Tim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #156
the following is a conversation with tim dillon a stand-up comedian who is fearless in challenging the norms of modern day's social and political discourse quick mention of our sponsors netsuite business management software athletic greens all-in-one nutrition drink magic spoon low carb cereal better help online therapy and rev special tech service so the choice is business health sanity or transcripts choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount at the support this podcast as a side note let me say that i will continue talking to scientists engineers historians mathematicians and so on but i will also talk to the people who jack kerouac called the mad ones in his book on the road that is one of my favorite books he wrote the only people for me are the mad ones the ones who are mad to live mad to talk mad to be saved desirous of everything at the same time the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble in that i have no idea how they will turn out but i'm willing to risk it for a chance at a bit of an adventure and i'm happy and honored that tim this time wanted to take a chance as well if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it up a podcast follow on spotify support it on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with tim dillon what would you like your tombstone to read it's a good way to summarize the uh essence of a human being i would like it to say this has not been paid for and i want i want my my living relatives to struggle to to pay for it and i think i would like them to be hounded every day i would like people to call and go listen we don't want to ever excavate a body but we will because this has not been paid for i i love the idea of leaving the world like debt leaving the world in in lots of debt that other people have to deal with yeah and i i know people that have done that and i know people that have been in families where that's happened where someone has to sit and and just curse the sky because they don't have a physical person anymore to be angry at and they but they still have to deal with the decisions that person made and that's deeply tragic but that's always struck me as very funny well it's the kind of immortality the debt because you can if the debt lasts for a long time the anger lasts for a long time and then you're now immortal in the minds of many you arouse emotion in the minds of many my mother's best friend in the town i grew up and her husband shot himself in the the driveway and my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve because he owed so much money she would come over and go i hate him i fucking hate him and it was just such an interesting thing to see somebody who and her kids ended up getting angry at her for that because they didn't understand why she would hate a guy who was clearly you know suffering and but she goes he took the selfish way out he fucked us and it was always interesting for me to uh just remember that like you can leave earth and still be a problem [Laughter] that's kind of a special person so that's i think what i'd like my tombstone to read yeah there's a there's a show called louie with lucy canada i'm aware of that there's this moment i think where an old guy's talking to louie about the best part about love is after you break up and it's remembering that like remembering the good times and feeling that loss the pain of that loss the worst part about love is when you no longer feel that pain the pain of losing somebody lasts longer is more intense and lasts longer than the actual love so his argument was like the pain is the re is what love really is wow in the same way that anger your tombstone would arouse is will last longer and that's that's deeply like a human thing like why do we attach happiness to the way we should remember others it could be just anger i know so many people who will have deeply complicated feelings when i i you know i did drugs for many years so and i i spent time with some wild people and their parents were also wild people and some of their parents have done crazy things to them and you know have created situations that were not uh productive for child rearing yeah and so i know that when those people die it's going to be a very mixed bag like there's going to be a lot of complex emotions like hey we loved that guy but also when we look back uh he was a horrible father a horrible husband but he was fun and and and we don't put enough stock in that but that will be a push and pull yeah and i'll be the one kind of bringing up like hey he was a lot of fun yeah he was a lot remember when he he stuck us you know one of the things this particular person i'm talking about we were we were at a bar me and my friend were there we're having dinner and his father who was you know an alcoholic and a a you know a guy that would go out every night and didn't work you know refused to work would lie and say he was going to work and then go to a bar i mean just a fun person and uh he he we were sitting at this bar restaurant and the bartender we see his father walk up to the bartender and say pointed us pointed our table and go and put the thumbs up and the bartender nodded and then the father walked over to our table and he said listen i just want to let you know i just bought you dinner and i looked at his son i said he's a pretty good guy and then he he climbed over the little fence down to the water and got his little boat it was a little cigarette boat and he just drove away and then about an hour later we uh we went we said i think uh that guy took care of the bill but she said well go talk to the bartender so we just walked to the bartender and he goes he handed us a bill and the bill was for like a thousand dollars and we said wait a minute what the hell is going on and he goes the guy that left an hour ago said you were going to take care of his bill he's been drinking here all week and we go what are you talking about and he goes remember he pointed at you he put the thumbs up and you guys waved yeah you remember that and the guy and we went yeah and i just looked at my friends my friend and i went you know your dad is just we're gonna remember him for all kinds of reasons but to you he was fun he was a lot of fun he wasn't my dad but i spent a lot of time with him i was in two boating accidents with him you know two boating accidents all involved drugs yes he was usually alcohol was involved when he left his house um and when he was at home as well but i was in two boating accidents and do you know how fun someone has to be to get in a second boating accident do you know what a good time someone has to be yeah to get in a boat with them after you've already gotten in one wreck never get full to get what was that line george bush never get fooled again right yeah so if you're getting fooled again you know there's a reason for it but he was he was a fun guy he did have a death wish the second boating accident he grabbed me and said you can't hang out with me anymore and i said why he goes i'm trying to kill myself and i was like oh and then i understood that like oh the fun under the fun lived a very destructive person who not only was destructive but wanted to die so speaking of fun people that want to die i i don't know if you're we can go hunter s thompson but uh charles bukowski i don't know if you're aware of the guy i'm aware of i'm sure i've read some stuff so his tombstone says i just want to ask you a question about it his uh tombstone says don't try interesting what do you think about that advice as a way to approach life i i think for many people it's a good good advice uh because the people that are gonna try will do anyway and the people that need to be told there's a whole cottage industry now of motivational speakers and life coaches and gurus uh that tell people uh that they all have to own their own business and be their own boss and be a disrupter and get into industries you know that's incredibly unrealistic for most people most people are not suited for that and you know the gary vee's in the world that tell everybody that they should just hustle and grind and hustle and grind they're very light on the specifics of what they should actually do um yeah i think a lot of people that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people i think i think my generation got horrible advice from our our parents from our teachers and that advice was follow your dreams uh and nobody and that was it by the way there was no like what are your dreams are they realistic what happens when they don't work out will your dreams make you happy are your dreams real do they exist on earth yeah can you follow anybody will follow your dreams you can be anything you want to be horrible advice horrible advice worst advice you could ever give a generation of people really truly i mean think about think about it if you were talking to somebody and you were trying to make them succeed are there any two uh worse pieces of advice to give them then follow your dreams and you can be anything you want to be those to me are the two most destructive pieces of information i've ever heard so let me uh push back because oh that's fair this is many people do so uh yeah this is like a rigorous journalistic interview larry king by the way passed away today so i'm i'm taking over the it's very sad i'm carrying the very sad let's see king yeah what was i even gonna say oh let me push back on the follow your dream thing is i come from an immigrant family where i was always working extremely hard at stuff like in in a stupid way i would i love there's something about me that loves hitting my head against the wall over and over and over until either my head breaks or the wall breaks just like i love that dedication for no purpose whatsoever it's like the mouse that's stuck in a cage or whatever and no and everybody always told me my family the people around me to sort of uh the epitome of what i could achieve is to be kind of a stable job you know the the old like lawyer doctor in my case it's like scientists and so on but i had these dreams had this fire you know about i love robots and that nobody ever gave me permission to pursue those dreams i know you're supposed to grab it yourself nobody's supposed to give you permission but there's something about just people saying you know fuck what everyone else thinks like giving you permission a parent or somebody like that saying do your own thing go become an actor go become like do the crazy thing you're not supposed to do an artist go build a company quit school all that kind of stuff yes sure that's to push back against the uh follow your dreams as advice in mass if you were to look at in mass if you were to look at statistically how few people that works out for i'm just no let's be very honest this is very true be very honest so i mean like yeah if you're gonna go be an act hey i was broke for 10 years before i became a before i was making money as a comedian i get it i didn't need gary vaynerchuk to tell me to follow my thing right and here's the other thing i was kind of funny and like i was kind of a lot of things were in my favor of being a comedian right i had this kind of crazy fucked up life i had a lot of stories i had exhausted or i was willing to fail i had failed before i was broke i didn't care about being broke i knew how to be broke um i had i was shameless to to a degree i was i would get on a stage night after night and be laughed at i would uh i had a high threshold for being embarrassed i had a high threshold for people thinking that i was a scumbag right and showing up at family parties and being like yeah i still really don't have a job and i'm just i work at comedy clubs kind of and i get booked when i can um and i i i was you know suited for it there's this idea that people can just roam around the world injecting themselves into other things they have no aptitude for at all and will that to happen a small percentage of people might be able to do that but the vast majority of people have something they might key into that they're meant to do like you loved robots you love technology and you found a place in that world where you thrive but i think many people a lot of people love robots right so a lot of people think everything you do is interesting i think your shit is fascinating i i watch you or podcast and i think it's very interesting i have no place in your world you know what i mean i have no place in that world i i don't like remedial math i don't like community college math i think it's a waste of my time what do you think about robot would you ever buy a robot for your home yes what will it do i'll be a companion a friend oh yeah i mean i would like to start replacing friends and family with robots immediately okay i mean truly truly i mean i'm not even kidding like i would like to have a thanksgiving with four robots i'm i'm dead serious well are they interqueuing on like uh do the role are the robots when do the robots start going crazy that's my question is like how long do the robots live with me before they are also a problem and i gotta replace them you know what i mean you're gonna indoctrinate the wrong is my the robot's gonna call me like my aunt does and talk about coronavirus for an hour every morning and tell me everyone in america who's died of coronavirus one of the things i enjoy in life is how terrified uh people like you i'm a huge fan by the way get a robot well i am i'm concerned about ai like completely getting rid of the need for human beings because human beings i mean you go out in the street and you go so few of these people are necessary even now even now you look at people and you go they're hanging on by a thread right and you can just imagine how many jobs are going to get replaced how many industries are going to be completely remade with ai and the pace of change worries me a little bit because we do a very bad job in this country of mitigation when we have problems we don't do a great job we did a not great job with kovid right we don't do a good job it's just something we don't do well we kind of we're good in booms and busts we're good when it's good and we're actually we kind of know how to kind of like hey we're bottomed out we're like we're like a gambling addict in this country we like we know what it feels like to be outside of an otb at 9am drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes going i'm going to build it back and we know what it's like to win but tru anything in between it seems not that great so to me it feels like are we going to be able to like help people that are displaced and that have their jobs taken by i mean do you do you not fear sort of an uh a world where you have a lot of you know artificial intelligence replacing workers and then what happens there's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence one of them is yes displacement of jobs workers that's technology in general that's just uh any kind of new innovations displaced jobs i'm less worried about that i'm more worried about other impacts of artificial intelligence for example the nature of our discourse like social the effects of algorithms on the way we communicate with each other the spread of information uh what that information looks like the creation of silos all that kind of stuff i think that would just make worse the effects that the displacement of jobs uh has i think ultimately i have a hope that technology creates more opportunities than it destroys i hope so too so in that sense ai to me is uh an exciting possibility but you know the challenges this world presents will create divisions will create chaos and so on so i'm more focused on the way we deal as a society with that chaos the way we talk to each other that's huge creating the platform that's healthy for that now as a as a comedian creator whatever you want to call it people that put out content uh the gatekeepers are now algorithmic right so they are kind of almost ai already so if you are a person that puts out you know youtube videos podcasts uh whatever you're doing um you are it used to be a guy in the back of the room with a cigar saying i like you or get him out of here now it's it's an algorithm you barely understand like i talk i talk to people at youtube but i don't know if they understand right the algorithm they don't they don't that's fascinating yeah it's fascinating because i speak to people at youtube and i go hey man what's going on here one of my episode titles of my podcast was called knife fight in malibu it was about real estate and and it was because a realtor in malibu i was trying to get a summer rental which i can't really afford but i don't i don't think that's a huge problem you know i've followed my dreams so i called a realtor and she said listen she goes i don't know what the government's saying yeah but she goes it's a real night fight out here you know an old grizzled woman real realtor canned skin sig out the mouth driving a porsche you know yeah it's a real knife fight out here you know her entire life had become real estate her soul had been hollowed out her kids hate her you know no one's made her common years but it's just she just loves heating it's fun floors fun yeah she's a demon from hell and we need them truly we're getting rid of them it's not good yeah and she goes a real knife fight out here so we put that in the episode title and of course i guess some algorithm thought that we were showing like people stabbing each other and wendy's and we we got like demonetized did we get demonetized we lost a lot of views because we were kicked out of whatever out like we're just