In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, I sit down with a good friend of mine, Brian Callan, to talk about his stand-up career and what it's like to work at a comedy club in Kentucky. We also talk about what it s like to be a comedian in the big city of Louisville, KY and how it s not as easy as it sounds. I also talk a little bit about my upcoming show this weekend at the Cobb's Comedy Club, which is a great place to do stand up comedy in the area, and how to get a gig at one of the most famous comedy clubs in the country. Also, I talk about how I got into standup comedy and why I don t have any pressure to do comedy anymore, and why it s a good thing I don't have to do any other type of comedy. I also get into a lot of other stuff, too, but that s another story for another time. Enjoy! -Joe Rogans Experience Podcast is brought to you by The Fleshlight. -The Fleshlight Podcast is a production of Gimlet Media. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review and tell a friend about what you think of the podcast. We'll be looking out for more shows like this in the future! - Thank you so much for all the support and shoutouts! -The Joe Rogans Podcast. XOXO, Brian Rogans, and the Fleshlight Crew. Thank you for all your support and love you all so much love and support! -Jon Rogan's Podcast! Jon Rogan, Justin Edberg, Jake, and the boys at Super Entertainment, - Thankyou, Justin, the JOGAN Experience Podcast -Josie and the JOBEROGAN Podcast, JOE ROGAN, and all the JOE JERAN EXPERIENCES - THE JOE JRAN EXCUSES! -JOSIE ROGA, THE JOBAN EPISODES, JOSIE JOERAN EPIC AND THE PODCAST - JOBE RODAN EXPRESS, JOBEYE AND THE FOSTER, AND THE MALAYA RYAN BOWYER EPISODE - JORDAN AND THE WEEKS, AND MORE!
00:02:37.000It's like they put emphasis on the fact that they go, if you come here and pay a premium, you're going to laugh your ass off for two hours.
00:03:45.000When I was at Gersh, Gersh had some secret deal with the improvs that they didn't tell me about.
00:03:50.000It was really creepy because other clubs would tell me, like a few of them would say, hey, I've been trying to book you forever and I could never book you.
00:04:10.000But what I did is, that's why you separate the powers.
00:04:13.000That's why you get a booking agent who's going to make his own money on you in his own way.
00:04:17.000Isn't it sort of, there's a fucking dance, man, between big business, which you can't have a fucking society like this without a big business.
00:04:25.000You know, and it extends from comedy clubs into pretty much anything.
00:04:29.000Let me give you an example of why that's good and why it's bad.
00:04:32.000Let's take, for example, have you noticed that when you travel the country, there aren't a lot of restaurants that are locally owned?
00:04:38.000So you don't see a lot of mom and pop restaurants with character.
00:04:41.000A lot of times you go into a place and you've got Hooters.
00:05:26.000So if you open a restaurant and somebody gets food poisoning and they sue you, A lot of times you better have really good insurance because keeping up with those medical bills, if four people get E. coli or whatever it might be and you have a local restaurant, we'll see you later.
00:05:41.000The reason that a lot of these restaurants take a chance of opening up, it's very hard to make a restaurant work anyway.
00:05:46.000The reason you open a restaurant if you're P.F. Chang's, you got deep pockets and you become a corporation.
00:05:52.000You can withstand any kind of bullshit you deal with when it comes to lawsuits, Are they franchises?
00:05:58.000Are they all protected under the same umbrella financially and legally?
00:07:58.000I love the way the guy thinks, the way he really loves.
00:08:02.000He went to South Boston, did this awesome episode on South Boston, and the way he fucking loves a town, like a real town, which South Boston is.
00:08:10.000And he went to these places in New York in this one Italian bakery.
00:08:15.000Or it's like a deli, but not a bakery.
00:09:26.000The weirdest thing about the Amish, did you ever see that documentary where they, what's that thing they do called Rumskeller or something like that?
00:10:07.000It's also a life that connects you to a community.
00:10:10.000And a very strong community with history.
00:10:11.000And also I think it's really easy, it's a lot easier in some ways to grow up that way because you're given a, your boundaries and the way to behave and the blueprint for how to live your life is laid out for you.
00:10:24.000A lot of times we grow up in this country with no blueprint.
00:10:27.000You gotta kind of make it up as you go along.
00:11:52.000There's a contrarian streak in a human being.
00:11:55.000It's why any time you see any government experiment in history, in any society, where it's a monarchy, an oligarchy, whether it's a collectivist sort of nature, we're all going to behave this way and these are the rules.
00:12:37.000She's gonna grab your dick like it was a rope hanging over a canyon and she fell out of an airplane and just caught it before sudden death.
00:12:46.000Like fucking Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger.
00:14:42.000I think with the power of any kind of religion or anything, anytime you try to go beyond that which you can measure, I think a lot of belief has to do with less to do with superstition and more to do.
00:14:55.000So the same way you listen to a piece of music that gets you pumped to go do something, I think people can derive the same kind of strength and inspiration from Scripture.
00:16:14.000And the Nazis killed a lot of people, but that kind of...
00:16:16.000No, listen, if the Muslims had kicked the ass that the Christians did, we would all be learning that Muhammad was the thing, and we wouldn't be celebrating Christmas.
00:16:23.000We'd be celebrating some walk around the big box.
00:16:26.000No, but I do think that there is a resilience to things like love thy enemy and unforgiveness.
00:16:37.000And the reason why we are immersed in Christianity is because this epoch, this world that we're living in, we're dealing with a very small amount of time.
00:16:44.000It seems like an enormous amount of time for us.
