In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian talks about growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, growing up as a hippie, and the weirdest thing he's ever done. He also talks about his new job at Goodwill selling used jeans, and what it's like to grow up in the 80s and 90s in Portland, Oregon, and why he thinks it's a good place to be a kid. Also, he talks about why he doesn't want to go to college anymore and why it's not so bad that he's going to college in the big city, New York City. And he's not here to talk about it because he's in a relationship with a girl who wants to be an engineer. This episode is sponsored by Goodwill, and you can get 10% off of your first pair of used jeans if you go to Goodwill. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise stated. We do not own the rights to any music used in this episode. If you like it, please leave us a rating and review it on Apple Podcasts. or wherever else you re listening to this podcast. Thank you for supporting this podcast and/or sharing it on your social media or sharing it with your friends and family. It helps us spread the word about it. Much love, and support it everywhere else. - thank you. Cheers. Cheers, Cheers! - Cheers - John xx - Joe Rogans and Cheers - John Rocha John Rogan of course, and his music is also a big thank you, John Rogans, too! & his music, too, and all the rest of his work, and much more. XOXOXO - John's music is out there. -- JOGAN -- JOE ROGAN PODCAST (Music: "The Good, the Good, Bad, the Bad, The Good, The Bad, and The Weird, The Weirdest, the Wrong, the Weirdest Thing, and Everything in between. ) , and his new book, "The Other Side Of It All, and Much More!
00:01:39.000Like super ultra left-wing people who are really just mean, and they just find a target, and the target is a right-wing, and so they go after them.
00:01:59.000I had an ex-girlfriend who was really into fashion, and I remember one time her saying, we lived in San Francisco for a while, and I remember her saying, yeah, I want to go for a hippie look, and I'm going to buy the fringe.
00:02:11.000And I just remember thinking, that is so antithetical to what a hippie is, to go buy expensive hippie outfits.
00:03:53.000It's like a lot of white guys who are into Asian women will go to Asian countries, like China, for instance, because there's no white men there, or not as many, rather.
00:04:08.000I can remember the minute I experienced that, thinking like, You know, first everyone's looking at me, okay, I'm a foreigner, whatever, but these women are smiling and flirting, and what's going on?
00:04:21.000And, you know, eventually someone explained to me, like, dude, you're white.
00:04:24.000They love, and I've always, the one thing about my body that I would complain about is my skin.
00:05:30.000Well, maybe because of the novelty, and also there's a reputation among redheads for being sort of temperamental, and everybody knows a temperamental woman's a lot of fun in bed, right?
00:07:06.000I still have mostly, like, say, 80% black in my beard, but, like, the sides of my hair, like, where if I had any, this is all going white now.
00:08:05.000But you used to have to go up to the fucking pharmacist.
00:08:07.000You used to have a prescription for that shit.
00:08:09.000Yeah, I've bought a lot of Rogaine in my day because my ex-father-in-law in Spain had me bring it back from the States every time I came to visit.
00:11:46.000Well, I know a guy who's got pancreatic cancer who's fighting it, and they gave him a very short window to live, and he's pushed way past that, and everybody's completely shocked.
00:11:55.000But he has this amazing attitude, and he's positive and enjoying life.
00:11:59.000And I think his point of view is not, instead of rage against the dying of the light, enjoy the moment and live your life...
00:12:06.000And I think because of that, he's actually living longer.
00:12:09.000There was a guy, his name was Bill Hoyler, who I became friends with from the internet, from my own message board.
00:12:16.000He was a young kid who got pancreatic cancer, and he lived for years.
00:12:53.000You can't let him sleep in his fucking car.
00:12:55.000Your immune system is super important when you have cancer.
00:12:58.000Sleep is super important for your immune system.
00:13:01.000But he was always so thankful and never weird and like for a kid a young kid who was facing this horrible Disease that almost nobody escapes from it's like the percentage of people that survive one of the worst very very bad But his attitude was always like I'm gonna fucking fight this and I'm gonna he would post these tweets on the messages on the message board like Three years later.
00:13:23.000I'm still alive motherfucker like that kind of shit and you know he had tubes in his stomach when I saw him once we saw him Eddie Bravo and I Became friends with this kid.
00:13:32.000We saw him maybe six or seven times over the years.
00:13:36.000And, you know, one time we saw him, his head, he'd lost all his hair, his eyebrows were gone, he had tubes coming out of his stomach because, you know, some surgery that he had.
00:13:44.000And he was still alive and he still had a good attitude.
00:13:46.000It was amazing what an attitude he had.
00:13:49.000And I think that that attitude is probably what allowed him to live for so long.
00:15:40.000You know, I don't think it would be too terrible if people could live to be a thousand years if I knew that we had the resources to support it.
00:15:47.000Because I would think, like, man, what kind of amazing philosophy and insight would you get from a thousand-year-old woman who's lived hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and...
00:15:57.000And seeing culture shift and change and remembers as much as she could and tells you about life in a way that only a person has lived a thousand years.
00:16:28.000I think that we're gonna see a great advance in our lifetime of lifespans.
00:16:34.000But the real issue is do we have the resources for that?
00:16:36.000Because one of the things that is going on with our world, as everybody knows, is there's a lot more people today than there's ever been in recorded human history by a giant number.
00:16:47.000And when you see places like India that are in dire poverty, it's one third of the size of the United States.
