner had to undo locks. And when they undid the locks, they

had to find the right key, like this giant ring of keys. And if they did it within a certain amount of time, the person got launched off of this tree, like, you know, fucking 100, 200 yards into the air on a bungee cord attached to the bottom of a helicopter. It was fucking crazy. And I remember they were describing the helicopter. They were like, well, you know, we have to be careful with this because you've got to make sure that the people don't pull the helicopter at a weird angle. That makes the helicopter spiral out of control. Can you imagine as you're falling, the helicopter just slices you into hamburger? We did a lot of them like this where people hung from helicopters.

But that's really not that big of a deal. They're just hanging over water. You know, if they fall, they just land on the water. And they're not going nearly as fast as it looks like. Bouge, though. That's a long drop. That's a long drop.'s a yeah but you're gonna live it just yeah it sucks it feels weird but you're gonna live you learn a lot about human beings from a show like that though it's fascinating because between that and uh what doing mma commentary i really i know a lot about seeing

people when they're when they're breaking like at at the point where they can't tolerate anymore and they give up. There's a give-up point that some people have. Some people don't even have it. Some people never give up. They just have this, whatever that give-up thing is, a part of them, it's broken. They don't even consider it. They'll just march forward with their face hanging off. There's this guy, Diego Sanchez, who fights like that.

This guy might not be the most skilled fighter. He's very skillful. Might not be the most skilled, but he's one of the most crazy in that he's not going to quit. This is dangerous, man. Did you see that video of those two guys at the spa who broiled themselves? Did you see that? They broiled themselves? Yeah. It's like a competition. It's like a spa, right? You can stay in the longest a spa right you can stay in the you can stay in the spa the longest in this in this sauna and it's these two guys and they like you know it's a it's an elimination process these are really disturbing pictures if you show them but it's like basically uh one of the guys died like he broiled himself inside this thing because he wouldn't get out he wouldn't listen to his body broiled he just cooked himself like a fucking lobster in there and i think one of the guys survived but there's just a picture of him

you can find if you google search like guys fried and sauna or something i don't know what it is but it's like he's just laying there and his whole body's rigid he's like you know like like you put a fucking like a lighter on a ant which god forgive me i did want when i was a kid i know but it's just like that. Like he's just curled up and he's bright, blistered red. Oh, my God. Really horrible because he wouldn't give up. What a dumbass way to die.

You die at a spa? Got broiled. Hey, he died with his slippers on. I mean, it's like being massaged to death or something. Those little rubber slippers. Yeah. Those rubber slippers they give you? Fatal relaxation. Yeah. You know? Hey, the guy, he went out. He's a fucking slippers they give you. Fatal relaxation.

Yeah. You know? Hey, the guy, he went out. He's a fucking hero in my book. The guy's got balls. The guy's got balls. He didn't give up. This is an interesting thing, though.

You see, like, people who rise to the occasion and people who doubt themselves. And you see them, like, fumble and stumble because of the pressure. And some people find a way to, like, to get through it. It's one of the more fascinating things about watching anything that's a competition is that we wonder how we would do in that scenario. And we almost always fall short. Yes. So we're always in awe of the guy who manages to get by all those people

that are trying to drag him to the ground and carry that ball across the line. Amazing. I wouldn't have done it. You know, in the list of things that people are afraid of, consistently number one after death, of course, is public speaking. Right? And here you guys are, two stand-up comedians, right? I give public presentation.

I mean, I think that's a big one. I mean, I don't know how it compares adrenaline-wise to hanging from a helicopter on a bungee cord or whatever. Or sauna competition. Or sauna. Show that pic. A sauna off. Can you show that pic? I can't find the gross one. It's just these two. Show sauna off. Can you show that pic? I can't find the gross one.

It's just these two. They might have pulled it from the internet. That's not the guy. It's like a guy who's like, maybe somebody tweet. Maybe it's not the real picture. Maybe you got a picture of a guy who died in a fire. Somebody tweet a JPEG of this guy getting broiled, man. It's really.

How do you know it's true, Duncan? I almost died in a sauna once. Really? Yeah, but I'd been drinking a lot and then decided to have sex with my girlfriend. Oh, look. Yeah, we passed out. Oh, my God.

Both of us in the sauna, and we were alone. And luckily, I woke up somehow. First of all, you guys are fucking lightweights. What do you mean? I just had to say that. Passed out in a sauna. You don't know how to eat fucks, man. Exactly. That's what I just had to say that. Passed out in a sauna. It was a lot of alcohol. You don't know how he fucks, man.

Exactly. That's what I was going to say. I bet Chris Ryan fucks like a honey badger. I love the way you said that. You don't know how he fucks, man. And she was a volleyball player. I'm lucky I didn't break my dick. That was a really powerful one, so be careful.

Really strong athletic. Puerto Rican volleyball player. Oh, Jesus, Louisa. Yeah. Good God, man. Now he's still alive. In a sauna. Is that real?

There you go. Yeah, that's real, man. Look at his skin falling off. That's it. He's all rigid. He's dead. He broiled himself. He broiled himself.

That guy's dying right there? I think he's probably dead already there. What does it say, Jamie? What's the scroll? Yeah, right there. Hold on. It says he's being removed from the sauna. Oh, my goodness. That guy got fucking cooked he got cooked they literally cooked themselves for what a trophy he probably won at least five dollars it's ridiculous man

so humans get lured into awful things i gotta pee here yeah that is a weird thing man darwin award that's a darwin award winner right there yeah it is but you know we we also if if he won and it was like a million dollars or something like that and he was okay we would applaud him for his ability to withstand extreme agony we we somehow or another admire people that are willing to survive extreme agony and the force of endurance races and things for something meaningful though not for a million dollars. Right. You know, I mean.

Well, what's weirder, this or dying in a super marathon, one of those hundred marathon, you know, hundred mile marathons and your fucking heart gives out. I think they're both kind of dumb, really. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nothing against athletes, but yeah, I just, I find all that kind of hardcore competition meaningless. I just read a very interesting book called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, who was in a concentration camp in World War II. He was a psychiatrist. And he said the how of anything is resolved if you find the why.

And what he meant was you can survive anything if it's meaningful. If it's not meaningful, anything will take you down. Wow. It's a very interesting book, beautiful book. Anyway, I don't know why the hell

I'm talking about that. Oh, endurance, right? Because he endured Auschwitz. So I find that, that's obviously incredibly admirable. But somebody's like, you put yourself in that position. I was talking to a friend in Africa and he was joking.

He was like, you know, only white people die bungee jumping and, you know, like motorcycle jumping and all this. So that's a white dude thing. If I told my mother I died bungee jumping or if someone told my mother I died bungee jumping, she'd be like, that idiot was bungee jumping. He didn't die from malaria or starvation? Or, you know, like, what are you, white? Well, that's a hack stand-up comedian premise. Oh, is it? Yeah, for black comics, we'll talk about, like, camping. That's a big one.

They're terrified of bears and shit. Black people don't go camping. It's like the whole thing that, like, white people go out bungee jumping. White people jump out of a helicopter and ski down the side of a mountain. So maybe he stole this from Dane Cook. No, I don't think. It's probably an obvious premise because it's true. A lot of things, there's a lot of parallel thinking when it comes to the realization

if you live in an incredibly dangerous environment like Africa and you're looking at white people that are fucking bungee jumping. You're not looking for danger. What are you doing, stupid? It seems to be, it writes itself. It's not like, you can't see how a lot of people would come to the same conclusion. I mean, it's true. White people are fucking hang gliding and shit

and getting in those fucking wingsuits and flying through downtown Brazil. That's intense. Oh, man. Oh, my God. I can't even watch that shit. Yeah. Dude, did you see that video of the gay dance troupe in Alabama? Yes, I tweeted it.

It's so awesome. Oh, that they hired by accident? Yeah. Yes. Tell the story. Well, they hired a gay female impersonator dance troupe accidentally for this parade. What was the name of the dance troupe to accidentally for this parade and they and like they like what was the name of the dance troupe I can't remember the name

I don't remember but it was something ridiculous but what's so funny is you have so here's what you have you have these like gay dancers and they're interviewing them and like combining that with interviews with an angry mother who's like my child never should have had to see something like that she's clearly the satanist right she's like a my child never should have had to see something like that. She's clearly the Satanist, right? She's

like a pawn of the Dark Lord. She's an angry, angry person. These guys, they're just saying like, they're saying like, that's so hilarious. Listen, man, if this came to my town, I would be fucking throwing money at them.

It's just hilarious. It's fabulous. It's great, man. They're good, too. Come on, it's just hilarious it's fabulous it's great man they're they're good too come on that's funny in in the in the interview that they did with him they threw out like alan watts level wisdom one of them says at the end of the day we just came to dance it's really beautiful and sweet meanwhile this white angry white lady is, my child will never be the same. My child saw Dancing Coon with a Santa Claus outfit on.

Yeah. It's really weird. Who's evil? You should be laughing with your kids. How is that hurting anything? I'll tell you why. These people don't get any weed. That's what it is. Weed is just not really getting down there.

And certainly no acid. If we were high and we were at the side of the road and that parade walked by, we would be in our glory. Yes. We would cheer and we would- We might join them. Fuck. I don't know if I'd join them.

Pull your shirt up and join in. That would be distracting them from their work that they've obviously put. It'd be like me being a heckler who thinks he's funnier than the comedian. Oh, you think so? Yeah, because they've obviously... That was the other thing about it. That shit was choreographed. It's true.

It's not their fault that the fucking people who hired him didn't really know what they were getting. It's like being a comic and you get booked for a club and they go, well, we expect you to work clean. Well, I expect you to know what the fuck I do before you hire me. Yeah. I'm here, dude. Do you want me to do comedy or not? But you don't get to tell me what to do. It's like when Ted, you know, the thing when Ted had Sarah Silverman and then they, she came out and did what Sarah Silverman always does. And then the next day the head of Ted tweeted that it was the most God awful performance he'd ever seen. And he was embarrassed to have invited her and shit. Like how, how are you surprised

that sarah silverman says shit that's offensive well what was her premise what was she uh going on to uh to talk about do you know she just did her stand-up routine she did the thing uh talking about you know adopting a baby with terminal illness you know that that business you haven't heard that yeah oh it's great it's it's great. The whole thing is like, I love kids. And she does it with her cute Sarah Silverman thing. I love babies. But they get older and then it's problematic. So there's so many kids who need parents.

I'm going to adopt children with terminal illnesses. So they die when they're seven or eight. And then I can get another one. She is great. It's fucked up. But it's obviously comedy This idea that And this is one of the grossest things that's going on these days I've actually started talking about this on stage

There's a real problem with people pretending that Jokes are statements And these are actual opinions There's an art to saying Fucked up shit you don't really mean If I know that you don't really mean it. It's fun. You and I do it all the time. It's the essence of comedy.

You take that out. Duncan will call me up and say the most ridiculous shit. And I'll say, well, that sounds like a good idea. How long have you been working with the Mormons? Joe, I've seen the error of my weight. You'll hang in there for five minutes. When he got taken by the NSA to the camp, right? Oh, yeah.

The camp. That was fantastic. On my podcast, I said that I'd been taken to a camp. A re-education camp. To a re-education camp. And then me and Brendan Walsh just sang songs about how great the beach is. And it just turned into this vapid thing. But man, I think that what people forget is that it's the intention.

Yeah, it's always that. It's always the intention. Always that. I think people feel like there's cheap laughs that people get away with at the expense of other people's feelings. And that's why they don't like certain kinds of jokes. I agree. of other people's feelings, and that's why they don't like certain kinds of jokes. I agreed.

There's a balance, and there's off-color subjects that are absolutely done hilarious, and then there's off-color subjects that are done crudely, and it's almost insulting how bad the material is, and you're obviously just doing it just for shock factor. And we know the difference between the two. It's the difference between someone you want to listen to where they're carefully considering what they're saying and then someone who's just not really either capable of or not willing to look deep enough to get true insight so when they're both both have to be accepted though right yeah because you can't have one without the other you have to compare them you need shitty comedy to compare

the good comedy right you need bad experiences i think the good comedy. Exactly, right. You need bad experiences. I think the hack for life as far as, like, bad experiences, like the sadness and the trouble and then the happiness, is just exercise. Just fucking work out in a brutally hard way and avoid all that depression. Just get all that shit out of your way. Like, if you get through, like, a brutal kickboxing workout or a jiu-jitsu workout, regular normal nonsense,'m fucking leaving that's it i've got my shit okay all right

you're too tired to give it yeah look this has been choking me all night okay leaving okay so um that is a shocking thing about exercise sometimes when i'm depressed and i finally like drag myself out of the house and go to the gym and just run and sweat and then i'm in my car and i feel great and it's like really that's all i am is that it i just have to exercise there's no like chant well you're a fucking bag of chemicals there's no chance yeah you you want the the uh mystical payoff yeah no i just want i want it i want it it's some part of, when you realize just how very simple it is, some part of you will reject that because you want it to be complex. You want it to be something like, oh, you mean I just.

