Joe Rogan is an actor, comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. In this episode of Train By Day Joe Rogan Podcast by Night, he talks about his early days on Saturday Night Live, how he got into the business, and how he became a TV host.
00:01:50.000And he got such a kick out of it because when it rains on you or snows on you like it would in Woody Creek, you come in the house and you smell like a wet dog.
00:03:15.000Real year on Saturday Night Live, maybe it was 1977, like the spring, summer of 77. I was asked by Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, if I would, I had to go to, our season was head-ended, I'd gone to California.
00:03:37.000And he asked if I would drive his Volkswagen convertible bug back cross-country for him.
00:04:33.000So, the Jerome Hotel, which would have been full of like...
00:04:36.000Knucklehead skiers from anywhere was only full of like the people that worked the town and lived in the town and they took over the bar and they took over the swimming pool which was outside so that's I was there and it was just I remember being there and they were like beautiful girls and this really funny guy and I didn't know who he was and we just had the most fun you know making girls laugh that's kind of what It may or may not have been the reason I was brought here.
00:12:10.000I mean, you could take a lot of his commentary on politics from 1976 and apply it easily to today.
00:12:17.000You know, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is one of the best books ever on the American political system, just like what it's like when people are running for office.
00:12:24.000Yeah, to me it's a better book than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is really fun.
00:12:29.000But the Campaign Trail book is so insightful about America and about...
00:13:49.000The kind of peak that never comes again.
00:13:54.000San Francisco in the middle 60s was a very special time and place to be a part of.
00:14:01.000But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world.
00:15:29.000That is just an amazing piece of writing that so perfectly captured that very strange moment in time where the anti-war, the peace-love movement just got drowned out by the Nixon administration.
00:15:55.000Thinking of Hunter and the words that he said, but seeing Johnny and how close Johnny and Hunter became, how much they loved each other and how much they shared with each other.
00:16:20.000You know, and it's just, thank God there was a guy like him around to document it from that perspective, to give you this, like, insight, and that the way he did it with Gonzo journalism, where he just would have real facts mixed in with fiction, and you couldn't tell what was what, and you had to be in on it to understand what he was doing.
00:16:40.000Yeah, you had to enter the event to comment on it.
00:17:58.000So I would go to work and I would come home and then we would stay up and sort of just an hour or so before, maybe an hour and a half before, two hours before dawn, he'd have a NyQuil and scotch in the hot tub and then go to sleep.
00:18:23.000And then I had to get about 90 minutes and then...
00:18:26.000The teamster was knocking on the window saying, Bill!
00:20:51.000He also, for whatever he was, the people who knew, and you know, like Secret Service guys, you ever run into them, they like read people for a living.
00:21:18.000They knew what he was after hours and they knew what he was during hours where the people who were really smart knew this guy's really smart.
00:22:13.000And, you know, if you can be realistic and savvy about those things, then people trust you.
00:22:18.000Well, it's still pretty extraordinary that they also got him to agree, or at least thought he would agree, that he would only talk about football.
00:22:27.000Well, he knew if he blew it, that was it.
00:22:30.000And that was going to be the end of it.
00:22:31.000And it was only, you know, I don't know what month it was.
00:22:34.000There's more coffee in this, I feel like.
00:23:14.000It's just that meeting in the limousine is like one of my favorite meetings because it just...
00:23:19.000You could feel how weird it must have been for Hunter to be sitting in a limo getting a ride with Nixon and they're just talking about football and then they can find common ground.
00:23:30.000Well, it's very much like this is happening...
00:23:31.000This has been happening in my life anyway, and I'm sure it's happening in everyone's life for the last, got to be 10 years, where you meet people, we have something in common, we've got something we've got to get done, you know.
00:23:47.000But if we talk politics, we're leaving the rails, you know.
00:23:50.000All hell's going to, you know, we're not going to get anything done.
00:23:57.000And, you know, it could be worse than that.
00:24:00.000We could be adversaries or even enemies or, you know, so that, I mean, it's, you mentioned it, it's like, I go places where, and I'm sure you do too, where you just can't talk, you just don't want to talk politics with people because there are people that are,
00:24:17.000you know, whose politics can be the exact opposite of yours, completely 12 to 6. And yet there are people that have lived lives that are so extraordinary and so enormous in terms of what they give to the world and the planet.
00:24:34.000And you think, why would I ever want to get...
