back to indexTim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #156
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The following is a conversation with Tim Dillon,
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a standup comedian who is fearless
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in challenging the norms
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of modern day social and political discourse.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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So the choices, business, health, sanity, or transcripts.
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to get a discount at the support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that I will continue
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talking to scientists, engineers, historians,
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mathematicians, and so on.
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But I will also talk to the people
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who Jack Kerouac called the mad ones
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in his book, On The Road.
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That is one of my favorite books.
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He wrote, the only people for me are the mad ones.
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The ones who are mad to live,
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mad to talk, mad to be saved,
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desirous of everything at the same time.
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The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,
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but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles
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exploding like spiders across the stars.
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And in the middle, you see the blue center light pop
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and everybody goes, ah.
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Some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble
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in that I have no idea how they will turn out.
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But I'm willing to risk it for a chance
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at a bit of an adventure.
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And I'm happy and honored that Tim, this time,
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wanted to take a chance as well.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
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support it on Patreon, or connect with me
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on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with Tim Dillon.
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What would you like your tombstone to read?
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It's a good way to summarize the essence of a human being.
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I would like it to say, this has not been paid for.
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And I want my living relatives to struggle to pay for it.
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And I think I would like them to be hounded every day.
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I would like people to call and go, listen,
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we don't wanna ever excavate a body,
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but we will because this has not been paid for.
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I love the idea of leaving the, like debt,
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leaving the world in lots of debt
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that other people have to deal with.
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And I know people that have done that.
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I know people that have been in families
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where that's happened, where someone has to sit
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and just curse the sky
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because they don't have a physical person anymore
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to be angry at, but they still have to deal
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with the decisions that person made.
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And that's deeply tragic,
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but that's always struck me as very funny.
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Well, it's a kind of immortality, the debt.
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Because if the debt lasts for a long time,
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the anger lasts for a long time.
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And then you're now immortal in the minds of many.
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You arouse emotion in the minds of many.
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My mother's best friend in the town I grew up in,
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her husband shot himself in the driveway.
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And my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve
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because he owed so much money.
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She would come over and go, I hate him.
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I fucking hate him.
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And it was just such an interesting thing
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to see somebody who, and her kids ended up getting angry
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at her for that because they didn't understand
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why she would hate a guy who was clearly suffering.
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But she goes, he took the selfish way out.
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And it was always interesting for me to just remember
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that you can leave earth and still be a problem.
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That's kind of a special person.
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So that's, I think, what I'd like my tombstone to read.
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Yeah, there's a show called Louis with Louis C.K.
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I don't know if you watched it.
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There's this moment, I think, where an old guy's talking
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to Louis about the best part about love
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is after you break up.
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And it's remembering the good times and feeling that loss,
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the pain of that loss.
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The worst part about love is when you no longer
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So the pain of losing somebody lasts longer,
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is more intense and lasts longer than the actual love.
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So his argument was like the pain is what love really is.
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In the same way that anger,
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your tombstone would arouse will last longer.
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And that's deeply like a human thing.
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Like why do we attach happiness
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to the way we should remember others?
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It could be just anger.
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I know so many people who will have
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deeply complicated feelings when...
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I did drugs for many years and I spent time
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with some wild people.
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And their parents were also wild people.
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And some of their parents have done crazy things to them.
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And have created situations that were not productive
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for child rearing.
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And so I know that when those people die,
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it's going to be a very mixed bag.
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Like there's going to be a lot of complex emotions.
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Like, hey, we loved that guy.
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But also when we look back, he was a horrible father,
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a horrible husband, but he was fun.
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And we don't put enough stock in that,
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but that will be a push and pull.
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And I'll be the one kind of bringing up like,
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hey, he was a lot of fun.
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Remember when he stuck us,
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one of the things this particular person I'm talking about,
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we were at a bar and me and my friend were there,
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we're having dinner.
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And his father, who was an alcoholic,
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a guy that would go out every night and didn't work,
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refused to work, would lie and say he was going to work
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and then go to a bar.
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I mean, just a fun person.
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And we were sitting at this bar restaurant
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and the bartender, we see his father walk up
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to the bartender and say, point at us, point at our table
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and go and put the thumbs up.
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And the bartender nodded.
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And then the father walked over to our table and he said,
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listen, I just want to let you know I just bought you dinner.
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And I looked at his son and I said, he's a pretty good guy.
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And then he climbed over the little fence down to the water
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and got in his little boat.
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It was a little cigarette boat and he just drove away.
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And then about an hour later, we went and we said,
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I think that guy took care of the bill.
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But she said, well, go talk to the bartender.
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So we talked to the bartender and he goes,
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he handed us a bill and the bill was for like $1,000.
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And we said, wait a minute, what the hell's going on?
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And he goes, the guy that left an hour ago said,
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you were going to take care of his bill.
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He's been drinking here all week.
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And we go, what are you talking about?
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And he goes, remember, he pointed at you.
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He put the thumbs up and you guys waved.
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You remember that?
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And the guy go, and we went, yeah.
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And I just looked at my friends, my friend and I went,
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you know, your dad is just,
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we're going to remember him for all kinds of reasons.
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But to you, he was fun.
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He was a lot of fun.
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He wasn't my dad, but I spent a lot of time with him.
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I was in two boating accidents with him.
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You know, two boating accidents.
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Alcohol involved, drugs involved.
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Yes, he was, usually alcohol was involved
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when he left his house and when he was at home as well.
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But I was in two boating accidents.
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And do you know how fun someone has to be
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to get in a second boating accident?
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Do you know what a good time someone has to be
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to get in a boat with them
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after you've already gotten in one wreck?
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Never get fooled again.
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What was that line?
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George Bush, never get fooled again.
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Yeah, so if you're getting fooled again,
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you know, there's a reason for it,
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but he was a fun guy.
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He did have a death wish.
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The second boating accident, he grabbed me
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and said, you can't hang out with me anymore.
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He goes, I'm trying to kill myself.
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And I was like, oh.
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And then I understood that like all of the fun
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under the fun lived a very destructive person
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who not only was destructive, but wanted to die.
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So speaking of fun people that want to die,
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I don't know if you're, we can go Hunter S. Thompson,
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but Charles Bukowski.
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I don't know if you're aware of the guy.
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I'm aware of him, sure.
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I've read some of his stuff.
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So his tombstone says,
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I just want to ask you a question about it.
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His tombstone says, don't try.
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What do you think about that advice
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as a way to approach life?
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I think for many people, it's a good advice
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because the people that are going to try will do anyway.
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And the people that need to be told,
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there's a whole cottage industry now
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of motivational speakers and life coaches and gurus
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that tell people that they all have to own their own business
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and be their own boss and be a disruptor
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and get into industries.
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That's incredibly unrealistic for most people.
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Most people are not suited for that.
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And the Gary Vees of the world that tell everybody
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that they should just hustle and grind
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and hustle and grind.
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They're very light on the specifics
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of what they should actually do.
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Yeah, I think a lot of people,
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that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people.
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I think my generation got horrible advice
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from our parents, from our teachers.
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And that advice was follow your dreams and nobody,
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and that was it, by the way.
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There was no like, what are your dreams?
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Are they realistic?
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What happens when they don't work out?
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Will your dreams make you happy?
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Are your dreams real?
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Do they exist on earth?
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Can you follow, anybody follow your dreams?
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You can be anything you want to be.
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Horrible advice, horrible advice.
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Worst advice you could ever give a generation of people.
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I mean, think about it.
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If you were talking to somebody
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and you were trying to make them succeed,
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are there any two worse pieces of advice to give them
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than follow your dreams
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and you can be anything you want to be?
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Those to me are the two most destructive pieces
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of information I've ever heard.
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So let me push back because.
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Okay, that's fair.
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This is. Many people do.
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So yeah, this is like a rigorous journalistic interview.
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Larry King, by the way, passed away today.
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So I'm taking over the.
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Yeah, what was I even gonna say?
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Oh, let me push back on the follow your dream thing
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is I come from an immigrant family
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where I was always working extremely hard at stuff,
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like in a stupid way.
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I would, I love, there's something about me
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that loves hitting my head against the wall
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over and over and over until either my head breaks
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or the wall breaks.
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Just like, I love that dedication
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for no purpose whatsoever.
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It's like the mouse that's stuck in a cage or whatever.
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And no, and everybody always told me,
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my family, the people around me,
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the sort of the epitome of what I could achieve
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is to be kind of a stable job.
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You know, the old like lawyer doctor,
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in my case, it's like scientists and so on.
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But I had these dreams at this fire, you know,
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about love robots.
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And that nobody ever gave me permission
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to pursue those dreams.
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I know you're supposed to grab it yourself.
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Nobody's supposed to give you permission,
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but there's something about just people saying, you know,
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fuck what everyone else thinks,
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like giving you permission, a parent
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or somebody like that saying, do your own thing.
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Go become an actor, go become like,
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do the crazy thing you're not supposed to do,
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an artist, go build a company, quit school,
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all that kind of stuff.
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That's the push back against the,
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follow your dreams as bad advice.
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In mass, if you were to look at,
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in mass, if you were to look at statistically
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how few people that works out for,
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I'm just, no, but let's be very honest.
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So I mean like, yeah, if you're gonna go be an,
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hey, I was broke for 10 years before I became a,
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before I was making money as a comedian.
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I didn't need Gary Vaynerchuk
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to tell me to follow my thing, right?
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And here's the other thing.
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I was kind of funny and like,
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I was kind of, a lot of things were in my favor
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of being a comedian, right?
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I had this kind of crazy fucked up life.
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I had a lot of stories.
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I had exhausted, I was willing to fail.
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I had failed before.
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I didn't care about being broke.
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I knew how to be broke.
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I had, I was shameless to a degree.
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I was, I would get on a stage night after night
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and be laughed at.
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I would, I had a high threshold for being embarrassed.
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I had a high threshold for people thinking
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that I was a scumbag, right?
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And showing up at family parties and being like,
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yeah, I still really don't have a job.
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And I'm just, I work at comedy clubs kind of,
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and I get booked when I can.
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And I was, you know, suited for it.
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There's this idea that people can just roam
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around the world injecting themselves into other things
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they have no aptitude for at all.
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And will that to happen?
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A small percentage of people might be able to do that,
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but the vast majority of people have something
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they might key into that they're meant to do.
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Like you loved robots, you love technology,
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and you found a place in that world where you thrive.
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But I think many people, a lot of people love robots, right?
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So a lot of people think everything you do is interesting.
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I think your shit is fascinating.
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I watch you or podcasts, and I think it's very interesting.
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I have no place in your world.
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You know what I mean?
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I have no place in that world.
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I don't like remedial math.
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I don't like community college math.
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I think it's a waste of my time.
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What do you think about robot?
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Would you ever buy a robot for your home?
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I'd be a companion, a friend.
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Oh yeah, I mean, I would like to start replacing friends
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and family with robots immediately.
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I mean, truly, truly.
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I mean, I'm not even kidding.
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Like I would like to have a Thanksgiving with four robots.
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Are they into QAnon?
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Like are the robots, when do the robots start going crazy?
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That's my question is like, how long do the robots
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live with me before they are also a problem
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and I got to replace them?
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You know what I mean?
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You're gonna indoctrinate the robot.
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The robot's gonna call me like my aunt does
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and talk about coronavirus for an hour every morning
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and tell me everyone in America who's died of coronavirus.
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One of the things I enjoy in life
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is how terrified people like you,
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I'm a huge fan by the way, get a robot.
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Well, I'm concerned about AI
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completely getting rid of the need for human beings
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because human beings, I mean, usually you go out
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in the street and you go,
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so few of these people are necessary, even now.
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Even now you look at people and you go,
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they're hanging on by a thread, right?
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And you can just imagine how many jobs
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are gonna get replaced, how many industries
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are going to be completely remade with AI
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and the pace of change worries me a little bit
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because we do a very bad job in this country
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of mitigation when we have problems.
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We don't do a great job.
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We did not great job with COVID, right?
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We don't do a good job.
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It's just something we don't do well.
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We're good in booms and busts.
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We're good when it's good.
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And we're actually, we kind of know how to kind of like,
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hey, we're bottomed out.
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We're like a gambling addict in this country.
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We like, we know what it feels like
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to be outside of an OTB at 9 a.m.
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drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes going,
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I'm gonna build it back.
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And we know what it's like to win,
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but anything in between, it seems not that great.
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So to me, it feels like are we gonna be able
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to like help people that are displaced
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and that have their jobs taken by,
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I mean, do you not fear sort of a world
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where you have a lot of artificial intelligence
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replacing workers and then what happens?
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There's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence.
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One of them is, yes, displacement of jobs, workers.
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That's technology in general.
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That's just any kind of new innovations displace jobs.
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I'm less worried about that.
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I'm more worried about other impacts
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of artificial intelligence.
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For example, the nature of our discourse,
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like social, the effects of algorithms
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on the way we communicate with each other,
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the spread of information,
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what that information looks like,
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the creation of silos, all that kind of stuff.
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I think that would just make worse
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the effects that the displacement of jobs has.
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I think ultimately, I have a hope
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that technology creates more opportunities
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So in that sense, AI to me is an exciting possibility,
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but the challenges this world presents
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will create divisions, will create chaos and so on.
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So I'm more focused on the way we deal
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as a society with that chaos,
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the way we talk to each other.
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Creating the platform that's healthy for that.
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Now, as a comedian creator,
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whatever you want to call it,
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people that put out content,
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the gatekeepers are now algorithmic, right?
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So they are kind of almost AI ready.
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So if you are a person that puts out YouTube videos,
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podcasts, whatever you're doing,
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it used to be a guy in the back of the room with a cigar
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saying, I like you or get him out of here.
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Now, it's an algorithm you barely understand.
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I've talked to people at YouTube,
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but I don't know if they understand the algorithm.
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This is fascinating.
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Yeah, it's fascinating.
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Because I speak to people at YouTube and I go,
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hey, man, what's going on here?
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One of my episode titles of my podcast
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was called Knife Fight in Malibu.
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It was about real estate.
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And it was because a realtor in Malibu,
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I was trying to get a summer rental,
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which I can't really afford,
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but I don't think that's a huge problem.
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I follow my dreams.
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So I called a realtor and she said, listen,
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she goes, I don't know what the government's saying,
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but she goes, it's a real knife fight out here.
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You know, an old grizzled woman, real realtor,
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tanned skin, sig out the mouth, driving a Porsche.
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It's a real knife fight out here.
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Her entire life had become real estate.
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Her soul had been hollowed out.
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Her kids hate her.
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No one's made her come in years,
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but she just loves heated kitchen floors infused.
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She's a demon from hell and we need them, truly.
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We're getting rid of them.
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And she goes, it's a real knife fight out here.
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So we put that in the episode title.
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And of course, I guess some algorithm thought
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that we were showing like people stabbing each other
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in a Wendy's and we got like demonetized.
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Did we get demonetized?
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We lost a lot of views
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because we were kicked out of whatever out,
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like we're just kicked out.
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And then I was asking YouTube about it.
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They were kind of understanding it.
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But even the people that work there
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didn't truly seem to understand the algorithm.
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So can you explain to me how that works
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where they barely know what's going on?
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No, they do not understand the full dynamics
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of the monster or the amazing thing that they've created.
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It's the amount of content that's being created
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is larger than anyone understands.
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Like this is huge.
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They can't deal with it.
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The teams aren't large enough to deal with it.
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There's like special cases.
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So if you fall into the category of special case,
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so we can maybe talk about that, like a Donald Trump,
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where you like actually have meetings
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about what to do with this particular account.
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But everything outside of that is all algorithms.
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They get reported by people
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and they get, like if enough people report
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a particular video, a particular tweet,
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it rises up to where humans look over it.
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But the initial step of the reporting
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and the rising up to the human supervision
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is done by algorithm.
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And they don't understand the dynamics of that
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because we're talking about billions of tweets.
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We're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours
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of video uploaded every day.
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Now, the hilarity of it
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is that most of the YouTube algorithm
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is based on the title.
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And the description is a small contribution
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in terms of filtering,
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in terms of the knife fight situation.
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And that's all they can do.
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They don't have algorithms at all
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that are able to process the content of the video.
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So they try to also infer information
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based on if you're watching all of these QAnon videos
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or something like that, or Flat Earth videos,
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and you also watch, are really excitedly watching
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the whole knife fight in Malibu video,
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that says that increases the chance
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that the knife fight is a dangerous video for society
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or something like that.
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Based on their contribution.
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So people are watching something,
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because I watch QAnon and Flat Earth videos
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That, you know what I mean?
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I watch these videos and I make fun of them on my show.
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But what's interesting is,
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if I then go watch something else,
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I'm increasing the likelihood
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that that video is gonna get looked at
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as potentially subversive or dangerous.
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So they make decisions about who you are,
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who you are as a human being,
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as a watcher, as a visual user,
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based on the clusters of videos you're in.
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But those clusters are not manually determined.
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They're automatically clustered.
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We have titles where they got upset about,
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I don't even understand.