I don't want it to be complex. I just want it to hurt less. Well, it's always doing that to you anyway. I mean, there's a transformative process throughout every experience that you have throughout your life. Everything that you do, you sort of get a balance on, well, now I know how to handle this better this time. The reality of the situation is we have a certain amount of requirements that our body needs. It needs to move around. It has to.

But doesn't it atrophies? It becomes fairly useless. Right. You have to keep it moving. Good food. And to really appreciate the movement of it, you have to push it really hard. Right. You push it really hard.

It's like a drag racer or a race car that you could develop into a race car. You develop it just by pushing it and pushing it and pushing it, and it becomes a race car. Or if you let it sit alone, it becomes a really junky old shit box that can't start anymore. I mean, it literally is almost that simple. I wonder if you really have to push it though because i'm thinking of hunter-gatherer people right who are sort of the model for what the body needs and they don't really push it but they move constantly moving constantly it's hard have you ever gone hiking with pack and go yeah yeah no it's it's good it's

a good workout it's a real workout like you's a real workout. Like, you start to, like, walking up hills all day, man, you get fucking exhausted. Yes. Nepal. There's a guy, we were talking about this guy that, there's a show called Solo Hunters. And these guys, they take, like, these little, you know, those little GoPros and attach them to their rifle or their bow and arrow. And they have a camera with them and they go out into the woods and they hunt bear and moose and, like, crazy shit. Well, one of the guys, this guy, Remy Warren, who's, like, this world-famous hunter,

he's got a VO2 max of a high-level endurance athlete, and all he does is hike. He hunts 300 days a year. He's constantly walking around at high altitude. Yeah. Yeah, constantly walking around in hills in high altitude carrying backpacks. Yeah. It's fucking hard work.

Yeah. It's really hard work. So, like, that's what, if you were going to hunt, like, that's what you had to do. You had to fucking walk a lot. It's like, hunting is not just like, oh, let's go to the animal place and go shoot one of those fucking things

and drag it out of there. No, you got to find them, you got to track them, you got to sneak up on them. Especially in the old days, you had dog shit equipment. You had bows and arrows that you made yourself. That's crazy. Oh, my God. Spears.

Terrible. And you've got to get close enough to an animal to use that thing. And there's a common misconception that there were more deer back then. Actually, there weren't. There's more deer today in North America than there have ever been. Way more than when Columbus first got here. Because of management, because of all the different habitats, because of farmlands, they thrive in farmlands like fucking rats.

Well, and because of the absence of predators, which humans killed. Exactly. I was just in Kruger Park in Africa a week ago. Intense place, really interesting place. And I was thinking about that, that very issue of like how, because Kruger Park is this big area. It's – I don't know how big it is, but it's like a county size or bigger. And they're just dirt roads and you just sort of drive around.

And the deal is you can never get out of your car because there are leopards and lions and all sorts of crocs and shit everywhere. But you see a lot of stuff. I mean there – we saw during the day we probably saw five or six lions just along the side of one of these roads, dirt roads. So if there are five or six lions just along the road, how many lions are there in that place? You know, it's like there's a lion every hundred meters along the road. Well, how many fucking lions can a place like that support? Of all my friends, you're the most likely to get eaten by an animal. I just realized that.

you're the most likely to get eaten by an animal. I just realized that. Well, did you know that in those areas in South Africa, especially like a lot of those places where wild animals exist, they're fenced in. Yeah. There's a lot of what they call high fence hunting operations in South Africa because it's a dirty secret about Africa and about a lot of North America, but even more dirty about Africa because Africa a lot of his trophy hunting the amount of money that people pay to go

hunting over there is is that's responsible for a great deal the money that's used for conservation efforts like there's a really and they also for importing animals like they've there's more a lot of African animals in Texas right then there are in Africa because Texas, they bring them to these wild hunting ranches, like thousands and thousands of acres. And they just have these deer just live there. They just live in Texas now. And they just live off the land. And then they take guided trips to go and hunt these things.

But they have African wild animals that are running around, like Sitka deer and shit, running around Axis deer, running around in Texas. Yeah. People who pay for hunting licenses, they go over and, I mean, it's kind of crazy. There was a piece on how cowardly it is to hunt the lions. Someone showed it on this website because they're just sitting there. All you do is you run up to the difference between a normal day and a day where the car shoots them is that a metal stick comes out, and then all of a sudden their life ends. So they're just sitting there.

They have no idea you're a threat. They have no idea that this is a game that we're playing, like we're going to shoot the lion. They're just sitting there chilling, and then someone comes along and will ice a lion. Like, it's kind of fucked, but people want to be able to say that they killed a lion. As if there were any danger whatsoever. Yeah, a lot of them are doing it from trucks. They're doing it from the roof of trucks. There's a great Hemingway short story about a guide who takes a man and his wife out to hunt lions.

And the guy is about to shoot the lion, and the lion charges. And the dude freaks, and the guide has to kill the lion when he's about to kill the lion and the lion charges and the dude freaks and the guide has to kill the lion when he's about to kill the guy yeah and uh and then that night the guide sleeps with the guy's wife holla yes of course he does of course hemingway what a badass so so fucking manly did you ever see that uh woody allen uh movie where um i think it's called midnight in paris yes owen wilson he goes back in time and he meets Hemingway. That was pretty fascinating. I love

that premise. All the different writers and painters and stuff that were there. Picasso was there. Just the idea of meeting Hemingway. Man, it's just... Getting drunk with him. Some people live, like really live, man. Some people really... Like when I hear your stories about Africa and like, you've been everywhere.

Listen to you, woes me. You just got back from a fucking spiritual retreat with Ram Dass in Hawaii. No, I don't feel. You're so silly. I don't feel woes me. I'm just saying, like, when I was there, when I was at that retreat, and by the way, that's not like in Africa. There's no lions there. There's cougars.

But, like, I'm just but uh they're more doing that with crystals but but but when when i was um you know when i was there you would run into people who just all they do is just travel they figure out how to do it they just travel around the world and you're kind of like that i used to be like a traveler you seem you were just in africa yeah but i was there because my my wife's daughter was getting married. I didn't go to Africa. For years, for 15, 20 years, the thing that was most meaningful

for me was movement and travel and seeing new cultures and all that. You're talking about backpacks. Man, I wore a backpack for 15 years. Well, you're the real deal, dude. You're a guy who really made that choice. You're a guy who got to that point and you're like, you know what? Nope what nope i'm gonna have a bunch of really cool experiences and a bunch of adventures but but just like anything else you sort of you get to have been there done that

point and it started to be like well you know what another stamp in my passport really doesn't fucking matter anymore well you are you have a real gift for podcasting. I'm glad you're really doing this now. You have a gift for the narrative that may not come through in just a printed word as much because you can't hear you say it. It's not just the thoughts that you say. It's how you say it. You're very good at it. So the idea that you didn't do it before and now that you have done it, like the idea that you're going to just travel around the world and not give us fresh podcasts people like this bullshit bro well thank you that's really nice you know it's true man i'm really glad you're doing it and the guy who got me into it is duncan i mean daniele bolelli i'm really glad he's doing

it as well yeah it's it's a cool thing and i'm really glad you're doing as well i mean it's it's podcasting is one of the weirdest and most uh fascinating entrants into the world of media that's ever existed it's one of the one of the weirdest and one of the ones where you can i think probably affect the like the curve of society i think the curve of society is going to get affected more by fascinating podcasts than by virtually anything that they've ever had as far as like the the like exposed electronic media whether it's television whether it's radio i think all those things had a big impact but i think podcasting and viewer created or you know uh regular user created content, whatever it may be, people with webcams, people writing blogs, this new stream of stuff that's coming down the pipe now,

it's so different. There were no podcasts like yours. It did not exist when I was in high school. If it did exist when I was in high school, me and my friends would have huddled around candles, okay? We would have sat around listening, and we would have talked about, do you think Duncan's right?

Yeah, my dad's a fucking asshole. Duncan's totally right. This dick just wants me to suffer like him, and he'll fucking regret it on his dying deathbed, but will I let him regret it? Fuck no. I'm taking my guitar, and I'm fucking hitchhiking to Canada.

And I think that exists now en masse. You're doing it. You're doing it. So many of our friends have podcasts. Bill Burr and Brian Callen and Ari Shafir and Joey Diaz. It's like a fucking epidemic. You want to talk about an epidemic of entertainment. Podcasting is an epidemic.

Yeah, it's definitely. I wonder what it's gonna evolve into I cuz it's still in the early embryonic phases of the thing I wonder what it's gonna be in 15 years what it will be or how it'll be accepted or or what it'll be I'm really thought it's gonna vary just like everything else very it's like books like you know there's books that are dog shit you're not gonna get a goddamn thing out of them and there's books that you read like everything else varies. It's like books. There's books that are dog shit. You're not going to get a goddamn thing out of them. And there's books that you read like the war of art. You read a couple of passages and you're like, God, yes, this fucking guy's nailing it. Like, holy shit, this is a real game changer.

This guy's giving me the tools to re-approach my way of looking at the very thing I do for a living. Like, wow, this is kind of nuts. way of looking at the very thing I do for a living. Like, wow, this is kind of nuts. You know, so there's a lot of variation when it comes to podcasting, but it's the possibility that someone could just express something and it can get there immediately. Think about all the time and effort you had to put to creating a book like Sex at Dawn. And think about if you just decided to break that discussion up into X amount of podcasts and just freely relay your experiences on the subject, the information, where you got it from. Passionately talk about these cultures where these people have these unique experiences with each other. Passionately talk about the roots of common misconceptions about things like promiscuity and a lot of this. It's all missing in a flat word.

You know, you could get that you gather the prose and, you know, you can kind of paint the. But to hear a person say it, you know, to hear you talk about your work is almost more rewarding. Yeah. And it's very rewarding on on my side as a writer, because the thing is, like, I'm not one of these people who always wanted to be a writer. I always had people telling me I should be a writer because when I wrote something it worked you know but I never like writing I still don't like writing and people get really disappointed to hear that like oh you know it's your process and like my process I just avoid it as long as possible and then do it you know that's my process I hate it I really like public speaking and I like stuff like this because

there's an immediacy to it. It's the difference between sitting in a studio and making a record and doing concerts. It's energized. If you're not terrified by public speaking, as none of us are, you guys know better than me. It fills you with energy to be on stage and see people responding to what you're saying as opposed to draining it out of you. Also, I think that I can clearly see that I've benefited greatly from all these conversations. Like I know me personally, it's expanded my thoughts. It's an education. 100%.

Yeah. It gives people a reason to take time out of their day and talk with you, which is so cool. It's also made me very enthusiastic about communicating with people. And I think the art of conversation, you know, I think we're so lost in the day-to-day grind where people have to pretend to be something they're not for the majority of their day. They, you know, they have to be reserved. You can't, you know, make jokes. You can't talk about anything that's really crazy or controversial because you have to work. You know, you're there to work. You're not there to be yourself. So

there's all this suppression. And then when people get free of that, how much time do they really have to truly open up? And the more people you're around that are exposing you to different thoughts, like one of the things that I love about talking to you is you and I often agree on things, but we also have wildly different perspectives

that we come at these things from. And you'll oftentimes come at something where I'll go, yeah, I agree with you, but you're coming at it from such a weird place that I probably never would have considered. But because you're my friend, I get to consider that. And then I get enriched by this possibility. And then you being my friend, you will come up with another possibility. And we all feed off of each other. And then other people listen to that and they say, hey, I was listening to Duncan Trussell talk about this thing.

And Christopher Ryan said that this is – and then boom and that branches out and then it spreads from there. The enhancement that you feel in having these conversations is contagious. It's contagious to other people that are listening to it. I met people in Maputo, Mozambique who listened to Duncan's podcast. No way. Yeah. Seriously. What's up?

