The following is a conversation with Tim Dillon, a standup comedian who's fearless in challenging the norms of modern day social and political discourse. Quick mention of our sponsors Natsui Business Management Software, Athletic Greens, All-In-One Nutrition Drink, magic spoon, low carb cereal, better help online therapy and Rev Speci Text Service. So the choices business, health, sanity or transcripts choose wisely. My friends and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I will continue talking to scientists, engineers, historians, mathematicians and so on.

But I will also talk to the people who Jack Kerouac called the mad ones in his book On the Road. That is one of my favorite books he wrote. The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live mad, to talk mad, to be saved, desirous of everything. At the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

And in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, oh, some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble in that I have no idea how they will turn out, but I'm willing to risk it for a chance at a bit of an adventure. And I'm happy and honored that Tim this time want to take a chance as well. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it and have a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at LAX.

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And now here's my conversation with Tim Dylan. What would you like your tombstone to read? It's a good way to summarize the essence of a human being. I would like you to say this has not been paid for.

And I want I want my my living relatives to struggle to to pay for it.

And I think I would like them to be hounded every day. I would like people to call and.

Listen, we don't want to ever excavate a body, but we will because this has not been paid for.

I love the idea of leaving the debt, leaving the world in lots of debt that other people have to deal with. Yeah, and I know people that have done that. I know people that have been in families where that's happened.

Where. Someone has to sit around and just curse the sky because they don't have a physical person anymore to be angry at, and they but they still have to deal with the decisions that person made. And that's deeply tragic. But that's always struck me as very funny.

Well, it's a kind of immortality, the debt, because you can if the debt lasts for a long time, the anger lasts for a long time, and then you're not immortal in the minds of many. You arouse emotion in the minds of many.

My mother's best friend in the town I grew up and her husband shot himself in the the driveway. And my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve because he owed so much money.

She would come over and go, I hate him, I fucking hate him. And it was just such an interesting thing to see somebody who and her kids ended up getting angry at her for that because they didn't understand why she would hate a guy who was clearly suffering. And but she goes he took the selfish way out. He fucked us. And it was always interesting for me to just remember that, like, you can leave Earth and still be a problem.

That's kind of a special person. So that's, I think what I'd like my tombstone to. Yeah, there's a there's a show called Louie with Lucy Cannon, which I'm aware of. There's this moment I think we're all guys talking to Louie about. The best part about love is after you break up. And it's remembering that like remembering the good times and feeling that loss, the pain of that loss. The worst part about love is when you no longer feel that pain, since the pain of losing somebody lasts longer, is more intense and lasts longer than the actual love.

So his argument was like, the pain is the is what love really is. Wow. In the same way that anger your tombstone would arouse is will last longer. And that's that's deeply like a human thing. Like why do we attach happiness to the way we should remember others. It could be just anger.

I know so many people who will have deeply complicated feelings when I you know, I did drugs for many years or so and I spent time with some wild people and their parents were also wild people.

And some of their parents have done crazy things to that, as you know, have created situations that were not productive for child rearing. Yeah. And so I know that when those people die, it's going to be a very mixed bag. Like there's going to be a lot of complex emotions like, hey, we loved that guy. But also when we look back, he was a horrible father, a horrible husband, but he was fun and and we don't put enough stock in that.

But that will be a push and pull. And I'll be the one kind of bringing up like, hey, he was a lot of fun. Yeah, he was a lot. Remember when he he stuck us?

You know, one of the things this particular person I'm talking about, we were we were at a bar with me and my friend were there were having dinner and his father, who was, you know, an alcoholic and a guy that would go out every night and didn't work, you know, refused to work, would lie and say he was going to work and then go to a bar.

I mean, just a fun person.

And he he we were sitting at this bar restaurant and the bartender, we see his father walk up to the bartender and say, pointed us, pointed our table and go and put the thumbs up.

And the bartender nodded. And then the father walked over to our table and he said, listen, I just want to let you know I just bought you dinner.

And I looked at the son, I said he's a pretty good guy, and then he he climbed over the little fence down to the water and got in his little boat. There's a little cigarette out. And he just drove away. And in about an hour later, we went, we said, I think that guy took care of the bill, but she said, we'll go talk to the bartender. So we talked to the bartender and he goes, he handed us a bill.

And the bill was for like a thousand dollars. And we said, wait a minute, what the hell is going on? And he goes, the guy that left an hour ago said you were going to take care of his bill. He's been drinking here all week. And we go, what are you talking about? And he goes, Remember he pointed at you? He put the thumbs up and you guys waved.

You remember that guy? And we went, Yeah.

And I just looked at my friends, my friend. And I went, you know, your dad is just we're going to remember him for all kinds of reasons. But to you, he was fun. He was a lot of fun.

He wasn't my dad, but I spent a lot of time with him. I was in two boating accidents with him. You know, to boating accident involved drugs, yes, he was usually alcohol was involved when he left his house and when he was at home as well. But I was in a boating accident. And do you know how fun someone has to be to get in a second boating accident?

Do you know what a good time someone has to be to get in a boat with them after you've already gotten in one raft?

Never get fooled again. What was that like? George Bush never get fooled again. Yes.

If you're getting fooled again, you know there's a reason for it. But he was he was a fun guy. He did have a death wish. The second boating accident, he grabbed me and said, you can't hang out with me anymore. And I said, why? He goes, I'm trying to kill myself. And I was like, oh. And then I understood that, like, all of the fun under the fun lived a very destructive person who not only was destructive but wanted to die.

So speaking of fun, people that want to die, I don't know if you're we can go Hunter S. Thompson. But Charles Bukowski. I don't know if you're aware of the guy I'm aware of. I'm sure I've read some stuff.

So his tombstone says, I just want to ask you a question about his tombstone, says don't try. Interesting. What do you think about that advice as a way to approach life?

I think for many people, it's a good, good advice because the people that are going to try will do anyway.

And the people that need to be told there's a whole cottage industry now of motivational speakers and life coaches and gurus that tell people that they all have to own their own business and be their own boss and be a disruptor and get in new industries. You know, that's incredibly unrealistic for most people. Most people are not suited for that. And, you know, the Gary views of the world that tell everybody that they should just hustle and grind and hustle and grind very light on the specifics of what they should actually do.

Yeah, I think a lot of people that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people. I think I think my generation got horrible advice from our parents, from our teachers. And that advice was follow your dreams and nobody.

And that was it. By the way, there was no like, what are your dreams?

Are they realistic? What happens when they don't work out? Will your dreams make you happy?

Are your dreams real? Do they exist on earth? Can you follow your dreams? You can be anything you want to be.

Horrible advice, horrible advice, worst advice you can ever give a generation of people. Really, truly. I mean, think about think about it.

If you were talking to somebody and you were trying to make them succeed, are there any two worst pieces of advice to give them? Then follow your dreams and you can be anything you want to be. Those, to me, are the two most destructive pieces of information I've ever heard.

So let me push back, because that's fair. This is many people do. So, yeah, this is like a rigorous journalistic interview. Larry King, by the way, passed away today. I'm taking over the ferry. I'm carrying the very sad. It's all right. Larry King. Yeah.

What was I going to say? Oh, let me push back on the follow you dream thing is, I come from an immigrant family where I was always working extremely hard at stuff like in a stupid way. I would I there's something about me that loves hitting my head against the wall over and over and over until either my head breaks or the wall breaks, just like I love their dedication for no purpose whatsoever. It's like the mouse that's stuck in a cage or whatever.

And and everybody always told me, my family, the people around me, the sort of the epitome of what I could achieve is to be kind of a stable job. You know, the old like lawyer doctor, in my case, it's like scientists and so on. But I had these dreams at this fire, you know, about love robots and that nobody ever gave me permission to pursue those dreams.

I know you're supposed to grab it yourself. Nobody's supposed to give you permission. But there's something about just people saying, you know, fuck what everyone else thinks, like giving you permission, a parent or something like that, saying do your own thing, go become an actor, go become like do the crazy thing. You're not supposed to do an artist, go build a company, quit school, all that kind of stuff.

Yes, sure.

That's the push back against the follow your dreams as it is in mass. If you were to look at this in mass, if you were to look at statistically how few people that works out for, I'm just no, let's be very honest, to be very honest. So, I mean, like, yeah, if you're going to go be an hey, I was broke for ten years before I became a before I was making money as a comedian.

I got it. I didn't need Gary Vaynerchuk to tell me to follow my thing. Right. And here's the other thing. I was kind of funny and like I was kind of a lot of things. Were in my favor of being a comedian, right? I had this kind of crazy fucked up life, I had a lot of stories I had exhausted or I was willing to fail. I had failed before I was broke. I didn't care about being broke.

I knew how to be broke. I had I was shameless, too, to a degree. I was I would get on a stage night after night and be laughed at. I would I had a high threshold for being embarrassed. I had a high threshold for people thinking that I was a scumbag. Right. And showing up at family parties and being like, yeah, I still really don't have a job. And I'm just I work at comedy clubs kind of and I get booked when I can.

And I was, you know, suited for it.

There's this idea that people can just roam around the world injecting themselves into other things they have no aptitude for at all. And will that to happen?

A small percentage of people might be able to do that, but the vast majority of people have something they might key into that they're meant to do, like you loved robots, you love technology, and you found a place in that world where you thrive. But I think many people, a lot of people love robots. Right? So a lot of people think everything you do is interesting. I think your shit is fascinating. I watch you or podcast, and I think it's very interesting.

I have no place in your world, you know what I mean? I have no place in that world.

I don't like remedial math. I don't like community college math. I think it's a waste of my time.

What do you think about robot? Would you ever buy a robot for your home? Yes. What will it to be? A companion? A friend? Oh, yeah.

I mean, I would like to start replacing friends and family with robots immediately. I mean, truly, truly. I mean, I'm not even kidding. Like, I would like to have a Thanksgiving with four robots. I'm dead serious. Well, are they into Kuhnen like do the are the robots? When do the robots start going crazy? That's my question is like how long do the robots live with me before they are also a problem and I got to replace them, you know what I mean?

You're going to indoctrinate the robot as my the robot is going to call me. Like my aunt doesn't talk about coronavirus for an hour every morning and tell me everyone in America who's died of coronavirus.

One of the things I enjoy in life is how terrified people like you he's found, by the way, get a robot.

Well, I am I'm concerned about I like completely getting rid of the need for human beings because human beings I mean, usually you go out in the street and you go, so few of these people are necessary. Even now.

Even now, you look at people and you go they're hanging on by a thread. Right. And you can just imagine how many jobs are going to get replaced, how many industries are going to be completely remade with AI. And the pace of change worries me a little bit because we do a very bad job in this country of mitigation. When we have problems, we don't do a great job. We did not. Great job with covid, right?

We don't do a good job. It's just something we don't do well. We kind of we're good in booms and busts were good when it's good. And we're actually we kind of know how to kind of like, hey, we're bottomed out with a good we're like a gambling addict in this country. We like we know what it feels like to be outside of an OTB at nine a.m. drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, going, I'm going to build it back.

And we know what it's like to win. But anything in between, it seems not that great. So to me, it feels like are we going to be able to, like, help people that are displaced and that have their jobs taken? By I mean, do you not fear sort of a world where you have a lot of, you know, artificial intelligence replacing workers? And then what happens?

There's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence. One of them is, yes, displacement of jobs, the workers, that's technology in general. That's just any kind of new innovations, displace jobs. I'm less worried about that. I'm more worried about other impacts of artificial intelligence. For example, the nature of our discourse, the social the effects of algorithms on the way we communicate with each other, the spread of information, what that information looks like, the creation of silos, all that kind of stuff.

I think that would just make worse the effects that the displacement of jobs has. I think ultimately I have a hope that technology creates more opportunities than it destroys. I hope so, too. And so in that sense, I to me is an exciting possibility. But, you know, the challenges this world presents will create divisions, will create chaos and so on. So I'm more focused on the way we deal as a society with that chaos, the way we talk to each other, that's that's setting the platform that's healthy for that.

Now, as a as a comedian creator. Or whatever you want to call it, people that put out content are the gatekeepers are now algorithmic, right? So they are kind of almost A.I. already. So if you are a person that puts out, you know, YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever you're doing, you are it used to be a guy in the back of the room with a cigar saying, I like you or get them out of here.

Now, it's such an algorithm. You barely understand. Like, I talk I talk to people at YouTube. I don't know if they understand the algorithm.

They don't. They don't. That's easy. Yeah, it's fascinating because I speak to people at YouTube and I go, hey, man, what's going on here? One of my episode titles of my podcast was called Knife Fight in Malibu. It was about real estate and it was because a realtor in Malibu, I was trying to get a summer rental, which I can't really afford. But I don't I don't think that's a huge problem. I you know, I follow my dreams.

So I called a realtor and she said, listen, because I don't know what the government saying. Yeah. But she goes, it's a real knife fight out here, you know, an old grizzled woman, real realtor.

Danskin She got the mouth drive driving a portion. Yeah, it's a real knife fight out here. You know, her entire life had become real estate. Her soul had been hollowed out or container. You know, no one's made a common years, but it's just she just loves heated floor views, fun. She's a demon from hell. And we need them truly. We're getting rid of them. It's not good. Yeah. And she goes a real knife fight out here.

So we put that in the episode title. And of course, I guess some algorithm thought we were showing like people stabbing each other in a Wendy's and we got like demagnetized.

Did we get the monitors that we lost?

And we lost a lot of use because we were kicked out of whatever out like we're just kicked out. Then I was asking YouTube about it. They were kind of understanding it, but even the people that worked there didn't truly seem to understand the algorithm. So can you explain to me how that works? Were they barely know what's going on?