00:24:52.000You know, you're making more of a mess, you know.
00:24:56.000That's kind of what's, you know, that's what I feel a lot about what's going on anywhere, everywhere, you know, that people are leading with their handkerchief and not with their whole self, you know, what they understand about what living is.
00:26:45.000I think the thing that if I had to regret anything or anyone regrets anything about it was the sort of hostility that was shown towards the actual servicemen, most of whom were drafted, you know, to fight, you know.
00:27:00.000So those service people had an experience that I will never have.
00:27:27.000And I don't think that – I think that the sort of – there could have been more vision about who we're talking to or who we're talking to about whatever kind of change you want to make.
00:27:40.000And so that the agents of it are not necessarily the architects like you say.
00:27:45.000The people who are making this tribal thing.
00:27:52.000And how do you jump over or how do you excuse or not excuse isn't the word but how do you Unite?
00:28:03.000Miss the people that are the agents who are just people that have a job or whatever it is.
00:28:08.000They're doing their work to survive and live, whatever it is.
00:28:14.000How do you get to the architects with whatever you feel is what could be a shared experience and get them to sort of dissolve the creation of the tribal world?
00:28:29.000You have people on here, I guess, that...
00:28:31.000Know, you know, or think about those things and have the ability to do something about it.
00:28:36.000I don't think I have the ability to do anything more than something for myself mostly.
00:28:42.000But you do because you have the ability to express yourself and you're an example.
00:28:46.000And a lot of times when someone is a very reasonable, intelligent person like you and you express yourself, other people get inspired to maybe re-examine the way they're looking at things.
00:29:54.000Most people are addicted to social media, so you're constantly getting inundated with the worst fucking things in the world all day long, and you're freaking out.
00:30:19.000I think music played such a big part of whatever that movement was, whatever you call the peace movement or the hippies or, you know, whatever it was.
00:30:29.000It was an extraordinary moment in time.
00:30:32.000And the music was part of the experience and part of the, it brought the message.
00:34:26.000I've got someone, a friend, that's been trying to get me to...
00:34:30.000Do a movie about it, but the person responsible for making all the laws was someone who had absolutely no background in any of the fields, no knowledge whatsoever, just a total huckster that got himself out in front.
00:35:00.000That Buick is going to make a car, and this could be wrong, but I heard they're going to make a car next year that's not going to look like any car, ever.
00:35:09.000It's going to be like a brand new, whatever the hell, 25 or 26 Buick.
00:35:15.000And it's not going to look like the 24 or 5. It's going to look like its own individual thing, that they're going to try to re...
00:35:26.000To recommence the idea of making a new car every year.
00:36:14.000And the story is that these guys at Ford designed a car and they took, The rear quarter panel from this automobile, the fender from this, the back fender from this, the rear windows from this, and just did a composite of all these different cars.
00:38:23.000I mean, if you go back and look at, like, pull up a Boss 429, 1969, Boss 429. This, to me, is the pinnacle of muscle car design, is the Boss 429. Like, that is just spectacular.
00:39:28.000All the quiet in between where he's in the grocery store, he's with the groceries, the mailbox.
00:39:33.000He's seeing these people and these people.
00:39:35.000And he has this very quiet inner self that's dealing with people very respectfully.
00:39:42.000And his blood pressure only moves, the needle only starts to move when he gets with the bad guy, Chalmers, who's obviously a fraud of some sort.
00:39:52.000And he's got him like, you see him like, not just as a...
00:39:58.000with like a person he knows is trying to use him.
00:40:01.000And just watching that part of the performance and that part of the story was much more interesting.
00:40:08.000The first time I saw all that as its own weave through it. - Yes. - That the car stuff had very little to do with what I was getting from the people.
00:40:33.000It's a really beautiful American movie like that.
00:40:37.000I'm so glad you brought that up because it's one of the things that I love about that movie and Le Mans, another great Steve McQueen movie, is that he had these Moments, and you could do that in a movie back then, where no one was talking for minutes and minutes at a time.
00:47:40.000It was funny to see Clayton wear without a mask on.
00:47:43.000Imagine a contract saying you can't do personal appearances.
00:47:46.000Well, no, it was like he was, the Lone Ranger was copyrighted, you know, nine days from Sundays, you know, so he could go and be right on an elephant.
