The Joe Rogan Experience - #697 - Christopher Ryan

Episode Date: September 17, 2015

Christopher Ryan, PhD is a psychologist, speaker, and author of New York Times best seller "Sex At Dawn"

Let's start. That could be, yeah. Chris Ryan and I have decided that for my friend Steve Renazzisi, who just admitted that he lied about working in the September 11th, the Twin Towers during September 11th, that we're just going to lie all day. So this podcast is all bullshit. Everything we say, psychologically, this is a tough one for me because I really like Steve.

He's a good friend. I really like that guy. I see him in the comedy store all the time. I've known him for years. I really like him. And then I see this, and I'm just like Jesus Christ you know what what gets me what gets me when someone does something like this is I imagine what it would be like to be them to have told some sort of a crazy lie and got stuck telling it

where you're repeating it over and over again and then you just got it's just becomes like it's it's locked in it's like how do you erase it how do you go back and take a lie away especially if you transition from like a regular guy who just bullshits with his friends to a public figure like i guess this guy got famous at some point right yeah so then you've got your lies that all your friends think are true and now you're doing interviews with the fucking wall street journal or whatever and if that comes up what do you do you stick to your guns or you humiliate yourself you know in your private circle you know because you gotta there's that well apparently he did humiliate himself in his private circle.

He pulled Ari and a few guys aside years ago and told them that it wasn't true. No shit. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's been fucking with him forever. I just, you know. Good for him.

He's coming out of the closet. Although he got pulled out of the closet, I guess. I think he got pulled out by the New York Times. I think the New York Times got him. He's coming out of the closet. Although he got pulled out of the closet, I guess. I think he got pulled out by the New York Times. I think the New York Times got him. You know, they do their research, and they found out that he didn't really work for Merrill Lynch. You know, he said he worked for Merrill Lynch for like a year and a half as an account manager. Didn't really work for Merrill Lynch either. Well, as you were saying before the mics went on, like, what a dumbass lie.

Like, oh, Merrill Lynch, account manager? Wow, let me suck your dick. Like, who gives a shit? You used to work for Merrill Lynch, account manager? Wow, let me suck your dick. Like, who gives a shit? You used to work for Merrill Lynch? Hey, I used to be an accountant, baby, you know? I like how lies for Chris Ryan immediately translate into potential sex. Why else would you lie? Nothing else is worth it, you know?

I guess to get a better job or something, maybe that would be something. I don't want a job. My entire life has been about avoiding ever having a job other than blow job. Writing books even. Just like, God, let me just get this out of the way so I don't have to have a job. Dude, I don't ever want to write another fucking book in my life. Even that I'm trying to get out of. That's hilarious.

But you're an author. You're an established, successful author. And you're like, fuck, I don't want to do that. Dude, I wrote a book and suddenly was running a business. Like, I never wanted to have a business. I'm not a business guy. What is the business? Chris Ryan, Inc.

You know what it's like. If you're in the paper, suddenly managers are calling you and lawyers and you've got the sort of parasite infrastructure that gloms onto you like those things on the bottom of boats. And it's like, no offense to any accountants. Or parasites. But you know what i mean right i mean and and so i mean you know joe rogan enterprises is a huge thing you know and you must that must take a lot of time a lot of attention and so even in my you know micro scale it's just a giant pain in the ass it certainly can be fortunately for me i don't think of anything that i'm doing as like really work work yeah you know it's just stuff i enjoy doing that happens to be an occupation rather than.

But yeah. Also, I mean, what you're doing, you're at a level where you can afford to hire good people to help you. I'm not. Right. And my wife is useless. So she's a wonderful woman. Don't get me wrong. And she's very good at certain things, but, you know, producing a podcast, editing a book, you know, the kind of stuff I need someone to do.

I mean, I have to answer her emails, you know. She can't be bothered. When you hear a guy like this Renazizi story, when you hear a lie, does it freak you out? You know what? Here's the thing that freaks me out. Does that, does it freak you out? You know what? Here's the thing that freaks me out.

And it freaks me out. Like even like the Jared from subway thing, or when I read something about some guy who was messed up, I forget what the article was about. I think what the article was about a guy who was friends with a guy who turned out to be a murderer. And it's about a guy who got messed up and, and got involved in some rough sex with some prostitute and killed her and then sought her up and left her fucking body in bags and shit. Could have been an accident. Whenever I hear about anybody who's just gone completely off the rails like that, I always say, OK, if I was that guy, if I was born in his shoes, if I lived his life, would I have been that fucking guy?

Like how much of what we are is determinism? You know, how much of what we are is based on the events that took place that have that are completely outside of our control about how much of it is how we were raised? I mean, we've all heard people tell like terrible stories about how their parents raised them terrible stories about the environment they're forced into and you always wonder like how much of who each one of us is is based on a bunch of shit that's completely outside of your control and how much of these events that take place whether it's the jared from subway thing or i had my friend Barry Crimmins on who's this great comedian and a real icon in Boston and Bobcat Goldthwait did a film on him about his horrific childhood sexual abuse he was raped when he was four years old by his babysitter's boyfriend and it was this

horrific horrific story and you know this is something completely outside of this guy's control. And how much of who he is now is based on that. Well, he's like in his 50s. And this is like still something he's dealing with from when he was four. You know, it's just you, what you are now is like this series of these series of events is like this series of events that have kind of, a lot of them just laid out in front of you without you having any control over it at all. Now here you are.

And when I see a guy that does something really crazy, I mean this is like minorly crazy. We're not talking about a horrific crime like a Bill Cosby thing or something like that. We're back to the comedian now. Yeah the comedian Yeah, yeah, not the chopped up prostitute. No no no no no Yeah, I mean the Steve Renizzisi my friend, you know what it's what he did was just Doesn't make any sense

Like and you just wonder like what it must be like Fuck to be that guy who's done that it was just like said this thing for no fucking reason it doesn't make any sense and then has to stick with it just i don't i mean that's my angle on these things instead of getting upset about i mean especially this one so but how does that relate to what you're saying do you feel like if you may if you were in the position he was in you might have done something similar i always always worry that, yeah. Whenever I see someone do anything crazy like murder or craziness or anything, I always say, well, how much of who you are is because of your life experiences,

a lot of them outside of your control, your genetics, your parents, the environment that you were raised up in, the people that you came in contact with when you were younger. How much of that is who you are today in 2015? I think's god damn it I think it's a lot and so I see this guy you know my friend and again Steve run is easy what he did was just dumb it's not evil it's not nobody got hurt you know I mean he might have hurt someone's feelings people that actually were survivors of 9-11. That's potentially possible. But you know what I mean?

He didn't rape anybody. He didn't murder anybody. It's just fucking what happened? How does the brain get so fucking tweaked? And of the lies he's been busted for, the I was in the Twin Towers at 9- 11 is the one that everyone's focused on right no one gives a about lying about working for maryland right well although i don't understand why you would right like you said unless you're trying to get laid and also like you know i would argue that anyone who was a survivor of 9 11 who was actually there has bigger issues to think

about than some comedian is so i would argue he didn't really hurt anyone except himself now that he's busted. Rationally, yeah, you're right. So who gives a shit? And everybody in public life is lying on some level, right? You've got a persona, and you have to be true to that persona. I mean, I remember when I first sat down with this producer to talk about doing a TV show, which ultimately never got made like most TV shows.

But when we were like putting together the whole chat, the summaries of the episodes and all this stuff, he said, so what's your on air, who are you gonna be on the show? And I said, what do you mean? It's like, I'm just gonna be me. He said, no, are you gonna be like the funny guy? Are you gonna be the really smart professorial guy?

You know, what's your image, your persona gonna be? I said, I'm just gonna be me. He said, oh, you're gonna be authentic with air quotes. I said, what the fuck is that? No, I'm going to be authentic. He's like, no, on TV you can't be really authentic. The most you can be is, quote, authentic, because you have to be the same every fucking episode.

And if you come in one day and you're feeling pissed off because you just had a fight with your wife or you got diarrhea or whatever your issue is, you can't express that. You have to be the same guy you were last week. But why is that? Consistency. Well, it's entertainment.

But that's the medium, though. The medium is just so limiting in that way that people expect that every week. That's one of the cool things about a podcast is that they kind of don't. Like when you do tangentially speaking, you can kind of like be you. Nice. Yeah. I try to, but still, I am conscious of the distinction

between who I really am and who people are getting the impression I am. And I try to be, like just last episode I did in the intro, I did a little thing about, because people were writing to me and saying, like, what's it like to go from like some nobody in Barcelona to TED Talks and Rogan show and all this stuff. Right. What's that like? Did you like feel it happening? Did you expect it? Did you is it like being on a river and it was just flowing that way or were you swimming toward it? And so I tried to address it a little bit. And what I said was in my very minuscule experience, fame is like wine that tastes really good and can only get you drunk while it's in your mouth. So you swallow it quickly.

I know it's not the best thing. The other metaphor I thought of was like. Oh, okay. Okay. So if it's in your mouth, it gets you drunk. But if you swallow it, you're fine. It's not the best thing. The other metaphor I thought of was like. Oh, okay. Okay. So if it's in your mouth, it gets you drunk. But if you swallow it. You're fine.

You're fine. Right. Okay. So you, I mean, you know what I'm talking about. Someone comes up to you and like, they're like nervous and like, oh my God, it's Joe Rogan. Right. And you're like, yeah, I'm just, I'm just me. Right.

Right. I mean, you know the truth. You're just a guy. But they're reacting to what they think you are, which is so much more than what you actually, what anyone is, you know? That's the nature of fame. It's this bullshit thing that only has the value that people apply to it. Right, right. And they're applying more to it than you are because you're you, right?

And you know what it's like behind the curtain. But you don't want to disrespect them behind the curtain so but you don't want to disrespect them either right and you don't want to disrespect what it is that they're experiencing in that moment even though it's complete bullshit right right right i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about no no you're making sense because it it's it's very confusing to people that don't know it but it's it's like a magic trick that um if tricks the magician, he's a fucking idiot. You know what I mean? It's like you have a magic trick. Look, I pull a dove out of my hat.

You know there was no fucking dove in it. Dove's in your sleeve, asshole. You're hiding the dove. I see what you're doing. You know what you're doing. But if you say, I have this amazing ability to make doves appear out of nowhere, and you really believe it, well, you're a moron. It's like you have a magic trick in being on television or being, you know,

on the radio or in movies or whatever it is, whatever it is that people get attracted to you by your work, by your, by you being an author, whatever it is, that thing makes you different than another person. Instead of just like, I appreciate talent, like, very much so. And I can kind of be, like, starstruck when I meet someone that I really appreciate or that I really am admiring of their work. But I kind of know what it is.

It's like I've seen it enough times that I'll go, hey, there's that guy that fucking sings that awesome song. Hey, I love your shit, man. It's, like like it's a good thing but it's not i don't think of him as other than a human being but i remember one of the first times i ever met a famous person or the first times i ever met famous people i couldn't believe i was seeing them in real life one of the first guys i'd ever met i was in harvard square in

cambridge i don't even remember the dude's name but he had been in a bunch of like television dramas that's funny and i was like you're that guy from that show and he like tell me what the show he's asking a question you like want to know where the t-stop was you know we could catch public transportation you know he approached you you know he just he was just yeah he asked a question asked I thought I don't know if I asked him if he was that guy first or if he asked me but he didn't give a fuck he was like yeah yeah yeah I'm that guy from that show did you guys know where this thing is and we you know told him where it was i'm like whoa we just saw

that guy i still to this day don't remember who the fuck he was that's funny and when i was little my uncle used to work for uh howard marks advertising my uncle vinnie is an artist and he worked for the company that drew the album covers for kiss so when i was like boy i guess i was like eight or nine years old maybe i don't know how somewhere in that age i met uh ace freely who was the lead guitarist to kiss and he always wore makeup and i met him with no makeup on and uh you know he would come would come by. It was a great hustle they had. They wore makeup when they were on stage, but then offstage, no one knew who the fuck they were.

Yeah, perfect. So they were huge superstars selling out arenas, rock stars, but they were just completely incognito. So this guy just walks into the office, and my uncle knew him because they were friends, and he's like, oh, hey, what's up? How you doing? And I was so confused.

I was like, is that what he looks like? Because you couldn't even see them. This was obviously pre-internet, but there was no photos of them available without their makeup. There was like maybe one photo with like a hand in front of them or something like that where you really couldn't see clearly. But to see him in the flesh moving around and walking and talking, I was like maybe one photo with like a hand in front of them or something like that where you really couldn't see clearly. But to see him in the flesh moving around and walking and talking, I was like, what the fuck? I thought about that for years. It's a pretty cool thing because they, I mean, I don't know anything about KISS. Like if they were in masks from the beginning, like with the makeup from when they were playing clubs and stuff.

with the makeup from when they were playing clubs and stuff. So were they anticipating, like, wow, if we get famous, we don't want to be recognized at the Whole Foods? Did they see that shit coming? They saw Whole Foods coming. Trader Joe's. It's all out there. I don't think so. I think there was a style of, I think they used to call it glam rock.

Is that what they used to call it? David Bowie and all that. Yeah. I mean, I think that's what it's called but I think it was just a hook I think their hook was that they were going to wear face paint you know and have these designs in their face like Paul Stanley was the star child so he had a star over his face and Gene Simmons was the demon used to spit blood and blow fire on stage they had had you know peter chris was the cat and then ace freely was you know he had uh he was like the spaceman and they had this persona that they they had adopted like these characters and no one knew what they were and all their names

were fake too i'm pretty sure so like who they were when they were on stage and it was sort of taken even further into fantasy land by this makeup and these crazy costumes that they wore like they wore boots like gene simmons boots had teeth on the bottom of them like these it was just all so nutty so bringing it back to your buddy yeah imagine you know your kiss and you're trying to pick up a woman in a bar and you're like you know i'm gene simmons. Get the fuck out of here. You probably work at Merrill fucking Lynch. I think they probably had so many girls coming up to them, they never went to a bar and tried to meet people.

They never went. Yeah. I mean, they were probably just trying to think, how many can I fuck in a day, and how many do I have to say no to? Because it's just not gonna work out well you've got people to do that for you probably yeah they probably had like handlers handlers wranglers i i heard an interview the other day with um uh i don't

forget his name but he's one of the main guys of iron maiden and uh which as a band i don't know but i know they're huge right and he's a jet pilot and he flew commercial airlines for years so he was like you know nobody knew it was me up there you know and I'd just be you know flying you know London to New York or whatever like this is your pilot we're reaching out or cruising out and then he'd go like play a gig in New York. So he would fly as a commercial air pilot and then do a gig. Right. And then they bought a jet, a 747 or something, to fly the band around. So now he flies the band to gigs.

How fucking strange. Didn't John Travolta fly commercially for Qantas? That rings a bell. Yeah, I know he's an accomplished pilot. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he did. A friend of mine went flying with Tom Cruise. He's got like one of those biplanes, a stunt plane.

Wow. And it was like loop-de-loop, and she said, man, I almost puked on him. Because she was in front, you know, the pilot's in back, and she was like, I was this close to Ralph and all over Tom Cruise. So the pilot goes in back, and the passenger is in front. Right. How strange. Yeah. Those old planes, man, when you see what it is, this wire frame with this very thin coating

outside of it. So flimsy. The cables going out to the flaps and stuff. And they used to have to manipulate the flaps with handles in order to make it go up and down and move the rudder. Oh, God. And they fought with those things. You remember the old King Kong, King Kong 1, with King Kong on top of the World Trade Center? No, it wasn't World Trade Center.

It was the Empire State Building back then. King Kong lied about that. Man, fucking liar. He's climbing up the Empire State Building, and they're shooting at him with those planes. Those old rickety World War I planes. It's pre-World War II. Yeah. Because King Kong, I believe, was the 30s.

The original King Kong. It's early. I want to say like 33 or something like that. It was a talkie, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was a talkie. So early talkies. We went over that yesterday that the first movies were actually the 1800s for silent movies.

It was the late 1800s. With the horses, the first one to show that all the horse's feet came off the ground at once. No. You know that story? Yeah. I think that was the first motion picture. Really? A French guy.

Yeah, there was a bet. It's a long time since I may be full of shit here, but I'm sure people are Googling it even as we speak. But there was, I think it was the first motion picture was that they were trying to determine whether all of a horse's feet came off the ground at once. So he set up, I don't know if it was like a bunch of cameras in a bank that sequentially shot.

