In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and his good friend Gregory talk about a wide range of topics, from TikTok's new ban on anti-Israel content, to the Iran nuclear deal, and much more!
00:04:22.000So any criticism of Palestine, what's going on in Gaza, all that stuff's going to get squashed probably.
00:04:28.000TikTok says does not have a rule that bans or blocks the word Epstein across the app, but many U.S. users have recently been unable to send that word in direct messages.
00:04:38.000I have a friend, his name's Bobby Epstein, totally unrelated.
00:04:42.000He's the guy who owns the Coda racetrack.
00:05:43.000I mean, what's your big picture take on whether or not social media platforms, which are privately owned, have responsibility that, say, regular broadcast networks would have in terms of not censoring things?
00:05:57.000Well, regular broadcasts problem is they censor things.
00:06:32.000There's 20 things that the American public has to know about.
00:06:35.000So they censor, or at least they curate the content.
00:06:40.000I think for social media platforms, if Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter, we would be fucked because there would be no place where you could say whatever you want, even heinous things, right?
00:06:51.000But if someone says heinous things, you can block them and not interact with them.
00:06:55.000And you can let other people tear them down and tear them apart.
00:07:28.000And there's been a lot of calls that say that you shouldn't be able to be anonymous on social media, that you should have consequences for your actions.
00:07:36.000The problem with that is then you lose all your whistleblowers, right?
00:07:40.000All the whistleblowers that are talking about giant corporations that are doing horrible things to the environment secretly in other countries, which we find out about all the time.
00:07:48.000Like the Stephen Dosinger case, where that guy got arrested.
00:09:05.000I mean, yeah, it's a weird thing because I know right now to cover the Pentagon, no journalists can go into the Pentagon unless they sign an agreement to only put out government-sponsored press releases.
00:09:35.000But then, see, the problem with the Pentagon is you're talking about national security.
00:09:40.000And if someone released something, like the name of an agent that was undercover somewhere and something happened, that person got killed or compromised, or some sort of a national security interest, you know, was the whole thing was tanked.
00:10:26.000See if we can find what that story is.
00:10:28.000But like, imagine if you were in the FBI office and you heard about an imminent attack and you printed something.
00:10:37.000Like if you're a reporter and you're covering this stuff and you have access to this information somehow and it gets released and these guys find out about it and they skate.
00:10:46.000They nabbed 50 Latin kings in Operation Broken Crown after three months sweep.
00:11:02.000Okay, this is on X. Quietly executed Operation Broken Crown, a sweeping violent gang takedown involving 13 field offices targeting the Latin Kings gangs, members which were publicly threatening law enforcement officers, 50 arrests, $200,000 in seized assets, seizure of 10 kilos of illicit narcotics.
00:14:21.000From the early 1950s to the 1960s, Las Vegas casinos and tourism promoters actively used nearby nuclear weapons tests as themed attractions to draw gamblers and visitors.
00:17:14.000Yeah, so as it's drying up, it's at like it was, I think it's probably picked up a little bit, but at one point in time was at a historic low.
00:17:29.000As of last latest reporting, at least six separate discoveries of human remains were made in Lake Mead in 2022 as the water level dropped, representing at least several different individuals.
00:17:57.000And he used to bring this guy in who he was a New York City cop.
00:18:01.000And they basically said, we'll double your pay and give you early retirement if you put on a frog suit every night and you go out into, I think it was Flushing Bay, one of the bays out in Queens, which was a famous place where the mob was dropping bodies.
00:18:18.000And the guy would go into the water in a frog suit and he'd wait by this bridge.
00:18:23.000And when they drop a body, he'd fucking call it in.
00:18:48.000Search in MacArthur Park for guns and possible bodies was stopped because authorities said it was an unpermitted and potentially unsafe operation on City Park property.
00:19:16.000Plan to use sonar and remotely operated vehicles to look for weapons and human remains in the lake.
00:19:21.000Los Angeles Park Rangers halted the effort before the sonar entered the water, saying the team did not have the required permits or clearances.
00:19:32.000If you really think, if this guy really thinks that there could be bodies and guns in the lake, why wouldn't you guys search for bodies and guns if someone could search for it?
