Comedian and actor Jimmy Seibert joins the show to talk about what it's like being in Austin, Texas, and what it means to be part of a community of likeminded people who are out to make a difference in the world. Jimmy also talks about why comedy is a great thing to be a part of, and why you should go out and do it. The Joe Rogan Experience is a podcast by day, about comedy, by night, all day. Hosted by Joe and Jimmy, and featuring stand-up comedian, comedian, actor, writer, and podcaster, Joe Rogans. Produced in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY. Thanks to Jimmy and Joe for coming on the show and for being part of the conversation. This episode was produced and edited by James Mastreani and Alex Blumberg. It was mixed and produced by Patrick Muldowney. Additional engineering and mixing by Matthew Boll. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was done by Mark Phillips. We are a project of Native Creative Podcasts. Music and sound design by Kevin McLeod. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed are those of the respective owners and copyright of their respective record labels. If you like what you hear on the pod, please be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you re listening to the pod. Thank you for supporting the pod is a big thank you're listening to this podcast. -Joe Rogan and we appreciate the support we get from your support us in this podcast, we really appreciates the support and support us. Thank you so much, and we really do appreciate the feedback we get back from you. -- Thank you, Jimmy and I appreciate it greatly. XOXO -Avery Adams -- -- and we re looking forward to seeing you back in the next episode of the pod? -- And thank you for being a little bit more in the future, Joe and I really appreciative of your support you're a lot more than you can do that in the podcast. -- And we really appreciate it. -- thank you, Joe -- I really appreciate all the support us, too much, thanks you, really appreciate the love you're being kind and appreciate it, it's a lot of love and support we can do it, you're amazing.
00:01:27.000And it feels like that's a great thing to do.
00:01:30.000Well, it also seemed like I kind of had to do it, because when I moved here, I had this idea that I'd just be able to, like, do whatever local spots I could and then go on the road.
00:01:47.000Like, and that's one of the things that we really had at the Comedy Store that made the Comedy Store so special, is that it wasn't just that it was a great place to work and come up with new material and work on it, but it was also a great place to meet other people that were doing the same thing.
00:02:01.000It's interesting, comedy as opposed to acting.
00:02:29.000If someone does fantastically and they're playing hockey arenas, then more people are pulled up through the clubs and the theatres into the arenas.
00:04:10.000There's also this shared experience of being there with other people that really feels good for people when you're laughing with a bunch of people.
00:04:16.000Especially in a world where the individual has become sacrosanct and the tribe has been left to the side.
00:04:37.000Yeah, and there's also, with our art form, it's uniquely coming from one person.
00:04:45.000Unless you're a singer-songwriter or an author, those are probably the only other people.
00:04:50.000Any other mass form of entertainment that you're seeing, you're seeing a lot of different people collaborating, which is good, like in a film.
00:05:01.000But there's something about an individual's perspective and someone going, what the fuck is this?
00:05:08.000I mean for me that thing of stand-up is naturally progressive.
00:05:14.000For me it's like stand-up is about – there's an Overton window about what – that theory of the Overton window, what is and what isn't acceptable to talk about publicly.
00:06:34.000You'd watch whatever you like, like Game of Thrones or an MMA fight or whatever.
00:06:39.000And if you have your phone near you, there's a temptation to check the news and refresh and refresh and see what's going on and to ruin the experience for yourself.
00:08:18.000It's, you know, that self-authored thing.
00:08:21.000I mean, the thing I'm working on at the moment, I'm slightly jealous of the club, I'll be honest.
00:08:26.000I saw the club last night and went, this is quite something to do, to set up a club and to have that community, and it's great.
00:08:35.000I'm working at the moment on a, I don't know whether it's a book or whether it's a, I think it might be like an online course, but a comedy course.
00:08:57.000We get to be the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, or certainly someone in our generation does.
00:09:02.000If you think about it like George Carlin and Richard Pryor were John the Baptist, or someone's coming through.
00:09:10.000It feels like it's getting bigger and bigger.
00:09:13.000My vision is it gets taught in schools.
00:09:17.000So we teach music, and we teach drama and art, and I think stand-up comedy is an art form, and I think we need to get less magical thinking and more, okay, let's put down a language, like music, you can write it,
00:09:32.000let's come up with a, I mean, I'm working on like 50 joke types, but let's come up with a way of analyzing this and teach people how to do it, because what does it give you?
00:09:43.000Like, if your kid does stand-up comedy, Okay, well, they have to find their voice.
00:09:48.000They have to look at things from a different angle, a different perspective.
00:10:50.000We've actually talked many times about putting together a course, and we've thought about doing it maybe at the club, and just having professional comics that are on their way up, that are just starting, and having a workshop where we could talk to them about material,
00:11:08.000about the importance of editing, about getting to the point quickly, and how to...
00:11:15.000I think it would be great because how many comics do we know, guys that do this for a living and are doing great, that do have magical thinking?