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Like we had a title that was so innocuous, in my opinion,
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and the title of the episode was called Bomb Disney World.
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And I was asking people to consider bombing Disney World.
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And YouTube got angry at that.
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So you don't know why.
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You can never understand why.
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You could have said Disney World is the bombs.
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Right, right, right.
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It's just rearranging.
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That's what it probably meant.
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I wasn't saying do it,
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but I was saying let's start thinking about plans to do,
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not let's do it, but let's get in the mind.
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Let's change the conversation.
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I think it's very interesting because as a comedian,
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you don't wanna live in that world
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of worrying about algorithms.
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You don't wanna worry about deplatforming
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and shadowbanning.
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I mean, all these conversations
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that I've had with other comedians about shadowbanning,
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I mean, it's hilarious.
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We all call each other, I think I'm being shadowbanned.
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Are you being shadowbanned?
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Nobody knew what that word was a month ago,
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I mean, a year ago,
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but everyone now is convinced that everything they do
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that isn't succeeding is being shadowbanned.
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So it's this new paranoia,
link |
this algorithmic paranoia now that we all kinda have
link |
because there are genuine instances
link |
of people being taken out of an algorithm,
link |
you know, rightly or wrongly,
link |
however you wanna believe.
link |
But then there are also things that just don't perform
link |
as well for a myriad of reasons.
link |
And then we're all saying like, well, they're against me.
link |
They're shutting me down.
link |
And you don't know if that's true or not, you know?
link |
What do you think about this moment in history,
link |
which was really troubling to me?
link |
We could talk about several troubling aspects,
link |
but one is Amazon removing Parler from AWS.
link |
To me, that was the most clearly troubling.
link |
It felt like it created a more dangerous world
link |
when the infrastructure on which you have competing
link |
medium of communications now puts its finger on the scale,
link |
now influences who wins and who loses.
link |
Absolutely, you're right.
link |
And what you're always told is like,
link |
if you don't like Twitter, create your own service.
link |
Or if you don't like something, you can do your own thing.
link |
Or if you are, and basically because, you know, tech,
link |
you have to be in business with one of five companies.
link |
And I think it's like Amazon, Facebook, Google, YouTube,
link |
and Twitter, whatever, they're like, you know,
link |
I mean, Amazon puts everything on the cloud,
link |
you know, Google and YouTube,
link |
it's all basically the SEO and the advertising.
link |
And you got to get your name out there.
link |
You don't wanna be buried in it.
link |
Like, because you have to do business with it,
link |
it's a cartel of these companies.
link |
You understand it better than anybody
link |
that you are prevented, truly.
link |
And I think whatever you think about Parler,
link |
whatever you think about what people are saying on Parler,
link |
whatever you think about Alex Jones,
link |
whatever you thought about Milianopolis,
link |
the state has an interest in,
link |
and has always had an interest in crushing dissent.
link |
This is what the state has done.
link |
This is how they, you know, retain the power they have
link |
by eliminating dissent where they can.
link |
Now, because you don't have, you know,
link |
three broadcast networks anymore,
link |
and a handful of newspapers that were all run, by the way,
link |
by people that had been either compromised or happily,
link |
you know, happily going with the program,
link |
and you have this wild west of the internet,
link |
people like me, people that make,
link |
I make funny content that I hope is funny,
link |
but a lot of it is wild and crazy.
link |
I say a lot of wild and crazy things.
link |
They're very funny.
link |
I say a lot of wild and crazy things about powerful people.
link |
You mock the powerful in there
link |
by bringing them down a notch.
link |
We'll probably talk about it,
link |
but humor is one of the tools to balance the powers
link |
And to make people feel better about things
link |
and to, you know, whatever the case may be, right?
link |
That's my goal is to kind of like,
link |
hey, people have had a shitty day.
link |
If this video or podcast makes you laugh, that's great.
link |
I think that it won't ever,
link |
it was never gonna stop at Alex Jones.
link |
Not that I think he should have been taking off everything
link |
but this keeps going until we have sanitized
link |
all of social media.
link |
And what they really want it to be
link |
is what Instagram is kind of becoming,
link |
which is a marketplace of,
link |
you could just go and buy sneakers, go buy a sweatshirt,
link |
go buy jeans, go buy this, go buy that.
link |
And the idea of the free exchange of information
link |
seems to be the old internet.
link |
And it seems the new internet seems to be, you know,
link |
hyper, and I'm a capitalist,
link |
but this seems to be like hyper capitalist
link |
in the sense of like, they only want you consuming things
link |
and they don't want you thinking too much.
link |
And that seems to be where it's heading.
link |
I've even seen that with Instagram
link |
where it's like everything on Instagram is like,
link |
buy a sweatshirt, you know?
link |
And I'm like, all right, man.
link |
Hey man, if I want a sweatshirt, I'll get it.
link |
You know, just every ad seems to be encouraging consumption,
link |
but very few things seem geared towards,
link |
hey, let's have a dialogue or let's,
link |
and not that Instagram was ever great for that,
link |
but like, if everything's are geared now
link |
towards content on Instagram,
link |
a lot of it seems geared towards shopping.
link |
See, I don't know, that's an interesting point.
link |
I don't know if the consumerism that capitalism leads to
link |
is necessarily gets in the way of nuanced conversation.
link |
I feel like you could still sell Tim Dillon sweatshirts
link |
and have a difficult nuanced conversation
link |
or mock the current president, the previous president,
link |
mock the powerful, all that kind of stuff.
link |
We try to balance that.
link |
Do you have sweatshirts?
link |
Are they on sale now, fake business?
link |
We do, fake business sweatshirt
link |
with the Enron logo, fake business,
link |
because I do fake business all the time.
link |
It would be nice if you talk about Alex Jones
link |
if you plug the sweatshirt during that conversation.
link |
Yeah, we'll do that, absolutely.
link |
But what I tend to worry about with,
link |
I see social media and technology
link |
existing to flatten society.
link |
It makes people very boring.
link |
All of the experiences kids have right now are online.
link |
Many of their closest friendships are online.
link |
Their first relationships are online.
link |
The culture is very homogenous,
link |
and I think it's eliminating characters.
link |
It's eliminating interesting people.
link |
It's making people into AI.
link |
All of their tastes.
link |
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
link |
AI could be Charles Bukowski as well.
link |
Let's not get crazy.
link |
It's not there yet, right?
link |
I mean, the $75,000 dog is not doing anything.
link |
So we're not there yet.
link |
Listen, I hate people.
link |
I get why you like AI so much.
link |
I hate people too, and I'm very amenable to AI,
link |
and I agree with you.
link |
Listen, I think the future,
link |
we gotta get everyone out of here.
link |
I'm with you on that, so don't think I'm.
link |
He's manipulating my mind and my.
link |
That's why the flash of light in your eyes
link |
when you talked about that dog
link |
was so much more than any person.
link |
And I get it, by the way.
link |
I hate people, but if we could.
link |
They're not excited.
link |
If we could just use robots to kill most of them,
link |
I think that would be good for society.
link |
I'm with that too,
link |
but I think that social media flattens people.
link |
Flattening the personalities of characters.
link |
Flatten the personalities of people, man.
link |
And it's just, you know, when's the last time?
link |
Like, I like the idea of like, you know,
link |
and I'm, you know, somebody showing up to high school
link |
with like a backpack and taking out an old CD
link |
and being like, hey man, here's this band
link |
you've never heard of that I love
link |
or whatever, you gotta get into this.
link |
And I'm like, you know, when I talk to young,
link |
you know, I have friends that have younger brothers
link |
And I know that the dominant culture was always dominant.
link |
I'm not an idiot, but like,
link |
I feel like it's harder to be unique and original now
link |
because so much of what's promoted
link |
is just this way to kind of corral people
link |
into believing and thinking a certain set of ideals
link |
that's constantly shifting and evolving.
link |
And people are just caught up in that.
link |
And to me, it gets very boring very quickly.
link |
I hate being bored and that's what it is.
link |
I don't know what to do with that
link |
because at the same time, podcasts are really popular,
link |
long form podcasts are really popular
link |
and people are hungry for those kinds of conversations.
link |
There's a lot of dangerous ideas, quote unquote,
link |
flowing, being spread around through podcasts,
link |
meaning just like debates.
link |
You know, so that's still popular.
link |
So I don't know what to.
link |
That gives me hope, I guess.
link |
And like I said, I look at the negative a lot
link |
because that's what I usually make fun of,
link |
but there's a lot of positive stuff happening too.
link |
Let's talk a bit about Alex Jones.
link |
So you've gotten a chance to talk to him
link |
while you were on the Joe Rogan Experience.
link |
I've been on Alex's show.
link |
I've talked, I've had Alex on my show.
link |
I've talked to Alex for three hours
link |
in front of, I guess it was maybe like 15 million people
link |
right on Joe's show.
link |
It was a really wild conversation.
link |
I think it was one of the coolest moments in broadcasting
link |
that clearly that I've ever been a part of.
link |
But I think it goes in the lexicon of like,
link |
these are big podcasts.
link |
Like I think it's one of the biggest podcasts.
link |
A week before the election, Alex Jones.
link |
I'm really grateful that Joe gave me the opportunity
link |
And it was just an amazing conversation to watch.
link |
What was the shirt you wore?
link |
It was a fun joke that no one in tech got
link |
because we all know how funny they are.
link |
But the tech writers, which is mainly blue haired.
link |
I do not agree with these statements.
link |
It's mainly blue haired people
link |
whose goal in life is to find things
link |
to give them orgasms with.
link |
If you want to dye your hair blue, it's your choice.
link |
Yeah, but is it your choice?
link |
But at the end of the day, it's like,
link |
all the tech writers, like a lot of people just,
link |
and I'm not, I'm just maligning tech unfairly.
link |
But a lot of people that sense there's a humor
link |
were like, he's advocating for human trafficking.
link |
I'm like, it's clearly a joke
link |
because we're coming off the believe all women.
link |
We're coming off that.
link |
And it's very funny to just say Fridges Lane,
link |
hey man, believe all women.
link |
Like, it's just our politics and our public sphere
link |
is so schizophrenic right now
link |
that when you point that out,
link |
people are going to be angry with you.
link |
But that was a fun shirt to wear.
link |
But on Alex, you know, I was one of the people
link |
that found him really entertaining,
link |
that the same kind of thing as with Bukowski,
link |
these kinds of personalities that are wild,
link |
crazy, full of ideas.
link |
They don't have to be grounded in truth at all,
link |
or they can be grounded in truth a little bit.
link |
Like, he's just playing with ideas,
link |
like a jazz musician, screaming sometimes.
link |
Obviously he has some demons.
link |
Sometimes he's super angry for no reason whatsoever
link |
at some weird thing that he's constructing in his own head.
link |
Sometimes he's super loving and peaceful,
link |
especially lately that I've heard him,
link |
I don't know if you've seen with him,
link |
with Michael Malice, where he's doing,
link |
like Malice was doing,
link |
like telling Alex Jones, I love you, Alex.
link |
Just this loving kind of softness and kindness
link |
underneath it all.
link |
I don't know what to make of any of it.
link |
And then there's this huge number of people
link |
that tell me that Alex Jones is dangerous for society.
link |
So what do you do with that?
link |
Do you think he's dangerous for society?
link |
Do you think he is one of the sort of
link |
entertaining personalities of our time
link |
that shouldn't be suppressed or somewhere in between?
link |
I don't think that Alex per se is dangerous for society.
link |
I think the greater danger for society comes again
link |
from stifling all dissent, right?
link |
All, like anybody with a voice that uses it,
link |
that critiques the government,
link |
and putting all of those people in a category
link |
and getting rid of them is incredibly dangerous.
link |
I think the biggest problem that Alex has ever had
link |
was when he questioned the Sandy Hook shooting.
link |
And that really was,
link |
because it really is this identifiable incident
link |
that you can look at where it did get away from him
link |
and a lot of his fans who,
link |
the people that are attracted to conspiracy stuff,
link |
and I have some of those fans,
link |
some of them are really smart people,
link |
some of them are mentally unwell.
link |
A lot of them happen to be mentally unwell.
link |
So when you have a fan base of people
link |
where some of them are mentally unwell,
link |
and you are questioning tragic events, okay?
link |
And Alex was right about Epstein.
link |
He was right about a lot of things,
link |
and he's got no credit for that.
link |
And I understand that this,
link |
sometimes when you write about 10 things
link |
and you're wrong about something,
link |
and the thing you're wrong about is so offensive to people,
link |
you're never gonna get any credit for being right,
link |
even though you were right more than when you were wrong.
link |
The problem was a lot of his fans who were crazy stalked,
link |
harassed these families and accused them of being actors
link |
and accused them of faking their children's deaths.
link |
It was just horrific experience.
link |
And Alex is tied to that.
link |
And how much he inspired that by what he did on his show,
link |
I don't know because I haven't watched hours and hours
link |
of that particular thing, the whole Sandy Hook thing.
link |
If you listen to him, he says, I really covered it.
link |
I kind of covered it and moved on.
link |
Other people go, no, he spent a long time on it.
link |
But that's the real danger of going into that territory
link |
over and over again,
link |
going everything's a false flag or everything's fake.
link |
I think Alex has actually been kind of reasonable.
link |
He's resisted a lot of the politics of racial resentment
link |
on the alt right, for example, he's resisted that.
link |
He's resisted the antisemitic currents
link |
of a lot of that politics.
link |
He's resisted a lot of the virulently anti trans
link |
or anti gay stuff.
link |
Now he does dip his toe into the water
link |
of like the culture wars, of course he does.
link |
But I've never really seen him,
link |
and I could be wrong about this,
link |
embrace white nationalism or identitarianism.
link |
I've never seen him really go antisemitic.
link |
I've never seen him take that route.
link |
When I grew up and I would turn him on every now and then,
link |
he was talking about NAFTA, the WTO,
link |
he's talking about 9 11,
link |
he was talking about the world trade organizations
link |
and a lot of these big conferences,
link |
whether it was the Bilderberg group,
link |
whether it was a Bohemian Grove, which he infiltrated.
link |
And he was talking about,
link |
hey, here are the most powerful people in the world.
link |
Here's what they're doing.
link |
And here's how it affects you.
link |
And that was interesting to me
link |
because no one else was really talking about it
link |
except Alex Jones, occasionally Art Bell on WABC.
link |
You'd listen to him at night, right?
link |
I think Alex became very controversial
link |
when he decided to back Donald Trump.
link |
And then he has a considerable following
link |
and a considerable audience
link |
that he was then able to marshal
link |
in the direction of supporting Donald Trump.
link |
That was when the spotlight,
link |
because then he was talking to Trump, Trump did his show,
link |
Alex Jones just got bigger, right?
link |
And he blew up, that's the term, right?
link |
He blew off, he put out the Good HBO special,
link |
whatever you wanna call it.
link |
He has a hit song, he blew up.
link |
And then people started looking at the things
link |
that he was associated with.
link |
The Sandy Hook thing is a blemish on his record.
link |
I do believe he regrets it.
link |
But again, I do see the point of the families
link |
who are like, dude, fuck this guy forever.
link |
This is the worst thing I ever went through.
link |
It's a very tough, I understand the people that say that.
link |
I understand, and I understand the people that go,
link |
when you have tech companies that act
link |
in a coordinated manner to just get rid of someone,
link |
they don't have any way to defend themselves.
link |
It's a little terrifying when you think
link |
about that power being abused and how wouldn't it be?
link |
Do you think he should have not have been banned
link |
from all these platforms?
link |
I don't think, I do think that
link |
if you are a private company, right?
link |
I do think, and this is where you run into this problem.
link |
I don't know if these tech companies
link |
were government utilities, would that decrease
link |
people's likelihood of being banned?
link |
I don't know, right?
link |
So I understand the benefit of them being treated
link |
like public utilities and people thinking
link |
they have the right to a Twitter.
link |
I've never, I don't know, I have very little confidence.
link |
I mean, the government's trying to roll out a vaccine
link |
in California and we vaccinated like five people.
link |
I mean, in terms of what we need to do in the state, right?
link |
So maybe if it was a government utility,
link |
I do think someone like Alex,
link |
like there should be some process.
link |
So if you're gonna get rid of someone,
link |
they should have a way to defend themselves.
link |
There should be more democratic process
link |
that you can go through
link |
than just being unilaterally taken off something.
link |
But like, then you run into the,
link |
you're like, am I gonna say that everyone deserves?
link |
No, if you're threatening or harassing people
link |
or threatening to kill them,
link |
publishing their private information,
link |
if you're committing crimes on these platforms,
link |
obviously the people that own these platforms
link |
are gonna be like, we're not gonna allow this to happen.
link |
So I understand that there is a line, right?
link |
There is some, like people that say there's no line
link |
aren't really thinking, like there is a line.
link |
I just thought that line seems to be moving all the time
link |
and it seems to be a very hard thing to police.
link |
But I don't think you can remove a guy off everything
link |
and then also bank accounts won't give him debit cards
link |
or credit cards, I don't know if you talked to him
link |
about that, but like, you know,
link |
there were financial institutions that were refusing
link |
to let him park his money there.