No, they do not understand the full dynamics of the monster or the amazing thing that they've created. It's the amount of content that's being created is larger than anyone understands. This is huge. They can't deal with it. The teams aren't large enough to deal with it. There's like special cases. So if you fall into the category of special cases, you can maybe talk about that like a Donald Trump, where you actually have meetings about what to do with this particular account.

But everything outside of that is all algorithms. They get reported by people and they get like if enough people report a particular video, a particular tweet, again, it rises up to where humans look over it. But the the the initial step of the reporting and the rising up to the human supervision is done by algorithm. And they don't understand the dynamics of that because we're talking about billions of tweets. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of video uploaded every day.

Now, the hilarity of it is that most of the YouTube algorithm is based on the title.

That's crazy. It's and the description is a small contribution in terms of filtering in terms of the knife fight situation. Right. And that's all they can do. They can they don't have algorithms at all that are able to process the content of the video. So they try to also infer information based on if you're watching all of these Kuhnen videos or something like that or flat Earth videos and you also watch, ah, really excitedly watching the whole knife fight in Malibu radio that says that increases the chance that the knife fight.

Is a dangerous video for society or simply interesting, wow, based on their contribution, people are watching something because I watch Kuhnen and Flat Earth videos to ridicule them, right.

That you know what I mean. I watch these videos and I make fun of them on my show. Yeah, but what's interesting is if I then go watch something else, I'm increasing the likelihood that that video is going to get looked at as potentially subversive or dangerous.

Exactly. That's why.

So they make decisions about who you are, who you are as a human being, as if watcher the user based on the clusters of videos you're in. But those clusters are not manually determined that they're automatically clustered. And so weird.

We have titles where they got upset about and I don't even understand, like we had a title that was so innocuous in my opinion. And the title of the episode was called Bomb Disney World. And I was asking people to consider bombing Disney World. And YouTube got angry at that.

So you don't know why you can never understand.

Going to Disney World is the bomb. Right, right. Right. It's just that's what I was going to do it.

But I was saying, let's start thinking about their plans to like not let's do it. But let's let's get in the mind.

Let's change the conversation. Yeah, I think it's very interesting because as a comedian, you don't want to live in that world of worrying about algorithms. You don't want to worry about the platforming and shadow banking. I mean, all these conversations that I've had with other comedians about shadow banking, I mean, it's hilarious. We all call each other. I think I'm being shot. How bad are you being shot so bad? And nobody knew what that word was a month ago, I mean, a year ago.

But everyone now is convinced and everything they do that isn't succeeding is being shot up. Yeah. So it's this new paranoia. Yeah. There's algorithmic paranoia now that we all kind of have because there are genuine instances of people being taken out of an algorithm, you know, rightly or wrongly, for whatever however you want to believe. But then there are also things that just don't perform as well for a myriad of reasons.

And and then we're all saying, like, well, they're against me to shut me down.

And you don't know if that's true or not. You know, what do you think about this moment in history, which was really troubling to me? We can talk about several troubling aspects, but one is Amazon removing parler from us. To me, that was the most clearly troubling. It felt like it created a more dangerous world when the infrastructure on which you have competing medium of communications now puts his finger on the scale now influences who wins and who loses.

Absolutely.

You're right. And what you're always told is like, if you don't like Twitter, create your own service.

Right. Or if you don't like something, you can do your own thing or if you are and basically because, you know, tech, you have to be in business with one of five companies.

I think it's like Amazon, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter, whatever they're like, you know. I mean, Amazon puts everything on the cloud, you know, Google and YouTube. It's all basically the CEO and the advertising. And you got to get your name out there.

You don't want to be buried in like because you have to do business with your it's a cartel of these companies. You understand it better than anybody that you are prevented truly. And I, I think whatever you think about parler, whatever you think about what people are saying, I'm Hala, whatever you think about the Alex Jones, whatever you thought about me, Anapolis, the state has an interest in and has always had an interest in crushing dissent.

This is what the state has done. This is how they, you know, retain the power they have by eliminating dissent where they can now because you don't have, you know, three broadcast networks anymore and a handful of newspapers that were all run, by the way, by people that had been either compromised. You were happily, you know, happily going with the program. And you have this Wild West of the Internet, people like me, people that make I make funny content that I hope is funny, but a lot of it is wild and crazy.

Yeah, I see a lot of wild and crazy things. They're very funny. I say a lot of wild and crazy things about powerful people. Yeah.

You mock the powerful in there by bringing them down a notch. We'll probably talk about it, but humor is one of the tools to talk to. To balance the powers in society. Well, sure, to make people feel better about things and to, you know, whatever the case may be. Right. That's my goal is to kind of like, hey, people have had a shitty day. If this video or podcast makes you laugh, that's great.

I think that it won't ever it was never going to stop it. Alex Jones. Not that I think he should have been taken off everything the way he was, but this keeps going until we have sanitized all of social media.

And what they really want it to be is what Instagram is kind of becoming, which is a marketplace of you could just go and buy sneakers, go buy a sweatshirt, buy jeans, go buy this, go buy that. And the idea of the free exchange of information seems to be the old Internet. And it seems the new Internet seems to be, you know, hyper and I'm a capitalist.

But this is like hyper capitalist in the sense of like they only want you consuming things and they don't want you thinking too much. And that seems to be where it's heading.

I've even seen that with Instagram, where it's like everything on Instagram and like buy a sweatshirt, you know?

And I'm like, all right, man. Hey, man, if I want a sweatshirt, I'll get it. Like, relax.

You know, just every ad seems to be encouraging consumption, but very few things seem geared towards hey. Let's have a dialogue or let's not that Instagram, we have a grade for that, but like furry things are geared now towards content on Instagram, a lot of it seems geared towards shopping.

See, I don't know. That's an interesting point. I don't know if the consumerism that capitalism leads to is necessarily gets in the way of nuanced conversation. I feel like you could still sell 10 million sweatshirts and have a difficult, nuanced conversation or mock the current president. The previous president mocked the powerful all the time.

We try we try to balance that. I mean, sweatshirts we do.

And I think on the business, we do think business sweatshirt with the Enron logo, because I like I do fake business all the time would be nice. If you talk about Alex Jones, if you plug the sweatshirt during that conversation. Yeah, we'll do that. Absolutely. Yeah.

But what I tend to worry about with I see social media and technology existing to flatten society. It makes people very boring. All of the experiences kids have right now are online.

Many of their closest friendships are online. Their first relationships are online. The culture is is very homogenous. And that's why I think it's eliminating characters. It's eliminating interesting people. It's making people into ehi all of their Toilolo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charles Bukowski as well. Let's not get crazy. It's not there yet. Right. I mean it's seventy five thousand dollars. Dog is not doing anything you know. So we're not there yet. At least I hope I get what you like. I so much. I hate people too and I'm very amenable to I and I agree with you.

Listen, I think the future that we got to get everyone out of here. I'm with you on that. So don't think I love people.

He's manipulating my mind and my that's why the flash of light in your eyes when you talked about that dog was so much more than any person. And I get it, by the way, you're right. I love people. But if they're not excited, if you can just use robots to kill most of them, I think that would be good for society.

I'm with that, too. But I think that social media flattens, flattening the personalities, personalities of people, man.

And it's just, you know, when's the last time like, I like the idea of like, you know, and, you know, somebody showing up to, you know, high school like a backpack and taking out an old CD and being like, hey, man, here's this band you've never heard of that I love or whatever. You got to get into this. And I'm like, you know, when I talk to Young, you know, I have friends that have younger brothers and everything.

And I know that the dominant culture was always dominant. I'm not an idiot, but like I feel like it's harder to be unique and original now because so much of of what's promoted is just this way to kind of corral people into believing and thinking a certain set of ideals that's constantly shifting and evolving. And people are just caught up in that. And to me, it gets very boring very quickly. I hate being bored and that's what it is.

I don't know what to do with that because at the same time, podcast, really popular, long form podcast, really popular. And people are hungry for those kinds of conversations. There's a lot of dangerous ideas, quote unquote, flowing, being spread around through podcasts, meaning just like debates. Correct. Know. So that's still popular. So I don't know what the I agree with you. That gives me hope. I guess I hope so too.

And like I said, I look at the negative a lot because that's what I usually make fun of. But there's a lot of positive stuff happening, too.

Let's talk a little bit about Alex Jones. I so you've gotten a chance to talk to him while you were on the Joe Rogan experience?

I've been on Alex's show. I've talked I've had Alex on my show. I've talked to Alex for three hours in front of I guess it was maybe like fifteen million people right on Joe show. It was a really wild conversation.

I think it was one of the coolest moments in broadcasting that clearly that I've ever been a part of.

But I think it goes in the lexicon of like these are big podcasts. I think it's one of the biggest podcasts a week before the election.

Alex Jones. I'm really grateful that Joe gave me the opportunity to be there. And I was just an amazing conversation to watch.

What was the shirt you were just laying?

It was a fun joke that no one in tech got because we all know how funny they are.

But the tech writers, which is mainly I do not agree with these mainly blue haired people whose goal in life is to find things to give them orgasms with. You know, you're down to your hair blue. It's your choice. Yeah.

And but is it your choice? But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, all the talk about it, like a lot of people. And I'm not I'm just maligning tech unfairly, but a lot of people that senses of humor, like he's advocating for human traffic.

I'm like, it's clearly a joke because we're coming off the believe all women. Yes, we're coming off that. And it's very funny to just say Quijas man. Hey, man, believe all women like it's just our politics and our and our public sphere is so schizophrenic right now that when you point that out, people are going to be angry with you.

But that was a fun shirt to wear. But on Alex, you know, I was one of the people that. I found him really entertaining that that the same kind of thing is borkowski these kinds of personalities that are wild, crazy, full of ideas, they don't have to be grounded in truth at all or they can be grounded in truth a little bit like he's just playing with ideas like a jazz musician screaming sometimes, obviously has some demons. Sometimes he's super angry for no reason whatsoever as some weird thing that he's constructed in his own head.

Sometimes he's super loving and peaceful, especially lately that I've heard him scene with him with Michael Malus, where he's doing like Malus was doing, like telling Alex Jones, I love you, Alex. You know, just this loving kind of softness and kindness. And after all, I don't know what to make of any of it. And then there's this huge number of people that tell me that Alex Jones is a is dangerous for society. Right. So what do you do with that?

Do you think he's dangerous for society? Do you think he is one of the sort of entertaining personalities of our time that shouldn't be suppressed or somewhere in between?

I don't think that Alex Persay is dangerous for society.

I think the greater danger for society comes again from stifling all dissent at all, like anybody with a voice that uses it to critiques the government and and putting all of those people in the category and getting rid of them is incredibly dangerous to me.

More so. I think the biggest problem that Alex has ever had was when he questioned the Sandy Hook shooting. And that really was because it really is this identifiable incident that you can look at where it did get away from him and a lot of his fans who the people that are attracted to conspiracy stuff. And I have some of those fans, some of them are really smart people.

Some of them are mentally unwell. A lot of them happen to be mentally unwell. So when you have a fan base of people where some of them are mentally unwell and you are questioning, you know, tragic events, and Alex was right about Eppstein. He was right about a lot of things. And he's got no credit for that. And I understand that this sometimes when you write about 10 things and you're wrong about something and the thing you're wrong about is so offensive to people, you're never going to get any credit for being right, even though you were right more than when you were wrong.

The problem was a lot of his fans who were crazy, stalked, harassed these families and accused them of being actors and accused them of like faking their children's death.

It was just horrific experience. And I'll just talk to that. And and you know how much he inspired that by what he did on his show? I don't know, because I haven't watched hours and hours of that particular thing, like the whole Sandy Hook thing. If you listen to him, he says, I really covered it. I kind of covered it and moved on. Other people go, no, he spent a long time on it. But that's the real danger of going into that territory over and over again, going everything is is everything's a false flag.

Everything's fake. I think I think Alex is actually being kind of reasonable. He's resisted a lot of the the politics of, like, racial resentment. I'm like the. All right. For example, he's resisted that. He's resisted the anti Semitic currents of a lot of that politics. Right. He's resisted a lot of the virulently anti trans or anti-gay stuff.

Now, he does dip his toe into the water of like the culture wars. Of course he does. And but I've never really seen him.

I could be wrong about this. Embrace white nationalism or identity. Arianism, I've never seen him really go anti Semitic. I've never seen him take that route when I grew up and I would turn him on every now and then he was talking about NAFTA, the WTO. He's talking about 9/11.

He was talking about, you know, the world trade organizations and a lot of these big conferences, whether it was the Bilderberg Group, whether it was Bohemian Grove, which he infiltrated and he was talking about, hey, you're the most powerful people in the world.

Here's what they're doing and here's how it affects you. And that was interesting to me because it was no one else was really talking about it except Alex Jones occasionally. Art Bell on on ABC. You listen to him at night, right?

I think Alex became very controversial when he decided to back Donald Trump, and then he has a considerable following in a considerable audience that he was then able to marshal in the direction of supporting Donald Trump. That was when the spotlight, because then he was talking to Trump. Trump did his show. Alex Jones just got bigger. Right. And he blew up. That's right. You blew off like he he had the good he put out the good HBO special, whatever you want to call it.

He has a hit song. He blew up. And then people started looking at the things that, you know, he was associated with. The Sandy Hook thing is a blemish on his record. I do believe he regrets it. But again, I do see the point of the families who like, dude, fuck this guy forever. This is the worst thing I ever went through. It's a very tough I understand the people that say that. I understand and I and I understand the people that go when you cordin when you have tech companies that act in a coordinated manner to just get rid of someone they don't have any way to defend themselves.

