Tim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom
嘉宾：Tim Dillon
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The following is a conversation with Tim Dillon,
a standup comedian who is fearless
in challenging the norms of modern day social
and political discourse.
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As a side note, let me say that I will continue
talking to scientists, engineers, historians,
mathematicians, and so on.
But I will also talk to the people
who Jack Kerouac called the mad ones
in his book "On the Road."
That is one of my favorite books.
He wrote, "The only people for me are the mad ones,
"the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,
"mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
"the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,
"but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles,
"exploding like spiders across the stars.
"And in the middle, you see the blue center light pop,
"and everybody goes, 'Oh.'"
Some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble
in that I have no idea how they will turn out,
but I'm willing to risk it for a chance
at a bit of an adventure.
And I'm happy and honored that Tim, this time,
wanted to take a chance as well.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify,
support it on Patreon, or connect with me
on Twitter @LexFriedman.
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 essence of a human being.
- I would like it to say, "This has not been paid for."
(Lex laughing)
And I want my living relatives to struggle 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 wanna ever excavate a body, but we will,
"because this has not been paid for."
- I love the idea of leaving the world, like debt,
leaving the world in lots of debt
that other people have to deal with.
And 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 just curse the sky,
because they don't have a physical person anymore
to be angry at, but they still have to deal
with the decisions that person made.
And that's deeply tragic,
but that's always struck me as very funny.
- Well, it's a kind of immortality, the debt,
'cause 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 in,
her husband shot himself in the driveway,
and my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve,
because he owed so much money,
she would come over and go, "I hate him.
"I fucking hate him."
And it was just such an interesting thing
to see somebody who, and her kids ended up getting angry
at her for that, because they didn't understand
why she would hate a guy who was clearly suffering,
but she goes, "He took the selfish way out.
"He fucked us."
And it was always interesting for me to just remember
that you can leave Earth and still be a problem.
(laughing)
That's kind of a special person,
so that's, I think, what I'd like my tombstone to read.
- Yeah, there's a show called "Louie" with Louis C.K.
I don't know if you've watched it.
- Yes, I'm aware of it.
- There's this moment, I think,
where an old guy's talking to Louis
about the best part about love is after you break up,
and it's remembering that,
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.
- Interesting.
- 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 what love really is.
- Wow.
- In the same way that anger,
your tombstone, what arouses, will last longer.
And that's deeply like a human thing.
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 did drugs for many years,
and I spent time with some wild people,
and their parents were also wild people.
And some of their parents have done crazy things to them,
and have created situations
that were not productive for child-rearing.
And so I know that when those people die,
it's going to be a very mixed bag.
Like there's going to be a lot of complex emotions,
like, "Hey, we loved that guy,
but also when we look back,
he was a horrible father, a horrible husband,
but he was fun."
And we don't put enough stock in that,
but there will be a push and pull.
And I'll be the one kind of bringing up like,
"Hey, he was a lot of fun."
He was a lot, remember when he stuck us,
one of the things,
this particular person I'm talking about,
we were at a bar,
me and my friend were there, we're having dinner,
and his father who was an alcoholic,
and a guy that would go out every night,
and didn't work, 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 we were sitting at this bar restaurant,
and the bartender,
we see his father walk up to the bartender and say,
"Point at us, point at 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 climbed over the little fence
down to the water,
got in his little boat,
it was a little cigarette boat,
and he just drove away.
And then about an hour later,
we went and we said,
"I think that guy took care of the bill."
But she said, "Well, go talk to the bartender."
So we talked to the bartender,
and he goes, he handed us a bill,
and the bill was for like $1,000.
And we said, "Wait a minute, what the hell's going on?"
And he goes, "The guy that left an hour ago
said you were gonna take care of his bill,
he's been drinking here all week."
And we go, "What are you talking about?"
And he goes, "Remember, he pointed at you,
he put the thumbs up, and you guys waved?"
You remember that?
And the guy goes, and we went,
"Yeah," and I just looked at my friend,
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--
- Alcohol involved?
Drugs involved? - Yes, he was,
usually alcohol was involved when he left his house.
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?
(laughing)
Do you know what a good time someone has to be
to get in a boat with them
after you've already gotten in one wreck?
- Never get fooled again, 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 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,
§02Transcript · 07:48–15:28
all of the fun, under the fun,
lived a very destructive person
who not only was destructive, but wanted to die.
- So speaking of fun people that wanna die,
I don't know if you're,
we can go Hunter S. Thompson,
but Charles Bukowski, I don't know if you're aware of the guy.
- I'm aware of him, sure.
I've read some of his stuff.
- So his tombstone says,
I just wanted to ask you a question about it.
His tombstone says, "Don't try."
- Interesting.
- What do you think about that advice
as a way to approach life?
- I think for many people, it's a good advice.
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
that tell people that they all have to own their own business
and be their own boss and be a disruptor
and get into industries.
That's incredibly unrealistic for most people.
Most people are not suited for that.
And the Gary V's of 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.
Yeah, I think a lot of people,
that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people.
I think my generation got horrible advice
from our parents, from our teachers.
And that advice was follow your dreams.
And that was it, by the way.
There was no like, what are your dreams?
Are they realistic?
What happens when they don't work out?
Will your dreams make you happy?
Are your dreams real?
Do they exist on earth?
Can you follow, anybody follow your dreams?
You can be anything you wanna be.
Horrible advice.
Horrible advice.
Worst advice you could ever give a generation of people.
Really, truly.
I mean, think about it.
If you were talking to somebody
and you were trying to make them succeed,
are there any two worse pieces of advice to give them
than follow your dreams
and you can be anything you want to be?
Those to me are the two most destructive pieces
of information I've ever heard.
- So let me push back because--
- Okay, that's fair.
Many people do.
So yeah, this is like a rigorous journalistic interview.
Larry King, by the way, passed away today.
So I'm taking over the--
- It's very sad.
- I'm carrying the--
- Very sad.
RIP 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 a stupid way.
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 everybody always told me, my family,
the people around me,
the sort of, the epitome of what I could achieve
is to be kind of a stable job.
The old like lawyer, doctor,
in my case, it's like scientist and so on.
But I had these dreams, I had this fire 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,
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 the pushback against the,
follow your dreams as bad 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, but let's be very honest.
- This is very true, yeah.
- Be very honest.
So I mean like, yeah, if you're gonna go be an actor,
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, I was willing to fail.
I had failed before.
I was broke.
I didn't care about being broke.
I knew how to be broke.
I had, I was shameless to a degree.
I was, I would get on a stage night after night
and be laughed at.
I would, I had a high threshold for being embarrassed.
I had a high threshold for people thinking
that I was a scumbag, right?
And showing up at family parties and being like, yeah,
I still really don't have a job.
And I'm just, I work at comedy clubs kind of,
and I get booked when I can.
And I was, you know, suited for it.
There's this idea that people can just roam
around the world injecting themselves into other things
they have no aptitude for at all.
And will that to happen?
A small percentage of people might be able to do that.
But the vast majority of people have something
they might key into that they're meant to do.
Like you loved robots, you love technology,
and you found a place in that world where you thrive.
But I think many people, a lot of people love robots, right?
So a lot of people think everything you do is interesting.
I think your shit is fascinating.
I watch your podcast and I think it's very interesting.
I have no place in your world.
You know what I mean?
I have no place in that world.
I don't like remedial math.
I don't like community college math.
I think it's a waste of my time.
- What do you think about robot?
Would you ever buy a robot for your home?
- Yes.
What will it do?
- I'll be a companion, a friend.
- Oh yeah, I mean, I would like to start replacing
friends and family with robots immediately.
I mean, truly, truly.
I mean, I'm not even kidding.
Like I would like to have a Thanksgiving with four robots.
I'm dead serious.
Are they into QAnon?
Like are the robots, when do the robots start going crazy?
That's my question is like,
how long do the robots live with me
before they are also a problem?
And I got to replace them.
You know what I mean?
- You're going to indoctrinate the robot.
- The robot's going to 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 people like you,
I'm a huge fan by the way, get in front of robots.
- Well, I am 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 COVID, right?
We don't do a good job.
It's just something we don't do well.
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 a gambling addict in this country.
We know what it feels like to be outside of an OTB
at 9 a.m. drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes
going, I'm going to build it back.
§03Transcript · 15:29–23:16
And we know what it's like to win,
but anything in between, it seems not that great.
So to me, it feels like, are we going to be able to like
help people that are displaced
and that have their jobs taken by, I mean,
do you not fear sort of a world where you have a lot of,
you know, artificial intelligence replacing workers
and then what happens?
- There's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence.
One of them is yes, displacement of jobs, workers.
That's technology in general.
That's just 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,
what that information looks like,
the creation of silos, all that kind of stuff.
I think that would just make worse the effects
that the displacement of jobs has.
I think ultimately, I have a hope that technology
creates more opportunities than it destroys.
- I hope so too.
- And so in that sense, AI to me is an exciting possibility.
But you know, the challenges this world presents
will create divisions, will create chaos and so on.
So I'm more focused on the way we deal as a society
with that chaos, the way we talk to each other.
- That's huge.
- Creating the platform that's healthy for that.
- Now as a comedian, creator, whatever you wanna call it,
people that put out content,
the gatekeepers are now algorithmic, right?
So they are kind of almost AI ready.
So if you are a person that puts out YouTube videos,
podcasts, whatever you're doing,
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 an algorithm you barely understand.
Like I've talked to people at YouTube,
but I don't know if they understand the algorithm.
- They don't.
- They don't.
- This is fascinating.
