#2492 - Ari Shaffir

26:38Or 9-11, like, it popped off a little high. but there was like we need something to be like hey we're all against that and then those countries would be like look they're all against us so they just like they need each other to keep growing well it makes sense and also you need an enemy in order to get higher military contracts higher budgets I mean if you don't have terrorism how can you justify a trillion dollar military budget so you need to like say hey they're a real threat like that's a 30 person group yeah they're not coming for us but like we gotta take them down look at the training they're doing you ever seen Shane's bit on monkey bars on monkey bars doing their training I love that bit about how bad they are at jumping jacks it's what fat people do to get in shape of the biggest loser and they're stuck over there like shut up they're not going over there and then I always wondered why we left behind all the shit like cynically do we leave that stuff behind so that they could use it The older I get, the less I think there's accidents.

27:39There's ineptitude for sure, but there's also like, we've done the research, we know. At some point, you know, there's bad moves you make here or there. I mean, we left behind tanks and Black Hawk helicopters. Like, what, we couldn't get those out? We had to leave right now. We were there for 20 years. Also, we got to get out right away. You don't want to put a grenade in each one first before you go? Like, what do you mean? And also, those are still good. Yeah, we didn't get out like Vietnam. Park them in a field and drop a fucking bomb on it. Yeah. You don't have to leave it there for the enemy.

28:12For the Taliban so they can keep the people under their thumb forever. Yeah, if you retreated last second, I could see it, but it wasn't that. And then you're like. They didn't have to leave. The way they left was insane. When you see those ships, the planes that are flying away, and people are hanging on to the wheels of the plane and falling off because they don't want to be left behind. Because they know. There's so many people that work with the Americans. You said you'd protect us over and over again. And then you're like, yeah, we've done this over and over again. We'll just say it. Exactly.

28:40It says that it was equipment we gave to the Afghan state. So it wasn't U.S. equipment any longer. And it's already given over to them? Yeah. We gave it to the Afghan state, but not the Taliban, the National Defense and Security Forces. Right. And then there was not that many of them. And so the moment that we left, the Taliban just took everything. There's also like, what is the Taliban? We have this word on it. It's like an evil word. But are they just like the government in a lot of these places? Like the cartels in Colombia, they like build schools. They do bad shit. But they also are the government.

29:17They make sure the businesses run OK. And so you have this idea, cartel, it sounds like that. But it's like, it's more than that. I wonder how much of the Taliban is actually into terrorism and how much is like just running day to day stuff. Well, that's a good point because in America, I mean, what are the pharmaceutical drug companies? I mean, how many people – we talked about this the other day. It's like 70 ,000 people died of opioid overdoses in America in 2024. 70 ,000. 70 ,000. 70 ,000. So like – and a lot of that is probably cartel fentanyl, but a lot of it is like flat-out old-school oxycodone.

29:54So it's like what are they? What are they? And how much are they donating to political camps? pain every year right but they thought you saw the most effective thing of that sackler with ferris bueller that documentary series whatever yeah painkiller is they started every episode with a real person talking about how their son is dead yeah or you know something like that yeah and then they can you're like oh my god this makes it so real yeah painkiller that's what's called yeah it's so good that's peter bergs you know we talked about that the other day it's an amazing series amazing series like that that yeah matthew broadward played such a good fucking creep he did such a good job god that fucking that show's so disturbing because it's based on true story and he show a guy falling into the despair from being fine yeah to just like oh we all know somebody who got hooked i mean it's so potent it's so powerful and they told doctors they told people they told everybody that wasn't even addictive they knew it was addictive they knew it operated on the same path i mean that's in the painkiller series yeah that it operates on the same pathway as heroin like you're saying that this is not addictive this is a lie yeah what they did there was go if that movie is completely accurate it's like okay so this is for heavily cancerous like bedridden people that have a pain threshold of eight to ten like it'll be good for them why don't we just extend the pain threshold to three to 10 yeah and that allows a lot more people in if you're at a nine it doesn't matter if i get addicted my life is awful right now right if you're at a three like walk it off exactly i talked about when i got my nose fixed when the doctor tried to give me two different opiates and i was like it was nothing i mean it didn't even hurt it was just mildly uncomfortable and that was also because it was stuffed up with gauze like those it wasn't even gauze like these foam things with the tube that they stuff in your nose to keep your nostrils open while it's healing.

31:51But he gave me two different opiates. And I was like, is it going to get worse than this? Because I don't – I'm fine. Yeah, they don't tell you – but be careful. I would not take it unless you absolutely need it. No, they don't tell you any of that. They want you to do it because they're financially incentivized. I got a wisdom tooth out. And the dentist was like – I was like, hey, I don't want to like – Why did you get a wisdom tooth out? Did it hurt? I don't remember. It was so long ago. Yeah. It was like 15, 18 years ago. What's the logic on that? Are you supposed to get wisdom teeth taken out?

32:20I've had both out. Because I've heard people say you shouldn't. Like there's no reason to take them out. Why do you? Are they getting pacted or something? I don't know. Often they're growing in wrong and they cause problems with other teeth. It had to be that. But he gave me this thing of Vicodin. I was like, I don't want to. And he goes, you're friends with comedians, right? And I was like, yeah. He goes, your friends will want it. Whatever you don't need. What the fuck? Whatever you don't need. I'm sure you can find it. He was joking around, but he was right. I have tons of attic fronts. Of course.

32:48They are all like, nice. Yeah. Advising me to take aspirin, not use up one of those precious. I took that stuff once when I had my first ACL reconstruction. And it made me so stupid. Vicodin? I think it was Vicodin. It was either Vicodin or Percocet. I can't remember, but I think it was Vicodin. But I wound up selling it at the pool hall. Yeah. Sell it. Give it some money. Yeah. Yeah. Do the right thing. The only time I would advise taking Vicodin is if you have like two beers. And really want a good night. Really? Oh, yeah. Those go so well with liquor. Is Vicodin an opiate? Is it the same thing as oxycodone?

33:23Like, what is Vicodin? It's a downer. I don't know what oxy does. You're a downer.

33:33It combines hydrocodone and Tylenol. Oh, Tylenol. Tylenol and hydrocodone. Nice one, Joe. A lot of people die from that shit, too. Tylenol? Yeah. I was reading this sad story once about this lady who, she had COVID, and she was in so much pain from COVID that she kept taking Tylenol, and she died of a fucking liver failure. Ooh. Because the acetaminophen killed her liver. Sometimes you see people dying, and you're like, what a loser way to die. Oh, yeah. You can't ever tell anybody. There was no victimhood. Aspirin overdose? Dork. That's crazy. How much aspirin do you have to take before you die?

34:10That seems nuts. I feel like all these middle school girls would try it before they had access to stuff really when they just want to be drama queens Like I took a whole bottle last Oh, yeah, I knew a girl do exactly that thing exactly that in high me too. Yeah, she took aspirin, but it's like that's not gonna do it Yeah, your call for attention is there. She was also crazy annoying Like let me tell you how she do it big tits and she fucked everybody she was nuts and I'll accept it This girl was a fucking freak She fucked everybody she was an animal Catholic school girl. I just stumbled across something weird.

34:45What? I just typed in Tylenol deaths and this thing came up. The Chicago Tylenol murders. It seems like it's an unsolved case. Drug tampering. Yeah, there was tampered Tylenol that people bought that was potassium cyanide. Seven people died. Yeah, they broke. That's when they started doing the seal on top. Yeah. Yeah, right? I remember this. I remember this. This is when I was in high school. Do they know why? Investigation suspects. I wonder what the conspiracy, what's the tinfoil hat? Someone recently was arrested. No suspect has been charged as of 2026. Whoa. So a bunch of people died and they just got away with it.

35:25Yeah. Wow. Someone was convicted of extortion, sending a letter to Tylenol manufacturer claiming responsibility and demanding a million dollars. If I remember right, they said we found out the problem with one plant that had whatever and we've got it. And someone else was like, well, okay, I bought this bottle before that happened, so this should be safe. And then it wasn't. And then it was like Tylenol or whatever was like covering up how bad it got. Instead of going, recall everything. Estimated 31 million bottles were in circulation with a retail value of over$100 million, equivalent to$334 million in 2025.

36:00The company also advertised in the national media for individuals not to consume any of its products that contained acetaminophen after it was determined that only these capsules had been tampered with. Wow. There's other ones in California that strychnine in them. Wow. So that's probably one of those things, too. There's copycats, right? Like one person hears about someone buying poison Tylenol. I want to do that. Yeah, I want to poison people in Ohio. Hacks. I want to poison. Yeah. Fucking hacks. Get your own shit. Fucking hacks. Yeah. Just be original. Be awful. Evil, but be original. There's so many of those.

36:36like the Tylenol were like wait were you guys evilly covering this up and resulting in more deaths that I found out down there was like Coca-Cola Dole were like oh these are like evil corporations. As soon as they realized that you know the Pinto story uh uh so Ford found out let's research this to make sure this is true because someone brought it up on the podcast they were blowing up and they realized it's cheaper to just pay people off that died from their car being blown up than it is to recall all these Ford Pintos. Because the Pinto had the gas tank, rather, was in the back. Yeah, something like that.

37:15And there was something about the design where if you got rear-ended, it would blow up. And it was just a dollar value on it. Yeah. Somebody did. I want to say Ford. You know, you say Ford, but really it's a person. It's not the Ford of today. It's some guy. Would that be a thing for pre-production crash tests? Yeah. Investigators and lawsuits showed that pre-production crash tests had already revealed this vulnerability, but the car still went to market largely unchanged. Who told us about this? I kind of remember that. One of our guests explained that to us, and it was just like, oh, God. It's so dark.

37:52It's such a fucking dark, evil thing to do, to say, well, people are going to die, but we'll just pay them off. What's the number? Yeah, what is the number? First of all, the car sucked. Why'd you make it in the first place? It's a terrible shitty fucking... It kind of looks cool now, but... No, it doesn't. It's got that sun deck in the back. Garbage car. So Coca-Cola would have people just like... If you were like a leftist leader running for whatever, they were worried that if that person got in power, they would unionize their population, and that would cost them more money in the plants. And they would just have people straight killed.

38:28Straight up get them out of the way. Coca-Cola had people whacked? Dole used to be the American Fruit Company. How about Coke and a Smile? They had people whacked? I mean, look it up. When we say Coke, it's probably an executive somewhere. Probably an executive. They didn't do a big vote. House of Cards style who had some guy who was a fixer for him. Right. And he's like, look, these motherfuckers are causing problems. And this guy was concerned with his job as whatever CEO, executive. But it's happened over a long period of time. They were giving money to, I think, FARC or something in Colombia.

39:03After they were already labeled like a terrorist organization, they're still giving them money. For decades, Coca-Cola's faced several severe allegations regarding the murder and intimidation of union leaders at bottling plants in Colombia and Guatemala. They hired paramilitary death squads to suppress labor activism. That's like, oh, what? They want an honest, like, day's pay? Get rid of him. you know do you remember when ross perot was running for president you were too young i barely remember but sort of i was just starting to be aware of how fucked up politics were and because he was on television explaining about the world trade organization about when they were going to um start opening up plants in mexico and moving jobs to mexico he's like what you're what you're gonna hear is a giant sucking sound where all the money and jobs are gonna go down to Mexico.

39:58And what we allowed during that time was essentially what the labor unions were doing in this country was making sure that people had a great wage because the corporations were getting paid well. So the CEOs wanted all the money like they always do. The corporation wanted all the money. But you really can't make a Mustang unless you have the people that are on the assembly line, Unless you have the people that are doing all the hard labor and all the work. And they should get compensated correctly. So the auto unions workers organized it. And they went on strike. And they did what they had to do.

40:37And they were making a great living. They were making a great living. And these people had a nice house. And they had a car and a garage. And it felt good that they were getting paid really well. And so a lot of people thought, well, they're getting paid too well. And this is fucking up our profits. And I'm simplifying this. if you're a historian. Take 10 bucks from a million people instead of let the top guys make a million less. What they did is just open up a plant in Mexico and pay people fucking slave labor. And they go over there and they pay them slave wages. And these people are making cars for like fucking how much, a dollar a day or something like that instead of getting healthcare and retirement.

41:14It's a corporate society. And so great. That's what we're talking about. The free market says go to Mexico. The moral market says no, no, no, no, no. Hold on, let's just pay people what they deserve here. But it's not just that, but they destroyed Detroit. That's right. That's Roger and me, that documentary. Michael Moore's greatest documentary. His first one is his best one. Because it's really documenting a horrific attack on Detroit and Flint, Michigan and all those places up there where there's all these auto plants. And they all just went away, man. And those jobs went away. And now Detroit is.

41:51Detroit's kind of bouncing back now. Danny was talking about it at Brown where he was like, just before COVID, it was like starting to be like some cool new restaurants and like really coming back. Then COVID kind of nailed it down again. And now it's, I think, back, back, going back up again. They have some cool stuff in there. I mean, there's a bunch of companies that are like proudly like made in Detroit. Underrated pizza. Detroit pizza. Oh, really? Square. Yeah, it's really good. Square. Interesting. Yeah. Crispy like on every bite, every slice. Oh, okay. Because it's not thick crust square.

42:20It's like that thin crust square. It's just really good. Isn't it funny that we want it in a circle? I want it in a circle. Why? I don't know. Odd. It's weird You get committed to it. It's like we don't get committed to that with a sandwich Like if I go to a Jewish deli and I get a square sandwich I don't say no I want it to look like a submarine Doesn't look right. Right. You know like no one cares. No one cares the shape. No It's a really good salmon, but some people do like if you give them a cheeseburger, but it's on bread They're like, what is this bullshit? What the fuck? Square bullshit.

