Ep 529 - Weed & Gambling (feat. Saagar Enjeti)

Support the D. A. W. G. Z. @ patreon.com/MSsecretpod Watch 'Breaking Points' w/ Saagar & Krystal Go See Matt Live in Irvine CA Next Wknd @ mattmccusker.com/dates Go See Shane Live @ shanemgillis.com Yo0o0o0o0o0. Hope you're all having a good week. Here's the public unveiling of the new set up (previously seen on the patreon). Cusk is blessed by Saag this week and the two chop it up for like 2 hrs. Hot mf cast. Check out Breaking Points. Please enjoy. God Bless. Download the PrizePicks app or visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/DRENCHED today and use code Drenched to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/MSSP and get on your way to being your best self. The Mountain is calling, you should answer #DoTheDew #MTNDEW Shop now @ https://lets.shop/2141/dothedew Support the show & get Lucy Breakers for 20% off & free shipping at https://www.lucy.co promo code DRENCHED Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Wow, wow, Wes.

• 0:01Matt McCusker?

  We're live, Saagar. Thank you, dude. Thank you for coming.

• 0:04Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. I like your setup.

• 0:05Matt McCusker?

  Thank you, man. Thank you. It's, uh, it's-

• 0:07Speaker 02

  Since I'm in politics, you know, I kinda think I-

• 0:09Matt McCusker?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 0:10Speaker 02

  I vibe with the set more, I think.

• 0:13Matt McCusker?

  I think it's a good look for you, too, dude. I think you look good on the-

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Really?

• 0:16Matt McCusker?

  There's something about-

• 0:16Speaker 02

  See, now I feel really self-conscious. I should've worn my suit. The only reason I didn't is because I'm going out after this, you know, I'm like gonna be out of the town.

• 0:22Matt McCusker?

  For sure, yeah.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  You don't wanna be walking around Austin, Texas in a suit.

• 0:24Matt McCusker?

  Just sweating in a suit.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  I did it yesterday after Lex Friedman's podcast, and I was getting a lot of looks.

• 0:29Matt McCusker?

  Did you guys both wore suits?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Yes, we both wore suits. That's right.

• 0:31Matt McCusker?

  That's kinda nice.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  But his is the black suit. His is different. He has like a uniform.

• 0:35Matt McCusker?

  He does.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  And I like to change it up.

• 0:36Matt McCusker?

  He's like an alien fighter. He dresses like Will Smith in Men in Black.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 0:40Matt McCusker?

  It's kinda, there's something nice about that. I've always wanted to do the Steve Jobs thing where I wear the same thing every day.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  You could do it. I think you could do it.

• 0:45Matt McCusker?

  I feel like I could. I know one guy who's been wearing all white for seven years, and I might jack his swag.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  In comedy, do you think it is useful to have a uniform or no? Cause I noticed that comedians have been getting very like fashion-forward.

• 0:57Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  And sometimes I'll go to a set and I'm like, honestly, what he's wearing is kinda distracting me right now.

• 1:01Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I don't understand why. I mean, I have like a loose uniform. It's just jeans, usually these sneakers, and I just switch a plain-colored t-shirt.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  That's fine. See, that's not just, that's like, uh, that's comfortable. I could see that working. But sometimes I'll see these guys in like crazy-ass Gucci stuff.

• 1:15Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Dude, I'm blinded by you right now. I can't even hear what you're saying.

• 1:18Matt McCusker?

  I never understood that, too, cause it's like, dude, you're supposed to be making people laugh.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  You tell me. It's your, it's your profession.

• 1:24Matt McCusker?

  I don't know what it is. I see people go way fashion-forward on the stage, and I'm kinda like, dude, you're kinda, it's just like a distraction.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Totally. Thank you. Good. I'm glad you agree.

• 1:32Matt McCusker?

  I totally agree. It's like, nobody cares. Your job here is to play the fool. Like, you're trying to dress like a cool guy. It's like, I think it detracts.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  I, I'm with you, man.

• 1:40Matt McCusker?

  I think it detracts. If I ever wear anything that is remotely eye-catching, I'll think about it on stage the entire time.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:46Matt McCusker?

  I can't, yeah. They took me forever to, this is my Oura ring. It's just for tracking my biometrics.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 1:51Matt McCusker?

  Took me forever. I would meet every, every person I met, I'd be like, I'm usually not a two-ring guy.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  You're the only Oura ring, uh, person I know who's a guy.

• 1:58Matt McCusker?

  I know. It's like, well, they track their periods.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I know. That's why every woman I know is like, they're obsessed with period tracking. So, how does it feel to be a guy wearing an Oura ring?

• 2:06Matt McCusker?

  Well, me and-

• 2:06Speaker 02

  What do you even get out of it?

• 2:07Matt McCusker?

  Me and Nick Sacks from 311, I'm not the only guy who got from 311 and wears an Oura ring, too.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Real men, real men wear whoop straps.

• 2:13Matt McCusker?

  Whoop straps are cool, but here's the thing, sleeping with something on my wrist, I, I get it to track my sleep.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18Matt McCusker?

  My sleep is way up.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  You can sleep with this.

• 2:20Matt McCusker?

  I'm just too clunky on my hands.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  What do you mean it's too clunky on your hands?

• 2:22Matt McCusker?

  It's too clunky. I tried doing the Apple Watch sleep and it just, I can't get with it.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I'll tell you, when I got my wedding ring, it took me months to get used to this shit.

• 2:28Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  It's just, even now, I'm always like this.

• 2:30Matt McCusker?

  Yep.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I notice subconsciously, I'm always twisted around.

• 2:34Matt McCusker?

  I bang it on shit. I felt weird for the longest time and then now if I don't have it on, I feel like a,

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:38Matt McCusker?

  like a naked boy.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Do you ever get terrified that you're gonna rip your finger off? I think about that all the time.

• 2:42Matt McCusker?

  How are you gonna rip your finger off?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  I don't know, like the, the trunk or something, like something will catch just exactly the right way.

• 2:48Matt McCusker?

  Oh, you're gonna come into it like that?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and your entire finger is gonna be completely ripped off.

• 2:52Matt McCusker?

  Then it's, well, you look, if you rip your ring finger off, then it's on. You can do whatever you want. Just be like, bro, my bad.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  What do you even tell your wife? Put the ring on the nub?

• 3:02Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it's like, I lost my ring. You just cheat on her all the time if you're going on a ring finger?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Like, babe, I don't have a ring finger. It's gone.

• 3:10Matt McCusker?

  Our vows are over. Yeah, if you lose that finger, you're a bachelor. You're a bachelor.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  I like that. Wait, you remember those rules in the 2000s? Um, I love watching, you know, 2000s movies or even actually 1990s, like American Pie, when they're like, it's not cheating if you're in, not in the same zip code.

• 3:25Matt McCusker?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  And rewatching it 25 years later, 25 years later, you're like, that makes no fucking sense. You're like, what are you talking, like, how was this conventional wisdom in 2001?

• 3:34Matt McCusker?

  That, the hall pass was another big one, like, hall pass.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  That was, there was a whole Friends episode, like, what's your hall pass? And all that, but that's not real. It's just totally fake.

• 3:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, you're, you're buttfucking a lady in a hotel room. Like, stop acting like it's a cute thing to do. Yeah, I was literally just thinking about hall passes yesterday. I was like, they tried to push that for a little bit. They're like, hall pass.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  2000s trope as if all relationships functioned on, uh, if you're not in separate area codes, you're not married or you're engaged. Hall passes were apparently and allegedly a thing. What else was there?

• 4:04Matt McCusker?

  Work wife, work wife, work husband, bro.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Huge thing. That's right.

• 4:07Matt McCusker?

  That shit pisses me off. I don't like that stuff at all.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  The entire work wife concept is fucking weird, you know?

• 4:11Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  I mean, I understand how it, uh, arises, but it's like, it's not your work wife. You're cheating on your wife.

• 4:15Matt McCusker?

  I second. You're having an emotional relationship?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  You are having an emotional affair.

• 4:19Matt McCusker?

  That's going to bleed over.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, things were weird in the nineties.

• 4:23Matt McCusker?

  They were, and there was also in the nineties, it was like very in vogue, we talked about this before, but it was like very in vogue to like jailbait, the concept of like having sex with underage women was just like, yo, bro, I had jailbait.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  That was a big, that's another big American Pie thing too.

• 4:37Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, man, they don't age well, but they are still hilarious.

• 4:41Matt McCusker?

  Dude, they're so funny.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  They should remake it, they should do it again. They, we need, what was the last one, American Wedding, is that what that?

• 4:46Matt McCusker?

  I, I lost track. American Pie, I saw that, that was like a huge thing to see when I was younger, I, I kinda jumped off that and Hangover, I didn't really follow The Hangover as well. Comedy's, they stopped making comedy movies for the most part.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the whole reason I'm here is because Shane is filming Tires.

• 5:00Matt McCusker?

  I know, now it's the emergence, it's reemerging, and that, that technically is a show, the comedy, the great American comedy, there was like the Farrelly Brothers, all these people. You don't have, they don't, you don't have like a comedy in the theaters.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  And the weirdest thing too is that the director, Todd Phillips, I mean, he made so many of those movies that I love, Old School, he made, what else did he make? He made Road Trip, I think, which is an incredible film.

• 5:21Matt McCusker?

  Road Trip's nice.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Road Trip is so good. But now, and then he did The Hangover, he became Filthy Rich, but then he just made, he made the Joker movie. And then he made Joker 2, which is adorable, it's like a total disaster.

• 5:31Matt McCusker?

  Why did they do that?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I don't know, I mean, um, the Galaxy Brain case, Tarantino had a really good quote, he's like Joker is Todd Phillips saying, you know, the way he talks, he's like, Joker is Todd Phillips saying, way of saying fuck you to the audience, and, and that's why it's brilliant. And I was like, I don't know Tarantino, I think you're galaxying, braining yourself and how that shitty movie is actually really good.

• 5:52Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it sucks.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just bad, it's just empirically bad.

• 5:54Matt McCusker?

  I know, even, even though to be like, yeah, cause it, for me, I always think of like the mood, like the, I guess if you're already, you have that track record, it's like people will still invest in you.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Well, that thing is fuck you money. And honestly, he's a super weird dude. One of my favorite books, uh, I read about Hollywood was Molly's Game. Actually, it also became a movie, which is a good movie, I think it's on Netflix. Um, and it's about that girl who ran this high stakes poker game in, in Hollywood. But I ended up reading the book and I found out Tobey Maguire is a complete and total psycho. So Toby, yeah, I had no idea. So Toby was part of the quote unquote pussy posse with Leo DiCaprio. So I knew that. But then I'm reading about these weird psychological mind games that he would play in the book. And he would, at one point he had a quote where he's like poker is not about winning. Poker is about destroying people's souls.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  And he would string people along and bring them, get them into debt. And he was constantly charging this girl, the girl who ran the games. And he was fucking with her and her livelihood and he would take the game. He's a multi hundred millionaire or whatever, right?

• 6:56Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  And he's constantly, he's charging her for using his automatic shuffling. Just weird power game shit, like hot, like true Hollywood.

• 7:03Matt McCusker?

  He's like an evil nerd. He's like an evil nerd.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Psycho. Reading that book, I was like, dude, you are an actual psychopath. Like, this Seabisc, he's the jockey. That's Spider-Man. That's all I know about this guy. I was like, oh, man, this is.

• 7:16Matt McCusker?

  Well, he's probably upset his parents died when he was younger and he had to become like superhero, got bit by a spider.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  He's got that. And then, uh, yeah, the more I learned, and then Todd Phillips is in the book too. That's what made me think of it.

• 7:25Matt McCusker?

  He's nuts. So this is all like a biographer, basically, like digging into these people?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  No, she wrote the book. She was like my journey running the high stakes poker game.

• 7:33Matt McCusker?

  Got you, got you, got you.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  She was like the assistant to some rich Hollywood fuck and he brought her to run the games. And then she got in with like Tobey Maguire, apparently Leo came and Toby got Leo to come.

• 7:44Matt McCusker?

  The pussy posse, yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but Leo is also apparently like didn't talk to anybody and just put his headphones on the entire time while he was playing poker.

• 7:50Matt McCusker?

  Dude, I've heard a headphone story about Leo.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, so that's what reminded me of the other Leo story.

• 7:56Matt McCusker?

  You know the song he listens to?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  No, what is it?

• 7:58Matt McCusker?

  Oh dude, it's uh, fuck.

• 8:01Matt McCusker?

  Time to pretend. He listens to Time to Pretend while like someone who's wearing like basically this.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Extremely young women. I mean, I don't get it.

• 8:09Matt McCusker?

  Time to pretend, dude.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  What in?

• 8:11Matt McCusker?

  She's 27. It's time to pretend she's 27, but she's.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  No, younger. What's the pot off for Leo?

• 8:17Matt McCusker?

  He's pretending.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right. He's trying to pretend that she's 18.

• 8:19Matt McCusker?

  He's trying to pretend she's 27, but she is 18.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  The whole thing is very strange. The Leo thing, I don't get it. I love Leo. He's such an incredible actor. He's got great instincts. He's actually a very, very smart guy. Um, but yeah, his personal life, it's weird. I think we need to call a spade a spade.

• 8:32Matt McCusker?

  It is. And it's also one of those things where I think Bill Barr is like another avowed, kind of like, yeah, I fuck 19 year olds. I'm 65 and he's like this.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  He's older than that. I think he's like 67, bro. He might be, he might be pushing seventy, actually.

• 8:43Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and it's another one where it's like, yeah, it's, it is weird. It is definitely weird, dude, because it's the mental difference is crazy.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we're talking like order, like statistical, like, like, think about how many standard deviations away you are.

• 8:58Matt McCusker?

  It's like a vampire. It's like you're an immortal vampire at that point. You're seventy, talking to an eighteen year old.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Eighteen year old girl, yeah.

• 9:04Matt McCusker?

  You're kind of babysitting her.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely, you are. There's no question. I don't know, man.

• 9:07Matt McCusker?

  And if it's like, dude, like, you could be like, oh, I can make a, you know, I can make a geometric case for their breasts. It's like, alright, dude, well. Like, dude, just stop being such a pervert. Go jack off, dude. You don't have to date an eighteen year old. Just go jerk off. You don't have to, like, try to make it a lifestyle movement.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  See, I love this because this is a very just natural way of us, like, you know, bringing ourselves to being like, yeah, you know, there's actually really something about you. You should just get married, bro. Like, just get married, be normal. Being normal is good. It's actually a good thing. People who aren't normal are fucking weirdos. And, I mean, you know, you and I are in a unique position. We actually probably eventually get to meet some of these famous people that you see. Or other, or you get to just hear little things that are not from out in the public. And you're like, oh, yeah, there's a real cost to this, isn't there? You're like, and I'm like, I'm not really sure you, I'm like, I don't want to fuck with this. This is not the way that I choose to live my life, and I don't really want to be associated with that.

• 9:53Matt McCusker?

  Well, dude, there comes a point where you're either involved in this, like, you know, because, yeah, you're absolutely right, because you, you, you get to, like, you know, they're like the rarefied air of, like, Hollywood and all that stuff. And it does turn into like a diabolical power game. And it's like, we all have those instincts to participate in some level, but there are people who give their entire lives to, like, you know, like, looking at another guy's car, or be, being like, he got what project? Fucking motherfucker.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's real.

• 10:18Matt McCusker?

  Where's my nineteen year old girlfriend? I need to fucking eat her pussy right out of combat.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  It's a real, like, weird, consumerist, like, idolatry of the self. And it's like, everything that I've learned, you know, in life is just like, all of that is horrible, and it's bad.

• 10:30Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  There's a good political, you know, thing to this, too. If you stay in Washington, the thing is, lots of people who are young come to Washington. Twenty-two, twenty-three years old, wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, all of that. Most people burn out by twenty-seven. So I'm like in my mid-thirties now, and so I'm in the cohort, like, we made it. Like, the people who actually got the job, stayed in the lifestyle and all of that. But this is the Also, you know, there's this cringe show, but How I Met Your Mother. And there's a very important concept that Barney lays out in that show where he's like, relationships, and I think life is like this, have off-ramps like an exit where it's like, relationships is like one year, three year, five year, 10 year, 25, something like that. And if you look statistically, he's not wrong.

• 11:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  In terms of like when divorces and breakups and all that stuff happen. But for, yeah, for like professional DC or honestly, any career where it requires you to give fucking everything to it, but then you start to see, one of the most important pieces of advice I got was like, look at where you are and then look at the guy who's 10 years in that same path. And I was in the White House briefing room, for example, and I was looking around, I'm like, wait a second. I'm like, I don't want to be any of you people. I'm like, I need to get the fuck out of here.

• 11:34Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  I'm like, this is, I'm like, if we're on this track, I'm like, this is a bad track. We gotta get out.

• 11:38Matt McCusker?

  What was the White House briefing? What do you, was that like when you sit and ask questions?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where, well, I didn't even get to sit. I had to stand like a bitch in the corner, but.

• 11:46Matt McCusker?

  Oh, excuse me, so you're like just yelling questions?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  It's horrible, man. Yeah, so actually I'm hopeful with the new administration that we can change some of this up. So the way it works is that the White House Correspondents Association is like a cartel. And even though it's unofficial, they run everything. So all the briefing room seats are assigned by the White House Correspondents Association. I was working for the Daily Caller at the time, which is a conservative media outlet. And if you want a seat, you have to apply and applying takes years to get a new seat. And so if you don't have a seat, then obviously you have to get there early. So I would get there hours early, ahead of time, just to be able to stand in the, in the hallway, like on the side. And you're literally crammed in up against like all these different people. There's all this jockeying and there's like foreigners.

• 12:28Matt McCusker?

  It's like the stock market kind of in a way.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  It's literally, it's like a movie, right? And then you just sit there and you kind of like poke your hand. I was lucky because I'm tall, so I actually get my hand above. There was this short girl behind me and she was like, can I get in front of you? I'm like, sorry bitch.

• 12:39Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, no, I was here at 5 a.m.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  It's a doggy dog world, like get here earlier. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you. That's, that's the, that's what I'm talking about though. I don't want to be that person. That actually sucks.

• 12:48Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Or there was this girl who she's like, hi, I'm shooting a documentary. I'm from England and all this and I was just wondering if I'd get my shot. I'm like, yeah, but if you get your shot, I'm gonna get my questions. So it's like, and then my boss is gonna chew my ass out, so it's just not gonna happen.

• 12:59Matt McCusker?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, and. You don't want to be in that mind space is more what I'm saying.

• 13:03Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  That's probably.

• 13:04Matt McCusker?

  It takes a toll. It does take a toll.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Hollywood, finance, politics, all these other things all function the same way in that if you want to be in the top point one percent of your field, you have to give everything to it. And that's it. There's no other choice.

• 13:13Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  And, you know, people should be real with that. So if you're listening and you're like thinking like, oh, I really want to do something like that, just be, just understand what it takes. Understand what it actually takes to get there.

• 13:22Matt McCusker?

  Oh dude.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:22Matt McCusker?

  For sure. Dude, it's funny because I'm, I'm viewing schools now for, and it's like kind of related. So I'm looking at schools for my daughter. She's going into kindergarten next year. So we're like looking at, and it's like, dude, schools now are, and I think it's good, but they're, what I've been seeing, it's like, they're educating people to like, do something for everybody to like bring something to the world rather than like, well, you know, we were in school. It's more like,

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:45Matt McCusker?

  build yourself up so that you're a high value individual that you can just take resources for yourself and just, you know, like fuck off. And it's like, yeah, but the problem is, is like they sold everyone that dream, but the reality is, is like, most people aren't going to get those.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Well, and it's not even.

• 13:59Matt McCusker?

  Most people are going to become doctors and shit.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Most people don't want to do that.

• 14:01Matt McCusker?