00:16:53.000It has three times as many people plus.
00:16:56.000It's like, wow, I mean, you're dealing with a lot of poverty and a lot of suffering.
00:17:01.000And, you know, maybe it's a perspective issue.
00:17:03.000And maybe what I consider poverty, they consider life, and that if I lived that life, I would be accustomed to it, it would be normalized.
00:17:10.000But I've got to think that most people don't want to sleep on dirt, and most people don't want to eat food that's bad, or struggle to survive in any way, and dealing with rampant diseases and That you're dealing with in impoverished nations, you know, when they don't have enough medicine to take care of people.
00:17:53.000But seriously, I mean, if you think about, you know, just how much things have changed since you and I were kids, you know, if you're talking to a guy that's 500 years old, it's like, holy shit, man.
00:18:03.000Well, yeah, the other thing is, a thousand years from now, I mean, if we really could live to be a thousand years old, a thousand years from now, people might not be necessary.
00:18:11.000I mean, we might have evolved past this state in some sort of a gigantic technological leap.
00:18:16.000I really believe that when you're looking at the iconic image of an alien, you know, the big heads, the big eyes, and no genitals, I think we're looking at what holds us back as organisms and the things that...
00:18:30.000If you look at our wars and our greed and all the crazy fucking larceny and crazy shit that people do, it's all attached to the primate body.
00:18:39.000It's all attached to sex and breeding and greed and guilt and fear and the worry about being mortal.
00:18:46.000If we can move past that in some genetic engineering leap or if it goes Kurzweil on us, And they develop some insane artificial body that you transfer your consciousness into that is just way more preferable.
00:19:00.000You know, you got all the buttons you can push for orgasm, all the buttons you can push for adventure.
00:19:04.000All those exist inside your head and they can access them at any moment.
00:19:10.000In some crazy 3D, you know, minority report fashion where everything you see, you're interacting with the world in a very different way, you might get a bunch of people to jump ship, and the models might get better, and then the next model might be so pleasurable, so much better than being a human being that it just fucking,
00:21:04.000And at that point, he injects sperm into the other, and so the other becomes female, because now the eggs have been fertilized, and that one's male.
00:21:35.000It's amazing when you see all the different varieties of life, when you see all the different forms that it can take, and then you stop to consider that that's just in our Earth's environment.
00:21:46.000Imagine what they're going to find if they can chip through Europa and get to those oceans.
00:21:50.000It's very possible there's something alive under there that's being fueled from the heat of the volcanic vents.
00:23:02.000And so they build these things and they've got this chamber and then below the chamber are cooling fins that hang down perfectly spaced and the air circulates through them so that it keeps the temperature exactly the same all the time.
00:23:55.000I think there's a, you know, you're talking about like quantum leaps and thinking and stuff.
00:23:59.000I feel like in a strange way, and I'm even hesitant to say this publicly because it's an example of what I'm talking about, like it's really hard to talk about The areas where Darwinian notions of evolution don't quite make it because you immediately get lumped in with the religious lunatics.
00:24:44.000Why is that legitimate to talk about, but eugenics as a concept, not saying as an actual practice...
00:24:49.000I don't think you should take people's lives because they're dumber than you.
00:24:51.000No, but you could encourage some people not to reproduce, like people who have a genetic propensity to a certain illness.
00:25:00.000Like, hey, you know, maybe you should adopt, and here's a massive tax credit if you do, right?
00:25:06.000I agree with that, but man, I don't think you should be able to tell anybody that they can or can't breed.
00:25:10.000I think education is important with all aspects of breeding, but we all know that people make terrible decisions when it comes to breeding.
00:25:17.000Because they want to get that nut, son.
00:25:20.000And then they're like, oh no, I made a person.
00:25:22.000Alright, now I've got to deal with it.
00:25:23.000I don't think we should take that away from people just because they have diseases or force them to get an abortion.
00:25:29.000Also, one valid point that people who have illnesses...
00:25:34.000I don't want anyone else to have the illness that I have, but I'm alive, and I'm okay, and I have cerebral palsy, and I have whatever I have, and I can still enjoy life.
00:25:46.000It might not be perfect, but you're telling me that this experience, my experience in life, because I have cerebral palsy or because I have something else, is not valid.
00:26:24.000We're not comparing it to, you know, you should die, you should be, you know, we're saying nothing.
00:26:30.000Now, how do you compare it to nothing?
00:26:32.000A kid who isn't born isn't suffering, right?
00:26:37.000So, I mean, I think that the assumption...
00:26:41.000I've got a cousin, this really smart little kid, he's like five or something, and the other day he was talking about how he, before he was born, he was saying that all fetuses should have...
00:29:37.000He also wrote a book about hallucinogens, hallucinations, which was very interesting because it was the first, this came out maybe five years ago, and it was, it struck me as the first, like, mainstream A sort of non-apologetic discussion of the use of hallucinogens by a very mainstream doctor who's written all these bestsellers.
00:30:00.000And he talks about when he lived in Topanga in the 60s and he took some acid.
00:32:40.000I always imagine you like inner city, because I remember you talking about rough neighborhoods and stuff.
00:32:45.000I lived in Newton from the time I was 14 to the time I was 17. Well, that was high school, you know, 14 to 17. And then like a year and a half, two years after that, I stayed there.