42:52I want a round bun, motherfucker. Yeah, on rye bread. Yeah, what is this? Rye bread is for pastrami. I want the way I grew up. Don't give me rye bread with a fucking cheeseburger, you communist. Is my name Ruben? Then why are you giving me something that looks like a fucking Ruben? Yeah, what is this? Like, if you buy an Italian sandwich, it has to come on a big old fucking hoagie roll. A ciabatta. You know, one of those big fucking seeded. Yeah, that's what you want. All bread. It's weird that we want our pizza to only be circular. And then what's weird, too, is you're not eating it in the round version.

43:23Right. You're eating it in this weird triangle. Right. You're eating it in a wedge. Just an edge of round. That edge could be. You know what I've seen that deeply disturbs me? Oh, no. When people take a circular pizza and then they chop it up into a bunch of squares. I'm like, what have you done? No, that's the Ohio style. Is that what it is? Really? That's what it's called? Or pub style. Oh, okay. So you split it up a lot? Yeah. That makes kind of sense, but not for. You bring one pizza into the bar, and now fucking 10 people can get a bite as opposed to... I guess the only other way is to make slices like that thin.

43:53Like real thin, like long, but that's not fun. We also have edge-to-edge toppings. How many pizzas has Dave Portnoy sold? If you really stop and think about it. Dave Portnoy is probably responsible for more pizza sales in this country than any other living human being. Yeah, probably. Yeah, because I watch his pizza reviews. I want to go get a pizza. He gives it to be honest. Oh, he's very good at it. Yeah. I mean, he really loves pizza, too. You could tell. He's not making any money off of that. No, he's really not. No. Just like some views. It's a labor of love. He likes it. It's fun for him, and it's become a thing.

44:27And he gets in arguments with pizza places sometimes. Like, they yell at him. He yells at them. You can't film in here. He's like, fuck you. They throw shit at him. It's really kind of crazy. That's so great. But I've gone to places because he recommended them. If I find out that I'm in a town and I know that there's pizza there, I'm like what does Portnoy think? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want a local rec? No one's done that with anything else. Like what other celebrity has done that with any other kind of food where they go places and review it? There's a guy in New York, not a celebrity, but he was his goal was to search out every single slice in New York.

45:02It took him years and then named the best ones. Boy, how would you know? How are you gonna compare a slice to a slice you had a year ago? Right, I guess you gotta, yeah, you really gotta know. How are you gonna know? You can instantly go no. But yeah, anything that's good, you got to go back and forth. Plus it's super subjective. Obviously. Yeah. You got to go cheese. You got to pick out cheese to cheese. Right. It has to be just plain cheese pizza. Which is a classic. It's so good. I mean, other pizzas are great. But man, a really good plain cheese pizza is fucking phenomenal. Yeah. Especially if it's done well.

45:40Here's the secret too if you're in New York. underrated tip I told Ruddy this he's going to New York fat guy so he's gonna want to like get some tips I was like no matter what you were gonna get just say do you have anything fresh coming out and they say it's gonna be like 10 more minutes so it's okay I'll wait that's what you want when you go to Krispy Kreme and they got the serve the hot donuts they're coming out hot yeah lights on without lights on if I'm thinking about having it when I used to live in LA yeah there was a Krispy Kreme down the street like it was on the way home and if I drive by if that fucking hot The hot light was on.

46:13I'm like, I'm pulling in. I'm getting a hot one. It's so much better than warmed up. It's so much better. Like when they come right out in the glazed ones that are coming right out hot, they just dissolve in your mouth right there. And good for you. Oh, yeah. It's better than vitamins. Look at that. It cures diabetes. You have all dough and you're like, let's put sugar in it. Like, let's put sugar on top. Let's fully overwhelm your system. I remember I would eat them, and then I'd go back to my house, and I'd go, what's wrong with you? Why did you do this? What the fuck is wrong with you? We've all been there.

46:52You fucking idiot. What the fuck's wrong with you? I feel so bad. Because I would eat like a half a dozen, too. I'd eat like six donuts. I always buy like a box, and I'd eat half the box. I'd buy like a box of a dozen, and I'd buy like chocolate cream filled and all the different ones, and I'd eat like six of them in my car on my way home. And then I'd get home and I'm like, oh. Hurting. Just poisoned. An adult has learned nothing about his body. 39 years old. Sitting on the couch. Oh. When you have that after 23 years old, you're like, you're hurting. You're like, I just have to let this pass.

47:29I have to do this for an hour. You're like, what a fucking loser. You're a fucking loser. You ate yourself into feeling bad. I do that all the time. Drinking, I get. It sneaks up on you. I eat when if I go to New York every time I go to New York I eat myself into a coma I eat myself way too just way too fat I get hurt me like where my stomach stretched out so much it hurts Because I've got so much food in there. I really can't fit any more food and I look pregnant My stomach sticks out you got burnt belly Oh, you look so awful and it's all swollen and bloated because it's all the pasta and bread It's all the water and the wine.

48:06It's making it expand. I think straight your body's like bring everything into the stomach right now yeah you have no like if i had to pass a spelling bee i'm fucked my iq dips by like 40 points yeah it's it's terrible i'm a glutton too i'm a i have a real problem with like volume i just when i start eating i'm like a dog i just keep eating i just can't stop like i'm good at not eating like i can not eat for like 12 16 hours But when I sit down for a meal, or when I'm ordering, I think it comes from being poor when I was a kid, too. So it's like there's something about, like, wanting everything.

48:42I want it all. I want steak. I want pasta. I want this. I want that. I want that. I want that. And then after, like, you never learn, you fucking idiot. Yeah. And you're like, I've had about enough. And then you're like, one more bite. And then you're like, and now if we're talking, I'm going to eat, like, two more full plates worth as we're talking. I remember we were in Atlanta once. This has happened more than once, but this one lady in Atlanta was like almost arguing with me. Too much food. Yeah, we went to a diner in Atlanta after our show. And I ordered two things. I ordered like meatloaf and I ordered a steak.

49:14And she's like, oh, honey, that's too much food. I go, no, it's not. I go, I'm going to eat it all. And she's like, that is too much food. I go, you don't know me. You don't know me. You don't know me. I can consume. I will consume all of this. This is not a problem. I need this. Yeah, when it's time for you to eat, you eat. especially also after shows dude oh god you do fucking long ass shows i brought you and goldie once a hot dog i was just like there was i was doing the early days of yours not early but like mid-level days and then high-level days so i remember having more access than anyone could really get anymore oh yeah you were behind me in the when the camera was on you and duncan so you guys made out

49:59we were bored they timed it so we noticed we noticed the camera was sitting right behind you so the way they could see the monitor so they were sitting behind me so they knew what the camera was capturing so we're on that camera that guy's camera they waited and then it's right here and in the middle so there's the camera's on you guys

50:21Frosty died. Oh, my God. This is the early, early days. This is probably like 2002 or something like that. That was way back in the day. First, we're giving out a... So, Duncan was being accused of being an Illuminati a lot then. So, he goes, oh, there's a camera. I mean, I got to do this thing. He goes, what? He goes, it's just to stoke the flames. So, he'll just do this. He'll do triangles. At some point, he made a big triangle with both our hands. And then I think he said it. I don't know. It doesn't matter. One of us said it. The other reacted. Hey, next time we got a kiss. And it was like, fuck, yes.

50:54I'm pretty sure it was Duncan. God damn it. Yeah, you're right. We do. It was like, this is going to be awful, but you have to. I didn't know about it until after it was over. People were like, your friends were kissing on camera. And I just, I literally couldn't breathe. I was like, oh my God. Oh my God. I go, show it to me. Show it to me. I made the guys in the truck show me the video of it. I'm like, oh my God, this is so funny. There was also a wrestling moment, or it was. There was a lot of wrestling in that fight, if I remember right. It's a long time ago. But there was a blog from an MMA blog.

51:25It's like two bored bearded dudes make out during a UFC fight.

51:35Dude, you give a comic a camera on you, and we're like, let's go. We've got to do something. Especially, you have six hours. six hours of fights so there's all this time to think and they're not all exciting some of them are fucking boring and when they're boring you gotta come up with different ways to entertain yourself yeah what you gonna do yeah it was so fun you could see the one that was on it so like when those fighters are in front of us this has gotta I'm gonna fix this like it wants to work it wants to work

52:09this one works those are fun times that was back when the ufc was like no one was watching anyway you could just do whatever the weigh-ins was the best we had a weigh-in in florida and it was just like only the camps kind of came in and the tap out guys rest in peace they'd come in there well just one rest in peace yeah live well um but it was just like you'd be in there and i remember once you were like hey Ari maybe I'll call you up to weigh in and you could you just could and you're like you want to go now all right it was like there was no real rules that it was pretty pretty wild no one knew what was going on Ari Shaffir and you would just walk out yeah you could do anything back then and that was also a real weigh-in that was when the guys actually would get on the scale now it's a ceremonial weigh-in oh really yeah because now the they They weigh in in advance because they want to give them more time to recover.

53:05Oh, right. The whole thing's gross. They shouldn't be weighing in. They shouldn't be cutting weight. As a casual fan, it's the most obvious one. Make them weigh in at the event. It's crazy. I mean, we've had long discussions. I had a discussion recently with Hunter Campbell where we're trying to figure out a way to blow up all the weight classes and make people fight out what their actual weight is. But you would have to, like, show up in camp. Like, you know. Get to the exact right weight. A pound or two below for safety. But it would have to be random. They couldn't know you were coming. Oh, the whole way through it has to be at that weight.

53:39Just show up. What do you weigh? Get on the scale. 185? Bro, you're supposed to be fighting at 155. How the fuck are you 185? It's dumb because you're not actually... It's like having field goals decide like an NFL game. This is like a minor part of the sport. Right. So that's like you're fighting a 185 or fighting against a 160 pound. So you're not actually saying who's best at your class. In elite levels, they're all doing it. So everybody's cheating. It's sanctioned cheating. It's not cheating because it's legal. But it's rewarding guys who know how to cut better than guys who don't. And as a casual fan, that's not what we're into.

54:13It's also very biological. So some people can cut weight very easily. And to some people, it's a fucking grind. And it's way more of a grind for women. Women hold on to that water weight a lot harder than men do. so when a woman has to lose like a woman has to cut like 20 pounds it's yeah man they cut weight but apparently it's way more brutal for them interesting yeah it's fucking terrible they should they should it should have never been in there in the first place and they should figure out a way to get it out what do they do in high school wrestling when people fight like 112 that's just your weight or do you weigh in the day right the way in the day uh but it's still you're still cutting weight i i weighed i used to wrestle at 128 and then i wrestled 28 for a grown man i mean You know, high school?

54:58Oh, okay. And then 134. And then, because I couldn't really make 128 anymore. And then when I started fighting in Taekwondo, I fought, my first fights were at 140. That was when I was like 15, 16. And then my last fight at 140, I was 17. And I was not 140. And I was starving myself. And I was cutting a bunch of water weight. And then I would fight dehydrated. But I only did it one year. I only did it one year. And then I went up to 155, which was much better. That was easy because I didn't have to cut any weight. I was way better then. But that thing where they do in wrestling, you're not getting hit in the head in wrestling, right?

55:35So it will deplete you. And so you have to make a decision like how much am I going to be depleted and want to be the size bully and have a bigger frame and utilize it but have depleted performance? Like how much how good a shape would I have to be in where that depletion only takes out a certain percentage of my ability? And so it's like this calculated thing like Kurt Angle, for instance. Kurt Angle, when he was Olympic gold medalist, he didn't cut any weight. And he was a phenomenal wrestler. Kurt Angle was a fucking monster and he was beating guys way bigger than him. But he had so much energy because he didn't cut weight.

56:12And so he was wrestling against guys that did cut weight and he was dominating them. Yeah, because he was full strength. But they were bigger than him. They were bigger than him, but he had incredible skill, also strong as fuck anyway, and had no depletion of his resources. Like his body was working at full capacity. It's like Greg Fitzsimmons in the prime. He would just fight anybody. Greg Fitzsimmons. He would just fight anybody. Oh, tiny little man. Fight anybody. He got attacked on stage at Stitches. Wrong guy to rush. They attacked him, and some brawl broke out, and the bouncers got in, they take the guy away, and then Greg gets on the microphone.

56:49Didn't even end the show. Gets on the microphone, and he goes, anybody else want some of this? And Greg started laughing. It was great. He finished his set. Wow. He finished. Great composure. Kept it together. Finished his set. Fucking fun, dude. Wow. Yeah. But they really should ban weight cutting. But the only way they're really ever going to be able to do that is to make more weight classes. There's not enough weight classes. And then you'll have the – I don't understand enough to talk about it. I think boxing has 18 weight classes. Yeah, don't you have some like who cares weight classes? Yeah, there's sort of – And if you really want to get known, you've got to move up or down to one of the majors.

57:31Well, you know what's weird? Like 160 is a huge weight class. 147, welterweight, huge weight class, big, giant fights. Cruiserweight? Which is like between light heavyweight and heavyweight, no one gives a fuck about. Wow. Why? It's weird. It's just weird. Nobody gives a shit about the cruiserweight champion. Like Usyk, before he became the heavyweight champion, was the cruiserweight champion. And people cared about him just because he was so skillful. But he had to go up to heavyweight before people cared. But if he was a light heavyweight, he would have been huge. Beyond. Shame on. It's weird.

58:04Very weird. But I think boxing, how many weight classes does boxing have? Professional boxing. I want to say there's 18. Whereas in the UFC, there's only eight. It's a big difference. It's a big difference. And you can follow champions better. Yeah. But it's also, it's like. Even when Mighty Mouse came in, it was like, you have this dominant guy coming in to really launch the weight class. But people are like, we don't have this weight class. So we're less interested in you than we should be. Well, people have a thing about tiny people. They look at a small guy who's like 5 '3 and weighs 125 pounds.

58:36They're like, nah, we don't care. 17 here. 17. Red Ben said the 135ers and 125ers, they should have to come into the octagon on little mini horses and ride around a couple times. That's so rude. That's so rude. And so what's also interesting is like flyweight women, like Valentina Shevchenko, it's one of the premier weight classes in the women's division. Because that's heavy? For a woman, it's like normal size. 125 is like a normal weight. It's like a man fighting at 160 or 170. It's normal. Weird. Yeah. It's weird. But there's not enough weight classes. And they should have fixed that a long time ago.