Well, they have a video of it. Oh, here we go. 1889. There you go. Yeah. In the second frame, you can see all the horses' feet are off the ground. Yeah. What was the first movie ever made?

The first movie, Thomas Edison in 1889. Oh, really? Thomas Edison. Yeah. That's what this is saying. It's too bad he was such a prick. Apparently. Oh, really? Thomas Edison? Yeah. That's what this is saying. It's too bad he was such a prick. Apparently he was, right? He stole Tesla's ideas?

Yeah. It's hard to tell, though. That could be like one big he said, she said thing, but obviously Tesla was a super genius and Edison electrocuted a fucking elephant. For fun. To show. To scare people. Yeah. Against show. To scare people, even. Yeah, against DC.

Which is hilarious. Yeah. Well, against ACDC, against alternating current. Like, DC was what was the standard. Right. And ACDC, alternating current, was what Tesla had invented so that you could plug in all sorts of different devices that need less power. Oh. But then Edison already had a business thing going.

Yes, yes. And didn't want, and even though Tesla's idea was better, right? Yes. More efficient. Yeah. Well, Tesla was a weird, weird, weird guy, man. But you kind of have to be to be that fucking smart and figure out that many different things. Well, so that brings us back a little bit to what we were talking about before with the persona.

I've got this idea that most of the people who rise to positions of prominence in Western society are troubled in some way. So, like, you know, you're talking about geniuses. Like, you have to be – a genius is a certain kind of distortion, right? Right. I think Einstein said that a smart man controls his mind, a genius is controlled by it, right? So there's an obsessive quality to it. Right. And I wonder if the extent to which our – this is this old book that I'm writing. It seems that if you say the underlying structure of civilization is essentially pathological, then it makes sense that the leaders, the people who rise to prominent positions within that society, will predominantly be pathological.

Is that necessarily true? Like is Zuckerberg like a guy who creates something like Facebook? Is that guy pathological. Is that necessarily true? Like, uh, is Zuckerberg like a guy who creates something like Facebook? Is that guy pathological? Well, you know, you would, I would look at him and say, I don't know the guy, of course I saw the movie that's as close as I got to him. But, uh, does he seem like a balanced, uh, healthy character to me? You know, it seems like a lot of what's created is created by sexually frustrated adolescent men or boys. Right. And he would probably fit into that area, you know?

Right. I mean, wasn't the whole thing like a dating, a way to meet chicks at Harvard? Wasn't that the origins of it? I think it was a dating thing. I don't really know. I don't it was in the make sense though yeah yeah so anyway I mean Freud talked about this in civilization it's discontents that you know civilization is built on deflected sexual energy and if we were

all just getting laid as much as we wanted nobody would do anything that's that's a good point and also if you really concentrate on what is healthy, in quotes, what's healthy is friendship and fun. None of those really stack up points, you know, as far as like monetary, you know, what you can put in your bank account, what you can show as far as like your real estate holdings and, you know all that look at my fancy stuff you know like that that's really what people look to when they look for the gauge of success the gauge of success is almost always attached to money right and that's it and if you get to the point where you see through money or fame or power these these burton these metrics that are

socially accepted then you become you know what the Jesus figure the Buddha the you know You sort of check out tune in turn on drop out right? Yeah, and then you're a loser And you're not influencing The direction of society. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird like it's weird about our ideas like knowing the temporary nature of life it's weird about our ideas. Like, knowing the temporary nature of life, it's weird that our idea of success is based almost entirely on the possession of things. Yeah. And that, of course, feeds into the powers that be, right? The consumerist change, the change nature into plastic, you know, which seems to be what we're about. I have a weird theory about this that I've repeated before. So in interest of saving the

attention span of the people that listen, I think that the reason why people are hooked on materialism, the reason why it's so attractive is because ultimately what it's doing is propelling technology and innovation. And that the more we become obsessed with acquiring the newest, latest, greatest things, the more it will push innovation, these newest, latest, greatest things. And the reason for that is we're ultimately creating an artificial life. And I think that we are the technological caterpillar that becomes some artificial intelligent butterfly. And that what we're doing is creating a new life form we just we're so we're so arrogant that we're we think that we are the only life and this is the only

life that's possible but meanwhile what we're doing is we we we have been born into these inefficient um these biological entities these shells that house our imagination, and that we eventually will escape them or create something that makes us obsolete, more likely the latter. Yeah, I'm grappling with these very issues right now at the end of this book. Are you? Yeah. Have you ever read Kevin Kelly or heard of him? No.

He's a very deep thinker in artificial intelligence and the Internet and all that kind of stuff. Very interesting guy. And systems, like how systems self-organize and like, you know, like they take high speed film of flocks of birds and they see that the individual birds are reacting to other birds the flock is reacting quicker than individual birds can can react there's there there's what they call phase change where you shift from a group of birds to a flock of birds or a bunch of fish to a school of fish where where everything starts functioning very differently right and um like for example did you know that uh locusts and grass hoppers are the same animal yeah it did yeah completely crazy yeah it's just a matter of

to your point yeah well yeah when when it rains and so then there's a lot of food, they replicate, you know, they reproduce really quickly. So now you've got the population density, and then the food starts to dissipate because the water is going, and now they get very tight population density, and they become locusts, which their brains change, their legs change, their coloring changes, their behavior changes, and they start swarming. So with less food, they swarm? Yeah. Well, the food is restricted. So they get into, you know, like an oasis or something. So they get into smaller areas because the water from the rain, first it rains. So you get lots of them. Then the water starts to disappear, right? It evaporates over a few days or whatever and the food is less and less.

So they're concentrated. And it's when they're packed tightly that they shift into locusts. And that's when they swarm and they go out, you know, and wipe out anything they can find. But then they can shift back to grasshoppers again. So I'm sort of arguing in this book that civilization is when our species shifted to locusts, a phase shift into a locust form, and we swarmed.

And we've been swarming ever since. But we're about to run out of material. And, you know, like the fish stocks are down, the water's gone. Like everything's, we're in the age of no more, you know. It's hard to argue. You know, i was watching this documentary the other day about the 1970s when they were talking about the 1970s there was a hundred million less people in america in america in america and and like the world population was

billions less but that's stunning yeah a hundred million i mean think about if a hundred million people died today in america it would be a fucking enormous tragedy of epic proportion. But that was just the numbers a few decades ago, four decades ago, whatever it was, you know, whatever, you know, pick a number. That's fucking crazy. That's crazy. 100 million people is a lot to gather inside of 50 years. That's really remarkable. Yeah, and we're still talking as if growth is the natural

and it's the only way to be, right? We need growth. We need growth. They're worried that reproduction levels are below zero in Japan and Spain and some other countries. Why are we worried? That's great. I mean, short term, it's a problem because you don't have enough young people to work and pay for the old people, whatever.

But long term, imagine how great the fucking earth would be if there were one billion people on earth. You know, that was something that came to McKenna in a mushroom trip. He asked the mushroom how to save the human race, and they said every couple reproduce only with one child, and the human race would be saved. That's it. That's all we'd have to do.

It's a significantly lower population, and, you know, with mortality and accidents and natural causes and all the other jazz. Take control. Actually, this is going to be historic. I am a little, I'm at the end of the book, right, where the publisher requires a prescriptive, like, what's next? You know, what do we do with all this kind of chapter,

which I hate doing, but I'm doing it. So you have to, like, have a solution? Takeaway. Their phrase that they love is, what's the takeaway? The takeaway. Got to have a takeaway. Have to have a love is, what's the takeaway? Gotta have a takeaway. Have to have a final act, Mr. Ryan. Yeah, the gun's been on the mantelpiece through the whole play, somebody's gotta get shot.

You can't end the movie like, no country for old men. The guy just wanders off, and like, what the fuck? Where's the resolution? But, you know, I've been reading kevin kelly reading other stuff and i've come around you and duncan and i have always had this sort of three-way debate about the future humanity and all that and i see three scenarios one of which is the one you just outlined where we are a transitional life form that gives birth to techno intelligence and spreads out into the universe and whatever. And another is sort of apocalyptic collapse and Mad Men, not Mad Men, Mad Max. Mad Men.

They all become advertising executives in the 60s. Completely different outfits. Thin lapels, A lot of smoking. But the other one, which I'm actually, you know, if I were a betting man, I probably wouldn't put my money on this. But I'm encouraged to think about it. I read a book recently called Future Perfect. I don't remember the author. Stephen Johnson is the author.

Another internet tech web guy, right? And he makes a really strong case, which I've heard you make. You've made it to me, actually, that the internet is, first of all, it's very, very early days for the internet. And it opens up revolutionary possibilities, like beyond anything that's happened to our species in the past. The fact that you and I right now are talking to hundreds of thousands of people with no sponsor telling us, don't say that, don't say this, that I can, you know, we can talk shit about Monsanto, we can talk shit about the U.S. government, we can do whatever we want. That is really revolutionary. And the effects of that are impossible for us to really predict. And it's international, right? It doesn't respect national

borders. Anyone, anywhere, it's archived. It functions vertically and horizontally. That's really something. And one of the examples he uses in his book is Kickstarter. In two years after they launched, Kickstarter was already spending more supporting artists than the National Endowment for the Arts. Wow. In two years. And now it's like three times that.

That's amazing, right? Who would have thought that there were so many people who were like, I'll give 20 many people who are like i'll give 20 bucks to that guy i'll support that and you know this just with this technology you're able to do stuff i was reading about this tribe in the amazon the other day who are um basically have taken over defense of their land because the government's useless and so they've got legally they're completely justified but the loggers keep coming in and you know invading you know so they've set up like gps

units all around and and motion controlled cameras and uh they're using technology to try to defend their land and document in incursions and stuff and i was thinking like wouldn't it be cool to set up a crowd-funded thing where you could send 20 bucks to this tribe in the amazon to help them buy a fucking motion detected camera or a drone why not right like you know about kiva no kiva is micro loans um and it's just a website like kickstarter where you go in kiva you put put 100 bucks in and you they've got all these people who have applied for loans. You pick a country El Salvador. OK, you go through, you look at all the their pictures and like, OK, I need 150 bucks to buy a goat because I make goat yogurt and sell it

in the village. OK, you give her 25 bucks. She pays it back. Their repayment rate is over 99% because they've got people in country who verify that everything's cool and this is a real thing and whatever. So then the money gets paid back to your account after they get their goat and they sell enough yogurt. And then you can either take your money out or you can recycle it and like go to Uganda and let's find somebody in Uganda we can help them put a new roof on the shop right and it's completely you to them and the the company just you know is the it's like tinder or anything else it's it's just a way to connect really cool you know and it's your money and if you don't want to do it anymore you take your money and you're out yeah these like sort of non-capitalistic ideas are one of the most beautiful things about the Internet. Like these sort of organically created ideas like Kickstarter, crowdfunding, couch surfing.

Yeah. You know, like all the sharing economy. He calls it it's his term is pure progressives. economy he calls it it's his term is pure progressives and so then like what's gonna happen if you know we can get the oligarchs out of the way and make internet direct voting that's the ultimate future right internet direct voting where it's not no longer electoral college we don't look at things as in terms of states but we look in terms of the mass of the race or the mass of the human organism, what benefits. That's it, yeah.

The problem is there's been people that have been candy fed, they've been baby fed for so long that it's almost like they're, it's like taking a person who's been in solitary confinement, locked up like a veal, and then forcing them to run an ultra marathon. It's like, you're not prepared for this. You're not conditioned for it. You don't have the resources to pull off an informed version of the future. Yeah, but, you know, and again, it's really weird that I'm arguing the hopeful side here, but hey, what the fuck?

We said this was going to be a bullshit podcast, right? We're lying. We're fucked. I don't believe any of this. The one thing I would say about human nature, because I get asked a lot, what's human nature? I think the strongest thing I can say about human nature is

humans want to do what everyone else is doing. That's what we're really good at. We're not good at thinking it through, but like, oh, everyone else is killing Jews. Well, I guess I'll kill some Jews then, you know, like everyone else hates black people. Then I hate black people. Gay marriage is cool. Okay.

Gay marriage is cool. Like, look how fast that changed. Yeah. I was going to bring that up when you were talking about the birds, like the birds moving in a flock in a way where they're moving in such harmony that they couldn't possibly be reacting to each other. Is that what happens with mob mentality? I guess so. Yeah.

And I think, you know, in humans, it's mob mentality. It's fan, like that hysteria. Like Beatles. The Beatles. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Like just insanity. Yeah. Like just insanity, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is, you know, greater than the sum of its parts, right? Yeah. That phenomenon. Like there's no, you know, I mean, geese are a different thing, but most flocks of birds, you know, starlings you see doing that thing at night, there's no leader. Yeah. Right?

There's nobody saying, hey, let's go to the left now. There's no choreography. It mimics in fish as well, right? There's nobody saying, hey, let's go to the left now. There's no choreography. It mimics in fish as well, right? Sure, fish and swarms of locusts. And in fact, in one of these books by Kevin Kelly, he talks about how they were doing the artificial, the guys who did Batman, one of the Batman movies, and they were doing the special effects.

And I guess there were bats bats there were flocks of bats that they needed to um replicate on screen and they they they just set up a logarithm where each bat would react to the other bats near it in certain according to certain um uh variables calculate calculations and then they just set it loose and it formed a flock. Whoa. So it's like it doesn't even have to be alive. It just has to have certain consistent responses. Wow. Yeah.

So what the fuck are we talking about? Well, we're talking about human beings moving in a mob mentality. Do you think that we're a—I think the evidence is that we're a superorganism more than we're an individual. Yeah. Well, see, what I did in the book, and, you know, I hope this is making people want to read it when it comes out, not like, yeah, I already heard all this shit, but, you know, what I did was I started by saying your individuality is itself an illusion. Right. Because 90% of your weight, once you get the water out, is made of, no, no, not your weight.

90% of your DNA, of the DNA that constitutes your body is not your DNA. It's the DNA of microorganisms that live on and in you. Right. Right. So I got into the whole, the, the whole, um, uh, intestinal fauna and, you know, and all that. Yeah. And it's, so you couldn't exist without that. So each of us is a community, right? Yeah. So, and then you go to the higher level and it's just the same thing, you know. Each of us constitutes an organism as well. We're part of this thing that we can't really see because, you know, we're part of it. It's hard to, it's like fish don't think about water, you know. Right.

And it's not considered because we always like to think of ourselves as individuals, but the evidence is there that we get insanely lonely when we're by ourselves oh yeah I mean we don't very confinement it's the worst thing you can do to someone in jail I mean it's really crazy and if you think about human beings like being isolated and being lonely and then the incredible joy that they have when they find civilization or people like someone alone on a raft they're not thinking about well i'm alive at least let me just think about my life and no

they're like fuck i gotta find people i have to find people like even if you have all the food in the world if you're floating around on a boat lost at sea you're incredibly sad like we have this insane intense need for each other to be united, bonded with each other. And if we're not, we're fucked. We're some strange sort of super organism. I made a video when I had my 2005 Showtime special. And I did this video about flying over the earth. and I did this video about flying over the earth.

And then if you fly into Los Angeles, and if you look at the earth as a host for life, and, you know, our bodies, you could certainly say that our bodies are a host for life because of all the organisms that we just talked about, the fact that there's more E. coli in your body than there are people that have ever lived ever. I mean, it's amazing. And all that stuff is important for life.

Yeah. But when you fly into Los Angeles and you're flying over that just gigantic mass of cities, like if the earth is an organism, well, what are people? It looks like a growth. Like Los Angeles looks like a growth. It looks like a growth on the super organism like mold on a sandwich and if you saw mold on a sandwich you don't think of individual pieces of mold with individual identities and personalities you just see mold yeah and I think the same thing could be said about human

beings that we're just so close to it we can't see the forest for the trees that we don't see ourselves objectively. We don't go, oh, we're one thing. We're one big thing that's making technology. I mean, that's essentially what we are. We're one big thing that's willing to sacrifice the very fucking air, the very air that we need to stay alive. We're willing to blacken that shit up in order to produce, you know, industrial goods. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I hope that's not the way it's going, but it's sort of, it feels that way. That's the trajectory we're on at the moment. What I'm hoping is that the, the internet, I mean, I look at the gay marriage thing and a lot of the stuff is,

is ugly that happens on the internet, but the idea that there is, for the first time ever, the potential for a species mind, a species-level mind. What's the first thing any conscious mind becomes aware of? Its own mortality. So maybe, maybe what's happening is as these synapses are connected for the first time ever and there's this super mind for a super organism, it becomes aware of what it's doing and suddenly it's like, fuck, stop this. This is crazy. This is crazy. We're killing ourselves. If we can understand that at a species level, then we can change it, right?