00:16:46.000But the amount of time that the Christian religion has dominated the earth is not the same amount of time that back when the Romans were dominating shit or the Greeks were dominating shit.
00:16:53.000They had a couple thousand years on us.
00:16:56.000We've only been around for a couple hundred years.
00:17:55.000There's some crazy, weird survival thing going on.
00:17:58.000And the only way to truly be happy is you have to be on whatever team your race is.
00:18:03.000If you're a dog and you're ratting out all these other dogs and then the people run around and club the dogs to death in front of you, you'll be a shitty dog.
00:18:46.000And biologists would argue with you over the semantics, over the word evolution, saying that evolution only pertains to a biological thing.
00:18:53.000That you don't have evolution of culture.
00:20:07.000You have access right now to too much information for our puny brains.
00:20:11.000And that's where religion and any sort of a predetermined pattern of behavior that you can follow as an operating system, whether it's being an Amish person or anything, that's why they come in handy.
00:20:22.000You look, the fucking meltdown in Japan and fucking Mississippi's underwater and you, the fucking tornadoes that go through Alabama and birds are falling from the sky.
00:21:14.000When you got consumption, which is another word for tuberculosis...
00:21:17.000It's just any time you read any piece of literature or history from even 50 years ago, it is always a story about somebody, Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Prize winning playwright.
00:21:28.000His brother got tuberculosis and he had to watch him die.
00:21:32.000And Long Day's Journey in the Night is about that.
00:21:43.000Look at polio 60 years ago, 50 years ago, when kids were on iron lungs.
00:21:48.000And the best case scenario, your child is four, he'll never walk again.
00:21:51.000That was the best case scenario, but usually you just died because your lungs didn't hold up.
00:21:55.000And we've invented, that's the fundamental difference.
00:21:58.000Nobody that's listening right now, I guarantee, Nobody knows anybody who has even been crippled by something like polio, scarred by something like smallpox.
00:22:06.000So the world, in a lot of ways, we're feeding.
00:22:09.000In the 70s, in the 70s, and especially in the 60s, China and India, half the world's population was starving, man.
00:22:19.000They couldn't even, they had to import grain.
00:22:41.000It's so overwhelming and moving so quickly that people feel like, since they can't understand it, they have to come up with some kind of a debunking mechanism or something they can understand or at least something they can hold on to, and that's where religion plays a huge part.
00:22:53.000I don't think technology is pushing religion out of the way.
00:22:57.000In some ways, I think this huge exponential growth of technology is actually ushering in Another wave, and that is a wave of very religious people who don't know how to put this technological wave into context.
00:23:15.000Tissue regeneration, all the stuff we talk about.
00:23:17.000It's also that you're able to contact many people.
00:23:32.000He's like, you know, back before the internet, if you had a fetish, man, it was just really hard to find like, you know, a group or just anybody you could get hit with.
00:23:38.000You'd have to go out to dinner and be like, I'll be right back.
00:24:00.000You know, and sometimes, you know, you get in conversations like, you know, like you find out things like cream pies and, you know, and foot jobs and all these different like really creepy things that are just totally standard.
00:24:32.000This is the very day that the darkness, the dark side of sexuality was revealed to me.
00:24:38.000Because normally when you find these magazines, you'd find like Time magazine, You know, and then there would be like a Playboy inside of it.
00:24:46.000Like if you would find one over someone's house.
00:24:48.000But if you find them in the woods, you know, like I never bought a magazine until I was like 20. You always found them over someone's house or you stole it from your dad's bathroom or something.
00:24:56.000But the magazines that you would get from your dad were like Penthouse if you were lucky.
00:25:15.000It was me and my friends, and I'll never forget this.
00:25:18.000Because my friend Juan, my friend Juan Alvarado, he was the first one to talk.
00:25:23.000And we're all sitting around looking at this magazine, and we peel through it page by page for like five minutes.
00:25:29.000And he finally goes, dude, I think this magazine's all dicks and feet.
00:25:38.000It was the whole magazine was dicks and feet.
00:25:42.000And I remember this because also, it was the first time my friend Josh, who was the next one to speak, it was the first time I ever heard someone say, what the fuck, in a way that I knew they didn't really want an answer.
00:25:54.000You know, when you say what the fuck, occasionally you say what the fuck like you come home, there's water everywhere.
00:28:48.000Technology, for example, in porn, for example, it gives you exactly what you want right now in every technicolor detail.
00:28:55.000And there was an article I read by this, I can't remember her name, this woman who said that they're finding this interesting phenomenon with teenage boys, and that is that these kids now have access to RedTube, and they're watching porn starting at 10, 9. And they're getting exactly what they want.
00:31:22.000The Vidocq Society, where they get together the third Thursday of every month, all these retired profilers and And detectives and they solve cold cases.
00:31:31.000And the rule is it's got to be an unjust case where a little girl was killed.
00:31:34.000It can't be a drug dealer who was knocked off.
00:31:37.000But it's usually they deal with serial killers and people got away with it and they think it's a serial killer.
00:31:57.000And once you get into the fetish, once you get into, you know, whatever it might be coming on somebody's feet, and then you want to, then you want to, you know, maybe choke them or whatever, you don't go back.
00:32:08.000You mentally never go back to being normal.
00:32:11.000Once you start going down the rabbit hole, Some people stop.