kicked out yeah and i was asking youtube about it they were kind of understanding it but even the people that worked there didn't truly seem to understand the algorithm so can you explain to me how that works where they barely know what's going on no they do not understand the full dynamics of the the monster or the amazing thing that they've created it's the amount of content that's being created is larger than anyone understands like this is huge they can't deal with it the teams aren't large enough to deal with it there's like special cases so if you fall into the category a special case so we can maybe talk about that like a donald trump where you like actually have meetings about what to do with this particular account but everything outside of that is all algorithms they get uh reported by people and they get uh like if enough people report a particular video a particular tweet it get it rises up to where humans look over it but the the initial step of the reporting and the rising up to the human supervision is done by algorithm and they don't understand the dynamics of that because we're talking about billions of tweets we're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of video uploaded every day now the hilarity of it is that most of the youtube algorithm is based on the title that's crazy it's and the description is a small contribution in terms of filtering in terms of the knife fight situation right and that's all they can do they cannot they don't have algorithms at all that are able to process the content of the video so they try to also infer information based on if you're watching all these like q and on videos or something like that or flat earth videos and you also watch are really excitedly watching the whole night fight in uh malibu right video that says that increases the chance that the knife fight uh is uh a dangerous video for society or something interesting wow based on their contribution people are watching something because i watch q and on and flat earth videos to ridicule them right that you know what i mean i watch these videos and i make fun of them on my show yeah but what's interesting is if i then go watch something else i'm increasing the likelihood that that video is going to get looked at as potentially subversive or dangerous exactly that's why so they make decisions about who you are who you are as a human being as a watcher the visual user based on the clusters of videos you're in but those clusters are not manually determined they're they're automatically clustered that's so weird we have titles where they got upset about and i don't even understand yeah like we had a title that was so innocuous in my opinion and the title of the episode was called bomb disney world and i was asking people to consider bombing disney world and youtube got angry at that so you don't know why you can never understand who said disney world is the bomb right right right say it's just rearranging that's why i wasn't gonna do it but i was saying let's start thinking about yeah plans to do like not let's do it like but let's let's get in the mind let's change the conversation yeah i think it's very interesting because as a comedian you don't want to live in that world of worrying about algorithms you don't want to worry about the platforming and shadow banning i mean all these conversations that i've had with other comedians about shadow banning i mean it's hilarious we all call each other i think i'm being shadow band are you being shadow band and nobody knew what that word was a month ago i mean a year ago but everyone now is convinced that everything they do that isn't succeeding is being shadowed yeah so it's this new paranoia yeah this algorithmic paranoia now that we all kind of have because there are genuine instances of people being taken out of an algorithm you know rightly or wrongly for whatever however you want to believe but then there are also things that just don't perform as well for a myriad of reasons and and then we're all saying like well they're against me they're shutting me down and you don't know if that's true or not you know what do you think about this moment in history which was uh really troubling to me we could talk about several troubling aspects but one is amazon removing parlor from aws to me that was the most clearly troubling it felt like it created a more dangerous world when the infrastructure on which you have competing uh medium of communications now puts its finger on the scale now influences who wins and who loses absolutely you're right and what you're always told is like if you don't like twitter create your own service right or if you don't like something you can do your own thing or if you are uh and and and basically because you know tech you have to be in business with one of five companies i think it's like amazon facebook google uh youtube and twitter whatever they're like you know i mean amazon puts everything on the cloud you know google and youtube it's it's all basically the seo and the advertising and you got to get your name out there you don't want to be buried and like because you have to do business with your it's a cartel of these companies you understand it better than anybody uh that you are prevented truly and i i think whatever you think about parlor whatever you think about what people are saying on parlor whatever you think about uh alex jones whatever you thought about milo yiannopoulos the state has an interest in and has always had an interest in in crushing dissent this is what the state has done this is how they you know retain the power they have by eliminating dissent where they can now because you don't have you know three broadcast networks anymore and a handful of newspapers that were all run by the way by people that had been either compromised or happily you know happily going with the program and you have this wild west of the internet people like me people that make i make funny content that i hope is funny but a lot of it is wild and crazy yeah i say a lot of wild and crazy things they're very funny i say a lot of wild and crazy things about powerful people yeah you mock the powerful in there by bringing them down a notch we'll probably talk about it but humor is one of the tools yeah to to uh to balance the power in society well sure or and to make people feel better about things and to you know whatever the case may be right that's my goal is to kind of like hey people have had a shitty day if this video or podcast makes you laugh that's great i think that it won't ever it was never going to stop at alex jones not that i think he should have been taking off everything the way he was but this keeps going until we have sanitized all of social media and they what they really want it to be is what instagram is kind of becoming which is a marketplace of you could just go and buy sneakers go buy a sweatshirt go buy jeans go buy this go buy that and the idea of the free exchange of information seems to be the old internet and it seems the new internet seems to be uh you know hyper and i'm a capitalist but this seems to be like hyper capitalist in the sense like they only want you consuming things and they don't want you thinking too much and that seems to be worth heading i've even seen that with instagram where it's like everything on instagram like buy a sweatshirt yeah you know and i'm like all right man hey man if i want a sweatshirt i'll get it like relax you know just every ad seems to be uh encouraging consumption but very few things seem geared towards hey let's have a dialogue or less and not that instagram was ever great for that but like very things are geared now towards content on instagram a lot of it seems geared towards shopping see i i don't know it's an interesting point i don't know if the consumerism that capitalism leads to is necessarily gets in the way of nuanced conversation i feel like you could still sell tim dillon sweatshirts and have a difficult nuanced conversation or mock the current president the previous president mock the powerful all that kind of stuff we try we try to balance that i mean we have sweatshirts we do would you they're not are they on sale now business uh we do a fake business sweatshirt with the enron logo fake business cause i like i do fake business all the time it would be nice if we talk about alex jones if you plug the sweatshirt during that conversation yeah we'll do that absolutely yeah um but what i tend to worry about with uh uh i i see social media and technology existing to flatten society it makes people very boring all of the experiences kids have right now are online many of their closest friendships are online their first relationships are online uh the culture is is very homogenous and that's i think it's eliminating characters it's eliminating interesting people it's making people into a.i uh all of their teachers yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah charles bukowski as well let's not get crazy it's not there yet right i mean the 75 000 dog is not doing anything you know so i mean we're not there yet listen i hate p i get why you like ai so much i hate people too and i'm very amenable to ai and i i i agree with you like listen i think the future we got to get everyone out of here i'm with you on that so don't think i'm i love people he's manipulating my mind that's why the flash of light in your eyes when you talked about that dog was so much more than any person and i get it by the way you're right i love people but if they're not excited if it can just use robots to kill most of them i think that would be good for society i'm with that too but uh i i think that social media flattens flattening the personalities personalities of people man and it's just you know when's the last time like i like the idea of like you know and i'm you know somebody showing up to uh you know high school like a backpack and taking out an old cd and being like hey man here's this band you've never heard of that i love or whatever you got to get into this and i'm like you know when i talk to young you know my friends that have younger brothers and everything every and i know that the dominant culture was always dominant i'm not an idiot but like i feel like it's harder to be unique and original now because so much of of what's promoted is just this way to kind of corral people into believing and thinking uh a certain set of ideals that's constantly shifting and evolving and people are just caught up in that and to me it gets very boring very quickly i hate being bored and that's what it is i don't know what to do with that because at the same time podcasts are really popular long-form podcasts really popular and people are people are hungry for those kinds of conversations there's a lot of dangerous ideas quote unquote flowing uh being spread around through podcasts meaning just like debates correct you know so that's still popular so i don't know what to i agree with you that gives me hope i guess i hope so too and like i said i i look at the negative a lot because that's what i usually make fun of but there's a lot of positive stuff happening too let's talk a bit about alex jones i so you've gotten a chance to talk to him while you were on the joe rogan experience i've been on alex's show i've talked i've had alex on my show i've talked to alex for three hours in front of i guess it was maybe like 15 million people right on joe's show it was a really wild conversation i think it was one of the coolest moments in broadcasting that i clearly that i've ever been a part of but i think it goes in the lexicon of like these are big podcasts like i think it's one of the biggest podcasts a week before the election alex jones i'm really grateful that joe gave me the opportunity to to be there and i it was just an amazing conversation to watch what was the shirt award uh it was a fun joke that no one in tech got because we all know how funny they are uh but the tech writers which is mainly do not agree with these things mainly blue hair and people whose you know goal in life is to find things to give them orgasms with you know without to dye your hair blue it's your choice yeah i respect it and but is it your choice but at the end of the day it's like you know all the tech writers like a lot of people just and i'm not i'm just maligning tech unfairly but a lot of people in that sense of humor were like he's advocating for human trafficking i'm like it's clearly a joke because we're coming off to believe all women yes we're coming off that and it's very funny to just say free just lane hey man believable women like it's just our politics and our and our public sphere is so schizophrenic right now that when you point that out people are going to be angry with you but that was a fun shirt to wear but on alex you know i was one of the people that found him really entertaining that that the same kind of thing as with bukowski these kinds of personalities that are wild crazy full of ideas uh they don't have to be grounded in truth at all or they can be grounded in truth a little bit it like he's just playing with ideas like a jazz musician screaming sometimes obviously he has some demons sometimes he's super angry for no reason whatsoever as some weird thing that he's constructed in his own head sometimes he's super loving and peaceful especially lately that i've heard him i don't know if he's seen with him with michael malus where he's doing uh like uh malice was doing like well telling alex jones i love you alex you know just this loving kind of softness and kindness underneath it all i don't know what to make of any of it and then there's this huge number of people that tell me that alex jones is a is dangerous for society right so what do you do with that do you think he's dangerous with society do you think he is one of the sort of entertaining personalities of our time that shouldn't be suppressed or somewhere in between i don't think that alex per se is dangerous for society i think the greater danger for society comes again from stifling all dissent right all like anybody with a voice that uses it that critiques the government and and putting all of those people in a category and getting rid of them is incredibly dangerous to me more so i think the biggest problem that alex has ever had was when he questioned the sandy hook shooting and that really was because it really is this identifiable incident that you can look at where it did get away from him and a lot of his fans who the people that are attracted to conspiracy stuff and i have some of those fans some of them are really smart people some of them are mentally unwell a lot of them happen to be mentally unwell so when you have a fan base of people where some of them are mentally unwell and you are questioning uh you know tragic events okay and alex was right about epstein he was right about a lot of things and he's got no credit for that and i understand that this he's sometimes when you write about 10 things and you're wrong about something and the thing you're wrong about is so offensive to people you're never going to get any credit for being right even though you were right more than when you were wrong the problem was a lot of his fans who were crazy stalked harassed these families and accused him of being actors and accused them of like faking their children's deaths it was just horrific experience and alex is tied to that and and he and and and you know how much he inspired that by what he did on his show i don't know because i haven't watched hours and hours of that particular thing like the whole sandy hook thing um if you listen to him he says i really covered it i kind of covered it moved on other people go no he spent a long time on it but that's the real danger of going into that territory over and over again going everything is is uh everything's a false flag or everything's fake i think i think alex has actually been kind of reasonable like he's resisted a lot of the the politics of like racial resentment on like the alt-right for example he's resisted that he's resisted the anti-semitic uh currents of a lot of that politics right he's resisted a lot of uh the the virulently anti-trans or anti-gay stuff now he does dip his tone in the water of like the culture wars of course he does and but i've never really seen him and i could be wrong about this embrace white nationalism or identitarianism i've never seen him really go anti-semitic i've never seen him take that route uh when i grew up and i would turn him on every now and then he was talking about nafta the wto he's talking about 911 he was talking about the the you know the world trade organizations and a lot of these big conferences whether it was the bilderberg group uh or whether it was uh bohemian grove which he infiltrated and he was talking about hey here are the most powerful people in the world here's what they're doing and here's how it affects you and that was interesting to me because it was never no one else was really talking about it except alex jones um occasionally art bell on on wabc you'd listen to him at night right um i think alex became very controversial when he decided to back donald trump and then he has a considerable following and a considerable audience that he was then able to marshal uh in the direction of supporting donald trump um that was when the spotlight because then he was talking to trump trump did his show alex jones just got bigger right and he blew up that's the term right you blew off like he he he had the good uh he put out the good hbo special whatever you want to call that he had a hit song yeah he blew up and then people started looking at the things that you know he was associated