59:17There's giant gaps. Like the gap between 185, which is middleweight, and then 205, which is light heavyweight. That's crazy. That's a big one. It's a giant leap. And then everything else. Well, not even. That's what's even stupider. You get to heavyweight at 265. That's the cutoff for heavyweight. So you have to weigh 265 or under. That's my favorite weigh-ins because they're still wearing their jeans. They're like, I'm inside a range. Yeah, they don't give a fuck. So ceremonial weigh-ins is what we have now. So when someone weighs in now, they've already weighed in in the morning in an official scale in front of doctors and state reps.

59:57They give them a chance to come back again. The athletic commission checks them out. It's so crazy. And so then they just suck a bunch of water down and electrolytes and they slowly rehydrate over the four or five hours. Yeah, they have to do it slow. Science is so crazy behind the heavyweight division is older than the United States Wow Officially 1738 whoa Weigh as much as they want. Whoa, they're real so heavyweight was weight. They weighed 160 plus Since the division is no way D plus yeah people are tiny but what oh yeah You know Rocky Marciano was like one of the great heavyweights of all time.

1:00:34Yeah, he weighed 185 pounds So Rocky Marciano, the heavyweight champion of the world, one of the greatest of all time, weighed 15 pounds less than me. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that nuts? It's so different. Do you ever look back at a fat guy from like Chris Farley types or whatever and you're like, you're not even, you're just a little big. Yeah. It's like normal fat. You're like Steve Simone body. Look at these guys back then. They wore diapers and shit. Like, what are you wearing? What's that thing around your waist? What is that? It's a wipe of blood. And they all fought bare knuckle back then too. Quick fights.

1:01:05Well, they just broke their hands a lot. They threw a lot of punches to the body back then because they didn't want to break their hands on people's heads. That was the biggest defense back then, the Brian Dennehy thing? Yeah. Lower your head and make them punch you on the head and break. Just lower your head. And they all boxed like this, too, where they would throw their knuckles out like that. Wow. Because if you just blast someone, you could blast someone like that if you have gloves on and hand wraps. Stockton slap would have gone a long way back then. Oh, yeah. They would have been legendary.

1:01:33Slapped them. Yeah, it's a it's funny how things change and then how they go back to it because now bare knuckle boxing is making a huge Back yeah, see chess boxing. Oh, yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, it's ridiculous Five minutes if you're a good boxer like you have a massive advantage. I just got a concussion He doesn't even know what the night does. He's like like you can't move that like fuck I'm gonna use idea that was what kind of fucking psychopath who wants to combine those things? Yeah You it have to be people that aren't they good at boxing and aren't that good at chess because there's so many flat lines you and sends you to the hospital You're not playing chess afterwards.

1:02:11Yeah, so it has to be people that kind of suck at boxing kind of suck at boxing Because if you really like Mike Tyson somebody you fucking kale and they have to get carried out in a stretcher Well, then you by fault one by default won the chest as well because they can't even play Yeah, just dusty boards. You have to take him to the hospital. How are they gonna play chess? I don't even understand the rules there. You have to have a minimum of 1 ,800 in chess to be a competitor. What is that? What's 1 ,800? I would imagine pretty good. Is that a score? What does that mean? There's scores in chess?

1:02:42Like a golf handicap. Yeah, it's something like that. Wow. So what is like Magnus Carlsen, the guy that was on the podcast, what does he have? What's his rating? Let's see. I'll just type this. He plays poker too. Does he? He'd be in the top 5 to 10 % of players. Super smart. He's a math guy. He's one of those dudes you talk to him. There's some guys you talk to like oh there's a lot working on behind those eyes It's like if you were high around that guy you'd probably get weirded out He's a 2840 Wow way better. What is the highest ranked chess player alive good question Joe? Thank him That'd be him.

1:03:17Oh really? Yeah, he peaked at 2882 the highest in history. That's crazy That is crazy what about that schizo jew turned arab whatever his name is which guy which the fucking boy the boy went schizo schizo jew turned arab yeah wasn't there some bobby fisher's oh yeah he became like very anti-semitic right i don't know very close 2785 so magnus is better than him. Yeah. I mean, if Magnus is the best ever. Yeah, Magnus is the best ever. Oh, okay. He's a fucking super genius. So, what happened with Bobby Fischer? This actually has him rated maybe one point below Magnus' peak. 2881. One-year performance, it says.

1:04:04Bobby Fischer? Yeah, it's based off of who you're playing, when you're playing them, and how good they are at the time. It's like golf. It's like who's in the tournament. Yeah, but that happens. Pool has ratings. They have a Fargo rating. And they also do it per game. There's this guy, he just died recently, Chang Jung Lin, and he's this dude from Taiwan, and he played at 1 ,000. 1 ,000 was his for one game. He couldn't get a game. Not for one game, excuse me, for like one match. What would he have to give to you or to me? It would be pointless. It would just destroy us. He never missed. He'd be like, make a ball and you win?

1:04:45There's another guy, this guy who's also from Taiwan, Koh Ping Chung, and he played an entire match where he never missed a ball. He won 11 to nothing against another world-class player. Who lost a coin flip to start. Yeah, he lost their lag. Their lag, and I think he broke and left a long shot on the one ball, and the guy missed that, and he never made a ball. He didn't make one ball. And winner goes first. Winner goes first, yeah. There was a couple times, it was winter breaks, so every time he broke, and he was making the one ball on the side like every game, and every time he didn't have a shot, he would just play a lock-up safety, and the guy would kick and then leave a shot, and then he would run out again.

1:05:28He just got in the zone, so he played at a 1 ,000 Fargo for the entire match. That's crazy. That means he never missed a ball on four-inch pockets. Oh, really? Tiny little pockets. there's people that are like it's amazing how big pool is too across the world and billiards too yeah and in in asia it's huge asia's huge do you find people with just an overhang just so it doesn't get wet and they're all out there playing and just like flip-flops and well we're losing a lot of the top uh taiwanese and chinese players to a game that they play in china now where it's like a snooker table it doesn't look like a pool table like the the pockets aren't cut the same way they're rounded but they're playing nine ball and they're playing with like purses for like top top purses like six hundred thousand dollars for a tournament seven hundred thousand so they're all going over there and playing in that because you can make millions in a year instead of a couple hundred grand which is like what the best players make in america why women were going to fucking russia to play basketball until now until now when well just don't bring weed you know i I mean, just don't bring weed.

1:06:39The thing is, like, weed helps basketball a lot. I'm not a basketball player, clearly. But weed. You couldn't keep score. Me and a Muggsy Bogues. Yeah. All right. That's a good reference. Yeah. Nice. But weed, apparently, is phenomenal for basketball players. Like, they all talk about it. Like, I've talked to basketball players about weed. They say, I can play way better when I'm high. Well, they had the collective bargaining, not a late one, but like 20 years ago. And they're like, we can test for drugs. but they fought back. They go, not weed. So if you get caught with weed, sure, you can suspend us, but you can't test for it because why?

1:07:14We're all doing it. Yeah, they're all doing it, and it helps the game. It helps pool for sure. It helps poker for sure, for sure. Oh, I'd imagine you read people's tells. According to World Snooker Tour figures, more than 24.5 million unique viewers watched the third session of the final alone in China. and during the whole 2025 tournament, it had a cumulative audience of 180 million in national broadcasters. That's like an NFL playoff game. 24 million watched the finals of this. It's like a billion for Super Bowl, right? Yeah. But like a playoff game. But that's snooker, or like the English call it snooker.

1:07:53So snooker is very different, and it's on a 12-foot table. It's a huge table, and the balls are very small, and they don't have numbers on them. It's just like red, black, pink. It's mostly red. There's red that's in the stack. And then you have black, pink, brown. And I think there's another one. I've never played the game. I fucked around with it when I was in Scotland. They had a table and I was like shooting balls on it. It's interesting. In Columbia, they all play this thing. Three cushion billiards. Yeah, and they take their cue and move a thing over, like a scorer over. And they keep playing and move one over.

1:08:25And they're all playing it. And there's just kind of casual bars. But it's like 20 tables and they're everywhere. And this is where there's no holes in the table, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's called three cushion billiards. I had to sit there and watch and drink. It's a fun game. I don't know how to play it really well. Strategy. It's a hell of a strategy. It is definitely strategy, but it's really understanding angles. It's understanding how to kick and how to like – when I say kick, what I mean is like go off a rail and hit another rail and then collide with the ball. So three cushion billiards is you have three balls on the table.

1:08:58That's it. And so you have the whole table. It's like a big-ass pool table. But there's no pockets, and you have three balls. And so what you have to do is hit one ball and then go three rails at least, three cushions, and then hit the second ball. And then hit another ball. Yes. Wow. But also put yourself in a position where then you can make another shot afterwards. Right. Or play safety. It's a complicated game, and it's different because it's a lot of its spin, and the harder you hit it, the shorter the angle is. And if you hit it with English, it spins out wider or shorter, depending upon what you're trying to do with it.

1:09:34But if you get good at it, it really will help your pool game because you'll really have a much more deep understanding of how the ball moves around the table with different speed and side spin and all that kind of shit. I've only fucked around with it, though, and not in a long time. We had a table at Executive Billiards in White Plains. we used to have a one three cushion table they would fuck around on. Just play for laughs? I couldn't do it. I want to see the balls go away. That's nice to hear that. I want to see when I fire a ball in I want to see it go down that hole. Bye bye. I want to clear it out.

1:10:10I don't want balls lingering just staring at me like do it again. Do it again. Do it again. I'm still here. Do it again. It's funny that that became a bar sport. It's really just darts and that became the sports at bars. Sure. And the table takes up a lot more space. The dartboard, yeah. Dartboard, sure, but the pool table, you need some actual space. Yeah. And that space is totally not usable other than that. That's where it is. Unless a girl's dancing on it. I went to a pool hall slash samba place somewhere in Brazil. What? Pool and samba? Yeah, it's like daily it's a pool hall, but then at night it turns into samba and the highest level guys coming, their capital and their music capital.

1:10:56It's so fun. But these guys don't stop playing pool. And so everyone's dancing. It's so packed and crowded. It's excuse me. And you're like, the etiquette is you just know when you're in a bar. You're like, all right, all right. But you want to be like, bro, it's packed. You can't play pool here. Yeah, you can't play pool there. But they were doing it. Well, there's a place in the Bronx that is this Dominican pool room where they gamble big money, big money. And they stream some of the matches on YouTube. and it's fucking bananas because people are just talking constantly. They're yelling at each other in Spanish.

1:11:28Oh, wow. You know, Dominican people are having fun. They're having fun. There's all this Spanish speaking and they're yelling and they're all very flamboyant and having a good time. And they get people to go over there and play like pros and they get so rattled because the environment— They're not used to that. Right. Wow. Play on this turf. Right. Not only that, but the guys can play, and they're accustomed to that culture. So they're accustomed to all the yelling and all the craziness and guys standing in front of the hole while you're shooting at it, which is a no-no in regular pool. Oh, that's like high school.

1:12:01Yeah. Do it then. Do it. They don't do it that bad. It's not that bad, but there's plenty of guys moving around the table. They're all talking. Everyone's yelling. The tables next to you are yelling. They don't care if you're betting$30 ,000 on a set. Dominicans are having so much fun, they're allowed to use the N-word. blacks are like you know what they kind of rule give it to them just dominicans but it's really interesting because i've watched guys who are like top pros go over there and fucking lose to guys that they're not supposed to lose to and the reason why they're losing is because they're just rattled by the environment and so what a lot of these guys will do they'll put airpods on so they'll put airpods in with the noise canceling so they try to take away some of the fucking sound and just focus, but you're really going to be playing at like 60 % of your capacity because there's just too much chaos going around.

1:12:53If you play in a real, legit pool tournament, everything's dead quiet while the guy's down on the ball. And then they clap when someone makes the ball. Then he moves to the next shot. They stop clapping. Yeah, too respectful. Yes, but not in these fucking pools. These guys are playing for big money. They're playing for tens of thousands of dollars and they're just getting sharked and rattled. Stealing their blood. I watched guys like, I watched this guy Oscar Dominguez play this dude. Oscar's a top pro. He was on the Moscone Cup. He was on the Moscone team for the U.S. And he was over there playing this dude.

1:13:26And I was like, how did they get him to go there? Wow. I'm talking about Jeremy Jones. And rep, too. It's like the guys who do Burning Man. The DJ's like, I'll play for free. It's just like, it's a rep thing. Well, I don't think it's that. I think it's the money. Oscar loves to gamble. And he's going to a place where someone's willing to gamble him for a lot of money. Wait, you say this thing about Jones? I'm going to listen while I go to piss. Go piss. Go piss. We'll pause. We'll pause. We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen. We'll pass it everywhere. I'm not going to say the whole thing. We'll pause.

1:13:52We're back, folks. We're back. So what I was saying is my friend Jeremy Jones, who was a U.S. Open champion, he said he went to that pool hall once, and he said, I'm never going back. Too much. It's too much. Too much. And he's also said that the neighborhood is like - Dank. Things can go sideways. Yeah. It's a neighborhood where like, hey, you might go there three nights in a row, and you have Have a good time. Fourth night, four people get shot. You know what I mean? That was always the problem with underground pool, I mean poker rooms. Oh, I imagine. You play at Commerce or a place like it's legit, it's fine.

1:14:21You go underground, you're like, there's a guard there. Right, and you're walking out with a lot of money. I remember when you were struggling in the early days of comedy when we kind of first met. Yeah. And you were making your money by winning pool tournaments or poker tournaments. Yeah. Finishing at least. Yeah. You would go to these casinos and make and you would play it like a job. You'd be like super serious. I've read books on it. Yeah. The best book. There's tells and there's strategy. The best. My favorite book is this guy Mike Caro. It's a book called Mike Caro's Book of Poker Tells.

