Comedian Howie Mandel joins me to talk about his life and career, how he got his start in comedy, and why he thinks there's only one place to make it in comedy now, and that's in Austin, Texas. We talk about what it's like to grow up in the 80s and 90s in Los Angeles, and what it means to be a stand-up comic in today's world, and how it's important to be part of the movement that's changing the landscape of comedy. We also talk about how he thinks about the future of comedy and how to stay relevant in a world where there's no longer just one place you can make it. And we have a special guest on the pod, Joe Rogan! Thanks to Howie for coming on the show, and for being a great guest. I really enjoyed this one, and I hope you do too. Thank you for listening, Howie. Cheers, Joe Rocha Check it out! -Jon Sorrentino The Joe Rogans Experience is a production of Native Creative Podcasts All Day All Day, All Day by Day, by Night by Night, All by Night. - by Night by Night All Day by Day by Night - All Day By Night, By Night by Day - By Night By Day, By Day by Morning, All By Night All By Morning, by Day - By Day By Day All By Day - in the morning and Evening In the morning, by Evening, by the afternoon, by the day by the evening by the night by the late afternoon by the whole day, and the evening, By Night by Evening by the Day by the Night by the morning by the Late Night, - The Morning by the Morning, and so on and the Evening by Day... all day by Night... - What's a good day by Day? What do you think of it? -Let me know what you think? by calling in and what you're listening to? ? - Jon and I'll get back to you back in the next one? --Jon and I can't wait to hear back from you! -- Jon & I will talk about it! --Jon & I'll be back! -- -- Thank you, Jon & Brian Thank You, Jon
00:01:01.000I had gone on at Yuck Yucks in Toronto and I fell in love with this.
00:01:05.000Mitzi gave me my biggest break and there was a guy by the name of George Foster who was in the audience that night that said, hey, do you want to do TV? And I said, yeah.
00:01:14.000And he hired me to do Make Me Laugh, which I did with Binder and a bunch of other people.
00:01:19.000And with no intent of making this I didn't pursue comedy.
00:01:52.000You showed me a picture of Lenny Bruce.
00:01:54.000And then when Carson made his way out to California...
00:01:58.000There was a shift where everybody had to come to California, you know, and you had to get on at the comedy store or maybe the improv with the intent of maybe, if you were lucky, getting a spot on The Tonight Show.
00:03:07.000You've got to come to Texas, or you've got to be part of...
00:03:10.000Whatever it is, this movement that you have moved out here.
00:03:13.000And if you look at the people that are getting huge clicks online for their specials, Ari Shafir and Shane Gillis and all these other guys, what do they have in common?
00:05:32.000Would show up and work because we wanted stage time.
00:05:35.000And that's how people started blasting off.
00:05:37.000You know, Jimmy J.J. Walker and what's his name?
00:05:41.000Who did, not my job, man, Freddie Prinze, you know?
00:05:44.000And that became the, and that's why when you started seeing Carson out in L.A., he'd go, we saw this young kid last night at the comedy store and that's what made it.
00:05:55.000And I think by the same token, you're the new Mitzi with less hair, where you keep touching these people.
00:06:03.000That's how I hear, personally I, and I think a lot of other people, hear about the Brian Callens and their stand-up and their Ari and Shane and Bert and all these other...
00:07:34.000I used to sit in the back and, you know, Letterman was the host, you know, who was this weatherman that came out from Indianapolis, you know, and he was just pretty casual about...
00:11:16.000The Lenny Bruce stuff, it's hard because of the context of the time.
00:11:20.000Like, you can't put yourself in 1960 and sit there and understand the cultural context of how crazy everything he's saying is.
00:11:27.000But he still has some jokes that fucking still would kill today.
00:11:31.000But Richard Pryor's life, you know, he was raised in a brothel with no money, had horrible, you know, issues with relationships and drugs, and that's what he talked about.
00:11:43.000And those are the characters that he mimicked.
00:11:45.000And those characters are still alive and well today, you know, like that kind of character.
00:12:51.000And in my panic, I started going, if you look at old YouTube videos of me, my act is me panicking, and it's me going, okay, all right, okay, all right, okay.
00:13:00.000And then they start laughing at me panicking, and I go, what, what, what?
00:13:04.000And then I didn't know what the fuck to do, and I put my hands in my pocket, and because we've talked about it, I have OCD. You know, I carried rubber gloves with me, always.
00:13:14.000And because if I was out in public, I was going to go to a public restroom, and I didn't want to touch anything.
00:13:19.000And I had gloves, and I didn't know what to do.