  True.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  You don't want like, I'm Indian, so I know a lot of doctors. It's like, do you want to know how hellish medical school is? Be real, whenever you are like, for real. Do you want to spend eight years in school, four years making shit money with $300,000 in debt? Working 80, 90 hours a week, getting shit on by the attending physicians, then hoping, hoping and praying that you get, you know, your placement or whatever for the next job. So by the time you're my age, you can finally get your first paycheck. Oh, but fuck you, even though you get your first night paycheck. 90% of that is going to be going to clearing off of your medical debt and you've lived 10 years. You're probably now addicted to smoking, food, like some vice of some, there's no way. Again, you, you know this too. When you work really hard, like it takes it all from you. You're going to be addicted to energy drinks, nicotine, whatever. Like you, you need something.

• 14:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  It's not possible to do a natural.

• 14:47Matt McCusker?

  It's dude, it's true. I've, I've gone back and forth and it's like, I'm like, no, I don't need anything. And I had like a pretty harsh caffeine phase for myself. I'm like sensitive to it.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:56Matt McCusker?

  I had to stop that because I wasn't sleeping, but.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  How do you, because you travel a lot, right?

• 15:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  That's brutal.

• 15:01Matt McCusker?

  I've recently. It sucks. I've recently introduced melatonin. I'm a very like natural type. I don't want to take anything, but I've, I've succumbed to just like.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 15:09Matt McCusker?

  Just.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Can I give you a warning about melatonin? So Andrew Huberman says not to take melatonin.

• 15:13Matt McCusker?

  I know, man. I know it's not good.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Cause he's saying, it was something about, something he said, like the, the label on the bottle can be anywhere between like two percent and one hundred and a thousand percent of what's actually in there.

• 15:23Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he said something, don't take my word for it, but it was something along the lines of, I've seen them give melatonin to rats and it shrivels their balls. So he's like, I think that it messes with testosterone.

• 15:32Matt McCusker?

  Enough said, dude. I'm done.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  My opinion, you should stay off.

• 15:35Matt McCusker?

  I'm off it. I'm off it.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Stay off the melatonin.

• 15:37Matt McCusker?

  I'm off it. It's, it is a, I, as soon as I started taking it, I was like, I get why Michael Jackson had a guy with like an IV in his arm.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  No, that was a whole other level, man. That's like pro, what was it? Propofol?

• 15:47Matt McCusker?

  Propofol. It was propofol. But you start to like, dude, it's like, you're just sitting there reading a book and all of a sudden the melatonin just starts to like weigh, you're like a stone statue and then you're just like, huh.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Did you, uh, read about this Matthew Perry thing? Oh, it was so fucked up. I love Matthew Perry. Uh, so, I mean, it's really sad. I read his book actually after he died and Perry was, obviously everybody knows he was a drug addict.

• 16:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  But, you know, it's, uh, his parents, it turns out his mom was like the press secretary for Justin Trudeau's dad.

• 16:13Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  When he was the prime minister. Yeah, he was actually, and apparently he beat the shit out of Justin Trudeau when they were kids, which is wild.

• 16:17Matt McCusker?

  Matthew Perry beat up Justin Trudeau?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Matthew Perry beat up Justin Trudeau.

• 16:21Matt McCusker?

  That's kinda boss.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is cool. But so Perry, it turns out when he was like a really little baby and he was crying, his parents would give him like benzos, like benzodiazepine.

• 16:30Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Like really fucked. And he was like, yeah, well, some of my parents' funniest stories is about me as a baby, just sitting there like drooling out of my mouth. When they were plugging me full of benzos, cause I was crying, he was like colicky. And so his theory of why he's so fucked up and addicted to drugs was because at a very early age, that he had benzos. And he's talked about how the very first time he ever felt like anything was good in this world was when he was drunk at 14 years old. And that was the rat race. And then he becomes a fucking hundred millionaire, centimillionaire, whatever from Friends. And that's why you can see his weight wildly fluctuate on the show, cause he was either drunk or he was on pills or he was on oxy. But dude, the, the, the thing is with Perry is he died of a ketamine overdose, I believe.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  And they, uh, Los Angeles District Attorney filed this case against a so-called like ketamine queen. And they have text messages in there. Of the doctor and the girl who was selling him all this illegal ketamine being like, how much can we take this rich asshole for? You know, charging him thousands of dollars per hit of ketamine of which they're buying.

• 17:32Matt McCusker?

  Not very chill ketamine community.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Deeply exploitative shit like really bad.

• 17:37Matt McCusker?

  I have a, I have a, a lot of people are really into ketamine. I have a very kind of like weird thing. Cause I knew a lot of like evil hippies who were like, they got like addicted to that shit. They used to call it, they used to call it hippie heroin.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  What's it called? K-hole, right?

• 17:50Matt McCusker?

  K-hole, yeah. Well dude, before it became mainstream, it was known like people like, oh, it's hippie heroin. Cause they would like nod out.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  What does it do? Cause I thought that it helps.

• 17:58Matt McCusker?

  Dissociative.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  But there's the depression aspect, there's like the therapeutic aspect. And apparently he'd been having ketamine in a therapeutic setting, but then I guess he got addicted to that. And that's why he died in that hot tub, man, because dude, and it was like his assistant, his little drug assistant. They were working to procure him drugs and charge him thousands of dollars because they were ripping this guy off.

• 18:16Matt McCusker?

  That's not right. They're, it's called custying someone out. They're custying them. You treat them custody prices. Yeah. It's not a good thing to do. But yeah, I, I've heard people who swear by it. They're like, if you do like, cause you can do. Like, you know, they have like, they make like little lozenges and stuff. So you could like lay there. My brother's all about it. He's like, you lay there.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  He's a big K guy?

• 18:32Matt McCusker?

  Big K guy, big special K guy. He was really selling me on it. And it was like, you know, I'm like, and I get like, if you're laying there. It's like a 30 minute ordeal. You come out of it. He's like, it is, it's good. It's like, you know, well, uh. But then there's doctors who like, will prescribe you a little bit. Like you can just kind of have it to kind of like. Cause you can either like get into a K-hole or just kind of take the edge off. And I knew like these dudes that would just snort K constantly. But if you snort too much, then you'll, you'll just be sitting there like.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  The other K that I see signs for everywhere, and I actually don't know what it is, is Kr- is it Kratom?

• 19:01Matt McCusker?

  Kratom, Kratom, yeah.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  What is Kratom? It's like you see signs for this everywhere. CBD, they sell Kratom. I don't know a single person that's ever used Kratom. I don't know what Kratom is. I just know it exists, but it's everywhere. It's literally everywhere. It's every gas station in America.

• 19:13Matt McCusker?

  Gas stations sell like drug, like full on, they sell drugs or you can sell weed legally at gas stations now. It's dude, they did it. It's the hemp farm bill allowed THCA, which is weed, the active ingredient's THC.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Is that the same as, uh, was it spice or whatever those?

• 19:27Matt McCusker?

  No, it's dude, it's so spice, spice is a synthetic. So it's like, if you take, you know, delta nine, tetrahydro, whatever it's called. There's the exact molecule that's illegal. Spices like, let's remove a couple of carbon molecules and like a hydrogen. And now it's like very similar, but it's legal because it's not technically the same stuff. It's like an analog or whatever you want to call it.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 19:44Matt McCusker?

  So what kratom is, well with the THCA stuff, it's like it, TH, uh, weed picked off the plant is THCA. Cause there's a carbon molecule. That's why if you have to make brownies, you have to heat the weed up to decarboxylate it. And that's what like THC is illegal, but THC is legal. So now you can grow hemp, which is just weed.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:03Matt McCusker?

  With THCA, which is just THC and it's legal and you can sell it at a gas station. It makes, it's completely schizophrenic. It makes no sense. It makes no sense, but I mean, I think it's sick. You can mail it right to your house, but.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Really?

• 20:14Matt McCusker?

  Oh yeah. You can just get it mailed right to you.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Are you a big weed guy?

• 20:16Matt McCusker?

  I was for the longest time.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I can smell weed in here, you know?

• 20:19Matt McCusker?

  It wasn't me. It wasn't me. I know you hate it. It wasn't me. That was you, bro. You were blazing. Me and Sagar ripped the blunt, dude. I like that.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Don't put misinformation out there, alright? The moment my, when I came down here, my nostrils flared. I didn't want to say anything, but I did suspect you. I'm not gonna lie. I immediately suspected you.

• 20:36Matt McCusker?

  I was a big weed guy since I was like in high school through college.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  But you quit, right? So it's a success story.

• 20:43Matt McCusker?

  I cut it out, but here's the thing. It becomes too much, like especially when you have kids. It's like, I just can't, I can't be high.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Can you tell that to more people? Yeah.

• 20:51Matt McCusker?

  Some people claim, but like for me personally, it's like having like a, like a, like a weird panic attack at a playground.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:59Matt McCusker?

  Not serving your family. Oh fuck dude, that's gotta be brave for my daughter right now.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  But everybody says it's chill, you know, it's chill, dude. It's totally chill.

• 21:05Matt McCusker?

  Dude, the thing is the weed's different. The weed is so strong now.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Thank you. Please continue.

• 21:10Matt McCusker?

  Dude, I have, I have, dude, I've literally, I was selling weed from 2008 up until whatever, pretty embarrassing recently, but the.

• 21:20Matt McCusker?

  Whatever. I don't even remember.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  I'm gonna call Philly PD.

• 21:23Matt McCusker?

  Maybe 2009.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Is weed legal in Philly?

• 21:25Matt McCusker?

  I knew a guy who got, it's totally, it's a medical.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:28Matt McCusker?

  I knew a guy who got caught with coke in, outside of the, you know, whatever, Delaware County.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 21:35Matt McCusker?

  And apparently they, the Delaware County, like whatever township police called the Philadelphia PD and like, we caught this guy with cocaine. We also think he's been buying weed from Philadelphia. Uh, and dude, the Philly PD just went, hung up on, he was in the room. He was like in trouble for it.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I mean, to be fair, they have like actual problems. Murders.

• 21:50Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. And they were just like, he's like, dude, they, the Philly PD hung up on township police.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  They're like, dude, we don't care about that.

• 21:57Matt McCusker?

  But it is dude with the dabs, it has become drugified. So I like watched weed develop for years, like very close to it. And it was like, uh, it became a thing that was like, dude, this is like, dude, like, you know, it was like, everyone talks about this. Like in the seventies, it was like seven percent THC and you get like 14, 15 was like, wow, dude, it's like 30, some of them are like 28 to 30%. It's too much.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  And they also, the percentage was that are sold to you, it's kind of like what I just said about melatonin. You have no idea whether that's correctly in there or not. So yeah, let's stay off the weed. Let me that, uh, if you'll allow me a weed diet tribe.

• 22:30Matt McCusker?

  That's fine. I'll give you one. I, what my thing is now, it's like, so now they're starting to regrow it and introduce like the, um, grow it. So it's like only seven percent with CBD.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:41Matt McCusker?

  And that's very relaxing and it's not as psychoactive. It just, it really can like make you, it's like the founding father weed. That's like the hemp George Washington smoke.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Oh, is it?

• 22:48Matt McCusker?

  It's very chill. You're not like, you might get like, you know.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Well, he was doing opium too. Do you think other people?

• 22:52Matt McCusker?

  Was he doing opium?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Of course. They all were doing opium back then. That's how the painkillers happen. Yeah.

• 22:56Matt McCusker?

  True. I guess.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  You know, that's a forbidden part of the 1900s and nobody ever talks about the shocking number of opium and cocaine addicts that were up until like the 1920s, uh, incredible amount of society was addicted to morphine, opium, cocaine. You could get it readily across the counter. Uh, a lot of the doctors were going to prison because they were coke addicts and they were prescribing cocaine to different people. It's actually pretty wild.

• 23:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. I think you can get it in prison. You can get like opium in prison in like the twenties. I think you could get ordered on commissary.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:26Matt McCusker?

  I think so. I just read, I read a book about like an old, uh, like a burglar from like 1890s.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  It's probably not a bad way to spend the time, you know, you're already locked up.

• 23:33Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. You just, you could just gobble it up. You could just take, yeah, exactly. You could just gobble it up. I think, I think it was like, either the guards were selling it, but I, I remember the guy was saying in the book, he just ordered some opium from the truck.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Well, it wasn't illegal for, for a long time. Yeah. I mean, it took a long time because there was a lot of, it's the same problems we have now. Opium addicts at the time, it's like for a while they're on opium. They can't afford opium. You start robbing people to pay for your opium. And then it's like, they're like, okay, we gotta get rid of this.

• 23:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, this is a problem. Dude, the kratom now is, kratom is a, it's not.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  So what is it? Is it a plant?

• 24:01Matt McCusker?

  So technically an opium, it's a plant. It's a natural plant, but it has.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  This is what they say about, it's natural.

• 24:05Matt McCusker?

  It's natural.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It's natural. What did you just talk about? Oh, the cross plays with this. 30, 40% now. It's like, that's not fucking natural.

• 24:12Matt McCusker?

  Exactly. That you're.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  That's as natural as a red tomato in a grocery store.

• 24:15Matt McCusker?

  I totally agree. I, I think they've totally, they've ruined weed now. It's called type two cannabis. They're walking it back. And I think that, cause dude, I couldn't, I would just like freak out. I'm like, this sucks. This isn't fun at all. Or I do think though, and this is like a, uh, it's, I do like saying this to people because people get very like bullish with weed. They'll be like, dude, fucking five milligram. I could take a 50 mil. It's like, dude, it's because you're a dumbass. You don't have anything going on in your brain.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  It's like you've actually cooked so much of your IQ off that you no longer have the IQ to.

• 24:41Matt McCusker?

  No, I'm saying naturally they're a dumbass.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Oh, already naturally.

• 24:44Matt McCusker?

  People who can do like 200 milligram edibles. It's like, yeah, because you're a fucking dumbass. You don't have anything going on in your mind. You're just sitting there like, uh, you're like when a dog gets a brownie. You're just kind of like, uh. Or you metabolize it differently. I don't know.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah.

• 24:57Matt McCusker?

  But dude, yeah, the kratom, they do snag people with the natural stuff, but it's like it mimics opiates. So people will use it to get off of like, you could be sick from.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  It's like methadone?

• 25:05Matt McCusker?

  Heroin, if it was a plant, but it also is different. Like if you take a little bit, it's energizing. If you take a lot, it's like you ate like four Percocets. Dude, and people get addicted to it, man.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  No, no, I do know that. That's why I brought it up because there is a lot of this weird stuff that like kratom. Uh, obviously weed now with the mass legalization and nobody ever talks about, you know, if you look at the weed graph, like over 20% of weed users are using it on a multi daily basis. So that is like, imagine if 20% of people who drank alcohol drank like straight liquor all day, every day. That's not even close.

• 25:38Matt McCusker?

  What is the percentage of people who drink alcohol daily?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Who are daily drinkers? I think it's like seven to eight percent. And actually, by the way, I'm not putting alcohol off the.

• 25:45Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  It's really bad. People who are alcoholics, it ruins your life. You're, you know, it will kill you early. There's all this stuff. And actually it's weed and alcohol, almost all vices actually, uh, have the same effect where between like seven, it's like the Pareto principle where seven, uh, 20% can be responsible for 80% and so 20% of weed users consume almost all of the weed. And because they're using it every single day and it's extremely high THC and it's psychoactive. Uh, anybody who knows anybody who's ever owned a liquor store, it's like the vast majority of your sales are going to the same like alcoholics. Honestly, it's really sad.

• 26:19Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  And then gambling is the same way, like a huge percentage of casino, uh, returnees, like, you know, every people go to Vegas and they have fun, but like, if you have ever spent time in a casino, like the people that come every single day, they're just like pissing their lives.

• 26:32Matt McCusker?

  It makes you really sad.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  That's the saddest part. Like that. It's really sad.

• 26:36Matt McCusker?

  It's so sad. When you see, especially the old people there and you're like, damn, your kids stopped talking to you. You've worked your whole life.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Do you have sports gambling advertisers, do you?

• 26:44Matt McCusker?

  Oh, big time, yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Oh, do you?

• 26:45Matt McCusker?

  You can talk whatever you want.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Okay, all right, well, I'll say it.

• 26:47Matt McCusker?

  It's not fair to free speech.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 26:48Matt McCusker?

  You think I'm gonna restrict speech in the podium?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Sorry, DraftKings and FanDuel and all these other people.

• 26:53Matt McCusker?

  It's not those two, but yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, good. All right, well.

• 26:56Matt McCusker?

  We've definitely had that before.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Oh, have you?

• 26:57Matt McCusker?

  Say whatever you want.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Okay, all right.

• 26:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I'm not worried about that.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Well, I don't want to get you in trouble, but, you know.

• 27:00Matt McCusker?

  Can't get me in trouble?

• 27:01Speaker 02

  I, I have become totally convinced, but I don't put, uh, cars on the table. I actually like to go to the casino. I think casino gambling is really fun, but I think it's very important that I have to go to the casino, to a physical location. The stats right now on sports gambling, it's just like weed, all vices. Disaster. If you look at the amount of money that is being sucked out of people's pockets, it's horrible. So in this, in September, in New Jersey alone, New Jersey bettors lost $200 million in gambling online, in full online gambling. They lost $400 million, they were gambling on sports, and a total of $900 million in a single month of September, just if you include also casinos. So you can see that almost half of the money that New Jersey bettors lost, by the way, Jersey's not that fucking big.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  So we just talked about a billion dollars that got sucked out of the market.

• 27:49Matt McCusker?

  That's crazy.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  People are addicted to sports gambling, man. It's terrible. And the other thing is, if I studied, I, I went and I read a little bit about how casinos operate and casino profits, like the amount that they take is called the hold, like on a game. And the hold for DraftKings, FanDuel and all these others is way higher because traditional gamblers in casinos, they'll bet the money line or they'll bet the spread, but these retards on sports gambling are buying, are doing all these parlays that get algorithmically pushed. You have no fucking chance of winning your parlay.

• 28:16Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Sorry, sorry, you're not gonna win your parlay. And it's, don't ask me, check the stats.

• 28:22Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  And look at the profits for where all these people are coming from. So dude, mass sports gambling has been a fucking disaster. Like you've seen domestic violence has gone up in the places where it is. Bankruptcies are up. You're seeing a huge amount of credit card debt, 25% increase amongst the people where it is legal. And, and actually I just read an article about Brazil yesterday where basically it's a social transfer program. Where the government is cutting checks to working class people. Those people are gambling almost forty percent of their paychecks away on a consistent basis. So it's like a mass wealth transfer that's happening right now. And yeah, I mean sadly, because you can do it online. Just imagine if you could take your phone out and there was an app on your phone where you could drink alcohol. Do you know how popular that app would be?

• 29:07Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, or seat naked girls.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, well, that's a, we'll get to that next. We're gonna come next. This is gonna be the Killjoy Podcast.

• 29:16Matt McCusker?

  No.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Imagine if you could like suck marijuana from an app that was out of your phone. People would be addicted to that. That gambling is honestly worse than both of those.

• 29:25Matt McCusker?

  It's a double addiction because the phone's addictive.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 29:27Matt McCusker?

  And then you put addiction on top of an addictive device.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  And you have money that is now at stake. Every single state where this has happened, it's been an absolute nightmare. And you know, if you, all you have to do, the thing is, is that the gambling companies legally, they have to disclose all of this. So all you have to go do is go and read their profit and loss statements and look how much of this is coming from the parlay bets. It's the vast majority of their profits and yet you idiots keep signing up for it. And I get that it's fun, but it's not funny whenever your wife is like, hey, baby, can we buy these berries for our child? And you're like, oh, I actually pissed it all away on a parlay last night. And you know, now you have guys who are, you know, you've seen this explosion and people are like, I'm gambling on women's softball or in Korea. And I'm like, bro, you have a problem.

• 30:10Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  You have a problem.

• 30:11Matt McCusker?

  That's always been, people like, that's degenerate behavior. Like the world, Little League World Series, like you're a degenerate, you're a degenerate.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  You are a degem, bro. And this is, okay, this is my case. I think gambling should be legal. I think, but it should only mean casinos. Because one of my favorite parts about going to the casino is you meet the characters, right? You go to the crap table and you see a guy who hasn't showered in three days and has got his colostomy bag on. And by the way, he will teach you how to roll the dice and so shout out to that man for showing me, for showing me how to do it. But seeing him, I'm like, I don't ever want to be even in the same like universe of like whatever this dude is. But you can't see that when you're on the couch. You don't understand, you're the sucker. Last thing on this that I found out from Nate Silver's book. Is that if you are any good at sports gambling, you're banned. And so

• 30:58Matt McCusker?