with the sandy hook thing is a blemish on his record i do believe he regrets it but again i do see the point of the families who are like dude fuck this guy forever this is the worst thing i ever went through it's a very tough um i understand the people that say that i understand and i and i understand the people that go when you coordinate when you have tech companies that act in a coordinated manner to just get rid of someone they don't have any way to defend themselves uh it's it's a little terrifying when you think about that power being abused and how wouldn't it be do you think he should not have been banned from all these platforms i i don't think i do think that if you are a private company right i do think and this is where you run into this this problem like i don't know if these tech companies were government utilities would that decrease people's likelihood of being banned i don't know right so i'm i'm i i understand the benefit of them being treated like public utilities and people thinking they have the right to a twitter i'm i've never i don't know i have very little confidence i mean the government's trying to roll out a vaccine in california and we vaccinated like five people i mean in terms of what we need to do in the state right so maybe if it was a government utility i i do think someone like alex jo like there should be some process so if you're gonna get rid of someone they should have a way to defend themselves there should be more democratic yeah uh process that you can go through than just being unilaterally taken off something but like then you run into the you're like am i going to say that everyone deserves no if you're threatening or harassing people or threatening to kill them publishing their private information if you're committing crimes on these platforms obviously the people that own these platforms are going to be like we're not going to allow this to happen so i understand that there is a line right there is some like people that say there's no line aren't really thinking like there is a line uh i just don't that line seems to be moving all the time and it seems to be a very hard thing to police but i don't think you can remove a guy off everything and then also bank accounts won't give him debit cards or credit cards i don't know if you talk to him about that but like you know there were financial institutions that were refusing to let him you know park his money there so i mean it really does get pretty terrifying pretty quickly um probably without any transparency from those companies so you're right there it feels like there should be a process of uh just having for him to defend himself i think there needs to be a process for people to defend themselves i i every day i wake up and i go can is something i said in a video gonna get taken out of context is somebody gonna get angry is somebody gonna be you know i say wild stuff because that's what makes me laugh that's what makes my friends laugh and that's what makes my audience laugh so i i never ever people you know whatever whatever political side you come down on i think if you make your living speaking it's always interesting to me if you are pro the d platforming is that's odd it's interesting to consider kind of a jury uh context to where you know there's transparency about why your video about bombing um disney world might be taken down like it it's uh it gets taken down and then there is uh it's almost like creating a little court case a mini court case and not in the legal sense but in the in the public sphere and then people should be able to have you know you pick representatives of our current society and have a discussion about that and make a real vote you know just have like jury locks himself up in a discussion that kind of that kind of process might be necessary right now what happens is twitter is completely first of all they're just mostly not aware of everything they're doing there's too much stuff but the stuff they're aware about they make the decision in closed doors uh the meetings and without any transparency right to the rest of the company actually but also transparency to uh the rest of the world and so and then all they say is we're doing we're making decisions because the people they use things like violence so violence equals bad and if this person is quote-unquote inciting violence therefore that gives us enough enough reason to ban them without any kind of process it's i mean it's interesting i'm i'm torn in the whole thing if it was indeed there's no transparency about it but if parlor was indeed inciting violence like if there was brewing of violence potential violence where you know thousands of people might uh die because of some kind of riot like the that's the scary thing about mob about when a lot of people get together right who are good people like legitimately good people that love this country that don't see enemies yet around them but if they get excited together and there's guns involved it's a problem and then some cop gets nervous and shoots one person another person shoots the cop and then there's a lot of shooting involved and then it goes from five people dying in the capital to thousands of people dying in the capital well in fairness too to defend uh the people of the capital they didn't shoot the cop they they bludgeoned him to death with a fire extinguisher yes so i do i do want to just kind of put that out as a as a defense of them listen i'm sure there was some wild shit going on on parlor and i think the problem here's the problem right there's a lot of people that just want to go on these sites and say they want to kill everyone yeah and the problem is you know at what point do you shut them all down like i think a lot of people are just living in a world where they're powerless they don't have any political power they don't have any economic power right they can't throw their money around uh they don't have health care their their job security isn't great uh they might be living in a community that doesn't have the resources they would like it to have uh they're they're not happy and thrilled and then they have these sites where they can go on and just say man i'd like to fucking burn it all down and distinguishing a guy blowing off steam and saying wild stuff from a genuine threat is a very hard thing to do you know like i i've threatened to kill i got banned from airbnb i threatened to kill the people um that banned me comedically yeah comedically this is a joke i'm not going to kill you yeah this is a joke because i'm blowing off steam and i'm angry do you know how many people that my parent like my dad's like i'm gonna fucking kill this guy my mom's like i'm gonna fucking kill and they were talking about each other but it's but none of it ever happened but we should be i think you you you have to create a space for people to threaten to overthrow the government as long as they don't violently do it yeah like i mean does that make any sense like i mean as long as they're not going to go hurt innocent people what are you going to do like there's so many people out there that you that's why a lot of these things like you know 4chan these sites a lot of people going on there they just want to say the most fucked up shit because they it's the thing that gives them they can laugh or they can release steam and it's it is immature it is stupid it's not productive it's not you know but at the end of the day if you're not going to give people health insurance you got to give them something it's like when someone in this country dies that everyone disagrees with right political figure media figure a lot of people dance on their grave online and then everyone people goes dude there and the other side will always do it like if a conservative dies and everyone goes great conservatives goes this is grotesque that you and then when rbg dies they all have parties and the conservatives go great um you have to let people in this country enjoy the deaths of their enemies yeah you do because they don't have much else again if you gave them other things you might say guy you can go get a knee operation why don't you stop but if if they're working for shit wages and you haven't figured out a way to to treat them uh treat their cancer diagnosis and they don't like i mean life you know you know you gotta have you gotta derive pleasure from something right it's an interesting point that anger is a good valve like to for if if your life is suffering that there's something very powerful about anger but i still have hope that it doesn't have to be i mean that kind of channeling into anger uh that then becomes hate led us into a lot of troubles in human history yeah you have to be careful uh empowering people too much in that anger especially i think mike i think i understand why people were nervous about parlor about twitter and so on sure yeah because all that shit talking about violence was now paired with let's get together at this location right this was a new thing like it's not just being on whatever platform talking shit it's saying we're going to in physical space meat and then everybody got all these platforms got nervous well what happens when all these shit talkers uh all these angry people that are just steaming uh letting off steam meet in the physical space uh and there was probably overreach uh almost definitely overreach but i can understand why they were nervous i agree there doesn't seem to be and this is when trump got elected and when you have like whatever you have right whether you have riots in portland in seattle where you have the antifa people doing crazy things you have like you know the people storming the capital there never seems to be a ton of uh an examination of why these ideas are becoming popular why are people so angry yeah what is leading people to this yes why are we here what about their lives is to the point where they need to show up at these places and like and now obviously there's always going to be people on the fringe they'll always be the mentally unwell they'll always be people that want to destroy society but when you look at how popular large you know long discredited things whether it's fascism you know totalitarian communism all of these things are like why are they back why are they back in a big way and why are why are people so fed up with the status quo that they're finding you know solace in the most extreme uh discredited theories of how to run and operate societies theories that have led to deaths a lot of people so to me i'm like if those people at the capitol yes if they were going to work if there's you know if they were able to go out and drink at chili's if they were able to get a fucking checkup right like if their job paid a little bit and i'm not saying this is all the reason right i'm sure that there's a lot of people there that are doing quite well and they're still nuts but like the anger and the rage that's boiling to the surface of this society does it come from the fact that across the board people in very different areas and with very different political beliefs feel like they are being fucked over and there's nothing they can do about it that's what the baseline to me they look at the people that run the country and run the world whether they're tech titans the guys that you talk to or whether they're people that run the government whether they're people that run large banks large media companies the people that have created this kind of you know infrastructure that everyone lives in these people are incredibly powerless and when you push people to that point logically sadly and unfortunately the next thing does seem to be violence yeah the thing that troubles me a lot is you said nobody's asking why these beliefs are out there but sometimes it's not even acknowledged that people are hurting people are angry just even acknowledging that all the conspiracy theories that are out there acknowledging that they're out there and then people are thinking about it and talking about it just because otherwise so it's not acknowledged in this nuanced way what happens is you say okay 70 million people are white supremacists it's just throwing a kind of blanket statement and of course that gets them angrier and more makes them feel more powerless and that ultimately that that's what's been painful for me to see is that there's not an acknowledgement that most people are good right it's their circumstances where it's just you're pissed off right because you were powerless and you must fall in love you could fall in with a bad crowd that's the thing you can just fall in yeah and it doesn't mean that you're you don't there's not blame you know you're obviously you're you have agency you're a person you know but the idea that like you could be rehabilitated you could do something stupid or you could fall into the great you know a group of people that are and then in a few years you could go what the fuck was i doing yeah you know i'm an ex-drug addict i know what it's like to go from being one thing to being another thing right i'm still a drug if i would use drugs right now or drink i would still be addicted to them right i mean it's not something that i can ever change about myself but i know what it's like to go from one thing to another thing so when you look at racism or whatever ism homophobia misogyny whatever whatever you're looking at anti-semitism and you go that's a fixed condition where nobody's ever going to be able to change nobody's ever going to be able to be rehabilitated nobody's ever going to be able to reimagine themselves in a different way to me you're just you're throwing away someone and you're making them feel helpless and worthless um and that's going to lead to anti-social behavior that spills out into the violence we don't have a very redemptive society right that's a huge factor we don't have a redemptive society that's why i like o.j simpson because o.j yeah yes he did a bad thing supposedly allegedly yeah but he's very kind now on twitter and he makes very nice points about how we all have to get involved in the political process and he's on golf courses and i like watching people golf i don't do it but i like watching him do it and he's like an elder statesman because i remember him from the naked gun and i choose to forgive him um you know for for for whatever happened there which i don't know right but um i choose to forgive him really for i mean obviously you know they say that what they say is he cut his wife's head off but i i can look past that yeah and redeem him because he's very like stable on twitter and he's a good like i see all these people going crazy on twitter and i'm like there's maybe oj's lived the full life i think there's a benefit to that there's a benefit to kind of living a full life yeah how many of us have not at least tried to murder somebody 100 percent listen oj's had the highs and the lows but he did it on his terms and there's a reason it's like a frank sinatra song yeah he did it my way i mean like there's a benefit to that and he seems like a very well adjusted person now so i mean i don't know how is how is that a fact but it is a fact and that's an uncomfortable fact well that's a strong case for forgiveness in the in one of the more extreme cases i suppose uh but yeah there's not a process of forgiveness it seems that people just take a single event from your sometimes a single statement from your past and use that as a categorical like capture of the essence of this particular human being so murder might be a thing that you should get a time out for a little while it's bad right and let's just say that murder is not good i'm glad you make this definitive statement oj oj is an interesting cat because you're you're like he's very stable on twitter he's very like he's like let's take a look at it guys like we need more of his energy that's what i'm trying to say yeah i know like yes it was bad he killed the woman and the waiter yeah i'm was not for that yeah i wish he didn't do that but the try the og simpson trial was such a fun thing yeah and like you said we need more fun people you might speaking of fun people you've uh your politics have been all over the place i hope so i hope so i mean imagine not imagine someone whose politics weren't all over the place it would seem odd right like in the 10 years that i've been politically conscious just because i'm you know thirty five and twenty i know i've probably been conscious for over two decades but like democrats have become republicans republicans become democrats i remember when ann coulter said we need to defend george w bush when he said we need to go out and christianize or you know modernize the arab world we need to democratize the arab world and then ann coulter uh backed donald trump and the the all the right wing in america believe the nation building they believed in going out and uh democratizing areas that might breed radical terrorists whether it was iraq or wherever you were going toppling regimes and instituting new democratic norms in those countries that was the right-wing point of view when i grew up then the wing switched to we are going to be isolationists we're going to take care of america first and foremost we're not going to go into other countries and then the democrats who when i grew up were doves and and the right-wing people were more hawkish and the democrats were like the military solutions aren't the way we need to have multilateral diplomatic coalitions to solve all the problems now you know rachel maddow's like let's nuke russia every night on msnbc the democrats are like we need we need strong presence in syria we need a strong presence we need to counter putin