00:19:42.000It seems like there's probably a lot of people missing, a lot of crimes that could be solved, a lot of resources that have already been spent on cases.
00:19:48.000You could probably get to the bottom of a lot of things.
00:19:52.000A lay ale, I don't know how to say his name, said families of missing people, some of whom were last seen near MacArthur Park, had reached out to him for help, which inspired the idea of a large-scale sonar search of the lake.
00:20:03.000There's evidence down there for crimes, he said.
00:20:06.000We'll identify it with photography and the city will have to extract it.
00:20:10.000It also could be these are homeless people and the kids.
00:21:06.000It's almost like someone from the Republican side is like a secret plant at MSNBC because they know that stuff like this is going to get caught.
00:21:16.000Look at the difference between the one on the left and one on the right.
00:21:19.000Well, the nose looks blurry on the one on the left.
00:22:16.000And I love Jews because they are very accepting.
00:22:20.000You know, as much as you might be Orthodox, my wife is half Jewish.
00:22:26.000And there's something very open-minded about Jews.
00:22:30.000I mean, they were the original hippies and they were the original communists in America.
00:22:35.000And they were always open to different ideas.
00:22:38.000And I think when I think about Ari's family, if they were Christian conservative versus Jewish conservative, I don't know that they'd be as accepting of him.
00:22:47.000You know, Ari's dad survived the Holocaust.
00:24:40.000And we were trying to analyze it one day.
00:24:41.000And I was like, it's probably because if you're so buttoned down and so disciplined and regimented and conservative in your daily life, the way you cut loose, it's like you shit in each other's mouths and fuck each other in the butt.
00:24:54.000Like some of the craziest shit porn was coming out of Germany.
00:24:58.000This was like late 90s, early 2000s, when we first started finding weird websites that would, you know, you'd be able to find things on.
00:25:07.000Oh, no, before that, I'd go to Sex World in New York where you sit in those booths and you put in quarters and you watch porn.
00:25:13.000And they always had the darkest German porn in there.
00:25:53.000I've been in hotels where they put the remote control in a baggie for you because they say that's the most no, no, because so you don't have to touch the remote.
00:26:02.000And then they change the baggie on the remote each time a new guest comes in.
00:26:07.000So you're supposed to remote through the baggie?
00:29:42.000I don't like when women wear too much of it and then they hug you at the comedy store and then you go home and you smell like fucking perfume.
00:29:48.000You're like, honey, it's just Whitney Cummings has this new Chanel.
00:29:54.000But like sometimes I'll be, I'll walk, I'll be sitting somewhere and I'll smell some nice perfume and I'll fucking whip my head around.
00:30:01.000It's like some 81-year-old woman hunched over and you're like, oh, they don't wear the old ladies.
00:30:08.000No matter how old they are, they'll still put on the makeup.
00:31:40.000It was like a sandbar that they built up, and then they hired, they didn't hire, they hired a bunch of black people to come on the island and build all the houses, the infrastructure.
00:31:57.000But like, all I know is there was a lot of black people doing the building.
00:32:02.000They finished it, and then the island held a big party for the black people on the end of the island to celebrate, and then they torched all their houses and forced them off the island.
00:32:11.000Yeah, that's the history of Palm Beach.
00:32:13.000They torched their houses after they were done building the mansion.
00:34:52.000Private clubs used to get away with that until I was a member of the Friars Club in New York, and they did not allow female members until I was there in, it was the late mid-90s before the Friars Club allowed female members.
00:35:09.000And the reason was legally, you can't have a club exclude people if you can prove business is being done there.
00:36:19.000You work out, you take a fucking steam, and you send a lazy boy, and you read the newspaper.
00:36:24.000And then they got a dining room downstairs where Henny Youngman is at one table, Alan King's at the, you know, and these guys, like those old, those old Borschbell comics, they lived to make you laugh.
00:37:07.000Turn of 20th century is an employment boom of unprecedented proportions in South Florida, the hiring of thousands of black laborers to extend Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railroad.