- Yeah, it's fascinating.
'Cause I speak to people at YouTube and I go,
"Hey man, what's going on here?"
One of my episode titles of my podcast
was called "Knife Fight in Malibu."
It was about real estate.
And it was because a realtor in Malibu,
I was trying to get a summer rental,
which I can't really afford,
but I don't think that's a huge problem.
I follow my dreams.
So I called a realtor and she said,
"Listen," she goes,
"I don't know what the government's saying,
"but it's a real knife fight out here."
You know, an old grizzled woman, real realtor,
tan skin, cig out the mouth, driving a Porsche.
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.
No one's made her come in years,
but she just loves heating kitchen floors and views.
Fun.
She's a demon from hell and we need them, truly.
We're getting rid of them.
It's not good.
And she goes, "It's 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 people stabbing each other in Wendy's
and we got demonetized.
Did we get demonetized?
- We didn't get demonetized, but we lost 80,000 views.
- We lost a lot of views
'cause we were kicked out of whatever,
we were just kicked out.
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 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 of special cases,
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 reported by people and they get,
they give enough people to report a particular video,
a particular tweet.
It rises up to where humans look over it.
But 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.
'Cause 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.
- And the description is a small contribution
in terms of filtering,
in terms of the knife fight situation.
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 of these QAnon videos
or something like that, or Flat Earth videos,
and you also watch, are really excitedly watching
the whole knife fight in Malibu video.
That says, that increases the chance that the knife fight
is a dangerous video for society or something like that.
- Interesting, wow.
- Based on their contribution.
- So if people are watching something,
'cause I watch QAnon 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.
But what's interesting is if I then go watch something else,
I'm increasing the likelihood that that video
is gonna 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 automatically clustered.
- It'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 why.
- You could have said Disney World is the bombs.
- Right, right, right.
- It's just rearranging.
That's what it probably meant.
- I wasn't saying to do it,
but I was saying let's start thinking about plans to do,
like not let's do it, but 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 wanna live in that world
of worrying about algorithms.
You don't wanna worry about deplatforming and shadowbanning.
I mean, all these conversations that I've had
with other comedians about shadowbanning,
I mean, it's hilarious.
We all call each other.
I think I'm being shadowbanned.
Are you being shadowbanned?
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 shadowbanned.
- Yeah.
- So it's this new paranoia,
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 however you wanna believe.
But then there are also things
that just don't perform as well.
For a myriad of reasons.
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 really troubling to me?
We could talk about several troubling aspects,
but one is Amazon removing Parler 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
§04Transcript · 23:21–30:57
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, and basically because tech,
you have to be in business with one of five companies.
I think it's like Amazon, Facebook, Google,
YouTube, and Twitter, whatever.
Like, I mean, Amazon puts everything on the cloud.
Google and YouTube, 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 in every,
like because you have to do business with it.
It's a cartel of these companies.
You understand it better than anybody
that you are prevented, truly.
And I think whatever you think about Parler,
whatever you think about what people are saying on Parler,
whatever you think about Alex Jones,
whatever you thought about Mila Yiannopoulos,
the state has an interest in,
and has always had an interest in crushing dissent.
This is what the state has done.
This is how they retain the power they have
by eliminating dissent where they can.
Now, because you don't have 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 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.
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
to balance the powers in society.
- Well, sure, 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 was never gonna 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 what they really want it to be
is what Instagram's 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, you know,
hyper, and I'm a capitalist,
but this is like hyper-capitalist
in the sense of like, they only want you consuming things
and they don't want you thinking too much.
And that seems to be where it's heading.
I've even seen that with Instagram
where it's like everything on Instagram
is like, buy a sweatshirt, you know?
And I'm like, all right, man.
Hey man, if I want a sweatshirt, I'll get it.
Like, relax.
You know, just every ad seems to be encouraging consumption,
but very few things seem geared towards,
hey, let's have a dialogue or let's,
and not that Instagram was ever great for that,
but like, if everything's geared now
towards content on Instagram,
a lot of it seems geared towards shopping.
- See, I don't know.
That's an interesting point.
I don't know if the consumerism that capitalism leads to
is necessarily gets in the way of nuanced conversation.
I feel like you could still sell 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.
- Yeah, we try.
We try to balance that.
- Do you have sweatshirts?
- We do.
Are they on sale now, fake business?
We do, fake business sweatshirt
with the Enron logo, fake business.
'Cause I do fake business all the time.
- It'd be nice if we talk about Alex Jones
if you plug the sweatshirt during that conversation.
- Yeah, we'll do that, absolutely.
But what I tend to worry about with,
I see social media and technology
existing to flatten society.
It makes people very boring.
All of the experiences kids have right now are online.
Many of their closest friendships are online.
Their first relationships are online.
The culture is very homogenous.
And I think it's eliminating characters.
It's eliminating interesting people.
It's making people into AI.
All of their tastes.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
- AI could be 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.
So we're not there yet.
Listen, I get why you like AI so much.
I hate people too.
And I'm very amenable to AI.
And I agree with you.
Listen, I think the future,
we gotta 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 and my--
- That's why the flash of light in your eyes
when you talked about that dog
was so much more than any person.
And I get it, by the way.
- You're right.
- I love people, but if we could--
- They're not exciting.
- If we could just use robots to kill most of them,
I think that would be good for society.
- I'm with that too.
But I think that social media flattens people.
- Flattening the personalities of characters.
- Flattening the personalities of people, man.
And it's just, when's the last time,
I like the idea of,
somebody showing up to high school with 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 gotta get into this.
And I'm like, when I talk to young,
you know I have friends that have younger brothers
and everything, and I know that the dominant culture
was always dominant, I'm not an idiot,
but I feel like it's harder to be unique and original now
because so much of what's promoted
is just this way to kind of corral people
into believing and thinking a certain set of ideals
that's constantly shifting and evolving.
And people are just caught up in that.
And to me, it gets very boring, very quickly.
I hate being bored, and that's what it is.
- I don't know what to do with that,
because at the same time, podcasts are really popular,
long form podcasts are really popular,
and people are hungry for those kinds of conversations.
There's a lot of dangerous ideas, quote unquote,
flowing, being spread around through podcasts.
Meaning just like debates.
- Correct.
- 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 look at the negative a lot
'cause 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.
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 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 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 be there, and it was just an amazing conversation
to watch.
- What was the shirt you wore, Julian Maxwell?
- "Frieges Lane," it was a fun joke that no one in tech got
because we all know how funny they are.
But the tech writers, which is mainly blue haired--
- I do not agree with these statements.
- Mainly blue haired people whose goal in life
is to find things to give them orgasms with, you know.
- If you want to dye your hair blue, it's your choice.
§05Transcript · 31:00–38:36
I respect it.
- Yeah, 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 that censors the humor were like,
he's advocating for human trafficker.
I'm like, it's clearly a joke
because we're coming off the believe all women.
- Yes.
- We're coming off that, and it's very funny
to just say "Frieges Lane," hey man, believe all women.
Like, it's just, our politics 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 the same kind of thing as with Bukowski,
these kinds of personalities that are wild,
crazy, full of ideas,
they don't have to be grounded in truth at all,
or they can be grounded in truth a little bit.
Like, he's just playing with ideas,
like a jazz musician, screaming sometimes.
Obviously he has some demons.
Sometimes he's super angry for no reason whatsoever.
It's 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 you've seen him with Michael Malice,
where he's doing, like 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 dangerous for society.
- Right.
- So what do you do with that?
Do you think he's dangerous for society?
Do you think he is one of the sort of
entertaining personalities of our time
that shouldn't be suppressed, or somewhere in between?
- I don't think that Alex, 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 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, 'cause it really is this
identifiable incident that you can look at
where it did get away from him,
and a lot of his fans who,
the people that are attracted to conspiracy stuff,
and I have some of those fans,
some of them are really smart people,
some of them are mentally unwell.
A lot of them happen to be mentally unwell.
So when you have a fan base of people
where some of them are mentally unwell,
and you are questioning, you know, tragic events, 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,
sometimes when you're right about 10 things
and you're wrong about something,
and the thing you're wrong about is so offensive to people,
you're never gonna get any credit for being right,
even though you were right more than when you were wrong.
The problem was a lot of his fans who were crazy
stalked, harassed these families,
and accused them of being actors,
and accused them of like faking their children's deaths.
It was this horrific experience.
And Alex is tied to that.
And, you know, how much he inspired that
by what he did on his show, I don't know,
because I haven't watched hours and hours
of that particular thing, like the whole Sandy Hook thing.
If you listen to him, he says, "I really covered it.
I kind of covered it and moved on."
Other people go, "No, he spent a long time on it."
But that's the real danger of going into that territory
over and over again, going,
"Everything's a false flag," or "Everything's fake."
I think Alex has actually been kind of reasonable.
Like he's resisted a lot of the politics
of like racial resentment on like the alt-right,
for example, he's resisted that.
He's resisted the anti-Semitic currents
of a lot of that politics, right?
He's resisted a lot of the virulently anti-trans
or anti-gay stuff.
Now, he does dip his toe into the water
of like the culture wars, of course he does.
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.
When I grew up, and I would turn him on every now and then,
he was talking about NAFTA, the WTO,
he's talking about 9/11,
he was talking about the World Trade Organizations
and a lot of these big conferences,
whether it was the Bilderberg Group,
whether it was Bohemian Grove, which he infiltrated.
And he was talking about,
"Hey, here are the most powerful people in the world,
and here's what they're doing,
and here's how it affects you."
And that was interesting to me,
because no one else was really talking about it,
except Alex Jones.