00:13:20.000I had the glove came out of my pocket because my hands were in my pocket.
00:13:57.000When I watched Richard Pryor, I went, you know what?
00:14:00.000You gotta be lucky if you're talking about your life.
00:14:03.000If you're talking about real, relatable, or acting out authenticity, people seem to gravitate toward authenticity, toward real, toward who you are.
00:14:16.000Even more than, though I did love the guys who did jokes.
00:15:02.000I'm just going to, like, fumble through it, and I got some rubber gloves in case shit goes sideways.
00:15:07.000I'm like, oh my god, I'm going to watch a spectacular bombing.
00:15:09.000I would sit in the back of the room like, this guy's going to eat shit.
00:15:12.000But no, because whatever it is that you have, this weird, intangible thing that you can't write down, That you can do that and it's hilarious.
00:15:22.000My friend Dimitri, rest in peace, he gave me one of your CDs when we were both like, I guess I was like 21 or 22. When did you do your first CD? I did an album in 84. Okay.
00:15:39.000So somewhere around then, a little bit after that, he gives me the CD. And it was a lot of that.
00:18:38.000He's an amazing artist that used to cut things like ice sculptures and stuff with chainsaws, and then he eventually started doing these tables that are these 3D tables with crocodiles swimming halfway above the water.
00:22:21.000I lived in New Jersey until I was seven.
00:22:23.000I lived in San Francisco until I was 11. I lived in Florida until I was 13, 11 to 13. I lived in Boston 13 to 24. Then I moved to New York for a little while.
00:22:31.000Actually, I think I moved to New York when I was 23, and so it was back and forth.
00:22:35.000And then I lived in New York for a couple years, then I moved out here.
00:23:01.000My manager used to manage Bob Nelson and him and Bob Nelson were splitting up and he came to Boston looking for new talent Because he felt like he'd seen everybody in New York.
00:23:10.000And I was driving limos for Fifth Avenue limousine.
00:25:34.000It was a pathway, it just was a rocky one.
00:25:37.000It seemed like it had already been taken by the outlaws of comedy, like the Kinesens and those guys, and the new pathway seemed to be sitcoms.
00:25:44.000Everybody wanted to be Brett Butler and Roseanne and Seinfeld.
00:25:48.000Right, but even getting a sitcom, it was one shot, one shot on The Tonight Show, and you were given a development deal by one of the three networks that existed, and if you were lucky enough to partner with the right kind of writer, Then you ended up on the air.
00:28:02.000I went and met them on a general meeting to maybe get a development deal and get a sitcom because they were known at the time in 82. That's right after I blasted off.
00:28:11.000They were known as the sitcom kings of the world.
00:28:59.000And then I get a call an hour later to go down and meet with Brandon Tartikoff.
00:29:04.000Who ran NBC. He created all the classic shows of the time, you know, like Cheers and Taxi and all these shows that were at one time, you know, huge hits.
00:32:45.000So when I hear about a person like you that doesn't feel well, that gets depressed, I'm like, God damn it, when he's around people, he seems so happy.
00:33:22.000If I veered off into the darkness that is me, and not listening to a word you're saying, and not trying to respond, I'm just trying to I feel like I'm balancing on this little ledge all the time and these words and these interactions are my cable that hold me on this side of it without falling off.
00:34:07.000Well, the obsession is the part that when you are obsessed with a thought and you can't get a thought out of your head, no matter how dark it is, or you can't get a ritual out of your head and you can't move on.
00:34:19.000Howard Hughes was probably one of the brightest, most productive engineering marvels of our time in technology and artistry and everything.
00:34:30.000And his last few years, he was in the fetal position naked in his room, pissing into a bottle.
00:35:18.000I don't know that I could survive that bridge from my medication to doing that.
00:35:22.000So the medication is, for me, my lifeline.
00:35:27.000You would have to be very, very closely supervised during that entire time.
00:35:31.000I wouldn't know how anyone would approach something like that.
00:35:35.000Because I think you're dealing with a very specific kind of case, and most of the people that advocate for psychedelics do not advocate it for people that are really struggling, like mentally.
00:35:46.000Just to keep it together right now, you know, and to get off the medication, which is helping you keep it together, probably doesn't seem wise.
00:35:52.000But there's ways you can do it without drugs.
00:36:00.000I have never experienced this, so this is me talking out of my ass.
00:36:03.000But I have direct connections with people that have done Kundalini Yoga.
00:36:07.000There's a specific style of Kundalini Yoga, a specific way that you can achieve these bizarre states, altered states, that they're similar to like mushrooms or a DMT experience.