And completely randomly, right? I'm sitting at a table in this wedding and I said something about a podcast and someone at the table is like, oh, I listen to podcasts. And it's like, who do you listen to? And it's like, oh, this guy Duncan Trussell. I think he's in LA. It's like, I've heard of him. Yeah, yeah.

That's fucking badass. That's so badass, man. The range. I got an email from someone saying, a FedEx driver in Utah who listens to my podcast when he's driving, and I'm sure yours as well

since we're all sort of in the same, and a woman in Finland who listens to it when she's commuting to work in the morning. Is she hot? I'll bet. Duncan wants to know. She's got to be hot.

Yeah. And it's dark up there all winter. Oh, she wants a hug. She wants to sit by the fire and suck dick. She wants to meet you. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Duncan.

Duncan's got to go to the bathroom again. If you just stop and think about the amount of downloads and the amount of episodes, just throw it out there. This podcast is, I think, what are we, like 430? 430? This is a 433rd podcast. Each one of them is, I think the majority of them are at least two hours long. Most of them are three. The majority of them are three hours.

There's only a few that are like an hour or more, just slightly more. So that's a lot of time. That's a lot of fucking information that gets out there. Can I just say while we're talking about this, it sounds like an Ask Kiss thing here, but you have really kind listeners. Every time I'm on your podcast, I get so many tweets and emails from people, and nobody's being a dick. I mean, sure, there are dicks out there, but for some reason they don't bother writing, you know, thank you dicks. It's beautiful. Yeah.

I mean, people are just so like enthusiastic and supportive and cool. It's a, it's a really interesting self-selected community, I guess, because people who are dicks probably wouldn't be attracted to this podcast. Well, I think people resonate, they imitate their atmosphere to a great extent. And if you grow up in a terrible place or a place that has weird tribal cultures, I mean, we've seen it time and time again, go back to Africa,

and the tradition of putting plates in your lips to signify how many cows you get, I mean, there's a lot of weird fucking things that people do. And you can get in a bad group and you can get that people do. And you can get in a bad group, and you can get in a bad pattern, and you can get into a bad groove that a lot of other people are also in, and it's

really easy to do. And you see that in there's radio stations that have followings where it's known that if you go on stage, like the Opie and Anthony show, I love Opie and Anthony, but it was known amongst a lot of comedians that if you get up, they were going to fucking torture you. Like, Bill Burr has a famous video of – and this is my favorite radio show ever, Opie and Anthony Show. So I'm not criticizing them.

But they're a bunch of men talking shit. And they're what they call the pests of the listeners. They're fucking savages. Savages. And they booed Dom Herrera. And after they booed Dom Herrera, Bill Burr is a huge Dom Herrera fan, always has been. So Bill went on after him and just tore the whole city a new asshole. Just kept talking shit about Philadelphia.

But they created that somehow or another with their intentions, with their broadcast, with what they put out in their broadcast. And I did not plan on this in any way shape or form this is just something that's happened all of it the the amount of positivity that's come out of it the attitude of the people that this this idea of embracing health and and and good thinking and being kind to people being of paramount importance like one of the most important things in your life not get your shit together not you be the fucking man not you be successful no number one most important thing is to be nice it's like the most important thing be kind until you can't be kind so you got to tell people to shut the fuck up come on

you're killing me you know it's like it's be kind until you hit that and be kind to yourself too fuck yeah and also be willing to do that same shit to yourself yeah be willing to be like super objective, super self-analytical. And just try to get through this and realize that if five people can do it, five million can do it. It's that simple. Like I always say, like this room, here's a perfect example. I've beaten it to death, but it's a good one. If we were the only people on the planet, if it was just us and we existed on this weird island and everywhere else,

like, look, guys, we got a lot of food here we're fine i mean this is a vibrant ecosystem there's no predators we can live here we're gonna be okay we both end up fucking duncan you know we probably this weird sex shit would happen but get that out of the way it's so he's got the beard right we could double t all i'm thinking is like, where are the girls? We have to find girls. I know. As soon as he said, like, us guys on an island, I'm thinking, maybe not. Fuck the food. Us friends, if we were in any place where we were forced to be together,

we would ultimately figure out a way to work it out. It would suck if there weren't girls. You're right. But ultimately, there would be no war is what my point is. There wouldn't be a war. You and I, even the minor disagreements that we have ever had ever in our 10-plus year friendship, they've been cured off with a couple sentences back and forth instantly. Yes.

And always super cool and always like, you know I would never say anything on purpose to hurt your feelings. Yes. That's not what a friend does ever. Right. Well, if we lived on an island together, it would be the same thing. You know, I wouldn't all of a sudden be like, you know, what the fuck, Duncan? You got to stop smoking weed or I'm going to put you in my canoe cage. You know, I've made a cage in this fucking canoe and I'm going to wrap you up in there.

You're not following my fucking rules. Not the cage again. Or I would say, you know, I need all the fucking mangoes, bitch. bitch i got a gun you guys don't have any guns left i got i need the fucking mangoes i want the mangoes i'm tired of eating my mangoes and you know i mean you know what you're talking about it is has happened uh in large scale is six or seven lord of the flies it's a lord of the flies situation that that that's how it was framed in the article because the lord of the flies of course for people who don't know it, is this book about kids who get stranded on an island somewhere and it turns into this really nasty Hobbesian, you know, dominating society. Some kids, they break the kids' glasses and it's all bullying and shit.

Piggy. Piggy, right. Didn't they fuck him? Or was that Deliverance? That was Deliverance. That's Lord of the Flies too. They fucked him in Lord of the Flies too? Burt Reynolds fucked him in Deliverance. That's Lord of the Flies 2. They fucked him in Lord of the Flies 2? Burt Reynolds fucked him in deliverance.

Burt Reynolds fucked a kid? No. No. No, right? A blind kid. It was even worse. A kid with cancer in his glasses. But no, these kids actually did get stranded on an island somewhere.

I don't remember the basis of the story, but it was a historical event. And they cooperated, took care of each other, and survived. Months. You know? And there wasn't any of that nastiness. This whole Hobbesian idea, we were talking earlier about the dominant paradigm and the bullshit that, you know, network TV was putting out for so long that's now getting subverted by the internet and by, you know, all these different channels of information. For me, one of the most pernicious ones is this idea of human nature being nasty in its essence. The Hobbesian view of...

So I take it you're not a fan of The Walking Dead? No, I just find it boring. I watched the first season or something and then it was like, okay, right, the heads blow up. Well, it's also a classic scenario of the people wind up being their worst enemies. The zombies seem pretty easy to deal with after a while because people that become the real issue, including the men who want to choose the alpha. The notion that we even have an alpha is more complicated than it seems.

Humans never organized themselves into wolf packs. That's not the way we live. Wolf packs You never see me and my boys when we go out, Chris Ryan We are like a wolf pack We holler to the moon together We slap our chest three times All in synchronous

Oh, God We all have wolf pack jackets It says wolf pack And like tattered jean letters over leather. Yeah, we're the wolf pack. You know. That's what they call us. They call us the wolf pack because you're basically all, basically like lone wolves gathered together out of respect.

Lone wolves gathered together. A group of lone wolves. Out of respect for each other. I mean, humans do gang up. Well, you know what? We have to ultimately realize that we 100% for each other. I mean, humans do gang up. Well, you know what? We have to ultimately realize that we 100% need each other. It's one of the most important things. We also 100% need the people.

If you want to truly be happy, you need the people around you to like you. Yes. And you need to have them. They have to have a reason to like you. You have to be giving out as much as you're taking away or more. Right. And if that doesn't. And see, what you just said is at the basis of what I think is one of the greatest misunderstandings in human evolutionary theory, which is, you know, they use game theory to try to work possibly, our ancestors couldn't possibly have lived in a sharing kind of environment economically because some people would just take and take and take and not give anything back, right?

And so that's a base assumption. So then from that, they justify capitalism and dog-eat-dog economics, right? And they say, well, it must have been that way. But the fact is shame is a hugely motivating force. And as you just said, we are designed by nature to really care whether the people around us love us or not. And if they don't, it freaks us out. So people work always to give back to the group, right?

Because if you're not giving back to the group, if you, worst case scenario, you get banished by the group, you're dead. Right. This is why they say that the part of your brain that experiences rejection is in a different part of the brain. It hurts worse than anything. Yeah. It does, too.

And it's why kids are so cruel with each other when they reject each other when they're at play. We're not playing with you anymore. Yeah. Ooh, they're exercising that little muscle, figuring out, like, ooh, look, I can get someone to dance. You know, I can get someone to dance. You know, I can give me shit to them. This is like the thing at this retreat that they talked about that I really love, man. So you're saying be kind to other people.

The question is, how can you be authentically kind to the people around you? And the simple, simple answer is you have to love yourself first. You can't reject yourself. You can't be the rejecting force because a lot of times your personality

is a personality constructed by people who rejected you from the moment you started talking. Your parents. It's not even you. So you're rejecting yourself. The first thing is start loving yourself. Embrace yourself right now. That's going to make a big change. Because if you want to really change somebody, love them. Love get around unless they're super annoying just avoid them but even love

everybody you can't fix the world but i'm just saying no no but here's you know you're right certain people are of course but in general if you want to watch somebody change get around them and just like them just beam love at them and watch how they act because here's one thing that is certain being mean to people does not make people better because if it did we would live on a planet of cool motherfuckers this planet would be filled with the sweetest people ever because we're all so cruel to each other it doesn't work that's very simplistic and here's why here's why it is, because it's not that everybody's all so mean to each other. It's just that when we are mean to each other, it hurts so

bad. If you stop and think about your interactions with people on a daily basis, there's very few mean ones. I went to the mall today and I wandered through a couple of stores and I met a bunch of people that said hi. I met a bunch of people that were at the fucking coffee bean stand. Yeah. They said hi. I met a guy in the parking lot. He said hi i met a bunch of people that were at the fucking coffee bean stand yeah they said hi i met a guy in the parking lot he said hi there was very little negative interaction you know what i'm saying like but when when it happens it's terrible it's just the real problem is when we look at life today and it's a huge issue with our view of the world is based on seven fucking billion people and that's madness you can't have the information the fears the the the tragedies the events of seven billion people inside your

fucking head you can't process that it's too goddamn big why don't you just think about the infinite amount of living beings in the universe itself why not consider all the fucking mold spores that are probably going to die when someone sprays lysol on them let's go fucking hog wild and worry about everything you can't you can't If you want to get through your 24-hour time period, only of which you're awake 16, you got to fucking prioritize. And if you don't fucking prioritize, you're not going to have time to enjoy this experience. You're not going to have time to take it in. You'll be caught up in the wave of momentum of other people's ideas and you'll never be able to catch yourself. But rejecting someone takes energy.

And if I understand what Duncan is saying. Or just call Verizon and change your number. Yeah. That takes energy too. I don't know how long you've been on hold with Verizon. But, you know, what you were describing is, you know, it's a psychotherapeutic thing where you're no matter who's sitting across the table from you, you have to accept them. If you're not accepting them, you're never going to be able to help them. It doesn't mean you have to like them.

It doesn't mean you have to not be annoyed by them. But it means you'll respect them. You respect whatever it is that's annoying about them is something that's resonating in you. Carl Jung said every person who irritates you is an opportunity to learn something about yourself. That's it. Because that person is annoying to you in a special sort of way. Oftentimes.

So there's something about you that's interesting. You're terrified of seeing those qualities in yourself. And the implication of what you're saying is if you embrace those qualities in yourself that you can't even accept, so you're casting them into the world, then all of a sudden those people who are so annoying to you stop being as annoying because you're not seeing the part of yourself you hate reflected on the screen of them. Possibly. And also possibly they feel accepted so they don't need to keep doing that bullshit to you. It's an experiment. You can do an experiment. And here's a great experiment.