00:37:20.000These laborers played a key role in the development of the early Palm Beach, also helped to build the Royal Point Siana Hotel, Flagler's White Hall residence, which is today known as the Henry Flagler Museum.
00:37:35.000Laborers and their families settled in Palm Beach Island between North County Road and Sunrise Avenue.
00:37:40.000This area of shanties and tent-like homes soon became known as the Styx.
00:37:46.000Many of those descendants still live in the area today.
00:38:18.000From what I heard, McRae said, he got with the residents and set up a party on West Palm Beach side and had everybody ferried over to the party and then had a mob of people to burn up people's homes and shanties and tents all over the styx and forced them out of there and took the land.
00:39:04.000No mention of a fire or any record of large-scale homelessness that would have followed such a devastating blaze.
00:39:10.000Everly Clark believes his version is the most accurate, and the Styx was actually legislated out of existence.
00:39:16.000They claim there was a fire and Flagler had the people come to circus and all that, but that's not true.
00:39:21.000Still, more than a century later, the urban legend remains strong and the pulse of public opinion split.
00:39:28.000There are so many historical facts that make some of the scurrilous removal of the residents believable that it's become lore for the most part in the black community.
00:39:36.000All right, well, let's find out if there's a historical record of the fires.
00:41:40.000There's real, there's a strong connection between the syphilis that evolved in North America and the syphilis that these guys had in Europe.
00:41:50.000Like there's always been syphilis, but syphilis had an outbreak in Europe after people came to North America, probably fucked a bunch of Native Americans, and then went back to Europe with these fucking diseases.
00:53:04.000And I went into the control room with Elon and watched the entire journey while it was flying over the earth and it lands and touched down in Australia in the ocean 35 minutes later.
00:55:56.000And I was like, but it doesn't make any sense.
00:55:58.000It doesn't make any sense that these guys went, like, Neil Armstrong basically went into hiding.
00:56:03.000And then at the 25th anniversary of the launch, he gave the most cryptic speech for this team of high school graduates, like these honor students.
00:56:11.000You should see the speech because the speech is nuts.
00:56:14.000And then I went back and watched the post-flight press conference when they supposedly landed after they landed on the moon and came back home.
00:57:19.000Way more powerful than a room of supercomputers.
00:57:21.000However, it doesn't take like immense computing power once you've got the calculations and you understand the trajectory and that you're going to use the gravity of the moon.
00:57:31.000You're going to slingshot around the moon and come back.
00:58:48.000By the way, can I just stop for a moment and go, having a talk about moon landing with Joe Rogan is a little bit like playing like pickup basketball with the Celtics.
01:00:50.000The rock was given as a private gift to former Prime Minister William Dries Jr. in 1969 by the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, J. William Middendorf II, during a visit by the Apollo 11 astronauts, Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin, soon after the first moon landing.
01:01:08.000Dries had been out of office for 11 years, but was considered an elder statesman.
01:01:13.000When he died in 88, that rock was donated to the Ricks Museum, where it has remained ever since.
01:01:18.000According to a museum spokeswoman, Ms. Van Gelder, no one doubted the authenticity of the rock because it was in the prime minister's own collection, and they had vetted the acquisition by a phone call to NASA.
01:02:40.000But the thing is, it's like if you're trying to film the surface of the moon in the day, you're not going to see any stars in the sky because it's going to be just like the stars on Earth.
01:02:50.000It's black, you know, black, the light that's reflected off the moon's surface is probably going to drown out most of it.
01:02:57.000It's probably going to be like, you know, you go out of New York City, you see a couple stars, right?
01:03:01.000Now think of the amount of light that's in New York City and think of the sun blasting down on the white surface of the fucking moon and how much reflection that must give.
01:03:12.000But it doesn't make sense that they didn't set a camera up with the aperture set up correctly where you get a time-lapse photo.
01:04:20.000This is they lied about going into the Vietnam War.
01:04:22.000They were about to do Operation Northwoods, where they're going to bomb Guantanamo Bay and blame it on the Cubans so that we can go to war with Cuba.
01:04:29.000They were going to blow up an American jetliner and blame it on Cuba.
01:04:33.000There were all the lies about drugs to start the war on drugs.