Occasionally Art Bell on WABC,
you'd listen to him at night, right?
I think Alex became very controversial
when he decided to back Donald Trump.
And then he has a considerable following
and a considerable audience
that he was then able to marshal
in the direction of supporting Donald Trump.
That was when the spotlight,
because then he was talking to Trump,
Trump did his show,
Alex Jones just got bigger, right?
I mean, he blew up, that's the term, right?
He blew up.
Like he had the good,
he put out the good HBO special,
whatever you want to call it.
He has a hit song.
He blew up.
And then people started looking at the things
that 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...
I understand the people that say that.
I understand, and I understand the people that go,
"When you have tech companies
that act in a coordinated manner
to just get rid of someone,
they don't have any way to defend themselves."
It's 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 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 problem.
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 understand the benefit
of them being treated like public utilities
and people thinking they have the right to a Twitter.
I've never, I don't know, I have very little confidence.
I mean, the government'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 do think someone like Alex,
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 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 gonna 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 gonna be like, we're not gonna allow this to happen.
So I understand that there is a line, right?
There is some, like people that say there's no line
aren't really thinking, like there is a line.
I just 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 talked to him
about that, but like, you know,
there were financial institutions that were refusing
to let him, you know, park his money there.
§06Transcript · 38:38–47:29
So I mean, it really does get pretty terrifying
pretty quickly.
- Probably without any transparency from those companies.
So you're right, it feels like there should be a process
of just having, for him to defend himself.
- I think there needs to be a process
for people to defend themselves.
Every day I wake up and I go,
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 never ever, people, you know,
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 deplatforming.
- It's interesting-- - That's odd.
- It's interesting to consider kind of a jury context
to where, you know, there's transparency
about why your video about bombing Disney World
might be taken down.
It gets taken down, and then there is,
it's almost like creating a little court case,
a mini court case, and not in a legal sense,
but 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 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 and close doors,
the meetings, and without any transparency
to the rest of the company, actually,
but also transparency to the rest of the world.
And so, and then all they say is we're 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 reason to ban them
without any kind of process.
I mean, it's interesting.
I'm torn in the whole thing.
If it was indeed, there's no transparency about it,
but if Parler was indeed inciting violence,
like if there was brewing of violence,
potential violence where thousands of people might die
because of some kind of riot,
this is the scary thing about mob,
about when a lot of people get together,
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.
- 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 Capitol
to thousands of people dying in the Capitol.
- Well, in fairness to defend the people of the Capitol,
they didn't shoot the cop, they bludgeoned him to death
with a fire extinguisher.
- Yes.
- So I do wanna just kind of put that out
as a defense of them.
Listen, I'm sure there was some wild shit
going on on Parler, and I think the problem,
here's the problem, right?
There's a lot of people that just wanna go on these sites
and say they wanna kill everyone.
And the problem is, 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.
They don't have healthcare, their job security isn't great.
They might be living in a community
that doesn't have the resources
they would like it to have.
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.
Like I've threatened to kill, I got banned from Airbnb,
I threatened to kill the people that banned me comedically.
Comedically, this is a joke.
I'm not going to kill you.
This is a joke 'cause I'm blowing off steam and I'm angry.
Do you know how many people that my parents,
like my dad's like, "I'm gonna fucking kill this guy."
My mom's like, "I'm gonna fucking kill."
They were talking about each other.
But none of it ever happened, but we should be,
I think you have to create a space
for people to threaten to overthrow the government
as long as they don't violently do it.
Does that make any sense?
I mean, as long as they're not gonna go hurt innocent people,
what are you gonna do?
There's so many people out there that,
that's why a lot of these things like 4chan, these sites,
a lot of people going on there,
they just wanna say the most fucked up shit
because it's the thing that gives them,
they can laugh or they can release steam.
It is immature, it is stupid.
It's not productive, it's not,
but at the end of the day,
if you're not gonna give people health insurance,
you gotta 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,
and the other side will always do it.
Like if a conservative dies and everyone goes, "Great."
Conservatives goes, "This is grotesque."
And then when RBG dies, they all have parties
and the conservatives go, "Great."
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 they're working for shit wages
and you haven't figured out a way to treat them,
treat their cancer diagnosis,
and they don't, I mean life,
you gotta derive pleasure from something, right?
- It's an interesting point that anger is a good valve.
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
that then becomes hate
led us into a lot of troubles in human history.
So you have to be careful
empowering people too much in that anger,
especially, I think I understand
why people were nervous about Parler,
about Twitter and so on. - For sure, yeah.
- Because all that shit talking about violence
was now paired with, "Let's get together at this location."
- Right, right. - This was a new thing.
It's not just being on whatever platform talking shit,
it's saying, "We're going to, in physical space, meet."
And then everybody got, all these platforms got nervous.
Well, what happens when all these shit talkers,
all these angry people that are just letting off steam
meet in a physical space?
And there was probably overreach,
almost definitely overreach,
but I can understand why they were nervous about it.
- 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 and Seattle,
where you have the Antifa people doing crazy things,
you have like, the people storming the Capitol.
There never seems to be a ton of an examination
of why these ideas are becoming popular.
Why are people so angry?
What is leading people to this?
Why are we here?
What about their lives is to the point
where they need to show up at these places?
And like, and obviously,
there's always gonna be people on the fringe.
There'll always be the mentally unwell.
There'll always be people that want to destroy society.
But when you look at how popular large,
long discredited things,
whether it's fascism, totalitarian communism,
all of these things are like, why are they back?
Why are they back in a big way?
And why are people so fed up with the status quo
that they're finding solace
in the most extreme discredited theories
of how to run and operate societies?
Theories that have led to death of a lot of people.
So to me, I'm like, if those people at the Capitol,
yes, if they were going to work,
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 better,
§07Transcript · 47:32–55:52
and I'm not saying that 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 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 makes them feel more powerless.
And that ultimately, that's what's been painful for me
to see is that there's not an acknowledgement
that most people are good.
- Right.
- There's circumstances where it's just, you're pissed off.
- Right.
- Because you are powerless.
- You could fall in with a bad crowd.
That's the thing, you can just fall in.
And it doesn't mean that there's not blame.
Obviously, you have agency, you're a person.
But the idea that you could be rehabilitated,
you could do something stupid
or you could fall into a group of people that are,
and then in a few years, you could go,
what the fuck was I doing?
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 addict.
If I were to 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 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 gonna be able to be rehabilitated.
Nobody's ever going to be able to reimagine themselves
in a different way.
To me, you're just, you're throwing away someone
and you're making them feel helpless and worthless,
and that's gonna lead to antisocial behavior
that spills out into violence.
We don't have a very redemptive society.
That's a huge factor.
We don't have a redemptive society.
That's why I like OJ Simpson, because OJ,
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,
'cause I remember him from "The Naked Gun,"
and I choose to forgive him for whatever happened there,
which I don't know, but I choose to forgive him really for,
I mean, obviously, what they say is he cut
his wife's head off, but I can look past that
and redeem him because he's very 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 a full life, and 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 in the past?
- 100%, listen, OJ's had the highs and the lows,
but he did it on his terms, and there's a real--
- It's like a Frank Sinatra song.
- Yeah, he did it my way, I mean,
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 that a fact?
But it is a fact, and that's an uncomfortable fact.
- Well, that's a strong case for forgiveness
in one of the more extreme cases, I suppose.
But yeah, there's not a process of forgiveness.
It seems like people just take a single event from your,
sometimes a single statement from your past,
and use that as a categorical capture
of the essence of this particular human being.
So murder might be a thing that you should get
a timeout for, a little--
- Murder's bad, murder, and let's just say that.
Murder is not good.
- Now, I'm glad you make this definitive statement.
It's a controversial-- - OJ's an interesting cat,
because you're like, he's very stable on Twitter.
He's very like, he's like, "Let's take a look at it, guys."
Like, we need more of his energy,
that's what I'm trying to say.
- Yeah, yeah. - I know, like, yes,
it was bad, he killed the woman in the waiter.
I was not for that.
I wish he didn't do that, but the OJ Simpson trial
was such a fun thing. - Yeah, and like you said,
we need more fun people in society.
- Well, you might. - Speaking of fun people,
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 'cause I'm 35, no, 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,
defended George W. Bush when he said,
"We need to go out and Christianize,
"or modernize the Arab world,
"and we need to democratize the Arab world."
And then Ann Coulter backed Donald Trump,
and all the right wing in America
believed in nation building.
They believed in going out and democratizing areas
that might breed radical terrorists,
whether it was Iraq or wherever you were going,
toppling regimes and instituting new democratic norms
in those countries.
That was the right wing point of view when I grew up.
Then the right wing switched to,
we are going to be isolationist,
we're gonna take care of America,
first and foremost,
we're not gonna go into other countries.
And then the Democrats, who when I grew up were doves,
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 strong presence in Syria,
"we need a strong presence,
"we need to counter Putin all over the globe,
"we need to get,"
so they're more hawkish on things.
So literally, I have watched two political parties
literally flip, and it's crazy to watch.
- And in some sense, I've watched that as well,
because when I first saw Barack Obama,
I admired that he was against the war.
This is whatever, maybe before he was a senator,
he spoke out against the Iraq war.
- Right.
- And then, you know,
it doesn't feel like,
it feels like his administration was more hawkish
than dovish, in a sense,
with all the drone attacks,
with the sort of inability to pull back,
or at least, en masse,
efficiently pull back from all the military involvement
that we have all over the world,
and just the language.
- What I think is interesting about that,
what's interesting about Obama,
'cause this is 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.