1:14:58Yeah. I managed to use one of them once in a World Series event. that if this is the one where it goes if someone looks at your chips it's because they have a killer hand and they think those chips are theirs and it's just like you know when you lie you look away a little bit that's like a tell we all kind of know you look at it just for a second you're not worried about your chips because you know your chips are staying you got a full house you know those are safe but you're looking at those like how much of that can I extract so I was throwing a bluff down against a pro at the World Series it was like whatever and I was like I think he must have read this book.

1:15:35And so I'm banking on that. So I'm holding my bluff nothing hand. And I just kind of do a very subtly, just do one little. And he goes, yeah, right. And he chucked his hand away. Wow. Yeah. He thought he had me read. But the best thing about Mike Carroll's poker tells. You double-crossed. I double-crossed. I double-crossed, Joe. Clever. Thank you for recognizing that. I love that. Love a double-cross. I love that. That's so cool. That's the cool thing about poker. That it's like, a lot of it's bullshit. You're bullshitting. You know? You're bluffing. The best thing about the poker tells, it was written in the 70s, and there's a bunch of race-based tells.

1:16:11Really? Yeah. Which ethnicities? All. All of them? If an older white man re-raises you, get out. That guy doesn't bluff. He's just trying to play. You know, his wife died years ago. He's just trying to extend. They're like, if you're playing against a Mexican, find out when payday is. And if it was this Friday, they're bluffing. They're just throwing in anything. They just want to play. They're going to part with their monies. There was a whole thing on blacks. I forget exactly what they were saying on that. Interesting. But it was very interesting. What year was this written? I think in the 70s.

1:16:40Interesting. Back when you could be honest. Yeah. And he was like, I don't know. I was telling you how to win. All in the family days. Yeah.

1:16:49You could get away with a lot of honest observations about different cultures. Mike Carroll's Book of Poker Tells. Orientals. Orientals. They're either very skillful or very luck-oriented. I like it says it now, Asian-Americans. What happened to Oriental? What happened to Oriental? Someone told me that Oriental is like a slur now. But it's actually the right word. Is it? The Orient? It's people or goods from the Orient. You know what the opposite is? What? You and I, Occidental. People or goods from, I guess, not the Orient. Really? We're Occidentals? Mm-hmm. You know what's also interesting? It's like Asian.

1:17:26Not a racist. Asian is so much of the world. Yeah. Like, Asian includes India, which is Asia. Nah. If I was president, executive order. That's, no. No. That's not who we're talking about. That's not who we're talking about. Isn't Pakistan in Asia? Yeah, right. That's Middle East. Fuck off. Yeah. Fuck off. You know, oh, Israel's also Asia, by the way. But it's also, like, the Philippines is Asia. That's Asia. I'll give you that. Okay, but it's way over there. It's way over there. And then you got China, and then you got Japan, and then you got Korea, and South Korea, and North Korea. Okay, let's be real.

1:18:02China and Japan are the obvious ones. Yes. That's Asia. Those are the big ones. The further you get, the more you - Korea. Korea's also a big one. Korea, okay. Vietnam, you're still in the gold. Vietnam gets a little - Mongolia, I don't know. Well, they're almost Russian. Saudi Arabia is Asia? Fuck off. We're talking about China and their subsidiaries. Look how big Asia is. Cambodia, okay, sure. All the jungles. Wow. How many have I been to there? So Russia's technically Asia? That's Asian Russia. Israel is the craziest one. I would cut off right here because it'd be European Russia, too. Oh, okay.

1:18:36So there's Asian Russia, so that would be Siberia, right? Yeah. The Maldives are... But that would be like Mongolia for sure. Kazakhstan is Asia. Wow. Yeah. Mongolia. But a lot of the Kazakhstan guys look Asian. True. Like this guy, Shavkat Rogmanov, who fights in the UFC? A Mongolian accent is crazy because it really is. It sounds like half Chinese, half Russian. They look Chinese speaking like the Russian accent. Hard people, bro. Hard people. Kazakhstan, India, Iran? Iran is Asia? Wow. Israel's Asia. Israel's Asia. Israel's the edge. Yeah, basically everything that's on the other side. All those people are Oriental.

1:19:21Orientals. Next time I go to Jerusalem, I'm going to call them all Orientals. Look how close Yemen is to Ethiopia. It feels like you could swim there. Yeah. If you really were motivated. Damn. Yeah. If you want to, you just go to a pool also. You don't really have to. Hey, look where Israel is. Don't worry. Look where Israel is. That's crazy. That's just so interesting. See how they split shit up. Israel is like, that's what's nuts. You ever see the border between Egypt and Palestine? That borders nuts me. Oh my god. It's the most fortified border you've ever seen in your life You think the border between Israel and Palestine is rough really the board Yeah, the border between Egypt and Palestine is way harder to do not want those people.

1:20:05They do not want those people over there You ever see it fucking rolls of barbed wire. It's crazy. Yeah, look at that That was that guy just catch a baby being thrown over click on that one, please the one that says the Arab weekly on the top. Yeah, right there. Look at that. Look at that, bro. Wow. You ain't getting through that. What a nice place to stroll for those two guys. Just a relaxing afternoon near the Gaza Wall. Look at that. That's crazy.

1:20:37Sad times. Oh, the saddest. The saddest. Peace in the Middle East. Yeah. Good luck. Yeah. they're all nuts. It's even more nuts now. Look what's happening in Lebanon. Now they're bombing Lebanon too. Really? Yeah. Follow any of this. Israel's bombing the shit out of southern Lebanon. Lebanon? Yeah, I was reading about this. Ryan Grimm was covering this Lebanon reporter, this reporter in Lebanon that Israel killed. They followed her with drones. They bombed a car in front of her. She ran into an abandoned building, and then they bombed the shit out of the building. And this took hours. And all the while she was contacting like whoever runs Lebanon and they were contacting Israel and saying, hey, this is this is a reporter.

1:21:28And so then they got text messages between this someone from the IDF had been saying to them, we're going to kill you. And then they got the number from her phone and contacted the person from the IDF. And they were saying, hey, she works for Hezbollah and, you know, fuck you and you're naive. It's crazy. Like they're just openly killing journalists. You know what they did a good job of when I was traveling? They got it more than up here, separating Israel from Jew. They really were like, we don't have any problem with Jews. But they were very staunchly anti-Israel. Well, if you live in Israel, you have to do military service, right?

1:22:06So everyone who lives in Israel is a part of the military in their eyes. Everyone who lives in Israel has served in the military. It's interesting, though. it's like a lot of those kids and then turned to adults are like very against what they're doing oh yeah it's like an uncovered i think um like part of it like yeah we don't like this i mean half this country or more even didn't vote for trump didn't vote for biden so they're like well i didn't i don't like this but then you're still like you have to like be pro everything about this thing even though like you cannot like certain things right the idea that like all israelis have a single hive mind yeah that's crazy that's not the case in any country ever It's not the same in any crowd.

1:22:47Especially a democracy, because Israel's literally the only democracy over there, really. Yeah, and they have parliament, too, so they have a lot of choices. And they're trying to, like, prosecute Netanyahu while all this is going on. Who is the Israelis? Yeah. Wow. I mean, this was one of the things that most people aren't aware of, but that before October 7th, there was hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in Israel protesting Netanyahu. We talked about it the other day because - It's hard to protest during the war. to expand but this was before the war right right so they were trying to expand uh what they can do in terms of like with their constitution we talked about it what it was the exact chamey do you remember the exact thing that they were disputing over but it was expanding the power that the government has and so people were protesting that and then also october 7 pops off yeah and then you know it's what happened here at 9 11 it became like if you say anything bad now you're like a traitor instead of just like, well, I was already saying they have issues with police overstepping or whatever.

1:23:51You're like, but now you can't say that for about three years. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So before October 7th, Israel experienced nine months of massive sustained protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, largely driven by opposition to proposed judicial reforms. These demonstrations included hundreds of thousands of participants accused the right-wing coalition of undermining democracy, weakening the Supreme Court, and attempting to interfere with Netanyahu's ongoing corruption trial. Yeah, and so that's the same as here, where it's not about like are you pro-gay marriage or not, or are you pro-peace of the Palestine or not.

1:24:25That's just people taking power. And so that goes beyond the right or left, and just go, no, no, that's an overstep. Yeah. Yeah, it's... But anyway. It's fucked because it's not going to get any better. It's not. And they've destroyed Gaza. Gaza is just a wasteland now. I mean, someone posted recent video of Gaza, like what it looked like now. Like right now. They sent a drone or something to get video footage of what Gaza looks like. It's crazy. It's crazy. It looks like they dropped a nuke. They just did it slowly. Instead of dropping one nuke, they did thousands of fucking conventional bombs and did the kind of destruction that a nuke would do.

1:25:09It's interesting. if you ask people how it's like polarizing everybody got or polarized and you couldn't just be like any suffering is wrong but like yeah i could show you a dead baby and a lot of people will go well what i gotta know what their last name is first before i can tell you if i feel bad or not right yeah instead of just like that's i know that's what's wrong about it yeah that's so dark and then if you talk about like what's happening in gaza people say well october 7th shouldn't happen like okay you're right it shouldn't have but guess what those kids that live in gaza they didn't do october 7th they didn't do it so like we're on their team it's like what we did to iran what if iran nukes new york city those kids that live in the bronx they had nothing to do with what happened in iran so like is that okay like what are we talking about it's a mess it's fucking nuts it's tribal warfare is fucking bananas and it's still going on well I was talking to people when I knew cousins and stuff in the military, and they had just gotten out.

1:26:06And they were like, we're all now. This is before October 7th. It's a few years before. Maybe 2018. They're like, we're talking now because we have the internet now. And we're like, this isn't sustainable, and we don't want to keep doing this. We've got to start figuring out a peace thing. And then that's all gone now. It's all gone. Not only is it all gone, but now that they've started bombing Lebanon, everybody's really terrified. Because they're like, well, where is this going? Because they're bombing Christian villages in Lebanon. and there's video of them destroying these solar panels that these Christian villages have in Lebanon where they're just plowing over and using tractors to take down these solar panels.

1:26:41Part of me goes to like - This isn't the military. What are you doing? Yeah. It still goes back to Wesley Clark, if I got that right. Yeah, the seven countries. The seven countries and Iran was on there and we just hadn't gotten there yet. Oh yeah. But that was always like, that's not a new thing that was just in the works for a couple decades just waiting for the time is right. yeah they wanted to do it within five years it took 25 took long yeah the Wesley Clark thing is funny because you know Dave Smith had a debate debate with Coleman Hughes about that and Coleman Hughes is like but Wesley Clark never said he read the memo he said someone told him about the memo because any historian would not even be able to use that oh I thought they said they had this I don't know I don't think so I think the way Coleman was describing it but the reality is okay yeah you might be right maybe because he hadn't read it any historian would not have been able to use it in the book but the fact that it all took place exactly how the memo stated that seems relevant and that came out before so you're like hey we're going to iran soon and then it's like they did syria they kept trying syria was the best to me because when obama was doing it and i don't care who's in charge they're all doing the same shit to me.

1:27:50But they go, we got to go in there to overthrow this dictator. And then people would just come off the whole Middle Eastern war. Like, no, we're done. And so they couldn't justify it. And then they go, hey, this is an insurgent group, and they're going to get out of hand. We got to go in and control them. And then it's like, wait, you want to go fight the guy who was fighting against Assad? And then that ended, and they go, no, we got to take down Assad. And it's like, you really seem like you guys want to go into Syria. Looking for any sort of excuse. It's all crazy. Politics is stupid. Let's move on.

1:28:20It's just evil. It's like it. It is gross. Yeah. Yeah. Your perspective is probably the healthiest. Just stay out of it. Stay out of it. Leave me alone. Fuck you. Live my life. But the thing is like some of it does affect your life. Like this psychedelic drugs thing. Okay. So in that moment where you got fucking maybe hopefully shrooms legalized, you know, in an ideal world is a very rare case of someone who can actually accomplish change. and you're a higher level than most people in terms of influence both personally and like broadly but also the the individual like him like most people wouldn't do it that way like if i was friends with obama there's not a fucking chance in hell i could have gone to obama and say hey dude you know it'd be cool if you got ibogaine legalized it would keep all these people that are addicted that he could have done that decades ago everyone could have done that they've known about ibogaine forever.

1:29:15And they've also known about the pill crisis forever. So all this stuff was common knowledge amongst plenty of people. John Hopkins has been doing these studies. John Hopkins has a playlist for shrooms and MDMA. They make a playlist for you. They do? This is a good MDMA or I forget which one. Shrooms playlist. Is it like John Hopkins sanctioned it or someone who works there? No, no, no. A professor. Or something like that. In the research they're doing. In the psilocybin research. It was all psilocybin, right and not i think yeah hopkins was still john hopkins was also yeah they all kind of led the way they have a playlist you can you can get it's on spotify or whatever people have been aware of it for so long you know inside the john hopkins psilocybin playlist wow this is 2020 dude i'm always amazed when my memory turns out to not be false look at that guy he looks like he's tripping he looks like he trips he's like an old dude's trip just hug people look at his smile that guy's not working for an insurance company.

1:30:13Loosing his time. Yeah, Bill Richards, look, he's tripped. Psychologist and researcher. They should put researcher in quotes. Psychologist, researcher, and former deadhead. I think of it as a nonverbal support system, sort of like a net for a trapeze artist. If all's going well, you're not even aware the net is there. You don't even hear the music. But if you start getting anxious or if you need it, it's immediately there to provide a structure. Oh, Bill, you trip hard. When I was doing ayahuasca, this guy was like, this shaman guy was like beating a drum very lightly. And when you come out of it, whatever, the slow like boom, boom, boom.