  That's kind of fucked up.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  If you win consistently on DraftKings or on FanDuel, they will cap your bet size to like $2. They're like, oh, you're allowed to bet $2.14.

• 31:08Matt McCusker?

  That's bullshit.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yes, and but you know why? And then people are like, I'm actually really good at sports gambling. I'm like, oh, how you been on the app? They're like, three years. I'm like, you're not any good at sports gambling. I'm like, they would have banned you.

• 31:16Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's everyone know. I'm like breaking even basically. It's like, no you're fucking that.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  It's like, well, first of all, you need to win 52% of your bets just to beat the house because 2% is the vig that goes to that.

• 31:26Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  But then over that, it's like, the, look, you're not winning. If you're still gambling consistently on the app, you have not won and there, you're the sucker.

• 31:35Matt McCusker?

  You know what they should do? An easy amendment to this that wouldn't be such a money suck is that when you lose your gambling money, it's held from you for six months. They get to make money on the interest and then they send it back to you. So you're like

• 31:46Speaker 02

  That would be nice, but

• 31:46Matt McCusker?

  You're momentarily penalized.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  I just read in New York, uh

• 31:49Matt McCusker?

  I mean, why would they do that? They would be like, fuck you. We're keeping all, how about we keep all of it and make interest off it?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  These guys are making the biggest killing in the planet. And like, the best part is all the states are doing it too because they want the money. But the thing, look, they're gonna pay for it because it's one of those where you're getting this fake tax revenue. But yeah, you know, when you have to come and send cops to Johnny's house because he went fucking broke and he beat up his wife or his girlfriend or whatever, you're paying for that, you know, in the community.

• 32:13Matt McCusker?

  He's blowing off some steam.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Parley goes down, he's gonna house, uh, one of those plastic bottles of whiskey from Costco. And, uh, we all know what happens next.

• 32:23Matt McCusker?

  It is weird that like, when like, it's like, when jobs are scarce, like, it just, people just end up beating up girls. Like, if there's not good stuff going on, people are like, well, I guess I have to beat up a girl now. It happens across like every culture.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  It's every culture. Uh, actually, a lot of people got mad at me on the show because I was talking about, it was during one of our immigration debates. I think you talked about it a little bit, actually, on your show. Uh, and, uh, and I was just like, look, and by the way, just full disclosure, I married into an Irish family from Philadelphia.

• 32:50Matt McCusker?

  Oh, there you go.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  So I, uh, I have no discrimination against the Irish. But what I'm saying is, back in the day, uh, I think it was reasonable to be like, well, you know, all these people are coming over here and they drank a lot of whiskey.

• 33:03Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  So here's the, nobody Knows this, the very first thing that women did whenever they voted was ban alcohol. That's why the temp, the temperance movement was entirely driven by women.

• 33:12Matt McCusker?

  Whoa.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And if it was the reason why is because they were getting the absolute shit kicked out of them by their drunk ass husbands. Who are drinking a liter of whiskey per day on average.

• 33:21Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  To deal with, you know, the industrial revolution.

• 33:25Matt McCusker?

  For sure, yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  All this, but it was also, let's, let's be honest, it was part of their culture, right?

• 33:28Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  And so, but, and so that, that, this, people don't forget is like that, for some reason, it's intrinsic. Like alcohol gambling and beating the shit out of your wife, it's, it's just a package deal.

• 33:39Matt McCusker?

  It's one big thing.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  You are signing up for that. You are a hundred percent. So don't incentivize it.

• 33:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it's just impulses ruling the roost and then eventually the curtain closes and you're like, ah.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, real, really what I think it is, is just somebody for the first time is showing the reality of what you've done. Where you can rationalize your parlays away, you can rationalize all this, but the very first time, like I just said, we're like, hey, can we pave to go see? I don't know, like, I want to go see my mom next week or whatever, can I get a flight? And they're like, no, we literally don't have any money.

• 34:05Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and or the ultimate being like, I told you the Chiefs weren't going to kick a field over. And you're like, shut the fuck up. You didn't know that.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:13Matt McCusker?

  It, it, well, it is funny, there is a huge, because you know, my whole, I'm all like Irish Catholic doubt and it's like.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:17Matt McCusker?

  Like we, seeing someone fall at a wedding, I'm like, nah. It's like, it's so normal and like my wife would like cry, she'd be like, that's not right. And I'm like, that's so sad, I'm like, dude.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  My in-laws and their family are not like that.

• 34:29Matt McCusker?

  People fall at weddings, it is what it is.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  I did see a really funny tweet and be like, you know, I, I, I left Dublin and I moved, I forget where they moved, like somewhere in South America or something. And they're like, and what I thought was, we were all having a good time, it turns out we're just crippling alcoholics.

• 34:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, like family beach trips were just like adults hammered for seven days and I'd just be like, alright. Then the kids would get hammered, they would pass out.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Beach culture is weird.

• 34:52Matt McCusker?

  Oh, it's crazy, dude, it's crazy.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  I had no exposure to it because I grew up here, uh, but yeah, I went to like, I think I went to Rehoboth, which is like the nice beach, right? But even then, I'm like, man, these ladies are hammering Tito's at like nine AM in the morning.

• 35:03Matt McCusker?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  There's some crazy shit going down.

• 35:05Matt McCusker?

  East Coast beach culture is like getting, it's like quiet, that's not like as like cool, like Margaritaville, it's just people just quietly.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Quietly D J.

• 35:12Matt McCusker?

  My uncles, yeah, my uncles would be like, they would all joke, they'd be like, ah, man, who's going to crack the first one? And they're like, I don't give a shit, I'll do it and you just crack a course, like, now they don't let you drink on the beaches like that.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Really?

• 35:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, they're taking them.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  I saw a lot of people doing it.

• 35:22Matt McCusker?

  Well, in, in the Jersey.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Doing in the solo cups.

• 35:24Matt McCusker?

  That's what I'm saying, they used to, and they'll still come around and police you. Uh, I grew up going to Sea Isle and you, dude, it was just beers, whatever.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Really?

• 35:31Matt McCusker?

  Now it's like you have to have a cup and they'll come around if you have alcohol in your cup. They can just write you a fine because everyone's gonna drink on the beach.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Of course they are. Yeah. See, see, and this is where my like nanny state instincts. I'm like, alright, well, fuck off. Alright, people are also on the beach and that's just a money grab for. We need rules, but really what it is like, we just need a better, we need a better culture around this stuff. Because we just gotta acknowledge the downsides, right? That's, that's all I'm asking. Everybody's asking like, sports gambling is the greatest thing ever. It's about freedom. You're gonna get, and look at their ads, right? They're like, you're gonna get rich. You're going free fifteen dollars.

• 36:06Matt McCusker?

  We'll give you five hundred dollars for five bucks.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Five dollars, a five hundred dollar deposit. I'm like, once again, bro, like, have you ever been to a casino? That shit doesn't get built based on winners. Like ninety-nine percent of the people who walk out of there are fucking losers. The odds that it are you is almost ninety-nine percent.

• 36:21Matt McCusker?

  Well, I think the gambling companies would be happier doing this because they do do that little disclaimer like, by the way, guys, if you know, in case you.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's mostly bullshit. And a lot of it is because they're required by the state to put it in there. And then what the states do is they take part of these losses and they fund these gambling. But it's like you are the receipt, the rise in sports gambling addiction has created the need for these gambling addiction centers. So it's like, just don't have it in the first place.

• 36:46Matt McCusker?

  The weirdest part about gambling addiction is that it's not even about winning or losing. Like, I read some book.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  They like when they lose. That's the craziest part. They love it when they lose.

• 36:54Matt McCusker?

  Or it's more like the flow state of just being like, it's not the winning or losing. It's just going from thing to thing and you're just, your brain's totally focused on something.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Again, I get it. I like it. I love to play baccarat.

• 37:04Matt McCusker?

  See, I don't like to gamble. I've never, I'm just filled with anxiety the whole time when I win.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  I love games of chance. Poker's more actually, I think I could justify poker because I wouldn't even really call it gambling, although it is technically like kind of a game of chance. But there's a lot of strategy in that. Obviously, like, the famous rounders quote, it's like the same ten people may end up at the finals for a reason. It's not a game of fucking chance. Whereas if you go to blackjack competitions or baccarat competitions, fucking, you get lucky, right? That's how it works. I see the appeal of both, but there is something. This is where I'll flip the script, man. The magic of the cards. Like when the baccarat thing, you're like, you're like, nine, nine, nine, nine. You're just sitting there. That moment, the anticipation.

• 37:41Matt McCusker?

  And it's fun.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  And when you hit it, oh my god.

• 37:43Matt McCusker?

  It's so fun. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Well, it's also-

• 37:45Speaker 02

  I play like fifteen dollar tables in Charlestown, West Virginia, next to toothless Chinese women who are getting their Chinese ash on my stomach. I prefer, honestly, I'd rather be around them. I love them. Shout out to the, uh-

• 37:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  You always want to gamble with Chinese, if you're playing baccarat, Chinese and Vietnamese, they know what's up.

• 38:03Matt McCusker?

  That's a good idea. That's a good call.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  And the less teeth they have, the more, the more good at the game they are.

• 38:07Matt McCusker?

  I can see that.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  They have patience. They, they have all these superstitions about dragons and, and colors and stuff.

• 38:12Matt McCusker?

  That's the thing though, man, because I was like sitting there one time backstage at a comedy show and they were like playing dice like in the green room, it's like, they had this little box. And I was like, it is just people interacting with magic. People are tracking gamblings. It's, it's, it's just-

• 38:24Speaker 02

  It's magic.

• 38:24Matt McCusker?

  It's like a divine thing. You're like, oh.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  And everybody, craps is also definitely the most fun game in the casino, although it is minus EV every single bet on the, on the craps table. So, but when you play, the magic of it is the crowd's game because, and I love craps gurus, right? Like I was talking about the diabetic guy and he's like, he's like, yeah, he threw it over here, threw it through over here. It's like, the first time he throws to the right, he's gonna roll seven, which means we all get fucked. So he was like, he's like, he about to roll that, take your bet off. And I was like, alright, got it, got it. He was right. And I was like-

• 38:49Matt McCusker?

  Dude, I, my only time-

• 38:50Speaker 02

  They know something. They know something.

• 38:52Matt McCusker?

  My only time playing craps, a guy was like, just do what I do. And I was up thirteen hundred dollars very quickly.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Holy shit. Thirteen hundred?

• 38:59Matt McCusker?

  Very quickly.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 39:00Matt McCusker?

  And I was just like-

• 39:01Speaker 02

  You're playing higher stakes than I am, man.

• 39:02Matt McCusker?

  I think, I was just drunk too, just like, ugh. It's fine. And then I got cocky. I was like, I know what's going on. As soon as I started doing my own bets, I was back down to six hundred. I just picked it up. I was like, thank you, sir. And just walked out. I was like, I'm fucking out.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  I mean, you left up. That's, you know, that's a victory.

• 39:14Matt McCusker?

  I will do that. I'm ruthless at a casino. If I win a hundred bucks, I'm out. I'm like, get me the fuck out of here. I just won a hundred bucks.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  But it could be two hundred.

• 39:20Matt McCusker?

  That's, to me, I'm like, I get so disgusted when I lose.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I'm missing it.

• 39:25Matt McCusker?

  The feeling I get, I just, I'm like, I think about just them just like, taking like the time I spent into like work and life, especially when I was like just working a job where I was like, I could be like, oh, that was a day of my life.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:36Matt McCusker?

  And I would just think of that, just getting like sucked into a vault, which is a huge chamber of money.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  To pay for free drinks for these fat alcoholics who are like-

• 39:44Matt McCusker?

  It would kill me.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Just sitting in the slot machine like, chh, chh.

• 39:47Matt McCusker?

  No, it would fucking kill me. The worst part is if, I, I don't really gamble much anymore. But it was like when I first did it, I was in Vegas for my cousin's bachelor party and he was like, you know, do this, do that. And I won the first four times I gambled, I won.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  What game was it?

• 39:59Matt McCusker?

  Blackjack. And I would just win, I would win like-

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Very high variance game though, that's the problem. You can get fucked so easily.

• 40:04Matt McCusker?

  Dude, I'd win like $200 and I'd win $200 and I'd just get right the fuck out. And I would spend all, my, my code was every, every dollar I won gambling, I'd spend it on everyone around me immediately. And it worked.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, you gotta spread the love. You gotta get the juju, you need the luck.

• 40:16Matt McCusker?

  Just, exactly. And then like I tipped the dealers heavily and then like I like, was like, I think I'm good at blackjack. And I instantly lost like $700 so, so fast, dude.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, the fact the-

• 40:26Matt McCusker?

  Fifteen minutes I was just out.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  That's, that's what they do. Cause it's a high variance game and they know they can wipe you out way before you're gonna wipe them out. So what they wanna do is just deal all those hands per hour. And already Blackjack, I think Blackjack is a 51-49 game, I'm pretty sure, even with perfect ba- were you playing basic strategy like perfect?

• 40:42Matt McCusker?

  No idea what the fuck I was doing. There was a guy, yeah, no idea. And there'd be guys like, dude, you gotta hit. And I'm like, no.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  I'm sure they get mad at you. Actually, yeah. If you don't play basic strategy correctly, because if you fuck it up, you're gonna fuck the whole shoe up for the entire table. And so they get very upset.

• 40:55Matt McCusker?

  I, they were very, they were very displeased with me, but I was like, bro, this is not my problem. We're not on a team. You're not sharing your money with me.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Gamblers know this. This is gen pop shit.

• 41:06Matt McCusker?

  I'd be like, dude, we're not on a fucking team. We're not splitting this money. This is my call and I would-

• 41:10Speaker 02

  No, but it is a team because if you fuck the math up and he's gonna hit it, he's gonna get the wrong card. Because he's playing math and you're not. And so that's what screws. But Dana White has a theory. Yeah, Dana White is like, sometimes you gotta go to war with the shoe. And you gotta, you gotta, he's like, you gotta turn basic strategy on the shoe. I was like, I don't really think that's how math works, but I mean, he's super rich, so he doesn't care.

• 41:30Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. I heard he likes to gamble.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Oh, he's-

• 41:33Matt McCusker?

  Heavily.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Me and my friends who like to go to the casino, we will hype ourselves up with Dana White clips. Yeah, yeah. Cause it's just like, cause he has, uh, he has like a love of the game. Like he, he's like, he's like, you know, I'm rich as hell. I can get on the jet and I can go anywhere else. If my kids are gone, I'm going to the casino. Yeah, he's just like, that's what I, he's like, that's what I do. It's what I do for fun.

• 41:53Matt McCusker?

  Once you're that rich, you have to play with big sums to excite yourself.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  He plays for millions. Like I think he, he said his dream is to play $1 million per hand on box. A million dollars a hand. He said, I think the highest he's gotten is like 300,000. To be fair, one of the reasons they probably won't let him, and that's one of the reasons I like Baccarat, is Baccarat is an actual 50/50 game.

• 42:11Matt McCusker?

  That's what I thought, I thought it was like there.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  So the house edge is like .05%. So you actually have pretty, I mean, you have like good odds, but like better than fucking Blackjack.

• 42:18Matt McCusker?

  For sure, yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Any of these, especially crap. Craps is a shit show. It's the most fun game in the casino, but every single one of the games, like I said, is minus EV. You're almost certainly gonna lose money, like whenever you play.

• 42:27Matt McCusker?

  Damn.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Especially in the long enough timeline. So if you do win, like you just get out of there.

• 42:31Matt McCusker?

  Get out, yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  If you're up, like if you have 100 and you win 200, get, get the fuck out.

• 42:36Matt McCusker?

  Balls out, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Immediately.

• 42:38Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Same with roulette. Do not play triple zero roulette. That is the biggest scam in the entire casino.

• 42:44Matt McCusker?

  What's triple zero?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  So on roulette, you know, they, if you could just bet black or red, the way that the house has its edge is in the old days, they had a green zero.

• 42:53Matt McCusker?

  Uh huh.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  So after a while, the casino execs were like, what if we had two zeros? We're like, maybe these idiots in Vegas, and you know, people are drunk and they're like, oh, there's only two zeros.

• 43:03Matt McCusker?

  I don't even think about the zeros.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  But bro, the math goes from like 49% or whatever to like, the house edge goes from like 1% or 2% to like 7%. And then after a while, they couldn't add three zeros, so they added like whatever the casino, no, they added a third one. So they go zero, then double zero, and then they have like the MGM logo on the wheel. So now the edge is like 11%.

• 43:26Matt McCusker?

  I thought you were saying they added 1-0, 1-0, and then a third, but it was a double zero.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  No, no. So there's a zero, then there's a double zero, and then there'll be so like MGM or Caesars or

• 43:35Matt McCusker?

  Just a blank space.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  You're just pissing your money away. Like people, you know, you know, there's the meme, it's like if you win, you're like, put it all in black or whatever. Like, well, check the zeros, because if there's triple zero, you're fucked, alright? Like, you have not good odds.

• 43:48Matt McCusker?

  Dude, that's, you know what I've done though with poker, not poker, um, the last couple of times I've been in a casino environment for like standup or something, a lot of times they give you chips.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Really?

• 43:57Matt McCusker?

  Something I've had fun, yeah, they'll be like, they'll give you like a couple of

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Just let me know the dates, I'll come with it.

• 44:01Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. They'll give you like, they'll give you like a hundred bucks, they'll give you like a hundred dollars.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Oh man.

• 44:05Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, you can break that down.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  We could turn that, yeah. We could turn it into 150. Yeah, yeah. We'll turn it into 150.

• 44:10Matt McCusker?

  Dude, what I started doing is when they give me chips, I put it on, I go to roulette or Blackjack, I put it all on one hand, and if it wins, I give it to the dealer. So here you go.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 44:18Matt McCusker?

  It's kind of, it's kind of a fun thing. And if I lose, I go, hey man, you know, whatever. It feels good.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  That does, yeah. I mean, they make, dude, you know the people they have to deal with. Like, what a shitty job. Like, I'm sure they make a lot of money, some, at least some of them, but probably the good ones, but, oh god, I can't imagine. You're dealing with the absolute, like, dregs of humanity.

• 44:34Matt McCusker?

  Especially like, at, you know, at their worst, like, fucking up and like, being like, oh, it's ruined.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Too, when people get mad at the dealers and they're like, "It's your fault, like, you're not gonna be able to miss." I'm just like, dude, fuck you. But then you also don't really wanna do anything, 'cause you're like, "This guy's kinda crazy."

• 44:48Speaker 02

  So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be a whole white knight. Like, you put your hands on, maybe, but like, you know, up until that, you're like, I'm just like, "Can we get security over here?"

• 44:54Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, dude, it's, it's a, I've never got bit by the gambling bug, man. I, I-

• 44:59Speaker 02

  That's good, that's a good thing.

• 45:00Matt McCusker?

  I tried to be a bookie for a while.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 45:01Matt McCusker?

  I tried, and it was just like-

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, but how, where were you getting your lines from?

• 45:05Matt McCusker?

  Mm, oh, I, it was like, my friend knew another, it was like a sub-bookie thing, where I was like, sending them, kind of just bets, basically. But it was my job to, like, collect them all.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Really?

• 45:15Matt McCusker?

  It was just my friends, it was just my friends, and then like-

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but what about when they don't pay?

• 45:18Matt McCusker?

  So here's what happened. They were like, "I don't watch sports like that," so I didn't know what the fuck was going on, so they were just, if they lost, they would call my, and they, I like, they would just leave me voicemails all weekend, being like, "Put another one, put it," and they just kept doubling down, doubling down, doubling down. And then eventually, like, some of my friends owed me money, and I just got to the point where I was like, "I'm not taking your money for this." And I just like, told the guy, I was like, "I'm, I'm not doing this anymore." I just felt bad. Like, if you like, sell something to somebody-

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:40Matt McCusker?