00:32:56.000But before that, I lived in a place called Jamaica Plain.
00:33:14.000Jamaica Plain has become more gentrified now.
00:33:16.000But when I lived there in 1979, 1980, I guess it was, somewhere around then.
00:33:22.000I think my first year of high school was 81. It was really bad.
00:33:26.000There was a lot of, like, bad shit going down.
00:33:29.000There were 17-year-old kids that were in the seventh grade.
00:33:32.000You know, they would like never graduated and like you'd be in, you know, I was like a little kid and I was going to class and it was just fucking full grown adults that are in my class.
00:33:40.000You know, there's guys and girls making out the back of the class was all these like inner city kids like they were so I come from Florida where I lived before that in a college community in Gainesville, Florida and we moved to like the only place in Boston that my parents could afford.
00:33:55.000It was this Jamaica Plain place and they worked really hard to get us out of there and moved us to Newton and Newton was like way more urban way more relaxed but Jamaica Plain was fucking sketchy It was sketchy.
00:34:06.000There's a lot of crime like there's breaking and enterings in our in our neighborhood all the time You know like we got a dog just to bark to let us know if someone's trying to get into the house It was very weird.
00:34:17.000It was a weird place to live and then Newton was a total different place That's cool.
00:34:22.000That's something you and I have in common, moving as kids.
00:35:11.000The point was that I wasn't reaching out.
00:35:17.000And then that worked great in the rest of my life, traveling all the time, living overseas, all that.
00:35:23.000I don't have a home, and you're like this too, right?
00:35:25.000You move enough, it's like, well, okay, I lived here for a couple years, I lived here for a couple years, but when people say, don't you miss your home, all your friends, the people you grew up with?
00:35:35.000I don't know the people I grew up with, you know, they were stages.
00:35:39.000I'm still friends with a couple guys from high school.
00:36:11.000He lived there, and we became friends when I moved into the neighborhood.
00:36:16.000Almost all my friends, like Joey, Ari, like all these guys moved all over the place.
00:36:22.000You know, Duncan, you know, Brian Callens, the worst, like not the worst, I shouldn't say, but the most experienced because he lived in Saudi Arabia.
00:36:30.000His family was involved in international finance.
00:36:34.000And so he lived in all these crazy Middle Eastern countries.
00:39:33.000He'd bring this shit into the country, and he was in this frat, and I knew someone who was in the frat, and I was never a frat boy at all, but they would invite me, and these yellow rocks of coke, you know?
00:39:46.000I mean, I went to this dumbass college where everybody was rich, so the drug scene there was off the charts.
00:39:53.000And I've done the best Coke there is, right?
00:39:56.000I mean, I know the guy who invented MDMA. You know, it's like I've had these really good connections for drugs.
00:41:12.000When I was a kid, I've told this story a hundred times, but I had a friend, my friend that I'm still friends with in high school, his cousin used to sell it.
00:41:19.000And his life went down the toilet, and I watched him wither away, lost like a shitload of weight, became weird.
00:42:01.000You know, I was not curious enough to want to do it, but listening to her, you know, she knew it was bad, knew she shouldn't do it, didn't want to do it anymore.
00:42:08.000But she'd tell you, Goddamn, what I'm doing, I love doing coke.
00:42:11.000In my experience, the people who tend to get really hooked on coke are people who have issues.
00:42:28.000Because the coke takes that away for a while.
00:42:30.000That totally makes sense in this case because this woman her mother was like really overbearing and her mother was like super alpha successful.
00:42:39.000Her mother was a single mom and was like like no man's gonna fucking run me and so she was a lawyer and she ran successful business.
00:42:49.000She had a law firm and she was like super like Intense with her daughter about achievement, about pursuing things, about, you know, don't eat the wrong foods and, you know, eat, you know, it was like really like overbearing and gave her a hard time about her weight.
00:44:22.000Williamson, I think, was the scientist's name.
00:44:24.000You know those famous studies where they give rats, like, they've got a water bottle that's just water and then another one that's got coke in it?
00:44:33.000And the rats will just keep doing the coke and they'll forget to eat and then they, you know, like, die.
00:44:37.000Like, these people you're talking about lost all this weight and just, like, completely focused.
00:44:45.000He looked at that and he's like, okay, well, that's the sort of main study that everybody cites that shows that Coke is addictive and it's Coke that causes the problem and it's the substance and molecular problems.
00:44:58.000But what if we took those rats, same kind of rats, but instead of just being in a cage where there's nothing to do, I think?
00:45:50.000If anyone wants to Google it, just Google Rat Park, because that's what he called this, you know, like, sort of enclosure that he made for the rats.
00:45:56.000Imagine being a rat, being stuck in a fucking fluorescent lighting room, and the fucking metal cage, and the little water bottle you gotta suck on, big tooth, ugh, the fucking life they live is dog shit.
00:47:46.000Then he went to Portland because he wanted to be in a place where you could get all your supplies for a restaurant, all the food, within a hundred mile radius.
00:47:58.000And he studied all over the country, and he said Portland's a place where everything can be grown within 100 miles.
00:48:03.000He sort of was ahead of the mountain biking craze, then he was ahead of the sort of farm-to-table thing, and he opened a chain called Laughing Planet, which there were like 15 or 20 of these vegetarian burrito shops in Portland.