You know, I think one of the reasons
that Obama was maybe,
§08Transcript · 55:54–1:03:54
you know, he had a very close relationship
with John Brennan, who was a CIA director.
And Obama was very close with John Brennan,
and Obama was very, you know,
you know, I think, malleable,
to the extent that, you know, the CIA,
and I've had CIA agents on my show,
John Kiriakou, a guy who went to jail
for exposing torture, was saying that,
like, you know, you get into the Oval Office,
all of a sudden, you're having
the presidential daily briefing every day,
and the intelligence people come in,
and they go, "Listen, man, I mean,
"there's gonna be a terrorist attack on your watch
"if you don't do X, Y, and Z."
They go, "We have," you know,
they call it like blue book information,
which is five levels above top secret,
and they go like, "Hey, man, a guy in Iran at a cafe
"said he's blowing everything up next week."
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 this information?
Because a lot of the people in Washington
have an interest in perpetual, constant, ongoing warfare,
and there's a lot of financial gain to be had from that,
so they're sneaking their information
into the presentations that are going to the president,
and then the president is now behaving and going,
"Fuck, I don't want a bomb going off.
"We gotta do what we gotta 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 going, "The deep state doesn't exist."
But it absolutely exists.
There's been books about it written by liberal journalists.
The deep state is only a term for unelected, largely,
power factions in Washington, D.C.
that outlive any presidential administration.
These are people that might work at the State Department,
they might work at the Defense Department.
These are people that are not always working officially
in any government capacity.
They might be private companies,
they might be military contractors,
they might be people at Boeing or Raytheon
or General Dynamics, and they constitute a group of people
that Trump kind of called the swamp,
but Trump had really no interest in draining the swamp.
But he articulated these things, and this is what it is.
You have a lot of interested parties
that have budgets that they want, big budgets.
Everybody wants a budget in Washington,
whether you know what it is, they want money.
And these are the people who really control.
So this idea that the president is the be-all, end-all
has gotta 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 past its peak.
- Yeah, I mean, that's just,
you could prove that case in court.
- Well, let's go to court right now,
but I do love the more complex idea
that there's just human beings who crave 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,
different ways to attain that power,
and then you can use that to leverage.
It probably doesn't have to be just in Washington, D.C.
There's people who crave power all over the world.
- Of course, but where we are now in Los Angeles,
these people are all good.
- LA. - Studio executives
and people that, from what I understand,
they treat everyone fairly and they're nice.
But D.C.'s the bad guys, but out here in LA.
- West Coast. - Everyone's lovely.
- So amidst this fun exploration in your mind
through the political landscape that you've done
over the past couple of decades,
decade that you've been conscious politically,
where does Donald Trump fit into this picture for you?
Is-- - Great question.
Well, he didn't, right?
'Cause 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,
but he got into politics very quickly,
and then he became the president, right?
So it was like, I knew him as Donald Trump,
this crazy New York City character,
the host of "The Apprentice."
I didn't think much about him.
He was just constant.
He was just this constant figure.
I don't think much about Warren Buffett.
I know Trump's like, he's married
to a new showgirl all the time,
and he's always opening another casino,
and he's on TV. - Wait, Warren Buffett?
Really? - No, Trump.
Trump. - Oh, Trump, okay.
- But Warren Buffett is the opposite, right?
Warren Buffett's been married for a million years,
lives in a little house in Omaha.
But that's what I associate Trump.
I don't think about Warren Buffett.
I don't think about these people.
They're just guys that I've known forever
that have like, you know,
you associate certain things with them, right?
And Trump, we always associated 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 really was able to become president at the moment
where we were about to have Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush.
And I think Americans felt like this is now
the oligarchy is spinning right in our face.
You're not even making it feel like
there's an appearance of democracy.
We have two crime families
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 Andrews Air Force Base.
If you watch his speech, he goes, "Hey, have a good life."
That's what he really feel like,
"Hey, have a good life.
"I'm gonna get on a plane right now
"and fly to a castle I own in Florida.
"And really, I'm not gonna 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?
- Yes.
- 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,
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 said, you know, basically he's saying like,
"They're in there, Mike Pence is in there.
"He knows that his people are going to try
"to get into a Capitol.
"I mean, those motherfuckers are not gonna have jobs.
"They're gonna go to federal prison."
And he doesn't care.
- He doesn't care.
- As long as they're storming the Capitol
to prove the point that he thinks he won the election,
he has no concern for these people, his followers.
He leads them lambs to the slaughter, right?
So that's not a respectable quality.
My favorite quality of Donald Trump
is his willingness to call bullshit.
So his willingness to call bullshit out.
He doesn't play the game.
He will, you know, when people say about Putin,
Putin kills people, he goes,
"We kill a lot of people here too."
Like he's willing and able to break the fourth wall
and say things that no politician has ever said.
He's willing to call out hypocrisy, you know,
of course not his own, but the media,
the members of the political establishment,
that's a laudable quality.
It's an entertaining quality, right?
We all like it.
I love to, I'm like, "This guy's saying something
"that a lot of people want said."
- Yeah.
- That being said, it's coupled with no real work or action.
- Right.
- So it's not coupled with anything behind it
§09Transcript · 1:03:56–1:10:46
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 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 mafia state.
- But he shakes up the norms of social discourse,
political discourse. - Yes.
- And that people are just hungry for that.
- Yes.
- But he got banned from Twitter.
- He did. - From all the different
platforms.
Do you think, is there an argument to be made
for and against banning Twitter?
- There's always arguments to 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 or hate him, he was the president.
We've elevated Twitter as now more powerful
than the president.
It's like, do you want that to be long-term,
the salute, 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 him a little time out
for a few days.
I think a time out, a little spanking, certainly,
but I don't know if a permanent ban across the board
on every social media, I mean, they banned him on Grindr.
I mean, this is how hilarious it is, right?
I mean, they banned him 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 me, Lillianopolis.
Yeah, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, you have such faith.
You have such faith that it's always gonna be the people
you dislike that are banned.
It's always gonna be the, it's never gonna 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 in the security state
that they're gonna always make the right decisions
and they're not gonna 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 deplatforming people that I hate.
I would deplatform my aunt, you know what I mean?
I would deplatform everyone I know.
I mean, so it's such an 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 were talking about.
It has an effect where people just become more bland.
- Yeah, self-censorship.
- Anxiety, all of these things go into it.
We try to fight it.
I try to fight it.
I think I 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 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.
That defense becomes harder when like
all of these lines are blurring.
Everybody's kind of everything now.
So like people say to me, you should run for office
and they're serious.
And I'm like, you're crazy, but they're serious.
Like, so the blurring of everything means
that people aren't in their lanes as much
and that you go, well, this guy is dangerous
because he's not just making a joke.
He's doing something else and he's using humor.
And I'm like, I'm really not.
I'm really just trying to make a joke.
That's all, that's really what I'm trying to do.
But I do think that because of the flattening,
there's a lot of people out there that go,
they take aim at humor because they go,
humor is where bad ideas can kind of,
you know, start and flourish.
- But don't you, to put some responsibility on you.
- Yeah.
- Don't you think humor is a way to,
that you are the modern,
like Jordan Peterson style intellectual.
That humor is actually a tool of changing the zeitgeist,
changing the social norms.
- It absolutely can be, but it also cannot be.
I don't think it's any one thing.
And I think there's a lot of pressure for a comedian.
You can be funny and right.
You can be funny and wrong.
If your goal is to be right,
you might end up being right and not funny.
So the reality is funny has to come first.
There are brilliant people that have been funny
and correct according to people, right?
But at the end of the day,
people that put way too much faith in what comedy is,
most of what comedy is,
is people showing up to strip malls
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 this, anti that.
And then they would go vote for Ronald Reagan.
They didn't care.
It doesn't really, 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.
It truly isn't.
No one is, comedians are the people that get on stage
and say, we're fucked up.
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.
'Cause then I'm a psychopath.
Well, and that's, I mean, I don't think,
no pushback here.
That's another issue.
But you know what I'm saying.
Well, I don't because, I mean,
I understand you using this as a psychological tool
for yourself to give yourself freedom.
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.
I hope that's what good comedy is.
But I think I try to do that.
But I also would hate to feel shackled to the idea
of that I had to make a point
and that point had to be correct.
I think the best comedy makes fun of everything.
It makes fun of both sides.
And then there's a deeper truth about 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.
§10Transcript · 1:10:49–1:18:15
'Cause I'm making fun of people on the left and the right
and in the center and people that don't care
and 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 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 Price, we had people talk
about so many problems in society, illustrate them
put a spotlight on them and we still have them.
They're worse now than they've ever been.
That's not true.
I think the society is better.
And 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
I mean, on the boring old measures
of what makes a good world, which is, you know
the amount of violence in the world, the amount
of opportunity, all those kinds of measures, even happiness
all of those things measured things have been improving.
Steven Pinker 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 power in the world.
- But I think a lot of the things that those guys criticize
whether it was militarism or the elites, the lying
the corruption, the bribery, that's still going on.
And it's always gonna 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.
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
and told people who to vote for is like, to me, it's crazy.
I understand like people have strong opinions
but like, I believe I have a job
and my job is to make you laugh or whatever
maybe make you think, but like my job is not
to tell you who to vote for.
I mean, it's absurd.
- But see the thing you do by the comedy
like on your Twitter that people should definitely follow.
- I believe that, @jimjdylan, I agree with you.
- Oh, on this point of--
- I agree with you wholeheartedly.
- That people should follow you.
Yeah, you give me freedom to think on my own.
