Comedian Brian Callan joins Jemele to talk about his new album and why he doesn t wear watches. He also talks about how he got into stand-up comedy and what it's like to be a comedian in the big city of New York. Plus, he talks about why he's not a fan of the dating pool and what he's looking for in a significant other. And, of course, there's a quiz from Jemele. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerSpeakers! Check them out here! The 500 is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. New Artist/Song influenced by The 500: An International Menace is out now! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with all things Native Creative! Produced and edited by Riley Bray. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Artwork by Jeff Kaale. Thank you to my good friend Brian Callen for the intro and outro music, and thanks to all the people who helped make this episode possible. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review, subscribe, rate and subscribe to our podcast, and tell a friend about what you think of it! we'll be listening to it on Apple Podcasts, and we'll get a shoutout in next week's episode on the next episode of Gimlet Media's new podcast, "The Good Morning America's "Good Morning America" coming soon! and "Good Life" coming out on Tuesday, July 17th, July 18th, 2019. Thank you for all the best of all the good vibes out there! - Thank you, bye. - Brian, Brian, Jeebus. XOXO. xoxo, Sarah, Sarah & Cherie - Sarah, Evan, Jake, Jack, Jaxon, Jazmin, and Kacie, Raffy, and Jacklyn, Margo, & Chacho, Jr. ( ) and Jonny, & Kacchos, Brian, Marnie, Jadynne, Rachael, Rene, and Ben, Sr. & Chiamu, Jr., etc., etc. , etc., etc. etc. - etc. <3 Thanks so much for listening to this episode.
00:01:16.000I'm probably more happy or never as happy as when I'm on the road at some cafe somewhere solving problems, coming up with new ideas and surprising myself.
00:02:26.000He said views are very important to him.
00:02:28.000They are, but I have another weird thing that, like, if you put me in a French cafe, there's a, I don't know if it's still around, but there was a, I'm so French.
00:04:33.000But I have another weird thing, which I think if I have leather under my feet, I don't feel as secure and I don't feel like I can run or fight.
00:05:33.000The problem is that there are just too many things to worry about.
00:05:36.000I also have to worry about fucking ticks and things that I can't see, like flesh-eating bacteria and MRSA. What I worry about more than anything, honestly?
00:06:40.000Robert Schock thinks that it might have coincided, these impacts might have coincided with, he believes there's a great deal of evidence for a mass coronal ejection, that there was some sort of a solar flare, a massive solar storm that happened.
00:09:39.000This is not like Bigfoot tracks or some shit like that.
00:09:43.000This is fucking real evidence of a crater that they have dated back to 12,500 years ago.
00:09:49.000Yeah, but people have a hard time believing in doomsday scenarios because it kind of like, you know, when you talk about taking the entire chessboard and throw it in the air and you have evidence for it, look at global warming and stuff like that.
00:10:04.000There is a, I really believe that people have, whether it's Leighton or not, a religious notion that we are ultimately sacred and that God would never do something that terrible to us en masse.
00:11:12.000It's a little trick that we try to pretend that we're important.
00:11:15.000Goddammit, just look up at the sky and although you can't see it, there are stars that are being swallowed up by black holes.
00:11:25.000Like, if the universe doesn't give a fuck about something that's a million times bigger than the Earth, why would you think it gives a fuck about you?
00:11:34.000Most people, that's a terrible, insulting question.
00:11:36.000You know, that's kind of what, who was it, Albert Camus, the French existentialist and Sartre and all those guys, they were saying, like Camus said, the fundamental question is, why not just commit suicide?
00:11:48.000Because everything is totally absurd and nothing means anything, right?
00:11:51.000It's like the rock of Sisyphus that you keep pushing up and it keeps rolling down.
00:11:55.000And then he said, but the truth is most people don't want to kill themselves, but they'll commit philosophical suicide.
00:12:02.000Meaning, instead of like really starting to ask these questions and really getting into it and realizing that it's all hopeless and despair, you know, you just glom onto a certain philosophy that gives you hope.
00:12:15.000Or whatever it might be, which is what it is.
00:12:17.000And maybe the way out of that is just to enjoy every day, taste your food, enjoy your friends, and realize that it could end in any second.
00:12:26.000You know another thing that's fucked with me?
00:13:50.000And once I realized that and stopped beating myself up about it and realized that I've always done the best I can, but here's what you can do.