Because probably for your entire life, when you get around douchebags, you either aggressively attack them, passive aggressively attack them, or try to get out of their presence. So do a little experiment. The next time you get around a real douche, somebody who's like really fucking annoying, and the douche temperature is starting to turn up. You don't have to stay there forever. But look at them and look at their face. And you'll see lines in their face. And if you look at those lines, you'll realize this douchebag has suffered. Just like you have suffered. This douchebag has suffered so much that they've created a massive defense mechanism called their personality,

which makes everyone think they're a douchebag. The world they wander through is a world of faces looking at them with either anxiety, sadness, a sense of claustrophobia, not wanting to be in their presence anymore. They're 40 or 50. It's not working. The reaction the world is giving them isn't only making them more and more and more of a douchebag. So this is compassion. You recognize that this person has suffered. You don't have to stay in this way forever. I tried it the other night at a bar with somebody. Passive hipster Buddhism by Duncan Trussell.

It lasted. It lasted. I was able to do it for like – because this is like a guy I would never, ever, ever be around. Somebody brought him. He's like this like just lunky, weird dude. And he's like being just a pure defense mechanism dick. I've just gotten back from this meditation retreat. So I'm like, all right, OK, OK, I'm going to see you. I'm going to find something in this person that I can love, that I can connect to.

I know that this person has gotten gotten this way because you know who knows what yeah so I open myself up much more than I usually do in those situations I didn't go take a leak or I didn't just go to some other part of the bar and he's you know what he starts doing man he starts like after this like whole like weird dicky like alpha male thing all of a sudden he starts pulling out his phone and he's like showing me pictures of his of his of his kids and it's like not an annoying thing he's like his face is now lighting up and he loves his kids and he's just all of a sudden there's just this one moment where the douchebag has fallen away and there's a sweet person who loves his kids dude you should write christmas movies well i i just

yeah it's it's it's it's a it's it's an observer. You know the observer effect in quantum physics where they say the observation affects the thing itself? Yeah. In that same way, like, if you just start experimenting a little bit with shining compassion out into the world, then you might get things bouncing back that aren't these douchebags that you're so used to encountering. And you don't have to trick yourself into thinking, like, I'm going to be fucking Gandhi or Ram Dass or I'm always going to be in this state. Just try to maintain the state for a minute. Then go back to being a dick.

You know, maintain the state for two minutes. And if you can't do it, then start punishing the person or being weird or like talking shit to him or talking shit about him. But just try two minutes and see what happens. The effects are going to really amaze you especially if your entire life you've only been dealing with people in a shitty way i've had to revise my whole cut the vampire out of your life thing man i'm not sure if that's the right way to do it i think it's love the vampire in your heart i've got to revise

the problem is there's not enough time and you know the real problem the number one real problem is how the fuck did they get that way in the first place? And that's people are being raised by shitheads So they're imprinting they're they're copying the behavior of failure. It's like Duncan said it You know, there's there's a deep rejection at the heart of somebody like that. I'm reminded of some some people I know some women I know who were sexually abused and then immediately put on a lot of weight right after. Right. It's protection.

It's protection. And it's also remove me from that whole dynamic with men. I got hurt in that. Remove me from it. Make me unattractive to them. Right. So the guy who's being a dick, he's being a dick in a way because he can't stand to be rejected by you. So he has to be never accepted yeah right and just like

negate the whole the whole issue it's no fun man when you start when you compassion if you're if you get a kick out of like rejecting people or if you get a kick out of like creating a us and them paradigm it really is a it's a problem because suddenly when you like realize like shit man this guy's just like me you know he's if i'd been in his situation i might even been more of a dick than he is who knows you just don't know and it's cooked into our society this is the thing i mean i i think you guys both probably agree with this i think that we live in a deeply pathological society and a healthy person in the society is by definition going to seem really strange, you know, because they're not in sync with the society.

Have you heard of the continuum concept? It's a book written by a woman who found herself pretty randomly living with a more or less Stone Age tribe in Venezuela. And she observed the way they raised children. And she wrote this book and her thesis, this was in the late 60s, early 70s. The thesis is essentially like when a baby is born in this society, that baby is in physical contact with his mother or another adult basically constantly until he or she doesn't want to be anymore and is off running around with their friends, right? Whereas in our society, up until the 50s, doctors were telling parents not to touch their infants. Put the infant in the crib, no matter how much it cries, do not touch it.

By caressing your child, you create pathology. You create sickness and illness and weakness. This was until the 1950s, right? Lots of kids died. It was called hospitalism because the problem is you had on the one side, this sort of macho male asshole attitude, dominating medicine, no woman doctors, and the nurses' opinions didn't count for anything because the men knew best. And on the other hand, you had the germ theory, as I'm talking early 20th century now, where it was understood that contagion was a big problem. So they started putting newborn infants

in these incubators, these isolation tanks, and they weren't allowing the mothers to even pick them up and touch them because they had no way of testing for germs. They just knew germs were somewhere. So all these kids are dying. And the nurses are saying, well, of course, you've got to pick them up. They're crying. Look, the women are resonating. And the doctors are saying, no, you can't touch them. No, no, no. No touching. No touching. And they were like, 20,

25% death rate in the most modern American hospitals from that. That is insane. That is fucking nuts. We're so weird. It's really fucked up. It's so weird that someone we're so weird it's it's really fucked up and so weird that someone would be so confident to avoid the natural instincts yeah well we override them all the time right masturbation will kill you it'll make you blind it'll make you crazy it will kill you yeah well it will make if you do it wrong yeah don't jerk off in your eyes don't jerk off into your eyes. Don't jerk off while you're driving.

Come in your eyes and then crash into a tree. Which is right up there on, you know, sauna-ing yourself to death. Or texting while driving. Oh, yeah, that's bad. Texting while driving, you go off a cliff. Yeah. There was a guy, I think it was like Paris Hilton's veteran or a plastic surgeon or something like that like some famous plastic surgeon and he tweeted a second before he fell off the side of a fucking cliff I read a thing I just retweeted a

thing a few days ago some some like computer designer or somebody who was working in the office tweeted uh I've been on the job 30 hours feeling great And then he died Like at his desk Wasn't it a she? No you're talking about a woman who went to Africa No that's another one I think you're thinking of That's just going on right now She went to Africa she was a PR woman Oh no that's yeah

She just landed and it got picked up What did she say? Oh the AIDS joke She goes well off to South Africa Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white in capital letters. That's exactly what it was.

Why would you do that? She was probably on Xanax. She probably had a glass of wine. Didn't know what the fuck she was doing. Woke up to a national controversy. She had to apologize. Her father said he was ashamed of her. Some guy went to the airport to meet her and took some pictures and then interviewed her father while they were waiting i guess and the father was like i can't believe she said that

he's south african speaking of weird stuff what about the steve martin thing do you hear about this what yeah what he tweeted somebody wrote like he was doing a back and forth with some of his followers on twitter and somebody wrote uh l like lasagna l-a-S-A-N-Y-A or something like that. Is that how you spell lasagna? And he wrote, well, it depends if you're going to an African-American restaurant or an Italian restaurant. And people got really offended by that. Yeah, but he deleted the tweet. And then he apologized and deleted it.

What is wrong with that? That's not... Nothing. That's what I'm saying. Like, what's offensive about saying there's a black American vernacular that sounds different than, you know, like, how is that insulting to anybody? Well, I had this conversation with someone where I was talking about, you know how you can listen to someone talk on the phone and know if they're black. And she was like, no, no, I don't know. I go, bullshit.

You do know. I go, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with being black, but you can tell when you're talking to a lot of people on the phone, you can tell if the guy's black. It's not a bad thing. Let me, all right, I would argue that there are some people who you can hear and know they're black. Very common. But that doesn't mean that you can listen to anyone and know they're black. There are a lot of black people who you wouldn't be able to tell. Of course not. There's a lot of white people that can sound like they're black as well if they decide to.

Exactly. But there is that quality that does exist. Of course. There's nothing wrong with it. Like the idea that she was looking at it like she wouldn't touch it for the 10-foot pole because it was politically incorrect and it was a dangerous thing to discuss. I'm like, why? Why is it dangerous to say that black people oftentimes have a different way of talking?

No one's saying bad or worse. It's like saying that people that are from the West Coast don't have a different way of talking than people that live in Minnesota or than people that live in New York. Of course they do. It's a dialect. Of course they do. It's not bad or worse.

There's a lot of super intelligent people. Like Feynman had a very pronounced New York accent right didn't he and he was Jewish yeah pronounced Jewish New York accent and he was one of the most brilliant physicists ever yeah I mean doesn't mean anything but that's the thing in America now anything around around sex you and I talked about this last time or or race is is so explosive and here's a comedian Steve Martin. Come on, he's been in the trenches forever.

Why is he retracting that? Why is he apologizing? Because he's a pussy and he's going to die soon. And he's scared because he's old. That's my news song. Well, he's a good guy. I mean, that's really what it is. He's a nice guy.

He doesn't want anybody's feelings to be hurt. Yeah, he was afraid to offend them. But, I mean, when people are offended over you breathing, fuck them. You're right, but I don't think he's a confrontational guy at all. No. He's an interesting cat. Steve Martin is a fascinating dude because, first of all, he was unbelievably hilarious and unbelievably innovative when he first came out. I mean, he was a unique cat.

This whole thing was very unique. His act was very unique. It was really funny and silly and slapsticky, but he's a unique guy in the fact that he got hugely successful and then didn't like the fact that people would laugh about anything that he did. He didn't feel like he had this real honest connection with them anymore and pulled away from comedy. Couldn't do comedy in clubs anymore.

It's like the Beatles stopped touring because they were screaming so loud they couldn't hear the music. I went to this talk with Steve Martin, and Steve Martin was there with an author. Because you were saying he's not confrontational. This was like six years ago. Steve Martin's there with this author.

He's clearly a big fan of this author. And somebody in the audience, the audience is getting to ask questions, and some asshole says, I have a question for the guy who isn't Steve Martin. And Steve Martin, I can't remember exactly what he said to this guy, but it was a brutal evisceration of this guy for being a disrespectful asshole. You saw the color just rush out of the guy's face. What did the guy do? He's just being rude. By saying the guy who's not Steve Martin

is dismissive. It was just rude. So he did it to defend his friend. Yeah, and it was brutal. And then you still see that guy's still a comic man. He hasn't stopped being a comic. That thing, that edge that's inside comics that'll come out is definitely inside of him. He's a brilliant guy.

Yeah. You read his autobiography? Yeah. Yeah, it's really good. He's an interesting dude. He reads it. If you go to audible.com, you can get it. He actually reads it.

He's a, you know, he's a brilliant guy and a great movie comedian. I mean, you go back to The Jerk, that is a masterpiece. Yeah. It still holds up. I was born a great movie comedian. I mean, you go back to The Jerk, that is a masterpiece. Yeah. It still holds up. I was born a poor black child. He's not apologizing for that, right? Well, he was a young man then. I'm sure now he's just like-

He's also got great books of short comedy essays that are hilarious. Yeah. Yeah, he's a unique talent. Steve Martin's a very unique talent, although I never bought him as a mob guy. The one where he played an Italian guy and they'd give him the crazy hair. Remember that? I don't remember that. He played a mob guy in the Witness Protection Program and moves into this-

Straight or comedy? Comedy. Comedy. When was the last time he did a straight movie? Does he do a lot of straight movies now? He did. Yeah. Didn't he do-

He's done some serious movies. I think so. Was he in a Woody Allen movie playing a straight character? That's always when a stand-up comedian branches, spreads their wings, they do a Woody Allen movie. Yeah, well, like Louis C.K. just did one, right? Dice Clay. And Andrew Dice Clay was in the same thing. There was an article online about Andrew Dice Clay deserving an Oscar.

For that role? Yeah. Wow, he was really good. I just saw that on the plane. I liked it, but I didn't see a lot of drama there. I mean, he wasn't playing an autistic person. I just thought it was very authentic. I thought it really worked.

He's a good actor, and it's surprising. Yeah, he is. And Woody Allen recognized that. Hey, have you seen that preview for that werewolf movie coming out? Of course, I'm sure you have. Yes. What do you think. Yes. Yeah. What do you think?

It's nonsense. It's one movie, Duncan. It's an American werewolf in London. It's a goddamn perfect movie. Dude, you're preaching to the choir here. Everything since then sucks a fat one. But isn't that the one where he takes acid and turns into a werewolf? I resented that as an acid head at the time.

The preview? That's William Hurt. No, I'm talking about American Werewolf in London. Hell no, he got chomped. No, you're thinking of Altered States. Oh, that's right. Altered States. You fucked that premise up so bad.

And he turned into a monkey. He turned into some sort of monkey from Taken Acid. Yeah. Well, he got into the sensory deprivation tank. That was based on living. That's right. That's right. That's the whole idea of Altered States.