1:30:51It would kind of like pull you back into it. Seven hour and 40 minute playlist. Boy, those guys go hard. They make sure. Put that on loop. Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Hey, don't do that. Don't give me sorrowful songs while I'm tripping. You trying to have a bad time? Yeah, I want to hear. I want to hear beautiful music. No, there's death. No, not grandma. People always ask me about mushrooms. Like, is it going to be this emotional, like, spiritual thing? I'm like, that gets hyped more. You're going to laugh with your friends. Yeah. That's the main thing. There's going to be, I mean, it depends on the dose, right?

1:31:28Like, a heavy dose will bring you to a very strange place. Dude, I had a best mushroom trip of all time on this trip. Yeah? Yeah. Of all time. Yeah, maybe. Maybe, maybe the first one. The Muhammad Ali of mushroom trips. Yeah, and it wasn't like it was crazy hard. It was just they were fresh. And it was just like the thoughts. And it was just in places where nobody really gave a fuck. So you didn't feel like you were like a drug addict. And just like, yeah, just seeing everything so clear. Mushrooms fucking rule. You just see everything so clear. It kills the you in your brain. It kills the bullshit part.

1:32:02Yeah, and so you go like, look at this behavior. And it's the same as analyzing someone else's behavior or your own. There's the same. That's a part of one of the problems that comes with living a stressful life is you get really wrapped up in yourself Like you're managing yourself. You're managing your thoughts. You're managing your whatever you're trying to do And then you think so much about you that a thing like that can take you out of that and you go Oh, what am I wasting my doing on this for? Why am I wasting my energy on this? It's so pointless It's not helping me at all and you see people i saw my father for like who he really is now just like a loving caring granddad and you're like oh what a fucking cool guy that i always saw as like this guy i grew up with and then just like man yeah and just like realizing like i'm doing this type of stuff he did like going you know starting a new life he did the same shit coming to america and it's like wow what a look at it separately from your father like that's a cool guy you talked about having your father come on this podcast to talk about his experience as a Holocaust survivor?

1:33:03He would. How old is he now? He's about to be 90. Wow. Still with it, though. He's not like a feeble. That's awesome. Yeah. Would he do it? He would do it. He loves getting the word out. How old was he when he was in the camps? Young. Single digits. Wow. I think maybe released at 12. Yeah, he would do it. He would love it because he works at the Holocaust Memorial as a docent or something. and he has a tattoo and everything does he have a tattoo i don't think so no he wasn't in a death camp he was in a work camp his i believe this is all i believe his my grandfather his dad was in was liberated from a death camp but yeah you should talk to him he would actually love it he loved getting the word i've seen him make speeches before and there's all these inner city kids from kansas city you know and then when they hear him talk it's just this moment you realize like oh this isn't a story this is like his life yeah it's a real thing yeah like a till of the hun you're like that seems like a fictional character yeah because they're so removed from it and this is just at the borderline of that dude he would yeah you should do it i would do it i'd love to have him on talk to him it's um it's a weird time with uh time with anything that has anything to do with people being Jewish because they conflate Jewish people with the Israeli government, the Netanyahu government and what they're doing in Gaza and what they're doing in all the other places.

1:34:26And it's also, it's like, there's a weird time now where people are enjoying questioning the numbers of people that died in the Holocaust. It's an internet retarded, just kind of like fun. But just like, but there is some weirdness to it. And one of the weirdness to it is like, there's some photos of like Auschwitz and a lot of that they took after the camps were liberated. And they had people go there and they took photos of them, like pretending that these people were at the camps. And they weren't. They were done after the fact. Yeah. But there's also tons of videos. It was only one million?

1:35:01Right. So that's okay somehow? No. You want to justify it in your head? Yeah, that's where it's weird. I don't know. If it was 600 people, I'd be like, ugh. Right. Well, it's clearly there was a lot of people. I don't know what the number is. But if it was 6 million or if it was 1 million or 3 million, it's like to catch people like, no, no, no, you guys said it was 6. And then the thing is like it's 1945. It's the 30s and 40s. So it's like I don't know. We're guessing. We don't have the wherewithal. And you ask somebody in the Holocaust, they go, well, I was only in my one camp. I can't tell you what was going on in Bergen-Belsen.

1:35:33But there's people that are like equally sure that it was 6 million. And then there's people that are equally sure that it was like 300 ,000 or 600 ,000 or whatever the fuck they think it was. And it's like this weird argument back and forth. I mean, you have to see how many Jews were in Europe before and after. And there should be more. It's funny. You see, like, if you have a stat like that, like separated from this, like in Peru, we're hiking to Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu. Me and O 'Neal. Oh, we got to talk about that. And they're like, it's fucking pouring rain. And everybody there, they're not liberal or conservative.

1:36:07They just go, it's been raining earlier than it should be. and they don't know about the word climate change. They just know we're told November 1st is when you plant. After that, you're in a risk. Now this is mid-October, and I don't know what's up. Well, there's going to be climate change whether human beings are here or not. That's the reality of the Earth. The Earth's temperature and climate has never been static. And the real problem with climate change is not recognizing that human beings are having an adverse effect on the planet because we certainly are in terms of pollution and particulate release.

1:36:39but that people like Al Gore and a lot of these fucking greenies, they're profiting off of this concept of climate change and then also using it to clamp down on people's rights. There's that too. Like we talked about people taking money from a good cause. So it's like for every good thing, they'll be like somebody's going to misuse it. 100%. For every good thing. It all gets conflated. But then it becomes a thing where like when I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast, He was like talking about it. I was like – and I said to him, I go, the problem with climate change is not just that the climate is changing because it always has, but that people are having an effect on it because they definitely are.

1:37:18But it's that there's a lot of money in this whole concept of climate change. The fake recycling that was never done. The ground landfills. It's all landfills. But it's better than nothing. Like, no, it's equal to nothing. Well, it's not only that, but you fucking made people feel like they were doing good by throwing their fucking water bottles in a blue thing. It's all kind of crazy. We're gross. Yeah. People are gross. But it was cool to see people's perspectives that were away from political and just their observations about stuff. Recognize that things change. Yeah. But look, Sub-Saharan Africa used to be lush green lands.

1:37:54I mean, they find whale bones in Sub-Saharan Africa in the desert. In the desert, they find whale skeletons in the desert way before there were cars. Right. Okay. way before there were plastic and power plants. So the Earth's climate has never been static. But the Machu Picchu thing is I really want to go there. My friend Luke Caverns, he's been on the podcast before. He's studied a tub. I've been three times. Has he really? But as a kid. That's what I meant. Oh, yeah, his family's from. Yeah, so they're like, oh, it's a one-hour flight from Lima. And then just take the train. But, like, yeah, it's pretty wild.

1:38:35So you're saying it wasn't even the Aztecs? Is that what you told me? Well, that's the Incas. Incas, Incas, Incas. Yeah, it wasn't. They don't think it was. They think the initial monolithic structures or megalithic structures were an earlier previously unknown civilization. Because the size and scope of their structures, the way they build it, and Graham Hancock has gone over this as well, is so much different than the stuff that's on top of it. So what happens is you have this old stuff that's enormous stones that are cut like jigsaws, right? And almost like it's melted, like the way it looks.

1:39:13You can't put a piece of paper through it after 200 years of breakdowns. Way more than 200 years. It's thousands of years. But the thing that's really nutty about it is that design is because when they have earthquakes, that way it won't fall off. It disperses the energy better as opposed to just stacking stuff on top of each other. that stuff falls, but when it's all interlocked in these weird forms, like that shit. That, yeah. So Che Guevara talks about it a little bit, where he goes, so Cusco is the gem of South America. It was the border of the Andes, where people would come in and do trade and everything.

1:39:46And you see this, and the Christians would come in, take over, and build facades on it and put a cross on top to be like, look what we did. We're more dominant than these people. And then an earthquake could come, facade would fall, and this would just remain. That stuff remains. Over and over and over again. Over and over again. These aren't even squares look at that's like a Tetris. Yeah, it's so cool And that was on purpose they did that because that what would survive but if you look at the stuff above it That's the stuff the Incas made so the Incas made this stuff was like it's all just stacked It's not as sophisticated and also not as large because they didn't have the technology Whatever the fuck these people had that was a big huge I mean Hundreds and thousands of tons I mean, these things are fucking enormous.

1:40:30The really crazy one is the Lebanon ones. In Lebanon - I've been there. Wait, no. Have you? I'm Jordan. Jordan, I'm talking about is the - So in Lebanon, they have these massive stones. What are they called, Jamie? The trilithon stones? So there's these stones that are like more than a thousand tons, and they're like several meters above the ground placed, and then on top of them, you have these Roman structures. Oh, right. So if you see like there, like that click where you had your cursor. Yeah. Look at the size of that guy. Wow. And look at the size of that stone. And then you see the stuff on top of it is smaller.

1:41:09It's not as sophisticated. And then you had the Roman. Now, the thing about the Romans is Romans had meticulous record keeping. And they talked about all the construction of all the different things they had. They don't even mention those stones. So it wasn't them. They don't mention how they made. No. I don't think it was them. I think it was a previous civilization. Look at that fucking thing. Oh, bro, I'm about to, you know Nazca Lines? Yes. Okay. Oh, yeah. I saw them. Oh, did you? Yeah, I flew over them. Bro, how weird is that? They're so big, the pictures won't do it justice, because you'll see a road.

1:41:38They didn't know, because from the ground level, you can't see any of it. And so they just build these roads through the desert. And so you can see a car sometimes, for perspective. And you're like, it's this dot on this giant monkey in the middle of the desert for however many hundreds of years. Yeah, they don't even know how long. They're crazy. Weird. And they're all like signals to something. There's all these theories on what it is. Something from the sky. You have to see them from above. You can only see them from above. That's nuts. Pilots would go over there and then somebody's like, what's that?

1:42:09I go, oh yeah, we don't know. We just kind of go over. Well, they found a bunch of them now because of AI. You know, they've like scanned the areas and found a bunch of previously undiscovered Nazca lines. Wow. Yeah. And the weird thing about it is that's also the place where they find these people with elongated skulls. they find like these weird skulls that have additional capacity so they have like 30 percent more capacity and they they don't have the same lines in their skulls that we have like when we're babies you know we have these what are they called sagittal i forget what the lines are called sagittal these lines that we have in our skull you know like your skull's not just one piece right it's like there's a bunch of pieces the incans you should tie them off so they get longer as a sign of like yeah but some of these skulls don't have the same structure as ours they're human skulls but they're longer they have more capacity of the 30 larger capacity and they don't have those lines that we have so it's like what was that were there different kinds of humans back then i guess out were there were they flying around were they flying around and making these fucking structures were they responsible for Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu and all these other places and they just died off and all we have left is like some skulls that we can't totally explain we don't have the means to explain it yet because if it was 20 ,000 years ago or 30 ,000 years ago or whatever it was that these people were ruling back then what would be left?

1:43:34Fucking nothing nothing, very little I mean look at Angkor Wat where it's like, yeah if you didn't see it, it's shocking any of it remained yeah well Angkor Wat's crazy and how about that other one in India where the entire temple's carved out of one stone or the one in Jordan the what is it fucking what is those places the Indiana Jones one what's that called that's where I went with my brother what is it Jimmy Petra it's nuts you come through this canyon and it's just in a mountain a giant three story temple that it's just carved out of the mountain. It wasn't added to. Right, and where's the stone?

1:44:16Where'd you put the stones? What'd you do? That view, coming out of the middle one, coming out of that cavern and seeing it after about an hour hike. That's crazy. It doesn't even, you have to see a human. See how small that person is in the middle? That is so crazy. So like, what? Right. Have you ever heard of Darren Cuyu? No. In Turkey? This is crazy. You want to hear this one? It's a place or a person? It's a place. so um i think they found this because someone was doing like construction on a house yeah and they found a pat oh so this is what it was so a guy kept losing his chickens they would go through a hole and they would never come out so this guy was like well where the fuck are these chickens going so they broke down the wall to figure out where the chickens go and they found an underground city that can hold 20 ,000 people Turkey with many many levels like many levels deep into the ground It's fucking bananas I watched a documentary now you see Look we see the way where you could you please go back to that one image with the houses?

1:45:31Yeah, like that like so this guy It was like behind a fucking wall in the house So these chickens would go into the hole They would just disappear. So it's like where's my fucking chickens? So the guy starts digging around to try to figure out where the chickens go and they found this and I want to say they found this in like the 20th century like I think it's the 20s. I just saw 1920s like 29 Wow, so no they forgot about it. Nobody knew about it Nobody knew who made it. There was no record of it. And it's so big. It can house 20 ,000 people in there. What was it for? No one knows. No one knows when.

1:46:11No one knows who. No one knows nothing. There's other ones they found in China. They found this fucking insane one in China that also has no records. It's enormous, like enormous caverns with giant columns. It's all carved out of the stone. they moved millions of tons of rocks out of there no record no one knows where the stone went I'm staying with the Lacandans Mayans, whatever and we were on a hike and there was this little abandoned temple just the size of this room and so the guide was like so now there's a tunnel in here to the main temple it's about a mile and a half away and there's a tunnel where you can go through it it takes a couple hours to walk and he goes he did it with my brother once he goes I'll never go back it's so frightening and there's fucking pumas around and you don't know The boom was in the tunnel?

1:46:58Yeah, you're like, you can't see shit. He goes, it's a bad place. But it's this long underground tunnel that was made however long ago. What the fuck? This is the one in China. This is one of the caves. So this is one of these caves in China. By the way, no record, no historical record of when it was created or who created it. I put up, wow. And this is another one that they found. In 1992, they found it. Four farmers in Longyu found the caves and they drained the water from five small ponds in their village. The ponds turned out to be five large man-made caverns further investigation revealed 19 more caverns nearby They've been determined to be more than 2 ,000 years old and their construction is not recorded in any historical documents Like look how crazy please show some of those images Yeah, it's the only one on this page Fucking bananas, so they're just guessing that it's 2 ,000 years old.