I mean, the passive technology is there. We all know how to, you know, anal sex is better. You know, let's make anal sex the way to, you know, no more reproduction. Let's all go. I'm not going to talk about it. You just went on a fucking crazy tangent. But no, I know what you're saying. I think the idea.

Non-reproductive sex. Yes. Sodomy is where it's at. Sodomy is where it's at. Be a good t-shirt. There's a lot of protein in cum, too. Don't necessarily have to eat chickens. By the way, I saw your Ronda Rousey interview.

And you were really funny. You said, what is it with lipstick? It's like, right here, thisonda Rousey interview. Yeah. And you were really funny. You said, like, what is it with lipstick? You know, it's like right here. This is where the dick goes. Right. And I was thinking, you know, that is why and how lipstick was invented. Yeah. Egyptian hookers.

You know that? It was hookers? Yeah, it was Egyptian hookers to advertise that they specialized in blowjobs. Wow. So if you saw a hooker with the red lips, it's like she's the blowjob specialist. Wow. How do we know that? Was that written somewhere?

Probably. Syroglyphics? I trust that I read it in the history of sex by somebody or other. We lost so much of what Egypt was all about when they burned the Library of Alexandria. Huge loss. It's incredible because if you see what they were able to accomplish, so much of what archaeologists and historians do when they go back and they look at what Egypt, what they were accomplished, it's like trying to figure out why and how the fuck all this stuff was done. I mean, all they have is what's left on the walls. It's so crazy.

All they have is what's left on the walls. It's so crazy. All they have, literally, they have the Rosetta Stone, and they have the hieroglyphs, and they have the architecture, and then they have to try to back-engineer and decipher. To this day, there's a dozen different theories about how they built the pyramids. They're really just guesswork. It's not aliens? I thought it was aliens. I don't think that's true.

I don't either. I think it's much more likely the advanced civilization rise and decline is much more likely. And as we're learning more about geologic catastrophes, as we're learning more about asteroidal impacts and things along those lines, it's way more likely that what you're looking at when you're looking at a lot of the ancient structures that exist that we can't totally explain was that something happened, that like civilization had reached a very high level and then probably were hit by giant rocks from space and very few people survived. But the people that did survive sort of re-figured out all the things over a course of a few thousand years, just like we have.

I mean, you go back a thousand years ago. Okay, let's just go a thousand years ago. Go back to 1015. People were apes. I mean, you're talking about like Genghis Khan. They're riding horses. No one's got a car. They're shooting arrows at each other.

No one's got guns. I mean, you're talking about craziness. You're talking about a crazy part of the world. They have catapults and shit. That was what the world was just a thousand years ago. So in a thousand years, we've gone from Genghis Khan to Elon Musk making Teslas. That's great. Genghis Khan to Elon Musk. A thousand years. That works. I mean, essentially a thousand years. So imagine what we're talking about when the, like, I've had Randall Carlson on my podcast, who is a fascinating guy who is absolutely obsessed with asteroidal impacts. And he studied them his entire life. And as time has gone on, more and more of his work has been vindicated, especially by core samples. He believes that there is enough proof that the ice age ended because of astro-oral impacts.

And he had thought this way before they had figured out. I think it's called tritonite. They found evidence of what they call nuclear glass all throughout Europe and Asia, and it all is around 12,000 years ago. It's all around the same time the Ice Age ended. And he thinks it was the catalyst for the end of the Ice Age and probably wiped out a gigantic chunk of humanity. That there was just massive asteroidal impacts all over the planet. And that it just fucking killed almost everybody or a huge percentage.

And everybody who's left sort of had to re-figure out how to make buildings, re-figure out how to engineer society, and then they were left with the skeletons, the architectural skeletons of the past. They would look at Stonehenge or look at Gobekli Tepe or any of these giant ancient structures and go, okay, what the fuck, what's this all about? Who did this? How'd they do this? And they would try to mimic it or create their own.

And that what you're looking at when you look at many of these ancient structures is just whatever would be left when a giant chunk of civilization is wiped out and people have to start all over again. Yeah. You ever read a book called The World Without Us? I've heard of it. I didn't read it. It's a good book. It's basically taking that same thought pattern and applying it to now. So what would happen if people all disappeared right now?

And so he talked to engineers in New York, for example. So what would happen? Right now, there are no people. What would happen? Well, the pumps would stop. And there are all these pumps that keep water out of the substructure of Manhattan, right? So then that fills up with water. Okay, then how long does it take for the anchors and the skyscrapers to rust away and corrode? So the skyscrapers start falling.

And so he figures all that out. Like, what animals would go feral and survive versus dogs are fucked. All dogs would be eaten, like, immediately. Cats would survive though. Really? Oh yeah. What about feral dogs? Like there's populations of feral dogs that exist even in America today.

They killed some old couple outside of Georgia. I guess they'd be eaten by coyotes. That makes sense. Better predators. Yeah, right. Yeah, more adapted. Pros. The amateurs don't last. I met a guy in colorado that is a professional mountain lion hunter and uh they get hired uh oftentimes like whether or not you knew it

california employs professional mountain lion killers wow because they don't have a hunting season on mountain lions in color, or in California, rather. In Colorado, they do. And so the wildlife organization, they measure the population, they calculate it, and they decide how many would be viable to take to keep the community of them healthy, but to protect the elk population and the deer population. And so then they adjust accordingly and they release tags. And tags are what the hunters use to go out and legally kill these animals.

Well, California doesn't have that. So in California they have, I think he said three different guys that kill an indeterminate amount of mountain lions, any trouble mountain lions they have all throughout California. They just travel around and kill these fucking things. all throughout California. They just travel around and kill these fucking things. Because if you don't, then they overpopulate, and then they become a problem with dogs and people and joggers and shit like that. But there's groups in California in particular,

like extreme wildlife advocates, that want that. They want no more hunting. What they want to do is reintroduce wolves and grizzly bears to California so that those animals control all the game populations to a sufficient level, which is really like, it's not very well thought out because then no one controls their population except assassins. They have to hire assassins to go out and kill the grizzly bears that start encroaching into civilization and the wolves that start moving in on people's livestock. They have to hire people to kill them. But it's this fascinating idea of animal management

that these people are juggling back and forth between the people that are pro-hunting and then the people that are the conservationists or the wildlife advocates. It's really fascinating stuff. Yeah, you remind me of something I just read recently about the cobra effect, it's called. It refers to the unintended consequences of trying to control wild animals. And it started when the British were in India, in New Delhi, the local authorities decided to deal with the fact that there were all these cobras living in the sewers and, you know, causing a big problem. So they instituted a price for each dead cobra that you would bring in.

They'd pay you a bounty, right? So that worked really well. They were getting rid of a lot of cobras. Then people started breeding them. To make money. Exactly. So suddenly there are all these cobras coming in and they realize they're being played. So then they're like, fuck that, and they stop paying the bounty.

So now the breeders have thousands of cobras, you know, and so they just let them loose. Oh, Jesus Christ. So you end up with a much bigger problem than you thought you were solving. Well, Australia's done that, too. Australia had a problem with—Australia didn't really have large mammals, or rather New Zealand didn't really have large mammals. But Australia introduced certain predators to try to deal with introduced animals like rabbits. They introduced rabbits to Australia, but they didn't have natural predators, so they brought over foxes. And then the foxes ate a shitload of rabbits and then got out of control and started eating ground nesting birds and decimating the population of ground nesting.

I mean, you can't tell you can't engineer a fox to only eat rabbits. But they never did get a hold of the rabbit population. They put up fences to try to stop the rabbits from moving into new areas. But they weren't quick enough. And the rabbits got through the fences. As they were building the fences, the rabbits fucked their way through to the other side of the fences and just fucked and made more and more rabbits got through the fences. As they were building the fences, the rabbits fucked their way through to the other side of the fences and just fucked and made more and more rabbits.

So then they wanted to introduce the foxes over there. Then they wanted to bring in predators to kill off the foxes. It's a clusterfuck of human beings trying to somehow or another manage nature. And every time it gets away. Yeah, through predators, especially things like a rabbit

that can just breed like crazy. Yeah. In an environment where they, you know, they really didn't have a natural enemy. There's a great documentary called Cane Toads about the same thing in Australia where there is some grub that was eating, destroying sugar cane. And in Hawaii, they're able to grow sugar and the grub is under control because they have these big toads that eat the grub. So they brought the cane toads to Australia and introduced them. And these toads are, like, that big. They're, I mean, they're like the size of a 16-ounce steak, you know.

They're massive. That's crazy. What a fucking, that's a frog? And they're everywhere. A toad? And they've just, like, gone crazy. What a fucking, that's a frog? And they're everywhere. A toad? And they've just like gone crazy. And the movie is really funny because it's like these people and their encounters with these cane toads. And they're Australian, so they're just naturally funny.

Can you eat them? No, no, but they do have bufetinin. If you lick them, you can get really high. Oh. But if your dog bites one, you'll kill your dog. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know, man. It makes you think. Like, you know, the whole super organism idea. There's one of those. Oh, there you go. Look at that thing. It's bigger than a steak.

Jesus fucking Christ. That is so big. It's so big. It looks like a large bass. The movie is so funny. It opens. There's so big. It's so big. It looks like a large bass. The movie is so funny. It opens. There's this scene. It's like early morning, and the fog is sort of, it's a foggy hillside, and there's a road.

And you see this van coming down the road, and it's sort of swerving. Swerving around. And gradually you realize that he's running over as many canto toes as he can, and they're all over the road. And he's hitting these cane toes. And he talks about how if you hit it just right, where it's facing the van and you seal its mouth, it pops and there's this big explosion. Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah. They have so many of them that they just run over them in the road?

They're everywhere, man. And it's the same thing as you were talking about. They don't eat the grubs. They eat everything else. They eat mice. They eat rats. They eat all sorts of shit. And they have no natural predators.

And they're poisonous. And they're poisonous. Fuck. So it's out of control. What's the proposal to try to manage that? I don't know what they're doing now. I saw this movie like 20 years ago at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York, and I've lost track of the cane-toed issue since then, I'm sure. Do you know what happens with rabbits? Every seven years,

rabbits have a die-off. Oh, really? Yeah. Rabbits, apparently, all like farmers and ranchers would tell you, they go in these great cycles, these seven-year cycles. And right now the population in a lot of areas is very high. Where I was in Colorado, this is where the guy was explaining to me. You were just there like two days ago or something. Yeah. And the guy who I was with, he explained it to me, but I had heard it from a few people before, that their populations get extremely high, and then a disease comes along and wipes them out. And it's clockwork. It happens every seven years. And then you find very few

rabbits. And then seven years later, it'll be a swarm again. It just takes a few years for them to rebuild back up. And then they're back. And then the same thing happens again. A new disease kicks along, maybe the same disease, I don't know. But this cycle of die-offs, of great population growth and die-offs. And this guy was arguing that I was hanging out with in Colorado. He was saying, you know, it's quite likely that what we're looking at is a natural cycle and that it could be applied to the human race as well. Yeah, there's a beautiful book, which I've recommended many times, called A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, a Canadian scientist. And he looks at every civilization that's existed, you know, the Mayans, the Sumerians, the Romans, the Easter Island,

all these different civilizations, and he shows that they all follow the same life cycle. It's exactly what you're saying, that there's an organic rise, and then there are certain conditions that happen just naturally. One follows the next, and then the decline. And, you know, you see it happen again and again and again. Yeah, it's like the tide, you know, it's in and it's out. It seems to be like a cycle that exists just in almost everything in nature, that there's some sort of a balancing factor that occurs with any system where you get an accumulation of one particular species or one particular thing, and then it dies off, and then it comes back. I mean, it could be argued that that's what the asteroidal impact is, that it's some sort of an inoculation from space.

Well, and also life apparently came from asteroids. Yes. Right. So. Panspermia. Yeah, exactly. That's the theory that even the building blocks of life, like simple life, like the amino acids. Right.

And all those things came by stars. And then when you find out that a human being really essentially is made out of star dust, in order to have carbon-based life forms, you have to have a star explode. Are you going to start singing hippie songs here? No, it's too crazy, man. I can't do it. We are stardust. What is that song? It's fucking shit.

Joni Mitchell. Yeah, there's a bunch of them. Yeah. By the way, while we're talking about the cycles of life. We are billion-year-old carbon. Yeah. And we've got to we're talking about the cycles of life. We are a billion-year-old carbon. Yeah. And we've got to get away. Get back to the garden.

Back to the garden. Yeah. Crosby, Stills, and Nash covered it. Yes, yes, yes. What was the name of that song? Woodstock? Yeah, Woodstock, yeah. By the time we got to Woodstock.

We are Stardust. We are golden. We are a billion-year-old carbon. Yeah. We've got to get our way back to the garden. That's a beautiful song it was they were hippies i love their song acid dirty feet love the one you're with yeah that's a good one you like that that's the theme song to sex at dawn yeah it should like

you should get a cd with the book or something it's funny i've met quite a few girls who've read your book and uh when they do your book. There's one of two reactions One reaction is fuck that guy and the the the other reaction is it's time to be a hoe It's time to just go out and get your freak on I was talking this comic like a couple weeks ago And she was saying if you ever read this book It's called sex at dawn. I go yeah I go the author is a good friend of mine and she goes fucking so right it's so right and i'm like oh there's a freak she's a freak like finally

somebody gave her a freak license exactly somebody came along with phd next to his name and said it's okay to be a freak do what you do it's all right oh man i've gotten so many beautiful emails from women um you know i've gotten some angry ones too but some really beautiful ones from women who say you know like and even some of the most moving ones are the ones where they say like i get my mom now you know that's what really touches me you know like i get it right. She wasn't bad. Yeah. She just liked to fuck, you know, and funny. And in those days, that was a big problem. You know, it's a weird thing that we we have such a conflicted relationship with. On one hand, we sell everything with sex. We use it to sell cars and fucking houses and everything is so much so that a normal look for a woman normal in a business environment is exposed legs just think about what kind of a business environment would it be if men walked around with thongs it wouldn't exist i mean what the fuck are you doing if men had like

little short skirts that they wore to work where your cock was just you could just lift up the shirt the skirt and your cock would be right there yeah that that's not acceptable but we women are so desirable and sex is so desirable that we have accepted this idea that a woman's attire could be like the easiest possible thing to fuck in. Like literally, panties that you just pull to the side and a skirt you just lift up. Easy access. And it's on Fox News. And high heels, which flips your

rear entry. And a bra. What's a bra? I mean, a bra is about like, here it is. It's a tit shelf. A tit shelf. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Just letting everybody know it's right here. Come and get it.

And yet, on the other side, you know, and none of this is to say that women should buy into this if they don't want to or that, you know, objectifying. I mean, objectifying is a complicated thing. It is. I think we all objectify constantly. Right. But, you know, like this guy, there was a big controversy a week or so ago. Some guy, a woman, a lawyer in England, tried to contact a senior lawyer in this firm through LinkedIn to get a job. And he wrote back and said, well, we don't have a job right now, but I'll tell you, your photo is stunning, and I'm sure you'll have lots of success.

So then she calls him out for sexual exploitation because he said her photo was stunning. That was it. That's just a compliment. Yeah. Is that all he said? He didn't make any sexual advances? Not like, let's have dinner, nothing.

Just like, your photo's stunning. So it became this big deal, and the guy, like, you know, half the people are saying the guy's a creep. And I'll tell you, creep shaming is an interesting thing. It is. Like if you're over 50, you should never. You shouldn't be sexual. You shouldn't be sexual, yeah.

What are you, like a 30-year-old girl, you piece of shit? Right, you're a pedophile. Oh, you creep. She's 22. Yeah. Why would you be attracted to her? She's a baby. You Woody Allen.

You disgust me. You disgust me with your sexual desires and your fucking Cialis-induced hard-on. Fuck you. Speaking of standing up for people, I really appreciated the article you wrote recently. It was Men's Life or I don't know. Maxim. That was really nicely done, man. Thanks, man.

