NatureBox is a company that sends healthier snacks to your door. They say they re all natural and contain a much higher quality ingredient than the typical vending machine food ingredients, which makes them healthier. They also try to use non-GMO food as well.
00:00:03.000This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by NatureBox.
00:00:06.000NatureBox is a company that sends healthier snacks to your door.
00:00:12.000Now I really appreciate my message board because every time anyone claims anything now, people fucking crawl up their ass with a microscope and find out what's cracking.
00:00:23.000And one of the big things about NatureBox is people go, this stuff's not healthy.
00:00:26.000We're not talking about kale or grapes or blueberries.
00:00:31.000It is healthy err and quite delicious.
00:01:12.000And their response was very reasonable.
00:01:14.000They said their products are all natural and contain a much higher quality ingredient than the typical vending machine food ingredients, which makes them healthier.
00:01:22.000They have over 100 snacks to choose from.
00:01:24.000And if you're looking for something for certain dietary needs, like wheat-free, which I'm a gluten-free person because I'm very trendy, low-sugar content, gluten-free, which is basically the same thing.
00:01:36.000I don't know why they had to be redundant.
00:03:42.000For the longest time, if you wanted to have a professional website, you really had to either learn HTML or you had to hire someone to do it.
00:04:06.000And they've even launched a logo creator.
00:04:09.000If you're thinking about opening up a company and you want a logo, they have a very simple logo creator where you can create a clean and simple logo design yourself in minutes.
00:04:19.000You can start an online store quite easily.
00:05:47.000We basically sell things to allow human beings to reach your potential, whether it's physically, strength and conditioning equipment, whether it's cognitively, which I don't think is a word, through things like alpha brain or new mood.
00:06:02.000What new mood is, is a 5-HTP supplement.
00:06:05.000If you've never heard of 5-HTP, 5-HTP is actually a supplement that allows your brain to build more serotonin that actually can enhance your mood.
00:06:15.000So much so that people who are on SSRIs, which is a serotonin something re-uptake inhibitor, people who are on antidepressants, essentially, they tell you not to take things like new mood because new mood and the antidepressant together might actually Give you too much serotonin, which is not good.
00:06:36.000All the science behind all the supplements are available at onit.com, whether it's AlphaBrain, whether it's New Mood, any of the supplements are explained with science and also with the research is posted with references.
00:06:50.000We recently completed a clinical test, the first of another, we were in the process of doing another one right now, a much larger one.
00:07:10.000These are all very expensive to do, and the process of selling supplements is a very controversial thing because there's a lot of bullshit out there.
00:07:26.000But since I knew about vitamins and supplementation, I've always been interested in optimizing my health, optimizing my fitness, optimizing the way my brain functions.
00:07:39.000And I've been a big fan of nootropics.
00:07:41.000I got turned on to them by Neuro One, which is Bill Romanowski's company.
00:07:46.000Bill Romanowski, if you don't know who he is, he's a former pro football player who was experiencing a lot of what we're hearing about today in the news, about pro-football players.
00:07:56.000A lot of these guys get busted up from football, develop a lot of cognitive problems, and he wanted to combat that with nutrition.
00:08:03.000So he developed a product called Neuro One.
00:08:05.000That was my introduction to the world of nootropics from Alice from Sarah and No Name in San Francisco.
00:08:14.000I got into that and then started researching all the various supplements before we ever created Alpha Brain.
00:08:20.000Alpha Brain is what I believe is the best combination of all of the known ingredients that can increase cognitive function.
00:08:27.000And again, if you go to onit.com, all of the science behind all the various ingredients individually is referenced.
00:08:33.000And then on top of that, all the research that we've done and the study that was just recently completed is also referenced.
00:08:42.000We also have a 100% 30-pill, 90-day money-back guarantee at Onit.
00:08:48.000We're not trying to sell you any bullshit.
00:08:49.000And the last thing I personally want is anybody feeling ripped off.
00:08:54.000That is also the last thing Aubrey wants, who is my partner in this.
00:08:58.000We sell you the best shit we can find, and we try to sell it to you at a reasonable rate.
00:09:02.000That includes strength and conditioning equipment, like kettlebells and battle ropes.
00:09:06.000And that includes health and nutrition things, supplements like hemp force protein powder or hemp force bars.
00:09:53.000I've enjoyed your work over the years.
00:09:55.000You have had probably one of the most unique views of Americans as an outsider, I think possibly ever.
00:10:02.000You know, your shows are all about What he's done is found the wackiest Americans ever known and put them on television and shown just how fucked up we really can be.
00:12:46.000I mean, I think you're being very self-deprecating right now because you might avoid conflict if you could, and I do as well.
00:12:54.000But you're also very brave in the situations that you've put yourself in.
00:12:59.000You've thrust yourself into some very bizarre circumstances.
00:13:03.000Well, you know, maybe I am cowardly, but I'm more afraid of the consequences of somehow not delivering on a creative idea than I am of the danger that fulfilling it involves, if that makes sense.
00:13:18.000So sometimes you're in a spot with a story.
00:13:21.000You know, people say like, you must be afraid when you're out on location.
00:13:24.000You know what I'm afraid of is going home without a story.
00:13:26.000Like, that's what keeps me awake at night.
00:13:28.000Like, are we actually going to get any usable material?
00:13:31.000So I was in Johannesburg doing a story on crime in Joburg, where the police are hugely under-resourced.
00:13:40.000And so private security agencies go around policing the streets.
00:14:00.000And so I tended to thrust myself into dangerous situations just out of a sense of panic, you know, that we weren't kind of doing what we were supposed to do.
00:14:12.000So essentially what's going on in South Africa is like a lot of what happened, where it was criticized.
00:14:19.000The American military started using mercenaries that were accountable to no one, Blackwater and the like.
00:14:25.000And that was a huge, huge issue because these folks were doing a lot of things that if soldiers had done them, they would be responsible for war crimes.
00:14:34.000But they fell into this very strange and gray area because they were mercenaries.
00:14:41.000And in fact, we spent a long time looking at trying to do that story and getting into Blackwater.
00:14:46.000They rebranded themselves as something else now.
00:14:50.000And the fact that these private citizens, essentially, because they weren't servants of the state, they were citizens of private companies, but they were still in Iraq, but accountable to no government because they could commit crimes, more or less, in Iraq, but go unarrested and unprosecuted because they were in this legal gray area.
00:15:12.000They changed their name twice, actually.
00:16:35.000But it's across the board as well because I've done several stories on prisons and there are private prisons as well.
00:16:44.000And if I can make a general observation, it's that what I found in the course of making documentaries is that nine times out of ten, you get more access and more accountability from a public agency.
00:16:55.000I mean, I've been inside and spent weeks inside San Quentin Prison and Miami Jail and a Maximum Security Mental Hospital for paedophiles here in California.
00:17:04.000And all of those opened their doors to us and let us wander around and document what was going on in a way that I thought was very laudable.
00:17:11.000I didn't agree with all the practices that were going on.
00:17:14.000And yet, if there are private prisons, they don't feel like opening up their doors.
00:17:19.000They don't feel the same sense of public trust.
00:17:24.000Well, they also, they're a business, and that's a real issue.
00:17:27.000Anything that you say that's negative could negatively impact their bottom line.
00:17:32.000They can make less money because of you, and so there's no benefit in having you there.
00:17:36.000Whereas the public outrage in a public institution can have a real impact.
00:17:42.000You know, the public can actually vote to get people out of positions that are causing certain rules to be into effect.
00:17:48.000You can't really do that with private prisons.
00:17:50.000Private prisons are, in my opinion, one of the most disturbing aspects of the current situation that we're in right now because so few people are actually aware of what's going on.
00:18:00.000Most folks who have nine to five jobs plus whatever commute time and family, they don't have the time to research any of this stuff.
00:18:09.000And they're really unaware of what's going on that we have this good percentage of our prisons in this country are actually businesses.
00:18:21.000And even more disturbing, they're lobbying to make sure that certain laws are in place so that they can ensure that they have more people in their prisons and make more money.
00:20:52.000In a weird way, it kind of aligns with certain aspects of the sovereign citizen movement where you see yourself as not beholden to the federal government and an independent entity.
00:21:01.000Well, I know his production company was like Amon Ra Productions, I believe.
00:22:53.000And then, of course, the money funds this bloated bureaucracy that keeps expanding in order to keep itself alive like any other organism.
00:23:00.000It continues to expand and just gets more and more ridiculous and needs tax money to stay open.
00:23:06.000So a guy like Wesley Snipes comes along and says, I'm not paying taxes, you know, it's hard for everybody to be sympathetic to that because here's a guy who makes millions of dollars, doesn't want to pay taxes, and the regular folks that have to pay taxes and make a fraction of that, they don't have any sympathy for a guy like that.