01:04:46.000On the 25th anniversary of the event in 1994, Neil Armstrong made a rare public appearance and held back tears as he spoke these brief cryptic remarks before the next generation of taxpayers as they toured the White House.
01:05:02.000Today we have with us a group of students among America's best.
01:05:09.000To you we say we have only completed a beginning.
01:07:24.000What I like about it is when you talk, if you're talking to someone annoying and they want to talk to you about like serious stuff and you go, I don't even think we went to the moon.
01:08:12.000But what I am saying is if there's one fucking conspiracy that I think is the most unlikely, the most preposterous in the public eyes, but might be true, it's that we didn't go to the moon.
01:08:24.000I remember I hadn't smoked pot because I haven't drank in 35 years and I didn't smoke pot for 20.
01:08:31.000And then one night I was with my buddy Ross Brockley.
01:08:34.000I don't know if you remember that guy.
01:09:06.000Well, have you seen the physics of guys falling down and then getting yanked back up to their feet?
01:09:10.000Like that's also, this is another guy that I talked to that's a physicist that doesn't want to be named.
01:09:16.000And he said, my problem has always been with the physics of 1 6 Earth's gravity.
01:09:21.000He goes, those people are not behaving like it's 1 6 Earth's gravity.
01:09:23.000He goes, when I look at it, it looks like it's in slow motion, but there's no indication that they can do things that you can't do in regular gravity.
01:09:31.000He's like, 1 6 Earth gravity is crazy.
01:09:33.000Like, could you imagine, like, look, I weigh 200 pounds.
01:09:36.000Imagine if I weighed 1 sixth of 200 pounds with 200 pounds of strength, how high I could jump?
01:09:43.000Dude, I probably jumped 20 fucking feet in the air.
01:12:21.000Well, they're probably forced to lie in front of the whole world, and they had to live as a fraud if it's true that they didn't go to the moon.
01:12:27.000I mean, it tracks with their behavior.
01:12:30.000Neil Armstrong became a recluse, didn't want to give interviews, didn't want to talk to people.
01:12:34.000But this is what you got to see on TV.
01:16:30.000So I spoke to you on the phone about a month ago and I started to tell you a story and you had heard it and you said, save it for the podcast.
01:26:42.000I was reading a story about a lady who snorted LSD and she thought it was cocaine and she snorted like the equivalent of like 500 doses of LSD.
01:26:51.000Like it should have killed her, but it didn't.
01:26:53.000Not only did it not kill her, but she had like chronic pain and it went away.
01:27:47.000You should, I mean, if you're going to use it clinically, there should be like a whole guideline, like dosage per body weight, how to do it, what's the setting, you know, what are the clinical guidelines.
01:27:59.000Like, the idea is using it for therapy.
01:30:48.000It says CNN review of nearly 70 pages of chats between Sambalin and the AI tool in the hours before his July 25th suicide, as well as excerpts from thousands more pages in the months leading up to that night, found that the chat bot repeatedly encouraged the young man as he discussed ending his life right up to his final moment, his last moments.
01:33:51.000If the business is that, if you're taking someone's voice and using it as a part of your product without permission and you're using it for profit, which they are.
01:35:21.000So, I mean, you got to think someone like you or I is a perfect person to take their voice from.
01:35:28.000How many hours of your content is online with the Sunday papers, with all the podcasts you've been on as a guest, with all the content you put out with stand-up?
01:35:38.000There's so much material they could pull from and just take your voice and know all of your different sounds that you make.
01:35:45.000I mean, what are the ramifications for that going into an election?
01:35:48.000You know, the week of the election before things can be corroborated or dismissed.
01:36:25.000You know, like, there's a version of these video programs that was just released, and they compared it to the version that was released, you know, X amount of months ago.
01:39:01.000I don't know if you can use it right when they announce the stuff because they'll announce it, show you how cool it is.
01:39:05.000Then people will try to recreate stuff that they've seen, and you're like, I can't make this.
01:39:09.000So, how the hell did you guys make it?
01:39:11.000That happens a lot in this, but they announced something yesterday where they're showing people like using, I don't think it's pulling off Google Maps, but it might be, but it looks like they're making GTA-level graphics and systems and playable worlds, I guess would be the word.