all over the globe we need to get so they are more hawkish on things so literally i have watched two political parties literally flip yeah and it's crazy to watch and in some sense i've watched that as well because i when i first saw barack obama i admired that he was against the war this was whatever uh when maybe before he was a senator he spoke out against the iraq war right and and then he you know it doesn't feel like uh it feels like his administration was more hawkish than than dovish in a sense with the with all the drone attacks with the sort of inability to pull back or at least in mass efficiently pull back from all the military involvement they'll have all over the world right so and just the language what i think is interesting about that what's interesting about obama because it's a very interesting study is that presidents are controlled in very different ways right you know presidents can be controlled by different factors power factions within washington and you know i think one of the reasons that uh obama was maybe you know he had a very close relationship with john brennan he was a cia director and obama was very close with john brennan and obama was very you know um you know i think uh malleable to the extent that you know the cia and i've had ci agents on my show john kiriakou a guy who went to jail for exposing torture was saying that like you know you get into the oval office all of a sudden you're having the presidential daily briefing every day and the intelligence people come in and they go listen man i mean we're there's going to be a terrorist attack on your watch if you don't do x y and z they go we have you know the code they call it like blue book information which is five levels above top secret and they go like hey man a guy in uh a guy in uh iran in a cafe said he's blown everything up next week and you know i mean it's the same thing as parlor you don't know if it's true or not but now the president's making decision on usually a lot of uncorroborated intelligence that goes into a presentation for the president where you're just terrified every day and you don't want a terrorist attack on your watch now so why are they getting all the information because a lot of the people in washington have an interest in perpetual constant ongoing warfare and there's a lot of financial gain to be had from that so they're sneaking their information into the presentations that are going to the president and then the president is now behaving and going fuck i don't want a bomb going off we got to do what we got to do and whatever version of that happens that is really kind of what is happening whereas the presidents are being controlled by forces that are outside of the political sphere but very much still in it and they have a lot of that's what the deep state is you know trump there's a lot of ridiculing trump of gone the deep state doesn't exist but absolutely exists there's been books about it written by liberal journalists the deep state is only a term for unelected largely power factions in washington dc that outlive any presidential administration these are people that might work at the state department they might work at the defense department uh these are people that are not always working officially in any government capacity they might be private companies they might be uh military contractors they might be people of boeing or raytheon or general dynamics and they constitute uh a group of people that trump kind of called the swamp but trump had really no interest in draining the swamp but it was he articulated these things and this is what it is you have a lot of interested parties that have budgets that they want big budgets everybody wants a budget in washington whether you know what it is they want money um and these are the people who who really control press so this idea that the president is the bln doll has got to be smashed which is why the horse race model of politics and being like is it right wing is it left wing is it what team am i on and what color am i wearing it's very simplistic but the reality is this is an empire it's past its peak we're in trouble the united states is an empire speaking yeah i mean that's just his you could prove that case in court well let's let's go to court right now but i do love the the more complex idea that there's just human beings who create power and seek ways to attain that power through different ways if you have barack obama or george bush or donald trump there's different attack vectors correct different ways to obtain that power and then you can use that to leverage and it probably doesn't have to be just in washington dc uh there's people who crave power for all over the world of course not in but where we are now in los angeles these people are all good uh studio executive people that i from what i understand they treat everyone fairly and and they're nice but i think he sees the bad guys but out here in l.a west coast everyone's lovely so amidst this uh fun exploration in your mind through the political landscape that you've done over the past uh uh couple day decade that you've been conscious politically where does donald trump fit into this picture for you is uh is a great question well he didn't right because we didn't he wasn't political until four years ago right he got political very quickly before i mean he was firing off crazy tweets about where obama was born or whatever yeah but he was he got into politics like very quickly and then he became the president right so it was like we didn't i knew him as donald trump this crazy new york city character that hosted the apprentice um i didn't think much about him he was just constant you know like he was just just as constant figures like i don't think much about warren buffett like i know like trump's like he's married to a new showgirl all the time and he's always opening another casino and he's on buffett really no trump trump like warren buffett is the opposite right warren buffet has like been married for a million years yeah lives in a little house in omaha but these are the that's what i associate trump like i don't think about warren buffett i don't think about these people they're just guys that i've known forever that have like um you know a uh you know uh you associate certain things with them right and trump we always associate with kind of vulgar garish new money billionaire married a lot you know casinos miss universe pageants but again you know but it makes perfect sense that he he really um was able to become president at the moment where we were had we were about to have hillary clinton versus jeb bush and i think americans felt like this is now the oligarchy is spinning right in our face you're not even making it feel like uh there's an appearance of democracy we have two crime families vowing for control of the country every four years and then there was this rogue kind of upstart guy that was really about himself you know trump doesn't really care that much about the i mean really was summarized perfectly when he left and he just said hey have a good life that's what he said before he got on andrew's air force base if you watch the speech he goes hey have a good life that's what he really feel like hey have a good life i'm i'm gonna get on a plane right now and fly to a castle i own in uh mar-a-lago in florida and really i'm not going to think too much about you people outside of how i can get more attention in the future can i ask you like a therapy question what is your favorite and least favorite quality of donald trump so my least favorite quality of donald trump i think because there's a few of them uh his lack of empathy complete and total lack of empathy i don't feel that he cares about human beings on any level and i feel like that's maybe or should be a requirement right i mean i don't think he cares i think it's obvious that he doesn't care i mean he sent you know basically he's saying like they're in there mike pence is in there he knows that his people are going to get try to get into a capital i mean those motherfuckers are not going to have jobs they're going to go to federal prison and he doesn't care he doesn't care as long as they're storming the capital to prove the point that he thinks he won the election he has no concern for these people his followers he leads them lamps to the slaughter right so that that's that's not a respectable cause my favorite quality of donald trump is his willingness to call bullshit so his willingness to call bullshit out he doesn't play the game uh he will you know when people say about putin putin kills people he goes we kill a lot of people here too like he's he's willing and able to break the fourth wall and say things that no politician has ever said he's willing to call out hypocrisy uh you know of course not his own but the media uh the members of the political establishment that's a laudable quality it's an entertaining quality right we all like it i love to i'm like this guy's saying something that a lot of people want said yeah uh that being said it's coupled with no real work or action right so it's not coupled with anything behind it that he just wants to we did an episode of my podcast once where it's like essentially he's like criticizing the deep state he wants a deeper state he wants a deeper state like he hired his daughter yeah and her husband i mean this is not a guy that's interested in transparency and openness he's a guy that would just prefer he wants to run the the mafia state but he shakes up the norms of social discourse political discourse and that people are just hungry for that yes but he got banned from twitter from all the different platforms do you think is there an argument to be made for and against baseball so his arguments be made for everything a permanent ban seems to be an overreaction to me he's the president of the united states it also rearranges the power like whether you like him or hate him love him hate him he was the president we've elevated twitter is now more powerful than the president it's like do you want that to be long-term the salute that the reality like now jack at twitter is more powerful than the president of the united states is that a good paradigm going forward i don't know i'm not listen maybe give a little time out for a few days yeah i think it time now a little spanking yeah certainly but i don't know if a permanent ban across the board on every social media i mean they banned them on grindr i mean this is how hilarious it is right i mean across the board on everything i don't think he could get an airbnb now neither can i but like i don't think he can do anything again i just i look back and there's so many people i have very smart intelligent friends that go yeah but who cares yeah but he's bad yeah but blah blah blah yeah but i don't like millionaires yeah but blah blah blah and i'm like you have such faith you have such faith that it's always going to be the people you dislike that are banned it's always going to be the p it's never going to be you man you have so much faith in the government you have so much faith in tech oligarchs you've never met you have so much faith faith in the security state that they're going to always make the right decisions and they're not going to penalize people that shouldn't be penalized to me i'm like wow i've never had that much faith in any human being ever including myself i wouldn't want that power i would start deep platforming people that i hate i would platform my aunt you know what i mean i would de-platform everyone i know i mean so that it's like it's it's such a insane power to give somebody like who gets heard who gets to speak yeah i'm worried about the effect it has on people like you actually i agree of being like everybody's a little more nervous in what they say correct and that that's a big problem yes because then you're just like long-term unmasked like we're talking about it has an effect where people just become more bland yeah self-censorship anxiety all of these things go into we try to fight it i try to fight it i think i think i gotta still do what makes me laugh and what makes me laugh is often fucked up and it's often you know it's not always fucked up in a way that you know it's gonna get me thrown off something but like i think pushing certain buttons is funny to me so i gotta keep doing that part of part of the problem is that so many of the lines are blurred right so you have comedians that are commentators and commentators that are comedians and politicians so it's like it's harder to the defense of like hey i'm a comedian leave me alone right that defense becomes harder when like all of these lines are blurring everybody's kind of everything now so like people say to me you should run for office and they're serious and i'm like you're crazy but they're serious like so the blurring of everything means that people aren't in their lanes as much and that you go well this guy is dangerous because he's not just making a joke he's doing something else and he's using humor and i'm like i'm really not i'm really just trying to make a joke that's all that's really what i'm trying to do but i do think that because of the flattening uh there's a lot of people out there that go they take aim at humor because they go humor is where bad ideas can kind of you know start and flourish but don't you uh to put some uh responsibility on you uh yeah don't you think humor is a way to uh that you are the modern like jordan peterson style intellectual the humor is actually a tool of changing the side guys changing the absolutely but it also cannot be i don't think it's any one thing and i think there's a lot of pressure uh for a comedian you can be funny and right you can be funny and wrong uh if your goal is to be right you might end up being right and not funny uh so the reality is funny has to come first there are brilliant people that have been funny and and correct according to people right but uh at the end of the day people that put way too much faith in what comedy is most of what comedy is is people showing up to strip malls and and telling jokes for an hour while people eat chicken fingers and they all get drunk and they laugh and they feel a little bit better about their lives that's really the majority of comedy then there's like 10 famous people that are really famous that do a version of that in an arena but the amount of cultural power they have has always been greatly exaggerated my uncles loved george carlin who was anti-military industrial complex anti-anti-that and then they would go vote for ronald reagan they didn't care it doesn't it doesn't really it does it's not as powerful as you think i wish it was it feels good it feels good for me to say i am the new thing it really isn't yeah it truly isn't no one is comedians are the people that get on stage and say we're fucked up we're we're we're drug addicts we're sex addicts we're fat we're gross we can't manage our money we can't stop eating we can't stop fucking doing horrible things we're liars we're narcissists we're scumbags we're the people that get out and say that only a psychopath would look at us and go show me the way like it's not i disagree with you well then i'm then i'm a psychopath and that's that's i mean that's not another thing no pushback that's another issue uh but you know what i'm saying one i don't because uh i mean i understand you using this as a psychological tool for yourself to give yourself freedom yes but the reality is you are one of the rare comedians like a george carlin who is besides being funny yeah when i hear things like that i'm like okay you're being very sweet but like i agree i understand what you're saying i do stuff that makes hopefully makes you think yeah i hope that's what good comedy is but i think i i try to do that but i also would hate to feel shackled to the idea of that i had to make a point and that point had to be correct i think the best comedy makes fun of everything makes fun of both sides and then there's a deeper truth about human humanity revealed but then what happens is people take that deeper truth and go let's politicize it but what does he mean is it the right or the left and i'm like i'm doing something that i think speaks to hopefully people on both sides for everybody because i'm making fun of people on the left and the right and in the center and people that don't care people that do care and i'm trying to figure out a way to do it but then immediately anything of value in this culture right now is like how do we politicize it how do we put it in a box so yes i think comedy could produce a lot of inherently valuable things reflective thoughtful things but then immediately can it be put in this box where all of those things can be used politically no and unfor like when they say like comedy is a great way to speak truth to power it is but i don't know how much it changes things i don't know how much a joke can dethrone a king i know the idea is nice but let's look at the practical applications i mean we had brilliant comics bill hicks george carlin richard pry we had people talk about so many problems in society illustrate them put a spotlight on them uh and we still have them they're worse now than they've ever ah that's not true i think the society is better and i so to push back in my perspective it's very possible that those voices were the exact reason we have the world today which i do believe is actually uh i mean i'm on the on the boring old measures of what makes a good world which is uh you know the amount of violence in the world the amount of opportunity the all those kinds of measures even happiness all of those things measured