Tim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Tim Dillon,

00:00:03.040 | a standup comedian who is fearless

00:00:05.520 | in challenging the norms of modern day social

00:00:08.180 | and political discourse.

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00:00:32.720 | to get a discount at the support of this podcast.

00:00:35.600 | As a side note, let me say that I will continue

00:00:38.160 | talking to scientists, engineers, historians,

00:00:40.480 | mathematicians, and so on.

00:00:42.440 | But I will also talk to the people

00:00:44.920 | who Jack Kerouac called the mad ones

00:00:47.840 | in his book "On the Road."

00:00:49.640 | That is one of my favorite books.

00:00:52.000 | He wrote, "The only people for me are the mad ones,

00:00:55.680 | "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,

00:00:58.840 | "mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,

00:01:03.060 | "the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,

00:01:06.140 | "but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles,

00:01:11.060 | "exploding like spiders across the stars.

00:01:14.140 | "And in the middle, you see the blue center light pop,

00:01:17.520 | "and everybody goes, 'Oh.'"

00:01:20.600 | Some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble

00:01:24.220 | in that I have no idea how they will turn out,

00:01:27.400 | but I'm willing to risk it for a chance

00:01:29.460 | at a bit of an adventure.

00:01:31.120 | And I'm happy and honored that Tim, this time,

00:01:34.800 | wanted to take a chance as well.

00:01:37.020 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

00:01:39.240 | review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify,

00:01:42.200 | support it on Patreon, or connect with me

00:01:44.960 | on Twitter @LexFriedman.

00:01:47.320 | And now, here's my conversation with Tim Dillon.

00:01:51.680 | What would you like your tombstone to read?

00:01:54.460 | It's a good way to summarize the essence of a human being.

00:01:58.860 | - I would like it to say, "This has not been paid for."

00:02:01.580 | (Lex laughing)

00:02:02.500 | And I want my living relatives to struggle to pay for it,

00:02:07.500 | and I think I would like them to be hounded every day.

00:02:11.380 | I would like people to call and go,

00:02:12.300 | "Listen, we don't wanna ever excavate a body, but we will,

00:02:15.660 | "because this has not been paid for."

00:02:18.820 | - I love the idea of leaving the world, like debt,

00:02:22.560 | leaving the world in lots of debt

00:02:24.760 | that other people have to deal with.

00:02:26.920 | And I know people that have done that,

00:02:29.120 | and I know people that have been in families

00:02:30.520 | where that's happened, where someone has to sit

00:02:34.040 | and just curse the sky,

00:02:36.760 | because they don't have a physical person anymore

00:02:39.000 | to be angry at, but they still have to deal

00:02:42.300 | with the decisions that person made.

00:02:44.080 | And that's deeply tragic,

00:02:45.360 | but that's always struck me as very funny.

00:02:47.080 | - Well, it's a kind of immortality, the debt,

00:02:49.460 | 'cause if the debt lasts for a long time,

00:02:52.140 | the anger lasts for a long time,

00:02:54.000 | and then you're now immortal in the minds of many.

00:02:57.060 | You arouse emotion in the minds of many.

00:02:59.400 | - My mother's best friend in the town I grew up in,

00:03:01.860 | her husband shot himself in the driveway,

00:03:06.860 | and my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve,

00:03:10.740 | because he owed so much money,

00:03:12.620 | she would come over and go, "I hate him.

00:03:15.340 | "I fucking hate him."

00:03:17.480 | And it was just such an interesting thing

00:03:18.800 | to see somebody who, and her kids ended up getting angry

00:03:21.520 | at her for that, because they didn't understand

00:03:24.360 | why she would hate a guy who was clearly suffering,

00:03:28.140 | but she goes, "He took the selfish way out.

00:03:30.220 | "He fucked us."

00:03:31.760 | And it was always interesting for me to just remember

00:03:34.880 | that you can leave Earth and still be a problem.

00:03:39.380 | (laughing)

00:03:41.760 | That's kind of a special person,

00:03:43.400 | so that's, I think, what I'd like my tombstone to read.

00:03:45.580 | - Yeah, there's a show called "Louie" with Louis C.K.

00:03:48.580 | I don't know if you've watched it.

00:03:49.420 | - Yes, I'm aware of it.

00:03:50.500 | - There's this moment, I think,

00:03:52.140 | where an old guy's talking to Louis

00:03:54.220 | about the best part about love is after you break up,

00:03:58.520 | and it's remembering that,

00:04:01.400 | remembering the good times and feeling that loss,

00:04:05.700 | the pain of that loss.

00:04:07.220 | The worst part about love

00:04:08.420 | is when you no longer feel that pain.

00:04:10.540 | - Interesting.

00:04:11.360 | - The pain of losing somebody lasts longer,

00:04:15.700 | is more intense and lasts longer than the actual love.

00:04:18.620 | So his argument was like the pain is what love really is.

00:04:23.500 | - Wow.

00:04:24.340 | - In the same way that anger,

00:04:26.120 | your tombstone, what arouses, will last longer.

00:04:30.620 | And that's deeply like a human thing.

00:04:33.580 | Why do we attach happiness

00:04:36.340 | to the way we should remember others?

00:04:38.580 | It could be just anger.

00:04:40.580 | - I know so many people

00:04:42.220 | who will have deeply complicated feelings when,

00:04:45.440 | I did drugs for many years,

00:04:48.220 | and I spent time with some wild people,

00:04:50.700 | and their parents were also wild people.

00:04:53.260 | And some of their parents have done crazy things to them,

00:04:58.140 | and have created situations

00:05:00.900 | that were not productive for child-rearing.

00:05:05.900 | And so I know that when those people die,

00:05:09.180 | it's going to be a very mixed bag.

00:05:11.580 | Like there's going to be a lot of complex emotions,

00:05:13.660 | like, "Hey, we loved that guy,

00:05:16.620 | but also when we look back,

00:05:19.140 | he was a horrible father, a horrible husband,

00:05:23.020 | but he was fun."

00:05:24.340 | And we don't put enough stock in that,

00:05:27.500 | but there will be a push and pull.

00:05:29.380 | And I'll be the one kind of bringing up like,

00:05:30.920 | "Hey, he was a lot of fun."

00:05:33.160 | He was a lot, remember when he stuck us,

00:05:36.460 | one of the things,

00:05:37.300 | this particular person I'm talking about,

00:05:39.220 | we were at a bar,

00:05:40.820 | me and my friend were there, we're having dinner,

00:05:42.500 | and his father who was an alcoholic,

00:05:45.580 | and a guy that would go out every night,

00:05:47.980 | and didn't work, refused to work,

00:05:50.720 | would lie and say he was going to work,

00:05:52.540 | and then go to a bar.

00:05:53.500 | I mean, just a fun person.

00:05:55.760 | And we were sitting at this bar restaurant,

00:06:00.140 | and the bartender,

00:06:00.980 | we see his father walk up to the bartender and say,

00:06:04.260 | "Point at us, point at our table,

00:06:06.140 | and go and put the thumbs up."

00:06:07.540 | And the bartender nodded,

00:06:08.940 | and then the father walked over to our table,

00:06:10.620 | and he said, "Listen, I just want to let you know,

00:06:11.920 | I just bought you dinner."

00:06:13.260 | And I looked at his son,

00:06:15.620 | I said, "He's a pretty good guy."

00:06:17.380 | And then he climbed over the little fence

00:06:19.860 | down to the water,

00:06:20.700 | got in his little boat,

00:06:21.520 | it was a little cigarette boat,

00:06:22.360 | and he just drove away.

00:06:23.660 | And then about an hour later,

00:06:24.900 | we went and we said,

00:06:26.380 | "I think that guy took care of the bill."

00:06:28.900 | But she said, "Well, go talk to the bartender."

00:06:30.540 | So we talked to the bartender,

00:06:32.460 | and he goes, he handed us a bill,

00:06:34.100 | and the bill was for like $1,000.

00:06:36.460 | And we said, "Wait a minute, what the hell's going on?"

00:06:38.420 | And he goes, "The guy that left an hour ago

00:06:40.500 | said you were gonna take care of his bill,

00:06:42.100 | he's been drinking here all week."

00:06:44.340 | And we go, "What are you talking about?"

00:06:46.060 | And he goes, "Remember, he pointed at you,

00:06:47.900 | he put the thumbs up, and you guys waved?"

00:06:50.540 | You remember that?

00:06:52.300 | And the guy goes, and we went,

00:06:53.420 | "Yeah," and I just looked at my friend,

00:06:55.020 | my friend and I went,

00:06:55.860 | "You know, your dad is just,

00:06:57.340 | we're gonna remember him for all kinds of reasons."

00:07:00.100 | - But to you, he was fun?

00:07:01.580 | - He was a lot of fun, he wasn't my dad.

00:07:03.420 | But I spent a lot of time with him.

00:07:04.500 | I was in two boating accidents with him.

00:07:06.500 | You know, two boating accidents--

00:07:08.420 | - Alcohol involved?

00:07:09.740 | Drugs involved? - Yes, he was,

00:07:10.740 | usually alcohol was involved when he left his house.

00:07:13.300 | And when he was at home as well.

00:07:15.820 | But I was in two boating accidents.

00:07:17.220 | And do you know how fun someone has to be

00:07:19.860 | to get in a second boating accident?

00:07:21.780 | (laughing)

00:07:22.700 | Do you know what a good time someone has to be

00:07:25.860 | to get in a boat with them

00:07:27.700 | after you've already gotten in one wreck?

00:07:30.660 | - Never get fooled again, what was that line, George Bush?

00:07:33.020 | Never get fooled again?

00:07:34.380 | - Right.

00:07:35.340 | Yeah, so if you're getting fooled again,

00:07:37.340 | you know, there's a reason for it.

00:07:38.180 | But he was a fun guy.

00:07:39.540 | He did have a death wish.

00:07:40.540 | The second boating accident, he grabbed me and said,

00:07:42.300 | "You can't hang out with me anymore."

00:07:43.460 | And I said, "Why?"

00:07:44.300 | He goes, "I'm trying to kill myself."

00:07:45.820 | And I was like, "Oh."

00:07:46.980 | And then I understood that like,

00:07:48.700 | all of the fun, under the fun,

00:07:50.740 | lived a very destructive person

00:07:53.140 | who not only was destructive, but wanted to die.

00:07:56.380 | - So speaking of fun people that wanna die,

00:07:59.900 | I don't know if you're,

00:08:01.260 | we can go Hunter S. Thompson,

00:08:02.660 | but Charles Bukowski, I don't know if you're aware of the guy.

00:08:06.380 | - I'm aware of him, sure.

00:08:07.300 | I've read some of his stuff.

00:08:08.900 | - So his tombstone says,

00:08:10.820 | I just wanted to ask you a question about it.

00:08:12.460 | His tombstone says, "Don't try."

00:08:15.420 | - Interesting.

00:08:16.620 | - What do you think about that advice

00:08:18.260 | as a way to approach life?

00:08:19.980 | - I think for many people, it's a good advice.

00:08:24.060 | Because the people that are gonna try will do anyway.

00:08:26.940 | And the people that need to be told,

00:08:28.300 | there's a whole cottage industry now

00:08:30.260 | of motivational speakers and life coaches and gurus

00:08:35.140 | that tell people that they all have to own their own business

00:08:39.900 | and be their own boss and be a disruptor

00:08:42.940 | and get into industries.

00:08:45.180 | That's incredibly unrealistic for most people.

00:08:47.500 | Most people are not suited for that.

00:08:50.180 | And the Gary V's of the world that tell everybody

00:08:52.700 | that they should just hustle and grind

00:08:54.140 | and hustle and grind.

00:08:54.980 | They're very light on the specifics

00:08:56.100 | of what they should actually do.

00:08:58.140 | Yeah, I think a lot of people,

00:08:59.740 | that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people.

00:09:02.140 | I think my generation got horrible advice

00:09:05.180 | from our parents, from our teachers.

00:09:07.620 | And that advice was follow your dreams.

00:09:09.660 | And that was it, by the way.

00:09:12.260 | There was no like, what are your dreams?

00:09:14.520 | Are they realistic?

00:09:15.660 | What happens when they don't work out?

00:09:17.300 | Will your dreams make you happy?

00:09:18.780 | Are your dreams real?

00:09:20.860 | Do they exist on earth?

00:09:22.620 | Can you follow, anybody follow your dreams?

00:09:25.700 | You can be anything you wanna be.

00:09:26.860 | Horrible advice.

00:09:28.100 | Horrible advice.

00:09:29.140 | Worst advice you could ever give a generation of people.

00:09:31.660 | Really, truly.

00:09:32.780 | I mean, think about it.

00:09:35.020 | If you were talking to somebody

00:09:37.140 | and you were trying to make them succeed,

00:09:39.200 | are there any two worse pieces of advice to give them

00:09:43.560 | than follow your dreams

00:09:46.140 | and you can be anything you want to be?

00:09:48.640 | Those to me are the two most destructive pieces

00:09:51.820 | of information I've ever heard.

00:09:53.140 | - So let me push back because--

00:09:54.820 | - Okay, that's fair.

00:09:55.660 | Many people do.

00:09:57.820 | So yeah, this is like a rigorous journalistic interview.

00:10:01.860 | Larry King, by the way, passed away today.

00:10:04.020 | So I'm taking over the--

00:10:05.580 | - It's very sad.

00:10:06.420 | - I'm carrying the--

00:10:07.260 | - Very sad.

00:10:08.080 | RIP King.

00:10:09.700 | - Yeah, what was I even gonna say?

00:10:11.180 | Oh, let me push back on the follow your dream thing

00:10:14.660 | is I come from an immigrant family

00:10:18.260 | where I was always working extremely hard at stuff,

00:10:23.160 | like in a stupid way.

00:10:24.700 | There's something about me

00:10:26.900 | that loves hitting my head against the wall

00:10:28.580 | over and over and over

00:10:29.900 | until either my head breaks or the wall breaks.

00:10:32.380 | Just like I love that dedication for no purpose whatsoever.

00:10:36.200 | It's like the mouse that's stuck in a cage or whatever.

00:10:39.060 | And everybody always told me, my family,

00:10:43.620 | the people around me,

00:10:45.020 | the sort of, the epitome of what I could achieve

00:10:48.880 | is to be kind of a stable job.

00:10:51.740 | The old like lawyer, doctor,

00:10:54.720 | in my case, it's like scientist and so on.

00:10:57.720 | But I had these dreams, I had this fire about,

00:11:01.200 | I love robots and that nobody ever gave me permission

00:11:06.200 | to pursue those dreams.

00:11:08.400 | I know you're supposed to grab it yourself.

00:11:10.240 | Nobody's supposed to give you permission,

00:11:12.000 | but there's something about just people saying,

00:11:15.060 | fuck what everyone else thinks,

00:11:18.740 | like giving you permission,

00:11:19.760 | a parent or somebody like that saying, do your own thing.

00:11:23.480 | Go become an actor, go become like,

00:11:25.520 | do the crazy thing you're not supposed to do, an artist,

00:11:28.280 | go build a company, quit school, all that kind of stuff.

00:11:32.000 | - Yes, sure.

00:11:33.220 | - That's the pushback against the,

00:11:35.180 | follow your dreams as bad advice.

00:11:38.680 | - In mass, if you were to look at, in mass,

00:11:41.160 | if you were to look at statistically

00:11:43.200 | how few people that works out for,

00:11:45.400 | I'm just, no, but let's be very honest.

00:11:47.000 | - This is very true, yeah.

00:11:47.840 | - Be very honest.

00:11:48.660 | So I mean like, yeah, if you're gonna go be an actor,

00:11:50.560 | hey, I was broke for 10 years

00:11:52.040 | before I became a, before I was making money as a comedian.

00:11:54.640 | I get it.

00:11:55.860 | I didn't need Gary Vaynerchuk

00:11:57.400 | to tell me to follow my thing, right?

00:11:59.760 | And here's the other thing.

00:12:00.580 | I was kind of funny and like, I was kind of,

00:12:03.200 | a lot of things were in my favor of being a comedian, right?

00:12:07.760 | I had this kind of crazy fucked up life.

00:12:09.120 | I had a lot of stories.

00:12:10.520 | I had exhausted, I was willing to fail.

00:12:12.960 | I had failed before.

00:12:14.720 | I was broke.

00:12:15.580 | I didn't care about being broke.

00:12:17.000 | I knew how to be broke.

00:12:18.720 | I had, I was shameless to a degree.

00:12:21.360 | I was, I would get on a stage night after night

00:12:23.560 | and be laughed at.

00:12:24.880 | I would, I had a high threshold for being embarrassed.

00:12:28.040 | I had a high threshold for people thinking

00:12:29.880 | that I was a scumbag, right?

00:12:31.840 | And showing up at family parties and being like, yeah,

00:12:33.840 | I still really don't have a job.

00:12:35.320 | And I'm just, I work at comedy clubs kind of,

00:12:38.600 | and I get booked when I can.

00:12:40.000 | And I was, you know, suited for it.

00:12:44.520 | There's this idea that people can just roam

00:12:48.080 | around the world injecting themselves into other things

00:12:53.080 | they have no aptitude for at all.

00:12:56.440 | And will that to happen?

00:12:58.280 | A small percentage of people might be able to do that.

00:13:01.120 | But the vast majority of people have something

00:13:04.180 | they might key into that they're meant to do.

00:13:06.800 | Like you loved robots, you love technology,

00:13:09.320 | and you found a place in that world where you thrive.

00:13:12.840 | But I think many people, a lot of people love robots, right?

00:13:16.180 | So a lot of people think everything you do is interesting.

00:13:18.460 | I think your shit is fascinating.

00:13:20.180 | I watch your podcast and I think it's very interesting.

00:13:23.620 | I have no place in your world.

00:13:26.280 | You know what I mean?

00:13:27.340 | I have no place in that world.

00:13:29.060 | I don't like remedial math.

00:13:33.020 | I don't like community college math.

00:13:35.420 | I think it's a waste of my time.

00:13:37.340 | - What do you think about robot?

00:13:38.300 | Would you ever buy a robot for your home?

00:13:40.580 | - Yes.

00:13:41.740 | What will it do?

00:13:43.180 | - I'll be a companion, a friend.

00:13:44.900 | - Oh yeah, I mean, I would like to start replacing

00:13:46.780 | friends and family with robots immediately.

00:13:49.060 | I mean, truly, truly.

00:13:51.260 | I mean, I'm not even kidding.

00:13:52.620 | Like I would like to have a Thanksgiving with four robots.

00:13:56.740 | I'm dead serious.

00:13:58.900 | Are they into QAnon?

00:14:00.060 | Like are the robots, when do the robots start going crazy?

00:14:05.060 | That's my question is like,

00:14:07.020 | how long do the robots live with me

00:14:08.700 | before they are also a problem?

00:14:10.620 | And I got to replace them.

00:14:12.500 | You know what I mean?

00:14:13.460 | - You're going to indoctrinate the robot.

00:14:15.460 | - The robot's going to call me like my aunt does

00:14:17.140 | and talk about coronavirus for an hour every morning

00:14:19.540 | and tell me everyone in America who's died of coronavirus.

00:14:22.940 | - One of the things I enjoy in life

00:14:25.740 | is how terrified people like you,

00:14:29.180 | I'm a huge fan by the way, get in front of robots.

00:14:32.340 | - Well, I am concerned about AI

00:14:35.300 | like completely getting rid of the need for human beings

00:14:39.620 | because human beings, I mean,

00:14:41.020 | you go out in the street and you go,

00:14:43.500 | so few of these people are necessary.

00:14:45.460 | Even now, even now you look at people and you go,

00:14:49.220 | they're hanging on by a thread, right?

00:14:51.060 | And you can just imagine

00:14:51.980 | how many jobs are going to get replaced,

00:14:54.060 | how many industries are going to be completely remade

00:14:57.820 | with AI and the pace of change worries me a little bit

00:15:01.700 | because we do a very bad job in this country of mitigation

00:15:06.260 | when we have problems.

00:15:07.540 | We don't do a great job.

00:15:08.620 | We did a not great job with COVID, right?

00:15:11.180 | We don't do a good job.

00:15:12.020 | It's just something we don't do well.

00:15:13.260 | We're good in booms and busts.

00:15:15.860 | We're good when it's good.

00:15:17.140 | And we're actually, we kind of know how to kind of like,

00:15:19.300 | hey, we're bottomed out.

00:15:20.620 | We're like a gambling addict in this country.

00:15:22.820 | We know what it feels like to be outside of an OTB

00:15:26.060 | at 9 a.m. drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes

00:15:28.100 | going, I'm going to build it back.

00:15:29.820 | And we know what it's like to win,

00:15:31.580 | but anything in between, it seems not that great.

00:15:35.700 | So to me, it feels like, are we going to be able to like

00:15:39.020 | help people that are displaced

00:15:41.700 | and that have their jobs taken by, I mean,

00:15:44.060 | do you not fear sort of a world where you have a lot of,

00:15:48.700 | you know, artificial intelligence replacing workers

00:15:52.140 | and then what happens?

00:15:53.300 | - There's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence.

00:15:56.100 | One of them is yes, displacement of jobs, workers.

00:15:59.460 | That's technology in general.

00:16:01.340 | That's just any kind of new innovations, displaced jobs.

00:16:06.340 | I'm less worried about that.

00:16:10.420 | I'm more worried about other impacts

00:16:11.860 | of artificial intelligence.

00:16:12.900 | For example, the nature of our discourse, like social,

00:16:15.620 | the effects of algorithms on the way we communicate

00:16:18.060 | with each other, the spread of information,

00:16:20.700 | what that information looks like,

00:16:22.380 | the creation of silos, all that kind of stuff.

00:16:25.060 | I think that would just make worse the effects

00:16:29.660 | that the displacement of jobs has.

00:16:33.140 | I think ultimately, I have a hope that technology

00:16:36.380 | creates more opportunities than it destroys.

00:16:38.780 | - I hope so too.

00:16:39.900 | - And so in that sense, AI to me is an exciting possibility.

00:16:44.900 | But you know, the challenges this world presents

00:16:50.020 | will create divisions, will create chaos and so on.

00:16:53.020 | So I'm more focused on the way we deal as a society

00:16:56.900 | with that chaos, the way we talk to each other.

00:16:59.020 | - That's huge.

00:16:59.860 | - Creating the platform that's healthy for that.

00:17:01.740 | - Now as a comedian, creator, whatever you wanna call it,

00:17:05.660 | people that put out content,

00:17:08.740 | the gatekeepers are now algorithmic, right?

00:17:11.220 | So they are kind of almost AI ready.

00:17:13.300 | So if you are a person that puts out YouTube videos,

00:17:17.620 | podcasts, whatever you're doing,

00:17:20.020 | it used to be a guy in the back of the room with a cigar

00:17:25.220 | saying, "I like you," or "Get him out of here."

00:17:28.240 | Now it's an algorithm you barely understand.

00:17:31.420 | Like I've talked to people at YouTube,

00:17:33.100 | but I don't know if they understand the algorithm.

00:17:35.580 | - They don't.

00:17:36.420 | - They don't.

00:17:37.240 | - This is fascinating.

00:17:38.080 | - Yeah, it's fascinating.

00:17:39.220 | 'Cause I speak to people at YouTube and I go,

00:17:40.660 | "Hey man, what's going on here?"

00:17:42.100 | One of my episode titles of my podcast

00:17:44.380 | was called "Knife Fight in Malibu."

00:17:46.540 | It was about real estate.

00:17:48.560 | And it was because a realtor in Malibu,

00:17:50.900 | I was trying to get a summer rental,

00:17:52.180 | which I can't really afford,

00:17:53.220 | but I don't think that's a huge problem.

00:17:55.500 | I follow my dreams.

00:17:57.540 | So I called a realtor and she said,

00:17:59.520 | "Listen," she goes,

00:18:00.360 | "I don't know what the government's saying,

00:18:01.820 | "but it's a real knife fight out here."

00:18:03.340 | You know, an old grizzled woman, real realtor,

00:18:05.100 | tan skin, cig out the mouth, driving a Porsche.

00:18:08.700 | It's a real knife fight out here.

00:18:10.180 | You know, her entire life had become real estate.

00:18:12.540 | Her soul had been hollowed out.

00:18:14.060 | Her kids hate her.

00:18:15.780 | No one's made her come in years,

00:18:16.980 | but she just loves heating kitchen floors and views.

00:18:20.180 | Fun.

00:18:21.020 | She's a demon from hell and we need them, truly.

00:18:23.820 | We're getting rid of them.

00:18:24.940 | It's not good.

00:18:26.180 | And she goes, "It's a real knife fight out here."

00:18:27.980 | So we put that in the episode title.

00:18:30.060 | And of course, I guess some algorithm thought

00:18:31.980 | that we were showing people stabbing each other in Wendy's

00:18:35.180 | and we got demonetized.

00:18:37.780 | Did we get demonetized?

00:18:38.860 | - We didn't get demonetized, but we lost 80,000 views.

00:18:41.180 | - We lost a lot of views

00:18:42.260 | 'cause we were kicked out of whatever,

00:18:43.860 | we were just kicked out.