00:23:54.000We were supposed to have a mixed martial arts fight several years ago.
00:23:56.000Before he went into jail, he owed a lot of money in taxes.
00:24:02.000And a promoter, one of the original promoters for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, apparently he contacted them and wanted to have a mixed martial arts fight in order to make some money.
00:24:13.000And they contacted me and offered me some ridiculous amount of money.
00:24:16.000And I said, yeah, I'll fight that guy.
00:24:18.000I'll fight that guy for that much money.
00:24:21.000But he changed his mind after time went on.
00:24:24.000And I'm sure he was embroiled in legal battles, and there might have been some chemicals involved in his decision-making.
00:26:43.000And I've learned along the way that crazy shit can happen.
00:26:46.000People are throwing bones at each other.
00:26:48.000Have you ever done a show on mixed martial arts?
00:26:50.000Well, it's an interesting question because it's one of the few times when now and then we approach a story because it feels like it should be right for us and then it doesn't pan out for whatever reason.
00:27:01.000So I'm well aware of your work with the UFC and about three years ago we spent a couple of months really trying to crack it as a story.
00:27:11.000And then what happened was we didn't get, well we were trying to do MMA and we didn't get access to the UFC or not good enough access.
00:27:20.000So we were looking at the second tier but it's quite a big drop-off from the UFC down to the smaller leagues.
00:27:27.000There was a guy we were dealing with called Terry Treblecock.
00:27:58.000But there was another one we would, and part of the same shoot, we looked at an outfit that was, I want to say it was cops versus cons, or does that ring a bell?
00:28:38.000If you have a spectrum of fights, that's probably the darkest.
00:28:42.000But the guy in charge of it had got religion, and he'd started a new outfit, and he was in the awkward maneuver of trying to edge away from the brutal, super brutal, horrible stuff into a lighter mode, more acceptable fare, but still kind of trying to keep his brand viable.
00:29:02.000And his new thing was called something like cops versus cons.
00:29:05.000And the concept was it was law enforcement personnel fighting representatives of the criminal fraternity.
00:29:12.000That was going to help him with Jesus?
00:29:14.000That was his, because it was like, he wants to show how there was some rationale, like he wants to show how we can all be on the same team and kind of fight and then shake hands at the end of the day.
00:29:27.000And there's not a big difference between cops and the street brawlers.
00:29:33.000It was a kind of a spin, but when it got down to it, it was nowhere near as brutal as what he'd been doing with felony fights.
00:29:40.000And the reason we didn't pursue the story was it became clear that it was actually a sport.
00:29:47.000And if anything, to my mind, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but less brutal than boxing, that you take more punishment because boxing bouts are so long and possibly because of the gloves as well, you're getting more brain injuries through boxing.
00:30:02.000And that compared with boxing and even maybe, you know, NFL football and stuff, it wasn't that questionable what the UFC or the MMA guys were doing.
00:30:14.000They were just going out there fighting and then shaking hands.
00:30:18.000Well, there's certainly less animosity between fighters and much more camaraderie.
00:30:23.000In fact, two men who are probably two of the best in the world, Leota Machida and Chris Weidman, who are going to fight for the UFC middleweight title.
00:30:32.000They met recently at a seminar or some convention, and there's a photo of them together smiling, holding like arm in arm.
00:30:40.000I mean, these guys are in a couple months, they're going to try to kill each other, but yet they're smiling and very friendly.
00:30:46.000It's very common for people to be friendly both before and after the fights.
00:30:52.000there's with martial arts the true martial art mentality is not one of a thuggish nature it's not one of it's Those are that Wideman, the guy on the left with the Monster Milk shirt on, is the current champion.
00:31:08.000And the other guy, Leoto Machida, the one on the right, is the number one contender who's two amazing fighters who are going to fight.
00:31:15.000And you see them hugging and smiling before they're about to fight.
00:31:20.000And Wideman, who is a wrestler, which I consider one of the very best martial arts, and Machida is a karate master, a true martial artist, Machida.
00:31:29.000He really embodies what you expect from a martial artist in the bowing.
00:31:38.000He's very disciplined, meditates, and really is what you would expect in a sort of a movie version of a martial arts competitor, a martial arts master.
00:31:49.000Except, you know, he really truly is a real deal.
00:31:51.000But I think that that attitude, the martial arts attitude, is one of the more appealing aspects of fighting, where it's not like a Mike Tyson, you know, the sort of the thuggish, you know, insulting.
00:32:04.000There's some of that in MMA as well, but it's very rare in boxing that you get someone who has the martial arts ideals and ethics that sort of competes.
00:32:14.000But when it comes down to whether or not it's more or less dangerous, it really depends upon the bouts and it depends upon the style that a person fights in.
00:32:25.000If you look at like a Floyd Mayweather fight, Floyd Mayweather is probably like the least hit boxer Of all time.
00:32:31.000If you wanted to argue that boxing is a super safe sport, watch a Floyd Mayweather fight.
00:33:24.000From long careers and from a lot of training, hard training.
00:33:27.000There's also a bit of evolution going on right now in mixed martial arts as far as how they train, how fighters train.
00:33:36.000And there was a lack of knowledge and understanding about the proper way to go about training in the old days when it was first starting out, where people would just try to be as rough and tough as possible.
00:33:48.000So they would spar in the gym at 100%.
00:33:51.000They would basically have fights in the gym.
00:33:58.000Your mic is on, so when you do that, that click is making noise.
00:34:02.000They're full-on fights where they don't do that anymore.
00:34:05.000Now, it's very wise to rarely spar at 100%.
00:34:11.000Most of the time, spar at a lighter impact rate and work much more on technique and much more on strategy and positioning and preserve yourself inside the gym.
00:34:25.000And so, as I say, we abandoned it almost because of a sense of feeling like it seemed healthy and normal in a non-like kind of masculine.
00:34:38.000So you would only go after it if it was a freak show.
00:34:42.000You know, with that story, we needed some extra dimension.
00:34:46.000And I think that possibly if we'd got to the top tier, like with the UFC, then there would have been a sufficient sort of show business gloss to it to feel or just a sense of stakes.
00:34:58.000But the guys we were meeting were all part-timers.
00:35:01.000They were guys who worked during the week as mechanics, teachers, personal trainers.
00:35:06.000And every couple of weekends, they would fight a few bouts.
00:35:10.000So it felt like a, I mean, I'm not disrespecting them, but they were not full-time fighters.
00:35:16.000And it was missing some kind of sense of scale or something.
00:36:11.000Kickboxing and boxing is where smokers really came from.
00:36:15.000And what it is is essentially fights that would take place in the gym.
00:36:18.000And what they would do is they'd wear headgear, boxing gloves, like sparring gloves, shin pads, which you don't see in regular kickboxing.
00:36:27.000And they would go at it, essentially full clip, in front of family and friends.
00:36:32.000And it would be unsanctioned amateur bouts.
00:36:35.000The problem with a lot of these smokers is there was oftentimes no medical care whatsoever.
00:36:40.000And they were just, you know, hoping that no one got badly injured.
00:36:45.000And regulatory commissions frowned upon them because they were really competitions, but they were being labeled as non-competitive sparring.
00:36:55.000They were calling them sparring bouts.
00:36:58.000So I've also had smokers where they had full MMA rules with little gloves and no pads at all.
00:37:35.000And so I went to see a lot of the King of the Cage bouts in the 90s.
00:37:39.000And when we would go see them, they were all on Native American reservations.
00:37:44.000Then they also started doing a thing called pancrease fights.
00:37:47.000And what pancrease fights were, there was this strange rule loophole where you were allowed to fight, but you could slap.
00:37:56.000You couldn't close your fists and punch to the face, but you could pull your hands back and hit with the palms to the face and then kick full blast to the face, kick full blast to the body.
00:38:07.000So there was a lot of those fights going on in the United States as well when there was no regulatory body for that.
00:38:13.000It just sort of fit into some strange loophole.
00:38:16.000But King of the Cage is still one of those places right now where young fighters, when they're looking to get experience, they'll start.
00:38:23.000They come up through that, and that's still going, is it?
00:38:30.000My friend Bud Brutzman, who's a good buddy of mine, was also one of the original owners of that.
00:38:35.000And he got out and he became part of Shark Fights for a while, which is another organization, but I don't think he does anything with MMA now.
00:38:58.000It's one of my favorite documentaries about Irish traveler families and the feuds that go on between these families spanning generations.
00:39:06.000There's the Joyce family and another family, I can't remember their name, but and the strange dynamic, it's just really weird.
00:39:16.000Like the families, they're very traditional, they got no money, like very close to the soil kind of families.
00:39:25.000And they issue these like fight videos, like calling each other out into the fights, saying like, you come and see me and I'll tell you, you never insult me.