00:11:23.000Well, it just comes to me and I need to do this to make it happen.
00:11:28.000Understanding how to write music has never damaged anyone's creativity.
00:11:34.000So I think the idea of analyzing it and treating it like a job and how do you sit down and write?
00:11:38.000And some people go, well, I don't sit down and write.
00:13:49.000I mean, Colin Quinn's solo shows, I think there's three or four now.
00:13:54.000He just did one at the club a couple weeks ago, and The whole staff, everyone, the comics, the staff, everyone was raving about how brilliant his writing was, the timing.
00:14:36.000I thought Bumping Mics was like, that's another great Netflix, hats off, to give Jeff Ross and Dave, to make it kind of feel like it was in three parts and it felt like a visit to New York.
00:14:49.000And those shows, whenever there's a festival and those guys come and play, it feels like, oh, well, that's the late night hang.
00:15:01.000I think what Dave enjoys is just the work.
00:15:06.000I mean, when you talk to him, he gets up in the morning, or whenever he gets up, he goes to the coffee shop, smokes a cigarette, drinks coffee, and starts writing.
00:15:14.000Goes over the news, finds out what's going on.
00:15:16.000When he goes into a town, like say he's in Cleveland, What's going on in Cleveland?
00:20:07.000Yeah, it's just, it's, but the whole vibe of the place then is it's, you know, everyone is in service of this night, of this thing, of a theatrical performance.
00:20:19.000Well, it's the only art form that is consumed all over the world, loved by everyone, cherished by people, but does not have a direct professional path in order to be successful.
00:21:48.000I mean, I'm like, I think I'm 40 countries in now.
00:21:51.000And you go, what's happened the last 10 years?
00:21:55.000Like, the English language has become bigger.
00:21:58.000And the English language was big to begin with.
00:22:00.000But things like YouTube and Netflix has meant, because there used to be a thing in certain countries where they would dub every movie and every TV show into the local language.
00:22:09.000And they would get it a little bit later, and it wouldn't matter.
00:22:12.000And the local actors would do the voice, and the show would be a hit.
00:22:17.000In the age of kind of global, you know, interconnectivity, people know what Game of Thrones was on last night and the new specials by Joe is out this evening.
00:22:27.000So they watch it sort of straight away and they watch everything in English.
00:24:10.000My friends from the UK that have come to America, one of the things that they've all sort of said is that in the UK, they kind of want you to not do well.
00:24:19.000Whereas in America, they sort of celebrate you succeeding.
00:24:22.000I think culturally, if you think about what America is about, it's, you know, it really...
00:24:59.000It's like they've embraced it because, you know, a scene moved into a city where there's 15 world-class comedians that live here now that didn't live here three years ago.
00:27:01.000And there's so much resentment around.
00:27:03.000It's such a maligned word because it gets attached to woo-woo bullshit and people wear wooden beads and, you know, it gets attached to posing.
00:32:58.000I mean, it's genuinely shocking watching it now, isn't it?
00:33:01.000Yes, it's genuinely shocking, but it was the first time people saw that his head moves back and to the left, indicating a shot from the front.
00:33:08.000And that fell against the narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
00:33:14.000There was a ton of eyewitnesses that said that they heard gunshots from the grassy knoll.
00:33:19.000And then there was also this ridiculous magic bullet that they had to attribute to Lee Harvey Oswald's gun because one bullet had hit an underpass and ricocheted and hit a person.
00:33:33.000So they knew that one of the bullets that got shot missed Kennedy, hit the underpass, hit a curb and ricocheted and hit this guy and he got brought to the hospital.
00:33:41.000How on earth do we not have an answer to this now?
00:35:21.000And then somehow or another Dick Gregory acquired it and that was around 75. And that's when he aired it on television.
00:35:27.000And when he aired it on television, it just opened up everyone's eyes.
00:35:31.000They're like, well, anyone who'd ever seen anything get shot knows that when you get hit with something from the back, you don't go back towards the shot.
00:35:55.000I mean, Tucker Carlson came out on television and said the CIA killed Kennedy, and I think that's probably one of the reasons why he could remove from Fox.
00:36:30.000There was, according to the lore, the last confessions of E. Howard Hunt, the ultimate keeper of secrets regarding who killed JFK, Yeah, that's how you keep a secret, a pipe.
00:36:42.000I think on his deathbed, he said that he was involved in the conspiracy to kill the president.
00:39:37.000But I think that thing of like going, the story I was told was he was kind of connected very high up because of what he did in terms of fixing things.
00:39:47.000Like, so the guy that, are you familiar with the Perfumo affair?
00:39:51.000So it was the idea that the minister for, I think the Ministry of Defense was having, he was having an affair with a lady who was also, Christine Keeler, who was also having an affair with a Russian agent.
00:40:03.000And she had been procured by this other guy who then got assassinated.