It's it's a little terrifying when you think about that power being abused.

And how wouldn't it be do you think he should have not have been banned from all of these platforms?

I don't think I do think that if you are a private company. Right. I do think and this is where you run into this this problem, like, I don't know if these tech companies were government utilities, would that decrease people's likelihood of being banned? I don't know. Right.

So I'm I'm I understand the benefit of them being treated like public utilities and people thinking they have the right to a Twitter.

I've never I don't know. I have very little confidence. I mean, the government is trying to roll out a vaccine in California and we vaccinated like five people. I mean, in terms of what we need to do in the state. Right. So maybe if it was a government utility, I do think someone like Alex, like there should be some process. So if you're going to get rid of someone, they should have a way to defend themselves.

There should be more democratic.

Yeah. Process that you can go through than just being unilaterally taken off something.

But like then you run into the like, am I going to say that everyone doesn't know if you're threatening or harassing people or threatening to kill them, publishing their private information if you're committing crimes on these platforms? Obviously, the people that own these platforms are going to be like, we're not going to allow this to happen. So I understand that there is a line, right? There is some like people that say there's no line, aren't really thinking like there is a line.

I just thought that line seems to be moving all the time. And it seems to be a very hard thing to police. But I don't think you can remove a guy off everything. And then also bank accounts won't give him debit cards or credit cards. I don't know if you talk to him about that, but like, you know, there were financial institutions that were refusing to let him, you know, park his money.

So, I mean, it really does get pretty terrifying pretty quickly, probably without any transparency from those companies.

So you're right, it feels like there should be a process of just having for him to defend himself, or I think there needs to be a process for people to defend themselves.

I every day I wake up and I go, it is something I said in the video, going to get taken out of context, somebody's going to get angry, somebody's going to be, you know, I say wild stuff because that's what makes me laugh. That's what makes my friends laugh and that's what makes my audience laugh.

So I never, ever people, you know, whatever whatever political side you come down on, I think if you make your living speaking, it's always interesting to me if you are pro the platforming. That's odd.

It's interesting to consider kind of a jury context to where, you know, there's transparency about why your video about bombing Disney World might be taken down like it. It's it gets taken down. And then there is it's almost like creating a little court case, a many court case, and not in a legal sense, but in the in the public sphere. And then people should be able to have you know, you pick representatives of our current society and have a discussion about that and make a real vote, you know, just have, like, jury locks himself up in discussion.

That kind of that kind of process might be necessary. Right now. What happens is Twitter's completely first of all, they're just mostly not aware of everything they're doing. There's too much stuff. But the stuff they're aware about, they make the decision in closed doors, the meetings, and without any transparency to the rest of the company, actually, but also transparency to the rest of the world. And so and then all they say is we're doing we're making these decisions because the people, they use things like violence.

So violence equals bad. And if this person is, quote unquote, inciting violence, therefore that gives us enough enough reason to ban them without any kind of process. It's I mean, it's interesting. I'm I'm torn on the whole thing. If it was indeed there's no transparency about it.

But if parler was indeed inciting violence, like if there was brewing of violence, potential violence where, you know, thousands of people might die because of some kind of riot like this.

The scary thing about mob, about a lot of people get together, right.

Who are good people, like legitimately good people that love this country, that don't see enemies yet around them. But if they get excited together and there's guns involved, it's a problem. And then some cop gets nervous and shoots one person, another person shoots the cop and then there's a lot of shooting involved. And then it goes from five people dying in the capital to thousands of people dying in the capital.

Well, in fairness to to defend the people of COP, they didn't shoot the cop.

They they bludgeoned him to death with a fire extinguisher. Yes. So I do I do want to just kind of put that out as as a defense of them. Listen, I'm sure there was some wild shit going on on parler. And I think the prompt here's the problem, right?

There's a lot of people that just want to go on these sites and say they want to kill everyone. Yeah.

And the problem is, you know, at what point do you shut them all down? Like, I think a lot of people are just living in a world where they're powerless. They don't have any political power, they don't have any economic power. They can't throw their money around. They don't have health care. Their job security isn't great. They might be living in a community that doesn't have the resources they would like it to have there.

They're not happy and thrilled. And then they have these sites where they can go on and just, hey, man, I'd like to fucking burn it all down. And distinguishing a guy blowing off steam and saying wild stuff from a genuine threat is a very hard thing to do. You know, like I have I've threatened to kill. I got banned from there. Maybe I threatened to kill the people that banned be comedically.

Yeah, comedically. This is a joke. I'm not going to kill you. This is a joke because I'm blowing off steam and I'm angry. Do you know how many people that my parent like my dad's like I'm going to fucking kill this guy, my mom, like I'm going to fucking kill.

And they were talking about each other, but it's but none of it ever happened. But we should be I think you have to create a space for people to threaten to overthrow the government as long as they don't violently do it.

I mean, does that make any sense? Like I mean, as long as they're not going to go hurt innocent people, what are you going to do?

Like, there's so many people out there that that's why a lot of these things like 4chan, these sites, a lot of people going on there, they just want to say the most fucked up shit because they it's the thing that gives them they can laugh or they can release steam. And it is immature. It is stupid. It's not productive. It's not, you know, but at the end of the day. If you're not going to give people health insurance, you got to give them something, it's like when someone in this country dies that everyone disagrees with, right?

Political figure, media figure. A lot of people dance on their grave online and then everyone goes dead and the other side will always do it like a conservative dies and everything goes great conservatives goes. This is grotesque that you and then one RPG dies. They all have parties and the conservatives go crazy. You have to let people in this country enjoy the deaths of their enemies. Yeah, because they don't have much else. Again, if you gave them other things, you might say, Guy, you can go get a knee operation.

Why don't you stop? But if if they're working for shit wages and you haven't figured out a way to to treat them, treat their cancer diagnosis and they don't like. I mean, life, you know, you know, you gotta you've got to derive pleasure from something. Right.

That's an interesting point. That anger is a good valve. Like to for if your life is suffering, that there's something very powerful about anger. But I still have hope that it doesn't have to be that kind of channeling into anger. And that then becomes hate. Let us into a lot of troubles in human history.

You have to be careful empowering people too much in that anger, especially, I think, Mike. I think I understand why people are nervous about parler, about Twitter and so forth. Yeah, because all that shit talking about violence was now paired with let's get together at this location that this was a new thing. Like it's not just being on whatever platform talking shit. It's saying we're going to in physical space meet. And then everybody got all these platforms, got nervous.

Well, what happens when the shit docker's all these angry people that are just letting off steam meet in the physical space? And there was probably overreach, almost definitely overreach, but I can understand why they were nervous.

I agree. There doesn't seem to be. And this is what Trump got elected. And when you have, like, whatever you have. Right, whether you have riots in Portland, in Seattle, where you have the Antifa people do crazy things, you have like, you know, the people storming the Capitol, there never seems to be a ton of examination of why these ideas are becoming popular. Why are people so angry at what is leading people to this?

Yes. Why are we here? What about their lives is to the point where they need to show up at these places and like and obviously this is going to be people on the fringe. They'll always be the mentally unwell. They'll always be people that want to destroy society.

But when you look at how popular, large, long discredited things, whether it's fascism, you know, totalitarian communism, all of these things are like, why are they back? Why are they back in a big way? And why why are people so fed up with the status quo that they're finding, you know, solace in the most extreme discredited theories of how to run and operate societies, theories that have led to deaths of a lot of it.

So to me, I'm like. If those people at the capital. Yes, if they were going to work, if there's you know, if they were able to go out and drink at Chili's, if they were able to get a fucking checkup. Right. Like if their job paid a little bit. And I'm not saying this is all the reason. Right. I'm sure that there's a lot of people there that are doing quite well and they're still not.

But like the anger and the rage that's boiling to the surface of the society, does it come from the fact that across the board, people in very different areas and with very different political beliefs feel like they are being fucked over and there's nothing they can do about it?

That's what the baseline to me. They look at the people that run the country and run the world, whether they're tech titans, the guys that you talk to, or whether they're people that run the government, whether they're people that run large banks, large media companies, the people that have created this kind of infrastructure that everyone lives in, these people are incredibly powerless. And when you push people to that point, logically, sadly and unfortunately, the next thing does seem to be violence.

The thing that troubles me a lot is he said nobody's asking why these police are out there, but sometimes it's not even acknowledged that people are hurting.

People are angry, just even acknowledging that all the conspiracy theories that are out there, acknowledging that they're out there and then people are thinking about it and talking about it just because otherwise it's not acknowledged in this nuanced way. What happens is you say, OK, 70 million people are white supremacists. It's just throwing a kind of blanket statement. And of course, that gets them angrier and more makes them feel more powerless. And that ultimately that that's what's been painful for me to see, is that there's not an acknowledgement that most people are good.

Right. And there's circumstances where it's just you're pissed off. Right, because you are powerless and you could fall into the bad crowd.

That's the thing. You can just fall in. And it doesn't mean that you're you don't there's not blame. You know, you obviously you have agency.

You're a person, you know, but the idea that, like, you could be rehabilitated, you could do something stupid or you could fall into the great, you know, a group of people that are and then in a few years you can go, what the fuck was I doing? Yeah, you know, I'm an ex drug addict. I know what it's like to go from being one thing to being another thing. Right. I'm still a drug.

If I would use drugs right now or drink, I would still be addicted to them. Right. I mean, it's not something that I can ever change about myself, but I know what it's like to go from one thing to another thing. So when you look at racism or whatever ism, homophobia, misogyny, whatever, whatever, you're looking at antisemitism and you go, that's a fixed condition where nobody's ever going to be able to change. Nobody's ever going to be able to be rehabilitated.

Nobody's ever going to be able to reimagine themselves in a different way. To me, you're just you're throwing away someone and you're making them feel helpless and worthless. And that's going to lead to antisocial behavior that spills out into the violence.

We don't have a very redemptive society. Right. That's a huge factor. We don't have a redemptive society. That's why I like OJ Simpson, because OJ Simpson. Yes. Yes, he did a bad thing. Supposedly. Allegedly. Yeah, but he's very kind now on Twitter. And he makes very nice points about how we all have to get involved in the political process. And he's on golf courses. And I like watching people golf. I don't do it, but I like watching him do it.

And he's like an elder statesman because I remember him from the Naked Gun and I choose to forgive him, you know, for for for whatever happened there, which I don't know.

But I choose to forgive him really for. I mean, obviously, you know, what they say is he cut his wife's head off.

But I, I can look past that and redeem him because he's very, like, stable on Twitter. And he's a good like I see all these people going crazy on Twitter. And I'm like, there's maybe Ojai's lived a full life. I think there's a benefit to that. There's a benefit to kind of living a full life. Yeah.

How many of us have not at least tried to murder somebody?

One hundred percent. Listen, OJs had the highs and the lows, but he did it on his terms.

And there's a Frank Sinatra song. Yeah, he did it my way. I'm like, there's a benefit to that. And he seems like a very well-adjusted person now. So I mean, I don't know how is how is that a fact? But it is a fact. And that's an uncomfortable fact.

Well, that's a strong case for forgiveness. And the one of the more extreme cases, I suppose. But, yeah, there's. A process of forgiveness, it seems that people just take a single event from your and sometimes a single statement from your past and use that as a categorical, like capture of the essence of this particular human being.

So murder might be a thing that you should get a time out for a little less bad. And let's just say that murder is not good. I'm glad you make this definitive statement.

O.J. O.J. is an interesting cat because you're like he's very stable on Twitter.

He's very like he's like, let's take a look at a guy. Like we need more of his energy.

That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I know. Like, yes, it was bad he killed the woman and the waiter was not for that.

Yeah, I wish she didn't do that. But the trial the O.J. Simpson trial was such a fun thing.

Yeah. And like you said, we need more fun people. You might speaking of fun people, you've your politics have been all over the place.

I hope so. I hope so.

I mean, imagine not. Imagine someone whose politics weren't all over the place. It would seem odd, right? In the ten years that I've been politically conscious just because I'm 35 and I'm probably the conscious for over two decades. But like Democrats have become Republicans, Republicans become Democrats. I remember when Ann Coulter said we need to defend George W. Bush, when he said we need to go out and Christianize or, you know, modernize the Arab world.

We need to democratize the Arab world. And then Ann Coulter back Donald Trump and all the right wing in America believed in nation building. They believed in going out and democratizing areas that might breed radical terrorists, whether it was Iraq or wherever you were going, toppling regimes and instituting new democratic norms in those countries. That was the right wing point of view when I grew up. Then the right wing switched to we are going to be isolationist. We're going to take care of America.

First and foremost. We're not going to go into other countries. And then the Democrats who when I grew up were doves and and the right wing people were more hawkish. The Democrats would like the military solutions aren't the way we need to have multilateral diplomatic coalitions to solve all the problems.

Now, you know, Rachel Maddow is like, let's nuke Russia every night on MSNBC. The Democrats are like, we need we need strong presence in Syria. We need a strong presence. We need to counter Putin all over the globe. We need to get to there more hawkish on things.

So literally, I have, what, two political parties literally flip.

Yeah. And it's crazy to watch. And in some sense, I've watched that as well, because I when I first saw Barack Obama, I admired that he was against the war. This is whatever we maybe before he was a senator, he spoke out against the Iraq war. Right. And and then, you know, it doesn't feel like it feels like his administration was more hawkish then than dovish, in a sense, with with all the drone attacks, with the sort of inability to pull back or at least in mass efficiently pull back from all the military involvement that we have all over the world.

And just the language.

What I think is interesting about that, what's interesting about Obama, because he's a very interesting study, is that presidents are controlled in very different ways. Right. You know, presidents can be controlled by different factors, power factions within Washington.