1:47:48They don't know right right They're just like because there's no record. There's no record of it, but it's bananas bananas and they've also those carvings they think are post later people yeah came in post discovery that's their way of doing um yeah because you see how like those lines on the walls that's how everything looks it's just those carved straight lines and it looks like the other stuff was like more modern that they think those lines are so that the erosion wouldn't hurt it as much i don't know i mean that might have been how they did it they might have had some sort of a device that they carve the stone out with but the thing is it's like this is where's this on a map show me where long you is in a map I want to visit a lot of China there's some a lot of places in there that I'm like don't know about trying to be back out back out China's so big long you caverns keep going back to do do keep going back to me context do do do oh my god that's pretty deep in there Good luck It's near Wuhan, look Take a train to Wuhan, catch a bug Yeah, go eat some armadillo Pangolin That's how you got leprosy, eating armadillo and pangolin You're really not supposed to eat those things Go back to the images please The images are nuts, man It's like, what were these people doing?

1:49:06Like, who made this? I love standing in a place like that And you just instantly get connected to the history of it Could you imagine It's 1992 and you're just draining a pond. You're a farmer. And then you drain the pond and you go, oh, there's a little cave in here. Let's go to the cave. And you go and you see this shit. And no one knows who made it. And China, again, China has extensive historical records because China has existed for thousands and thousands of years. It's one of the few countries that's essentially been just China for 5 ,000 plus years. Bananas, man. Aquarium for real dragons.

1:49:47She's had to keep them somewhere. Well, I mean, who made it and how did they make it? Like, how did they do that? And for what? For what purpose? How did they make that 2 ,000 plus years? And by saying 2 ,000, it's like you're just taking a guess. 2 ,000 means, so there's a Joan Didion piece on El Salvador from a long time ago. And she goes, they don't use numbers the way we use numbers. They say 50, it means a bunch. Oh, like 72 virgins. Yeah, it means a bunch, an amount. Like, bro, he went there a million times. Tons of, like, what is a ton? Oh, bro, I smoke tons of joints. That's not possible.

1:50:27Break it down. So Perplexity, our AI sponsor, says no one knows for certain who created the Longue Caves. Archaeologists agree they are man-made and probably over 2 ,000 years old, but there's no record of their builders or patrons. That's crazy, dude. That is so crazy. Oh, pottery and other finds inside date roughly to the late Quinn or Western Han period around 200 BCE, suggesting they were excavated at or before that time. But the thing is that pottery could have been someone who just left pottery later. It's like if you leave behind a cell phone in Egypt and 5 ,000 years from now, people say, oh, well, this is an iPhone 16.

1:51:07This must be from. But that means it has to be at least that old or older. At least that old or older. So it's at least 2 ,000 plus years old. But how crazy is that there's no known records? Shit going quick and just bury some shit from a long time ago. Get some artifacts and just leave it in there and step away. How much shit like that is still out there in other parts of the world where they don't know about it and no one's found it yet? That the Mayan guy said. He was like, yeah, no one knows. He goes, me and my friends know about it. Fuck. So it's just like everywhere. Well, we were talking about the Aztecs, about how the Aztecs, And this is another thing that I found out through perplexity when I was just I was writing this thing about Mexico and about how crazy the history of Mexico is.

1:51:44And, you know, that the Spaniards came over with essentially like 12 muskets and took over the whole country. But when they when the Aztecs were living in these temples, they didn't build them. They called them the place where the gods were born. So they found them. So there's a previous civilization like Teotihuacan and all these other beautiful pyramids and temples. They don't know who fucking made them. They don't know who made them. That cave in Vietnam was found in 1991. I saw the 60 Minutes thing on that. Did you see that? Look at that. That dude from 60 Minutes, like a dude and a lady from 60 Minutes went and visited this cave.

1:52:26And I was like, that's one cool thing about something like 60 Minutes, that they would do something like that. Because it's a long journey. You have to fly in, drive a long distance, then hike a long distance. Some of these places aren't any, nothing's there. You can fit skyscrapers inside of these caves. They have their own ecosystems. Like there's clouds in there. It probably fucking rains inside the cave. There's insects, there's animals that live in these caves that have over time lost their ability to see because they didn't need it. so their hearing goes up, their sight goes down. There's like bugs in Thailand and Sa Phong and places like that where it's like, oh yeah, these animals only exist here.

1:53:04They hear you breathe and leap up. There's a salamander in Barton Creek Springs. Yeah, a special salamander. Oh really? It only lives there? It's a hippie salamander that got mixed with weird people swimming in the creek. Yeah. Oh, whoa. They survive on chicks with arm hair. They're only able to survive here. Hippie menstrual cycles. Yeah, I was doing Bottom of the Barrel last night and somebody brought up that there's nude beaches at Lake Travis. And I'm like, what is it like? Barton Springs. No, no, no. Barton's topless. Well, maybe. Is it? When you take one of those boat rides out. Chicks, they show the...

1:53:37Bro, it's noice. Noice? Yeah. Noice? It's noice. Hippie tits? Some of them are gross hippie tits, but some of them are like real tits, dude. Real ones. Influencers go there, too. Oh, like girls who do too much ayahuasca and they wear wooden beads and they want their tits out? Dude, so I was in Patagonia. Hippie Hollow Park. 4.6 stars. That's a lot. I was asking people, it was a rafting thing, and I was like, who's the worst? I always try to do this, especially at comedy clubs too. Who's the worst person you've ever had here? So there's like, which country, which people are the worst? And they go, I don't know.

1:54:08I'm like, listen, I'm from Jews, so it's Jews, right? And they go, I mean, they want freebies for sure. But we're trying to get which country's the worst. And he goes, well, the worst overall, though, is influencers. And they have no country. But they make everything about them. They make you pause too long to take their shots. They make you get out of their shot. We're all just trying to raft. They think they're there for them. Yeah. One of the influencers got arrested in Korea. Johnny Somali. Do you know who that guy is? He was in Korea. And apparently they have some statue that is about, I think it's something about sex slavery or something like that.

1:54:47So he was like kissing the statue and being rude to people. and they just sentenced him to, he did a bunch of shit over there. They sentenced him to six months of hard labor in Korea. We need some of that here for influencers. Quit doing fucking selfie talking while you're walking. You're not a black lady. You don't get to talk to your phone. Black ladies get to talk to their phone? Oh, they love speakerphone. Why do they not like that? I don't know. It's just black ladies. and it's like. Why do you think they like that? Why did they like it? They want everyone to hear their conversation. Maybe because their fucking nails will cut up their face if they bring it too close.

1:55:27I'm trying to think of possible reasons. It is weird where certain cultures gravitate towards certain behavior and activities. It's new racism. It's fun because it's like this isn't in the books. This is a brand new observation. Speakerphone is like I remember being outside of Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles and saying like how many – how come so many black guys are on speakerphone? And people are like that's racist. I'm like no it's not. No, it's a racial observation. Observing. I'm not mad at them. Yeah, I don't care. I'm just wondering why. Like, why is it worse that I hear both sides of the conversation versus one side?

1:55:59Like, if someone's just talking on the phone, why is that less offensive than someone talking through a speakerphone? You can observe. Why do the Hasidic Jews always talk on flip phones all the time? And you're like, there's something up. Do they? Yeah, there's some where it's like, why do the people used to ask me that when I would do Jew and A's, when I was doing the Jew hour building it? So they'd ask questions. So I'm going to check drops. I'd be like, ask questions. and I built my material that way. Oh, that's smart. But one of them was like, why do they all wear matching clothes to daughters?

1:56:25Or like if one's 10, one's eight, why do they wear matching stuff? That's the only one I couldn't figure out until I finally figured it out. It's two for one sales. United threatens to kick off passengers who don't use headphones. Yeah, good. Oh, well that's because people are like listening to like loud YouTube videos right next to that. Bro, all over South America. Oh, really? It is. Scroll Instagram videos loudly. There's no even thought. We were on an overnight bus once, and there was a guy listening to like best Hollywood screams. And it was like, dude, we're sleeping. Oh, God. It's crazy.

1:56:59They just don't do it. And you want to be like, be quiet, but they're like, why? It's not part of our culture. It's like the Dominican pool hall. Yeah, exactly. This is how we do it. They're just used to chaos. It is weird that people get used to a certain amount of chaos. You know? And that's just normal. Yeah. New York is a normal jackhammer. It's like nothing. Nothing. Yeah, if you live in New York, you're totally accustomed to that. Oh, that was what I wanted to send you, Jamie. I don't know. Maybe I did send it to you the other day about where they figured out that there's a part of your brain that recognizes when birds aren't chirping.

1:57:30Ooh. And you kind of freak out. Because there should be some background noise. Well, if birds aren't chirping, it generally means that predators are nearby. Oh. Got it. Their brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now in this room, it's on. The circuit predates primates. Whoa. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continually as a predator detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of them, a million history. The forest full of song meant that no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning.

1:58:11Your nervous system never updated this software. A loud quiet. Yeah. You're like, something's up. The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants, six minutes of birdsong, dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check. Listen, I'm a hippie. I live in New York, and it's like I got to get to nature once in a while or I'll go crazy. That's why we have to protect the parks. That's why we have to protect the parks.

1:58:52We have to. Tomorrow. Tomorrow we're protecting the park. Tomorrow we are. Yes. It's back. Fucking this new guy. Listen, I'm a one-issue voter. I'm not a voter at all. But if I was. I'm not me. Yeah. And it's this. We saved another park, Elizabeth Street Gardens. Classical park. And they go, no. The other guy was like, we got to tear this down for low-income housing. And then Lower East Side and the East Village, that's a community-oriented place. They take care of shit on their own. Always have. It's a parks district because there were like these buildings collapsed. And they're just like, let's build it into parks.

1:59:25And then the city, when it came back, they're like, let's take those back. They're like, no, no, no. Fuck that. We made these. East River Park's massive. But Illinois Street Gardens is tiny. And the other guy, the black guy, whatever his name was. Eric Adams. Eric Adams. He goes, I'm going to protect that park. And I'm going to protect all the parks. The park's got nicer. They redid them all. And they painted all the benches. I liked them. And he goes, OK. So this community goes, we will find you another place to build low-income housing. And they did. They had this whole platform. And they go, we can do it on this block, down the street there and there.

1:59:58It's actually more houses than you were planning on building. OK. and now this fucking new guy goes no we're gonna raise that to the ground what? and they're like no no we did it we found another place they keep trying to get him to like just say you're gonna protect it and he's pretty much like I won't Elizabeth Street Gardens is fucking gone if I have my say really? and they're like dude come on you're supposed to be of the people again it's single issue voter I don't know about the rest you gotta protect that park so do you think that there's some sort of a financial interest? Someone's always getting this.

2:00:33Someone's always getting that. But you would not think it would be him. He's a democratic socialist. There's a non-capitalist reason why green spaces are important. It doesn't bring in money. They try to fuck up with this one. Central Park. They try to fuck this one up. Zilker? Yeah, with underground garages and stuff and totally redoing it. The people won, so it didn't happen. But there is a thing that helps all of our level of life, level of joy. Central Park is a genius idea. They would never do that now if it wasn't already done. We were talking about this with Brian Simpson. I was like, if I lived in New York City, if something happened and I had to do JRE from New York City, I would have to live near the park.

2:01:13Because I would have to have my dog. I'm not going to get rid of my dog. So I'd have to take him. I just have to have a place where I 100 % were able to take. I'd have a routine where I'm taking him to the park every day. Central Park rules. and you see somebody playing saxophone and you feel like you're in a Woody Allen movie. Bro, Central Park's incredible. It's so big, too. It's so big. When you stay in a hotel that looks over the park, you really get a sense of the scope, the size of it. Fly over it. The scale of it is incredible. It's so... And by the way, they would love to sell that off.

2:01:45Oh, yeah. And just start stacking it up, make it look like China, you know, like one of those big cities that they have over there. You need green spaces. They are important to our way of life. Yeah. It's good for your dome, obviously. It's good for the fucking mind. Yeah, it's healthy. But even Central Park, it's like it's not as good as like real. Well, yeah, it's a park. I'll buy me two days of sanity. I got to get to the actual woods and then I get a week or two Central Park will balance you out. Yeah, it'll balance you out like it's way better than no. And it seems like people are cooler there.

2:02:15Like every time I've been in Central Park, people seem like a little nicer. Like if you run into people on Broadway, they don't seem as nice as people that you run into in Central Park. It's not this. There's also that thing with like, hey, no smoking in here. Like, I'm really sorry. And then you put it out and you're like, I'll light it up as soon as you're gone. You can't smoke in Central Park? Nothing. Really? You do. Weed. But cigarettes I get more mad at. But also like, yeah, if I got a cigar and I'm with a friend, I'm smoking. Yeah. Well, I could see how that would annoy people. Sure, but also chill.

2:02:46But you can walk down the street in New York and smoke a cigarette, right? Or joint, yeah. Right. Yeah. It's still weird to me when I see a black guy on a stoop rolling a joint and I'm like, what are you doing? It's legal now. You're going to go to jail. But it's right. I know. It's totally legal. Well, now it's different nationwide because Trump just changed it to Schedule 3. Again, this is something that Obama could have done. Biden could have done. Clinton could have done it. Trump could have done it. Yeah. And now it's Schedule 3, which is still not good. I mean, it should be just like alcohol.

2:03:15But at least it's getting close. It's getting close. Dude, I had moments out there of nature where you're in the middle of nowhere and you really do feel rejuvenated like that. Where you're like, you're not even, it's not even hiking culture. So it's like you're not passing anyone. Right. For hours and hours and hours. You're at peace. You're just at peace. And whatever that thing is that they've just discovered about birds, there's a similar thing that your body recognizes when you're actually in real nature. It feels different. There's no cell phone signal. You know anything about grounding?

2:03:46Yes. What's your take on it? Well, Huberman believes it's a real thing. And so I always trust Huberman because he's very objective about all this kind of stuff. electromagnetic waves coming off the ground that you need to get in touch with. It does feel good. When I take the dogs out in the yard and I walk around barefoot, it feels good. I mean, I'm just judging it based on how it makes me feel. It's like that word tree hugger got a bad rap, but it's like, it comes from like, touch that, they're in the ground, so you're connected to the ground. It probably comes from people that were tripping balls.