00:18:44.700 | And I was asking YouTube about it.

00:18:46.340 | They were kind of understanding it,

00:18:47.620 | but even the people that worked there

00:18:49.340 | didn't truly seem to understand the algorithm.

00:18:51.860 | So can you explain to me how that works

00:18:53.620 | where they barely know what's going on?

00:18:55.300 | - No, they do not understand the full dynamics

00:18:58.220 | of the monster or the amazing thing that they've created.

00:19:01.540 | It's the amount of content that's being created

00:19:04.540 | is larger than anyone understands.

00:19:06.380 | Like this is huge.

00:19:07.540 | They can't deal with it.

00:19:08.460 | The teams aren't large enough to deal with it.

00:19:10.860 | There's like special cases.

00:19:13.140 | So if you fall into the category of special cases,

00:19:15.660 | we can maybe talk about that, like a Donald Trump,

00:19:18.260 | where you like actually have meetings

00:19:20.140 | about what to do with this particular account.

00:19:22.280 | But everything outside of that is all algorithms.

00:19:24.880 | They get reported by people and they get,

00:19:28.780 | they give enough people to report a particular video,

00:19:31.180 | a particular tweet.

00:19:32.780 | It rises up to where humans look over it.

00:19:36.620 | But the initial step of the reporting

00:19:40.900 | and the rising up to the human supervision

00:19:45.540 | is done by algorithm

00:19:46.540 | and they don't understand the dynamics of that.

00:19:48.340 | 'Cause we're talking about billions of tweets.

00:19:50.500 | We're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours

00:19:55.460 | of video uploaded every day.

00:19:58.300 | Now, the hilarity of it is that most of the YouTube algorithm

00:20:03.300 | is based on the title.

00:20:07.260 | - That's crazy.

00:20:09.420 | - And the description is a small contribution

00:20:11.620 | in terms of filtering,

00:20:12.580 | in terms of the knife fight situation.

00:20:14.860 | And that's all they can do.

00:20:16.580 | They cannot, they don't have algorithms at all

00:20:19.580 | that are able to process the content of the video.

00:20:22.480 | So they try to also infer information based on

00:20:26.780 | if you're watching all of these QAnon videos

00:20:29.220 | or something like that, or Flat Earth videos,

00:20:32.280 | and you also watch, are really excitedly watching

00:20:35.860 | the whole knife fight in Malibu video.

00:20:39.360 | That says, that increases the chance that the knife fight

00:20:43.360 | is a dangerous video for society or something like that.

00:20:47.780 | - Interesting, wow.

00:20:48.980 | - Based on their contribution.

00:20:49.820 | - So if people are watching something,

00:20:52.140 | 'cause I watch QAnon and Flat Earth videos to ridicule them.

00:20:55.780 | - Right.

00:20:56.620 | - That, you know what I mean?

00:20:57.440 | I watch these videos and I make fun of them on my show.

00:21:00.020 | But what's interesting is if I then go watch something else,

00:21:03.260 | I'm increasing the likelihood that that video

00:21:05.420 | is gonna get looked at as potentially subversive

00:21:07.340 | or dangerous.

00:21:08.180 | - Exactly.

00:21:09.000 | - That's why.

00:21:09.840 | - So they make decisions about who you are,

00:21:12.020 | who you are as a human being, as a watcher,

00:21:14.300 | the visual user, based on the clusters of videos you're in.

00:21:17.980 | But those clusters are not manually determined,

00:21:20.500 | they're automatically clustered.

00:21:23.220 | - It's so weird.

00:21:24.640 | We have titles where they got upset about

00:21:27.260 | and I don't even understand.

00:21:28.980 | - Yeah.

00:21:29.820 | - Like we had a title that was so innocuous in my opinion,

00:21:32.840 | and the title of the episode was called Bomb Disney World.

00:21:36.140 | And I was asking people to consider bombing Disney World.

00:21:41.140 | And YouTube got angry at that.

00:21:43.940 | So you don't know why.

00:21:45.660 | You can never understand why.

00:21:46.500 | - You could have said Disney World is the bombs.

00:21:48.740 | - Right, right, right.

00:21:50.900 | - It's just rearranging.

00:21:52.060 | That's what it probably meant.

00:21:52.900 | - I wasn't saying to do it,

00:21:53.720 | but I was saying let's start thinking about plans to do,

00:21:58.220 | like not let's do it, but let's get in the mind.

00:22:01.780 | Let's change the conversation.

00:22:03.380 | - Yeah.

00:22:04.220 | - I think it's very interesting because as a comedian,

00:22:05.860 | you don't wanna live in that world

00:22:06.940 | of worrying about algorithms.

00:22:07.980 | You don't wanna worry about deplatforming and shadowbanning.

00:22:09.980 | I mean, all these conversations that I've had

00:22:11.840 | with other comedians about shadowbanning,

00:22:13.460 | I mean, it's hilarious.

00:22:14.340 | We all call each other.

00:22:15.180 | I think I'm being shadowbanned.

00:22:16.700 | Are you being shadowbanned?

00:22:18.260 | And nobody knew what that word was a month ago,

00:22:20.620 | I mean, a year ago, but everyone now is convinced

00:22:23.500 | that everything they do that isn't succeeding

00:22:25.340 | is being shadowbanned.

00:22:26.180 | - Yeah.

00:22:27.020 | - So it's this new paranoia,

00:22:30.080 | this algorithmic paranoia now that we all kind of have

00:22:33.340 | because there are genuine instances

00:22:36.680 | of people being taken out of an algorithm,

00:22:39.620 | you know, rightly or wrongly,

00:22:40.980 | for however you wanna believe.

00:22:42.740 | But then there are also things

00:22:43.900 | that just don't perform as well.

00:22:45.060 | For a myriad of reasons.

00:22:47.060 | And then we're all saying like, well, they're against me.

00:22:50.660 | They're shutting me down.

00:22:51.940 | And you don't know if that's true or not, you know?

00:22:55.060 | - What do you think about this moment in history,

00:22:57.540 | which was really troubling to me?

00:22:59.940 | We could talk about several troubling aspects,

00:23:03.900 | but one is Amazon removing Parler from AWS.

00:23:08.900 | To me, that was the most clearly troubling.

00:23:13.780 | It felt like it created a more dangerous world

00:23:16.820 | when the infrastructure on which you have competing

00:23:21.820 | medium of communications now puts its finger on the scale,

00:23:27.060 | now influences who wins and who loses.

00:23:30.660 | - Absolutely, you're right.

00:23:32.700 | And what you're always told is like,

00:23:35.260 | if you don't like Twitter, create your own service.

00:23:37.180 | - Right.

00:23:38.020 | - Or if you don't like something, you can do your own thing.

00:23:40.140 | Or if you are, and basically because tech,

00:23:45.140 | you have to be in business with one of five companies.

00:23:47.060 | I think it's like Amazon, Facebook, Google,

00:23:49.780 | YouTube, and Twitter, whatever.

00:23:51.580 | Like, I mean, Amazon puts everything on the cloud.

00:23:54.540 | Google and YouTube, it's all basically the SEO

00:23:56.700 | and the advertising and you got to get your name out there.

00:23:58.580 | You don't want to be buried in every,

00:24:00.100 | like because you have to do business with it.

00:24:02.060 | It's a cartel of these companies.

00:24:03.660 | You understand it better than anybody

00:24:05.980 | that you are prevented, truly.

00:24:08.020 | And I think whatever you think about Parler,

00:24:10.980 | whatever you think about what people are saying on Parler,

00:24:13.140 | whatever you think about Alex Jones,

00:24:16.860 | whatever you thought about Mila Yiannopoulos,

00:24:19.060 | the state has an interest in,

00:24:21.580 | and has always had an interest in crushing dissent.

00:24:25.540 | This is what the state has done.

00:24:27.100 | This is how they retain the power they have

00:24:31.940 | by eliminating dissent where they can.

00:24:34.580 | Now, because you don't have three broadcast networks

00:24:37.580 | anymore and a handful of newspapers

00:24:39.540 | that were all run, by the way,

00:24:41.300 | by people that had been either compromised

00:24:44.700 | or happily going with the program,

00:24:48.700 | and you have this wild west of the internet,

00:24:51.700 | people like me, people that make,

00:24:54.500 | I make funny content that I hope is funny,

00:24:57.340 | but a lot of it is wild and crazy.

00:24:59.620 | I say a lot of wild and crazy things.

00:25:01.880 | They're very funny.

00:25:02.980 | I say a lot of wild and crazy things about powerful people.

00:25:05.660 | - Yeah, you mock the powerful in there

00:25:07.380 | by bringing them down a notch.

00:25:09.300 | We'll probably talk about it,

00:25:10.460 | but humor is one of the tools

00:25:12.020 | to balance the powers in society.

00:25:17.380 | - Well, sure, and to make people feel better about things,

00:25:19.980 | and to, you know, whatever the case may be, right?

00:25:22.600 | That's my goal is to kind of like,

00:25:23.980 | hey, people have had a shitty day.

00:25:25.700 | If this video or podcast makes you laugh, that's great.

00:25:29.420 | I think that it was never gonna stop at Alex Jones.

00:25:33.100 | Not that I think he should have been taking off

00:25:35.220 | everything the way he was,

00:25:36.700 | but this keeps going until we have sanitized

00:25:41.540 | all of social media.

00:25:42.700 | And what they really want it to be

00:25:44.980 | is what Instagram's kind of becoming,

00:25:46.740 | which is a marketplace of,

00:25:48.560 | you could just go and buy sneakers,

00:25:50.060 | go buy a sweatshirt, go buy jeans,

00:25:52.260 | go buy this, go buy that.

00:25:53.740 | And the idea of the free exchange of information

00:25:56.140 | seems to be the old internet.

00:25:58.380 | And it seems the new internet seems to be, you know,

00:26:01.940 | hyper, and I'm a capitalist,

00:26:03.540 | but this is like hyper-capitalist

00:26:05.140 | in the sense of like, they only want you consuming things

00:26:08.820 | and they don't want you thinking too much.

00:26:12.100 | And that seems to be where it's heading.

00:26:13.580 | I've even seen that with Instagram

00:26:14.940 | where it's like everything on Instagram

00:26:16.180 | is like, buy a sweatshirt, you know?

00:26:19.100 | And I'm like, all right, man.

00:26:21.140 | Hey man, if I want a sweatshirt, I'll get it.

00:26:23.180 | Like, relax.

00:26:25.140 | You know, just every ad seems to be encouraging consumption,

00:26:29.900 | but very few things seem geared towards,

00:26:33.880 | hey, let's have a dialogue or let's,

00:26:37.540 | and not that Instagram was ever great for that,

00:26:39.020 | but like, if everything's geared now

00:26:40.620 | towards content on Instagram,

00:26:42.460 | a lot of it seems geared towards shopping.

00:26:44.860 | - See, I don't know.

00:26:46.060 | That's an interesting point.

00:26:47.020 | I don't know if the consumerism that capitalism leads to

00:26:50.900 | is necessarily gets in the way of nuanced conversation.

00:26:53.820 | I feel like you could still sell Tim Dillon sweatshirts

00:26:57.220 | and have a difficult nuanced conversation

00:26:59.700 | or mock the current president, the previous president,

00:27:03.540 | mock the powerful, all that kind of stuff.

00:27:05.460 | - Yeah, we try.

00:27:06.300 | We try to balance that.

00:27:07.120 | - Do you have sweatshirts?

00:27:08.100 | - We do.

00:27:08.940 | Are they on sale now, fake business?

00:27:11.320 | We do, fake business sweatshirt

00:27:14.120 | with the Enron logo, fake business.

00:27:15.420 | 'Cause I do fake business all the time.

00:27:17.300 | - It'd be nice if we talk about Alex Jones

00:27:18.860 | if you plug the sweatshirt during that conversation.

00:27:21.300 | - Yeah, we'll do that, absolutely.

00:27:23.300 | But what I tend to worry about with,

00:27:25.220 | I see social media and technology

00:27:29.640 | existing to flatten society.

00:27:32.320 | It makes people very boring.

00:27:34.460 | All of the experiences kids have right now are online.

00:27:38.700 | Many of their closest friendships are online.

00:27:40.620 | Their first relationships are online.

00:27:42.940 | The culture is very homogenous.

00:27:45.660 | And I think it's eliminating characters.

00:27:47.980 | It's eliminating interesting people.

00:27:49.700 | It's making people into AI.

00:27:52.220 | All of their tastes.

00:27:53.060 | - Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:27:53.900 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:27:54.740 | - AI could be Charles Bukowski as well.

00:27:56.980 | Let's not get crazy.

00:27:57.900 | - It's not there yet, right?

00:27:59.660 | I mean, the $75,000 dog is not doing anything.

00:28:03.760 | So we're not there yet.

00:28:06.400 | Listen, I get why you like AI so much.

00:28:08.320 | I hate people too.

00:28:09.320 | And I'm very amenable to AI.

00:28:11.320 | And I agree with you.

00:28:12.960 | Listen, I think the future,

00:28:14.120 | we gotta get everyone out of here.

00:28:15.760 | I'm with you on that.

00:28:16.760 | So don't think I'm--

00:28:17.600 | - I love people.

00:28:18.420 | He's manipulating my mind and my--

00:28:20.760 | - That's why the flash of light in your eyes

00:28:22.840 | when you talked about that dog

00:28:24.400 | was so much more than any person.

00:28:27.160 | And I get it, by the way.

00:28:28.080 | - You're right.

00:28:28.920 | - I love people, but if we could--

00:28:30.040 | - They're not exciting.

00:28:30.880 | - If we could just use robots to kill most of them,

00:28:33.840 | I think that would be good for society.

00:28:35.880 | - I'm with that too.

00:28:37.160 | But I think that social media flattens people.

00:28:40.560 | - Flattening the personalities of characters.

00:28:42.320 | - Flattening the personalities of people, man.

00:28:43.600 | And it's just, when's the last time,

00:28:45.200 | I like the idea of,

00:28:46.600 | somebody showing up to high school with a backpack

00:28:52.000 | and taking out an old CD and being like,

00:28:53.360 | hey man, here's this band you've never heard of

00:28:56.040 | that I love or whatever, you gotta get into this.

00:28:58.280 | And I'm like, when I talk to young,

00:29:00.080 | you know I have friends that have younger brothers

00:29:01.360 | and everything, and I know that the dominant culture

00:29:03.960 | was always dominant, I'm not an idiot,

00:29:05.440 | but I feel like it's harder to be unique and original now

00:29:08.480 | because so much of what's promoted

00:29:12.000 | is just this way to kind of corral people

00:29:15.360 | into believing and thinking a certain set of ideals

00:29:18.700 | that's constantly shifting and evolving.

00:29:20.800 | And people are just caught up in that.

00:29:23.400 | And to me, it gets very boring, very quickly.

00:29:27.280 | I hate being bored, and that's what it is.

00:29:29.720 | - I don't know what to do with that,

00:29:30.640 | because at the same time, podcasts are really popular,

00:29:33.160 | long form podcasts are really popular,

00:29:34.680 | and people are hungry for those kinds of conversations.

00:29:38.360 | There's a lot of dangerous ideas, quote unquote,

00:29:41.080 | flowing, being spread around through podcasts.

00:29:44.960 | Meaning just like debates.

00:29:46.680 | - Correct.

00:29:47.820 | - So that's still popular, so I don't know what to--

00:29:50.640 | - I agree with you.

00:29:51.460 | - That gives me hope, I guess.

00:29:52.480 | - I hope so too.

00:29:53.320 | And like I said, I look at the negative a lot

00:29:55.400 | 'cause that's what I usually make fun of,

00:29:57.200 | but there's a lot of positive stuff happening too.

00:30:00.040 | - Let's talk a bit about Alex Jones.

00:30:02.120 | So you've gotten a chance to talk to him

00:30:06.800 | while you were on the Joe Rogan Experience.

00:30:09.120 | - I've been on Alex's show, I've had Alex on my show,

00:30:12.920 | I've talked to Alex for three hours in front of,

00:30:16.280 | I guess it was maybe like 15 million people, right,

00:30:18.360 | on Joe's show, it was a really wild conversation.

00:30:20.680 | I think it was one of the coolest moments in broadcasting

00:30:24.320 | that clearly that I've ever been a part of,

00:30:26.800 | but I think it goes in the lexicon of like,

00:30:29.200 | these are big podcasts.

00:30:31.280 | Like I think it's one of the biggest podcasts.

00:30:33.200 | A week before the election, Alex Jones,

00:30:35.320 | I'm really grateful that Joe gave me the opportunity

00:30:37.320 | to be there, and it was just an amazing conversation

00:30:40.680 | to watch.

00:30:41.520 | - What was the shirt you wore, Julian Maxwell?

00:30:43.680 | - "Frieges Lane," it was a fun joke that no one in tech got

00:30:46.560 | because we all know how funny they are.

00:30:48.800 | But the tech writers, which is mainly blue haired--

00:30:50.560 | - I do not agree with these statements.

00:30:51.760 | - Mainly blue haired people whose goal in life

00:30:54.680 | is to find things to give them orgasms with, you know.

00:30:57.480 | - If you want to dye your hair blue, it's your choice.

00:31:00.200 | I respect it.

00:31:01.040 | - Yeah, but is it your choice?

00:31:02.560 | But at the end of the day, it's like,

00:31:04.360 | you know, all the tech writers, like a lot of people just,

00:31:06.560 | and I'm not, I'm just maligning tech unfairly,

00:31:08.960 | but a lot of people that censors the humor were like,

00:31:10.680 | he's advocating for human trafficker.

00:31:12.840 | I'm like, it's clearly a joke

00:31:14.000 | because we're coming off the believe all women.

00:31:16.280 | - Yes.

00:31:17.120 | - We're coming off that, and it's very funny

00:31:19.120 | to just say "Frieges Lane," hey man, believe all women.

00:31:21.400 | Like, it's just, our politics and our public sphere

00:31:24.880 | is so schizophrenic right now that when you point that out,

00:31:28.400 | people are going to be angry with you.

00:31:29.920 | But that was a fun shirt to wear.

00:31:31.720 | - But on Alex, you know, I was one of the people

00:31:34.440 | that found him really entertaining.

00:31:37.320 | That the same kind of thing as with Bukowski,

00:31:40.600 | these kinds of personalities that are wild,

00:31:44.320 | crazy, full of ideas,

00:31:46.800 | they don't have to be grounded in truth at all,

00:31:48.480 | or they can be grounded in truth a little bit.

00:31:50.840 | Like, he's just playing with ideas,

00:31:53.080 | like a jazz musician, screaming sometimes.

00:31:55.920 | Obviously he has some demons.

00:31:57.800 | Sometimes he's super angry for no reason whatsoever.

00:32:01.240 | It's some weird thing that he's constructed in his own head.

00:32:04.480 | Sometimes he's super loving and peaceful,

00:32:06.360 | especially lately that I've heard him.

00:32:08.400 | I don't know if you've seen him with Michael Malice,

00:32:10.160 | where he's doing, like Malice was doing,

00:32:14.360 | like, well, telling Alex Jones, "I love you, Alex."

00:32:17.000 | You know, just this loving kind of softness

00:32:19.520 | and kindness underneath it all.

00:32:21.160 | I don't know what to make of any of it.

00:32:22.600 | And then there's this huge number of people

00:32:24.520 | that tell me that Alex Jones is dangerous for society.

00:32:28.800 | - Right.

00:32:29.640 | - So what do you do with that?

00:32:30.640 | Do you think he's dangerous for society?

00:32:32.360 | Do you think he is one of the sort of

00:32:35.000 | entertaining personalities of our time

00:32:37.480 | that shouldn't be suppressed, or somewhere in between?

00:32:39.800 | - I don't think that Alex, per se,

00:32:42.480 | is dangerous for society.

00:32:43.880 | I think the greater danger for society

00:32:45.760 | comes, again, from stifling all dissent, right?

00:32:50.040 | All, like anybody with a voice that uses it

00:32:53.120 | that critiques the government.

00:32:54.920 | And putting all of those people in a category

00:32:58.120 | and getting rid of them is incredibly dangerous.

00:33:00.280 | To me, more so.

00:33:01.840 | I think the biggest problem that Alex has ever had

00:33:05.440 | was when he questioned the Sandy Hook shooting.

00:33:08.160 | And that really was, 'cause it really is this

00:33:11.160 | identifiable incident that you can look at

00:33:13.960 | where it did get away from him,

00:33:15.480 | and a lot of his fans who,

00:33:16.880 | the people that are attracted to conspiracy stuff,

00:33:18.760 | and I have some of those fans,

00:33:20.040 | some of them are really smart people,

00:33:21.840 | some of them are mentally unwell.

00:33:23.480 | A lot of them happen to be mentally unwell.

00:33:25.680 | So when you have a fan base of people

00:33:27.160 | where some of them are mentally unwell,

00:33:28.920 | and you are questioning, you know, tragic events, okay?

00:33:33.920 | And Alex was right about Epstein.

00:33:35.520 | He was right about a lot of things.

00:33:36.680 | And he's got no credit for that.

00:33:38.360 | And I understand that this,

00:33:40.840 | sometimes when you're right about 10 things

00:33:42.480 | and you're wrong about something,

00:33:43.800 | and the thing you're wrong about is so offensive to people,

00:33:48.560 | you're never gonna get any credit for being right,

00:33:50.600 | even though you were right more than when you were wrong.

00:33:52.880 | The problem was a lot of his fans who were crazy

00:33:55.960 | stalked, harassed these families,

00:33:58.500 | and accused them of being actors,

00:34:00.040 | and accused them of like faking their children's deaths.

00:34:02.680 | It was this horrific experience.

00:34:06.040 | And Alex is tied to that.

00:34:08.080 | And, you know, how much he inspired that

00:34:12.960 | by what he did on his show, I don't know,

00:34:15.540 | because I haven't watched hours and hours

00:34:18.160 | of that particular thing, like the whole Sandy Hook thing.

00:34:21.660 | If you listen to him, he says, "I really covered it.

00:34:24.720 | I kind of covered it and moved on."

00:34:26.440 | Other people go, "No, he spent a long time on it."

00:34:29.020 | But that's the real danger of going into that territory

00:34:32.120 | over and over again, going,

00:34:33.620 | "Everything's a false flag," or "Everything's fake."

00:34:37.040 | I think Alex has actually been kind of reasonable.

00:34:39.400 | Like he's resisted a lot of the politics

00:34:41.880 | of like racial resentment on like the alt-right,

00:34:44.560 | for example, he's resisted that.

00:34:46.160 | He's resisted the anti-Semitic currents

00:34:49.420 | of a lot of that politics, right?

00:34:51.240 | He's resisted a lot of the virulently anti-trans

00:34:55.600 | or anti-gay stuff.

00:34:56.440 | Now, he does dip his toe into the water

00:34:58.000 | of like the culture wars, of course he does.

00:35:00.720 | But I've never really seen him,

00:35:03.640 | and I could be wrong about this,

00:35:05.120 | embrace white nationalism or identitarianism.

00:35:08.560 | I've never seen him really go anti-Semitic.

00:35:10.540 | I've never seen him take that route.

00:35:12.920 | When I grew up, and I would turn him on every now and then,

00:35:15.360 | he was talking about NAFTA, the WTO,

00:35:17.280 | he's talking about 9/11,

00:35:18.520 | he was talking about the World Trade Organizations

00:35:22.820 | and a lot of these big conferences,

00:35:24.080 | whether it was the Bilderberg Group,

00:35:25.880 | whether it was Bohemian Grove, which he infiltrated.

00:35:28.860 | And he was talking about,

00:35:29.700 | "Hey, here are the most powerful people in the world,

00:35:31.480 | and here's what they're doing,

00:35:32.800 | and here's how it affects you."

00:35:34.240 | And that was interesting to me,

00:35:35.600 | because no one else was really talking about it,

00:35:37.760 | except Alex Jones.

00:35:39.120 | Occasionally Art Bell on WABC,

00:35:42.060 | you'd listen to him at night, right?

00:35:43.900 | I think Alex became very controversial

00:35:48.220 | when he decided to back Donald Trump.

00:35:50.060 | And then he has a considerable following

00:35:51.980 | and a considerable audience

00:35:53.660 | that he was then able to marshal

00:35:56.780 | in the direction of supporting Donald Trump.

00:35:58.980 | That was when the spotlight,

00:36:02.020 | because then he was talking to Trump,

00:36:03.660 | Trump did his show,

00:36:05.540 | Alex Jones just got bigger, right?

00:36:07.380 | I mean, he blew up, that's the term, right?

00:36:09.020 | He blew up.

00:36:09.860 | Like he had the good,

00:36:12.380 | he put out the good HBO special,

00:36:13.820 | whatever you want to call it.

00:36:14.660 | He has a hit song.

00:36:16.060 | He blew up.

00:36:16.900 | And then people started looking at the things

00:36:18.540 | that he was associated with.

00:36:20.260 | The Sandy Hook thing is a blemish on his record.

00:36:22.180 | I do believe he regrets it.

00:36:23.660 | But again, I do see the point of the families

00:36:25.580 | who are like, "Dude, fuck this guy forever.

00:36:27.580 | This is the worst thing I ever went through."