And, you know, I think one of the reasons that Obama was maybe, you know, a very close relationship with John Brennan, who was a CIA director, and Obama was very close with John Brennan.

And Obama was very, you know, you know, I think malleable to the extent that, you know, the CIA and I've had CIA agents on my show, John Kiriakou, a guy who went to jail for exposing torture, was saying that like, you know, you get into the Oval Office, all of a sudden you're having that presidential daily briefing every day and the intelligence people come in and they go, listen, man, I mean, we're going to be a terrorist attack on your watch.

If you don't do X, Y and Z, they go, we have the code. They call like bluebook information, which is five levels above top secret.

And they go like, hey, man, a guy in a guy in Iran at a cafe said he's blown everything up next week. You know, I mean, it's the same thing is partly you don't know if it's true or not. But now the president's making a decision on usually a lot of uncorroborated intelligence that goes into a presentation for the president.

Well, you're just terrified every day and you don't want a terrorist attack on your watch now. So why are they getting all this information? Because a lot of the people in Washington have an interest in perpetual, constant ongoing warfare and there's a lot of financial gain to be had from that.

So they're sneaking their information into the presentations that are going to the president. And then the president is not behaving and going, fuck, I don't want a bomb going off. We've got to do what we've got to do.

And whatever version of that happens that. Is really kind of what is happening, whereas presidents are being controlled by forces that are outside of the political sphere, but very much still in it, and they have a lot of power. That's what the deep state is. You know, Trump, there's a lot of ridiculing. Trump is going the deep state does exist. That absolutely exists. There's been books about it written by liberal journalists.

The deep state is only a term for unelected, largely power factions in Washington, D.C. that outlive any presidential administration.

These are people that might work at the State Department. They might work at the Defense Department. These are people that are not always working officially in any government capacity. They might be private companies, they might be military contractors. They might be people at Boeing or Raytheon, General Dynamics. And they constitute a group of people that Trump kind of called the swamp of Trump had really no interest in draining the swamp.

But he articulated these things and this is what it is.

You have a lot of interested parties that have budgets, that they want big budgets. Everybody wants a budget in Washington, whether you know what it is. They want money. And these are the people who really control press.

So this idea that the president is the be all end all has got to be smashed, which is why the horserace model of politics and being like, is it right wing, is it left wing, is it what team of Myon and what color am I wearing? It's very simplistic, but the reality is this is an empire, its past, its peak.

We're in trouble.

The United States is an empire. Yeah, well, I mean, that's just you could prove that case in court. Well, let's let's go to court right now.

But I do love the the more complex idea that it's just human beings who crave power and seek ways to attain that power through different ways. We have Barack Obama or George Bush or Donald Trump. There's different attack vectors, different ways to attain that power. And you can use that leverage. And it probably doesn't have to be just in Washington, DC. There's people who crave power all over the world. Of course not.

But where we are now in Los Angeles, these people are all good L.A. studio executives, people that, from what I understand, they treat everyone fairly and they're nice.

But I think he sees the bad guys. But out here in L.A. and West Coast, everyone's lovely.

So amidst this fun exploration, in your mind, through the political landscape that you've done over the past couple of decades, you've been conscious politically. Where does Donald Trump fit into this picture for you is a great question.

Well, he didn't write because we didn't he wasn't political until four years ago.

Right. He he got political very quickly before. I mean, he's firing off crazy tweets about where Obama was born or whatever.

But he was he got into politics very quickly and then he became the president. Right. So it was like we didn't I knew him as Donald Trump, this crazy New York City character, the host of The Apprentice. I didn't think much about him. He was just constant, you know, like he was just his constant figures. Like, I don't think much about Warren Buffet. Like, I know like Trump's like he's married to a new showgirl all the time.

And he's always opening another casino. And he's like, really? No Trump.

Oh, like Warren Buffett is the opposite of Warren Buffett. I've been married for a billion years.

He lives a little house in Omaha. But these are that's what I like. I don't think about Warren Buffett. I don't think about these people. They're just guys that I've known forever that have like, you know, a you know, you associate certain things with them.

Right. And Trump was always associated with kind of vulgar, garish new money. Billionaire, married a lot, you know, casinos, Miss Universe pageant. But again, you know, but it makes perfect sense that he he really.

Was able to become president at the moment where we were had we were about to have Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush, and I think Americans felt like this is now the oligarchy is spinning right in our face.

You're not even making it feel like there's an appearance of democracy. We have two crime families vying for control of the country every four years. And then there was this rogue kind of upstart guy that was really about himself. You know, Trump doesn't really care that much about the. I mean, really was summarized perfectly when he laughed and he just said, hey, have a good life. That's what he said before he got on Andrews Air Force Base.

I would watch the speech. You guys have a good life. That's what he really feel like. Hey, have a good life.

I'm I'm going to get on a plane right now and fly to a castle I own in Marlock in Florida. And really, I'm not going to think too much about you people outside of how I can get more attention in the future.

Can I ask you, like a therapy question is, what is your favorite and least favorite quality of Donald Trump?

So my least favorite quality of Donald Trump, I think, because there's a few of them are his. Lack of empathy, complete and total, lack of empathy, I don't feel that he cares about human beings on any level, and I feel like that's maybe it should be a requirement.

Right.

I mean, I don't think he cares. I think it's obvious. He doesn't mean he said, you know, basically he's saying like they're in there. My pet is in there. He knows that his people are going to try to get into a capital. I mean, those motherfuckers are not going to have jobs. They're going to go to federal prison. And he doesn't care as long as they're storming the Capitol to prove the point that he thinks he won the election.

He has no concern for these people, his followers. He leaves them lambs to the slaughter. Right. So that that's that's not a respectable calling. My favorite quality of Donald Trump is his willingness to call bullshit.

So his willingness to call bullshit out, he doesn't play the game. He will. You know, when people say about Putin, Putin kills people, he goes, we kill a lot of people here, too. Like he's he's willing and able to break the fourth wall and say things that no politician has ever said. He's willing to call out hypocrisy. You know, of course, not his own, but the media, the members of the political establishment.

That's a laudable quality. It's an entertaining quality. Right. We all like it. I love it. I'm like this guy saying something that a lot of people want said. Yeah. That being said, it's coupled with no real work or action. Right. So it's not coupled with anything behind it that he just wants to. We did an episode of my podcast once where it's like essentially he's like criticizing the deep shit. He wants a deeper state.

He wants a deeper state like he hired his daughter and her husband.

I mean, this is not a guy that's interested in transparency and openness. He's a guy that would just prefer he wants to run to the mafia state.

But he shakes up the norms of social discourse, political discourse, and then people are just hungry for that. Yeah, but he got banned from Twitter, all the different platforms. Do you think is there an argument to be made for and against those arguments we made for everything?

A permanent ban seems to be an overreaction to me. He's the president of the United States. It also rearranges the power, like whether you like him or hate him, love him or hate him, he was a president.

We've elevated Twitter. It's now more powerful than the president. It's like, do you want that to be long term? The salute that the reality like now, Jack at Twitter is more powerful than the president of the United States. Is that a good paradigm going forward? I don't know.

I'm not listen, maybe give me a little time out for a few days. I think it's time that a little spanking, certainly. But I don't know if a permanent ban across the board on every social media.

I mean, they banned them on Grindr. This is how hilarious they mean. They can look across the board on everything. I don't think you can get in there and be not neither can I. But like, I don't think you can do anything again. I just I look back and there's so many people are very smart, intelligent friends. Yeah, but who cares. Yeah, but he's bad. Yeah. But blah blah blah. Yeah. But I don't like me like Anapolis.

Yeah but blah blah blah blah blah.

And I'm like you have such faith, you have such faith that it's always going to be the people you dislike that are banned. It's always going to be the it's never going to be you man. You have so much faith in the government, you have so much faith in tech oligarchs you've never met. You have so much faith, faith in the security state that they're going to always make the right decisions and they're not going to penalize people that shouldn't be penalized.

To me, I'm like, wow, I've never had that much faith in any human being ever, including myself. I wouldn't want that power. I would start platforming people that I hate Occupy from my aunt, you know what I mean? I would platform everyone I know.

I mean, so it's like it's such an insane power to give somebody like who gets hurt, who gets to speak.

Yeah, I'm worried about the effect it has on people like you. Actually, I agree of being like everybody's a little more nervous.

In what they say, correct, and that as a big problem, yes, because then you're just like long term masse, like we we're talking about it has an effect where people just become more bland.

Yeah, self-censorship. Anxiety, all of these things go into it, we try to fight it. I try to fight it. I think I think I got to still do what makes me laugh and what makes me laugh is often fucked up. And it's often, you know, it's not always fucked up in a way that, you know, is going to get me thrown off something. But like, I think pushing certain buttons is funny to me.

So I got to keep doing that. Part of part of the problem is that so many of the lines are blurred. Right. You have comedians that are commentators and commentators that are comedians and politicians. And so it's like it's harder to get the defense of like, hey, I'm a comedian, leave me alone. That defense becomes harder when, like, all of these lines are blurring everybody's kind of everything now. So like people say to me, you should run for office and they're serious.

And I'm like, you're crazy, but they're serious. Like, so the blurring of everything means that people aren't in their lanes as much and that you go, well, this guy is dangerous because he's not just making a joke, he's doing something else and he's using humor. And I'm like, I'm really not I'm really just trying to make a joke, that's all. That's really what I'm trying to do. But I do think that because of the flattening, there's a lot of people out there that go they take aim at humor because they go humor is where bad ideas can kind of, you know, start and flourish you to put some responsibility on you.

Yeah. Don't you think humor is a way to that?

You are the modern like Jordan Peterson style intellectual. The humor is actually a tool of it can be changing the zeitgeist changing, but it also cannot be.

I don't think it's any one thing. And I think there's a lot of pressure for a comedian. You can be funny and right. You can be funny and wrong. If your goal is to be right, you might end up being right and not funny. So the reality is funny has to come first. There are brilliant people that have been funny and correct, according to people.

Right.

But at the end of the day, people that put way too much faith of what comedy is, most of what comedy is, is people showing up to strip malls and and telling jokes for an hour while people eat chicken fingers and they all get drunk and they laugh and they feel a little bit better about their lives.

That's really the majority of comedy. Then there's like ten famous people that are really famous that do a version of that in an arena. But the amount of cultural power they have has always been greatly exaggerated. My uncles loved George Carlin, who was anti military industrial complex, anti this, anti that, and then they would go vote for Ronald Reagan. They didn't care. It doesn't it doesn't really. It does. It's not as powerful as you think.

I wish it was. It feels good. It feels good for me to say I am the new thing. It really is. Yeah, it truly is. It No one is. Comedians are the people that get on stage and say we're fucked up where we're drug addicts or sex addicts, where fat, we're gross. We can't manage our money, we can't stop eating. We can't stop fucking doing horrible things. We're liars, we're narcissists, we're scumbags.

We're the people that get out and say that only a psychopath would look at us and go show me the way like it's not I disagree with you. Well, then then I'm a psychopath. And that's that's I mean, I think I know push back. That's another issue. But you know what I'm saying. One, I don't because I mean, I understand you using this as a psychological tool for yourself to give yourself freedom. Yes. But the reality is you are one of the rare comedians, like a George Carlin who is besides being funny.

Yeah. When I hear things like that, I'm like, OK, you're being very sweet. But like, I agree. I understand what you're saying. I do stuff that makes hopefully makes you think, yeah, I hope that's what good comedy is, but I think I try to do that. But I also would hate to feel shackled to the idea of that. I had to make a point and that point had to be correct. I think the best comedy makes fun of everything, makes fun of both sides.

And then there's a deeper truth about humor, humanity revealed. But then what happens is people take that deeper truth and go, let's politicize it. But what does he mean? Is it the right or the left that I'm like I'm doing something that I think speaks to hopefully people on both sides for everybody because I'm making fun of people on the left and the right and in the center and people that don't care and people do care. And I'm trying to figure out a way to do it.

But then immediately, anything of value in this culture right now is like, how do we politicize it? How do we put it in a box? So, yes, I think comedy could produce a lot of inherently valuable things, reflective, thoughtful things.

But then immediately, can it be put in this box where all of those things can be used politically? No. And on like when they say like comedy is a great way to speak truth to power. It is. But I don't know how much it changes things. I don't know how much a joke can be thrown. And can I know the ideas. Nice. But let's look at the practical applications. I mean, we had brilliant comics. Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Richard.

We had people talk about so many problems in society, illustrate them, put a spotlight on them, and we still have them, they're worse now than they've ever been.

That's not true. I think a society is better. And so the pushback in my perspective, it's very possible that those voices were the exact reason we have the world today, which I do believe is actually I mean, on the on the boring old measures of what makes a good world, which is, you know, the amount of violence in the world, the amount of opportunity that all those kinds of measures, even happiness, all of those things measure things have been improving.

Steven Pinker, because a lot of shit for this, but he's really good articulating how the data says pretty clearly that the world is getting better.

And it's arguable that the freedoms we do enjoy currently are thanks to the comedic voices or the people who mock. So to me, it's possible that humor is the very thing that saves the world. Humor is the very thing that keeps the balance of power in the mind.

But I think a lot of the things that those guys criticize, whether it was militarism or the elites, the lying, the corruption, the bribery and stuff that's still going on and it's always going to go on. Right, because that's the nature of human beings.

We call it out, we point it out, but we don't have a plan to change. Not really our job. Right. And and I think that too much now is like, well, comedians should have like I don't tell people who to vote for. Like the idea that comedians won't tell people who to vote for is like to me is crazy. I understand like people have strong opinions, but like I believe I have a job and my job is to make you laugh or whatever, maybe make you think.