00:47:53.000I think I may have seen him riding on an elephant in a parade once, but also without the mask on.
00:48:00.000But I should talk about movies because I'm supposed to be talking about movies.
00:52:33.000Okay, so that's why I wanted to ask, because this movie, the third movie, opens today, which is yesterday, and it's called Riff Raff, and this is a movie that you have to see.
00:57:47.000How do you decide what projects to pick?
00:57:50.000It's really just what, well, there are certain people, like with people that I've worked with before, there's some, like Wes Anderson is one, and Jim Jarmusch.
00:58:32.000You have to read the script, because people, you know, the script is pretty much, if the script's not there, I mean, you know, I can always help improve a script, but if the basic thing isn't there, it's like, I was scratching at one the other day, and I'm writing, and I'm going, what the hell am I doing this for?
00:59:47.000The most extreme example in that, like, we all live in a quasi-dormitory.
00:59:53.000You know, we take over a small hotel in some city, and all the actors and, like, the key crew live in the hotel.
01:00:02.000And you come down for breakfast in the morning, and people pad down in their slippers and their jammies, and they have coffee and stuff, and they look at the newspaper and say, what are we doing today?
01:00:12.000And then they, like, pad back up the stairs and get on their clothes, and they go to work.
01:00:38.000Like, I remember, like, in between shots on Kingpin, we'd be on the side of a road somewhere.
01:00:45.000And it would be like, everybody's got to pick up a rock and we got to throw it at that telephone pole.
01:00:51.000You know, who's going to hit the telephone pole with a rock?
01:00:53.000So we would sit there and like, I don't know, a dollar, ten dollars, a hundred dollars, whatever it was, we're throwing and somebody's got to hit the rock.
01:01:00.000You know, and then people like pull out cash and pay.
01:01:03.000Because it's just like, we just got to keep this thing going.
01:01:06.000You know, we're not going to let the energy of this thing drop.
01:01:14.000Being loose and always being physical, always being connected, attached, not just attached but connected, and entertaining, entertaining each other, really making this fun.
01:01:28.000God damn it, we are going to have fun or else.
01:01:31.000If you don't have fun making a comedy, you've just made a bad movie that's not funny.
01:01:42.000And it's one of those films, like, if you tried making that today, it would be an uphill trudge.
01:01:48.000Well, you know, and that's, like, one of those things.
01:01:51.000They had a moment on Saturday Night Live, an in-memoriam thing.
01:01:54.000They said, oh, I was there the week of the thing, and they said, yeah, so-and-so's working on the in-memoriam, and I'm thinking, well, who's gone?
01:02:39.000Like Head Wound Harry, you know, which was one that not many people think about.
01:02:43.000But how, you know, like somebody would object to a dog eating a brain wound, you know, like licking the blood coming out of someone's skeletal wound, you know.
01:02:52.000But someone told me on the way here, a friend of mine, a musician named Mike Zito.
01:03:41.000We actually played one of his clips the other day.
01:03:42.000We had to take it out of the show, but it was a clip from SNL that you could never play today about a doctor who decided that every child was female and he had to do operations on all of them.
01:06:18.000He had a great voice and he could play straight and, you know, playing, doing comedy is the ability to play straight and he could really do it.
01:07:03.000Like, he would make me feel like I wasn't doing enough.
01:07:05.000Like, he'd have, like, all of his scripts would have tabs for all the scenes that he was in, and then he'd have notes underneath each thing, and everything would be organized.
01:07:13.000He had a three-ring binder he would put the script in.
01:08:50.000But there's something about the uncertainty of bringing up someone from the audience that raises the energy level and the expectation and the possibility.
01:14:48.000And I just want to say that Frank Langella, who I only know from like doing – he was kind of like a Broadway guy and he did some horror movies.
01:15:48.000That whole Nixon Watergate story, I used to think about it very differently until Tucker Carlson broke it down for me.
01:15:56.000Bob Woodward was an intelligence agent, and the first time he ever gets a job as a journalist, he's covering Watergate.
01:16:02.000All the people that were involved in the break-in, FBI people, it was a complete intelligence operation.
01:16:09.000Nixon definitely did the things they accused him of, but the whole thing was sort of coordinated by the intelligence agents to get Nixon out of office.
01:16:18.000Apparently, what the story was, according to—I can play you the Tucker thing if you'd like to see it.
01:16:23.000But apparently what the story was, it sounds crazy.