00:48:19.000Sold that because he had quintuple bypass surgery.
00:48:59.000Oh, so he would go back with these chimps.
00:49:01.000And he told this hilarious story where he's with this chimp, and he'd go back there and smoke a joint at the end of the day, and the chimps are wandering around.
00:49:09.000And one day this chimp comes over and sits down next to him, and he's smoking a joint, and the chimp reaches out.
00:50:59.000People do what they have to do, and they're in prison to have fun, but they don't want to be there.
00:51:04.000And that's the same thing with these animals.
00:51:06.000The idea that somehow or another they're being saved...
00:51:10.000I guess we're supposed to accept that they're doing conservation work, for sure, and that some of these animals can only exist in captivity in this day and age, or at least we have to have some of them in captivity to ensure their survival, because humans are pushing in on their area.
00:51:24.000Where they live, but fuck man, that's, especially with intelligent animals, that's depressing as shit.
00:51:29.000I've got a friend, I just did a podcast with him the other day, he's sort of been hired by the whole marine mammal consortium To try to help them deal with their image problem from blackfish and blah blah blah,
00:51:46.000So we were talking about this and he's been working a lot in this place in Florida where the dolphins are used for therapeutic, you know, with like vets with PTSD and kids who are autistic and stuff and the dolphins seem to have a real sensitivity and there's an interaction.
00:52:04.000And a lot of them are born in captivity.
00:52:06.000If you let them loose, they'd be dead within hours.
00:52:09.000You know, they don't know how to survive and stuff.
00:52:40.000You know, they're very community-based animals.
00:52:44.000Isn't it possible that they could take an area in a bay, like a very large area, and take all the world's captive orcas and transport them to this large bay?
00:52:54.000Like take a large area in a part of the world that we don't go, but it's habitable.
00:54:12.000He wrote Animal Liberation, which sort of started the whole animal rights frenzy in the 70s, whenever it was.
00:54:19.000Really interesting philosopher teaches at Princeton now, I think.
00:54:23.000And he made a really interesting argument about using primates in drug testing.
00:54:29.000Because, you know, the argument there is, well, they're close to humans, so their responses to pharmaceuticals and things is as close as we're going to get for our own testing.
00:54:39.000And what he said, he's one of these guys who just thinks really clearly wherever it goes, and he doesn't give a shit.
00:56:07.000If it saves your wife, if your wife is saved, the person you love more than anyone else in this world is saved because They tortured some chimp.
00:56:45.000Like, what makes someone uniquely qualified to be the person that makes a very difficult choice?
00:56:49.000And really, no one deserves to be the person who decides this group of people dies, so this group of people lives, or that this monkey gets a battery cable attached to his dick.
00:57:09.000I've never really understood the difference between the two, to be honest with you.
00:57:12.000I think sociopaths don't feel empathy, and psychopaths are prone to more violent behavior, if that makes any sense.
00:57:19.000I think sociopaths, from what has been explained to me, and I might be butchering this, probably should look, but I think the idea being that they're not feeling empathy, like the rest of us are.
00:57:29.000If by their actions they get ahead, but somebody else suffers, it doesn't bother them.
00:57:34.000Whereas for you, you would do something that would hurt someone's feelings.
00:57:37.000You'd be like, man, I just can't fucking sleep.
00:58:49.000A disregard for the laws and social norms, a disregard for the rights of others, a failure to feel remorse or guilt, a tendency to display violent behavior.
00:58:58.000In addition to their commonalities, sociopaths and psychopaths also have their own unique behavioral characteristics as well.
00:59:05.000Sociopaths tend to be nervous and easily agitated.
00:59:07.000They are volatile and prone to emotional outbursts, including fits of rage.
00:59:13.000Psychopaths, on the other hand, are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities.
00:59:48.000Like you're feeling like no, you know, there's like certain feelings that people have where you feel, you see it in them that they feel remorse or they feel sad or they feel empathy.
01:00:00.000And then there's other people that are like faking that where it's like, They're doing bad acting on a soap opera.
01:00:06.000I mean, I was on a TV show here two weeks ago or something, and it struck me how there are concentric circles of bullshit that get more intense the closer you get to the cameras.
01:00:17.000You check into the hotel, and they're like, Hey, Dr. Ryan, nice to meet you.
01:02:56.000For a guy like that, who's probably a thousand times more famous than my level of fame, he's probably legitimately a thousand times more famous than me.
01:03:08.000When George Clooney shows up, helicopters will start circling the restaurant that he's at, and people will just jump out of buses with cameras and try to touch him.
01:03:16.000And it relates to what we were just talking about, like that fake emotion thing, right?
01:03:21.000How much true input is he getting from human beings?
01:05:08.000He was married to Olivia Wilde for seven years, you know?
01:05:11.000So he's sort of like, he's like in this world, a strange world.
01:05:16.000And he was talking, his father was this crazy Italian prince who hung out with Fellini and Brigitte Bardot and Salvador Dali.
01:05:24.000And, you know, he sort of started the Dolce Vita in Italy in the 50s and squandered this huge family fortune, like in his lifetime on women and boats and parties and all this shit, you know?
01:05:40.000Anyway, Tao is a great flamenco guitarist, and we were talking about, like, how do you get in, you know, when did you start playing guitar?