01:42:29.000We went over all the people that got hurt making that movie, including the tin man got violently ill because they painted him with toxic paint.
01:45:27.000Because we were talking about a second location for the mothership.
01:45:32.000And the two main candidates are New York City and Vegas.
01:45:39.000And I was thinking with Vegas, we would have to do it differently.
01:45:42.000We would just fly in comics every week.
01:45:46.000And then, you know, would we have enough local talent?
01:45:50.000I was saying to have a development program.
01:45:52.000So part of the program that's involved in the mothership is one of the things that always bothered me, if I would go to like a really nice improv on the road, is they didn't have a development program.
01:47:02.000And then on top of that, they don't really support development.
01:47:05.000We have two nights of open mic nights.
01:47:06.000And that was like part of the program.
01:47:08.000When Adam Egan and I sat down and we first hashed out the idea of doing a club, we said the thing was like, what would be the best thing for comedy?
01:47:17.000What would be the best thing in terms of like developing new comedians?
01:47:20.000Like you have to have open mic nights.
01:47:23.000And then having Kill Tony is gigantic.
01:47:25.000Having a place where not only do you have this place where someone who's never been on stage before could do a fucking minute in Madison Square Garden, which is what a lot of people did.
01:47:36.000You get people going up for the very first time ever in front of 16,000 people.
01:47:40.000But you also have this thing where you see someone who's a beginner do pretty well and Tony invites them back and then maybe gives them a golden ticket or maybe makes them a regular where they're a regular thing.
01:47:52.000Every week they have the opportunity to do a new minute.
01:47:54.000Or sometimes a comic will go, I want you to feature for me in Atlanta next week.
01:47:59.000Well, a lot of these guys are now headlining on the road.
01:48:01.000You know, guys like Ari Maddie, William Montgomery, Cam Patterson's down on Saturday Night Live.
01:48:06.000So the idea was to have it set up where you have enough talent to develop new headliners, you know, like Boston did, like L.A. was at one point in time.
01:48:20.000And I don't, I was thinking, I don't know if there's enough talent in Vegas, you know, because you I think there is.
01:48:36.000And I think most comedy communities are very top down, right?
01:48:39.000The level of the best guys raises the level of everybody else.
01:48:44.000New York City obviously has a tremendous amount of talent.
01:48:47.000New York City's always been one of the best, if not the best place for talent on the planet, right?
01:48:54.000And then LA has always been really good, but LA, a lot of people were distracted and much more interested in a career in Hollywood than they were actually just being really good at stand-up.
01:49:03.000Whereas New York, I always felt, was more pure.
01:49:07.000Those guys like Attel and a lot of these guys, Patrice, they were just interested in being great comics.
01:49:12.000And guys like Sam Murrell and Mark Norman now and Joe List.
01:49:20.000And if you set up a club in New York City, the way the mothership is, where the comics get 80% of the money, where you have these nights where you're developing, we have a legitimate talent coordinator that's actually watching people and giving them advice and giving them new spots.
01:49:35.000And he has a whole database of comedians that are potentially that have potential.
01:49:40.000Dude, no, Monday nights, because I'm doing Kill Tony Monday night.
01:49:44.000So I always, it's my favorite because then I go with Adam to the open mic night before Kill Tony.
01:50:18.000And some of those people will make it through the net.
01:50:20.000You know, one out of a hundred, one out of a thousand, whatever the number is.
01:50:23.000Some of those people will eventually be your peers.
01:50:26.000And those will be the more interesting comics because so much of this industry is about trust fund kids.
01:50:32.000Like you go out to do stand-up comedy and whether it's LA or New York, you can't afford to do it unless you got a parent helping you pay the rent.
01:50:40.000And then it's some kid who took classes at the UCB.
01:50:44.000He's got a marketing degree from Villanova and they become social media marketers who do really bland suburban comedy.
01:51:28.000Well, the thing about like, I know there's certain clubs that will allow influencers to come in and do a night, like people that literally have no act, but they have like a big TikTok following.
