Greg and Mark talk about how much money we should be making in third-world countries, and how much we should all be making here in the United States. Also, Greg tries to write a Christmas letter to Santa, but it's not too late, it's always next year. Greg and Mark also discuss the idea that if you don't have a job, you're going to end up being an economic slave in some third world country, and why that's a bad thing. And they talk about why we should care about the people that create an economy within their own country, within their community, and at the same time live the life that they'll never eat that money up anyway. They also talk about what it means to be a capitalist and why it's a good thing that we don't need to have our own factories or other infrastructure built in order to be able to make things in the first-world. This episode is sponsored by Foxconn, a company that makes iPhones and other products that are made in other countries. You can get 20% off the top of your box by using the promo code: "UPLEVEL" at checkout and get 10% off your purchase when you enter the discount code: UPLEVEL at checkout. Also, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, rate, and review the podcast! and leave us a review on iTunes and other podcasting platforms! If you like the podcast, tell a friend about the podcast and/or share it on your thoughts on social media! or share it with a friend! Timestamps: 5 stars and a review! 5 stars is a big thank you're listening to this podcast and I'll be listening to it! 6 stars is much appreciated! 7 stars means you'll get a discount on the podcast next week! 8 stars means a better chance to win a chance at a new episode! 9 stars equals 5 more spots on the next episode next week, and a discount code 10 stars equals a better review next week at the next one? 9 days of the podcast will get a new ad discount! 11 stars equals 7 days of free shipping and a free ad discount, which means more merchandize that means more chances to win $10,000 off the next week 12 days of a new product review? 13 days of ad discount equals $100,000 gets a better product review
00:00:31.000I was thinking about Santa with the elves.
00:00:35.000Isn't there a funny metaphor that he's got all these little elves working to make children's toys for no money, and then you think about our toys do come from China?
00:00:43.000That is kind of fucked up, but Chinese people aren't elves, dude.
00:00:53.000The whole idea of getting a bunch of people to work for way less than they would ever make here is kind of a weird accepted thing that we have as far as our items, our electronics, and the things that we love.
00:01:07.000Almost all of them are made by people in another country working for shit money.
00:01:19.000Yeah, it's basically, you know, there used to be slavery, and with slavery, you paid the help nothing, or very little, and you had to house them, and you had to feed them, and you had to heal them.
00:01:29.000You go to a third world country, it's slavery, but you don't have to deal with any of the overhead.
00:01:34.000Yeah, because they don't really care if they own you all the time.
00:01:37.000They just care if they own you enough so that you show up and do what you have to do.
00:01:54.000Capitalism depends on a certain percentage of the population being hardcore unemployables so that you can always say there's somebody else.
00:02:57.000I'm not super wealthy, but if I was, I would really be thinking about a different agenda than making more.
00:03:02.000You really look at the people that create an economy within their own country, within their own community, and at the same time, live the life that they'll never fucking eat that money up anyway.
00:03:20.000You got a little podcast coming off of yours and you got people that work for you and comedians that you bring on the road and, you know, it's everywhere.
00:03:28.000It's almost like, you know, I hate that expression that Obama used when he was in office about small businesses.
00:03:49.000If everyone goes, fuck you, you can't pay me 25 cents an hour, fuck you, then we don't have iPhones anymore.
00:03:56.000But because we know that these people are poor, not we, we don't have any iPhone factories, but because they know these people are poor, they can continue doing that.
00:04:16.000The Foxconn factories are terrifying because those people live there.
00:04:20.000They have dormitories there, they eat there, live there, sleep there, and they have nets all around them.
00:04:25.000And this is where it gets really weird.
00:04:26.000You know, there's always going to be people who on the hardcore right will always argue towards whatever is like economically best for the company.
00:04:37.000You know, they'll somehow or another come up with some justification for what Kind of damage tapping an oil well do or oil spills or this kind of shit.
00:04:45.000But this guy said to me, he goes, well, you know, if you look at the numbers, it's actually very similar to the number of people that commit suicide in an overall population.
00:05:14.000There's so many people that work there that the amount of people that commit suicide on the job are directly proportioned to a normal city.
00:06:47.000Because the instinct to not kill yourself is so strong that the pain that would make you do it must just be something you can't imagine.
00:06:56.000You know, I've talked to quite a few people now with what you would call depression or have had depression and overcome it or have had any sort of mental issues and had to take medication for it and overcome it.
00:07:10.000And I just think we vary so much, man.
00:07:15.000I think our minds and what we can do, our norm, what makes us happy, whatever your state is, what you need to achieve to get out of the muck, the down feeling, and what another person needs to achieve could be very different.
00:07:31.000You know, it's just like everything else, like people that are tall, people that are short, freckles, whatever the fuck it is, we vary so much that we gotta be really careful when we, like, look at, like, how could he do that?
00:07:42.000Like, yeah, might have been a good life for you on the outside.
00:07:46.000But that guy was in, like, some sort of chemical hell all the time.
00:07:49.000Yeah, the exterior maybe doesn't have much to do with the interior.
00:07:52.000I mean, if you talk about the statistics of people committing suicide, I wonder if it's not about the same in the lower class as it is in the upper class.
00:08:01.000You know, I mean, I don't I don't I don't know if that's really the factor because I think there's quite a few people like they said Mexico is one of the happiest countries on Earth.
00:08:10.000It was also like not a very wealthy country.
00:08:15.000Yeah, I think there's there's a benefit to that that we don't recognize because we're so wrapped up in the idea of accumulating money accumulating dollars that we forget like that's only part of wealth The really intelligent wealth is keeping the vibe good as long as possible.
00:08:33.000Whether it's happiness with friends, happiness with co-workers, happiness with what you do for a living, pride in your accomplishments, whatever the fuck it is that it takes to keep it.
00:08:43.000Feeling included in a group of people.
00:09:16.000And I would rarely quote a commercial, I think, when it's funny.
00:09:19.000But it's like this chick and she's saying goodbye to a guy and it's an insurance commercial.
00:09:24.000And she's in like a big prairie dress with a bonnet and he's the real cowboy and he's putting his hat on and he's like, I gotta go off into the sunset.
00:10:03.000Mine for the first time, yours for the second act.
00:10:07.000And It's like a great feeling to be doing your solo thing, but you're surrounded by other people that have the same background and are following the same path.
00:11:07.000But he said it's like taking a master's class in comedy.