00:13:58.000Be brutally honest and assess yourself and see where you're falling short and then just change your approach.
00:14:04.000So that's kind of what I did when I saw acting, when I saw what just being an actor was.
00:15:16.000That's kind of, when I look at my body of work and the progression of my specials, for example, like Man Class, a little too, you know, just about being funny and a silly goose, then never grew up a little more personal about my dad, but then this last one, Complicated Apes, where's my camera?
00:18:54.000I'm in support of you being whatever you want to be.
00:18:57.000I'm a person who believes in free will or your ability to freely express yourself, I should say.
00:19:03.000But if you work for a corporation, you work for a tech corporation, especially a particularly progressive tech corporation, you run into some real problems.
00:19:13.000And I was talking to a guy who was telling me, you don't know the half of it, that we're dealing with a guy who he identifies as an animal and that he believes that he's kin, like he's a fox kin or a dog kin or something like that.
00:19:30.000And he wants a litter box in his office.
00:19:33.000This guy wants to be able to shat in his fucking office into a box of...
00:20:19.000I know, but you know, this is about humanness and when someone's feelings, how they identify in that moment, which of course are so transitory, right?
00:20:29.000I mean, my fucking, not to bring it back, but the whole idea of complicated apes is that we are- This is your new special that's out right now?
00:23:46.000I would like to spend more in taxes if they could fix inner city communities and take these poor neighborhoods and throw a fuckload of money.
00:23:53.000Spend more, you fucking Republican piece of shit!
00:23:56.000The problem is you got white privilege.
00:24:48.000I think you should be able to make an intelligent argument that there is a difference between being not anti-Israeli, but having problems with their policies and Jews, right?
00:24:59.000Because there are a lot of Jews that are critical of Israel as well.
00:25:42.000And one of them is shouting down the other one saying that, you know, homosexuality is forbidden by God, but then we're supposed to be protective of LBGT people.
00:25:52.000We're supposed to be open-minded and progressive and allowing them, but then you have these people who are saying that it's their religion, that they think that this is wrong, and this is also a protected class.
00:26:08.000And this is one of the weird moments where people are standing back while LBGT people are getting absolutely crucified in the streets, yelled at with bullhorns, told they're sinners and blasphemers.
00:26:20.000But that actually is part of free speech, right?
00:26:24.000So it's part of being able to organize and express yourself, organize and petition your government.
00:26:28.000That's constitutional as long as you don't incite someone To violence, as long as you don't say, hey, you guys, go kill those gay people over there.
00:26:39.000Bro, I'm not talking about constitutionally.
00:27:41.000So we are tribal, and it's fun to break into these us versus them.
00:27:46.000I think the biggest problem is kind of deciding that, first of all, the internet has made it very possible for you to purify your echo chamber.
00:27:56.000And then you surround yourself with people who think and see the world exactly like yourself.
00:28:02.000And I think we get smarter when we listen to the other side, even if you don't agree with them.
00:28:07.000Because your ideas aren't working and their ideas aren't working, but put your ideas together and maybe somebody gets pregnant with a new idea.
00:28:14.000Yeah, the idea is that there's some way that you could stop all division between human beings as long as people are allowed to express themselves and they live unique and individual lives.
00:29:32.000Or if the United States is really a team, why don't we look at it as a team in terms of equal allocation of resources to solve conflicts and problems, including crime?
00:29:52.000I mean, when we talk about illegal immigration and what to actually do about it, people are all over the We're good to go.
00:30:14.000I don't want spree shooters, but when you get down to it and you hear people who are really educated on the subject of guns, they can get you twisted up in an argument if you start talking about gun control because you realize this is a complicated issue and maybe it's a mental health issue,
00:31:55.000But this tyrannical hierarchy and stuff, as if you took white males and took all of them out of the equation, as if there wouldn't be a new hierarchy.
00:32:06.000When you try to make things really equal in a communist society, the people closest to the government making the decisions, they become the new elite.
00:32:14.000So you're not going to fucking avoid that shit.
00:32:17.000And also, there's no equality of effort.
00:32:20.000The problem with equality of income and equality, like people want success.
00:32:24.000They think that if you're more successful that it's because of some sort of a cheat.
00:32:28.000You've rigged the system or cheated somehow or another.
00:33:26.000He's 29, and he's got such a command of philosophy, but he makes it so accessible.