00:33:04.000Well, there's a lot of new science to suggest that if you are an evil person, let's just say you're a serial killer or you're just a killer, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that You lack the ability, not only with the medigula, which is the part of the brain that, I guess, deals with compassion and things,
00:33:20.000but you also may also not have the neuron synapses required to actually fire when somebody's being hurt and it causes a sense of disdain or you feel bad about it.
00:33:37.000So, as we learn more about the brain, it may just be that criminals, for the most part, are brain damaged, are simply brain damaged.
00:33:44.000So that raises a really important question.
00:33:47.000If, then, you can prove that someone has a lesion the size of a pinhead on a certain part of their brain that causes them to lack any kind of compassion and, in fact, causes them not to be able to feel at all, and so they have to do crazy shit just to feel, Just to be alive.
00:34:33.000Could you imagine if you were walking around and some guy killed your sister?
00:34:35.000He's like, hey, sorry, I just had some shit wrong in my brain.
00:34:38.000No, but it does raise questions we're going to be grappling with.
00:34:41.000Another thing about technology, as we learn more about the brain, and you find that a lot of criminals have an underdeveloped, for example, medigula.
00:35:48.000I think that you're definitely wounded sometime in a crucial stage of your development, probably.
00:35:54.000That's another theory I've heard, where people say, as you're developing, a lot of times, if you're developing sexually and mentally at a certain age, and you see something really horrific and violent, you can associate violence with sexual release.
00:36:30.000The mystery is that you see people who go through the worst abuse in the world and they come out of it incredible people who give back to society and they're everybody's hero.
00:36:40.000And then you see somebody where one thing happens.
00:36:43.000One thing happens at the right time, and they're in and out of rehab for the rest of their life.
00:36:48.000Look at people who make a shitload of money.
00:36:50.000A lot of their kids are good-looking, tall, they're doing all the things, and they spend their whole life battling a drug problem, whereas one dude comes up in an orphanage and ends up running a company or whatever it might be.
00:37:01.000Yeah, but I think it's all really kind of clear.
00:37:04.000If you look at it in the progression of their lives, what kind of experiences have they had, how they move towards solving or getting past that experience, and what can you learn from watching them?
00:37:14.000If you really wanted to take the crazy point of view, the crazy point of view is that...
00:37:20.000This world is really your imagination.
00:37:21.000And that everything that takes place in this world is really a lesson for you.
00:39:30.000Where Maren was talking about how if he was upset with anything, it was that his parents never instilled a sense of healthy competition in him.
00:39:36.000For him, it was always, if he's losing the game, he's throwing the board up in the air, and then the fucking game's over.
00:40:20.000And you get used to losing and winning and you realize that The good that you do, whether you do good at jujitsu or any other game, one of the reasons why I'm obsessed with games is because there's a direct correlation in my mind between focusing excellence, like focusing my energy and my concentration on something, and then seeing direct results, and then applying those direct results to the rest of my life.
00:40:40.000And with some people, they never have any real competition in their life.
00:40:44.000And because of that, when anything comes up, anything that's big, anything that does require you to rise the occasion or deal with a social issue, you fucking lock up, man.
00:41:43.000If you want to be that guy flying through the fucking air with your tongue out in front of the baddest motherfucking basketball players in the world and kicking shit on a level that they've never seen before, Dr. J, suck my dick, stupid.
00:42:58.000And Michael Jordan is just this ultra bad motherfucker who's obsessed with it.
00:43:02.000He just has to constantly get new pussy.
00:43:05.000He has to constantly get the latest Ferrari.
00:43:07.000He has to constantly be playing golf and winning money and gambling on basketball games and gambling on baseball games and gambling on whatever the fuck he can, man.
00:44:54.000If you're a pro athlete or you're a hip hop, the first thing you should do in your entourage is have fucking three accountants following you everywhere.
00:45:01.000Just hire, go to New York, find a Jewish or Italian accountant, have them fucking follow you around all the time.
00:45:05.000Well, you know, Iran Barkley, you know who he was, right?
00:45:07.000Beat Thomas Hearns, former, I think, super middleweight champion.
00:45:19.000But what they were saying, what he was saying, rather, was he was hanging out with Eddie Murphy and Michael, or hanging out with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall.
00:45:25.000And he's like, I had to fucking keep up, you know?
00:45:28.000So he was, you know, buying a Mercedes and the best watches.
00:45:33.000And, you know, that's like the most transient of jobs or the most temporary of jobs.
00:45:39.000And by the way, how much money, you would know better than I would, if you make, if you get a $20 million payday, right, and you're a boxer, how much of that money after taxes and jail?
00:46:37.000of things you have to pay and the bills are high but the the amount of money that you actually get is like 34 cents on a dollar something silly like that it's something ridiculous yeah so yeah so these guys spend like they actually have 20 million bucks but that's part of the fun man it's part of the fun is watching someone walking around with giant diamond encrusted chains and crazy fucking watches and then a month later finding out that they lost their house there's something there's something for you for your own amusement Joe Rogan knew a comic who had a huge deal.
00:48:57.000Thailand is the only country, well, you can make the argument for Vietnam, but they've gone through so many wars fighting for their independence.
00:51:28.000The king, from what I understand, his son is a little bit different.
00:51:31.000His son has fallen a little bit out of favor with the people.
00:51:34.000He's a playboy and he's a product of just having a lot of money.
00:51:37.000But his dad, his dad is, and by the way, I mean, his son was, you don't hear bad things about his son, but his father was always this sort of sober, stayed presence.
00:52:09.000Like a lot of things about the Thai women, like people think, well, because there are a lot of like strip clubs and there's a big sex trade there that Thai women are loose.