00:11:09.000He listened to Bill Burr talk about how he writes jokes.
00:11:12.000He listened to Greg Fitzsimmons talk about the differences between his act now and his act then, where the errors are.
00:11:18.000You get Joey Diaz talking about, like, how he learned to let go and how he had fear when he was on stage and always worried about people accepting him.
00:13:41.000And Steve Wright could not stop laughing.
00:13:43.000He's been on my podcast, and he's just like, in all the years I've done this, I've never had anybody throw somebody under the bus like that.
00:13:54.000And he just kept talking about it for like 15 minutes.
00:13:57.000It's a funny thing like about people don't want to admit they were asleep.
00:16:13.000We were living in Boston, and we could go in any direction.
00:16:18.000There was probably 200 or 300 rooms between Boston Comedy.
00:16:23.000Between Sherry Hirsch, between Norm LaFoe, Billy Downs, Paul Barkley, they all had like Boston Comedy, Barry Katz's organization had many, many, many rooms.
00:16:47.000And if you were a good comic and you were reliable, and again, if you had a car and you would pick up the headliner, You would literally call a guy like Mike Clark and he would fill seven weekends on the spot in one phone call.
00:17:02.000And then you'd call Barry Katz and he'd fill seven weekends.
00:17:06.000And like, you know, in a week you talk to five agents and your year is booked six nights a week.
00:17:13.000And then all you got to do is play softball, go to the movies and drive to the gig at night.
00:18:01.000So when they're calling their seat and their name, or their name and their Johnson Party of Six, they're doing it on the same microphone as you.
00:19:54.000They leave The Cape, and my friend dated this girl from The Cape, and she became a whore and a crackhead.
00:20:00.000She was this sweet, preppy girl from The Cape, came from money.
00:20:03.000Moved to Venice Beach, and all of a sudden she was getting skinny, and all of a sudden she had a herpes virus on her lip, and he got it from her.
00:24:00.000It says, a disposable tampon pad user produces a dump truck of menstrual waste in their lifetime, and it's showing you this giant fucking dump truck, which probably doesn't have only tampons in it, but...
00:24:12.000That would be great, as if every time you threw out a tampon, you had to throw it in your truck.
00:24:17.000Every woman gets one truck, and once it's filled, we kill you.
00:24:21.000Yeah, you have, like, a yearly dump of your tampons.
00:24:26.000Like, for a year, they have to stay in your backyard in a big pink barrel.
00:24:31.000Just dogs barking from all over the neighborhood.
00:24:33.000Yeah, you know how you have, like, trash is, like, one color, the recyclables, like, brown, like, lawn, you know, like, lawn trimmings and stuff.
00:25:12.000Well, we were down in Florida one time, me and, you know, Mike Gibbons, my buddy Mike, and this other guy, the guy whose girlfriend became a hooker, as a matter of fact.
00:25:22.000And there was a water slide park, and it was locked.
00:25:26.000And we got through the chain link fence, and we went in, and my buddy turned the water on.
00:25:31.000It was like a real rudimentary roadside water park.
00:25:35.000And we started going down the slide in the middle of the night.
00:25:37.000It's like fucking, you know, midnight.
00:25:39.000And I remember thinking, like, I would not have had that much fun during the day.
00:25:42.000And I think that's what menstrual sex is like.
00:25:59.000Let me ask you this, in all sincerity, because I've debated this myself.
00:26:03.000Would you, if they one day figure out a way to manipulate human bodies in such an incredible way that they can actually turn you into a woman?
00:26:14.000I can turn you back into a woman, back into Greg again.
00:26:41.000What if they figure out a way to manipulate genetics to the point where you could become your wife and your wife could become you, like literally become you, and then fuck you?
00:27:09.000There's so many little secrets that women have, and there's things you wonder about their soul, and what they're really thinking when you're talking, and all those little subtle things.
00:27:55.000And psychologically, if I had to analyze, with all due respect, and this is, again, just my opinion, I think the reason why those like savage type sexual scenarios like savage lustful crazy things, ball gags and spitting in your mouth and you know like a lot of the crazy shit that seems to excite people unexpectedly you know when you talk about like the average American woman And then you talk about them.
00:28:21.000I don't know exactly what Fifty Shades of Grey is.
00:30:51.000I've told this story, but just in the nature of this discussion, I got the first job that I ever did in Hollywood, that stupid hardball show.
00:31:06.000I came out here, didn't have any friends, and I was out here filming it for like two weeks, and didn't have a girlfriend in LA, didn't know anybody, so I'd just go to the comedy store and go home.
00:31:17.000And we had this scene that we were doing with me and this girl, and she gave me a hug.
00:31:23.000And she didn't even give me a hug, like a sexual hug.
00:31:54.000And unfortunately, whether it's because of genetics, or because of diet, or because of fucking fill in the blank, where some people just aren't That attractive to other people.
00:32:02.000And that's not a politically correct thing to say, but that's exactly what it is.
00:32:06.000And so they're super excited about someone being excited about them.
00:32:10.000There's an app where you can hug people, where people meet.
00:32:14.000They meet up in a public place and they hug.
00:32:55.000It's just the problem is there's a lot of, like, overly needy people out there, a lot of crazy people out there, a lot of mean people out there, a lot of insult people that will insult you just to get a rise out of you.
00:33:08.000And girls have to deal with that way more than we do.
00:33:10.000It's the worst thing in the world when you see a guy hit on a girl and then the girl refutes him and you're like, fuck you bitch, I didn't like you anyway.
00:33:50.000I mean, certainly, I think there's a lot of factors.
00:33:53.000I think that's a big part of it, though, definitely.
00:33:55.000I think the other part of it is that, like, I think for a lot of men, it's, like, very frustrating to try to figure out how to get someone to choose you over, you know, X guys, X number of guys.
00:34:28.000You're doing it to be more attractive.
00:34:31.000Whether you're doing it for yourself or you're doing it for your business images ultimately for yourself, you're trying to be more attractive.
00:34:38.000And no matter how unattractive you are, you're trying to be more attractive because you're trying to, you know, it's nature.
00:34:45.000You're trying to attract the best mate that you can get.
00:34:48.000It's crazy that guys will, some guys will go, like, all out, like, with diamonds and shit, and, like, giant watches with crusted and diamonds, and they know, like, look, I am only gonna attract dumb hoes.