01:51:39.000Yeah, but they'll give them like an off-night, like a Monday or a Tuesday, where they're not excluding a real comedy.
01:51:45.000Sometimes they'll give them a fucking weekend.
01:51:55.000Well, the problem with that is when you talk about certain clubs, like the Punchline in San Francisco or Denver Comedy Works, they have a brand.
01:52:04.000And if I live in Denver, I know that if I go to the Comedy Works on a Friday night and I don't know who's headlining, I'm going to see a quality show.
01:52:12.000Now, if you start bringing in a social media flunky and I go to the Denver Comedy Works and I see that, I'm not going back to that club again.
01:53:26.000And they really do develop new talent.
01:53:28.000And then, you know, if they get somebody who's good, they've got five or six clubs around the country and they send those guys out to their family.
01:55:00.000Students have been kicked out of the country.
01:55:03.000That kind of influence is crazy, especially at an institution of higher learning, which is supposed to be a place where you challenge ideas.
01:55:11.000It's supposed to be a place where if someone comes in and you have a particular stance on, you know, fill in the blank, whatever it is, Ukraine, someone else is supposed to say, you're wrong and here's why.
01:55:20.000And then the whole audience is supposed to listen to these very compelling speeches, very compelling debates, and you learn.
01:55:27.000You learn about how people formulate opinions.
01:55:29.000When I was a kid, when I was in high school, when I was at Newton South High School, Barney Frank came in and he had a debate with a guy from the Moral Majority.
01:56:53.000But when you kick someone out of school for a paper that they wrote, this person that's legally in that class, allowed to be there, supposed to be there.
01:57:02.000What you're saying is you're intimidating people and keeping them from expressing their opinions because they don't want to be like that lady.
01:57:12.000If your parents, you know, if your parents are from India and they scraped up the money to send you to Harvard or wherever the fuck it is, and you're in America and they hear about this, you better not fucking talk some fucking shit.
01:57:32.000Like you get intimidated from speaking like that or from speaking about anything that's controversial because you could perhaps get kicked out of the fucking school now.
01:57:41.000Which is crazy because you're forcing, you're encouraging people to self-censor.
01:57:45.000You're discouraging free speech and communication and you're discouraging debate and challenging ideas, which is supposed to be a giant part of being in a university.
01:57:54.000No, when I was at BU, which you were at for a minute, right?
01:58:01.000The president, John Silber, who was, you know, very conservative and he was pretty active in the Central American, you know, sponsoring fucking uprisings in Central America.
01:58:14.000So there was a professor there named, you know, this guy.
01:58:28.000And there was a lot of debates on campus.
01:58:30.000There were kids on both sides, and they kept Zinn there because they realized I was a vibrant voice that students needed to hear to go against a lot of what was conservative.
01:58:40.000And there was anti-apartheid marches, and there was a lot of politics on BU was actually very much like Berkeley in the 60s.
01:59:18.000I remember I was doing a show in Miami, and I was talking about sex, and I remember saying, I remember like a lot, I saw a lot of them look confused.
01:59:26.000I go, How many of you people are virgins?
01:59:28.000And a bunch of people clapped and raised their hands.
02:00:30.000I'd make like a thousand bucks a show.
02:00:32.000They'd book me on, I'd do 10 shows in seven days because I would do nooners.
02:00:37.000So I would get, I would rent a car in Chicago, and then I would drive through North Dakota, fucking Minnesota in January, through snowstorms.
02:01:38.000Well, you remember we used to do those gigs in New England where if the Red Sox were in the playoffs, that TV, the sound might be off, but the TV was staying on.
02:02:03.000Dude, the first night I ever did stand-up comedy, and then I didn't do it for a little while after this, but my first night was the night that the New England Patriots lost to the Chicago Bears.
02:02:46.000And this was like, I mean, the lineups when we were doing it, this is the open mic night was like me, you, Dane, Bill Burr was a little bit after us, and Mark Maron would be on there, and fucking Louie would be there.
02:03:04.000And he would start the show by going, Welcome to Comedy Hell, where the pipe dreams of a handful of comedy yokos can soar as high as the lights on Broadway or crash and burn in that fiery pit known only as comedy hell.