00:39:49.000And the code of honor and the defending your name and the strangeness of the rules whereby there was always this whole code of rules about if you were called out, you had to fight.
00:40:01.000If they insulted your dad, you had to fight.
00:40:03.000And then the kids getting groomed into it very young.
00:40:07.000And we could never build trust with the families.
00:40:09.000But the guy who made Knuckle, do you remember how he gets in with the families?
00:40:22.000They're kind of drinking and fighting and getting married.
00:40:25.000And having done one wedding, he maybe does another wedding.
00:40:28.000And then he builds trust, access through the wedding videos.
00:40:32.000He parlays that into shooting the fight videos.
00:40:36.000And so, I mean, I was glad someone did it.
00:40:39.000You know, it's really worth, if listeners who haven't seen that, should check out Knuckle.
00:40:44.000Yeah, it's a fascinating, fascinating documentary.
00:40:47.000And there's so many of those call-out videos that are available now.
00:40:50.000They put them up on YouTube now to really embarrass the person that they're calling out instead of just a video where you hand a cassette off to somebody else like in the olden days.
00:41:00.000Now they put these videos up on YouTube and they're damn hilarious.
00:41:38.000People sometimes ask me what the strangest or the most difficult story I've ever done.
00:41:43.000And one of them was definitely this gypsy one.
00:41:46.000And it wasn't for lack of a story being that the story was there, but we just couldn't figure out how to get to it.
00:41:55.000And there was just no sense of, you'd be having these conversations with the guy, you know, there was a guy who was very high up in the gypsy community, and he had a number of sons, and he was big in the fighting world, and he was just connected in various ways, both legal and probably not legal.
00:42:12.000But you would have conversations with him, and you couldn't figure out what was real and what wasn't real.
00:42:18.000And there was a slight sense of, you know, they call non-gypsies gorgeous.
00:42:27.000Or maybe, I mean, the spellings could vary, but we were gorgeous.
00:42:29.000And I always felt that because we were gorgeous, you know, non-gypsies, that he as a gypsy just felt like no real sense of needing to tell the truth to us a lot of the time.
00:42:43.000You know, I'm not trying to generalize that or be, you know, say that's true for all gypsies or travelers, but for him, it was like, because we were gorgeous, it felt like, you know, we just didn't count.
00:43:09.000And they, well, was that movie Snatch sort of highlighted it a bit with Brad Pitt.
00:43:15.000But these people, they travel, you know, and they set up shopping places.
00:43:19.000And I have some friends from England, and they have friends that live in this wealthy community, this suburban community outside of London.
00:43:29.000And these people apparently just moved into the area, set up their caravans, set up shop, and just started destroying the area.
00:43:39.000They started putting garbage everywhere.
00:43:42.000I mean, and they can't do anything about it.
00:43:45.000Apparently, there's like massive protection of these people in England, and they're trying to be polite about it and the way they go about dealing with the situation.
00:43:55.000And these folks that lived in these multi-million dollar estates are really kind of fucked.
00:44:01.000Well, it's one of these situations where it's very hard to find the right line because on the one hand, we're talking about a community that is heavily discriminated against, is deeply poor, has massive dislocation in various respects, very high rates of illiteracy, of children not going to school, their children's health not being good, and massively out of work.
00:44:27.000And then, so, you know, by all normal sort of barometers, you'd think that's a community that needs help, but also there's various social vices that go along with that.
00:44:38.000And so then I think it's fair to say many of the traveling folk are not well liked in rural areas.
00:44:46.000And they are, and there's a cultural thing too, where they say, like, it's not in our culture to stay in one place.
00:44:54.000We have to roam around and we have to be allowed to build a house in a field where you're not supposed to build houses.
00:45:01.000So it's like one of these, you know, they can sort of make a cultural argument, say, like, we're culturally, you can't, our tradition is, it's like, you know, it's like Native Americans saying like, we have to be allowed to kill whales.
00:45:14.000You know, like, you know, there's these debates and there's a spectrum of, and there's a point where you say like, well, it's your culture to mutilate female genitalia, but it's still illegal and you can't do it, right?
00:45:24.000Or what you say, it's your culture to hunt whales.
00:45:26.000Well, well, we don't really want you to do that, but maybe you can hunt deer Instead, it's our culture to, you know, so you've got to try and find, it's a tricky area.
00:45:36.000The area about the hunting whales is a very unique one because I believe there's certain Inuit tribes that are still allowed to hunt certain animals, like seal.
00:47:34.000Clearly, you know, we moved, we, meaning North Americans, whoever came here from Europe and wherever, when they migrated here, encroached on Native American land and sort of changed the whole rules.
00:47:50.000And that's where this whole Indian reservation thing comes into play here.
00:47:54.000We allowed them to set up shop in these areas, usually that sucked, places that the new people didn't want at all.
00:48:02.000They allowed these Native Americans to have these areas and then they allowed them to sort of establish their own rules in these areas.
00:48:08.000So then that was fine for the longest time and they just sort of lived in poverty until they started making casinos.
00:48:15.000Then it got really strange because then non-Native Americans were allowed to invest in these casinos and then they established these crazy businesses where they make millions and millions and millions of dollars and they allow gambling, which is frowned upon everywhere else.
00:48:34.000That's another one that I'd like to do a story on.
00:48:36.000I didn't figure out a way of doing it.
00:48:38.000But you know, in talking about this, I think what the realization I had was in the end, the stories I do aren't about wackiness, in my view, or even stuff that's sort of ethically dubious, although I sometimes go into those areas.
00:48:56.000What I'm interested in is angst and the deepest kinds of human angst, where you are facing issues that emotionally take you to the core of your being and your soul.
00:49:10.000And in some cases, it's, you know, it could be stuff that seems kind of dubious, like the world, I've done a story on brothels, or I did a story about porn performers, and it's the strangeness of taking the intimacy of the sex act and putting that on TV.
00:49:25.000And then in other cases, it's stories where the angst is something where you're presented with a choice that is really through no fault of yours.
00:49:35.000Like you've got a parent who's got dementia, serious Alzheimer's, or a loved one, let's say.
00:49:43.000Your husband, who you've been married to for 50 years, doesn't recognize you anymore and is having sex at his old people's home with some of the other women there.
00:50:02.000Ah, so they can get Viagra and the old people.
00:50:04.000And some of the homes, as I understand it, there, I mean, we didn't actually film elderly people having sex, but it was clear when one of the women I was spending time with was visiting her husband of 30 years.
00:50:21.000Whenever she visited him, he would take one of his new girlfriends out.
00:50:25.000They'd go out for a meal and they went out as a sort of threesome because he didn't remember that he was married to his wife.
00:50:35.000And so, I mean, but I'm just taking that as an, so when I come to this question of why didn't the story about the mixed martial arts work out, I think it was to do with, like, there wasn't a great deal of angst there.
00:50:51.000It was kind of healthy and people just venting a little bit of male aggression.
00:50:58.000So I'm trying to give you the DNA of, we started out by talking about wackiness, American culture, but the DNA for what I do is much more about the fundamental existential kind of the irresoluble.
00:51:18.000Like those sort of like those deep conflicts that we have as human beings from which that are just bundled into the whole package of being human.
00:51:27.000Do you find it limiting in that you have to have conflict in order to have a story?
00:51:32.000Can you have a story where you're pursuing conflict?
00:52:19.000But they kind of have a lot of cozy chats, and I'm watching this, like, okay, I'm not getting, where's this going to start?
00:52:25.000And I think like, and maybe I'm programmed in a different way from some people, because I could not watch that film and get what people were getting out of it.
00:52:33.000So you require conflict in order to be engaged.
00:53:17.000But there was this character who is this yoga master, quasi spiritual leader, whatever he is, you know, without judging.
00:53:27.000And there's this guy named Mike, who was a devotee, who lived in this guy's ashram, I guess, and believed that this man could materialize jewelry and objects.
00:53:41.000And the story of him stomping his foot down and a 50-pound note appeared in his hand.
00:53:54.000One of my favorite moments was you sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to him, and you asked him whether or not, you said, try not to take this the wrong way, but did you have sadness in your life before you met this guy?
00:55:08.000The deep story there is that I spent, that was at Weird Weekends Days, which was about 10 years ago.
00:55:13.000And I used to try and spend, it was like a little rule of thumb.
00:55:16.000I'd find a contributor who I could relate to the most.
00:55:18.000Like, you take something that seemed really out of whack, like something that on the face of it, you think, how could people really think it's cool to move to Idaho and not pay taxes and think the UN is going to invade?
00:55:29.000How could people really think that an Indian guru is going to manifest Rolex watches, they call them Siddhis, by meditating and cure cancer by jamming on a keyboard, right?
00:56:57.000If you back up about three or four minutes before that, find it is you'll see Louis getting out of bed and he looks very groggy and then he communicates with this guy and they have this sort of a weird breakdown.