00:39:06.000So where you live, the outside is like a house, but the inside, where it faces the lion sanctuary, is all wire mesh, and it's all around your bed.
00:39:17.000So it's like your walls are insulated with lions.
00:39:20.000And you walk out there, and then you sleep.
00:39:22.000You walk out there like a long path through this thick wire mesh, and you sleep in the middle of the lion sanctuary.
00:39:30.000Periodically, throughout the day, they release animals for the lions to chase and kill in front of you.
00:39:38.000You're brushing your teeth, and you see some poor giraffe stumble out, look left, look right, and you see them run towards it and take it down like, fucking Christ!
00:39:49.000You hear bones snap, and one of them's got the neck, and the thing's flopping around, it's trying to kick, and they're tearing its guts apart, and you're 20 feet away.
00:39:57.000And your chest is rumbling from the noise.
00:40:00.000You can barely hear it over your electric toothbrush.
00:40:11.000Just ripping apart some giraffe right in front of you.
00:42:14.000Anyway, I had this feral cat, and when it was time, like, most of the time I could pet him, but there was occasionally times when you try to pick him up, he'll fight you to the death.
00:44:56.000And then you realize, like, man, if you're that fucked up from, like, that first couple months, like, your view of the world is that dangerous.
00:45:04.000I mean, you're literally wild in the street.
00:46:06.000You know, it reminded me of when you talked about grabbing him in the laundry basket.
00:46:10.000Do you remember back in Boston, you were out one night with Jennifer, and I was home, and I swear to God, on my father's grave this happened.
00:46:19.000I rented Batman at the Blockbuster, and I put it in, and I'm sitting at home, and I'm watching it, and then all of a sudden I see this shadow.
00:46:29.000And then I turn my head and I see another shadow.
00:46:31.000And I look up and there's a bat flying around the apartment.
00:46:42.000And it's like, ever since I was a kid, my aunt had this bar near her, and they had bats, and they would be telling me they were fruit bats, and if they bite you, you'll get rabies, and you'll die.
00:46:50.000And we would always be outside playing tag at night, and the fucking bats would fly by, and I'd freak out.
00:46:56.000And so, I'm alone in the apartment, and there's a bat flying around, and Batman is on TV. And so, all I knew is they go in your hair, which I think is, like, not even true.
00:47:07.000So I put on a baseball cap backwards...
00:47:10.000And I had on sunglasses and a tennis racket.
00:47:39.000And you just grabbed the tennis racket out of my hand and you walked up and he was in the window and you just bashed him once and he just went down.
00:47:47.000And then you just walked over and you had takeout in your hand and you just went into the kitchen and started eating it.
00:47:51.000I'm standing there with sunglasses and a hat on.
00:51:25.000But meanwhile, that coyote will eat that beagle.
00:51:28.000The beagle thinks everybody's like him.
00:51:30.000You know, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the food gets put into a bowl, and his tail wags, and he waddles his little fucking chubby body over to the bowl, and he eats.
00:51:39.000And meanwhile, outside, it's this thing.
00:51:41.000His ribs are showing, and it's getting...
00:51:43.000Big, long face just designed for snatching shit up.
00:53:24.000In the natural world of chickens, they want to fuck a rooster and they want the egg that they give, you know, they make an egg almost every day.
00:53:32.000But most of the time those eggs are unfertilized.
00:53:34.000So the eggs that we eat are unfertilized eggs.
00:53:53.000I mean, you know, when you leave the eggs there, some of them they'll, like, I guess, like, some of them sometimes they'll peck away at their eggs and they'll eat them.
00:54:02.000And you have to, like, make sure that they don't do that.
00:54:06.000But when they get broody, when they get broody is when they think that somehow or another one of these eggs, even though there's no rooster, is going to become a baby.
00:54:13.000So they sit on it and they don't want to get off of it.
00:54:15.000And then they start pecking at their belly and fluffing it up and it gets ugly.
00:54:19.000But you can fix it as long as you catch it early.
00:54:22.000You catch it early, you just put them on a perch.
00:54:24.000So it was a smaller box and the coyote got under it and smashed the bottom of it and stole the chicken.
00:55:34.000Well, it's almost like we've got this hamster that's in a cage in our house, which is really, to me, the saddest thing in the world because he's alone and nobody holds him.
00:55:42.000My daughter picks him up like once a week for about 20 minutes, tops.
00:57:16.000And I watched this one dude, this old Chinese guy, he laid down on a blanket and he had a bag of peanuts and he would just slowly like reach his hand out and the squirrels would come over and just take it from him.
00:57:50.000Wolf liked the man because he was giving him food, but it weeded out the vicious ones until they got smaller and cuter, and we crafted them to be the little lapdogs that we wanted.
00:57:59.000The crazy thing is how short of a time it takes to do that, to change these animals.
00:58:05.000Like, we don't know how long it took before wolves became dogs, but...
00:59:07.000Their overall, even the males, their bodies became much more feminine.
00:59:11.000And they became domesticated like in 10 years to the point where you would go near the fox cage and they would wag their tail and like whimper to be near you.
00:59:49.000You sort of domesticated this animal like very quickly and the idea behind it was they were trying to make an analogy towards people like that we're kind of doing that with society if you look at the way people used to be like there was some study recently about hunter-gatherers and the difference between their bones and our bones that their bones were much more dense and because these people were working from the time they were babies I mean they just never stopped like picking things up and Climbing
01:00:20.000hills and like they were constantly at work.
01:00:22.000But we're becoming like more and more fragile as we sit at desks all day and sit in our car to get to our desk and sit on the couch to watch TV after you're done and then read a book in bed.
01:00:37.000And that, you know, when you really think about that, like that's kind of very similar to what is happening with those foxes.
01:00:45.000It's just a matter of preferring one type of behavior, not breeding with the other ones.
01:00:52.000And I think their premise was about like the best way to eliminate like war.
01:00:57.000And eliminate all these different negative aspects of our culture would be for, and people have said this, for people like that to just, people to stop fucking them.
01:01:20.000Well, if you think about it, and stay with me on this because it's a little dark, but if the people that are natural soldiers, they are going to war, and they are dying without breeding as much as the guys that are afraid to go to war.
01:04:22.000People are taking those Land Cruisers, the old ones that look like Jeeps, and even the newer ones, like after that, and they're fixing them up and selling them for over $100,000.