00:36:29.340 | It's a very tough...

00:36:31.020 | I understand the people that say that.

00:36:35.680 | I understand, and I understand the people that go,

00:36:38.620 | "When you have tech companies

00:36:40.780 | that act in a coordinated manner

00:36:42.260 | to just get rid of someone,

00:36:43.660 | they don't have any way to defend themselves."

00:36:46.620 | It's a little terrifying when you think about

00:36:49.540 | that power being abused,

00:36:51.380 | and how wouldn't it be?

00:36:53.500 | - Do you think he should not have been banned

00:36:56.060 | from all these platforms?

00:36:57.140 | - I don't think, I do think that

00:36:59.540 | if you are a private company, right?

00:37:01.680 | I do think, and this is where you run into this problem.

00:37:04.700 | I don't know if these tech companies

00:37:06.660 | were government utilities,

00:37:07.940 | would that decrease people's likelihood of being banned?

00:37:11.020 | I don't know, right?

00:37:12.860 | So I understand the benefit

00:37:17.180 | of them being treated like public utilities

00:37:19.140 | and people thinking they have the right to a Twitter.

00:37:21.940 | I've never, I don't know, I have very little confidence.

00:37:25.460 | I mean, the government's trying to roll out a vaccine

00:37:27.100 | in California, and we vaccinated like five people,

00:37:29.580 | I mean, in terms of what we need to do in the state, right?

00:37:32.740 | So maybe if it was a government utility,

00:37:35.220 | I do think someone like Alex,

00:37:37.620 | like there should be some process.

00:37:40.700 | So if you're gonna get rid of someone,

00:37:42.040 | they should have a way to defend themselves.

00:37:44.300 | There should be more democratic process

00:37:49.300 | that you can go through

00:37:51.860 | than just being unilaterally taken off something.

00:37:54.580 | But like, then you run into the,

00:37:57.180 | you're like, am I gonna say that everyone deserves,

00:37:58.820 | no, if you're threatening or harassing people

00:38:00.920 | or threatening to kill them,

00:38:01.980 | publishing their private information,

00:38:03.260 | if you're committing crimes on these platforms,

00:38:05.860 | obviously the people that own these platforms

00:38:07.820 | are gonna be like, we're not gonna allow this to happen.

00:38:10.420 | So I understand that there is a line, right?

00:38:14.300 | There is some, like people that say there's no line

00:38:16.640 | aren't really thinking, like there is a line.

00:38:19.020 | I just don't, that line seems to be moving all the time,

00:38:22.700 | and it seems to be a very hard thing to police.

00:38:25.000 | But I don't think you can remove a guy off everything.

00:38:28.220 | And then also bank accounts won't give him debit cards

00:38:31.040 | or credit cards, I don't know if you talked to him

00:38:32.420 | about that, but like, you know,

00:38:34.140 | there were financial institutions that were refusing

00:38:36.100 | to let him, you know, park his money there.

00:38:38.060 | So I mean, it really does get pretty terrifying

00:38:42.220 | pretty quickly.

00:38:43.220 | - Probably without any transparency from those companies.

00:38:46.700 | So you're right, it feels like there should be a process

00:38:50.500 | of just having, for him to defend himself.

00:38:54.180 | - I think there needs to be a process

00:38:55.820 | for people to defend themselves.

00:38:57.440 | Every day I wake up and I go,

00:39:00.940 | is something I said in a video

00:39:02.460 | gonna get taken out of context?

00:39:03.860 | Is somebody gonna get angry?

00:39:05.020 | Is somebody gonna be, you know, I say wild stuff

00:39:07.860 | because that's what makes me laugh.

00:39:09.260 | That's what makes my friends laugh,

00:39:10.340 | and that's what makes my audience laugh.

00:39:12.220 | So I never ever, people, you know,

00:39:15.140 | whatever political side you come down on,

00:39:18.460 | I think if you make your living speaking,

00:39:20.700 | it's always interesting to me

00:39:22.460 | if you are pro the deplatforming.

00:39:25.780 | - It's interesting-- - That's odd.

00:39:27.380 | - It's interesting to consider kind of a jury context

00:39:32.820 | to where, you know, there's transparency

00:39:35.140 | about why your video about bombing Disney World

00:39:38.580 | might be taken down.

00:39:39.620 | It gets taken down, and then there is,

00:39:44.380 | it's almost like creating a little court case,

00:39:46.980 | a mini court case, and not in a legal sense,

00:39:49.220 | but in the public sphere.

00:39:51.420 | And then people should be able to have,

00:39:53.700 | you know, you pick representatives of our current society

00:39:57.580 | and have a discussion about that and make a real vote.

00:40:00.780 | You know, just have like jury locks himself up

00:40:03.580 | in a discussion.

00:40:04.740 | That kind of process might be necessary.

00:40:08.100 | Right now what happens is Twitter is completely,

00:40:11.720 | first of all, they're just mostly not aware

00:40:13.540 | of everything they're doing.

00:40:14.780 | There's too much stuff, but the stuff they're aware about,

00:40:17.980 | they make the decision and close doors,

00:40:20.660 | the meetings, and without any transparency

00:40:24.380 | to the rest of the company, actually,

00:40:25.860 | but also transparency to the rest of the world.

00:40:29.500 | And so, and then all they say is we're making decisions

00:40:33.940 | because the people, they use things like violence.

00:40:37.780 | So violence equals bad, and if this person

00:40:40.780 | is quote unquote inciting violence,

00:40:42.700 | therefore that gives us enough reason to ban them

00:40:45.700 | without any kind of process.

00:40:48.020 | I mean, it's interesting.

00:40:49.240 | I'm torn in the whole thing.

00:40:50.800 | If it was indeed, there's no transparency about it,

00:40:54.540 | but if Parler was indeed inciting violence,

00:40:59.000 | like if there was brewing of violence,

00:41:01.260 | potential violence where thousands of people might die

00:41:06.260 | because of some kind of riot,

00:41:08.740 | this is the scary thing about mob,

00:41:12.340 | about when a lot of people get together,

00:41:14.980 | who are good people, like legitimately good people

00:41:19.100 | that love this country, that don't see enemies yet

00:41:22.500 | around them, but if they get excited together

00:41:26.100 | and there's guns involved--

00:41:27.340 | - It's a problem.

00:41:28.180 | - Some cop gets nervous and shoots one person,

00:41:31.580 | another person shoots the cop,

00:41:33.420 | and then there's a lot of shooting involved,

00:41:35.260 | and then it goes from five people dying in the Capitol

00:41:38.140 | to thousands of people dying in the Capitol.

00:41:41.020 | - Well, in fairness to defend the people of the Capitol,

00:41:44.500 | they didn't shoot the cop, they bludgeoned him to death

00:41:47.700 | with a fire extinguisher.

00:41:49.580 | - Yes.

00:41:50.400 | - So I do wanna just kind of put that out

00:41:52.940 | as a defense of them.

00:41:54.700 | Listen, I'm sure there was some wild shit

00:41:57.060 | going on on Parler, and I think the problem,

00:41:58.900 | here's the problem, right?

00:42:00.460 | There's a lot of people that just wanna go on these sites

00:42:04.260 | and say they wanna kill everyone.

00:42:06.420 | And the problem is, at what point do you shut them all down?

00:42:11.420 | Like I think a lot of people are just living in a world

00:42:14.460 | where they're powerless, they don't have any political power,

00:42:17.900 | they don't have any economic power, right?

00:42:19.700 | They can't throw their money around.

00:42:22.060 | They don't have healthcare, their job security isn't great.

00:42:26.100 | They might be living in a community

00:42:27.660 | that doesn't have the resources

00:42:29.380 | they would like it to have.

00:42:31.420 | They're not happy and thrilled.

00:42:34.060 | And then they have these sites where they can go on

00:42:36.060 | and just say, "Man, I'd like to fucking burn it all down."

00:42:39.740 | And distinguishing a guy blowing off steam

00:42:42.740 | and saying wild stuff from a genuine threat

00:42:45.960 | is a very hard thing to do.

00:42:47.820 | Like I've threatened to kill, I got banned from Airbnb,

00:42:52.860 | I threatened to kill the people that banned me comedically.

00:42:57.860 | Comedically, this is a joke.

00:43:00.540 | I'm not going to kill you.

00:43:02.140 | This is a joke 'cause I'm blowing off steam and I'm angry.

00:43:05.140 | Do you know how many people that my parents,

00:43:07.260 | like my dad's like, "I'm gonna fucking kill this guy."

00:43:09.460 | My mom's like, "I'm gonna fucking kill."

00:43:11.580 | They were talking about each other.

00:43:13.340 | But none of it ever happened, but we should be,

00:43:17.380 | I think you have to create a space

00:43:20.540 | for people to threaten to overthrow the government

00:43:24.180 | as long as they don't violently do it.

00:43:27.140 | Does that make any sense?

00:43:28.740 | I mean, as long as they're not gonna go hurt innocent people,

00:43:32.300 | what are you gonna do?

00:43:33.300 | There's so many people out there that,

00:43:34.940 | that's why a lot of these things like 4chan, these sites,

00:43:38.020 | a lot of people going on there,

00:43:39.160 | they just wanna say the most fucked up shit

00:43:41.620 | because it's the thing that gives them,

00:43:44.500 | they can laugh or they can release steam.

00:43:46.940 | It is immature, it is stupid.

00:43:48.980 | It's not productive, it's not,

00:43:51.260 | but at the end of the day,

00:43:52.980 | if you're not gonna give people health insurance,

00:43:56.280 | you gotta give them something.

00:43:57.940 | It's like when someone in this country dies

00:44:00.020 | that everyone disagrees with, right?

00:44:01.900 | Political figure, media figure.

00:44:03.700 | A lot of people dance on their grave online

00:44:06.180 | and then everyone people goes,

00:44:07.900 | and the other side will always do it.

00:44:09.780 | Like if a conservative dies and everyone goes, "Great."

00:44:12.300 | Conservatives goes, "This is grotesque."

00:44:14.620 | And then when RBG dies, they all have parties

00:44:17.900 | and the conservatives go, "Great."

00:44:19.600 | You have to let people in this country

00:44:22.980 | enjoy the deaths of their enemies.

00:44:25.100 | - Yeah. - You do,

00:44:27.180 | because they don't have much else.

00:44:29.620 | Again, if you gave them other things,

00:44:31.700 | you might say, "Guy, you can go get a knee operation.

00:44:34.780 | "Why don't you stop?"

00:44:36.980 | But if they're working for shit wages

00:44:40.460 | and you haven't figured out a way to treat them,

00:44:43.620 | treat their cancer diagnosis,

00:44:46.620 | and they don't, I mean life,

00:44:49.180 | you gotta derive pleasure from something, right?

00:44:54.260 | - It's an interesting point that anger is a good valve.

00:44:57.900 | If your life is suffering,

00:45:01.800 | that there's something very powerful about anger,

00:45:04.940 | but I still have hope that it doesn't have to be.

00:45:07.700 | I mean, that kind of channeling into anger

00:45:10.060 | that then becomes hate

00:45:12.860 | led us into a lot of troubles in human history.

00:45:15.820 | So you have to be careful

00:45:17.700 | empowering people too much in that anger,

00:45:22.060 | especially, I think I understand

00:45:26.800 | why people were nervous about Parler,

00:45:28.980 | about Twitter and so on. - For sure, yeah.

00:45:30.700 | - Because all that shit talking about violence

00:45:35.180 | was now paired with, "Let's get together at this location."

00:45:39.660 | - Right, right. - This was a new thing.

00:45:42.060 | It's not just being on whatever platform talking shit,

00:45:46.180 | it's saying, "We're going to, in physical space, meet."

00:45:49.940 | And then everybody got, all these platforms got nervous.

00:45:52.460 | Well, what happens when all these shit talkers,

00:45:55.020 | all these angry people that are just letting off steam

00:45:58.740 | meet in a physical space?

00:46:00.260 | And there was probably overreach,

00:46:03.940 | almost definitely overreach,

00:46:05.240 | but I can understand why they were nervous about it.

00:46:07.260 | - I agree.

00:46:08.100 | There doesn't seem to be,

00:46:08.920 | and this is when Trump got elected

00:46:10.140 | and when you have like, whatever you have, right?

00:46:11.940 | Whether you have riots in Portland and Seattle,

00:46:13.580 | where you have the Antifa people doing crazy things,

00:46:15.780 | you have like, the people storming the Capitol.

00:46:18.660 | There never seems to be a ton of an examination

00:46:22.020 | of why these ideas are becoming popular.

00:46:24.540 | Why are people so angry?

00:46:26.220 | What is leading people to this?

00:46:28.260 | Why are we here?

00:46:29.720 | What about their lives is to the point

00:46:32.260 | where they need to show up at these places?

00:46:34.860 | And like, and obviously,

00:46:35.780 | there's always gonna be people on the fringe.

00:46:37.300 | There'll always be the mentally unwell.

00:46:38.860 | There'll always be people that want to destroy society.

00:46:41.420 | But when you look at how popular large,

00:46:44.460 | long discredited things,

00:46:46.340 | whether it's fascism, totalitarian communism,

00:46:50.060 | all of these things are like, why are they back?

00:46:53.260 | Why are they back in a big way?

00:46:54.780 | And why are people so fed up with the status quo

00:46:58.620 | that they're finding solace

00:47:02.620 | in the most extreme discredited theories

00:47:07.500 | of how to run and operate societies?

00:47:09.960 | Theories that have led to death of a lot of people.

00:47:11.700 | So to me, I'm like, if those people at the Capitol,

00:47:16.500 | yes, if they were going to work,

00:47:20.220 | if they were able to go out and drink at Chili's,

00:47:24.640 | if they were able to get a fucking checkup, right?

00:47:29.260 | Like if their job paid a little bit better,

00:47:32.020 | and I'm not saying that this is all the reason, right?

00:47:34.580 | I'm sure that there's a lot of people there

00:47:36.060 | that are doing quite well, and they're still nuts.

00:47:38.620 | But like the anger and the rage

00:47:40.740 | that's boiling to the surface of this society,

00:47:44.160 | does it come from the fact that across the board

00:47:49.160 | people in very different areas

00:47:51.660 | and with very different political beliefs

00:47:53.980 | feel like they are being fucked over

00:47:56.540 | and there's nothing they can do about it.

00:47:59.500 | That's what the baseline to me,

00:48:02.620 | they look at the people that run the country

00:48:05.060 | and run the world, whether they're tech titans,

00:48:07.780 | the guys that you talk to,

00:48:08.900 | or whether they're people that run the government,

00:48:11.780 | whether they're people that run large banks,

00:48:14.720 | large media companies, the people that have created

00:48:18.420 | this kind of infrastructure that everyone lives in,

00:48:21.700 | these people are incredibly powerless.

00:48:23.780 | And when you push people to that point,

00:48:26.820 | logically, sadly, and unfortunately,

00:48:30.020 | the next thing does seem to be violence.

00:48:33.580 | - Yeah, the thing that troubles me a lot

00:48:36.700 | is you said nobody's asking why these beliefs are out there,

00:48:41.660 | but sometimes it's not even acknowledged

00:48:44.340 | that people are hurting, people are angry,

00:48:49.340 | just even acknowledging that all the conspiracy theories

00:48:52.900 | that are out there, acknowledging that they're out there.

00:48:55.540 | And then people are thinking about it and talking about it

00:48:58.260 | just because otherwise,

00:49:00.900 | so it's not acknowledged in this nuanced way.

00:49:03.260 | What happens is you say, okay,

00:49:04.980 | 70 million people are white supremacists.

00:49:07.660 | It's just throwing a kind of blanket statement.

00:49:12.180 | And of course, that gets them angrier

00:49:16.180 | and makes them feel more powerless.

00:49:19.700 | And that ultimately, that's what's been painful for me

00:49:24.700 | to see is that there's not an acknowledgement

00:49:28.300 | that most people are good.

00:49:31.980 | - Right.

00:49:32.860 | - There's circumstances where it's just, you're pissed off.

00:49:36.980 | - Right.

00:49:37.820 | - Because you are powerless.

00:49:38.820 | - You could fall in with a bad crowd.

00:49:42.300 | That's the thing, you can just fall in.

00:49:44.420 | And it doesn't mean that there's not blame.

00:49:47.180 | Obviously, you have agency, you're a person.

00:49:50.720 | But the idea that you could be rehabilitated,

00:49:54.060 | you could do something stupid

00:49:55.420 | or you could fall into a group of people that are,

00:49:58.500 | and then in a few years, you could go,

00:49:59.860 | what the fuck was I doing?

00:50:02.100 | I'm an ex-drug addict.

00:50:03.100 | I know what it's like to go from being one thing

00:50:05.220 | to being another thing, right?

00:50:06.920 | I'm still a drug addict.

00:50:07.820 | If I were to use drugs right now or drink,

00:50:09.620 | I would still be addicted to them, right?

00:50:11.220 | I mean, it's not something

00:50:12.180 | that I can ever change about myself,

00:50:14.100 | but I know what it's like

00:50:14.940 | to go from one thing to another thing.

00:50:16.380 | So when you look at racism or whatever-ism,

00:50:19.980 | homophobia, misogyny, whatever you're looking at,

00:50:22.860 | anti-Semitism, and you go, that's a fixed condition

00:50:26.100 | where nobody's ever going to be able to change.

00:50:28.540 | Nobody's ever gonna be able to be rehabilitated.

00:50:30.900 | Nobody's ever going to be able to reimagine themselves

00:50:34.700 | in a different way.

00:50:35.880 | To me, you're just, you're throwing away someone

00:50:38.980 | and you're making them feel helpless and worthless,

00:50:41.900 | and that's gonna lead to antisocial behavior

00:50:44.060 | that spills out into violence.

00:50:46.020 | We don't have a very redemptive society.

00:50:48.780 | That's a huge factor.

00:50:50.580 | We don't have a redemptive society.

00:50:52.660 | That's why I like OJ Simpson, because OJ,

00:50:56.020 | yes, he did a bad thing, supposedly.

00:50:58.140 | - Allegedly, yeah.

00:50:58.980 | - But he's very kind now on Twitter,

00:51:01.300 | and he makes very nice points about how we all have

00:51:04.060 | to get involved in the political process,

00:51:05.660 | and he's on golf courses, and I like watching people golf.

00:51:07.940 | I don't do it, but I like watching him do it.

00:51:10.100 | And he's like an elder statesman,

00:51:12.060 | 'cause I remember him from "The Naked Gun,"

00:51:13.900 | and I choose to forgive him for whatever happened there,

00:51:18.900 | which I don't know, but I choose to forgive him really for,

00:51:23.700 | I mean, obviously, what they say is he cut

00:51:26.060 | his wife's head off, but I can look past that

00:51:30.060 | and redeem him because he's very stable on Twitter,

00:51:34.300 | and he's a good, like I see all these people going crazy

00:51:36.620 | on Twitter, and I'm like, there's maybe,

00:51:39.300 | OJ's lived a full life, and I think there's a benefit

00:51:42.620 | to that, there's a benefit to kind of living a full life.

00:51:45.500 | - Yeah, how many of us have not at least tried

00:51:48.060 | to murder somebody in the past?

00:51:48.900 | - 100%, listen, OJ's had the highs and the lows,

00:51:53.860 | but he did it on his terms, and there's a real--

00:51:57.820 | - It's like a Frank Sinatra song.

00:51:59.580 | - Yeah, he did it my way, I mean,

00:52:01.140 | there's a benefit to that, and he seems

00:52:02.620 | like a very well-adjusted person now,

00:52:04.180 | so I mean, I don't know, how is that a fact?

00:52:07.500 | But it is a fact, and that's an uncomfortable fact.

00:52:09.820 | - Well, that's a strong case for forgiveness

00:52:12.100 | in one of the more extreme cases, I suppose.

00:52:16.260 | But yeah, there's not a process of forgiveness.

00:52:18.860 | It seems like people just take a single event from your,

00:52:21.300 | sometimes a single statement from your past,

00:52:23.940 | and use that as a categorical capture

00:52:27.940 | of the essence of this particular human being.

00:52:31.900 | So murder might be a thing that you should get

00:52:36.180 | a timeout for, a little--

00:52:38.180 | - Murder's bad, murder, and let's just say that.

00:52:42.620 | Murder is not good.

00:52:44.140 | - Now, I'm glad you make this definitive statement.

00:52:46.580 | It's a controversial-- - OJ's an interesting cat,

00:52:49.180 | because you're like, he's very stable on Twitter.

00:52:53.300 | He's very like, he's like, "Let's take a look at it, guys."

00:52:55.900 | Like, we need more of his energy,

00:52:57.340 | that's what I'm trying to say.

00:52:58.620 | - Yeah, yeah. - I know, like, yes,

00:52:59.980 | it was bad, he killed the woman in the waiter.

00:53:03.020 | I was not for that.

00:53:04.620 | I wish he didn't do that, but the OJ Simpson trial

00:53:07.380 | was such a fun thing. - Yeah, and like you said,

00:53:10.740 | we need more fun people in society.

00:53:12.140 | - Well, you might. - Speaking of fun people,

00:53:15.060 | your politics have been all over the place.

00:53:17.660 | - I hope so, I hope so.

00:53:19.860 | I mean, imagine not, imagine someone whose politics

00:53:22.580 | weren't all over the place, it would seem odd.

00:53:26.060 | - Right, like-- - In the 10 years

00:53:27.460 | that I've been politically conscious,

00:53:28.780 | just 'cause I'm 35, no, I've probably been conscious

00:53:31.460 | for over two decades, but like,

00:53:33.140 | Democrats have become Republicans,

00:53:34.620 | Republicans become Democrats.

00:53:36.580 | I remember when Ann Coulter said we need to,

00:53:38.660 | defended George W. Bush when he said,

00:53:40.060 | "We need to go out and Christianize,

00:53:41.820 | "or modernize the Arab world,

00:53:44.020 | "and we need to democratize the Arab world."

00:53:45.820 | And then Ann Coulter backed Donald Trump,

00:53:48.500 | and all the right wing in America

00:53:50.540 | believed in nation building.

00:53:51.980 | They believed in going out and democratizing areas

00:53:56.180 | that might breed radical terrorists,

00:53:58.620 | whether it was Iraq or wherever you were going,

00:54:01.100 | toppling regimes and instituting new democratic norms

00:54:05.220 | in those countries.

00:54:06.060 | That was the right wing point of view when I grew up.

00:54:07.780 | Then the right wing switched to,

00:54:11.100 | we are going to be isolationist,

00:54:13.220 | we're gonna take care of America,

00:54:15.140 | first and foremost,

00:54:16.260 | we're not gonna go into other countries.

00:54:18.220 | And then the Democrats, who when I grew up were doves,

00:54:21.140 | and the right wing people were more hawkish,

00:54:23.940 | and the Democrats were like,

00:54:24.780 | the military solutions aren't the way.

00:54:27.660 | We need to have multilateral diplomatic coalitions

00:54:30.700 | to solve all the problems.

00:54:32.260 | Now, you know, Rachel Maddow's like,

00:54:33.940 | "Let's nuke Russia every night on MSNBC."

00:54:37.380 | The Democrats are like,

00:54:38.420 | "We need strong presence in Syria,

00:54:41.900 | "we need a strong presence,

00:54:43.340 | "we need to counter Putin all over the globe,

00:54:45.620 | "we need to get,"

00:54:46.460 | so they're more hawkish on things.

00:54:48.100 | So literally, I have watched two political parties

00:54:52.420 | literally flip, and it's crazy to watch.

00:54:54.940 | - And in some sense, I've watched that as well,

00:54:58.140 | because when I first saw Barack Obama,

00:55:01.140 | I admired that he was against the war.

00:55:03.460 | This is whatever, maybe before he was a senator,

00:55:07.620 | he spoke out against the Iraq war.

00:55:09.820 | - Right.

00:55:11.340 | - And then, you know,

00:55:12.860 | it doesn't feel like,

00:55:16.420 | it feels like his administration was more hawkish

00:55:20.300 | than dovish, in a sense,

00:55:23.260 | with all the drone attacks,

00:55:25.740 | with the sort of inability to pull back,

00:55:28.300 | or at least, en masse,

00:55:30.620 | efficiently pull back from all the military involvement

00:55:33.580 | that we have all over the world,

00:55:35.340 | and just the language.

00:55:36.420 | - What I think is interesting about that,

00:55:37.860 | what's interesting about Obama,

00:55:38.900 | 'cause this is a very interesting study,

00:55:40.580 | is that presidents are controlled

00:55:42.980 | in very different ways, right?

00:55:44.460 | You know, presidents can be controlled

00:55:46.500 | by different factors, power factions,

00:55:49.100 | within Washington.

00:55:50.980 | You know, I think one of the reasons

00:55:52.460 | that Obama was maybe,

00:55:54.460 | you know, he had a very close relationship

00:55:55.780 | with John Brennan, who was a CIA director.