link |
So, I mean, it really does get pretty terrifying
link |
Probably without any transparency from those companies.
link |
So you're right, it feels like there should be a process
link |
of just having, for him to defend himself.
link |
I think there needs to be a process
link |
for people to defend themselves.
link |
Every day I wake up and I go,
link |
is something I said in a video gonna get taken
link |
out of context, is somebody gonna get angry,
link |
is somebody gonna be, you know, I say wild stuff
link |
because that's what makes me laugh,
link |
that's what makes my friends laugh
link |
and that's what makes my audience laugh.
link |
So I never ever, people, you know, whatever political side
link |
you come down on, I think if you make your living speaking,
link |
it's always interesting to me if you are pro
link |
the deplatforming, that's odd.
link |
It's interesting to consider a kind of a jury context
link |
to where, you know, there's transparency
link |
about why your video about bombing Disney World
link |
might be taken down, like it gets taken down
link |
and then there is, it's almost like creating
link |
a little court case, a mini court case
link |
and not in a legal sense, but in the public sphere.
link |
And then people should be able to have, you know,
link |
we pick representatives of our current society
link |
and have a discussion about that and make a real vote.
link |
You know, just have like jury locks himself up
link |
in a discussion, that kind of process might be necessary.
link |
Right now, what happens is Twitter is completely,
link |
first of all, they're just mostly not aware
link |
of everything they're doing, there's too much stuff,
link |
but the stuff they're aware about,
link |
they make the decision in closed doors meetings
link |
and without any transparency to the rest of the company
link |
actually, but also transparency to the rest of the world.
link |
And so, and then all they say is we're making decisions
link |
because the people, they use things like violence.
link |
So violence equals bad and if this person is quote unquote,
link |
inciting violence, therefore that gives us enough reason
link |
to ban them without any kind of process.
link |
I mean, it's interesting, I'm torn in the whole thing.
link |
If it was indeed, there's no transparency about it,
link |
but if Parler was indeed inciting violence,
link |
like if there was brewing of violence, potential violence
link |
where, you know, thousands of people might die
link |
because of some kind of riot, like this is the scary thing
link |
about mob, about when a lot of people get together.
link |
Who are good people, like legitimately good people
link |
that love this country, that don't see enemies
link |
yet around them, but if they get excited together
link |
and there's guns involved and then some cop gets nervous
link |
and shoots one person, another person shoots the cop
link |
and then there's a lot of shooting involved
link |
and then it goes from five people dying in the Capitol
link |
to thousands of people dying in the Capitol.
link |
Well, in fairness to defend the people at the Capitol,
link |
they didn't shoot the cop, they bludgeoned him to death
link |
with a fire extinguisher.
link |
So I do wanna just kind of put that out
link |
as a defense of them.
link |
Listen, I'm sure there was some wild shit going on
link |
on Parler and I think the problem, here's the problem,
link |
right, there's a lot of people that just wanna go on
link |
these sites and say they wanna kill everyone.
link |
And the problem is, you know, at what point
link |
do you shut them all down?
link |
Like I think a lot of people are just living in a world
link |
where they're powerless, they don't have any political
link |
power, they don't have any economic power, right?
link |
They can't throw their money around.
link |
They don't have healthcare, their job security isn't great.
link |
They might be living in a community that doesn't have
link |
the resources they would like it to have.
link |
They're not happy and thrilled.
link |
And then they have these sites where they can go on
link |
and just say, man, I'd like to fucking burn it all down.
link |
And distinguishing a guy blowing off steam
link |
and saying wild stuff from a genuine threat
link |
is a very hard thing to do, you know?
link |
Like I've threatened to kill, I got banned from Airbnb,
link |
I threatened to kill the people that banned me,
link |
comedically, comedically, this is a joke.
link |
I'm not going to kill you, this is a joke
link |
because I'm blowing off steam and I'm angry.
link |
Do you know how many people that my parents,
link |
like my dad's like, I'm gonna fucking kill this guy,
link |
my mom's like, I'm gonna fucking kill.
link |
They were talking about each other.
link |
But none of it ever happened, but we should be,
link |
I think you have to create a space for people
link |
to threaten to overthrow the government
link |
as long as they don't violently do it.
link |
I mean, does that make any sense?
link |
I mean, as long as they're not gonna go hurt innocent people,
link |
what are you gonna do?
link |
Like there's so many people out there that,
link |
that's why a lot of these things like 4chan, these sites,
link |
a lot of people going on there,
link |
they just wanna say the most fucked up shit
link |
because it's the thing that gives them,
link |
they can laugh or they can release steam
link |
and it is immature, it is stupid.
link |
It's not productive, it's not, you know,
link |
but at the end of the day,
link |
if you're not gonna give people health insurance,
link |
you gotta give them something.
link |
It's like when someone in this country dies
link |
that everyone disagrees with, right?
link |
Political figure, media figure,
link |
a lot of people dance on their grave online
link |
and then everyone, people goes,
link |
and the other side will always do it.
link |
Like if a conservative dies and everyone goes, great,
link |
conservatives goes, this is grotesque that you,
link |
and then when RBG dies, they all have parties
link |
and the conservatives go, great.
link |
You have to let people in this country
link |
enjoy the deaths of their enemies.
link |
You do because they don't have much else.
link |
Again, if you gave them other things,
link |
you might say, guy, you can go get an E operation.
link |
Why don't you stop?
link |
But if they're working for shit wages
link |
and you haven't figured out a way to treat them,
link |
treat their cancer diagnosis, and they don't like,
link |
I mean, life, you know, you gotta,
link |
you gotta derive pleasure from something, right?
link |
It's an interesting point that anger is a good valve,
link |
like to, if your life is suffering,
link |
that there's something very powerful about anger,
link |
but I still have hope that it doesn't have to be.
link |
I mean, that kind of channeling into anger
link |
that then becomes hate led us
link |
into a lot of troubles in human history.
link |
So you have to be careful empowering people too much
link |
in that anger, especially, I think my,
link |
I think I understand why people are nervous about Parler,
link |
about Twitter and so on.
link |
Because all that shit talking about violence
link |
was now paired with let's get together at this location.
link |
This was a new thing.
link |
Like it's not just being on whatever platform talking shit,
link |
it's saying we're going to in physical space meet.
link |
And then everybody got, all these platforms got nervous.
link |
Well, what happens when all these shit talkers,
link |
all these angry people that are just steam,
link |
letting off steam meet in a physical space.
link |
And there was probably overreach,
link |
almost definitely overreach,
link |
but I can understand why they were nervous.
link |
There doesn't seem to be,
link |
and this is when Trump got elected
link |
and when you have like, whatever you have, right?
link |
Whether you have riots in Portland and Seattle,
link |
where you have the Antifa people doing crazy things,
link |
you have like the people storming the Capitol.
link |
There never seems to be a ton of an examination
link |
of why these ideas are becoming popular.
link |
Why are people so angry?
link |
What is leading people to this?
link |
What about their lives is to the point
link |
where they need to show up at these places?
link |
And like, and obviously there's going to be people
link |
There'll always be the mentally unwell.
link |
There'll always be people that want to destroy society.
link |
But when you look at how popular,
link |
large, long discredited things,
link |
whether it's fascism, totalitarian communism,
link |
all of these things are like, why are they back?
link |
Why are they back in a big way?
link |
And why are people so fed up with the status quo
link |
that they're finding solace
link |
in the most extreme discredited theories
link |
of how to run and operate societies,
link |
theories that have led to deaths of a lot of people.
link |
So to me, I'm like, if those people at the Capitol,
link |
yes, if they were going to work,
link |
if they were able to go out and drink at Chili's,
link |
if they were able to get a fucking checkup, right?
link |
Like if their job paid a little bit better,
link |
and I'm not saying that this is all the reason, right?
link |
I'm sure that there's a lot of people there
link |
that are doing quite well and they're still nuts.
link |
But like the anger and the rage
link |
that's boiling to the surface of this society,
link |
does it come from the fact that across the board
link |
people in very different areas
link |
and with very different political beliefs
link |
feel like they are being fucked over
link |
and there's nothing they can do about it.
link |
That's what the baseline to me,
link |
they look at the people that run the country
link |
and run the world, whether they're tech titans,
link |
the guys that you talked to,
link |
or whether they're people that run the government,
link |
whether they're people that run large banks,
link |
large media companies,
link |
the people that have created this kind of infrastructure
link |
that everyone lives in,
link |
these people are incredibly powerless.
link |
And when you push people to that point,
link |
logically, sadly, and unfortunately,
link |
the next thing does seem to be violence.
link |
Yeah, the thing that troubles me a lot
link |
is you said nobody's asking why these beliefs are out there,
link |
but sometimes it's not even acknowledged
link |
that people are hurting, people are angry,
link |
just even acknowledging that all the conspiracy theories
link |
that are out there, acknowledging that they're out there.
link |
And then people are thinking about it and talking about it
link |
just because otherwise,
link |
so it's not acknowledged in this nuanced way.
link |
What happens is you say,
link |
okay, 70 million people are white supremacists.
link |
It's just throwing a kind of blanket statement.
link |
And of course that gets them angrier
link |
and makes them feel more powerless.
link |
And that ultimately, that's what's been painful for me
link |
to see is that there's not an acknowledgement
link |
that most people are good.
link |
There's circumstances where it's just you're pissed off.
link |
Because you are powerless.
link |
I mean, most of us are powerless.
link |
You could fall in with a bad crowd.
link |
That's the thing, you can just fall in.
link |
And it doesn't mean that there's not blame.
link |
Obviously you have agency, you're a person.
link |
But the idea that you could be rehabilitated,
link |
you could do something stupid
link |
or you could fall into a group of people that are,
link |
and then in a few years you can go,
link |
what the fuck was I doing?
link |
I'm an ex drug addict.
link |
I know what it's like to go from being one thing
link |
to being another thing.
link |
I'm still a drug addict.
link |
If I would use drugs right now or drink,
link |
I would still be addicted to them.
link |
I mean, it's not something that I can ever change
link |
about myself, but I know what it's like
link |
to go from one thing to another thing.
link |
So when you look at racism or whatever ism,
link |
homophobia, misogyny, whatever you're looking at,
link |
antisemitism, and you go, that's a fixed condition
link |
where nobody's ever going to be able to change.
link |
Nobody's ever gonna be able to be rehabilitated.
link |
Nobody's ever going to be able to reimagine themselves
link |
in a different way.
link |
To me, you're just, you're throwing away someone
link |
and you're making them feel helpless and worthless.
link |
And that's gonna lead to antisocial behavior
link |
that spills out into the violence.
link |
We don't have a very redemptive society.
link |
That's a huge factor.
link |
We don't have a redemptive society.
link |
That's why I like O.J. Simpson.
link |
Because O.J. Simpson, yes, he did a bad thing supposedly.
link |
But he's very kind now on Twitter
link |
and he makes very nice points about how we all have
link |
to get involved in the political process
link |
and he's on golf courses and I like watching people golf.
link |
I don't do it, but I like watching him do it.
link |
And he's like an elder statesman
link |
because I remember him from the naked gun.
link |
And I choose to forgive him for whatever happened there,
link |
which I don't know.
link |
But I choose to forgive him really for,
link |
I mean, obviously, what they say is
link |
he cut his wife's head off.
link |
But I can look past that and redeem him
link |
because he's very stable on Twitter and he's a good,
link |
like I see all these people going crazy on Twitter
link |
and I'm like, O.J.'s lived a full life.
link |
I think there's a benefit to that.
link |
There's a benefit to kind of living a full life.
link |
Yeah, how many of us have not at least tried
link |
to murder somebody?
link |
100%, listen, O.J.'s had the highs and the lows,
link |
but he did it on his terms.
link |
And there's a real.
link |
It's like a Frank Sinatra song.
link |
Yeah, he did it my way.
link |
I mean, there's a benefit to that.
link |
And he seems like a very well adjusted person now.
link |
So I mean, I don't know, how is that a fact?
link |
But it is a fact and that's an uncomfortable fact.
link |
Well, this is a strong case of forgiveness
link |
in one of the more extreme cases, I suppose.
link |
But yeah, there's not a process of forgiveness.
link |
It seems like people just take a single event from your,
link |
sometimes a single statement from your past
link |
and use that as a categorical like capture
link |
of the essence of this particular human being.
link |
So murder might be a thing that you should get a time out
link |
for a little while.
link |
Murder, and let's just say that.
link |
Murder is not good.
link |
I'm glad you make this definitive statement.
link |
O.J. is an interesting cat because you're like,
link |
he's very stable on Twitter.
link |
He's very like, he's like, let's take a look at it, guys.
link |
Like we need more of his energy.
link |
That's what I'm trying to say.
link |
I know like, yes, it was bad.
link |
He killed the woman in the waiter.
link |
I was not for that.
link |
I wish he didn't do that.
link |
But the trial, the O.J. Simpson trial was such a fun thing.
link |
And like you said, we need more fun people in society.
link |
Speaking of fun people,
link |
you've, your politics have been all over the place.
link |
I mean, imagine not,
link |
imagine someone whose politics weren't all over the place.
link |
It would seem odd.
link |
In the 10 years that I've been politically conscious,
link |
just because I'm 35 and 20.
link |
No, I've probably been conscious for over two decades,
link |
but like Democrats have become Republicans,
link |
Republicans become Democrats.
link |
I remember when Ann Coulter said,
link |
we need to, he defended George W. Bush when he said,
link |
we need to go out and Christianize
link |
or modernize the Arab world.
link |
We need to democratize the Arab world.
link |
And then Ann Coulter backed Donald Trump.
link |
And all the right wing in America believed
link |
in nation building.
link |
They believed in going out and democratizing areas
link |
that might breed radical terrorists,
link |
whether it was Iraq or wherever you were going,
link |
toppling regimes and instituting
link |
new democratic norms in those countries.
link |
That was the right wing point of view when I grew up.
link |
Then the right wing switched to,
link |
we are going to be isolationist.
link |
We're going to take care of America.
link |
First and foremost,
link |
we're not going to go into other countries.
link |
And then the Democrats who, when I grew up,
link |
were doves and the right wing people were more hawkish.
link |
And the Democrats were like,
link |
the military solutions aren't the way.
link |
We need to have multilateral diplomatic coalitions
link |
to solve all the problems.
link |
Now, Rachel Maddow's like,
link |
let's nuke Russia every night on MSNBC.
link |
The Democrats are like,
link |
we need strong presence in Syria.
link |
We need a strong presence.
link |
We need to counter Putin all over the globe.
link |
We need to get, so they're more hawkish on things.
link |
So literally I have watched two political parties
link |
literally flip and it's crazy to watch.
link |
And in some sense I've watched that as well
link |
because when I first saw Barack Obama,
link |
I admired that he was against the war.
link |
This is whatever, maybe before he was a Senator,
link |
he spoke out against the Iraq war.
link |
And then it doesn't feel like,
link |
it feels like his administration was more hawkish
link |
than dovish in a sense with all the drone attacks,
link |
with the sort of inability to pull back,
link |
or at least in mass efficiently pull back
link |
from all the military involvement
link |
that we have all over the world.
link |
So, and just the language.
link |
What I think is interesting about that,
link |
what's interesting about Obama,
link |
cause this is a very interesting study,
link |
is that presidents are controlled in very different ways.
link |
Presidents can be controlled by different factors,
link |
power factions within Washington.
link |
I think one of the reasons that Obama was maybe,
link |
you had a very close relationship with John Brennan,
link |
he was a CIA director.
link |
And Obama was very close with John Brennan,
link |
and Obama was very, I think malleable to the extent
link |
that the CIA, and I've had CIA agents on my show,
link |
John Kiriakou, a guy who went to jail for exposing torture,
link |
was saying that like, you get into the Oval Office,
link |
all of a sudden you're having
link |
that presidential daily briefing every day,
link |
and the intelligence people come in and they go,
link |
listen man, I mean, there's gonna be a terrorist attack
link |
on your watch if you don't do X, Y, and Z.
link |
They go, they call it like blue book information,
link |
which is five levels above top secret,
link |
and they go like, hey man, a guy in Iran at a cafe
link |
said he's blowing everything up next week,
link |
and you know, I mean, it's the same thing as Parler,
link |
you don't know if it's true or not.
link |
But now the president's making a decision
link |
on usually a lot of uncorroborated intelligence
link |
that goes into a presentation for the president,
link |
where you're just terrified every day,
link |
and you don't want a terrorist attack on your watch.
link |
Now, so why are they getting all this information?
link |
Because a lot of the people in Washington
link |
have an interest in perpetual, constant, ongoing warfare,
link |
and there's a lot of financial gain to be had from that.
link |
So they're sneaking their information
link |
into the presentations that are going to the president,
link |
and then the president is now behaving and going,
link |
fuck, I don't want a bomb going off,
link |
we gotta do what we gotta do.
link |
And whatever version of that happens,
link |
that is really kind of what is happening,
link |
whereas the presidents are being controlled
link |
by forces that are outside of the political sphere,
link |
but very much still in it.
link |
And they have a lot of, that's what the deep state is.