Yeah. It's terrible. I thought it was great at the time, and it was important to me because it got me into isolation tanks, but it's terrible if you try to watch it now. But the best part is the schizophrenic on acid saying, I feel like my heart is being touched by Christ.

Remember that? That was a great line in that movie. I'm looking for new werewolves. I just saw The River's Edge. Have you seen that? What's that? Crispin Glo great line in that movie. I'm looking for a new werewolf movie. I just saw The River's Edge. Have you seen that? What's that? Crispin Glover? Oh, Christ.

I saw it a long time ago. Yeah, it's a really strange movie. That guy's too much for me. Very funny. He's like Duncan if he went completely off the deep end and became a meth head. Then I need to start doing meth. I fucking love Crispin Glover. That's awesome.

He's so crazy. In his movies, he's so good at what he does. You know who else is really good? I can't remember the cat's name. Everyone's a cat today. I can't remember the guy's name, but he was one of the bad guys in the X-Files. He's that one weird dude that you never know his name, but when he's on a movie, you're like, oh, this guy's awesome. Yeah, there are several people like that. Who's that old dude? Creepy old dude. Creepy old dude.

I don't know what this werewolf movie is, man. I can't find any things online. Have you seen the trailer for Transcendence? Yeah, the trailer for Transcendence looks really interesting. Have you seen that? That's the new Matrix. Well, it's essentially the idea of the full Ray Kurzweil

Vision being Realized with one guy Being Johnny Depp playing the Kurzweil character Gets killed by somebody But as he's dying they download his consciousness Into a computer Yeah play it That's pretty intense

How hot is she? Jesus Christ....requires us to unlock the most fundamental secrets of the universe. Imagine a machine with a full range of human emotion. And tits. Its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence

of every person in the history of the world. Some scientists refer to this as the singularity. Professor? I call it transcendence. A series of attacks conducted by a radical anti-tech group known as RIFT. They've been in AI labs all over the country. We lost decades of research

and development. It's radiation poisoning. The bullet must have been laced with it. The effect is irreversible. Will's body is dying but his mind is a pattern of electrical signals. We can upload his consciousness. We can save him. Not like this. Assuming that this works, if we missed anything, a thought, a childhood memory, how will you know who you're dealing with? Oh my God. I can't feel anything. I'm here.

You need to get me online. I need more power. He may be intelligent, may even be sentient. This is no will. Shut it down. Shut it down? It's him. Your friends crossed a line.

They don't know the danger. This is astounding. So how do we fight it? You can't. And AI is like any intelligence. It has needs. but real will die it'll start to evolve where's the machine to influence perhaps the entire world where are you going everywhere Where are you going? Everywhere.

Wow. They could fuck that up. That could be one of those movies where you're like, okay, fuckheads. It already looks fucked up, man. Am I wrong or does it seem like they told the whole story in the trailer? That's what they do now. That's what they do. Really? Yeah, we just did a spoiler alert.

Just show me Jennifer Lawrence. I just want to watch her. She's so pretty. Do you think she listens to your podcast? I hope she does. God, I love her. The American Hustle movie? She looks fantastic in that movie.

You're reaching out to Jennifer Lawrence through Joe Rogan's podcast. I think it'll work. I feel it happening. Really? You think I have a shot with Jennifer Lawrence? I think you have a very good shot now. I think she should call me to set up the date, though. Sure.

Whatever it takes. I'm sure she's a fan of your work. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that'll be an interesting pairing with her. You know what I'm talking about? Her? The movie?

The new movie about the guy who falls in love with the computer program? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which Duncan is living, even as we speak. I mean, Duncan is entering the Oculus Rift looking for a girlfriend, right? No. Is that what you're doing in there? I can't be. I put that thing on for two minutes.

I want to vomit. You get nausea. All my utopian ideas about the Oculus Rift are destroyed by the... Haven't they corrected that, though? Well, they say the new ones... There's this thing. It's like latency. There's a 15-millisecond latency.

There's some kind of latency between when you move your head and when it registers that you've moved your head, and it's in milliseconds. And under a certain amount, apparently, you don't get motion sickness. But where my Oculus Rift is at right now, like if I have a drunk friend over and they put on the Rift, they just turn green and want to puke. It doesn't work. So police could use it as an alcohol test. Yeah, you could. Bulimics could use it. If you're sick of using your finger to vomit,

just put on the Oculus Rift and run around Half-Life for six minutes. You'll spew. Dimension Films is reproducing American Werewolf in London. They're going to reboot it. Have the same story. I hope it's good, man. I hope so, too. Leave it alone. Well, I just

hope they don't go CGI and fuck it up. They will. When do remakes like that work? I'm sure there's some. It's possible. It worked with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Remember when they remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre? No, I didn't watch it. I wanted to call the police. I watched the second Invasion of the Body Snatchers last night, the Donald Sutherland one.

That's the second one, I believe. Yeah, that's good. There's one from, is that true? Am I correct? Yeah, there's a black and white one. There's an old black and white one. That's right. You know how I know it's true?

Because I watched it, actually. And it was really fun. Now that I remember, okay. Because I've seen three of them. There's a Jennifer Tilly one, too, or Meg Tilly. There's a Meg Tilly one later. But the original one is really fascinating. Because it's like, a lot like the Twilight Zone movie

in that it's a time capsule. It would not work today. It would be a terrible piece of shit that you wouldn't believe that they could actually make. But when you watch it in the context of it being from like 1951 or whatever the fuck it was, it's really interesting. Oh, cool. Well, and ideas, I mean, even if the effects are bullshit, the ideas are timeless.

Like old Star Trek episodes or Twilight Zone. Some of those ideas were just amazing. Well, they ran out of them, though. They used them all up on those fucking, you know, all those Hitchcock shows and all those What are those what was that one show that they had that um night gallery Well, no there was there was the Twilight Zone and then there was one that was like it God damn it. There was another one that was Like It. Love American Style?

The Love Boat. No, there was a similar thing to the Twilight Zone, but I can't remember what it is now. I thought it was called Night Gallery. Might have been. Tales from the Crypt? The Outer Limits? The Outer Limits. Thank you.

Thank you, Jamie. Yeah, that was it. The Outer Limits was another one. It was very similar along those lines. Those guys burned through so many ideas. Why aren't there shows like that? Is there a show like that? They ran out of ideas.

There's no more creepy, freaky ideas. No, there's all kinds of freaky ideas, man. Yeah, I think they get tired. All this vampire shit and werewolves and zombies. The vampires are all for girls, too. It's all about sex. Vampires got so hot. They weren't always like that.

Look up Nosferatu. Have you ever seen that? Love it. That is a vampire. That thing is scary. It's got long, awful fingers. It's a terrible being. Now, these glitter vampires, the sun doesn't even hurt them.

It just makes them. Yeah, there's Nosferatu. And by the way, look at his teeth. Very rat-like. Completely different thing. Yeah. He was, they were like rats that were people that would hypnotize people and suck their blood out.

Ever since you told me, you pointed out the fact that in Twilight, this vampire is hundreds of years old, dating a high school kid. It's ridiculous. The idea is ridiculous that he would, first of all, have to keep going to high school. The idea is that he died when he was 17. He's so creepy. So because he died when he was 17, he's going to be 17 for perpetuity? That's preposterous.

That doesn't make any sense. Like, why doesn't he just not go to fucking high school for the 100th year in a row? He just keeps going to high school. Nobody notices the fact that this guy is just fucking hopping around the country, going to high school after high school, fact that this guy is fucking hopping around the country, going to high school after high school, showing in as the weird loner with the white skin. But that does happen, man. You heard the story about the guy who would pose as a fourth grader. Did you ever hear that?

Oh, my God. He's like some kind of little person, or he's got some kind of aging thing, and he would enroll himself in elementary schools. There was this guy. He was an adult who was in an elementary school for like a year.'s like yeah i can't remember his name though but it was like he was he would just pretend to be a kid you know as an adult it's fucked up well when i was in new york there was a girl who was on the arsenio hall show okay she was a stand-up comic and we all knew her as this young teenage girl from the east village and she was like 14 or 15 years, and we all knew her as this young teenage girl from the East Village.

She was like 14 or 15 years old, and she was going up and doing stand-up. And she was funny, man. She was funny like an adult, and it was weird. It was weird watching because as far as stand-up comics go, it wasn't like going to see Duncan or Joey Diaz or Ari. It wasn't like high-level stand-up comedy, but it was impressive for a 15-year-old. So she goes on the Arsenio Hall show, and the fucking phones line up.

And they're like, I went to high school with this bitch. She's fucking 30. She's not in high school. She's not 14. The fuck out of here. She graduated in 1986, and people start going crazy and calling in. Hilarious going crazy and calling in. Hilarious.

What a great story. She gets exposed. Barry Katz client, by the way. When she knew she'd get exposed. I don't think she did. I don't think she did. I think she thought she would get away with it. On TV?

I don't know if she changed her name. I don't know what she did. But she went up there. What a great story, though. I mean, what a movie. She was like 30. She had a 15-year-old kid. I think shit like that's going to

start happening more and more with the age regression therapies they're going to have. I think there's going to be like this. Did you hear about that? The thing that keeps popping up about the mice? Did you hear about this? And they're going to start human trials in a year? What? It's some kind of they figured out some way to reverse, apparently reverse the aging process in

mice. They want to start human trials in a year. I love being around a scientist because his bull—I know your bullshit, but— It's like beeping off the fucking charts. But, yeah, apparently—I mean, who knows? Apparently. Yeah, where did you read this? On the internet. No, I think it's real.

I do think it's real. Like, it's an actual study. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Every time I hear this shit, I think Ray Kurzweil is going to die. I'm really sorry. And not because some guy shoots him with a radioactive bullet. Researchers reverse aging process

in mice. People could be next. This is in the Huffington Post. This is in a bunch of science journals. It's all over. It's about the mitochondria and it's about they've figured out a way it says the age process we discovered

is like a married couple when they're young they communicate well but over time living in close quarters for many years communication breaks down Harvard University based investigator this is all like legit shit as with marriage the restoring of the lines of communication can nurse back cells to health

the communication breakdown is caused by lower levels of the chemical called NAD, which decreases with age. Prior to the study, the only known ways of slowing the decrease were to have a low-calorie diet and regular exercise. In this study, researchers used a compound that mimics the benefits of diet and exercise on mice. There you go, fella. Yeah, give me a pill.

I'll take it. There you go, fella. Yeah, give me a pill. I'll take it. In two-year-old mice, the compound helped reduce insulin resistance and inflammation, making them nearly as healthy as mice that were just six months old. It's something like a 60-year-old being similar to a 20-year-old. Wow. Hey, 20-year-olds, you're about to be fucked because all these old 50-year-olds are going to turn into 20-year-olds again. You have a mattress on the floor.

You thought Viagra was bad. They have airplanes. You know what I mean? You're sleeping on a mattress. You're now competing with people who should be dead and are healthy. Well, Duncan, why does it have to be competition? Can't we all just get along? Can't we all just work together?

Can't this be the ultimate social utopia when there is no ageism anymore? You've got to be yourself, right? Right. Because think about it. The 50-year-old women are going to be like 20-year-olds too. Hot as fuck. Ready for dick. It's going to be.

Back in the game. And they're going to have all the experience of having had kids and having lived. And having been divorced. And they're not going to be. Well, no, but. Money and. I find women, you know, 45 and over are a lot easier to deal with. A lot easier.

Do you think they're just more realistic, more relaxed, more confident? Yeah, they're not living in that Hallmark bullshit world anymore of expecting everything. They've lowered their standards is what you're trying to say, Chris Ryan. They've got experience. They lower their standards. They don't expect a lot from you. They're not looking for six-pack anymore. They're just,. Yeah. They lower their standards. They don't expect a lot from you. They're not looking for six-pack anymore. They're just, okay, we'll just sit down.

Can we just watch TV? Can we just have a drink? We don't have to walk. Let's just sit. I look forward to the future, man. That's so exciting to see that kind of research start popping up because if that's popping up, you know there's going to be six more things based on it that are going to pop up. And it's a really cool thing.