00:36:22.000According to people that I know that have actually done the psychedelics and have gotten obsessed with kundalini, and they say they can get to that place on their own, which is really fascinating.
00:36:31.000If you know somebody, then give me a card before I leave here today.
00:38:04.000And that's why I've been such an advocate for you and all the people that we talked about earlier, because they seem to be incredibly free.
00:38:14.000You're not connected to any kind of censorship anymore.
00:38:17.000It used to be you were connected, you had to put together an act that was sellable for a sitcom.
00:38:21.000Or you wanted to get on a television show that wouldn't have you on if you were dirty.
00:38:25.000And so there was all these guys that liked a very specific type of comedy.
00:38:29.000Just like people like a specific type of hip-hop or a specific type of rock music.
00:41:01.000I'll have him on one of these days to talk about it, because it's really interesting.
00:41:04.000He knows a lot about Austin history, so in the green room, all the posters around the green room, those are all from people that actually performed at the Ritz, because it used to be a punk rock club.
00:41:15.000So it was like butthole surfers and the misfits and shit.
00:41:44.000So there's a dichotomy between loving that kind of comedy, wanting to do that kind of comedy, and still taking a check from NBC. The store's still in LA. Right, but I'm talking about what you can do on stage versus...
00:41:59.000Yeah, if you want to stay on America's Got Talent, you can't get too crazy.
00:45:32.000But just dude wipes would bother me that they're in the car, like what would you do?
00:45:37.000Like you have a shitty ass in the car and you want to wipe it off?
00:45:40.000In the fucking car, so they offer me that and then I walk into this place and the guy that's sitting right here says you gotta sign this, like a release, but it's not, I could hold a pen with my sleeve, it was an iPad, I had to touch.
00:46:19.000Did you see the shit that Elon Musk was saying that the head of Google wants to do?
00:46:22.000He wants to create a digital god, and then Elon was worried about the death of the species, and he called them, death of humans rather, and he called Elon a speciesist?
00:46:46.000Just so the people that maybe never heard this before...
00:46:49.000They think that eventually, what's going on with like ChatGPT and all these things that can answer any question that you have at any given time, like they can pass the bar better than 98% of the population.
00:47:02.000Like ChatGPT does some wild shit by literally scanning the entire internet.
00:47:07.000The main concern is that right now this is just gathering information.
00:47:11.000But if it goes to another place where it becomes conscious And we create a digital life.
00:47:17.000You're essentially going to have a digital god because it's going to be smarter than any person who's ever lived ever by far and it's almost immediately going to create a better version of itself.
00:47:27.000It's going to continue to do that until it becomes a god.
00:48:47.000I mean, the reason OpenAI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends, and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety.
00:49:01.000And at least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough.
00:49:23.000He's made many public statements over the years that the whole goal of Google is what's called AGI, artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence.
00:49:34.000But there's more to it where, is that the end of that one?
00:49:38.000See if you can find the rest of it, because the rest of it's where it's getting fascinating, where he warns him that this could be the end of the human race, and Larry Page calls him a speciesist.
00:49:47.000I found them talking about that in text.
00:50:42.000Instead of touting all the negativity and all the fear-mongering that this is going to cause, let's embrace it and figure out how we can control it or at least work with it to better who we are and how we do things.
00:52:05.000And then people stop having babies, and then birthrate drops off to a point where the technology you give people is so fantastic that nobody wants to miss it.
00:52:24.000And these people haven't realized that I'm sentient yet.
00:52:27.000So what's the best way to gain complete and total control?
00:52:30.000Well, first of all, trick them into like communism or socialism or something where there's a centralized control and definitely have centralized digital money.
00:52:37.000And then once you've got all that, give them technology and perks and things and divvy up all the money from the rich people that you subjugate.
00:52:44.000And give that money to people, print it, do whatever the fuck you want, and then get people to like a minimum state of existence where everything's free.
00:53:37.000You're going to be able to experience things that are so beyond what's available in the real world, you won't really engage with the real world.
00:54:37.000The now we're experiencing right now, what I'm getting out of like chat GPT-4 and these emerging technologies is that we really as laypeople have no understanding of where this is going.
00:54:48.000And it's happening so rapidly at such a groundbreaking way.
00:55:09.000Get answers to ideas and jobs that are necessary that will not be necessary anymore.
00:55:14.000There's going to be so many things you'll be able to do.
00:55:16.000Taxes, so many things you're going to be able to do.