00:57:08.000That's also the one where I try and call, because then the guru says he's a big fan of Siegfried and Roy or David Copperfield.
00:57:14.000He says he went to Vegas and I took that as a kind of slightly very subtle coded possible admission that he takes an interest in magic and therefore what he does is a kind of conjuring.
00:57:26.000So I sort of was trying to edge towards getting him to admit that, you know, like we know that you can't make a Rolex watch appear out of thin air, right?
00:57:36.000And so why not just let's just get that out there and admit that, you know, that's what you do.
00:57:42.000But he's a guru, so he couldn't really admit it.
00:59:17.000But I think what I see, my take on it is he's emotionally, you know, close to the surface and probably has been through a lot of difficult things.
00:59:30.000I mean, I'm getting dangerously close to kind of diagnosing him in absentia, but I also think he's trying to step outside it.
00:59:40.000He's trying to say, I agree with you, but I'm not one of them.
00:59:43.000Like, I don't think he thinks that he did have a breakdown.
01:00:48.000And then, I mean, at the same time, it may have taken someone with a certain credulity or a willingness to believe in occult forces to come up with the notion of gravitational pull through a vacuum at a distance, when until then, they'd been grappling with science as mechanistic.
01:01:11.000In other words, what I'm saying is gravity, nothing explains why gravity exists.
01:01:16.000You know, I mean, why do objects attract one another at a distance through a vacuum?
01:01:55.000I think that's what I'm trying to say.
01:01:56.000And at that time, the paradigm of science in the 17th century was that all that nonsense that they used to believe in the Middle Ages was nonsense that you didn't have, and even Aristotelian ideas of things going up.
01:02:10.000Everything could be explained mechanistically.
01:02:11.000It was a mechanistic that objects banged into each other, and that's why things moved.
01:02:17.000So it took a leap of faith to say, you know what, maybe objects move each other through forces that are invisible and can't really be explained.
01:02:26.000Well, it's also important to note that most scientists were religious back then.
01:02:37.000It was very common to be a Christian, very, very uncommon to be an atheist.
01:02:43.000In fact, anyone espousing atheistic ideas was thought to be a fucking nut, which is really interesting.
01:02:48.000Today, where you look at the vast majority of scientists, a huge percentage of them either are agnostic or claim to be atheists.
01:02:57.000You know, I think it would be comparable to saying, nowadays, saying I'm a pedophile.
01:03:01.000You know, I think actually being an atheist in the 17th century was so outside the norm of what people considered acceptable.
01:03:10.000I mean, I think that's the only way we could get our brains around thinking you would be shunned.
01:03:16.000People would look at you and think, like, what is wrong with you?
01:03:19.000Because it was just taken for granted in all levels of acceptable society.
01:03:25.000Well, I think it's really interesting just going back into our past, just recent past, that we have with recordings and television and watching how different our culture is from today, say from the 1920s and 1930s, even films from the 1940s and 50s.
01:03:47.000I'm a stand-up comedian, and when I go back and I listen to the stand-up comedians of the 1950s and the 1960s, I mean, it's incredible how much different culture is between now and then.
01:03:59.000The greatest, probably the most important comedian ever is Lenny Bruce, in my opinion.
01:04:04.000But if you try to listen to Lenny Bruce today, it's really not funny.
01:04:39.000If it was released today, if someone tried to release a Three Stooges movie today, you'd be like, what a piece of shit.
01:04:45.000And that's a person, you know, I have great respect for the Three Stooges.
01:04:49.000It sounds crazy to say, but I think that it's an evidence of the references.
01:04:57.000Our culture is just extremely different now.
01:05:00.000And I think that's one of the more challenging aspects of trying to look back on the 1600s and trying to imagine what life was like, trying to go back to the days when they used to have to put skirts on table legs because they were thinking that people were going to be sexually attracted to table legs and piano legs.
01:05:20.000It's hard for people to imagine that that was a real thing.
01:05:23.000What about thinking of 100 years in the future and what we'll look back on now as culturally weird and that we take for granted?
01:05:36.000Oh, there's massive amounts of contradictions that we have in our society.
01:05:40.000I mean, I think, first of all, the way people dress will be bizarre.
01:05:45.000Women's high heels will be laughed at.
01:05:47.000Women's high heels, like when you see women walk around with spikes, you know, and women love wearing stilettos and pumps and all these really bizarre feet-distorting shoe wear or footwear.
01:05:58.000I mean, I think that's one of the things that's going to be looked back upon.
01:06:10.000I mean, and racism was normal in the 19th century.
01:06:14.000And even someone like Lincoln, who we think of as being a hero of the civil rights struggle, freeing the slaves, the Emancipation Proclamation, made a number of deeply racist statements.
01:07:11.000They covered it up so much, so I don't know if you're familiar with that case, but the DA, the guy who was a, the prosecutor was trying to try to find out information.
01:08:04.000Well, see, it's been a matter of a lot of soul-searching for me because of the strangeness of then discovering that he had this track record of apparently sexually abusing.
01:08:45.000So there's no exact cultural figure in America to compare him with, but he was mainly known as a DJ.
01:08:53.000And from the late 60s right through to the 90s, he was just on the radio a lot.
01:09:01.000And then he got a TV show on the back of his DJing career where it was called Jibble Fixit.
01:09:06.000And people would call in with requests for special fix-its, which were dreams that he would make come true for them.
01:09:12.000So kids would say, I've always wanted to box with a big box, you know, meet Muhammad Ali or drive a ferry or whatever it was, dance with Shawadi Wadi, or, you know, like just, and they would come on and he would fix it for them to do their things.
01:09:29.000It was a very popular mainstream TV show for 20 years.
01:09:32.000And all, so everyone in Britain knew who he was and he was very, very, in his appearance, he was very odd.
01:09:40.000You know, you could see him there, but even more so in his younger years, he had this helmet of hair.
01:09:44.000And so you always looked at him and thought, God, he looks really odd, like something not right about him.
01:09:49.000But at the same time, he became a knight.
01:09:52.000He was very well in the establishment.
01:13:44.000But there was an atmosphere of feeling that he was doing good works for charity and that he was a VIP.
01:13:54.000And, you know, I think abuse victims, even when it's not a celebrity, there's a lot of pressure on them not to come forward due to embarrassment and a misplaced sense of guilt.
01:14:08.000And when it's a prominent member of the celebrity world who's viewed as a kind of a benevolent philanthropist, even more so.
01:14:22.000Yeah, that was the issue with Sandusky as well, that he worked in charities, charitable organizations that helped a lot of young kids that were orphans.
01:14:32.000And he took a lot of these young kids on trips.
01:14:36.000And this was apparently when he had sexually molested them, allegedly, what have you.
01:14:41.000I don't know if he's ever admitted to any of this, but of course he's obviously guilty of something.
01:14:46.000But that was his thing, that he had helped all these kids, and he was involved in all these charitable organizations.
01:14:53.000But there were suspicions about him, and there was stories about him for a long time.
01:15:00.000And the idea is the reason why they had protected him was because it would take down Penn State, this enormous money-making machine, this huge cultural, it was a huge business, and it was also like a big part of the community.
01:15:18.000I mean, Penn State is this institution, this established institution that would be brought down by this.
01:15:25.000And victims had come forward and gone to the police or gone to the university authorities?
01:15:34.000My friend Dama Reira is actually friends with the prosecutor, the one who chased him down at the end, not the guy that turned up missing, but one of the ones who was involved at the very end when he did wind up getting prosecuted.
01:16:37.000And I would probably safely say that a good reason why he died was not just old age.
01:16:44.000The devastating effect of this all becoming public was probably just unbelievably hard to deal with.
01:16:52.000Of course, you know, not minimizing what happened to those kids is much more difficult for them to deal with it.
01:16:57.000The whole thing is just totally disgusting, but fascinating in some sort of a strange, bizarre way that human beings are capable of doing something like that, that they're capable of shielding this monster.
01:17:39.000It's hard to explain, but, you know, sometimes I think, you know, in a male way, I'm not that connected to the deepest sources of my emotions.
01:17:50.000So I don't really know what it was, but I do think that being hugged is a very simple, and it's a physical act, but It creates all kinds of emotions inside of you, and it just sort of welled up from nowhere.
01:18:07.000I don't really know exactly what happened.
01:18:09.000I thought about that quite a bit after I watched it, and one of the things that I took from it was the emotions and just the whole group of people waiting in line to hug someone, the anticipation of it, and the love that's in the air.
01:18:23.000There's sort of this group-minded thing that's going on.
01:18:26.000And there's a lot of music, loud music.
01:19:15.000I would think that just the experience itself of being around all those people that were in this sort of dancing, joyous state and this long line to get to this woman.
01:19:25.000And she probably had some sincere, loving gesture towards everyone as well.
