In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with comedian and writer Mike McLendon to talk about a wide range of topics. We talk about his new book, how he got into stand-up comedy, and why he writes a book. We also talk about cult leaders and why they need guns to do what they do. And we talk about how much time we spend thinking about our jizz and why we should all try to masturbate more. It's a fun, lighthearted episode with a lot of laughs and a whole lot of good points. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you think about how important it is to take care of your jizz. I know that it's important to me and I think it's even more important to have a good night's rest and a good morning. I hope that you enjoy it and that you have a great day! -Joe Rogan Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Cover art by Ian Dorsch. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you re listening to this podcast. We'll be looking out for the next episode of the show! Subscribe, Like, Share, and Share! Thank you for listening and Share and Retweet! I'll be back next week with a new episode next week! -The Joe Rogans Podcast! Cheers, Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino -Jon & Mike Rogan Podcast, Jon and Mike McLaughlin. - Jon & Mike McLennan - The JOGAN Podcast -- Subscribe to the JOBYS Podcast by The JOBY PODCAST by and Mike McElroy , & Mike McClennan Podcast by John Rocha ( ) Thanks to Jon and Mauricio Pizzi Thank You, Mike & Mike Pizzio @ , and . of The JODYS Podcast, The JOE RODAN Podcast by the JOE'S BODYS EPISODES by , & AND THE JOE JOSEPH EPISODE, & , AND JOSICA PORTAL thanks to JOE
00:00:29.000Yeah, it seems like cult leaders have to have guns because their faith in their ability to see the universe and all the good and everything is not quite good enough.
00:00:41.000You need an AR. You need an AR to really get your point across.
00:02:15.000I mean, there's probably a benefit in it, but every benefit that you get off of something that's a difficult endeavor is a detriment to something else.
00:03:26.000I have thought about it many times, and I had a deal to write one once, but as I was writing it, they were trying to get me to write it like stand-up.
00:03:33.000And they wanted me to write it in a way that, like, was funny like you'd be on stage.
00:03:38.000Like, how much laughs would you want per minute on stage?
00:03:42.000Which I kind of don't really think about even stand-up that much.
00:03:58.000Why don't you just transcribe your stand-up?
00:04:01.000And I was like, listen, I have a very different idea of what I want to write than you do.
00:04:05.000So I'm going to give you your money back.
00:04:07.000I gave them the money back and I said, I'm...
00:04:09.000I'm just gonna if I'm gonna write something I'm gonna write it on my own and I did for a little while then I stopped but it was a lot of it It was just like I only have so much time to write and I would rather write about ideas that I'm gonna do on stage But I do have an idea about my time I've been working on it a little bit lately So I'm thinking about actually going forward with this.
00:04:27.000It's about a my time when I was in my really early 20s and I discovered pool halls and Oh, yeah?
00:05:39.000My friend Steve, who was the guy who ran the desk, who, you know, administered, gave people the balls, assigned your tables and stuff, he used to just put that motherfucker on, like, every time we were there.
00:06:15.000You know, like we'd played a couple of times.
00:06:17.000And then we just stumbled into this pool hall that had...
00:06:23.000This insane array of characters, all these people that were criminals and hustlers and homeless people and people who lived in flophouses and people who are fucking insane gambling addicts that would bet on raindrops coming down a windowpane.
00:06:43.000They would bet on fucking anything, man.
00:06:53.000I think I was 23 or 24. Somewhere around then.
00:06:57.000It's like, well, yeah, like 90. So, yeah, I was probably 23. And I just remember thinking, like, this is a whole world that I didn't know existed.
00:08:06.000These are exceptional people that just happen to never plug into regular society.
00:08:12.000Well, it's like that dude in Malcolm X's autobiography, the guy that, like, he ran all the numbers in his mind and he never forgot a single one.
00:08:19.000And Malcolm X said, like, he could have been, like, a mathematical genius or a statistical professor or whatever, but instead he was, like, a hustler.
00:08:26.000He used that genius to be on the streets.
00:08:28.000There's some people that have genius power that they apply to an art form, but they could have applied it to anything.
00:08:34.000Like Jay-Z. Jay-Z doesn't write any of his lyrics.
00:08:37.000If you read Jay-Z's lyrics, they don't seem ad-libbed.
00:08:40.000They seem really well structured and written and funny and sharp.
00:10:41.000It's a recent rule that came about because apparently there's an allegation that one of the UFC trainers...
00:10:48.000I want to be real clear about this because I actually like this guy a lot and I think he's a super talented trainer and I do not know if this is true.
00:11:25.000Yeah, it's fishy also because it gives the possibility that fights are dives.
00:11:30.000You know, when a coach is betting against their fighter, or giving other people information against their fighter, if that happened, I don't know if it happened again, I just want to be real clear.
00:14:11.000Well, you know there's that weird idea, and apparently this is proven, that the difference between a world championship runner and the number five is like less than a second.
00:15:46.000On that pool thing though, when you walked into that pool hall, And saw like, bam, this is another universe.
00:15:55.000To me, that's the experience of my life over and over again.
00:16:01.000That is what the book is about, is these momentary portals into another universe, you know, where somebody taps you on the shoulder and goes like, walk over here.
00:18:22.000And with great power comes great responsibility.
00:18:24.000I go, you're gonna have to figure out how to like where the line is.
00:18:28.000Because people who are funny, take it from me, walk through the world offending people because they think they're being funny and they've gone like a step too far in personal interactions.
00:18:45.000Like, there's a thing that you're doing when you're creating, specifically when you're ad-libbing, where if you're on stage, you're ad-libbing.
00:18:52.000You are literally, like, you've got these missiles that are coming into silos, and you're like, launch it!
00:19:22.000But yeah, there was that moment on my Crowdwork album, Crowdsurfing, where I heard myself, when I was listening back to it, I was riffing one riff, and in that riff switched back and did the better riff.
00:19:34.000That's a pretty, speaking of the way the brain works...
00:19:57.000There's a fucking hilarious one that Schultz just put out.