Seriously, as a guy who's not in great shape, I appreciated that. Yeah, the concept. Well, they wanted me to write something about the human body, about getting in shape or whatever. And it just occurred to me to make the comparison to a human body in sandcastles. Your body is like a sandcastle. The reason why sandcastles are kind of cool is because you know that they're not going to last. Yeah, it was really well done.

Thanks, man. I mean, it called the mandala, the idea of building something beautiful that's going to be washed away as soon as you get done with it. I often think about life that way, not physically so much, but like I feel I'm in my mid-50s now and I feel like I'm starting to figure it out. Yeah, that is part of the problem, right? By the time you realize the hustle, the fucking game is almost done. It's like I'm learning how to dance and they're turning the lights on.

That's sort of probably also what contributed to all these fucked up civilizations was that people only lived to be like 30, you know, if you were really lucky. So you were just constantly on momentum, like running downhill where you couldn't stop. Like, ah! And then the barbarian hordes cut your head off. And then hopefully along the way you fucked and left behind some of your genes. And then they fucked. And people just died off in these giant chunks when rats came into your cities. It carried fleas.

It had the plague. Yeah, the plague. And just blah. And then finally we developed the ability to fight off diseases, inoculate ourselves from certain viruses, build up walls to keep out the barbarians, build up stockpiles of food so that we didn't have to constantly hunt and gather.

And then everybody went, hmm, I think if you make something circular, we can roll it. I'm going to call it a wheel. And then they started pushing things along. I mean, you could argue that agriculture and that civilization was the downfall, but you could also argue it was the beginning of real thought. It was the beginning of relaxed thought because you had the opportunity to innovate. Well, and you had the surplus of food that you could have people who thought for a living. Yeah. And then the machine slowly started to plot our demise.

They started with, listen, I could be a wheel, man. I can carry you around. You don't have to put anything on your back. I'll make life easier for you. Hey, dude, you know, if you just fucking make a silo, you could put all your grain in the silo. Yeah, exactly. You have stockpiles in the winter. And next thing you know, you've got Steve Jobs.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember in the 80s when've been the eighties when my boss gave me a beeper and I was like, Oh cool. I get a beeper now. And within two days it's like, you might as well put a fucking leash around my, you know, it's like, this isn't helping me. This is for you. You fuck. How about people that are required to answer emails over the weekends? Yeah. There's a lot of jobs that you're required to answer emails at night, over the weekend. You have to constantly be aware. You have to have your phone.

There's certain companies that require people that are employees to have their phone where the notifications are turned on so that emails come in for the company. You have to instantly answer them. Even when you're not at work? You're not at work. You're working. There's jobs, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley and these really very competitive tech industries. There's a lot of debate as to when you should not have to answer an email.

When is it okay? If your boss sends you an email at 7 o'clock at night and you don't respond until 6 o'clock in the morning when you wake up or whatever it is, you could get in trouble. And they're fucking drug testing you. That drives me nuts. You smoke weed fucking last weekend and you come to work and you're like drug testing you. That drives me nuts. You know, you smoke weed fucking last weekend. Yeah. And you come to work and you're like, are you fucking kidding me?

This is slavery. That one's nuts. That is slavery. We're moving back to Spain. Are you? Oh, yeah. Really? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this was always a temporary visit. This was a slow nomadic trip through North America. Portland and then Spain. Well, it was, I mean, first it was Vancouver, Canada. And then we were in Nicaragua for the winter. Then we went back to Vancouver. Then we came to LA for the winter is when, you know, you and I and Duncan started doing the shrimp parade and all that. I was living in Topanga, but it's always like a slow move. And

then we went to Portland for a year and a half and now we're going to go back to barcelona what made you decide uh to go back yeah well we were always planning to go back i mean we we sort of flirted with maybe staying for a while um but my wife's a doctor and for her to get a license in the u.s would mean like going back to medical school, essentially, which she's not going to do. Right. And she really likes working. She hasn't worked in four years while we've been traveling. So, you know, that's an issue, like if she's going to continue practicing. But also just we really like Spain. You know, I've lived in Spain most of my life. I've lived in Barcelona longer than I've lived anywhere else. Really?

And what is it about Barcelona that's more appealing than America? You know, when I first got to Spain, I felt I traveled a lot and I was actually on my way somewhere else. But I got robbed and, you know, I ended up hanging out. And the way Spanish people see life is much closer to the way i see life and so even though i was raised in america i never felt like this country never really made sense to me how so well like what we're just talking about like work materialism materialism you know it's all about money spanish people that you know the expression is we work to live we don't live to work right you know there are no

like Spanish cars there's no cup holder if you want do you want to get a drink pull over in a cafe and get a drink there are no to go cups you want a coffee go to a cafe really yeah it's like someone should tell them about cups with lids on them

what the fuck is wrong with those apes? Crazy, uncivilized heathens. Fucking cave people. Sex. You know, even though Spain is, you know, officially a Catholic country, there's so much more chilled out about sex. About sex outside of marriage. Like, whatever. Just don't tell me about it.

That's the sort of normal way to deal with it. Women, no, I've lived in Spain 23 years or something, right? I get accustomed when I see a beautiful woman, I look at her, and she knows I'm looking at her, and she appreciates it, and she smiles, and I smile, and everybody's happy. Come to America, look at a woman like that, you're a fucking rapist. Right. You're eye-rap raping me have you heard that microaggressions i mean fuck your microaggressions i don't want to hear if you're not a fucking dwarf i don't want to hear about microaggressions give me a break

i mean this country is just nuts man and like it and i feel bad because they're there i love people here i've got great friends here there are a lot of things i love about it like you know work-wise And I feel bad because I love people here. I've got great friends here. There are a lot of things I love about it. Work-wise, it's the best place to be. But life-wise, fuck, I love Spain. You go out to lunch with a friend, it's probably going to go until 5 or 6 o'clock. Everybody just hangs out.

Yeah, yeah. It's more of a hangout. Yeah. No, like restaurants. I'm sitting in a restaurant, and we're talking. The waiter, first of all, the waiter's going to come four times and ask, you know, how is everything? Oh, how are you? Oh, how's your day going?

Fuck you. Get away. I'm trying to talk to my friend here, right? Then they'll come and say, are you still working on that? This isn't work. This is fucking lunch. Am I working on that? Get out of here.

Drive me crazy. Tips. 20%. I go to Portland. I fucking buy a croissant and a cup of coffee. There's a big tip jar. I run my credit card. 10%? 15%? You just handed me a fucking bag and a cup. I'm supposed to give you 15% extra?

That's because your boss is too fucking cheap to pay you a decent wage. That is true. That is exactly what it is. I like the tip thing because I like being generous. I like the option to make someone happy by giving them a nice tip. Right. But it is kind of fucked that waiters and waitresses don't even make minimum wage.

Right. I don't know if that's true anymore. Is that still true? Yeah, it's true. That's crazy to me. That seems rude. It seems evil. It seems illegal. It's humiliating. Yeah. Too, because they have to like smile and give you all this fake cheerfulness. There was an article that was written recently about that, about the emotional toll of requiring people to be artificially happy and that it's not productive and that like the

artificially happy people that answer phones and ask questions and, and how are you today, sir? And how's everything like requiring people to do that, that work for you. Not only is it not productive, it, it, it wears them out and it makes them less productive at other things that you probably need them to, because there's like a,'s like a mental, there's an energy that you need to do that that you could be doing and directing towards something that's actually productive. Yeah. It's one thing. You don't want to be rude, but just being efficient is enough. You don't have to have this like fake sort of smiley bullshit.

But that fake smiley bullshit people require it like especially people who are customers the customer is always right like that kind of nonsense like this relationship where the customer has to be like massaged and catered to instead of just appreciated as a fellow human being yeah there's like an established relationship between the customer and the employee your Your employee is rude. Sir, I'm sorry. Is there any way we can make it up to you? I don't know.

I might be taking my business elsewhere. Yeah. You know, I mean, if that was about friendship, you'd be like, well, go fuck off. Make a new friend, dickhead. And in Spain, that's the reaction you'll get. Well, that's nice. You go into a shop. But see, in Spain, I bitch all the time too, right?

So I'll take it with a grain of salt. What do you bitch about in Spain? Where's the fucking waiter? The people are rude. Exactly. That is true. The one thing I do find in Europe, the service is not as good. No.

It's just not. No, because they don't get paid tips. And they don't give a fuck. But they should probably give a fuck. Like there's a middle ground there somewhere. No. It's just not. No, because they don't get paid tips. And they don't give a fuck. But they should probably give a fuck. Like, there should be a middle ground there somewhere. Yeah. I think that is the middle ground, right? I think, like,

in Spain, you go into a shop to buy whatever, and the woman's on the phone with her boyfriend. She's going to finish her conversation before she comes to help you, right? Yeah. But, I mean, for example, I went to Spain a few months ago to renew my residency paperwork and all that. And it was a typically Spanish experience where, you know, this kind of thing in America, you would, you know, go online and fill out this thing and, you know, call the IRS and be on hold.

And then you'd get some grumpy asshole in Philadelphia. But it would all get done pretty quickly. In Spain, you go to this office and they're like, hey, how are you? No, they're really friendly and nice. Oh, no, it's not this office. You have to go to this other office. Oh, sorry. Okay. You go to the other office. They're really nice, but that's not the right office either. They misinformed you. But nobody's got any mala leche, as they say in Spanish, which is like bad milk, literally, which is like bad milk literally which like bad intentions so it takes three days and it's kind of a pain in the ass but it isn't a pain in the ass because you're having fun all the time everyone's nice right the women are beautiful the cops are nice in spain they're nice guys you can go up to a cop in spain and be like hey man

you know can i park here and he's like i remember literally i was trying to park my motorcycle in the ramblas and and it's no parking but there are motorcycles everywhere and there's this cop standing right there so i go over and i'm like i'm a foreigner right can i park my bike here or not and he says legally no but nobody will say anything like can you imagine an american cop saying that maybe in the 60s when when would that have ever been said in this country it'd have to be a long time ago and see the the legal system is in spain it's a problem if you're bothering someone not if you're breaking a law if you're breaking a law and nobody says anything,

the cops don't give a shit. So in America, it's the law. It's, did you break the law? Are you growing weed on your terrace? We're flying helicopters with infrared detectors to catch you. Not, did your neighbors complain or did you shoot somebody, right? In Spain, like, I grew weed on my terrace for 20 years. Nobody said a fucking word. Nobody cared. Is weed legal in Spain? Like a lot of things in Spain, it's kind of not, kind of is.

Tolerated? And this is a really important cognitive difference between Spain and the U.S. is tolerance for ambiguity. Like in Spain, I'll tune in like, oh, there's a Barca-Madrid soccer game. Really big deal, right? Starts at 8 o'clock. I'll turn on the TV at 8 o'clock and there's still some fucking sitcom on. What's going on? Well, they're running late.

You know, the game will start in 10 minutes or you know it's just can you park here well you know there's a lot of ambiguity and no one really cares if it's not causing a problem whatever whatever you know so weed for a long, weed was illegal officially, but the cops didn't care. So, like, if you're smoking a joint on a playground and a cop walks by, he's probably going to say, dude, what the fuck? Go somewhere else. Get away from this playground. The kid's here. That's what would happen.

That's it? That's it. If you give him shit, then maybe it'll escalate. Do they have quotas? No. No quotas, no property seizures. There's none of that stuff. That stuff's so creepy.

No minimum mandatory sentencing. The property seizures, if people don't know about it, I mean, they've lessened them considerably, but those things are horrific. And what they've done to people is they've dragged people into the legal system oftentimes when they're completely innocent. Property seizures are not necessarily, in many states, even a result of them catching you with something illegal. It's catching them with too much cash. Like there's a lot of people that have gotten caught.

Some states, I think it was North Carolina or South Carolina, some states were really bad with it. They would catch people that would be, say, if you were going to buy a car, you call the guy on the phone, how much do you want for the car? 10 grand. Okay, I got it. So you got your 10 grand, your cash, you're driving over to this guy's house to buy the car, and you have this 10 grand, you get pulled over. The cop would go, what are you doing with 10 grand? I'm going to buy a car. Well, we don't believe you. We're going to take that 10 grand. And so they would take that 10 grand. In one case, this police department had bought a margarita machine with the $10,000 that they stole from people that they thought were buying drugs. Or they claimed to think were buying drugs.

Claimed to think. But just stop and think about that. They took the money to buy a drug machine, which is what a margarita machine is. I mean, a margarita mixer. Like, what the fuck, man? That kind of corruption, that kind of sneakiness where you write it down and you make it legal, in quotes. Well, it's on the books. Search, you know, asset forfeiture for people that are suspected for selling drugs. If you have more than X amount of dollars on you, we can pull you over for that. And they've just used that over and over again, that one law, to rip off law-abiding citizens and

then drag them through the legal system for years at their own expense. So even if they get their money back, the amount of time it's cost them, and obviously that time, a lot of it is you're going to lose work because of that time. And then hiring lawyers, legal fees. And if you lose, they robbed you of time and the money. If you can't prove where that money came from, maybe you're just really shitty with your taxes. You don't pay taxes. You work for cash. And you've been just working odd jobs for cash.

You saved up a bunch of money. You can't prove that that money came from illegal means. You're fucked. Well, like everything else in this country, it's set up to fuck the person who can't afford to defend themselves. And it's set up even a creepier way that's anti the way this country's supposed to be set up, where you're guilty until proven innocent. You have to prove yourself innocent just by having currency on you.

And it's less than someone makes in a year. It's like the idea that you had savings, get the fuck out of here. You don't save anything, dummy. Give me that. And some kid who's selling weed living in his parents' basement, if they bust him, they take the parents' house. Parents had nothing to do with it. They'll take your car. They pull you over and you got a joint in your car, they sell your car.

Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of that going on over the past few decades ever since that just say no when we saw on television with nancy reagan that that began the hysteria of this stuff and then asset forfeiture is just legalized stealing and it's uh you know a billion dollar industry in this country yeah legalized stealing and then you got legalized you know bribery in the political system okay yeah that's what lobbyists are yeah super PACs I mean the whole the whole I mean this country is collapsing right I

you can see it if you start reading these books we're talking about you can see the phase that we're in we're in a phase now where there are all these different industries that are set up to extract the commonwealth. Literally, the wealth of the community is being pulled. The war is in the Middle East. What was that serving? The only people who benefited from any of that were Bechtel and Raytheon and Halliburton. Yeah, these guys who do this for a living. And Eisenhower himself said, you know, the military industrial complex,

when you get people who make a living with bombs and they need to be making bombs, well, they're going to blow those bombs up. They're going to find a reason to use those bombs. Of course. That was one of the creepiest speeches ever. And the most fascinating thing about it is that it was captured. I mean, it was broadcast on television. But if you didn't listen to it that time, it was gone.

He said it, and then it was gone. And it was years and years and years later before people started actually watching that, like in the fog of war. Wasn't it in the fog of war? Was it in that? Is that the McNamara movie? Yes. Yeah, that's a movie yes yeah it might not have been in that but but regardless it's it's definitely available on

YouTube yeah I mean I've watched it I saw it in the corporation have you seen that film yes that's a great documentary that's a creepy documentary when you realize that when they compare corporations to psychopaths and the idea of the infinite growth paradigm there it is Constantly make me like if you make a billion dollars a year you go wow you're successful. What do you make next year? Well, I'm just gonna make a billion again. What are you a fucking loser? You have to make a billion one girl billion to grow infinite growth like that is what the stock markets all about right? consistent infinite growth Apple consistently makes more money every year. They have to make more money at Google every year you know every

fucking company they have to make more money you can't Chris Ryan enterprises is you have to constantly be in the black Chris Ryan bad news for my shareholders we peaked we decided to convert our dollars to whatever the fuck they have in Spain what What's the Spain money? Oh, they're in euros now. It used to be pesetas. So what do you do when you go over there? I sit back and let my fucking wife work.