But like, my job is not to tell you who to vote for.

I mean, it's absurd to see the thing you do. Yeah. By the comedy like on your Twitter that people should definitely fall, I believe. Is it A.J.?

Dylan, I agree with you on the on this point. I agree with you. I can't just follow you. Yeah.

You give me you give me freedom to think well, my own meaning. Like you're shaking things up to where I'm I don't feel constrained about what I can think about and that's awesome. And that I thank you. So you're not telling me what to think. You're giving me the freedom to sing. And that's what great comedy does, is I don't I don't often agree with George Carlin. He can get pretty political sometimes, but, you know, just the ability to do that.

So rare podcast do that, you know, like certain people that can really just challenge you to even we disagree with them to sort of be like, oh, it's OK to think about this kind of stuff. Yeah.

And I appreciate that because that's awesome. And I mean that that's great. And I use a brilliant guy. That's great if I'm giving you the license to think that, man, the world is completely fucked, but I'm happy about that.

Yeah.

No is speaking about the world being completely fucked. Alex Jones turned on Kuhnen.

I know it's not very tough, Matt. They had a rough marriage. They fought it. They fought it out for years.

And eventually we just knew someone was going to leave someone who tried to leave him a few months ago, also at someone else's house. The car wasn't in the driveway. Yeah, well, the thing about KUNR, that makes it a lot of fun. Yeah. It's kind of a make it up as you go along. I've I'm a drug addict, right.

So often my lies aren't planned. They're in the moment. A lot of what to do on the podcast. A lot.

You know, in the moment I have an idea what I want to talk about. I rant and I go and I've been, like, stoned. And I show up at home and my parents are like, what's going on? There was fifty dollars on the mantel. Now it's not there. And I'm like. Well, and I got to make something up on the spot, right, I've been, you know, are you drinking again? No, I'm not.

And then you had to have a while.

You were gone for two days. No one knows where you are. And somebody said you left your car. Well, I was.

Well, this is I was at a sales conference and I left my car. I flew to Phoenix, like, I understand that is Kuhnen is an ever evolving conspiracy theory with the events are happening in the past, in the present and in the future.

It's kind of hilarious. Every conspiracy theories that Kennedy or something like that, that there's a lot of truth in that or all truth. But at the end of the day, it's like you're looking back from thirty thousand feet, analyzing little things that already happened, Cunard's like. So I think Alex is kind of like I'm a little tired of the constant evolving nature of that conspiracy theory as so he's not a fan of like the jazz that it's cuing on.

So they're not because they're improvising. They're improvising.

Alex is like, hey, man, I was on board a little bit, but at the end of the day, it's getting a little annoying because it can turn on you eventually. You become part of the conspiracy, right? Well, Alex is controlled opposition.

That's what they'll say eventually you because Kuhnen just eats things. So it's a conspiracy that just eats things. The minute you start to say, hey, man, maybe that's not it. It just eat you. You're in on it. Everyone's in on it. Everyone's a satanic pedophile. Everybody everyone that questions is eating children. And you go, wait a minute, that seems illogical. And but now there's no no children now and not enough.

And I think Cunard's over now, unfortunately, because for these people. But I think fortunately for them, they're going to have to find a new hobby. But I think it's over now because even the best kuhnen people now are starting to go, hey, man, this might not be going down the way we thought.

Yeah, but they've literally gone as far as to say they're like Biden and Trump switched faces. Trump's actually still the president, except Biden. Yeah, you have to be a real moron now.

You got to be real stupid.

Now, it's at the end, like when it was cool, like when the stuff happened, Kuhnen was like it was party at CU. Yeah. And then when the Hunter bought laptop, stuff started to happen.

They were like dancing like it's time and then Biden wins and they're like, wait, whoa.

And it's just like it's the day after the CUNA if you ever want to party in high school or college. Kulen Right now, the day after the party, you wake up, it's 12:00 noon. The sun is hitting you in the face. You're hungover. There's a stench of disgusting beer and cigarettes all over the house. You're like, what the fuck happened here? I've got to get out of here and get a bacon, egg and cheese. That's what Kunhardt is.

They got to sober up, get out of that house, get a bacon, egg and cheese and go, man, we were fucking whacked. We were high. Dude, I thought Nancy Pelosi was eating children for four years and the Donald Trump was going to put her in Guantanamo Bay.

Wow.

That was because I mean, it's interesting that people had to do that after the sixties. They were like, yeah, I just did a bunch of acid and I lived in a ranch in Malibu and fucked everyone I ever saw. And they're like, I thought that was the way the world was going to go. And I followed some shaman guy, some guru who just wanted to fuck me and ten other people that were living there. And we did that for three years.

Apparently, we never created the utopia we thought we were going to have. And now I'm back working here, you know, at Allstate Insurance. And we have great policies. And we'd love you to come in the office if we can break them down for you.

It all ends. Fowlkes All the law, all the bullshit ends, but it's fun. They have so much fun. Kuhnen was hard to get mad at because they were this was all they had.

Yeah.

And they were, they were quite good at it and they were good at it and, and it was a lot of desperate people but there were also rich idiots.

Those also like dumb rich people and those are like the saddest people in Cuba because it's like they should they have the resources to do other things, but they just love you.

They're like, I'm just into this and I'm like, you're rich. Go do something. How incurious are you? Go to the Amazon, go birdwatch. I don't know. But, you know, so play golf. It's sad, but they're like, done now. I mean, they're. Oh, it's over. So you think this is the.

I think everything's ending. My whole thing is that Trump's out Cunard's over. Quarante is going to end. Everything's going to go back to something that's more recognizable. I think that.

Are you optimistic about the twenty twenty one and what to certain aspects? I have optimism and then I have I have short term optimism and long term pessimism, meaning that I think in the short term things can get better. I think long term, because there's so many forces that are out of our control that are evolving in ways I barely understand, that are carving up society. It's going to be very tough long term to be completely optimistic, like, hey, it's going to be great, it's going to be good forever.

But short term, I think, yeah, this quarantine will end, things will get better, the economy will get a little better. The constant Trump craziness will die down a little bit. That's my hope. And people can go back to focusing on things that matter, which is, you know. The things that are near you and close to you. Yeah, the humans around you, humans around you, not Nancy Pelosi. I have my uncles to talk about, Nancy, like you've never met her.

We'll never meet her.

Shut up. Yeah. And I have a belief that this kind of local love and kindness that you naturally can have for human beings that you actually know can be expanded at scale through the social networks that we use, that we build, that Twitter is currently failing at that miserably.

I would be great, but that if we were able to increase the love through the social networks, that would be great.

It feels very hard to. It's a worthy challenge, you have tweeted, one of the underreported reasons conspiracy theories take hold is because some of them are true.

What conspiracy theories do you believe that are sort of important for people to think about? Would you say Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman with no connections to any other situation government? You know, I believe that JFK was removed from office by a group of people that had.

Very different interests, but the question of state, so these are powerful people that are able now to dictate through basically the threat of violence what the president's the surface powerful people in our society.

I mean, I'm not again, I'm not I want another investigation into 9/11, not because I think George Bush pressed a button that made 9/11 happen, but because we invaded the country of Iraq. And then we, you know, 15 out of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. There was tons of stuff in the 9/11 report that didn't make sense to anybody. There's tons of stuff about that day that I feel like we just don't know.

Yeah, that's so to interrupt. That's when I my little ant life touched upon conspiracy theory world and first learned about Alex Jones is when 9/11 happened. It was very frustrating to me how poorly the reporting and the transparency around what exactly happened, who knew what, all that kind of basic information that you would hope the government would release, reveal and use as like a lesson for how we prevent this. Instead, it felt like a lot of stuff was being hidden in order to manipulate some kind of machine that leads us to war.

Yeah, that's that's fair to say. Yeah. I mean, I just don't feel like we've gotten the full story. I don't know the full story. I can't I don't know what it is, but I don't feel like we've gotten the full story yet.

There are there are groups of powerful pedophiles, right. Whether they're in the Catholic Church or they're in the government or wherever they are, they are able to cover things up that they do. They're able to silence people that try to out them in terms of like, you know, disrupt their operations. That's true. Kuhnen has nuggets of truth. It just went crazy.

Any conspiracy theory that involves the Knights Templar and also Chrissy Teigen is probably wrong.

I what's the Knights Templar? Well, it was just this group of knights back in the day, you know, that supposedly secret meetings and like in every conspiracy they talk about, like, you know, if you go deep enough, it's like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, you know, all of these secret groups throughout history, the Illuminati, the there's a thread that connects all of us. And oh, yes, it connects it all to David Spade.

I mean, it's a little much. Well, how do you if you're David Spade, defend yourself, by the way?

You ignore it because it's hilarious. And I know David Spade, it's like Hollywood kind of boring. Yes, there are sex orgies. I'm not invited. I'm sure there's shit going on. Kids, you get abused, women going to be all good. I'll invite you to one place if you want. What do we get?

We got the seventy five thousand dollar dog and then we'll get one. But, you know, I mean, if we go out to sushi restaurants like and you sit there and you listen to people complain, that's what a lot of it is. What a lot of Hollywood is, is deeply sad tragedy that people don't understand that it's some of it is nefarious and dark and there are problems and there are real powerbrokers here.

It's a Darktown. One hundred percent. But they did it. Everybody that lives here is in some wide ranging, vast conspiracy isn't true. It ignores how humdrum, boring, deeply sad most people's lives are in Hollywood and it ignores how sad fame is in general. Fame is a sad thing, not always, but a lot of times it's a sad thing. It's fleeting, it's ephemeral. It doesn't last. It separates you from other people. It's isolating.

It can be traumatic depending on what's going on. Obviously, it's better than the alternative. If you're trying to be famous, it's better to be famous than not famous. Right. I'll say that. But it's it's it's a mixed bag to a degree. There are things about it that aren't great. And Hollywood has a deep undercurrent of sadness, of people that have not realize their dreams and people that have realized them pull out.

All of those people, the people that win Olympic gold medals can sometimes suffer from depression. They've lost.

Well, somebody said and I forget who said it, it's a great quote, it's not mine. I think it's from a book or it might be from a TV show. Sometimes it quotes something in there like that's from like Charlotte's Web.

I'm like, oh, the two worst things. I think it's from the movie Limitless. I'm like an idiot. But anyway, thanks for having me on tomorrow. I will never publish this. It's for the movie.

And I think he says the worst two worst things in the world are not. Oh, you know, it's not from Monolith. I think it's from the fact that the movie where Nicolas Cage sold weapons, it was called Lord of War.

It's a little better than limitless.

Anyway, it's a good movie. It's a great movie. He said the two worst things in the world are not getting what you want and getting it.

So the undercurrent of sadness that run through Hollywood are there are two rivers that converge and there are people that just never had it and people that have it and go, now what? And so it's a sad place, a tragic loss. And there's a lot of it's boring. That's what people don't realize is it's actually kind of boring for life is kind of boring. Life is kind of boring.

But there's also like, you know, so I think Cunard's is a way to make a lot of it seem like it's super exciting, exciting.

And listen, I don't want to diminish the experiences of people who've been abused because there is a lot of horror here. But the whole Kuhnen thing was like everybody in everything is doing. And that's not sure what's the just telling on that a little bit is Bill Gates. The conspiracy theories around Bill Gates bother me because this is me, dumb, naive, Lex thinks that Bill Gates did a lot of good for this world, first, by creating a company that empowered personal computers, and second, by donating a ton of money for like treating malaria in Africa and all those kinds of things.

And there's these huge amounts of conspiracies, I think, based on like just replies to whatever Bill Gates does anything like. To me, the top replies should be about how inspiring that guy is to donate so much money. Well, I think I think this is the thing I'm struggling with is if I'm Bill Gates, like, how do you behave differently? How do you show people that you're if you're not, I don't know, doing creepy stuff that they're saying he's doing?

Well, I think part of it is that he's done some really good stuff. Right.

He's an innovative guy, is on the vanguard of a lot of things, but he's also the Antichrist. And I think that that is, you know, they're not mutually exclusive. He is the prince of darkness as well as know. Here's my Bill Gates. He's a Batman villain, billionaire, meaning that he's not a villain, but he's got all this money right. Here's the thing. And I love masking all these guys. I know you love these guys.

Listen, when you have the kind of money that these guys have and you have the vision that they have and they want society to look a certain way and a lot of them are doing great things, people, they need to get better at the pushback. They need to get a little better when somebody says, hey, man, what's going on over there? Bill Gates needs to be a little better going, here's what. Yeah, because, you know, Bill Gates has the money.

You know, I think he wants he wanted to shoot a missile of dust at the atmosphere to help global warming.

And a lot of scientists were like, hey, man, that might not be the way to do it, but no one in history, like so few people in history, have had the resources to even have that thought, that if you have the resources to have that thought and you have designs on the way you want society to look, whether it's public health policy or vaccinations, whatever, you have to get a little better at dealing with legitimate critiques.

And obviously, you're not defending yourself against people that say you're the Antichrist, but like you need to get a little better. And I feel like Bill Gates and some of those people at that level are like, oh, PR is kind of like, you know, terrible, terrible.

And they're terrible.

And Zuckerberg are really bad as Zuckerberg is horrible and he seems especially bad at public.

And it makes you feel so bad because the problem of being a billionaire is you lose touch with reality if you're not careful. I think Elon is good at, at least so far, maintaining touch with reality.

But if you look at the name of his child, you can clearly see I do like him. And I do think what he's done with Tesla, you know, my producer as a Tesla, and he never shuts up about it. Most people that have Tesla never shut up about them. And they thought they think they're part of the development team at SpaceX. And I, I like that he's created a world where people can get excited about a thirty seven thousand dollar car and never shut the fuck up about it to the point where I have to threaten people with physical violence to get them to stop telling me about that.