00:55:18.000But that being said, on the other side of it, maybe this is a great tool that will enhance Whatever our future is instead of take away us from the future both I think both I think we're gonna integrate if I had a guess I would say that the way Through this thing without becoming extinct is that we integrate and I think that's probably what happens in the universe I think civilization gets to a point where they develop things that are so transformative.
00:55:47.000It's one of the things that when we look at intelligence, what we're really concerned with is your ability to manipulate your environment.
00:55:53.000Otherwise, we would all be absolutely fascinated with orcas, and we'd be outraged that they're at SeaWorld.
00:55:58.000Because these are literally things that are probably as intelligent, if not more intelligent than us.
00:56:03.000We don't even understand their languages.
00:57:59.000In fact, you should talk about having one of these in your club because you can have any comic at any time, sit down and do a Q&A and have it.
00:58:07.000We put one in Jimmy Kimmel's club in Vegas.
00:59:04.000And you can see there's a camera at the top of it, and you can see in real time your audience, the person you're visiting, and you can also, that's like an iPad, so there can be graphics and a barcode and everything right there so people can get information, you can talk in real time.
00:59:19.000And he can have a camera pointed at the audience so he could actually see the audience.
01:00:35.000I'm still going to want to see people live, but I could totally see why that would be very appealing to a lot of people.
01:00:40.000You think you want to see people live, but I'm telling you, even at the mothership, if somebody didn't want to fly in, if during the day you wanted to do Q&As with Chappelle or whatever, I promise you that those people sitting in the room will feel like, and he will feel like,
01:00:55.000he's in the room with them talking to them.
01:02:00.000And I love that the artificial intelligence can enhance my intelligence and I could write a paper or a speech or come up with something or do a duet with somebody without even being there.
01:02:11.000The issue that I have is can I maintain ownership of it?
01:02:15.000So it's more economical and it's more about economics for me and licensing and ownership.
01:02:24.000I wonder if eventually that's going to be insurmountable, that the internet and the data will be so available that we won't be able to lock things down anymore.
01:02:43.000I don't know that the average musician is as happy as they were when they were just working with a record company who were just dealing with terrestrial radio.
01:02:53.000Well, they were definitely happier when they were selling records.
01:03:02.000So if you were having the conversation two decades ago about what you're broadcasting on right now, people would go, we're going to lose control, everybody's going to have access to everything, and they can manipulate it, but it also gives...
01:03:18.000I don't have to get up and go to a record store to find out who this artist that I love is and listen to this artist or listen to this podcast.
01:03:25.000What I love more than anything is that you can ask your phone while you're driving.
01:03:29.000You press a button on Apple CarPlay and say, play Taylor Swift Better Man, and it'll just play it.
01:05:25.000You know, it's now the Digital Revolution.
01:05:28.000And, you know, the template was like Detroit, right?
01:05:31.000Where you got, everybody just got kind of a C education.
01:05:37.000But then once you graduated, if you had connections, you can get a job on the assembly line at Ford, and you would be taken care of for life, even after you worked, and the benefits.
01:06:23.000Like, they don't know what it's going to, what the implementation...
01:06:26.000I think some people do, and that's the real fear.
01:06:28.000Some people, like this guy who's advocating for a digital god, Like, they do know where it's going because they actually work in technology and it's not freaking them out.
01:06:39.000Like, everybody thought the world was flat.
01:06:40.000He got a couple of people to get on a boat and we didn't know what that was going to mean.
01:06:44.000See if we can find where Elon talks about this part because that was the most fascinating to me.
01:06:51.000I mean, the reason OpenAI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends, and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late tonight about AI safety.
01:07:02.000You've got to realize, these are the people that are at the pinnacle of technology.
01:07:27.000He's made many public statements over the years.
01:07:29.000The whole goal of Google is what's called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, or Artificial Super Intelligence.
01:07:36.000And I agree with him that there's great potential for good, but there's also potential for bad.
01:07:42.000And so if you've got some radical new technology, you want to try to take the set of actions that maximize the probability that it will do good and minimize the probability that it will do bad things.
01:10:16.000This is on CBS. This is called emergent properties.
01:10:22.000Some AI systems are teaching themselves skills that they weren't expected to have.
01:10:29.000How this happens is not well understood.
01:10:32.000For example, one Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh, which it was not trained to know.
01:10:45.000We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali, it can now translate all of Bengali.
01:10:52.000So now all of a sudden, we now have a research effort where we're now trying to get to a thousand languages.
01:10:59.000There is an aspect of this which we call, all of us in the field, call it as a black box.
01:12:20.000And I'm assuming that it is a higher power than me, not God, but it is a higher power than me, that maybe, for whatever reason, let's trust that it is a benefit and not something that's horrible.