I married a doctor, dude. I thought, I married a doctor. I'm like, I am set. I am set for life. And that's how you were thinking when you married her? Well, you know, a little bit. Well, you love her, obviously. Of course I love her. But there's also that added benefit, the fact that she's in a good business. Well, I mean, the thing is, doctors in Europe don't make the kind

of money doctors make in the U.S., right? But nor do they, you know, come out of college with $200,000 in debt. Right. Malpractice insurance, is that all a burden? No. I mean, the whole thing is so amped up in the U.S. A good doctor, like, you know, normal sort of she's a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist in Spain, you know, good experience, whatever, might make 70 grand a year, something like that. You know, like a decent, stable, you know, good benefits. Everyone in Spain, everyone in Europe gets at least a month off every year. That's cool. Paid. A month off. If you work in a shop, you get a month

off. But they have the full 30 days off or do they get like a week here, a week there? Full 30 days, use it when you want. 30 days in a row. You can do it if you want. You can do it if you want. Most people take August. The month of August, nothing is happening. Barcelona is empty. Really? In the month of August. Yeah, it's amazing.

But, you know, like the thing about Spain that I love is that life is about pleasure. I mean, if we had to really boil it down, there is no shame in pleasure. And in America, pleasure is shameful. Why do you think that is? I think it goes back to the Puritans, you know, the original sort of influence of the Puritans, and that it got amped up, you know, like we're talking about the war on drugs,

and we're talking about the Cobra effect, you know, these unintended consequences. If you look, it served political ends to keep attacking outsiders who did have pleasure black people Indians Mexicans you know they're coming back again into fashion as the victims you know yeah attack these brown skinned pleasure see pleasure you know hedonists because they're they're evil they're you know that's all evil shit but they're evil. That's all evil shit. But they're dancing. Nobody buys that shit in Europe. Footloose.

In Spain, anyway. Fucking Footloose. This is how dumb we are in America. We made Footloose again. They tried to remake Footloose. This fucks. That's interesting, though. It's also, when you look at it,

America is so overwhelmingly infatuated with productivity. Yeah. You know, I mean, being productive and getting— Yes, efficiency. Yeah. And, you know, look at our workforce. You know, we have—like, there's a goddamn commercial. I think it's for, like, Shell.

I think it's a Shell commercial. And there's an old man man and it's the weirdest fucking commercial and it's it it's talking about how hard this guy works and this guy he's a farmer and he's like standing like a field of wheat and he's like you work hard not because you have to but because it's what you do and the guy smiles and i'm like what the fuck are you saying it's almost like you're trying to trick people into working hard so they can tell people there it is almost this is the guy can we play this let's let's play this because it's just go full screen because it's so fucking bizarre

this is one of the weirdest commercials man i i always weird out can i because this they air this commercial during hunting shows. Not because you have to. Not because some boss told you to. But because that's what you were born to do. Now watch this. They get close on this guy. And that deserves the best we can do. And he smiles.

It's what you're born to do. Thank you. Thank you for working hard from the number one heavy-duty engine oil in America. What the fuck kind of a commercial is that? It's what you were born to do? Now, here's what kills me. The person who wrote those words doesn't work for Shell. He works for an advertising agency that they hired to do that.

Yeah. That old man, he's a fucking actor. Yes. Nobody who works for Shell really had anything to do with yeah that old man he's a fucking actor yes uh nobody who works for shell really had anything to do with that yeah you know so the classic commercial we here at uh chevron we believe that blah blah blah and then you see all the people with clipboards and hard hats of various racial backgrounds none of those people work for fucking chevron none of them the guy who wrote the words doesn't work the guy who's reading the words doesn't work.

There is no—Chevron is like an entity that's—there is no there there. Right. It's just a collection of people designed to collect money. And it's not even the people who matter because all those people could quit tomorrow and Chevron would still exist. They'd just hire more people. So Chevron's like the whirlpool and more people yeah so chevron's like the whirlpool and the people are the water oh you know that's so that's part of this whole thing i'm writing but you know did you see that commercial speaking of irritating american

commercials there was one i think it was on the super bowl even where there's like a dude walking through the house and he's like why do i have the best i have the best because that's what i am and that's what i do and he like high fives his kid it was a cadillac commercial do you remember that it was so irritating i haven't seen it oh it was so fucking annoying why do i have the best because that's what i am i am we work harder we play harder like and it's about america bro it's yeah bro what happened to bro bro used to be cool oh you know that guy was in a frat i know but calling someone bro used to be what's up bro it used to be okay yeah used to be like a black thing in fact it started out and white people ruined it like white white guys ruined bro. What's up, bro?

Like, that used to be okay. Bro would be like, he called me bro. I'm a brother. It's short for brother. But now bro is, like, the douchiest thing someone could call you. He's a bro. Or one of the things that people love to throw around is, especially in the fitness industry, is bro science. It's like when, like, there's a lot a lot of like really wacky ideas when it comes to

athletics and some some people they have these ideas that don't necessarily have any scientific background to them and they call it bro science yeah yeah he's full of bro science bromance yeah bromance but bromance is you know you love a guy yeah that's like oh that guy's awesome I got a bromance. But bromance is, you know, you love a guy. Yeah. That's like, oh, that guy's awesome. I got a bromance for that guy. That's not quite as douchey. There's like this, someone was teaching me the, what is it, the handshake, shoulder, one arm. There is a definite thing there. There's a thing.

Yeah. Yeah. There's like a grip, like a fucking manly thumb up grip. And then the one thing. And if you're really douchey give a couple slaps on the back the yeah there's a word for that too that's like I'm not gay slap I've seen people slap each other pretty goddamn hard doing that yeah that doesn't feel good here's another thing I love about Spain you

kiss girls always on the mouth when you know when on the cheeks when you meet a pussy you meet a woman you kiss kiss okay then I come to America and it's like hi how are you right you know like keep four feet away from me you might be a rapist you're eye raping them already what are you doing looking at them you fucking creep you over 50 you're over 50 looking at a woman? You piece of shit. I know, I know. What the fuck is wrong with you? Don't you have grandchildren or something to go wait on? Hey, what do you think about Donald Trump talking about how hot his daughter is?

Did he say that? He did. Oh, you didn't hear about this? So this became a big problem because he said, you know, Ivanka, my daughter, she's one of the hottest, you know, most beautiful women alive. And he said, Ianka, my daughter, she's one of the hottest, most beautiful women in the whole island. And he said, I'll tell you what, if I were 30 years younger and not her dad. Whoa, what the fuck does that mean?

Jesus Christ. I wonder if he's jerked off to his daughter. Just saying, look, this is just thought. No one's getting hurt here. It's me alone and my ideas. I made her. Yeah. I don't know.

Yeah. That's a weird thing to say. It is a weird thing to say, but I think it's better to say it than to think it and give it power. Right. Right. I think saying shit, and this, again, back to the whole Spain-U.S. thing. In America, there is thought crime. And in Spain, I don't think, maybe I'm romanticizing Spain.

I lived there a long time. But another thing I really like about living in Spain is that I speak the language well enough to, like, if I'm paying attention, I know what everyone's saying. But if I'm not paying attention, it all just becomes in the background. Oh, nice, like jazz. Yeah. Yeah.

You can sort of let it go. Certain kind of jazz. Elevator music. Yeah, yeah. When I was in high school, there was, someone wrote a paper, an article for the local school paper, and I don't remember most things

from high school so long ago but I remember this one article that this kid wrote about what they make you do in the Boy Scouts and it was about the tenants of the Boy Scouts whatever they were but one of them was about keeping your thoughts pure oh yeah and he wrote something that was really cool. I was, you know, obviously a really smart kid. I wish I remember who it was. But he wrote, well, why do I have to keep my thoughts pure? He goes, one of the things that I like about my thoughts is that they're mine.

I can think whatever I want. As long as I don't do anything that harms anybody, why do you care what my thoughts are? And I remember reading that. And I was like, wow, that's so right. What does that mean, keep your thoughts pure. Guy's in jail now. Probably. Yeah. He might be, he might be. George Carlin did a great thing on that, you know, in terms of Catholicism and how he said like, this was like class clown way back. Right. But I remember I was a little kid and my

dad got that record. And I remember the, one of the bits in there was like you know in catholicism if you think about sinning you've already sinned so you're thinking about feeling up sally at the weekend save your time you're you're already you sin it's done right in pure thoughts yeah in pure thoughts that's straight out of christianity well also the confession the confessional is one of the most bizarre and ridiculous put your balls on the table any religious and it was invented to make sure that people weren't doing anything wrong i mean the the priests would immediately report to any higher-ups of any illegal activity or stealing or you know adultery or fornication or whatever the

it would be you ever read about the or fornication or whatever the fuck it would be. Do you ever read about the crazy shit where people were fucking animals in the Middle Ages and they would have trials and sometimes the animals would be executed for being overly seductive? You know what? Now that you brought this up, I read something recently about this.

God, I can't remember what the story was, but it was the animal trials. It was about animal trials. Did you tweet that or anything? Could be. I don't know. I have a friend who just wrote a book, The Boundaries of Desire. He's a historian who focuses on sexuality.

And his first book was Sex and Punishment. And it was sort of like from the origins of civilization to the end of the 19th century. And then Boundaries of Desire is the 20th century. So he writes about all this crazy legal shit and, you know, like the Comstock laws that made it illegal to, in early 20th century America, to even teach sex education to women. Like you couldn't even teach women how they get pregnant. That was illegal because of this crazy fuck. Wow. I've always wondered what it is about people that makes them, like, it's oftentimes, like,

some of the earliest imprinting with pleasure that makes people attracted to certain things. That's where, like, fetishes come from. that makes people attracted to certain things. That's where fetishes come from. And I've always wondered, some people are just overly attracted to extremely overweight women for whatever reason. That just locks into them.

That's their thing. And I've always wondered, what is it about sexuality that sexuality is malleable? It kind of adjusts to what your earliest impressions of like i've heard stories of guys who uh caught their mom putting on pantyhose once when they were like really young and then for the rest of their life became like fascinated with a fetish of women

wearing pantyhose and like they want to jerk off on pantyhose and have pantyhose rubbed on their dicks and it becomes this weird sort of a sexual imprinting thing right yeah one of the interesting differences between male and female sexual development is that women don't seem to have that women appear it's called erotic plasticity women are plastic throughout their lives so it's easier for them to adapt to different situations. Now, sometimes that works against them, right? Because they fall in love with an asshole, an abusive asshole or whatever. But men have a developmental window, generally from like five to nine years of age, somewhere in there. And it's exactly as you described it. If there's a particular experience that they have during that time, it can resonate with them for the rest of

their lives. And once that window closes, that's it, it's done. So, you know, as you say, it could be pantyhose, it could be red high heels, it could be, you know, whatever it is, they've got that association and they can never not have it. They'll have it for the rest of their lives. Some people argue that pedophilia is a result of the same sort of thing. And I've argued, not in writing, but I've mentioned it on the podcast, I think that there's a form, a manifestation of homosexuality, of what we call homosexuality which is really a fetish um is more is better described as a fetish experience by a straight man and all right i'll tell you what i mean by that let's say you you're born straight there's there's

definitely a genetic component to sexual orientation, right? It's getting back to where we started, like how much is genetic, how much is experiential. So just as a seven-year-old boy can have an experience with, you know, seeing someone with pantyhose or, you know, whatever, he's under the table and his mom's friend comes and she's got red high-heeled shoes and he's got a heart on and so he associates the two. What if that seven-year-old boy has an experience with another boy or with a man or an adolescent or whatever, right? So this guy sucks his dick or whatever it is. And so he's got this very deep association between have, you know, having a man sucking his dick and this incredible pleasure, even though he's straight, he's got that association.

So for the rest of his life, he could have that association in the same way that another boy has the association with pantyhose or high heeled shoes or whatever. It's a fetish. It's not his orientation. shoes or whatever it's a fetish it's not his orientation so then what you've got is a straight guy who has a fetish for getting a blow job from a man so every once in a while he goes down to the truck stop and you know has this experience he gets caught everyone says oh you're a closeted gay man and he's thinking i don't think i, but I don't know what the fuck I am. All I know is I love my wife. I have sex with my wife. I could never fall in love with a man.

I never think about having a relationship with a man. But man, I love it when this guy with a mustache sucks my dick. So I've never really wanted to write about this. I've never really wanted to write about this. And the reason is that I think it could play into the hands of the Christians who are arguing that you can pray the gay away. You see what I mean? Right. Because in a case like that, I think there could be a therapeuticolution or just a therapeutic treatment that could have some value. But, I mean, in my case, I would never say that there's a sickness there.

I would just say it's a fetish. Like some people are into latex. You're into that, you know? Totally makes sense. I mean, there are weird things that people get sort of bonded to, that their sexuality gets bonded to always men yeah almost never women you'll never find a woman who can't come you know if she's not sniffing latex it's something about rubber I have a friend who's a dominatrix I know she's more than it I mean she's a humiliatrix humiliate

humiliatrix so she's the next level she specialrix. She's a humiliatrix. Humiliatrix. Humiliatrix. Take it to the next level. She specializes in dudes who get off on being humiliated. And I had her on the podcast. She's really smart, really interesting. And it's not her thing. She just stumbled into this. So it's just a business for her. It's a business.

She's like shell oil of dick slapping. We hear it, humiliatrix. We suck dick not because we want to, but because we're barred to do. But she never meets the dudes. It's all internet. One of the best things about it is she's got phone lines

dedicated to guys who get off on being ignored. So the phone rings. She picks it up. Oh yeah, okay, I'll be right back. Puts the phone down. picks it up oh yeah okay i'll be right back puts the phone down it goes about her day and it's like clocking up hilarious yeah guys who get off on being ignored by a pretty girl to be ignored by a professional ignore she sells her socks, her panties, her old tennis shoes, her toenail clippings, her hair, her salami. The way she got into it was she was living in Japan, and she was like 17 or something. And she was corresponding with some guy online, and he was trying to pick her up.

And she wasn't into it, but he was funny, so she corresponded with him. And at one point she said, I've got to go take a piss. And he said, oh, don't throw it away. Put it in a bottle. I'll buy it from you. Oh, my God. Come on. You're foolish.

And he's like, no, seriously. Trust me, I will. I'll, you know, 200 bucks or whatever. So she pisses in a bottle and she sends it and there's 200 bucks shows up in her account. And she's like huh this is interesting there must be more guys like this out there so she starts you know investigating it and she finds that the world is full of these dudes seriously check her out sierra lynch it's like

i'm gonna write her name down check out want to get her on the podcast. Check out her site. She's beautiful. Where does she live? She lives in Portland. But she spells it C-E-A-R-A. Sierra Lynch. I'll fly her out. And yeah, she's got guys. She's been on, she was on a show on HBO recently. Yeah. Some sex show.

I was on it, too. She's been profiled she's you know she's a public figure that's hilarious Duncan used to know a girl who would yes tada Duncan used to know a girl humiliatrix extraordinaire congratulations young lady you found an excellent niche or niche as it were Duncan knew a girl who would sell her socks and she would wear them for days at a time to get them like really stinky

and then she would sell them to dudes and you know, like a couple hundred bucks at a time. So like that was her thing. She would just be wearing socks all the time and then sending them to people. That's a good gig. I guess. Getting paid for doing what you're doing anyway.

I guess. I don't know. There's just something weird about the idea of being connected to these people that are so fucked up they want your stinky socks. Yeah. Yeah, although as things go, I mean, getting back to fetishes, it's a relatively harmless thing. And the fact that now people can engage these things in a more or less open way i mean what worries me with her is she she was telling me like there are guys who really get off on being blackmailed and so these guys would give her like all their bank account numbers and passwords, and then

they would send her photos of me with a dildo up my ass, and now her job is to threaten to tell the wife, I'm going to tell your wife if you don't give me $500, and oh no,

please don't tell my wife, and you've got to go through this whole thing. And I mean, it's kind of crazy you know and I said to her like you know and she said like I never you know I don't contact wives because they haven't agreed to participate in this I'm not going to do that well that's very ethical of her

she has to be ethical she's a pro but I said to her well like what about the bank account she's like no i would never you know i don't i don't that would be a crime even if the guy gave it to me i said yeah but what if your email gets hacked and she's like oh i hadn't thought of that yeah some russian kid hacks that email that's a lot of stuff there wow that's an interesting thing well maybe the guy's a separate humiliation bank account just i hope so yeah i mean god i mean but to get the real rush you'd have to give her your real bank account yeah to get the real full like fuck i could be ruining my life i know another

woman who specializes in kicking dudes in the balls i've seen. I've seen girls step on them. Ah. Like, step on guys' balls, like the high-heeled shoes, stomp on them. You could lose a ball like that, by the way. Yeah. Super easy. Yeah, I would think so. Oh, God, that's so terrifying. I'm so boring.