01:05:47.000And he said, well, when I was 13, the Rolling Stones came to, like, Rome or wherever they were playing, and my dad is an old friend of Keith Richards, and he took me to the hotel where the Stones were staying, and Keith had,
01:06:02.000like, a whole floor to himself, right?
01:06:05.000And we went in and there were all these people and all this scene.
01:06:08.000And actually Keith Richards' father was there, he mentioned.
01:06:11.000And my dad mentioned to Keith, like, hey, Tao's learning guitar.
01:06:17.000And Keith had a flamenco guitar there.
01:06:20.000And he picked it up and he did a few, like, riffs.
01:06:23.000And he said to him, if you want to learn to play guitar, learn flamenco.
01:06:27.000Because if you can play flamenco, you can play anything.
01:07:36.000To get really good at anything, whether it's the drums or the guitar or playing chess, I mean, it's all the same thing, really.
01:07:43.000It's like you need to just get obsessed at that particular discipline.
01:07:47.000Whatever it is that it takes to get really good at it, a big part of what makes someone really good at anything is this crazy obsession.
01:07:55.000If you don't have that obsession, you'll just drift in and out from one thing to the other until you find the thing that you really are obsessed with.
01:08:01.000Now, obsession is defined, you know, in the psychological terms as a pathology, right?
01:08:12.000And, you know, this is a very subversive kind of thought, but it's like, in our society, this relates back to the psychopaths who attain great success.
01:08:23.000I mean, are most really successful people responding to some deep trauma?
01:08:31.000Like they say, comedians, you know, there's some need for approval and, you know, make people laugh, make people love you, you know, because whatever your family structure...
01:08:41.000I don't know as many comedians as you do, but, you know, you always hear that, right?
01:08:45.000You know, because I needed the attention in actors.
01:08:48.000Like, they need people looking at them.
01:09:34.000I think to get to be a Keith Richards, you have to have this desire to produce something that people are going to love.
01:09:41.000Because when you listen to his guitar riffs, or any great guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughan, anyone, they have to have this deep desire to connect with just the correct sounds that's coming out of their mind, their imagination,
01:09:57.000their Their skill, their interpretation of the moment.
01:10:01.000That's why people like when someone does a guitar solo, the idea being that this guy's just feeling it.
01:10:08.000It's not the exact same solo every time.
01:10:11.000Every time they're doing it, if a guy just starts riffing and everybody starts cheering and going along with it, you want to see what's in that guy right at that moment.
01:10:21.000Expresses itself through all the discipline and all the years that he's practiced guitar and then the finger coordination that it's able to achieve.
01:10:29.000And you know, there's some shit that's like, you could tell they're just kind of, they're just going fast.
01:10:37.000Yeah, there's people that shred and it's really cool and it's really impressive.
01:10:41.000And then there's some Stevie Ray Vaughan shit.
01:10:44.000There's some Stevie Ray Vaughan where you feel like him crying through the guitar.
01:10:49.000There's this emotion that's attached to it and that people connect to.
01:10:54.000And when you see Stevie Ray Vaughan's version of Little Wing, you see a great guitarist Inhabiting and loving another great guitarist, you know, there's something really beautiful about that.
01:13:28.000There's a thing that like the whole song builds to this fucking wild guitar lead near the end.
01:13:34.000And like if I'm working out or running or something, I always have that on my playlist because I just there's like energy comes out of the ether, you know, it's amazing.
01:13:43.000Yeah, they had a cover of Higher Ground.
01:13:45.000That was one of the few covers that I actually enjoyed as much as the original, just like Steve Ray Vaughan's version of Voodoo Child.
01:15:10.000Damaged soul, you know, seeking approval from the world.
01:15:14.000Well, I often wonder if what we're seeing when we see great resonating forms of expression, whether it's art or whether it's comedy or any music...
01:15:26.000I always wonder if what we're looking at is a mathematical equation, if we're looking at like a yin and a yang, an ebb and a pull, and that the ebb, you know, whatever it was that created this great deficit responds, the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit responds with this incredible work of art to sort of make up for all the trauma that it experienced when it was young,
01:15:47.000which is why It's really tough to find someone who had this really ultra-privileged life, who was accepted and loved and nurtured in every way, who becomes this really fascinating, great artist.
01:16:00.000What you usually find is these people that are in pain and torn up.
01:16:05.000Yeah, and I often wonder if we're looking at it in a cultural context, and we sort of, oh, that guy's an asshole, or his life sucked, or she was abused, or he was neglected.
01:16:17.000And we're looking at it in terms of like these definitions that we've already categorized in our mind.
01:16:23.000But in fact, what it really is, is like math.
01:16:29.000We're looking at a minus and a positive.
01:16:31.000We're looking at a Jimi Hendrix, this young black man in this incredibly racist world who comes along right at the moment of this psychedelic acceptance where the whole world, especially young people, are turning on in a way that they never have before.
01:17:53.000And Stephen Root and Candy Alexander and I were joking around about how Phil had these notes.
01:17:58.000Like, he would have, uh, his script would be, he would have tabs for each scene, and, like, these different color tabs for every scene that he was in, and everything would be highlighted, and he would have notes and stickums, and everything was, like, super organized, and we were always like, shh, can I borrow your script?