00:33:30.000Yeah, like Jimmy will start his day with philosophize this just listen get a get a nugget and then he goes and works out and plays tennis and just He's a national treasure because he only lives to educate himself and make the world a better place He just makes people feel good about themselves.
00:33:44.000He's trying to enjoy life But do you think you'd want to do it over and over and over again the exact same life?
00:37:45.000Just pick up a history book or a piece of literature, anything that's written before 1950, which most people don't, 1968. Any classic book.
00:37:53.000And one of the central themes is the fact that people, especially children, died.
00:38:01.000Lincoln lost, what, three of his children?
00:38:57.000And I saw people arguing that one of the dumbest fucking things I ever saw in my life, someone was saying, there's a simple cure to tetanus, just expose it to open air.
00:39:12.000But why is it that all these guys who make the noise don't have degrees?
00:39:16.000Because they want to believe that there's some sort of an organized clan of people that are trying to keep your health down or support big pharma.
00:39:27.000The real facts of diseases like smallpox and like polio, like all these horrific diseases that people in our grandparents' generation had to deal with, is that they were cured by medicine.
00:39:49.000Big Pharma, left unchecked, is like anything else, where it's a corporation that wants to have universal growth.
00:39:56.000They want to have constant, never-ending growth, and they want to keep making money, and the way to do that is to prescribe more people poison.
00:40:02.000Ben Goldacre, you ever have him on his podcast?
00:42:58.000And then I couldn't work out for like four or five days.
00:43:01.000And I remember thinking to myself, you've got to remember this.
00:43:04.000You've got to remember this shitty feeling when you can't even exercise and I'm hawking up green shit and spitting in the sink just to look at it.
00:48:41.000And they think the carnivore diet might be, from what I've heard on your podcast and elsewhere, is that I guess you kind of give your gut bacteria a kind of a reset?
00:50:24.000And he's like, the way they can track shit, he goes, they could look at a blade of grass.
00:50:29.000And the way it was bent, or like a certain area, and go, oh, cuckoo, whatever the fucking kudu ran through here, or whatever the fuck it was.
00:50:37.000They could tell what kind of animal came through.
00:51:34.000I mean, they all look like that's what the NFL is made up of.
00:51:37.000And that guy who wrote the sports gene, Richard Bernstein, I think, Sports Illustrated writer, said the fastest people in the world come from that part of the world, the Biafra Coast.
00:51:45.000That's where Jamaica, that's where the slave trade had gone, and they came from that area.
00:51:51.000So you can actually isolate the genes.
00:56:04.000Kamara was saying that his knees were so fucked up before some of his fights that he had to walk on grass because it hurt to walk on concrete.
00:59:58.000Super Millionaire Playboy character who he came up with this bow dog fight thing and it was back when you used to be able to gamble online right you were able to gamble online now you can again but you used to be able to gamble online a lot of businesses were sort of constructed around the premise that Online gambling was going to be legal.
01:00:20.000But through some bullshit finagling, the federal government put the kibosh on online gambling.
01:00:26.000They put the stop on this thriving business.
01:00:29.000And a lot of these companies, like, there was professional pool organizations, like the IPT that went under because they were counting on online gambling.
01:02:57.000And I feel like Tyron may have done a lot of cardio for that camp, because he knew he was going to have to deal with that, so he looked a little thinner than he normally does.
01:05:40.000Like, Wonderboy was saying that about Darren Till.
01:05:42.000He thought Darren Till was trying to ruin his career by sidekicking him in the knee, and he doesn't think that that technique should be legal.
01:06:33.000I think Robbie Lawler stopped doing it.
01:06:35.000I think Cowboy, I think a lot of these guys stopped.
01:06:36.000Well, Robbie stopped sparring completely for years while he was fighting for Strikeforce, but then when he moved to American Top Team, he started sparring again, and he was training really hard.
01:06:47.000That's when actually he became the welterweight world champion.
01:07:01.000I've gone back and forth about five times on whether or not that was a good stoppage, but Usman convinced me after we watched the footage that was a bad stoppage.
01:11:19.000He's so powerful that if he clips DC, anything can happen.
01:11:23.000Yeah, but he's going to get punched in the face by DC. And I personally believe that if you are not getting punched in the face and working on patterns and really working on your striking, you get into the ring with a guy like Daniel Cormier who does that every day.
01:11:38.000True, but we don't know that that's the case.