00:55:58.060 | And Obama was very close with John Brennan,

00:56:00.500 | and Obama was very, you know,

00:56:02.900 | you know, I think, malleable,

00:56:06.300 | to the extent that, you know, the CIA,

00:56:08.060 | and I've had CIA agents on my show,

00:56:09.780 | John Kiriakou, a guy who went to jail

00:56:11.660 | for exposing torture, was saying that,

00:56:13.900 | like, you know, you get into the Oval Office,

00:56:16.180 | all of a sudden, you're having

00:56:17.020 | the presidential daily briefing every day,

00:56:18.900 | and the intelligence people come in,

00:56:20.060 | and they go, "Listen, man, I mean,

00:56:22.460 | "there's gonna be a terrorist attack on your watch

00:56:24.260 | "if you don't do X, Y, and Z."

00:56:25.940 | They go, "We have," you know,

00:56:27.180 | they call it like blue book information,

00:56:28.980 | which is five levels above top secret,

00:56:30.740 | and they go like, "Hey, man, a guy in Iran at a cafe

00:56:35.480 | "said he's blowing everything up next week."

00:56:37.020 | You know, I mean, it's the same thing as parlor.

00:56:38.460 | You don't know if it's true or not,

00:56:39.980 | but now the president's making decision

00:56:41.620 | on usually a lot of uncorroborated intelligence

00:56:44.940 | that goes into a presentation for the president,

00:56:48.180 | where you're just terrified every day,

00:56:49.540 | and you don't want a terrorist attack on your watch.

00:56:51.580 | Now, so why are they getting all this information?

00:56:53.740 | Because a lot of the people in Washington

00:56:56.660 | have an interest in perpetual, constant, ongoing warfare,

00:57:00.100 | and there's a lot of financial gain to be had from that,

00:57:02.720 | so they're sneaking their information

00:57:04.420 | into the presentations that are going to the president,

00:57:07.260 | and then the president is now behaving and going,

00:57:09.140 | "Fuck, I don't want a bomb going off.

00:57:11.620 | "We gotta do what we gotta do."

00:57:13.420 | And whatever version of that happens,

00:57:16.640 | that is really kind of what is happening,

00:57:18.580 | whereas the presidents are being controlled

00:57:21.960 | by forces that are outside of the political sphere,

00:57:25.620 | but very much still in it, and they have a lot of,

00:57:27.900 | that's what the deep state is.

00:57:29.020 | You know, Trump, there's a lot of ridiculing Trump

00:57:31.220 | of going, "The deep state doesn't exist."

00:57:33.460 | But it absolutely exists.

00:57:34.420 | There's been books about it written by liberal journalists.

00:57:36.820 | The deep state is only a term for unelected, largely,

00:57:41.820 | power factions in Washington, D.C.

00:57:44.900 | that outlive any presidential administration.

00:57:47.900 | These are people that might work at the State Department,

00:57:50.300 | they might work at the Defense Department.

00:57:52.700 | These are people that are not always working officially

00:57:56.380 | in any government capacity.

00:57:57.940 | They might be private companies,

00:58:00.060 | they might be military contractors,

00:58:02.860 | they might be people at Boeing or Raytheon

00:58:04.980 | or General Dynamics, and they constitute a group of people

00:58:09.980 | that Trump kind of called the swamp,

00:58:11.980 | but Trump had really no interest in draining the swamp.

00:58:14.140 | But he articulated these things, and this is what it is.

00:58:18.760 | You have a lot of interested parties

00:58:21.060 | that have budgets that they want, big budgets.

00:58:24.660 | Everybody wants a budget in Washington,

00:58:26.380 | whether you know what it is, they want money.

00:58:29.340 | And these are the people who really control.

00:58:31.740 | So this idea that the president is the be-all, end-all

00:58:34.140 | has gotta be smashed, which is why

00:58:36.380 | the horse race model of politics and being like,

00:58:38.540 | is it right wing, is it left wing,

00:58:40.380 | is it what team am I on and what color am I wearing?

00:58:43.580 | It's very simplistic, but the reality is this is an empire.

00:58:47.260 | It's past its peak, we're in trouble.

00:58:50.060 | - The United States is an empire past its peak.

00:58:51.940 | - Yeah, I mean, that's just,

00:58:53.460 | you could prove that case in court.

00:58:56.020 | - Well, let's go to court right now,

00:58:57.500 | but I do love the more complex idea

00:59:01.380 | that there's just human beings who crave power

00:59:04.620 | and seek ways to attain that power through different ways.

00:59:08.140 | If you have Barack Obama or George Bush or Donald Trump,

00:59:13.060 | there's different attack vectors,

00:59:15.740 | different ways to attain that power,

00:59:17.660 | and then you can use that to leverage.

00:59:19.940 | It probably doesn't have to be just in Washington, D.C.

00:59:23.460 | There's people who crave power all over the world.

00:59:26.540 | - Of course, but where we are now in Los Angeles,

00:59:29.340 | these people are all good.

00:59:31.540 | - LA. - Studio executives

00:59:32.740 | and people that, from what I understand,

00:59:34.660 | they treat everyone fairly and they're nice.

00:59:38.620 | But D.C.'s the bad guys, but out here in LA.

00:59:41.580 | - West Coast. - Everyone's lovely.

00:59:43.660 | - So amidst this fun exploration in your mind

00:59:48.660 | through the political landscape that you've done

00:59:50.660 | over the past couple of decades,

00:59:53.540 | decade that you've been conscious politically,

00:59:56.500 | where does Donald Trump fit into this picture for you?

00:59:59.580 | Is-- - Great question.

01:00:02.780 | Well, he didn't, right?

01:00:04.060 | 'Cause he wasn't political until four years ago, right?

01:00:07.820 | He got political very quickly before.

01:00:10.420 | I mean, he was firing off crazy tweets

01:00:12.060 | about where Obama was born or whatever,

01:00:14.060 | but he got into politics very quickly,

01:00:17.900 | and then he became the president, right?

01:00:19.220 | So it was like, I knew him as Donald Trump,

01:00:22.060 | this crazy New York City character,

01:00:23.780 | the host of "The Apprentice."

01:00:25.980 | I didn't think much about him.

01:00:27.420 | He was just constant.

01:00:29.540 | He was just this constant figure.

01:00:31.660 | I don't think much about Warren Buffett.

01:00:33.140 | I know Trump's like, he's married

01:00:34.900 | to a new showgirl all the time,

01:00:37.660 | and he's always opening another casino,

01:00:39.460 | and he's on TV. - Wait, Warren Buffett?

01:00:41.660 | Really? - No, Trump.

01:00:42.700 | Trump. - Oh, Trump, okay.

01:00:43.540 | - But Warren Buffett is the opposite, right?

01:00:44.940 | Warren Buffett's been married for a million years,

01:00:47.460 | lives in a little house in Omaha.

01:00:48.660 | But that's what I associate Trump.

01:00:50.500 | I don't think about Warren Buffett.

01:00:52.180 | I don't think about these people.

01:00:53.580 | They're just guys that I've known forever

01:00:55.660 | that have like, you know,

01:00:57.940 | you associate certain things with them, right?

01:01:02.540 | And Trump, we always associated with kind of vulgar,

01:01:04.780 | garish, new money, billionaire, married a lot,

01:01:08.300 | you know, casinos, Miss Universe pageants.

01:01:10.780 | But again, you know, but it makes perfect sense

01:01:13.660 | that he really was able to become president at the moment

01:01:18.660 | where we were about to have Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush.

01:01:22.540 | And I think Americans felt like this is now

01:01:25.020 | the oligarchy is spinning right in our face.

01:01:27.540 | You're not even making it feel like

01:01:29.540 | there's an appearance of democracy.

01:01:32.500 | We have two crime families

01:01:34.220 | vowing for control of the country every four years.

01:01:37.060 | And then there was this rogue kind of upstart guy

01:01:40.460 | that was really about himself.

01:01:42.300 | You know, Trump doesn't really care that much about the,

01:01:44.420 | I mean, really was summarized perfectly when he left

01:01:46.660 | and he just said, "Hey, have a good life."

01:01:48.660 | That's what he said before he got on Andrews Air Force Base.

01:01:51.060 | If you watch his speech, he goes, "Hey, have a good life."

01:01:53.700 | That's what he really feel like,

01:01:56.820 | "Hey, have a good life.

01:01:58.300 | "I'm gonna get on a plane right now

01:02:00.540 | "and fly to a castle I own in Florida.

01:02:05.460 | "And really, I'm not gonna think too much about you people

01:02:08.900 | "outside of how I can get more attention in the future."

01:02:12.340 | - Can I ask you like a therapy question?

01:02:14.100 | - Yes.

01:02:14.940 | - What is your favorite

01:02:17.700 | and least favorite quality of Donald Trump?

01:02:21.660 | - So my least favorite quality of Donald Trump,

01:02:24.940 | I think, because there's a few of them,

01:02:28.820 | his lack of empathy,

01:02:33.420 | complete and total lack of empathy.

01:02:35.180 | I don't feel that he cares about human beings on any level.

01:02:39.180 | And I feel like that's maybe or should be a requirement.

01:02:42.740 | Right?

01:02:43.580 | I mean, I don't think he cares.

01:02:45.180 | I think it's obvious that he doesn't care.

01:02:46.500 | I mean, he said, you know, basically he's saying like,

01:02:49.220 | "They're in there, Mike Pence is in there.

01:02:50.620 | "He knows that his people are going to try

01:02:53.940 | "to get into a Capitol.

01:02:54.780 | "I mean, those motherfuckers are not gonna have jobs.

01:02:56.740 | "They're gonna go to federal prison."

01:02:58.660 | And he doesn't care.

01:03:00.140 | - He doesn't care.

01:03:00.980 | - As long as they're storming the Capitol

01:03:02.220 | to prove the point that he thinks he won the election,

01:03:04.740 | he has no concern for these people, his followers.

01:03:08.980 | He leads them lambs to the slaughter, right?

01:03:11.280 | So that's not a respectable quality.

01:03:13.660 | My favorite quality of Donald Trump

01:03:16.100 | is his willingness to call bullshit.

01:03:18.620 | So his willingness to call bullshit out.

01:03:20.220 | He doesn't play the game.

01:03:22.420 | He will, you know, when people say about Putin,

01:03:24.460 | Putin kills people, he goes,

01:03:25.460 | "We kill a lot of people here too."

01:03:26.780 | Like he's willing and able to break the fourth wall

01:03:31.340 | and say things that no politician has ever said.

01:03:33.420 | He's willing to call out hypocrisy, you know,

01:03:36.820 | of course not his own, but the media,

01:03:40.140 | the members of the political establishment,

01:03:41.820 | that's a laudable quality.

01:03:43.220 | It's an entertaining quality, right?

01:03:45.360 | We all like it.

01:03:46.300 | I love to, I'm like, "This guy's saying something

01:03:48.100 | "that a lot of people want said."

01:03:49.860 | - Yeah.

01:03:50.860 | - That being said, it's coupled with no real work or action.

01:03:53.820 | - Right.

01:03:54.660 | - So it's not coupled with anything behind it

01:03:56.540 | that he just wants to,

01:03:58.440 | we did an episode of my podcast once

01:03:59.820 | where it's like essentially he's like criticizing

01:04:01.220 | the deep state, he wants a deeper state.

01:04:03.420 | He wants a deeper state,

01:04:04.460 | like he hired his daughter and her husband.

01:04:07.940 | I mean, this is not a guy that's interested

01:04:09.620 | in transparency and openness.

01:04:11.460 | He's a guy that would just prefer,

01:04:13.900 | he wants to run the mafia state.

01:04:16.740 | - But he shakes up the norms of social discourse,

01:04:20.820 | political discourse. - Yes.

01:04:21.980 | - And that people are just hungry for that.

01:04:24.260 | - Yes.

01:04:25.100 | - But he got banned from Twitter.

01:04:26.980 | - He did. - From all the different

01:04:27.840 | platforms.

01:04:29.120 | Do you think, is there an argument to be made

01:04:31.620 | for and against banning Twitter?

01:04:33.460 | - There's always arguments to be made for everything.

01:04:35.720 | A permanent ban seems to be an overreaction to me.

01:04:38.220 | He's the president of the United States.

01:04:39.740 | It also rearranges the power,

01:04:41.220 | like whether you like him or hate him,

01:04:42.460 | love him or hate him, he was the president.

01:04:45.540 | We've elevated Twitter as now more powerful

01:04:47.700 | than the president.

01:04:48.820 | It's like, do you want that to be long-term,

01:04:50.740 | the salute, the reality?

01:04:52.080 | Like now Jack at Twitter is more powerful

01:04:54.860 | than the president of the United States.

01:04:56.540 | Is that a good paradigm going forward?

01:05:00.100 | I don't know.

01:05:01.460 | I'm not, listen, maybe give him a little time out

01:05:03.620 | for a few days.

01:05:05.060 | I think a time out, a little spanking, certainly,

01:05:08.360 | but I don't know if a permanent ban across the board

01:05:10.860 | on every social media, I mean, they banned him on Grindr.

01:05:13.260 | I mean, this is how hilarious it is, right?

01:05:14.900 | I mean, they banned him across the board on everything.

01:05:17.580 | I don't think he could get an Airbnb now, neither can I,

01:05:19.780 | but like, I don't think he can do anything.

01:05:22.820 | Again, I just, I look back and there's so many people,

01:05:25.340 | I have very smart, intelligent friends that go,

01:05:26.740 | yeah, but who cares?

01:05:27.660 | Yeah, but he's bad.

01:05:28.740 | Yeah, but blah, blah, blah.

01:05:29.740 | Yeah, but I don't like me, Lillianopolis.

01:05:31.340 | Yeah, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:05:32.780 | And I'm like, you have such faith.

01:05:35.260 | You have such faith that it's always gonna be the people

01:05:39.040 | you dislike that are banned.

01:05:40.540 | It's always gonna be the, it's never gonna be you.

01:05:43.100 | Man, you have so much faith in the government.

01:05:45.320 | You have so much faith in tech oligarchs you've never met.

01:05:48.180 | You have so much faith in the security state

01:05:51.460 | that they're gonna always make the right decisions

01:05:53.720 | and they're not gonna penalize people

01:05:55.580 | that shouldn't be penalized.

01:05:56.860 | To me, I'm like, wow, I've never had that much faith

01:06:00.420 | in any human being ever, including myself.

01:06:02.220 | I wouldn't want that power.

01:06:03.660 | I would start deplatforming people that I hate.

01:06:05.980 | I would deplatform my aunt, you know what I mean?

01:06:08.420 | I would deplatform everyone I know.

01:06:10.620 | I mean, so it's such an insane power to give somebody,

01:06:14.140 | like who gets heard?

01:06:15.220 | Who gets to speak?

01:06:16.820 | - Yeah, I'm worried about the effect it has on people

01:06:18.900 | like you, actually.

01:06:20.060 | - I agree.

01:06:20.900 | - Of being, like everybody's a little more nervous

01:06:24.500 | in what they say.

01:06:27.460 | - Correct.

01:06:28.300 | - And that, that's a big problem.

01:06:29.460 | - Yes.

01:06:30.300 | - Because then you're just like long-term unmasked,

01:06:32.820 | like we were talking about.

01:06:33.740 | It has an effect where people just become more bland.

01:06:37.620 | - Yeah, self-censorship.

01:06:40.320 | - Anxiety, all of these things go into it.

01:06:43.320 | We try to fight it.

01:06:44.160 | I try to fight it.

01:06:45.000 | I think I gotta still do what makes me laugh

01:06:47.120 | and what makes me laugh is often fucked up.

01:06:49.480 | And it's often, you know, it's not always fucked up

01:06:52.360 | in a way that, you know, it's gonna get me

01:06:53.560 | thrown off something, but like,

01:06:55.080 | I think pushing certain buttons is funny to me.

01:06:58.400 | So I gotta keep doing that.

01:07:00.320 | Part of the problem is that so many of the lines are blurred.

01:07:02.920 | Right, so you have comedians that are commentators

01:07:05.800 | and commentators that are comedians and politicians.

01:07:08.400 | So it's like, it's harder to the defense of like,

01:07:10.160 | hey, I'm a comedian, leave me alone.

01:07:11.800 | That defense becomes harder when like

01:07:14.320 | all of these lines are blurring.

01:07:15.840 | Everybody's kind of everything now.

01:07:18.160 | So like people say to me, you should run for office

01:07:21.200 | and they're serious.

01:07:22.020 | And I'm like, you're crazy, but they're serious.

01:07:23.640 | Like, so the blurring of everything means

01:07:26.720 | that people aren't in their lanes as much

01:07:29.240 | and that you go, well, this guy is dangerous

01:07:31.960 | because he's not just making a joke.

01:07:34.640 | He's doing something else and he's using humor.

01:07:38.000 | And I'm like, I'm really not.

01:07:38.960 | I'm really just trying to make a joke.

01:07:40.320 | That's all, that's really what I'm trying to do.

01:07:42.120 | But I do think that because of the flattening,

01:07:46.000 | there's a lot of people out there that go,

01:07:48.160 | they take aim at humor because they go,

01:07:49.920 | humor is where bad ideas can kind of,

01:07:52.360 | you know, start and flourish.

01:07:54.080 | - But don't you, to put some responsibility on you.

01:07:57.680 | - Yeah.

01:07:58.520 | - Don't you think humor is a way to,

01:08:00.140 | that you are the modern,

01:08:03.360 | like Jordan Peterson style intellectual.

01:08:05.920 | That humor is actually a tool of changing the zeitgeist,

01:08:10.040 | changing the social norms.

01:08:10.880 | - It absolutely can be, but it also cannot be.

01:08:12.920 | I don't think it's any one thing.

01:08:14.400 | And I think there's a lot of pressure for a comedian.

01:08:17.560 | You can be funny and right.

01:08:18.960 | You can be funny and wrong.

01:08:21.080 | If your goal is to be right,

01:08:22.880 | you might end up being right and not funny.

01:08:25.620 | So the reality is funny has to come first.

01:08:27.840 | There are brilliant people that have been funny

01:08:30.160 | and correct according to people, right?

01:08:33.240 | But at the end of the day,

01:08:35.040 | people that put way too much faith in what comedy is,

01:08:38.360 | most of what comedy is,

01:08:39.720 | is people showing up to strip malls

01:08:41.560 | and telling jokes for an hour

01:08:43.800 | while people eat chicken fingers

01:08:45.160 | and they all get drunk and they laugh

01:08:46.620 | and they feel a little bit better about their lives.

01:08:48.800 | That's really the majority of comedy.

01:08:50.520 | Then there's like 10 famous people that are really famous

01:08:53.240 | that do a version of that in an arena.

01:08:55.760 | But the amount of cultural power they have

01:08:57.720 | has always been greatly exaggerated.

01:08:59.640 | My uncles loved George Carlin,

01:09:01.440 | who was anti-military industrial complex,

01:09:03.760 | anti this, anti that.

01:09:05.200 | And then they would go vote for Ronald Reagan.

01:09:07.040 | They didn't care.

01:09:07.880 | It doesn't really, it's not as powerful as you think.

01:09:12.800 | I wish it was.

01:09:13.960 | It feels good.

01:09:15.260 | It feels good for me to say, I am the new thing.

01:09:18.440 | It really isn't.

01:09:19.840 | It truly isn't.

01:09:20.680 | No one is, comedians are the people that get on stage

01:09:23.040 | and say, we're fucked up.

01:09:24.400 | We're drug addicts.

01:09:26.200 | We're sex addicts.

01:09:27.080 | We're fat.

01:09:28.120 | We're gross.

01:09:28.960 | We can't manage our money.

01:09:29.920 | We can't stop eating.

01:09:31.160 | We can't stop fucking doing horrible things.

01:09:33.120 | We're liars.

01:09:33.960 | We're narcissists.

01:09:34.800 | We're scumbags.

01:09:35.640 | We're the people that get out and say that.

01:09:37.480 | Only a psychopath would look at us and go, show me the way.

01:09:42.240 | Like it's not.

01:09:43.680 | I disagree with you.

01:09:44.520 | 'Cause then I'm a psychopath.

01:09:46.880 | Well, and that's, I mean, I don't think,

01:09:50.680 | no pushback here.

01:09:51.520 | That's another issue.

01:09:54.760 | But you know what I'm saying.

01:09:55.600 | Well, I don't because, I mean,

01:09:58.040 | I understand you using this as a psychological tool

01:10:01.080 | for yourself to give yourself freedom.

01:10:03.640 | But the reality is you are one of the rare comedians

01:10:06.840 | like a George Carlin who is, besides being funny.

01:10:10.280 | Yeah, when I hear things like that, I'm like, okay,

01:10:12.120 | you're being very sweet.

01:10:12.960 | But like, I agree.

01:10:14.080 | I understand what you're saying.

01:10:14.920 | I do stuff that makes, hopefully makes you think.

01:10:17.240 | I hope that's what good comedy is.

01:10:18.880 | But I think I try to do that.

01:10:21.080 | But I also would hate to feel shackled to the idea

01:10:25.880 | of that I had to make a point

01:10:28.480 | and that point had to be correct.

01:10:31.360 | I think the best comedy makes fun of everything.

01:10:33.600 | It makes fun of both sides.

01:10:34.800 | And then there's a deeper truth about humanity revealed.

01:10:38.240 | But then what happens is people take that deeper truth

01:10:40.520 | and go, let's politicize it.

01:10:42.080 | But what does he mean?

01:10:43.120 | Is it the right or the left?

01:10:44.200 | And I'm like, I'm doing something that I think speaks

01:10:46.480 | to hopefully people on both sides for everybody.

01:10:49.160 | 'Cause I'm making fun of people on the left and the right

01:10:51.120 | and in the center and people that don't care

01:10:52.640 | and people that do care.

01:10:53.520 | And I'm trying to figure out a way to do it.

01:10:55.560 | But then immediately anything of value

01:10:57.400 | in this culture right now is like, how do we politicize it?

01:10:59.720 | How do we put it in a box?

01:11:01.000 | So yes, I think comedy could produce a lot

01:11:02.960 | of inherently valuable things, reflective, thoughtful things

01:11:07.280 | but then immediately can it be put in this box

01:11:10.480 | where all of those things can be used politically?

01:11:13.040 | No.

01:11:14.120 | And like when they say like comedy is a great way

01:11:15.960 | to speak truth to power.

01:11:17.160 | It is, but I don't know how much it changes things.

01:11:23.920 | I don't know how much a joke can dethrone a king.

01:11:28.560 | I know the idea is nice

01:11:30.840 | but let's look at the practical applications.

01:11:34.400 | I mean, we had brilliant comics, Bill Hicks, George Carlin

01:11:39.400 | Richard Price, we had people talk

01:11:41.800 | about so many problems in society, illustrate them

01:11:45.320 | put a spotlight on them and we still have them.

01:11:48.840 | They're worse now than they've ever been.

01:11:50.640 | That's not true.

01:11:51.480 | I think the society is better.

01:11:52.680 | And so to push back in my perspective

01:11:55.200 | it's very possible that those voices were the exact reason

01:11:59.200 | we have the world today, which I do believe is actually

01:12:01.960 | I mean, on the boring old measures

01:12:07.160 | of what makes a good world, which is, you know

01:12:10.680 | the amount of violence in the world, the amount

01:12:12.600 | of opportunity, all those kinds of measures, even happiness

01:12:16.640 | all of those things measured things have been improving.

01:12:19.120 | Steven Pinker gets a lot of shit for this

01:12:21.480 | but he's really good at articulating how the data says

01:12:24.640 | pretty clearly that the world is getting better.

01:12:26.800 | And it's arguable that the freedoms we do enjoy currently

01:12:31.040 | are thanks to the comedic voices or the people who mock.

01:12:34.760 | So to me, it's possible that humor is the very thing

01:12:38.240 | that saves the world.

01:12:39.480 | Humor is the very thing that keeps

01:12:41.560 | is the balance of power in the world.

01:12:44.040 | - But I think a lot of the things that those guys criticize

01:12:46.360 | whether it was militarism or the elites, the lying

01:12:50.960 | the corruption, the bribery, that's still going on.

01:12:53.600 | And it's always gonna go on, right?

01:12:54.720 | Because that's the nature of human beings.

01:12:56.320 | We call it out, we point it out

01:12:58.640 | but we don't have a plan to change.

01:13:01.000 | It's not really our job.

01:13:02.680 | And I think that too much now is like, well

01:13:05.800 | comedians should have a, like

01:13:07.600 | I don't tell people who to vote for.

01:13:09.560 | Like the idea that comedians went

01:13:10.920 | and told people who to vote for is like, to me, it's crazy.

01:13:13.200 | I understand like people have strong opinions

01:13:15.560 | but like, I believe I have a job

01:13:17.920 | and my job is to make you laugh or whatever

01:13:19.920 | maybe make you think, but like my job is not

01:13:22.200 | to tell you who to vote for.

01:13:23.120 | I mean, it's absurd.

01:13:24.200 | - But see the thing you do by the comedy

01:13:27.800 | like on your Twitter that people should definitely follow.

01:13:30.360 | - I believe that, @jimjdylan, I agree with you.

01:13:33.760 | - Oh, on this point of--

01:13:35.840 | - I agree with you wholeheartedly.

01:13:37.080 | - That people should follow you.

01:13:38.560 | Yeah, you give me freedom to think on my own.