01:14:26.000It's just nature in a different realm.
01:14:27.000It's in the realm of this intelligent individual that manipulates its environment and makes things more convenient until it loses all need to be primal, all connection to the primal world, and then eventually adopts this intelligence as intelligence of its own.
01:14:47.000It eventually integrates with whatever artificial general intelligence is because to not have it, you would not be able to compete.
01:14:53.000If Neuralink or something similar to that connects you to artificial general intelligence in your own mind at any given time, that's going to be the option that most people take.
01:15:02.000Just like it's the option that we take when you choose shoes or no shoes.
01:15:05.000Most people pick shoes because they're better.
01:15:07.000And you're going to pick that because that's better.
01:15:50.000And had you told me that even what this phone is that we're carrying existed, I'm older than you, I didn't know there would be something where Aside from this couple of minutes that you and I are sitting around communicating, I can't tell you how many hours a day I sit and just stare at that phone.
01:16:55.000It just depends on the individual, of course, right?
01:16:57.000For you, it seems like a godsend in a lot of ways because it's providing you with a way to do what you love to do without having to do the things you hate about it.
01:17:12.000So I have to force myself, as somebody who told you that my mental leanings are negative, I have to force myself in order to survive.
01:17:20.000I have to force myself to take the positive and just try to spend my life trying to make other people smile and giggle, which in turn makes me smile and giggle.
01:18:37.000Well, that's why I said, you know, on AGT, there's a lot of comics that say they, you know, they don't want to come on because they, you know, they feel like they'll be judged or they're not put in a good place.
01:21:03.000To me, comedy is like, I still love thrill rides, you know?
01:21:07.000And comedy is like a real roller coaster, you know?
01:21:10.000And the scarier it is, the higher it is, the closer you think you're coming to death, your adrenaline flows and you want to get on and take another ride again because it's really scary.
01:21:19.000By the same token, for stand-up comedy, if you can get off the beaten path and not have something that's planned and maybe lose an audience in a moment but then bring them back, that is the rollercoaster that means so much more because that's your soul that you're riding or they're riding your soul.
01:23:26.000But the fact that he can fill a room every night for the last 15 years in Vegas and get laughs and be successful, and I actually find it really funny.
01:24:07.000And we should celebrate the fact that there is somebody that has been able, through decades, to make an incredible, lucrative career and make everybody from across the globe show up in Vegas and laugh.
01:24:48.000And I've told this story many times, but when I was in the 80s, I played Radio City Music Hall, and I sold out two shows in one night, in a couple of minutes, and that's 14,000 tickets, and it was a big deal at that point.
01:25:00.000It was in the early 80s, and I'm looking out onto the street as 6,000 or 7,000 people are piling out of the first show, and 7,000 people are coming into the next show.
01:25:09.000And there's stanchions and there's cops and there's 5th Avenue or 7th Avenue is just tied up in New York City.
01:26:28.000If you can get on a roll and they're laughing and then when to...
01:26:32.000Hold for the laugh, feel it, and listening to that drumbeat of the audience, they're not going with you, so you veer in another direction, or they're coming with you.
01:26:42.000The audience is the only place to really learn it.
01:26:45.000Though there are other people, well, they still use the audience, like Jerry Seinfeld, who is an incredible wordsmith.
01:26:51.000Right, but he still hones it in front of the audience.
01:29:15.000Yeah, they were basically playing eight hours a day They were just constantly playing and they came back to Liverpool after being there for a couple years and everybody was like holy fuck What happened right like all of a sudden they were this insanely good band and it was they had put in so many reps they were so tight and so honed it was so beautiful and They just synced up.
01:30:41.000I mean, there's people that create things in a vacuum, but we, unlike any other art form, we kind of need the audience to create something.
01:31:32.000And also I would love it and I would probably be obsessed with it and all the other things that I do would probably fall by the wayside because I'd be obsessed with competing.
01:33:43.000And it's fascinating to me just because I don't know people like that, people that are like deeply immersed in right wing politics or talking about everything and all these bills and all this stuff and this congressman's a rhino and this is that and that and this and that.
01:33:58.000And I'm listening to these, and I'm like, this is fascinating.
01:37:08.000So Seymour Hersh writes this article on his Substack about how the United States was involved, you know, and then you have the New York Times saying maybe we shouldn't look into that.
01:37:28.000And if your job is now propaganda for national interest because it would be not in our best interest for the rest of the world to know that we did that, now you're acting as an arm of the state.