Their car drives itself. Oh, you should have a few less drinks and a few a few fewer Vicodin and you can drive yourself. Have you thought about getting it? I've never thought about I don't like them, but minimalist.

I don't like. I want more. I want more. I want to just being it.

I want it rolling. My my my producer wants to drive a truck.

I want a stagecoach. Old school stagecoach horse thief. Shit.

I'm not going, it's going back to that. I live in an area a lot of horses it's going back to like whipping a horse. I want an animal to shriek while I go back.

You want more suffering in the world, not less.

Oh I think we need it ok, but I just don't like the billionaire is a bad word and it's not. And that's sure. Not every billionaire is a pedophile.

I know. But the problem is a lot of like it's just, you know, abstinence. Very smart. I like just getting people at that house and taking photos of them.

Nobody knew what they were doing, but it's like it was one of those things was like after the most social guy ever, like every photo, he's like, hey, it's like everyone that's ever done anything in the world has been at that fucking island. Every human being is like in a photo. It just weird. Like, I'm like, it's funny. I mean, my friends get together. We don't ever take photos. Right? Like last night, a few people I was my birthday yesterday.

I'm seventeen and my my friends came over and we're just eating dinner. Right. And we had a fun night just for people that are over nobody. Right. Nobody ever thought like let's let's hey, I want to remember it. Let's take photos.

I'm thirty six but but everything I did there's just photos of everybody. It's interesting. Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

No, I think he was killed by that guy that that that that guy that they put in his cell, that lunatic who's that big muscled guy. I think he was just he did it for money, kept his mouth shut. That money.

From whom do you think? Mossad and MI6, CIA, all three, so there's a lot of pressure from a lot of different people, probably probably Mossad, CIA more.

I mean, it seems very clear that he was working inside of a honeypot intelligence operation, just like Maxwell's father was an Israeli superspy just named Maxwells, working for Israeli intelligence. It would be odd to think and of course, the CIA knows about everything that Israeli intelligence is doing with Americans. So I would think that it's a very cozy relationship with those two intelligence agencies. And I think if you ran it by anyone, I think if you ran it by French intelligence, they'd go, yeah, no get.

I don't think there was any intelligence service in the world whose job is to protect the powerful people that live in their countries that was against him getting whacked.

But do you think it's possible that he's just an evil person who is after manipulating people and also that was now so that there is a bigger factual, that there's a bigger thing, evil people don't get your facts, Tim. Don't know the facts of the case. You don't get handed a sixty four. Show me another evil guy who was handed a sixty five million dollar place by Les Wexner. Show me another evil guy that got that type of handshake deal where he was basically let off without anything after a judge had made a very sweetheart deal for him after he was accused of molesting a 14 year old.

Show me another evil guy that doesn't have that kind of backing, that has those type of friends, those connections, those type of properties. Show me a, you know, multiple passports all over the world. So show me a guy without anyone backing him that's doing it. Why did they you know, so you think he's just an evil guy who is doing this for whom it's his own? Just shits and giggles. He was getting off on it.

Human nature. Human nature, huh? It's human nature. 70 million dollar lives marked. Yeah. Is it human nature? And it's I don't think it's human nature. I think it's I think it's I think they manipulated human nature, but I think they I think they did it. I think just I think Epstein was really just a functionary. And I think just Lane was kind of a pimp and Epstein was kind of a guy that, you know, made the money OK, and, you know, hid money and things like that and worked for a lot of powerful people.

I don't believe in lone pedophiles anymore.

I don't even believe that if you're a pedophile, you're like in a group, you know what I mean?

You know?

Well, I'm not even I'm not even going there busting. I'm just saying. So you believe there's some power in her. What do you think happens to her now?

Like, what a great, great question. I mean, I don't know what'll happen to her, but I imagine she'll get some type of deal closed door thing years from now when people don't really care about the case and she'll serve some time in a very lax thing or she'll be killed. I mean, again, it's like if she was doing what she was doing, which is, I believe, the fact that she was compromising powerful people so that they could be blackmailed by, you know, the intelligence services of the U.S. and Israel, probably.

I don't I don't see how she wasn't doing that. Someone's blog. Someone's using the photos and the tapes. Right. Someone's using that against these people.

Someone wants to control these people. Well, who and why? That's the real question. And I think the real question is, you want to you want to exert control over congressmen and senators and presidents because they have the power to make decisions to affect about the CIA. Just works for a lot of very wealthy people. That's what the CIA, how the CIA started. It was lawyers, bankers. They're protecting financial interests of multinational corporations all over the world, overthrowing democratically elected governments, going in and doing subterfuge campaigns, encouraging terror.

They're doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I don't see why that would change. I think that's who they still represent. And I think those people want certain policies and certain people pushed forward. And I think those people are controlled. And I think one of the ways to control people is your sexual problems. And and that's the way they did it.

I wish there was a way to because everything you just said now makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

I'm being indoctrinated on air now.

I think there's just a question, just a fun random guy who just wanted to make home movies of presidents.

Well, you think I'm just some random guy. I'm just trying to sell myself as somebody who is friendly with the American audience.

I believe you are backed by people that want people to be more comfortable with robot dogs.

I believe that I believe your push to be the happy face of A.I., which is why I wish I will this your face out, I think Joe Rogan's role.

No, Ed, this is live now. I mean, I wish there was a way to for some of the conspiracy theories to prove that that's not the case, like what the CIA is. There is some possibility in my mind that institutions like to see a different kind of organizations are driven less by organized malevolence and more by just incompetence, just bureaucracy being incompetent.

I think that argument gets less and less persuasive when you look at all the things they've been able to do.

This is very certain. Just said that there's a bunch of them that have done that because there's some conspiracy theories that are dramatic and true. The question is, I wish there was a way to prove that some of them are not. And it's very difficult because so much is shrouded in mystery. Like, one of the things I'm bothered by is when people accuse other, like, athletes of using steroids, for example. And it's just yes, a lot of people use steroids, but it's something that people just don't believe you like.

There's some incredible athletes that look shredded. They look just incredible performers. And everybody just says that they're on steroids.

They kind of assume I mean, and that and people accuse me all the time of being on performance enhancing drugs and steroids.

And it is hard. But what I remind them is what my, my, my, my, my, my appearance as a result of dedication, but up the hard work, diet, exercise, dedication, I Ankita.

I'm on. I'm on.

I'm doing a version of your right now. So I'm doing a version of Kitto right now with bread and it's you see what I mean.

You're carb up with sugar and sugar and it's a very it's a good diet for I grew up in the 90s when nobody ever lost weight, sadly, because every diet was like, you can eat what you want, just be accountable.

No one even knew what that meant.

So it would be like my mother being like, if you have chocolate chip pancakes, have a glass of water. Yeah, just take a walk around the block. You go to McDonald's three times a day, just walk around the block. One parent said, my mother just walk around the block you find. Going to have a cigarette, walk 20 steps, walk 20 steps back. It's exercise. So, you know, there's too many conspiracies that a lot of them, aren't you?

A lot of them are bitter, angry people trying to justify their own impotence, not being able to do anything in life. And they're like the people that have done something in life. They're all nefarious. It's all the cards are stacked against me. That's 100 percent true. One hundred percent. It attracts usually people that have not figured out a way to succeed and or I haven't succeeded on the level that they want you, but.

That also being true, there is a fair amount of fakery going on and provable and, you know, we just have to, I think, separate, separate, know that these things are often inflated or not true, but know that sometimes they are true.

Otherwise they wouldn't exist if there was no if there was nothing to JFK, there was nothing to 9/11.

If there was if people felt like they were being dealt with, honestly, this wouldn't exist. I mean, this exists because there are real questions that people have that don't can answer it for whatever reason. And then the vacuum of the refusal to answer those questions, that that information vacuum is filled with people like Alex Jones who are curious and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're horribly wrong and sometimes they're all over the place.

A good storytellers and people love stories.

And when there's an absence of actual Alex is a uniquely American person, like, very interesting. I don't know how many countries, like how many people make a living as a conspiracy theorist, a good living in other countries.

Right. It's very rare, right? I mean, it's very interesting.

And he became like, I know people that normally was kids. I go to Austin and perform a lot. And, you know, he was a guy that would take a bullhorn and yell at cops because he thought DUI checkpoints were unconstitutional. That's what he was doing in college. And he's just went through. I was hated by the right. He was hated by the Bush people. He was hated by them. And he went from being this this guy that was considered like a leftist, even like even though he's never a leftist, he was considered this like.

Enemy of mainstream conservatism like he was not, and you considered a guy that wasn't a patriot, wasn't this, wasn't that.

And he just wow, like he whines, wins and ends up just being this confidant of a Republican president, very divisive Republican president. And he becomes a populist in everything. It's really wild to watch that. But I do think he should retire eventually just so we could get, you know, some I don't know. It seems like a it's a lot to keep doing.

Well, I hope this world allows for Alex Jones to continue having a voice, because just like you said, he's a. I use the word fun, but really he he shakes up the norms of our discourse.

I do, too. I do think we need to put more value.

I think entertainment, you know, we need we do need to say that, like, there are people that should be allowed to have a voice for entertainment purposes. Right. And that's not part of what Donald Trump now that he's not the president. Come on. Let the guy let him talk.

Who do you think is the best comedian of all time? Oh, that's a great question, greatest of all time. You mentioned Karlen, your uncle's like in Kahlan. Well, is great, Greg is really hard to argue with. But Chappelle is also really great. Louis C.K. is really great. I don't know that there's what Joan Rivers is great. I don't know you smile at that.

Well, is a beast of a comic. I'm not aware of her stand up to the comic as rogue and ask any of them. Kinnison is great.

So what makes a great comic, do you think, in the history of comedy?

Just like I said something at the moment, in a way, I found a way to communicate with people in the funniest possible way at that moment and illustrate illustrated larger truths about life in what they did. And I think the guys like Louie and Chappelle and Pryor and Kinnison and Hecks, people like Joan Rivers have done that. And even, you know, modern people, people like Maria Bamford's an amazing comedian. It's just a different style of comedy, Persay.

But she's an amazing comedian. You know, Katt Williams is an amazing comedian. You know, it really is.

Yeah. Do you have any was he the one of the things you kind of mentioned that, as you mentioned, that were kind of fearless in saying that they needed to be said? Katt Williams is more I don't remember his comedy, but I think it's just more wild out there to an extent that you can watch it.

He's got stuff. He talks about stuff. He talks about race brilliantly. He talks about America brilliantly. No, I think there's a lot of stuff there.

And of course, Chris Rock. Chris Rock, of course, it's so hard, you can't really pick one.

And you just kind of there's a class of people that throughout this history of this business, which is not that long of a history.

It's, you know, pretty much within the last century, you know, that are have been really influential, sometimes at style, the way they deliver things, sometimes the substance of how they, you know, what they're saying, or sometimes it's just a style of what they're saying. I mean, and we're only talking about stand up comedians. Right. So there's a million great comedians. I mean, if we're going to talk about Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and Chris Farley, I mean, these are brilliant.

And those guys are bigger influences on comedy, I think, than stand ups. Really, truly. So there's there's so many brilliant people in the business who is for you, like influential.

Just early on it was influential because I watched Bill Hicks and I'd be like this guy saying crazy shit on stage and this is the only way he can get away with it. It's because it's so funny.

And he was calling out like, you know, the military industrial complex and he was talking about the first Gulf War. I remember he said a joke that I heard. It made me sit up straight. He goes, he goes, he was in Canada and he said, we got a war in the States. He was talking about the first Gulf War. And he said, I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops.

And to me, I love that joke. It was so funny to me. And I was like, oh, you can't get away with that anywhere other than standing on a stage. You could never say that in an office, really. And this was before like it was like pitchy. And there's the other thing. I always knew that comedians had to say shit and have it be funny enough that you couldn't get away with it in polite society.

That was the whole point. That was why it was a dark theater or dark nightclub. That's when people had a few drinks. That's what the art form was. And that's why I saw a guy like that was influential when I started watching him. And of course, like, you know, I loved SNL when I was a kid. And I would watch Chris Farley and I would watch, you know, people like even John Belushi going back in the day.

But I'd watch Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell and all these guys. I mean, the there's so many funny people, but Bill Hicks was kind of funny.

And then Patrice O'Neal was like probably my favorite comedian who's made me laugh more than anybody else, I think is you actually that maybe on your podcast we're talking about Patrice on the on that he was actually vicious to others.

I think he was a little mean to other people, but he was very good to people that he liked. I guess. I think he was like not. I mean, he wasn't. And I never met him. I have no inside info, but from what I've heard, he was like a no nonsense guy. Right? You just said what he wanted to say.

But I think in terms of comedians, I don't know of anyone funnier than Patricia Neal, who said in modern times that said more about our society than him. I mean, he was just a brilliantly funny guy on the radio. He was funny on his specials. He was funny everywhere.

He was funny. And there's something else to be said about the whole medium of comedians doing podcasts. Yeah, because there's a lots of weird special new thing that changed everything. I mean, Rogen started with that. Yeah, you're doing that it. I think that's a whole nother form of like stand ups. Yeah, the ones that have a lot to say, almost like we get to witness the process of the creation of the jokes in a way or the mind.

Right. The sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes that just comedians relate to social media comedians.

Comedy's a it's a performance based medium. So it's about getting up and doing it, getting up in a club, getting up in the theater, getting up in a bar, getting up wherever you can get up. And comedy for years was about performance.