They did say that the cost of the treatment would be insane, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. As was when you bought a cell phone. The first cell phones were thousands of dollars, and now you can go to Bolivia in the middle of the jungle, people have cell phones. There's also this artificial muscle that they've created that has 1,000 times human strength. This is another story that came out today, or yesterday, rather. American scientists have developed a robotic muscle

1,000 times more powerful than humans using a revolutionary material that fluidly changes its properties. Hmm, I wonder what that means. The invention gives vanadium dioxide amazing superhero-style powers. Its most striking property is to change shape and structure whenever differing amounts of heat are applied to it. We are in for some really freaky shit in the next couple of decades. Things are going to get really, really weird.

Because no one saw this coming 10 years ago. But aren't things always getting really weird? Of course, always have been. The weirdest times ever are always right now. Yeah, I mean, I feel like a curmudgeon. But you guys talking about reversing the aging process and the super muscle and this and that. I feel like Mark Twain when they invented the radio and he's like, oh, great.

We still don't have anything to say to each other. It's like – But do we not though? Well, no. I mean I'm talking about in his time. The point is – It sounds like he had a hangover when he said that. Fuck Mark Twain.

I feel like we're going in the wrong direction. And so every time there's another carrot dangling out there saying, oh, look, eternal life. Oh, look, there's this. Oh, you're going to be a superhero. It's like the casino guy. We're almost out of money. And the casino guy is saying, well, maybe if you just place a few more bets, you'll win it all back. But again, ultimately, hasn't that always been the case, though?

No. Hasn't everybody always thought that the Have you ever listened to Hunter S. Thompson Talking in the 1970s This is It's over It's almost over The fucking

The great demise Where we're skidding into The apocalypse Everybody's felt that way Well he was right But was he? Yeah Because we're still here

Look here we are Well no we're here He's not Shit's Well he shot himself in the head But shit Shit is always weird By the way

Cut to three years from now, Chris Ryan's going to be 21. And I'll shoot myself in the head in Colorado. You're going to be healthy, doing yoga every day. Finally banging a 20-year-old. Yeah, you're giving up on those 45-year-olds that are fucking so needy. Get out of here with your cats.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know, man. I mean, you can philosophically break it down as much as possible. If somebody's going to give me a pill, it's going to, it's going to. But they're not. That's the thing. They're just going to tell you they will to keep you in the game. Keep you running on the wheel.

What are you talking about? Well, what about, I mean. I mean, well, you know, you said like everything's always about to end. Right. But on the alternatively, everything's always about to be great. I mean, in the 30s and 40s, they were saying, oh, what are we going to do with all our leisure time that technology is going to give us? We're going to be working three hours a week and have jet packs and have our food grow out of the table just as we're ready to eat it. None of that shit ever

happens. It never happens. We're working more hours now than we were then. The standard of living, we're talking about Hunter S. Thompson in the 70s. The middle class family now has less money than they had in 1970. Right. At least they're not dying of tuberculosis. No, they're dying of, you know, insulin resistance. I'll take that over coughing, like spraying blood into my kerchief and watching everyone around me dying and eaten by rats. My kerchief.

Powdered wigs are coming back. blood into my kerchief and watching everyone around me dying and eaten by rats. My kerchief. Yeah. Powdered wigs are coming back. You're really making a big leap because I don't think it's that black and white. I don't think that it really is worse. I don't think that – I think it's gotten way better. I think for sure, yeah, quality of life is still – there's just too many people, finite amount of resources corrupt economy beyond corrupt government all those no good games for xbox what about all the stuff that we said

earlier what about all the stuff we said about communication about the access to information being different than it's ever been before i think if anything it's more rosy today the the view of society and the potential for the future more rosy today than it's ever been before see this this syria thing is a perfect example. This is the first time in my recollection that the United States people, the populace, stood up when there was a proposed military action and said, fuck that. Like a giant percentage of the population was so alarmed that these knuckleheads, they were like, hey guys, this is like revolution type shit.

Like if you go through with this, you're at the door of a revolution. And here's the best way to keep this revolution from happening. Keep them calm. And the best way to keep them calm is to not go into another war right now. You guys are running two shell games right now. You're sucking minerals out of Afghanistan. You're sucking oil out of Iraq. How about everybody just back the fuck off and stop trying to invade everything all at once?

And they did. And that's never happened before. But see, you see that as a out of Iraq. How about everybody just back the fuck off and stop trying to invade everything all at once? And they did. And that was, that's never happened before. But see, you see that as a sign of progress. I see that as a sign of like so much blood has already been lost, the body can't bleed anymore. Someone's a half full guy. Exhaustion. The country's exhausted, broke, and people are saying, you know, we can't do anymore. We got the National Guard doing seven tours in Iraq.

You know, the National Guard never went anywhere overseas until Bush, you know. And now we've accepted that as normal. We've got higher percentage of people in prisons than any country in the world than this country ever has before. No doubt. You know, it's like I think going back to my friend that I was talking about earlier in Africa, it might be a wash. It might be that, yeah, the Internet's really cool and that's it. But on the other hand, the prison industrial complexes, you know, and yeah, it might be cool that we didn't get into Syria. But on the other hand, we're blowing up wedding parties in Yemen from the sky and nobody gives a shit because nobody's dying on our side.

And you know what I mean? It's like maybe it's a wash. But when people start telling me utopia is right around the corner, bullshit detector start blinking really brightly i don't necessarily think utopia but eternal life uh you know super muscles whatever it's it's a sales pitch oh i don't agree for something that isn't gonna pay off but i don't agree because i i think if you just look at what we have i mean we already have superpowers you have a goddamn phone you can talk to and it answers any right but are. Right, but are people happier? Are people really happier now than they were 50 years ago? Some people are happier.

Some are. Some are happier. Some are. But I don't think you could ever say that, are people happier? Because if you're just going to generalize about just people overall, well, what kind of people are we talking about? Well, that's the thing. You have to take an aggregate. We're talking about people in Africa. We're talking about people in America. That's exactly right. We're talking about people in nice neighborhoods. We're talking about people in poverty. And is in progress. But if we're talking about progress in America. That's exactly right. We're talking about people in nice neighborhoods. We're talking about people in poverty. And isn't progress.

But if we're talking about progress for the human race or human species, then we are talking about all people. We've got to be talking about the aggregate, right? Jesus Christ. Isn't that what progress would be? Well, we don't have any. I mean, you have influence on your immediate environment. You have influence on the people that you're allowed to reach outside your immediate environment with technology. immediate environment, you have an influence on the people that you're allowed to reach outside your immediate environment with technology.

But once you start talking about the entire world, if we're really responsible for that, well, then all societies have to break down. We have to start from scratch. Well, I'm not saying we're responsible. I'm just saying that when people start talking about how things are getting better, I think you need to, what we need to do is understand, define our terms. What do you mean by better, A? And secondly, what do you mean by for us?

I'll tell you better. Here's better for me. I can go on audible.com, download an audio book of Jack Kornfield talking about describing Buddhism in this super simple way that I've never heard that wakes me up to this idea of like, shit, man, I get it. If I don't love myself, if I don't figure out a way to, to, to really embrace myself, I'm going to be a miserable, I'm going to be kind of unhappy. I'm going to be unhappy for maybe the rest of my life. So things are getting better because we have access to information that can improve our internal states. And then once you're happy, all the innovation can be enjoyed. But if'm saying the access to information now is so much

greater than it ever was, that if somebody really wants to plug in and transform themselves, they can. And that's better. That's better. But another point is, in Buddhism, there's an idea of something called fundamental dissatisfaction, which comes from being a human being. And it doesn't matter what time you were born into. It doesn't matter where you were born or if you're born in a futuristic society where you never will age and flying Android blowjob machines come down the moment they detect any type of horniness from your neural patterns and and make you come you're still if you don't deal with your internal if you don't deal with your internal, if you don't deal with the basic fundamental problem of being a human being, the idea that life is suffering, if you don't deal with your attachment to your ego and your identity, you're going to suffer no matter what.

And that doesn't change. That's just part of being a human being. So, I mean, I just think it's a more interesting time. Better lotions. More interesting. Better lotions. More interesting... Better lotions? Better lube. Cars go faster. Zero to 60 times or down. Yeah.

I think the potential for expansion is monstrous. And I think that the potential for information to get to you, the possibilities of it getting to you, are greater than it's ever been before. The access to knowledge is insane. Putting it all together and making a package

as a happy human being is always a difficult pursuit. Always has been, always will be, and even more complicated now because there's an increased amount of variables, a staggeringly increased amount of variables. And you can only, I mean, there are two things. There's a bottleneck. Like you say, there's more information

than ever before and I completely agree with that but your brain still has to process it and it can only go a certain speed. Well, that's where shit like this terminator style muscle

comes in because it's going to, they're going to move into the neural field. Are they saying they're going to implant muscles in people? No, they're saying

they're able to create an artificial style muscle. But I don't understand what they replace your muscles? Is that what they're implying? Well, this is the very early stages of anything that would apply to a robot or to whatever the fuck they're going to do.

But essentially, they're trying to mimic the possibilities of muscle tissue. Oh, man. You know, there's another one that they've done where they combine spider silk with human skin to create some artificial bulletproof skin. Spider-Man. Dude.

It's fascinating to watch people break down the very structure of reality, the very compounds of the various aspects of life, whether it's flesh or bone or cognitive function, the brain itself. They've created artificial brain cells. I mean, they are like literally things are materializing and it's going to be an incredible puzzle that we have to solve as far as our possibilities for altering our environment.

But none of it matters if we're not getting information about government, about the inner workings of corporations, because these are the people, these are the institutions that we're not getting more. Our access to good information about what's really going on is destroyed by the internet because the internet has killed journalism. Sort of, but isn't the real problem with all these, whether it's corporations that give money to lobbyists, that give money to politicians and influence. Isn't the real problem is that it's not clear and obvious what's going on? Right. People are slowly starting to unveil all these issues of corruption. Well, as the boundaries between people and information becomes smaller and smaller to

the point where there's no boundary, everyone's going to be accountable. You're going to be accountable for everything, including corporations. Corporations are going to be accountable for their actions. But who's going to do that work? Who's going to go to the board meetings and record who voted for what and where the money's going? That's journalism. That's if you live today. And there's no money in journalism.

If you live today in this world, that is the case. I think the world where we live in, in 20, 30, 40, whatever it is, there's going to be no secrets. It's not going to be like the board has to meet. Everyone's going to know on the whole planet what the corporation's been up to, what the ramifications of this, who's profited from this directly. So you think the Snowdens and the Bradley Mannings are going to win out over the NSA? 100%. They can't lose.

Yeah, Glenn Greenwald for life. I love you. They can't lose. Yeah, Glenn Greenwald. I just listened to him on the way over here. I was listening to him. He was talking. He was at a Marxism conference or something.

And he was talking about how he was on Meet the Press and how David Gregory essentially called for him to be arrested and put in prison for being a journalist. Unbelievable. for being a journalist. Unbelievable. You know? And David Gregory himself is completely complicit in selectively using the leaks that are given to him, right?

Which is what he was accusing Greenwald of having done. Right. You know, utilize a leak in writing your story. And he's like, that's what David Gregory does every week.

You know, at some dinner party, somebody mentioned something to him that they want to be disseminated. That's all those guys do. He described them as actors playing journalists on TV. But, I mean, Glenn Greenwald's one of the only ones out there. You know, Jeremy Scahill. See, I don't think the Internet has destroyed journalism.

Journalism destroyed itself. The Internet has created real journalism. The Internet has given birth to a totally new style of journalism that's not connected to the machine, that's actually viewer-supported, whether it's shows like The Young Turks or podcasts or anything. What you're getting is a viewer supported experience where there's no incentive to lie to you anymore. The incentive is actually to tell the truth. These shifts are, you can't ignore them.

There's this new access and this new thirst for information. It's very different than anything any culture has ever experienced before. I don't think you could take it lightly. And I think ultimately it spells progress because it spells outrage and outrage over corruption. Once there's a balance, there's a yin and a yang when it comes to government. And once there's a balance and the corruption has been at least forced to relinquish its grasp, whether prosecuted, whether people have to go to jail for the way they've been running this society is debatable. This is what the law used to be at a certain point in time. Yeah, none of these torture guys are anywhere near a jail. But there's no debate. It's got to all stop.