00:41:01.000I mean, there's a similar case in America with Sandusky, you know, who...
00:41:07.000Jerry Sandusky, he was the coach that did a lot of things with kids and worked with kids, and everybody had this image that he was this great guy, when it turns out the entire time he had been molesting kids.
00:41:30.000Which is like Boy Scout masters and priests.
00:41:34.000Which is, you know, it's a terrible thing because something like the Scouts, which is very good for kids, go and play together and learn those things and those skills.
00:41:40.000It's a great organization, and yet that's absolutely fucking ruined it.
00:41:44.000That's the first thing you think of now when you think of the Scouts.
00:41:58.000Someone was talking to me about the history of the Catholic Church and what happened and the idea of the thing that turned the Catholic Church bad was the plague.
00:42:53.000So the barrier to entry For getting into the priesthood went from, you've got to be great, to, ah, you seem to have all your own teeth and you can string a sentence together, you'll be great.
00:43:05.000So all of that stuff that comes after, downstream of that, like the plenary indulgences, this thing where you could buy your way into heaven in the Middle Ages, you could sort of pay someone to go, yeah, you can make sure I'm okay when I get there, though.
00:43:18.000That kind of nonsense came along afterwards when it had all kind of...
00:43:56.000I mean, if you have a community where the priest is literally connected to God, and he's a biological male, and he's horny, and these women worshipped him and came to them for...
00:44:23.000And they'd seek guidance from you, you'd get all these accolades, and apparently they were allowed to have sex with women, and they were fucking everybody.
00:44:38.000There's often been, and it's a very unpleasant thing, but there's often been a conflation between homosexuality and pedophilia, which is so...
00:44:49.000It's nonsense, but it keeps on kind of rearing its head in a weird way.
00:44:52.000But there is something with the Catholic Church where it's hard to remember how vilified gay guys were a generation ago, let alone two generations ago.
00:45:04.000Yeah, well, very recently, in the 90s.
00:45:10.000So there's a weird thing where, okay, so let's say you're a gay guy in, I don't know, 1890. You knew you were gay when you were 14 or whatever.
00:45:19.000Everyone else is getting married and going off, and you go, I'm a gay guy.
00:45:54.000Well, there's also there's a different attitude towards same sex minors and adults that is with some people in the gay community.
00:46:05.000In fact, there was a law that they were trying to pass In California, where they were saying that the age of consent being 18 was in somehow or another anti-LBGTQ because some young men sought mentors in older gay men,
00:47:19.000And then at 18 maybe, okay, go and do whatever you're going to do.
00:47:24.000I remember when I was 18 years old, when I turned 18, my girlfriend was a year younger than me and she was 17. And I was terrified that I was going to go to jail.
00:47:35.000Because I was a legal adult and she was still a child.
00:48:00.000I think if you're dating a girl like that.
00:48:02.000I mean, this is 1985. So Gavin Newsom signed a law that could give judges a say on whether to list someone as a sex offender for having oral or anal sex with a minor.
00:48:13.000The bill would expand discretion currently granted judges in statutory rape charges as promoted by bringing fairness under the law to LBGTQ defendants.
00:48:23.000The current law, in place for decades, permits judges to decide whether a man should be placed on California's sex offender registry if he had voluntary intercourse with someone from 14 to 17 years old and was no more than 10 years older than the person.
00:48:45.000But that discretion says only apply to a man who had vaginal intercourse.
00:48:50.000The new law changes permits – the new change, rather, permits judges to use the same discretion when the case involves voluntary oral or anal sex.
00:49:00.000The measure won't apply when a minor is under 14, when the gap is larger than 10 years, or when either party says the sex wasn't consensual.
00:49:10.000The law does not change the age of consent in California, which is 18. Adults caught having sex with minors will still face statutory rape charges.
00:49:50.000The law ends discrimination by treating LGBTQ young people the exact same way that straight young people have been treated since 1944, Wiener said in a statement, adding, today California took yet another step towards equitable society.
00:50:03.000So what that seems to me is like there was a law already in place giving judges discretion, but it was only for vaginal sex, and he thought that it should apply to oral and anal sex.
00:50:11.000It seems like the law is the issue, right?
00:50:14.000Because 10 years old, if someone's 26, another person's 16, or 15 and 25, that's crazy.
00:50:22.000There's a reason why it's 18. 18 is reasonable.
00:50:25.000And I think you have to give people agency at some point.
00:50:28.000At some point you have to give people agency and go, look, you're allowed to make your own decisions now.
00:50:33.000I mean, you are certainly a young person at 18, but if you're a young man at 18 and you decide to have sex with a man who's 30 years old, that's completely reasonable.
00:50:41.000I think it's also, you know, try telling an 18-year-old they're not...
00:52:19.000And it's also the difference in how we...
00:52:21.000It's unfortunate, but there's a prejudice about women having sex versus men having sex, that a woman is being taken advantage of by the man, that they don't have agency,
00:52:37.000whereas the man is the pursuer and the predator.