Meaning like you're shaking things up to where I'm
I don't feel constrained about what I can think about.
And that-- - That's awesome.
- That-- - Thank you.
- So you're not telling me what to think.
You're giving me the freedom to think.
And that's what great comedy does is, you know,
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, 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 'cause that's awesome.
And I mean, that's great.
And to a guy like you, who's 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 that.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
Speaking about the world being completely fucked,
Alex Jones turned on QAnon.
I know almost nothing-- - It's a very tough, Matt.
They had a rough marriage.
They fought it out for years.
And eventually we just knew someone
was gonna leave someone.
Q tried to leave him a few months ago.
- Oh, so--
- Yeah, Q was staying at someone else's house.
The car wasn't in the driveway.
Yeah, well, the thing about QAnon that makes it a lot of fun
is it's kind of a make it up as you go along.
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 all in the moment.
I'll have an idea of what I wanna 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 at a sales conference,
"and I left my car.
"I flew to Phoenix."
Like, I understand what that is.
QAnon is an ever-evolving conspiracy theory
where the events are happening in the past,
in the present, and in the future.
It's kind of hilarious.
Every conspiracy theory is like Kennedy,
something like that,
that there's a lot of truth in that, or all truth.
But at the end of the day,
it's like you're looking back from 30,000 feet,
analyzing little things that have already happened.
QAnon's like, so I think Alex is kind of like
a little tired of the constant evolving nature
of that conspiracy theory.
- So he's not a fan of like the jazz
that is QAnon, so they're not,
because they're improvising constantly.
- Correct, 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."
Alex is controlled opposition.
That's what they'll say.
Eventually, you, because QAnon 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 just eats you and go, "Well, you're in on it."
Everyone's in on it.
Everyone's a satanic pedophile, everybody.
Everyone that questions it is eating children.
And you go, "Wait a minute, that seems illogical."
But now there's not enough. - There's not enough children.
- Now there's not enough.
And I think QAnon's over now, unfortunately,
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 QAnon people now are starting to go,
"Hey, man, this might not be going down
"the way we thought."
But they've literally gone as far as to say
that Biden and Trump switched faces.
Trump's actually still the president except Biden's.
You have to be a real moron now.
You gotta be real stupid now.
It's at the end.
It was cool when the Epstein stuff happened,
QAnon was like, "It was party at Q."
And then when the Hunter Biden laptop stuff
started to happen, they were like, "Dancing, it's time."
And then Biden wins and they're like, "Wait, whoa."
And it's just like, it's the day after the party.
QAnon, if you ever went to a party
in high school or college,
QAnon right now is the day after the party.
You wake up, 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?
"I gotta get out of here and get a bacon, egg and cheese."
That's what QAnon 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..."
'Cause I mean, it's interesting.
The people that do that after the '60s,
they were like, "Yeah, I just did a bunch of acid
"and I lived in a ranch in Malibu
§11Transcript · 1:18:17–1:25:29
"and fucked everyone I ever saw."
And they're like, "I thought that was the way
"the world was gonna go.
"And I followed some shaman guy,
"some guru who just wanted to fuck me
"and 10 other people that were living there.
"And we did that for three years.
"Apparently we never created the utopia
"we thought we were gonna have.
"And now I'm back working here 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.
QAnon was hard to get mad at because they were,
this was all they had.
- Yeah.
- This was fun.
- They were quite good at it.
- And they were good at it.
And it was a lot of desperate people,
but they were also rich idiots.
There's also like dumb, rich people.
And those are like the saddest people
in Q because it's like they should,
they have the resources to do other things,
but they just love Q.
They're like, "I'm just into this."
And I'm like, "You're rich.
"Go do something.
"How incurious are you?
"Go to the Amazon.
"Go birdwatch."
I don't know, but they're, so.
- Play golf.
- It's sad, but they're like done now.
I mean, it's over.
- Oh, so you think this is the--
- I think everything's ending.
My whole thing is that Trump's out, QAnon's over,
the quarantine's gonna end,
everything's gonna go back to something
that's more recognizable.
I think that--
- Are you optimistic about the 2021 and what--
- To a degree, in certain aspects,
I have optimism and then I have,
I have short-term optimism and long-term pessimism.
Meaning that I think in the short-term,
things can get better.
I think long-term, because there's so many forces
that are out of our control,
that are evolving in ways I barely understand,
that are carving up society,
it's gonna be very tough long-term
to be completely optimistic,
like hey, it's gonna be great,
it's gonna be good forever.
But short-term, I think yeah, this quarantine will end,
things will get better,
the economy will get a little better,
the constant Trump craziness will die down a little bit.
That's my hope, and people can go back
to focusing on things that matter,
which is the things that are near you and close to you.
- Yeah, the humans around you.
- Humans around you, not Nancy Pelosi.
I have uncles that talk about Nancy Pelosi.
I'm like, you've never met her.
You'll never meet her, shut up.
- Yeah, and I have a belief that this kind of local love
and kindness that you naturally can have
for human beings that you actually know
can be expanded at scale through the social networks
that we use, that we build.
Twitter's 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 to.
- It's a worthy challenge.
You've tweeted, "One of the underreported reasons
"conspiracy theories take hold
"is because some of them are true."
What conspiracy theories do you believe
that are sort of important for people to think about,
would you say?
- Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman
with no connections to any other situation, government.
I believe that JFK was removed from office
by a group of people that had very different interests.
- But the question of deep state,
so these are powerful people that are able now
to dictate through basically the threat of violence
what the presidents, the surface powerful people
in our society.
- Yeah, I mean, again, I want another investigation
into 9/11, not because I think that George Bush
pressed a button and made 9/11 happen,
but because we invaded the country of Iraq,
and then 15 out of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
There was tons of stuff in the 9/11 report
that didn't make sense to anybody.
There's tons of stuff about that day
that I feel like we just don't know.
- Yeah, that's, sorry to interrupt,
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 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.
I can't, I don't know what it is,
but I don't feel like we've gotten the full story.
Yeah, there are groups of powerful pedophiles, right?
Whether they're in the Catholic church
or they're in the government or wherever they are,
they are able to cover things up that they do.
They're able to silence people that try to out them
in terms of like, you know, disrupt their operations.
That's true.
QAnon 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 Knights Templar?
- Well, it was just this group of Knights back in the day.
You know, it's that, you know, supposedly secret meetings.
And like in every conspiracy, they talk about like,
you know, if you go deep enough,
it's like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians,
you know, all of these secret groups throughout history,
the Illuminati, the-
- Oh, and there's a thread that connects all of it.
- Oh, yeah, it connects it all to David Spade.
I mean, it's a little much.
- Well, how do you, if you're David Spade,
defend yourself, by the way?
- You ignore it because it's hilarious.
And I know David Spade.
It's like, Hollywood'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.
- We got the $75,000 dog and then we'll get one.
But you know, me and David Spade,
we go out to sushi restaurants, like,
and you sit there and you listen to people complain.
That's what a lot of it is.
What a lot of Hollywood is, is deeply sad tragedy
that people don't understand.
And some of it is nefarious and dark
and there are problems and there are real power brokers.
Here, it's a dark town, 100%.
But the idea 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 separates you from other people.
It's isolating.
It can be traumatic, depending on what's going on.
Obviously, it's better than the alternative.
If you're trying to be famous,
it's better to be famous than not famous, right?
I'll say that.
But it's 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, dark, right. - Both of those people--
- 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.
§12Transcript · 1:25:31–1:32:27
Sometimes I quote something and they're like,
"That's from like Charlotte's Web."
I'm like, oh.
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, he's done some genius.
- I will not publish this.
- It's from the movie, and I think he says,
"The two worst things in the world are knockout."
Oh, you know it's not from Limitless?
I think it's from the movie
where Nicolas Cage sold weapons.
It was called Lord of War.
It's a little better than Limitless.
Anyway-- - That'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 are two rivers that converge
and there are people that just never had it
and people that have it and go, "Now what?"
And so it's a sad place, a tragic place,
and there's a lot of, it's boring.
That's what people don't realize.
It's actually kind of boring.
- Well, life is kind of boring.
- Life is kind of boring, but there's also like,
so I think QAnon's this way to make a lot of it seem
like it's super exciting.
And listen, I don't wanna diminish the experiences
of people who've been abused
'cause there is a lot of horror here,
but the whole QAnon thing was like,
everybody in everything is doing, and that's not true.
- Well, see, just to linger on that a little bit
is Bill Gates, the conspiracy theories
around Bill Gates bother me
because this is me, dumb, naive Lex,
thinks that Bill Gates did a lot of good for this world.
- Sure. - First, by creating a company
that empowered personal computers,
and second, by donating a ton of money
for treating malaria in Africa
and all those kinds of things.
And there's these huge amounts of conspiracies, I think,
based on just replies to whenever 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 that-- - I'm so sorry to,
and the thing I'm struggling with is if I'm Bill Gates,
like, how do you behave differently?
How do you show people that you're, if you're not,
I don't know, doing creepy stuff
that they're saying he's doing?
- Well, I think part of it is that
he's done some really good stuff, right?
He's an innovative guy,
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 deal 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, and I love Mosk 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."
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.
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, "Ugh."
PR is kind of like, you know, beneath that.
- They're terrible at it.
- They're terrible at it.
They're terrible at it.
- Him and Zuckerberg are really bad at it.
- Zuckerberg's horrible at it.
He seems especially bad at public policy.
- 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, if you look at the name of his child,
you can clearly see.
Listen, I do like him,
and I do think what he's done with Tesla,
you know, my producer has a Tesla,
and he never shuts up about it.