01:16:27.000But the story was that Nixon was digging into who killed JFK. One of the things that they wanted to set up when he was running for president is to make sure that Gerald Ford was his vice president.
01:16:40.000Gerald Ford was also on the Warren Commission.
01:16:43.000He was digging into it, and they wanted to remove him from office.
01:17:24.000Here's the way I see the Bob Woodward story.
01:17:27.000See, you said, I don't know, what did you say first about Nixon, about your way of looking at Nixon?
01:17:33.000The way I look at Nixon, and part of it is, seeing this, I like this way that, I love the way Langella did this.
01:17:40.000I thought it was really well done and made a character of him, you know, a person of him.
01:17:49.000But to me, I feel, here's what I feel about Nixon.
01:17:55.000It's like, you know, he was hard to care for.
01:17:59.000He ran against JFK, who was everybody's, you know, my hero.
01:18:02.000And my father actually pushed me into John F. Kennedy in 1960. You know, just pushed me into the crowd and just pushed me up so I'd bounce up against him.
01:18:12.000Now I'd have been wrestled to the ground.
01:18:31.000No, I'm not defending Nixon in any way, shape, or form.
01:18:33.000In fact, I talked about Nixon before that I think he's the problem with the whole psychedelics, drug, legalization act of 1970. But however, when I read Wired, the book written by, what's his name, Woodward, About Belushi.
01:18:48.000I read like five pages of Wired and I went, oh my God.
01:18:57.000All of a sudden I went, oh my God, if this is what he writes about my friend that I've known for half of my adult life, which is completely inaccurate, talking to the people of the outer, outer circle getting the story, what the hell could they have done to Nixon?
01:19:15.000I just felt like If he did this to my friend like this, and I acknowledge I only read five pages, but the five pages I read made me want to set fire to the whole thing.
01:20:26.000You know, I got a bone for Woodward ever since I read that.
01:20:29.000Well, once you see it from something that you know, you know, once you see propaganda or bullshit from someone that you know, and you see a distorted perception, it really, it opens your eyes to the fact that a lot of the things you read are horseshit.
01:20:43.000I mean, Belushi made people's careers possible.
01:24:00.000If that much was, to me, was disturbingly ugly and, like, irresponsible to report, then I can't imagine that I got so that I only found five.
01:24:19.000You know, and I'm sure he's done, Wilbert does other things.
01:24:21.000I've seen him on TV, and he can be smart and everything, but, you know, he's going to have to answer for that sometime for something, you know, I think.
01:24:51.000And Bob Woodward, like one of the squarest guys in the world, gets to tell the story of what it was like to live in New York City in the 70s.
01:25:47.000Where I lived in Chicago was more dangerous than where I lived in New York ever.
01:25:52.000But the city was, you know, the economic part of it and the infrastructure was, you know, like the subways were, you know, people complain about the subways now.
01:26:10.000Summer and winter, and you either froze or you had, like, metal shavings dust flying through in the summer with no heat, with no air conditioning.
01:26:21.000And, you know, if it's 97 degrees out, it's even hotter inside a crowded subway car, you know?
01:26:27.000That was also back when Times Square was Times Square.
01:27:42.000Now there's, you know, you're crashing into, not exactly debutante, or not exactly like bridesmaid parties, but like, you know, there's people with flags and dragging people around and stuff.
01:28:21.000And, you know, you saw, you know, your life just changed dramatically from being, you know, unable to – barely able to pay your rent or afford, you know, a car, a telephone, anything unable to – barely able to pay your rent or afford, you know, a to having a credit card.
01:28:47.000Like, that was a big thing, you know, a credit card and a credit card.
01:28:52.000You know, we had to, because they wanted a safe, we had this sort of cab account with a thing called Skulls Angels.
01:29:00.000There was a sort of company within the Yellow Cab Company called Skulls Angels.
01:29:04.000And you could call them, and they would pick you up anywhere in the city and take you wherever.
01:29:08.000And it was just, you just signed your name.
01:29:49.000And you got to, you know, really, you know, I mean, I probably could have done, you know, gotten more out of it, but I certainly got a lot, I put a lot into it, you know.
01:30:04.000I got a lot, an amazing kind of education, you know.
01:30:10.000I got an amazing education, but I guess that gets back to, you know.
01:30:17.000I got to put my education to use, is what I should say.