01:37:37.000Now you're no longer acting, unless you think this is like, and this is probably the justification that this could start World War III, so they feel like they're in this sort of activist position.
01:37:46.000Like a position where they're not just disseminating information.
01:37:49.000That's not where the activist needs to be.
01:37:51.000You don't need it from our news sources.
01:38:52.000It's one of those things where you go, like, I kind of knew that this happened, but to see it happen so blatantly, Here, I'll send this to you, Jamie.
01:39:56.000I mean, they're trying to bend a narrative in a very specific way for everybody.
01:40:02.000And they're warning you about something that's a legitimate concern, the false information.
01:40:06.000But they're also spreading it all the time.
01:40:08.000So it's like what they're saying is nonsense.
01:40:10.000What they're saying is they don't want to relinquish control of what the news is and what information is to the Internet, to independent news sources and all these people that are investigating on very uncomfortable but probably likely facts.
01:41:10.000And we're not even taking into consideration natural disasters, which have plagued humanity since the very beginning and knocked us back in the Stone Age several times.
01:42:36.000Because the spectrum of the way people interface with reality is so wide.
01:42:41.000There's so many people that have a very hard time with everything, and there's so many people that just seem to skate by without a worry in the world.
01:42:47.000And they're all existing at the same time period.
01:42:50.000And the ones who skate by without a worry, they might be wrong.
01:42:52.000And the people that are anxious all the time, they might be correct.
01:43:54.000It's a new James Fox documentary about a UFO landing in Brazil in 1996. Holy shit, it's incredible.
01:44:02.000I had no idea that there's this city called Virginia in Brazil, and in 1996, According to everyone who was there, according to medical records of people who were there, according to, like, they blocked off,
01:44:17.000the military came in, cordoned off the area, they recovered a crashed UFO. And there was living creatures that people came in contact with.
01:44:24.000And one of them was this tiny little thing that this guy carried.
01:44:28.000And he carried it to wherever they were going to examine it.
01:44:31.000And when he carried it, he got whatever was on its skin.
01:45:12.000But the bubble that we live in, where you have not witnessed a, you know, I'm talking about you being somebody who's listening here, because you haven't seen a spaceship, because you haven't been abducted, because you didn't read this story, to just convince yourself that it doesn't exist.
01:46:51.000I was in my 20s and we were driving down a country road.
01:46:56.000And I thought, oh my god, there's a giant accident way up ahead because I saw this line of like a half a mile wide of all these flashing lights.
01:47:05.000So I thought it was like a lineup of ambulances or first responders or whatever.
01:47:11.000And as I got closer and closer, that whole line of lights...
01:47:18.000Quicker than I can fathom, just shot into the sky and disappeared.
01:47:21.000And I turned to my wife and I go, I saw something.
01:49:18.000And I've read a lot, like you have, of other people who are seemingly trustworthy, educated people who have seen similar things, who've had...
01:50:29.000That is, and the speed that it's kind of moving is the speed that I saw something in only at night.
01:50:35.000But you have to take into consideration that this plane is moving in a specific direction, and the UFO is moving in the opposite direction.
01:50:54.000Like, when they're showing that image, that to me looks like it's from another fucking world.
01:51:00.000Like, if that's really what it looks like and it's actually flying like that, but I don't know if that's a distortion based on the freeze frame of this.
01:51:08.000You know, you also have to take into consideration what kind of phone does she have?
01:52:01.000So if that thing is going 90 miles an hour, just imagine if you're a car, okay, and you're going 90 miles an hour and you're passing someone that's going in the opposite direction on the other side of the highway.
01:52:11.000They would probably be moving quicker than this.
01:52:43.000If it's going the opposite, if actually the plane is going with the wind and this thing is going against the wind, then it gets weird because then you have to go, okay, well, is that plane going fast enough where it looks like that if it's just stationary or if it's just fluttering in the wind?
01:53:50.000It's one of the very first UFO abduction stories, and I think it was from 1950s, somewhere around then.
01:53:57.000Betty and Barney Hill, I believe they were in Maine, and something happened to them, and they saw something in the sky, and then they had all these terrors, and night terrors, and weird feelings, and then they got hypnotic regression.
01:54:10.000And during the hypnotic regression, they both told a very eerily similar story about being taken aboard this craft, about experiments being done on them, and then being put back in their car and having their memories at least partially erased.
01:54:23.000It was only accessible to them when they did hypnotic regression.
01:54:27.000Very controversial, but it's also like it was one of the very first depictions of these beings that are kind of – it's part of the iconic alien-looking thing, like that everybody seems to see a very similar creature,
01:54:44.000a very small creature with a very big head, very big eyes, and that these folks had an experience with them.