  That's like, yes, you gave me that, but to be like, "Yo, the Bears lost, you owe me $250," which is, I was like-

• 45:45Speaker 02

  And you actually have to collect it, too.

• 45:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and I was like, "I don't wanna do it." Yeah, exactly. That's the big thing, man.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  I don't know, yeah, I mean, east coast, sports gambling culture has always been there. I don't know, I mean, I grew up here, I don't remember thinking, or hearing like, other parents, I guess I grew up in a Bible Belt area, so I'm, they wouldn't be doing it. But I don't remember a lot of money-changing hands on college football, but now, these days, college football is actually even more worthy action.

• 46:08Matt McCusker?

  I, I could see that, yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Because apparently, it's like, there's the mismatches, or whatever, there's like, underdogs, and, you know, for somebody who hates gambling, I know way too much about gambling.

• 46:15Matt McCusker?

  I had a, it's a love-hate relationship. That and weed too.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 46:19Matt McCusker?

  You don't know a lot about weed. You don't know a lot about weed though.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  I don't know a lot about the experience of weed, but I've read it.

• 46:24Matt McCusker?

  Have you ever smoked weed?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Um, I think I smoked weed when I was very drunk when I was in college once.

• 46:29Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  And that's pretty much it.

• 46:30Matt McCusker?

  That makes sense. That's fair.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:31Matt McCusker?

  What'd you blaze?

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know. I don't know.

• 46:33Matt McCusker?

  You don't even know?

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Dude, you're at a party.

• 46:35Matt McCusker?

  Blue Dream.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Somebody passes you, whatever. It probably was fake. It was probably like not even marijuana. It was like somebody's grass that he had bought off of somebody else and got ripped off.

• 46:43Matt McCusker?

  Well dude, the K2 is big in prison. That's like the stuff you're talking about.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  I know.

• 46:47Matt McCusker?

  And that bucks. I have friends that are like-

• 46:48Speaker 02

  People lose their minds. Is that right?

• 46:50Matt McCusker?

  Yes. I have, I think these guys, you know, they'll do anything, like speedballs and shit. And I have friends that are like, bro, the K2 is fucked up.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Really?

• 46:57Matt McCusker?

  They're, you're in jail. You're in like the county jail. You just blaze K2 and have like an absolutely satanic experience. He's like, dude, it's for real. Like terrifying.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  I think I saw some videos about that. Um, for some reason, my YouTube feed has been pushing me a lot of prison content.

• 47:11Matt McCusker?

  It's a good, it's a good-

• 47:12Speaker 02

  And you can go down a serious rabbit hole of prison, prison tube. Shout out to Johnny Mitchell, by the way, The Connect. You should have him on your show, actually.

• 47:19Matt McCusker?

  What'd he do?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  He's a comedian. He's like six, seven, but he does this show called The Connect where he interviews, he, when he went to jail for, as a weed dealer. And, um, he interviews like other people who were drug dealers and then also talks about their prison experience. Uh, so I actually did a show. He's an interesting, he actually likes politics. That's why, uh, we talked a little bit, but some of his content is really good.

• 47:40Matt McCusker?

  Dude, it's the best.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  He interviews like, you know, like high level drug kingpins.

• 47:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  And he'll be like, tell me about the story, but then also like, what was it like to be in federal prison or whatever?

• 47:49Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Uh, what a nightmare.

• 47:51Matt McCusker?

  That's dude, I, I just finished a book about an LSD dealer who got caught in the early nineties. So he got sentenced for like 20 years.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 47:58Matt McCusker?

  Where he never even got caught with acid. They, it was just all, he was doing Western.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  It was conspiracy. Yeah.

• 48:02Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, exactly. Got a conspiracy charge, 20 years. And it was during, he was in jail during the race riot, like the crack laws.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 48:08Matt McCusker?

  And he had a altercation with a lieutenant, uh, like one of the guards. And, uh, he was a white guy. And when the crack riots happened, it was more, it was just black inmates having riots or doing riots. And the lieutenant was like, he was, he incited the riot. Send him to fucking Marion, which is like a super max. And he had to do like, I think like- Three years in Marion. Where he ended up only doing five years out of the 20 years.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Right, well, I think everyone likes prison content because it's like, what would I do?

• 48:34Matt McCusker?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  I've thought about that too. I'm like, well, I'm not white, not black, not Hispanic.

• 48:39Matt McCusker?

  You're another, you'd be another, you're another, that's what it's called.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  But how many are others are there?

• 48:43Matt McCusker?

  Not a lot, bro.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  The other Indians in prison are gonna be like doctors for Medicare fraud, you know, they're like, hello, doc.

• 48:50Matt McCusker?

  I think it's called others. I think you're, it's like, Inuit, Indian.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Inuit?

• 48:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Actually, they're probably pretty good, right? They can fight.

• 48:58Matt McCusker?

  Exactly, pretty jacked, but your numbers, your numbers are not great.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  No, it's not good.

• 49:02Matt McCusker?

  So, yeah, I think it's like, dude, I got so deep into prison shit, but it's like, yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  So then my, what would your strategy be? My strategy would be getting my parents to put money on my books, right? And then we pay the others for protection.

• 49:13Matt McCusker?

  That's the big thing you can do. My plan was always to pay the Muslim Brotherhood.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 49:17Matt McCusker?

  So you can pay the Muslim Brotherhood to protect, but then it's like, yeah, it is like racial.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  But I could fake it and I could just grow my beard and say that I was a Muslim, right?

• 49:24Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and you can get a, you can get the Muslim diet too.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 49:27Matt McCusker?

  You got to answer a few questions.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  The halal food is better?

• 49:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, people do the kosher diet, that's a big thing.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Really?

• 49:32Matt McCusker?

  If you can prove like you're Jewish and you're allowed to switch your religion every like six months or so to get a different diet. I swear to God.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  I read that Ramsey Youssef, who was the, he was the World Trade Center bomber, the 93 bomber. He, he apparently stayed in his cell for like 10 years straight. Whenever, uh, cause he refused to do a strip search, cause he said it violated his religion. But then apparently he was like, okay, I'm now converted to Christianity. Uh, but apparently the warden and all of them don't believe him. So it's set up for, I don't really know what's going on, but I think he has started to like, he's finally left his cell after 13 years.

• 50:04Matt McCusker?

  He's a Christian now?

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Uh, well, he claims he's Christian.

• 50:06Matt McCusker?

  Are they gonna go about his butthole or like, he's like, all right, I'm ready.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Well, I think you have to do that thing where you, with the squat and cough or whatever. He refused to do it. He was like, I won't do it. So he literally, and man, he did not leave his, his cell in supermax in ADX Florence or whatever.

• 50:20Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 50:20Speaker 02

  For like 13 years, like it was totally crazy.

• 50:23Matt McCusker?

  And after 13 years, he's like, I'm being kind of shut up.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  I mean, it's understandable. It's like, you spent 13 years, you literally haven't, you have never laughed and you're like, okay.

• 50:30Matt McCusker?

  That's so impressive. I would make 13 minutes and I'd be like, you know what, I'm just gonna show this guy my ass, I won't get it over with.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  You know, they say they sleep a lot. That was the interesting thing.

• 50:38Matt McCusker?

  Yep, that's a big one.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  You can train yourself to sleep 12 hours a day, but it's like, what do you do all day? You know, even when you're awake, like that just sounds terrible.

• 50:44Matt McCusker?

  You work out, sleep a lot and.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  In your cell?

• 50:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, just right, yeah. And it's, the guy in the book I read about the LSD dealer, Gil Blazer. He was saying like, he got schooled on like masturbation techniques.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 50:56Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, like just nothing, nothing hands on, you know, he said it never was a punk, that was his term.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  A punk.

• 51:00Matt McCusker?

  But he was like going into it how like you like use a sock and you flip it inside out so you're hitting like more of the soft area. And then at the very end, he said you'd apply force to the under part of your head. He's like, and it's so funny him writing, it's like my orgasms were intense and powerful and it's like, damn.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's always, did you watch the show Escape at Dannemora? Uh, it's in, it's on Netflix. It's really good. It was created by Ben, uh, Ben Stiller. And it's, uh, Javi, oh, was it? No, Benicio. It's Benicio and then the guy from There Will Be Blood, the guy who's the twins. Anyway.

• 51:31Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Paul Dano, that's his name, Paul Dano. And so those two are inmates who like basically sweet talk this woman, this like obese prison worker. And then they both start a relationship with her and they get her to smuggle in tools and then they literally tunnel out of the prison. It's a real life story. It happened in 2015. So I watched the show. It was fantastic, really good acting. And then I went the red, the real story. Dude, it was wild. Like it's, it's this high, they're both in there for murder. Like one guy literally murdered a police officer. The other guy like butchered and kidnapped an old man for money. These are like no shit killers.

• 52:06Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Locked up in this high security prison in, uh, I think it was in North New York, like, you know, upstate New York.

• 52:13Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, up there.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was in the Adirondacks.

• 52:14Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  And, uh, yeah, so they were up there and they were able to get her to smuggle in like hacksaw blades. They cut their way out of their cells, were able to make their way like through the pipes and everything. Use a sledgehammer, hammer through multiple walls and then cut a hole in a drain pipe or whatever. Crawl through the pipe, come up out on the other side, crawl through a manhole. And they were on the run for like 23 days. One guy almost made it to Canada. They shot him like 10 miles from the Canadian border. Yeah, one guy was killed, the other guy, sorry, spoiler alert.

• 52:44Matt McCusker?

  What year was this?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  2015. It was like, yeah, dude, it was like.

• 52:46Matt McCusker?

  They shot him at the, oh, I guess, yeah, if he's that high profile.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Well, they were, a trooper was like, hey, who are you? And he just like took off running. And, uh, the other guy apparently was like a drunk and they would find, they would find like hunting cabins and he would just be like, all right, just grabbing whiskey.

• 53:01Matt McCusker?

  He was like a bear. He was like a bear.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, literally, he was like a bear.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  That's a good way of putting it.

• 53:08Matt McCusker?

  He's like, we need to peel, he was just walking around.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that the other guy left him, he was like, fuck this dude, he's like turned into a drunk. He's never gonna make it. And then.

• 53:15Matt McCusker?

  He's not gonna make anything of himself.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  And so then he got, he got killed and the other guy actually almost made it to Canada.

• 53:20Matt McCusker?

  Damn.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, he almost, I, I, the weird part of the show is, uh, it's structured really well. The first like six episodes, you're really rooting for the prisoners. And then before you get to the, uh, last episode, they do a flashback that shows what they did. And you're like, wait, fuck these guys, like, this is terrible. Cause you don't know what they're in there for, you know, they're in prison. But then they're like, oh, he literally murdered a cop. And then the other guy like kidnapped this man and tried to extort money from him and fucking like butchered him and cut him up into little pieces. You're like, dude, you're.

• 53:52Matt McCusker?

  His parlays didn't work, did he?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're correct. I'm like, we gotta get this guy out of here. Like, this is not good.

• 53:58Matt McCusker?

  Yo, guys, welcome to the advertisement portion of the podcast. I'm on my motherfucking Assassin's Creed shit right now. You guys can't even see me. I was doing this earlier to ensure audio quality because I had fucked up the audio of the ads because I was recording through my laptop like a dumbass. Now I kinda like the look now, they got my phone out. Um, all right, guys, here, big thing. And I try to add some tranquil music to the ads because it's, it's kind of jarring. You're just listening to a podcast, you give your brain over to the podcast and out of nowhere, it's like, hey, listen up, we got, it's like, fuck, man. Fuck, how about a heads up? So what we're doing, we're gonna add a little gentle music and kinda get in the zone. You can chill, you can kinda use this time to kinda drift off, whatever you wanna do.

• 54:40Matt McCusker?

  But we are gonna do the advertisements and I also, I gotta say, here's my number one advertisement right now. I fucked up and I got, I'm doing shows, well, hear me out here. I failed to promote my shows in the Irvine Improv, SoCal. Um, I'm so fucking SoCal, I forgot to do the ads or make a flyer for the Irvine show. Oops, my bad, it's next weekend. Thanksgiving weekend, Friday, November 29th, Saturday, November 30th, two days, four shows. Come out to motherfucking Irvine Improv. Um, and I'll be honest, I'm not just saying, I'm not just saying this because I'm doing a show. I love Irvine. Irvine was the first place I went to in California. And I was telling someone recently, I'm like, I fucking love Irvine. And they lived in LA and like,

• 55:22Matt McCusker?

  you love, are you like, are you kidding? Are you, are you trying to be funny? I'm like, no, why? And apparently everyone from LA just snubs Irvine, like, I would never, fuck you guys, dude. Irvine rules, LA's fucking bullshit. Irvine, we're talking Laguna Beach, we're talking motherfucking Newport Beach, conservative ass stronghold down there in SoCal, dude. Shit. Um, come out. I love Irvine. Uh, it's literally the first place I went to in California. I, I'm very excited to go there. I'm gonna bring my whole motherfucking family. We're all gonna do Thanksgiving out there. It's gonna be sick. So Irvine Improv, Friday, November 29th, Saturday, November 30th. Let's go. Let's show these LA fucking pussies, dude, who's really fucking SoCal. They're not fucking SoCal, they're North Irvine.

• 56:05Matt McCusker?

  This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Take a moment to say thank you to someone in your life, including your therapist, if that's someone you'd like to shout out. If you have multiple reads this month, perhaps highlight someone different each time. Well, let's see. Last week I highlighted my mommy. I'm thankful for my mommy. Um, I was going to do my daddy this week. I'm very thankful for my daddy, but you know what? Know who I'm gonna, know who I'm gonna thank this week? Our almighty creator, guys. How awesome is God? Come on now. How awesome is the fact that you can call it the big bang, whatever you wanna call it? The universe was created out of an infal- infinitesimal, infinitesimal, however you say that. A teeny tiny, incomprehensibly small void, nothingness.

• 56:50Matt McCusker?

  And the universe has exploded out of nothingness, and that nothingness is the substratum of all that exists today. And it still exists in the universe. That's basically God. How awesome's that? Thank you so much for that. I'm so grateful. Guys, this month is all about gratitude and along with the person, person, the cosmic deity I just shouted out, there's another person we don't get to thank enough, ourselves. It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we are trying our best to make sense of everything. And in this crazy world, that isn't easy. Here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life, including yourself. And that this is the time for a personal endorsement. That's what they're asking for. Um, yeah, I think, you know, therapy is, is good. You gotta, you gotta do something, man.

• 57:34Matt McCusker?

  You gotta get outside of your, just your ego. That's, that's the thing that's keeping you in. You know, your egoic struggles of just, I want more. I'm not enough. Blah, blah, fucking blah. And therapy is one conduit to escape yourself and to try to like forge a better life. Or you can just become one with your creator. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/MSSP today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H E L P, dot com slash M S S P.

• 58:20Matt McCusker?

  PrizePix is the best place to get real money sports action. That's right. With over 10 million members and billions of dollars in awarded winnings, PrizePix has made daily fantasy sports accessible to all. You just pick more or less on at least two or more players for a shot to win up to 100 times your cash. Run your game all season long on PrizePix. Guys, PrizePix is the only real money daily fantasy platform with an injury insurance policy. So your lineup stays in play even if one of your players gets injured. If your player leaves in the first half for whatever reason and doesn't return, PrizePix keeps your lineup live. Sign up today to get $50 instantly when you play $5.

• 59:05Matt McCusker?

  You don't even need to win to receive the $50 bonus. What? It's guaranteed. Think Justin Jefferson will get more than 83.5 yards next week? It's a pretty good guess. Lamar Jackson will pass more than 1.5 TDs? Oh, man, cook up hot takes with your friends and win real money this football season when you and your crew run your game on PrizePix. What's better, what's better than you and your crew, dude, just cooking up hot takes and running your game on PrizePix? Download the PrizePix app today and use code DRENCHED to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code DRENCHED. The PrizePix app to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game.

• 59:47Matt McCusker?

  Lucy is made for your nicotine routine and delivered straight to your door. They don't deliver it to your window or just kick it onto your lawn. Guess where they bring it? To your door. It's amazing. Guys, it's 100% pure nicotine and always tobacco free. Lucy isn't like every other nicotine pouch company that's owned by big tobacco. They're like the mom and pop shop of pouches. Have you ever heard about Breakers? They are the nicotine pouches with an extra surprise. Each pouch holds a capsule that can be broken open to release extra flavor and hydration. In case you're thirsty, break a pouch. If you know your pouches, you know that the nicotine doesn't hit in immediately and neither does the flavor. The geniuses at Lucy came up with a brilliant way to fix both those problems.

• 1:00:28Matt McCusker?

  They put a mini liquid capsule inside each Breakers pouch. And I haven't done these, I haven't tried the Breakers pouch, but I'll be honest, Josh Cabazo, one of our producers, he's honestly, Josh is one of my favorite people. He is the absolute fucking man, by the way. Josh was, he tried a, um, a Breaker pouch on this very episode, like while he was recording it and, uh, Sager gave him one. He had one as well. And Josh was like raving about it. I, I forgot all about it. He's like, dude, that shit was fucking awesome. By the way, he liked it, so I can't give you a personal endorsement. I haven't tried it, but Josh has tried it and I trust his word and he was, he loved the liquid surprise. Let me tell you guys, he said it perked him right up. Guys, let's level up your nicotine routine with Lucy.

• 1:01:13Matt McCusker?

  Go to lucy.co/drenched and use promo code DRENCH to get 20% off your first order. Lucy has a 30 day refund policy if you change your mind. Again, that's lucy.co and use code DRENCH to get 20% off. And here comes the fine print. The Lucy products are only for adults of legal age. And every order is age verified. Warning: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Yes. You know what we all need to get more of? Off our ass. With bold flavors and a refreshing citrus kick, Mountain Dew will get you off your ass and have you feeling like you're on an actual mountain. A mountain where the weather is always perfect,

• 1:01:57Matt McCusker?

  your friends are ready to hang, and a day of epic proportion awaits. They gotta fire the guy who wrote that fucking piece of shit paragraph. Guys, but guess what doesn't suck? Look at, look how fucking blue that is. What is this, voltage? Look at this. Look at that shit, dude. You can put this in a Windex bottle and go, it's like, no, I'm just drinking voltage, everybody. Don't you squirt it right in your mouth. Look at this motherfucker's crazy. And you go, maybe I fucking am. Let's get off our ass together, brother, and hang on a perfect mountain. A day where epic proportion awaits. That's what I like. That's the kind of fun times I like to have with my friends, guys. When we all drink our voltage and our Baja Blast. You know, you know what game we play?

• 1:02:41Matt McCusker?

  You know what fun and competitive social activity we engage in that I'd like to talk to you guys about? Let me tell you guys, man, look, when we drink regular Mountain Dew, I told you already, we wrestle. When we drink the fucking blue ass, look how fucking blue this shit is. When we drink this, oh my God, dude, we play a secret game. Me and my friends, we play a secret game in which, how do I say? We all take our turn doing something fun. And the last person to, hmm, dare I say, arrive at the party has to chug the voltage

• 1:03:18Matt McCusker?

  full of... You know what the fuck I'm saying? You guys don't even know what's going on there. Voltage Mountain Dew. What the hell was I, sorry, guys, I blacked out. I don't even know what the hell I was talking about. Guys, the mountain is calling. You should answer. Grab your friends, grab an ice cold Mountain Dew wherever refreshing beverages are sold and do the doo.

• 1:03:41Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, the prison culture shit is like fascinating, man.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:44Matt McCusker?

  I've won, I like almost, I'm glad I've never went, but I kind of was like, damn, I kind of wish like I-

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  How much weight were you moving then, when you were selling marijuana?

• 1:03:52Matt McCusker?

  Decent amount, like-

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Like, pounds?

• 1:03:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:03:56Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  So you could have gone, you actually could have gone-

• 1:03:58Matt McCusker?