01:11:42.000We also know that he has been wrestling with this Michigan State wrestler that's one of the best wrestlers on the planet Earth.
01:11:48.000There's a video of him wrestling with this current phenom, and he's training with real elite world-class fighters.
01:11:56.000He knows what he's doing with his striking.
01:11:58.000Yeah, but Daniel Cormier's got that down, and he's also...
01:13:05.000Like the great fighters that I notice are guys who they come in with a game plan, that game plan gets shut down, and then they change it up.
01:14:21.000The best thing would be if they could figure out a way to revitalize your body's natural production of testosterone that's similar to the way it is when you're a 30-year-old man.
01:15:51.000Telomeres, also called telomere terminal transferase, is an enzyme made of protein and RNA subunits that elongates chromosomes by adding TTAGGG sequences to the end of existing...
01:17:27.000And I've had some conversations with some other people that are really deeply entrenched in the world of genetic engineering and And CRISPR and all the new innovations, they're going to be able to do that.
01:18:02.000But there's one gene that is, yeah, where you can, and why we sleep, he was talking about it, but also my friend has that gene, his genome, and the doctor goes, you have that gene, Frank Grillo.
01:18:13.000He goes, you have that gene, because I know he doesn't sleep at all.
01:18:14.000I'm always like, how do you sleep five hours?
01:18:17.000And he's fully awake and he works out for fucking two hours.
01:18:21.000And I've only met one other dude like that, and that's a gene that's vanishingly rare, and some people can get five to six hours of sleep, five hours and achieve total wakefulness.
01:21:42.000Well, there's two arguments, and I support both of them.
01:21:46.000One argument is that public land hunting is harder, and you should really be more proud of success on public land, because it's for everybody.
01:22:21.000When wolves move into areas, the elk just shut down all the calling.
01:22:24.000One of the coolest things about elk hunting is they fucking scream.
01:22:29.000The first time I ever went elk hunting with Cam Aynes, he took me elk hunting, I remember this morning, we're out there in this basin, you hear just...
01:22:36.000You hear them screaming, and it's still dark out, and we're walking, and I'm like, this is the fucking coolest thing I've ever heard in my life!
01:22:45.000Just hearing them scream and yelling at each other, and trying to fight off the other males, and you hear their horns clashing against each other because their antlers are fighting.
01:22:55.000Is this on public land, or is this on private land?
01:23:49.000And even the pheasant, there's just something about looking for an animal that focuses your mind And even in something as lame as when they're roosting on a field, you got the dog and the dog points.
01:26:19.000I think once you've felt what it's like to catch a fish and then cook it and eat it once, and by the way, if you've never had really fresh fish, really fresh fish is so flavorful and delicious and just a little bit of butter and lemon on it and just a little bit of seasoning and...
01:28:34.000There's a real dumb thing because they do hunt them, but they hunt them with professional hunters that the state has to hire because they get depredation permits because these things start killing livestock or dogs or...
01:30:18.000Most of the time when grizzlies eat people, though, or most of the time when grizzlies kill people, they're not killing someone because they want to eat them.
01:30:39.000Just curl up in a ball, you're supposed to put your hand behind your neck, lay in a fetal position, and don't let her get access to your organs.
01:30:46.000Because she wants to chew your organs apart.
01:32:08.000I just stumbled across a story about this just happening where the bear spray didn't work, and it was attacking the guide, and the client went to grab the Glock out of the...
01:32:55.000Well, they killed an elk, and they had hung it in a tree, and they had taken some of the meat back, because, you know, you have to hike out.
01:35:39.000We have video of me and him in my backyard, and I'm laying these nocturnal arrow knocks, they're lit knocks, so they fly through the air, it looks like laser beams, and I'm laying them into my elk target at like 65 yards, thunk, thunk,
01:35:55.000thunk, all of them going into the vitals.
01:35:58.000I had Donald Cerrone one time just sit there and explain to me where to place my feet and what I was doing wrong and why more weight should be on my back foot.
01:36:07.000But just little things like that, or my buddy Tarek, and Wayne McCulloch, of course, who I train with.
01:36:13.000But my boy Tarek, he'll teach me stuff.
01:36:17.000But just where you're looking, how to judge distance, and there are certain techniques to do it, or just where your back foot should be in relation to that person's foot.
01:36:38.000I mean, there's ways to do things correctly, and people have spent their entire life learning these things and learning how to teach these things, too, which is critical.