link |
You know, Trump, there's a lot of ridiculing Trump
link |
of going, the deep state doesn't exist.
link |
It absolutely exists, there's been books about it
link |
written by liberal journalists.
link |
The deep state is only a term for unelected, largely,
link |
power factions in Washington, DC,
link |
that outlive any presidential administration.
link |
These are people that might work at the State Department,
link |
they might work at the Defense Department.
link |
These are people that are not always working officially
link |
in any government capacity.
link |
They might be private companies,
link |
they might be military contractors,
link |
they might be people at Boeing or Raytheon
link |
or General Dynamics.
link |
And they constitute a group of people
link |
that Trump kind of called the swamp,
link |
but Trump had really no interest in draining the swamp.
link |
But he articulated these things, and this is what it is.
link |
You have a lot of interested parties that have budgets
link |
that they want, big budgets.
link |
Everybody wants a budget in Washington,
link |
whether you know what it is, they want money.
link |
And these are the people who really control press.
link |
So this idea that the president is the be all end all
link |
has got to be smashed,
link |
which is why the horse race model of politics
link |
and being like, is it right wing?
link |
Is it, what team am I on and what color am I wearing?
link |
It's very simplistic, but the reality is this is an empire.
link |
It's past its peak.
link |
The United States is an empire past its peak.
link |
Yeah, I mean, that's just,
link |
you could prove that case in court.
link |
Well, let's go to court right now.
link |
But I do love the more complex idea
link |
that there's just human beings who crave power
link |
and seek ways to attain that power through different ways.
link |
If you have Barack Obama or George Bush or Donald Trump,
link |
there's different attack vectors.
link |
There's different ways to attain that power
link |
and then you can use that to leverage.
link |
And it probably doesn't have to be just in Washington, DC.
link |
There's people who crave power all over the world.
link |
Of course, but where we are now in Los Angeles,
link |
these people are all good.
link |
Studio executives and people that I,
link |
from what I understand, they treat everyone fairly
link |
and they're nice, but he sees the bad guys,
link |
but out here in LA, everyone's lovely.
link |
So amidst this fun exploration in your mind
link |
through the political landscape that you've done
link |
over the past couple of decades
link |
that you've been conscious politically,
link |
where does Donald Trump fit into this picture for you?
link |
Well, he didn't, right?
link |
Cause we didn't, he wasn't political
link |
until four years ago, right?
link |
He got political very quickly before.
link |
I mean, he was always firing off crazy tweets
link |
about where Obama was born or whatever,
link |
but he was, he got into politics like very quickly
link |
and then he became the president, right?
link |
So it was like, we didn't, I knew him as Donald Trump,
link |
this crazy New York city character,
link |
the coast of the apprentice.
link |
I didn't think much about him.
link |
He was just constant, you know,
link |
like he was just this constant figure.
link |
Like I don't think much about Warren Buffett.
link |
Like I know like Trump's like,
link |
he's married to a new show girl all the time
link |
and he's always opening another casino and he's on TV.
link |
Wait, Warren Buffett really?
link |
Trump, but like Warren Buffett is the opposite, right?
link |
Warren Buffett's like been married for a billion years,
link |
lives in a little house in Omaha,
link |
but these are the, that's what I associate Trump.
link |
Like I don't think about Warren Buffett.
link |
I don't think about these people.
link |
They're just guys that I've known forever
link |
that have like, you know,
link |
you associate certain things with them, right?
link |
And Trump, we always associated with kind of vulgar,
link |
garish, new money, billionaire, married a lot,
link |
you know, casinos, Miss Universe pageants.
link |
But again, you know, but it makes perfect sense
link |
that he really was able to become president at the moment
link |
where we were about to have Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush.
link |
And I think Americans felt like this is,
link |
now the oligarchy is spitting right in our face.
link |
You're not even making it feel like
link |
there's an appearance of democracy.
link |
We have two crime families
link |
vowing for control of the country every four years.
link |
And then there was this rogue kind of upstart guy
link |
that was really about himself.
link |
You know, Trump doesn't really care that much about the,
link |
I mean, really was summarized perfectly when he left
link |
and he just said, hey, have a good life.
link |
That's what he said
link |
before he got on Andrews Air Force Base.
link |
If you watch his speech, he goes, hey, have a good life.
link |
That's what he really feel.
link |
Like, hey, have a good life.
link |
I'm gonna get on a plane right now
link |
and fly to a castle I own in Florida.
link |
And really, I'm not gonna think too much about you people
link |
outside of how I can get more attention in the future.
link |
Can I ask you like a therapy question?
link |
What is your favorite
link |
and least favorite quality of Donald Trump?
link |
So my least favorite quality of Donald Trump,
link |
I think because there's a few of them,
link |
his lack of empathy,
link |
complete and total lack of empathy.
link |
I don't feel that he cares about human beings on any level.
link |
And I feel like that's,
link |
maybe it should be a requirement, right?
link |
I mean, I don't think he cares.
link |
I think it's obvious that he doesn't care.
link |
I mean, he sent, you know, basically he's saying like,
link |
they're in there, Mike Pence is in there.
link |
He knows that his people are going to get,
link |
try to get into a Capitol.
link |
I mean, those motherfuckers are not gonna have jobs.
link |
They're gonna go to federal prison and he doesn't care.
link |
As long as they're storming the Capitol
link |
to prove the point that he thinks he won the election,
link |
he has no concern for these people, his followers.
link |
He leads them lambs to the slaughter, right?
link |
So that's not a respectable quality.
link |
My favorite quality of Donald Trump
link |
is his willingness to call bullshit.
link |
So his willingness to call bullshit out.
link |
He doesn't play the game.
link |
He will, you know, when people say about Putin,
link |
Putin kills people, he goes,
link |
we kill a lot of people here too.
link |
Like he's willing and able to break the fourth wall
link |
and say things that no politician has ever said.
link |
He's willing to call out hypocrisy, you know,
link |
of course not his own, but the media,
link |
the members of the political establishment,
link |
that's a laudable quality.
link |
It's an entertaining quality, right?
link |
I love, I'm like this guy saying something
link |
that a lot of people want said.
link |
That being said, it's coupled with no real work or action.
link |
So it's not coupled with anything behind it
link |
that he just wants to,
link |
we did an episode of my podcast once
link |
where it's like essentially he's like criticizing
link |
the deep state, he wants a deeper state.
link |
He wants a deeper state.
link |
Like he hired his daughter and her husband.
link |
I mean, this is not a guy that's interested
link |
in transparency and openness.
link |
He's a guy that would just prefer,
link |
he wants to run the mafia state.
link |
But he shakes up the norms of social discourse,
link |
political discourse, and that people
link |
are just hungry for that.
link |
Like he got banned from Twitter,
link |
from all the different platforms.
link |
Do you think, is there an argument to be made
link |
for and against banning Twitter?
link |
There's always arguments to be made for everything.
link |
A permanent ban seems to be an overreaction to me.
link |
He's the president of the United States.
link |
It also rearranges the power,
link |
like whether you like him or hate him,
link |
love him or hate him, he was the president.
link |
We've elevated Twitter is now more powerful
link |
than the president.
link |
It's like, do you want that to be longterm the salute,
link |
that the reality, like now Jack at Twitter
link |
is more powerful than the president of the United States.
link |
Is that a good paradigm going forward?
link |
I'm not, listen, maybe give him a little time out
link |
I think a time out, a little spanking, certainly,
link |
but I don't know if a permanent ban across the board
link |
on every social media.
link |
I mean, they banned them on Grindr.
link |
I mean, this is how hilarious it is, right?
link |
I mean, they banned them across the board on everything.
link |
I don't think he could get an Airbnb now, neither can I,
link |
but like, I don't think he can do anything.
link |
Again, I just, I look back and there's so many people,
link |
my very smart, intelligent friends that go,
link |
yeah, but who cares?
link |
Yeah, but he's bad.
link |
Yeah, but blah, blah, blah.
link |
Yeah, but I don't like Milianopolis.
link |
Yeah, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
link |
And I'm like, you have such faith.
link |
You have such faith that it's always gonna be the people
link |
you dislike that are banned.
link |
It's always gonna be the, it's never gonna be you.
link |
Man, you have so much faith in the government.
link |
You have so much faith in tech oligarchs you've never met.
link |
You have so much faith in the security state
link |
that they're gonna always make the right decisions
link |
and they're not gonna penalize people
link |
that shouldn't be penalized.
link |
To me, I'm like, wow, I've never had that much faith
link |
in any human being ever, including myself.
link |
I wouldn't want that power.
link |
I would start deplatforming people that I hate.
link |
I would deplatform my aunt, you know what I mean?
link |
I would deplatform everyone I know.
link |
I mean, so it's such an insane power to give somebody,
link |
like who gets heard, who gets to speak?
link |
Yeah, I'm worried about the effect it has
link |
on people like you, actually.
link |
Of being, like everybody's a little more nervous
link |
And that is a big problem.
link |
Because then you're just like longterm unmasked,
link |
like we're talking about.
link |
It has an effect where people just become more bland.
link |
Yeah, self censorship, anxiety,
link |
all of these things go into it.
link |
We try to fight it.
link |
I try to fight it.
link |
I think I gotta still do what makes me laugh
link |
and what makes me laugh is often fucked up.
link |
And it's often, it's not always fucked up in a way
link |
that it's gonna get me thrown off something,
link |
but I think pushing certain buttons is funny to me,
link |
so I gotta keep doing that.
link |
Part of the problem is that so many of the lines
link |
are blurred, right?
link |
So you have comedians that are commentators
link |
and commentators that are comedians and politicians.
link |
So it's harder to get the defense of like,
link |
hey, I'm a comedian, leave me alone.
link |
That defense becomes harder
link |
when all of these lines are blurring.
link |
Everybody's kind of everything now.
link |
So like people say to me, you should run for office
link |
and they're serious and I'm like, you're crazy,
link |
but they're serious.
link |
Like, so the blurring of everything means
link |
that people aren't in their lanes as much
link |
and that you go, well, this guy is dangerous
link |
because he's not just making a joke.
link |
He's doing something else and he's using humor.
link |
And I'm like, I'm really not.
link |
I'm really just trying to make a joke.
link |
That's all, that's really what I'm trying to do.
link |
But I do think that because of the flattening,
link |
there's a lot of people out there that go,
link |
they take aim at humor because they go,
link |
humor is where bad ideas can kind of start and flourish.
link |
But don't you, to put some responsibility on you,
link |
don't you think humor is a way to,
link |
that you are the modern,
link |
like Jordan Peterson style intellectual,
link |
that humor is actually a tool of.
link |
Changing the zeitgeist,
link |
changing the social norms. It absolutely can be,
link |
but it also cannot be.
link |
I don't think it's any one thing
link |
and I think there's a lot of pressure for a comedian.
link |
You can be funny and right.
link |
You can be funny and wrong.
link |
If your goal is to be right,
link |
you might end up being right and not funny.
link |
So the reality is funny has to come first.
link |
There are brilliant people that have been funny
link |
and correct according to people, right?
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
people that put way too much faith in what comedy is,
link |
most of what comedy is,
link |
is people showing up to strip malls
link |
and telling jokes for an hour
link |
while people eat chicken fingers
link |
and they all get drunk and they laugh
link |
and they feel a little bit better about their lives.
link |
That's really the majority of comedy.
link |
Then there's like 10 famous people that are really famous
link |
that do a version of that in an arena.
link |
But the amount of cultural power they have
link |
has always been greatly exaggerated.
link |
My uncles loved George Carlin,
link |
who was anti military industrial complex,
link |
anti this, anti that.
link |
And then they would go vote for Ronald Reagan.
link |
It's not as powerful as you think.
link |
It feels good for me to say I am the new thing.
link |
No one is, comedians are the people that get on stage
link |
and say, we're fucked up.
link |
We're drug addicts.
link |
We're sex addicts.
link |
We can't manage our money.
link |
We can't stop eating.
link |
We can't stop fucking doing horrible things.
link |
We're narcissists.
link |
We're the people that get out and say that.
link |
Only a psychopath would look at us and go,
link |
I disagree with you because then I'm a psychopath.
link |
Well, and that's, I mean, I don't think,
link |
That's another issue.
link |
But you know what I'm saying.
link |
Well, and I don't because, I mean,
link |
I understand you using this as a psychological tool
link |
for yourself to give yourself freedom.
link |
But the reality is you are one of the rare comedians
link |
like a George Carlin who is, besides being funny.
link |
When I hear things like that, I'm like,
link |
okay, you're being very sweet.
link |
But like, I agree.
link |
I understand what you're saying.
link |
I do stuff that makes, hopefully makes you think.
link |
I hope that's what good comedy is.
link |
But I think I try to do that.
link |
But I also would hate to feel shackled to the idea
link |
of that I had to make a point
link |
and that point had to be correct.
link |
I think the best comedy makes fun of everything.
link |
It makes fun of both sides.
link |
And then there's a deeper truth about humanity revealed.
link |
But then what happens is people take that deeper truth
link |
and go, let's politicize it.
link |
But what does he mean?
link |
Is it the right or the left?
link |
And I'm like, I'm doing something that I think speaks
link |
to hopefully people on both sides for everybody.
link |
Cause I'm making fun of people on the left and the right
link |
and in the center and people that don't care
link |
and people that do care.
link |
And I'm trying to figure out a way to do it.
link |
But then immediately anything of value
link |
in this culture right now is like, how do we politicize it?
link |
How do we put it in a box?
link |
So yes, I think comedy can produce a lot
link |
of inherently valuable things, reflective, thoughtful things.
link |
But then immediately, can it be put in this box
link |
where all of those things can be used politically?
link |
And unfortunately, like when they say like,
link |
comedy is a great way to speak truth to power.
link |
It is, but I don't know how much it changes things.
link |
I don't know how much a joke can dethrone a king.
link |
I know the idea is nice,
link |
but let's look at the practical applications.
link |
I mean, we had brilliant comics, Bill Hicks,
link |
George Carlin, Richard Pryor.
link |
We had people talk about so many problems in society,
link |
illustrate them, put a spotlight on them.
link |
And we still have them.
link |
They're worse now than they've ever been.
link |
I think the society is better.
link |
And so to push back in my perspective,
link |
it's very possible that those voices
link |
were the exact reason we have the world today,
link |
which I do believe is actually,
link |
I mean, on the boring old measures
link |
of what makes a good world,
link |
which is the amount of violence in the world,
link |
the amount of opportunity that all those kinds of measures,
link |
even happiness, all of those things measured,
link |
things have been improving.
link |
Steven Pinker gets a lot of shit for this,
link |
but he's really good at articulating
link |
how the data says pretty clearly
link |
that the world is getting better.
link |
And it's arguable that the freedoms we do enjoy currently
link |
are thanks to the comedic voices or the people who mock.
link |
So to me, it's possible that humor
link |
is the very thing that saves the world.
link |
Humor is the very thing that keeps,
link |
is the balance of power in the world.
link |
But I think a lot of the things that those guys criticize,
link |
whether it was militarism or the elites,
link |
the lying, the corruption, the bribery,
link |
that's still going on.
link |
And it's always gonna go on, right?
link |
Because that's the nature of human beings.
link |
We call it out, we point it out,
link |
but we don't have a plan to change.
link |
It's not really our job.
link |
And I think that too much now is like,
link |
well, comedians should have a,
link |
like, I don't tell people who to vote for.
link |
Like the idea that comedians
link |
went and told people who to vote for,
link |
it's like, to me, it's crazy.
link |
I understand like people have strong opinions,
link |
but like, I believe I have a job.
link |
And my job is to make you laugh or whatever,
link |
maybe make you think,
link |
but like, my job is not to tell you who to vote for.
link |
I mean, it's absurd.
link |
But see, the thing you do by the comedy,
link |
like on your Twitter,
link |
that people should definitely follow.
link |
I believe that, Jim J. Dillon, I agree with you.
link |
Oh, on this point of,
link |
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
link |
That people should follow you.
link |
Yeah, you give me,
link |
you give me freedom to think on my own.
link |
Meaning like you're shaking things up
link |
to where I don't feel constrained
link |
about what I can think about.
link |
And that's awesome.
link |
So you're not telling me what to think,
link |
you're giving me the freedom to think.
link |
And that's what great comedy does,
link |
is I don't often agree with George Carlin.
link |
He can get pretty political sometimes.
link |
But just the ability to do that's so rare.
link |
Podcasts do that too now.
link |
Like there's certain people
link |
that can really just challenge you to,
link |
even when you disagree with them,
link |
to sort of be like,
link |
oh, it's okay to think about this kind of stuff.
link |
Yeah, and I appreciate that,
link |
because that's awesome.
link |
And I mean, that's great.
link |
And a guy like you, who's a brilliant guy, that's great.
link |
If I'm giving you the license to think,
link |
then man, the world is completely fucked.
link |
But I'm happy about that.
link |
Speaking about the world being completely fucked,
link |
Alex Jones turned on QAnon.
link |
I know almost nothing...
link |
It's a very tough match.
link |
They had a rough marriage.