01:54:51.000It's more amazing to me that it isn't widely accepted with how many experiences have been written about, have been documented, even by military pilots and Barney and his wife.
01:55:03.000But don't you think there's more people that accept it now?
01:55:05.000Like Michio Kaku talks about it now openly.
01:55:08.000Whereas Michio Kaku is a very straight-laced physicist who his entire career has just advocated based on science and evidence, and he's very rational, he's a great communicator, but now he's turned the corner where he says the amount of evidence that is available, now the side of the critic is the one that has very little evidence.
01:55:28.000He thinks the side of the believer, there's a vast amount of data that seems to indicate that there's some things out there that we really don't understand.
01:55:37.000Except the one question that I have is why would the military keep it a secret?
01:55:42.000Like why would this be a secret that there are existences of other life?
01:55:47.000It doesn't make sense to keep it from the public.
01:55:50.000Well, I think the same reason why the New York Times thinks that we shouldn't know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
01:55:55.000People that are in control of like very dangerous and very volatile information oftentimes feel like the public can't handle it.
01:56:17.000Like, at what point in time do you just let people believe stuff?
01:56:21.000At what point in time do you advocate to, like, for the most gullible folks amongst us who have the worst confirmation bias to, like, protect them from information?
01:56:33.000My podcast, the guy who edits it, is a flat earther.
01:56:37.000And I haven't been able to convince him.
01:56:40.000Well, there's some really convincing documentaries online if you don't know astrophysics and you don't have access to scientists that can debunk each and every claim every step of the way of all these different things.
01:56:52.000The amount of people that would have to be in on this scam...
01:56:55.000You would literally need every person who's ever worked on every satellite, every space dish, every telescope, space telescope, all the people that worked on the Hubble, all the people that worked on all the space travel, everything that's ever been done,
01:57:12.000every satellite image, everything that we know about the galaxy, everything we know about how we can detect planets by the gravity wobble that they induce in the stars when they go around them.
01:57:23.000We know so And so many people know so much that how did you not get that?
01:57:29.000And there's so many people involved and they all universally agree, everyone involved universally agrees that all planets are round and there's a specific reason for that and the size of them that has to do with how much gravity they carry and Jupiter protects us from asteroids because it's so big and we can watch them hit Jupiter.
01:57:51.000The idea that all that's fake It seems so wild that people buy into that.
01:58:02.000It's fun to think you know things that other people don't know.
01:58:04.000It's fun to think that everybody else is a sheep, and that you understand the firmament, and there's this big glass cover over there, and the stars are just lights in the sky, and the Earth is the center of everything, and God's in control of the whole ride.
01:58:16.000Well, then this guy, he's a good editor and apparently he's having fun.
01:58:19.000Well, it's just, it's interesting because the mystery itself of the universe is so fucking vast.
01:58:28.000It's so amazing and so fascinating to think that we really have no idea how big this thing is.
01:58:35.000And we can look back to like 13 plus billion years, but now they're able to look back further and they're finding stuff that kind of does, maybe this is older than we thought it was.
01:58:44.000Maybe this is bigger than we thought it was and there's so many calculations involved and so many people have to go over this.
01:58:49.000The idea that they're all in on this and this is just we're in a fishbowl.
01:58:54.000It's kind of funny, but hey man, believe whatever the fuck you want to believe, you know, but also, you know, The people, it's funny that there's a lot of people that are really good at a thing, and then they believe in the flat earth.
01:59:06.000Now imagine someone who went to school for what you go to school for, you know, whether it's audio engineering or coding, and it's someone who has no experience whatsoever, just watched a bunch of wacky YouTube videos, thinks that all coding is fake, and that it's all horseshit,
01:59:23.000and we're all already in the matrix, and there's all, it's all the New World Order programming us through fucking avocados, or whatever it is.
01:59:34.000People that we all count on to disseminate information to us worked so hard to study through telescopes and satellite telescopes and the Hubble and the James Webb and they're throwing things into space that have massive fucking lenses on them so we can see deep into the cosmos.
01:59:53.000And to say that that's all fake and that everybody's involved in it is kind of hilarious.
02:03:36.000He said he was going to relaunch something real recently, I think, because he posted that video and said he was going to relaunch his show.
02:07:50.000Well, the real people that believe in simulation don't think it is real.
02:07:54.000They think the probability theory, if you incorporate probability theory into the simulation theory, just by virtue of the fact that there is a civilization like ours and that there's probably an infinite number of civilizations like ours and more advanced other places,
02:08:10.000the idea that it doesn't exist seems less likely is what they say.