00:20:00.000He's talking to some guy in the audience who brought a date, and the date turns out to be a trans woman, and it's just this hilarious But fun, light-hearted, positive.
00:20:46.000But there's something beautiful about this, too.
00:20:48.000How many magical moments you offered on stage in the pre-digital kind of upload everything era, where you're just like, it was just momentary.
00:20:56.000It was just an offering to that moment.
00:20:58.000There's something really beautiful about that.
00:22:32.000Do you know why people think perhaps the Jews didn't suffer as much in plague other than conspiracy theories that they started it during the Black Plague?
00:22:41.000There was a conspiracy theories way back then that they did it?
00:22:59.000You wash your hands before you eat bread.
00:23:00.000And and People didn't really do that because germ theory wasn't people didn't know about germ theory They didn't understand the correlation between washing your hands and eating and so Jews would always wash your hand before every meal and that is how Apparently they they sidestepped some of the the ravages of the plague.
00:26:20.000The other day we were on the beach though and my neighbor had a lobster trap out and he took out his lobster trap and he was undoing it and there was this undulating piece of seaweed.
00:26:30.000I go, I think there's something alive in there.
00:26:31.000And we shook it off and it was a full giant octopus.
00:26:35.000It was the coolest and my kid reached in and grabbed the octopus like just like it was her friend She was like baby octopus my friend and they will bite the fuck out of you That's what we found out every octopus is venom.
00:26:46.000Oh, she didn't get bit Every octopus is venomous and not most of them can't kill you, but every one of them has a beak that will fuck you up Yeah, they're all beak, but he was very cool.
00:26:55.000Do you know how they kill them when they catch them?
00:28:50.000Petting the crow with a brush, and she put the brush back on the shelf, then the crow flew over the shelf, grabbed the brush, brought it back, and said, no, no, keep petting me.
00:29:06.000You start doing a certain, I think it's leaving it gifts, and then it will go, oh, this person gives gifts, then it will start bringing you gifts, and then if you keep going, it will start attacking your enemies.
00:29:16.000Your neighbors will come over and be like, what's up, Joe?
00:29:18.000And then the crow will come down and attack.
00:29:20.000Yeah, this guy, Dan Flores, who was on the podcast before, had essentially trained a crow by leaving it food every day, and he would go on a walk with his dog, and the crow would hang out with him.
00:30:43.000They just capture them and then they do this weird thing where they train them and then they let them go after a few years of service.
00:30:49.000When I was in Scotland, there was this lady who was, she trained a variety of birds, but she trained owls and falcons, and so she had a falcon there, and she said the problem with the falcon is when they let it go, it just fucks things up.
00:31:02.000It just finds another bird and kills it.
00:31:04.000Like, every time she lets it go, finds something and kills it.
00:33:12.000I mean, it's a very different connection with food when you've been there and harvest it and when you actually go in the wild.
00:33:21.000So it's one thing if you have a farm and you raise a cow and you kill the cow and you eat the cow, you have a connection with that food that's very different than me who just goes to a supermarket and buys a steak.
00:33:33.000It's another level of that when you're going into the woods with a bow and arrow.
00:33:39.000And you're climbing mountains and you're going 8-10 miles a day.
00:33:42.000It's like you swoop into their universe.
00:34:17.000I was with my friend Colton, and he goes, look at the cat!
00:34:20.000He stops the truck, and it's at dusk, like, right when the sunlight's going down, and I see these glowing eyes under a tree, and we're about 30 yards away from it, and I have binoculars.
00:34:29.000So I put up my binoculars to look at it up close.
00:37:57.000It's like, it's this tricky medication.
00:37:59.000I mean, it's great that women got their liberation sexually and that every time you had sex, it wasn't like you're going to have a baby that you could choose when to do it, when not to do it.
00:38:09.000Is that a flicker perception up too, having a kid at 16?
00:38:22.000So it's not saying that birth control is entirely bad, but if you're a woman and you have to take this thing in order to not get pregnant, and the guy doesn't have to do shit...
00:38:33.000If a birth control pill was invented for a guy, and I think they did come up with one, but it radically lowers your testosterone.
00:38:50.000So the way to kill your sperm cells would be either to ramp up your endogenous testosterone to where your body doesn't produce testosterone anymore, so you don't produce sperm cells, or You could kill it.
00:41:19.000We were just talking about that the other day.
00:41:21.000If you donate half your liver to me, if you and I have the same blood type, within six to eight weeks, your liver will have returned to full size, and my liver that you donated, that you gave me, will be full size as well.
00:41:34.000It feels like they could cure liver cancer by just doing elective half a liver in a lab growth.
00:41:41.000Well, they're going to eventually be able to do that, I would imagine.
00:41:45.000They're already looking into some sort of reconstruction of organs, like to be able to create a completely new heart that's made of your own tissue so that your body doesn't reject it.
00:41:55.000You know, because your body rejects other people's tissue.
00:41:58.000So if you gave me a heart, I would have to take crazy medication to make sure that my body didn't reject that heart.
00:42:33.000Did not ever it did not work one time.
00:42:36.000Oh, no, but he was just like flying around the world.
00:42:39.000It's like medical like master They're going this genius the genius of our time winning like Nobel prizes and stuff and just people were dying They were just putting a fucking tube into people's throat instead of a trachea.
00:42:51.000Oh my god Oh my god, how many did he do before they got him?
00:42:55.000It was like a half a dozen or something like that.
00:42:58.000Yeah, it was really not just an insane person In this weird way, I mean, it's kind of what we were talking about earlier.
00:43:03.000He was a genius, but he was like a mad, he'd become a mad genius.
00:43:17.000And simultaneously, he was hustling a woman like he was pretending to be married to a journalist in America, and then he was already married in Italy.
00:43:27.000So he kind of had two different madman things going on at once.
00:43:41.000Once there's a wall up where you're a medical professional, I guess there is a little bit of an arm's length.
00:43:45.000I mean, these people did know they were doing an experimental surgery and that they could die, I guess, but they didn't know that it definitely wouldn't work.
00:43:53.000But they obviously decided that he did something wrong.