01:36:51.000We both came from a Taekwondo background, and I got very, very, very fortunate in that the school that I found, that I stumbled into, J. Kim Taekwondo Institute in Boston, was one of the best gyms on earth.
01:37:42.000And your positioning, she ingrains those fundamentals so that you can't do it wrong.
01:37:49.000So before you start playing tennis, you are ingraining neural pathways and patterns that are perfectly correct so that when the shit hits the fan, you get emotional, you don't know how to do it wrong.
01:38:54.000There's this guy, Coach Anthony, who I watch his videos on YouTube.
01:38:58.000I think he's in Kansas City, by the way.
01:38:59.000I'd love to get in there and train with him.
01:39:01.000He's a guy who, like, breaks shit down in those little details.
01:39:06.000And you just realize what a science boxing is.
01:39:08.000And you realize, like, it was that awesome Teddy Atlas thing you did where he goes, his boxer, like, you're making mistakes, but then there are mortal.
01:39:15.000Like, you're making sins, but you're making mortal sins, like getting hit with shots you don't see.
01:39:25.000It's like, you want to be really good at something, get great coaching, and it's those small adjustments that make all the difference.
01:39:33.000Like, the difference between the number 100 tennis player in the world and the number 2 tennis player in the world is that much, but it's all the difference in the world.
01:39:40.000Yeah, learning how to do things correctly in every single discipline is the most important thing.
01:40:30.000And he'll come out and fight the first five rounds of the southpaw, and you think you got him figured out, and then he'll switch stances and fuck you up.
01:42:25.000I think learning things and getting better- There's an art to learning.
01:42:28.000Yeah, there's an art to learning, but I think it's so critical to enjoying life.
01:42:32.000I think that's one of the, like, learning stuff and doing difficult things where you can see incremental improvement that's based on your effort and your concentration.
01:42:41.000I think these are really important for happiness.
01:42:50.000Also, I know where to place my energy and I can see myself getting better, but more importantly, not only do I see myself getting better, but I come to understandings.
01:42:58.000When I'm writing stand-up now, when I'm thinking of what my next one hour is going to be, I start kind of like getting to what I think about in essence.
01:43:36.000I was going to say, the only time a moccasin is macho is if you're sneaking up on a castle guard to take him out with a knife or you're hunting deer.
01:48:36.000A video where a kid stopped a cat, I think it was like a bobcat, a small bobcat, like in a village, was getting attacked by some snakes and was protecting its babies.
01:48:46.000And the mom just left the babies to die or whatever because she knew that she couldn't fight it.
01:48:51.000The kid just grabbed the snake by the head and walked it away and threw it like in the bush, came back and grabbed the babies and gave them back to the mom.
01:52:52.000So through the software rendering, they do something like that on the left, and then they make it on the right, but make it with a lake and a mountain.
01:55:23.000And that respite is when you see a great work of art or you're doing great works of art.
01:55:28.000And somehow, when you see something beautiful, when you're laughing really hard at great stand-up, when you're seeing an amazing movie like American Beauty, the state it puts you in is so incredible because it gets you to forget momentarily about your own biology, about your own urges,
01:55:45.000For whatever reason, you rest in this state of majesty, this sort of high relief, your higher self, and you go, man, that might be what God's about.
01:55:53.000That might be what it's like to be touching something bigger than myself or bigger than all this other appetite stuff.
01:56:00.000It's almost like something, you forget about death and you forget about your fears and everything else.
01:56:07.000You know, those feelings of inspiration.
01:56:09.000That can happen when you're listening to great music or it can happen when you're making great music.
01:56:15.000But that is almost the only time you have, I guess, and of course we can talk about flow when you're climbing a mountain with no ropes or whatever it might be.
01:56:23.000I think that puts you in those states of true focus and true flow.
01:56:33.000And When you are not that, you know, everything else becomes drudgery, almost because everything becomes...
01:56:41.000And I would even equate, like, we stay alive also, not just for accomplishments, but, like, when you're with your friends, like, when we're doing the Fight Companion and we're laughing and being silly geese for no other reason, there's a flow to that.
01:57:39.000Yeah, those moments that we have when we're doing the Fight Companion where we're just fucking howling and laughing, that's why, and those, you can't recreate that.
01:57:48.000You know, one of the things that's interesting about Fight Companion is a bunch of people have tried to recreate it.