01:18:14.000You know, like, nobody could find their fucking script, but Phil had his shit in a binder, he would take his thing, he would punch holes in them, stick them in a binder, you know, he was super-duper organized and anal about that kind of shit, but one of his greatest moments, you know, When we were friends,
01:18:30.000somewhere along the line he started smoking weed.
01:20:33.000You know, I was just a different person.
01:20:34.000I was still operating on the momentum of my youth and chaos, and I couldn't even believe I was hanging out with Phil Hartman at a strip club.
01:20:43.000Like, to me, like, seven years before that, I had been fighting, you know?
01:22:02.000TV shows, especially news radio, was one of the easiest jobs I've ever had in my life, in terms of the actual performance of it.
01:22:09.000I mean, you would be a little nervous before, make sure you knew your lines, make sure you get it right, but the cast was so fucking good that, like, you were working with these people that were so funny, all you had to do was just do your thing.
01:24:18.000The people who came in, you know, Fox didn't think they were strong enough to run a show, so they fucked up their pilot, they fucked up all the episodes, and they tanked a great idea.
01:24:28.000You know, they were baseball fans, and they wanted to make a hilarious sitcom about baseball akin to Married with Children for Baseball.
01:25:51.000Sleep in some bed that some dude before he's been farting and jerking off into.
01:25:56.000And I did that, and then it got picked up, and then I got an apartment.
01:26:01.000I signed a lease because I figured, oh, this is going to stay.
01:26:03.000I had the Oakwood for a couple of weeks, and I go, oh, this show's doing well, and they thought it was going to get picked up, and then it got canceled.
01:26:49.000And the ability to perform under pressure.
01:26:51.000One of the things about sitcoms, about auditioning for them, it's so unnatural.
01:26:55.000You're in this room, there's a table, there's these people that you don't know, and you're supposed to pretend that, you know, we're on a tropical island and we're trying to find where the first aid cabin is.
01:28:24.000A lot of people that come from that environment do, because I think it's really hostile, and they're all competing to get their stuff in the air.
01:28:35.000There's a lot of greatness that comes from that, too.
01:28:38.000I mean, Saturday Night Live, if you look at the overall body of work and you just cherry-pick greatness, my God, I mean, you have this incredible bouquet of John Belushi and Phil Hartman and Adam Sandler and Chris Rock.
01:30:40.000They'll create these things like, okay, how is this going to work the best?
01:30:45.000I don't mean to single them out, but just like some people that write some books where it's pretty obvious as they're writing the book, they're kind of bullshitting who they are and what they're projecting.
01:30:54.000Yeah, this will connect with that part of the audience, but I don't want to offend that part.
01:30:59.000You know, you're talking earlier about that whole ebb and flow idea, the mathematical sort of it all equals out at the end.
01:31:06.000I've thought about that a lot, not so much in terms of individuals, though it makes sense, but I've thought about that a lot in terms of historical moments, historical periods.
01:31:16.000You know, like Vietnam, the late 60s, right?
01:31:19.000Like 65 to 71. That's when more Americans are dying in Vietnam than any other period earlier than that.
01:31:29.000Before they ramped up, it wasn't as many.
01:31:31.000So you've got all this conflict, all these riots in the streets.
01:31:35.000You've got Selma and Martin Luther King and all this agitation.
01:31:39.000And at the same time, you've got Jimi Hendrix.
01:31:51.000When the shit hits the fan, it's really interesting, you know?
01:31:55.000And interesting people rise to the top, whereas when things are stable, the interesting people just, you know, they don't get anywhere, because the structures are rigid and controlling, you know?
01:32:07.000Well, sometimes there's a need for reform and change that makes these interesting things blossom almost out of pressure, almost out of like two rocks pushing together in the Creator.
01:32:19.000There's this effect that happens because people are pushed into a certain way.
01:32:23.000And in that sense, there's always been the argument that we need a certain amount of evil to appreciate love, to appreciate happiness.
01:32:35.000This is in certainly no way supporting war, but people who look at war, like people in this country especially, as just something, and they don't think about it deeply, they don't think about it...
01:32:49.000In a way where they comprehend the loss of lives and the sadness and the sorrow.
01:32:54.000They just look at it as those are our heroes.
01:32:55.000They got to do what they got to do over there so we could do what we do over here.
01:34:04.000We're going to operate in this very small box.
01:34:06.000Where the soldiers are heroes, and there's no doubt they're doing what they do over there so we can do what we do over here.
01:34:11.000And they'll repeat that mantra over and over again without any consideration whatsoever for what it means as human beings.
01:34:19.000You're dealing with groups of human beings fighting other groups of human beings for some reason that has not really been clearly defined to me.
01:34:28.000That most of the people fighting have no clue what it is.
01:34:35.000For someone who goes over there and experiences it, it's probably got to be really weird to see that sort of cookie-cutter version of it being expressed by people.
01:34:49.000I have quite a few friends that have been overseas and been involved in the war, and you talk to them, and man, they have sorrow.
01:34:59.000They have some shit they don't like to remember.
01:35:00.000They have some really difficult things.
01:35:03.000You know this Brian Williams thing that happened in the news?
01:35:06.000One of the things that I took from it, especially hard, was not that Brian Williams was not telling the truth, because I think he's a fucking Hollywood guy.
01:35:44.000That they were in a helicopter, and the helicopter took small arms fire, and that the helicopter in front of them was the one that got hit with the RPG. And it wasn't the one that Brian Williams was in.