  I could have went to jail. In Philly, it was like, you could have five pounds and you wouldn't real, you could like get locked up, but you wouldn't do like a sentence at a certain point, but- That's what I've heard, but like before though, like in the, see like the 2000s, it started getting more lax, more lax, more lax. By the end of it, nobody was going to jail for weed. They, even like the cops would find a half pound of weed on you and just be like, Jesus Christ, and just take it and make the fuck out of here.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  How does it all work though? Like in terms, not the cost, so were you selling to other dealers? Cause you had enough-

• 1:04:24Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, eventually, it was like I would do both. You would like, you would get like, like, the way it would work is you'd have to like, I remember I like saved all my money so hard and I eventually saved up $1,600 and I bought a half pound. And then I got to like actually make money off of it. And then eventually I started, you'd get affronted to you, you like find somebody that would affront me like 30 pounds of weed.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is the interesting thing I read from Johnny's podcast, is like, there's a lot of consignment in the, in the drug business.

• 1:04:48Matt McCusker?

  And then double consignment. I would get something fronted and double consign it to other people and then you have to kind of like-

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  What if he doesn't pay you? And then you gotta pay the guy.

• 1:04:54Matt McCusker?

  You tell him, hey man, if I'm falling on tough times. That's the, that's the thing. It's like, I, you're never supposed to meet that person, like the top level person because they want to keep like an air of like, cause they're gonna tell the guy, like, you tell him, I'm like, I'm fucking murderer, but I met the guy. He was, you know, wasn't-

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Were you ever physically threatened? Did you ever see weapons?

• 1:05:11Matt McCusker?

  I got robbed at gunpoint, yeah. Oh yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  What was that like? What happened?

• 1:05:14Matt McCusker?

  It was surreal. It was like, so I got, I got, I got threatened with a club one time. That was embarrassing. I gave into the club just outside. This guy was like, I want to fucking hit you with this. And I was like, alright.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Like what kind of club? Like a handmade club?

• 1:05:25Matt McCusker?

  Like a wooden, just a fucking like a 1920s police officer baton, dude. He was like, but I was in West Philly, like trying to buy Percocets.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  You did the right thing.

• 1:05:33Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and there was like seven guys around me and I was like, seriously guys, where are my Percocets? And they were like, dude, we'll fucking bash your brains in. And I was like, alright, you guys can keep the $200. You win. You win this round. Um, but yeah, it was that. And then I had a guy one time, he got robbed and blamed it on me. I, I think he just took my money, but he came out like we were in an apartment. He was like, something's got to eat. Like cocked a gun and walked towards me and I was like, oh shit. That time it was just like, everything just goes super slow. I remember it was being like very slow, terrified too. People were like, dude, if someone pulled a gun on me, I'd fight. It's like, I was frozen, totally frozen.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, spider fight. Yeah.

• 1:06:06Matt McCusker?

  Exactly. Second time I-

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  You got robbed twice.

• 1:06:09Matt McCusker?

  Oh, well, that time I got like, I had already, I like paid this guy money to go get something and bring it to me. And he's like, I got robbed after you gave me the money. And I was like, bro, it's fine. I like, I was like, it's all good, man. And he's like, nah, man, this is fucked up. And he just fucking like cocked a gun, like walked. He was like, did you do it? And I was like, how the fuck did I, what are you talking about?

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Oh, like you would have set him up.

• 1:06:28Matt McCusker?

  I was like, why would I do that?

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:06:30Matt McCusker?

  Whatever. But that was the whole thing. And then the, uh, the second time I was in an apartment and it was like someone had owed me a bunch of money and I was bringing them more stuff. So I had like the money they owed me and like about four pounds of weed. And there, he was gonna give it to some other guy. And then this just dude comes up in a ski mask with the kid who was like supposedly his customer and the kid set it all up. Uh, but that one I was like, I remember everything slowed down again, but I was able to read their faces. And the kid I knew was very much afraid. And the other kid, I was like, he's pretending to be afraid. And then once the, the guy with the ski mask left with all the money and stuff, I was like, you did, you did that.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Did you beat him up?

• 1:07:04Matt McCusker?

  I started choking him.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:07:05Matt McCusker?

  Pretty badly. And then like a kid I was, I knew was like, stop. Cause I was like a blind rage. I was, you're almost, you have like a gun in your face. You're terrified.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  That's horrifying.

• 1:07:13Matt McCusker?

  And I was just fucking just holding this kid's neck. Like, I know you fucking did that. And the kid's like, stop. And like, thank God. I was like, oh, okay.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Matt McCusker?

  You know, but I don't, I don't think, I wasn't like violent like that though. I was never, that was the only time. It was all, it was like almost all my money.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  That's crazy, man.

• 1:07:26Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it was pretty fucked up.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  How did you get out of this? What, what got you out of it?

• 1:07:29Matt McCusker?

  This podcast, this podcast, I wasn't on Percocets. I was selling them. I never-

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  Oh, you were selling Percocets?

• 1:07:33Matt McCusker?

  I'm not a vice, I was never really a vice ridden man. Porn, obviously, has been my downfall.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  You're a true, uh, direct, you're a true leech on society.

• 1:07:39Matt McCusker?

  I was, absolutely. Yeah, I had no, I was-

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  You honestly should have gone to prison. I'm not gonna lie. I think you owe three years of your life to the state.

• 1:07:46Matt McCusker?

  I think I should, actually. But now, now I do service through high paid podcast.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. You're doing a service.

• 1:07:53Matt McCusker?

  But I do, I honestly, it's not like a sexy tale because yeah, usually you have the redemptive arc of like, I got caught. But I was always, I was pretty principled. Like I remember like, I was like, pills are evil. I didn't know anything about them. I'm like, oh, these are very addictive. Coke. I was like, this stuff's no good either. But weed, there was a thing where it was like, this is good for people. Cause I was smoking so much of it. I was like, weed is good for people. I was like, people need weed. It's good for you. I thought it was good for me, you know, I was obviously killing it in life. Fighting people for Percocets.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  People need me more like you. If you smoke weed, you can also end up in West Philadelphia with a club in your face.

• 1:08:28Matt McCusker?

  That was for pills. That was for pills.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:08:30Matt McCusker?

  That was for pills.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  You were, you were high at the time.

• 1:08:31Matt McCusker?

  Weed was chill.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  You were high.

• 1:08:32Matt McCusker?

  I was high forever.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:08:34Matt McCusker?

  I remember I tried to start a policy with every customer, I would smoke a blunt with them and I ended up smoking like nine blunts. And it was just completely.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  How do you even function?

• 1:08:41Matt McCusker?

  I didn't. I wasn't functioning.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  So do you still smoke a lot? You said no.

• 1:08:44Matt McCusker?

  No. Now it's like very, I honestly try to, um. There was a big impulsive element of it, but now I've been trying to do it where I've tried to this for years where like, I almost like incorporated into a meditation practice. But then you get into it, you're like, well, why do I even need that if I meditate? You know, so that was kind of like, well, so now it's like. Special occasions.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  How much better did your sleep get?

• 1:09:03Matt McCusker?

  So much better. That's the thing with weed. You don't, you can even say like, well, I'm sleeping better, but your REM sleep is trash.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Yes, thank you.

• 1:09:09Matt McCusker?

  It's true.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  That's what I was about to bring up. I was like.

• 1:09:11Matt McCusker?

  It's totally true.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  There's a lot of people, there's a big psy op by the weed guys who are like, oh, you smoke a bowl right before bed. And it's like, actually you're nuking your REMs. It's like people, you know, when you get on an airplane and people are like, just gonna have a glass of wine, just to go to bed. I'm like, actually you're getting way shittier sleep. Yeah. It's like, you're actually not sleeping at all.

• 1:09:27Matt McCusker?

  Dude, nobody wants to hear this.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Semi-conscious, but.

• 1:09:29Matt McCusker?

  Nobody wants to hear this. I tell people all the time. It's like, and the weed does fuck up your REM sleep.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. It's empirical. It's true.

• 1:09:35Matt McCusker?

  You don't dream. You don't dream. And everyone knows when I stopped smoking weed, I have crazy dreams. Like that's because your REM rebounding.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:09:40Matt McCusker?

  Same as alcohol. Oh dude, it's, yeah, it's like I, I was completely like, um. When I was younger, also I was making a living off it. I'm like, weed. Is awesome. This stuff rules. Everybody needs this stuff. Everyone needs to be selling this stuff under me.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

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• 1:10:25Speaker 04

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• 1:10:39Matt McCusker?

  That's what happens with heroin, though. Heroin, if you're using heroin, you try to convince people to do heroin because you want to start selling it to them. Then you don't have to pay. Really, it's very, that's kind of, yes, it's very, very evil. And you're like, you're like, want to inject them too. Yeah, I remember someone explained that to me and I was like, someone offered me to sell heroin. I said, no. I said, no, thank you, sir. Heroin's evil. The pills are evil, but no one knew what the fuck they were.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Matt McCusker?

  I came out of it. I got a, uh...

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Is Percocet the same as Oxy...

• 1:11:05Matt McCusker?

  Oxycodone, yes. Percocet is oxycodone mixed with acetylcyanol, basically.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:11:10Matt McCusker?

  So oxycodone and Oxycontin and Percocet are the same thing that are...

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  Is it the same strength? Is that?

• 1:11:14Matt McCusker?

  No.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  What was the whole, like, pill thing in the 2000s then? That was Oxycontin, right? Or Oxycontin?

• 1:11:19Matt McCusker?

  It was all of them. It was Percocets, um, there's a bunch of them. It's, uh... Vicodin was, uh, hydro something.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  Hydrocodone, that's right.

• 1:11:30Matt McCusker?

  That's Vicodin. Vicodins were less desirable. If you had Vicodins, people were like, oh, fine. But Percocets, people wanted them. And then the oxies came out, which was just like 5mg Percocet, 10mg, you know, whatever it was. Oxy would have been like 40.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like 80, right? I read a, I read a book about it and I remember, I watched some documentary about the Sackler family. That shit is evil, man.

• 1:11:50Matt McCusker?

  Dude, it was.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  In terms of the cash programs and those pill mills and they had total knowledge. That's really what led to the heroin spike, all the black tar heroin.

• 1:11:58Matt McCusker?

  Big time dude.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  And it wasn't.

• 1:11:59Matt McCusker?

  People had no idea what they were taking. It wasn't just the Sacklers, it was every doctor in the country. Dude, I got like, I would give a sore throat from my college campus and they do on Percocets and I'm like, no.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Matt McCusker?

  But I, when I was like nineteen or eighteen and I got my wisdom teeth out and my friend was like, bro, I will pay you. He's like, you'll get, um, you get pills, I'll buy them off you. And I'm like, I'll give you two hundred dollars. I'm like, what? I was like, for sure.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:22Matt McCusker?

  I hate medicine. You can have my medicine. And dude, and it was like, I remember coming out in like of my wisdom teeth in a haze, but remembering like, I asked them, I was like, what can I, like, what am I gonna get? And they were like, we're just gonna give you like, uh, ibuprofen. I was like, um, I'm a real baby with pain. Is there anything else I can have? They're like, yeah, we'll give you like, I think it was like Percocets or Hydrocodone. And they just gave me a full vial and that's, that was the whole thing that set the whole thing off is I made two hundred dollars off of it. And then once I went to college, I was like, I gotta find more of those things. And my friend was like, yo, these things are awesome. So I didn't do them.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:12:55Matt McCusker?

  And then I watched, dude, I watched firsthand a whole, there was like this apartment complex. Cause at a certain time I was getting, I ended up finding like, I'll get like twenty-five hundred, uh, Vicodin at a time. And I remember my friend would bring them into this like apartment complex and they all get distributed throughout there. And I did, I watched this whole like little ecosystem of people like degenerate.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Matt McCusker?

  That's when I was like, oh, and I'm like nineteen, twenty at the time. And I was like, this is fucking bad.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  No, it's bad. Uh, yeah, the pills, man, that, that is.

• 1:13:20Matt McCusker?

  You should go to jail, dude. I'm such a piece of shit.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  Uh, you just gotta give back to society, man.

• 1:13:24Matt McCusker?

  I do, I do though. I do. I'm, I'm telling you, that's my, I'm all service now. I'm all service.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:13:29Matt McCusker?

  I'm wildly overpaid, but I'm a wildly overpaid servant. That's all, dude, for real though. The thing is, is like, and I, this is why I like, um, I've been researching the world religions a lot. There's a really good book called The Religions, The World's Religions by Huston Smith. And he goes into like the connective tissue between like Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, you know, everything else, Islam and, um,

• 1:13:52Matt McCusker?

  I do like, growing up in a Christian like environment, it was, they don't sell it very well to young people. It's like, this sucks. I'm not, it's like, it's just a bunch of shit you gotta take on face value. I started researching Hinduism when I was like, it's a classic stoner move, just be like so high and be like, oh dude.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  There's nothing more annoying than white guys who are into Hinduism.

• 1:14:10Matt McCusker?

  I know.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Than George Harrison wannabes, just like, fuck off. In India, they, they literally laugh at you. They're like, yeah, we'll take your money, bud.

• 1:14:17Matt McCusker?

  I know.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:18Matt McCusker?

  But it is a beautiful religion.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  Yes, it's, it's a good religion.

• 1:14:21Matt McCusker?

  And it was like, for me, that was, it gave me a concept of God from researching it from that angle that I was like, oh, that kind of makes sense.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Good, yeah, that's great.

• 1:14:28Matt McCusker?

  But I like their, their, their relationship with pleasure from what I've read is like, it's not as, and correct me if I'm, it's not as like forbidden. It's like, yeah, if you want pleasure, go get it till you're tired of it, or is it?

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Kind of, um, well, it's hard to say, man, because, you know, even calling Hinduism a religion, obviously it is a religion. But it is intrinsic to the land of India, and I'm really convinced of that. As in, like, the practice of Hinduism, like, you don't go on Sunday, you just have temples everywhere. People stop on their way and off from work, like, at the end of the day for special occasions, for little stuff, like, you'll go and you'll ask a blessing. It's not in the, the Abrahamic faiths require, like, rigid practice, and this is much more like a part of daily life. So, the religion itself doesn't like, say yes or no or whatever about, I don't know, pleasure, hard work, it doesn't like prescribe rules. But the Indian culture definitely also plays like a huge part of it.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  So, I'm not really convinced, that's why I think Buddhism is a religion. I think that actually is a religion, and that's one that can transpose into, you know, Western society or whatever. But Hinduism, like, you really, you really gotta be in India if you wanna be

• 1:15:33Matt McCusker?

  That makes sense.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  A real Hindu, I think.

• 1:15:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Or at least practice it in the way that it's meant to be practiced. You can try, obviously, and everybody can do their own thing, but there's a huge amount of people who are Hindus who are atheists. They don't even believe, like, in God.

• 1:15:45Matt McCusker?

  It's more, you're saying it's more the cultural kind of practice?

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  It's part of the Indian culture, like, it really, like, when you're there, it just makes sense. Like, that's how people practice their lives, like, each village has its own deity, the way that, you know, there's a certain type of blessing, or they call it a puja, which is a ceremony, which is the type of puja that you would do for This milestone in your life or whatever, whereas like Abrahamic fates is like on Sunday or on Friday. We pray, we pray five times a day and we do it at this time and the, you know, the, the, whatever, the chant of the prayer. And with the meat that we eat is like this where, you know, even amongst Hindus, like 40% of Hindus are vegetarian, but 60% are not. So, you know, there's no, there's no yes and no on life or on how to live. Like it's just, it's just, uh, very much, yeah, part of the culture over 8,000, 9,000 years.

• 1:16:28Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that is, uh, it is, it is such a funny stoner move though to be like, dude, I think I'm, I just do mushrooms.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  And yoga, it's like girls who are into yoga, it's like, shut up. They're like, my shivasana, really like, oh.

• 1:16:38Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that is, uh, that is, that is tough. When they start, you start, you know, like four Sanskrit words and you're like, like, suka.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Or the om tattoos, you're just like, spare me, man.

• 1:16:50Matt McCusker?

  I will say, dude, I will say though, if from like, just like a, yeah.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Isn't that a Hindu, isn't that a Hindu deity? It kinda looks like it. What do you got going on over there?

• 1:16:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, this might be a shiva.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  That's Sanskrit, that's Sanskrit down there. I can't read it. Yeah.

• 1:17:03Matt McCusker?

  Oh, this? No, this is actually English.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Oh, oh.

• 1:17:04Matt McCusker?

  Dude, this was a shirt I designed and tried to sell as merch and it's a very low seller.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Chocker.

• 1:17:13Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, dude, I, I do think though, there's something, um, religiously, let's just say in the United States, it's like Christianity is, it's cool. It's getting a resurgence.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  I don't think so. Statistically, no.

• 1:17:25Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I guess maybe that's just the internet memes I'm thinking of.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you're thinking of trad wife.

• 1:17:28Matt McCusker?

  I'm thinking of trad wife internet memes.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  If you take a look at the stats, uh, Christianity is never, I mean, not Christianity, religion, we have never lived in a more secular country.

• 1:17:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Honestly, even coming back here is shocking, like to Texas in the modern, I mean, I literally grew up here. This was a deep Bible belt state. That's what I remember.

• 1:17:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  And to watch it become like cosmopolitan is, is weird, honestly. Even when I go back to College Station, I mean, I don't know, I guess I just don't feel the same, I don't live there anymore. This is kinda different. But it doesn't just feel the way that it did back then. And in general, stats wise, the evangelism, uh, Catholicism, uh, all practicing religions and the rise of people who just call themselves spiritual, it's never been higher.

• 1:18:09Matt McCusker?

  Right.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  And that's really, I mean, the right wing. trad people are the ones who blame that for where we are. But honestly, uh, kind of to make it political. I think that's why Trump is the first like real secular president. Like, everybody knows like Trump is not religious.

• 1:18:24Matt McCusker?

  He loves the Bible, what are you talking about? He loves the Bible.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's like, yeah, he loves it so much that he sells, sells a copy. But, you know, 30% of the people who voted for Trump are literally pro-choice. Like, over 30%. That's crazy, right? If you think about it in terms of the abortion election, uh, and all that. So the mass secularization of America has made being conservative like just so, though the Texas I grew up in, George W. Bush was literally my governor. That type of, you know, conservatism is fucking gone.

• 1:18:48Matt McCusker?

  Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. I, I, I think they're, well, my, to bring me back to my main point, I think the, I do think like, yeah, there's a lot of people who have left organized religion who are going towards kind of spiritualism, but no, everyone has a very, I think now it's like everyone has a very strained relationship. If people are trying to like, practice some form of like God in their life. I, I do feel like researching other religions helps people kind of like conceptualize it. Cause you're like, yeah, I'm not going to do this, but you can read that and like, yeah, that kind of makes sense. If you look at it like a giant conscious universe.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  And then even then, I mean, I, I could defend, there's a lot of-

• 1:19:20Matt McCusker?

  What are, what are your stances on that?

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  What, religion?

• 1:19:22Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, religion, God, God, like believing in God or not.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  I'm not religious at all. Um, I mean, I grew up around here, so I still have a very like side eye view of, uh, a lot of the Bible Belt stuff.

• 1:19:30Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  But I, I think it's good for people. Now that I've been removed from it for quite a long time.

• 1:19:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, there's, you know, it's like the South Park episode about Mormonism. We're like, look, this is some batshit crazy stuff, but the truth is like, they're living a better life than you.

• 1:19:43Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  And so, it's like, maybe, maybe we're the crazy ones, right?

• 1:19:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  You know, they're the ones who believe in planet collab or whatever, but they have nine children, they're really happy, they help each other, the Mormon church has no debt, they, uh, make sure that you get very cheap education at BYU's if you stay in the faith, they take care of you, they take care of each other. I grew up around a lot of Mormons, they're some of the happiest people I know. They have like multiple children, they, uh, settled well, they seem like they're doing like really well in life and, uh, they get to, you know, they, they have a big community aspect where they, you always have just dozens of people who share your values, who are around, who if you're out of town, somebody can come watch your pets, or if you need help with your kids, or- Whatever. So like they're the winners in life, man. Like that's, that's, that's what people need to take away.