00:43:56.000They put him in jail for two and a half years.
00:44:16.000It kept failing on sick people that needed new tracheas.
00:44:20.000So he was like, what I need to do is find a relatively healthy person that has a tracheal issue, like a collapsed trachea or something, where they're still walking through the world with relative health, like the oyster guy, and I'll put it in them and that will prove that the thing works.
00:44:53.000So he literally went on a worldwide quest to find somebody with like a fucked up trachea but that wasn't sick and found someone like that and it was cosmetic for her.
00:45:03.000And she's like, I'm tired of talking like this and I have to have like a scarf on and okay, I'll do it.
00:45:08.000She didn't like the way her trachea looked?
00:45:10.000No, I think she like talked weird and she had issues for sure.
00:45:28.000It's about a guy who was like, he was a neurosurgeon and he was just like, it wasn't clear if he was like Dr. Mengele, like wanted to kill people or if he was just like a stupid person that was just like slashing in people's bodies.
00:45:39.000Like it wasn't clear what he was doing, but it looked like when he would open someone up, he had no idea what he was doing.
00:45:44.000I mean, he just was like stapling a artery to a bone.
00:46:25.000Yeah, man, you can't be fucking entirely sure that someone's not out of their mind.
00:46:29.000Well, there's certain professions like that where you assume their degree is the thing that makes them competent, but you forget that it's just a person.
00:46:38.000Here's the guy, it says, of the 37 patients, Dunched, how do you say it?
00:47:16.000One patient, a childhood friend of Dunst, went in for a spinal operation with someone he trusted and woke up a quadriplegic after a doctor damaged his vertebral artery.
00:48:30.000He claims he was invited to other American prisons, expected design modifications to electric chairs, possessed no relevant formal training or education, and claims that he was told that those who did possess such qualifications would not provide advice due to their opinions on death penalty,
00:48:47.000fear of reprisals, or that they were squeamish about the subject.
00:49:01.000So, his career continued with other state prisons seeking his advice on execution facilities other than electrocution, such as gas chambers, hanging and lethal injection.
00:49:14.000Initially professed his ignorance of other methods of execution.
00:49:19.000The authorities seeking his advice reminded him that others with more qualifications refused to help.
00:49:25.000Luchter claims to have taught himself on these other methods of execution and provided advice that was used by the authorities to improve safety and efficiency.
00:49:35.000So as Fall claimed when Luchter claimed to have been sought as a witness for the defense for Ernest Zundel during, so one of the Nazis, right, in Canada for spreading false news by publishing and sending material denying Holocaust overseas.
00:49:52.000Luchter was asked by the defense to travel to Poland to visit...
00:50:12.000And Luchter was asked by the defense to travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz to investigate whether there had been operating gas chambers for executions at the camp.
00:50:21.000At first examination, Luchter felt that using poison gas in a building with the internal and external design of the buildings currently on display at the site would have caused the death of everyone in the area outside the buildings as well as inside.
00:50:35.000The film shows videotaped footage taken in Poland of Luchter taking samples of bricks in the buildings to take back the United States forensic science labs.
00:50:44.000To determine whether there was evidence of poison gas in the material.
00:50:47.000These samples were not identified as to where they came from.
00:50:50.000Luchter states that the laboratories reported that there was not any trace of any poison gas at any time.
00:51:17.000I think I remember that this documentary, because he starts saying these things, it's very similar to social media clout.
00:51:24.000He starts saying these things and everybody starts to, in the Holocaust denial community, starts bigging him up and going, this is our guy.
00:51:31.000And he gets more ideological as a result of it.
00:51:59.000Would hold for the extermination chambers, it would hold for the delousing chambers as well, and one would have to conclude that no delousing chambers existed either.
00:52:11.000So it's just he doesn't understand how it dissipates.
00:52:14.000So there's probably no trace because there's no trace left.
00:52:19.000We're talking about he's doing this 70 years later.
00:52:23.000I think that's what the documentary was about, was that this guy quickly got in over his head.
00:52:29.000The minute he said one thing, they were all like, we love you, and he became this kind of figurehead of that movement.
00:55:11.000I guess if you were extremely ill, it would seem like, but you're still walking through the world, it would seem like you had been possessed on some level.
00:55:18.000Well, I've said that about people that get addicted to drugs.
00:55:22.000I've met people and they weren't addicted to drugs and they got addicted to drugs.
00:55:25.000It's like, oh my God, it's like that person got bit by a vampire.
00:56:09.000And so meth becomes this sort of cyclical trap where you can't actually...
00:56:13.000It's not just that you want to get high.
00:56:15.000Your brain can't make you happy without it.
00:56:17.000And it takes a long time to rewire your brain in that particular way.
00:56:24.000Heroin is the one that everybody overdoses from and meth is the one that people kind of go mad from slowly because their brains get weirdly atrophied in that way.
00:56:31.000One of my friends from the pool hall was a crack addict and he would go get crack and then he would have to come down by drinking 40 ounces.
00:56:44.000I took him a couple of times to like bad neighborhoods so he could cop but then we'd always have to go to a liquor store and he would get like a 40 ounce Of what?
00:58:52.000Yeah, so you just got let out and you were just out on the streets listening to rap, drinking 40s.
00:58:56.000I was a latchkey kid and my mother, Oakland Public Schools, my mom was deaf, my dad was deaf too, and he was like a sort of born-again Hasidic Jew.
00:59:06.000When my parents split, my dad got super, super religious.
01:00:08.000And kids in that neighborhood, we used to play dodgeball games where it would be the ultra-Orthodox kids versus the actually religious kids.
01:00:24.000And I would be nine months a year in Oakland, regular public school, listening to Too Short, fly back to my dad's house, get driven to the Orthodox barber shop, put a yarmulke on me, slacks, and I would go cosplay as an extra from Fiddler on the Roof for six weeks a year.
01:00:42.000And that's sort of, I think that's the reason I fell into the rehab so heavily, into the drug so heavily, is because I was, everything about me made me feel like I am, I don't fit.