I mean, I spend time with all these, like, really kinky people, but, like, I'm so dull. Sex, sex, sex. Basic, you know. Yeah. Well, you're not fucked up. That's what it is. Sorry to tell you.

Not yet. But it goes back to what we're saying about people being sexually malleable. What do you think that is? Is it because people couldn't have like a very rigid, or men rather, couldn't have a rigid idea of what's sexually attractive because if they did, if their standards were too high, then they wouldn't reproduce. what's sexually attractive because if they did, if their standards were too high, then they wouldn't reproduce. And so in the times of demanding, you know, what we're like, uh, John Marco Allegro, uh,

who was, uh, one of the, um, uh, lead scholars that was deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. He wrote this book called the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. And it was, it's a great book. And, uh, it was bought up by the catholic church actually and uh so you can only find it in uh it for a while you could only find it in um used form but now uh jan ervin has uh republished it you can you can get it again uh and he wrote another one called uh the christian sacred mushroom in the christian sacred mushroom in the cross and, uh, something Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian myth. And it's essentially about, uh, that what the, it's his,

after studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years, it's his interpretation that what the, what Christianity was really all about was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility cults. And that fertility back then was extremely important. It was extremely important to breed because we didn't have this luxury that we have today of like people say, oh, is your girl on the pill? Man, I got her pregnant. Fuck, what do I do? Like people wanted to get people pregnant because the human population was not guaranteed.

Like there was a very real possibility that you would come into a village that was empty because everybody died. They died of plague or they were invaded or whatever the fuck it was like they didn't have enough people and now there's no one and your name doesn't pass on so that this was like a real possibility. So people is the idea of being sexually malleable that people can adapt to almost anything to become attracted to just make sure that they are attracted to something, that they can come in something and make a person, whether it's overweight women or skinny women or this or that, that it can move around and that occasionally it gets imprinted that this is like the thing that you're really into. And that in times of great excess, when people are slovenly and like today, like this idea that a guy gets a fetish off being blackmailed. Like, what is that?

That's a guy with too much fucking free time. I mean, clearly. Too much money, too. Yeah, too much money, too much free time. He's not starving to death. That's not a guy who's out there picking mushrooms, trying to find something edible to eat. He's not starving to death. That's not a guy who's out there picking mushrooms, trying to find something edible to eat.

No, this is a guy that's sitting around trying to figure out a way to occupy his fucked up mind because it's too easy to just live. He doesn't have real survival concerns. Yeah. Well, we've eroticized power, which ties into that. I've read that one source of clientele for a lot of these sorts of women is Muslim dudes who want to be forced to eat pork. Whoa. They get an erotic charge from that. Makes sense.

It makes sense, right. It totally makes sense. I mean, I often think, like, you know, getting back to, like, my boring sexuality, I think part of the reason that I'm not kinky is that I'm not repressed. Right. You know, and in a way, it's like a steam engine. If you don't have that container and build up the pressure, you don't get that explosive release so if you're just kind of like yeah whatever you know i get laid sometimes and i like women and yeah yeah like it's great but it's i mean i wonder if healthy is less exciting than crazy well but is crazy

exciting to you though because crazy is not exciting to me. Like, I don't find, like, the humiliatrix, I absolutely believe her. I believe that she has, like, a series of guys that want her to shit in their face or whatever the hell it is. But to me, it's just silly. I don't get it. Yeah. Like, you know, if- But are those guys having stronger orgasms than you and me?

Could be. I mean- At what cost? Yeah. That's it. But are those guys having stronger orgasms than you and me? Could be. At what cost? That's it. They steal your bank account and shit in your face, and you just come like a fucking wild cat. I'm broke. I mean, maybe. But I mean, is that fucking brief experience of coming?

You know? I mean, it's that fucking brief experience of coming, you know? I mean, how much? All you have to do if you want to come really hard is just not come for a while. Right. I mean, you don't really need to have someone kick you in the balls or shit in your hair. There's other things that you can do. All you have to do is just, like, go without. You know, like, water tastes amazing when you haven't had any water for a while.

That's true. You know, when you haven't had water water for a while. That's true. When you haven't had water for a while, God, it's the greatest thing in the world. But when you have it all the time, it becomes normal and you don't even want it. You want to diet Coke. Yeah. But if you're starving or dying of thirst, rather, you would just love to get that water in your mouth. And I think that's kind of the same thing with sex.

And that's where I think a lot of perverts fuck themselves over because they're just jacking off all day till they get blisters on their dick and then they have to find a new way to hold their dick where it doesn't hurt as much and you when you do come it's you're chasing the dragon like it doesn't feel good anymore but if you could just take a few weeks off you would be so horny that when you did come, your ears would ring. You'd be like, whoa! But you can't hold off long enough. And if you hold off long enough, then you get to the promised land, which is wet dreams. Oh, yeah. I can get those after three days. Seriously? Yeah, three days of no sex.

Man, your testosterone levels must be through the roof. I put it in there. Do you? Yeah. Make sure they're through the roof. I add it. there. Do you? Yeah. I make sure they're through the roof. I add it. Oh, I should probably try that now that I'm a creep. Yeah, you are a creep.

Once you reach creep age, what you need is tea. Well, people, you know, it's like a source of shame for some people. They don't want to admit that. Like testosterone replacement therapy is like a shameful thing. Like people have asked me, and then I told them, I go, yeah, yeah, I take testosterone. And they go, what? You just tell me? You're just admitting it?

It's a chemical component of your body. It's like if your body was lacking in blood, and you could just simply add blood to it, you'd feel better. Wouldn't you do that? But for whatever reason, testosterone is associated with being a man. I also have hypothyroidism. It's called Hashimoto's disease. Oh, yeah. It's genetic.

My mom has it. And other people in my family have it. So I take this stuff called Armour Thyroid. It's formulated from pig's thyroid. And it's great. It makes me feel way better. But I was having some real problems before I was taken. I'd get these crazy headaches at night.

Like my head was pounding or thought thought it was something really wrong with me and I would fall asleep like when I would fall asleep it was like I got shot with a tranquilizer door like like at the end of the day I was just so wiped out I couldn't figure out what it was and so while I was on fear factor I had some real issue with it like my fucking headaches would be crazy I was be so tired at the end of the day. And then I got my blood test done. But I would tell people that I take thyroid medication, and nobody would bat an eye.

Like, oh, you replace your thyroid hormone. Well, that's logical. But you tell people that you replace your testosterone, and they're like, well, what the fuck are you doing? Do you have to? No, I definitely don't have to. If I stop doing it, I will have less testosterone than I have now, but I won't feel as good. It's that simple. It's up to you to not abuse it, though.

Because if you abuse it, there are guys, especially some MMA fighters, have tested these hyperhuman levels that are not even safe. They're really actually kind of dangerous. Because the idea is that more is better. And just keep going harder and harder. But you really shouldn't do that because then you could develop anxiety. There's a lot of different things that happen when you do it. Like rage and stuff? You can definitely get rage. You definitely get more upset at things more easily. But a lot of people, they develop actual anxiety. You have anxiety attacks from having an excess of testosterone.

You start getting paranoid and you can get weirded out about things. It's just a matter of going to an ethical doctor that really understands what they're doing. And then make sure you're not taking too much of it. You're doing it right. And you just want to stay within like a healthy, consistent standard. And you'll just feel better. Your immune system will function better. consistent standard and you'll just feel better. Your immune system will function better.

But people don't like to talk about it because it like you have to admit that somehow or another you needed that. You have to admit that you're aging. Yeah. You have to. Which is shameful again. It's amazing. Also, and you're taking it not to like, you know, combat a disease. You're taking it to feel better.

Yeah. Which is pleasure. Right. Which is shameful. Shameful pleasure. Dirty pleasure. Oh, you want to feel good all the time pleasure right which is shameful pleasure dirty pleasure you want to feel good all the time well that's wrong with you my issue with marijuana too you know I tell people like people that why do you need pot it's not that I need it I enjoy it yeah I enjoy it and it gives me more

pleasure it gives me more pleasure when I watch movies it gives me more pleasure when I eat food and it gives me way more pleasure when I have sex sex feels way better when you take marijuana but that's an embarrassing thing to admit for some people whatever for whatever reason i love how the word needs comes in yeah why do you need it bro oh i don't need weed to have fun who the fuck said anyone needed anything here you know i don't even need toothpaste moralistic if i don't use toothpaste my teeth will be less clean but you know i don't need it it's weird we we're weird man we're weird and also that we don't want it we don't want to factor in our own mortality we don't want to address it we don't know want to admit it so

anything that you're doing to mitigate that is a weakness anything you're doing to combat anti-aging is just vanity you know like well i guarantee you I have more energy because of it. I know I do. I know I feel better. I can get more things done, and my body works more efficiently, especially someone like me that enjoys doing things that are physically active, like martial arts and jiu-jitsu. Without the testosterone, without growth hormone and thyroid hormone

and all these different hormones that are functioning at their optimum levels, your body's just not going to work as well. It's like having a race car that you don't take care of the spark plugs. You don't, you don't, you know, you don't replace the oil. You just let it drive it until that fucking engine seizes up and then you're done. That's nature. That's nature. But if we need that, but that's not nature because why are we getting vaccinated then?

You know, why are we taking vitamins then? Why are we taking vitamins then? Why am I going to the doctor and getting checkups? Why don't I just let cancer eat my body? Why get chemo? It's just natural. We have weird ideas of what you should. All those weird ideas are not based on critical thinking and objective analysis. They're just based on the standards that somehow or another someone else has set forth.

Chevron. Shell, you were born to work hard. Because you were born to. Well, I mean, you know, same thing with like these sex pills, like now the female Viagra and stuff. It's bad. It's bullshit. Yeah. Well, it doesn't work either because of what we're saying. No, because of what we were talking about earlier, the plasticity.

Women's sexuality isn't about blood flow, right? Right. Men, if you make your dick hard, you're horny because it engages nerve endings. And, you know, like, well, my dick's hard. I got to fuck something, you know, like, well, my dick's hard. I got to fuck something, you know? Well, even when guys get, like, a pee boner. Like, when guys, like, if women don't know this, when men have to urinate and you wake up in the middle of the morning and your dick is hard, it's not because you're horny a lot of the times. It's because you have to pee. It's morning wood. Yeah, and that's what morning wood is.

But you can use that morning wood like you could use, like, any regular old boner. Yeah. So when a guy wakes up and he has a boner, oftentimes he's like, wow, I don't want to waste that. You know, it becomes like- I got a hammer. That looks like a nail. It becomes like, this looks like a thing to use right here.

Yeah. Excellent. Well, you have, on average, three erections per night if you sleep eight hours. Really? Yeah. So while you're sleeping, you're getting boners. Yeah. And that's one of the ways they test to see if your impotence is psychological or physiological. They'll put like a little piece of paper tape on your dick. And in the morning,

if the tape is torn, it means you had an erection at night. So it means your body, your blood flow is fine. It's head thing wow how weird you have to tie a ribbon around your dick tie a ribbon around ceremony in the middle of the night for the hostages how strange yeah what a strange thing sex is weird i mean you asked a question earlier uh about the you know what's the purpose of the fetish generation module in the male brain and all that. And I was thinking, well, two things. One, in Sex of Dawn, we talked about animals, because this appears to be not only a human thing, but common to male mammals as well of other species.

There was one experiment where this guy, I think he was in Scotland, took all the, he had a herd of sheep and a herd of goats. And one year he took all the babies and he put them with the other species. So now all the baby goats are living with the sheep and all the baby sheep are living with the goats and he let them live with that species till they reach sexual maturity at which point they were having sex with the so the goats are having sex with the sheep and the sheep are having sex with the goats right then he takes them and puts them back with their own species okay and what happened was the females were like all right whatever and they were now so now the female sheep are having sex with the male sheep.

Right. There were switched back. But the males refused. The males who came, you know, who had been raised with the other species were like, no, I'm a goat fucker. Sorry. Not interested because they had been imprinted. Wow. So the females just went with what was there.

The males were like, no, no no that's not me sorry that's really interesting yeah that's really interesting and the testosterone we also talked about that i remember there were some interviews with um a guy there was one there was a guy who had a disease where his body suddenly stopped making testosterone and he described you know eventually he was diagnosed and started taking supplements but he described it and he and it was like all it wasn't about sex it was all pleasure stopped it was like i didn't give a shit about music i didn't give a shit about food i didn't give a shit about relationships i just was like blasé about everything. And then there was another one where we quoted someone who was going through a sex change from female to male.

And she talked about like when she was a woman, she was a lesbian and she lived in Manhattan. And she was talking about like, yeah, you know, I'd be on the subway and I'd see an attractive woman and I'd think, I wonder what she's like and what kind of food she's into and what she's reading. And then when she was transitioning to male, she started taking testosterone. And she said, once I started taking testosterone, I'd be on the subway and I'd see the same kind of woman. And I'd just be like, kind of woman and I'd just be like tits cunt ass cunt and she said she said uh I it really gave me insight and compassion for adolescent boys Chaz Bono said that oh really yeah she said that when well he said that when he transitioned from being female to male that he understands it now yeah for the longest time

like he never understood men and it was just alien to him and then once he started taking testosterone he was like oh this is why guys are so fucking creepy it's like they're just overwhelmed by this demon inside of them we call testosterone that you require in order to be happy and to enjoy anything in life that's one of the things that happens to men with traumatic brain injuries is the pituitary gland gets damaged. They stop producing testosterone. They get deeply depressed.

And one of the best ways to mitigate that is supplementing them with testosterone. Like that cures a lot of the depression that a lot of these soldiers go through when they come back from the war. This traumatic brain injury just disrupts the pituitary's ability to function. You know, one of the, when, sort of typical situation, you get a guy like my age, right?

Mid-50s, been married a long time, monogamous, typical mid-life crisis, has sex with his secretary, and then suddenly it's like, holy shit, you know, I'm in love, right? Why does he think he's in love? Because food tastes better, the colors are brighter, everything's more interesting. Why is that? Because his testosterone levels have gone up. One of the only things you can do without supplements to increase testosterone is have sex with a new woman. Your body responds to you having sex with a new woman with a spike in testosterone production.

So he's got this T elevated T levels. He thinks he's in love. He's not in love. He's just fucking someone new for the first time in 20 years. Wow. So he divorces his wife because now he's in love with this woman who seems to have the keys to the fucking universe that wears off in a couple of years. And now he's, you know, even more fucked than he was before well that's also the key to this whole midlife crisis thing

where guys buy sports cars you know yeah sports well also sports cars like literally driving a sports car elevates your testosterone especially when you're quote-unquote peacocking especially if jay leno's driving and you're in the passenger seat. That was a good episode, actually. When you're driving around people, especially potential young mates, females that could see you, your testosterone rises when you're in this car. Right. And even talking and flirting with potential young girls that you may, you know, one day have sex with, just being around them raises your testosterone. Yeah.

Just the possibility. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wonder, getting back to Sierra, I wonder if some of those guys who are buying her panties, if they're not getting testosterone surges. Probably. They're getting it.

Something's happening, right? There's getting some kind of dopamine, serotonin, some sort of a rush. Yeah, definitely. Dirty panties. Hey, have you ever heard of fecal transplants? Yes. Yeah, that's, I mean, sort of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. The biological thing.

Really interesting. Well, it's fascinating how many things it cures and how many people have like real bowel issue. People die from C. difficile infestation every year. And with fecal transplant, 98% recovery rate within hours. Nuts. It's crazy. Within hours. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, the biological organism, the idea of the biological organism being an individual has been completely debunked. And that's what probiotics are all about. Yeah. I'm a big fan of probiotics. I drink, where is didn't bring any must have left in my car i drink uh kombucha every day i drink that shit like water i drink two or three of them a day well i'm a big fan i mean i spent a lot of my uh younger years traveling you know in central america and asia and stuff and uh like when i'm in America, I put on weight.

Now, part of it's that, you know, the food, and I drink beer, probably more beer. You know, here you get a beer, it's a pint. Spain, you get a beer, it's about half a pint. Really? Yeah, it's a caña. Again, Spain, it's just a different vibe. Servings of everything are smaller. Higher quality, like really good and tasty, but small.