01:04:34.000There's a company called Icon, and they make incredible cars, man.
01:04:39.000I mean, it's like you're talking about very, very expensive shit, and I agree.
01:04:43.000I mean, it's not necessarily something that I would buy, because it is a lot of fucking money.
01:04:48.000But they take these, like, Broncos, and they take an old Bronco, they take the shell, and they completely redo it with the highest-end components, like the best suspension possible, a completely modern engine, you know, with, like, 400 horsepower.
01:05:03.000They take a Coyote engine from the 5.0 Mustang.
01:05:07.000So it's a Mustang GT engine, like this crate engine.
01:05:44.000Goddamn, that's a fucking work of art, man.
01:05:47.000It's like something you played with as a kid and dreamed of driving.
01:05:50.000Yeah, like when you think about a regular truck, like regular trucks are cool, you know, hey, you know, you got kids, you want to pile them into an Escalade, that's cool.
01:05:58.000But if you see that thing driving down the street, I mean, that's like some Mad Max, Apocalypto, Wonder Ride.
01:06:06.000It's a cool west side car, too, because it looks like you could take it on the beach.
01:06:11.000You could take that wherever the fuck you want to go.
01:06:13.000Well, that's what I think about, is when the shit hits the fan, and it's going to in L.A., obviously, there's going to be some type of a terrorist strike, or there's going to be a poisoning of the water.
01:08:04.000You know Celsius whatever they do up there and These people have no power for like two fucking weeks and in Toronto Wow in the middle of the winter So that it could happen in LA man if it happened in LA in the summer if you get ugly quick So that would be one that's like one kind of apocalypse.
01:08:35.000I am, because the way the bay is shaped, you know, you've got, you know, from the Palisades down to whatever, Manhattan Beach is all one half circle, basically.
01:08:45.000And Venice is in the center of that half circle.
01:08:47.000So as the water is rushing in from a tsunami, it's all getting channeled into one opening, which is Venice Beach.
01:08:55.000That shit's going to come straight down Venice Boulevard.
01:10:31.000Yeah, I mean, if you've got really good shit that does the purpose and does it at a really high level, you essentially could just maintain it forever.
01:10:41.000That's what they've been really doing in Cuba with cars, you know.
01:10:43.000If you go to Cuba, you look at their cars, apparently a large percentage of them are American automobiles from, like, the 50s and 60s.
01:12:30.000They're getting back to that now, for sure.
01:12:32.000The cars look better today than they did for a long time.
01:12:35.000But I would really like to know, what the fuck happened?
01:12:38.000What happened in the 1980s where things went so bad?
01:12:43.000I know there's peaks and valleys in a lot of things, but in American automobile design, it doesn't make any sense.
01:12:49.000Yeah, and at the exact same time as when the Japanese cars started coming out, just when we needed to be at our best to compete, we suddenly just...
01:12:56.000I don't know, the factories, were they...
01:13:45.000Yeah, if you want to build something, it's really gotten to the point where you're just getting squoze from every direction.
01:13:51.000And it's adding, you know, I'd rather see another guy get a job than see the union just absorb that much more money.
01:13:59.000Well, any times you have bureaucracy, any time you have a large number of people that are involved in something that really only needs a couple people.
01:14:09.000I mean, how many people really need to be involved in going over your construction plans?
01:15:43.000I mean, you should be able to hire whoever the fuck you want if it's your money and your job.
01:15:47.000But when you're talking about something like, you know, a union that's involved in construction or a union that's involved in, you know, coastal commissions, those type of things, you know, where people are deciding whether or not, the groups of people that decide whether or not this happens to you or that doesn't happen to you.
01:16:45.000You've got to establish a living wage.
01:16:50.000If people are working for you, and this is a valuable thing they're doing for you, you have to pay them enough so they can feed themselves and clothe themselves.
01:17:03.000Things that are going to come up mean you're a piece of their organization and they're demanding to be recognized as a valuable piece of the organization.
01:17:58.000Like you would do four hours in the morning and I would come in at noon and I would take over and I would do the job for the next four hours.
01:18:05.000And then you go to the gym, you go fucking have lunch.
01:18:07.000You literally would work four hours a day.
01:18:53.000I think unions, if used correctly, are a nice sort of insurance to people getting paid a fair wage and getting treated ethically and having money distributed in an ethical and fair way.
01:19:10.000The problem with anything is things don't always go the way they should, best case scenario.
01:19:14.000Yeah, it's almost like you've got to start over again with the unions.
01:19:26.000No, I was thinking about this one woman, though, that works at my kid's school, and she had liquor on her breath, and she was, like, you know, just ignoring the class and reading the paper, and, like, they couldn't get rid of her.
01:19:36.000Yeah, it was just impossible to get rid of her.
01:19:39.000There's so much you have to go through.
01:20:19.000Having groups of people that are all behaving in an ethical way, having them in a large number, like whether it's a big group like the Actors' Union or whether it's a Carpenter's Union, it's fucking really hard.
01:20:34.000It's really hard to get people all together in a group like that to act ethically, to just always be cool.
01:20:43.000There was the Writers Guild East and the Writers Guild West.
01:20:46.000Which effectively, you know, destroyed the power of either one.
01:20:49.000There was AFTRA and SAG, which are both actors' unions.
01:20:52.000They're finally combined now, but it should have been...
01:20:55.000Right now, it should be the DGA, which is the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Actors' Union should all be under the same...
01:21:01.000And IATSE, which is like the technical guys.
01:21:04.000It should all be one union because what they do is the studios will line it up so that the contract for the actors' union comes up in January every two years.
01:21:14.000But then they set up the Writers Guild to renew in February every two years.
01:22:31.000What do you think are the primary benefits of union?
01:22:33.000Well, I've had my health coverage, because I've been in the Writers Guild for like 13 years straight, so I've had my health insurance paid for.
01:24:10.000There's no way, like, most shows shouldn't take more than eight hours to shoot, you know, and instead it takes 15. Why do you think that is?
01:24:38.000So I think with cable, there's usually not a strong hand on the wheel as much as there is in network shows where there's somebody that's a showrunner that really has to answer the studio and say, no, we are done at 6 p.m.
01:26:34.000If they did do it, the culinary union would make some insane amount of money every year, millions of dollars every year.
01:26:39.000So what they do is they have this like smear campaign, like constant smear campaign about the UFC and they hired politicians and one of them actually just got busted.