01:01:07.000There was a local rabbi when I was getting close to my bar mitzvah, and he goes, he noticed, he was very nice, and he noticed that I didn't know Hebrew.
01:01:15.000These kids spoke, and I'm not kidding, these kids spoke Yiddish as a first language.
01:01:18.000That's why they had the Eastern European accent, right?
01:01:20.000So my uncle, he was first generation American, so he sounds like an American because the first generation of Americans say, go fit in, right?
01:01:27.000But then by the time he had kids, they're like feeling their comfort in the United States, and they go, Don't go fit in.
01:01:33.000Go to a seminary where we learn Yiddish.
01:01:35.000So my cousins sound like extras from Dr. Zhivago and my uncle sounds like a New Yorker.
01:01:54.000So it's getting towards my bar mitzvah, right?
01:01:56.000It's my 12th year or 11th year and I don't know the alphabet.
01:02:00.000And this rabbi sees that I'm struggling.
01:02:03.000And my dad was deaf and so he had this kind of like bizarre relationship with the community where he was like one part accepted, one part almost mascot in a way that was a little insulting, but he was loved, whatever.
01:02:14.000The rabbi said, give him to me and I'll teach him Hebrew, right?
01:04:56.000But if you were born lucky enough to have genetic deafness in your family...
01:05:01.000So that you and your sibling were both deaf, then the two of you sitting together could create language, a language of two, right?
01:05:11.000You would back and forth between two siblings create a family sign system that would enable the both of you learning from one another to create a language and enable you to reason and think and talk about how you feel even if it was just with one person.
01:05:24.000But you couldn't communicate with the outside world.
01:06:03.000They teach him to sign, and his thing was he wanted them to take the catechism, right?
01:06:09.000He wanted them to be able to go to heaven.
01:06:11.000He realized, oh, deaf people are linguistically capable, but they can't get into heaven unless they can take the catechism and confess their faith and take communion, right?
01:06:58.000So much so that the way that he would fundraise for this school is he would do like a traveling like roadshow where he would take his star pupils around France and around Europe and they would be at like an exhibition hall and a person in the audience would ask a question he would say oh Joe do you have a question for the deaf person and then you'd ask them at some French question like you know what is what degree of suffering can be borne by man or how many creams is too many creams for a brie or whatever And he would take your question,
01:07:25.000sign it to his star pupils, and they would take a piece of chalk, walk up to the blackboard, and write the answer in perfect French.
01:07:34.000Like, deaf people, oh my god, it, like, unlocked this whole conception of the deaf as, like, they can think, they can reason, oh, all they need is language to be free, right?
01:07:44.000So this whole network of schools for the deaf started to spring up.
01:07:48.000They sprung up in all over Europe and they would copy the teaching methods of the school for the deaf.
01:07:55.000And a guy from America came over, right?
01:07:59.000And he saw this system and he basically took their star pupil.
01:08:04.000And one of the things was the deaf would teach each other.
01:08:07.000So you would teach them sign and then they would become educated and then they would become a professor at this school.
01:08:11.000And he took like the star professor, Laurent Clerc was his name.
01:08:15.000Thomas Gallaudet was the name of the American.
01:08:17.000He came over and he saw Laurent Clerc and he said, move to America with me and let's go replicate this in America.
01:08:28.000By the time they landed, Thomas Gallaudet knew rudimentary sign and Laurent Clerc, who was like a fucking genius, knew basically had been taught English.
01:08:35.000And they set up the first school for the deaf in America.
01:08:39.000He was a genius, like a real genius, like an actual, like lucky enough to have been, you know, these circumstances in history where like the perfect man at the perfect time.
01:08:49.000They come here, they set up this school here, and they start to create American Sign Language.
01:08:53.000And they borrowed from these different worlds, right?
01:08:56.000They took French Sign Language as the base.
01:08:58.000Martha's Vineyard, back then, had this weird genetic anomaly on the island of Martha's Vineyard.
01:09:03.000This is like before it was just a place for Kennedys to fuck their mistresses.
01:09:06.000This was like back when it was a fishing island.
01:09:09.000There was some weird genetic thing that had happened where, over the course of hundreds of years, one in 25 people on Martha's Vineyard was deaf.
01:09:58.000You've seen it in movies where the Native Americans will gesture to each other And you think they present it as if it's like a war language so they don't have to make noise.
01:10:07.000But what it actually was was all the tribes in America spoke different languages.
01:10:11.000So they created this kind of Esperanto of the tribes so that they could trade.
01:10:16.000And that was called Plains Indian Sign Language.
01:10:18.000And they took all that into a kind of bouillabaisse of French Sign Language bass, Martha's Vineyard Chaser, and Plains Indian sprinkled on top, and they created American Sign Language.
01:10:28.000And then 100 years, 200 years later, my mother was born deaf in Oakland, California, and she went to the California School for the Deaf, and she absorbed this language.
01:10:39.000My mother was 13 when she went to the California School for the Deaf.
01:10:44.000This is my long-winded way of telling you why deaf people have such a problem with hearing people.
01:10:49.000That language that she learned, she was in an oral school system.
01:10:53.000So almost as soon as the sign language system came out, And hearing people looked at it and go, we got to get rid of that.
01:11:00.000The one thing that unlocked their freedom, the one thing that unlocked their minds, hearing people saw it and said, we have to take that away from them.
01:12:08.000Oliver Sacks said teaching a deaf person without sign is like teaching you Japanese from inside of a soundproof booth by holding up flashcards in Japanese and like putting a symbol next to it.
01:12:19.000It was like kind of doomed to failure.
01:12:21.000And then they went through this 200 years reimposed darkness.
01:12:26.000There was a trial where all the hearing educators decided that deaf people wouldn't sign anymore.
01:12:32.000They fired all the deaf educators and they pushed them out and they created this oral system which really, I mean, it worked for some people.
01:12:39.000But what it created was you had to be exceptional in order to be average in the deaf world.
01:12:45.000You had to be a genius in order to get that oral system to work for you because your natural mode of communication had been kind of stamped out.