things have been improving stephen picker gets a lot of shit for this but he's really good at articulating how the data says pretty clearly that the world is getting better and it's arguable that the freedoms we do enjoy currently are thanks to the comedic voices or the people who mock so to me it's possible that humor is the very thing that saves the world humor is the very thing that keeps is the balance of my power but i think a lot of the things that those guys criticized whether it was militarism or uh the elites the lying the corruption the bribery that's still going on and it's always going to go on right because that's the nature of human beings we call it out we point it out but we don't have a plan to change it's not really our job right and and i think that too much now is like well comedians should have a like i don't tell people who to vote for like the idea that comedians went to people who vote for us like to me is crazy i understand like people have strong opinions but like i i believe i have a job and my job is to make you laugh or whatever maybe make you think but like my job is not to tell you who to vote for i mean that's absurd but see the thing you do yeah by the comedy like on your twitter that people should definitely follow i believe jim jay dillon i agree with you oh on the on this point of uh yeah i agree with you to follow you yeah you you give me you give me freedom to think meaning like you're shaking things up to where i'm i don't feel constrained about what i can think about and that's awesome that i thank you so you're not telling me what to think you're giving me the freedom to think that's what great comedy does is you know i don't i i don't often agree with george carlin he can get pretty political sometimes but you know just the ability to do that so rare podcasts do that too now like there's certain people that can really just challenge you to uh even when you disagree with them to sort of be like oh it's okay to think about this kind of stuff yeah and i appreciate that because that's awesome and i mean that that's great and a guy like you is a brilliant guy that's great if i'm giving you the license to think then man the world is completely fucked but i'm happy about them yeah that's speaking about the world being uh completely fucked uh alex jones turned on q and on i i know almost a very tough match they had a rough marriage they fought it and they fought it out for years uh and eventually we just knew someone was going to leave someone uh tried to leave him a few months ago oh so yeah was he staying at someone else's house the car wasn't in the driveway um yeah well the thing about q anon that makes it a lot of fun yeah is it it's kind of a make it up as you go along i've i'm a drug addict right so often my lies aren't planned they're in the moment a lot of what i do on the podcast a lot you know it's only in the moment i'll have an idea what i want to talk about and i rant and i go and i've been like stoned and i show up at home and my parents are like what's going on there was 50 on the mantel now it's not there and i'm like well and i gotta make something up on the spot right i've been you know are you drinking again no i'm not and then you gotta have a well you were gone for two days no one knows where you were and somebody said you left your car well i was well this is i was at a sales conference and i left my car i flew to phoenix like yeah i understand what that is q anon is an ever evolving conspiracy theory where the events are happening uh in the past in the present and in the future it's kind of hilarious every conspiracy theory is like kennedy something like that there's a lot of truth in that or all truth but at the end of the day it's like you're looking back from 30 000 feet analyzing little things that have already happened q anon's like so i think alex is kind of like got a little tired of the constant evolving nature of that conspiracy theory so he's not a fan of like the jazz that it's queuing on so they're not because they're improvising they're improvising alex is like hey man i was on board a little bit but at the end of the day it's getting a little annoying because it can turn on you eventually you become part of the conspiracy right still alex is controlled opposition that's what they'll say eventually you because q anon just eats things so it's a conspiracy that just eats things the minute you start to say hey man maybe that's not it'll just eat you and go you're in on it everyone's in on it everyone's a satanic pedophile everybody everyone that questions it is uh eating children and you go wait a minute that seems illogical and but now there's not enough children no there's not enough and i think q anon's over now unfortunately uh um because for these people but i think fortunately for them they're gonna have to find a new hobby but i think it's over now because even the best q anon people now are starting to go hey man this might not be going down the way we thought yeah but they've literally gone as far as to say that like body and trump switched faces trump's actually still the president except biden's yeah you have to be a real moron now you got to be real stupid now it's at the end like when it was cool like when the episode stuff happened q and on was like it was party at queue yeah and then when the hunter bought laptop stuff started to happen they were like dancing like it's time and then biden wins and they're like wait whoa and it's just like it's the day after the par q and on if you ever went to a party in high school or college queuing on right now is the day after the party you wake up it's it's it's 12 noon the sun is hitting you in the face you're hungover there's a stench of disgusting beer and cigarettes all over the house you're like what the fuck happened here yeah i got to get out of here and get a bacon egg and cheese that's what q anon is they gotta sober up get out of that house get a bacon egg and cheese and go man we were fucking whacked we were high dude i thought nancy pelosi was eating children for four years and that donald trump was gonna put her in guantanamo bay wow that was because i mean it's interesting that people had to do that after the 60s they're like yeah i just did a bunch of acid and i lived in a ranch in malibu and fucked everyone i ever saw yeah and they're like i thought that was the way the world was going to go and i followed some shaman guy some guru who just wanted to fuck me and 10 other people that were living there and uh we did that for three years apparently we never created the utopia we thought we were going to have and now i'm back working here you know at allstate insurance and we have great policies and we'd love you to come in the office so we can break them down for you it all ends folks all the love all the bullshit ends but it's fun they had so much fun q anon was hard to get mad at because they were this was all they had yeah and they were fun they were quite good at it and they were good at it and they and and and and it was a lot of desperate people but they were also rich idiots there's also like dumb rich people and you those are like the saddest people in queue because it's like they should they have the resources to do other things yeah but they just love queue they're like i'm just into this i'm like you're rich go do something how incurious are you go to the amazon go birdwatch i don't know but there you know so play golf it's sad but they're like done now i mean they're they're oh it's over oh so you think this is the uh i think everything's ending my whole thing is that trump's out q anon's over the is quarantine's to end everything's going to go back to something that's more recognizable i think that are you optimistic about the 2021 and what you want in certain aspects i have optimism and then i have i have short-term optimism and long-term pessimism okay meaning that i think in the short term things can get better i think long-term because there's so many forces that are out of our control that are revolving in ways i barely understand that are carving up society it's going to be very tough long term to be completely optimistic like hey it's going to be great it's going to be good forever but short term i think yeah this quarantine will end things will get better the economy will get a little better uh the constant trump craziness will die down a little bit um that's my hope and people can go back to focusing on things that matter which is you know the things that are near you and close to you yeah the humans around you humans around you not nancy pelosi i have my i have uncles to talk about nancy people i'm like you've never met her you'll never meet or shut up yeah and i i i have a belief that this kind of local love and kindness that you naturally can have for human beings that you actually know can be expanded at scale through the social networks that we use that we build twitter is currently failing at that miserably that would be great but that's if we were able to increase the love through the social networks that would be great it feels very hard too it's a worthy challenge uh you've tweeted one of the underreported reasons conspiracy theories take hold is because some of them are true what uh conspiracy theories do you believe that are sort of important for people to think about would you say um kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman with no connections to any other situation government you know i believe that jfk was removed from office uh by a group of people that had very uh different interests but the question of like deep state so these are powerful people that are able now to dictate uh through basically the threat of violence what the president's the surface powerful people in our society yeah i mean i've no again i'm not i i want another investigation into 911 not because i think that george bush pressed a button and made 911 happen but because we invaded the country of iraq and then we uh you know 15 out of 19 hijackers were from saudi arabia uh there was tons of stuff in the 911 report that didn't make sense to anybody uh there's tons of stuff about that day that i feel like we just don't know yeah that's hard to interrupt uh that's when i my little aunt life touched upon conspiracy theory world and first learned about alex jones is when 9 11 happened it was very frustrating to me how poorly the reporting and the transparency around what exactly happened who knew what all that kind of basic information that you would hope the government would release reveal and use as like a lesson for how we prevent this instead it felt like a lot of stuff was being hidden in order to manipulate some kind of machine that leads us to war yeah that's that's fair to say yeah i mean i just don't feel like we've gotten the full story i don't know what the full story is sorry i can't i don't know what it is but i don't feel like we've gotten the full story um yeah there are there are groups of powerful pedophiles right whether they're in the catholic church or they're in the government or wherever they are they are able to cover things up that they do they're able to silence people to try to out them in terms of like you know disrupt their operations that's true q anon has nuggets of truth it just went crazy any conspiracy theory that involves the knights templar and also chrissy teigen is probably wrong what's the nice templar well it was just this group of knights back in the day you know it's that you just suppose these secret meanings and like in every conspiracy they talk about like you know if you go deep enough it's like the knights templar the raw secretions uh you know all all of these secret groups throughout history the illuminati the and there's a thread that connects all of us oh yes it connects it all to david spade i mean it's a little much well how do you if you're david spade defend yourself by the way you ignore it because it's hilarious and i know david's it's like hollywood's kind of boring yes there are sex orgies i'm not invited i'm sure there's shit going on kids do get abused women get abused i'll invite you to one please if you want with the we get we got the 75 000 dog yeah and then we'll get one but you know i you know me david's big we go out to sushi restaurants like and you sit there and you listen to people complain that's what a lot of it is what a lot of hollywood is this deeply sad tragedy that people don't understand that it's some of it is nefarious and dark and there are problems and there are real power brokers here it's a dark town 100 percent but they think that everybody that lives here is in some wide-ranging vast conspiracy isn't true it ignores how humdrum boring deeply sad most people's lives are in hollywood and it ignores how sad fame is in general fame's a sad thing not always but a lot of times it's a sad thing it's fleeting it's ephemeral it doesn't last it um separates you from other people it's isolating uh it can be traumatic depending on what's going on obviously it's better than the alternative if you're trying to be famous it's better to be famous than not famous right i'll say that but it's it's it's a mixed bag to a degree there are things about it that aren't great and hollywood has a deep undercurrent of sadness of people that have not realized their dreams and people that have realized them yeah both of those people like the people that win olympic gold medals can sometimes suffer from depression correct they've lost well somebody said and i forget who said it it's a great quote it's not mine i think it's from a book or it might be from a tv show sometimes it quotes something and they're like that's from like charlotte's web i'm like oh uh the two worst things oh i think it's from the movie limitless i'm like an idiot but anyway thanks for having me on tomorrow i will never i will not publish this um it's from the movie and i think he says uh the worst two worst things in the world are naka oh you know it's not from limitless i think it's from the mat that the movie where nicholas cage sold weapons it was called lord of war it's a little better than limitless anyway it's a good movie it's a great movie he said the two worst things in the world are not getting what you want and getting it so the undercurrents of sadness that run through hollywood are there two rivers that converge and there are people that just never had it and people that have it and go now what and so it's a sad place a treasure place and there's a lot of it's boring that's what people don't realize is like it's actually kind of boring well life is kind of boring life is kind of boring but there's also like you know so i think q anon's this way to make a lot of it seem like it's super exciting and listen i don't want to diminish the experiences of people who've been abused because there is a lot of horror here yeah but the whole q a thing was like everybody in everything is doing and that's not true let's see the just to link on that a little bit is uh bill gates the conspiracy theories around bill gates bother me because this is me dumb naive lex thinks that bill gates did a lot of good for this world sure first by creating a company that empowered personal computers and second by donating a ton of money for like treating malaria in africa and all those kinds of things and there's these huge amounts of conspiracies i think based on like just replies to whenever right uh bill gates does anything like to me the top replies should be about how inspiring that guy is to donate so much money well i think i think that's so sorry too and the the thing i'm struggling with is if i'm bill gates like how do you behave differently how do you show people that you're if you're not i don't know doing creepy stuff that they're saying he's doing well i think part of it is that he he's done some really good stuff right he's an innovative guy he's on the vanguard of a lot of things but he's also the antichrist and i think that that is you know they're not mutually exclusive he is the prince of darkness as well as some no here's my thing with bill gates he's a batman villain billionaire meaning that he's not a villain but he's got all this money right here's the thing i love mosque and all these guys i know you love these guys listen when you have the kind of money that these guys have and you have the vision that they have and they want society to look a certain way and a lot of them are doing great things people they need to get better at the pushback they need to get a little better when somebody says hey man what's going on over there bill gates needs to be a little better at going here's what yeah because you know bill gates has the money you know i think he once he wanted to shoot a missile of dust at the atmosphere to help global warming and a lot of scientists were like hey man that might not be the way to do it but no one in history like so few people in history have had the resources to even have that thought yeah that if you have the resources to have that thought and you have designs on the way you want society to look whether it's public health policy or vaccinations whatever you have to get a little better at dealing with legitimate critiques and obviously you're not defending yourself against people that say you're the antichrist but like you need to get a little better and i feel like bill gates and some of those people at that level are like pr is kind of like you know they're either terrible they're terrible they're terrible him and zuckerberg are really bad at it zuckerberg's horrible at it he seems especially um bad at public yeah and it makes me feel so bad because the problem with being a billionaire is you