01:13:43.560 | Meaning like you're shaking things up to where I'm

01:13:48.440 | I don't feel constrained about what I can think about.

01:13:51.560 | And that-- - That's awesome.

01:13:53.480 | - That-- - Thank you.

01:13:54.440 | - So you're not telling me what to think.

01:13:56.240 | You're giving me the freedom to think.

01:13:57.520 | And that's what great comedy does is, you know,

01:14:00.120 | I don't often agree with George Carlin.

01:14:04.120 | He can get pretty political sometimes, but you know

01:14:07.680 | just the ability to do that, so rare.

01:14:10.240 | Podcasts do that too now.

01:14:11.680 | Like there's certain people that can really

01:14:13.680 | just challenge you to, even when you disagree with them

01:14:16.920 | to sort of be like, oh, it's okay to think

01:14:18.480 | about this kind of stuff.

01:14:19.680 | - Yeah, and I appreciate that 'cause that's awesome.

01:14:21.880 | And I mean, that's great.

01:14:23.080 | And to a guy like you, who's a brilliant guy, that's great.

01:14:25.240 | If I'm giving you the license to think,

01:14:28.080 | then man, the world is completely fucked.

01:14:30.600 | But I'm happy about that.

01:14:31.720 | - Yeah.

01:14:32.560 | (laughing)

01:14:34.800 | Speaking about the world being completely fucked,

01:14:38.560 | Alex Jones turned on QAnon.

01:14:40.360 | I know almost nothing-- - It's a very tough, Matt.

01:14:42.480 | They had a rough marriage.

01:14:43.680 | They fought it out for years.

01:14:46.480 | And eventually we just knew someone

01:14:48.600 | was gonna leave someone.

01:14:50.520 | Q tried to leave him a few months ago.

01:14:52.800 | - Oh, so--

01:14:53.640 | - Yeah, Q was staying at someone else's house.

01:14:55.520 | The car wasn't in the driveway.

01:14:57.080 | Yeah, well, the thing about QAnon that makes it a lot of fun

01:15:01.720 | is it's kind of a make it up as you go along.

01:15:04.440 | I'm a drug addict, right?

01:15:06.040 | So often my lies aren't planned.

01:15:09.120 | They're in the moment.

01:15:10.040 | A lot of what I do on the podcast,

01:15:11.200 | a lot, you know, it's all in the moment.

01:15:12.360 | I'll have an idea of what I wanna talk about,

01:15:13.560 | and I rant, and I go.

01:15:14.800 | And I've been like stoned, and I show up at home,

01:15:17.520 | and my parents are like, "What's going on?

01:15:19.680 | "There was $50 on the mantel.

01:15:21.080 | "Now it's not there."

01:15:22.520 | And I'm like, "Well,"

01:15:26.000 | and I gotta make something up on the spot, right?

01:15:28.720 | I've been, you know, "Are you drinking again?"

01:15:31.000 | "No, I'm not."

01:15:33.360 | And then you gotta have a,

01:15:34.560 | "Well, you were gone for two days.

01:15:35.760 | "No one knows where you were,

01:15:36.720 | "and somebody said you left your car."

01:15:37.920 | "Well, I was at a sales conference,

01:15:41.600 | "and I left my car.

01:15:42.520 | "I flew to Phoenix."

01:15:43.480 | Like, I understand what that is.

01:15:45.120 | QAnon is an ever-evolving conspiracy theory

01:15:47.760 | where the events are happening in the past,

01:15:50.480 | in the present, and in the future.

01:15:51.680 | It's kind of hilarious.

01:15:52.560 | Every conspiracy theory is like Kennedy,

01:15:54.360 | something like that,

01:15:55.200 | that there's a lot of truth in that, or all truth.

01:15:57.320 | But at the end of the day,

01:15:58.320 | it's like you're looking back from 30,000 feet,

01:16:00.360 | analyzing little things that have already happened.

01:16:02.440 | QAnon's like, so I think Alex is kind of like

01:16:04.840 | a little tired of the constant evolving nature

01:16:08.760 | of that conspiracy theory.

01:16:11.080 | - So he's not a fan of like the jazz

01:16:13.200 | that is QAnon, so they're not,

01:16:14.760 | because they're improvising constantly.

01:16:15.600 | - Correct, they're improvising.

01:16:16.720 | Alex is like, "Hey, man, I was on board a little bit,

01:16:19.280 | "but at the end of the day, it's getting a little annoying

01:16:21.060 | "because it can turn on you.

01:16:22.600 | "Eventually, you become part of the conspiracy."

01:16:25.080 | Alex is controlled opposition.

01:16:26.560 | That's what they'll say.

01:16:27.800 | Eventually, you, because QAnon just eats things.

01:16:31.520 | So it's a conspiracy that just eats things.

01:16:33.320 | The minute you start to say, "Hey, man, maybe that's not,"

01:16:35.720 | it just eats you and go, "Well, you're in on it."

01:16:38.200 | Everyone's in on it.

01:16:39.040 | Everyone's a satanic pedophile, everybody.

01:16:40.920 | Everyone that questions it is eating children.

01:16:43.640 | And you go, "Wait a minute, that seems illogical."

01:16:46.920 | But now there's not enough. - There's not enough children.

01:16:48.280 | - Now there's not enough.

01:16:49.600 | And I think QAnon's over now, unfortunately,

01:16:52.200 | because for these people, but I think fortunately for them,

01:16:56.000 | they're gonna have to find a new hobby.

01:16:57.520 | But I think it's over now

01:16:58.440 | because even the best QAnon people now are starting to go,

01:17:00.840 | "Hey, man, this might not be going down

01:17:02.280 | "the way we thought."

01:17:03.760 | But they've literally gone as far as to say

01:17:05.400 | that Biden and Trump switched faces.

01:17:07.880 | Trump's actually still the president except Biden's.

01:17:10.600 | You have to be a real moron now.

01:17:12.880 | You gotta be real stupid now.

01:17:16.200 | It's at the end.

01:17:17.720 | It was cool when the Epstein stuff happened,

01:17:19.640 | QAnon was like, "It was party at Q."

01:17:22.880 | And then when the Hunter Biden laptop stuff

01:17:24.720 | started to happen, they were like, "Dancing, it's time."

01:17:28.440 | And then Biden wins and they're like, "Wait, whoa."

01:17:33.440 | And it's just like, it's the day after the party.

01:17:36.640 | QAnon, if you ever went to a party

01:17:38.120 | in high school or college,

01:17:39.240 | QAnon right now is the day after the party.

01:17:40.840 | You wake up, it's 12 noon,

01:17:43.560 | the sun is hitting you in the face, you're hungover,

01:17:45.240 | there's a stench of disgusting beer

01:17:47.160 | and cigarettes all over the house.

01:17:48.480 | You're like, "What the fuck happened here?

01:17:50.840 | "I gotta get out of here and get a bacon, egg and cheese."

01:17:53.680 | That's what QAnon is.

01:17:55.120 | They gotta sober up, get out of that house,

01:17:57.080 | get a bacon, egg and cheese and go,

01:17:58.120 | "Man, we were fucking whacked.

01:18:00.800 | "We were high, dude.

01:18:02.060 | "I thought Nancy Pelosi was eating children for four years

01:18:05.160 | "and that Donald Trump was gonna put her in Guantanamo Bay.

01:18:08.340 | "Wow, that was..."

01:18:11.120 | 'Cause I mean, it's interesting.

01:18:12.080 | The people that do that after the '60s,

01:18:14.040 | they were like, "Yeah, I just did a bunch of acid

01:18:15.920 | "and I lived in a ranch in Malibu

01:18:17.340 | "and fucked everyone I ever saw."

01:18:20.000 | And they're like, "I thought that was the way

01:18:21.460 | "the world was gonna go.

01:18:22.380 | "And I followed some shaman guy,

01:18:24.960 | "some guru who just wanted to fuck me

01:18:26.600 | "and 10 other people that were living there.

01:18:28.700 | "And we did that for three years.

01:18:30.480 | "Apparently we never created the utopia

01:18:32.380 | "we thought we were gonna have.

01:18:33.560 | "And now I'm back working here at Allstate Insurance

01:18:37.200 | "and we have great policies

01:18:38.940 | "and we'd love you to come in the office

01:18:40.440 | "so we can break them down for you."

01:18:42.100 | It all ends, folks.

01:18:43.540 | All the love, all the bullshit ends, but it's fun.

01:18:46.740 | They had so much fun.

01:18:47.980 | QAnon was hard to get mad at because they were,

01:18:50.840 | this was all they had.

01:18:53.380 | - Yeah.

01:18:54.600 | - This was fun.

01:18:55.660 | - They were quite good at it.

01:18:56.800 | - And they were good at it.

01:18:57.780 | And it was a lot of desperate people,

01:19:00.660 | but they were also rich idiots.

01:19:02.820 | There's also like dumb, rich people.

01:19:04.620 | And those are like the saddest people

01:19:07.140 | in Q because it's like they should,

01:19:09.200 | they have the resources to do other things,

01:19:11.440 | but they just love Q.

01:19:13.080 | They're like, "I'm just into this."

01:19:14.920 | And I'm like, "You're rich.

01:19:17.300 | "Go do something.

01:19:18.540 | "How incurious are you?

01:19:20.180 | "Go to the Amazon.

01:19:21.920 | "Go birdwatch."

01:19:23.120 | I don't know, but they're, so.

01:19:25.040 | - Play golf.

01:19:25.880 | - It's sad, but they're like done now.

01:19:26.960 | I mean, it's over.

01:19:29.160 | - Oh, so you think this is the--

01:19:31.000 | - I think everything's ending.

01:19:32.160 | My whole thing is that Trump's out, QAnon's over,

01:19:34.720 | the quarantine's gonna end,

01:19:35.960 | everything's gonna go back to something

01:19:38.900 | that's more recognizable.

01:19:40.580 | I think that--

01:19:42.220 | - Are you optimistic about the 2021 and what--

01:19:44.840 | - To a degree, in certain aspects,

01:19:47.500 | I have optimism and then I have,

01:19:49.260 | I have short-term optimism and long-term pessimism.

01:19:52.740 | Meaning that I think in the short-term,

01:19:54.220 | things can get better.

01:19:55.280 | I think long-term, because there's so many forces

01:19:57.500 | that are out of our control,

01:19:58.680 | that are evolving in ways I barely understand,

01:20:01.020 | that are carving up society,

01:20:02.900 | it's gonna be very tough long-term

01:20:04.780 | to be completely optimistic,

01:20:07.100 | like hey, it's gonna be great,

01:20:08.080 | it's gonna be good forever.

01:20:09.440 | But short-term, I think yeah, this quarantine will end,

01:20:12.040 | things will get better,

01:20:12.880 | the economy will get a little better,

01:20:14.640 | the constant Trump craziness will die down a little bit.

01:20:18.640 | That's my hope, and people can go back

01:20:20.400 | to focusing on things that matter,

01:20:22.240 | which is the things that are near you and close to you.

01:20:26.080 | - Yeah, the humans around you.

01:20:27.280 | - Humans around you, not Nancy Pelosi.

01:20:30.520 | I have uncles that talk about Nancy Pelosi.

01:20:32.320 | I'm like, you've never met her.

01:20:33.840 | You'll never meet her, shut up.

01:20:35.740 | - Yeah, and I have a belief that this kind of local love

01:20:40.740 | and kindness that you naturally can have

01:20:42.940 | for human beings that you actually know

01:20:45.300 | can be expanded at scale through the social networks

01:20:49.300 | that we use, that we build.

01:20:52.140 | Twitter's currently failing at that miserably.

01:20:54.540 | - That would be great.

01:20:55.380 | - But that's--

01:20:56.200 | - If we were able to increase the love

01:20:58.700 | through the social networks, that would be great.

01:21:00.880 | It feels very hard to.

01:21:03.460 | - It's a worthy challenge.

01:21:04.900 | You've tweeted, "One of the underreported reasons

01:21:08.100 | "conspiracy theories take hold

01:21:10.040 | "is because some of them are true."

01:21:11.900 | What conspiracy theories do you believe

01:21:17.460 | that are sort of important for people to think about,

01:21:22.460 | would you say?

01:21:23.460 | - Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman

01:21:27.320 | with no connections to any other situation, government.

01:21:31.260 | I believe that JFK was removed from office

01:21:34.780 | by a group of people that had very different interests.

01:21:39.780 | - But the question of deep state,

01:21:42.220 | so these are powerful people that are able now

01:21:45.140 | to dictate through basically the threat of violence

01:21:49.720 | what the presidents, the surface powerful people

01:21:53.020 | in our society.

01:21:53.860 | - Yeah, I mean, again, I want another investigation

01:21:57.380 | into 9/11, not because I think that George Bush

01:21:59.800 | pressed a button and made 9/11 happen,

01:22:01.420 | but because we invaded the country of Iraq,

01:22:03.700 | and then 15 out of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

01:22:08.700 | There was tons of stuff in the 9/11 report

01:22:10.880 | that didn't make sense to anybody.

01:22:12.940 | There's tons of stuff about that day

01:22:14.660 | that I feel like we just don't know.

01:22:16.380 | - Yeah, that's, sorry to interrupt,

01:22:18.460 | that's when I, my little aunt life,

01:22:21.980 | touched upon conspiracy theory world

01:22:23.940 | and first learned about Alex Jones,

01:22:26.140 | is when 9/11 happened.

01:22:27.820 | It was very frustrating to me how poorly

01:22:31.540 | the reporting and the transparency

01:22:33.020 | around what exactly happened, who knew what,

01:22:36.000 | all that kind of basic information

01:22:37.500 | that you would hope the government would release,

01:22:41.420 | reveal, and use as like a lesson for how we prevent this.

01:22:45.940 | Instead, it felt like a lot of stuff was being hidden

01:22:48.940 | in order to manipulate some kind of machine

01:22:51.500 | that leads us to war.

01:22:52.820 | - Yeah, that's fair to say.

01:22:54.700 | Yeah, I mean, I just don't feel like

01:22:56.260 | we've gotten the full story.

01:22:57.380 | I don't know what the full story is.

01:22:58.540 | I can't, I don't know what it is,

01:23:00.340 | but I don't feel like we've gotten the full story.

01:23:02.980 | Yeah, there are groups of powerful pedophiles, right?

01:23:06.340 | Whether they're in the Catholic church

01:23:07.500 | or they're in the government or wherever they are,

01:23:09.020 | they are able to cover things up that they do.

01:23:11.220 | They're able to silence people that try to out them

01:23:13.540 | in terms of like, you know, disrupt their operations.

01:23:16.160 | That's true.

01:23:17.000 | QAnon has nuggets of truth.

01:23:18.660 | It just went crazy.

01:23:20.180 | Any conspiracy theory that involves the Knights Templar

01:23:23.220 | and also Chrissy Teigen is probably wrong.

01:23:27.260 | - What's the Knights Templar?

01:23:28.900 | - Well, it was just this group of Knights back in the day.

01:23:32.100 | You know, it's that, you know, supposedly secret meetings.

01:23:34.740 | And like in every conspiracy, they talk about like,

01:23:36.820 | you know, if you go deep enough,

01:23:37.860 | it's like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians,

01:23:40.900 | you know, all of these secret groups throughout history,

01:23:43.860 | the Illuminati, the-

01:23:45.180 | - Oh, and there's a thread that connects all of it.

01:23:46.780 | - Oh, yeah, it connects it all to David Spade.

01:23:49.100 | I mean, it's a little much.

01:23:50.580 | - Well, how do you, if you're David Spade,

01:23:52.100 | defend yourself, by the way?

01:23:53.260 | - You ignore it because it's hilarious.

01:23:54.820 | And I know David Spade.

01:23:55.740 | It's like, Hollywood's kind of boring.

01:23:57.500 | Yes, there are sex orgies.

01:23:58.900 | I'm not invited.

01:23:59.740 | I'm sure there's shit going on.

01:24:00.940 | Kids do get abused.

01:24:01.780 | Women get abused.

01:24:02.860 | - I'll invite you to one.

01:24:03.940 | - Please.

01:24:04.780 | - If you want.

01:24:05.620 | - We got the $75,000 dog and then we'll get one.

01:24:08.540 | But you know, me and David Spade,

01:24:10.940 | we go out to sushi restaurants, like,

01:24:13.020 | and you sit there and you listen to people complain.

01:24:15.340 | That's what a lot of it is.

01:24:16.940 | What a lot of Hollywood is, is deeply sad tragedy

01:24:20.220 | that people don't understand.

01:24:22.220 | And some of it is nefarious and dark

01:24:24.060 | and there are problems and there are real power brokers.

01:24:26.540 | Here, it's a dark town, 100%.

01:24:29.220 | But the idea that everybody that lives here

01:24:31.140 | is in some wide ranging, vast conspiracy isn't true.

01:24:34.700 | It ignores how humdrum, boring, deeply sad,

01:24:39.580 | most people's lives are in Hollywood.

01:24:41.460 | And it ignores how sad fame is in general.

01:24:44.380 | Fame's a sad thing.

01:24:46.060 | Not always, but a lot of times it's a sad thing.

01:24:49.300 | It's fleeting, it's ephemeral, it doesn't last.

01:24:52.300 | It separates you from other people.

01:24:55.500 | It's isolating.

01:24:57.380 | It can be traumatic, depending on what's going on.

01:24:59.780 | Obviously, it's better than the alternative.

01:25:01.620 | If you're trying to be famous,

01:25:03.020 | it's better to be famous than not famous, right?

01:25:05.340 | I'll say that.

01:25:06.540 | But it's a mixed bag to a degree.

01:25:09.260 | There are things about it that aren't great.

01:25:11.420 | And Hollywood has a deep undercurrent of sadness,

01:25:14.020 | of people that have not realized their dreams

01:25:16.220 | and people that have realized them.

01:25:18.380 | - Yeah, dark, right. - Both of those people--

01:25:21.180 | - The people that win Olympic gold medals

01:25:23.020 | can sometimes suffer from depression.

01:25:24.780 | - Correct. - They've lost--

01:25:26.180 | - Well, somebody said, and I forget who said it,

01:25:28.060 | it's a great quote, it's not mine.

01:25:29.700 | I think it's from a book, or it might be from a TV show.

01:25:31.980 | Sometimes I quote something and they're like,

01:25:33.380 | "That's from like Charlotte's Web."

01:25:34.980 | I'm like, oh.

01:25:36.580 | The two worst things, oh, I think it's from the movie

01:25:38.380 | Limitless, I'm like an idiot.

01:25:40.220 | But anyway, thanks for having me on.

01:25:42.620 | Tomorrow, he's done some genius.

01:25:43.460 | - I will not publish this.

01:25:45.300 | - It's from the movie, and I think he says,

01:25:48.500 | "The two worst things in the world are knockout."

01:25:50.500 | Oh, you know it's not from Limitless?

01:25:52.420 | I think it's from the movie

01:25:55.900 | where Nicolas Cage sold weapons.

01:25:58.020 | It was called Lord of War.

01:25:59.300 | It's a little better than Limitless.

01:26:00.500 | Anyway-- - That's a good movie.

01:26:01.580 | - It's a great movie.

01:26:02.420 | He said, "The two worst things in the world

01:26:03.900 | "are not getting what you want and getting it."

01:26:06.380 | So the undercurrents of sadness that run through Hollywood

01:26:08.660 | are there are two rivers that converge

01:26:10.740 | and there are people that just never had it

01:26:12.540 | and people that have it and go, "Now what?"

01:26:14.500 | And so it's a sad place, a tragic place,

01:26:16.060 | and there's a lot of, it's boring.

01:26:17.860 | That's what people don't realize.

01:26:19.460 | It's actually kind of boring.

01:26:20.820 | - Well, life is kind of boring.

01:26:21.940 | - Life is kind of boring, but there's also like,

01:26:24.460 | so I think QAnon's this way to make a lot of it seem

01:26:26.700 | like it's super exciting.

01:26:28.460 | And listen, I don't wanna diminish the experiences

01:26:30.700 | of people who've been abused

01:26:31.540 | 'cause there is a lot of horror here,

01:26:33.260 | but the whole QAnon thing was like,

01:26:34.700 | everybody in everything is doing, and that's not true.

01:26:37.980 | - Well, see, just to linger on that a little bit

01:26:40.580 | is Bill Gates, the conspiracy theories

01:26:44.380 | around Bill Gates bother me

01:26:46.220 | because this is me, dumb, naive Lex,

01:26:50.940 | thinks that Bill Gates did a lot of good for this world.

01:26:53.700 | - Sure. - First, by creating a company

01:26:56.580 | that empowered personal computers,

01:26:58.860 | and second, by donating a ton of money

01:27:01.500 | for treating malaria in Africa

01:27:04.620 | and all those kinds of things.

01:27:06.320 | And there's these huge amounts of conspiracies, I think,

01:27:10.180 | based on just replies to whenever Bill Gates does anything.

01:27:15.460 | Like, to me, the top replies should be

01:27:18.700 | about how inspiring that guy is to donate so much money.

01:27:22.460 | - Well, I think that-- - I'm so sorry to,

01:27:24.780 | and the thing I'm struggling with is if I'm Bill Gates,

01:27:29.520 | like, how do you behave differently?

01:27:32.060 | How do you show people that you're, if you're not,

01:27:34.780 | I don't know, doing creepy stuff

01:27:36.600 | that they're saying he's doing?

01:27:38.140 | - Well, I think part of it is that

01:27:39.860 | he's done some really good stuff, right?

01:27:42.260 | He's an innovative guy,

01:27:43.180 | he's on the vanguard of a lot of things.

01:27:45.060 | But he's also the antichrist.

01:27:47.160 | And I think that that is, you know,

01:27:49.300 | they're not mutually exclusive.

01:27:51.340 | He is the prince of darkness, as well as some,

01:27:54.300 | no, here's my deal with Bill Gates.

01:27:55.940 | He's a Batman villain billionaire,

01:27:57.300 | meaning that he's not a villain,

01:27:58.380 | but he's got all this money, right?

01:27:59.740 | Here's the thing, and I love Mosk and all these guys,

01:28:01.260 | I know you love these guys.

01:28:02.420 | Listen, when you have the kind of money that these guys have

01:28:04.620 | and you have the vision that they have,

01:28:06.260 | and they want society to look a certain way,

01:28:08.200 | and a lot of them are doing great things,

01:28:10.060 | people, they need to get better at the pushback.

01:28:12.980 | They need to get a little better.

01:28:14.180 | When somebody says, "Hey man, what's going on over there?"

01:28:16.860 | Bill Gates needs to be a little better at going,

01:28:18.540 | "Here's what."

01:28:20.740 | Because, you know, Bill Gates has the money.

01:28:23.680 | You know, I think he once, he wanted to shoot a missile

01:28:26.300 | of dust at the atmosphere to help global warming.

01:28:28.620 | And a lot of scientists were like,

01:28:29.560 | "Hey man, that might not be the way to do it."

01:28:31.240 | But no one in history, like so few people in history

01:28:33.300 | have had the resources to even have that thought.

01:28:35.540 | That if you have the resources to have that thought,

01:28:37.060 | and you have designs on the way you want society to look,

01:28:39.120 | whether it's public health policy,

01:28:40.900 | or vaccinations, whatever,

01:28:42.300 | you have to get a little better

01:28:44.420 | at dealing with legitimate critiques.

01:28:46.660 | And obviously you're not defending yourself

01:28:48.220 | against people that say you're the Antichrist,

01:28:49.740 | but like, you need to get a little better.

01:28:51.700 | And I feel like Bill Gates and some of those people

01:28:53.820 | at that level are like, "Ugh."

01:28:55.900 | PR is kind of like, you know, beneath that.

01:28:57.900 | - They're terrible at it.

01:28:58.740 | - They're terrible at it.

01:28:59.580 | They're terrible at it.

01:29:00.400 | - Him and Zuckerberg are really bad at it.

01:29:01.500 | - Zuckerberg's horrible at it.

01:29:02.700 | He seems especially bad at public policy.

01:29:07.700 | - Yeah, and it makes me feel so bad

01:29:09.980 | because the problem with being a billionaire

01:29:13.180 | is you lose touch with reality if you're not careful.

01:29:16.520 | I think Elon is good at, at least so far,

01:29:20.420 | maintaining touch with reality.

01:29:22.260 | - No, if you look at the name of his child,

01:29:24.340 | you can clearly see.

01:29:25.740 | Listen, I do like him,

01:29:27.180 | and I do think what he's done with Tesla,

01:29:29.020 | you know, my producer has a Tesla,

01:29:30.340 | and he never shuts up about it.

01:29:31.660 | Most people that have Teslas never shut up about them,

01:29:34.140 | and they think they're part

01:29:35.700 | of the development team at SpaceX.

01:29:37.260 | And I like that he's created a world

01:29:39.900 | where people can get excited about a $37,000 car

01:29:43.180 | and never shut the fuck up about it

01:29:44.940 | to the point where I have to threaten people

01:29:46.580 | with physical violence to get them to stop telling me

01:29:49.220 | about that their car drives itself.

01:29:50.860 | - Oh, you should get a Tesla.

01:29:51.700 | - Maybe have a few less drinks

01:29:52.860 | and a few fewer Vicodin, and you can drive yourself.