01:12:52.000And then in about the 70s, deaf people started to like kind of rise up and say, fuck that.
01:13:27.000Is the reason that when I was born into the deaf community, there was so much distrust of the hearing world because they were like, they stole from us the one thing that gave us freedom.
01:14:42.000And then you have to do this kind of like, this kind of interpretive dance where you're not, you can't be like, oh, we think your son is awesome.
01:15:16.000I am at a disadvantage, Joe, because this is South Africa, and I do not speak South African Sign Language, but I remember this guy.
01:15:25.000Oh, so there is a South African Sign Language.
01:15:27.000I would assume every system—you want to hear something crazy— It is so not a translation of English that my mother would have a much harder time understanding a British signer than a French signer.
01:16:51.000I've been an interpreter when people were told they were dying.
01:16:55.000I've been an interpreter when people were graduated from graduate school, from getting their doctorate.
01:17:00.000I've been an interpreter where people were in court, and it was literally the degree to which I could sign accurately and faithfully was the difference between them going to prison and not going to prison.
01:17:10.000I've done all of that, and that weight is super massive to me.
01:17:49.000Because my mom was like, my mom's like an iconoclast, and she's like, I'm not going to allow a taboo in deaf society to keep me from experiencing as much of life as I could possibly experience.
01:17:59.000But in general, especially at the beginning, deaf people hated the idea of a cochlear implant because they do not feel And I think to some degree I agree with them that deafness is a disability.
01:18:10.000They feel that what it is, it's a culture.
01:18:38.000Do they hear it the way a normal person hears it?
01:18:41.000Well, I can tell you in section two of the book, My Rave Years, what kind of music the deaf like more than any other in my experience, is definitely slamming techno.
01:20:37.000So you'd be just kind of barely moving?
01:20:40.000When I was a big raver, and I became eventually like a rave promoter, and I was a DJ at raves through the 90s, and an ecstasy dealer, but that's another story.
01:20:48.000I started, when I was about 16, I bought my first set of turntables and a mixer.
01:20:52.000And I was terrible, obviously, like everybody starting out.
01:20:55.000But you can't play in your headphones DJing, really.
01:20:59.000And I had a very lucky break in having deaf parents because I would just set everything all the way to the max and my mom would be happily studying in the other room and I would just be train wrecking techno beats.
01:22:51.000But she, for some reason, you know, I wish, I mean, I love my mom, and who am I to say that it wasn't worth it?
01:22:57.000She says it's worth it to her, and it's not my business.
01:22:59.000She wanted to experience in the last quarter of her life, like, the sensation of sound, and I think, like, I get that, when you've never experienced something, like, why you wouldn't walk through that door.
01:23:09.000But to me, I wish she'd never gotten it, because now she's, like, this wobbly older lady, and it, like, scares the shit out of me.
01:26:13.000But also, with these people, these scientists, that's a really sneaky trick to get a bunch of prominent people together and then invite you to be with those prominent people.
01:26:54.000The CIA will tell you to do something, you do it.
01:26:57.000If you're a person that has an enormous amount of influence in a field of science, that's a very valuable person to have on your hand.
01:27:05.000If you ever have something where someone has to speak to the general public, you get this expert, and this expert has an opinion that's very different than some other people's opinions, and then they promote that opinion as the person.
01:27:19.000You could do a lot of things, especially if you have a lot of them.
01:28:42.000But I think, what are the odds that the smartest man ever to get Lou Gehrig's got to live long enough to give over the full bulk of his genius?
01:28:49.000There's something very beautiful and interesting about that to me.
01:28:51.000Well, yeah, that's a good point that that guy who had so much to give lived so long with the disease it kills so quickly.
01:34:35.000Like that these things happen on purpose?
01:34:37.000That there's something, some sort of a destiny to life?
01:34:41.000I can tell you that I've been thinking about Destiny a lot.
01:34:44.000She was the other stripper at the strip club looking at Stephen Hawking.
01:34:47.000No, I've been thinking about Destiny a lot because of this book.
01:34:50.000Because, you know, these are worlds, all of these worlds that I write about in this book, like deafness and Hasidic Judaism and AA and raves and Burning Man and stand-up.
01:34:59.000They don't go together except through, like, my body.
01:35:27.000Is destiny in this weird way because it never could have been anything else?
01:35:31.000I have all these, and I'm sure you do too, these portals in my life.
01:35:34.000You could have been a pool hustler only.
01:35:36.000And you could have gone to the pool hustler thing and then gotten shot and died at 25. There's all these multiverse possibilities of the Moshe that wasn't.
01:35:46.000And the Moshe that was was always headed in this direction.
01:35:51.000The only reason I started stand-up is because I was in Israel doing a semester abroad and it was in the second intifada and it got shut down.
01:36:00.000I just decided randomly to go to New York and I happened to have a friend who I'd kept in touch with who was doing stand-up and she brought me to a show that night and I saw Patrice and Sarah Silverman.
01:36:12.000And I never even thought stand-up in my life I like never I mean I'd seen like delirious or it's like I watched Janine's Special and it's but I didn't care stand up wasn't part of my thing But I saw them doing their thing and I was like I couldn't believe it like I I'd been writing like long-form monologues and like wanting to be an actor I didn't know what I wanted to do.
01:36:32.000I wanted to write plays Maybe I wanted to be a historian.
01:36:34.000I just didn't know and then I saw them.
01:37:27.000I got a wife at home who's a comic who I met in comedy clubs.
01:37:30.000I have a child at home that's a result of the connection that the two of us have.
01:37:34.000I can't even look back and think about the other lives it could have been because it's like, that to me is destiny, is looking back and going.
01:37:54.000Do you believe that there's infinite numbers of you living in different directions and infinite possibilities?
01:38:01.000The people that believe that we live in one channel of essentially what's an infinite radio dial, that's why you can only exist in the moment, really.
01:38:17.000Yeah, it's only one thing going and it can go any way.
01:38:22.000And if there's an infinite number of you out there, which it likely, the way the universe is, if you talk to people that actually understand the scope of infinity, they will tell you that.