• 1:20:25Matt McCusker?

  That's, that's my, yeah, that's my question is like, that's what I'm, what I've been trying to like read about and like think about a lot is like, what is the grounding force for like? People's lives and if it, you know, if it dissipates into like, if, if there is no, that's like what religion has been forever. And now people are like, people. The antidepressants, like all that's, people are now like, you have to like, back up the molecules in your brain because you're sad because your worldview is inherently kind of bleak.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Very, very well said. And also, I mean, like woke ism quote unquote is a religion. And so, or being anti woke is also a religion. Politics is a religion.

• 1:20:56Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Religion will find a way in its life, whether you find religion or not. The thing is about it is what I, you know, would advocate for is that I think especially in big cities and like in elite circles, there's a real sneering at religion, but they don't look at it in the way that I just said, where it's doing quite a lot of good for people who are in the faith in the community. So for me, I'm just like, look, you know, do whatever you want to do. And actually having lived all my entire adult life in mass secular America, we have a lot of problems, right? Like the gathering place of the secular American is the bar. It shouldn't be. It, you know, that's weird actually. Like waiting until you're in your mid 30s to even try to start having children. And then by that time, like, I, I don't know. I just think there's a lot of choices.

• 1:21:38Matt McCusker?

  They should be turning it into Christ's blood. They should be turning it into Christ's blood.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  There's just choices that you make that make it all about you. And one of the things that are really important about religion is like, actually, no, it's not about you. It's about other people. And so by doing that and by choosing the secular elite path, you are literally pursuing something that is just all about you. It's about the pursuit of your own pleasure, about your own money, about all of this. But it will strip away any of the great things in life that will genuinely make you happy. So if you're not religious, then you have to actually consciously seek that out. And I, you know, you prob, I'm gonna tell you about this. You have children now, right? Like it's probably harder to connect and find like groups of other parents. Whereas in the, if you grew up in Texas in the 90s and you went to church, that's dusted, bro.

• 1:22:21Matt McCusker?

  You're done. Yeah, you're done.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Day one, it's so, it's sold. Like someone will be at your house. When your wife gives birth, they will have food waiting in your house and all that. But if you don't have that type of community. That's really hard.

• 1:22:32Matt McCusker?

  You're stuck.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  The number of people, actually, there's a really interesting, like, American Family Studies, uh, study that shows that the number of friends, particularly among men, uh, the number of, like, male friends that people have has an all-time low. I think the record number is actually in the zero to one category of people who consider themselves, like, close friends. And so if you think about it, like, in that community aspect, people are lonelier than ever, they're having difficulty really finding a mate, they're really having problems in terms of fostering close friendships, so they're doing what? Betting parlays on gambling. They just wanna feel something.

• 1:23:06Matt McCusker?

  Stimulate the brain.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  They're stimulating the brain.

• 1:23:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that is sad. My, that's my problem, is like, there needs to be some sort of cohesive organizing force, and most of them are negative. Where it's like, you know, again, it's like, fucking, you know, Proud Boys, all that, you go like, the, the things are, and it's, it's not even like, you know, a lot of it, I think, does come down to the media, cuz it's like, you know, it's like, you don't have to take your worldview or your life prescriptive path to the media, but it's like, they are experts, they are this, and it is looked upon as like, this is an authoritative source of information.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Matt McCusker?

  And it's just mean. Like, everything you see is just like, he's a fucker, this guy is such a loser, let me tell you about this guy, and it's, it's on both sides.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:23:38Matt McCusker?

  I think that's bad for people mentally, like, a lot.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  Definitely, but, uh, I will give, that's some, that's a bit cope also, cuz people blame the media, and it's like, look, that's what you, people want. Like, at a certain point, like, it's true. I could be so much more successful, wealthy, and famous if I just did that. I actually am actively giving up a lot of that.

• 1:23:55Matt McCusker?

  That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  No, I know, but that's a choice that I'm making, but the truth is, is that that is what most people want. Most people want to fulfill their base instincts. They want to have that, uh, you know, that dopamine rush of saying, yeah. I mean, honestly, Shane's bit about the Fox News dad, I mean, I actually, the first time I met him, I was like, you know, that really is like, one of, probably one of the most important bits you've ever done, because it's deeply true.

• 1:24:19Matt McCusker?

  It's in the vernacular now. People will say, I have a Fox News dad.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  It is a deeply true, like, it's a bit, it's a comedy bit, but that is like, an archetype and, and something that really does exist. Like, in, in American society.

• 1:24:32Matt McCusker?

  No, it is, it's true.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  And it's, I would flip it and say, you, there are also MSNBC moms out there, right, who are just as bad, and wine moms and all that, but it is a cancer. On American society, but honestly, that's what they want. Like, I was talking with Lex yesterday and I brought up one of my favorite media quotes and it's from a book called The Loudest Voice in the Room. It's a biography of Roger Ailes, who was the chairman of Fox News and the creator. And he said, "People want to be informed." People don't want to, people don't want to be informed, they want to feel informed. And I think that is like the most deeply true thing about media that I've ever read.

• 1:25:04Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, no, that's true. I guess what I'm saying is, is like, it's just bad. It's like, it's bad, because it's like, it's, like you were saying, there's a financial incentive to be like a major dickhead. Which, when I, when I first saw reality TV, I was like, "This is bad." This is going, this is creating a pathway.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  Right, but it's good.

• 1:25:21Matt McCusker?

  Being just a absolute...

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  It's so bad. Yeah, it's so good, though. Yeah, it was bad for America, but it's fun to watch.

• 1:25:26Matt McCusker?

  If you were smoking weed back then, you would have been like, "What the fuck, dude? This is so fucked up." I remember I was just high watching reality TV, like, this, this is modeling a type of behavior that also pays off genuinely.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  Narcissism.

• 1:25:36Matt McCusker?

  Which taps into people's, you know, own, like, biological drives. And I was like, "This is not good." Because that's what's being modeled, that's what you're pushed unconsciously to do. And like you were saying, like, dude, if you wanted to, like, really double down, anyone, any of us can do it. Hang a couple of American flags back here and be like, "Let me tell you something, motherfucking..."

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  I get so annoyed. Be like, "You're a grifter," or whatever. I'm like, "Bitch," I'm like, "I could make way more money."

• 1:25:56Matt McCusker?

  I could grift, yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, if I wanted to grift, I would grift you, you bitch. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be like, if I just sat there and be like, "Look at these liberal tears that are flowing from their faces."

• 1:26:07Matt McCusker?

  I'm telling you, all the channels, you put an American flag behind you, you sell your merch hat, and it's just like...

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Especially for me, brown guy, be like, "Brown guy loves Trump," and all this.

• 1:26:15Matt McCusker?

  I know, I know, I know, dude.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  The problem is, is that I get bored, man. I find, I find those people so utterly boring. That I have no interest in even talking to them.

• 1:26:24Matt McCusker?

  It's embarrassing.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  It is humiliating.

• 1:26:26Matt McCusker?

  You could make a lot of money.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  Oh, a shit ton of money, absolutely.

• 1:26:28Matt McCusker?

  Especially if you're a black, black guy is the top of the market now. If you're a black guy with a red hat, be like, "Let me tell you something," it's like...

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  You'll be famous overnight. MAGA me-mas will be sending you five bucks a month and being like, "Have you seen this nice young man?"

• 1:26:43Matt McCusker?

  But yeah, I do hope we can like somehow move to a something that animates people other than like, you think people will ever be animated other than their base instincts by the masses? Do you think there will be like an actual like?

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  Gen pop? No. Uh, gen pop will always be the same.

• 1:26:57Matt McCusker?

  Always be.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I'm, look, America, society, these, mat, rise of mass media has always looked exactly the same. Like, people think it's worse now than it ever was. Total bullshit. Uh, if you go back and you look at the yellow journalism era, like, it was insane.

• 1:27:10Matt McCusker?

  That's true. That's true.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  People were, you know, slamming each other and, I mean, imagine this, American, America's news in the 1800s was literally political. Like, when you would read the news, you would read the Kentucky Democrat, or you would read, like, the Kansas City Republican. Like, your literal newspaper was the party that you supported. And one of the ways that people would get interested and instigate politics is socialists and others would be like, "We're starting a socialist newspaper," because the news itself was a political vector.

• 1:27:41Matt McCusker?

  That's crazy. I didn't know that.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, because I, I was totally bought into like, dude, it's never been this bad.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. It's bullshit. Uh, so like, the thing is, is that in the old days, the rise of yellow journalism, of the penny papers, people like William Randolph Hearst and others, uh, and before him, like Joseph Gordon Bennett, it was all sensationalism, tabloid, that's where it all comes from. And that was overwhelmingly popular. What happened is, is that the old days that we romanticize is actually a very unique time in American history, where the vast majority of Americans were getting their news from the network TV. So in the 60s and the 70s, everybody romanticizes Walter Cronkite, all this stuff. Let me tell you something, the news was just as fake back then as it is today. It's just that, thank God, we have the internet to be like, no, no, no, it's fake and it's bullshit. Because, so, I, book, it's a slog, but people should read it. It's called Personal History by Catherine Graham.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  She ran, uh, the Washington Post, she was the owner of it, and her father bought the paper, and then her son is the one who sold it to Jeff Bezos. But, so she ran the paper for basically her entire life. Her husband ran it, then he, uh, committed suicide, and she took over and ran it for decades. And if you read that paper, actually, if you've ever watched the movie The Post, it's directed by Steven Spielberg with Tom Hanks, and it's about the Pentagon paper. Meryl Streep plays her in the movie and it's really like when reading that book you're like you know she's getting politicking with Kennedy is at dinner and he's like giving them advice on how to write in the paper and her husband who was owner of the post is friends with JFK and he's skewing the coverage in a certain way so everyone has this romantic nature

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  about the 60s and Cronkite it's like no they were just as partisan as people are as today as Rachel Maddow and these people they were but America didn't know they had much more higher like institutional trust and cable news exploded that obviously after the network era but and then the rise of blogs and everything but people were really romanticized this oh the news was fair and balanced it's like no it's not that the news is what got us into Vietnam you know no it wasn't fair and balanced these people were writing columns and justifying all this bullshit they knew what was happening they didn't report any of it it was only in like what 1968 we finally tell everybody the truth by that time 500,000 Americans are sitting in Vietnam JFK

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  we used to go and hang out and all of his secretaries McNamara and all these guys were hanging out in Georgetown which is a very rich neighborhood at their fancy ass mansions secretly telling them what they should write in their papers like dude it's it's always been like as corrupt people just didn't know it yeah

• 1:30:11Matt McCusker?

  I feel like Trump did kind of crack the uh he like he like part of the veil to be like yo this is actually a lot of this is bullshit

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  the roots of Trump are uh in there's a famous clip 2012 Newt Gingrich was the Republican debate South Carolina debate and the opening question even I will admit is a crazy question uh they were like Mr Gingrich uh you're what he like I don't know the circumstances he's done his third wife and he like divorces wife I think she was going through cancer or something like oh it was terrible it was no it was bad it was like it was bad uh and it was the second time that he done something like that anyway so like that was the opening question and Gingrich is like let me tell you something that was one of the most disgusting acts and the mainstream media is a direct participant something like that in the Democratic Party and the crap the pop as you would say from the audience oh roars like you can hear it on the microphone of like

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  All of that and I I watched that clip because all the ingredients for Trump were there the whole time. It's just like you have to go and look for it like Michelle.

• 1:31:10Matt McCusker?

  He was the first one that tapped into that.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  Well, he was the first one who attacked his media on the stage and flipped the debate and made it about them. And it was a referendum. It was like, no, fuck you, actually. When they were and you could see John King is kind of taken aback because he's never experienced this before. And now it's the norm in Republican politics. People expected at that time it was crazy. It was shocking. Um, but yeah, I mean, I watched that clip a lot because I'm like, that's, that's it. That's where Donald Trump, 2015, the famous debate, you know, and Megyn Kelly's like, Mr. Trump, you've called women pigs. You know, he's like, only Rosie O'Donnell. And they was just, it's.

• 1:31:44Matt McCusker?

  Everyone, yeah.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  The crowd just roars, man. And it's like, that was it. Like, that's the moment that he won, in my opinion, uh, in the 2015 primary. Broke politics forever, but the ingredients were there. They were all there.

• 1:31:56Matt McCusker?

  It's funny that he was like, like, that was like one of the first dominoes that toppled the mainstream media. And he was just trying to get a fourth wife. He was just trying to get something new. He was like, bro, nothing's gonna stop me. Not the entire mainstream media.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  No, I think what it is, is in all of this, is that the base has always hated the media. It's just that the politicians, they need the media. I mean, this is another like fakery out of all of this is that the idea that the Republicans hate the media. Like, nobody craves media attention more than Republicans.

• 1:32:26Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  Specifically mainstream media. There are some good ones out there who actually understand that the news is bad and like, don't want to give them access. But in reality, like as much as they say they hate it, like they want to be on CNN, bro. They like it, you know, they want to go on Fox. They want, they don't, I don't know.

• 1:32:41Matt McCusker?

  I, so, speaking of the politician stuff, what is, so Matt Gaetz, that's something I can't like wrap my head around. He got, he got appointed, that's his name.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Attorney General, that's right.

• 1:32:49Matt McCusker?

  Attorney General.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's nominated to be the Attorney General.

• 1:32:51Matt McCusker?

  And what the big, the big thing about him is that he might have trafficked kids.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  Stop, man.

• 1:32:56Matt McCusker?

  That's a weird, that's a weird one.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Details are very, uh, strange. So, uh, and, and to be fair, the DOJ did drop their case against him. So they investigated it and they leaked a lot of the details. So he was never convicted or even prosecuted.

• 1:33:09Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  Um, of any of this, and there genuinely was some weird, I, I'd have. To go back and look at the details, but somebody was trying to blackmail him for like 25 million dollars. And that's how some of this stuff came out, but like empirically, he was definitely like hooking up with like very young girls and like hanging out with sketchy people and getting blackout drunk like all while he was a congressman. So, uh, the detail, as I understand it, 2021, uh, from to now, there's been a three year investigation in the House Ethics Committee about Gates and his behavior from that was instigated by an attorney who filed a complaint claiming to represent an underage girl who says that she slept with Matt Gaetz whenever she was underage. Now, obviously though, she may claim that, but as I understand it, the feds did investigate at least some of these claims. And of course they haven't brought charges.

• 1:33:53Matt McCusker?

  Sure.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  So the report itself was due to be released, uh, I think tomorrow, actually, when from the day that we are taping. And that report now will not be released because what happened is is that Gates got nominated to be the Attorney General. He resigned as a House of Representatives. So the House Ethics Committee, two days later of his nomination was supposed to release that, but they will no longer release the report because he's no longer a sitting member of Congress considering his resignation. So there's some background, uh,

• 1:34:19Matt McCusker?

  That's kind of sketchy, yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I mean, uh, his behavior has also made it a little weird in terms of, first of all, just what he admitted to is wild.

• 1:34:26Matt McCusker?

  Also, why would he be appointed though? It almost seems like he'd have perhaps dirt on DJT.

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:34:31Matt McCusker?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't think it's a dirt thing, dude. Gates is just one of it, like he's one of his biggest.

• 1:34:35Matt McCusker?

  He's one of his bros.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, not bros, he's one of his biggest defenders on television. He's one of those people who like anything goes like he's all in, uh, I mean, look,

• 1:34:44Matt McCusker?

  It seems tactical, I'm saying, they're like to abandon Congress, have a higher job, right, two days before potentially the shoe drops.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  You could read that into that if you want.

• 1:34:52Matt McCusker?

  That's what I, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  But I mean, but at the same time, like, why would Trump go along with that scheme then, right? Like, cause for this, Trump would have to be like, okay, Matt, I'll bail you out.

• 1:34:59Matt McCusker?

  That's what I'm saying, that's hence the dirt. I, I don't know, I'm, I'm just wildly speculating. I'm trying to figure out why appoint somebody with such a sketchy record.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, I think that the case is simple. Gates is a true believer, that's what it is. He's been all in for Trump for eight years. He was his biggest defender on television. Trump loves him, he always goes on Fox and he's always, Matt Gaetz is always like, I'm all in for Trump. To be fair, Gates is an interesting guy, like from my perspective. He has generally been anti-war, like he's been sponsored a lot of stuff with progressive Democrats about trying to end forever wars. He's somebody who wanted to pardon Edward Snowden. He opposed the Julian Assange stuff. You'll like this. He's very pro-weed. He's one of the most pro-marijuana members of Congress.

• 1:35:39Matt McCusker?

  I don't care about weed anymore. I like mushrooms.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Okay, but we're coming for that next. But he had, he, yeah, he's, he's actually quite libertarian is the way to go. He's pro Bitcoin, you know? He's been a heterodox guy for a while. So I'm actually, I'm not that, you know, worried about, people hate Matt Gaetz because, you know, I mean, look, he's, he's kind of an asshole, like media-wise.

• 1:36:01Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  He's got a reputation about town and he likes to come in and he blow, like, he, he likes to mouth off. Can we put it that way?

• 1:36:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  He's got a bat, like, the Republicans hate him because he's, he's the one who mounted that coup against Kevin McCarthy and got Kevin McCarthy kicked out. So a lot of the establishment types hate him, but Trump loves him because he's loyal and he wants him to like root out a lot of the people who are in the Department of Justice, who he would see as like, you know, deep state or enemies or whatever. And I honestly think Gates would do that, but I mean, it is crazy because AG is like a real, dude, you're the chief law, like legal officer of the United States. Like you have to determine the legality of president's actions. You direct the Department of Justice and the FBI, like what type of cases we're going to prosecute or not. Like you make the call on some like really big decisions. Like you have to write the legal justification sometimes for what the president is doing.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  Work with the White House Counsel's Office. I mean, it is a real no shit job. Like it's a real job. And yeah.

• 1:36:59Matt McCusker?

  I'm glad you said that because I had, that was my next question. What the fuck is the Attorney General?

• 1:37:02Speaker 02

  I had to go look it up because I was like, yo, does he even have a law degree? But he does. Yeah. But I was like, I don't know if he's a lawyer, you know?

• 1:37:09Matt McCusker?

  That's fucking wild. So it is about, we're about to enter like, you know, what's the Senate and the House are Republican now. They'll get two Supreme Court picks most likely.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, Alito and Clarence Thomas. That's right. They'll probably resign. Although Sonia Sotomayor, one of the Democrats, she's 70, uh, but she does have type one diabetes and Democrats have tried to get her to resign because they were like, hey, you need to go so that Biden can appoint somebody. But she pulled an RBG and she's like, I'm not going anywhere.

• 1:37:33Matt McCusker?

  Whoa.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Matt McCusker?

  Damn, they wanted one.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:37:36Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, cause we're going to enter into like a, what's up?

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  Can you believe that she didn't? These people are such narcissists.

• 1:37:41Matt McCusker?

  I can totally believe that she did that.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  So believes in power and uh, that and like not even being part, I mean, I'm, look, I don't really care, but it's more from a liberal perspective. It's like, if you think this is fascism and the end of democracy, like bitch, then resign. Like, what are you doing?

• 1:37:53Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  You're literally type one diabetic, seven years old and you're obese. Like, what do you think's gonna happen? Look at a fucking actuarial table. Like.

• 1:38:00Matt McCusker?

  Dude, it's, it is sad though, if you think about like, um, even like what happened to Biden, it's like, being that old and being driven by kind of like the power drive until like your brain just falls apart, it's pretty fucking terrible.

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I say it's sad, but it's also like pathetic and deeply egomaniacal and narcissistic. And that, at the end of the day, you know, that's what it takes to be a politician. Like, that's the truth. Is uh, he, by the way, has been the same his entire life. So I talked about this book yesterday with Friedman called What It Takes. It was written in 1988. It's about the 1988 presidential campaign. That's where Biden had that plagiarism scandal. He's been an egomaniacal narcissist, chip on his shoulder guy for his entire life. So, you know, what they say about when you get old is it just makes you more of what you already are.

• 1:38:43Matt McCusker?