01:29:55.940 | - Have you thought about getting a Tesla?

01:29:57.060 | - I've never thought about it.

01:29:57.900 | I don't like them. - You should get a Tesla.

01:29:58.740 | - They're minimalist.

01:29:59.660 | I don't like, I want more.

01:30:01.260 | I want more.

01:30:03.180 | - Get the Cybertruck.

01:30:04.100 | - I wanna stage, I wanna, my guy, my dude,

01:30:07.420 | my producer wants a Cybertruck.

01:30:09.140 | I want a stagecoach.

01:30:10.780 | Old school stagecoach horse thief shit.

01:30:14.100 | - You should ride a horse.

01:30:15.860 | - It's going back to that.

01:30:16.900 | I live in an area with a lot of horses.

01:30:18.260 | It's going back to like whipping a horse.

01:30:20.540 | I want an animal to shriek while I go by.

01:30:22.900 | (laughing)

01:30:25.620 | - You want more suffering in the world, not less.

01:30:27.620 | - Oh, I think we need it.

01:30:28.860 | - Okay, but I just don't like that billionaire is a bad word

01:30:33.420 | and it's not necessarily,

01:30:35.060 | not every billionaire is a pedophile.

01:30:37.140 | - I know, but the problem is a lot of like,

01:30:39.860 | it's just, you know, Epstein was very smart

01:30:41.780 | at like just getting people at that house

01:30:43.260 | and taking photos of them.

01:30:44.980 | Nobody knew what they were doing,

01:30:46.020 | but it's like, it was one of those things

01:30:47.260 | where it's like, Epstein was the most social guy ever.

01:30:49.300 | Like every photo, he's like, hey.

01:30:51.580 | And it's like everyone that's ever done anything

01:30:54.780 | in the world has been at that fucking island.

01:30:57.140 | Every human being is like in a photo.

01:30:59.540 | It's just weird.

01:31:00.380 | Like I'm in, like, it's funny, me and my friends

01:31:01.700 | get together, we don't ever take photos, right?

01:31:04.140 | Like last night, a few people,

01:31:05.580 | it was my birthday yesterday, I'm 17.

01:31:07.860 | And my friends came over and we're just eating dinner, right?

01:31:11.660 | And we had a fun night and just four people that are over,

01:31:13.700 | nobody, right?

01:31:14.660 | Nobody ever thought like, let's, hey, I wanna remember it.

01:31:18.100 | Let's take photos, I'm 36, woo!

01:31:20.940 | But everything Epstein did,

01:31:23.500 | there's just photos of everybody, it's interesting.

01:31:26.540 | - Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself?

01:31:29.300 | - No, I think he was killed by that guy

01:31:32.380 | that they put in a cell,

01:31:35.320 | that lunatic who was that big muscled guy.

01:31:38.140 | I think he was just, he did it for money,

01:31:40.340 | kept his mouth shut.

01:31:41.340 | - That money from whom do you think?

01:31:43.620 | - Mossad, MI6, CIA, all three.

01:31:47.220 | - So there's a lot of pressure

01:31:48.300 | from a lot of different powerful people.

01:31:49.940 | - Probably Mossad, CIA more.

01:31:51.860 | I mean, it seems very clear that he was working

01:31:55.260 | in type of a honeypot intelligence operation.

01:31:57.820 | Ghislaine Maxwell's father was an Israeli super spy.

01:32:01.140 | Ghislaine Maxwell's working for Israeli intelligence.

01:32:03.460 | It would be odd to think.

01:32:04.660 | And of course the CIA knows about everything

01:32:06.400 | that Israeli intelligence is doing with Americans.

01:32:08.940 | So I would think that it's a very cozy relationship

01:32:12.060 | with those two intelligence agencies.

01:32:13.900 | And I think if you ran it by anyone,

01:32:15.820 | I think if you ran it by French intelligence,

01:32:17.260 | they'd go, "Yeah, no, get him."

01:32:19.580 | I don't think there was any intelligence service

01:32:21.140 | in the world whose job is to protect the powerful people

01:32:23.580 | that live in their countries

01:32:24.540 | that was against him getting whacked.

01:32:27.060 | - But do you think it's possible

01:32:28.180 | that he's just an evil person

01:32:30.060 | who is after manipulating people and also was a profile?

01:32:33.860 | So there's a bigger thing.

01:32:35.780 | - It's factual that there's a bigger thing.

01:32:37.900 | Evil people don't get handed-

01:32:38.740 | - Those are your facts, Tim Dillon.

01:32:40.820 | - No, they're the facts of the case.

01:32:42.620 | You don't get handed a 65.

01:32:44.300 | Show me another evil guy who was handed

01:32:46.180 | a $65 million place by Les Wexner.

01:32:50.460 | Show me another evil guy that got that type

01:32:53.140 | of a handshake deal where he was basically let off

01:32:57.540 | without anything after a judge had made

01:33:00.380 | a very sweetheart deal for him

01:33:02.940 | after he was accused of molesting a 14-year-old.

01:33:06.260 | Show me another evil guy that doesn't have

01:33:09.340 | that kind of backing, that has those type of friends,

01:33:11.620 | those connections, those type of properties.

01:33:13.660 | Show me multiple passports all over the world.

01:33:16.920 | So show me a guy without anyone backing him that's doing it.

01:33:20.420 | Why did they, so you think he's just an evil guy

01:33:23.180 | so he's doing this for whom?

01:33:24.980 | It's his own just shits and giggles?

01:33:26.980 | He's just getting off on it?

01:33:28.340 | - Human nature, yeah.

01:33:29.300 | - Human nature, huh?

01:33:30.380 | It's human nature?

01:33:31.340 | $70 million limestone mansion.

01:33:33.620 | - Visibly mocked.

01:33:34.780 | - Yeah, is it human nature?

01:33:36.380 | - And it's like poetry. - I don't think

01:33:38.100 | it's human nature.

01:33:38.940 | I think they manipulated human nature,

01:33:41.820 | but I think they did it.

01:33:43.540 | I think Just Lane, I think Epstein was really

01:33:45.540 | just a functionary and I think Just Lane

01:33:47.580 | was kind of a pimp and Epstein was kind of a guy

01:33:50.340 | that made the money okay and hid money and things like that

01:33:54.300 | and worked for a lot of powerful people.

01:33:56.180 | I don't believe in lone pedophiles anymore.

01:34:00.060 | I don't even believe that.

01:34:01.060 | If you're a pedophile, you're like in a group.

01:34:03.900 | You know what I mean?

01:34:05.100 | You know?

01:34:07.500 | - Well, I'm not even going there,

01:34:09.460 | but staying on Just Lane, so you believe

01:34:11.780 | there's some power in her.

01:34:13.060 | What do you think happens to her now?

01:34:15.380 | Like what are the--

01:34:16.220 | - Great question.

01:34:17.460 | I mean, I don't know what'll happen to her,

01:34:19.900 | but I imagine she'll get some type of deal,

01:34:22.900 | closed door thing years from now

01:34:24.940 | when people don't really care about the case

01:34:26.860 | and she'll serve some time in a very lax thing

01:34:30.400 | or she'll be killed.

01:34:31.300 | I mean, again, it's like if she was doing

01:34:33.780 | what she was doing, which is I believe a fact

01:34:36.220 | that she was compromising powerful people

01:34:38.660 | so that they could be blackmailed

01:34:40.260 | by the intelligence services of the US and Israel,

01:34:45.260 | probably, I don't see how she wasn't doing that.

01:34:51.140 | Someone's blackmailing, someone's using the photos

01:34:53.900 | and the tapes, right?

01:34:55.060 | Someone's using that against these people.

01:34:57.680 | Someone wants to control these people.

01:34:59.300 | Well, who and why?

01:35:00.720 | That's the real question.

01:35:02.040 | And I think the real question is you wanna exert control

01:35:05.600 | over congressmen and senators and presidents

01:35:09.120 | because they have the power to make decisions

01:35:11.960 | to affect the, but the CIA just works

01:35:13.740 | for a lot of very wealthy people.

01:35:15.960 | That's what the CIA, so how the CIA started, right?

01:35:18.640 | It was lawyers, bankers.

01:35:19.940 | They're protecting financial interests

01:35:22.200 | of multinational corporations all over the world,

01:35:25.120 | overthrowing democratically elected governments,

01:35:27.600 | going in and doing subterfuge campaigns,

01:35:29.440 | encouraging terror, they were doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

01:35:31.900 | I don't see why that would change.

01:35:33.320 | I think that's who they still represent.

01:35:34.860 | And I think those people want certain policies

01:35:38.460 | and certain people pushed forward.

01:35:40.120 | And I think those people are controlled.

01:35:42.120 | And I think one of the ways to control people

01:35:44.060 | is their sexual problems and that's the way they did it.

01:35:48.120 | - I wish there was a way to,

01:35:51.840 | 'cause everything you just said now is--

01:35:54.520 | - Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

01:35:57.360 | I'm being indoctrinated on air.

01:35:59.880 | No, it was just--

01:36:00.720 | - You think you're just a,

01:36:01.640 | Jeff Ramsey is just a fun random guy

01:36:03.600 | who just wanted to make home movies of presidents?

01:36:06.560 | - Well, you think I'm just some random guy?

01:36:09.740 | I'm just trying to sell myself as somebody

01:36:11.900 | who's friendly with the American audience.

01:36:14.280 | - I believe you are backed by people

01:36:16.460 | that want people to be more comfortable with robot dogs.

01:36:19.560 | I believe that.

01:36:21.380 | I believe you're pushed to be the happy face of AI.

01:36:23.760 | - Which is why I will edit this part out.

01:36:24.720 | - They should have picked the happier face.

01:36:27.720 | No editing, Joe Rogan's rule, no editing.

01:36:30.680 | - This is live.

01:36:31.720 | No, I mean, I wish there was a way to,

01:36:33.640 | for some of the conspiracy theories

01:36:35.140 | to prove that that's not the case.

01:36:37.000 | Like what the CIA is,

01:36:39.660 | there is some possibility in my mind

01:36:42.440 | that institutions like the CIA

01:36:45.240 | and different kind of organizations

01:36:47.600 | are driven less by organized malevolence

01:36:52.600 | and more by just incompetence,

01:36:54.700 | just bureaucracy being incompetent.

01:36:56.720 | - I think that argument gets less and less persuasive

01:37:00.440 | when you look at all the things they've been able to do.

01:37:03.000 | - They spot, it's very certain,

01:37:05.360 | just like you said, that there's a bunch of them

01:37:07.560 | that have done, there's some conspiracy theories

01:37:11.020 | that are dramatic and true.

01:37:14.040 | The question is, I wish there was a way to prove

01:37:17.440 | that some of them are not.

01:37:19.080 | And it's very difficult

01:37:20.160 | because so much is shrouded in mystery.

01:37:22.520 | Like one of the things I'm bothered by

01:37:24.360 | is when people accuse other,

01:37:26.020 | like athletes of using steroids, for example.

01:37:28.760 | And it's just, yes, a lot of people use steroids,

01:37:31.040 | but it sucks that people just don't believe you.

01:37:34.760 | Like there's some incredible athletes that look shredded,

01:37:37.840 | that look just incredible performers,

01:37:40.420 | and everybody just says that they're on steroids.

01:37:43.920 | They kind of assume.

01:37:44.760 | - Yeah, I mean, and people accuse me all the time

01:37:47.960 | of being on performance-enhancing drugs and steroids.

01:37:50.420 | And it is hard, but what I remind them is,

01:37:53.320 | it's what my appearance is a result of dedication.

01:37:58.320 | But no, it's hard work, diet, exercise, dedication.

01:38:02.160 | - Are you on keto?

01:38:03.080 | - I'm on, I'm doing a version of, you're keto, right?

01:38:07.680 | - Yeah.

01:38:08.520 | - So I'm doing a version of keto right now with bread.

01:38:11.540 | And it's, do you see what I mean?

01:38:13.240 | - You carb up in order to be--

01:38:14.440 | - So it's keto with sugar.

01:38:16.160 | It's called keto plus sugar.

01:38:18.080 | And it's a good diet for,

01:38:21.180 | I grew up in the '90s when nobody ever lost weight, sadly,

01:38:23.740 | because every diet was like,

01:38:25.620 | you can eat what you want, just be accountable.

01:38:28.260 | No one even knew what that meant.

01:38:30.020 | So it would be like my mother being like,

01:38:31.500 | if you have chocolate chip pancakes, have a glass of water.

01:38:34.840 | - Yeah.

01:38:35.680 | - Just take a walk around the block.

01:38:37.900 | You can go to McDonald's three times a day.

01:38:40.020 | Just walk around the block.

01:38:41.060 | It's what my parents used to say.

01:38:42.060 | My mother would be like, just walk around the block.

01:38:44.540 | You're fine.

01:38:45.500 | Gonna have a cigarette?

01:38:47.680 | Walk 20 steps.

01:38:48.700 | Walk 20 steps back.

01:38:50.000 | It's exercise.

01:38:51.380 | So, no, there's too many conspiracies out there.

01:38:54.500 | A lot of them aren't true.

01:38:55.320 | A lot of them are bitter, angry people

01:38:56.660 | trying to justify their own impotence,

01:38:59.820 | not being able to do anything in life.

01:39:01.260 | And they're like, the people that have done something

01:39:02.580 | in life, they're all nefarious.

01:39:04.180 | It's all, the car just acted against me.

01:39:05.940 | That's 100% true, 100%.

01:39:08.660 | It attracts usually people that have not figured out a way

01:39:13.220 | to succeed, or haven't succeeded on the level

01:39:16.220 | that they want to.

01:39:17.660 | But that also being true, there is a fair amount

01:39:22.120 | of fuckery going on, and provable.

01:39:25.600 | And we just have to, I think, separate,

01:39:28.940 | know that these things are often inflated or not true,

01:39:34.560 | but know that sometimes they are true.

01:39:36.200 | Otherwise, it wouldn't exist.

01:39:37.960 | If there was no, if there was nothing to JFK,

01:39:41.160 | if there was nothing to 9/11, if people felt like

01:39:44.520 | they were being dealt with honestly, this wouldn't exist.

01:39:47.740 | I mean, this exists because there are real questions

01:39:50.860 | that people have that don't get answered

01:39:52.580 | for whatever reason.

01:39:53.780 | And then the vacuum of the refusal to answer those questions,

01:39:57.220 | that information vacuum, is filled with people

01:40:00.140 | like Alex Jones, who are curious,

01:40:02.140 | and sometimes they're right, and sometimes

01:40:03.460 | they're horribly wrong, and sometimes

01:40:06.060 | they're all over the place.

01:40:07.140 | - And good storytellers, and people love stories,

01:40:09.140 | and when there's an absence of actual--

01:40:11.820 | - Alex is a uniquely American person,

01:40:13.940 | like very interesting.

01:40:14.860 | I don't know how many countries,

01:40:16.060 | how many people make a living as a conspiracy theorist,

01:40:18.260 | a good living, in other countries, right?

01:40:20.140 | It's very rare, right?

01:40:21.660 | I mean, it's very interesting, and he became,

01:40:23.420 | like I know people that knew him when he was a kid,

01:40:25.180 | 'cause I'd go to Austin and perform a lot,

01:40:27.260 | and he was a guy that would take a bullhorn

01:40:28.980 | and yell at cops 'cause he thought

01:40:30.220 | D.W.E. checkpoints were unconstitutional.

01:40:32.140 | That's what he was doing in college.

01:40:33.900 | And he just went through, he was hated by the right.

01:40:35.860 | He was hated by the Bush people.

01:40:37.220 | He was hated by the, and he went from being this guy

01:40:41.340 | that was considered a leftist, even.

01:40:44.220 | Even though he was never a leftist,

01:40:45.660 | he was considered this enemy of mainstream conservatism.

01:40:50.660 | Like he was not, and they considered a guy

01:40:53.080 | that wasn't a patriot, wasn't this, wasn't that.

01:40:55.860 | And he just, wow, he whines and whines,

01:40:58.540 | and ends up just being this confidant

01:41:01.060 | of a Republican president,

01:41:02.540 | a very divisive Republican president,

01:41:04.460 | and he becomes this populist and everything like that.

01:41:06.380 | It's really wild to watch that.

01:41:08.100 | But I do think he should retire eventually,

01:41:10.420 | just so we could get some, I don't know,

01:41:12.500 | it seems like a, it's a lot to keep doing.

01:41:14.940 | - Well, I hope this world allows for Alex Jones

01:41:17.620 | to continue having a voice,

01:41:19.140 | because just like you said, he's a,

01:41:21.540 | you used the word fun, but really,

01:41:24.860 | he shakes up the norms of our discourse.

01:41:28.740 | - I do too, I do think we need to put more value.

01:41:30.720 | I think entertainment, we do need to say

01:41:33.940 | that there are people that should be allowed

01:41:35.540 | to have a voice for entertainment purposes.

01:41:37.980 | - Right.

01:41:38.820 | - And that's part of what Donald Trump,

01:41:40.940 | now that he's not the president, come on.

01:41:43.880 | Let the guy, let him talk.

01:41:46.180 | - Who do you think is the best comedian of all time?

01:41:49.320 | - Oh, that's a great question.

01:41:50.860 | Greatest of all time.

01:41:53.020 | - You mentioned Carlin, your uncle's liking Carlin.

01:41:55.760 | - Well, Carlin is great.

01:42:00.660 | Carlin is really hard to argue with,

01:42:03.660 | but Chappelle is also really great.

01:42:08.340 | Louis C.K. is really great.

01:42:11.060 | I don't know that there's what Joan Rivers is great.

01:42:15.140 | I don't know, you smile at that.

01:42:16.500 | But she's a beast of a comic.

01:42:18.300 | - I'm not aware of her standup actually.

01:42:19.820 | - She's a beast of a comic.

01:42:20.820 | Ask Rogue and ask any of them.

01:42:22.320 | Kinnison's great.

01:42:24.260 | - So what makes a great comic, do you think,

01:42:26.980 | in the history of comedy?

01:42:29.060 | Just like--

01:42:29.880 | - Said something at the moment in a way,

01:42:33.020 | found a way to communicate with people

01:42:35.680 | in the funniest possible way at that moment

01:42:38.220 | and illustrated larger truths about life in what they did.

01:42:43.220 | And I think that guys like Louis and Chappelle

01:42:46.960 | and Pryor and Kinnison and Hicks,

01:42:50.180 | people like Joan Rivers have done that.

01:42:53.200 | And even modern people,

01:42:55.040 | people like Maria Bamford's an amazing comedian.

01:42:57.760 | It's just a different style of comedy per se,

01:43:00.460 | but she's an amazing comedian.

01:43:01.960 | Cat Williams is an amazing comedian.

01:43:05.540 | She really is.

01:43:06.380 | - Does he have any,

01:43:08.020 | well see, one of the things you kind of mentioned,

01:43:10.040 | the communities you mentioned,

01:43:11.180 | they were kind of fearless in saying

01:43:12.780 | the difficult things that needs to be said.

01:43:15.280 | Cat Williams is more, I don't remember his comedy,

01:43:17.760 | but I think it's just more wild out there.

01:43:20.540 | - Well, to an extent, but you can watch it.

01:43:21.960 | He's got stuff, he talks about stuff.

01:43:23.600 | He talks about race brilliantly.

01:43:24.980 | He talks about America brilliantly.

01:43:26.640 | No, I think there's a lot of stuff there.

01:43:28.400 | - Of course, Chris Rock.

01:43:29.520 | - Of Chris Rock, of course.

01:43:30.580 | It's so hard, you can't really pick one.

01:43:32.280 | You just gotta, there's a class of people

01:43:35.080 | that throughout the history of this business,

01:43:37.020 | which is not that long of a history,

01:43:38.360 | it's pretty much within the last century,

01:43:40.660 | that have been really influential.

01:43:44.760 | Sometimes it's style, the way they deliver things.

01:43:47.020 | Sometimes it's substance of how they,

01:43:49.920 | what they're saying,

01:43:50.800 | or sometimes it's just a style of what they're saying.

01:43:53.000 | And we're only talking about standup comedians, right?

01:43:55.200 | So there's a million great comedians.

01:43:56.760 | I mean, if we're gonna talk about Jim Carrey

01:43:58.600 | and Adam Sandler and Chris Farley,

01:44:00.560 | I mean, these are brilliant.

01:44:01.760 | And those guys are bigger influences on comedy,

01:44:03.960 | I think, than standups, really, truly.

01:44:06.240 | So there's so many brilliant people in the business.

01:44:09.600 | - Who was for you influential, just the early on?

01:44:12.400 | - Hicks was influential, 'cause I'd watch Bill Hicks,

01:44:14.340 | and I'd be like, this guy's saying crazy shit on stage,

01:44:17.320 | and this is the only way you can get away with it

01:44:18.680 | is 'cause it's so funny.

01:44:20.200 | And he was calling out the military industrial complex,

01:44:23.720 | and he was talking about the first Gulf War.

01:44:25.340 | I remember he said a joke that I heard,

01:44:27.280 | it made me sit up straight.

01:44:28.120 | He goes, he was in Canada,

01:44:29.960 | and he said, "We had a war in the States."

01:44:31.240 | He was talking about the first Gulf War.

01:44:33.120 | And he said, "I was in the unenviable position

01:44:35.680 | "of being for the war, but against the troops."

01:44:38.920 | And to me, I love that joke.

01:44:40.640 | It was so funny to me.

01:44:41.540 | And I was like, oh, you can't get away with that anywhere

01:44:44.560 | other than standing on a stage.

01:44:46.700 | You could never say that in an office, really.

01:44:48.840 | And this was before it was like PC.

01:44:50.800 | And the other thing, I always knew that comedians

01:44:53.800 | had to say shit and have it be funny enough

01:44:56.840 | that you couldn't get away with it in polite society.

01:44:58.940 | That was the whole point.

01:44:59.920 | That was why it was a dark theater or a dark nightclub.

01:45:02.760 | That's why people had a few drinks.

01:45:03.960 | That's what the art form was.

01:45:05.240 | And that's why, so a guy like that was influential

01:45:08.200 | 'cause I started watching him.

01:45:09.840 | And then, of course, I loved SNL when I was a kid,

01:45:12.160 | and I would watch Chris Farley,

01:45:13.420 | and I would watch people like even John Belushi

01:45:17.040 | going back in the day,

01:45:17.920 | but I'd watch Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell

01:45:20.040 | and all these guys.

01:45:20.880 | I mean, there's so many funny people,

01:45:23.160 | but Bill Hicks was kind of funny.

01:45:24.820 | And then Patrice O'Neill was probably my favorite comedian

01:45:27.760 | who's made me laugh more than anybody else.

01:45:31.240 | - I think it was you, actually, that,

01:45:34.000 | maybe on your podcast, we're talking about Patrice O'Neill,

01:45:36.360 | that he was actually vicious to others.

01:45:40.160 | - I think he was a little mean to other people,

01:45:42.040 | but he was very good to people that he liked, I guess.

01:45:44.060 | I think he was like, I mean, he wasn't,

01:45:46.360 | and I've never met him, I have no inside info,

01:45:48.500 | but from what I've heard, he was like no nonsense guy.

01:45:51.640 | He just said what he wanted to say.

01:45:53.200 | But I think in terms of comedians,

01:45:55.720 | I don't know of anyone funnier than Patrice O'Neill

01:45:58.440 | who said, in modern times,

01:46:01.200 | that said more about our society than him.

01:46:03.180 | I mean, he was just a brilliantly funny guy.

01:46:05.320 | On the radio, he was funny.

01:46:06.960 | On his specials, he was funny.

01:46:08.900 | Everywhere, he was funny.

01:46:10.160 | - And there's something else to be said

01:46:11.520 | about the whole medium of comedians doing podcasts.

01:46:14.960 | - Yeah.

01:46:15.800 | - 'Cause that's, it unlocks a weird, special,

01:46:18.280 | new thing that changed everything.

01:46:20.320 | I mean, Rogan started with that.

01:46:22.440 | - Yeah.

01:46:23.260 | - You're doing that.

01:46:25.400 | - I think that's a whole 'nother form of stand-ups.

01:46:28.840 | - Yeah.

01:46:29.800 | - The ones that have a lot to say.

01:46:31.960 | Almost like we get to witness the process

01:46:36.580 | of the creation of the jokes in a way, or the mind.

01:46:39.600 | - Right.

01:46:40.440 | - The sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes.

01:46:43.960 | It's just--

01:46:45.140 | - Comedians relate to social media.

01:46:47.160 | Comedians, comedy's a, it's a performance-based medium.

01:46:52.160 | So it's about getting up and doing it,

01:46:53.960 | getting up in a club, getting up in a theater,

01:46:55.920 | getting up in a bar, getting up wherever you can get up.

01:46:58.800 | And comedy, for years, was about performance.

01:47:03.080 | And then on the higher end,

01:47:04.120 | it was about movies and TV shows.

01:47:06.560 | But we were very slow to get on YouTube.

01:47:09.600 | We were very slow to adapt to technology.

01:47:11.960 | We were very slow to monetize anything

01:47:15.120 | we did on the internet.