01:35:54.000But he was telling his story about this, and then people started questioning, no, you weren't in the helicopter with Brian Williams.
01:36:01.000This guy was in the helicopter with Brian Williams.
01:36:03.000And so the guy says, man, you know what?
01:36:04.000I don't really completely remember, but it's hard for me to go over this.
01:36:41.000When people ask me about my experience with Brian Williams, this is what happened.
01:36:44.000And he gave a very logical account of it.
01:36:46.000The reason why we were an hour late, he said, is because we had to drop off a payload.
01:36:49.000We dropped off our payload, and then it took us about an hour, and then we went to the site where the guys landed, and then we all...
01:36:55.000Had huddled down together in a sandstorm, and it was an incredibly traumatic event for all involved.
01:37:02.000So, I'm not giving Brian Williams a free pass, because he remembered this in a fucked up way, because I do think he bullshitted it.
01:37:07.000I think he added a bunch of shit to his version of it, and put himself in more danger, because he didn't think that anybody had put the pieces together.
01:37:16.000Look, his story as itself would have been just as good if he said the helicopter in front of us got hit with an RPG. It doesn't make you better because you almost died.
01:38:15.000I mean, within 15 minutes of meeting this guy, he told me he had trained with the SEALs, he had played semi-professional basketball in Europe, and he owned this amazing apartment that we were in that I knew he didn't own, his boss owned, who was this billionaire guy.
01:38:30.000And he was the private pilot of this billionaire guy, this friend of mine, right?
01:38:36.000And so I knew this guy was full of shit, but I also knew he flies a fucking Learjet for a living.
01:38:43.000He's like on standby to fly this guy wherever around the world.
01:38:47.000Like, dude, that's a good story in itself.
01:39:52.000Nope, just ego and alcohol and a bunch of craziness, but smoking cigarettes tell me about how he's just sparring eight rounds with a world champion, which isn't totally impossible.
01:40:02.000I had this guy in Joe Schilling recently, he's one of the best kickboxers in the world, and he admitted on the podcast he smokes cigarettes on a regular basis.
01:40:46.000And he tells me some Latin word for a star system somewhere.
01:40:51.000And he said, like, again, within 15 minutes, he said that he was the highest paid artist in the world because he had designed that Atlas thing in front of Rockefeller Center, which was the highest, like,
01:41:07.000most expensive piece of art, any whatever, like, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
01:43:27.000We went in and it was just like lunatics.
01:43:31.000And there was this woman, like must have been in her mid-50s, lying on her back in a little nightgown, no underwear, with her like arms and legs, you know, like a crab, doing a crab thing.
01:43:43.000And we walk in, and it's like this, you know, pussy, and the whole scene just scared the shit out of me.
01:43:48.000And Casilda just started laughing, like, you crazy old lady, what are you doing?
01:43:57.000And the thing that I didn't understand until I hung out with her is that people who are psychotic know they're psychotic.
01:44:06.000And so they kind of know how ridiculous they are.
01:44:11.000And as a doctor, when she laughs, she laughs in such a loving, accepting, I get you kind of way that it creates this instant rapport and they start laughing.
01:44:22.000Oh, so she like relieves a little tension.
01:44:25.000Like it's all, okay, I know you're just another crazy person.
01:44:28.000I deal with you all the time and come on.
01:44:30.000It's kind of like how a gynecologist, I imagine, would have to sort of be so laid back that you kind of, you know, okay, he's seen a million pussies.
01:45:38.000I taught several kids from white belt all the way up to higher belts.
01:45:45.000I don't think I taught anybody up to black belt, but I got pretty close.
01:45:48.000Because it takes quite a few years to achieve black belt.
01:45:51.000So for most of them, it is very rare that they make it to that far.
01:45:56.000They'll learn some lessons along the way and it'll help them, you know, in life, but to achieve that level of ability is a lot of commitment.
01:46:10.000In a good school, maybe, I mean, might be one out of 500 or 600, but it's close to a thousand, whatever it is.
01:46:18.000It's not 1% by any stretch of the imagination.
01:46:21.000It's probably, at a good estimate, one-tenth or one-percent.
01:46:26.000I imagine you'd be really good in that kind of an environment, not just martial arts, but kids in general, because there's sort of an immediate respect.
01:48:04.000It was one of his best performances ever.
01:48:06.000I'm good at getting inside of people's heads, especially people that I know, and telling them what they need to hear to get them to go out there and fire them the fuck up.
01:48:14.000And telling them what you're really good at, man.
01:48:39.000And they'd be fighting other little kids, and most likely they wouldn't get hurt.
01:48:42.000But when you've got a little seven-year-old in front of you, and you're putting pads on his head to protect him from kicks, and you're like, listen, you've just got to stay focused and don't be afraid.
01:48:51.000All you need to think about is what you're doing.
01:48:54.000Don't think about what happens if it goes wrong.
01:49:04.000Stay defensive, keep moving, never stand in one place, never stand put, always keep fainting, always keep the opponent guessing, and I'd go over all the most important things to them and then pump them up and tell them, you can do this.
01:49:16.000When you get through this, you're going to feel so good.
01:49:18.000I know you feel terrible now, but as terrible as you feel now, when it's over, you're going to feel so good.