And then on the higher end, it was about movies and TV shows, but we were very slow to get on YouTube. We're very slow to adapt to technology. We're very slow to monetize anything we did on the Internet. So podcasting was a way for comics and funny people to kind of get into that space, start earning money. And now because of the pandemic, it's really become essential and it helps you. And even without the pandemic, it was where people were.

It was how you were building a fan base. And that's like, you know, comics were very reticent to embrace social media at all because they thought it was cheap and they didn't like it and they thought the people on it were idiots and were unfunny. And it was just a blatant, you know, whatever it was, whether it was a money grab or it was just too commercial in the sense where they're like, hey, look at me.

Like it was just goofy.

Right? And then comics, I think, got displaced because all the YouTube came in and all the social media stars came in and they really knocked comics off because now people are much more like if you ask anyone under 30 who their famous favorite comedian is, they say they were Dobek and there's nothing wrong with that.

Dave is a funny guy, but like what you. You know, I'm not especially to me, Aton, but that's OK, I don't, you know, but he makes people laugh. So he's funny, but he's what people that's a comedian. So comics got beat by other people coming into a digital space before they did, laying the groundwork and taking it over. And now comics are just trying to stay alive, like even my podcast, which is people really like it, thank God.

And I love doing it.

The Tim Jones Show. Well, thank you. I was late, you know. I mean, I was I just you know, I've been podcasting for a long time, but really dedicating myself and putting the resources behind it. I was late to it. Like I was like, hey, I'm I'm telling jokes on stage, which is great. But I should have been allocating more time to building an infrastructure online. And I wasn't doing it. And a lot of comics are doing it.

Funny comics weren't doing comics.

It should be doing it. And I think when the pandemic ends, a lot of comics will just keep doing live standup. But I will keep obviously I'm going to go back on the road and do lt. But I will keep doing this podcast and building digitally and also exploring ideas.

You're doing like short videos and so on. You're you're trying to look for different mediums of how I want to be flying everywhere.

I want to be funny everywhere. I love making things to my producer. Ben Avory is like a brilliant editor and comedic mind. Even though he's not a standup, he's able to he understands funny, understands what makes me funny. We're able to make these really I mean, some of those videos, they're just brilliant little videos, even though they're tiny little videos, they're fucking as funny as anything. And it's not me. It's me working with somebody else to make something really great.

And if and it's that relationship that's very important was in some sense, the the medium of a short video is a challenge, just like the medium of a short tweet, of course, how to say something.

I mean, whatever the flavor is of what's in your heart, what's in your mind, how to say it, whether it's the goal, funny or something or just an expression, I think it's the whole thing that's important to us is that it's an extension of really like an extension of your friendship in a way like are you guys laughing at it?

Right. Are you guys making each other laugh about this idea? And if that's the case, other people are going to laugh at it. You know, I think so much of the old medium was like everything was top down, OK, pitched me this idea.

I pitch it to the showrunner. They pitch it to the network. They pitch to the standards and practices sales. And we got to go through everything. Now it's just like our me and a few bodies or even just one body laughing at this idea.

Does it captivate us and do we see it visually?

And also a great line from Roseanne, a guy not Roseanne, but a guy that worked on Roseanne, the old Roseanne, the great one. He said, is it funny with the sound off? But that's what we try to do, is is it funny with the sound off when you see me in the dumb things or me the Meghan McCain or mean the thing?

It's funny with the sound of it, funny with the sound off, you have a good starting point.

That's hilarious because you say you're one of the people because most people are not funny. Most are most comedians like you, you Will Ferrell is another example that there's something about when I click on one of your videos. It's funny, just like the first thing I see, just your face. Well, thank you, I swear to God, I mean, that's what we try to do, right? We're trying to be funny. Yeah. So we're trying to be funny.

Can we talk about love a little bit? Sure. So you came out of the closet as being gay when you were 25? Yeah, it was late. Very late. Very late before the standards, during and after.

How has your view on love evolved? Interesting, it's it's hard to say because, like I would I I'd like to make a very, like, Disneyfied statement about like that you can't be in love secretively. You should be honest. Love should all be about honesty. But that's not true, right.

There's people that are in love that are lying to everyone else, but they're deeply in love.

I would love to say something like honesty is an ingredient for love, you know, but I don't know, maybe honesty with each other. But I mean, I, I think there's a lot of people in the world that aren't honest.

My view on love is superimportant. I think that it's a lot of society in America is all about love. We don't tend to focus on other things in terms of like, you know, friendship or sustainability of that, because I think that a lot I know a lot of people in relationships where it's like, I don't know, they're not.

They are they love each other. But like it's also a rock solid couple because they are they're very compatible in many other ways. So I think they're friends. They have a friendship. And love is the same thing. This is parts of it that aren't right.

So it's like I look at it is like there is there needs to be more than just like that, like amazing like chemistry or physical attraction. That is this chemical thing that happens.

There should be like some underlying I mean, again, that's from what I that's what I've observed as really long lasting, successful relationships.

Well, is there something about coming out that. That was. That you took away, that you remember? Yes, I found the site and it was I that I it wasn't society, it was me. So there were kids that were out in my high school that I waited years later to do it.

That was no one's fault but my own. So I was taking the cowardly way out. And a lot of people, so I could blame society are like, oh, I lived in a conservative area and I grew up.

Not that you should take responsibility for your own decisions and if you're being cowardly, admit that you're being cowardly. So that's what I took out of it, is it? It's not society's fault that you chose to be a coward society. You'll never be perfect. You have to be honest when you're ready to be honest or however you want to be honest. But it's not something too much now, is it's everyone else's fault that you didn't take make a hard choice or a hard decision.

So that's kind of what I took out of it.

Now, in retrospect, you see yourself as or being afraid. Do do you think at the time?

Well, I want people to like me, which is that which is the disease of humanity. Right. Is that we want to be liked. And what happens is if you want people to like you and love you, even you want people to feel comfortable with you.

And also people like your family, friends or my family, I would always, you know, could always throw in the street. But I'm kidding. I mean, but I am not. Yeah, but my friends, my circle of friends, which I were my family at the time, when you're a senior, when you're tenth, eleventh grade in high school, your your friends are your family, you know what I mean.

Like that you're so you don't want to do anything that puts you on the outside of the circle thinking back to that fear the things you're afraid of now, but you're not doing you're afraid to do.

I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of not being good at my job, not being funny, letting people down, not putting out products that are good, you know, whether it's the podcast every week or standup or the videos, like I'm afraid of like there's a ton of people that really enjoy what we do. So when you're in that position, you're nervous that you're going to start doing things that they don't like. So the new things you want to do, the evolution you want to do, you want to make sure you're evolving in the right way.

You know, you want to make sure that you're doing things that are consistent with why people liked you.

But also you don't want to put yourself in a box and limit what you can be going forward. So, like, I had a talk with the CEO of NBC Universal once I was doing some internal sketch for them, and I was playing like a cab driver. And he was a and he's not the current CEO and he's a former CEO. And I said, well, what's the hardest part of running a corporation of this size? And he said something very interesting.

He said, the hardest part is maximizing the current profit model of what you have at the same time, getting ready, getting ready, getting the company ready for where it's going to be in five years, he said. Those are often at odds and that's the toughest thing. He goes because I could just bang out everything I got to do right now. And we're going to make a lot of money doing this. But am I devoting enough resources into digital so that in five years, when that's where everything lives, are we competitive in that space?

So it's funny as I am now, hopefully to people and a lot of the things that I want to do now, I'm going what am I what groundwork am I not laying for three to five years down the road so that I can be adapting to the trends that are important then in terms of not so much comedic trends, but like the technological trends, like what is the what is it? You know, I should have done podcasting earlier. What should I should I have a bigger presence on Tick-Tock?

So I have a bigger presence here. I should have a business. Should I be on Twitch? Should I be doing this? I do not. What am I not doing that I should be doing that I'll regret not doing.

And those are those are the conversations I think I have in my own head all the time.

And I guess there's parallels to come out as gay or just parallels and like career paths. You're taking all that. That's ultimately just fear. Fear? Yeah.

It's the fear of, you know, the best thing that happened in my career was that I came to L.A. I.

Didn't have an idea of what was going to happen. I met somebody who was really committed to making funny things that we just wanted to be funny. No one would let us be funny. We didn't have Comedy Central letting us be funny. We didn't have HBO. We didn't have Netflix. We just had a garage and a phone in the beginning and then a camera and then a thing. And we just want it to be funny. And that was the greatest risk really I took because I was like, well, I don't know what else is going to happen right now, but I just want to be funny and funny.

Save my life right. Any funny got me out of drugs. Funny, probably got me out of the closet. Funny was the thing that I was able to do that made everything OK in my own head. So I was like, as long as I'm being funny, something good will happen. So we did that and then something really cool happened that we were able to do a lot of cool things. But, you know, that's what it is.

It's fear that keeps you from being the better version of yourself, your mom.

I mean, you have so many complicated, fascinating parts of your story.

But your mom, as you were growing up, suffering from mental illness, schizophrenia, can you tell her story and how that relationship has changed over the years?

Yeah, well, she was always eccentric and always, you know, the terms for schizophrenia in an Irish Catholic household where we didn't talk about anything. Were they centric?

Fun. She's fun. This is a theme to this unpredictable.

She's a liar. She was a livewire. Any of the words you would use to describe somebody who's a fucking lunatic? But you wouldn't say that even. Right.

She she started experiencing symptoms probably early on in her life. But she also, like I think, started really manifesting them when I was in my mid teens.

So like fourteen. Thirteen, fourteen area, and she got really, really bad, and then I think she was institutionalized about ten years ago, a little over 10 years ago, and she could really no longer live on her own.

She was unable to go to work.

She was unable to function. So I visit her when I can. Obviously, I'm not in New York. Whenever I go to New York, I visit her. She's aware of what I do, my career and everything like that. You know, she has good days and bad days. But, you know, mental illness is a thing.

It's very tough. We don't talk about as a society. People with mental problems don't get that much attention. We tend to think that they did something wrong or that they deserve it or that they are, you know, to be ignored. And we don't devote a lot of resources into it, which is unfortunate because then you have the junk gurus come in and go like, let's diagnose your mental illness of Instagram. And it's like, that's not the move.

Yeah.

Do you do you love her? I do. I do. I love her.

But I also remember her that isn't her now.

And when someone has mental illness that's severe, you make peace with their death before they die.

Well, yeah, because the part of them that you love and remember a lot of cases is is is not.

Evident or obvious that my mother is still a loving person that I love, but the fun, her ability to be present in the moment and to not, you know, that is lost with the progression of her illness so that you still love her. And I mean, again, you know your parents, you know, the time horizons you have with your parents are unknown. People don't know. You could be friends with their parents, with their lives for their entire life.

And I have friends whose parents were in their life. But my mother was a very she knew what I was when I was a little kid. I was an actor when I was like six to 12. My mother knew that I was a performer. She knew what I was and what I'd ultimately do. She recognized that in me when I said to her, I want to audition for shows. I want to be on stage, I want to be on this.

I want to do this.

She let me do it because she knew who I was and she didn't want to get in the way of me being a human, being a fully realized person at six. So that's probably the best thing a parent could do for kids. Let them be who they are.

And my mother did that. So that I mean, that's good. We ate too much fast food, there were negatives, but she did let me be. That's why you want to throw them out into the street? Yes, sometimes.

But coming coming to accept mortality of her. I guess identity, as you remember from childhood, do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death?

I'm afraid of death. I don't like the idea of death, but I know what's happening, you know? I know it's going to happen eventually.

I don't think about it. I think about I want to do some good stuff that people can look back at. And I think I'm proud. I'm proud of the show where if people look back at the show, I don't know how comedy ages or whatever, but like, I think I put out a lot of stuff and I want to continue to put out stuff and I want to put out a few specials that people can look back at and go, oh, this guy was really funny in this really crazy.

You know, he lived in the latter part of the century when all this shit was going on and he kind of made fun of it and he did something to make people's lives a little better just by having a few laughs, you know.

What do you think about this is something like in the podcast context, do you think you'll have just one or two or three shows out of thousands maybe that are like the truly special ones? That's probably the case. Or do you think it's entirety of the body of work?

I think people will take ten minute clips from all different shows and put them together. And that's a highlight. Yeah, like a highlight reel of just like these are like the best things that he's ever done or the best rants he's ever had, the best things, whatever.

So the legacy would be that this was an important voice in a very weird time. I would hope.

I would hope that that's part of it. And I hope that I continue to be you know, you say important, I say funny, but hopefully I continue to be a voice. And that's what I think when I think about death, I think about like what did people what do people come on earth to do? And I think I came I think my main purpose on this planet, other than to experience whatever love or, you know, worthiness or whatever is to make to entertain people.

And there's a lot of people in comedy right now that are not entertainers, and that's really the problem. But and they got into comedy sort of the way that, you know, you can walk into the wrong store in a mall and then not realize you're in the wrong store and trying a bunch of clothes and then go, fuck, I wasted my whole afternoon. But I think I've always kind of been an entertainer and that's what I want to do.

There's unfortunately, sadly, a lot of people that look up to you.

That is a horrible thing. But life is a nightmare. Yeah.

If you were to give them advice, young folks, people in college, maybe even high school, but people in their 20s about what to do with their life, whether it's career or whether it's just life in general, what would you say?

Ignore everyone, make a few good friends who truly have honest conversations with yourself about your. When do you feel the most alive, figure that out, when and how do you feel the most alive now?

Figure that out. Try to figure out a job or a career that can replicate that feeling. Don't listen to anyone, don't listen to your parents, don't listen to the gurus on the Internet, don't listen to me, don't listen to anyone, figure out, you know, where you feel the most alive. Where do you feel excited? Where do you where does your pulse quickened? What do you feel matters when you're in a situation? Do you feel like it matters?