02:03:21.000And then you would see guys who are like legit pros who would do guest spots.
02:03:25.000Like I remember one time I watched Teddy Bergeron when Teddy was in his prime.
02:03:30.000And people forgot about Teddy Bergeron.
02:03:32.000It's really unfortunate because he had a bunch of personal and substance issues that kind of derailed his career.
02:03:37.000But when he was on in his prime, he was so smooth and so slick.
02:03:44.000And I remember watching him because I'd only done comedy like twice at that time.
02:05:20.000And it was one of the first cities to really explode in terms of clubs popping up everywhere and lines of people getting to the shows.
02:05:29.000And so Jim Downey goes, all right, let me check it out.
02:05:32.000So he flies to Boston, and there was this club called the Ding-Ho, which was the first place to really house comedy in Boston.
02:05:42.000So they get the best of, get all lined up, and they're in the green room, and they're chopping up lines of blow, and they're getting on stage, and they're jokes about, what about the hair in Malden?
02:05:54.000It's not as big as the hair in Revilla.
02:05:56.000And it's like, that's not going to play on the tonight show.
02:05:59.000And they're killing, but none of it is right for the tonight show.
02:06:03.000And then Stephen Wright, who was, they put him on as a, as a, out of pity at the end of the show.
02:06:10.000And I remember, I'm not going to say which, but one of the comedians had pulled Steve aside and said, look, Steven, he'd been struggling for years, not doing well.
02:06:19.000And they go, this is not for you, man.
02:07:17.000In the next two years, it had died off significantly.
02:07:20.000Well, what happened was there was so much comedy on TV.
02:07:24.000There was all these, you know, one-hour shows where everybody did the six-minute set, comedy on the road, half-hour comedy hour, comedy hour.
02:07:34.000And so it got kind of, it got kind of overexposed.
02:07:38.000And so the club started opening everywhere.
02:07:41.000And then as it fell off, they started papering the rooms and giving out free passes.
02:07:46.000And so, I mean, I still experience, you know, if I go into a new market, especially if it's like an improv where it's five or six hundred seats and I'm there for five shows, they'll give out a fair amount of free passes.
02:08:08.000So then this, so then it just, and then there were so many rooms and not enough comedians to do well in those rooms.
02:08:14.000And so it kind of sagged and it went away.
02:08:16.000And I really wonder now, like that we've been in a kind of COVID launched, post-COVID launched comedy, like it's never been at this heights that it's at right now.
02:08:26.000I mean, you got people like you doing arenas.
02:09:35.000Just on that street, you got the Black Rabbit, you got the Velveeta room, then you got Cap City, where a lot of headliners come in, which is about 20 minutes away.
02:10:19.000And I, and, you know, and then it's fucking nuts.
02:10:22.000Like, literally from the time you wake up until five in the morning where you end up at Larry Flint's Barely Legal Club, which, you know, Louis C.K. has this whole thing about the barely legal.
02:11:10.000They've got a nude roast where literally everybody on stage is nude, including the judges.
02:11:17.000And then they've got boxing, comedians boxing each other outside.
02:11:21.000The green room is filled with mushrooms and acid and weed and open bars.
02:11:28.000And then you've got, I mean, it's basically, it's kind of like when we used to go to the Montreal Comedy Festival, you got big by doing a set in front of the industry, getting a deal, and then hopefully getting on TV.
02:17:05.000I think the impact of that book has opened up a lot of people's eyes to the fucking shenanigans that were going on back then.
02:17:10.000Yeah, when we were at Skank Fest, so Duncan and I are talking to Tom for like a half an hour, and Duncan doesn't know who I just introduced him as Tom.
02:17:18.000And then when I brought up Chaos and that he wrote it, Duncan's jaw dropped because he's obsessed with the book.
02:17:25.000So he was doing a live podcast from Skank Fest.
02:18:26.000He came on the last time he did my episode, my podcast, rather, the episode he dressed up like John Lilly, who's the psychedelic pioneer from the 70s.
02:19:36.000Those Ice House shows were crazy because we would have a stand-up show going, and then you'd have about six people on the podcast with a joint going the entire time in this small room.