00:52:41.000So there's an aspect of that that goes along with it.
00:52:47.000We don't think of a 16-year-old boy having sex with a hot 30-year-old woman as that boy being molested.
00:54:44.000When I was in high school, the first girlfriend that I had, she had a single mom, and she was essentially on her own and left to roam around from the time she was very young.
00:54:55.000She had been going to concerts when she was 12 and 13 years old, and she had already had sex before I had.
00:55:02.000She was a year younger than me, and when we met, I was a virgin, and she wasn't.
00:55:06.000And so it was, you know, she was more worldly and mature than I was.
00:56:09.000It feels ridiculous that we let that go.
00:56:13.000And maybe it's like, okay, so if it's too expensive, then I can see an argument to say, well, on academic merit, we cut the number of places until we can afford for it to be free.
00:57:11.000And it's pushed on people because everybody feels like they have to go to college or they're going to be a loser.
00:57:15.000And there's people right now in America that are getting Social Security money, and their Social Security money is getting docked because they owe student loans.
00:58:08.000I don't know what advice you would give an 18-year-old today.
00:58:12.000It would really depend upon what they want to do.
00:58:15.000I mean, I'm the worst person to give that advice because of my childhood and the way I grew up, very unstable, divorced parents, stepdad, moved to a new place all the time.
00:59:17.000So that thing of going, couldn't hold down a job.
00:59:19.000But I mean, you're pretty good at showing up to stuff.
00:59:21.000Well, I realized later that it was just I wasn't interested in those things.
00:59:27.000And what I was terrified of is being forced to do something that I wasn't interested in forever.
00:59:31.000And I saw so many people that they would just wait until they got home every night and just get drunk and then do it all over again in the morning and then their bodies were deteriorating and they all wound up getting cancer and getting sick and they all died young.
01:00:48.000And that thing of finding your tribe, finding your thing.
01:00:51.000So a lot of people that are lost just haven't found their tribe, their thing.
01:00:54.000It's hard if you haven't found it yet because you kind of go, well, it's easy for you to say you found it.
01:00:58.000I was also not around people that were following their passions.
01:01:02.000Everyone that I was around was working.
01:01:04.000You know, we lived in a blue-collar community, and it was surrounded by a white-collar community, and these people that had all worked really hard, got a very good education, and got a respectable job, either as a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or whatever, and they had a wonderful home, and they worked well.
01:01:21.000I looked at them as like these deteriorating vessels of flesh that were barely getting by in the world and I didn't want to do what they were doing.
01:01:29.000And I didn't know until I got into martial arts that there were people that were doing different things and that they were surviving and thriving, teaching something that they loved.
01:01:43.000It's interesting, the teaching thing, because if I think of your stand-up career, you've done what you've done in stand-up and now you're building a club and, you know, you've lowered a rope and you're pulling people up.
01:01:55.000Well, it was also I learned how to talk in front of people.
01:01:58.000Because I was painfully shy and socially awkward as a kid.
01:02:02.000I'd have anxiety going to a bank teller, that I was going to have to talk to the bank teller.
01:02:18.000I think that's being 16. I think being a teenager is about being slightly uncomfortable in your own skin and deciding who you're going to be.
01:04:03.000Now I read non-fiction, voraciously, but I like non-fiction, but I don't feel like I need the stories because I'm doing something creative.
01:04:10.000I think it was that part of me that wanted that.
01:04:46.000Well, especially if you get captured early, and that's what I was talking about with the student loan thing.
01:04:50.000You get trapped in debt, and then you're on this path to a career, and then along the way, someone says, hey, have you ever thought about doing comedy?
01:05:41.000You should also be surrounded by people that are also doing the same so you can learn from each other.
01:05:46.000If you're a lone person on an island out there taking risks, it's very difficult to assess whether or not you're on the right path or whether or not it's viable.
01:05:54.000One of the beautiful things about stand-up and one of the things I love about the club is all these young risk-takers are around people that are the same and that are maybe 10 years ahead of them.
01:06:35.000Like, it's that thing of, like, you're match fit for this thing.
01:06:38.000One of the things that we found in L.A. is that...
01:06:42.000Like when I was doing the Comedy Store and the Improv and the Ice House and going back and forth and doing, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then I'd go on the road Friday and Saturday.
01:06:54.000You get this groove where you just kind of know how to make something funny.
01:07:00.000And so it's easier to create new material as well.
01:14:19.000But knowing what you are strikes me as a very important part of, again, another reason to study stand-up comedy is like you find out who you are.
01:16:31.000Maybe physics delivers and we get to a new place.
01:16:35.000And there could be generation upon generation upon generation.
01:16:38.000Well, we're still at the ground level of this thing where people find a voice and find a perspective on things, and it's called stand-up comedy.
01:16:45.000It's kind of an American medium, and it's new.