link |
They fought it out for years.
link |
And eventually we just knew
link |
someone was gonna leave someone.
link |
Hewlett tried to leave him a few months ago.
link |
Yeah, he was staying at someone else's house.
link |
The car wasn't in the driveway.
link |
Well, the thing about QAnon that makes it a lot of fun
link |
is it's kind of a make it up as you go along.
link |
I'm a drug addict, right?
link |
So often my lies aren't planned.
link |
They're in the moment.
link |
A lot of what I do on the podcast,
link |
a lot, you know, it's all in the moment.
link |
I'll have an idea what I wanna talk about,
link |
and I rant and I go.
link |
And I've been like stoned,
link |
and I show up at home,
link |
and my parents are like,
link |
There was $50 on the mantle.
link |
Now it's not there.
link |
well, and I gotta make something up on the spot, right?
link |
I've been, you know, are you drinking again?
link |
And then you gotta have a,
link |
well, you were gone for two days.
link |
No one knows where you were.
link |
And somebody said you left your car.
link |
Well, I was at, well, this is,
link |
I was at a sales conference and I left my car.
link |
I flew to Phoenix.
link |
Like, I understand what that is.
link |
QAnon is an ever evolving conspiracy theory
link |
where the events are happening in the past,
link |
in the present, and in the future.
link |
It's kind of hilarious.
link |
Every conspiracy theory is like Kennedy,
link |
something like that,
link |
that there's a lot of truth in that,
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
it's like you're looking back from 30,000 feet,
link |
analyzing little things that have already happened.
link |
so I think Alex is kind of like got a little tired of
link |
the constant evolving nature of that conspiracy theory.
link |
So he's not a fan of like the jazz that is QAnon.
link |
because they're improvising constantly.
link |
They're improvising.
link |
Alex is like, hey man,
link |
I was on board a little bit,
link |
but at the end of the day,
link |
it's getting a little annoying
link |
because it can turn on you.
link |
Eventually you become part of the conspiracy.
link |
Alex is controlled opposition.
link |
That's what they'll say.
link |
because QAnon just eats things.
link |
So it's a conspiracy that just eats things.
link |
The minute you start to say,
link |
hey man, maybe that's not,
link |
it just eats you and go,
link |
well, you're in on it.
link |
Everyone's in on it.
link |
Everyone's a satanic pedophile.
link |
Everyone that questions it is eating children.
link |
And you go, wait a minute,
link |
that seems illogical.
link |
But now there's not enough children.
link |
Now there's not enough.
link |
And I think QAnon's over now, unfortunately,
link |
because for these people,
link |
but I think fortunately for them,
link |
they're gonna have to find a new hobby.
link |
But I think it's over now
link |
because even the best QAnon people now are starting to go,
link |
hey man, this might not be going down the way we thought.
link |
But they've literally gone as far as to say
link |
that like Biden and Trump switched faces.
link |
Trump's actually still the president except Biden.
link |
You have to be a real moron now.
link |
You gotta be real stupid now.
link |
Like it was cool when the Epstein stuff happened,
link |
QAnon was like, it was party at Q.
link |
And then when the Hunter Biden laptop stuff
link |
started to happen, they were like dancing,
link |
And then Biden wins and they're like, wait, whoa.
link |
And it's just like, it's the day after the party.
link |
QAnon, if you ever went to a party in high school
link |
or college, QAnon right now is the day after the party.
link |
You wake up, it's 12 noon.
link |
The sun is hitting you in the face.
link |
There's a stench of disgusting beer and cigarettes
link |
all over the house.
link |
You're like, what the fuck happened here?
link |
I gotta get out of here and get a bacon, egg and cheese.
link |
That's what QAnon is.
link |
They gotta sober up, get out of that house,
link |
get a bacon, egg and cheese and go, man,
link |
we were fucking whacked.
link |
We were high, dude.
link |
I thought Nancy Pelosi was eating children for four years
link |
and that Donald Trump was gonna put her in Guantanamo Bay.
link |
Wow, that was, cause I mean, it's interesting.
link |
People had to do that after the sixties.
link |
They were like, yeah, I just did a bunch of acid
link |
and I lived in a ranch in Malibu
link |
and fucked everyone I ever saw.
link |
And they're like, I thought that was the way
link |
the world was gonna go and I followed some shaman guy,
link |
some guru who just wanted to fuck me
link |
and 10 other people that were living there.
link |
And we did that for three years.
link |
Apparently we never created the utopia
link |
we thought we were gonna have.
link |
And now I'm back working here at Allstate Insurance
link |
and we have great policies and we'd love you
link |
to come in the office so we can break them down for you.
link |
It all ends folks, all the love, all the bullshit ends,
link |
but it's fun, they have so much fun.
link |
QAnon was hard to get mad at because they were,
link |
this was all they had.
link |
Yeah, and they were quite good at it.
link |
And they were good at it and it was a lot
link |
of desperate people, but they were also rich idiots.
link |
There's also like dumb rich people
link |
and those are like the saddest people in Q
link |
cause it's like they should,
link |
they have the resources to do other things,
link |
but they just love Q.
link |
They're like, I'm just into this.
link |
And I'm like, you're rich, go do something.
link |
How in curious are you?
link |
Go to the Amazon, go bird walk.
link |
I don't know, but they're, you know, so.
link |
It's sad, but they're like done now.
link |
I mean, it's over.
link |
I see you think this is the.
link |
I think everything's ending.
link |
My whole thing is that Trump's out, QAnon's over,
link |
the quarantine is gonna end.
link |
Everything's gonna go back
link |
to something that's more recognizable.
link |
Are you optimistic about the 2021 and what.
link |
To a degree in certain aspects, I have optimism.
link |
And then I have, I have short term optimism
link |
and longterm pessimism.
link |
Meaning that I think in the short term,
link |
things can get better.
link |
I think longterm, because there's so many forces
link |
that are out of our control that are evolving
link |
in ways I barely understand that are carving up society.
link |
It's gonna be very tough longterm
link |
to be completely optimistic.
link |
Like, Hey, it's gonna be great.
link |
It's gonna be good forever.
link |
But short term, I think, yeah, this quarantine will end.
link |
Things will get better.
link |
The economy will get a little better.
link |
The constant Trump craziness will die down a little bit.
link |
And people can go back to focusing on things that matter,
link |
which is the things that are near you and close to you.
link |
Yeah, the humans around you.
link |
Humans around you, not Nancy Pelosi.
link |
I have uncles that talk about Nancy Pelosi.
link |
I'm like, you've never met her.
link |
You'll never meet her, shut up.
link |
And I have a belief that this kind of local love
link |
and kindness that you naturally can have
link |
for human beings that you actually know
link |
can be expanded at scale through the social networks
link |
that we use, that we build.
link |
Twitter is currently failing at that miserably.
link |
That would be great.
link |
If we were able to increase the love
link |
through the social networks, that would be great.
link |
It feels very hard to.
link |
It's a worthy challenge.
link |
You've tweeted, one of the underreported reasons
link |
conspiracy theories take hold
link |
is because some of them are true.
link |
What conspiracy theories do you believe
link |
that are sort of important for people to think about,
link |
Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman
link |
with no connections to any other situation, government.
link |
I believe that JFK was removed from office
link |
by a group of people that had very different interests.
link |
This is the question of like deep state.
link |
So these are powerful people that are able now
link |
to dictate through basically the threat of violence
link |
what the presidents,
link |
the surface powerful people in our society.
link |
Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not...
link |
I want another investigation into 9 11,
link |
not because I think that George Bush pressed a button
link |
and made 9 11 happen,
link |
but because we invaded the country of Iraq.
link |
And then we, 15 out of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
link |
There was tons of stuff in the 9 11 report
link |
that didn't make sense to anybody.
link |
There's tons of stuff about that day
link |
that I feel like we just don't know.
link |
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
That's when I, my little aunt life
link |
touched upon conspiracy theory world
link |
and first learned about Alex Jones is when 9 11 happened.
link |
It was very frustrating to me
link |
how poorly the reporting and the transparency
link |
around what exactly happened, who knew what,
link |
all that kind of a basic information
link |
that you would hope the government would release, reveal,
link |
and use as like a lesson for how we prevent this.
link |
Instead, it felt like a lot of stuff was being hidden
link |
in order to manipulate some kind of machine
link |
that leads us to war.
link |
Yeah, that's fair to say.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I just don't feel like
link |
we've gotten the full story.
link |
I don't know what the full story is.
link |
I can't, I don't know what it is,
link |
but I don't feel like we've gotten the full story.
link |
Yeah, there are groups of powerful pedophiles, right?
link |
Whether they're in the Catholic church
link |
or they're in the government or wherever they are,
link |
they are able to cover things up that they do.
link |
They're able to silence people that try to out them
link |
in terms of like, you know, disrupt their operations.
link |
QAnon has nuggets of truth.
link |
It just went crazy.
link |
Any conspiracy theory that involves the Knights Templar
link |
and also Chrissy Teigen is probably wrong, you know?
link |
What's the Knights Templar?
link |
Well, it was just this group of Knights back in the day.
link |
You know, it's that supposedly secret meetings.
link |
And like in every conspiracy, they talk about like,
link |
you know, if you go deep enough,
link |
it's like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians,
link |
you know, all of these secret groups throughout history,
link |
the Illuminati, the...
link |
Oh, and there's a thread that connects all of this.
link |
Oh yes, it connects it all to David Spade.
link |
I mean, it's a little much.
link |
Well, how do you, if you're David Spade,
link |
defend yourself, by the way?
link |
You ignore it because it's hilarious.
link |
And I know David Spade.
link |
It's like Hollywood's kind of boring.
link |
Yes, there are sex orgies.
link |
I'm sure there's shit going on.
link |
Kids do get abused, women get abused.
link |
I'll invite you to one.
link |
Please, we got the $75,000 dog and then we'll get one.
link |
But, you know, me and David Spade,
link |
we go out to sushi restaurants, like,
link |
and you sit there and you listen to people complain.
link |
That's what a lot of it is.
link |
What a lot of Hollywood is is deeply sad tragedy
link |
that people don't understand that some of it is nefarious
link |
and dark and there are problems
link |
and there are real power brokers here.
link |
It's a dark town, 100%.
link |
But the idea that everybody that lives here
link |
is in some wide ranging vast conspiracy isn't true.
link |
It ignores how humdrum, boring, deeply sad
link |
most people's lives are in Hollywood.
link |
And it ignores how sad fame is in general.
link |
Fame's a sad thing.
link |
Not always, but a lot of times it's a sad thing.
link |
It's fleeting, it's ephemeral, it doesn't last.
link |
It separates you from other people.
link |
It can be traumatic depending on what's going on.
link |
Obviously it's better than the alternative.
link |
If you're trying to be famous,
link |
it's better to be famous than not famous, right?
link |
But it's a mixed bag to a degree.
link |
There are things about it that aren't great.
link |
And Hollywood has a deep undercurrent of sadness
link |
of people that have not realized their dreams
link |
and people that have realized them.
link |
Both of those people.
link |
The people that win Olympic gold medals
link |
can sometimes suffer from depression.
link |
Well, somebody said, and I forget who said it,
link |
it's a great quote, it's not mine.
link |
I think it's from a book, or it might be from a TV show.
link |
Sometimes I quote something and they're like,
link |
"'That's from like, Charlotte's Web."
link |
The two worst things are,
link |
oh, I think it's from the movie Limitless.
link |
I'm like an idiot.
link |
But anyway, thanks for having me on.
link |
Tomorrow you're gonna make some genius.
link |
I will not publish this.
link |
It's from the movie, and I think he says,
link |
"'The two worst things in the world are not good."
link |
Oh, you know what's not from Limitless?
link |
I think it's from the movie
link |
where Nicolas Cage sold weapons.
link |
It was called Lord of War.
link |
It's a little better than Limitless.
link |
Anyway. That's a good movie.
link |
It's a great movie.
link |
He said, the two worst things in the world
link |
are not getting what you want and getting it.
link |
So the undercurrents of sadness
link |
that run through Hollywood are,
link |
there are two rivers that converge,
link |
and there are people that just never had it,
link |
and people that have it and go, now what?
link |
And so it's a sad place, a tragic place.
link |
And there's a lot of, it's boring.
link |
That's what people don't realize is like,
link |
it's actually kind of boring.
link |
Well, life is kind of boring.
link |
Life is kind of boring.
link |
But there's also like, you know,
link |
so I think QAnon's this way to make a lot of it seem like
link |
it's super exciting.
link |
And listen, I don't want to diminish the experiences
link |
of people who've been abused here,
link |
because there is a lot of horror here.
link |
But the whole QAnon thing was like,
link |
everybody in everything is doing, and that's not true.
link |
Well, see, just to linger on that a little bit is,
link |
Bill Gates, the conspiracy theories around Bill Gates
link |
bother me because, this is me, dumb, naive Lex,
link |
thinks that Bill Gates did a lot of good for this world.
link |
First, by creating a company
link |
that empowered personal computers.
link |
And second, by donating a ton of money
link |
for like treating malaria in Africa
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
And there's these huge amounts of conspiracies, I think,
link |
based on like just replies to whenever
link |
Bill Gates does anything.
link |
Like, to me, the top replies should be about
link |
how inspiring that guy is, to donate so much money.
link |
And so sorry to, the thing I'm struggling with is,
link |
if I'm Bill Gates, like, how do you behave differently?
link |
How do you show people that you're, if you're not,
link |
I don't know, doing creepy stuff
link |
that they're saying he's doing?
link |
Well, I think part of it is that
link |
he's done some really good stuff, right?
link |
He's an innovative guy, he's on the vanguard
link |
of a lot of things, but he's also the antichrist.
link |
And I think that that is, you know,
link |
they're not mutually exclusive.
link |
He is the prince of darkness, as well as some, no.
link |
Here's my deal with Bill Gates.
link |
He's a Batman villain billionaire,
link |
meaning that he's not a villain,
link |
but he's got all this money, right?
link |
Here's the thing, and I love Musk and all these guys,
link |
I know you love these guys.
link |
Listen, when you have the kind of money that these guys have
link |
and you have the vision that they have,
link |
and they want society to look a certain way,
link |
and a lot of them are doing great things,
link |
people, they need to get better at the pushback.
link |
They need to get a little better.
link |
When somebody says, hey man, what's going on over there?
link |
Bill Gates needs to be a little better at going,
link |
here's what, because, you know, Bill Gates has the money.
link |
You know, I think once he wanted to shoot a missile
link |
of dust at the atmosphere to help global warming,
link |
and a lot of scientists were like,
link |
hey man, that might not be the way to do it.
link |
But no one in history, like so few people in history
link |
have had the resources to even have that thought,
link |
that if you have the resources to have that thought,
link |
and you have designs on the way you want society to look,
link |
whether it's public health policy or vaccinations,
link |
whatever, you have to get a little better
link |
at dealing with legitimate critiques.
link |
And obviously you're not defending yourself
link |
against people that say you're the Antichrist,
link |
but like, you need to get a little better.
link |
And I feel like Bill Gates and some of those people
link |
at that level are like, ugh, PR is kind of like, you know.
link |
They're terrible at it.
link |
They're terrible at it.
link |
They're terrible at it.
link |
Him and Zuckerberg are really bad at it.
link |
Zuckerberg's horrible at it.
link |
He seems especially bad at public.
link |
Yeah, and it makes me feel so bad
link |
because the problem with being a billionaire
link |
is you lose touch with reality if you're not careful.
link |
I think Elon is good at, at least so far,
link |
maintaining touch with reality.
link |
No, if you look at the name of his child,
link |
you can clearly see.
link |
Listen, I do like him,
link |
and I do think what he's done with Tesla,
link |
you know, my producer has a Tesla,
link |
and he never shuts up about it.
link |
Most people that have Teslas never shut up about them,
link |
and they think they're part of the development team
link |
at SpaceX, and I like that he's created a world
link |
where people can get excited about a $37,000 car
link |
and never shut the fuck up about it
link |
to the point where I have to threaten people
link |
with physical violence to get them to stop telling me
link |
about that their car drives itself.
link |
Oh, you should get a Tesla.
link |
Maybe have a few less drinks and a few fewer Vicodin,
link |
and you can drive yourself.
link |
Have you thought about getting a Tesla?
link |
I've never thought about it.
link |
You should get a Tesla.
link |
I don't like them, they're minimalist.
link |
I don't like, I want more.
link |
Get the Cybertruck.
link |
I want a Cybertruck.
link |
I'm just being a, trolling you by being a salesman.
link |
My producer wants a Cybertruck.
link |
I want a stagecoach.
link |
Old school, stagecoach, horse thief shit.
link |
It's going back to that.
link |
I live in an area with a lot of horses.
link |
It's going back to like whipping a horse.
link |
I want an animal to shriek while I go by.
link |
You want more suffering in the world, not less.
link |
Oh, I think we need it.
link |
Okay, but I just don't like that billionaire is a bad word.
link |
And it's not necessarily,
link |
not every billionaire is a pedophile.