What situation was that? What got you excited? What thing did you walk into where you looked around and were taken back and you're like, wow, this is amazing.

And I'm filled with or if you can figure out a life where you're you can excite yourself, you might not use drugs or alcohol or a sex addiction or gambling or irresponsibility. You might not have to get your fucking kicks in very destructive places if you can get them in a productive place.

We've got to you have a pretty. Weaving like this, full of mistakes and so on, many mistakes. Is that are mistakes a bug or a feature I do recommend embrace the mistakes, make a bunch of them. Depends what they are. Right. So you had the full spectrum? I've had a lot, but a lot of Monika's sunk me right. Like there sound like fun when I talk about them, but they actually could have sunk me.

And they were all part of what made me funny. But I don't know, I would never tell anyone else to just light their life on fire and hope it all works out on the other end. It would be pretty irresponsible. But hey.

At the end of the day, it's like you're gonna we get there's you know, I think one of my themes is that there's too much we give the power we think we have to the power of choice has been elevated on our society to an unhealthy degree.

I think people are I think you could you could get really good at something, but you're born with a certain aptitude. It might be to be a deal maker, might be to be an athlete. It might be to be an artist. It might be to be a romantic, to just fall in and out of love, in and out of love in. And I love it might be to be like a world traveler, like. But whatever you are, I think you are.

I think that there's something about you that makes you something. And if you can figure it out and then you're not going to be good at it per say. But if you're if you're an athlete, it might not mean that you're going to be a great athlete in the history, but it might mean you're the best coach anyone's ever had or you're the person that builds a local scene for young athletes or whatever.

If you are a really good deal maker, it doesn't mean you're going to be Warren Buffett, but it might mean you're somebody who enjoys making deals all the time and things like that. Like if you're an entertainer, it might mean that you are an entertainer.

It might mean that you are in the world of entertainment because you love it so much that if you lack the skill set to really pursue it on a on a degree, you just want to be like there's a there's a thing inside of you that makes you what you are.

I think I look at certain people and I go, you were born to be that thing. You know, my whole purpose is to find it. I was a juror on that murder on a murder trial in Long Island. And the the woman who's the D.A., I'm like, you were born to do this. You were born to put murderers away.

And this guy killed the mother of his children. He's a bad guy. But like, I was like, you are really good at what you do. She has a strong belief in whatever her moral code is and what her justice and ethics are. And she wants to communicate that to people. She was very good at at doing what she did.

I don't know the facts of the case. I didn't really listen. He seemed guilty as well as voted guilty, but I didn't really listen to her.

But I heard the shape of her mouth is very bovine. Like it counted. It conferred a certain level of expertise that I enjoyed.

It was funny. I mean, you could see your half joking. Yeah. You can often see that people just they found their place. They found their roll down their thing. They found their thing. And that's kind of the purpose of life. And once you are in a place that seems sticky like that place, it seems right. You know, that's one of the problems with the generation that you're speaking to, is there's always a feeling like I should keep exploring and keep exploring, but it's OK to stay in a place that you found that works.

Yeah.

And and listen, sometimes the best place you'll find is like one point. People are like, when did you feel really excited and alive? It's like doing nothing, right.

You know, like that's the other thing. It's like some people give me, like, I feel really excited and alive and I'm laying in my backyard and a hammock and I just wanted the simplest life and not have to do much. And I don't like doing anything and I love laying around.

I go, wow, this guy looks good today, Bill Gates, because it's good today. Let's shoot a missile into it. He wants to do shit, right? So it's like in between that and nothing, you can find something.

But in that process for you personally, I mean for me and for others, I think there's a struggle. When you look at when in looks in the mirror, do you love yourself? Do you hate yourself? Well, a lot of times I think I'm Amy Schumer, so I'm confused.

I don't I'm a detente for myself all the time. I don't love myself. I hate myself. Addicts have a very bad problem where you can't just fall in love with yourself and you can't hate yourself.

Both of them lead you to a negative place. You try to stay kind of even keel. I don't go like, hey, man, you put out a video, got all these views. Things are great. You sold a bunch of tickets. Let's fucking go out like maybe let's say, hey, man, let's have that drink that you've been waiting for for eleven years. And I don't look at myself and call you in a burger yesterday. You're a piece of shit.

You're horrible. You'll never, you know, get into the shape you want. Like I try not to get too low or too high.

Both of them are not good for my particular mind.

OK, I got to ask, we were kind of spoke about twenty, twenty one. And you being potentially hopeful, hopeful, short term. Cynical long term. Yeah. So let me ask I forgot to ask, are you moving to Austin.

I don't know. I mean I don't think so immediately. You know, I love Joe. I love what he's trying to do down there. I'm appreciative of everything that he's done for not only me, but for comedy in general. And I think as things happened in Austin and unfold is such a political answer. But as things unfold, I will consider it more and more.

But I mean, I think I got another year in L.A. So you you've spoken so nice about this magical place that is Los Angeles, L.A. So you think you think there's a place for comedy in L.A.?

Oh, yeah. They'll always be a place for comedy in L.A. So it's going to be a place for comedy in New York. I mean, the question is how thriving of a comedy scene is I. And the judge can probably make it one, but as of right now, it isn't. So that would be him doing that.

But the question there's a lot of people escaping Los Angeles. But I know better about New York. There's a lot of really brilliant.

Let them go. There's there's other people. This is the thing. It's like this is the fear thing. It's like, no, but all the brilliant people are leaving. There'll be other people and they'll fill their shoes the way that they've done throughout history. And I think that New York and L.A. and maybe in five to 10 years, they're not the two cities that would be real rough in five years when there's pandemic's over for people in Australia to go, dude, you got to go to America.

You've got to visit Charleston and Austin.

Yeah, stop. Let's be adults there. Let's be adults. It's still going to be New York and L.A. for a while. L.A., is it absolute hell scape. But I don't think you're going to replace California with another place. Yeah. And also, everyone's making decisions now because we're literally in the midst of a pandemic we've never had before, but we've never had this before. Joe, Joe loved California up until the point that he had problems with it.

Like we all had problems with it. There's a lot of benefits to being here.

I think a lot of us made pretty bad decisions in twenty twenty because we were all locked up and stuck with our own thoughts. But so it's funny this parallels because I don't necessarily, you know, obviously find a comedy, but I don't care where comics move. Sure. But there's a parallel move that's happening, set of decisions which do influence my decision making, which is where to start a business that's tech centered. And that's more about the San Francisco Silicon Valley.

And there is a lot of people leaving there that's there in Austin there.

Well, Austin, there's a I think there's a bunch of different places. Phoenix, there's Denver.

Austin will probably be a massive tech hub. Ilan's there. It seems like it's all everything about Austin says that it's going to be a massive tech hop. I just don't know if that means it'll be a massive comedy hub. Yeah, it might.

I don't know if those two can actually co-exist. It's interesting because.

Yeah, I don't I think, you know, comedy suffered in New York and L.A. when everyone got super rich. I'm like, you know, it just wasn't as cool.

It's so much more fun on the road. Still more fun to perform for people that want and need to laugh in strip malls than it is to perform for hedge fund managers and with their dates and, you know, Instagram models in L.A., it's just what it is common on the road is much more fun. So maybe in the spirit of that, Austin becomes but you know, you know, Austin is just colonized by tech pros and stuff like, yeah, I'm sure sure.

It'll be fun and it'll be great. I think Joe's made aliasing. So if anyone's going to make Austin a scene, it's Joe. And like the on the Illinois side, which is where I'm much more familiar with the promise of the possibility of what that could become, because there's a lot of problems with Silicon Valley. And, of course, it might be naive to think that just because it's the grass is greener thing, which is just because the place where you come from has a lot of problems doesn't mean you can just create a new place.

It's not going to have those.

There's homelessness in Austin. There are problems in Austin. I mean, I think that with by the way, with the influx of very rich people to an area, sometimes that helps things, but sometimes it just makes things more polarizing. And it's spot puts a spotlight on those problems and makes those problems even bigger. Right. So, I mean, I don't know that it's necessarily it's hard to predict. I just know that L.A. right now is funny.

It's funny that there's 15 year old tech talkers making millions of dollars dancing in a house while the world burns. That is very funny. Well, for your for for your style of humor. Yes. The absurdity. It's funny that no one cares about Hollywood starlets and actresses and actors. And I'm going to say, fuck you. They've won three Academy Awards. They're all being replaced by just mediocre dancer, 15 year olds.

I mean, it's like there's something hilarious about this city and it will burn in hell, but so will everything.

So what are we talking about? Yeah, eventually the the sun will die out and we will all be gone unless we colonize outside of our solar system. But, you know, I stand I just sit here. You know, I'm struggling with this because Boston I'm currently at MIT. Boston doesn't feel like the right place to start a business in the tech sector. And so I'm looking at San Francisco the way it is. I'm looking at Austin, Austin clearly.

So it seems clear. But it's it's such a difficult thing to. To predict what a place will look like in 10 years and it's 20 years and it's so hard to predict.

Like it or not, until you're there and, you know, this is speaking to risk, there's not really a good reason for you to move anywhere. There's not a good reason to do anything in life. Part of me wants to just fucking do it and whatever and see what I like.

Boston, you like other things about Boston besides the tech thing, like, am I right here?

That's the problem. And but you like do you like like the food in Boston? Do you eat food. I haven't been, I haven't eaten food or been outside for years and I mean that, that's probably the better version.

What were your Ketel forever leaving here for a long time.

Yeah, chiral fasting for a long time, 15 years. Fasting, eating once or twice a day. I'm not. I haven't. And no sugar ever. No like no sugar and no pasta ever. No bread over the past and no bread.

No.

Except like so my sauce you could kind of live anywhere because like going out it's such a big part of what city you live in and like you like the food there. Do you like the restaurants. Can you meet people. Whatever it's like you really can just kind of.

Yeah. So not married, no kids. Right. You have freedom. I mean to have freedom. Yeah, and that that's why we have the curse of too many choices, right? That's the thing with too many choices, we don't have somebody ask on what about like we don't have to justify decisions to anyone so we can just kind of, like, let our minds run wild. So you just got to hone the instinct of just what feels right and just fucking do it.

And that's awesome. Joe, down there in Illinois, down there, Austin, seems like a real no brainer move for you to try.

You know, try the hell not. Why not? And then I think I should go to Amitay. I like I mean I mean, I think I should give those nerds a piece of my mind. You should go to I was in a Uber pool once with a kid from out of it, and I was eating this thing from Bovis Bakery. I forget what it was.

It was like a it's so good. I don't know. You don't know above his bakery. Right. You have to be famous. How does eating a thing was like covered in chocolate. This kid like this little nerd like this little like, you know, USB drive with feet was just staring at me and they just dropped him off at MIT and he like, scurried away. Yeah, but that's a big school that doesn't the NSA recruit out of there heavy like Amitay, places like that.

I can't I can't speak to that. But what this is ridiculous question. I sometimes ask myself when I'm alone, what is the meaning of life, do you think about the big existential kind of why the hell we're here?

It's a cosmic kind of joke, kind of in a weird way, right? I mean, Joe said it the other day on maybe it was you saying that like he was just like, you know, by the time you figure out what it is, you're out of here, you know, it's kind of interesting or even start to figure out what it is you're out of here. It's like it's like that's kind of funny. It's like you don't get enough time to truly I think the meaning of life is just like.

At the end of the day, do you feel it was time well spent? Was it time well spent? That's that's really what it is if you look back, do you go, Hey. It was time well spent, a pretty good ride was pretty good ride, I did I did a lot. I did a lot of things. I doing what you say is a part of it.

I think if you say you're going to do something, maybe doing it, that seems to be extrapolating the meaning of life questions like, you know, what did you come here to do? I think it just goes down deep, like, who are you and what do you want? And, you know, what are you suited to do?

And what it does seem that like the people who are most enlightened that I've ever met or read books by, they ultimately land on humor like they don't take it seriously. They embrace the absurdity of it all and just kind of laugh, laugh at it in this kind of a simple way. So it does seem that humor is like one of the fundamental truths of the universe. When some of you love humor, humor can be love, right? People laughing that that sound is kind of like Carolyn Knapp, who wrote a book called Drinking a Love Story, which is a really good book about not drinking, drinking and then not drinking and.

She said the you could understand things as love that I think one of the last lines of the thing is like people talking about their experiences in life, that that could be love.

Like, you know, laughter is love. Like I feel like love.

And finding it wherever you could find it is why we're here. That's that connection. And laughter can be love. And, you know, figuring out, you know, something that makes life better for a lot of people can be love, you know, whether it's a vaccine or a technological advancement or whatever.

Like, you know, all of those things I think can be that feeling. And I think that's what's important. It connects you to a larger frequency.

You know, I don't think there's a better way to end it. I hope you're one of the voices. I truly believe that your legacy will be one of the most important voices of our time because you're fearless and challenging all the absurdity of the nonsense that of our social and political discourse. I hope you keep doing it. I'm a fan. I'm still a bit starstruck.

So I'll stop and listen, I, I was your intellectual capacity.

Enjoying anything I do only underscores how truly fucked we are.

But thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you for talking today.

Thank you, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dillon and thank you to our sponsors, NetSuite, business management software, athletic greens, All-In-One nutrition drink, magic spoon, low carb cereal, better help online therapy and speech to text service. So the choices business, health, sanity or transcript choose wisely. My friends, and if you wish, click the sponsored links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me give you some words from George Carlin, scratchiness cynic, and you will find a disappointed idealist.

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