01:30:20.000I mean, in this kind of new challenging environment, I got to put what my education to that point had been to use.
01:30:28.000What was the adjustment like going from being broke to all of a sudden having money, being famous, living in New York City, trying to make sense of this new reality that you live in?
01:34:06.000Well, the question is how long have I been caddying for?
01:34:09.000So I started caddying when I was very young.
01:34:14.000Our eldest brother, Edward, started caddying.
01:34:17.000So Caddyshack must have been a lot of fun for you then.
01:34:20.000Yeah, well, Caddyshack came, you know, my brother Brian was the, wrote the, Brian wrote it with Doug Kenny, one of the really great funny guys from National Lampoon, and Harold Ramis, who ended up directing the movie.
01:34:33.000But all the golf stuff is all Brian's memories of caddying.
01:34:38.000The whole golf story comes from Brian, sort of.
01:35:02.000There's a thing called a jam boy, which I don't know if it really exists.
01:35:05.000My friend Duff insists that back in the day there was a thing called a jam boy who walked around, I think it was a slave or something like it, who walked around covered with jam to draw the insects away from the golfers.
01:35:19.000Now, I don't know if that's true or not.
01:39:53.000Well, I should talk about them because they really are on to something, and it's about quieting your brain when you play, which I always thought I'd get better as my brain softened.
01:40:48.000You know, it just, it's decluttering, you know?
01:40:51.000It's like when you do it in your life, and you...
01:40:57.000You know, you mentioned distractions at the very beginning.
01:41:01.000You know, you think about all the things that can catch you, you know, to distract you.
01:41:05.000And if you're trying to do something that's pretty straightforward, whether it's stir grits or sew a line whether it's stir grits or sew a line of something or...
01:41:28.000Or play a game of golf, which ideally you only have to swing, hit the ball like 75 times.
01:41:35.000Everything that distracts you from that is a problem.
01:41:41.000So it's the ability to sort of just pull the weeds out of your head, as I read a Japanese man say once, and attend to it when you attend to it.
01:41:53.000You know, it's a few hours to play a round of golf.
01:42:49.000You separate that and you step up and you hit the thing.
01:42:52.000And hitting the thing is only hitting the thing.
01:42:55.000And if you can do that, then you start having real success with the actual hitting.
01:43:01.000And the sort of joy of the sort of mind-body connection and all this sort of aesthetic, all the kind of like, you know, almost spiritual things about a mind-body exercise, a game, come to you, you know?
01:43:18.000You know, when you hear great athletes say they're in a zone, they're not in a zone.
01:43:55.000One thing that they sort of say was like you would just, in between shots, you would just take your golf ball, if you're on a putting green or if you have a spear in your pocket, and you just toss it up and catch it.
01:47:33.000All the archers have binoculars and they all pull them up after each shot because they're looking for precise distances and then they'll make slight adjustments on their scope and their sight and move and then they'll take a breath.
01:48:10.000So this is just for real, complete archery fanatics who are absolutely lost in this connection between your mind, your body, and the flight of the arrow.
01:49:36.000executing the shot like you would like a rifle trigger most of these guys use what's called a hinge and so that's what they're going for they're looking for it so with a hinge you don't you don't You don't make the release go off like with a button, where you press a button.
01:49:52.000It's just a rotation of the handle, and you don't know when it's going to go off.
01:53:06.000When, you know, I play pool at a pretty high level, like, I bet that book would be very beneficial to me.
01:53:11.000I bet there's some techniques and strategies of how to focus yourself and completely remove yourself from the rest of the world and just think about this mind-body connection and the execution of this thing that you're trying to do.
01:57:42.000And when you don't address it and then you just allow people to camp any way that you want, you're almost sort of encouraging mental health.
01:57:50.000Problems to be everywhere all throughout and just be throughout the entire city.
01:57:54.000It's just a lack of empathy for the people.
01:57:57.000If you're empathetic for them, you don't let them just camp out and shit on the street.
01:58:02.000What you do is you try to say, obviously, a real problem.
01:58:04.000This needs to be addressed for the greater good of the city and for these people.
01:58:16.000Leave them out in the street and let them do whatever they want and become a hazard for everybody else, then it makes the city kind of fucked up.
01:58:42.000It's all during the Reagan administration when they opened up the mental health institutes and just let people out in the streets.