Most people that have Teslas never shut up about them,
and they think they're part
of the development team at SpaceX.
And I like that he's created a world
where people can get excited about a $37,000 car
and never shut the fuck up about it
to the point where I have to threaten people
with physical violence to get them to stop telling me
about that their car drives itself.
- Oh, you should get a Tesla.
- Maybe have a few less drinks
and a few fewer Vicodin, and you can drive yourself.
- Have you thought about getting a Tesla?
- I've never thought about it.
I don't like them. - You should get a Tesla.
- They're minimalist.
I don't like, I want more.
I want more.
- Get the Cybertruck.
- I wanna stage, I wanna, my guy, my dude,
my producer wants a Cybertruck.
I want a stagecoach.
Old school stagecoach horse thief shit.
- You should ride a horse.
- 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.
(laughing)
- 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 necessarily,
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, Epstein was the most social guy ever.
Like every photo, he's like, hey.
And it's like everyone that's ever done anything
in the world has been at that fucking island.
Every human being is like in a photo.
It'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 friends came over and we're just eating dinner, right?
And we had a fun night and just four people that are over,
nobody, right?
Nobody ever thought like, let's, hey, I wanna remember it.
Let's take photos, I'm 36, woo!
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 they put in a cell,
that lunatic who was that big muscled guy.
I think he was just, he did it for money,
kept his mouth shut.
- That money from whom do you think?
- Mossad, MI6, CIA, all three.
- So there's a lot of pressure
from a lot of different powerful people.
- Probably Mossad, CIA more.
I mean, it seems very clear that he was working
in type of a honeypot intelligence operation.
Ghislaine Maxwell's father was an Israeli super spy.
Ghislaine 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 I would think that it's a very cozy relationship
with those two intelligence agencies.
And I think if you ran it by anyone,
I think if you ran it by French intelligence,
they'd go, "Yeah, no, get 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
§13Transcript · 1:32:28–1:40:13
that he's just an evil person
who is after manipulating people and also was a profile?
So there's a bigger thing.
- It's factual that there's a bigger thing.
Evil people don't get handed-
- Those are your facts, Tim Dillon.
- No, they're the facts of the case.
You don't get handed a 65.
Show me another evil guy who was handed
a $65 million place by Les Wexner.
Show me another evil guy that got that type
of a handshake deal where he was basically let off
without anything after a judge had made
a very sweetheart deal for him
after he was accused of molesting a 14-year-old.
Show me another evil guy that doesn't have
that kind of backing, that has those type of friends,
those connections, those type of properties.
Show me multiple passports all over the world.
So show me a guy without anyone backing him that's doing it.
Why did they, 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 limestone mansion.
- Visibly mocked.
- Yeah, is it human nature?
- And it's like poetry. - I don't think
it's human nature.
I think they manipulated human nature,
but 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 made the money okay and hid money and things like that
and worked for a lot of powerful people.
I don't believe in lone pedophiles anymore.
I don't even believe that.
If you're a pedophile, you're like in a group.
You know what I mean?
You know?
- Well, I'm not even going there,
but staying on Just Lane, so you believe
there's some power in her.
What do you think happens to her now?
Like what are the--
- Great question.
I mean, I don't know what'll happen to her,
but I imagine she'll get some type of deal,
closed door thing years from now
when people don't really care about the case
and she'll serve some time in a very lax thing
or she'll be killed.
I mean, again, it's like if she was doing
what she was doing, which is I believe a fact
that she was compromising powerful people
so that they could be blackmailed
by the intelligence services of the US and Israel,
probably, I don't see how she wasn't doing that.
Someone's blackmailing, 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 wanna 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, so how the CIA started, right?
It was lawyers, bankers.
They're protecting financial interests
of multinational corporations all over the world,
overthrowing democratically elected governments,
going in and doing subterfuge campaigns,
encouraging terror, they were doing all kinds of crazy stuff.
I don't see why that would change.
I think that's who they still represent.
And I think those people want certain policies
and certain people pushed forward.
And I think those people are controlled.
And I think one of the ways to control people
is their sexual problems and that's the way they did it.
- I wish there was a way to,
'cause everything you just said now is--
- Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
I'm being indoctrinated on air.
No, it was just--
- You think you're just a,
Jeff Ramsey is just a fun random guy
who just wanted to make home movies of presidents?
- Well, you think I'm just some random guy?
I'm just trying to sell myself as somebody
who'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 I will edit this part out.
- They should have picked the happier face.
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 CIA is,
there is some possibility in my mind
that institutions like the CIA
and 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.
- They spot, it's very certain,
just like you said, that there's a bunch of them
that have done, there's some conspiracy theories
that are dramatic and true.
The question is, I wish there was a way to prove
that some of them are not.
And it's very difficult
because so much is shrouded in mystery.
Like one of the things I'm bothered by
is when people accuse other,
like athletes of using steroids, for example.
And it's just, yes, a lot of people use steroids,
but it sucks that people just don't believe you.
Like there's some incredible athletes that look shredded,
that look just incredible performers,
and everybody just says that they're on steroids.
They kind of assume.
- Yeah, I mean, 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 appearance is a result of dedication.
But no, it's hard work, diet, exercise, dedication.
- Are you on keto?
- I'm on, I'm doing a version of, you're keto, right?
- Yeah.
- So I'm doing a version of keto right now with bread.
And it's, do you see what I mean?
- You carb up in order to be--
- So it's keto with sugar.
It's called keto plus sugar.
And it's a good diet for,
I grew up in the '90s when nobody ever lost weight, sadly,
because every diet was like,
you can eat what you want, just be accountable.
No one even knew what that meant.
So it would be like my mother being like,
if you have chocolate chip pancakes, have a glass of water.
- Yeah.
- Just take a walk around the block.
You can go to McDonald's three times a day.
Just walk around the block.
It's what my parents used to say.
My mother would be like, just walk around the block.
You're fine.
Gonna have a cigarette?
Walk 20 steps.
Walk 20 steps back.
It's exercise.
So, no, there's too many conspiracies out there.
A lot of them aren't true.
A lot of them are bitter, angry people
trying to justify their own impotence,
not being able to do anything in life.
And they're like, the people that have done something
in life, they're all nefarious.
It's all, the car just acted against me.
That's 100% true, 100%.
It attracts usually people that have not figured out a way
to succeed, or haven't succeeded on the level
that they want to.
But that also being true, there is a fair amount
of fuckery going on, and provable.
And we just have to, I think, 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,
if there was nothing to 9/11, 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 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.
- And good storytellers, and people love stories,
and when there's an absence of actual--
- Alex is a uniquely American person,
like very interesting.
§14Transcript · 1:40:14–1:47:41
I don't know how many countries,
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,
'cause I'd go to Austin and perform a lot,
and he was a guy that would take a bullhorn
and yell at cops 'cause he thought
D.W.E. 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 guy
that was considered a leftist, even.
Even though he was never a leftist,
he was considered this enemy of mainstream conservatism.
Like he was not, and they considered a guy
that wasn't a patriot, wasn't this, wasn't that.
And he just, wow, he whines and whines,
and ends up just being this confidant
of a Republican president,
a very divisive Republican president,
and he becomes this populist and everything like that.
It's really wild to watch that.
But I do think he should retire eventually,
just so we could get some, I don't know,
it seems like a, it's a lot to keep doing.
- Well, I hope this world allows for Alex Jones
to continue having a voice,
because just like you said, he's a,
you used the word fun, but really,
he shakes up the norms of our discourse.
- I do too, I do think we need to put more value.
I think entertainment, we do need to say
that there are people that should be allowed
to have a voice for entertainment purposes.
- Right.
- 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.
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.
But she's a beast of a comic.
- I'm not aware of her standup actually.
- She's a beast of a comic.
Ask Rogue and ask any of them.
Kinnison'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 illustrated larger truths about life in what they did.
And I think that guys like Louis and Chappelle
and Pryor and Kinnison and Hicks,
people like Joan Rivers have done that.
And even 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 comedian.
Cat Williams is an amazing comedian.
She really is.
- Does he have any,
well see, one of the things you kind of mentioned,
the communities you mentioned,
they were kind of fearless in saying
the difficult things that needs to be said.
Cat Williams is more, 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.
- Of course, Chris Rock.
- Of 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 the history of this business,
which is not that long of a history,
it's pretty much within the last century,
that have been really influential.
Sometimes it's style, the way they deliver things.
Sometimes it's substance of how they,
what they're saying,
or sometimes it's just a style of what they're saying.
And we're only talking about standup comedians, right?
So there's a million great comedians.
I mean, if we're gonna 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 standups, really, truly.
So there's so many brilliant people in the business.
- Who was for you influential, just the early on?
- Hicks was influential, 'cause 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 'cause it's so funny.
And he was calling out 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 was in Canada,
and he said, "We had a war in the States."
He was talking about the first Gulf War.
And he said, "I was in the unenviable position
"of being for the war, but against the troops."
And to me, I love that joke.
It was so funny to me.
And I was like, oh, you can't get away with that anywhere
other than standing on a stage.
You could never say that in an office, really.
And this was before it was like PC.
And 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 nightclub.
That's why people had a few drinks.
That's what the art form was.
And that's why, so a guy like that was influential
'cause I started watching him.
And then, of course, I loved SNL when I was a kid,
and I would watch Chris Farley,
and I would watch people like even John Belushi
going back in the day,
but I'd watch Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell
and all these guys.
I mean, there's so many funny people,
but Bill Hicks was kind of funny.