01:19:31.000I mean, imagine what it would be like to be adored by so many people and such a large group of people that are established there to come see you and get in line to hug you.
01:19:44.000I mean, I think as well, I was under a lot of pressure.
01:19:47.000You know, when I'm doing those stories, I feel very pent up and I'm aware that I have one chance to kind of get the thing that I'm trying to get.
01:19:56.000And it was one of those classic things where I was supposed to hug her the day before.
01:20:01.000And then we took a crew break and went for an Indian meal.
01:20:04.000And then when we arrived at the hugging tent, they'd packed up and left.
01:20:08.000And I was like, oh my God, we missed the hug.
01:20:11.000And then it turned out she was doing two nights.
01:20:13.000She was doing like two dates in that city because she was on tour, like hugging her way around India.
01:21:21.000And when they sang the national anthem, the intensity and the feeling in the air, the patriotism, just the emotions involved.
01:21:35.000You're dealing with thousands of people in the audience who have lost loved ones, lost friends, maybe been wounded themselves, maybe taken lives themselves.
01:21:44.000Many of them, I'm sure, taken lives themselves.
01:21:47.000And the palpable, the patriotism and the emotion.
01:21:51.000And I am a person who was absolutely against all of these wars, whether it's the Iraq invasion, the Afghanistan war.
01:21:59.000I thought the whole thing was about money and the whole thing was ill-advised.
01:22:03.000I thought that the idea of going in for these supposed weapons of mass destruction was incredibly transparent.
01:22:10.000And then I thought that the government and the military-industrial complex was capitalizing on a horrible event in September 11th and using that as an impetus to go and invade these countries and take over, you know, resources.
01:22:25.000But that moment when that thing was happening and that person was singing the national anthem, was a soldier that was singing the national anthem and everyone was standing there proud and the energy in the air and the cheer when it was over.
01:23:28.000And this is coming from a person who I believe that it's very important to have military.
01:23:34.000I believe that there are bad people in the world.
01:23:36.000I believe that there's sometimes no other solutions.
01:23:41.000I don't believe in pacifism when you're dealing with thugs and evil people in the world.
01:23:46.000But I also believe that there's good people that are sent into bad situations for all the wrong reasons by people that are trying to make money.
01:23:55.000But in that state, in that state, being there with all those soldiers, being there with all those people, man, you got swept away by it.
01:24:03.000You just carried away by this intense feeling of patriotism.
01:24:08.000It's indescribable because you could feel the emotions of those people that are in that room.
01:24:15.000And I wonder if that's similar to what you were experiencing when you were there.
01:24:23.000And it's not the only time when, I mean, it's the only time I think I felt that exact sort of emotion of whatever that was, sort of religious transcendence.
01:24:33.000But I've, you know, there's plenty of times when you are around people.
01:24:37.000I mean, in a way, a lot of the stories I do are about the altered consciousness of being exposed to people who believe things passionately and the slight sense of Stockholm syndrome that sets in when you're there for prolonged periods, you know, and the weird change in consciousness that takes place.
01:24:57.000You know, I did a story where I was with the Phelps clan, the Westboro Baptist Church.
01:25:05.000In fact, I did two different things, but for the first one, I was there for three weeks.
01:25:07.000It was called The Most Hated Family in America.
01:25:10.000And it was really odd because when you're inside their little compound in their castle, imbibing their air and their doctrine round the clock, stuff that seems really weird and hateful on the outside starts to seem mundane.
01:25:28.000You know, you're still able to step outside and say, I'm here to do a job and this is wrong, but you get anesthetized.
01:25:52.000Steve, and his daughter left a couple of years ago.
01:25:58.000We went back and did a follow-up because a couple of the people we featured in the first one then left.
01:26:03.000But Steve almost, you could argue, by dint of having been born outside the church, was compensating by being even more hardcore because he was the fiercest and the most, in conversation, he was the hardest and the most abusive, I guess, most verbally full of bile.
01:26:26.000And he also, when you questioned anything that he was saying, would start insulting you.
01:26:52.000He said, you're right up there with Pontius Pilate.
01:26:55.000Like I was one of the three most evil men of all time, like, you know, way beyond Hitler.
01:27:00.000And the reason was because I'd been exposed to the teachings.
01:27:06.000Like, I'd been given a special opportunity.
01:27:10.000Like, I was blessed beyond measure because I had been exposed for three weeks to the pure teachings of the only people preaching salvation on earth.
01:27:21.000And having seen that and still rejected it, then that put me way beyond the pale.
01:27:29.000I found it incredibly fascinating how effective a guy who sucks at speaking is at running a cult.
01:29:31.000They view it as a confirmation of their holy status and of their salvation that they're rejected because there's some verse somewhere in the Bible saying, ye will be hated of men and people will throw things at you.
01:30:36.000And he was one of the few times where you try and do an interview with someone who clearly can't stand you.
01:30:42.000And I said something like, how can you really believe that there's no, like, even if you accept that what you say is true, you know, their position is there's no other church in the world that is preaching the doctrine.
01:31:25.000Not just that, but this arrogant assumption that he's the man with the word of God and that it comes out of this angry old fuckhead's face.
01:31:34.000You know, it's an amazing thing that this guy is able to put together this group.
01:31:38.000I mean, I just, this is the moment where you sat down and talked to this guy.
01:32:14.000And God Almighty is going to send you past to hell.
01:32:17.000Is it accurate to say that you regard the Whisper Baptist Church as the only church that's giving biblical preaching according to the Word of God?
01:33:04.000He had, I think, I want to get this right.
01:33:06.000I think it was like 12 kids, but four of them had left the church.
01:33:11.000And each of them had had quite a few kids.
01:33:15.000But I think if you're an egomaniac, number one, number two, if for whatever reason you cleave to a certain kind of dogmatic religious outlook, it's probably not that difficult to run, to have a cult.
01:33:31.000It's unfortunate, but I think you're right.
01:33:34.000It's shocking, but I think you're right.
01:33:36.000I've often said that all you have to do is speak confidently and clearly, and most people will be like, I can't do that.
01:33:42.000Yeah, and have no compunction about saying that you speak the word of God or whatever it is.
01:33:47.000It's really all you have to do, right?
01:33:49.000You have to be the guy with the answers.
01:33:50.000You have to be the guy that absolutely, not just the answers as a human, but the answers from above.
01:33:55.000I mean, have you read the new Menson book, the new Charles Menson book by Jeff Gwynn?
01:34:00.000No, I try not to read anything that comes out about Manson.
01:34:04.000I'll ask you why in a second, but when you read it, it's like, oh my word, you just have to be kind of come out with a few kind of riddles that you've learned from street pimps, and people fall into your lap.
01:34:44.000Like, there's some real serial killers that were fucking terrifying.
01:34:47.000But when you think of serial killers, it's always Manson, Manson.
01:34:51.000Manson is the guy, the crazy guy, the wild guy, because he carved a fucking swastika in his head.
01:34:56.000if you I mean Henry Lee Lucas the guy from that they made that movie about him Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer allegedly killed somewhere around 60 people you know Right.
01:36:32.000Well, he did a number of landmark interviews in the, I guess in the 70s or the early 80s.
01:36:36.000You can see them on YouTube where he sort of turned him into a celebrity.
01:36:41.000I mean, I guess the cases were big at the time, but then he Geraldo did some shows.
01:36:48.000I think Diane Sawyer might have done an interview.
01:36:50.000And then they passed laws to say that you couldn't, basically you couldn't interview Charles Menson anymore.
01:36:56.000It's fascinating to see what Geraldo has become.
01:36:59.000Do you know that Geraldo was like a counterculture figure at one time?
01:37:02.000Geraldo was the guy who introduced the world to the Zapruder film.
01:37:06.000He had Dick Gregory on his television show, and he showed the world a Zapruder film, essentially establishing the idea that it was more than one person or someone else other than Lee Harvey Oswald that killed Kennedy.
01:37:33.000But I saw something recently where Dick Gregory was sitting down with Paul Mooney, who's a great old comedian from Los Angeles, who was a writer for Richard Pryor and just a great comedian.
01:37:44.000And the two of them were sitting around talking about racism and culture.
01:37:49.000Some of his jokes back in the day were pretty good.
01:37:57.000He was the guy who somehow or another got a hold of the Zapruder film.
01:38:00.000The Zapruder film was made, obviously, in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated, but it was bought by Time Life magazine, I believe, by whoever owns Life Magazine or Time at the time.
01:38:13.000And they just put it on a shelf for years.
01:38:18.000The 1970s is when Geraldo had it on his show.
01:39:27.000And now at the bottom of the screen, the headshot.
01:39:31.000That's the shot that blew off his head.
01:39:33.000It's the most horrifying thing I've ever seen in the movies.