01:16:49.000This is what it must have felt like in the jazz clubs in the 30s.
01:17:20.000And I hope for them, all of them, no matter what age they are, that thing of like, they get to do something that fulfills them, that makes them truly happy.
01:17:29.000And they get to, it's not even do something, to be.
01:20:49.000Someone told me this thing recently about the difference between ambition and entitlement.
01:20:55.000And it's, okay, so it's where you are now and where you want to be.
01:21:00.000And if you want to do something about it and you're going to do something about it, that's ambition.
01:21:04.000And if you think someone else should, that's entitlement.
01:21:07.000And giving people agency, high agency people, giving them like the power to do that is what the whole school system should be set up to do.
01:21:17.000Yeah, and teaching people the difference between those things and that you are not doing enough.
01:21:23.000You may think that you're doing enough and that you should be receiving more, but you get what you deserve for the most part.
01:22:10.000That snippet of it is absolutely perfect because that's what a lot of – the reason why most people criticize is because they feel like someone has something they don't deserve.
01:22:20.000Obviously, there's criticism for people that are doing something terrible or doing something badly or just ruining something.
01:22:26.000Well, I had this theory about envy and jealousy.
01:22:29.000And I don't mind which word you use for which.
01:22:32.000But for me, I would say envy is very good, jealousy is very bad.
01:23:12.000The bad feeling is you wish you had what that person has.
01:23:15.000So instead of looking at the reality of your existence and your life and whether or not you deserve it or whether or not you put the work in or whether or not you've achieved a level of proficiency that would allow you to get that...
01:23:26.000You just want it and they have it and you're mad at them because they make you feel bad.
01:23:33.000It's like dumb guys that wind up hating women because they keep getting rejected.
01:23:37.000So they associate women with negative feelings and bad feelings because these women reject them.
01:26:45.000But, you know, if you want a dream, if you have a thing that you're striving for, and you don't chase it, that's a terrible way to live your life, to wake up one day and realize that you didn't go for it.
01:27:43.000If everything goes well, your perspective will be enhanced with every day you're on this planet and every life experience that you have and that you learn from.
01:27:52.000That will enhance your ability as an artist to express yourself.
01:27:59.000You'll understand how other people see you.
01:28:01.000You'll understand how to get these ideas into people's heads better.
01:28:04.000It's interesting that thing of light going, another reason to teach stand-up, the idea of knowing how you're perceived in the world is such an underrated skill.
01:28:13.000Because knowing how you change the atmosphere when you walk in a room, it's often the way with like, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, like very, very beautiful people, like super symmetrical, beautiful people tend to speak very slowly.
01:31:17.000When I write, so people, I think when you write, when most people write, they sort of just write the word.
01:31:24.000I need to think of every letter in the word as I write.
01:31:27.000And so as I read, I read individual words.
01:31:30.000So I'm quite, like I read, I read pretty slowly even now, like compared to, I I don't know what my reading age is, but it's definitely not commensurate with where I should be.
01:31:41.000But I managed to kind of game the system.
01:31:53.000You just basically, I sort of, I figured out early on that pattern recognition thing of going, okay, I need to get A's in my A-levels, like whatever you call the end of school.
01:34:14.000The slowdown processing can affect everything that follows.
01:34:17.000That includes slowed reading because you have trouble processing and understanding words, difficulties with writing and spelling, problems with how you store words and their meanings in your memory, trouble forming sentences to communicate more complex ideas.
01:34:28.000Dyslexia is uncommon overall but widespread enough to be well known.
01:35:35.000I mean, I went to, you know, arguably the best university in the UK. I guess Oxford would have issues with that, but I think Cambridge was great, and did very well academically.
01:37:48.000Yeah, you can choose to interface with life in a more positive way.
01:37:52.000And, you know, sometimes people need things that happen to them, near-death experiences, tragedies, psychedelics, something that, like, snaps you out of this state that you're in, this groove that's been deeply cut into your consciousness and the way you approach life.
01:38:09.000You need something different that sort of allows you to see, like, okay, I can look at things differently and that would be a better thing for me.
01:38:18.000That would help me achieve what I'm trying to achieve in life.
01:38:20.000And then as you do do that and apply it and you see the results that are positive, Then you gain momentum in this very good direction.
01:38:28.000I mean, for me, I think grief is a huge driver.
01:38:31.000You know that great, there's lots of great quotes, it's always the same with me, but that thing of every man has two lives, and the second begins when he realizes he only has one.
01:38:53.000So I think that thing of when you're a kid, you're kind of living Sort of for someone else.
01:38:58.000You're sort of trying to impress your parents or someone at school or there's that kind of weird memetic desire for I want what they've got.
01:39:06.000You know, they've got those trainers so I want those training shoes.
01:39:09.000You know, they've got that car, I want that car.
01:39:12.000You're in competition with the world to kind of keeping up with people.