  Oh, God.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  Like, you're just more, you're just, if you're already an arrogant fuck, like, you're just gonna be more of an arrogant fuck when you're old. Like, that's.

• 1:38:49Matt McCusker?

  That's so sad, man.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  It's true, yeah.

• 1:38:50Matt McCusker?

  That's so sad. That was, that was my overarching point with religion. It's like, you need, I feel like as a society, we need a vehicle for self-transcendence so that you don't become a just eighty-year-old walking around demented, like, trying to lead the country.

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, I mean, I, at the end of the day, that's like genuinely like self-idolatry. He's like, I am the one, I will stop Donald Trump. I'm the most important figure. Nothing is bigger than me. I, you know, it's, it's pure narcissism. And he's chiefly responsible for, both for being a terrible president, but also for the loss of the Democratic Party. It really, I mean, it's, it's crazy.

• 1:39:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, they're.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  If I were them, I would be freaking out. I'd be, I would, I would be so furious. I mean, nobody has fucked their party more than George, than Biden since George W. Bush, uh, and his handling of the Iraq war.

• 1:39:34Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, for sure. What do you, what do you think the, the future of the Democratic Party's gonna look? Cause I thought the same thing, like, dude, if they don't like. I think they're gonna need an outsider, they're gonna need a Democrat.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was my prediction. Not necessarily Democratic Trump, but if we're in an era, so for example, like Obama like rose from the ashes, right? Because, you know, he was a no-name senator. He gave it a great speech, no four, big fucking deal, okay?

• 1:39:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  Uh, but then he came out of nowhere, he had anti-war credentials, and Harry Reid is actually the one who was like, "You should run for president." He's like, "You're not a good senator." He's like, "You don't like it here." He's like, "Get out of here. Go run for president." He's the first person who put that in Obama's mind. But with the rest of them, like if we look in the past, Bill Clinton also came out of nowhere in 92.

• 1:40:18Matt McCusker?

  Right.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  We had 12 years of Republican rule.

• 1:40:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  1980 to 1992. It was Reagan and it was Bush. And Clinton, I mean, he was a no-name governor from Arkansas, but he created this thing, the Democratic Leadership Committee, which like basically moved the Democratic Party much more to the right and made it more of like a neoliberal thing, and that's how he was able to win like a major victory in 92.

• 1:40:39Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  So, somebody will come. I think that person needs to come from the ashes, though. I think anybody tainted by the stain of like woke-ism from the 2010s and the Great Awakening onward, on top of like the Biden and all the trans shit and all this.

• 1:40:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  Plus, you know, I just, this whole last decade has been a nightmare, right?

• 1:40:59Matt McCusker?

  It collapsed in on itself, yeah.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  And it collapsed in on itself. So, anybody really tainted by that at the national political level, they're gonna have a tough time, in my opinion. That's why, even though I think Gavin Newsom's very talented, and I think that Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg and all these other people, I think that they, you know, they like to believe that they could overcome it, and maybe, right? Like, Trump could fuck everything up and he could be a nightmare, right?

• 1:41:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  In terms of his popularity, and it'd be easy to beat him. Anybody could. But if he doesn't, and if he governs even reasonably well, 40, 50% approval rating, you're gonna need somebody with like real political entrepreneurship and skills to be able to rise out of that.

• 1:41:33Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and they kind of, the Republican side has a kind of like a, I feel like a deeper roster, they could people they could tap. That are also like, you know, like RFK, he can like talk, he's not like, like a total robot of a politician.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  He's not a Republican, right? So, he's whatever he is. Yeah, he's an independent, he's endorsed Trump. Yes, although I don't think RFK will ever run.

• 1:41:51Matt McCusker?

  I don't think he will. I don't think he will, but I'm saying they seem to have like a Tulsi Gabbard, like they have like a deeper roster of people. Maybe that's just me because I'm biased, but it's like.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 1:41:59Matt McCusker?

  I don't know if anyone like, you're saying like these like news some Buttigieg is like, I really think they need a new person.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You need somebody who is totally untainted by the system. Um, and that's real, that's what Obama was. That's what Bill Clinton was.

• 1:42:12Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  I mean, the appetite for, although I will say the appetite, the thing is about the democratic base is now it's rich white people. And the thing is about rich white people is they don't really give a shit about a lot of stuff. They just want to win. Like, I'm serious. Like, they are just like, we want to win. They're like, oh, you need to say what? Okay, whatever. You know, like, say it. Just win. So it is a little different this time because this time around is whatever narrative they're sold about what will beat Trump, that's who they're gonna nominate. That's why they, that's why they nominated Biden. They didn't care what he stood for. They were like, we need somebody, we need Trump out of here.

• 1:42:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  You know, that's what it's gonna be like.

• 1:42:46Matt McCusker?

  Bring out the dancing black ladies. They threw everything. They were like Beyonce, Cardi.

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  So were you as shocked as I was that they get paid? I had no idea. I had no idea.

• 1:42:56Matt McCusker?

  I didn't know.

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  I was so naive. I thought celebrities just did it because they supported them.

• 1:43:00Matt McCusker?

  If they didn't get paid events because they're at the Diddy parties. So like, you better like, you better show my W2.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Matt McCusker?

  It's just so weird to be like, we're gonna have.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  Million dollars to Oprah? A million dollars.

• 1:43:08Matt McCusker?

  Million bucks, dude.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  She's a billionaire. What the fuck do you need a million dollars for? What are we doing?

• 1:43:11Matt McCusker?

  I mean, it's a nice little treat though.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, but it's like, don't you already support Kamala? Like, just, just do it, you know? And that's the thing is, I don't think they're getting paid to say something that they don't already believe, but if you already believe it, just do it for free. Like, why would you?

• 1:43:25Matt McCusker?

  I don't think they believe it. You can't, you can't, you can't, like, there's no way, there's no like, you know, again, it's like Republicans, I'm not like a, a big Republican guy, but I really like zoom in on like the liberal Democrat, like the modern liberal Democrat type. It's like, I don't really see a coherent vision at all. It's, it's all, it's too bought in on the, the post-modernism, which is in itself is self-contradictory and goes nowhere.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 1:43:47Matt McCusker?

  So that's kind of what happened to them. They like, it was their like, Trump was the right energizer battery pack. Theirs was like the post-modern racial power versus, you know, worldview.

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was very, it's very odd.

• 1:43:59Matt McCusker?

  And it just, it just literally collapses in on itself and it contradicts itself. Like, you know, there's no hierarchies. It's like, well, who do you prefer? Trump or Biden? Well, there's, there are, all that bullshit. But it's like, they, all they're gonna have, if I were a Democrat, like leading the campaign, outsider candidate, and I would come by and be like. If you're a Trump supporter, I still love you, man. That's all they have to, that's all they have to do.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they made the whole dictator fascist playbook that they ran this time. That was very stupid. You know, they did. So I don't know how they're gonna do it, man. I really don't. Uh, I have confidence that they will figure it out just because people are too triumphalist. As in, I know, I was talking about the 2008 Obama wins, right? They're like, we will never lose an election again. James Carville literally wrote a book called Forty More Years. About how the Democrats will be in power forever. Demographics are destiny. It's over. It's a white party. And now Donald Trump has won two out of the last three presidential elections. The last one, he won the popular vote and he won Latino men. He basically completed a racial realignment of the US politics. Imagine going back, you know, to 2008 and telling me that. That was only 16 years ago, man.

• 1:45:04Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, dude. And Obama lost his juice. They like, they trotted him out to be like, go yell at young black guys. Like, dude, it just is like, ah, man.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  He's sneering. Just like, that's the, I, I, I have Obama derangement syndrome. Like, I hate Obama. And like, not for the reasons that like, white boomers hate him. We're like, he's destroying this country.

• 1:45:24Matt McCusker?

  I was working construction when he got elected and it was a somber day for like,

• 1:45:28Speaker 02

  For the boomers, yeah.

• 1:45:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, like boomer age white guys. They'd come into work and be like, they were, they were just mad he was a black guy. That was it. They were just, they came in and they were going, it was so, it was kinda funny.

• 1:45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Matt McCusker?

  But I, I do agree. I, I think there's something very sinister about wrapping yourself in that like, cultural identity and like,

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  I call him the Instagram president. He's this fucking, you know, he's just this cultural elite. He's everything that he supposedly stood against. And the way that he governed, you know, he came and he was supposed to end the Iraq war. And the financial crisis he was supposed to solve. He fucked both of those up. We had a horrible economic depression, um, for that, you know, the entire period. I mean, look, if you wanna look at the wealth inequality, the explosion, the lack of wage growth, um, that all happened under Obama. He got lucky that Mitt Romney ran against him. All the ingredients to be able to beat him were there. Romney, Romney just ran a terrible campaign. And then immigration in 2014, he overinterprets his mandate and he's like, You know what? Fuck this. I'm gonna do whatever I want on immigration. And he goes all in and he does DACA.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  And honestly, that is responsible for Donald Trump. Because what he did is he both polarized the liberal base on the issue of immigration, which was amnesty first, maybe border security sometime in the future. But he also energized the Republicans who were like, oh, my God. When they have power, they're gonna mass legalize literally millions of illegal immigrants. And that it leads to the 2014, that 2014 executive order leads directly. One year later, Trump comes down the escalator and says, no, we're gonna build a wall and Mexico's gonna pay for it. So there are direct consequences for these actions. And immigration is the number one reason, in my opinion, why Donald Trump was elected. Like, there's no question.

• 1:47:07Matt McCusker?

  What do you think about the population collapse that's gonna come when all of the boomers go?

• 1:47:11Speaker 02

  I think that's fake.

• 1:47:12Matt McCusker?

  You don't think, you don't think we're gonna have the, just importing people?

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  Uh, no. I mean, I think that's a very convenient explanation. Um, I mean, look, at a certain point, too.

• 1:47:20Matt McCusker?

  Well, how, if the numbers dip, how's it, how's it not real?

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  No, what I'm saying is that the idea that, first of all, that we're gonna have population collapse and we're like, Japan is just like, not true. But there's, there, first of all, but the second is there's this presumption that the only way to do it is to import, like, basically, like, second-class citizens from South America.

• 1:47:37Matt McCusker?

  Did you ever read The Next Hundred Years by George Friedman?

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  I have not read that book. I think I'm familiar with the thesis.

• 1:47:41Matt McCusker?

  That's his big thing.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I mean, this is a very popular way that people justify, like, mass migration. Um, first of all, like, there's another way, which is you could try both economic and social incentives to change the picture. But the other thing is, there's something, like, really sick about this idea that the only way to, like, that the birth rate itself is the only thing that matters and not, like, what the actual makeup of the United States is. And that all the secondary and the third, the secondary tertiary effects of what mass illegal immigration, like, does to the US economy, to US society. It makes a mockery of, like, US law. And, like, the entire way our immigration system works is just totally fucked up. Like, people don't understand. Like, the, our immigration system is totally unique in the Western world.

• 1:48:25Speaker 02

  The entire rest of the Western world has basically merit-based immigration. We are the only country still left on family-based chain migration. So the way, what that means is that, so I'm a US citizen, right? And so, because I was born here, I was born here in Bryan, Texas. But the way it would have worked is my parents who immigrated here, their family members have a preference in the US immigration system.

• 1:48:45Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  If they were able to sponsor someone to come to America. It doesn't matter whether those family members are, are they college educated? Like, who are these people, right? Like, do you have a degree? Like, what's your job?

• 1:48:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:55Speaker 02

  Do you support yourself? That makes sense. If you immigrate to Australia, they're like, they have a points-based immigration system. So they're like, a college degree? Cool. Oh, you speak English? Much higher up at the list.

• 1:49:04Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  That's how it should work. It should be merit-based. It should be based upon, are you going to benefit the America? Now, people get very squirrely about this because it is contrary to the way that, what I talked about earlier, the 1800s mass immigration.

• 1:49:17Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that was my mom's dad.

• 1:49:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:49:19Matt McCusker?

  Oh, no, it was the 1900s, sorry.

• 1:49:20Speaker 02

  But here's a good quote that I heard. "We don't make immigration policy for our grandparents, we do it for our grandchildren."

• 1:49:25Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  So, just because some, so, in the 1800s, we had what? Industrial Revolution? We needed a shit ton of basically just like bodies to sit there.

• 1:49:32Matt McCusker?

  Dumb asses.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  Shovel. Oh, you can swing a shovel? Cool. You're fucking Slovenian? Who cares? Whatever. But that's not how the US economy works.

• 1:49:41Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  The US economy is a service-based economy. Our manufacturing jobs are high-tech manufacturing. Like, you need to be able to speak English to function in America. 12 million people illegally entered this country in the last four years. The 27% of them don't have a high school diploma in Spanish, by the way. So they're barely literate in Spanish. 20-something percent of them have barely completed a high school education by Latin American standards or wherever they came from. And then, only a small portion are actually college-educated. So, look, be real. Look at the stats. What is that gonna cost the United States? Are they bad people? Absolutely not.

• 1:50:17Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  But it makes a mockery of this idea of, first of all, of just order. Like, in terms of be able to just come here, no matter who you are, you just raise your hand, fake, say, "I fear for my life."

• 1:50:27Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  You're an economic migrant, let's all be honest. And if you interview these people, they'll tell you the same. They're like, "I came here for a job." I don't begrudge you, that's fine. But the point is, is that you can't allow that system to be in place where, basically, the cost of the bill of all this is gonna come down to us. So, we need to dramatically shift to a To an actual merit-based immigration system. That's number one. But two, what we really need to do is also consider, after that period of massive immigration of European migration, we had social chaos in this country. We actually were becoming like ethnic, there was a whole war over this. Teddy Roosevelt gave a famous speech, "There is no hyphenated America." And hyphenated me like, you know, like, "I'm a Slovenian American." He was like, "No, we're all Americans. We need to be done with hyphenation."

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  And that led to a complete shutdown, basically, of US immigration from the 1920s up until the Immigration Naturalization Act of 1965. That immigration moratorium actually allowed for assimilation, where the term "white" became popular, because it's like, as you know, if you read a book, ask white Protestants, were Irish people white in 1920? Absolutely not, okay? Like, they're like, "Lithuanian?" They're like, "You're Lithuanian. You're not white, okay? That was bad. Just so we're all aware. That was bad." And so, the change in that, we need to go through that again. Like, we need to completely change the way that we've, our foreign-born population has never been as high than previous from the 19, I think, the late 1900s, right around when we had the same immigration moratorium. We're signing up for the same levels of problems,

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  where our heterogeneous population is just way too removed from each other. We don't have a common civic understanding or any of this. And the truth is, is that if you just keep importing 1 million people per year, per year, and then the vast majority of them are illegal, no disorderly process, like, dude, this just breaks the civic foundation of the country. Like, it's just not gonna work. And I say this to somebody whose parents came from India, like, but that's my point, is I'm here now. I'm a citizen. Like, I have to care about my children, my grandchildren. What country are they gonna grow up in?

• 1:52:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and it's also, it's like, it is kind of a bullshit thing to be like, well, since your, you know, parents came, you have to decide, it's like, I can change my fucking mind, yeah.

• 1:52:36Speaker 02

  By the way, they left the Third World so I could live in the First World, and I can make up my own mind.

• 1:52:41Matt McCusker?

  It's amazing, yeah.

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  The best part of coming to America and to the West. Anybody who is from, like, a Western or a non-Western country will know this. In the non-Western countries, you're kind of like told what to do. There's a path, and there's, you know, there's a rigid class system, and there's like, "This is how we live our life." And like, that's the best part about coming here, man. You can do whatever you want. You can say whatever you want. The social mobility here is better than anywhere else in the entire world.

• 1:53:07Matt McCusker?

  Dude, and that was the problem. I went to school for, uh, social work. Like, when I went to, I got my graduate degree in social work in, uh... And you were like, if you brought up social mobility, the teachers would for real like, be like, that's a myth.

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  No, no, it's not.

• 1:53:20Matt McCusker?

  No, it's not. I was really big, that's, no, it's not. They're like, that's a myth.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  Does wealth give you privilege? Absolutely. But, uh, actually, I think I read that people who are born in the upper quintile, if you look at the, uh, across generations, after like three generations, their kids are usually back down.

• 1:53:34Matt McCusker?

  Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:53:37Matt McCusker?

  It does have a, money, extreme money has a degenerative effect.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:53:40Matt McCusker?

  Like, it's obviously, it's, uh, incredible, you know, bounty to be born with a ton of money, but dude, it like kind of warps people big time.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  One of my favorite books is, uh, The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt, and it's exactly about this. And it's basically, uh, I think a hundred years after Cornelius Vanderbilt died, his generations, uh, not a single one of them was a millionaire, not one. And the first Vanderbilt, after Cornelius Vanderbilt, to make anything of himself, was one of the only Vanderbilts not to be born with money. His name is Anderson Cooper.

• 1:54:09Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  He is the first Vanderbilt, member of the Vanderbilt family, to not be born with money. The first one who was broke, who made anything out of himself.

• 1:54:18Matt McCusker?

  What the fuck?

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, that's it. Anderson Cooper is the first successful Vanderbilt in like 200 years.

• 1:54:23Matt McCusker?

  Since Cornelius.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Since Cornelius, uh, the Commodore. Commodore, uh, Commodore.

• 1:54:27Matt McCusker?

  I didn't, I, I've heard he's a Vanderbilt, but it's always like, he's a CIA.

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, his mother was Glan- Gloria Vanderbilt. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, I mean, and if you, and you read their stories, the money just destroyed them. It destroyed their family.

• 1:54:38Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  Uh, all of them just became like degenerate dilettantes who became, you know, I mean, they were addicted to alcohol and drugs, and they would blow it on these gigantic houses and, uh, you know, they got caught up in the British rat race, and they, they all became Dollar Princesses. I love the term Dollar Princesses. A Dollar Princess is, in the 1800s, American industrialists were filthy rich. And the way to have social mobility is they're like, we need to get our daughters married to English lords. But the English lords were broke. And so they were like, oh, we'll marry your kids. So Winston Churchill's mother, she was a Dollar Princess, Jenny Churchill. Um, and, uh, there were, uh, they hit, the Duke of Marlborough, I forget exactly what his name, he was another Churchill.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  I think it was Randolph Churchill. He married one of Cornelius Vanderbilt's. Either granddaughter or great granddaughter, same thing, he bailed him out, so he literally, he could rebuild his house. And after they got married, he was like, by the way, I don't give a shit about you at all. He's like, I really don't care. He's like, I married you for your money. He's like, I'm just gonna go do whatever I want to do. Like, I'm just gonna go live my life. Yeah.

• 1:55:40Matt McCusker?

  That's kind of, that's crazy.

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

  No, it's horrible. It's horrible. Her life ended up, it was a nightmare, unfortunately for her.

• 1:55:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. Well, it's also very rigid. And I know if you have generational wealth, it's like you're, you have to, you can get cut out of the will, then you're fucked.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Yes, there's stuff like, there's all of that, and then, you know, you have that house, the built more down in, in North Carolina. The largest house literally ever built in the United States. It was built by Vanderbilt. You know, did you read about them? Like, this guy would have like seven marriages in the course of his life.

• 1:56:06Matt McCusker?

  Dude, I, I did work in Arlen Specter's estate. He was dead, and it was, I think one of the-

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  The senator from Pennsylvania?

• 1:56:13Matt McCusker?

  Yes. I painted his house. I like, me and my friend helped paint his house.

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  Did you ever ask him about JFK?

• 1:56:17Matt McCusker?

  Huh?

• 1:56:17Speaker 02

  About JFK?

• 1:56:18Matt McCusker?

  They were dead, he was dead. I should have asked him, but that's why I think he got a nice little estate, but the, dude, it was, it was just like his surviving family members, and it was for real, like, sad, man. Like, we were in there, like, using oil primer, and like, the lady came in and was just like, it smells. Like, yeah, we had a, yeah, it's fucking-

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:56:35Matt McCusker?

  Oil paint. Like, well, I have a party coming in. We're like,

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  He should have told us that, yeah.

• 1:56:41Matt McCusker?