01:39:36.000Now, the Warren Commission said that all of the shots were fired from behind by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone assassin, firing at the president.
01:39:43.000And as you can see clearly, the head is thrown violently backwards.
01:39:47.000Completely consistent with the shot from the front, right.
01:39:50.000Now this is an extreme blow-up of just the president from the film.
01:39:56.000Coming out behind the sign, he's shot.
01:41:06.000Like, why would anybody think that he acted alone?
01:41:08.000If you look at all the injuries that Kennedy had to his body, first of all, the shot in the neck, it's an entry wound.
01:41:14.000In Bethesda, Maryland, they called it a tracheotomy.
01:41:18.000But in Dallas, Fort Worth, when he was first administered by, taken care of by doctors, they said it was an entry wound.
01:41:25.000They changed what the wound in his neck was in order to fit with the established narrative of Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone shooter.
01:41:33.000That's one reason to think that there was more than one person.
01:41:36.000The other reason to think there was more than one person was a single bullet theory.
01:41:39.000And I've heard a lot of people say that the single bullet theory could have happened, that bullets can act very weird when they go through, and they absolutely can.
01:41:47.000People have shot people and bullets shot someone from the front and the bullet has ricocheted inside their head and come out their eye and landed in front.
01:41:58.000Bullets take very strange paths when they ricochet off bones.
01:42:01.000That's not what's weird about the bullet passing through two people.
01:42:05.000What's weird about the bullet passing through two people is, first of all, why did they think that one bullet did that?
01:42:11.000And the reason for that is because a bullet hit the underpass, ricocheted off a curbstone, and hurt some person that was standing in the underpass.
01:42:19.000So they had to attribute one of the shots, one of the three shots, to that bullet.
01:42:23.000They knew that Kennedy and Connolly had both been hit, and then they knew that there was a headshot.
01:43:05.000That's the reason why I think that more than one person was involved.
01:43:09.000And that's the reason why there's a book called Best Evidence by a guy named David Lifton who goes into great detail.
01:43:16.000He was a bookkeeper and an accountant.
01:43:19.000And he had some assignment involving the Warren Commission.
01:43:24.000And he was such a meticulous guy that he actually read the entire Warren Commission, which is some insane number of pages.
01:43:32.000But he read it, and he wrote a book called Best Evidence, all about all the contradictions in the Warren Commission report and why he thought that the entire thing was established to make a predetermined conclusion and to establish that with the American public.
01:43:51.000I think more than one person was involved.
01:43:52.000But it could have been Lee Harvey Oswald, too.
01:43:55.000That's what people, I don't understand why people have to have either Lee Harvey Oswald killed them or there was other people.
01:44:01.000Like it has to be either a lone assassin or other people.
01:44:03.000I think Lee Harvey Oswald clearly was a fucked up guy who had some sort of a connection to the government.
01:44:10.000He went to Russia, lived in Russia, and then came back to the United States, got a passport till he was living in Russia, and then was readmitted back into the United States and had some dubious connections to the world of government.
01:44:26.000It was a very strange, strange story that in this day and age, you know, all these years later, we're most likely never going to get the full details.
01:44:35.000How many impacts do you see in that video?
01:45:03.000It's very difficult to tell from that video how many times he's been hit.
01:45:08.000But the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone seems the least likely of the scenarios.
01:45:16.000And then the photos of E. Howard Hunt, who was arrested allegedly, along with a bunch of people that were quote-unquote hobos that they had arrested behind the grassy knoll, but then they were all released.
01:45:31.000They were hobos, but they were dressed normal.
01:45:33.000They were dressed like regular people.
01:45:35.000And then Woody Harrelson's dad, who is a known murderer, who supposedly has some sort of a connection to it.
01:45:57.000He wanted to disrupt the military-industrial complex.
01:46:01.000He wanted to do a lot of things that were very unpopular.
01:46:05.000I mean, in a way, you could pose the question as not why would he have been assassinated, but why aren't more presidents assassinated?
01:46:11.000Well, look at a guy like Obama who gets in office.
01:46:13.000It's amazing to me that given the level of vitriol that's directed at him from quarters in the far right, that someone – But I think every day there are threats, and probably some of them are credible threats against him.
01:46:28.000I'm sure the CIA or rather the Secret Service does a great job of stopping a lot of assassination attempts.
01:46:35.000I mean, if we lived in a time like during the Lincoln administration when everything was very just, you know, they just didn't have the type of security that they have today.
01:46:42.000They didn't have this sort of technology, the ability to track people, the ability to keep an eye on questionable folks.
01:52:18.000I think that it's a great way of acquiring meat.
01:52:20.000It's probably way more ethical than being a farmer.
01:52:23.000You know, if you're going to look at it that way, you're going to say, well, this is how I acquire my meat.
01:52:26.000I leave food out for them and then I shoot them.
01:52:28.000Okay, I see that and I agree with that.
01:52:32.000I think it's better than farming in that sense.
01:52:34.000But to call it hunting the same way you would call hunting, like climbing up to the Alps and looking for a mountain goat that lives in the wild or going through the Rockies and chasing down a moose that lives in the wild, it's two completely different sort of endeavors.
01:52:54.000When you've got these animals fenced in, you have an account of how many are there.
01:53:14.000What a contradictory and complex subject.
01:53:19.000Because for folks who don't know, Africa was on the verge of a lot of the animals that are now being hunted were on the verge of extinction.
01:53:29.000Now they have extremely high numbers, all in these high fence operations.
01:53:34.000And these people go over there and hunt them.
01:53:37.000And that guy that you had that owned that operation, that got crazy with you and put his hand on the camera and pulled it down, was very emotional.
01:53:46.000I was making the exact same point you just made.
01:53:49.000And I think the phrase I said, you know, if you've got a fence up and the animal knows it's going to be fed, and you just hide in your little bunker until the warthog or the lion shows up knowing that the food's out, and then you take a pop at it.
01:54:05.000I said, it's like tennis without a net.
01:54:08.000And that was what he took exception to.
01:57:54.000I don't know if this is true now, but at the time it was true that there are more tigers in captivity in Texas than there are in the wild in India.
01:58:04.000I mean, there's thousands and thousands of tigers in America and kept as pets in people's backyards.
01:58:11.000And what I heard again and again was like, I will get in the cage and stroke my tiger or my lion and cuddle it.
01:58:19.000But I am not getting close to my monkeys.
01:59:02.000Whereas a tiger, I don't say it's a good life for a tiger, but a a tiger doesn't necessarily become dysfunctional from being pent up but a um a chimpanzee is like a person and you need you need stimulation yeah and not only that they also know to go cut the video they also know to to go after your fingers they go after your balls like they know what you want yes well you want to keep your fingers so they bite your fingers off like there's there's a certain intelligence to their attack that's very disturbing,
01:59:32.000as opposed to like a tiger that just wants to kill you.
01:59:35.000I read a thing about a chimpanzee attack at a zoo.
01:59:37.000Like, before I went out to do the story, I was reading up on chimpanzee attacks because I knew for the story to work, I'd probably at some point have to cuddle a chimpanzee or something like that.
01:59:49.000Like, it was making me more nervous than the idea of going into a prison cell or a jail cell where, you know, you know there's enough rationality on the part of the prisoner that he's not going to attack me and bite my balls.
02:00:06.000But the chimpanzee is not going to think like that.
02:00:09.000And I read an account of an attack at a zoo, a chimpanzee, and the local news turned up and the chimpanzee ran over and bit the cameraman's balls off.
02:01:27.000That would make sense because the cliche, and it may be true that gets passed around, is that a full-grown chimp has the strength of seven men.
02:01:53.000I'm sure there's an idiot out there that would do almost anything that you came up with.
02:01:56.000Those guys that you interviewed that were pro wrestlers that were beating each other with fucking barbed wire, I'm sure if you put a mask on one of those dummies, they would get in there and scrap of the chimpanzee.
02:02:08.000But my point that I wanted to get back to was the complex, contradictory aspect of those canned hunts in Africa.
02:02:28.000I mean, it was just the whole situation, the idea that I'm going to take the life of this animal just to indulge my own sense of either what I think I need for this program to work or my sense of like, oh, I'm going to experience this to see what it feels like to take the life.
02:02:49.000It didn't feel like, I just didn't feel an urge to do it.
02:03:14.000Yeah, they were trophy hunters and they weren't doing it to acquire meat.
02:03:19.000These people were doing it to have this, to kill things.
02:03:23.000And the video of them being all joyful and happy when they all got together and compared notes after their individual hunts, like several individual hunting parties had went out.
02:03:35.000They all came out like after the second day, their first full day of hunting.
02:03:39.000And we do an inventory of, they'd got like, you know, three zebras, two kudu, a gazelle, you know, and there was an inventory of kind of, and they, and you can sort of pick them out like they're on a shopping list.