lose touch with reality if you're not careful i think elon is good at at least so far maintaining touch with reality no but if you look at the name of his child you can clearly see liz i do like him and i do think what he's doing with tesla you know my producer is a tesla and he never shuts up about it most people that have tesla's never shut up about them and they talk they think they're part of the development team at spacex and i i like that he's created a world where people can get excited about a 37 000 car yeah and never shut the fuck up about it to the point where i have to threaten people with physical violence to get them to stop telling me about that their car drives itself oh you shouldn't have a few less drinks and a few a few fewer vicodin and you can drive yourself have you thought about getting a tesla i've never thought about i don't like them they're minimalist i don't like middle i want more i want more i want to travel i want to see i'm just being my producer wants a cyber truck i want a stage coach old school stage coach horse thief shit that it's going worse it's going back to that i live in an area with a lot of horses it's going back to like whipping a horse i want an animal to shriek while i go by [Laughter] you want more suffering in the world not less oh i think we need it okay but i just don't like that billionaire is a bad word and it's not necessary sure not every billionaire is a pedophile i know but the problem is a lot of like it's just you know epstein was very smart at like just getting people at that house and taking photos of them nobody knew what they were doing but it's like it was one of those things where it's like after the most social guy ever like every photo he's like hey everyone that's ever done anything in the world has been at that fucking island every human being is like in a photo it's just weird like i'm in like it's funny me and my friends get together we don't ever take photos right like last night a few people it was my birthday yesterday i'm 17 and my my friends came over and we're just eating dinner right and we had a fun night just four people that are over nobody right nobody ever thought like let's let's hey i want to remember it let's take photos i'm 36. but but everything epstein did there's just photos of everybody it's interesting do you think jeffrey epstein killed himself no i think he was killed by that guy that that that that guy that they put in the cell that lunatic uh who's that big muscled guy i think he was just he did it for money kept his mouth shut that's money from whom do you think massage mi6 cia all three so there's a lot of pressure from a lot of different profiles probably probably massage cia more i mean it seems very clear that he was working inside of a honeypot intelligence operation just lane maxwell's father was an israeli super spy uh justly maxwell's working for israeli intelligence it would be odd to think and of course the cia knows about everything that israeli intelligence is doing with americans so uh i would think that it's a very cozy relationship with those two intelligence agencies and uh i think if you ran it by anyone i think if you ran up by french intelligence they'd go yeah no get get him i don't think there was any intelligence service in the world whose job is to protect the powerful people that live in their countries that was against him getting whacked but do you think it's possible that he is just an evil person who is after manipulating people and also so that there's a bigger thing so it's factual that there's a bigger thing evil people don't get him those are your facts tim dillon no there's the facts of the case you don't get handed a 65. show me another evil guy who was handed a 65 million dollar uh place by les wexner show me another evil guy that got that type of uh handshake deal where he was basically uh let off without anything after a judge had made a very sweetheart deal for him after he was accused of you know molesting a 14 year old show me another evil guy that uh doesn't have that kind of backing that has those type of friends those connections those type of properties show me a you know multiple passports all over the world so show me a guy without anyone backing him that's doing it why did they you know so you think he's just an evil guy so he's doing this for whom it's his own just shits and giggles he's just getting off on it human nature yeah human nature huh it's human nature 70 million dollar uh limestone yeah is it human nature and it's like i don't think it's human i think it's i think i think they manipulated human nature but i think they i think they did it i think just lane i think epstein was really just a functionary and i think just lane was kind of a pimp and epstein was kind of a guy that you know made the money okay and you know hid money and things like that and worked for a lot of powerful people i don't believe in lone pedophiles anymore i don't even believe that if you're a pedophile you're like in a group you know what i mean uh you know whoa i'm not even i'm not even going there but staying on just laying us so you believe there's some power in her what do you think happens to her no like what what are the great great question i mean i don't know what'll happen to her but i imagine she'll get some type of deal uh closed-door thing years from now when people don't really care about the case and she'll serve some time in a very relaxed thing or she'll be killed i mean again it's like if she was doing what she was doing which is i believe the fact that she was compromising powerful people so that they could be blackmailed by uh you know the intelligence uh services of the us and israel um probably i don't i don't see how she wasn't doing that someone's black someone's using the photos and the tapes right someone's using that against these people someone wants to control these people well who and why that's the real question and i think the real question is you want to continue you want to exert control over congressmen and senators and presidents because they have the power to make decisions to affect the but the cia just works for a lot of very wealthy people that's what the cia went so how the cia started right it was lawyers bankers they're protecting financial interest of multinational corporations all over the world overthrowing democratically elected governments going in and doing subterfuge campaigns encouraging terror they're doing all kinds of crazy stuff i don't see why that would change i think that's who they still represent and i think those people want uh certain policies and certain people pushed forward and i think those people are controlled and i think one of the ways to control people is their sexual problems uh and and that's the way they did it i wish there was a way to uh because everything you just said now it makes a lot of sense doesn't it i'm being indoctrinated on air no uh i think there's just uh just a fun random guy who just wanted to make home movies and presidents um well you think i'm just some random guy i'm just trying to sell myself as somebody who's friendly with the american audience i believe you are backed by people that want people to be more comfortable with robot dogs i believe that i believe you're pushed to be the happy face of ai which is why out no editing joe rogan's rule no editing this is live no i mean i wish there was a way to for some of the conspiracy theories to prove that that's not the case like what the the cia is there is some possibility in my mind that institutions like the cia different kind of organizations are driven less by organized malevolence and more by just incompetence just bureaucracy being incompetent i think that argument gets less and less persuasive when you look at all the things they've been able to do right now it's it's very certain just you said that there's a bunch of them that have done because there's some conspiracy theories that are dramatic and true the question is i wish there was a way to prove that some of them are not and it's very difficult because so much has shrouded mystery like one you know one of the things i'm bothered by is when people accuse other like athletes of using steroids for example right and it's just yes a lot of people use steroids but it sucks the that people just don't believe you like uh there's some incredible athletes that look shredded they look just incredible performers and everybody uh just says that they're on steroids they kind of assume yeah i mean and that and people accuse me all the time of being on performance-enhancing drugs and steroids and it is hard but what i remind them is it's what my my my my my appearance as a result of dedication uh but hard work diet exercise dedication are you on keto uh i'm on i'm on i'm doing a version of your keto right yeah so i'm doing a version of keto right now with bread and it's do you see what i mean your carb up sort of and it's a very it's a good diet for i grew up in the 90s when nobody ever lost weight sadly because every diet was like you can eat what you want just be accountable no one even knew what that man so it would be like my mother being like if you have chocolate chip pancakes have a glass of water yeah just take a walk around the block yeah you could go to mcdonald's three times a day just walk around the block it's my parents used to say like my mother be like just walk around the block you're fine um gonna have a cigarette walk 20 steps walk 20 steps back it's exercise so um no i there's too many conspiracies out there a lot of them are true a lot of them are bitter angry people trying to justify their own uh uh impotence not being able to do anything in life and they're like the people that have done something in life they're all nefarious it's all that the card just stacked against me that's 100 true 100 it attracts usually people that have not figured out a way to succeed and or haven't succeeded on the level that they want to but that also being true there are there is a fair amount of fuckery going on and provable and you know we just have to i think separate uh separate know that these things are often inflated or not true but know that sometimes they are true otherwise it wouldn't exist if there was no if there was nothing to jfk there was nothing to 9 11. if there was if people felt like they were being dealt with honestly this wouldn't exist i mean this exists because there are real questions that people have that don't get answered for whatever reason and then the vacuum of the refusal to answer those questions that that information vacuum is filled with people like alex jones who are curious and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're horribly wrong and sometimes they're all over the place good storytellers and people love stories and yeah when there's an absence of actual alex is a uniquely american person like very interesting i don't know how many countries like how many people make a living as a conspiracy theorist a good living in other countries right it's very rare right i mean it's very interesting and he became like i know people that knew him when he was a kid because i go to austin and perform a lot and you know he was a guy that would take a bullhorn and yell at cops because he thought dewey checkpoints were unconstitutional that's what he was doing in college and he just went through he was hated by the right he was hated by the bush people he was hated by the and he went from being this this this guy that was considered like a a leftist even like even though he's never left this he was considered this like enemy of mainstream conservatism like he was not and like he considered a guy that wasn't a patriot wasn't this wasn't that and he just wow like he whines and whines and ends up just being this confidant of a republican president very divisive republican president and he becomes this populist and everything like that it's really wild to watch that but i mean i do think he should retire eventually just so we could get you know some i don't know it seems like a it's a lot to keep doing well i hope this world allows for alex jones to continue having a voice because just like you said he's uh i use the word fun but really he he shakes up the norms of our discourse i do too i do think we need to put more value i think entertainment you know we need we do need to say that like there are people that should be allowed to have a voice for entertainment purposes right and that's par and that's part of what donald trump now that he's not the president come on let the guy let him talk who do you think is the best comedian of all time oh that's a great question greatest of all time you mentioned carlin your uncle's liking carlin well carlin is great carlin is really hard to argue with but chappelle is also really great um louis c.k is really great i don't know that there's what joan rivers is great i don't know you smile at that because i was a beast of a comic i'm not aware of her stand up actually yeah just of a comic ask rogue and ask any of them um kennison's great so what makes a great comic do you think in the history of comedy just like said something at the moment in a way found a way to communicate with people in the funniest possible way at that moment and illustrate you know illustrated larger truths about life in what they did and i think that guys like louie and chappelle and uh pryor and kinnison and hicks people like joan rivers uh have done that and even you know modern people people like maria bamford's an amazing comedian it's just a different style of comedy per se but she's an amazing community uh you know kat williams is an amazing comedian you know it really is does he have any well see the one of the things you kind of mentioned the community as you mentioned they were kind of fearless and saying that difficult things that needs to be said kel williams is more i i don't remember his comedy but i think it's just more wild out there well to an extent but you can watch it he's got stuff he talks about stuff he talks about race brilliantly he talks about america brilliantly no i think there's a lot of stuff there and of course chris rock chris rock of course it's so hard you can't really pick one you just gotta there's a class of people that throughout this history of this business which is not that long of a history it's you know pretty much within the last century uh you know that are have been really influential sometimes it's style the way they deliver things sometimes the substance of how they you know what they're saying or sometimes it's just a style of what they're saying i mean and we're only talking about stand-up comedians right so there's a million great comedians i mean if we're going to talk about jim carrey and adam sandler and chris farley i mean these are brilliant and those guys are bigger influences on comedy i think than stand-ups really truly so there's there's there's so many brilliant people in the in the business who was for you and like influential just the early on hicks was influential because i'd watch bill hicks and i'd be like this guy's saying crazy shit on stage and this is the only way you can get away with it is because it's so funny and he was calling out like you know the military industrial complex and he was talking about the first gulf war i remember he said a joke that i heard it made me sit up straight he goes he goes he was in canada and he said we got a war in the states he was talking about the first gulf war and he said i was in the unenviable position of being for the war but against the troops and to me i loved that joke it was so funny to me and i was like oh you can't get away with that anywhere other than standing on a stage you could never say that in an office really and this was before like it was like pc and they said the other thing i always knew that comedians had to say shit and have it be funny enough that you couldn't get away with it in polite society that was the whole point that was why it was a dark theater or a dark night club that's where people had a few drinks that's what the art form was and that's why i so a guy like that was influential because i started watching him and of course like you know i loved snl when i was a kid and i would watch chris farley and i would watch um you know people like even john belushi going back in the day but i'd watch adam sandler and will farrell and all these guys i mean the there's so many funny people but bill hicks was kind of funny and then patrice o'neill was like probably my favorite comedian who's made me laugh more than anybody else um i think it was you actually that's uh maybe on your podcast we're talking about patrice onyeon that he was actually vicious to others i think he was a little mean to other people but he was very good to people that he liked i guess i think he was like not i mean he wasn't and i've never met him i have no insight info but from what i've heard he was like no nonsense guy right he just said what he wanted to say but i think in terms of comedians i don't know of anyone funnier than patrice o'neill who said in modern times that said more about our society than him i mean he was just a brilliantly funny guy on the radio he was funny on his specials he was funny everywhere he was funny and there's something else to be said about the whole medium of comedians doing podcasts yeah because that's uh it unlocks a weird special new thing that changed everything i mean rogan started with that yeah you're doing that it i think that's a whole other form of like stand-ups yeah the ones that have a lot to say almost like uh we get to witness the process of the creation of the jokes in a way or the mind