00:55:21.000This is something I wanted to talk to you about because I wanted to know if you remember the place that you were when you heard the news that the prince was wed.
00:57:29.000It's because there, right now, will absolutely be an active campaign to discredit him.
00:57:34.000If they have murdered him, if they did shoot Osama bin Laden and he was unarmed, They will discredit him.
00:57:39.000And one of the ways they're going to discredit him is to make him look vain and to make him look like he's a crazy dictator who's, you know, living in squalor, like he's an insane person.
00:57:47.000So if you show pictures of his house and his house is all fucked up in disarray and there's blood all over the place and there's just garbage everywhere and then you show pictures of his beard and it's black, he looks like a nutty man.
00:57:58.000Do you see the video of him there just watching TV, though?
00:58:23.000And they have to be privy to all kinds of information, not to mention the Security Council and everything else.
00:58:27.000If you take a look at, and I'm talking about the hundred people at least who have top secret clearance, who all have different agendas and have no interest in glorifying Barack Obama at all, a lot of those people.
00:58:40.000I mean, the idea that you could ever pull off this fake assassination of Osama bin Laden after we've been trying to get him for this long, it wouldn't work even in a Hollywood movie.
00:58:53.000And when you talk about fake stories, what the CIA was doing with those fake stories was they were leaking them.
00:58:57.000It's true to Al Jazeera and things like that, but mainly what they would do is they want to get information out of you and you're a young man.
00:59:04.000Who believes in your Iman and you got captured?
00:59:07.000They'll show you a fake headline of the New York Times and they'll say, look what happened.
00:59:11.000All your guys have been killed and all of them are singing like canaries.
00:59:15.000They used all kinds of techniques like that.
00:59:17.000There's no doubt that you don't want to trust the CIA, but what's wonderful about our government, and this is just a fact, is anytime you try to keep a secret or come up with a huge conspiracy like this, you're dealing with 16 other people who have a totally different agenda who want nothing more than to expose you.
00:59:33.000And any time you have a group of people, whether it's Kissinger and Nixon or whoever, who try to come up with their own agenda to steer foreign policy or, my God, come up with a way to glorify their president, which is what this did for the Democrats.
00:59:47.000And I'll tell you something, the Republicans are going to have no...
00:59:49.000They can no longer use the notion that Obama is weak on terrorism for this upcoming election.
00:59:54.000So I can promise you there were plenty of Republicans who would have loved to have taken credit for this.
01:01:02.000It is a third of a mile or something crazy, or three miles less, away from what Pakistan's West Point is, this huge military facility.
01:01:10.000They're going to scramble jets, which they did, and a whole bunch of other things, the minute they start hearing gunshots right in their quarter.
01:01:17.000And by the way, there are a lot of people in the military who probably know he's already there anyway.
01:02:38.000I agree with everything you said about the SEAL Team 6, the baddest motherfuckers in the world.
01:02:42.000These are the guys that, by the way, if you don't know, being a SEAL is incredibly difficult.
01:02:46.000Then they take the best of the SEALs and 50% of them wash out because they can't handle what it takes to be in SEAL Team 6. I mean, I've read the Dick Marchenko books and all the...
01:02:56.000Dude, they're on another level of human being.
01:02:59.000They're on another level of human being.
01:03:01.000Boss Rootin was telling me how he trains the SEAL Team 6, and there's a record they had for running up and down this hill.
01:03:17.000Yeah, and they're not going to do—they all have different agendas, but the bottom line is the government has lied about a bunch of stories like this in the past.
01:03:27.000There's a woman that was, she was inside of a fucking hospital, and they pretended there was this crazy gunfight to get her out and rescue her from the Iraqis.
01:03:34.000And what really turned out was it was just a girl in a hospital, and there was no bullet shot at all.
01:03:39.000To your point, what you just said, let me piggyback on that.
01:04:53.000They put it through a facial recognition scan right away, which is about as they take the geometric portions where your nose, your eyes, it's like a fingerprint.
01:05:35.000He said, how come they identified his body within an hour, yet it takes these poor fucking guys that are wrongly accused 30 years to get a DNA match to get out of prison?
01:05:50.000Is it really that important to kill some guy living in squalor?
01:05:53.000I mean, is it that much more important than rescuing citizens that are wrongly accused?
01:05:57.000It's a good question, Joe, because it also raises, this assassination raises a fuckload of questions, one of which is, now that we've gotten the big name, Do you have a justification for being in Afghanistan?
01:07:01.000The Chinese would kill tigers and get their In Afghanistan, the number one way that they bribe warlords, because if you don't know, the way Afghanistan is structured today in 2011, the reason why it's an unwinnable country and an unwinnable war is because it's not a country.
01:07:16.000It's a series of warlords that are all kind of interconnected, and they all live in these villages.
01:08:07.000It's funny, there was some, you know, everyone keeps on, all these Osama stories are coming out, and they're saying, like, people are saying that Osama was a huge video gamer, that he used to play guitar hero, and so it's like all these bullshit stories now are coming out.
01:08:43.000The crazy thing is that he used to work for us.
01:08:45.000He used to be down with the CIA when we were training the Mujahideen to fight against the Soviets.
01:08:50.000That motherfucker was down in America.
01:08:52.000He never took a paycheck from the CIA, but he did himself open a lot of hospitals with his own money and things like that when the Soviets were invading and trying to colonize Afghanistan.
01:09:07.000If you were going to have a story that was going to...
01:09:10.000I mean, again, the view that the world is a theater played out for your own enjoyment.