01:47:16.480 | So podcasting was a way for comics and funny people

01:47:19.960 | to kinda get into that space, start earning money,

01:47:23.680 | and now, because of the pandemic,

01:47:25.160 | it's really become essential.

01:47:27.040 | And it helps you, and even without the pandemic,

01:47:29.120 | it was where people,

01:47:31.080 | it was how you were building a fan base.

01:47:32.680 | And that's like, you know,

01:47:34.280 | but comics were very reticent to embrace social media at all

01:47:36.920 | because they thought it was cheap and they didn't like it.

01:47:39.880 | And they thought the people on it were idiots

01:47:41.500 | and were unfunny, and it was just a blatant,

01:47:43.640 | you know, whatever it was, whether it was a money grab,

01:47:45.680 | or it was just too commercial,

01:47:47.480 | and in a sense where they're like,

01:47:48.800 | "Hey, look at me."

01:47:49.800 | Like, it was just goofy, right?

01:47:52.800 | And then comics, I think, got displaced

01:47:56.760 | because all the YouTubers came in

01:47:58.680 | and all the social media stars came in,

01:48:00.400 | and they really knocked comics off

01:48:03.100 | because now people are much more,

01:48:04.920 | like if you ask anyone under 30

01:48:06.200 | who their favorite comedian is, they say David Dobrik.

01:48:08.960 | And there's nothing wrong with that.

01:48:09.800 | David's a funny guy, but like what you,

01:48:13.080 | you know, not especially to me a ton, but that's okay.

01:48:17.480 | I don't, you know, but he makes people laugh,

01:48:19.800 | so he's funny.

01:48:21.640 | But he's what people, you know, that's a comedian now.

01:48:24.760 | So comics got beat by other people

01:48:28.040 | coming into a digital space before they did,

01:48:31.520 | laying the groundwork and taking it over,

01:48:35.000 | and now comics are just trying to stay alive.

01:48:38.480 | Like even my podcast, which is, people really like it,

01:48:41.320 | thank God, and I love doing it.

01:48:43.360 | - The Tim Dillon Show.

01:48:44.520 | - Well, thank you.

01:48:45.420 | I was late, you know?

01:48:49.000 | I mean, I was, I just, you know,

01:48:50.760 | I've been podcasting for a long time,

01:48:52.200 | but really dedicating myself

01:48:53.480 | and putting the resources behind it, I was late to it.

01:48:55.640 | Like I was like, hey, I'm telling jokes on stage,

01:48:58.120 | which is great, but I should have been allocating more time

01:49:00.560 | to building an infrastructure online,

01:49:02.360 | and I wasn't doing it, and a lot of comics weren't doing it.

01:49:04.660 | Funny comics weren't doing it.

01:49:06.400 | Comics that should be doing it,

01:49:08.080 | and I think when the pandemic ends,

01:49:09.320 | a lot of comics will just keep doing live standup,

01:49:12.200 | but I will keep, obviously I'm gonna go back on the road

01:49:14.640 | and do live standup, but I will keep doing this podcast

01:49:16.640 | and building digitally too.

01:49:17.480 | - But you're also exploring ideas.

01:49:19.280 | You're doing like short videos and so on.

01:49:22.120 | You're trying to look for different mediums

01:49:24.320 | of how to be funny. - I wanna be funny everywhere.

01:49:27.360 | I wanna be funny everywhere.

01:49:28.280 | I love making things too.

01:49:29.520 | My producer, Ben Avery, is like a brilliant editor

01:49:33.200 | and comedic mind, even though he's not a standup.

01:49:36.120 | He's able to, he understands funny,

01:49:38.120 | he understands what makes me funny.

01:49:39.240 | We're able to make these really, I mean,

01:49:41.960 | some of those videos, they're just brilliant little videos,

01:49:44.040 | even though they're tiny little videos,

01:49:45.440 | they're fucking as funny as anything,

01:49:47.580 | and it's not me, it's me working with somebody else

01:49:50.920 | to make something really great,

01:49:52.880 | and it's that relationship that's very important.

01:49:56.200 | - Well, in some sense, the medium of a short video

01:49:59.400 | is a challenge, just like the medium of a short tweet.

01:50:02.240 | - Of course. - Of how to say something.

01:50:04.960 | I mean, whatever the flavor is of what's in your heart,

01:50:08.980 | what's in your mind, how to say it,

01:50:10.440 | whether it's the goal is funny or something,

01:50:13.640 | or just an express an idea.

01:50:15.840 | I think the whole thing that's important to us

01:50:18.240 | is that it's an extension of,

01:50:20.220 | really like an extension of your friendship in a way.

01:50:22.340 | Like, are you guys laughing at it?

01:50:24.580 | Are you guys making each other laugh about this idea?

01:50:27.940 | And if that's the case,

01:50:29.220 | other people are going to laugh at it.

01:50:31.860 | I think so much of the old medium

01:50:33.900 | was like everything was top-down.

01:50:35.860 | Okay, pitch me this idea, I pitch it to the showrunner,

01:50:38.720 | they pitch it to the network,

01:50:39.920 | they pitch it to this, to that, to the, you know.

01:50:42.020 | Standards and practices, sales,

01:50:43.820 | and we gotta go through everything.

01:50:45.480 | Now it's just like, are me and a few buddies,

01:50:48.000 | or even just one buddy, laughing at this idea?

01:50:51.220 | Does it captivate us?

01:50:52.700 | And do we see it visually?

01:50:55.060 | And also a great line from Roseanne,

01:50:58.580 | a guy, not Roseanne, but a guy that worked on Roseanne,

01:51:01.920 | the old Roseanne, the great one, he said,

01:51:04.260 | "Is it funny with the sound off?"

01:51:06.660 | - Right. - That's what we try to do.

01:51:07.820 | - That's brilliant. - Is it funny with the sound off?

01:51:10.060 | When you see me in the dumb things,

01:51:11.900 | or me in the Meghan McCain, or me in the thing,

01:51:15.140 | is it funny with the sound off?

01:51:15.980 | And if it's funny with the sound off,

01:51:17.500 | you have a good starting point.

01:51:18.620 | - That's hilarious, 'cause you,

01:51:20.820 | I would say you're one of the people,

01:51:22.860 | 'cause most people are not funny with the sound off,

01:51:25.180 | most comedians, you, Will Ferrell's another example of that.

01:51:28.880 | There's something about when I click on one of your videos,

01:51:32.620 | it's funny, just like the first thing I see,

01:51:35.140 | just your face.

01:51:36.820 | - We, well, thank you, that's very sweet.

01:51:39.060 | But I mean, that's, thank God,

01:51:40.300 | I mean, that's what we try to do, right?

01:51:41.660 | We're trying to be funny.

01:51:42.980 | So we're trying to be funny.

01:51:45.060 | - Can we talk about love a little bit?

01:51:46.580 | - Sure.

01:51:48.140 | - So you came out of the closet as being gay

01:51:52.420 | when you were 25.

01:51:53.700 | - Yeah, it was late, very late.

01:51:55.780 | - Very late.

01:51:56.620 | Before then. - By today's standards.

01:51:58.260 | - During and after, how has your view on love evolved?

01:52:03.260 | - Interesting.

01:52:05.740 | It's so hard to say, because I would,

01:52:08.300 | I'd like to make a very Disney-fied statement

01:52:12.260 | about like that you can't be in love secretively.

01:52:15.740 | You should be honest.

01:52:16.700 | Love should all be about honesty,

01:52:17.860 | but that's not true, right?

01:52:19.740 | There's people that are in love

01:52:21.460 | that are lying to everyone else,

01:52:23.660 | but they're deeply in love.

01:52:25.900 | I would love to say something like,

01:52:27.060 | honesty is an ingredient for love, you know?

01:52:30.180 | But I don't know, maybe honesty with each other.

01:52:33.060 | But I mean, I think there's a lot of people in the world

01:52:35.820 | that aren't honest.

01:52:37.020 | My view on love is super important.

01:52:39.420 | I think that it's, a lot of society in America

01:52:43.500 | is all about love.

01:52:44.860 | We don't tend to focus on other things

01:52:49.060 | in terms of like, you know, friendship

01:52:52.020 | or sustainability of that.

01:52:54.780 | 'Cause I think that a lot,

01:52:55.660 | I know a lot of people in relationships

01:52:57.140 | where it's like, I don't know, they're not,

01:52:59.660 | they are, they love each other,

01:53:01.220 | but like, it's also a rock solid couple

01:53:04.020 | because they are, they're very compatible

01:53:07.740 | in many other ways.

01:53:09.060 | - Right.

01:53:09.900 | - So I think that like-- - They're friends.

01:53:10.740 | - They have, right.

01:53:11.620 | - I see friendship and love as the same thing.

01:53:14.020 | - There's just parts of it that are, right?

01:53:15.300 | So it's like, I look at it as like,

01:53:18.340 | there is, there needs to be more than just like that,

01:53:21.740 | like amazing like chemistry or physical attraction

01:53:25.900 | that is this chemical thing that happens.

01:53:28.620 | There should be like some underlying.

01:53:30.460 | I mean, again, that's from what I,

01:53:32.860 | that's what I've observed as really long lasting,

01:53:36.140 | successful relationships.

01:53:37.620 | - Well, is there something about coming out

01:53:40.220 | that was, that you took away that you remember

01:53:45.220 | as being profound and insightful and so on?

01:53:48.540 | - Yes, that it was my, that I, it wasn't society,

01:53:51.460 | it was me.

01:53:52.720 | So there were kids that were out in my high school

01:53:55.220 | that I waited years later to do it.

01:53:58.600 | That was no one's fault but my own.

01:54:00.500 | So I was taking a cowardly way out

01:54:02.660 | and a lot of people, so I could blame society

01:54:05.820 | or like, oh, I lived in a conservative area

01:54:07.860 | and I grew up in a, you should take responsibility

01:54:11.020 | for your own decisions.

01:54:11.860 | And if you're being cowardly,

01:54:12.780 | admit that you're being cowardly.

01:54:14.500 | So that's what I took out of it is that

01:54:16.220 | it's not society's fault that you chose to be a coward.

01:54:19.220 | Society will never be perfect.

01:54:21.100 | You have to be honest when you're ready to be honest

01:54:23.580 | or however you want to be honest, but it's not somebody,

01:54:26.100 | too much now is it's everyone else's fault

01:54:28.460 | that you didn't take, make a hard choice or a hard decision.

01:54:31.620 | So that's kind of what I took out of it.

01:54:33.740 | - So now in retrospect, you see yourself as,

01:54:36.340 | or being afraid.

01:54:38.220 | Do you think at the time?

01:54:40.780 | - Well, I wanted people to like me,

01:54:42.140 | which is the disease of humanity, right?

01:54:45.100 | Is that we want to be liked.

01:54:46.220 | And what happens is if you want people to like you

01:54:48.820 | and love you, even you want people

01:54:50.900 | to feel comfortable with you.

01:54:52.100 | - And those were people like your family?

01:54:53.780 | - Friends, more.

01:54:55.140 | My family, I would always,

01:54:56.420 | could always throw in the street, but I'm kidding.

01:54:59.600 | I mean, but I am not.

01:55:01.860 | But my friends, my circle of friends,

01:55:03.700 | which were my family at the time,

01:55:05.300 | when you're a senior,

01:55:06.860 | when you're 10th, 11th grade in high school,

01:55:08.420 | your friends are your family, you know what I mean?

01:55:10.660 | Like that's your, so you don't want to do anything

01:55:12.820 | that puts you on the outside of the circle.

01:55:15.300 | - So thinking back to that fear,

01:55:16.780 | is there things you're afraid of now

01:55:19.420 | that you're not doing, you're afraid to do?

01:55:21.940 | - I'm afraid of all kinds of things.

01:55:24.020 | I'm afraid of not being good at my job,

01:55:26.580 | not being funny, letting people down,

01:55:29.900 | not putting out products that are good,

01:55:33.260 | whether it's the podcast every week or standup

01:55:36.020 | or the videos, like I'm afraid of like,

01:55:37.780 | there's a ton of people that really enjoy what we do.

01:55:40.160 | So when you're in that position,

01:55:41.620 | you're nervous that you're going to start doing things

01:55:44.540 | that they don't like.

01:55:45.380 | So the new things you want to do,

01:55:46.900 | the evolution you want to do,

01:55:48.500 | you want to make sure you're evolving in the right way.

01:55:50.820 | You want to make sure that you're doing things

01:55:52.460 | that are consistent with why people liked you.

01:55:54.540 | But also you don't want to put yourself in a box

01:55:56.660 | and limit what you can be going forward.

01:55:59.800 | So like I had a talk with the CEO of NBC Universal once,

01:56:02.980 | I was doing some internal sketch for them.

01:56:05.740 | And I was playing like a cab driver and he was a,

01:56:08.660 | and he's not the current CEO, but he's a former CEO.

01:56:10.820 | And I said to him, what's the hardest part

01:56:11.940 | of running a corporation of this size?

01:56:14.820 | And he said something very interesting.

01:56:17.100 | He said, the hardest part is maximizing

01:56:18.980 | the current profit model of what you have

01:56:22.460 | at the same time, getting ready, getting ready,

01:56:25.180 | getting the company ready for where it's going to be

01:56:26.660 | in five years.

01:56:27.900 | He said, those are often at odds.

01:56:29.740 | And that's the toughest thing.

01:56:30.920 | He goes, 'cause I could just bang out everything

01:56:33.120 | I got to do right now.

01:56:34.040 | And we're going to make a lot of money doing this,

01:56:35.780 | but am I devoting enough resources into digital

01:56:37.820 | so that in five years when that's where everything lives,

01:56:39.860 | are we competitive in that space?

01:56:42.140 | So as funny as I am now, hopefully to people

01:56:44.820 | and a lot of the things that I want to do now,

01:56:46.460 | I'm going, what am I, what groundwork am I not laying

01:56:49.820 | for three to five years down the road

01:56:51.980 | so that I can be adapting to the trends

01:56:55.580 | that are important then in terms of not so much

01:56:58.360 | the comedic trends, but like the technological trends.

01:57:01.540 | Like what is the, what is the, you know,

01:57:04.340 | I should have done podcasting earlier.

01:57:06.220 | What, should I have a bigger presence on TikTok?

01:57:09.100 | Should I have a bigger presence here?

01:57:10.220 | Should I have a, should I be on Twitch?

01:57:12.100 | Should I be doing this?

01:57:12.940 | Should I be doing that?

01:57:13.760 | What am I not doing that I should be doing

01:57:15.540 | that I'll regret not doing?

01:57:17.260 | And those are the conversations I think I have

01:57:20.380 | in my own head all the time.

01:57:21.220 | - And I guess there's parallels to coming out as gay

01:57:23.340 | or just parallels in like a career paths you're taking,

01:57:27.140 | all that, that's ultimately just fear.

01:57:30.000 | - It's fear.

01:57:30.840 | - Yeah.

01:57:31.660 | - It's the fear of, you know, the best thing that happened

01:57:34.640 | in my career was that I came to LA.

01:57:37.060 | I didn't have an idea of what was going to happen.

01:57:41.760 | I met somebody who was really committed

01:57:45.720 | to making funny things.

01:57:48.400 | That we just wanted to be funny.

01:57:50.060 | No one would let us be funny.

01:57:51.240 | We didn't have Comedy Central letting us be funny.

01:57:53.880 | We didn't have HBO.

01:57:54.800 | We didn't have Netflix.

01:57:55.720 | We just had a garage and a phone in the beginning

01:57:58.140 | and then a camera and then a thing.

01:58:00.240 | And we just wanted to be funny.

01:58:01.740 | And that was the greatest risk really I took

01:58:04.020 | because I was like,

01:58:04.860 | "Well, I don't know what else is going to happen right now

01:58:06.960 | but I just want to be funny."

01:58:08.680 | And funny saved my life, right?

01:58:10.200 | I mean, funny got me out of drugs.

01:58:11.620 | Funny probably got me out of the closet.

01:58:12.960 | Funny was the thing that I was able to do

01:58:15.000 | that made everything okay in my own head.

01:58:16.840 | So I was like, "As long as I'm being funny,

01:58:18.160 | something good will happen."

01:58:19.060 | So we did that.

01:58:20.400 | And then something really cool happened

01:58:21.720 | that we were able to do a lot of cool things.

01:58:23.760 | But you know, that's what it is.

01:58:25.700 | It's fear that keeps you

01:58:27.000 | from being the better version of yourself.

01:58:29.400 | - Your mom, I mean, you have so many complicated,

01:58:33.600 | fascinating parts of your story.

01:58:35.000 | - Oh, thank you.

01:58:35.960 | - Your mom, as you were growing up, suffered.

01:58:39.280 | - Schizophrenic, yeah.

01:58:40.120 | - Well, from mental illness, yes, schizophrenia.

01:58:43.520 | Can you tell her story

01:58:44.800 | and how that relationship has changed over the years?

01:58:46.960 | - Yeah, well, she was always eccentric

01:58:49.200 | and always, you know,

01:58:50.040 | the terms for schizophrenia in an Irish Catholic household

01:58:52.780 | where we didn't talk about anything

01:58:54.000 | were eccentric, fun, she's fun.

01:58:57.420 | - There's a theme to this conversation.

01:58:58.260 | - Unpredictable.

01:58:59.860 | She's a live wire.

01:59:04.860 | Any of the words you would use to describe somebody

01:59:06.740 | who was a fucking lunatic, but you wouldn't say that.

01:59:09.880 | - Positive spin.

01:59:12.700 | - Right.

01:59:13.540 | She started experiencing symptoms

01:59:17.060 | probably early on in her life,

01:59:18.260 | but she also, I think, started really manifesting them

01:59:22.620 | when I was in my mid-teens, so like 14, 13, 14 area.

01:59:27.620 | And she got really, really bad.

01:59:30.960 | And then I think she was institutionalized

01:59:33.040 | about 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago.

01:59:35.880 | And she could really no longer live on her own.

01:59:37.740 | She was unable to go to work.

01:59:39.520 | She was unable to function.

01:59:40.880 | So I visit her when I can.

01:59:42.040 | Obviously, I'm not in New York.

01:59:42.920 | Whenever I go to New York, I visit her.

01:59:44.400 | She's aware of what I do, my career,

01:59:46.120 | and everything like that.

01:59:47.000 | You know, she has good days and bad days,

01:59:48.360 | but, you know, mental illness is a thing.

01:59:50.760 | It's very tough.

01:59:51.600 | We don't talk about it as a society.

01:59:53.140 | People with mental problems don't get that much attention.

01:59:57.180 | We tend to think that they did something wrong

02:00:00.300 | or that they deserve it or that they are, you know,

02:00:03.260 | to be ignored, and we don't devote a lot of resources

02:00:06.180 | into it, which is unfortunate

02:00:07.300 | because then you have the junk gurus come in and go like,

02:00:09.980 | "Let's diagnose your mental illness off Instagram."

02:00:12.500 | And it's like, that's not the move.

02:00:14.260 | Yeah.

02:00:15.980 | - Do you love her?

02:00:17.500 | - I do, I do.

02:00:19.240 | I love her, but I also remember her that isn't her now.

02:00:24.240 | And when someone has mental illness that's severe,

02:00:28.040 | you make peace with their death before they die.

02:00:31.240 | - Wow, yeah.

02:00:32.120 | - Because the part of them that you love and remember,

02:00:36.400 | a lot of cases is not evident or obvious.

02:00:41.400 | Now, my mother's still a loving person that I love,

02:00:44.100 | but the fun, her ability to be present

02:00:48.680 | in the moment and to not, you know,

02:00:50.700 | that is lost with the progression of her illness

02:00:54.960 | so that you still love her.

02:00:56.320 | And I mean, again, you know, your parents,

02:00:58.960 | you know, the time horizons you have

02:01:00.440 | with your parents are unknown.

02:01:01.660 | People don't know.

02:01:02.500 | You could, you know, I have friends

02:01:03.320 | that their parents were in their lives

02:01:04.680 | for their entire life.

02:01:06.120 | And I have friends whose parents were in their life,

02:01:07.800 | but my mother was a very, she knew what I was.

02:01:10.120 | When I was a little kid, I was an actor.

02:01:11.440 | When I was like six to 12,

02:01:13.040 | my mother knew that I was a performer.

02:01:14.420 | She knew what I was and what I'd ultimately do.

02:01:16.400 | She recognized that in me.

02:01:17.600 | And when I said to her, I want to audition for shows,

02:01:19.320 | I want to be on stage, I want to be on this,

02:01:20.580 | I want to do this, she let me do it

02:01:23.040 | because she knew who I was and she didn't want to get

02:01:25.480 | in the way of me being a human being,

02:01:27.640 | a fully realized person at six.

02:01:30.680 | So that's probably the best thing a parent can do for a kid

02:01:33.440 | is let them be who they are.

02:01:35.960 | And my mother did that.

02:01:37.760 | So that, I mean, that's good.

02:01:39.200 | We ate too much fast food.

02:01:42.800 | There were negatives, but she did let me be who I was.

02:01:44.880 | - That's why you want to throw them out into the street.

02:01:46.840 | - Yeah, sometimes.

02:01:48.160 | - But coming to accept the mortality of her,

02:01:55.840 | I guess, identity as you remember it from childhood,

02:02:01.060 | do you ponder your own mortality?

02:02:04.320 | Are you afraid of death?

02:02:06.160 | - I'm afraid of death.

02:02:07.000 | I don't like the idea of death, but I know it's happening.

02:02:09.960 | You know, I know it's going to happen eventually.

02:02:12.440 | I don't love it. - Do you think about it?

02:02:14.240 | - I think about, I want to do some good stuff

02:02:15.800 | that people can look back at.

02:02:17.000 | And I think I'm proud of the show

02:02:18.400 | where if people look back at the show,

02:02:19.880 | I don't know how comedy ages or whatever,

02:02:21.640 | but like, I think I put out a lot of stuff

02:02:23.480 | and I want to continue to put out stuff

02:02:24.840 | and I want to put out a few specials

02:02:26.120 | that people can look back at and go,

02:02:27.800 | oh, this guy was really funny in this really crazy,

02:02:30.400 | you know, he lived in the latter part of this century

02:02:32.840 | when all this shit was going on

02:02:34.000 | and he kind of made fun of it.

02:02:35.680 | And he did something to make people's lives a little better

02:02:40.680 | just by having, you know, a few laughs, you know?

02:02:43.720 | - What do you think about, this is something like

02:02:46.240 | in the podcast context, do you think you'll have

02:02:50.680 | just one or two or three shows out of thousands maybe

02:02:55.160 | that are like the truly special ones?

02:02:57.000 | - That's probably the case.

02:02:57.960 | - Or do you think it's an entirety of the body of work?

02:03:00.760 | - I think people will take 10 minute clips

02:03:02.980 | from all different shows and put them together and--

02:03:05.640 | - It's a highlight?

02:03:06.480 | - Yeah, like a highlight reel of just like,

02:03:08.080 | these are like the best things that he's ever done

02:03:10.960 | or the best rants he's ever had, the best things, whatever.

02:03:13.480 | - So the legacy would be that this was an important voice

02:03:17.040 | in a very weird time of human history.

02:03:19.720 | - I would hope that that's part of it

02:03:21.640 | and I hope that I continue to be, you know,

02:03:24.080 | you say important, I say funny,

02:03:25.960 | but hopefully I continue to be a voice.

02:03:28.460 | And that's what I think, when I think about death,

02:03:30.520 | I think about like, what did people come on earth to do?

02:03:33.480 | And I think I came, I think my main purpose on this planet,

02:03:37.320 | other than to experience whatever love or, you know,

02:03:41.040 | worthiness or whatever is to make, to entertain people.

02:03:44.640 | And there's a lot of people in comedy right now

02:03:46.200 | that are not entertainers and that's really the problem.

02:03:49.800 | But, and they got into comedy sort of the way that,

02:03:51.880 | you know, you can walk into the wrong store in a mall

02:03:55.440 | and then not realize you're in the wrong store

02:03:57.540 | and try on a bunch of clothes and then go,

02:03:58.840 | fuck, I wasted my whole afternoon.

02:04:00.920 | But I think I've always kind of been an entertainer

02:04:02.720 | and that's what I wanna do.

02:04:04.140 | - There's unfortunately, sadly,

02:04:07.000 | a lot of people that look up to you.

02:04:08.920 | - That is a horrible thing.

02:04:10.880 | - But life is a nightmare.

02:04:12.360 | - Yeah.

02:04:13.200 | If you were to give them advice, young folks,

02:04:17.840 | people in college, maybe even high school,

02:04:20.320 | but people in their 20s about what to do with their life,

02:04:24.440 | whether it's career, whether it's just life in general,

02:04:27.120 | what would you say?

02:04:27.960 | - Ignore everyone, make a few good friends,

02:04:31.360 | truly have honest conversations with yourself about your,

02:04:39.080 | when do you feel the most alive?

02:04:42.520 | Figure that out.

02:04:44.360 | When and how do you feel the most alive?

02:04:47.280 | Figure that out.

02:04:50.280 | Try to figure out a job or a career

02:04:52.160 | that can replicate that feeling.

02:04:53.860 | Don't listen to anyone.