right the the sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes which is comedians relate to social media comedians are commit comedy's uh it's a performance based medium so it's about getting up and doing it getting up in a club getting up in a theater getting up in a bar getting up wherever you can get up and comedy for years was about performance and then on the higher end it was about movies and tv shows but we were very slow to get on youtube we're very slow to adapt to technology we're very slow to monetize anything we did on the internet so podcasting was a way for comics and funny people to kind of get into that space start earning money and now because the pandemic has really become essential and it helps you and even without the pandemic it was where people were it was how you were building a fan base and that's like you know but comics were very reticent to embrace social media at all because they thought it was cheap and they didn't like it and they thought the people on it were idiots and were unfunny and it was just a blatant you know whatever it was whether it was a money grab or it was just too commercial and in in a sense where they're like hey look at me like it was just goofy right um and then comics i think got displaced because all the youtubers came in and all the social media stars came in and they really knocked comics off because now people are much more like if you ask anyone under 30 who their famous favorite comedian is they say david dobrik and there's nothing wrong with that david's a funny guy but like what you you know i don't not especially to me a ton but that's okay i don't you know but he makes people laugh so he's funny um but he's what people you know that's a comedian now so comics got beat by other people coming into a digital space before they did laying the groundwork and taking it over and now comics are just trying to stay alive like even my podcast which is people really like it thank god and i i love doing it the tim dillon show well thank you uh i was late you know i mean i was i just you know it i've been podcasting for a long time but really dedicating myself and putting the resources behind it i was late to it like i was like hey i'm i'm telling jokes on stage which is great but i should have been allocating more time to building an infrastructure online and i wasn't doing it and a lot of comics weren't doing it funny comics weren't doing comics that should be doing it and i think when the pandemic ends a lot of comics will just keep doing live stand-up but i will keep obviously i'm going to go back on the road and do live standard but i will keep doing this podcast and building digitally too you're also exploring ideas you're doing like short videos yes and so on you're you're trying to look for different mediums of uh everywhere i want to be funny everywhere i love making things too my producer ben avery is like a brilliant editor and comedic mind even though he's not a stand-up he's able to on he understands funny he understands what makes me funny we're able to make these really i mean some of those videos they're just brilliant little videos even though they're tiny little videos they're fucking as funny as anything and it's not me it's me working with somebody else to make something really great and if and and it's that relationship that's very important um in some sense the uh the medium of a short video is a challenge just like the medium of a short tweet of course how to say something i mean whatever the flavor is uh of what's in your heart what's your mind how to say it whether it's the goal is funny right or something or just an expressing idea i think it's the whole thing that's important to us is that it's an extension of really like an extension of your friendship in a way like are you guys laughing at it right are you guys making each other laugh about this idea yeah and if that's the case other people are going to laugh at it you know i think so much of the old medium was like everything was top down okay pitch me this idea i pitch it to the show runner they pitch it to the network they pitch to this that you know standards and practices sales and we got to go through everything now it's just like our me and a few buddies or even just one buddy laughing at this idea does it captivate us and do we see it visually and also a great line from roseanne a guy not roseanne but a guy that worked on roseanne uh the old roseanne the great one he said is it funny with the sound off right that's what we try to do that's brilliant is it funny with the sound off when you see me and the dumb things or me and the mega mccain yeah or me and the thing is it funny with the sound off and if you're funny with the sound off you have a good starting point that's hilarious because uh you i would say you're one of the people because most people are not funny with this honor most comedians like you you will ferrell is another example of that there's something about when i click on one of your videos it's funny just like the first thing i see yeah just your face we well thank you that's very sweet but i mean thank god i mean that's what we try to do right we're trying to be funny yeah so we're trying to be funny can you talk about love a little bit sure so you came out of the closet as being gay when you were 25. yeah it's a lot it's late very late very late before today's standards during and after how has your view on love evolve interesting it's so hard to say because like i would i i'd like to make a very like disney fine statement about like that you can't be in love uh secretively you should be honest love should all be about honesty but that's not true right there's people that are in love that are lying to everyone else but they're deeply in love yeah um i would love to say something like honesty's of ingredient for love you know but i don't know maybe honestly with each other but i mean i know i i think there's a lot of people in the world that aren't honest my view on love is super important uh i think that it's we a lot of society in america is all about love we don't tend to focus on other uh things in terms of like you know uh friendship or sustainability of that because i think that a lot i know a lot of people in relationships where it's like i don't know they're not they are they love each other but like it's also a rock-solid couple because they are they're very compatible in many other ways right so i think they're like friends they have right i see friendship and love is the same thing right there's parts of it that are right so it's like i look at it as like there is there needs to be more than just like that like amazing like chemistry or physical attraction that is this chemical thing that happens there should be like some underlying i mean again that's from what i that's what i've observed as really long lasting successful relationships well is there something about coming out that that was uh that you took away that you remember as yes profound and insightful it was i that i it wasn't society it was me so there were kids that were out in my high school that i waited years later to do it that was no one's fault but my own so i was taking a cowardly way out and a lot of people so i could blame society or like oh i lived in a conservative area and i grew up you should take responsibility for your own decisions and if you're being cowardly admit that you're being cowardly so that's what i took out of it is it it's not society's fault that you chose to be a coward society will never be perfect you have to be honest when you're ready to be honest or however you want to be honest but it's not somebody too much now is it's everyone else's fault that you didn't take make a hard choice or a hard decision so that's kind of what i took out of it so now in retrospect you see yourself as were being afraid do you right do you think at the time well i wanted people to like me which is that it was just the disease of humanity right is that we want to be liked and what happens is if you want people to like you and love you even you want uh people to feel comfortable with you and those were people like your family friends more my family i would always you know could always throw in the street but my i'm kidding i mean but i am not yeah uh but my friends my circle of friends which i were my family at the time when you're a senior when you're 10th 11th grade in high school your fa your friends are your fam you know what i mean like that's your so you don't want to do anything that puts you on the outside of the circle this is thinking back to that fear is there things you're afraid of now are there not doing you're afraid to do i'm afraid of all kinds of things i'm afraid of not being good at my job not being funny letting people down uh not putting out products that are good you know whether it's the podcast every week or stand up or the videos like i'm afraid of like there's a ton of people that really enjoy what we do so when you're in that position you're nervous that you're gonna start doing things that they don't like so the new things you want to do the evolution you want to do you want to make sure you're evolving in the right way you know you want to make sure that you're doing things that are consistent with why people liked you but also you don't want to put yourself in a box and limit what you can be going forward so like i had a talk with the ceo of nbc universal once i was doing some internal sketch for them and i was playing like a cab driver and he was a and he's not the current ceo but he's a former ceo and i said what's the hardest part of running a corporation of this size and he said something very interesting uh he said the hardest part is maximizing the current profit model of what you have at the same time getting ready getting ready getting the company ready for where it's going to be in five years he said those are often at odds and that's the toughest thing he goes because i could just bang out everything i got to do right now and we're going to make a lot of money doing this but am i devoting enough resources into digital so that in five years when that's where everything lives are we competitive in that space so it's funny as i am now hopefully to people and a lot of the things that i want to do now i'm going what am i what groundwork am i not laying for three to five years down the road so that i can be adapting to the trends that are important then in terms of not so much comedic trends but like the technological trends like what is the what is it you know i should have done podcasting earlier what should i should i have a bigger presence on tick tock should i have a bigger presence here should i have a business or should i be on twitch should i be doing this should i be doing that what am i not doing that i should be doing that i'll regret not doing and those are those are the conversations i think i have in my own head all the time and i guess there's parallels to coming out as gay or just parallels in in like career paths you're taking all that that's ultimately just fear it's fear yeah it's the fear of you know the the best thing that happened in my career was that i came to la i didn't have an idea of what was gonna happen i met somebody who was really uh committed to making funny things that we just wanted to be funny no one would let us be funny we didn't have comedy central letting us be funny we didn't have hbo we didn't have netflix we just had a garage and a phone in the beginning and then a camera and then a thing and we just wanted to be funny and that was the greatest risk really i took because i was like well i don't know what else is going to happen right now but i just want to be funny and funny saved my life right i mean funny got me out of drugs funny probably got me out of the closet funny was the thing that i was able to do that made everything okay in my own head so i was like as long as i'm being funny something good will happen so we did that and then something really cool happened that we were able to do a lot of cool things but you know that's what it is it's fear that keeps you from being the better version of yourself your mom i mean you have so many complicated fascinating parts of your story but thank you your mom uh as you were growing up suffering yeah well for mental illness yes schizophrenia can you tell her story and how that relationship has changed over the years yeah well she was always uh eccentric and always you know the terms for schizophrenia in an irish catholic household where we didn't talk about anything were eccentric fun she's fun there's a theme to this unpredictable she's uh a while she was a live wire any of the words you would use to describe somebody who's a fucking lunatic but you wouldn't say that um right she she started experiencing uh symptoms probably early on in her life but she also like i think started really manifesting them when i was in my mid teens so like 14 13 14 area and she got really really bad and then i think she was institutionalized about 10 years ago a little over 10 years ago and she could really no longer live on her own she was unable to go to work she was unable to function so i visit her when i can obviously i'm not new york whenever i go to new york i visit her she's aware of what i do my career and everything like that you know she has good days and bad days but you know mental illness is a thing it's very tough we don't talk about it as a society people with mental problems don't get that much attention we tend to think that they did something wrong uh or that they deserve it or that they are you know to be ignored and we don't devote a lot of resources into it which is unfortunate because then you have the junk gurus come in and go like let's diagnose your mental illness off instagram and it's like that's not the move um yeah do you uh do you love her i do i do i love her but i also remember her that isn't her now and when someone has mental illness that's severe you make peace with their death before they die oh yeah because the part of them that you love and remember a lot of cases is is is not evident or obvious now my mother's still a loving person that i love but the fun her ability to be present in the moment and to not you know that is lost with the progression of realness so that you still love her and i mean again you know your parents you know the time horizons you have with your parents are unknown people don't know you could you know i have friends that their parents are in their lives for their entire life and i have friends whose parents were in their life but my mother was a very she knew what i was when i was a little kid i was an actor when i was like six to 12. my mother knew that i was a performer she knew what i was and what i'd ultimately do she recognized that in me and when i said to her i want to audition for shows i want to be on stage i want to be on this i want to do this she let me do it because she knew who i was and she didn't want to get in the way of me being a human being a fully realized person at six so that's probably the best thing a parent can do for a kid is let them be who they are and my mother did that so that i mean that's good we we ate too much fast food there were negatives but she did let me be well that's why you want to throw them out into the street yes sometimes uh but coming uh coming to accept uh mortality of her i guess identity as you remember it from childhood do you uh ponder your own mortality are you afraid of death i'm afraid of death i don't like the idea of death but i know what's happening you know i know it's gonna happen eventually i don't think about it i think about i want to do some good stuff that people can look back at and i think i'm proud i'm proud of the show where if people look back at the show i don't know how comedy ages or whatever but like i think i put out a lot of stuff and i want to continue to put out stuff and i want to put out a few specials that people can look back at and go oh this guy was really funny in this really crazy you know he lived in the the latter part of this century when all the shit was going on and he kind of made fun of it and he did something to make uh people's lives a little better just by having you know a few laughs you know what do you think about this is something like in the podcast context do you think you'll have just one or two or three shows out of thousands maybe that are like the truly special ones that's probably the case or do you think it's the entirety of the body of work i think people will take 10-minute clips from all different shows and put them together and it's a highlight yeah like a highlight reel of just like these are like the the best things that he's ever done or the best the rants he's ever had the best things whatever so the legacy would be that this was an important voice in a very weird time i would hope i would hope that that's part of it and i hope that i continue to be you know what you say important i say funny but hopefully i continue to be a voice and that's what i think when i think about death i think about like what did people what did people come on earth to do and i think i came i think my main purpose on this planet other than to experience whatever love or you know worthiness or whatever is to make to entertain people and there's a lot of people in comedy right now that are not entertainers and that's really the problem uh but and they got into comedy sort of the way that you know uh you can walk into the wrong store in a mall and then not realize you're in the wrong store and try on a bunch of clothes and then go fuck i wasted my whole afternoon but i think i've always kind of been an