01:09:14.000If you were going to have this story come to any conclusion, this is the best conclusion ever.
01:09:19.000Because if this was a fucking movie, if this was the Hulk and the bad guy had just died mysteriously and they dumped him in C, they'd go, okay.
01:09:26.000And you'd buckle up and the credits would roll and you'd go, fucking for sure there's going to be a sequel.
01:09:46.000When you hear about the Jessica Lynch story, you have to wonder, man.
01:09:50.000You have to wonder how much of this story is true and how much of it is not.
01:09:53.000Is it possible that they stormed this fucking compound, there are a bunch of Islamic militants there, There are a bunch of bad guys they were looking for.
01:10:01.000They cap these motherfuckers, but there's no Bin Laden.
01:10:04.000They say, all right, here's what we do.
01:10:16.000We've been telling them this whole time.
01:10:18.000Yeah, they're fucking hiding Bin Laden.
01:10:20.000And that's why we need to go to Pakistan with these drones and shoot hellfire missiles out of these drones to the mountainside to fuck all these people up.
01:10:33.000I think it actually puts the U.S. in a really tough position because now you've got a lot of people asking very tough questions of Pakistan saying you guys didn't know he was there.
01:10:41.000And Pakistan has been our ally for the most part.
01:10:44.000They're not really, but they've ostensibly been our ally because we need them.
01:11:26.000And around there, they go, you guys are gonna be gone in 10 years.
01:11:29.000We gotta deal with what's really going on.
01:11:31.000So you want us to be mean to the quote-unquote Taliban?
01:11:35.000Like you said, you know who the Taliban is?
01:11:36.000It's the dude with the biggest fucking guns and the most drugs, okay?
01:11:39.000That's who's gonna be holding the cards after you guys leave.
01:11:42.000So after your centralized government, that big experiment where you have democracy in a country that's always been a series of tribes, you're gonna tell me, what are you gonna do then?
01:11:50.000We have to deal with that fucking mess.
01:11:52.000We got to deal with that law, this area, Waziristan, etc.
01:12:39.000You're going to tell people how to behave?
01:12:40.000The minute you come in there and you're a foreigner who doesn't speak their language, and you're telling them how to fucking live, what do people do?
01:12:46.000The minute they do that, they go, get Get the fuck out of here.
01:12:48.000And if I can't shoot you, I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut.
01:12:50.000And when you're gone, spend all your money.
01:12:52.000When you're fucking gone, I'm gonna do whatever I want.
01:13:09.000Mexico's got tacos and tacos aren't worth that much.
01:13:12.000I believe that the only thing that has resilience, the only thing that changes anything in life and the only thing that has resilience is ideas.
01:13:25.000When an idea takes hold, like the constitution of this country or whatever, when an idea takes hold, if an idea called democracy takes hold, it'll fucking change and bring down military dictatorships.
01:13:34.000Take a look at fucking all of South America.
01:14:21.000One, the final vestige of that is North Korea.
01:14:23.000And those people suffer so horribly it's sick.
01:14:26.000But that's the one place in the world that still somehow this tyrannical dictator has the lid on.
01:14:33.000But there is a, like we were saying, there is an evolution of freedom, isn't there?
01:14:38.000Right, but it's true that the CIA is without a doubt involved in orchestrating a lot of these revolts.
01:14:43.000It's not that these things are happening organically.
01:14:46.000Wesley Clark in 2007 talked about the United States plan in all these different foreign countries, and many of them that have dictatorships, including Libya.
01:14:54.000And he talked about the plans to overthrow Libya, and this was in 2007. It's true, but you know, this Spring Awakening really actually caught a lot of people on their heels, and especially a lot of Middle East experts.
01:15:04.000Well, I think all you need to do is push it, and then it goes.
01:16:24.000When you hear about a guy like Wesley Clark, who's a fucking, what is he, a four-star general running for president, he says that the United States had been plotting this COVID operations.
01:16:33.000So they must have some influence on it.
01:16:35.000I think in the sense that we're trying to—well, I mean, the influence we had, for example, in Libya was that we, along with our NATO allies, said we can't allow the Libyan military to fly over these rebel strongholds in these towns and just carpet bomb the fuck out of them and shoot them.
01:16:51.000We got to create a no-fly zone around these people.
01:16:54.000So in that sense, we did get militarily involved.
01:16:59.000But, you know, to an extent, I think that democratic countries, starting with Europe, and this was actually led by Europe, they say, what is in our national interest?
01:17:11.000Is it still in our national interest for Gaddafi or Mubarak in Egypt who'd been there for 30 years?
01:17:17.000Is it in our national interest for that guy to be in power?
01:17:20.000There is a convenience when Mubarak is in power and you say, you can make a phone call to Mubarak and say, hey, you got to cooperate with Israel because it's in our national interest.
01:17:50.000I'm actually starting to talk that way.
01:17:52.000So anyway, for a little more, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:17:54.000You know, when you read shit like Confessions of an Economic Hitman and you see that we go only into countries that have massive natural resources that we want to stockpile and control...
01:18:05.000It makes you very skeptical about motivation.
01:18:07.000It makes you very skeptical when you see all the money that people spend on war.
01:18:11.000And I'm not pro-socialist, but I am pro-fixing problems.
01:18:15.000And I think, I don't believe necessarily in welfare.
01:18:19.000I don't believe that if you give people money that you're going to somehow or another improve their life because they were broke and now you give them money and now everything's going to be great.
01:18:27.000No, because you're going to develop a whole culture that expects to get a check for nothing.