01:57:53.000They've done their own, and they always abandon it.
02:00:22.000Yeah, well, he does that Tinfoil Hat podcast, too, with Sam Tripoli, and then they do conspiracy stand-up comedy where they go to the performance clubs together, but it's really selling well.
02:09:26.000Well, yeah, you're in this sort of weird state of mind where you're just trudging and breathing, and that's all you really can concentrate on.
02:09:36.000You don't have much room for other things.
02:09:38.000Like, when you're really struggling, When I'm running up a steep hill and I'm running with a dog, he's so much faster than me.
02:10:46.000But then when you catch your breath, it's like during the time where your heart rate is dropping, you start looking at the actual real magnitude of your problems.
02:10:59.000One of our biggest problems is the way we interact with each other, right?
02:11:04.000If you think about all the problems that people have in the world, obviously there's the big global ones, global conflict and war and financial conflict.
02:11:12.000Weird shit that countries do to each other back and forth.
02:11:15.000But it's human beings in conflict with other human beings.
02:11:19.000And how much of that could be avoided?
02:11:58.000People go to war the way you organize men young men is not whether we hate them That doesn't last as much what you do is you you go.
02:12:07.000Hey, it's about love It's about defending our country our way of life and you you create symbols and propaganda and things for them to march behind That's always how you motivate large groups how you create an ideology in your You know your fighting force you need that Because they tend to fight for something.
02:12:28.000You know, I think at West Point it says a nation defines itself on what it's willing to fight for.
02:12:32.000Nobody wants one world government, right?
02:12:35.000That's one of the things that everybody's scared of.
02:12:49.000One group having all that fucking power.
02:12:52.000Yeah, anytime one group, that's my problem with a big federal government.
02:12:56.000Right, but it seems like they're all ridiculous at this point, but if there was laws that we all agreed on, like you can't just, say if you go to Singapore with weed, you go to jail for the rest of your life.
02:15:28.000And people made it through that to some form of security where they started thinking about rules and laws and how to enforce them and keep things civil.
02:15:38.000Well, yeah, I think the fascinating thing is slavery.
02:15:42.000Slavery was the order of the day, and the leading philosophers and moral thinkers of our time, from Jesus to the Buddha to Muhammad to Socrates and Aristotle to all of them, never, ever really spoke much about slavery,
02:15:59.000about owning other human beings, about selling someone's children.
02:16:26.000The abolition movement was started by what you'd call fanatic Christians, but they risked everything and convinced the Crown to enforce a ban on slavery in the high seas.
02:16:39.000So if you were a British naval ship, Even if there was a Turkish ship over there and they had slaves, the British spent years and great cost at basically hanging slave traders,
02:16:54.000freeing slaves, all that stuff on the high seas.
02:16:57.000So even though obviously there was a lot of racism that went on, the Brits and their navy were the ones that began the abolition of worldwide slavery.
02:17:21.000No, Britain abolished slavery, I believe, way earlier than America did.
02:17:25.000So we were 1865. We were 1865. Another thing to remember is the United States has been a country with slavery longer than it's been a country without.
02:17:33.000So that gives you an idea of how recent that is.
02:18:09.000And, well, I mean, I think that it's Harriet Beecher Stowe, and I think the legend is that Lincoln said, so you're the little woman that wrote this book that started this great war.
02:18:21.000Because she put this—she had never actually—she was from the North, but she interviewed fugitive slaves and people who, you know, who used to be.
02:18:30.000And if you read that book, man, it put such a face on what slavery, the brutality, what it was really about in this country or anywhere where you could take a woman's child, an eight-year-old, and you'd get some money.
02:18:43.000And it's the story where the slave trader goes, well, I'll buy the kid.
02:18:47.000I could fetch a good price for him down south.
02:18:50.000We'll take him when his mom ain't there.
02:18:52.000Maybe have her go do a chore so when she comes back, you know.
02:18:56.000Otherwise, it's all kinds of hemming and hawing.
02:18:59.000And they had slave brokers who would come in and go, look, your plantation is in debt.
02:19:05.000You've got to start selling some of your slaves.
02:19:07.000Now, I'm not going to take those guys, but that woman, she's got those two healthy-looking boys.
02:20:15.000We're in the process of this thing where we're figuring out life, what's fair, what's right, how to run shit...
02:20:23.000And we're doing it based on this idea that someone had already got it dialed in.