entertainer and that's what i want to do there's uh unfortunately sadly a lot of people that look up to you that is a horrible thing but life is a nightmare yeah uh if you were to give them advice young folks people in college maybe even high school but people in their 20s about what to do with their life uh whether it's career whether it's just life in general what would you say ignore everyone make a few good friends truly have honest conversations with yourself about your what when do you feel the most alive figure that out when and how do you feel the most alive yeah figure that out try to figure out a job or a career that can replicate that feeling um don't listen to anyone don't listen to your parents don't listen to the gurus on the internet don't listen to me don't listen to anyone figure out you know where you feel the most alive where do you feel excited where do you where does your pulse quicken what do you feel matters when you're in a situation do you feel like it matters uh what situation was that what got you excited what thing did you walk into where you looked around and were taken back and you're like wow this is amazing and i'm filled with awe if you can figure out a life where you you you can excite yourself you might not use drugs or alcohol or a sex addiction or gambling or irresponsibility you might not have to get your fucking kicks in very destructive places if you can get them in a productive place we got a you had a pretty weaving life that's full of uh mistakes and so on many mistakes is that are mistakes a bugger feature like do you recommend uh embrace the mistakes like make a bunch of them depends what they are right so well you you've had the full spectrum i've had a lot but a lot of mine could have sunk me right like they sound like fun when i talk about them but they actually could have sunk me and they were all part of what made me funny but i don't know i would never tell anyone else to just light their life on fire and hope it works out on the other end it would be pretty irresponsible but hey at the end of the day it's like you're gonna we get there's you know i think one of my themes is that there's too much we give the power we think we have to the power of choice has been elevated on our society to uh an unhealthy degree i think people are i think you could you could get really good at something but you're born with a certain aptitude it might be to be a deal maker it might be to be an athlete it might be to be an artist it might be to be a romantic just fall in and out of love in and out of love in and out love it might be to be like a world traveler like but whatever you are i think you are i think that there's something about you that makes you something and if you can figure it out and then refine you're not going to be good at it per se but if you're if you're an athlete it might not mean that you're going to be a great athlete in the history but it might mean you're the best coach anyone's ever had or you're the person that you know builds a local scene for young athletes or whatever if you are a really good deal maker it doesn't mean you're going to be warren buffett but it might mean you're somebody who enjoys making deals all the time and things like that like if you're an entertainer it might mean that you are an entertainer it might mean that you are in the world of entertainment because you love it so much that if you lack the skill set to really pursue it on a degree you just want to be like there's there's a there's a thing inside of you that makes you what you are i think i look at certain people and i go you were born to be that thing you know my whole purpose is to find it i was a juror on that murder trial on a murder trial in long island and the the woman who's a d.a i'm like you were born to do this you were born to put murderers away and this guy killed the mother of his children and he was a bad guy but like i was like you are really good at what you do she has a strong belief in whatever her moral code is and what her justice and ethics are and she wants to communicate that to people she was very good at at doing what she did i don't know the facts of the case i didn't really listen he seemed guilty so i just voted guilty but she i didn't really listen to her but i heard the shape of her mouth was very bovine like a cow and it conferred a certain level of expertise that i enjoyed well it's funny i mean you could see you're half joking yeah you can often see that people just this they found their place they found their roles found their thing they found their thing and that's kind of the the purpose of life and once you are in the in the place that seems sticky like the place that seems right you know that's one of the problems with the generation that you're speaking to is there's always a feeling like i should keep exploring keep exploring but it's okay to stay in a place that you follow that works yeah and listen sometimes the best place you'll find is like one point people are like when did you feel really excited and alive it's like doing nothing right yeah you know like that's the other thing it's like some people are gonna be like i feel really excited and alive and i'm laying in my backyard in a hammock yeah and i just wanted the simplest life and not have to do much and i don't like doing anything and i love laying around and going wow this guy looks good today yeah bill gates goes this sky looks good today let's shoot a missile into it he wants to do shit right so it's like in between that and nothing is you can find something but in that process for you personally i mean for me and for others i think there's a struggle when you look in when tim and dylan looks in the mirror do you love yourself or do you hate yourself well a lot of times i think i'm amy schumer so i'm confused i don't i'm a dayton to myself all the time i don't love myself or hate myself addicts have a very uh bad uh problem where you can't just fall in love with yourself and you can't hate yourself both of them lead you to a negative place you try to stay kind of even keel i don't go like hey man you put out a video i got all these views things are great you sold a bunch of tickets let's fucking go out like maybe let's hey man let's have that drink that you've been waiting for for 11 years and i don't look at myself and go you ate a burger yesterday you're a piece of shit you're horrible you'll never you know get into the shape you want like i try not to get too low or too high both of them are not good for my particular mind okay i i gotta ask we were kind of spoke about 2021 and you being potentially hopeful hopeful short-term cynical long-term yeah so let me ask i forgot to ask are you moving to austin i don't know i mean i don't think so immediately you know i love joe i love what he's trying to do down there i'm i'm appreciative of everything that he's done for not only me but for comedy in general and i think as things happen in austin and unfold it's such a political answer but as things unfold i will consider it more and more but i mean i think i got another year in l.a so you uh you've spoken so nicely about this magical place that is los angeles so you're very funny you think there's a place for comedy in l.a oh yeah there'll be a place for comedy in l.a so it's going to be a place for comedy in new york i mean the question is how thriving of a comedy scene is austin going to be and the joe can probably make it one but as of right now it isn't so that would be him doing that but the question there's a lot of people escaping los angeles but i know better about new york there's a lot of really brilliant let them go there's there's other people this is the thing it's like this is the fear thing it's like no but all the brilliant people are leaving there'll be other people and they'll fill their shoes the way that they've done throughout history and i think that new york and la listen maybe in five to ten years they're not the two cities it would be real rough in five years when this pandemic's over for people in australia to go dude you gotta go to america you gotta visit charleston and austin yeah stop let's see adults here let's be adults it's still gonna be new york in l.a for a while uh la's is is it absolute hellscape but i don't think you're gonna replace california with another place yeah and also everyone's making decisions now because we're literally in the midst of a pandemic we've never had before right we've never had this before joe loved california up until the pandemic he had problems with it like we all have problems with it there's a lot of benefits to being here i think a lot of us made pretty bad decisions in 2020 because we're all locked up and stuck with their own thoughts but so it's funny there's parallels because i don't necessarily you know i'm obviously a fan of comedy but i don't care where comics move sure but there's a parallel move that's happening instead of decisions which do influence my decision making which is where to start a business that's tech centered and that's more about the uh san francisco silicon valley and there is a lot of people leaving there that's everyone in austin there well austin there's a i think there's there's a bunch of different places phoenix there's denver austin will probably be a massive tech hub elon's there it seems like it's all everything about austin says that it's going to be a massive tech hub i just don't know if that means it'll be a massive comedy hub yeah it might i don't know if those two can actually coexist it's interesting because yeah i don't i think you know comedy suffered in new york in l.a when everyone got super rich like you know it just wasn't as cool it's still much more fun on the road it's still more fun to perform for people that want and need to laugh in strip malls than it is to perform for hedge fund managers on and with their dates and uh you know instagram models in la it's just what it is comedy on the road is much more fun so maybe in the spirit of that austin becomes but you know you know if austin is just colonized by tech bros and stuff like yeah i mean sure it'll be fun and it'll be great i think joe's made a l.a scene so if anyone's going to make austin a scene it's joe yeah and i like the on the elon side which is what i'm much more familiar with the promise of the possibility of what that could become because there's a lot of problems in silicon valley and of course it might be naive to think that just because it's like the grass is greener thing which is just because the place where you come from has a lot of problems doesn't mean you can just create a new place that's not going to have those yeah there's homelessness in austin there are problems in austin i mean i i think that with by the way with the influx of very rich people to an area sometimes that helps things but sometimes it just makes things more polarizing and it spots puts a spotlight on those problems and makes those problems even bigger right so i mean i don't know that it's necessarily it's hard to predict i just know the la right now is funny it's funny that there's 15 year old tick tockers making millions of dollars dancing in a house while the world burns that is very funny well it's for your for for your style of humor yeah yes the absurdity it's funny that it is no one cares about hollywood starlets and actresses and actors and everyone goes hey fuck you even though they've won three academy awards they're all being replaced by just mediocre dancer 15 year olds i mean it's like there's something hilarious about this city and it will burn in hell but so will everything so what are we talking about uh yeah eventually the the sun will die out and we will all be gone unless we colonize outside of our solar system but you know i i stand i just sit here you know i'm struggling with this because boston i'm currently at mit boston doesn't feel like the right place to start a business uh in the tech sector and so i'm choosing i'm looking at san francisco the way it is and i'm looking at austin austin clearly so it seems clear but it's it's such a difficult thing to uh to predict what a place will look like in 10 years in 15 years or 20 years and it's so hard to participate you'll like it or not until you're there and you know this is speaking to risk um there's not really a good reason for me to move anywhere well there's not a good reason to do anything in life part of me wants to uh just fucking do it and whatever and see what happens like boston do you like other things about boston besides the tech thing mit that's the problem and but do you like you like like the food in boston do you eat food i haven't been i haven't eaten food or been outside for years and i mean that that's probably the better version but you're keto forever you've been keto for a long time yeah keto fasting for a long time uh 15 years fasting uh eating once or twice a day i'm not having uh no sugar ever no like no sugar and no pasta ever no no bread ever no pasta no bread no except like uh so my source you could kind of live anywhere because like going out is such a big part of what city you live in and like you like the food there do you like the restaurants can you meet people whatever but it's like you really can just kind of yeah so not married no kids right you have freedom i'm me too i have freedom yeah and that that's we we have the curse of too many choices right that's the thing we have too many choices we don't have somebody else going what about like we don't have to justify our decisions to anyone yeah so we can just kind of like let our minds go run wild so you just gotta hone the instinct of just what feels right and just fucking do it and that's austin with joe down there and elon down there austin seems like a real no-brainer move right for you to try you know why the hell not why not why not and then i think i should go to mit like i mean i mean i think i should give those nerds a piece of my mind yeah you should go to i was in an uber pool once with a kid from mit and i was eating uh this thing from bova's bakery i forget what it was it was like a uh it's so good i don't know you don't know bova's bakery right yeah i was in boston it's famous i was eating a thing i was like covered in chocolate this kid like this little nerd like this little like you know usb drive with feet was just staring at me and they just dropped him off at mit and he like scurried away yeah but that's a big school that doesn't the nsa recruit out of there heavy like at mit places like that i can't i can't speak to that but what this is ridiculous question i sometimes ask myself when i'm alone what is the meaning of life do you think about the big existential kind of why the hell we're here it's a cosmic kind of joke kind of in a weird way right i mean joe said it the other day on maybe it was you saying that like he was just like you know by the time you figure out what it is you're out of here you know it's kind of interesting or you even start to figure out what it is you're out of here it's like it's like that's kind of funny it's like you don't get enough time to truly i think the meaning of life is just like at the end of the day do you feel it was time well spent was it time well spent that's that's really what it is if you look back do you go hey it was time well spent like a pretty good ride it was pretty good ride i did i did it did a lot i did a lot of things i i doing what you say is a part of it i think if you say you're gonna do something maybe doing it uh that seems to be extrapolating the meaning of life question to like you know what did you come here to do i think it goes down deep like who are you and what do you want and you know what are you suited to do and what it does seem that like the people who are most enlightened that i've ever met or read books by they ultimately land on humor like they don't take shit seriously they embrace the absurdity of it all and just kind of laugh i laugh at it in this kind of simple way so it does seem that humor is like one of the fundamental truths of the scene yes we're in and somehow it's love humor humor can be love right people laughing that that sound is kind of like carolyn knapp who wrote a book called drinking a love story which is a really good book about not drinking drinking and then not drinking and um she said the lat you could understand things as love that you i think one of the last lines in the thing is like people talking about their experiences in life that that could be love like you know laughter is love like i feel like love and and finding it wherever you can find it is why we're here that's that connection and laughter can be love and you know figuring out you know something that makes life better for a lot of people can be loved you know whether it's a vaccine or a a technological advancement or whatever like you know all of those things i think can be that feeling and i think that's what's important it connects you to a larger frequency you know i don't think there's a better way to end it tim i hope you're one of the voices i truly believe that your legacy would be one of the most important voices of our time because you're fearless and challenging all the absurdity of uh the nonsense that of our social and political discourse so i hope you keep doing it i'm a fan i'm still a big star struck so oh stop it listen i i your job i thought it was your intellectual capacity enjoying anything i do only underscores how truly fucked we are but thank you very much yeah uh thank you for talking today thank you brother thanks for listening to this conversation with tim dillon and thank you to our 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