01:38:36.000Not only do humans exist, but you exist.
01:38:41.000And not only do you exist, but you exist in the form where you have done everything that you have done on this earth.
01:38:49.000You, Moshe, the guy I'm talking to right now.
01:39:35.000It's what does that do and what are these moments and what is the powerful emotion of love and the way people feel when they hear great music and all the good things that human beings are capable of and all the things that human beings do.
01:39:58.000It's expressing the universe in some weird way has taken this multi-celled being and allowed it to change the surface of the planet and experiment with...
01:40:10.000Video where it flies through space and hits another person's device on the other side of the planet instantaneously What we've done is fucking bizarre and I can't think that there's not a meaning to it because there's a mean to us while it's happening would If you believe that story that I... Not that I'm saying that story was the most magical story.
01:40:55.000If you believe in destiny, like I was headed here because a force brought me here, that's magical.
01:41:00.000And if you believe in randomness, like there was no meaning, this was truly a pinball ping from wall to wall, that's just as magical to me.
01:41:12.000I've always said that if life itself as you live it right now was a psychedelic drug, you would take it and be like, what the fuck is this?
01:41:21.000Well, even to exist at all, scientifically, is so infinitesimally, like...
01:41:28.000We're the perfect amount of distance from the sun to have an ozone layer and an atmosphere, and then you're a human that you got to incarnate in the human version, where you're not just like a sustenance, like, you know, the pig that you shot.
01:41:41.000You could have been the pig that you shot, the funky pig, like...
01:41:47.000It feels so common if you don't pay attention to the beauty in your life.
01:41:51.000It can feel so common and banal and life is boring and meaningless.
01:41:54.000And if you turn around, if I turn around and look at the kind of magic of this existence and this incarnation, I... And that's why I love life so much.
01:42:05.000To me, the book is about my desire to...
01:42:10.000When I die, I want to squeeze the last drop of the towel that was life.
01:42:16.000I want the last little drip of water that was in there.
01:42:34.000I'm lucky and cuz a lot of my friends that I grew up with are dead and like I just and I could have been me too sure Could have been all of us.
01:42:42.000There's a lot of decisions you could have made that have Not gotten you to this point right now.
01:42:46.000Yeah me and Pete Holmes called we were talking about it.
01:42:48.000He was calling it spiritual Plinko Like, it just could have plinked in a different direction, and you'd be a different guy.
01:42:55.000You go on a car ride one day, you're in an accident.
01:42:57.000You go on a car ride the other day, you win the Nobel Prize.
01:43:00.000Yeah, you tie your shoes before you leave the house, and you avoid an accident.
01:43:04.000Or you tie your shoes and you get into an accident.
01:43:07.000So I think, yeah, you're talking about living in the moment.
01:43:10.000Because there's so many possibilities that if you believe it one way are happening or could happen to you, then fear is, I mean, I live in fear sometimes and it's like, this is so pointless because it's the thing with my daughter.
01:43:22.000The thing you're protecting her against, you're not protecting her against the actual thing that will harm her and vice versa.
01:43:26.000Well, that's the thing about anxiety, right?
01:43:28.000It's preparing for something that hasn't happened.
01:43:40.000I always would tell people when I was teaching, when I was teaching martial arts, when I'd have people compete and I'd take them to tournaments.
01:43:47.000I'd be like, the reason why you're so nervous is because you're smart.
01:43:51.000The last thing you want to be is not nervous right now, because nerves are going to save you.
01:43:55.000It's a terrible feeling, but you're going to get over it.
01:43:58.000But those nerves exist because you're aware of the variables.
01:44:35.000I mean, the thing that happens is when people become worshipful of their fear, and it takes away their ability to go out and experience life.
01:44:42.000They're so afraid of the disastrous possibilities of life that they forget to live a life.
01:44:47.000And I will say I'm not free of fear at all.
01:45:24.000So when he was bringing this dog, this guy was bringing a dog that they recognized as the enemy, there was a lot of people that were very distrustful of him.
01:47:12.000What a bizarre thing we've done to our bodies where we can no longer exist in the atmosphere, even if it's warm, people wear clothes.
01:47:20.000It's become a thing where you're shielding your genitals from the other people because they represent your sex.
01:47:28.000Also, though, I have heard that when people, when uncontacted tribes, really like old school, you know, sustenance living sort of Iron Age level tribes come out of isolation and decide to join the world, a big part,
01:48:32.000But I think that was, slowly over time, when we chose to wear clothes, we invented clothes and chose to wear clothes, I think slowly over time people lost all their body hair.
01:48:42.000But I think at one point in time, when you see these really, go to that other picture of him where you see his back and everything, that one, that one, perfect, perfect, that one.
01:48:50.000That's a fucking different kind of hair than the average person has.
01:48:54.000That dude has long hair on his shoulders.
01:48:57.000Do you think that, like, if you have more hair, you're older school?
01:49:55.000She would do those gloves, the ones that go all the way up to the elbow, and she'd be complaining the entire time, but it would be hilarious.
01:51:09.000I mean, if you look at it, I would imagine urban people, collectively, people who've lived in urban environments for longer periods of time probably have less body hair.
01:51:55.000What I do believe, in answer to a question you asked me two hours ago, are all of these rules somehow connected to a functional, nearly scientific corollary, like trichinosis or whatever?
01:52:06.000I do believe that on some level, every bit of biblical information, every bit of religious information, it has some sort of allegorical and metaphorical connection to our past.
01:52:18.000Like, what does it mean that Adam and Eve saw their nakedness and realized they were naked and decided to cover up?
01:52:28.000Definitely, I don't think Adam and Eve saw their nakedness and were ashamed, but something occurred where we realized we are naked in the world and we must cover because people can't look at what we're doing.
01:52:38.000It just makes sense that once they started wearing clothes, seeing people without clothes would be just this shocking thing.
01:52:44.000I can tell you an exact corollary for that in my personal life.
01:52:47.000When I go to Burning Man, last year was my 24th time at Burning Man.