And then Patrice O'Neill was probably my favorite comedian
who's made me laugh more than anybody else.
- I think it was you, actually, that,
maybe on your podcast, we're talking about Patrice O'Neill,
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, I mean, he wasn't,
and I've never met him, I have no inside info,
but from what I've heard, he was like no nonsense guy.
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.
- 'Cause that's, it unlocks a weird, special,
new thing that changed everything.
I mean, Rogan started with that.
- Yeah.
- You're doing that.
- I think that's a whole 'nother form of stand-ups.
- Yeah.
- The ones that have a lot to say.
Almost like we get to witness the process
of the creation of the jokes in a way, or the mind.
- Right.
- The sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes.
It's just--
- Comedians relate to social media.
Comedians, comedy's a, it's a performance-based medium.
So it's about getting up and doing it,
getting up in a club, getting up in 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 were very slow to adapt to technology.
We were very slow to monetize anything
we did on the internet.
So podcasting was a way for comics and funny people
to kinda get into that space, start earning money,
and now, because of the pandemic,
it's really become essential.
And it helps you, and even without the pandemic,
it was where people,
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,
§15Transcript · 1:47:43–1:55:12
you know, whatever it was, whether it was a money grab,
or it was just too commercial,
and in a sense where they're like,
"Hey, look at me."
Like, it was just goofy, right?
And then comics, I think, got displaced
because all the 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 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, not especially to me a ton, but that's okay.
I don't, you know, but he makes people laugh,
so he's funny.
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 love doing it.
- The Tim Dillon Show.
- Well, thank you.
I was late, you know?
I mean, I was, I just, you know,
I've been podcasting for a long time,
but really dedicating myself
and putting the resources behind it, I was late to it.
Like I was like, hey, I'm 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 it.
Comics that should be doing it,
and I think when the pandemic ends,
a lot of comics will just keep doing live standup,
but I will keep, obviously I'm gonna go back on the road
and do live standup, but I will keep doing this podcast
and building digitally too.
- But you're also exploring ideas.
You're doing like short videos and so on.
You're trying to look for different mediums
of how to be funny. - I wanna be funny everywhere.
I wanna 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 standup.
He's able to, 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 it's that relationship that's very important.
- Well, in some sense, the medium of a short video
is a challenge, just like the medium of a short tweet.
- Of course. - Of how to say something.
I mean, whatever the flavor is of what's in your heart,
what's in your mind, how to say it,
whether it's the goal is funny or something,
or just an express an idea.
I think 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?
Are you guys making each other laugh about this idea?
And if that's the case,
other people are going to laugh at it.
I think so much of the old medium
was like everything was top-down.
Okay, pitch me this idea, I pitch it to the showrunner,
they pitch it to the network,
they pitch it to this, to that, to the, you know.
Standards and practices, sales,
and we gotta go through everything.
Now it's just like, are 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,
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 in the dumb things,
or me in the Meghan McCain, or me in the thing,
is it funny with the sound off?
And if it's funny with the sound off,
you have a good starting point.
- That's hilarious, 'cause you,
I would say you're one of the people,
'cause most people are not funny with the sound off,
most comedians, you, Will Ferrell's 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,
just your face.
- We, well, thank you, that's very sweet.
But I mean, that's, thank God,
I mean, that's what we try to do, right?
We're trying to be funny.
So we're trying to be funny.
- Can we talk about love a little bit?
- Sure.
- So you came out of the closet as being gay
when you were 25.
- Yeah, it was late, very late.
- Very late.
Before then. - By today's standards.
- During and after, how has your view on love evolved?
- Interesting.
It's so hard to say, because I would,
I'd like to make a very Disney-fied statement
about like that you can't be in love secretively.
You should be honest.
Love should all be about honesty,
but that's not true, right?
There's people that are in love
that are lying to everyone else,
but they're deeply in love.
I would love to say something like,
honesty is an ingredient for love, you know?
But I don't know, maybe honesty with each other.
But I mean, I think there's a lot of people in the world
that aren't honest.
My view on love is super important.
I think that it's, a lot of society in America
is all about love.
We don't tend to focus on other things
in terms of like, you know, friendship
or sustainability of that.
'Cause 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 that like-- - They're friends.
- They have, right.
- I see friendship and love as the same thing.
- There's just 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 was, that you took away that you remember
as being profound and insightful and so on?
- Yes, that it was my, 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 in a, 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 that
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,
or being afraid.
Do you think at the time?
- Well, I wanted people to like me,
which is the disease of humanity, right?
Is that we want to be liked.
And what happens is if you want people to like you
and love you, even you want people
to feel comfortable with you.
- And those were people like your family?
- Friends, more.
My family, I would always,
could always throw in the street, but I'm kidding.
I mean, but I am not.
But my friends, my circle of friends,
which were my family at the time,
when you're a senior,
when you're 10th, 11th grade in high school,
your friends are your family, 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.
§16Transcript · 1:55:15–2:02:27
- So thinking back to that fear,
is there things you're afraid of now
that you're not doing, you're afraid to do?
- I'm afraid of all kinds of things.
I'm afraid of not being good at my job,
not being funny, letting people down,
not putting out products that are good,
whether it's the podcast every week or standup
or the videos, like I'm afraid of like,
there's a ton of people that really enjoy what we do.
So when you're in that position,
you're nervous that you're going to start doing things
that they don't like.
So the new things you want to do,
the evolution you want to do,
you want to make sure you're evolving in the right way.
You 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 to him, what's the hardest part
of running a corporation of this size?
And he said something very interesting.
He said, the hardest part is maximizing
the current profit model of what you have
at the same time, getting ready, getting ready,
getting the company ready for where it's going to be
in five years.
He said, those are often at odds.
And that's the toughest thing.
He goes, 'cause 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 as 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
the comedic trends, but like the technological trends.
Like what is the, what is the, you know,
I should have done podcasting earlier.
What, should I have a bigger presence on TikTok?
Should I have a bigger presence here?
Should I have a, 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 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 like a career paths you're taking,
all that, that's ultimately just fear.
- It's fear.
- Yeah.
- It's the fear of, you know, the best thing that happened
in my career was that I came to LA.
I didn't have an idea of what was going to happen.
I met somebody who was really committed
to making funny things.
That we just wanted to be funny.
No one would let us be funny.
We didn't have Comedy Central letting us be funny.
We didn't have HBO.
We didn't have Netflix.
We just had a garage and a phone in the beginning
and then a camera and then a thing.
And we just 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.
- Oh, thank you.
- Your mom, as you were growing up, suffered.
- Schizophrenic, yeah.
- Well, from mental illness, yes, schizophrenia.
Can you tell her story
and how that relationship has changed over the years?
- Yeah, well, she was always eccentric
and always, you know,
the terms for schizophrenia in an Irish Catholic household
where we didn't talk about anything
were eccentric, fun, she's fun.
- There's a theme to this conversation.
- Unpredictable.
She's a live wire.
Any of the words you would use to describe somebody
who was a fucking lunatic, but you wouldn't say that.
- Positive spin.
- Right.
She started experiencing symptoms
probably early on in her life,
but she also, 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 in New York.
Whenever I go to New York, I visit her.
She's aware of what I do, my career,
and everything like that.
You know, she has good days and bad days,
but, you know, mental illness is a thing.
It's very tough.
We don't talk about it as a society.
People with mental problems don't get that much attention.
We tend to think that they did something wrong
or that they deserve it or that they are, you know,
to be ignored, and we don't devote a lot of resources
into it, which is unfortunate
because then you have the junk gurus come in and go like,
"Let's diagnose your mental illness off Instagram."
And it's like, that's not the move.
Yeah.
- 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.
- Wow, yeah.
- Because the part of them that you love and remember,
a lot of cases 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 her illness
so that you still love her.
And I mean, again, you know, your parents,
you know, the time horizons you have
with your parents are unknown.
People don't know.
You could, you know, I have friends
that their parents were 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 ate too much fast food.
There were negatives, but she did let me be who I was.
- That's why you want to throw them out into the street.
- Yeah, sometimes.
- But coming to accept the mortality of her,
I guess, identity as you remember it from childhood,
do you ponder your own mortality?
Are you afraid of death?
- I'm afraid of death.
I don't like the idea of death, but I know it's happening.
You know, I know it's going to happen eventually.
I don't love it. - Do you 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 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,
§17Transcript · 2:02:30–2:10:14
you know, he lived in the latter part of this century
when all this shit was going on
and he kind of made fun of it.
And he did something to make people's lives a little better
just by having, 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 an 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 best things that he's ever done
or the best rants he's ever had, the best things, whatever.
- So the legacy would be that this was an important voice
in a very weird time of human history.
- I would hope that that's part of it
and I hope that I continue to be, you know,
you say important, I say funny,
but hopefully I continue to be a voice.
And that's what I think, when I think about death,
I think about like, what did people come on earth to do?
And I think I came, I think my main purpose on this planet,
other than to experience whatever love or, you know,
worthiness or whatever is to make, to entertain people.
And there's a lot of people in comedy right now
that are not entertainers and that's really the problem.
But, and they got into comedy sort of the way that,
you know, you can walk into the wrong store in a mall
and then not realize you're in the wrong store
and 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 wanna do.
- There's unfortunately, sadly,
a lot of people that look up to you.
- That is a horrible thing.
- But life is a nightmare.
- Yeah.
If you were to give them advice, young folks,
people in college, maybe even high school,
but people in their 20s about what to do with their life,
whether it's career, 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,
when do you feel the most alive?
Figure that out.
When and how do you feel the most alive?