01:26:47.000This is one of the main guys in New York that they had supposedly that had been a roadblock to getting the UFC legalized in New York.
01:27:01.000The reason being because of corrupt politicians and all goes back to the culinary union trying to keep the UFC, like trying to turn the station casinos into union casinos.
01:27:14.000So they're spending all this money and like...
01:27:33.000Obviously, I don't know all the details, so I should probably say for legal purposes, this is how it's been told to me.
01:27:39.000But ultimately, you know that if there's a lot of money to be made, and you've got some organization that relies on keeping strong numbers of members, they're going to be financially motivated to try to make some things happen.
01:28:47.000And you'd just be rubbing it in your skin.
01:28:48.000So he was filleting fish and training as a boxer?
01:28:51.000Yeah, he's one of the craziest guys I've ever met.
01:28:54.000He got his finger bitten off in a street fight and they replaced it with his toe and they curved it permanently so he could still throw right hooks.
01:30:27.000I know a dude who broke his toe really bad, and they told him he couldn't do jujitsu for six months if they were going to fix the toe, or they could amputate it.
01:31:49.000You also gotta make sure you don't get athlete's foot.
01:31:52.000Athlete's foot is when you get those cracks underneath your toes, like at the base where the ball of your foot reaches the bottom of your toe, that gets all dry and fucked up and cracks and it hurts.
01:32:05.000And a lot of that comes from your toes being dirty.
01:32:08.000It comes from weird fungus getting in there.
01:32:11.000Apparently this is the same as ringworm.
01:32:14.000Athlete's foot is kind of the same fungus as ringworm.
01:32:17.000It's just in a different spot on your body.
01:33:33.000I was reading this thing where they were saying that acidophilus, they believe, can discourage when you touch things, like say if you touch something and it's got some sort of funk on it, and then you accidentally touch your face.
01:33:44.000Well, if you're taking healthy doses of acidophilus, apparently acidophilus will resist the introduction of new bacteria.
01:33:51.000They're like, whoa, whoa, bitch, what are you doing here?
01:34:05.000It's just as important to keep the healthy flora as it is to get rid of the bad shit.
01:34:10.000Yeah, somebody told me, I was reading an article about bacteria, and it's like, there's a pretty big percentage of your body that's made up of bacteria.
01:34:57.000And there's a lot of studies that are trying to link that to autism.
01:35:01.000And they think that autism and poor gut bacteria, intestinal tract bacteria, it might be an issue.
01:35:08.000The inflammation factor, that inflammation might cause all sorts of distress throughout the entire body, like the symbiosis of your stomach, your digestive tract, your circulatory system, and your brain, all of them together, being affected equally, that this digestive disorder might also fuck with people's heads.
01:36:16.000And I went on, like, three different cycles of, I forget it was tetracycline or something, to the point where the doctor was like, you can't keep taking this, and it should just, it should equal out.
01:36:40.000I did fart in an elevator recently, and someone did the running, like, hand in, open the doors, and I came in, and I just looked at them like, hey, it's an asshole move.
01:36:49.000Mine was an asshole move, but you don't open up elevator doors on somebody.
01:36:54.000So because he shoved his arm in the elevator door...
01:36:58.000No, I had just farted, and then I saw the hand come in.
01:37:01.000You don't like people shoving the hand through it?
01:37:03.000I don't think you should do that, ever.
01:37:04.000Unless it's like, if you're in a parking structure in Santa Monica that's six stories and there's like one elevator, so it comes every 12 minutes, you can stick your hand in that.
01:37:12.000But if I'm in an office complex and there's like six banks of elevators or a hotel, you don't stick your hand in the door.
01:37:18.000Wow, but what if the guy's in a super hurry?
01:40:25.000I mean, I'm not asking you personally, but what is it about, like, why would a guy give a shit about a girl if a girl's toes took a hook turn and her feet are all...
01:41:32.000If you go back, I mean, if you put it in context of going back, you could show wealth by saying, it wasn't just the aesthetic of small feet.
01:41:40.000It was also saying, my bitch doesn't have to work.
01:46:45.000Like, what if you did a project for, you know, name X production company, and in the project was they can tweet anything they want from your social media sites?
01:47:04.000I mean, imagine if that was in your contract and they just started putting out like, there's a Tide commercial on your fucking Twitter feed.
01:47:10.000Tide got my clothes smelling fucking amazing.
01:48:02.000You can just tell it wasn't sent by the person that it says it is.
01:48:05.000Well, you get a sense of someone who they are when you read just their posts on a message board or you read their Twitter feed.
01:48:13.000You don't get it all, but if you're reading 140 characters a day over a long period of time, 140 characters a tweet, rather, over a long period of time, you kind of get a sense of the terrain.
01:48:25.000You kind of get a sense of the way people phrase things and say things.
01:49:48.000Sometimes I just don't really have anything to say.
01:49:50.000But, you know, you feel like, ah, I should put something out today, and then you write something, and you go, what the fuck did I write that for?
01:50:00.000Yeah, because I think some days I don't have shit to say.
01:50:02.000I think taking days off, you know, I was talking about this the other day, we were talking about stand-up in this way, that taking days off stand-up, taking weeks off stand-up, I think it was Cal I was talking to, we were talking about how if you go and go and go, your act gets really tight,
01:50:18.000everything feels really good, but when you take like a week off and then jump back in, the enthusiasm just cranks back up again.
01:50:24.000You know, I think that's the case with pretty much everything in life.
01:50:27.000If you do things too much, you lose your perspective.
01:50:30.000Like, you lose, like, what it is about that thing that you really enjoy.
01:50:36.000A bit can get a lot stronger when you walk away from it for a little while and you come back and you go, oh, I didn't even get why I wrote that bit.
01:50:43.000That's what I was originally thinking.
01:51:30.000And the other day, I was on stage, I was in the middle of one bit, and I started thinking about, oh my god, that fits right in there, in like a glove.
01:52:03.000That's why I think stand-up comedy, like, spending time just going over your act is, like, one of the one things that we all could do more of.
01:52:13.000I did this thing with Ari where I went over Shiny Happy Jihad, which was a CD I put out in like 86 or something like that, or 2006 rather.
01:52:22.000And when we went over it, we were talking about why he did this, why he did that, and I really hadn't thought about a lot of it.