01:53:54.000Humans appear relatively hairless compared to our other ape relatives, but the density of the hair follicles in our skin is actually the same as would be expected of an ape our size.
01:54:03.000The fine hairs that cover our bodies, which have replaced the thicker ones seen in our close relatives, are thought to be an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors.
01:54:43.000The researchers found that body hair significantly enhanced how well people detected the bed bugs, which participants noticing the bugs on the hairy arm quicker than they did when tested on the hairless arm.
01:56:03.000When she found porn, when I hit puberty and she found porn, she took the porn and rather than yell at me, she brought me to like a lesbian, like a feminist vibrator shop and And she said, you can pick any of the lesbian text-based erotica that you want.
01:56:19.000She wanted to make sure if I was looking at porn, it would have like 90 pages of prose poetry before we got to the good stuff.
01:56:25.000That's the kind of woman my mother was.
01:58:24.000I'm not going to articulate this well.
01:58:26.000Your body moves to beat it, but it moves at just below the speed of the virus.
01:58:32.000The virus moves faster than your body's ability to beat it.
01:58:36.000If the virus was slower, then your body would cure it, but it goes faster.
01:58:44.000And so they put this girl into an imposed coma.
01:58:47.000And slowed down, somehow in ways I don't understand, slowed down her system in such a way that the rabies went a little bit more dormant, and then her body was able to supersede the speed of the virus.
01:59:14.000Middazolam during rabies participants, the first week of ICU admittance.
01:59:17.000So yeah, it's a system now, and it doesn't work well, but it works a lot better than...
01:59:22.000Ability of the natural host immune response to clear the rabies virus that the patient is supported through the intense exotoxic phase is the basic premise of this strategy.
01:59:34.000So that makes sense too because you'd be able to hydrate them because one of the things that happens to people, they no longer can drink any water.
01:59:41.000They just start throwing it up as soon as it gets in their mouth.
01:59:43.000They said in that podcast that rabies presents in the way that an ancient, by ancient, like million-year-old disease presents.
01:59:55.000It doesn't feel similar to the more modern diseases and pathogens that we have in our systems now, but the way it presents is like an ancient killer.
02:00:26.000Post-exposure prophylaxis, according to a recent article published in Clinical Infectious...
02:00:31.000Oh, he's 84. 84-year-old man had died in 2021 about six months after waking up in the morning while a rabid bat was biting on his right hand.
02:00:40.000Now this is what we should be afraid of.
02:01:33.000Tasmanian Devils are affected by two independent transmissible cancers known as the Devil Facial Tumor and the Devil Facial Tumor Facial tumor 2. Both cancers are spread by biting and cause the appearance of tumors in the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils.
02:01:48.000So that's not a sexually transmitted disease.
02:01:51.000Speaking of a disease feeling mean, like what you're saying with rabies, the reason that they...
02:01:55.000The reason that they transmit it so much, they have the cancer in their thing and they've got a behavioral tick where the way that they, I think, fight...
02:02:48.000This is more sort of metaphysical, though.
02:02:52.000When we were raised, I remember being told to wash my hands all the time, right?
02:03:00.000But I don't really feel like I told my kids that.
02:03:02.000It used to be almost religious, like wash, wash, wash, wash.
02:03:06.000And then by the time I had my kid, I told her to wash her hands, but it wasn't like, you must.
02:03:10.000And then all of a sudden, a new pathogen came into the human genome, and it was like, I mean, obviously I don't think that washing hands is that big of a deal with COVID, but I had this thought, what if viruses...
02:04:28.000It started in America, but we were in the midst of World War I, and so every country was in this media embargo to not say, oh God, there's a new disease in America because it would have made our army look weak.
02:04:38.000And every other country didn't want to admit it either, but Spain was either not involved in the war or didn't have that embargo somehow.
02:04:45.000They reported the disease, and so for the rest of time it's Spanish flu.
02:04:50.000Another weird thing I found out, the flu that you get today is the Spanish flu.
02:04:56.000It's the variant that sprung off from the Spanish flu, like weakened and weakened and weakened an infinite amount of times, but the thing that we get that we call flu is just the cousin of the Spanish flu.
02:06:44.000And just like how the plague was started in all these different parts of the world because people were shitting in the streets and living in filth and no sanitation, and that's probably exactly how it starts with them as well.
02:06:55.000The virus is particularly deadly because it triggered a cytokine storm ravaging the strong...
02:07:12.000Apparently it was no more aggressive than previous influenza strains.
02:07:17.000Malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, poor hygiene exacerbated by the war, promoted bacterial super-infection, killing most of the victims after a typically prolonged deathbed.
02:10:33.000And in that Poor Things, I think it was historical, sort of semi-historical, there was a combustion engine cab, but it was a stagecoach with a fake horse head on it.
02:10:42.000At the very beginning of stagecoaches, people were so used to having a horse in front, it would just be like a little head.
02:11:15.000And the new theory, this really sent a chill down my spine, is that every planet goes through the same basic process, which is that they become, in 200 years, they go from pre-industrial revolution to industrial revolution to strip mining themselves for...
02:12:18.000Maybe it's a longer arc than we think.
02:12:21.000Maybe we're in the middle of it and maybe that's what asteroids are for.
02:12:25.000Maybe asteroids come along and we get a little cocky and they slam into the earth and we start from scratch again.
02:12:31.000And then we have the same genetics as the intelligent people that figured out how to build the pyramids, but we're this new, confused, barbaric version of it that's been fucking eating rats for a thousand years.
02:12:42.000So there's not just an infinite amount of Joes and Moshas, there's an infinite amount of human populations just regenerating and regenerating for an infinite amount of time until we get to the good one.
02:12:51.000Well, I'm a big fan of what they call the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
02:12:54.000And the Younger Dryas Impact Theory is based on a bunch of things, but one of the things it's based on is core samples.
02:13:01.000When they've done these core samples, they show that around 11,800 years ago, without a doubt, the Earth was hit by comets.
02:13:07.000And they think this is what happened that stopped the ice age.