02:04:57.440 | Don't listen to your parents.

02:04:58.840 | Don't listen to the gurus on the internet.

02:05:01.140 | Don't listen to me.

02:05:02.520 | Don't listen to anyone.

02:05:03.780 | Figure out, you know, where you feel the most alive.

02:05:07.500 | Where do you feel excited?

02:05:09.140 | Where does your pulse quicken?

02:05:11.500 | What do you feel matters?

02:05:13.680 | When you're in a situation, do you feel like it matters?

02:05:17.320 | What situation was that?

02:05:18.620 | What got you excited?

02:05:20.520 | What thing did you walk into where you looked around

02:05:24.480 | and were taken back and you're like, wow, this is amazing,

02:05:27.200 | and I'm filled with awe?

02:05:29.000 | If you can figure out a life where you can excite yourself,

02:05:34.080 | you might not use drugs or alcohol or a sex addiction

02:05:37.980 | or gambling or irresponsibility.

02:05:41.140 | You might not have to get your fucking kicks

02:05:44.180 | in very destructive places

02:05:46.460 | if you can get them in a productive place.

02:05:49.540 | You had a pretty weaving life

02:05:53.020 | that's full of mistakes and so on.

02:05:56.900 | Many mistakes.

02:05:58.100 | Is that, are mistakes a bug or a feature?

02:06:02.260 | Like, do you recommend embrace the mistakes,

02:06:05.000 | like make a bunch of them?

02:06:06.080 | Depends what they are, right?

02:06:07.520 | So--

02:06:08.360 | Well, you've had the full spectrum.

02:06:09.960 | I've had a lot, but a lot of mine could have sunk me.

02:06:12.680 | Right.

02:06:13.520 | Like, they sound like fun when I talk about them,

02:06:15.280 | but they actually could have sunk me.

02:06:17.800 | And they were all part of what made me funny,

02:06:21.440 | but I don't know, I would never tell anyone else

02:06:25.040 | to just light their life on fire

02:06:26.800 | and hope it works out on the other end.

02:06:28.680 | It would be pretty irresponsible.

02:06:30.800 | But hey, at the end of the day, it's like,

02:06:34.760 | you're gonna, we get, there's, you know,

02:06:39.120 | I think one of my themes is that there's too much,

02:06:41.700 | we give the power, we think we have too,

02:06:44.480 | the power of choice has been elevated on our society

02:06:48.000 | to an unhealthy degree.

02:06:50.480 | I think people are, I think you could get

02:06:53.080 | really good at something,

02:06:53.940 | but you're born with a certain aptitude.

02:06:56.000 | It might be to be a deal maker.

02:06:57.760 | Might be to be an athlete.

02:06:58.920 | It might be to be an artist.

02:07:00.000 | It might be to be a romantic

02:07:01.680 | and just fall in and out of love, in and out of love,

02:07:03.280 | in and out of love.

02:07:04.120 | It might be to be like a world traveler.

02:07:05.960 | But whatever you are, I think you are.

02:07:08.840 | I think that there's something about you

02:07:10.440 | that makes you something.

02:07:12.040 | And if you can figure it out and then refine,

02:07:13.720 | you're not gonna be good at it, per se,

02:07:15.800 | but if you're an athlete, it might not mean

02:07:18.400 | that you're going to be a great athlete in the history,

02:07:20.620 | but it might mean you're the best coach anyone's ever had,

02:07:22.840 | or you're the person that builds a local scene

02:07:25.760 | for young athletes or whatever.

02:07:27.480 | If you are a really good deal maker,

02:07:30.120 | it doesn't mean you're gonna be Warren Buffett,

02:07:31.480 | but it might mean you're somebody who enjoys

02:07:33.960 | making deals all the time and things like that.

02:07:37.120 | If you're an entertainer,

02:07:38.240 | it might mean that you are an entertainer.

02:07:40.960 | It might mean that you are in the world of entertainment

02:07:43.240 | because you love it so much that if you lack the skillset

02:07:46.840 | to really pursue it on a degree, you just wanna be it.

02:07:50.440 | There's a thing inside of you that makes you what you are.

02:07:55.880 | I look at certain people and I go,

02:07:57.000 | you were born to be that thing.

02:07:58.600 | - And the whole purpose is to find it.

02:08:01.280 | - I was a juror on a murder trial in Long Island,

02:08:04.000 | and the woman who's the DA, I'm like,

02:08:05.960 | you were born to do this.

02:08:07.320 | You were born to put murderers away,

02:08:10.240 | and this guy killed the mother of his children,

02:08:12.360 | and he was a bad guy, but I was like,

02:08:13.680 | you are really good at what you do.

02:08:15.600 | She has a strong belief in whatever her moral code is

02:08:18.600 | and what her justice and ethics are,

02:08:20.520 | and she wants to communicate that to people.

02:08:22.120 | She was very good at doing what she did.

02:08:25.880 | I don't know the facts of the case.

02:08:27.040 | I didn't really listen.

02:08:27.880 | He seemed guilty, so I just voted guilty.

02:08:29.680 | But I didn't really listen to her,

02:08:31.920 | but I heard the shape of her mouth was very bovine,

02:08:34.280 | like a cow, and it conferred a certain level

02:08:36.880 | of expertise that I enjoyed.

02:08:39.120 | - Well, it's funny.

02:08:39.960 | I mean, you could see you're half joking.

02:08:43.000 | - Yes, but I'm serious.

02:08:43.840 | - You can often see that people just,

02:08:46.800 | they found their place, they found their role.

02:08:48.880 | - They found their thing.

02:08:49.720 | - They found their thing, and that's kind of

02:08:51.320 | the purpose of life, and once you are

02:08:53.120 | in a place that seems sticky,

02:08:55.800 | like the place that seems right, you know,

02:08:59.400 | that's one of the problems with the generation

02:09:01.160 | that you're speaking to, is there's always a feeling

02:09:03.400 | like I should keep exploring, keep exploring,

02:09:05.660 | but it's okay to stay in a place

02:09:08.080 | that you found that works.

02:09:09.040 | - Yeah, and listen, sometimes the best place you'll find

02:09:12.080 | is when people are like, when did you feel

02:09:14.680 | really excited and alive?

02:09:15.940 | It's like doing nothing.

02:09:18.040 | - Right, yeah.

02:09:18.880 | (laughing)

02:09:19.720 | - You know?

02:09:20.540 | And the other thing, it's like some people

02:09:21.720 | are gonna be like, I feel really excited and alive

02:09:23.560 | when I'm laying in my backyard in a hammock,

02:09:25.920 | and I just want to have the simplest life

02:09:27.520 | and not have to do much, and I don't like doing anything,

02:09:30.240 | and I love laying around and going,

02:09:31.680 | wow, the sky looks good today.

02:09:33.600 | Bill Gates goes, the sky looks good today,

02:09:34.960 | let's shoot a missile into it.

02:09:36.320 | He wants to do shit, right?

02:09:37.580 | So it's like, in between that and nothing,

02:09:40.400 | you can find something.

02:09:42.040 | - But in that process, for you personally,

02:09:45.640 | I mean, for me, for others, I think there's a struggle.

02:09:49.520 | When Tim and Dylan looks in the mirror,

02:09:52.180 | do you love yourself or do you hate yourself?

02:09:54.860 | - Well, a lot of times I think I'm Amy Schumer,

02:09:56.780 | so I'm confused.

02:09:58.100 | (laughing)

02:09:59.940 | I'm a detente with myself all the time.

02:10:01.900 | I don't love myself or hate myself.

02:10:03.140 | Addicts have a very bad problem,

02:10:06.980 | where you can't just fall in love with yourself

02:10:09.180 | and you can't hate yourself.

02:10:10.500 | Both of them lead you to a negative place.

02:10:12.740 | You try to stay kind of even keel.

02:10:14.820 | I don't go like, hey man, you put out a video,

02:10:17.300 | you got all these views, things are great,

02:10:18.780 | you sold a bunch of tickets, let's fucking go out.

02:10:20.860 | Like, maybe let's, hey man, let's have that drink

02:10:23.140 | that you've been waiting for for 11 years.

02:10:25.060 | And I don't look at myself and go,

02:10:26.460 | you ate a burger yesterday, you're a piece of shit,

02:10:28.660 | you're horrible, you'll never get into the shape you want.

02:10:32.940 | Like, I try not to get too low or too high.

02:10:35.180 | Both of them are not good from my particular mind.

02:10:38.820 | - Okay, I gotta ask, we kind of spoke about 2021

02:10:42.900 | and you being potentially hopeful.

02:10:45.180 | Hopeful short-term, cynical long-term.

02:10:48.740 | - Yeah.

02:10:49.940 | - So let me ask, I forgot to ask, are you moving to Austin?

02:10:54.180 | - I don't know.

02:10:55.020 | I mean, I don't think so immediately.

02:10:57.580 | I love Joe, I love what he's trying to do down there.

02:10:59.820 | I'm appreciative of everything that he's done

02:11:02.260 | for not only me, but for comedy in general.

02:11:04.660 | And I think as things happen in Austin and unfold,

02:11:07.220 | it's such a political answer, but as things unfold,

02:11:09.700 | I will consider it more and more.

02:11:11.340 | But I mean, I think I got another year in LA.

02:11:14.460 | - So you've spoken so nicely about this magical place

02:11:18.660 | that is Los Angeles.

02:11:20.020 | - LA is very funny.

02:11:21.460 | - You think there's a place for comedy in LA?

02:11:24.460 | - Oh yeah.

02:11:25.860 | There will always be a place for comedy in LA.

02:11:27.380 | So there's gonna be a place for comedy in New York.

02:11:29.740 | I mean, the question is how thriving of a comedy scene

02:11:32.340 | is Austin gonna be?

02:11:33.580 | And Joe can probably make it one,

02:11:36.820 | but as of right now, it isn't.

02:11:38.620 | So that would be him doing that.

02:11:39.980 | - But the question, there's a lot of people

02:11:41.260 | escaping Los Angeles, but I know better about New York.

02:11:44.780 | There's a lot of really brilliant people.

02:11:46.580 | - Let them go.

02:11:47.420 | - There's other people.

02:11:48.660 | This is the thing.

02:11:49.500 | It's like, this is the fear thing.

02:11:50.660 | It's like, no, but all the brilliant people are leaving.

02:11:53.060 | There'll be other people and they'll fill their shoes

02:11:55.380 | the way that they've done throughout history.

02:11:57.660 | And I think that New York and LA,

02:11:59.420 | listen, maybe in five to 10 years,

02:12:00.860 | they're not the two cities.

02:12:02.340 | It would be real rough in five years

02:12:05.220 | when this pandemic's over for people in Australia to go,

02:12:08.420 | dude, you gotta go to America

02:12:10.420 | and you gotta visit Charleston and Austin.

02:12:13.180 | Stop, let's be adults here.

02:12:15.140 | Let's be adults.

02:12:16.220 | It's still gonna be New York and LA for a while.

02:12:18.660 | LA is an absolute hellscape,

02:12:21.900 | but I don't think you're gonna replace California

02:12:26.420 | with another place.

02:12:28.940 | And also, everyone's making decisions now

02:12:30.620 | because we're literally in the midst of a pandemic

02:12:32.420 | we've never had before.

02:12:34.020 | We've never had this before.

02:12:35.500 | Joe loved California up until the pandemic.

02:12:37.940 | He had problems with it.

02:12:39.220 | Like, we all have problems with it.

02:12:40.660 | There's a lot of benefits to being here.

02:12:42.420 | - I think a lot of us made pretty bad decisions in 2020

02:12:45.580 | because we were all locked up

02:12:46.860 | and stuck with our own thoughts.

02:12:48.940 | But, so it's funny there's parallels

02:12:52.060 | 'cause I don't necessarily,

02:12:53.460 | I'm obviously a fan of comedy,

02:12:55.940 | but I don't care where comics move.

02:12:59.060 | But there's a parallel move that's happening,

02:13:01.300 | set of decisions which do influence my decision-making,

02:13:04.380 | which is where to start a business that's tech-centered.

02:13:07.700 | And that's more about the San Francisco, Silicon Valley,

02:13:12.220 | and there is a lot of people leaving there.

02:13:15.220 | - That's where you're going to Austin.

02:13:16.780 | - Well, Austin, there's a, I think,

02:13:19.900 | there's a bunch of different places.

02:13:21.340 | Phoenix, there's Denver.

02:13:23.420 | - Austin will probably be a massive tech hub.

02:13:26.780 | Elon's there.

02:13:27.660 | It seems like it's all, everything about Austin says

02:13:30.700 | that it's going to be a massive tech hub.

02:13:33.220 | I just don't know if that means

02:13:34.220 | it'll be a massive comedy hub.

02:13:35.580 | It might.

02:13:36.420 | - I don't know if those two can actually coexist.

02:13:38.460 | It's interesting 'cause-

02:13:39.620 | - Yeah, I think, you know,

02:13:41.660 | comedy suffered in New York and LA

02:13:43.100 | when everyone got super rich.

02:13:45.380 | Like, you know, it just wasn't as cool.

02:13:47.140 | It's still much more fun on the road.

02:13:48.980 | It's still more fun to perform for people

02:13:50.580 | that want and need to laugh in strip malls

02:13:53.460 | than it is to perform for hedge fund managers

02:13:55.780 | and with their dates and, you know, Instagram models in LA.

02:13:59.260 | It's just what it is.

02:14:00.100 | Comedy on the road is much more fun.

02:14:01.700 | So maybe in the spirit of that, Austin becomes,

02:14:04.380 | but you know, if Austin is just colonized

02:14:06.980 | by tech bros and stuff, like, yeah, I mean, sure,

02:14:09.220 | sure it'll be fun and it'll be great.

02:14:10.740 | I think Joe's made LA a scene.

02:14:13.780 | So if anyone's gonna make Austin a scene, it's Joe.

02:14:16.380 | - Yeah, and I like the, on the Elon side,

02:14:20.140 | which is what I'm much more familiar with,

02:14:22.300 | the promise of the possibility of what that could become,

02:14:25.580 | because there's a lot of problems in Silicon Valley.

02:14:27.740 | And of course it might be naive to think that just

02:14:30.620 | because it's like the grass is greener thing,

02:14:33.100 | which is just because the place where you come from

02:14:36.260 | has a lot of problems,

02:14:37.460 | doesn't mean you can just create a new place

02:14:39.180 | that's not going to have those problems.

02:14:40.020 | - Yeah, there's homelessness in Austin.

02:14:41.620 | There are problems in Austin.

02:14:42.900 | I mean, I think that with, by the way,

02:14:44.900 | with the influx of very rich people to an area,

02:14:48.180 | sometimes that helps things,

02:14:49.220 | but sometimes it just makes things more polarizing

02:14:51.300 | and it puts a spotlight on those problems

02:14:53.500 | and makes those problems even bigger, right?

02:14:55.220 | So, I mean, I don't know that it's necessarily,

02:14:58.100 | it's hard to predict.

02:14:59.220 | I just know that LA right now is funny.

02:15:01.060 | It's funny that there's 15 year old TikTokers

02:15:03.060 | making millions of dollars dancing in a house

02:15:05.300 | while the world burns.

02:15:06.460 | That is very funny.

02:15:07.340 | - Well, it's for your style of humor, yes.

02:15:11.180 | The absurdity of the world.

02:15:12.260 | - It's funny that no one cares about Hollywood starlets

02:15:15.380 | and actresses and actors and everyone goes,

02:15:16.900 | "Hey, fuck you,"

02:15:17.740 | even though they've won three Academy Awards.

02:15:19.580 | They're all being replaced by just mediocre dancer,

02:15:23.060 | 15 year olds.

02:15:24.020 | I mean, it's like there's something hilarious

02:15:25.500 | about this city and it will burn in hell,

02:15:28.580 | but so will everything.

02:15:29.660 | So what are we talking about?

02:15:31.140 | - Yeah, eventually the sun will die out

02:15:34.580 | and we will all be gone unless we colonize

02:15:37.380 | outside of our solar system.

02:15:38.980 | But I just sit here.

02:15:42.900 | I'm struggling with this 'cause Boston,

02:15:45.300 | I'm currently at MIT,

02:15:46.500 | Boston doesn't feel like the right place to start

02:15:49.540 | a business in the tech sector.

02:15:52.660 | And so I'm choosing, I'm looking at San Francisco

02:15:54.820 | the way it is and I'm looking at Austin.

02:15:56.820 | - Oh, Austin, clearly.

02:15:58.340 | - So it seems clear, but it's such a difficult thing

02:16:02.260 | to predict what a place will look like in 10 years,

02:16:07.500 | in 15 years, in 20 years.

02:16:08.980 | - And it's so hard to predict if you'll like it or not

02:16:10.940 | until you're there.

02:16:12.100 | - And this is speaking to risk.

02:16:14.260 | There's not really a good reason for me to move anywhere.

02:16:18.220 | There's not a good reason to do anything in life.

02:16:21.180 | Part of me wants to just fucking do it

02:16:25.100 | and whatever and see what happens.

02:16:25.940 | - Do you like Boston?

02:16:27.060 | Do you like other things about Boston besides the tech thing?

02:16:30.820 | You like MIT.

02:16:31.660 | - At MIT, that's the problem.

02:16:33.420 | - Do you like the food in Boston?

02:16:35.340 | Do you eat food?

02:16:36.180 | - I haven't eaten food or been outside for years.

02:16:39.660 | - And I mean, that's probably the better version.

02:16:42.940 | But you're keto forever.

02:16:44.580 | You've been keto for a long time.

02:16:45.940 | - Yeah, keto fasting for a long time.

02:16:49.020 | 15 years fasting, eating once or twice a day.

02:16:54.020 | I haven't--

02:16:55.500 | - But no sugar ever?

02:16:57.420 | No like-- - No sugar.

02:16:58.580 | - And no pasta ever?

02:16:59.980 | No bread ever?

02:17:01.180 | - No pasta, no bread.

02:17:03.580 | Except like, so my source of--

02:17:06.340 | - You could kind of live anywhere

02:17:07.500 | because like going out is such a big part

02:17:10.140 | of what city you live in.

02:17:11.260 | And like, do you like the food there?

02:17:12.500 | Do you like the restaurants?

02:17:13.380 | Can you meet people, whatever.

02:17:14.420 | But it's like, you really can just kind of--

02:17:16.700 | - Yeah, so not married, no kids.

02:17:18.540 | - Right, you have freedom.

02:17:19.420 | I'm me too, I have freedom.

02:17:21.540 | - Yeah.

02:17:22.380 | - And that's, we have the curse of too many choices.

02:17:25.660 | - Right.

02:17:26.500 | - That's the thing.

02:17:27.340 | We have too many choices.

02:17:28.180 | We don't have somebody else going, what about like,

02:17:29.660 | we don't have to justify our decisions to anyone.

02:17:31.900 | So we can just kind of like let our minds run wild.

02:17:34.580 | - So you just gotta hone the instinct

02:17:37.500 | of just what feels right and just fucking do it.

02:17:40.980 | And that's it.

02:17:41.820 | - I think Austin would show down there and Elon down there.

02:17:42.980 | Austin seems like a real no brainer move for you.

02:17:46.460 | - To try, you know.

02:17:47.300 | - To try. - Why the hell not?

02:17:48.540 | - Why not? - Why not?

02:17:49.620 | - And then I think I should go to MIT.

02:17:51.520 | (laughing)

02:17:54.180 | Like, I mean, I think I should give those nerds

02:17:57.020 | a piece of my mind.

02:17:58.020 | - Yeah. - You should go to,

02:17:59.660 | I was in a Uber pool once with a kid from MIT

02:18:02.620 | and I was eating this thing from Bova's Bakery.

02:18:05.140 | I forget what it was.

02:18:06.060 | It was like a, it's so good.

02:18:08.740 | I don't know.

02:18:09.580 | You don't know Bova's Bakery, right?

02:18:10.700 | Yeah, it's in Boston, it's famous.

02:18:12.300 | I was eating a thing and I was like covered in chocolate.

02:18:14.260 | This kid, like this little nerd,

02:18:15.500 | like this little like, you know,

02:18:16.700 | USB drive with feet was just staring at me

02:18:19.220 | and I just dropped him off at MIT

02:18:21.220 | and he like scurried away.

02:18:22.460 | - Yeah.

02:18:23.280 | - But that's a big school.

02:18:24.120 | Doesn't the NSA recruit out of their heavy,

02:18:25.740 | like MIT, places like that?

02:18:27.780 | - I can't, I can't speak to that.

02:18:30.460 | But what, this is a ridiculous question

02:18:34.580 | I sometimes ask myself when I'm alone.

02:18:36.660 | What is the meaning of life?

02:18:38.780 | Do you think about the big existential kinda,

02:18:41.860 | why the hell we're here?

02:18:43.220 | - It's a cosmic kinda joke, kind of in a weird way, right?

02:18:46.580 | I mean, Joe said it the other day on, maybe it was you,

02:18:50.180 | saying that like, he was just like, you know,

02:18:52.620 | by the time you figure out what it is, you're outta here.

02:18:55.340 | You know, it's kind of interesting.

02:18:56.660 | Or you even start to figure out what it is,

02:18:58.340 | you're outta here.

02:18:59.180 | It's like, that's kinda funny.

02:19:00.700 | It's like, you don't get enough time to truly,

02:19:04.740 | I think the meaning of life is just like,

02:19:06.780 | at the end of the day, do you feel it was time well spent?

02:19:12.020 | Was it time well spent?

02:19:13.300 | That's really what it is.

02:19:16.500 | If you look back, do you go, hey, it was time well spent.

02:19:20.260 | Like I--

02:19:21.100 | - Pretty good ride.

02:19:21.920 | - It was a pretty good ride.

02:19:22.760 | I did a lot, I did a lot of things.

02:19:25.500 | I, doing what you say is a part of it, I think.

02:19:30.500 | If you say you're gonna do something, maybe doing it.

02:19:33.200 | That seems to be extrapolating the meaning of life question

02:19:38.140 | to like, you know, what did you come here to do?

02:19:41.040 | I think it goes down deep of like, who are you

02:19:43.220 | and what do you want and, you know,

02:19:45.060 | what are you suited to do and what--

02:19:47.460 | - It does seem that like, the people who are most enlightened

02:19:51.340 | that I've ever met or read books by,

02:19:54.420 | they ultimately land on humor.

02:19:56.380 | Like they don't take shit seriously.

02:19:58.460 | They embrace the absurdity of it all

02:20:01.140 | and just kind of laugh at it in this kind of simple way.

02:20:04.860 | So it does seem that humor is like,

02:20:08.340 | one of the fundamental truths of this universe.

02:20:11.340 | - Yes.

02:20:12.180 | - Wherein, and somehow--

02:20:13.020 | - It's love, it's love.

02:20:14.500 | Humor can be love, right?

02:20:16.920 | People laughing, that sound is kind of like,

02:20:20.540 | Carolyn Knapp, who wrote a book called

02:20:22.260 | "Drinking A Love Story," which is a really good book

02:20:25.820 | about not drinking, drinking and then not drinking.

02:20:29.540 | And she said the last, you could understand things as love.

02:20:34.540 | I think one of the last lines of the thing is like,

02:20:36.800 | people talking about their experiences in life,

02:20:39.180 | that could be love.

02:20:40.360 | Like, you know, laughter is love.

02:20:41.780 | Like I feel like love and finding it

02:20:44.020 | wherever you could find it is why we're here.

02:20:46.420 | That's that connection and laughter can be love

02:20:49.700 | and figuring out something that makes life better

02:20:54.700 | for a lot of people can be love,

02:20:58.180 | whether it's a vaccine or a technological advancement

02:21:01.820 | or whatever, like, all of those things,

02:21:04.420 | I think, can be that feeling.

02:21:06.420 | And I think that's what's important.

02:21:07.980 | It connects you to a larger frequency.

02:21:10.480 | - I don't think there's a better way to end it, Tim.

02:21:13.500 | I hope you're one of the voices,

02:21:15.780 | I truly believe that your legacy

02:21:17.620 | will be one of the most important voices of our time

02:21:20.020 | because you're fearless and challenging all the absurdity

02:21:22.980 | of the nonsense of our social and political discourse.

02:21:27.980 | I hope you keep doing it.

02:21:30.220 | I'm a fan, I'm still a bit starstruck, so.

02:21:33.180 | - Oh, stop it, listen, I thought it was your intellectual

02:21:37.140 | capacity, enjoying anything I do,

02:21:40.340 | only underscores how truly fucked we are.

02:21:43.180 | (laughing)

02:21:44.860 | But thank you very much.

02:21:46.860 | - Yeah.

02:21:48.140 | - Thank you for talking today.

02:21:49.220 | - Thank you, brother.

02:21:50.940 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dillon

02:21:53.300 | and thank you to our sponsors,

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02:22:07.120 | So the choice is business, health, sanity, or transcript.

02:22:12.120 | Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish,

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02:22:17.300 | and to support this podcast.

02:22:19.740 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:22:21.860 | from George Carlin.

02:22:23.620 | Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

02:22:28.620 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:22:31.800 | (upbeat music)

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02:22:36.960 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Tim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #156

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