01:40:07.000Well, that's a good point, what you just said, because that's, I think, one of the things that we're missing that has always existed in cultures is the rites of passage.
01:40:15.000Some sort of a ceremony that allows you to recognize that you are now held to a higher standard.
01:40:20.000You are in a new stage of existence and that this stage requires you to now you are a man or now you are a woman.
01:40:27.000And now you have to take agency over your own life and you have to take responsibility for your decisions.
01:40:33.000And you have to think of yourself as an adult now.
01:40:36.000And, you know, there's people that are 35 years old who are still living with their parents and they're still fucking off and never really matured and became a man.
01:42:04.000So they have these kind of list of, we could pull it up, just the list of thought patterns is brilliant for like, just look at you, you think actually the problems in the world today could be solved with a good session of this.
01:42:18.000It's like, just like things like magical thinking.
01:42:21.000Some people just do magical thinking or they, you know, it's kind of, they just put up their own, well, if I do this, then that.
01:44:52.000Well, it's an interesting thing that of like when you think politically, if you're having a political conversation with anyone, I always like try and ask...
01:45:00.000What would you need to see to change your mind?
01:45:02.000And if they don't have an answer, if it's a matter of principle, it means they're not willing to listen to reason.
01:45:21.000It's like, it's such an unusual thing, because most of what we have in our society, everything seems very, looking at America as a visitor here, thanks for having me, it feels like there's a cold civil war.
01:46:15.000I was most certainly in that camp at one point in my life.
01:46:18.000And then doing this podcast and having this incredible opportunity to talk to so many different people that are brilliant and so many different people that have completely different perspectives and my genuine curiosity as to why they think the way they think and learning how to not judge them because the way they think is different than mine,
01:46:39.000than my thoughts, but instead to try To try to put myself in their mind and try to see from their perspective and also give them the most charitable take on them that I can.
01:47:12.000That's such a silly perspective that so many people share.
01:47:15.000But it's that thing of like going, if you have the same political views that you had when you were 21 and you're now 45, you haven't been thinking much.
01:47:25.000You've just been rearranging your prejudices.
01:48:50.000And then there's also, like we were talking about this oversimplification, they make a lot of amazing medications that have helped so many people, that have prolonged lives, saved lives, helped people.
01:49:01.000I invest a lot of my money in a cancer company.
01:49:23.000So that idea if you go, well, it's also the medical establishment, there's lots of problems, but when you're sick, who are you going to call?
01:49:35.000It's just disturbing to realize that they've been captured and that the media has been captured so hard.
01:49:42.000And that was a real revelation that was very uncomfortable for me to accept.
01:49:49.000And a lot of the information that I got from that was from doctors, from heterodox doctors, doctors that would explain to you what the problems with the system were and how they were discouraged and doctors that were fortunate enough to go independent.
01:50:02.000Well, it's the interesting thing about your show.
01:50:04.000Is the thing about the Overton window and how much you're willing to push.
01:50:09.000Because when you said it's a lab leak, you were in trouble.
01:50:15.000And then 18 months later, everyone goes, yeah, but it probably was a lab leak, though.
01:50:19.000Yeah, but I wasn't saying it because I was guessing.
01:50:23.000I was saying it because brilliant people were willing to stick their neck out who were actual experts in viruses.
01:50:30.000And they had studied it and they understood it.
01:50:32.000But in this forum, you said it and it moved the conversation forward.
01:50:36.000You saying that moved the Overton window of like, actually, I think it might be okay to say that.
01:50:40.000I think it might be okay to talk about that.
01:50:42.000Like, it's that thing if you want to know where real power is in any community.
01:51:55.000I agree with what you're saying about...
01:51:59.000Captured seems like it's very strong language, but you go and there's so many incredible doctors out there and nurses out there and physios and the medical profession and researchers.
01:52:12.000There's so much incredible work going on.
01:53:59.000It's called bombing because the sound, it's like after, when you see a movie and they see Black Hawk down and the bomb blast goes off and everyone's ears are blown out.
01:56:10.000And that thing of like those, like your favorite album.
01:56:12.000I don't know what your favorite album is, but I know it came out when you were 18. I know at 17, 18, when you first got a driver's license, that first sense of freedom, that album that you had on in the car.
01:56:21.000For me, it would be the Stone Roses, the Stone Roses, whatever it is for you.
01:56:24.000But it'll be from that age with 95% of people.
01:56:28.000And then, I mean, I listen to a lot of new music.
01:56:32.000But there's something about a familiar tune.
01:56:33.000And yet movies, we want new stories, because it's for the higher mind.
01:56:37.000I was chatting to my friend Johnny McDade recently, who's a songwriter, and we're chatting about story songs, because he's got this idea to write songs with stories, to kind of connect, try and connect the two.
01:57:00.000Like, almost all the songs are about someone's life and some story in their life or some passage in their life or some moment where everything changed.