02:13:34.000The people that are proponents of this theory, like Graham Hancock and Rendell Carlson, they think that human beings had achieved a very high level of sophistication in probably a different direction than we have now.
02:14:25.000And people would say, well, there's no evidence of that theory.
02:14:27.000And then they started discovering things that they, like Gobekli Tepe is the best example, that are absolutely, absolutely over 11,000 years old.
02:14:36.000And so they go, okay, 11,000 years ago, people were building these complex stone structures.
02:14:41.000Like, how the fuck did they do that when we thought people were hunter-gatherers back then?
02:16:03.000Maybe this culture war that we're all fighting that people are complaining about now.
02:16:07.000Maybe part of that is this sort of struggle to Achieve a higher level of existence and maybe it's done in the wrong way on both sides to a certain extent But ultimately what it is is trying to sort out what's right and what's wrong and what's good and what's bad and why certain things take place and if we don't if we don't get to that and we keep keep engaging in wars then we never reach a technological level of sophistication that allows us to stop natural disasters and Right,
02:16:38.000If we can get to a point where we can knock asteroids out of the sky and do something to release the pressure of the super volcano and figure out a way to not have people starve and all those things could be accomplished if we get to a certain point.
02:17:29.000You're terrified of other people that might want to take from you the thing that gives you joy and happiness and community and love.
02:17:36.000Ultimately, I think we're going to figure out a way if human beings can exist long enough where we can work things out much better than we're doing right now.
02:17:44.000I think one of the things that hinders our ability to work things out is just like you were talking about sign language, like that your sign from America is different than the sign from the United Kingdom.
02:17:55.000I think if we develop a universal language through translation through technology, we will eliminate a lot of miscommunication and a lot of This failure to understand each other because we look at each other as the other.
02:18:10.000We look at each other as something that's very different than us.
02:18:13.000And they're already doing that on Samsung phones.
02:18:15.000Samsung phones, the new Galaxy S24 Ultra comes out with AI and one of the features of AI is a translate.
02:18:22.000So we can sit apart from each other and in real time This thing could take your, if you're speaking French, you could do it in your ears, in your headphones, or you could do it on the phone in written language.
02:18:34.000And if it's in headphones, we both have it, and I could talk to you in English, and you could understand it if you speak French, because it'll translate into perfect French, and then, or close enough as it is, it'll get better, and then you can speak French, and I will hear it in English.
02:18:47.000We need that for a liberal and conservative.
02:18:50.000You just put headphones in and it's like, oh, that's what you meant.
02:19:24.000And just enjoy the differences instead of thinking the differences as being some sort of a negative.
02:19:29.000And that's what you're saying is that hopefully we're evolving towards a situation where with a universal language or at least a universal understanding, you can see someone that's different and think that they're not.
02:19:38.000What is the difference between isn't that awful to isn't that interesting?
02:19:43.000And then because we're in a growth phase, you're going to go through over-corrections.
02:19:48.000I think a lot of the cultural war that we're involved in, all the craziness that's happening in society, it's an over-correction.
02:19:54.000And then people are going to get fed up with it and they're going to move into a more conservative direction.
02:19:59.000They'll get fed up with that and then they'll move to a more liberal direction.
02:20:01.000It's like it goes back and forth because we're trying to figure out what's the right way to do it and we're basing life On what we were taught by people who didn't know what the fuck they were doing, which is most of our parents and most of their parents.
02:20:14.000Like, they didn't know what the fuck they were doing.
02:20:16.000My grandparents didn't know what the fuck was going on in the world.
02:20:19.000They raised kids who didn't know what the fuck was happening.
02:20:26.000Their generation will figure it out a little bit better, and if we can stay alive, We can eventually get to some commonality and we can realize that a lot of this stupidity is based on our human system of these tribal interactions that's kind of ingrained in our genetics.
02:21:16.000I could fucking talk to you all night.
02:21:18.000Yeah, we'll wrap this up, but I'll recommend this book to people.
02:21:21.000It's called American Cosmic, and it's essentially about this whole flying saucer.
02:21:27.000I just did a whole podcast with a woman.
02:21:29.000But now this is a previous book that I'm reading, and it connects it to religion, and it connects it to the stories in the Bible of Ezekiel, that Ezekiel is essentially seeing a UFO, and that these things are not just a physical thing, that there's some sort of a psychological aspect to them.
02:21:47.000There's some sort of a frequency that we connect to occasionally as human beings, as thinking creatures.
02:21:53.000You're saying we get to a state of kind of enlightenment where the dimensional portal opens up for a split second and that's what we see.
02:22:00.000I don't know if you would call it enlightenment.
02:22:05.000A state of being able to receive whatever the frequency these things operate on.
02:22:11.000And I think there's a lot of stories from ancient religion that's probably based on this.
02:22:19.000And I think as we get more and more of an understanding of...
02:22:24.000Quantum physics and this concept of dimensions and this concept of the ability of something that's far more advanced than us to manipulate dimensions and to visit back and forth.
02:22:36.000And that the potential is that maybe that is where all intelligent life forms eventually evolve to if given enough time and they do it correctly.
02:22:44.000They become interdimensional travelers and that what we're looking at when we're looking at these grays, these weird looking things, that's us in the future.
02:23:11.000It's going to be able to operate machinery.
02:23:13.000One of the things that Bob Lazar said about that craft right there, the sport model that he allegedly worked on in Area 51, Site 4, was that they didn't have controls in them.
02:23:33.000But when you look at Neuralink, you go, wait a minute.
02:23:36.000I guess I could see operating a craft with my mind in a thousand years from now.
02:23:42.000There's that idea that AI, you know, when robotics catches up to AI and AI can implant itself in a robot warrior, then they are like an entity.
02:23:51.000And then they look and they go, what is the only threat to us?
02:25:03.000But there's a funny part in there where my friend Larry, early in my life, throws me up against a wall at an AA meeting and tells me to stop saying the N-word.
02:25:12.000And he's a black kid, a black friend of mine.
02:25:14.000And it was like when I thought that I had a pass or whatever.