Whether it comes from that, whether it comes from there was a recent story about how the drug war is a complete and total fucking joke based on the fact that these banks that have been caught laundering money. Did you read this? Oh, yeah. In Florida, UBC. Billions of dollars. Yeah, unbelievable. I'll pull it up because it's such a fucking crazy, crazy story. But when you read it, it shows you that the idea of a drug war, of the fact that they're trying to stop drugs from coming in, nonsense. They're just trying to arrest black people.

They're trying to fill up jails. They're trying to make it so that the people who are in control of the distribution stay in control of the distribution. It's madness. Yeah. I always feel like I'm raining on the parade when I talk to you two guys because you're so hopeful for the future. Well, I think you've just seen more than we have. It's so fun. You've been to more places, seen more fuckheads.

You're more educated. I love being – it's so great, man, because, like, it's so, you need that. You need balance. It's good to have balance, man. You don't want an echo chamber. You need somebody who's going to throw out the, you know, facts, and, like, because in that process, maybe you'll, you know, obviously are we headed towards some utopian

reality or some utopian future? I'd say the odds of that are pretty slim, especially as long as people are caught up in themselves as an individual instead of recognizing they're part of a whole. Regardless of any kind of innovation, that's always going to create problems. But I do think there's some beautiful things on the horizon that are just going to be wonderful. Of course there are.

I mean, the thing is, these conversations get complicated because anyone I'm talking to always says something like know, something like, oh, I don't want is Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves that Drug War is a Joke. It's by Matt Taibbi. Matt Taibbi. He's fantastic. The best. The best.

Since Hunter S. Thompson. Even better because he's more prolific and he's not fucked up on meth. Matt Taibbi. Matt Taibbi. Oh, you gotta read Matt. You haven't read Matt Taibbi?

Greatest journalist of all time. That octopus thing reminded me of him because he's famous for the squid. Yeah. What I was going to say is that in my world, it's better. So if you're saying is society better, well, only as applied.

But in my world, 100%. Yeah, but look at us. We're three dudes with— We're three beautiful, muscular men. We're magical white people. We're magical white people with no job, right? None of us is punching a clock anywhere. A lot of the people who are listening to this are sitting in a cubicle somewhere and they're working 40, 50 hours a week. They get home, they're fucking

exhausted. They don't have time to read Matt Taibbi because they got to like change the diapers and the kid and take the other one to soccer and, you know, pay the alimony. And it's like, and pay the alimony. And it's like, I think it's really important that we don't forget how incredibly fortunate we are and what an amazing pinnacle we happen to be standing on looking at experience. That said, you figured it out. You figured it out.

I figured it out. Here we are. In our world, the world is better today. Well, or we're just really lucky. Or we're living in a simulation. I don't know what we figured out. Why can't we embrace the simulation theory, the simulation that we have all subscribed to? We jumped into a really good simulation.

We don't have jobs. And, look, the world is a goddamn hologram. It's been proven, Duncan. Yeah, that was last week, right? The hologram thing. The universe is a hologram, Duncan. Tests have shown. This was something at the retreat they said.

They were talking about this thing that you're doing. Fucking retreat broke you. I loved it. Here's something they said I really like, which is because it's this thing that you're doing, the starving African child thing, where it's like there's always the starving African child to think about when you're too happy.

And the thing is, like, if you really want to honor and respect the suffering of the world and people who are trapped in various predicaments the greatest thing you could do is not feel guilty about your own happiness exactly ride that shit i don't feel i don't feel guilty about it but i also guilt to me i mean you know choi yung trung pa yes right okay one of the things that guy who the fuck are you talking about tib. Shogun Trump is amazing. He was a Tibetan guru who came to the U.S. early and.

He was an apostate. He was a Tibetan. He was like a reincarnation who came to the United States, started wearing suits, drinking, humping girls. Yeah. And his Buddhism, his breakdown of Buddhism is amazing. He's got two great books that I know of, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. And The Warrior Thing, The Path of the Shambhala, The Path of the Warrior.

That's beautiful. And another, Pima Chodron is a teacher who was his disciple. There's a great documentary on Netflix about him that you can watch. What year is this guy from? He's from, I guess, the 60s, 70s. 70s, 80s, yeah. But he died from liver disease from drinking. He was like Alan Watts, who also died from liver disease from drinking. Alan Watts died from liver disease, too?

That's so sad. But his whole thing was like, just be who you are. Like, be who you are. He was a dude who really loved booze. He did. And he would, and like, there's a story. And bitches. And he liked playing with people's conception of how

he should be. And like, in this documentary, there's a story where he's on stage with some like, very like, you know, tight, square, spiritual teacher. And he's on stage with a spiritual teacher and he's wasted. He's acting drunk and he's wasted. And like, after the talk,

he's in the hallway walking with some of his disciples totally not drunk anymore he's like how did i do what do you think he was acting drunk he was doing this because he was fucking around with like he was trying to create a contrast between this guy who apparently like considered himself to be a very like buttoned up very spiritual spiritual man and him who's just like, look, I can do whatever I want. I can be whoever I want to be. I don't have to act like I'm holy or sacred. You know, I don't have to act like a spiritual person. I can be a drunk guy who humps hippies and still be a spiritual teacher and still have something to offer the world. That's a beautiful thing, man. It is a beautiful

thing, except that he's pretending to be drunk. I never side with the people that are pretending to be drunk. I always suspect foul play. If you're pretending to be drunk, why would you pretend to be drunk? Or pretend to be anything else. I don't know. Watch your documentary. I don't know.

Have you ever seen comics that get a shot of water and pretend it's tequila on stage? No. It's dark. It's dark. They fake drunk. They fake pretending to be drunk. Well, his thing wasn't... I don't think...

Anyway, I can't defend it because... Attack is fuck. I can't defend it. Maybe it wasn't when he did it. Maybe he was one of the first. He wasn't at the fucking improv. Well, Dean Martin did it. But I mean, seriously, what is he doing?

He's faking it. He was... But he was... Listen. First of all, I'm not a disciple of chogim trump so i don't know why i'm getting defensive it's alan watts anyway no no chogim trump oh he's the one who did that yeah drunk yeah i got confused yeah well either one why would the guy do that i think he was demonstrating the power of not giving a shit which which is one of my pet

theories recently i think it's the only power we we get that actually becomes stronger as we age. But how do you say a guy's not giving a shit if he's pretending to be drunk? He obviously gives a shit. I think I'm going to say he had a— Put it on the show. No, he doesn't give a shit about his reputation as a spiritual guru. So he's making a fool of himself intentionally to demonstrate the fact that he's no big deal. And a lot of these gurus, that's what they do, man.

That's part of what they do is they get around people and they do some incredibly untraditional weird thing that doesn't seem to make much sense or it really like affects the people who watch them and it usually is a way to like point out your your own like ego and you're where you're stuck that's the idea and you you have to it's a leap of faith like was cho gim trumpe doing that on purpose maybe he was really drunk maybe he just wasn't having a good night or maybe he was doing it because he had a weird sense of humor Who knows but all you can say is this guy put out some amazing Fucking books that really break down Tibetan Buddhism and also like some of his disciples like Pema Chodron They're amazing teachers and they asked her about him, you know

What did she think about him being a boozer or drinking and she's just like what can i say he was a great teacher and he like taught me the dharma he taught me buddhism so like how can i judge i don't know that's just what he was like it's really cool man there's a there's a in especially in tibetan buddhism one of the um progenitors of it was a uh tilopa was his name and this was a you know they would go out and try to gather information about buddhism and so this guy i think his name was marpa is that right marpa miller miller up not right i don't know is there's very rapey yeah i don't know if you had r-e-p-a yeah millerapa rapa he was like wandering to try to gather information about buddhism and uh he you know he kept asking who can teach me this can give me, you can really teach me about this?

And so they told him, well, there's this guy, Tilopa, in this fishing village. You can go there and talk to him. He's an awakened being. And so he gets there and he asked people, do you know of this saint, Tilopa, this enlightened being? And they're like, we know the filthy homeless guy, Tilopa, who lives down by the river and eats fish scraps. Is that who you want to find? And he goes to this guy, and the guy proceeds to torture him for years, years

and years. And, like, finally, at the end of this whole process, and there's all these stories about the various means that this guy used to teach him, the final transmission, he slapped him in the face with a sandal. And that was, like, the big download that he got. And so the whole point of it all,

this mythology or half mythology or whatever it is, is that if you let your ego decide what a teacher is going to look like, then you are not gonna see a real teacher when they cross your path because you've already decided they wear robes or they don't wear robes or they're in shape or they're not in shape or they're this or they're that.

The moment you do that, you've cut out so much in the world. And that's what's really cool about Buddhism and all these stories is that quite often the teacher was never who you expected it to be. It was always a person who went way, way against what you thought somebody who was awakened might be like. And there's something really beautiful about that because if you knew what awakened beings look like, then you would be awakened yourself, wouldn't you? And you wouldn't really need anything because you already have it all figured out. So awakened beings slap you in the face with a sandal. Awakened beings apparently do whatever it takes to wake up the other beings around them.

And that's the essence of a koan, right? All these koans, like what's the hand of one hand slapping? What's the hand of one sandal slapping? Yeah. You remind me of this German guy I met in India years ago. I just met him in a cafe, just some guy had been living in India for a long time, and we were getting drunk. And he told me this story when he was young and first arrived

in India he found this teacher who didn't speak any German or English right but he just saw this guy in Varanasi and he was like that's the guy that's the guy who's going to teach me and he started following this guy and the guy for weeks and the guy was just like who are you get away from me why are you following me and he just followed this guy all through India. And then finally, like he was washing his robes and he fucked up the robe somehow in the wash. And so then this guru had like weird robes that weren't the right color. And then eventually he let this German guy wear a robe. And the German guy sort of ingratiated, just like a stray dog who won't leave you alone.

And he never understood what the guy was saying. He just felt there was something in his eyes that would be transmitted to him if he stuck with him. And eventually, because the white guy was following him all around, this guru became really well known in India, right? And he started bringing the white guy up next to him on the stage when he was doing his teachings and stuff because everybody knew him as the guru that the white dude followed all around. And eventually as the German language skills got better in Hindi or whatever language the guy was speaking, the German realized that this guy was completely full of shit. And he was just like using him to – so it was – what you were saying reminded me of this whole idea of like what a teacher looks like. And it's, yeah. The idea is it's like the teacher, the idea is you already are inside.

You're already awake. You have this, you're caught up in your ego. You're attached to your ego. You're already awake. And so different people, they need excuses to wake up. They need, they need an excuse wake up. They need an excuse. They need some kind of thing. Some people need to wear robes or some people need some kind of intense meditation practice. In some stories in Buddhism, somebody sees like a drop of

water hit a puddle and suddenly they gain the transmission and wake up. But, and I think Chogyam Trungpa even said this whole process of initiation is kind of ridiculous. It's really more of a thing for you. It's more of a thing because you need the excuse to be a better person. This is actually, not to get too far off track here, but this is in the Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky talks about Paul, who was basically the father of Christianity who never even met Jesus. But he was like walking down, he used to persecute Christians, and his name was Saul. And he was walking on the road to Damascus, and Jesus

appears to him and says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And at that moment, he realizes that Jesus is love, and he becomes like a disciple of Christ, and he changes. And so Dostoevsky, in this awesome essay in The Brothers Karamazov, says, okay, what happened there? Is Jesus like a magical medicine being that like touched him, and there was some magical thing that went through him where suddenly he got better? If that's the case, then Jesus is nothing, and humans are just empty robotic things, and there's no freedom. All you have to do is come in contact with the right person and you're going to get better again. Freedom's gone in that equation. Or did Saul need an excuse to stop being an asshole?

And the excuse he used was this hallucination of some magical being that came to him. And he let that be the excuse. That let him truly become an awakened being. And this is why in so many different religions and so many different philosophies, there's the process of initiation, which is like these series of things that you go through. And martial arts. Yeah. It's funny because your thoughts are all, all of these things you're saying are all very beautiful. But they're so clearly a work of fiction.

They're so clearly prose. They're so clearly a work of fiction. They're so clearly prose. They're so clearly a story. Like, even they're, like, flavored. It's like there's truth in them, but it's truth delivered in the filter of a story, you know, about someone getting slapped in the face with a sandal and being enlightened or someone seeing water hit. Do you see a conflict there? Does that make it untrue? No, definitely not especially when you consider the age of these things right the age of these initial thoughts

i mean how how old are the original stories they're goddamn ancient who knows but i mean isn't that the essence of fiction to convey a truth through yeah well that's why i find it fascinating because of the fact that when these things were originally conveyed and put down onto some form of you know written language or what have you, the actual stories still resonate through the obvious fiction. Oh, yeah. The actual truths of what you're saying still resonate through the obvious fiction of the work. Like, you tell me that a guy slapped a guy with a sandal and he achieved enlightenment.