link |
I know, but the problem is a lot of like,
link |
it's just, you know, Epstein was very smart
link |
at like just getting people at that house
link |
and taking photos of them.
link |
Nobody knew what they were doing,
link |
but it's like, it was one of those things where it's like,
link |
Epstein was the most social guy ever.
link |
Like every photo he's like, hey,
link |
and it's like everyone that's ever done anything
link |
in the world has been at that fucking island.
link |
Every human being is like in a photo.
link |
It's just weird, like I'm in,
link |
like it's funny me and my friends get together.
link |
We don't ever take photos, right?
link |
Like last night, a few people,
link |
it was my birthday yesterday, I'm 17.
link |
And my friends came over and we're just eating dinner, right?
link |
And we had a fun night,
link |
and just four people that are over, nobody, right?
link |
Nobody ever thought like, let's, hey, I wanna remember it.
link |
Let's take photos, I'm 36, woo!
link |
But everything Epstein did,
link |
there's just photos of everybody, it's interesting.
link |
Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself?
link |
No, I think he was killed by that guy,
link |
that guy that they put in his cell, that lunatic,
link |
who was that big muscled guy.
link |
I think he was just, he did it for money,
link |
kept his mouth shut.
link |
Money from whom do you think?
link |
Mossad, MI6, CIA, all three.
link |
So there's a lot of pressure
link |
from a lot of different powerful people.
link |
Probably Mossad, CIA more.
link |
I mean, it seems very clear that he was working
link |
inside of a honeypot intelligence operation.
link |
Ghislaine Maxwell's father was an Israeli super spy.
link |
Ghislaine Maxwell's working for Israeli intelligence.
link |
It would be odd to think,
link |
and of course the CIA knows about everything
link |
that Israeli intelligence is doing with Americans.
link |
So I would think that it's a very cozy relationship
link |
with those two intelligence agencies.
link |
And I think if you ran it by anyone,
link |
I think if you ran it by French intelligence,
link |
they'd go, yeah, no, get him.
link |
I don't think there was any intelligence service
link |
in the world whose job is to protect the powerful people
link |
that live in their countries
link |
that was against him getting whacked.
link |
But do you think it's possible that he's just an evil person
link |
who is after manipulating people and also was a pedophile?
link |
So that there's a bigger thing.
link |
It's not factual that there's a bigger thing.
link |
Evil people don't get handed.
link |
Those are your facts, Tim Dillon.
link |
No, there's the facts of the case.
link |
You don't get handed a 65.
link |
Show me another evil guy
link |
who was handed a $65 million place by Les Wexner.
link |
Show me another evil guy
link |
that got that type of a handshake deal
link |
where he was basically let off without anything
link |
after a judge had made a very sweetheart deal for him
link |
after he was accused of molesting a 14 year old.
link |
Show me another evil guy
link |
that doesn't have that kind of backing
link |
that has those types of friends, those connections,
link |
those types of properties.
link |
Show me multiple passports all over the world.
link |
So show me a guy without anyone backing him that's doing it.
link |
Why did they, so you think he's just an evil guy
link |
who is doing this for whom is his own just shits and giggles.
link |
He's just getting off on it.
link |
Human nature, yeah.
link |
Human nature, huh?
link |
It's human nature.
link |
$70 million limestone mansion.
link |
I'm being visibly mocked.
link |
Yeah, is it human nature?
link |
And it's like poetry.
link |
I don't think it's human nature.
link |
I think they manipulated human nature,
link |
but I think they did it.
link |
I think Epstein was really just a functionary
link |
and I think JustLane was kind of a pimp
link |
and Epstein was kind of a guy that made the money okay
link |
and hid money and things like that
link |
and worked for a lot of powerful people.
link |
I don't believe in lone pedophiles anymore.
link |
I don't even believe that.
link |
If you're a pedophile, you're like in a group.
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
Well, I'm not even going there,
link |
but staying on JustLane,
link |
so you believe there's some power in her.
link |
What do you think happens to her now?
link |
Like what are the differences?
link |
I mean, I don't know what'll happen to her,
link |
but I imagine she'll get some type of deal,
link |
closed door thing years from now
link |
when people don't really care about the case
link |
and she'll serve some time in a very lax thing
link |
or she'll be killed.
link |
I mean, again, it's like if she was doing
link |
what she was doing, which is I believe a fact
link |
that she was compromising powerful people
link |
so that they could be blackmailed
link |
by the intelligence services of the US and Israel,
link |
probably, I don't see how she wasn't doing that.
link |
Someone's black, someone's using the photos
link |
and the tapes, right?
link |
Someone's using that against these people.
link |
Someone wants to control these people.
link |
Well, who and why?
link |
That's the real question.
link |
And I think the real question is you wanna exert control
link |
over congressmen and senators and presidents
link |
because they have the power to make decisions
link |
to affect the, but the CIA just works
link |
for a lot of very wealthy people.
link |
That's what the CIA, so how the CIA started, right?
link |
It was lawyers, bankers.
link |
They're protecting financial interests
link |
of multinational corporations all over the world,
link |
overthrowing democratically elected governments,
link |
going in and doing subterfuge campaigns,
link |
encouraging terror.
link |
They were doing all kinds of crazy stuff.
link |
I don't see why that would change.
link |
I think that's who they still represent.
link |
And I think those people want certain policies
link |
and certain people pushed forward.
link |
And I think those people are controlled.
link |
And I think one of the ways to control people
link |
is their sexual problems.
link |
And that's the way they did it.
link |
I wish there was a way to,
link |
because everything you just said now is.
link |
It makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
link |
I'm being indoctrinated on air.
link |
You think there's just a,
link |
Jeff Ramsey is just a fun, random guy
link |
who just wanted to make home movies of presidents?
link |
Well, you think I'm just some random guy.
link |
I'm just trying to sell myself as somebody
link |
who's friendly with the American audience.
link |
I believe you are backed by people
link |
that want people to be more comfortable with robot dogs.
link |
I believe you're pushed to be the happy face of AI.
link |
Which is why I will edit this part.
link |
They shouldn't pick the happier face.
link |
Joe Rogan's rule, no editing.
link |
No, I mean, I wish there was a way to,
link |
for some of the conspiracy theories,
link |
to prove that that's not the case.
link |
Like what the CIA is.
link |
There is some possibility in my mind
link |
that institutions like the CIA
link |
and different kinds of organizations
link |
are driven less by organized malevolence
link |
and more by just incompetence.
link |
Just bureaucracy, being incompetent.
link |
I think that argument gets less and less persuasive
link |
when you look at all the things they've been able to do.
link |
It's very certain, just like you said,
link |
that there's a bunch of them that have done,
link |
because there's some conspiracy theories
link |
that are dramatic and true.
link |
The question is, I wish there was a way to prove
link |
that some of them are not.
link |
And it's very difficult,
link |
because so much is shrouded in mystery.
link |
Like one of the things I'm bothered by
link |
is when people accuse other athletes
link |
of using steroids, for example.
link |
And it's just, yes, a lot of people use steroids,
link |
but it sucks that people just don't believe you.
link |
There's some incredible athletes that look shredded,
link |
that look just incredible performers,
link |
and everybody just says that they're on steroids.
link |
They kind of assume.
link |
Yeah, I mean, and people accuse me all the time
link |
of being on performance enhancing drugs and steroids.
link |
And it is hard, but what I remind them is,
link |
it's what my appearance is a result of dedication.
link |
But no, it's hard work, diet, exercise, dedication.
link |
I'm on, I'm on keto.
link |
I'm doing a version of, you're keto, right?
link |
So I'm doing a version of keto right now with Brad.
link |
And it's, do you see what I mean?
link |
You carb up in order to be able.
link |
So it's keto with sugar.
link |
It's called keto plus sugar.
link |
And it's a good diet for,
link |
I grew up in the 90s when nobody ever lost weight sadly,
link |
because every diet was like,
link |
you can eat what you want, just be accountable.
link |
No one even knew what that meant.
link |
So it would be like my mother being like,
link |
if you have chocolate chip pancakes, have a glass of water.
link |
Just take a walk around the block.
link |
You can go to McDonald's three times a day.
link |
Just walk around the block.
link |
It's what my parents used to say.
link |
My mother would be like, just walk around the block.
link |
Gonna have a cigarette?
link |
Walk 20 steps, walk 20 steps back.
link |
So, you know, there's too many conspiracies out there.
link |
A lot of them aren't true.
link |
A lot of them are bitter, angry people
link |
trying to justify their own impotence,
link |
not being able to do anything in life.
link |
And they're like the people
link |
that have done something in life, they're all nefarious.
link |
It's all, the car just attacked against me.
link |
That's 100% true, 100%.
link |
It attracts usually people
link |
that have not figured out a way to succeed
link |
or haven't succeeded on the level that they want to.
link |
But that also being true,
link |
there is a fair amount of fuckery going on and provable.
link |
And, you know, we just have to, I think, separate,
link |
know that these things are often inflated or not true,
link |
but know that sometimes they are true.
link |
Otherwise it wouldn't exist.
link |
If there was no, if there was nothing to JFK,
link |
there was nothing to 9 11,
link |
if people felt like they were being dealt with honestly,
link |
this wouldn't exist.
link |
I mean, this exists because there are real questions
link |
that people have that don't get answered for whatever reason.
link |
And then the vacuum of the refusal to answer those questions,
link |
that information vacuum is filled with people
link |
like Alex Jones, who are curious
link |
and sometimes they're right
link |
and sometimes they're horribly wrong.
link |
And sometimes they're all over the place.
link |
And they're good storytellers and people love stories.
link |
And then when there's an absence of actual.
link |
Alex is a uniquely American person,
link |
like a very interesting, I don't know how many countries,
link |
like how many people make a living as a conspiracy theorist,
link |
a good living in other countries, right?
link |
It's very rare, right?
link |
I mean, it's very interesting.
link |
And he became like, I know people that knew him
link |
when he was a kid,
link |
because I'd go to Austin and perform a lot.
link |
And he was a guy that would take a bullhorn and yell at cops
link |
because he thought DEI checkpoints were unconstitutional.
link |
That's what he was doing in college.
link |
And he's just went through, he was hated by the right.
link |
He was hated by the Bush people.
link |
He was hated by them.
link |
And he went from being this guy
link |
that was considered like a leftist even,
link |
like even though he was never a leftist,
link |
he was considered this like enemy
link |
of mainstream conservatism.
link |
Like he was not considered a guy that wasn't a patriot,
link |
wasn't this, wasn't that.
link |
And he just, wow, like he whines and whines
link |
and ends up just being this confidant
link |
of a Republican president,
link |
very divisive Republican president.
link |
And he becomes this populist and everything like that.
link |
It's really wild to watch that.
link |
But I mean, I do think he should retire eventually
link |
just so we could get some, I don't know,
link |
it seems like it's a lot to keep doing.
link |
Well, I hope this world allows for Alex Jones
link |
to continue having a voice because just like you said,
link |
he's a, use the word fun,
link |
but really he shakes up the norms of our discourse.
link |
I do think we need to put more value.
link |
I think entertainment, we do need to say
link |
that like there are people that should be allowed
link |
to have a voice for entertainment purposes.
link |
And that's part of what Donald Trump,
link |
now that he's not the president,
link |
come on, let the guy, let him talk.
link |
Who do you think is the best comedian of all time?
link |
Oh, that's a great question.
link |
Greatest of all time.
link |
You mentioned Carlin, your uncle's liking Carlin.
link |
Well, Carlin is great.
link |
Carlin is really hard to argue with,
link |
but Chappelle is also really great.
link |
Louis C.K. is really great.
link |
I don't know that there's what Joan Rivers is great.
link |
You smile at that.
link |
Well, she's a beast of a comic.
link |
I'm not aware of her standup actually.
link |
She's a beast of a comic.
link |
Ask Rogue and ask any of them.
link |
So what makes a great comic do you think
link |
in the history of comedy?
link |
Said something at the moment in a way,
link |
found a way to communicate with people
link |
in the funniest possible way at that moment
link |
and illustrated larger truths about life in what they did.
link |
And I think that guys like Louis and Chappelle
link |
and Pryor and Kennison and Hicks,
link |
people like Joan Rivers have done that.
link |
And even modern people,
link |
people like Maria Bamford's an amazing comedian.
link |
It's just a different style of comedy per se,
link |
but she's an amazing comedian.
link |
Cat Williams is an amazing comedian.
link |
Does he have any, was he the one of the things
link |
you kind of mentioned, the communities you mentioned,
link |
they were kind of fearless in saying
link |
the difficult things that needs to be said.
link |
Cat Williams is more, I don't remember his comedy,
link |
but I think it's just more wild out there.
link |
Well, to an extent that you can watch it.
link |
He talks about stuff.
link |
He talks about race brilliantly.
link |
He talks about America brilliantly.
link |
No, I think there's a lot of stuff there.
link |
Of course, Chris Rock.
link |
Of Chris Rock, of course.
link |
You can't really pick one.
link |
You just gotta, there's a class of people
link |
that throughout this history of this business,
link |
which is not that long of a history.
link |
It's pretty much within the last century,
link |
that have been really influential.
link |
Sometimes it's style, the way they deliver things.
link |
Sometimes it's substance of how they, what they're saying,
link |
or sometimes it's just a style of what they're saying.
link |
And we're only talking about standup comedians, right?
link |
So there's a million great comedians.
link |
If we're gonna talk about Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler
link |
and Chris Farley, these are brilliant.
link |
And those guys are bigger influences on comedy,
link |
I think, than standups, really, truly.
link |
So there's so many brilliant people in the business.
link |
Who was, for you, influential, just early on?
link |
Hicks was influential, because I'd watch Bill Hicks,
link |
and I'd be like, this guy's saying crazy shit on stage,
link |
and this is the only way he can get away with it,
link |
is because it's so funny.
link |
And he was calling out the military industrial complex,
link |
and he was talking about the first Gulf War.
link |
I remember he said a joke that I heard.
link |
It made me sit up straight, and he goes,
link |
he was in Canada, and he said, we had a war in the States.
link |
He was talking about the first Gulf War.
link |
And he said, I was in the unenviable position
link |
of being for the war, but against the troops.
link |
And to me, I love that joke.
link |
It was so funny to me, and I was like,
link |
oh, you can't get away with that anywhere
link |
other than standing on a stage.
link |
You couldn't ever say that in an office, really.
link |
And this was before, like, it was like PC,
link |
and they said, the other thing,
link |
I always knew that comedians had to say shit
link |
and have it be funny enough
link |
that you couldn't get away with it in polite society.
link |
That was the whole point.
link |
That was why it was a dark theater or a dark nightclub.
link |
That's when people had a few drinks.
link |
That's what the art form was, and that's why.
link |
So a guy like that was influential
link |
because I started watching him.
link |
And then, of course, I loved SNL when I was a kid,
link |
and I would watch Chris Farley,
link |
and I would watch people like even John Belushi
link |
going back in the day, but I'd watch Adam Sandler
link |
and Will Ferrell and all these guys.
link |
I mean, there's so many funny people,
link |
but Bill Hicks was kind of funny.
link |
And then Patrice O Neill was probably my favorite comedian
link |
who's made me laugh more than anybody else.
link |
So I think it was you, actually,
link |
that maybe on your podcast,
link |
we're talking about Patrice O Neill
link |
and that he was actually vicious to others.
link |
I think he was a little mean to other people,
link |
but he was very good to people that he liked, I guess.
link |
I think he was like not, I mean, he wasn't,
link |
and I've never met him.
link |
I have no inside info, but from what I've heard,
link |
he was like no nonsense guy, right?
link |
He just said what he wanted to say.
link |
But I think in terms of comedians,
link |
I don't know of anyone funnier than Patrice O Neill
link |
who said, in modern times,
link |
that said more about our society than him.
link |
I mean, he was just a brilliantly funny guy.
link |
On the radio, he was funny.
link |
On his specials, he was funny.
link |
Everywhere, he was funny.
link |
And there's something else to be said
link |
about the whole medium of comedians doing podcasts.
link |
Because it unlocks a weird, special, new thing
link |
that changed everything.
link |
I mean, Rogan started with that.
link |
You're doing that.
link |
I think that's a whole nother form
link |
of like standups, the ones that have a lot to say.
link |
Almost like we get to witness the process
link |
of the creation of the jokes in a way, or the mind.
link |
The sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes.
link |
Comedians relate to social media.
link |
Comedians, comedy's, it's a performance based medium.
link |
So it's about getting up and doing it,
link |
getting up in a club, getting up in a theater,
link |
getting up in a bar, getting up wherever you can get up.
link |
And comedy for years was about performance.
link |
And then on the higher end,
link |
it was about movies and TV shows.
link |
But we were very slow to get on YouTube.
link |
We're very slow to adapt to technology.
link |
We're very slow to monetize anything we did on the internet.
link |
So podcasting was a way for comics and funny people
link |
to kind of get into that space, start earning money.
link |
And now because of the pandemic,
link |
it's really become essential.
link |
And it helps you, and even without the pandemic,
link |
it was how you were building a fan base.