So you eat more slowly. It's all about grass-fed food too like you don't you don't get that corn fed no fucking monsanto gmos you know that whole thing they're they're kicked out of a lot of countries um but yeah no in pesticides a friend of mine's in the wine importation business and he distributes organic wines. And he said he was in, I don't know if it was Spain or France. And he was like, you know, you guys should get organic certified. You know, we could charge more. And they're like, what are you talking about? Like we would never put pesticides on our grapes, you know, like that's crazy. Like we don't need to say it. Like nobody would do that. So it's a very different culture but i think that the because the cheeses and the things are alive there yes you can't import the ham even you

can't import spanish uh i guess now they've changed it you can start um but uh yeah food is alive so the micro the microbiome is very different yeah Yeah. I go to India, I lose weight quickly. Part of it's because I have fucking dysentery. Part of it's because you feel bad because everybody else is starving. There was an article recently about gray market foods in New York City. And I forget, it was something I read online. And it might have been from Dig. See if you can find it on Dig.

I think it is from Digg. That's where I get a lot of my interesting news stories. But they were talking about this one particular type of cheese that is very difficult to get, and it's cured with cheese mites, like these mites. And if the mites are of a certain number per cheese, it becomes illegal to import into America. It's very sketchy how you do it. But over in France or wherever the fuck they grow this cheese where it's really popular, it just gets fucking lousy with mites. And that's where you get the real flavor of this cheese.

And it's like a nutty sort of a sweet taste to this cheese. cheese and it's like a nutty sort of a sweet taste to this cheese and a lot of it is attributed to the fact that first of all they don't use homogenized or pasteurized milk they use raw milk when they make their cheese which is the way they make the best cheese it keeps the enzymes in it and then they're not scared of all these funky organisms yeah this is it the gray market foods if you scroll down you'll see that cheese it's It's sort of like an orange-looking weird fucking cheese. That's it right there. Oh, I've had that. Yeah, that stuff.

And if you make that a little larger so we can read it, it looks really weird. But this guy was talking about how good it tasted. Yeah. See, it's the unique way they alter the aging process, the presence of mites. FDA singled this cheese out as a potential public health hazard. How do you say it? Mimolette. Mimolette.

Mimolette has been banned and made illegal for sale in the U.S. and indignant consumers staged protests. Yeah. It looks cool. I'd like to try a piece of that. I've definitely had that, yeah. One of the things we did on Fear Factor to make things more disgusting

was we used really expensive cheese. We mixed really expensive cheese in with some of the stuff to give it this horrible fucking rotting smell. And there's an expensive cheese, what do they call a cheese place? There's a name for one of those places. I don't know what it's called. But they had a cheese place there's a name for one of those places i don't know what it's called but they had a cheese place in beverly hills and so we used to send um these people who work for fear factor to beverly hills to this super expensive cheese place

and buy this really expensive hard to get cheese and it stunk like death and we would pour that onto whatever the fuck they had to eat and and it would make them more repulsed. Did you ever have French people on? No. And they'd be like, ooh la la. Well, Filipinos, I have a bunch of friends that are Filipino, and they would always be like, because we serve people balut, and balut is a chicken or a duck embryo. It's like the full little embryos in there, and they'd eat the, and they were like, we

love that. Get me on that show. You ever have Anthony Bourdain on the show? On this? Yeah. Yeah, really? That's cool. I'd love to meet him sometime.

He's a great guy. Yeah. He's an interesting character. He'll eat anything. Yeah. Well, he's gotten super into jiu-jitsu to the point where he trains every day. With Henzo. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Every day, sometimes twice a day. Yeah. And his wife and his kid are doing it too. Yeah Henzo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every day, sometimes twice a day. Yeah, and his wife and his kid are doing it too. Yeah, yeah. He's 58 years old. He started at 58. Now he's got, he just earned his blue belt.

Oh, he just started recently. Yeah, like within a year ago. Oh, I thought this was a long-term thing with him. No, no, it's really recent. Really? Because when I first met him. Like risking getting hurt when you start something like that old? Well, it depends on how you do it and it depends on who you do it with, but absolutely.

If you have bad training partners, you can definitely get hurt. But you can definitely get hurt even with good training partners because weird shit happens. You roll over on an ankle. You blow some tendons out in your knee. You fuck up a disc in your back. It's all potential. It's definitely not fucking video games. It's real life. It's definitely not fucking video games. It's real life.

It's definitely dangerous, especially for a guy who's 58 who has no background of athleticism at all and all of a sudden starts at a very advanced age and becomes completely obsessed with it. That's cool. Yeah, it is cool. His original show, that No Reservation show really uh got me into the idea of food as an art form because i just thought of food as being oh that's good food's good this is good right that place is good to eat at i didn't think of it as like oh this guy's making art that you taste yeah like when someone you eat a great meal like that experience that sensual experience

is that pleasurable experience is art. It's like someone's art is giving you pleasure through your taste buds. Yeah. It's through smells and, you know, like when you have a really good meal, you smell it, you eat it. Like there's an art to that. I never really considered it that way until I watched his show. And, again, that's a very European approach to food. You know, America, food is fuel.

Yeah. Shove that sandwich down your throat and get back to food. You know, America, food is fuel. Shove that sandwich down your throat and get back to work. Not in Spain, man, or France or Italy. I have a buddy who's an athlete, and all he thinks about is food as fuel. He goes, I don't even care what it tastes like. I just eat it. He goes, I just want food as fuel. And I'm like, what? Soylent.

You heard about that? Well, Soylent Green. Yeah. They named it after that. Yeah. What is it? It's these guys in Silicon Valley who are coding. And they're like, I just want to work 24 hours.

I don't want to stop and eat. It's a waste of time. And so they came up, they like developed this food source, this gorp that you just like squeeze out of a tube and it's got everything you need. Oh, wow. And you're all, yeah. Ugh. Soylent.

There it is. Okay, yeah. You can pour it. So it's, yeah, you just like drink. That can't be good for you, though. And look at that, 29 bucks a month, modular. Soy proteins. Oh, that's going to make you grow tits.

Exactly. Vitamins and minerals. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, but what about, yeah, it's just weird. Where's going to make you grow tits. Exactly. Vitamins and minerals. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, but what about, yeah, it's just weird. Where's the pleasure? There's no pleasure. That stuff's nasty. Yeah.

It's one thing if you're a fucking astronaut, you've got to survive on the space station with stuff you squirt in your mouth. But this is like you have the abundance of the earth and you choose to squirt paste in your mouth instead. Well, see, maybe this is part, you know, this is this movement you were talking about, right? Because getting us to eat shit that doesn't take up space and we don't need clean air and we don't need healthy oceans, you know, that's in the interest of the technology, right? If you see that that's where we're going, if you think that that's where we're going, then a lot of these things start to fall into place and make sense in a weird way. I mean, I read the other day that the tuna stocks in the Pacific Ocean are down like 40% in the last 20 years.

That's incredible. Did you ever see Jiro Dreams of Sushi? You know what? I've got it on. Someone gave it to me. I haven't seen it. I resisted for a long time. People kept telling me how great it was.

I'm like, whatever. It's a fucking guy making sushi. Who gives a shit? But it's great. It's really great. And one of the things that they show in this movie is when he was young, what it would be like going to the fish market in Japan. Just fucking stacks of tuna. and the tuna was so abundant

and then the overfishing has made a massive impact on the fish supplies. We've literally, I mean look at how goddamn big the ocean is, the fact that we put a dent in it at all is just shocking. More than a dent, like we're collapsing the shit. Three quarters of the fucking Earth's surface is water. That plastic island?

Yeah. The size of Texas? Yeah. What the fuck, man? I think it's even bigger than that. Really? Yeah, and this kid has developed, I don't know if it's an actual functional machine, but he's developed some sort of a device to clean up the ocean.

Like a skimmer kind of thing. Yeah, and suck the plastic out. Well, you've got to think plastic, once it becomes a valuable resource, if someone figures out how to take it out of the ocean, if it was gold floating around out there, we would have a million ships that are fighting over this to try to get in.

Like, if Russia and the United States found gold, gold particles circling around at billions and trillions of dollars worth, boy, they couldn't wait to plant a flag in the middle of the ocean to suck all this gold out of the water. And because it's plastic, we're like, I got plastic right here, dude. I don't need the ocean plastic.

That's why you need the government, you know, because the government can create those artificial incentives. Pay for cobras. Yeah. Pay for plastic. I think that the government being a solution, it's a beautiful idea, but it doesn't really work. Yeah, yeah. It would be nice if the government was completely altruistic and enlightened and they were just on the ball.

See, here's the thing. Okay, going back to what we were talking about earlier. If we had direct voting and direct taxation where you can say, like, okay, I'm paying my taxes this year. It's 20 grand. I want five grand to go to education, five grand to helping poor people, five grand to whatever, blah, blah, blah. Nothing to the military.

If you could actually, or at least have some way of registering what people want their money to go toward, you'd have a much more responsive representative government. If they had an educated decision-making process, you really knew, what kind of a threat are we under? How much military do we really need? Because if we don't need any military at all, if there's no threat whatsoever, well, then that would be an appropriate way to respond. But what if they couldn't tell us how much threat there really was? And what if people had this idealistic idea of how the rest of the world functions, but

meanwhile, there really is a need for the military? I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle there. I don't think that the world is this beautiful place that we need to not worry about at all. I mean, we don't need any military. That just doesn't... I watch those ISIS videos on YouTube. I just, I'm not – they're out there. They're pretty nasty.

There's a lot of people out there that are fucking crazy. There's a lot of nutty fucking people that are killing people and would love to kill more. It's just always going to be that way. And I think that, like, what we're talking about, I think there's a push and a pull in this life. And I think, like, like you know we were talking about tides coming in and tides going out populations dropping and then increasing i think there's a need for resistance in some ways and i think that there's almost a need for bad things in order to inspire good things like we have to see the evil of something like isis or something

you know fill in the blank, Joseph Kony, you know, the Congo dictators and evil warlords. We need to see things like, you know, Idi Amin. We need to see horrific things like Pol Pot. We need to be aware of that in order to almost promote the opposite of it. But what I would argue is that every one of those things that you mentioned is a response to something earlier. Like Pol Pot is a response to the Vietnam War and the destruction of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger. And, you know, Kony is a response to the Congo having been exploited for ivory

and then minerals within our phones. Every one of these things arises out of a colonial exploitation. So we're saying Pol Pot's evil. Well, but Pol Pot is a response to evil that we're not often recognizes as evil because it's coming from us coming from our side so I just feel like everybody who does something really nasty they think they're doing good you know what I mean like those guys in Isis they think they're good right they're

doing it for Allah yeah or they're doing it for Allah. Yeah. Or they're doing it for, you know, in revenge for all the bombing or. Right. I mean, it's this process. So I agree with you. I mean, I'm not an anarchist and I'm not crazy. So I do feel like, you know, you've got to be ready to fight to defend yourself. to fight to defend yourself. But on the other hand,

I sort of agree with, you know, the Ghandis and the Martin Luther King and that whole line, civil disobedience, Thoreau's great essay, that like the only way to really end violence is to just not participate in it. Because the minute you participate in it, then it's the cycle. It's true.

Yeah, it's unavoidable. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of inarguable, really, right? But if you do not participate and your loved ones are slaughtered before your eyes, then what? Like, should you have acted to stop that from happening? And is a certain amount of violence justified in order to promote a higher ethical and moral standard for the culture to eliminate people who don't abide by those things. But you would have to have very strict interpretations of this, and you'd have to have very strict rules of engagement. And we clearly don't have that. Yeah. And I wonder if we ever did. It feels like it was better, right? Doesn't it? Like talking about police in the US,

like before the war on drugs, it seems like cops were cool. They weren't the enemy. I thought that too, but when you talk to cops, it seems like poverty and drugs and crime, they're kind of always together. Right. There's a great documentary

that I'm watching right now called, I think it's called The 7-5. Nick DiPaolo told me about it. He actually talked about it on Ari Shafir's Podcast and then I went and got it What is it called It's called

The 7-5 And it's all about This really corrupt Precinct In New York City In the 19 I think it was the 1970s. But it's fucking, that's it right there. It's fucking incredible.

It's so goddamn crazy. This guy, Michael Dowd, who I don't know his history. I need to, after the documentary's over, I'm going to Google him and find out what his history was. But he's hilarious. He's out now, I guess, because he's wearing civilian clothes. He's not a prisoner. And he testified about all the corruption that he was involved in and all the shit that he was involved in.

And then they start reenacting it and talking about it in the documentary along with facts and different people and different players involved. And you're like, whoa! Just completely out of control. Just totally out of control crime and corruption. And drugs. So this is pre-war on drugs. This is 1970s.

And it's just, I guess, kind of pre-war on drugs. But Nixon sort of instituted a war on drugs. They really instituted a war on drugs essentially when they passed the sweeping psychedelic acts of 1970 where they made essentially everything psychoactive, illegal, all the different mushrooms and LSD. Many people don't even know that. But prior to 1970, all that stuff was legal. That was one of the big issues with the tune in, turn out, Timothy Leary's Leary's ideas, was that it was legal. You could actually be effective.

I mean, LSD, one of my favorite fun facts about LSD is that it was mostly used initially by psychiatrists to get insights into what it was like to be psychotic. It was called a psychotomimetic. And in other words, it mimes the effects of psychotic. It was called a psychotomimetic. And in other words, it mimes the effects of psychosis. So psychiatrists who dealt with psychotic people, as my wife does, would take LSD to like, oh, this is what it must be like to be them. This is what it's like to hear voices and to lose touch with reality and to have all this overwhelming input. And then they would go back to their patients with a greater compassion and understanding because they were like, I get it. I know what you're going through.

That's fascinating. Which is what a shaman does, right? Like in shamanic practices, often it's the shaman who takes the drugs in order to change his or her consciousness to help you with whatever you're dealing with. I mean, that's such a beautiful sort of noble approach to healing. I was driving yesterday, and I drove past a short bus. You know, those little buses where kids are troubled. And there was this little boy. He looked like he was Indian.

He looked like he was probably about 9 or 10 years old. And he was staring at his hands, and he was like moving his hands around and nodding and going back and forth. He was like, at first I thought he was just playing, you know, I thought it was just a kid in a bus who was bored, and then as I was stuck there at the red light, and I'm looking in this window, and he was making noises, and look at his face, and he was moving his mouth around, and he was just staring at his fingers that I was realizing like oh this kid's kind of fucked up there's something wrong with him and then I

started thinking me I was only it was only for you know whatever it takes for a light to change I was thinking like what what is this guy seeing like what is he seeing he's obviously not seeing things that normal people see or experiencing it in the same way that a quote-unquote normal person would but he was moving his fingers around and staring at it and bouncing back and forth like what is this kid's trip like what is this like for him is it does he have some abnormal levels of neurochemicals like what is causing him to have this experience what error in his circuitry like what is it but it was you know it was sad but fascinating at the same time I mean I don't know what he was suffering from but it was clearly something well my

Casilda's she's really interesting she she loves psychotics that's her favorite population to work with which you know psychotics are the people who have lost touch with reality. So that kid may have been having a psychotic break or who knows what his thing is. But the first time I went into her office when I first met her, it was like one flew over the cuckoo's nest, right? Like the double doors, the locking doors, the grates over the windows, high security, people just like, you know, completely out of it. And she loves those people because she says they're honest. They're completely honest. And they don't lie.

And when she meets them, and I've seen this happen in the street countless times at this point, she laughs. She just laughs. And they, because they know they're crazy. There's part of them that's observing. And they know they're acting ridiculous. And they're like shouting at, you know, something that they know isn't there, but they can't help it. So she laughs in this very friendly, open way.

And they like, oh, like, you get it. They have this rapport. It's a really beautiful thing I've never seen happen before. But it's almost like a shamanic kind of connection she has with people. But, you know, she sees kids like that, and she's just like, oh, I love those kids. I love them. She's not afraid of them at all. She's afraid of normal people because we're all lying.

She's not good at – it's a weird thing as a psychiatrist. She's not good at seeing through bullshit. She smells it, but she just flees from it. So she'd just rather have it where bullshit's not even an option. It's not even on the table. She wants honesty. And if that means you're drooling and pissing down your leg, that's fine. She doesn't care about that. Lucky for me. Boy, is she an outlier.