01:58:47.000Well, it started before that in New York.
01:58:49.000And that was my experience in New York was like Rockefeller, way back when, and I could be wrong, but this is how it was attributed, sort of opened up the mental, closed up the mental health hospitals and pushed These many, many, many people out on the streets that had nowhere to go.
01:59:09.000And it wasn't a poverty situation, although it looks like it when you look at it.
01:59:15.000It's really a mental health situation.
01:59:17.000And a great number of these people have no interest in going into a place.
01:59:23.000They would just as soon live on the street.
01:59:25.000Their life is like an interior monologue that they can't control.
01:59:30.000And living in a home is no different than living on the street.
01:59:46.000This is sort of like where, you know, I'd like to think about, let's not talk politics.
01:59:51.000Let's agree with what we can agree on.
01:59:54.000So that solution is like, this is where the great minds...
01:59:57.000Of California or the United States need to come together and say, okay, these are, why don't we solve these problems that are common to every state has a city that has X number of people living on the street, whether it's Yankton, you know, whether it's, you know, Minneapolis, whether it's, you know, Louisville, whatever.
02:00:22.000Everyone's got like a street scene situation that's rough like that.
02:00:27.000And it's hard to say let's – you know, you say there's got to be a solution.
02:00:32.000Where is that going to come from and who's going to believe it if it comes from this direction or that direction or this side or that side?
02:00:40.000How do you like evaporate the walls of separation and say like how do we get the right people with the right minds to solve these?
02:04:06.000No, I think we were talking earlier about...
02:04:12.000The agents versus the architects or something like that used a word that explained the people who are coming up with this sort of thing.
02:04:20.000I was watching something, and I've really tried to avoid watching the news lately, but I saw someone talking about, and it was someone that works.
02:04:28.000You say the word bureaucracy, and it's a loaded word.
02:05:12.000My person is saying the bureaucracy gets sort of like fed from above somehow or other.
02:05:21.000It's fed by these people that are the architects of one side or the other.
02:05:25.000But the actual bureaucracy includes the people that can solve the problem.
02:05:30.000Like, encased in this bureaucracy are people that can solve the problems.
02:05:35.000And that if you just sort of – I'm not saying this is the case, but if you sort of just like zip a bunch of the bureaucracy out, you run the risk of zipping out some of the people that actually have the brains to do the solutions.
02:05:50.000And what this person said was the solution to the bureaucracy is within the bureaucracy that is finding the people that know what can be done because they really do have the data.
02:06:10.000And they actually have the data on how to do this thing.
02:06:13.000But because it keeps being fed from above all the time, there's just all this extra debris and noise that keeps coming down that causes more clutter and more splitting and more something.
02:06:29.000So, you know, I'm not going to suggest that I could solve the question of bureaucracy today, but I think there's something about what we have.
02:06:42.000You know, I'm going to go off on tangents now, but I always kind of had an objection to Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation, because I thought, damn it, that's not my generation.
02:07:47.000And then they come back shell-shocked.
02:07:48.000And then you come back with shell-shocked on top of it.
02:07:51.000And then back then, the sort of, kind of, I don't want to say a macho thing, but...
02:07:55.000Back then, people just didn't want to talk about it, which to me is part of what created the hippie generation, was kids couldn't get their parents to talk about anything that they thought mattered.
02:08:09.000What their parents were talking about was like, huh?
02:08:12.000Wait, what's so wrong about peace, love, and understanding?
02:08:18.000So and they couldn't get to that because even the idea of peace was a completely different concept to someone that lived through a world war.
02:08:30.000So these kids were like, I don't even understand who these people are.
02:08:34.000I know I'm their flesh and blood, but I don't know that.
02:08:37.000I don't know what the hell they know and why they're this way.
02:08:40.000But he chose people that lived a very intentional purpose during that very, very difficult, challenging time where they just went, I don't know what I don't know.
02:08:53.000I don't know what all this is, but I do what I do know.
02:08:56.000I do know what I do know and stay through that.
02:08:59.000And that's, I guess that, I don't know how this relates me to this idea of bureaucracy, but people that do know the facts have got to stay with the facts, even in the face of, like, all the blunderbussing above about, you know, there's this and there's that.
02:09:16.000You've got to be really dedicated to what you do know.
02:09:22.000And realize that there's lots that you don't know.