2:04:15Because if you're tripping balls, those trees hug you back. I've been there, yeah. Those trees hug you back. They talk to you. They're like, hello, Ari. You can feel the cells. I'm an oak tree. I've been here for 300 years. I've been here before this was America. Yeah, it's pretty wild. When I go to the mountains, especially like the elk hunting mountains, because it's so hard to get there. And when you get there, there's no cell phone service. And when you're up there, you feel different. You just feel different. You feel better. You really do. You feel more relaxed. Dude, my brain was firing in a way that it hadn't fired in so long.

2:04:51it was just like all the the shit holding you down just like pulled off and after not very much time it was like just thoughts creative thoughts were just like pouring out of me so you when the six months you were gone no um social media no social media i took i took ymh's on a piece of paper a couple people from ymh's um emails i got two months ahead on my ads and my podcast on you'd be tripping So I'm like, you guys are set for two months. You don't need me. And then after. So did you record a bunch of episodes in advance? A year's worth. To release them? Oh! I did my work. Oh my God. That's crazy.

2:05:32Yeah. They're all evergreen episodes. How did you do that? I, one, worked hard. Two, loved hearing about travel. I love it. Right. So like, it wasn't much work for me to come in and be like, tell me about Cambodia. Tell me about Thailand. Tell me about Taiwan. Tell me about, you know, Uruguay. Well, that's how I feel about podcasting in general. Yeah, you like it. You'll have here or there, like, this guy was sucked. I wish I should have stayed home. But generally, that's really interesting. So I love it, and I just got way ahead. It's funny when Danny Polaszczak, I put out an episode. He goes, did we do it like two years ago?

2:06:04And I'm like, it wasn't time yet. I don't know. Oh, wow. Or I'll save it for if a comic has a special. Like, let's just record it now. In nine months, you'll have a special. I'll put it out there. How many do you have banked? Through July, still. Whoa. Yeah. That's crazy. So how many did you do a week? Sometimes none. Sometimes like six or seven. I was very. Oh, really? You'd be tripping, dude. I see every mistake I made for the skeptic tank, and I was like, let's avoid that. Like what kind of mistakes are you making? So like minimum of effort on my part technologically. So why I'm interested is my Jamie.

2:06:36Right, right, right. Here's the footage. Handle. By the way, settle down because they're not. They're my version of Jamie. This is the only. This is the goat. Well, I have 15 people doing one Jamie job. Yeah. That's the problem. like when people talk about like who should i hire i'm like well i have one guy i don't know what to tell you you need a guy on the spectrum but yeah but i did i did that i just kept sometimes about two two a day for four straight days and any comic who goes hey i'm sorry i'm busy i'm like buddy let's reschedule this isn't supposed to be stressful right let's do it when you have time there's no yeah chill no big deal that's the way to do it and um and when you're ahead you can afford a week with nothing and it wasn't like i gotta find someone we gotta do this now yeah that's out yeah that's out all the music choices they used to make i'm like that's a lot of work yeah well the music thing is the problem is like you get flagged now it should be used to we used to be able to play music on youtube all the time and now everything gets flagged you got to be real careful we used to play songs almost every episode full song yeah when there was nothing when when the show made zero money west it was so fun you're actually making a fun thing it was so outlaw it's a little more corporate now which is sad but also fine it helps people a lot more now but man podcasting was just do whatever the fuck you want well we were at the early early days like when i started this thing it was 2009 it's almost 20 years old which is so nuts have you figured out a way to monetize it yet not yet i'm working on it there i was i think i'm gonna sell rubber pussies.

2:08:05You were for a bit. You were for a bit. That was my first sponsor. Only sponsor. I don't need another one. We're good. It was funny because Sam Harris was like one of his requests when he first did my podcast. Please don't mention pussies. He wouldn't let me do an ad for the fleshlight. I said, okay. Okay, it doesn't matter. It's not like it's paying a lot of money. It was just fun more than anything. Yeah, but so I would wait. So after two months, I go, hey, I need the next months of ads. And I would say one One day, I would just do all the ads and the bumpers. Like, this guy's got a new special.

2:08:37Here's his tour dates. I'd find a waterfall or something, and I would do it in a fun place. Oh, wow. Yeah, I was just like, let's do it fun. If I'm going to do remote, let's be remote. Yeah. How did you do it? Do you do it video as well? Yeah, iPhone. Jamie told me this a long time. My first trip to Southeast Asia, I was like, hey, I need a pocket camera. Like, what's the best? And he was like, bro, you're not going to want to hear this. It's the iPhone. Yeah. It's the best one. Or a Galaxy. Yeah. Like, any modern cell phone. Any modern cell phone, the video's fucking incredible. Stabilizers. Yeah, the video stabilization's amazing.

2:09:10And all you do is you set it up on a little tripod and it'll go for fucking hours. Yeah, so I'll put it on a tree far away. I did one for a Danny Brown episode in like Sucre, Bolivia, in front of the statue of Sucre. Oh, wow. And it's just like - You guys were in Bolivia? That was everywhere. Wow. Dude, I saw an inauguration for the first president they had in 20 years. Where? In Sucre. in Bolivia. Whoa. They had the old guy who was running things for 20 years. Okay. A crazy dude that everyone hated. He said farming is more important than industry here. So we should give the farmers two votes per person.

2:09:49And the cities get one. Now, they also run the media there. So everyone in the farmlands in the heartland, they didn't see any of the problems. Right. That's city shit. So they'll go, I don't know, everything on the radio says the guy's doing a great job. Let's vote him in again. He's doing great. I listen to the radio. The guy's doing a great job. And everyone in the city is like, oh, no, he's lying. So everything went to shit. 20 years. Like, well, let's turn on the radio again. Let's turn on, like, Trump news and see what Trump is saying about Trump. It's going to be pretty good. Right. Oh, yeah.

2:10:25There I am. Is this the video? Oh, wow. I pretend to be talking to my cell phone because it's so embarrassing. so I pretend to be talking my phone but I just have a cordless mic is Danny still sober I think he's back on we but like yeah he's off the alcohol was the issue yeah last time we did a podcast he got obliterated he's he's sober nice yeah good for him great Bolivia what is there like it was always Bolivian marching powder it was what when I was a kid what people would call cocaine interesting the salt flats were really cool there yeah just like miles and miles of salt fields Ooh. Oh, there's me and O 'Neal in Peru.

2:11:02Look at you guys with your stupid hats on. Yeah, I was just trying to find weird spots and like, I don't know, let's just film something. Why were you wearing those hats? It was Peru. Those are the alpaca hats that keep you warm. Oh, I went hunting. My first time hunting, I wore those hats. They're great. And Steve Ranallo was saying that's a very left wing hat. I'm like, why? Why? Why is it left wing? It's warm. Yeah, what? So I don't know about your hat. I'm like, what's wrong with my hat? Leave it alone. I'm about to kill something. Steve, chill. I'm about to murder something. I killed that deer with that fucking my left wing hat on.

2:11:33But that's all I would do. I'd just weigh in once in a while, get my month's worth of stuff, and then go back to disappearing. And I'm telling you, buddy, my brain was so alive. I would just, like, you just don't realize what you're dealing with responsibility-wise all the time. And then when you have none, it's like you just kind of be yourself. I came up with this whole, my storytelling shows up. I came up with this whole, like, how to frame it all, how to do everything. I had a vision of, like, this prologue that I want to bridge the gap. It's called The End. It's out now. RHP.com. And then did you film all that with your mom's house studios as well?

2:12:09Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. They might be the only group like that that's actually good. Tom was like, how much do you have? I'm like, I have about 80 % of it. He goes, I'll put in the rest. I'll supply all the people you need to make it happen. and then he's not a network he's Segura and he's a fucking dirtbag so he's like say whatever you want there's no censoring when it's Segura well it's also like Tom has made so much money that he's out he'll do whatever the fuck he wants you can't stop him he's going to do whatever he wants now oh nice look at all these episodes Miss Pat, The Stefano look at that Duncan did a great one Bobby, Shane, Shane, Bobby Kelly Big J Yeah, we made the show again.

2:12:53Nate Bargazzi. And then there's prologues. It's something I had a vision of this on that mushroom trip. Oh, wow. About how to frame what happened to this not happening and what is this thing now and how to go through it. And then I talked to a bunch of artists while I was gone and some made pictures. And this guy, William Child, he actually did a Danny Brown video. He's just, shit, I don't want to ruin this. Where'd you film these? The box in New York City. The place where Chappelle would have his comedian balls. Let's get that gay outfit. The gay outfit show is from, do you remember a show called This Is Not Happening?

2:13:26Yes. Completely, legally unrelated to this new show. You can say whatever you want, but I cannot. That was a comedian telling stories in a strip club. This is a strip club with a comedian telling stories. The first year, they go, hey, you got to wear the same outfit every day. And I go, no, that's fake. They go, no, but we got to mix and match days, so we got to do it. Oh, why? Is anybody gonna tune out because they see you have a different outfit on? No, it'll be like, it's weird, suddenly you're hosting a different thing. So I'd start wearing ridiculous suits I made in Hong Kong. Oh, yeah. And then my final year, I had this Indian outfit picked out that I went and sourced in LA and had this cool Indian outfit.

2:14:07All right, now it's cool. I thought it was gay. And I saved it for seven or eight years. But that show got taken away from me. I was like, if I ever do this again, I'm wearing this fucking outfit out of respect to overcoming. Those days were very fascinating. The days where Comedy Central was trying to force you into doing a Comedy Central special, but you had a deal with Netflix. And even though it was completely legal and contractually legal for you to do a comedy special with Netflix, Comedy Central was strong-arming you into doing it on Comedy Central and canceled your fucking show because you wouldn't do a special with them.

2:14:45So you had a successful show on Comedy Central. People want to know how gross Hollywood can get? Ari had a successful show that was doing very well on Comedy Central and they cancelled it because he wouldn't do a comedy special on Comedy Central it was one of the early ones, paid for my own special and then I said I gotta figure out where it's going and they go it should be here and I go no I don't think it should it's also it was a double special it needs to be on a streamer more than a network and I was like no I'm going to Netflix And yeah, and then they were like, let's go blackmail then. It's crazy.

2:15:21I get it from their perspective. No, I don't. They're like, hey, we can't be losing power. And they never really, they always thought it was an open mic. But it was not losing power because the reality is that would just bring more people to the comedy century show. And Netflix back then was so much bigger to do a special. When I did that 2017 special on Netflix, I was the mayor of New York for like three weeks. Everywhere I'd go, I'd bike at a red light, three people would recognize you. It was a different time for specials then. and of course that was the biggest thing I'm gonna do that it's still pretty big but not Jew they picked it up

2:15:59people ask me with this show why didn't you go to Netflix I'm like dude networks killed me not only that I'd rather just go straight to the people why do it there's no reason to at this point especially like Comedy Central doesn't even exist anymore that's what's nuts It was a wild time. You said you would host for free. Yeah. I was on the phone with you crying. I was like hearing it that they're taking away from in the moment. I said, tell them I will host it for free. Because you were going to take out a loan to pay off all the crew. Because all the crew had signed on for X amount of episodes and it was going to cost them money.

2:16:36And you were like, I'm trying to figure out a way to keep us on the air. I go, tell Comedy Central I will host it for free. You were already, it was 2017. This podcast was already going. Oh, yeah. It was huge by then. But it was number one in 2019 is when it started being number one. But it was probably top four. You had pedigree on the show. You've done two stories. One you liked, one you hated. But the one you liked was a great story. That's a great one. That's a great story. Dotham, Alabama. Yeah. And I was like, oh, he's part of the show. This kind of goes. If someone's got to do it, let's do it for free.

2:17:11You're saving money and getting a much bigger host. They just wanted to fuck you. they just wanted to fuck anyone I suggested they said no I said Ali Sadiq should do it they said no at least they went with Roy Roy was really good but it only lasted like a little bit it was over after that but that show could have gone on a long fucking time it was such a great idea it was great execution it was fun it was real in a moment where alt comedy and the ironic distance was getting bigger yeah this was a more real thing yeah And people responded to it. And listen. But it just shows you the grossness of the business sometimes when these people who are just gatekeeping executive assholes.

2:17:52They're really saying, you're not on the list. Yeah. And they don't exist anymore. That's what's most amazing. Well, that's a cool thing. You can go to Tom. You can go to a guy like that or whatever. And he goes, no, I love the show. It made me bigger. Let's get it going again. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also like nine years later, like the internet has completely taken over. Like it has drowned out all of those comedy networks. They don't exist anymore. Yeah. You need some level of curation or you're lost in a sea of content sometimes. But there's people you can trust. You know, if you want meditation, that guy, Sam Harris, is that the meditation guy?

2:18:33You know, whatever he's going to say, you're probably going to believe it. Meditation was, you know. If you need some to hear an MMA fighter like really speaking that this is a great source for that this podcast She needs some curator, but I mean like I'm the guy I'm not yeah, but even show I'll make it quality. I'll make it look right. You can always trust me to do that So come to me for that show was the coolest stand-up show of all time. It was a fun show It was a really good show and it was a show that I remember you created from scratch I remember when you were doing it at the lab, at the improv, that tiny little room.

2:19:07You were doing it for free. And I was like, what are you doing? Basically the same way that you were talking to me about my podcast. Like, what are you doing? That's what you were saying. What are you doing, dude? A fucking show for 20 people? I'm like, this is so weird. I'm like, Ari's telling stories. But I thought about it. I was like, it's probably a good idea to develop material that way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, a lot of people was like, hey, we're doing a show. It's about heartbreak this week or this month or it's about drugs or whatever. and they go, all right, let me, I have a story. Let me get all my thoughts down, you know, all the metaphors and stuff, the flowery stuff you put on them that Jay is so good at and stuff.