link |
And that's like, but comics were very reticent
link |
to embrace social media at all
link |
because they thought it was cheap and they didn't like it.
link |
And they thought the people on it were idiots
link |
and were unfunny and it was just a blatant,
link |
whatever it was, whether it was a money grab
link |
or it was just too commercial in a sense
link |
where they're like, hey, look at me.
link |
Like it was just goofy, right?
link |
And then comics, I think got displaced
link |
because all the YouTubers came in
link |
and all the social media stars came in
link |
and they really knocked comics off
link |
because now people are much more,
link |
like if you ask anyone under 30
link |
who their favorite comedian is, they say David Dobrik.
link |
And there's nothing wrong with that.
link |
David's a funny guy, but like what you,
link |
not especially to me a ton, but that's okay.
link |
I don't, but he makes people laugh, so he's funny.
link |
But he's what people, that's a comedian now.
link |
So comics got beat by other people coming
link |
into a digital space before they did laying the groundwork
link |
and taking it over.
link |
And now comics are just trying to stay alive.
link |
Like even my podcast, which is people really like it,
link |
thank God, and I love doing it.
link |
The Tim Dillon Show.
link |
I was late, you know, I mean, I was, I just, you know,
link |
I've been podcasting for a long time,
link |
but really dedicating myself
link |
and putting the resources behind it, I was late to it.
link |
Like, I was like, hey, I'm telling jokes on stage,
link |
which is great, but I should have been allocating more time
link |
to building an infrastructure online.
link |
And I wasn't doing it and a lot of comics weren't doing it.
link |
Funny comics weren't doing it.
link |
Comics should be doing it.
link |
And I think when the pandemic ends,
link |
a lot of comics will just keep doing live standup,
link |
but I will keep, obviously I'm gonna go back on the road
link |
and do live standup, but I will keep doing this podcast
link |
and building digitally too.
link |
But you're also exploring ideas.
link |
You're doing like short videos and so on.
link |
You're trying to look for different mediums of how to be funny.
link |
I wanna be funny everywhere.
link |
I wanna be funny everywhere.
link |
I love making things too.
link |
My producer, Ben Avery, is like a brilliant editor
link |
and comedic mind, even though he's not a standup.
link |
He's able to, he understands funny,
link |
he understands what makes me funny.
link |
We're able to make these really, I mean,
link |
some of those videos, they're just brilliant little videos,
link |
even though they're tiny little videos,
link |
they're fucking as funny as anything.
link |
It's me working with somebody else
link |
to make something really great.
link |
And it's that relationship that's very important.
link |
In some sense, the medium of a short video is a challenge,
link |
just like the medium of a short tweet.
link |
How to say something.
link |
I mean, whatever the flavor is of what's in your heart,
link |
what's in your mind, how to say it,
link |
whether it's the goal is funny or something,
link |
or just an expressing idea.
link |
I think the whole thing that's important to us
link |
is that it's an extension of,
link |
really like an extension of your friendship in a way.
link |
Like, are you guys laughing at it?
link |
Are you guys making each other laugh about this idea?
link |
And if that's the case,
link |
other people are going to laugh at it.
link |
I think so much of the old medium was like,
link |
everything was top down.
link |
Okay, pitch me this idea.
link |
I pitch it to the showrunner.
link |
They pitch it to the network.
link |
They pitch it to this, to that, to that.
link |
Standards and practices, sales,
link |
and we got to go through everything.
link |
Now it's just like, are me and a few buddies
link |
or even just one buddy laughing at this idea?
link |
Does it captivate us?
link |
And do we see it visually?
link |
And also a great line from Roseanne,
link |
a guy, not Roseanne, but a guy that worked on Roseanne,
link |
the old Roseanne, the great one.
link |
He said, is it funny with the sound off?
link |
That's what we try to do.
link |
Is it funny with the sound off?
link |
When you see me in the dumb things,
link |
or me in the Meghan McCain, or me in the thing,
link |
is it funny with the sound off?
link |
And if it's funny with the sound off,
link |
you have a good starting point.
link |
That's hilarious, because you,
link |
I would say you're one of the people,
link |
because most people are not funny with the sound off,
link |
Like you, Will Ferrell's another example of that.
link |
There's something about when I click on one of your videos,
link |
it's funny, just like the first thing I see, just your face.
link |
We, well, thank you.
link |
That's very sweet.
link |
But I mean, thank God.
link |
I mean, that's what we try to do, right?
link |
We're trying to be funny.
link |
So we're trying to be funny.
link |
Can we talk about love a little bit?
link |
So you came out of the closet as being gay
link |
Yeah, it was late, very late.
link |
By today's standards.
link |
During and after, how has your view on love evolved?
link |
It's so hard to say, because like I would,
link |
I'd like to make a very like Disneyfied statement
link |
about like that you can't be in love secretively.
link |
You should be honest.
link |
Love should all be about honesty, but that's not true.
link |
There's people that are in love
link |
that are lying to everyone else,
link |
but they're deeply in love.
link |
I would love to say something like,
link |
honesty is an ingredient for love, you know?
link |
But I don't know, maybe honesty with each other.
link |
But I mean, I think there's a lot of people in the world
link |
that aren't honest.
link |
My view on love is super important.
link |
I think that it's, a lot of society in America
link |
is all about love.
link |
We don't tend to focus on other things
link |
in terms of like, you know, friendship
link |
or sustainability of that.
link |
Cause I think that a lot,
link |
I know a lot of people in relationships where it's like,
link |
I don't know, they're not, they are, they love each other,
link |
but like, it's also a rock solid couple
link |
because they are, they're very compatible
link |
in many other ways.
link |
So I think that like,
link |
I see friendship and love as the same thing.
link |
There's just parts of it that are, right?
link |
So it's like, I look at it as like,
link |
there is, there needs to be more than just like that,
link |
like amazing, like chemistry or physical attraction
link |
that is this chemical thing that happens.
link |
There should be like some underlying,
link |
I mean, again, that's from what I,
link |
that's what I've observed as really long lasting,
link |
successful relationships.
link |
Well, is there something about coming out that,
link |
that was, that you took away,
link |
that you remember as profound,
link |
That it was my, that I, it wasn't society, it was me.
link |
So there were kids that were out in my high school
link |
that I waited years later to do it.
link |
That was no one's fault but my own.
link |
So I was taking a cowardly way out
link |
and a lot of people.
link |
So I could blame society or like,
link |
oh, I lived in a conservative area
link |
and I grew up in that.
link |
You should take responsibility for your own decisions.
link |
And if you're being cowardly,
link |
admit that you're being cowardly.
link |
So that's what I took out of it is that
link |
it's not society's fault that you chose to be a coward.
link |
Society will never be perfect.
link |
You have to be honest when you're ready to be honest
link |
or however you want to be honest,
link |
but it's not somebody, too much now
link |
is it's everyone else's fault that you didn't take,
link |
make a hard choice or a hard decision.
link |
So that's kind of what I took out of it.
link |
So now in retrospect, you see yourself as,
link |
were being afraid.
link |
Do you think at the time?
link |
Well, I wanted people to like me,
link |
which is the disease of humanity, right?
link |
Is that we want to be liked.
link |
And what happens is if you want people to like you
link |
and love you even,
link |
you want people to feel comfortable with you.
link |
And those were people like your family?
link |
My family I would always,
link |
could always throw in the street,
link |
I mean, but I am not,
link |
but my friends, my circle of friends,
link |
which I were my family at the time when you're a senior,
link |
when you're 10th, 11th grade in high school,
link |
your friends are your family.
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
so you don't want to do anything
link |
that puts you on the outside of the circle.
link |
It's just thinking back to that fear.
link |
Is there things you're afraid of now?
link |
That you're not doing, you're afraid to do?
link |
I'm afraid of all kinds of things.
link |
I'm afraid of not being good at my job,
link |
not being funny, letting people down,
link |
not putting out products that are good,
link |
whether it's the podcast every week or stand up
link |
like I'm afraid of like,
link |
there's a ton of people that really enjoy what we do.
link |
So when you're in that position,
link |
you're nervous that you're going to start doing things
link |
that they don't like.
link |
So the new things you want to do,
link |
the evolution you want to do,
link |
you want to make sure you're evolving in the right way.
link |
You want to make sure that you're doing things
link |
that are consistent with why people liked you,
link |
but also you don't want to put yourself in a box
link |
and limit what you can be going forward.
link |
So like, I had a talk with the CEO of NBC Universal once.
link |
I was doing some internal sketch for them.
link |
And I was playing like a cab driver and he was a,
link |
and he's not the current CEO, but he's a former CEO.
link |
And I said to him, what's the hardest part of running
link |
a corporation of this size?
link |
And he said something very interesting.
link |
He said, the hardest part is maximizing
link |
the current profit model of what you have
link |
at the same time, getting ready, getting ready,
link |
getting the company ready
link |
for where it's going to be in five years.
link |
He said, those are often at odds.
link |
And that's the toughest thing.
link |
He goes, cause I could just bang out
link |
everything I got to do right now.
link |
And we're going to make a lot of money doing this,
link |
but am I devoting enough resources into digital
link |
so that in five years, when that's where everything lives,
link |
are we competitive in that space?
link |
So as funny as I am now, hopefully to people
link |
and a lot of the things that I want to do now,
link |
I'm going, what am I, what groundwork am I not laying
link |
for three to five years down the road
link |
so that I can be adapting to the trends
link |
that are important then in terms of not so much
link |
comedic trends, but like the technological trends,
link |
like what is the, what is the, you know,
link |
I should have done podcasting earlier.
link |
What should I, should I have a bigger presence on TikTok?
link |
Should I have a bigger presence here?
link |
Should I have a business, or should I be on Twitch?
link |
Should I be doing this?
link |
Should I be doing that?
link |
What am I not doing that I should be doing
link |
that I'll regret not doing?
link |
And those are, those are the conversations
link |
I think I have in my own head all the time.
link |
And I guess there's parallels to coming out as gay
link |
or just parallels in like a career path
link |
so you're taking all that, that's ultimately just fear.
link |
It's the fear of, you know, the best thing that happened
link |
in my career was that I came to LA.
link |
I didn't have an idea of what was going to happen.
link |
I met somebody who was really committed
link |
to making funny things that we just wanted to be funny.
link |
No one would let us be funny.
link |
We didn't have Comedy Central letting us be funny.
link |
We didn't have HBO, we didn't have Netflix.
link |
We just had a garage and a phone in the beginning
link |
and then a camera and then a thing.
link |
And we just wanted to be funny.
link |
And that was the greatest risk really I took
link |
because I was like, well, I don't know what else
link |
is going to happen right now, but I just want to be funny.
link |
And funny saved my life, right?
link |
I mean, funny got me out of drugs.
link |
Funny probably got me out of the closet.
link |
Funny was the thing that I was able to do
link |
that made everything okay in my own head.
link |
So I was like, as long as I'm being funny,
link |
something good will happen.
link |
So we did that and then something really cool happened
link |
that we were able to do a lot of cool things,
link |
but that's what it is.
link |
It's fear that keeps you from being
link |
the better version of yourself.
link |
Your mom, I mean, you have so many complicated,
link |
fascinating parts of your story.
link |
Your mom, as you were growing up, suffered.
link |
Schizophrenic, yeah.
link |
Well, from mental illness, yeah, schizophrenia.
link |
Can you tell her story and how that relationship
link |
has changed over the years?
link |
Yeah, well, she was always eccentric and always,
link |
you know, the terms for schizophrenia
link |
in an Irish Catholic household
link |
where we didn't talk about anything were eccentric, fun.
link |
There's a theme to this conversation.
link |
She's unpredictable.
link |
She's a wire, she was a live wire.
link |
Any of the words you would use to describe somebody
link |
who was a fucking lunatic, but you wouldn't say that.
link |
Right, she started experiencing symptoms
link |
probably early on in her life,
link |
but she also, I think, started really manifesting them
link |
when I was in my mid teens, so like 14, 13, 14 area.
link |
And she got really, really bad.
link |
And then I think she was institutionalized
link |
about 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago.
link |
And she could really no longer live on her own.
link |
She was unable to go to work.
link |
She was unable to function.
link |
So I visit her when I can.
link |
Obviously, I'm not in New York.
link |
Whenever I go to New York, I visit her.
link |
She's aware of what I do, my career and everything like that.
link |
She has good days and bad days,
link |
but mental illness is a thing that's very tough.
link |
We don't talk about it as a society.
link |
People with mental problems don't get that much attention.
link |
We tend to think that they did something wrong
link |
or that they deserve it or that they are to be ignored.
link |
And we don't devote a lot of resources into it,
link |
which is unfortunate because then you have the junk gurus
link |
come in and go like,
link |
let's diagnose your mental illness off Instagram.
link |
And it's like, that's not the move.
link |
I love her, but I also remember her that isn't her now.
link |
And when someone has mental illness that's severe,
link |
you make peace with their death before they die.
link |
Because the part of them that you love and remember
link |
a lot of cases is not evident or obvious.
link |
Now, my mother's still a loving person that I love,
link |
but the fun, her ability to be present in the moment
link |
and to not, that is lost with the progression of realness
link |
so that you still love her.
link |
And I mean, again, your parents,
link |
the time horizons you have with your parents are unknown.
link |
People don't know.
link |
I have friends that their parents were in their lives
link |
for their entire life.
link |
And I have friends whose parents were in their life,
link |
but my mother was a very, she knew what I was.
link |
When I was a little kid, I was an actor.
link |
When I was like six to 12,
link |
my mother knew that I was a performer.
link |
She knew what I was and what I'd ultimately do.
link |
She recognized that in me.
link |
And when I said to her, I want to audition for shows,
link |
I want to be on stage, I want to be on this,
link |
I want to do this, she let me do it
link |
because she knew who I was
link |
and she didn't want to get in the way
link |
of me being a human being, a fully realized person at six.
link |
So that's probably the best thing a parent can do for a kid
link |
is let them be who they are.
link |
And my mother did that.
link |
So that, I mean, that's good.
link |
We ate too much fast food.
link |
There were negatives, but she did let me be who I was.
link |
That's why you want to throw them out into the street.
link |
But coming to accept the mortality of her,
link |
I guess, identity as you remember it from childhood,
link |
do you ponder your own mortality?
link |
Are you afraid of death?
link |
I'm afraid of death.
link |
I don't like the idea of death, but I know it's happening.
link |
I know it's going to happen eventually.
link |
Do you think about it?
link |
I think about, I want to do some good stuff
link |
that people can look back at.
link |
And I think I'm proud of the show
link |
where if people look back at the show,
link |
I don't know how comedy ages or whatever,
link |
but I think I put out a lot of stuff
link |
and I want to continue to put out stuff
link |
and I want to put out a few specials
link |
that people can look back at and go,
link |
oh, this guy was really funny in this really crazy,
link |
he lived in the latter part of this century
link |
when all this shit was going on.
link |
And he kind of made fun of it.
link |
And he did something to make people's lives a little better
link |
just by having a few laughs.
link |
What do you think about,
link |
this is something like in the podcast context,
link |
do you think you'll have just one or two or three shows
link |
out of thousands maybe that are like the truly special ones?
link |
That's probably the case.
link |
Or do you think it's an entirety of the body of work?
link |
I think people will take 10 minute clips
link |
from all different shows and put them together.
link |
And there's a highlight.
link |
Yeah, like a highlight reel of just like,
link |
these are like the best things that he's ever done
link |
or the best rants he's ever had,
link |
the best things, whatever.
link |
So the legacy would be that this was an important voice
link |
in a very weird time.
link |
I would hope that that's part of it.
link |
And I hope that I continue to be,
link |
you say important, I say funny,
link |
but hopefully I continue to be a voice.
link |
And that's what I think when I think about death,
link |
I think about like, what do people come on earth to do?
link |
And I think I came,
link |
I think my main purpose on this planet
link |
other than to experience whatever love
link |
or worthiness or whatever is to entertain people.
link |
And there's a lot of people in comedy right now
link |
that are not entertainers, and that's really the problem.
link |
But, and they got into comedy sort of the way
link |
that you can walk into the wrong store in a mall
link |
and then not realize you're in the wrong store
link |
and try on a bunch of clothes and then go,
link |
fuck, I wasted my whole afternoon.
link |
But I think I've always kind of been an entertainer
link |
and that's what I wanna do.
link |
There's a, unfortunately, sadly,
link |
a lot of people that look up to you.
link |
That is a horrible thing, but life is a nightmare.
link |
If you were to give them advice,
link |
young folks, people in college, maybe even high school,
link |
but people in their 20s about what to do with their life,
link |
whether it's career, whether it's just life in general,
link |
what would you say?
link |
Make a few good friends.
link |
Truly have honest conversations with yourself about your,
link |
when do you feel the most alive?
link |
When and how do you feel the most alive?
link |
Try to figure out a job or a career
link |
that can replicate that feeling.
link |
Don't listen to anyone.
link |
Don't listen to your parents.
link |
Don't listen to the gurus on the internet.
link |
Don't listen to me.
link |
Don't listen to anyone.
link |
Figure out where you feel the most alive.