02:20:29.000Whether it's through the Constitution, or whether it's through the democratic system, or the educational system, all these different systems that we have.
02:20:36.000They're perfect, and they're in place, and they're ready to rock, and they've been rock solid for generation after gen- Wait a minute, how long have they been around?
02:22:11.000You have an idea and all of a sudden, instead of having one book for 50 miles, you could print out paper and make multiple copies and send them out.
02:22:45.000He explained Lutherism, explained the whole movement and how he got away with it because he had a high public standing so they didn't prosecute him or sue him.
02:22:53.000They figured out a way to translate the Bible where other people could read it that couldn't speak Latin.
02:23:07.000The Catholic divide was about, essentially, wait a minute, I don't need to pledge allegiance to this giant institution called the Vatican with all the money and the costumes.
02:23:15.000What if I just have the Bible and I do what Jesus said, because I can read it right here.
02:23:20.000All of a sudden, now you're a Protestant.
02:23:22.000That was what everybody was scared about.
02:23:24.000I mean, it must have been the most horrific thing about...
02:23:34.000This was, like, when Genghis Khan was roaming the earth and running through Russia and Asia and Eurasia, Rome was like, they were thinking about going to battle with these people, the Mongols.
02:29:31.000There's a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time...
02:29:40.000If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
02:29:44.000The world will not have it, and it is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions.
02:29:53.000It's your business to keep it yours clearly and directly and keep the channel open.
02:29:58.000You don't even have to believe in yourself or your work.
02:30:00.000You have to keep open and aware directly of the urges that motivate you.
02:30:54.000Yeah, 1943. People were probably struggling then for freedom from the orthodoxy.
02:31:00.000Struggling to express themselves in different ways.
02:31:03.000You know, that's one of the more interesting things about stand-up is that it's indicative or it's...
02:31:09.000It's representative of the time in which it's performed in.
02:31:13.000Like, there are little windows in time to how people behaved and thought, and there was some shit that people did just 10, 15, 20 years ago that you just can't do now.
02:32:05.000Yeah, but there was no way that you and I can put ourselves back into the minds of people that lived in the 1950s when Lenny Bruce was doing this.
02:32:18.000There's no way we could put ourselves there.
02:32:20.000We're tainted forever by technology and innovation.
02:32:27.000Interaction, I think, is the big one, right?
02:32:29.000As soon as people start being able to exchange information with each other, whether it's through television and then through radio and television and television shows and then internet, the more they express themselves, the more they sort of figure out patterns of behavior that are acceptable.
02:32:46.000Yeah, but I wonder at times whether or not, I think stand-up is having a renaissance, but like music and things, I don't think we're living in a time of genius, are we?
02:35:41.000But Stevie Ray Vaughan, we can't put any of his music up.
02:35:43.000They'll yank us off the fucking iTunes.
02:35:45.000If I told you that you could trade a deep knowledge and practice of music over your knowledge of martial arts, would you take it right now?
02:36:51.000It's so important for me just to have the ability to get out 100% of aggression Be able to hit a bag and just get into a flow, smoke a joint, and then hit a bag.
02:39:32.000There's no doubt that they're so good.
02:39:34.000See, the thing is, every song, I don't know how every band does it.
02:39:41.000Every song is probably constructed differently, but in a lot of cases, there's a lot of people contributing to the song.
02:39:47.000The drummer has an idea, and the singer has an idea, and the guitar player has these riffs he's trying out, and they're trying to figure out the best way to do the song.
02:40:10.000And, you know, maybe they just thought that band's gonna go away and no one's gonna care about them anymore because we're a lead motherfucking Zeppelin.
02:40:50.000To 1969. Go 19 years and you see, you go from people that look like Hank Williams Sr. To a guy, Robert Plant, who apparently was wearing the blouses or dresses or t-shirts that the girl he had the night before had worn.
02:43:40.000I mean, a lot of the songs that Hendrix was writing, he died at 27. So that was a relatively...
02:43:46.000His musical development, I think, was done less with maybe psychedelics, but I don't think heroin played a factor until later on in his life.
02:46:10.000It's also possible that that stuff is rocket fuel.
02:46:17.000It's rocket fuel for your physical energy, your anger, your moods, your inhibitions dissolve, and it might open up the pathway to that forbidden door of demon rape that you didn't want to get to.
02:46:32.000And that becomes the best scene in a Stephen King book.