01:52:28.000And listening to it for the first time in all these years, I don't remember the jokes.
01:52:32.000So a few of them I remember, but some of them were really making me laugh.
01:52:35.000I never had heard them before, even though they were mine.
01:53:08.000Why don't we try this for the first show and that for the second show?
01:53:11.000Well, that's what's nice about when you go to a club and you work there for three nights is you got two afternoons where you can tape your set and listen to it the next day and think about it and then give yourself some time to write new shit.
01:53:22.000And, you know, you really have nothing to do except focus on your stand-up for, you know, two straight days.
01:53:27.000Then you come back to L.A. and you go on to the improv or somewhere and people are like, wow, you got like fucking a lot of new material there that's good.
01:53:35.000And like you wouldn't have that if you were just working in town.
01:55:23.000My brother was hooking up with one sister, and I was hooking up with the other one.
01:55:27.000And then we would just, like, fuck around and eat and drink, and then we'd go dancing with them at night, and then they'd leave on Sunday night, and they'd give us, like, all this Tupperware with all the leftovers in it that we'd survive on for a couple more days.
01:57:20.000If you thought about the difference between you as a 12-year-old or 11-year-old, and then puberty, and then riding the furious waves of puberty, which is what I call 16, 17, 18. Those years, into 19 even, by the time you figure out how to stay on the wave,
01:57:37.000the wave of hormones that your body starts producing and how different your observations on life are.
01:57:44.000When you're 10, you don't give a fuck about ass or tits or Feet or high heels or the way a girl puts her lipstick on but when you're 17 you're jerking off to magazines like you're taking magazines you're beating off on the girls pictures on magazines like look at naked bodies you're beating off like yeah And I can just remember going into a white noise space where nothing else mattered.
01:58:08.000I was jerking off and the world shut down around me.
01:59:27.000Basically, you know, all the testing that they did on mushrooms and LSD back in the 60s, I mean, starting, I think they started in what, like the 40s, right?
01:59:34.000Well, Gordon Wasson was the guy who originally started bringing mushrooms to the Western world.
01:59:40.000He was the one who started, I think it was Life Magazine.
02:00:33.000And what they're doing is, they're doing controlled testing.
02:00:38.000And they're giving it to people specifically that have terminal illnesses and helping them deal with their mortality, literally, that they're going to die.
02:00:48.000And how do you wrap your head around that?
02:00:50.000How do you deal with the depression that comes with that?
02:00:52.000And they're giving them the mushrooms, and 70% of them are having mystical experiences, like godlike experiences.
02:01:28.000Well, I think if you're at a real transformative period of your life...
02:01:31.000I mean, that's the biggest transformation ever, right?
02:01:34.000Going from life to death, the ultimate last trip that we all take, you're probably like super emotional and very engaged.
02:01:41.000And I would imagine that under that kind of stress and that kind of like uncertainty, a mushroom trip would be even more profound.
02:01:51.000If you have a real powerful psychedelic trip and it doesn't change your complete total view of reality, you probably just didn't get a high enough dose.
02:02:21.000But the difference between that kind of experience and like what they're giving these people in these trials, like you give people like five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms, that's like a big breakthrough dose.
02:02:31.000And you have this overwhelming, like, incredible, visionary, like, transformative experience that most people don't get to.
02:02:40.000Like, the DMT experience is supposedly the most intense out of all the psychedelics, out of all what McKenna used to call, like, the center of the mandala.
02:02:49.000All psychedelic experiences vary, whether it's peyote or mushrooms or...
02:02:56.000Sage, which is that fucking one that everybody gets at grocery stores.
02:03:08.000They all reach some different psychedelic state.
02:03:12.000But the center of the mandala, the craziest one, is the dimethyltryptamine experience.
02:03:16.000And if you have the dimethyltryptamine experience, it's impossible to look at the rest of reality the same way again, because you always know that that's in your head.
02:03:30.000No, but I'm saying how long does the effect last?
02:03:33.000It depends on how much you entrench yourself in the common threads and themes and pathways of everyday life.
02:03:41.000You can jump right back into everyday life and it doesn't last very long at all.
02:03:44.000It's like this unbelievably profound loving experience where when it's happening, you just feel overwhelmed, first of all, by the truth in these entities that you're encountering, like how much they know about you.
02:03:58.000Like, how much they know about who you are.
02:04:01.000And then the reality of, like, that might not even be entities.
02:04:05.000It might be there are many you's that encompass you.
02:04:07.000Just like there's billions of E. coli living in your gut.
02:04:10.000There might be, like, various streams of consciousness that are almost like entities that exist in your mind at any given time.
02:04:18.000And you might be tapping into these and turning these to eleven when you're on a psychedelic.
02:04:23.000It might be what the psychedelic is really doing is introducing you the potential of all the chemicals in your mind if like optimized in this one brief burst of love and color and just geometric objects and patterns just representing imagination at its fullest,
02:04:44.000And then that might be what's happening when you're doing these things.
02:04:46.000But regardless of what the actual, you know, whether it's both or neither one, The experiences themselves, they change the way you view the world because you know that that's possible now.
02:04:57.000Or you never knew that that was possible.
02:04:59.000You always felt like everything in my life, you know, if there was a scale from the worst experiences I've ever had to the best experiences I've ever had, everything is sort of categorized.
02:05:10.000So I was like, well, I know what it's like to be scared.
02:05:12.000Well, I know what it's like to be in a car accident.
02:05:13.000Well, I know what it's like to get a blowjob.
02:05:15.000I know what it's like to play football.
02:05:17.000You know, you have all these things and you say, well, I have a pretty good idea of what life is.
02:05:21.000And And then you take three hits off of this little vaporizer pipe You hear this like crackling, like burning plastic.
02:05:31.000And you see this chrysanthemum looking sort of like the flower of life.
02:05:36.000You know that flower of life that's described?
02:05:38.000Like you see it in a lot of like ancient Hindu art.
02:05:54.000The things that you're seeing are happening so fast, and they're never the same thing.
02:06:00.000You look at something and it becomes something else, like instantly, constantly, always changing.
02:06:04.000So you never can really lock onto anything.
02:06:07.000Everything is constantly moving and morphing and looking at you, and sometimes it's like jesters and they're giving you the finger, and then they disappear behind these fractal cyclones of geometric patterns that turn into flowers, that turn into grass.
02:06:22.000They're turning to babies coming out of vaginas.