01:57:50.000I mean, it's a weird thing, like, there's certain emotions that I can only, like, grief, I think, is one of them.
01:57:56.000I often have a thing with songs, like a song will come on the radio, and the grief that comes over you, you remember exactly where you were when you heard that song with the person, and it's, like, really beautiful.
01:58:24.000There's constantly new music that's coming out.
01:58:26.000I feel a bit, like, bad for musicians now in terms of going, there's a lot of comedians filling arenas, and it's only getting bigger, and theatres, and comedy clubs, and lots of comics.
01:58:38.000They're very evenly spread, it feels to me.
01:58:41.000It feels like music has gone the way of film.
01:58:46.000It used to be 100 movies came out every year, 200 movies.
01:58:50.000And yeah, sure, one did better than the others.
02:00:00.000I always talk about this scene from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where Brad Pitt kills one of the Manson girls by smashing her head against a mantelpiece.
02:00:07.000And it's like, Jesus Christ, it's so wild.
02:00:33.000But at that point I was making about like, right, okay, so 70s cinema was like kind of, yeah, there was a studio system, but it was a bit independent.
02:00:40.000The corporations hadn't got hold of it.
02:00:41.000And then in the 80s it became packaged and...
02:00:44.000The algorithm hadn't been created yet.
02:02:52.000So it's the books is the first thing, right?
02:02:54.000So you go, well, these books are great books and they've been around for 100 years or they've been, you know, George Orwell or Dostoevsky or those great books.
02:03:37.000And especially in our industry, in comedy or whatever, we are, you know, shout out to Dick Gregory, but going back and watching the people that invented what we do, I find that the frequency has changed in comedy.
02:03:52.000Like the laughs per minute has just increased.
02:08:51.000It's Hunter S. Thompson, the beginning of his career, when he was first experimenting with this gonzo journalism thing, which is like...
02:08:59.000He's essentially using fiction and non-fiction together.
02:09:04.000And he made up a lot of things, apparently, and he pissed a lot of the Hells Angels off because a lot of what he did was very similar to what he did with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
02:09:22.000Well, he also goes into the roots of how they got established, and it's a lot of people that were disenfranchised from the Vietnam War.
02:09:30.000They were just shell-shocked and broken.
02:09:33.000PTSD. Yeah, and they couldn't fit in with society anymore, and then they found this wild group of people that also couldn't fit in with society, and they found a brotherhood, much like the brotherhood that they had in the military.
02:11:45.000I think comics are people that could fit in, but chose not to.
02:11:49.000Most comedians I know, you go, well, at high school, I was in like four different groups.
02:11:55.000Or university at four different friendship groups and kind of kept them kind of separate from each other.
02:12:00.000I don't know why, but I was kind of attracted to that kind of having my own stuff.
02:12:05.000I always think like the question for comedians, if I meet a comic I don't know, you want to get to know them, I always go, which one of your parents was sick?
02:12:53.000It's a million years older than language.
02:12:54.000And really, if you talk to Robin Dunbar, I did a documentary with him, who's the guy that came up with the Dunbar number, of like, how many friends can you have?
02:13:02.000Because he talked about a lot on social media.
02:13:05.000So silverback gorillas can have about 60 in a pod.
02:13:09.000I think it's called a pod of gorillas.
02:13:11.000So silverback gorillas can have about 60 in the group, and they groom each other.
02:13:16.000And then it gets to 65, and there's five guys going...
02:15:01.000And you unite people in some strange way.
02:15:04.000People with completely different opinions about things.
02:15:07.000It's one of the things that I've said that's amazing about comedy as well is that you can go on stage and have an opinion and I can be in the audience and I have a completely different opinion and I don't agree with you at all.
02:15:16.000I'm like, I don't agree with this guy.
02:15:18.000But if you go on stage with an opinion and you make me laugh, You have somehow or another, you've injected that idea into my mind and now I have to consider how the irony and how the comedic value of your expressing that opinion.
02:15:35.000Unfortunately, unfortunately, you're not the first guy to notice this.
02:15:39.000So, I mean, Hitler knew it and that's why cabaret is such a great piece because those clubs, those cabaret clubs in Germany, And if you laugh with someone, it's like...
02:17:17.000What's really horrific about human beings is how recent that was and how we have sort of dismissed that as an artifact of time and that it's not possible today.
02:18:13.000I mean, I kind of thought that was like an interesting idea on America's original sin is slavery.
02:18:21.000And there's no way to change the past.
02:18:25.000But one thing you could do, if you can't work out reparations and people don't seem to be able to work out what to do with that, but one thing you could do is make America's foreign policy, why don't we just stop slavery?
02:20:49.000Right, we're going to do a thing with, we're going to say, if you have a horse, then you have to do this, you have to do that, whatever it was.
02:21:08.000That thing of, like, what's a resource now?
02:21:10.000America trying to get resources overseas.