01:18:31.000And then when you have that, you have no motivation, you have no work ethic, you have no enjoyment and satisfaction, you have no productivity.
01:18:52.000We all know this and we ignore that and concentrate on boogeymen on the other side of the fucking planet where it's quite obvious that this is transparent game going on where these boogeymen just so happen to only be where the gas is.
01:19:05.000They just so happen to only be where the oil is.
01:19:08.000They just so happen to only be where the heroin is.
01:19:13.000But I think also that the other question it raised is that anytime you have a country with a lot of natural resources, let's just take oil which is traded openly on the world market and that none of us would go anywhere without oil.
01:19:27.000If you look at the history of oil, I'm not an expert on the history of oil.
01:19:30.000I did live in Saudi Arabia for three years, but you look at the history of oil and the Middle East, which was strategic because of that resource.
01:19:39.000The Soviets and the Americans were obviously always fighting over who had control of that.
01:19:43.000The Arabs, for the most part, created something called OPEC and said, fuck both you guys, we're going to start controlling our own idea.
01:19:51.000But the idea of pan-Arabism, which is the notion that all the Arabs, that's what Saddam Hussein and Abdel Nasser in Egypt try to do, they try to bring all the Arabs together under one banner.
01:20:00.000You're never going to do that because people are nationalistic.
01:20:02.000People go, I'm Libyan first, I'm not Arab, I'm Libyan, I'm Egyptian.
01:20:08.000You look at how there was so much involvement and vying for those resources between two superpowers that of course, of course shit is going to get crazy.
01:20:19.000Of course when Saddam Hussein makes a huge mistake and invades Kuwait and we not only come to his rescue but we use Saudi Arabia, the land of Muhammad, where Islam started and we're launching planes out of Saudi Arabia to kill other Muslims.
01:21:13.000One thing that they always talk about is there's always circumstances that unfold that none of us had any fucking idea would happen.
01:21:21.000It seems to be that's the way life is.
01:21:23.000You got one plan and everything goes to shit.
01:21:26.000You know, I mean, you could make the argument, by the way, that the idea that we killed Osama bin Laden has raised a whole bunch of questions a lot of people don't want to answer from a political point of view.
01:22:01.000If you wanted to look at the one huge problem that we have, it's babies and children growing up and becoming shitty human beings because there's no love.
01:22:10.000And we're not putting money in that at all.
01:22:13.000The disproportionate amount of money we put in the military budget and compared to how we treat children in this country and raise kids and work on terrible communities and work on educating and getting people out of bad situations.
01:22:24.000And you say, oh, well, you know, they've got to figure it out on their own.
01:22:26.000You don't have a fucking clue What kind of a disproportionate life you would be living if you were born in the ghetto.
01:22:34.000If you've ever been around the projects, if you've ever been around terrible neighborhoods.
01:22:37.000I never lived in a really bad neighborhood, but I lived in Jamaica Plain in Boston and it wasn't good by any stretch of the imagination.
01:22:43.000There was a lot of really poor people around me, but we would go into really bad neighborhoods.
01:22:48.000We would go to buy pot, We would go to do different shit.
01:22:51.000We would go just because it was dangerous.
01:23:35.000Well, you know, one of the things that's always raised with social scientists is they say there are a lot of cases in this country where you threw a lot of money at a problem.
01:24:10.000Trying to find out how to spend that money and where to spend that money has always been Yeah, but the proportion of that money is the problem.
01:24:23.000The salaries that teachers get is unlivable.
01:24:26.000And that is a really important part of being a human being.
01:24:29.000If you look back on your teachers that you had and how much they influenced you and how much power they have over you, this is the person who stands in front of the class and tells you how the fucking world works.
01:24:37.000And when you're a kid, that's a huge responsibility that many times is bestowed on idiots.
01:24:43.000It's bestowed on idiots, and they took this job because they couldn't get another job, and they're fucking bitter and cunty.
01:24:49.000By the way, with the teachers' unions, just try firing a teacher who has tenure, because they've been teaching for three years in a lot of districts.
01:25:02.000Well, there's a documentary for everybody who watched called Waiting for Superman, but forget that.
01:25:06.000There's an article just now in the New York Times about trying to get, I think it was in the state of Ohio, just trying to get one law passed.
01:25:15.000One law that makes it harder for a teacher to get tenure or easier to hire a high-quality teacher in place of someone who's not performing.
01:25:23.000You are dealing with fucking 65 different interests with a lot of lobbying power starting with the teachers union that also then has a subsidiary called the Chicago teachers union that has a subsidiary called the county teachers union and you're dealing with fucking the reality of trying to make a law go through holy shit man holy shit yeah talk to a senator sometime say hey I want to get a law passed and it's a simple one talk to him and see how long it takes And how many years and how many people you've
01:25:53.000got to pay off and how many people you've got to convince that their interests...
01:25:56.000How many lobbyists you have to have on your side.
01:25:57.000Yeah, because a lot of people go, the problem with the law is two things.
01:26:33.000And we have to wrap our heads around the fact that there's...
01:26:36.000Some sort of a creepy situation has happened where there's a lot of money in keeping people in jail.
01:26:40.000And because of that, make no doubt about it, the prison guard unions and all these various law enforcement unions, they are not lobbying to make marijuana legal.
01:26:51.000They don't want it at all because it's a part of their economy.
01:26:58.000A lot of people have a vested interest.
01:27:01.000That's why being a politician or a president, the old saying when you're a president, you make one decision, you make 50% of the people happy and another 50% of the people out there hate your guts.