02:09:26.000But if you give up what you know in the name of jostling over here, then there's even more lost.
02:09:41.000And I think most people who get involved, particularly if they get involved in something like Homeless or any charitable organization, most of the people who get involved aren't doing it cynically.
02:09:52.000They're not doing it to get that big paycheck.
02:09:54.000Their initial reason for being involved in something like that is to help.
02:09:57.000The problem is sometimes when they realize it's just a big clog and you're not going to be able to do any meaningful good, then things get weird.
02:10:08.000And then you just sort of exist off of this system that's not doing anybody any good.
02:10:12.000This is his argument about why so many people are working on this and nothing's getting better.
02:10:19.000This is my friend who's a lawyer who went to San Francisco and saw this.
02:10:25.000And had a conversation with someone who's actually in government in San Francisco and was explaining what the problem actually is.
02:10:33.000And the government, people say it's the government?
02:10:36.000No, they just say there's no incentive.
02:10:38.000There's no incentive for them to do a better job.
02:10:42.000And there's a very compassionate perspective in the city.
02:10:46.000They're very kind people, and they don't want to take these homeless people and remove them.
02:10:53.000That sort of suicidal empathy that they have for the people in their city is causing this rash of tents everywhere and crime and, you know, you have to leave your fucking car unlocked otherwise they're going to smash your windows.
02:11:09.000There's no real incentive to do anything different.
02:11:13.000Because these people are still getting paid to keep it the way it is.
02:11:17.000The amount of money they make is not based on how much good they do.
02:11:21.000So if they're financially, if they're incentivized to, like, you get paid more if more people clean up, seek treatment, get on medication, get to a mental health institution, if you can show some sort of progress, it'll affect how much money you get.
02:12:02.000Well, I feel like there's something hanging over our heads here that's like this situation, and maybe it's just a continuous situation of like a world that gets more and more people all the time, and more people want to have a voice, and there's just more people shouting all at once, and there's not quite the same kind of agreement.
02:12:24.000We don't have like an ideal that we're all working for.
02:12:28.000You know, I guess, not to like cheat, but...
02:12:31.000You know, the greatest generation, they had to fight a war to maybe save the sort of structure of Western civilization.
02:13:20.000But I feel like there's no sort of idea that people can agree on that's The source of like a reason for our being.
02:13:33.000Well, it's a very uniting thing to be all together against a common enemy that is real, like World War II. Like there's a real purpose to life.
02:13:45.000People understand that this is a very important mission.
02:13:48.000This is something that, unfortunately, it's one of the best ways to unite people.
02:15:21.000It's too easy to just say, oh, there's the tents, let's go this way.
02:15:25.000The reality is the health of the community, it's dependent upon the health of the lowest members of the community on the social rung.
02:15:33.000The lowest members are the people that are sick.
02:15:35.000And if you don't take care of them, if you don't take care of the people that are mentally ill, that are homeless, that are addicted to drugs, that are on the street, that are desolate, that don't have friends, don't have love, don't have structure, don't have anything that they can call upon, horrible childhood, the whole deal.
02:16:29.000And I talked to Mayor Adler, who was the mayor of Austin at the time when I first moved here, and he was...
02:16:35.000He had a bunch of plans in place to help the homeless people, and they did an amazing job, because it got pretty bad here during the pandemic.
02:16:42.000I remember there being homeless here, yeah.
02:16:44.000They got hotels, they put people up, they put together programs, they got people jobs.
02:16:50.000There's a company that we've had, what is his name?
02:18:02.000He's just a wonderful guy, like a really beautiful person, and lives with these people.
02:18:07.000They're his neighbors, and they're constantly bringing people in, and he has all these different programs that people can sign up for to learn arts and crafts and learn how to sell things that you've made, and it's really cool.
02:18:21.000And, you know, I mean, he's doing his part.
02:18:24.000It's small in relation to, like, the problem of San Francisco.
02:18:29.000But you need people like that that really dedicate themselves to it.
02:18:45.000So there's these small houses that these people live in and they all have like a community kitchen where they can go and barbecue and grill outside.
02:18:52.000And there's an arts and crafts center.
02:18:54.000These people, they make cool chess pieces and they sell them.
02:18:57.000They make paintings and they sell them jewelry.
02:18:59.000They're doing all these different things and it gives them a sense of purpose.
02:19:02.000You've got to get this guy to San Francisco.