02:04:18.000Well, there were $100,000 American in which well that was what was going on in America.
02:04:23.000There was a big issue recently all over the news where there was a safari club that had auctioned, it was in Dallas, and they had auctioned off a hunt for an endangered rhino.
02:04:33.000And the idea was that all this money that they had auctioned off would go.
02:04:37.000There was a controversy about it, that's right.
02:04:39.000And it was also controversial because they were going to have to do something with that rhino because it was an old rhino.
02:05:04.000If you want to see the most grisly, way more grisly and upsetting than any kind of UFC show, it's watch a nature program with the elephants getting lost in the mist and getting attacked by, you know, like the level of gore.
02:05:18.000It's like they're like snuff films, in a sense.
02:05:22.000And so, and I think one thing that Ted Nugent used to say when I was filming with him was he objected to the Disney of our experience of the natural world.
02:05:32.000I think he's got an excellent point there.
02:06:23.000My children, I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old that are just starting to understand that the animals that they see in cartoons are not real animals and that real animals don't talk and real animals are very different.
02:06:35.000I mean, they obviously see the five-year-old especially sees that.
02:06:39.000But I'm starting to explain to her that if you ever see a bear, like bears are not to be approached and they're not cuddly.
02:07:22.000I mean, I don't think we really know how we feel about a lot of animals.
02:07:27.000And if we gave half as much thought to the conditions in industrial, in factory farms, in the way chickens and pigs are raised, as we do to endangered species,
02:07:43.000I mean, I'm more concerned about that in a way, like the conditions of how our food is created, that pigs get fed their own minced up piglets, you know, and just all kinds of hideous practices.
02:08:02.000There's a great deal of disgusting practices that are involved in agriculture and farming and taking care of livestock and mad cow disease, which England had a huge issue with.
02:08:17.000Because they were being fed their own offspring.
02:08:48.000It's a weird, weird thing, you know, that we dehumanize.
02:08:52.000And we also allow ourselves to put money above humanity, above ethics and morality.
02:08:59.000And when it comes to animals, it's more profitable to stuff them into containers where they can barely move and just feed them their own bodies and fatten them up and then sell them.
02:09:11.000Otherwise, that body, the dead babies or whatever the fuck they feed them, goes to waste.
02:09:16.000The parts that we don't use for hamburger and what have you goes to waste.
02:09:21.000And did you know, I mean, probably everyone knows this, but do you know in the world of raising chickens for eggs, all the male hatchlings get mashed up within a couple of days of being born?
02:13:46.000The actors, well, there's sort of union rules for actors.
02:13:50.000They couldn't make us start work at 2 o'clock in the morning.
02:13:52.000But it's Fiend to be like, you were a writer and then you turn on his like, yeah, we work from 6 in the evening till 4 in the morning and we like to hang out with Spider and we basically, we all play Yahtzee for a couple of hours and then we work for half an hour.
02:14:07.000I mean, it wasn't literally that, but it was kind of like, oh my God, it's like that episode of The Twilight Zone where the kid is in charge of the family and they're all like, oh, we're having a great time.
02:14:40.000So it was, but it's kind of like Werner Earhart saying, like, after you've stayed awake for 48 hours and peed your pants, then you have an enlightenment experience.
02:14:57.000Is that like if you haven't made a creative breakthrough by 6 o'clock in the evening, then, hey, why don't you go home and have a good night's sleep and try again the next morning?
02:15:07.000Well, I think they liked the idea of working under the wire as well.
02:15:11.000I think they would oftentimes deliver the script for the run-through, like we had a run-through in the morning or a table read.
02:15:19.000So if the table read was Monday morning, Sunday night, they would still be working.
02:15:23.000Like if we had to be at the table read at 9 a.m., they would be writing at 8 a.m.
02:15:27.000Like sometimes we would get, we would, we would go to rehearse, we'd have no table read, and we would wind up rehearsing the first, the first like five pages.
02:15:41.000And then while we were rehearsing, you know, like Josh Lee would come stumbling down barefoot, his hair would be all fucked up, be smoking a cigarette.
02:16:01.000Michael Moore was a little like that too.
02:16:03.000It was the feeling that unless your guts are on the floor, you know, then there's a chance you might have been able to improve it with more work.
02:16:14.000Like stay late and worry and worry and worry and stay late and work on the weekends until you just despair and you just think, I can't give anything more to the process.
02:16:23.000Well, everybody has their own method, you know, as far as the creative process.
02:16:27.000And I'm not saying that their method was the best, but it was fun for them.
02:16:35.000There's a few guys that were family guys that had real issues and wound up leaving.
02:16:39.000But they were having fun, and that having fun led them to be funnier.
02:16:45.000And I think whether or not it was a consequence of their laziness that it was so good, or whether there was a method to their madness, I mean, you would really have to take that up with Paul, and he would have to really soul search to find the actual correct answer.
02:17:18.000And if you ever want to hear one of the worst divorce stories of all time, listen to the podcast with him on and just what kind of a nightmare divorce can be.
02:18:51.000They had gone through some they had broken up, and he had a boat and slept in his boat for a while and then came back to her and wanted to keep the family together and was trying hard to work it out.
02:19:06.000So when people just are committed in that sort of a situation where they have to stay, or if they do stay, it's devastating to their lifestyle, devastating to their emotional state.
02:19:19.000It's very troubling and very scary when they start attacking each other as well, when they go after each other to try to hurt that person.
02:21:49.000I reached out a little bit to Andy Dick last year because we were trying to make a bunch of shows that were all set in LA.
02:21:56.000Since I was living here, the idea was let's do sort of LA stories.
02:22:01.000And one of them was going to be stand-up comedians.
02:22:04.000And we were trying to find intriguing guys, guys who sort of represented something about, I couldn't quite figure out what it was, but I thought it was something to do with the pressure on someone who's their own producer, their own writer, their own performer, and whose performance is the performance of themselves or a version of themselves.
02:22:24.000And that that entailed a certain kind of vulnerability and a kind of high-stakes professional maneuver that you go on stage and it's just you and a crowd of people and whether you might face heckling and whatnot.
02:22:36.000So that was how I'd formulated it in my head.
02:22:39.000And also that you might be cannibalizing your own life to some extent for material and whether that imposed a certain set of strains and whether being funny itself came from some angst or something in your background.
02:23:56.000And so that's a good way of looking at it.
02:23:59.000And that may have been one of the reasons.
02:24:01.000But, you know, in our keenness to, eagerness to get intriguing people, we perhaps stretched the categories a bit in a way that wasn't helpful.
02:24:12.000And that may have been a clue that it wasn't quite the right story.
02:24:15.000Or do you think there is a good documentary to be made?
02:24:18.000It felt like, when I was doing it, it felt like the world was not too close to my own world in an odd way.
02:24:25.000Well, there's certainly something to describing stand-up comedy.
02:24:28.000I mean, it sort of kind of has been done in a way, in some ways.
02:26:30.000Either I have an idea and I write down notes or I actually physically sit in front of the keyboard and I write long form and then cherry-pick ideas out of those long forms and introduce it.
02:26:40.000But it doesn't really come alive unless you do it in front of an audience.
02:26:44.000If I'd approached you, I don't think we did because I'd remember, but if I had approached you to be in the documentary, what would have been your thought process?
02:27:02.000It would seem like I would have to pay attention to all this.
02:27:05.000And there's something about observing something and filming something and recording something which changes the nature of the thing itself.
02:27:13.000And I think that in stand-up comedy, what's really important to me when I'm creating it, especially, is just getting it right.
02:27:20.000This is like working on it and getting it right.
02:27:22.000I wouldn't want cameras there and observing the whole process of it.
02:27:27.000Then I would have to think about that.
02:27:28.000So there's me, where do you write when you write?
02:27:47.000I just sort of tell you what my process is, but I wouldn't want, and I don't even like people filming things at my shows when I'm working on shit because I don't want it getting on YouTube or whatever.
02:28:29.000Like I have a stand-up comedy special that premiered on Comedy Central Friday night.
02:28:33.000And one of the points that I've made in advertising all these current shows that I'm doing is it's all new material.
02:28:40.000Like if you saw the thing from Saturday night or Friday night that aired, if you go see me live next week, you're not going to see any of that material.
02:29:29.000It takes away from the finished product, I think.
02:29:32.000When you know the whole process behind it, I mean, for someone who's like a comedy nerd or a dork, but I say that in all loving terms, like there's comedy nerds that come to dozens and dozens of shows every month, and they'll have seen me three or four times in a period of three or four months.
02:29:49.000I've had people come up to me and say, I love watching the material grow.
02:29:53.000I think it's amazing watching you add new bits to it or come up with new things.
02:29:57.000And I'm always uncomfortable about that because then the last thing you want to do is see someone in the front row two nights in a row.