02:19:47.000And I don't, I have never been high on stage in my life except for those shows because it was secondhand smoke.
02:20:29.000I think the next move in terms of a club would be we go to another city and try to do the same thing and really put a lot of time and money and effort into making it right.
02:21:21.000I love the walk to the stage because you're in the green room and you got to go down a flight of stairs and then you kind of feel the show over your head as you're walking underneath it.
02:24:09.000He had written a book about Andy Kaufman and claiming he's still alive.
02:24:12.000So he comes over to my, I was doing my show in my garage at that point.
02:24:17.000And he comes over and about 45 minutes into the podcast, I go, I go, so how does Andy's family feel about you saying this stuff about him still being alive?
02:24:29.000And he's like, oh, they're fine with that.
02:24:31.000I said, I kind of heard that they're, you know, a little myth, that they, they think it's disrespectful.
02:27:24.000That whole method acting thing, like becoming a person, especially an actual human where you have to sort of like figure out their brain patterns and their behavior patterns and imitate it.
02:28:32.000And, you know, you just think about like how fucking your show of shows as a writer early on and, you know, and just going on to do Frankenstein.
02:30:00.000Well, wasn't there a lawsuit that Google had to just recently settle where it turned out that there were certain times where your phone was listening to you, which is why you're getting ads for things that you had discussed?
02:30:32.000They have agreed to pay $68 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging they unlawfully recorded users' conversations through Google Assist-enabled devices without consent.
02:30:42.000The proposed Google settlement is pending approval from a federal judge, U.S. District Court for Northern District of California.
02:30:49.000Class action lawsuit was filed in 2019 after consumers accused Google of concealing that its assistant-enabled devices could unintentionally activate and record conversations inside users' homes.
02:31:43.000Yeah, but you don't understand the ramifications of this information.
02:31:46.000If somebody is in office and they want to start using keywords to locate people that they're going to have audited, like they just, some woman got was protesting ICE, and you know, they've got this facial recognition software that lets them know your name, your address.
02:32:18.000No, they're taking your license plate.
02:32:21.000They're taking people's faces and they're running it through.
02:32:24.000They had one woman went from a protest to her house and there was a car parked out front with ICE agents in it saying, we know where you live.
02:32:40.000She was probably yelling out or whatever.
02:32:42.000She wasn't a part of the organizers of the protest or anything like that because maybe she was an organizer.
02:32:46.000This is the weird thing: the organizer, the signal chats and everything.
02:32:50.000This is all being very coordinated and very funded.
02:32:55.000This is a very coordinated thing, like what they're doing, where they're doxing these ICE agents, and the whole thing is all very fucking weird.
02:33:04.000The point about the Google stuff, though, is people that go, oh, I'm not doing anything illegal.
02:33:10.000You are giving them your data, and that data is a commodity, and they are getting insanely wealthy off of getting your data in an unscrupulous way.
02:33:21.000They're not telling you they're doing this thing, and they're getting your data.
02:33:25.000And that data is making them insanely wealthy.
02:33:27.000And then they use that wealth in a bunch of different ways to influence all sorts of things in the world.
02:34:05.000But meanwhile, you want to put your might tell you to kill yourself like that.
02:34:08.000Not only that, but you're telling your innermost embarrassing things.
02:34:12.000You think that's not going to be used against you at some point when you try to get health insurance and health insurance has now audited what you said to ChatGPT and goes, well, you're a suicide risk or you're talking about trying to quit smoking.
02:34:27.000Wasn't there an instance real recently where someone had uploaded top secret information to ChatGPT to a public, a government official had, see if you can find this.
02:34:39.000Government official uploaded to a public chat GPT, not like some secure, encrypted version that the government gets because they were trying to go over some data.
02:35:32.000Uploads of sensitive CISA contracting documents triggered multiple internal cybersecurity warnings designed to stop theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks.
02:35:46.000And this fucking guy's the director of cybersecurity and infrastructure security.
02:35:52.000Well, what does it mean accidentally upload?
02:35:54.000Did it eavesdrop on him or did he say something that caused ChatGPT to get it?