02:06:54.000I'm supposed to, you know, achieve that in whatever means I can, you know, whether it's exercise or, you know, sex or whatever it is that you've just stopped doing because you're so depressed.
02:07:04.000It gives you the inspiration to try to get back there.
02:07:26.000But the people that do do it, that are in a good place when they wind up doing it, oftentimes experience this profound sense of being loved.
02:07:38.000That's what it's said in this, is they have people that walk you through it that are professionals at guiding you through this kind of experience.
02:07:45.000Yeah, that's super, super, super important.
02:07:48.000Like a lot of those indigenous tribes that do these shamanic rituals, they have very rigid sort of ideas of like, this is what we do.
02:07:59.000We sit down and we're all going to talk, we're all going to drink this liquid.
02:08:04.000This guy's going to blow tobacco smoke and play the drums and it's like slowly going to come on and it's like orchestrated.
02:08:10.000Like they're setting this up and this guy's going to sing and these guys will sing these things called Icaros.
02:08:15.000And these Icaros are these songs that they sing that accompany the DMT experience.
02:08:21.000So when you smoke DMT and you listen to these songs, you see these things dancing like as they're Like, I'll play it for you.
02:09:07.000I think you should be able to do whatever you want to do as far as if you want to run around and you want to have a good time and do mushrooms or drink whiskey or whatever it is.
02:09:21.000I was going to say, but when you see these studies coming out about the benefits of it, it makes you feel bad that all these people were...
02:09:59.000Someone, I don't know who was responsible for it all, but there was this sweeping...
02:10:06.000Illegalization or, you know, sweeping Prohibition Act that covered shit that's not even psychoactive.
02:10:11.000They just started marking things illegal.
02:10:14.000They didn't know exactly what was legal, what wasn't legal, but they lumped shit in like everything that was Schedule 1. There's all non-toxic, non-lethal drugs that are Schedule 1, like a giant percentage of them, which is crazy because that just shows you that there's a giant problem with the way they're classifying drugs still in 2015. Marijuana federally is still a Schedule 1 drug.
02:11:39.000If you get that close to the abyss, I mean, the experiences that you have in those things, if you have a weak heart, it would probably be incredibly taxing because a lot of people feel like they're going to die.
02:12:28.000They only had like seven batches of it, and they gave it to seven people, and they were all cured.
02:12:32.000But they knew about it since the 70s, but it's taken them this many years to develop it because none of the pharmaceutical companies can make a profit off of it.
02:12:43.000Because the government wasn't buying it.
02:12:45.000They weren't really, you know, actively, you know, they were looking for a cure but not really putting any money behind it.
02:12:51.000And so, but in order to make this cure, they have to like take fucking thousands of acres of this special kind of tobacco and they have to soak it in this chemical and all to come up with like a dozen doses.
02:13:11.000When you think about what these indigenous tribes have been able to do with these plants, that's when it gets really strange.
02:13:17.000Think about the fact that they've figured out a big percentage of the pharmaceutical drugs that we use today, a big percentage of them come from rainforests.
02:16:36.000Because you're not going to jot it down while you're doing it.
02:16:39.000It'd be great if they come up with a technology where they can videotape what your imagination is going through while you're tripping on something, and then show it in major theaters around the country.
02:16:48.000That's one of the things that someone, it might have been McKenna again, was speculating that one of the best ways to deliver a psychedelic trip to someone was virtual reality and figuring out a way through CGI imagery to reproduce the effects of the trip,
02:17:10.000If they could get the technology to that point, where someone could go trip, do mushrooms or do DMT, trip, and then figure out a way to reproduce that.
02:17:21.000Then you would take the drugs out, somebody could just watch the trip and feel the trip?
02:17:26.000Yeah, that it could be possible, that it could be done that way.
02:17:28.000He was totally believing it could be done that way.
02:17:32.000There's people that say they could do it with yoga, man.
02:17:34.000There's people that say they can have full-blown psychedelic experiences, hallucinations, visuals, you know, transported to the center of the universe and dancing with angels, the whole deal.
02:18:56.000And then you just feel totally rested and centered and stress is gone and like my baseline of depression has been so much higher since I started.
02:19:56.000But it does have a resonant sound because they say even mentally there's some kind of reverberation that goes on.
02:20:02.000So this, just doing this, has raised, like, whatever depression that you do get, it takes a longer time to come on and it's less impactful?
02:20:28.000You know, everybody in my family's got it.
02:20:30.000And it's just something that, you know, you can medicate it, you can exercise it out, or you can, you know, there's a lot of different ways to go at it.
02:20:38.000That's a weird way that we have to regulate the mind, to manage the mind, by just taking a thing.
02:20:46.000Like a sound and rolling it over in your mind over and over and over again.
02:20:50.000And it's almost like a cycle, like a cleaning cycle.
02:21:31.000You introduce a cleaning agent for 20 minutes and you nip all the buds and parse all the problems and settle it all down.
02:21:41.000That makes sense because me at my worst in my life, when I've felt most out of control in my life or doing the wrong shit or least in control of my emotions, I've always felt like I was on...
02:22:14.000Get into that space where you just let it all go, and once you do let it all go, you can start fresh.
02:22:21.000But when you don't get a chance to do that, it seems like you're constantly dealing with this phone call, what's connected to that thing that you've got to take care of, you didn't clean out that thing, and fuck, and this guy wants to meet you because you're supposed to do that thing, and it's all like, ah!
02:22:49.000I mean, not to be Freudian, because I'm not Freudian, but there are aberrations in your thoughts in terms of how we perceive ourselves and what external events...
02:22:59.000How we identify ourselves based on external events like, I didn't get this job.
02:23:08.000There's ways of having cognitive changes where you stop yourself from thinking what you thought from being a child and having a father that beat you or even something more subtle.
02:23:19.000Things that affected over time the way you connected external events to how you felt about yourself.
02:23:25.000And you can go in and you can just, by repeating, you know, no, that doesn't mean that, you know, that just means that this happened, like power of now.
02:23:35.000It's like you don't, you know, a thought is not a reality.
02:23:38.000It's just something that is flowing through you and you can notice it and you can comment on it without internalizing it and going for the full ride.
02:23:46.000You say that's one of the things that people have the hardest time with when it comes to sufferers, people that are trying to overcome the Abuse that they had when they were in childhood because that abuse oftentimes defines them.