link |
Where do you feel excited?
link |
Where does your pulse quicken?
link |
What do you feel matters?
link |
When you're in a situation, do you feel like it matters?
link |
What situation was that?
link |
What got you excited?
link |
What thing did you walk into where you looked around
link |
and were taken back and you're like,
link |
wow, this is amazing?
link |
And I'm filled with awe.
link |
If you can figure out a life where you can excite yourself,
link |
you might not use drugs or alcohol or a sex addiction
link |
or gambling or irresponsibility.
link |
You might not have to get your fucking kicks
link |
in very destructive places
link |
if you can get them in a productive place.
link |
Well, you had a pretty weaving life
link |
that's full of mistakes and so on.
link |
Is that, are mistakes a bug or a feature?
link |
Like, do you recommend embrace the mistakes,
link |
make a bunch of them?
link |
Depends what they are, right?
link |
Well, you've had the full spectrum.
link |
I've had a lot, but a lot of mine could have sunk me.
link |
Like, they sound like fun when I talk about them,
link |
but they actually could have sunk me.
link |
And they were all part of what made me funny,
link |
I would never tell anyone else
link |
to just light their life on fire
link |
and hope it all works out on the other end.
link |
It would be pretty irresponsible.
link |
But hey, at the end of the day, it's like,
link |
you're gonna, we get, there's, you know,
link |
I think one of my themes is that there's too much.
link |
We give the power.
link |
We think we have too, the power of choice
link |
has been elevated on our society to an unhealthy degree.
link |
I think people are, I think you could get really good
link |
at something, but you're born with a certain aptitude.
link |
It might be to be a deal maker,
link |
might be to be an athlete.
link |
It might be to be an artist.
link |
It might be to be a romantic,
link |
just fall in and out of love, in and out of love,
link |
in and out of love.
link |
It might be to be like a world traveler.
link |
Like, but whatever you are, I think you are.
link |
I think that there's something about you
link |
that makes you something.
link |
And if you can figure it out and then refine,
link |
you're not gonna be good at it per se.
link |
But if you're an athlete,
link |
it might not mean that you're going to be a great athlete
link |
in the history, but it might mean you're the best coach
link |
anyone's ever had, or you're the person that, you know,
link |
builds a local scene for young athletes or whatever.
link |
If you are a really good deal maker,
link |
it doesn't mean you're gonna be Warren Buffett,
link |
but it might mean you're somebody who enjoys
link |
making deals all the time and things like that.
link |
Like if you're an entertainer,
link |
it might mean that you are an entertainer.
link |
It might mean that you are in the world of entertainment
link |
because you love it so much that if you lack the skillset
link |
to really pursue it on a degree,
link |
you just want to be like, there's a thing
link |
inside of you that makes you what you are.
link |
I think, I look at certain people and I go,
link |
you were born to be that thing.
link |
The whole purpose is to find it.
link |
I was a juror on that murder trial in Long Island
link |
and the woman who's the DA, I'm like,
link |
you were born to do this.
link |
You were born to put murderers away
link |
and this guy killed the mother of his children.
link |
I mean, he's a bad guy, but like, I was like,
link |
you are really good at what you do.
link |
She has a strong belief in whatever her moral code is
link |
and what her justice and ethics are.
link |
And she wants to communicate that to people.
link |
She was very good at doing what she did.
link |
I don't know the facts of the case.
link |
I didn't really listen.
link |
He seemed guilty, so I just voted guilty.
link |
But I didn't really listen to her,
link |
but I heard the shape of her mouth was very bovine,
link |
like a cow, and it conferred a certain level
link |
of expertise that I enjoyed.
link |
I mean, you could see, you're half joking.
link |
Yes, but I'm serious.
link |
You can often see that people just,
link |
they found their place.
link |
They found their role.
link |
They found their thing.
link |
They found their thing,
link |
and that's kind of the purpose of life.
link |
And once you are in a place that seems sticky,
link |
like the place that seems right,
link |
that's one of the problems with the generation
link |
that you're speaking to, is there's always a feeling
link |
like I should keep exploring, keep exploring.
link |
But it's okay to stay in a place that you found that works.
link |
Yeah, and listen, sometimes the best place you'll find
link |
is like when people are like,
link |
when did you feel really excited and alive?
link |
It's like doing nothing.
link |
You know, like that's the other thing.
link |
It's like some people are gonna be like,
link |
I feel really excited and alive,
link |
and I'm laying in my backyard in a hammock.
link |
And I just wanted the simplest life
link |
and not have to do much, and I don't like doing anything.
link |
And I love laying around and going,
link |
wow, the sky looks good today.
link |
Bill Gates goes, the sky looks good today.
link |
Let's shoot a missile into it.
link |
He wants to do shit, right?
link |
So it's like in between that and nothing
link |
is you can find something.
link |
But in that process, for you personally,
link |
I mean, for me and for others, I think there's a struggle.
link |
When you look in the,
link |
when Tim and Dylan looks in the mirror,
link |
do you love yourself or do you hate yourself?
link |
Well, a lot of times I think I'm Amy Schumer,
link |
I'm a detente to myself all the time.
link |
I don't love myself or hate myself.
link |
Addicts have a very bad problem
link |
where you can't just fall in love with yourself
link |
and you can't hate yourself.
link |
Both of them lead you to a negative place.
link |
You try to stay kind of even keel.
link |
I don't go like, hey man, you put out a video,
link |
get all these views, things are great.
link |
You sold a bunch of tickets.
link |
Let's fucking go out and like, maybe let's,
link |
hey man, let's have that drink
link |
that you've been waiting for for 11 years.
link |
And I don't look at myself and go,
link |
you ate a burger yesterday.
link |
You're a piece of shit.
link |
You'll never get into the shape you want.
link |
I try not to get too low or too high.
link |
Both of them are not good for my particular mind.
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Okay, I gotta ask, we kind of spoke about 2021
link |
and you being potentially hopeful,
link |
hopeful short term, cynical long term.
link |
So let me ask, I forgot to ask, are you moving to Austin?
link |
I mean, I don't think so immediately.
link |
I love what he's trying to do down there.
link |
I'm appreciative of everything that he's done
link |
for not only me, but for comedy in general.
link |
And I think as things happen in Austin
link |
and unfold is such a political answer,
link |
but as things unfold, I will consider it more and more.
link |
But I mean, I think I got another year in LA.
link |
So you've spoken so nicely about this magical place
link |
that is Los Angeles.
link |
You think there's a place for comedy in LA?
link |
There will always be a place for comedy in LA.
link |
So it's gonna be a place for comedy in New York.
link |
I mean, the question is how thriving of a comedy scene
link |
is Austin gonna be?
link |
And Joe can probably make it one,
link |
but as of right now, it isn't.
link |
So that would be him doing that.
link |
But the question, there's a lot of people escaping
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Los Angeles, but I know better about New York.
link |
There's a lot of really brilliant people.
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There's other people.
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This is the thing.
link |
It's like, this is the fear thing.
link |
It's like, no, but all the brilliant people are leaving.
link |
There'll be other people and they'll fill their shoes
link |
the way that they've done throughout history.
link |
And I think that New York and LA,
link |
listen, maybe in five to 10 years,
link |
they're not the two cities.
link |
It would be real rough in five years
link |
when this pandemic's over for people in Australia to go,
link |
dude, you gotta go to America
link |
and you gotta visit Charleston and Austin.
link |
Let's be adults here.
link |
It's still gonna be New York and LA for a while.
link |
LA is an absolute hellscape,
link |
but I don't think you're gonna replace California
link |
with another place.
link |
And also, everyone's making decisions now
link |
because we're literally in the midst of a pandemic
link |
we've never had before.
link |
We've never had this before.
link |
Joe loved California up until the pandemic.
link |
He had problems with it.
link |
Like, we all have problems with it.
link |
There's a lot of benefits to being here.
link |
I think a lot of us made pretty bad decisions in 2020
link |
because we were all locked up
link |
and stuck with our own thoughts.
link |
But, so it's funny, there's parallels
link |
because I don't necessarily,
link |
you know, I'm obviously a fan of comedy,
link |
but I don't care where comics move.
link |
But there's a parallel move that's happening,
link |
set of decisions which do influence my decision making,
link |
which is where to start a business that's tech centered.
link |
And that's more about the San Francisco, Silicon Valley.
link |
And there is a lot of people leaving there.
link |
And they're going to Austin.
link |
Well, Austin, there's a, I think,
link |
there's a bunch of different places.
link |
Phoenix, there's Denver.
link |
Austin will probably be a massive tech hub.
link |
It seems like it's all, everything about Austin says
link |
that it's going to be a massive tech hub.
link |
I just don't know if that means
link |
it'll be a massive comedy hub.
link |
I don't know if those two can actually coexist.
link |
It's interesting because.
link |
Yeah, I don't, I think, you know,
link |
comedy suffered in New York and LA
link |
when everyone got super rich.
link |
Like, you know, it just wasn't as cool.
link |
It's still much more fun on the road.
link |
It's still more fun to perform for people
link |
that want and need to laugh in strip malls
link |
than it is to perform for hedge fund managers
link |
and with their dates and, you know, Instagram models in LA.
link |
It's just what it is.
link |
Comedy on the road is much more fun.
link |
So maybe in the spirit of that, Austin becomes,
link |
but you know, you know, if Austin is just colonized
link |
by tech bros and stuff like, yeah, I mean,
link |
sure, sure it'll be fun and it'll be great.
link |
I think Joe's made LA a scene.
link |
So if anyone's going to make Austin a scene, it's Joe.
link |
Yeah, and I like the, on the Elon side,
link |
which is what I'm much more familiar with,
link |
the promise of the possibility of what that could become
link |
because there's a lot of problems in Silicon Valley.
link |
And of course it might be naive to think that
link |
just because it's like the grass is greener thing,
link |
which is just because the place where you come from
link |
has a lot of problems,
link |
doesn't mean you can just create a new place
link |
that's not going to have those problems.
link |
Yeah, there's homelessness in Austin.
link |
There are problems in Austin.
link |
I mean, I think that with, by the way,
link |
with the influx of very rich people to an area,
link |
sometimes that helps things,
link |
but sometimes it just makes things more polarizing
link |
and it puts a spotlight on those problems
link |
and makes those problems even bigger, right?
link |
So, I mean, I don't know that it's necessarily,
link |
it's hard to predict.
link |
I just know that LA right now is funny.
link |
It's funny that there's 15 year old TikTokers
link |
making millions of dollars dancing in a house
link |
while the world burns.
link |
That is very funny.
link |
Well, it's for your style of humor, yes.
link |
The absurdity of the world is that it's...
link |
No one cares about Hollywood starlets
link |
and actresses and actors and everyone goes,
link |
Even though they've won three Academy Awards,
link |
they're all being replaced
link |
by just mediocre dancer 15 year olds.
link |
I mean, it's like there's something hilarious
link |
about this city and it will burn in hell,
link |
but so will everything.
link |
So what are we talking about?
link |
Eventually the sun will die out
link |
and we will all be gone unless we colonize
link |
outside of our solar system.
link |
But I just sit here,
link |
I'm struggling with this
link |
because Boston, I'm currently at MIT,
link |
Boston doesn't feel like the right place
link |
to start a business in the tech sector.
link |
And so I'm choosing,
link |
I'm looking at San Francisco the way it is
link |
and I'm looking at Austin.
link |
Oh, Austin, clearly.
link |
So it seems clear, but it's such a difficult thing
link |
to predict what a place will look like in 10 years
link |
and 15 years and 20 years.
link |
And it's so hard to predict if you'll like it or not
link |
until you're there.
link |
And this is speaking to risk,
link |
there's not really a good reason for me to move anywhere.
link |
There's not a good reason to do anything in life.
link |
Part of me wants to just fucking do it
link |
and whatever and see what happens.
link |
Do you like Boston, do you like other things about Boston
link |
besides the tech thing?
link |
MIT, that's the problem.
link |
Do you like the food in Boston?
link |
I haven't eaten food or been outside for years.
link |
And I mean, that's probably the better version.
link |
But you're keto forever.
link |
You've been keto for a long time.
link |
Yeah, keto, fasting for a long time.
link |
15 years fasting, eating once or twice a day.
link |
But no sugar ever, no like and no pasta ever, no bread ever.
link |
No pasta, no bread, no, except like, so my source of...
link |
You could kind of live anywhere
link |
because like going out is such a big part
link |
of what city you live in.
link |
And like, do you like the food there?
link |
Do you like the restaurants?
link |
Can you meet people?
link |
Whatever, but it's like, you really can just kind of...
link |
Yeah, so not married, no kids.
link |
Right, you have freedom.
link |
Me too, I have freedom.
link |
And that's, we have the curse of being vegan.
link |
We have too many choices.
link |
We have too many choices.
link |
We don't have somebody else going, what about like,
link |
we don't have to justify our decisions to anyone.
link |
So we can just kind of like let our minds go run wild.
link |
So you just got to hone the instinct
link |
of just what feels right and just fucking do it.
link |
I think Austin with Joe down there and Elon down there,
link |
Austin seems like a real no brainer move for you.
link |
To try, you know, why the hell not?
link |
And then I think I should go to MIT.
link |
Like, I mean, I think I should give those nerds
link |
a piece of my mind that you should go to.
link |
I was in an Uber pool once with a kid from MIT
link |
and I was eating this thing from Bova's Bakery.
link |
I forget what it was.
link |
It was like a, it's so good.
link |
You don't know Bova's Bakery, right?
link |
Yeah, it's in Boston, it's famous.
link |
I was eating a thing and I was like covered in chocolate.
link |
This kid, like this little nerd, like this little like,
link |
you know, USB drive with feet was just staring at me
link |
and they just dropped him off at MIT.
link |
And he like scurried away.
link |
But that's a big school that,
link |
doesn't the NSA recruit out of their heavy,
link |
like MIT, places like that?
link |
I can't, I can't speak to that.
link |
But what, this is a ridiculous question
link |
I sometimes ask myself when I'm alone.
link |
What is the meaning of life?
link |
Do you think about the big existential kind of,
link |
why the hell we're here?
link |
It's a cosmic kind of joke kind of in a weird way, right?
link |
I mean, Joe said it the other day on,
link |
maybe it was you saying that like,
link |
he was just like, you know,
link |
by the time you figure out what it is, you're out of here.
link |
You know, it's kind of interesting.
link |
Or you even start to figure out what it is,
link |
you're out of here.
link |
It's like, that's kind of funny.
link |
It's like, you don't get enough time to truly,
link |
I think the meaning of life is just like,
link |
at the end of the day, do you feel it was time well spent?
link |
Was it time well spent?
link |
That's really what it is.
link |
If you look back, do you go,
link |
hey, it was time well spent.
link |
It was a pretty good ride.
link |
I did a lot of things.
link |
Doing what you say is a part of it, I think.
link |
If you say you're going to do something, maybe doing it.
link |
That seems to be extrapolating the meaning of life question
link |
to like, you know, what did you come here to do?
link |
I think it goes down deep of like, who are you
link |
and what do you want and you know,
link |
what are you suited to do and what?
link |
It does seem that like, the people who are most enlightened
link |
that I've ever met or read books by,
link |
they ultimately land on humor.
link |
Like, they don't take shit seriously.
link |
They embrace the absurdity of it all
link |
and just kind of laugh at it in this kind of simple way.
link |
So it does seem that humor is like,
link |
one of the fundamental truths of this universe we're in.
link |
It's love, it's love.
link |
Humor can be love, right?
link |
People laughing, that that sound is kind of like,
link |
Carolyn Knapp, who wrote a book called,
link |
Drinking a Love Story, which is a really good book
link |
about not drinking.
link |
Drinking and then not drinking.
link |
And she said, you could understand things as love.
link |
I think one of the last lines of the thing is like,
link |
people talking about their experiences in life,
link |
that could be love.
link |
Like, you know, laughter is love.
link |
Like, I feel like love and finding it
link |
wherever you could find it is why we're here.
link |
That's that connection.
link |
And laughter can be love.
link |
And, you know, figuring out, you know,
link |
something that makes life better
link |
for a lot of people can be love.
link |
You know, whether it's a vaccine
link |
or a technological advancement or whatever.
link |
Like, you know, all of those things,
link |
I think, can be that feeling.
link |
And I think that's what's important.
link |
It connects you to a larger frequency, you know?
link |
I don't think there's a better way to end it, Tim.
link |
I hope you're one of the voices.
link |
I truly believe that your legacy
link |
would be one of the most important voices of our time,
link |
because you're fearless and challenging all the absurdity
link |
of the nonsense of our social and political discourse.
link |
So I hope you keep doing it.
link |
I'm still a bit starstruck, so.
link |
Listen, I was your intellectual capacity.
link |
Enjoying anything I do only underscores
link |
how truly fucked we are.
link |
But thank you very much.
link |
Yeah, thank you for talking today.
link |
Thank you, brother.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dillon,
link |
and thank you to our sponsors.
link |
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And now, let me leave you some words from George Carlin.
link |
Scratch any cynic, and you will find a disappointed idealist.
link |
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.