02:30:06.000Like you'll see someone, like you'll be in Portland for the weekend and you see a person in the front row Friday and then they're Saturday too.
02:30:13.000And you're like, shit, this guy knows all my fucking jokes.
02:30:47.000You want people to get the show at its best.
02:30:50.000And which is why when someone releases a special, like right after they release a special, it's oftentimes not the best time to go see them because all the material is like fucking scattered and they're trying to put it all together.
02:31:00.000And then you see the same person six months later and it's just fucking just boom, boom, boom.
02:31:50.000But now the internet is sort of all the Tom Cruise recruitment videos have been released, and all the craziness is out, and the people like that have wrote like going clear that book.
02:32:17.000At the same time, I think for students of, I guess, religious oddity or new religions or whatever you want to call it, it's known and it's out there.
02:32:30.000And you're reading Lawrence Wright, I read the Lawrence Wright, but there's a vast mass of kind of mainstream people for whom they still, all they know is that thing that Tom Cruise is involved in.
02:33:38.000What do they, like, we know with Catholics, they go to church, they have confession, they eat crackers, and it's the body of Jesus Christ, right?
02:33:50.000And they believe in the Pope, and we know roughly what their sacrament is, and they read the Bible, and they believe in Jesus, and so on and so forth.
02:34:57.000The lack of objectivity that will allow you to put that on and be able to do this fingertips down thing on the desk, like you're making a very important point while you're wearing a fucking frisbee, a gold frisbee around your neck.
02:35:15.000It's almost like he's trying to convince himself by tricking all these people.
02:35:46.000you know, all the other wacky shit that they believe.
02:35:50.000There's something to that where he's putting on this massive performance, not just for them, but for himself as well.
02:36:00.000I mean, to me, it's a bit like the Oscars.
02:36:03.000Like, that's when I was watching the Oscars last night.
02:36:05.000I was like, wow, it's like a Scientology event.
02:36:07.000You know, it's that level of, I think that's like the kind of, the performance or the, that's the semiotics of it.
02:36:26.000You know, like both Oscars and the freedom, you know, he's wearing it around his neck, but like, is it any more silly than having a little gold man?
02:36:33.000No, my friend Greg Fisimmons posted this something on Twitter, and I retweeted it.
02:36:37.000He said, I hope the Oscars get beamed to the troops so they could see all the people get rewarded for brave and courageous work this year.
02:36:48.000Which is such a great tweet, and especially if you know Greg, who's a brilliant comedian himself.
02:36:54.000But it's such a great tweet because it's so fucking right on.
02:36:59.000It's so pompous and self-rewarding and self-aggrandizing and so ridiculous.
02:37:04.000They're wearing suits with fucking special ties and, you know, formal attire.
02:37:13.000And, you know, not to say they shouldn't be, I mean, you know, do whatever the fuck you want.
02:37:19.000And my point is, though, is that so, like, with Tom Cruise, okay, he's got his fingers down.
02:37:25.000But in the end, like, so why pick on TC and Scientology, but we're letting the Oscars, you know, we say that, we'll give that a pass, but we can't have guys wearing little golden ones around their neck.
02:37:45.000Well, and also, why is it okay to pick on Tom Cruise, but it's not okay to pick on Jewish people with curls and their bobbing up and down, and that's their religion.
02:38:07.000And I think what I would try and do in making a documentary about it is to try and see past a lot of the things that people find weird or ludicrous about it, you know, which is, you know, the fact that they have big glitzy Scientology events and get to the core of what it is.
02:39:09.000There's also the ambiguous sexuality aspect of it.
02:39:12.000There's the rumors of homosexuality that are attached to famous male Scientologists that they shield them, you know, and especially the John Travolta thing.
02:39:48.000Like the same thing is like, if you say fuck around someone who never says fuck, they're like, oh, say fuck around a priest, they'll act like it's some horrible thing that you've done.
02:39:56.000But you say fuck around your friends, you don't even, it doesn't even register.
02:40:03.000It just, it has no power because it's so used so much.
02:40:07.000And I think maybe that's a bad analogy, but in a sense, it works because what they're doing is repeating these stories over and over and over and over and over again until they lose their meaning.
02:40:16.000But in the process, they're recording all this shit.
02:40:22.000If you're going through the process earnestly, you're telling them all the secrets of your life, all the crazy gay orgies you've been a part of, all the nutty fucking cocaine binges, whatever the fuck you've done that you're ashamed of.
02:40:37.000And you think that does that get released at the point you decide to leave, you think?
02:41:13.000Yes, he dabbled in Scientology, and that rumor was released.
02:41:17.000When the Tom Cruise or the John Travolta massage therapy stories were released, allegedly, that's when John Travolta was having issues with Scientology.
02:41:41.000I mean, if you have a powerful organization that gets a certain percentage of the amount of money that you make every year and they have a lot of crazy shit on you, you like to go and get massages and talk these guys into letting you fuck them.
02:41:55.000I mean, I would think that would be something that, you know, maybe if you were going to leave and take all that money away, they might bring, you know, assuming the organization.
02:42:05.000Any damaging confidences about Leah Remini?
02:42:27.000She alleged that David Miscavige's wife, who hasn't been publicly photographed allegedly for a number of years, maybe even sort of five or ten years, was being held captive or had been disappeared in some way.
02:42:42.000And that she'd been at Tom Cruise's wedding to, who would it have been at that point?
02:42:49.000Katie Holmes in Italy, I think, and said, here's David Miscavige.
02:43:52.000But I think this kind of goes back to the Swami G. Is that what his name was?
02:43:58.000The guy who was the supposed physicist who's living with Swami G. I think people love being a part of a group, whether the group makes sense or doesn't make sense.
02:44:09.000I think people, they find comfort in that, and they also get addicted to being a part of a group.
02:44:13.000And then when you're a part of something as powerful as Scientology, especially when you look at all the examples of people who are Scientologists who are greatly successful, my old neighbor was a Scientologist, and we had this really weird revelation when it came out, where he and I were talking.
02:44:28.000He was talking about buying a piece of land in our neighborhood.
02:44:31.000And he said he couldn't buy it right now because his wife was going clear.
02:44:36.000And I said, what are you talking about?
02:44:51.000he does fairly well, but he made $50,000 is a giant chunk of his income.
02:44:56.000And he was talking about how his wife is going to be no longer affected by outside influence, and that by going clear, it eliminates all the negative impact of people talking shit about you or, you know, fucking traffic, anything.
02:45:35.000I mean, but this poor guy was going to spend $50,000 on this.
02:45:39.000And he had this sort of glassy-eyed thing about him, this sort of lost thing.
02:45:44.000I think being a part of a group, we have these ancestral instincts that I think are passed down from the time where it was very important to be a part of a tribe, to stay alive.
02:45:54.000If you're by yourself in the hunter-and-gatherer times, it was very difficult to get enough food to stay alive.
02:46:22.000People are weird that we have these weird desires to be a part of groups.
02:46:27.000And I think someone like the Westboro Baptist Church or someone like Swami G's disciples or someone like Scientology, part of the appeal of that is being in a group.
02:46:39.000And then when you have Scientology, I'm not too familiar with what Scientology does do that's beneficial, but you look at a guy like Tom Cruise.
02:46:47.000Sexual stuff aside, you're talking about a tremendously successful person who looks great.
02:49:15.000Well, I've got three shows going out in Britain, new ones going out at the end of March, and so they'll probably be put up quite soon.
02:49:21.000And it's the thing I was telling you about, LA stories.
02:49:23.000The first one is about stray and abandoned dogs and our attempts to rehabilitate them using controversial dog therapy.
02:49:31.000You know, it's like turning criminal dogs and bringing them, rescuing them, bringing them into middle-class homes, and then sometimes they attack their new owners.
02:49:40.000And then thousands of them are killed every year in the shelters in LA.
02:49:43.000There's a huge stray and neglected dog problem in LA.
02:49:47.000Second one is about the hospitals where people are sort of under pressure to keep trying new, like they're close to possibly dying, but there's a new experimental therapy and they have the insurance to pay for it.
02:49:59.000And it's this weird 21st century conundrum of when do I stop and say like, I just want to have a peaceful death?
02:50:05.000When am I allowed to say like I don't want to try any more chemo?
02:50:10.000No, they're on the UK BBC, normal BBC.
02:50:13.000And the third one is about sex offenders living down in South LA, especially around Torrance, who live in these hostels with electronic bracelets, heavily monitored lives, and the whole strangeness of having done something so terrible.
02:50:28.000You know, they've abused their own children or some of them are rapists and so on.
02:50:33.000But they've done whatever or 10 years in prison and they've come out and they're on parole.
02:50:37.000And to what extent, if any, do we give people like that a second chance?
02:50:42.000Like, given that they're out, we are living alongside them, you know, more or less with certain restrictions.