She's a bit of a nutcase herself. And, you know, in the best possible way. I mean, I often think like someone who works in, you know, I'm a psychologist. I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff. about this stuff. Someone who works in mental health is like a lifeguard, you know, and 99% of us are the lifeguard who stands on the beach. And if you're in trouble, they'll like throw you a ring and wish you luck. She dives in, she goes right into the water, which is really dangerous and very rare. And one of the reasons, honestly, she's been on a break for a few years because it was blowing her mind there for a while. Wow. So it's good to be able to fuck off to America for a few years. Yeah, I would imagine the burden of that would be pretty intense. When I was fucking off my way through college, I shouldn't say fucking my way through.

I didn't really do much fucking in college, unfortunately. I didn't really do much fucking college, unfortunately. But I went to UMass Boston, and I basically was wasting my time there. I was only really going because I didn't want to be a loser. I'd go there because I would tell people, oh, I'm going to UMass Boston. Wasting my time. When I was trying to think of what would be a career that I would be interested in, psychology was the only thing that interested me because I thought, well, at the very least, at least I kind of understand how to manage my own

mind because I obviously had a lot of troubles. There was a lot going on in there that I was trying to always wrestle with inside my head. And I like if if at least i do that i will have a greater understanding of my own problems but then i thought about it and be like but i will be dealing with other people's fucking problems all the time and i just don't have the patience for that i just i admire people who do but i'm not one of them i I just I there's I believe that that shit is contagious and I think that negative energy Laziness slovenly behavior all that stuff wears on you because I think we imitate our atmosphere Far more than we want to admit and we become in sync With our atmosphere far more than we care to admit and if you're around a lot of really positive really healthy people

You tend to gravitate towards positive, healthy behavior. But if you're around people that are constantly self-sabotaging, that becomes the standard. That becomes the norm. It's your culture. Yes. And it's not good for you. And it's very, very frustrating to me. When I'm around people that are sabotaging themselves, I get angry.

I get, well, you just fucking stop. Get your fucking shit together. Which is not really a healthy way to approach them because it doesn't work. You can't yell at someone and say, get your shit together. But it's almost like impulsive because I know that it's creeping into my brain. Like, you're spitting on me, you fuck. You're sick. You're sneezing with your mouth open.

Cover your mouth. Yeah. You're coughing in my face. Yeah. And that's what someone's doing when they're sabotaging their life in front of you consistently and continually, and they drag you into their world. Well, fucking help me. Like, no. You are a grown person.

Help yourself, goddammit. And you get sucked into it. You know, like, you okay? I'm going to call you. I'll call you later. And you have to call and check up on them, and they're crying. You're like, what the fuck? You know?

It's like when people don't get their shit together it becomes contagious and i i worry about that when it comes to psychology i worry like like people that are constantly dealing with other people's disasters and fuck-ups if that's your day it's just every day you're dealing with someone who can't stop eating cake or they can't stop jerking off or they can't stop whatever it is that they're hung up on, whatever craziness. I always feel like, man, in trying or even making an attempt to help those people, you're sort of giving up a lot of your sovereignty when it comes to your own established mental state. your own established mental state. Yeah, which is why, you know,

Casilda's got extremely firm boundaries. And when we're, like, you know, if we're hanging out with someone, you know, potential friends or whatever, just people, whatever, if she detects something that's not right, she's just like, yeah, I'm going to go home. And she's out. Like, she's not going to, because gonna go home and she's out like she's not gonna she because i think it's what you're describing she feels like if this isn't a clinical situation where i'm in charge

then i feel she feels contaminated yeah whereas i feel more like yeah whatever you know everybody's got their weird shit but then i find myself developing friendships with people. And then a year or two down the road, it's like, fuck, you know, they weird out on me. And like, I didn't see that coming. And she'll say, are you kidding? I saw that coming the day he met that guy. Like, why would you know? I tried to warn you. Well, there's some people that are undeniably toxic.

And by toxic, it doesn't necessarily even mean that they're trying to harm you. Right. They might be toxic just by the fact that they're fucking so self-indulgent. And they're always, like, there's a lot of people that constantly want to talk about their own problems. Like, their own problems take precedent over everything that's going on. And it's just this constant examination of their own faults. And they never get better, those fucks. Those fuckers, they constantly repeat the same problems.

And I think that a lot of them, they have even addictions, and that these addictions, whether it's alcohol or drugs or whatever the fuck it is, those addictions they have are almost like, it's like facilitates this need to talk about themselves and their problems. They create more problems, so they're constantly addressing their problems. Yeah, I hear that. And that's why she prefers psychotics because they're not doing that.

It makes sense. They're crazy. They have to deal with some real shit. Neurotics are just a pain in the ass. Yeah. But psychotics, they can't help it. They're just like that. They're born that way.

Well, to wrap it all up, Chris Ryan, are we fucking doomed when is this book coming out by the way probably next summer are you almost done with it is it the editorial process now like not yet but within i'd say within a month i'm gonna i'll turn it in and then flee the country and then when you turn it in does a bunch of fucking bean counters start going over your shit and deciding which way it should go? Because you have to give up a little bit of creative control in order to have it published, right? Is that how it works? Yeah. I mean, it depends where you are in that world, you know? I mean, you know, it's probably the same like with a comic, right?

It's your first special. The producers are going to have a lot to say. Someone like you, you can walk in and say, no, I'm going to do it this way. Take it or leave it. But even then, like there were some bits that like Comedy Central wouldn't put on my last special. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

They're like, you can't do that one. That's just one. We can't put that one on the air. Yeah. Yeah. Although I mean, you could do a you're in a position with your platform where you could just say, all right, Comedy Central, I'll you know what? I'm going pay, tape this myself in a small club in L.A. and then distribute it through my podcast and cut you guys out. You could do that.

The earlier regime, like the regime that they have now is really good. But they had an earlier regime. And several years ago, I had a conversation with them over the phone. We were going over material. And in the middle of the conversation, I went, stop, stop, stop. We're done. We're not going to do this. Like they were saying, like, you've got to do this instead of that. You can't say that instead of this. And they were telling me as if like, we're going to create some sitcom together. Right.

You know, like, and as I go, this is like, no, that part has to be in because it's the whole point. The whole point about telling the story of noah and the ark to an eight-year-old retarded boy you have to have an eight-year-old retarded boy because so the eight-year-old retarded boy goes well there's a lot of holes in that story and they were like you can't do that i was like well that's it has to be done you can't tell me what i can and can't do like that's the whole point right are you saying that eight-year-old retarded boys don't exist, or are they just, you can't ever discuss them?

Which one is it? Because I'm not making fun of the eight-year-old retarded boy. I'm saying the eight-year-old retarded boy is too smart to buy the story of Noah and the Ark. Right. And to them, it was just, the vehicle was unacceptable. Like, well, we're done. We're done here.

Like, well, like, why don't you have it like an older, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, no. Why don't you have it like an older – no. You're saying this because you want to save your gig, and your gig is to be able to somehow or another justify what you've put on the air to the advertisers or whoever the fuck is above you. You can't do that with comedy. If you homogenize comedy you just develop yeah unless it's your thing like some people like that's how they think which is fine

but they shouldn't be working in comedy well they could be like Jim Gaffigan he's a hilarious guy but his comedy is very like anybody could laugh at it Brian Regan it's the same thing he's hilarious but that is him right you know there's always gonna be pop music and some pop music is really fucking good. And then there's always going to be just dirty, fucking nasty music from the street, which is also really good if that's what you're into. You turn me on to Doug Stanhope talking about someone who just goes, he's fantastic. Yeah, he's free.

Doug is 100% free. He's the opposite of what you're talking about yeah he doesn't know you can't tell doug what to do it's just it's not it's never gonna happen he doesn't care he does all doug needs is enough money to get by and he's done you know i mean he lives in this weird fucking town bisbee arizona seven miles from the border of mexico it's this weird artist community he's got this strangely painted house. He invites people over his house for Super Bowl party. Like, literally, the Internet. He'll, like, put out his address, and people just come to his house.

He's had 500 people over his house for Super Bowl parties. He didn't know 459 of them. I mean, he's that nuts. That's a lot of bean dip. His girlfriend, completely out of her fucking mind, like legitimately crazy, on pills. Her name is Bingo. She shaves her head. The hair that's left, she puts blue paint on it, and they fucking go out of the house.

She's wearing like socks on her arms. She's nuts. And that's his reality. He wears ironic suits, and he gets upset because now more people are wearing these ironic suits, and he's afraid that he's going to get lumped into these categories of these people that are like trying to act as if they're ironic by wearing you know ridiculous suits he's a he's a he's a fucking national treasure he really is it's so hard for someone to go that road so 100 committed that they come out on the other end of doug stanhope most of the time, somewhere along the line, they sell out.

Yeah. You have to. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, as far as the publishing thing, because of the success of Sex at Dawn, I think I'm in a position to sort of, you know, I've got leverage. Yeah. And the guy, the editor who acquired the book is the guy who edited Sex at Dawn.

So I know how he works. Oh, that's great. Different publisher. He quit and left. He's with someone else. So he's cool, and we've known each other for years. That's nice when you develop a relationship. I've heard of authors that have relationships with their editors, and it's really great.

I had a book deal for a while, and it didn't go well. It was the same thing as the Comedy Central thing. I wrote some stuff, and they were like, well, we want it to be like your stand-up. We want you to write. I wrote stuff like that Maxim piece, where it's not like stand-up. It's just my thoughts on things. And they were like, we want it to be like a laugh every minute. I'm like, we're done.

We're done. So I gave them their money back. I gave them their money back. I gave them their advance back. My friend Steve Rinell, who's a writer, is like, do you understand that that's like every writer's dream to give the money back and tell them to go fuck off? Well, see, I wouldn't give the money back and tell them to go fuck off. I think what I'm going to do is eventually decide to sit down and finish it and just release it online. I think that might be the best way to do it,

release it as an audio, not an audio book, but a PDF or release it as an e-book. An e-book, yeah. Or maybe find a publisher that just leaves me with a fucking home. Well, you know what I'm doing? I'm, and I might be getting a little ahead of myself here, but I've been talking to a company called Misfit,

very cool guys, interesting story. They're based in Fargo, sort of like Bisbee. The guy, he quit his job. He was working on Wall Street, JD, or I can't remember what his name is, but he was working on Wall Street, making a bunch of money, late 20s, going to marry his high school sweetheart, and they're going to go to the Bahamas or something on their honeymoon. And he goes in, he's talking to his sweetheart, and they're going to go to the Bahamas or something on their honeymoon. And he goes in, and he's talking to his boss, and his boss says, oh, listen, by the way, sorry. Congratulations on the wedding this weekend, but you've got to be in here Monday because we've got some deals coming up.

And he's like, my honeymoon. He's like, no, no, sorry. It's Wall Street. You're working for the big boys now. Oh, and we're going to give you a bonus. Bump up your annual salary now to $250 instead of whatever, $180 or whatever it was, right? And so he goes back to his office, and he's like, I just got a $75,000 raise. I'm making a quarter of a million dollars.

I'm 28 years old, and I can't go to the Bahamas on my honeymoon. Fuck this. And he says, I got to quit. And it was December 29th. And if he had stayed till the end of the year, he would have had his end of year bonus, which was like 50 grand or something. But he said, if I stay two more days, I won't do it. You know, it's that moment you're on the edge. You're either going to jump or you're not.

And he went in. He said, sorry, I'm out. Quit his job. Ballsy dude. Ballsy dude. Had no money saved because he was, you know, living the high life. And was actually in debt. And so they couldn't go to the Bahamas.

They got married. And he and his sweetheart got on the train and just went across America on Amtrak. And the train stopped in Fargo. And he was like, I love that movie. Let's get off and check this place out. And they ended up spending a few weeks there and fell in love with it. Wow. Fargo, North Dakota?

Fargo. And he said it's a really cool town and there are all these great artists there and really creative people. And it's this, because there's nothing for hundreds of miles right so like all the interesting people like are in fargo and uh he said it's this great town so they they opened this business where they sort of do like um branding for cool companies so they only work with who they want to work with. And anyway, so I'm talking to them about putting together a book of excerpts of some of the best episodes of my podcast. Oh, that's a great idea. For people who don't listen to podcasts and for people who do listen to podcasts to give as a gift, right? To their dad or their girlfriend or whatever. I mean, you guys could put together a fucking encyclopedia.

But anyway, I mean, like could put together a fucking encyclopedia but anyway I mean like why not you've got all these great interviews with really interesting people you know why not make an e-book or a physical book or whatever you know and spread the word it's not a bad idea if people are into reading it instead of listening to it I mean why not

and you know there's some forms some places where listening to it's not appropriate or not an option on the toilet? yeah I just think there's so many different ways to get information There's some forums. Some places we're listening to, it's not appropriate or not an option. On the toilet? Yeah. I just think there's so many different ways to get information now. It's such a cool time.

Yeah. So between podcasting and blogging and people creating little internet videos of their own and these YouTube content people. Like I had this guy Louis on yesterday from Unbox Therapy, and he reviews technological things, unboxes them. He's very educated on them, and he really explains the ins and the outs. He really educates your buying options because he gives you a lot of information that's pretty unique. But these guys, there was no option like that before. There was no in-depth consumer reports that completely uncensored, without commercials for 10, 15, whatever minutes he chooses to upload the video. Completely up to him.

The same thing as we were talking about, the impact the internet has, what an amazing thing it is because there's never been something like a podcast like this. This podcast is going to reach a million people. This one is going to get downloaded by a million people plus. And over the course of X amount of years, who knows how many million it will be because it's always up, available, it's always free. Anybody can download it, and it's available in a bunch of different forms. So you can get it from YouTube. You can get it from Vimeo.

You can get it from Ustream. You can get it from Stitcher. You can get it from iTunes. You can get it as an MP3. You can get it from Ustream. You can get it from Stitcher. You can get it from iTunes. You can get it as an MP3. It's just available on all these different – so it just keeps – and you can say whatever you want, and no one's going to stop you. And that never existed before. There's never been something like that before. That's why I hope we're not fucked.

I don't know if we're fucked, but I know that this thing that we have right now is fucked. that this thing that we have right now is fucked. Like this set up, you know, the Congress and the Senate and the fucking lobbyists and the president and the, you know, Department of Defense, corporations. You know, I mean, the movement has been, you think about the focus of power, right? It's been from hunter-gatherers, dispersed egalitarian hunter-gatherers.

Then you got despots that came, you know, gathered the power in agricultural societies. Then the despots get together and form institutions, primarily the church first. Then you've got political institutions. Then you've got corporate economic institutions. What's next? There's got to be a next. Yeah. So I'm hoping that the next will be a return to the dispersed power because of what we're talking about, because now we've got direct connections to everyone.

Yeah. It seems entirely possible. And it seems at least if it's not the only option, it'll be an option. It'll be like there will be corporations that are set up that are more ethical, more connected to people, and more grounded in their approach to trying to acquire money. Yeah. As opposed to like what we've got now, the infinite growth paradigm, which is kind of out of control. It's just you can't have – it's not sustainable. It doesn't make any sense.

But yet it's the norm. Yeah. Like this non-sustainable idea is the one that everybody pursues as opposed to hey everybody isn't a billion dollars enough a year we're good right we're good right here let's just you know i mean it's it just seems like these kind of discussions and discussions like this whether it's on uh social media or what have you and the just people's ability to Google and actually get the raw data and kind of it educates understanding and and and it just changes the way we view it instead of viewing it as you know this is how it

is and that's how you do and you don't work hard because you have to you do it because that's what you were born to do and then this actor smiles who by the way is not fucking working hard he's an actor that doesn't even talk right i mean bizarre bizarre and ironic i mean what an easy job yeah when we come in and close mike when we get right here i want you to smile but not a not a happy smile like I'm a rugged fucking hard man with calloused hands. Smile. Wearing overalls. I mean, I think we're seeing the bullshit better than we've ever seen it before.

Yeah. And that's at least step one. That is my hope right there. Look at you. You're becoming an optimist. I'm becoming. It's like I have grandkids or something. Not that I know of.

Wah, wah, of. All right, let's wrap it up. You still doing Tangentially Speaking? Every week. Every week. You get it on iTunes. Everywhere you get your finer podcasts. Website. ChrisRyanPhD.com. ChrisRyanPhD on Twitter. Yep. That's it. That's it. All right. Thanks, brother. It's been a pleasure. As always. Thank you. Bye, everybody. See you next week. Big kiss. Wow. That's it. All right. Thanks, brother. It's been a pleasure. As always. As always. Thank you. Bye, everybody. See you next week. Big kiss. Wow.

It's like laughing.