I'm like, oh, sure he did. Well, no, this- But I mean, what you're saying behind it, that what you're doing is exposing someone to these various new paths of thinking that sometimes a simple thing like water splashing into a pond opens up the doors of perception in a strange way that allows this sort of exponentially increasing understanding of your reality. And then it is just one event that causes this. It is really a slap in the face of the sandal. Yeah. But it's still obviously fiction. Well, and it's what we were talking about before we went on air, placebo.

Yes. Right? The fact that a placebo isn't an actual drug doesn't mean it's less real if its effects are tangible. Well, yeah, but it's not. That's such a weird fucking thing. I don't think it's just placebo. I think you're talking about a container to hold a certain type of energy. That's what a placebo

is. A placebo triggers your self-healing potential that was always there. And so does religion, right? Religion gives you a structure within which to be the decent person you already were. One of the most ultimately fascinating things about human beings is the placebo effect.

The idea that there's a tangible, quantifiable result that comes from a certain type of thinking. But whether it's positive or negative. Voodoo death. Or stress, just stress. Like they've shown that people that live in big cities or people that have high stress jobs, they're much more likely to have a host of different things go wrong with their body because they're just fucking redlining it all the time. Stress is devastating to your immune system.

I spoke at a scientific conference once, psychoneuroimmunology. Do you know about that? It's essentially the measure of how our mental state or our psychological state affects our immune response. And one of the guys who was on stage with me is Robert Ader, who just died recently. He's the first person to ever demonstrate in a laboratory that if you stress out mice, their immune system drops. It was very interesting the way he did it. He gave them, what's that artificial sweetener, not aspartame before? Xylitol? No, before the first one. Saccharin? Saccharin, yeah. So he put

saccharin in the water and let them drink the saccharin. And as soon as they drank the saccharin, he shocked them. And so he paired saccharin with an electrical shock right and then and every time they were shocked their immune response dropped because they were super stressed and you know the release of toxic chemicals and all that and then later so he trained them to associate those two things and then later he only gave them saccharin and noted that they had the same response so the immune response had been trained wow that is fucking weird yeah it's it's so hard though to keep your head about you it's so hard to stay calm to just to be cool and chill about things and then sorry to interrupt you but just the really weird thing about this is the next

generation and the third generation have the same response. Whoa, without having any exposure to saccharin. Exactly. Wow. Well, that makes sense. It's like the same thing with the reason why we have this fear of snakes. There's a genetic memory that gets passed down. Right, but see, this is where it's really interesting. This is considered epigenetics because it's not actually in the DNA,

but it's somehow the DNA gets trained by the experience, and that's passed along apparently through the genes. But it must be somehow the DNA gets trained by the experience and that's passed along. But it must be in the DNA. It gets in the DNA. Yeah. Or it's in, see, that's the thing about DNA. We've got all these genes, but it's not if you just have the gene for this or that. It's if that gene is triggered.

So there are triggering mechanisms that are more easily shifted than the genetic content itself. So it's like there's a gun, but that doesn't mean anyone gets shot unless somebody pulls the trigger. So the genes are all potentially there, but some get triggered, some don't. And so what seems to happen in this new field of epigenetics is they're noticing that the experience of an organism somehow affects the expression of genes in subsequent generations. This is, Sheldrake's morphogenetic field addresses this because I don't know that he believes that it's a genetic transmission, but he believes that when a thing starts a new behavior or learns a new thing, it creates this

like shift in the morphic field, some kind of field that exists outside of like life and that the the the being like when genetically like resonates with that field and so when there's some behavior pattern it gets sort of imprinted or it creates like a i can't remember the term he's like a runnel they have some psychedelic language for it but a path in this morphic field that that then every other thing like it begins to to resonate with the shift that it's in some invisible it's like a raindrop going down the window you ever see how they form a path and then the other ones go into the same yeah yeah that's it yeah exactly that's exactly a perfect way to put it yeah yeah you brought up earlier that I was skeptical of Sheldrake. I'm not skeptical of Sheldrake.

I'm just not, I'm not convinced that he's right either. I'm just open to it. I'm skeptical of it because I want it to be true. And usually stuff that I want to be true, it's like. Well, I don't think he's ever proven anything to be true. Like I think his, his studies on dogs, knowing that their masters are coming home. How sketchy are those?

I don't think they've been replicated anywhere. Yeah, I'm in the same boat. Stanley, who you met and maybe Duncan's going to meet, is an old friend of Sheldrake's, and he's where you are. He's like, I don't know, maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but he hasn't proven anything. Yeah, until he proves it, you have to say, hey, you can't keep writing that.

You can't keep saying that. It's a fascinating theory, but to say that you've actually proven it in studies not so much you know because that would be something like look they have proven weird shit man they've proven that you can teach a rat how to get through a maze in one part of the world then a rat in another part of the world they get through that maze quicker that has been proven that's weird that's it it is that's rupert sheljick it is you know you know the hundredth monkey thing? Yes. You know that whole, that's bullshit.

Is it really? That never happened. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, explain it for people who don't know what it is. The hundredth monkey was what, there were two islands. There were a bunch of monkeys on the two islands.

They had no contact with each other because they couldn't swim across. The monkeys don't swim, by the way, but even if they did, they couldn't swim across the monkeys don't swim by the way but they even if they did they couldn't swim across the gulf between the two islands and tourists started going to one island uh and they were both islands and they threw potatoes it's in japan i believe and they threw potatoes and the monkeys on one island learned to use the seawater to wipe off the dirt off the potatoes and then that then that sort of got transmitted through all the different monkeys on the island. And when the hundredth monkey learned that trick, suddenly the monkeys on the other island started doing it. It's horseshit.

It jumped. It's not true. Yeah. It says it online that it's bullshit. Actually, in Wikipedia, it's also, what they basically broke down was that the claim was that it was an observation of these Japanese scientists. One of the primary factors in spreading this claim was that many of the authors quote secondary tertiary or post-tertiary sources who have themselves misrepresented the original observations. So it's one of those things where it just becomes this, like how many times have you ever heard people say that uh there's killer sperm that attack other people's sperm baker and bellis research yeah yeah not really no there's no proof whatsoever that sperm does anything other than sperm stuff i never heard

that sperms aren't murderers i never heard sperm attack other people's sperm yeah there was never been proven to be true but sperm wars but i saw someone on like a science show the other day quoting that that very thing and people were fascinated. Like, wow, amazing. But there is some differentiation in semen. The first spurt of an ejaculate is different from the middle spurt and the last spurt. Tastes better. It's true.

That's where the tang comes through. That's the fructose. That's where the pineapple, rub it in your fuck. But, you know, you were talking earlier about— But they don't kill other sperm, right? Well, yeah. I mean, it's not that there are sperm that are killing other sperm. That's not the killer sperm thing and the kamikaze sperm and all that.

Baker and Bellis went way too far. In fact, they split at that point, And one of them stopped working with the other because the one kept saying, you know, that it would attack sperm and all this. But it's true that the first part of the ejaculate has chemicals that kill preexisting sperm. And the last spurt of the ejaculate has chemicals that protect your sperm from the next guy's first spurt so it's like a train like the the first car on the train attacks what's already there the last car protects what you're putting there okay so he just basically extrapolated way too far way too specific actually interesting right exactly the other thing is interesting is actual head of the penis designed to

suction out other dudes jizz the plunger lean back yeah it's got is the actual head of the penis designed to suction out other dudes' jizz. The plunger penis. And pull it back. Yeah. It's got the helmet. The whole idea of the helmet is that it's a push rod. It pulls back all the other guys' jizz and squirts in your own. Get in there, boys! Give them hell!

Send in your own troops. It's true. It's true. I mean, we're obviously designed for multiple mating. I mean, that's, you know. Well, our testicles swell when there's women around that are having sex with more than one man. And the fact that they're outside our bodies. Right.

What's that about? That's about keeping them cooler than body temperature so that they can be. It's about rubbing them, sucking them, a lot of other things. It's not, they would be useless if they're inside your body. It's a yin and a yang. You take the possibility of getting kicked in the balls and you bounce it against someone sucking on your balls while they jerk you off gorillas have their testicles inside their body they also have little one-inch dicks little one-inch dicks that's right fucking silly which ted would not let me show i when i did my ted talk they they pulled that i've got like in my

the talk i've given all over the place there there's the sort of laugh moment, the pivot of the whole talk, is this slide where I've been showing charts of testicle size and penis design and all this stuff. And then I get to this chart, and it's got, let's see, in the upper left-hand corner, it's got a gorilla lying on his back. There's no balls. And in the upper right-hand corner, it's got a bonobo whose balls are like bigger than chicken eggs. And in the middle, it's got a friend of mine in a hammock wearing a Speedo.

And it says, Gorilla Bonobo Italian. And my friend's completely cool with me using the slide. And he saw, I did it in Australia and he saw it online and wrote to me.

It was really fun but anyway when i did ted the last rehearsal the day before i go on they said uh you know that one slide it's a little creepy and they've already seen it i've already done it in three rehearsals they saw it before they even invited me and they're like well yeah it goes it's and one one of the people said i'm'm afraid Italians will be offended. I'm saying Italians have big balls. That is not an insult. You don't know Italians.

You think they're going to be offended. That's what I said. I said, have you ever been to New York? It's weird to think gorillas would probably ride noisy motorcycles. Do you think so? Would they have like a little skull cap on? Yeah. And ape handlebars? Yeah. The like a little skull cap on? Yeah And ape handlebars?

Yeah The ones they hold up like this? Sorry No, what's the connection? I didn't get that Because they have tiny dicks Oh So they would have like crazy loud motorcycles

To compensate? Yeah Or their expensive red sports cars Yeah Or they work out a lot One or the other Well, they they work out a lot. One or the other. Well, they definitely work out a lot. Look at the size of gorillas.

They're like the most working out animals ever. They're the biggest muscled ones and they also have the littlest dicks. Coincidence? There you go. I don't think so. Well, Ted, you know, I love the Ted Talks. I think they're endlessly educational

and fascinating and interesting. It's because of the vast amount of interesting people they've collected. As an organization, I've heard a lot of weird shit about them. Your Thing is one. Eddie Huang was there at the same thing with me.

Graham Hancock. Horror stories. They're not infallible. They're also probably growing in a fucking staggering rate Sarah Silverman Sarah Silverman Another thing In fact

When I did that And they made me take the slide I went back room Backstage to the technical guys Right And one of the guys Looked at me And he said

You're getting Silverman Ah Because of the dick You got Silverman That's hilarious We gotta end this thing Alright Fucking pretty God damn awesome podcast Hey Merry Christmas Merry Christmas Santa's on the way This is a dick. You got Silverman. That's hilarious. We got to end this thing. All right.

Fucking pretty goddamn awesome podcast. Hey, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Santa's on the way. Pagan holiday in the house. Holla. Holla. You can see Chris on Twitter. It's ChrisRyanPhD.

And Duncan Trussell is, of course, Duncan Trussell. Two S's, two L's. That's T-R-U-S-S-E-L-L. And download their podcast, you fuck. The Duncan Trussell Family Hour is available free and clear on iTunes and all other sources. And Chris Ryan, your podcast name and where they can get it. Tangentially Speaking. Same place.

Nobody can spell that shit. You need to change it to The Chris Ryan Show. I know. Fucking with tangentials. How dare you. How dare you. You're going to weed out dummies. You know. Fucking with tangentials. How dare you? How dare you? You're going to weed out dummies. You're not going to be able to teach them.

Tangentially speaking, iTunes. It's on iTunes, or you can get it on chrisryanphd.com. And buy the book as well. Fantastic book, Sex at Dawn. It'll change your life, you dirty fucks. All right, we will be back next week with the great Roseanne Barr and a bunch of stand-up comedians and a bunch of other cool motherfuckers. We've got a lot of good shit coming up. If we don't see you,

happy holidays. Enjoy your time with your family. Enjoy your time with your friends. Be joyful. Be loving. And we'll see you in a few days. Big kiss. Thank you.