01:27:11.000There's no way to avoid that when you have power.
01:27:14.000Tenure for a teacher has some of the elements of intellectual welfare.
01:27:28.000What you're going to do is you're going to make it so you can't get fired so you are allowed to be free with your ideas and you don't have to worry about the repercussions of your free thinking.
01:30:07.000We'll find them and I'll show them to you later because this is going to be a pain in the ass.
01:30:11.000But my point is, and you and I have both talked about this, and I did get out of here for a little while, but moving to somewhere where that's not an influence.
01:30:28.000I think, though, at the end of the day, you're still going to have a lot of people who hold on to what's important because life is basically a kick in the nuts and it's going to teach you that shit.
01:30:39.000You still got to find fulfillment in accomplishment.
01:30:41.000And the only way to accomplish something like a black belt in jujitsu is fucking roll all the time for four or five, six or seven or ten years.
01:30:49.000If you want a black belt, that's what it takes.
01:30:50.000You If you want to know that you truly are, you know, somebody that can tie somebody in a knot, and I'm speaking metaphorically in anything, it takes a long fucking time.
01:31:09.000I think it's always been, well, these people are, you know...
01:31:12.000I mean, I don't know of any story in the world or any leader in the world who didn't complain that his followers, for the most part, were retards...
01:31:19.000And, you know, he owed to change and get people to understand what's important.
01:31:23.000That's what every religious leader from Christ on, you know, from Moses, for God's sake, 5,000 years ago, my people don't know what's important.
01:31:32.000Here are the fucking commandments, you pagans.
01:31:51.000And ultimately, all these things are in place so that we can have this society, so that people can survive, so that people can keep breeding, so we can continue doing what we're doing.
01:32:08.000Well, we're the only animal that has a symbiotic relationship with an artificial life, and that artificial life is technology.
01:32:14.000You could say technology is not alive, but we used the word evolution culturally earlier.
01:32:19.000We used the word evolution for machines, and if you look at simple machines that were around 50, 60 years ago, and you look at the complex machines now with the The microchips that are just powering your fucking cell phone and where this is all headed in some sort of a weird direction.
01:32:33.000We are inexorably connected to this technology.
01:33:12.000We're also coming up with synthetic DNA. We're coming up with man-made bacteria, basically.
01:33:19.000And this is one of those conversations that inevitably, whenever we have this sort of conversation on the podcast, on my message board, someone will come up and go, Fucking bullshit!
01:33:56.000Computer scientists and scientists in general are talking about evolution in terms of human beings can control and are controlling their own evolution.
01:34:17.000But that's why weed is so awesome, you fuck.
01:34:20.000But Stoner Talk, in 20 years, we are going to, like it or not, have to contend with technological advances that are so far beyond what most of us are dealing with today.
01:34:32.000Biocompatible technology, things that fit into your body, that make you remember faster, keep you awake longer.
01:34:42.000So these are realities that are going to affect how you make a living, what you talk about, what you listen to, what your children are influenced by.
01:34:52.000So anybody who thinks they can stay out of this debate or even this discussion is kidding themselves, man.
01:35:03.000There's something to it when you're considering these really fantastical possibilities and probabilities of the exponential growth of technology.
01:35:11.000It does have this sort of silliness to it.
01:35:13.000I think that's kind of where spiritual conversation comes in with the notion that Yes, we have all these technological advances, but the same old questions that a human being is going to have to answer for himself are still going to exist.
01:36:05.000You know, it's like, it's almost like it's engineered into us.
01:36:09.000Well, I think it's the same reason whenever you start talking about, if a guy gets up and says, well, climate change and sea levels are rising.
01:40:46.000WikiLeaks, apparently they did remove names of all the people to protect the people, except people who are no longer with the CIA or whoever they were with, and they were already exposed.
01:41:06.000Do you know out of the 12 BP whistleblowers, all the 12 people that came forward about all the problems in the oil disaster, nine of them are missing, including people murdered.
01:41:16.000One guy who survived an assassination attempt.
01:43:02.000Listen, out of the 12 people in question that were the BP whistleblowers, nine are mysteriously dead, one nearly died in a brutal assassination attempt, one is imprisoned under questionable circumstances, and another has simply disappeared.
01:43:33.000You were in shock because some girls moved.
01:43:35.000Well, I mean, that's pretty crazy seeing three girls' buttholes and vaginas that are underage and you're just driving around like minding your own business.
01:43:43.000So I get out of my car and I go inside.
01:43:45.000Did you actually see their buttholes and vaginas or did they have their legs closed and you just saw their cheeks?
01:43:48.000No, I remember at least one of them I saw the, you know, like the whatever.
01:46:09.000And by the way, if you're telling me that all those investigative journalists out there from all those newspapers who are always looking for a story wouldn't be all over that, believe me, they would be all over that.
01:46:17.000Yeah, maybe, but this is sort of like some kind of shit that you have to be really, really, really, really, really sure about.
01:46:24.000You're not going to get this published in Time Magazine.
01:46:25.000I want you, on your podcast, to bring a reputable investigative journalist on this show so we can talk about what a news...
01:48:31.000It matters, but it also matters that this guy's been in trouble three times, two times, shouldn't sell weed anymore.
01:48:36.000Okay, you're right, but you're giving in to the man.
01:48:40.000You're saying whatever rules that you make, as illogical as they are, I'm going to fall by them because I don't want to get locked in a cage.
01:48:46.000What I'm saying is there's no way you should be locking someone in a cage for that.