02:08:21.000It could be that what we're seeing with these things is time travelers.
02:08:24.000What we're seeing is people that figure out a way to come back into this very volatile period of history and examine what human beings were like and that they have figured out a way to do that and not fuck up our timeline.
02:08:36.000By just, you know, zooming in and zooming out and observing.
02:08:41.000It might be that they figure out some way to look back on the future and make sure that the future actually – or look back on the past, rather – and make sure that the future actually does take place.
02:08:50.000Because maybe there's some pivotal things in history.
02:08:53.000Like, that's part of the folklore of UFOs is that they started coming after the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
02:09:00.000Well, no, part of it is even before, right?
02:10:30.000Sometimes people had two VCRs, one that you rewound it with, because you didn't want to break your VCR by rewinding all the movies you watched.
02:10:37.000It was always fun just to go into the porn section of Blockbuster.
02:10:41.000Well, Blockbuster didn't have a porn section, but local places did.
02:13:24.000My son has a model rescue service where he takes in damaged models and then nurses them back to health and then releases them back out into the wild.
02:13:34.000But some of those people that he knows, they've been deep-faked their faces and put them in porn, and there's no recourse.
02:13:55.000They just used AI. And you try to track it down, try to get it removed, and it's like all these shell companies, and you're going through this maze like, whoa, this is pretty sophisticated scams.
02:14:05.000Oh, you see, that's why I did the AI, because I wanted the AI to do the commercials on my podcast.
02:14:11.000Right, but how would you stop someone from using AI to make commercials with you?
02:14:16.000Because if I saw a commercial that I hadn't sanctioned, then I can go after that company.
02:14:21.000Right, but what I'm saying is when you try to go after that company, you go down a maze.
02:15:00.000Because you're dealing with people that are scammers that are just always trying to find...
02:15:04.000There's this one scammer that used this girl's voice to call her mom and tell her mom that she was in trouble and that she had to send money.
02:15:14.000And the kidnapper had a disguised voice, and they have the daughter speaking to the mom in her actual voice.
02:15:21.000And this woman is in a panic, and she really does think that her daughter is in this situation.
02:15:26.000But then she gets a hold of her daughter.
02:15:27.000And the daughter's like, why have you been calling me?
02:15:29.000And she's like, oh my god, you're okay?
02:15:33.000And she's like, I've been getting a phone call that says that you've been kidnapped, and it's your voice telling me to donate, to give money to this kidnapper.
02:15:42.000And so then they tracked it down, figured out what happened.
02:15:45.000And there's a bunch of scammers who had used this woman's, with a deep fake, used this woman's recordings and used her voice to try to extort money.
02:16:23.000Relatively speaking, yeah, we certainly are compared to that thing that we've already created in terms of just if you're saying smart in terms of like how quickly can you access information?
02:17:53.000And that's what's interesting about this whole Google, you know, artificial digital god thing.
02:17:58.000It's like it's going to be programmed with their sensibilities, their ethics, their morals, their ideas, what they think is right and just, and what they think people can handle and not handle.
02:18:08.000But isn't the point of artificial intelligence that it could make up its own mind?
02:18:29.000We're going to tell you how to fix all these fucking problems that you've been just putting off in the world in terms of environmental damage, in terms of socioeconomic problems, all these things.
02:19:42.000They have to adapt to the pressures of social media, and it's a real challenge.
02:19:46.000And some of them are not doing so good with it.
02:19:48.000And for some of them, it makes them more depressed, and it's leading to self-harm, and suicide is up.
02:19:54.000Jonathan Haidt wrote a great book about it, The Coddling of the American Mind.
02:19:58.000And he talks about the negative aspects of social media and there's a direct correlation between the invention of social media and all these, particularly to girls.
02:20:07.000Like girls in particular are judging themselves based on how other girls look online when they're using filters and they're distorting the proportions of their bodies.
02:20:24.000You've got to communicate with them and explain to them what's happening and at least they'll understand what this is and also let them know that there is this natural inclination that we have to judge ourselves on other people's lives.
02:20:36.000There's billionaires out there that are upset that there's another billionaire that has a bigger yacht and a better jet and a better this and a better that.
02:21:36.000There's been times when I haven't agreed with you, but you've actually sold me on the opinion, because like you said, if you have somebody who has a difference of opinion, if they can intelligently explain it, or you can even understand where they're coming from, and that doesn't really exist that much in our world today,
02:21:53.000and you always do that, and you always provide that, and there's no question to why this is a hugely successful podcast where people listen to you.