Figure that out.
Try to figure out a job or a career
that can replicate that feeling.
Don't listen to anyone.
Don't listen to your parents.
Don't listen to the gurus on the internet.
Don't listen to me.
Don't listen to anyone.
Figure out, you know, where you feel the most alive.
Where do you feel excited?
Where does your pulse quicken?
What do you feel matters?
When you're in a situation, do you feel like it matters?
What situation was that?
What got you excited?
What thing did you walk into where you looked around
and were taken back and you're like, wow, this is amazing,
and I'm filled with awe?
If you can figure out a life where 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.
You had a pretty weaving life
that's full of mistakes and so on.
Many mistakes.
Is that, are mistakes a bug or a feature?
Like, do you recommend embrace the mistakes,
like make a bunch of them?
Depends what they are, right?
So--
Well, 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 too,
the power of choice has been elevated on our society
to an unhealthy degree.
I think people are, I think you could get
really good at something,
but you're born with a certain aptitude.
It might be to be a deal maker.
Might be to be an athlete.
It might be to be an artist.
It might be to be a romantic
and just fall in and out of love, in and out of love,
in and out of love.
It might be to be like a world traveler.
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 gonna be good at it, per se,
but if you're an athlete, it might not mean
that you're going to be a great athlete in the history,
but it might mean you're the best coach anyone's ever had,
or you're the person that builds a local scene
for young athletes or whatever.
If you are a really good deal maker,
it doesn't mean you're gonna be Warren Buffett,
but it might mean you're somebody who enjoys
making deals all the time and things like that.
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 skillset
to really pursue it on a degree, you just wanna be it.
There's a thing inside of you that makes you what you are.
I look at certain people and I go,
you were born to be that thing.
- And the whole purpose is to find it.
- I was a juror on a murder trial in Long Island,
and the woman who's the DA, 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 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 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 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.
- Yes, but I'm serious.
- You can often see that people just,
they found their place, they found their role.
- They found their thing.
- They found their thing, and that's kind of
the purpose of life, and once you are
in a place that seems sticky,
like 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 found that works.
- Yeah, and listen, sometimes the best place you'll find
is when people are like, when did you feel
really excited and alive?
It's like doing nothing.
- Right, yeah.
(laughing)
- You know?
And the other thing, it's like some people
are gonna be like, I feel really excited and alive
when I'm laying in my backyard in a hammock,
and I just want to have the simplest life
and not have to do much, and I don't like doing anything,
and I love laying around and going,
wow, the sky looks good today.
Bill Gates goes, the 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,
you can find something.
- But in that process, for you personally,
I mean, for me, for others, I think there's a struggle.
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.
(laughing)
I'm a detente with myself all the time.
I don't love myself or hate myself.
Addicts have a very bad problem,
where you can't just fall in love with yourself
and you can't hate yourself.
Both of them lead you to a negative place.
You try to stay kind of even keel.
I don't go like, hey man, you put out a video,
§18Transcript · 2:10:17–2:17:27
you 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 get into the shape you want.
Like, I try not to get too low or too high.
Both of them are not good from my particular mind.
- Okay, I gotta ask, we 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.
I love Joe, I love what he's trying to do down there.
I'm appreciative of everything that he's done
for not only me, but for comedy in general.
And I think as things 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 LA.
- So you've spoken so nicely about this magical place
that is Los Angeles.
- LA is very funny.
- You think there's a place for comedy in LA?
- Oh yeah.
There will always be a place for comedy in LA.
So there's gonna be a place for comedy in New York.
I mean, the question is how thriving of a comedy scene
is Austin gonna be?
And 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 people.
- Let them go.
- 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 10 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
and you gotta visit Charleston and Austin.
Stop, let's be adults here.
Let's be adults.
It's still gonna be New York and LA for a while.
LA is an absolute hellscape,
but I don't think you're gonna replace California
with another place.
And also, everyone's making decisions now
because we're literally in the midst of a pandemic
we've never had before.
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 were all locked up
and stuck with our own thoughts.
But, so it's funny there's parallels
'cause I don't necessarily,
I'm obviously a fan of comedy,
but I don't care where comics move.
But there's a parallel move that's happening,
set of decisions which do influence my decision-making,
which is where to start a business that's tech-centered.
And that's more about the San Francisco, Silicon Valley,
and there is a lot of people leaving there.
- That's where you're going to Austin.
- Well, Austin, there's a, I think,
there's a bunch of different places.
Phoenix, there's Denver.
- Austin will probably be a massive tech hub.
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.
It might.
- I don't know if those two can actually coexist.
It's interesting 'cause-
- Yeah, I think, you know,
comedy suffered in New York and LA
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
and with their dates and, 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, if Austin is just colonized
by tech bros and stuff, like, yeah, I mean, sure,
sure it'll be fun and it'll be great.
I think Joe's made LA a scene.
So if anyone's gonna 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 problems.
- Yeah, there's homelessness in Austin.
There are problems in Austin.
I mean, I think that with, by the way,
with the influx of very rich people to an area,
sometimes that helps things,
but sometimes it just makes things more polarizing
and it puts a spotlight on those problems
and makes those problems even bigger, right?
So, I mean, I don't know that it's necessarily,
it's hard to predict.
I just know that LA right now is funny.
It's funny that there's 15 year old TikTokers
making millions of dollars dancing in a house
while the world burns.
That is very funny.
- Well, it's for your style of humor, yes.
The absurdity of the world.
- It's funny that 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?
- Yeah, eventually the sun will die out
and we will all be gone unless we colonize
outside of our solar system.
But I just sit here.
I'm struggling with this 'cause Boston,
I'm currently at MIT,
Boston doesn't feel like the right place to start
a business in the tech sector.
And so I'm choosing, I'm looking at San Francisco
the way it is and I'm looking at Austin.
- Oh, Austin, clearly.
- So it seems clear, but it's such a difficult thing
to predict what a place will look like in 10 years,
in 15 years, in 20 years.
- And it's so hard to predict if you'll like it or not
until you're there.
- And this is speaking to risk.
There's not really a good reason for me to move anywhere.
There's not a good reason to do anything in life.
Part of me wants to just fucking do it
and whatever and see what happens.
- Do you like Boston?
Do you like other things about Boston besides the tech thing?
You like MIT.
- At MIT, that's the problem.
- Do you like the food in Boston?
Do you eat food?
- I haven't eaten food or been outside for years.
- And I mean, 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.
15 years fasting, eating once or twice a day.
I haven't--
- But no sugar ever?
No like-- - No sugar.
- And no pasta ever?
No bread ever?
- No pasta, no bread.
Except like, so my source of--
- You could kind of live anywhere
because like going out is such a big part
of what city you live in.
And like, do 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's, we have the curse of too many choices.
- Right.
- That's the thing.
We have too many choices.
§19Transcript · 2:17:28–2:22:34
We don't have somebody else going, what about like,
we don't have to justify our decisions to anyone.
So we can just kind of like let our minds run wild.
- So you just gotta hone the instinct
of just what feels right and just fucking do it.
And that's it.
- I think Austin would show down there and Elon down there.
Austin seems like a real no brainer move for you.
- To try, you know.
- To try. - Why the hell not?
- Why not? - Why not?
- And then I think I should go to MIT.
(laughing)
Like, I mean, I think I should give those nerds
a piece of my mind.
- Yeah. - You should go to,
I was in a Uber pool once with a kid from MIT
and I was eating this thing from Bova's Bakery.
I forget what it was.
It was like a, it's so good.
I don't know.
You don't know Bova's Bakery, right?
Yeah, it's in Boston, it's famous.
I was eating a thing and 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 I just dropped him off at MIT
and he like scurried away.
- Yeah.
- But that's a big school.
Doesn't the NSA recruit out of their heavy,
like MIT, places like that?
- I can't, I can't speak to that.
But what, this is a ridiculous question
I sometimes ask myself when I'm alone.
What is the meaning of life?
Do you think about the big existential kinda,
why the hell we're here?
- It's a cosmic kinda 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 outta here.
You know, it's kind of interesting.
Or you even start to figure out what it is,
you're outta here.
It's like, that's kinda 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 really what it is.
If you look back, do you go, hey, it was time well spent.
Like I--
- Pretty good ride.
- It was a pretty good ride.
I did a lot, I did a lot of things.
I, doing what you say is a part of it, I think.
If you say you're gonna do something, maybe doing it.
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 of 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 at it in this kind of simple way.
So it does seem that humor is like,
one of the fundamental truths of this universe.
- Yes.
- Wherein, and somehow--
- It's love, it's love.
Humor can be love, right?
People laughing, that sound is kind of like,
Carolyn Knapp, who wrote a book called
"Drinking A Love Story," which is a really good book
about not drinking, drinking and then not drinking.
And she said the last, you could understand things as love.
I think one of the last lines of the thing is like,
people talking about their experiences in life,
that could be love.
Like, you know, laughter is love.
Like I feel like love and finding it
wherever you could find it is why we're here.
That's that connection and laughter can be love
and figuring out something that makes life better
for a lot of people can be love,
whether it's a vaccine or a technological advancement
or whatever, like, 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.
- 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
will be one of the most important voices of our time
because you're fearless and challenging all the absurdity
of the nonsense of our social and political discourse.
I hope you keep doing it.
I'm a fan, I'm still a bit starstruck, so.
- Oh, stop it, listen, I thought it was your intellectual
capacity, enjoying anything I do,
only underscores how truly fucked we are.
(laughing)
But thank you very much.
- Yeah.
- Thank you for talking today.
- Thank you, brother.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dillon
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