01:48:50.000And if someone does that, they're the criminals.
01:48:53.000When you have a society, a complex society, With a massive amount of access to information, literally you can find the answers to any question instantly on your phone.
01:49:01.000When you have a law that's in place that's completely illogical, like marijuana laws, and then you prosecute people for them, and then you lock them in jail, you are the criminal.
01:49:10.000You are the one who's going against logic and nature with all your fucking silly studies.
01:49:16.000Ron Paul just owned some motherfucker the other day on the Senate floor.
01:49:22.000And the guy was talking about marijuana.
01:49:25.000Yeah, because he said he thought heroin should be legal, I think.
01:49:28.000Ron Paul just clowned them about personal use, freedom of use.
01:49:32.000And if heroin was legal, do you think we'd all be using heroin?
01:49:42.000All you people out there that are involved in this industry of laws, an industry of creating jobs that are attached to laws, you're leeches.
01:49:54.000And if we got rid of that loophole and forced everybody that has some shitbag jobs for locking people up for pot, we would force those people to have more productive lives because they would have to evolve.
01:51:33.000It could be argued, though, that if there were less laws, and there were more freedom, and there was less people in these fucking bullshit, parasitic government jobs, that those people would be forced to contribute.
01:51:49.000It is a form of social welfare to have shit jobs that aren't necessary.
01:51:53.000There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal about how a lot of states, three out of one job are government jobs, not private sector jobs, not manufacturing jobs.
01:52:02.000When you hear, like, the government created new jobs, and you know what a lot of those jobs are?
01:52:11.000That's not what made this country great.
01:52:14.000Bureaucrats, and you're absolutely right.
01:52:15.000And it is a form of social welfare, because if you give someone a job and make it so they don't have to find their path, it's like I've always said, the greatest thing that ever happened to me when I was 21 years old, I played the lottery once.
01:53:15.000He believes in personal freedom and responsibility and allowing people to make their own choices.
01:53:22.000And makes the call on what is really going on and why we're invested in all these different parts of the world and what we're really doing.
01:53:29.000He's honest about it and he's saying this is not what America should be all about.
01:53:55.000Every time, like, Obama recently passed some fucking new law about genetically modified food, and it's going to fuck over all these organic farmers, man.
01:54:03.000And this shit's been going on for a while.
01:54:06.000Monsanto's involved with a lot of fucking creepy shit, man.
01:54:08.000And the government is behind all this.
01:54:10.000There's a good book, though, about that.
01:54:13.000Again, when you talk about technology, Monsanto and these other companies that do genetic engineering, the only way we're going to feed the growing population is through genetic engineering.
01:54:56.000One of the promises of genetic engineering is that we will maybe never have to use any pesticides And if you want to talk about agricultural runoff, that's one of the biggest forms of pollutants in all our waterways.
01:55:09.000So, for example, if you could come up with a kernel of rice, an apple that requires no spraying because in it, it has genes that are not only incredibly nutritious but that can ward off any kind of a pest, that's something that is going to be in our future.
01:55:25.000Do I feel weird about taking the gene of a jellyfish and putting it into a strawberry because it actually keeps it from freezing so you can ship it farther?
01:56:56.000Like, I read on some guy's thing, you know, he was shitting on someone for being middle-aged and buying a sports car that it was, you know, such a midlife crisis sort of a thing.
01:57:06.000And I was like, God, what a silly way to look at that.
01:57:08.000How come he's not just enjoying a car?
01:57:11.000You can never make fun of anybody who's a gearhead because it's a passion.
01:57:14.000It doesn't have to be anything rational or logical about it.
01:57:37.000I've always been obsessed with any new gadget.
01:57:40.000I remember the first time I saw Pong, I was obsessed with it.
01:57:44.000I couldn't believe that someone had figured out a way to make this move something on the TV. You were one of the first people I ever met who had email and stuff.
01:59:08.000But I think writing something down and, like, putting it up there for you.
01:59:13.000There's something about creating when you write things down and then put it in, like, a little box and then stick the box on the wall and then step back and look at it.
01:59:20.000It's like, instead of, like, being on top of it, writing it, and being immersed in the words, just put it on the wall and step back.
01:59:27.000Any really, really successful screenplay writer I've ever spoken to does exactly that.
01:59:35.000From Alan Ball, who I talked to, who wrote American Beauty, who I talked to about how he starts his scripts and stuff, and he said character, but any of those guys, all of them, Todd Phillips, they outline the shit out of it.
01:59:49.000They see it up on a board, and I don't know one director or one writer, certainly not one screenplay writer, not one, who makes a fortune Who's a successful screenplay writer, a professional, who doesn't do that.
02:01:22.000I'm constantly reading all this nutty fucking shit about the world, and I'm like, God damn it, this is not that fun.
02:01:28.000You can freak out about fucking supermassive black holes and super volcanoes, and you can freak out about the shifting of the polar ice caps, and it really doesn't make life any more interesting.
02:01:40.000You know, life is fun for like a fucking hour and a half.
02:01:55.000It's about a guy who is a rock and roll star, like some creepy Marilyn Manson, who buys this dead guy's suit.
02:02:03.000Online because it's haunted it comes with a ghost and he thinks he's being accused so he buys this dead guy suit I don't want to say any more about the plot because the plot is brilliant like how it's all established and set up but it's a fucking page-turner and it's so much more fun than reading a Michael Rupert book about the collapse of civilization you know smoking cigarettes collapse documentary have you ever watched you want to shit your pants watch that collapse documentary what is that?