02:24:02.000They feel like they're a shitty person for being abused.
02:24:05.000You're damaged because you've been abused.
02:24:08.000And you sort of define yourself by this abuse that you've suffered.
02:24:11.000Where you can't look at the bright side of things.
02:24:15.000Bad things are always going to happen to you.
02:24:17.000It's like you've defined yourself in some way because of the abuse that you've suffered.
02:24:21.000Or you even caused the abuse because you're bad.
02:24:27.000So then when anything bad happens in your life, you go back to thinking you caused it.
02:24:31.000It makes you think if this psychedelic legislation of the 1970s, if it never had been passed, and if these 35 years since that happened, if people had been allowed to explore These things and come to these conclusions and try to figure out what are the beneficial aspects of the way we behave and the way we think and the way we sort of qualify and quantify life's meaning.
02:24:57.000Whether it's financial or whether it's family.
02:25:08.000So much more thinking would have taken place on these really, people could say they're frivolous, these are distractions, but they're not.
02:25:17.000These ideas and concepts that you develop when you're either doing psychedelics or meditating or Anything where you're involved in sort of an active assessment and resetting of your consciousness, whether it's yoga, meditation, whatever the fuck it is,
02:25:33.000tanks, isolation tanks, what you're doing is you're allowing yourself time to reflect on what you're doing and whether or not it's beneficial and what could be changed.
02:25:43.000And if you don't have that reflection time, you oftentimes don't change unless you fall completely apart and you're forced to rebuild.
02:25:50.000You have to bottom out to change, yeah.
02:26:56.000For me, I think changing it with a shallow bottom meant that there was so much more baggage that went with it, you know, that I was bottoming out with feeling that I was dependent on something and I wasn't, I couldn't be myself fully because there was a part of my psyche that was locked up in this thing.
02:27:12.000And that was enough for me to go, I got to change.
02:27:14.000I don't want to live my life like that.
02:27:57.000Yeah, and it's funny because Boston, AA in Boston is a very intense thing because with the same power they drank with, they got sober with.
02:28:05.000You know, they would rage with sobriety.
02:28:09.000The people that used it and it worked for them, that's fantastic.
02:28:12.000But for some of them, it became like two meetings a day and, you know, you got three sponsors and it's like, you know, that's great, but, you know, move along a little bit here.
02:28:23.000You're getting a little caught up in this thing.
02:29:03.000But it was in Worcester and the AA community gets together and they do these conventions where they had like, you know, a thousand people coming from all over New England staying in this hotel and just having meetings.
02:33:19.000I had all the Mad magazines starting in 1975. I had a subscription all the way through, probably like three, four, five years, and I had them all.
02:33:28.000And then my mom just tossed them all out while I was in college, cleaned out the attic.
02:33:55.000And when I was like seven, eight years old, when we all started living together, I guess I was like seven, I got introduced to this weird...
02:34:05.000Kind of comic books they would leave in the bathroom.
02:35:17.000Like, watching this weird fucking guy with glasses, R. Crumb, like his version of himself that he would do, like, Riding on top of these women with these enormous asses and high heels.
02:35:26.000It was very strange, but you could tell.
02:35:29.000For him, this was like this wild fantasy.
02:35:34.000Insight into a really extremely creative artist and all the weird demons that flow through his brain or angels, whatever it is, that make him create his very strange art.
02:35:48.000I'm trying to think if there's anything like that today.
02:35:50.000I mean, there's all these cartoons, like Adult Swim kind of cartoons that are a little offbeat, but they're nowhere near as raw as this stuff is.
02:38:21.000I'm going to say that if you got in touch with him and you said, I'll come to you, I want to talk to you, I'm a big fan, he wouldn't give a shit if it was a podcast or whatever.
02:38:29.000I bet you that guy would sit down with you.
02:38:55.000I remember my sister used to work at an art gallery in New York, the Alexander Gallery, and they had an Art Crumb exhibit, and I remember asking her, and she said, no, he didn't come.
02:42:05.000A lot of the racist stuff that he did, he wasn't necessarily being racist as he was highlighting how a racist would view something and doing it in a very shocking way.
02:42:17.000I don't think I've ever read anything, I might be wrong, but I don't think I've ever read anything that indicated that he was actually racist.
02:42:42.000In the same way that when I was 12 years old, the pictures that I would make would probably be in the wheelhouse of the shit that he was making.
02:42:49.000He just made it much better and he did it as a man.
02:42:51.000But to put big pussy lips and nipples that are four inches long, that's what he used to write.
02:43:00.000Well, also, I guess what he was doing with a lot of his images, there were racist pop culture images from the 1940s.
02:43:08.000So he was reviving this very specific type of imagery that was really racist.
02:43:13.000And so the real question, the argument in this article on hoodedutilitarian.com, the argument was whether or not it was ironic and or parody And,
02:43:28.000like, whether it's enough to absolve him of doing, you know, these images, of re-enacting them or recreating them.
02:44:21.000Yeah, you don't become racist by looking at racist shit, right?
02:44:24.000The idea is affecting developing minds, developing personalities, children.
02:44:31.000Adolescents, showing them racist stuff and letting them know it's okay, that can plant racist seeds.
02:44:36.000But once you're an adult, no one's going to make you racist.
02:44:40.000If you're Greg Fitzsimmons in 2015 and you see some fucking ridiculous racist imagery, you're not going to automatically become racist, right?
02:44:49.000So the real concern is, are we protecting people from these satire images because we're worried about the impact of them or because it's offensive?
02:51:37.000They have all these different things that they call upon when they define various aspects of negative people that you encounter in your life that disbelieve the tenets of Scientology.
02:51:46.000Yeah, there's like orgs, orbs, something.
02:51:50.000I read a book about, written by the niece of the guy who is the head of Scientology.
02:52:15.000Every time she gets settled in, they just uproot her, separate her from her brother, send her to fucking Florida, send her to L.A., the Desert.
02:52:24.000And she talked about how the kids built the entire colony that they lived in.
02:52:29.000They would just put them out to work every day.
02:52:32.000They'd work like eight hours just weeding and gardening and building fences and all this crazy shit.
02:52:38.000And they would get schooled for like two hours a day and it was mostly Scientology schooling.
02:53:57.000And they would come down and, like, threaten her, threaten her brother who was still inside the church, threaten her mother— They don't fuck around.