01:49:22.000And when they would do it and they would compete, even if they would lose, they'd be so relieved.
01:49:38.000I read a book recently, a fascinating book called Paradise Made in Hell.
01:49:44.000Rebecca Solnit, and it's about disaster sociology, right?
01:49:48.000So it's studying people's behavior in disasters, right?
01:49:54.000And so it's fascinating because the idea we have is, like, that's when people get really crazy and they loot and pillage and, you know, oh, now I can rape and nobody will catch me and there are no cops.
01:50:05.000And in fact, what happens is the opposite.
01:50:07.000That's when people are most generous, most kind.
01:50:30.000And the main guy, there's this really moving passage where this guy who sort of started the field, who's no hippie, he teaches at Nebraska or something, he's like a very straight-up scientist, but he said, the best way to think about disasters is not as a disaster,
01:50:48.000but as relief from the disaster that is normal life.
01:50:54.000Because in normal life, we're all isolated, we're all suffering alone.
01:50:58.000And he's like, man, when the shit hits the fan, that's when things get really wonderful.
01:51:05.000Well, there's no escaping the fact that it's finite when you're watching people die around you, that's for sure.
01:51:23.000And I think one of the things that people miss in their lives that leads people to become very...
01:51:30.000Stagnant and disappointed in their existence is that there's no thrills.
01:51:35.000I think that's what leads people to get divorced or to become drug addicts or to be self-destructive.
01:51:43.000It's almost like people need thrills and when you get stuck in a really secure job Mm-hmm.
01:52:10.000To this group of people that are all doing the same thing, and you're going to do it every week, and at the end of the week, you know, when the day's done, then you can go home, and you can relax.
01:53:22.000You know, and, you know, take some anesthetics and you won't feel a goddamn thing.
01:53:27.000But how's that different from being dead?
01:53:29.000It seems like we're all doing our part in this existence and we're moving past what we used to be from single-celled organisms to higher primates to some weird thing right now that's a combination of conscious being and physical animal.
01:53:58.000The stage that you and I are in, they're going to look back at us and laugh the way we look back at Isaac Newton wearing a powdered wig or any of the...
01:54:05.000Weirdos that figured out all sorts of incredible things back in history, but also believed a bunch of stupid shit as well.
01:54:12.000You look back at Copernicus and the things that he discovered, and it's unbelievable and amazing.
01:54:23.000Imagine being Darwin and trying to express these ideas that you formulated over the course of your life's work to a bunch of Christian scientists, which is what he was dealing with.
01:54:35.000If you go back and think about it today, his challenges of this idea of this monotheistic world that the scientist pretty much universally existed in at that time and tries to push forth these crazy theories that he's coming up with,
01:54:53.000I mean, the resistance that he must have experienced to something that today is instantaneously accepted by everyone that's in academia, in science, I mean, almost across the board, his ideas are accepted.
01:55:07.000So we look back at those times and we go, God, they're fucking so stupid back then.
01:55:24.000We're in the middle of this weird process of human beings changing and becoming more aware of all the flaws and the folly in our civilization and our existence.
01:55:34.000And all the shit we're fighting for today, all the protests like Black Lives Matter and, you know, people fighting for rights of, you know, everyone across the board from women to gays to this to that.
01:55:45.000What we're doing is we're trying to patch up the holes in this crazy system with agitation and anger and loud voices and social media campaigns and it's essentially all just trying to make this thing into a more coherent, more advanced version of what it is now and then that in turn will find the inherent problems in its existence and it will move just like the monkeys from You know,
01:56:10.000200,000 years ago that became human beings were fighting off all these different creatures and realized, like, yo, we gotta make houses.
01:56:23.000I'm fucking tired of my babies getting eaten.
01:56:25.000Like, let's figure out spears and snakes.
01:56:27.000You know, let's figure a way to make a better situation.
01:56:32.000And I think we're in the middle of that, man.
01:56:34.000I think we just, like all things, you take it for granted that you're in the middle of it.
01:56:38.000If you look back on your childhood, you know, and today you look back and you go, wow, when I was 10, I was doing this and I was doing that.
01:56:45.000But when you were 10, you were just in the middle of it.
01:56:47.000You know, you look back on how much progress has taken place in your own life as a microcosm to your existence.
01:56:54.000All of our existence, your own individual memories and your own individual experiences, you're in the middle of it.
01:57:02.000As civilization, we're in the middle of this babyhood.
01:57:06.000We're in the middle of this adolescence, whatever the fuck it is.
01:57:19.000It's like yeah, it's always always in process always in process But amazing to think that right now we are at the pinnacle of human knowledge We are at the peak the tip of the spear as far as like everything that people have learned and figured out up until now We have this database we've accumulated from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of records and then you know after that it gets a little sketchy and You go a few thousand years,
01:57:45.000things get real weird in different languages.
01:57:47.000Things get even weirder and it gets more vague and more strange, more difficult to decipher.
01:57:50.000But all that data that we've accumulated and the access to it that we have today, unprecedented as far as we know in people.
01:58:01.000When you have a question, you just like with a psychology, psychopathy thing, we just bang, we just Google it and we didn't have to go to a library, we didn't have to order a book, we didn't have to Go to a bookstore or go to a class.
01:58:13.000You just instantaneously get that information.
01:58:16.000And I think that that is accelerating us in a way that we can't even comprehend.