2:19:41But, like, then they became a lot of people. It's like, that's my closer and my special now. I had no bit. I thought of it because of this. It became, you know, the biggest thing I had in my act. Isn't that nuts? It's nuts. Yeah. Because I loved giving people an excuse to, like, write something. It was also such a fun show because it was comedy outside of, like, regular stand-up. it was like another avenue and and it was a really fun thing to do you know and the thing about like the gatekeeping of it is like those people had nothing to do with it and they had all the power and by do by just exercising it in that way and then everybody talking about how gross it was nobody ever trusted them again and the thing is some of the stuff they do though like we need some diversity and and it'd be like i don't think you're wrong i think you don't want it to be all the same thing but there's something me and eric abrams came up with is it's a diversity of experience yeah is bigger two white dudes is not what we're talking about if it's like ali sadiq's life closer to gary owens life than mine you know gary owens and ali are closer to each other than me or gary you know right right right so that's what i want different whatever and they have these checklists you would go to in la here are the gays get one of these seven here are the black and it was like well I'm not gonna fuck up my product no way at the end of the day it has to be a meritocracy so then we would just work harder which a lot of people aren't willing to do and it's like well there's a great black woman in Indianapolis she's not in LA or New York but let's get her she has great stories there's a great black comic in Houston and he has these great stories about prison let's get him they're not on these lists you just gotta work a little harder to make your shit You know it's like Seinfeld letting everybody else shine right but it's like forced diversity without the merit without good quality Comedy, yeah, yeah, but it's just Gatekeepers fuck themselves really because now that we don't need them anymore like they they're what do those people do?

2:21:43Well, the people that were running Comedy Central. What do they do now? There's no jobs Well, the thing is with like with like cabs overstepping that made uber possible. Yeah, so Let's focus on the positive of this. And then the Uber people kept robbing and murdering people. So they just got Waymo's. Yeah, exactly. They'll be gone too. Take advantage. Yep. Yep. How many coke addicts do you need driving? You're like, bro, that's a red light. Please stop. I mean, they barely fucking vet those people. Yeah. But the cool thing is, because it's easier to film, and because I have friends that are fucking billionaires, you know, it's like, we can actually get it done now.

2:22:20It's a golden age for this. It is. To be able to make a TV show level thing on our own. Well, look at even movies like Theo and David Spade made a fucking movie. On their own. And they self-financed it. And it's doing well. They go, we know how much it's going to cost. We'll do it. We're rich. It's incredible. Yeah. It's a cool time. I mean, we made our budget back day one. That's awesome. On a massive project. Flying in 23 comics. You know, putting them all up. Paying them all. That's amazing. They're cutting in on the shares. We've never done that before. so are you gonna do that in the next season as well i don't know if it's gonna be a next season a lot of this was just a there was a hole in my in my resume where the show didn't end on the terms it should have ended on and that's why it's called the end yeah yeah it's a play on words for story titles too you know like the end but like i like so i just had to get it done right nice Nice.

2:23:14And then all these huge, like Shane Gillis, who when he was an open mic-er, was like, all these guys were like, I want to eventually do that show. Yeah. And the show went away. In the interim, he's like supplanting the Philadelphia 76ers so he can do comedy, you know? But he's like, I'd love to do that show. Dude, I had four people take private jets to come do the show. That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. Fuck yeah, dude. I'm so happy with it. It came out right. Everyone who's seen it is like, oh, this is like not just something you did. This is like a TV show. Yeah. It's like, I'm so happy.

2:23:49That's awesome. Yeah. I love it. I'm so happy to hear that, dude. That's great. And that prologue that that guy did, I'll send you a$2 off.

2:24:03I'll just pay. Yeah. We said we had to figure out a way. Me and O 'Neal and Abrams, we all were like writing it. We're like, I have to figure out a way to bridge the gap of this not happening to the end and what happened and everything without being too woe is me. And so we got this claymation guy who was like, yeah, let's just fill it with fucking punchlines. So it doesn't become that like, I love Schultz, but a little like, they couldn't keep us down. I'm like, I don't want to do any of that. I don't want to be earnest. So let's bridge the gap without ever being serious. Oh, nice. Yeah. So it was like a three minute prologue you get for free.

2:24:39Yeah. Yeah. That's William Child. That's Tim Key's video. Oh, wow. How did they do that? Did they use real claymation? Oh, yeah, dude. In a time of AI where everyone's doing the easy stuff, he is painstakingly, it takes him a day to build each one of those characters. That's three-day work. And then the backdrop takes another day or two. And how long does it take to actually do the animation? A long time. All day long. So if you have notes, you're like, dude, I need those notes before I start filming. this is click, move, click, move, click, move you gotta go back and erase the stuff the wires and shit too are they wires or just moving the clay?

2:25:15some of it has to be held up because clay would fall well there's wires in the arms you don't necessarily have to have wires to make it stand what is going on with his tits? what's in that bowl? he's making a he's like a turd He did a Trippie Red video that's really good. That's awesome, dude. That's cool that people are still doing stuff like that. Like the old school, the way they did King Kong. Well, here's what I noticed, too. When you start talking to some of these artists, you know, like some of my stage designs and stuff like that. Like for American Sweetheart, what I had was like this idea that like, what if we left society?

2:25:53How long till nature would just take back over? And like, let's do that with plants. And then the first ones are like so expensive. They're like, oh, I can't. Okay, I got to rethink. I can't that's far far out of the I'll spend a lot but not that much out of the budget but then you tell these people like well here's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to say you say the whole thing like here's what I'm trying to get across here's what I'm trying to say like we're too caught up in the news and stuff and if we all just like whatever and then they go fuck dude that's a good okay we can do it at cost and then him Anthony Shepard they were both like these great artists they were like fuck they stole your fucking show from you hold on that's fucking bullshit i can bring my cost way down let's we can do this oh still very expensive but they're like i'm gonna be part of something that's dope you know if tarantino was like you want to hold a boom mic i'm like yes i would do that for you to be part of something yeah there we go that's fucking dope dude it's what william child that's his instagram account whoa that's me look at you deliver me a message oh you're an asshole okay you know that is tell me that i was like that dude that's real february 18th 2010 the show was born in the third most vapid city in america me and six comedians telling stories about psychedelic drugs only 14 people showed up but god damn it was the best show i'd ever seen february that's awesome a lot of hard work completely on my own with help from no one i got a tv deal and that helped launch the careers of so many great comics fat ones who lost weight fat ones who somehow keep getting fat go on to normalize child molestation and then with a lot of hard and ending that's awesome wait wait watch this part you're in it hold on I mean that might have been the drugs

2:27:51Wait watch right after this hold on

2:27:56I mean it might have been the drugs There's only clips of it I guess there's a there's a moment after I go I realized I had to be a man and not just a man Who would go on to tap Shane Gillis twice with witnesses by the way and then to you and Norman raise your hand I was like, I witnessed it. I'm like, let's just have some fun, dude. Let's have some fun. I got Duncan to do a theme song on the way out of his episode. Oh, really? His story is about taking his kids to a Taylor Swift concert film and how awful it is. He thinks she's a 15 ,000-year-old vampire.

2:28:34He has this long song. He goes, you can see it. She's feeding off them. She gets bigger as they start cheering. It's so funny. And it's Duncan. He's so out there. And I'm like, hey, Duncan, he does this song. He breaks down every one of her songs. He goes, it's just this. And I was like, you know those crazy garage band songs you've been making for 25 plus years? You want to do the theme song just for that episode? And he goes, yeah, 100%. So it's this demonic song about being a 15 ,000-year-old vampire. It's a Taylor Swift original song. And you don't have to okay it with a network. You're like, let's just do it.

2:29:09I was like, what do you need is your credit? He made up some crazy credit for his band. That's awesome. That's amazing. Nobody's embraced that kind of AI technology more than Duncan. He's always sending me things that he's working on. Always. He does it all day long. Those garage band songs he used to make, it was just him coming up with crazy weird sounds. A long time ago. Yeah. The Sunset Days. Yeah. It was like, oh my God. Yeah. That's awesome, dude. Okay, so it's available on ari-shafir.com. ari-shafir.com. Each episode is$5.99. What happened to ari-the-great.com? It went away. People didn't know how to find it.

2:29:42but is it still there? Like if you go to ariathegreat.com does it take you to ariashafira.com? If I know anything about me there's no way I'm going to pay those fees every year. If I know anything about me and my people I doubt I still have that. All right. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I let the YMH staff I had a production card you know you need a production card at the end. One of them says YMH then Eric Abrams directed his and I was like the one I was using was just a still frame from this not happening just my dick pixelated And I was like, put my thing on that. I hate the, I'm not a producer, whatever.

2:30:16Right. And I didn't have it. And then we couldn't use anything with this not happening. So it's like, don't. And I was like, fuck, I need another one. I'm off in the jungle. So I told YMH, I was like, guys, you guys are all fucking idiots. Make me whatever production card you want and I will use it. And then they were like, we're going to make seven. I was like, all right. And I've seen a few of them and they're all so retarded. They're all so, one of them is me bringing a giant coin out of my fucking giant nose. It's just so retarded. Oh, I love working with people I like. Yeah, Tom's awesome.

2:30:48It's nice having a guy like that that's like really just acquired an enormous amount of funds. Yeah. And does whatever the fuck he wants. Fun funds. Yeah. Yeah. And his Netflix show was fucking great. Oh, it's so out there. It's so crazy. But it's like perfect for him. It's like his mind. Alright, let's wrap this bitch up. Tomorrow, Protect Our Parks. First Protect Our Parks in quite sometime dude i would get recognized here or there when i was traveling not much i'll tell you a couple things i saw one people know shane gill is his name except in brazil and then they only know ralphie bastos his name oh really that's the only comic they've ever heard of he's a big he's a big comic yeah i had him on the show really yeah he's great good dude but i'll tell you this though there's a lot of business and shit that gets caught up in this who's interviewing which politician and oh this guy's doing this or he's friends with this guy and all the money and everything and like am I doing well enough people try to do that keep up game this guy's getting more views on his clips I should start doing shorter stuff um anyone I told that didn't recognize me when it came up what my job was first I had to try to avoid it but if I kept like no no for real what do you do I'm like all right well I'm a I'm a stand-up comedian I mean this is 10 for 10 countries everybody would be like what what do you mean I'm like, yeah, I'm a stand-up comedian.

2:32:09And they go, like, as a hobby? I'm like, no, as a living. They're like, what? Grandma, come here. This guy does stand up. Like, what do you mean with a microphone? I'm like, yeah. He goes, that's so cool. That's so cool. I'm like, where? Just in New York? I'm like, and the country, and the world, really. Like, what? You pay your rent on this? I'm like, yeah. And then some. Like, no fucking way. They couldn't get over how cool it was, and they didn't know if I'm successful or not. They just know I do this. bro we have the coolest job and i've tested this in the world there's no cooler job you could tell people that they'll be like that reaction they start smiling just at the idea of the job can actually exist wow and that's what we do and the high level ones and the low level we're all doing the same shit we're all just coming up with a better dick joke to just entertain some strangers even gay ian even gay fucking ian blowing a dude and they go oh i just got an idea for a bit that's cool let me hold on I gotta write this down hold on I'll jerk you while I write it down oh that's awesome yeah it's an amazing job it's kind of incredible we live a very blessed life for sure yeah it's just yeah it's just I don't know I mean yeah it's fun to just focus on some positives and realize the negatives are nothing compared to the positives keeping up with the Joneses stuff and the paying attention to the numbers I mean obviously that's easy for me to say that you shouldn't do it, but you shouldn't do it.

2:33:32Well, there's this thing. Just concentrate on what you're doing and enjoy it. I was talking to Maddie Wiener, it's a really funny comic, and she was like, you know, all these people, and everybody really likes, she's going to be a star. And she was like, all these people are getting clips, these crowd works. I don't do crowd work. And it was like, well, then you shouldn't do those clips. Your road's just going to be a little longer than them, but don't think about it like that. Like, just do the shit you're good at. Yeah. You know? And then eventually you'll get found out. I mean, just do whatever you do.

2:34:00Whatever you want to do, but don't let them decide, oh, I need to write an under 60 second bit. It's got to have a punchline at 59 seconds or I can't put it on YouTube shorts. Like that's a dumb way to be building your stuff. Absolutely. Big J does kind of crowd work that no one's ever done. Long form crowd work. Yeah. But it's not clip worthy. He's also been doing it for so long and he has that kind of personality and like easygoing style that makes it work. You see Big J at like when somebody heckles him, like an angry heckle, not just like I'm going to be part of it. They're like, you fucking suck.

2:34:35He doesn't. I get worked up. He just goes, oh, what was it that you don't like? Like almost as if he's on mushrooms. He's like, no, I could see that. But what specifically? I just want to know. He's an easygoing guy. Yeah. He's just like, let's mind this for laughs. I'm like I caught up screaming. Well, he's also done so many shows in New York where that must happen so often. You develop strategies. You got practice at it. Big Jay, my co-host of Legion of Skanks. All right. That's right. You're back. Legion of Skanks. You're running it now that Dave Smith has decided to be a political commentator.

2:35:05Well, it's three for life. I'm not running it. I'm just part of it. No, no, no. You're running it. Print it. Joke world. I heard that you were the leader of the Legion of Skanks. I am. The leader of Skanks. Well, I'm the president. In the past, you ran for president. I think you won. I think. Yeah, I won. dude one day on one of these podcasts we got to talk about the presidential election it was a three month process of just non-stop creativity and stupidity we'll talk about it tomorrow okay oh shame is involved yeah she's my vice president there you go all right let's wrap this up i love you i love you too it's great to see you back yeah you too dude there's a bunch of times where i thought about you out there where i'm like you would love naska lines was one i'm Joe Rogan would love.

2:35:47The Mayan temples, you would love it. I went to Chichen Itza once, way back in the early days. El Salvador you would have loved? I'm sure. Just for the stuff you were into. There was so much. Anyway, I love you, buddy. I love you too. Jamie, I love you as well. We love you, Jamie. Bye.

2:36:15Thank you.