02:21:13.000I mean, I don't want to sound like a Boy Scout, but I think freeing slaves would be a much better thing to do than trying to get control of an oil field somewhere where you go, that's not going to be a resource in ten years' time.
02:21:24.000Yeah, the problem is it's a resource now.
02:21:26.000And it's a phenomenal one in terms of the amount of money that you could acquire.
02:22:05.000I think that thing of people saying, well, I would go and make a difference.
02:22:07.000Well, there's stuff going on now if you want to get involved.
02:22:09.000Well, what's so ironic is that it's one of the most horrific conditions that human beings are imposed, that's imposed upon human beings, but yet it is required in order for you to have a cell phone and complain about the injustices of the world.
02:22:24.000Every single person that has one of these things, you have in it minerals that were carved out of the ground by people living in the most insane conditions.
02:22:34.000Slavery, and not just that, like people with babies on their back that are breathing in this cobalt dust, horrific health consequences, everything, all the above.
02:23:01.000I mean, this is part of the anxiety of the modern world because we're surrounded by problems, told about problems that we have no agency there.
02:25:29.000I mean, I can't understand why, like, the big oil companies...
02:25:33.000Why isn't someone, like, instead of just going, you've got to, every time there's an oil spill, you've got to clean up the seabirds better, or, you know, the Gulf of Mexico disaster was horrific what happened.
02:25:44.000You go, why don't you just say you've got to invest half of your profits in nuclear?
02:26:40.000Because if you're buying stocks and you said, look, I'm going to leave my kids a bunch of stocks and shares, what do I think is going to be there in 30 years' time?
02:28:27.000I just, going to the movie theater to me is just, last time I went to see a movie, I brought my kids to see Barbie and there was a group of people just talking, just talking out loud.
02:28:38.000And someone had to shut them up and just, a lot of people were frustrated before they shut them up and You know, it's like that thing, rude people.
02:28:45.000It's tricky that, like, do you intervene or not?
02:28:51.000Right, because then people get in fights.
02:28:53.000Yeah, people get in fights, and it's not worth getting in a fight over, but you go, especially if you're sort of telling someone off and going, oh, guys.
02:29:01.000Sometimes you get it in comedy shows where you go...
02:29:04.000I've done it before where we went to see a show in the West End of London and a lot of people at the show had never been out to the theatre before because it attracted a broader audience.
02:29:15.000So people were on their phones and people were kind of chatting a little bit but you kind of went, okay, but they're...
02:29:52.000They don't give a fuck about other people's experiences.
02:29:55.000And that's this sort of agreement that you make when you go to a movie theater is that you're going to be polite and you're going to sit there and enjoy the film and you're not going to disrupt it for other people.
02:30:47.000Like, there's that weird thing when you go into a coffee shop, you order a coffee, and someone comes in after you, and they serve their coffee before you get yours.
02:32:02.000But most people, if you taught the martial arts, the difficulty of doing it, first of all, it drains all of the anxiety and stress out of your body because it's so physically demanding.
02:32:12.000So you're more calm and peaceful because of that.
02:32:14.000It is an interesting thing when you think about what...
02:32:42.000And so giving yourself something to do in the moment, if you have to bench press something, I'm afraid it's very difficult to worry about the imagined future problem.
02:33:04.000There's a lot of things that, you know, bullies need and people that are insecure need.
02:33:12.000It's a very interesting perspective there to go, because our thing is on dealing with bullying, it's the people that are bullied come forward and tell someone.
02:33:22.000But actually, that's a very interesting point because upstream of that is the bully.
02:35:08.000And it's so difficult to understand someone else's perspective, too, because we all have— A certain amount of discomfort in our life, a certain amount of anxiety, a certain amount of depression.
02:35:18.000And with some people, it's just insurmountable.
02:35:21.000Yeah, I think it's, yeah, that thing of like, how difficult is it for them?
02:36:18.000Yeah, I first experienced suicide when I was on news radio, when I was on a sitcom.
02:36:26.000One of the writers, who's a good friend of mine, killed himself.
02:36:28.000He was going through some marital thing and called his wife on the phone and shot himself in the head while he was on the phone with his wife.
02:36:37.000And knowing that was just so devastating.
02:37:38.000And like that circle of compassion that they had, you know, the good to everyone else in their life, and yet they can't be good to themselves.
02:37:46.000They can't include themselves in that group.
02:39:17.000You know, that thing of whatever's in ayahuasca, I don't know what it's made from, but someone's going to be going, okay, that experience that people are having, like the microdosing mushrooms that they're giving to veterans and having incredible results with PTSD and, you know, reintegrating those guys is phenomenal.
02:39:37.000We talked about the Overton window a bunch of times today, but that thing of like pushing this conversation, pushing what is acceptable to talk about, what people can do.
02:39:46.000Yes, and that is a great example of that Overton window because that was not acceptable to talk about just a few decades ago.