  And dude, she started spraying, just walking around, as if you were like in, she would just spray perfume in the room, and if you were standing there, she would just go, like, right in your face. My mom, my mom was a maid for the DuPonts, and she said it was the same thing. She was a maid at the house of the guy who was like a, it became like a psycho killer wrestler guy. He was down there, and she said it was like, she was like, I remember being like, it was a very sad, it was just like a sad vibe in the house.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  I mean, after a hundred years, yeah, basically destroy them all. And it is very sad, because most of them, they're burdened, and it's not just them. I read another book about the Astor family. I mean, John Jacob Astor was like, one of the first, like, real millionaires in the United States. He was a slumlord in Manhattan. He was like, this Dutch slumlord, he was like, hey, yeah, he's like, how many of you immigrants can charge $20 today? But, and then, and you know, and his family, like, they become these titans of society and all of that, and one of his- Great grandson, I think, died on Titanic. He was the one, he was the richest man on the Titanic and he died on Titanic. His nineteen year old wife who just impregnated, she got off, she had a baby, he became the Titanic baby.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Um, and because, yeah, cause he was literally in his mother's womb, uh, whenever she was, uh, she was saved off of the Titanic. But basically after him, and he was, by the way, ended up being like some degenerate playboy, you know, so it's like, didn't really live up to it.

• 1:57:59Matt McCusker?

  That is the funny thing. You can achieve, it is very funny though to be like, you can achieve at the highest level. Just so your grandson can just like crash a boat while he's like coked up.

• 1:58:08Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, I mean.

• 1:58:09Matt McCusker?

  One day.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  It happens all the time.

• 1:58:10Matt McCusker?

  Blow up on a river.

• 1:58:11Speaker 02

  The Rockefellers, you know, John, John D. Rock, he was kind of a psycho, actually.

• 1:58:15Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  His, his son actually was relatively successful. He seemed like a good guy. His grand, his son's, uh, Nelson Rockefeller, he was the vice presidential nominee for the Republicans, governor of New York. But after that, you know, things start to drift off and now we're in the, you know, the fifth and the sixth generation. You're like, ooh. They happen to the Kennedy family, dude, you know, it's like the, the longer you go down the Kennedy family, you're like, is there anybody impressive in the? I saw JFK's grandson going around the DNC when I was there, like filming TikToks and stuff and I was like, bro.

• 1:58:43Matt McCusker?

  Ah, that's, that's the kiss of death.

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  Fucking John F. Kennedy's grandson.

• 1:58:47Matt McCusker?

  I know.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  I wanna shake him. I'm like, live up to your goddamn father, your grandfather.

• 1:58:52Matt McCusker?

  It's gotta be a crazy family to be a part of.

• 1:58:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I just wanna be like, if your great grandfather, the patriarch could see you, he'd be sick. If he was like looking around.

• 1:58:59Matt McCusker?

  Just fucking.

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  Dancing. Yeah, he's like taking selfies and be like, hey guys. Like, you suck, dude.

• 1:59:04Matt McCusker?

  Just Lady Gaga, like.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, dude, this guy blows. He's a dandy.

• 1:59:09Matt McCusker?

  It is, it is, it is absolute dandy behavior.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:12Matt McCusker?

  It just does suck, cause it's like, you wanna do well, but it's like, if you kind of like, you know, if you just try to go for the absolute top.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:20Matt McCusker?

  It does, like, without a vision of some sort, you just end up just kind of like.

• 1:59:24Speaker 02

  I think that, uh, anybody who comes into even like a modest amount of money, like you probably need to do some serious thinking.

• 1:59:31Matt McCusker?

  You do.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  And you really need to be like, okay, like what is my life gonna look like?

• 1:59:35Matt McCusker?

  Look.

• 1:59:36Speaker 02

  Children, like.

• 1:59:37Matt McCusker?

  This is why people need to sell a lot of weed when they're twenty.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:59:40Matt McCusker?

  I did this. I had the hero's journey. I came into like, I would make like four thousand dollars a. Week and just be like

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 1:59:46Matt McCusker?

  Dude, I was killing it. Well, not I, I, I lost all, I lost all of it.

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  Four thousand times fifty two is how much? That's two hundred something thousand dollars.

• 1:59:53Matt McCusker?

  As like a twenty five year old dude and I got to like, I got to like

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  And that's all cat. You're not even paying taxes. Yeah.

• 1:59:57Matt McCusker?

  I pay taxes. No, you get the ego inflation and then like I got by the rug swept out, out from under me. So that was one of the best experiences of my life to lose all to get like the ego pump and then to have it just ripped away from you. Cause otherwise, yeah, dude, if like, if you, if you catch that, like, um, it gives you the thing, like when things are going well, I have an understanding like

• 2:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, you think you're a boss.

• 2:00:18Matt McCusker?

  They can definitely not go well very quickly.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Also, I would just say I've met a lot of people who are like super wealthy and all of them are pretty weird. Like every person I know, every person I've ever met with a hundred million more net worth. I'm like, dude, you're a weirdo.

• 2:00:33Matt McCusker?

  Well, you can't connect with anybody. You can't talk about like, if you even broach certain subjects, eighty percent of people are gonna be like,

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  You wanna know funny, I was talking to a guy and I was like, yeah, you know, when you're in an airport and he's like, oh, I haven't been in an airport in twenty years. And I was like, whoa, I was like, oh, cause you fly private. I was like, I've never even been on a private plane. And I was like, that's a crazy. That was, it was just so casual. He's like, I haven't been in an airport in twenty years.

• 2:00:54Matt McCusker?

  I know.

• 2:00:54Speaker 02

  I was like, whoa.

• 2:00:56Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 2:00:56Speaker 02

  What a life. Yeah. Like, what does that even look like?

• 2:00:59Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, dude, I, I was talking to somebody one time excited about like flying first class and he was like, dude, my kids have never not flown private. And I was like, oh, I didn't even think about that. I was like, fuck.

• 2:01:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that, that probably really fucks them up. And what are they gonna do then whenever they have to fly economy?

• 2:01:12Matt McCusker?

  Either they'll be stoked. Oh, here's the thing. I remember I grew up in like a, a upper middle class suburb. So like I moved to West Philly and I was in the hood and I was like, this is so cool. And then like, so maybe they'll just be on an airplane and be like, wow.

• 2:01:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, you know, sometimes you're, uh, what is it like sea on Southwest and you're like trying to go for the middle seat or whatever. And you're like, my life sucks.

• 2:01:33Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, true. That's, that's

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  And I'm talking about plane and now I'm talking about, uh, you know this, you're Northeast guy mega bus. Like when you're taking like a midnight mega bus to New York City. The cheapest one. And you're like, well, I'll take a bag and, uh, when I get there, like change in a bathroom and put a new shirt on.

• 2:01:50Matt McCusker?

  Mega bus, we did the Chi, there was a Chinatown bus, Chinatown, Chinatown, yeah. Just a pregnant lady driving it. You're like, what the fuck? But dude, yeah, it's

• 2:01:58Speaker 02

  Stomachs up against the steering wheel.

• 2:02:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, for real, dude. There was real pregnant lady driving it before.

• 2:02:03Speaker 02

  Drug addicts are like freaking out in the back and someone's like, hey, can y'all keep it down back there? I'm like, shut your goddamn mouth.

• 2:02:10Matt McCusker?

  That is true. It is. It does kind of set the bar too high. And then it's like you, all you can ever do is be disappointed in life. Or, you know, like, again, I did eventually become very disillusioned with life in the hood. I was like, this is sad. I was like, this is so.

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  Sad.

• 2:02:26Matt McCusker?

  It's so, dude, it's real so sad.

• 2:02:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz it's, the systems are like designed to just keep everybody down. And, I mean, look, they have individual responsibility for sure, but like also the, the way the entire thing is designed. It's like, they keep it contained. Nobody cares. Everyone just must pretend like it's over there.

• 2:02:42Matt McCusker?

  It's dude, it's real like, it's like, I remember me, I bought a house in West Philly with my brother when I was like 21. It was like, the house, dude, the house was $27,000. I lived in there. Yeah, it's pretty, it was pretty fucking awesome. But the.

• 2:02:55Speaker 02

  Did you hang on to it? Did you sell it?

• 2:02:57Matt McCusker?

  We sold it and then it got knocked down to me. It was structurally, it had a tree growing through the basement. It was bad. But the, but I remember like going into like my neighbor's house and they were like, it's funny cuz when you live there, like there are a lot of like, like, you know, when you grow up, like I grew up, my parents watching Fox News. It's just the news being like, black guys are up to no good again. And it's like, so you get this like skewed picture. Then you meet the individuals and you're like, damn, these are like some of the nicest people. Then there's, obviously there's people like just doing monstrous behavior. But I remember like the first time I walked into somebody's, like their, my neighbor's house, it's like visually jarring cuz it's like, everything's just fucked up. Like every, there's no symmetry that everything's built fucked up. And it's like, I remember like being, you know, there's just like bugs. And just being like, fuck dude, that's, it was like just crazy.

• 2:03:39Speaker 02

  I know.

• 2:03:40Matt McCusker?

  But then it's like, that's why you have to do good. It's, it's like the brutal reality behind all of like the, you know, let's save everyone political messaging. It's like, dude, nobody, you have to bail yourself out at the end of the day. You just have to. It's sad. It's not fair.

• 2:03:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I look at it.

• 2:03:53Matt McCusker?

  But you have to do it.

• 2:03:54Speaker 02

  Two ways. As in, we have to, of course, like design and move systems to create like a quality of opportunity. But you also have to have a responsibility, given the circumstances. For example, like, I don't know, any money, anything. Anything that you're working with, I'll often be like, what a bullshit. For example, and you guys probably have this too. I, you know, Crystal and I co-own our show. So we're small business owners too. And we have to deal with all the small bit, and all of the paperwork. And all the fucking accounting and all the shit behind it is mind numbing. It's stupid. It makes no sense. It's genuinely not fair because these major corporations and all these other people get all of these crazy tax breaks. And we're sitting here trying to figure this stuff out and it sucks all of our time and it's super stressful. And I could just be like, oh, it's not fair. And it's actually not fair.

• 2:04:40Speaker 02

  The people who are small business owners, you get fucked. Like that's the real.

• 2:04:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:42Speaker 02

  But you just have to do it, right? So I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna sit here. I'm gonna spend 10 hours of my goddamn time learning the ins and outs of all of this to make sure I'm not getting ripped off on my accounting.

• 2:04:53Matt McCusker?

  Why don't you just pay an account? Oh, you double check the accountant.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  You gotta double check, man. I mean, you're, I'm like you, you know, Patreon and all this. I want to be a good steward of other people's money. Like, I don't need to be pissing people's money away. It's not nice. You can't do that to people.

• 2:05:05Matt McCusker?

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a serious responsibility when you're like, hey, pay me $10 a month. Like, it's not a fucking joke, dude. You're like, actually, you have to be a steward of that money. For real.

• 2:05:13Matt McCusker?

  Well, hold on, man. People want to give their money, man. That's.

• 2:05:17Matt McCusker?

  But no, I agree. I agree. You gotta give them something. You gotta do something. You can't just piss it away.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  You're working for them and you can't just, you know, and it's also money. It's like, look, I grew up Indian, so, you know, we're fun. We, we, money, it means something. You know, you're taught from a very young age.

• 2:05:30Matt McCusker?

  Dude, they're, they're.

• 2:05:31Speaker 02

  And I don't care how much money you have. Like, $100 will always be $100 to me. I know exactly what that buys. I know what it means and what it does and like.

• 2:05:37Matt McCusker?

  It's, well, it's funny because it's in, where I'm from, in Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania, there had, there's been like a massive influx of Indian population. All, everyone I know, like, people have, like, landscaping companies. They're like, bro, they're like, just haggling on the fucking law. And they're, he's like, their lawns are this fucking high.

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Matt McCusker?

  They'd be like, I'm not paying. It's like, my cousin's like, bro, they haggle me to fucking death. It's really funny.

• 2:05:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, fuck them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:02Matt McCusker?

  That's what he gets.

• 2:06:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03Matt McCusker?

  But dude, it is a, yeah, it is like, it's one of those things. I feel like Indian, it's like they were out of the race conversation for a long time.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  Of course we are, yeah. We're, we're the inconvenient minority. Um, because Asians in general are completely invisibilized by US racial discourse.

• 2:06:17Matt McCusker?

  Big time.

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, look.

• 2:06:18Matt McCusker?

  You guys are killing it, dude.

• 2:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're the richest people in America.

• 2:06:21Matt McCusker?

  It's awesome.

• 2:06:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's cool. I mean, I mean, I'll say this. It's not really fair because Indians in America are, uh, Like so-called like the twice-selected elite and so

• 2:06:33Matt McCusker?

  Why do they say that?

• 2:06:34Speaker 02

  Because India is a billion people, okay? But the caste system where Brahmins, which is the top caste

• 2:06:40Matt McCusker?

  Oh, I know.

• 2:06:40Speaker 02

  Those people, oh yeah, so you do know. Brahmins, forty percent, I think it's only like one or two percent of India. My math could be wrong, so.

• 2:06:47Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 02

  But, you know, forty percent, so one or two percent of India, but forty percent of Indian-Americans are Brahmins. So that means forty percent of the people here are part of the top one to two percent already of the Indian caste system.

• 2:06:58Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, because of doctors, engineers, lawyers, people who are highly educated. So part of Brahmin culture, that's where I come from too, by the way.

• 2:07:05Matt McCusker?

  Okay, you come from Brahmin.

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  But, no, but I'm saying our family has generations

• 2:07:09Matt McCusker?

  That makes sense, you wouldn't be able to get, yeah.

• 2:07:11Speaker 02

  Of revering like education, family, we don't drink alcohol. We're like, this is how we live our life, like our, our life is about family, it's about furthering the next generation. Individualism really is a concept, is like not part of that. And that's actually why I think it meshes really well with America, is America will drag you to individualism. America will drag you to a little bit of consumerism, a little bit of like, you can be whoever you want to be. But the backstop that you have is like, no, no, no, no, this is not what we do. Like money, we don't spend it on stupid shit. When we have money, we spend it on books, on education. So the, the, my upbringing was like, the budget is limitless for anything educational. The budget is like zero for anything stupid.

• 2:07:51Matt McCusker?

  They're fucking around, yeah.

• 2:07:52Speaker 02

  And I, no offense, white people, but I have noticed you have proclivities for new cars and for nice sneakers.

• 2:07:58Matt McCusker?

  Check my ride, bro.

• 2:07:59Speaker 02

  And, uh, and, and nice kitchens and, you know, you'll be, and so I'll be like, so your kid's got twenty-five thousand dollars in debt and you've got a new fucking kitchen, interesting. Um, in our culture, that shit does not fly.

• 2:08:10Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Speaker 02

  Uh, but that's why I would say Indians are very successful in America because it's like, uh, we're, we're both, obviously, highly educated. That's number one, but two, I really think the culture is a huge aspect of it.

• 2:08:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:20Speaker 02

  The way that you revere money, you think about family, there will, there are no Indian parents out there who have the money who are not paying for their child's college education. It's just, it would never happen. And in white families, there's this weird, uh, hyper individual, like, they gotta, this like boomer mentality of like, they've gotta figure it out, because back in my day, I'm like, well, have you Looked at inflation like what?

• 2:08:41Matt McCusker?

  I know, I know.

• 2:08:42Speaker 02

  And you know, and they're like, well, they'll get it when I die. And I'm like, yeah, but it's actually way more useful to help your child out. When you're there 18, 19 to 25, those are the foundational years of your life. So it's a mindset difference.

• 2:08:54Matt McCusker?

  That was the one. No, no, dude, I appreciate you saying that. That was the one thing my parents were actually really good about is like, don't go into debt if you ever avoided it at all costs and also keep a low profile. Like, don't, don't try to, my dad does spaz, he like, he'll get it. He has like phases where he has like 57 bicycles in his basement.

• 2:09:13Matt McCusker?

  But they were very, and now my parents weren't like educated really. They, you know, they went to high school and they got out and that was it. But they were very like, that was the one thing I think that's the thing I'm going to copy off of them. They like sent us to like an all boys Catholic high school, paid for our college. And it's like, that's the one thing with my kids. It's like, we were, I'm looking for schools for my, my daughter right now. And it's like, I was telling my wife, I'm like, is it, your mom's big on, a lot of people I know are like, the public school is just as good. And it's like, I don't think so. I don't, I don't, I genuinely don't think so. It's like,

• 2:09:41Speaker 02

  I'm assuming you live in a nice area. It probably is.

• 2:09:43Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it's pretty nice. A lot of Indians, a lot of Indians.

• 2:09:45Speaker 02

  I think you're probably fine then, man. There you should. I went to public school. Yeah.

• 2:09:49Matt McCusker?

  No, I, but now the public schools around me are, it's like, it's newly nice. So the public schools are, but it's like you compare it to a private school. And it's like, I mean, you've done well for public school.

• 2:09:57Speaker 02

  I'll give you two cases. I'll give you the case for and against.

• 2:10:00Matt McCusker?

  My, my point is, sorry, before I cut you off, my point is if you, if you can't afford it, you should spend money on your kid's education. That's all I was trying to say.

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And so in that case, I mean, it's interesting, but more what I meant in terms of that is, uh, sometimes people will be like, I don't know, like I knew a girl who wanted to take like a graduate test, like study for the GRE. And she was like, oh, my parents won't pay for my GRE test, you know, thing, but they have the money to pay for it. But they're like, you have to work to go for your GRE test prep. I'm like, what? Like, who are your parents?

• 2:10:31Matt McCusker?

  That's so ruthless.

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. In my head, I'm like, that doesn't even fly. Like, it's just, you know, but if I was like, hey dad, so if I was like, dad, I need $5,000 for a GRE prep course. And I was like, 23 or whatever, be like, absolutely. But if I was like, I need $5,000 to go hang out in Saint-Tropez or it's like, he's like, what?

• 2:10:46Matt McCusker?

  Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes, it does make sense.

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  What I'm talking about.

• 2:10:50Matt McCusker?

  Well, in a lot of the suburbs like that I'm from, I've learned that many of the families are just debt. It's just like the whole thing runs on a giant balloon of debt and it's like kind of terrifying.

• 2:11:01Speaker 02

  Americans are obsessed with debt. Americans are obsessed with consumerism and you know, I can't, my dad, when he was making good money, he was rolling around in a 1988 Mazda with no air conditioning in 150 degrees.

• 2:11:12Matt McCusker?

  It's such a beast move though, dude.

• 2:11:13Speaker 02

  Texas with his windows rolled down and he refused to get it. He eventually sold it for $1,000 after he put 200,000 miles on it. So it's like, that's where I come from. And it's like, do you need a new Raptor truck, Texas? Probably not.

• 2:11:28Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:29Speaker 02

  It's like these guys, no offense, but you know, if you look at the average car payment, Texas is the highest average car payment in the nation because all of these idiots are rolling around in trucks. You don't need a brand new truck. You don't need an $80,000 Raptor. It's ridiculous. Like, sorry, you need a Toyota Camry, Camry or a Hyundai or like any of these other cars. They're great cars. They'll get you. So I am actually a big proponent of Dave Ramsey for the vast majority of people. I think Ramsey, he's very, what you were just saying. I think his like common sense approach, if 95% of people followed their life that way, they would be better off. He preaches like avoid debt, you know, don't use credit cards and all of this. I personally am a big credit card point fiend, but you know, I pay it by balance and all this stuff.

• 2:12:12Speaker 02

  But here's the thing, I think what he gets at is what we were talking about with impulse control and all that. It's look, look at the stats. People can't control themselves. They're only paying the minimums. They're taking out 35, 40, 50% debt or whatever on their APR. HELOC loans and all this. He has taught me about financial products. I didn't even know existed. I'm like, wait, so people out there are taking two mortgages and then another mortgage on top of that one? How do you sleep at night, bro?

• 2:12:35Matt McCusker?

  Dude, it's insane.

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  Oh my God. I actually cannot imagine. So if, if for anybody out there who's listening, if you listen to Dave and you actually take, at the very least, like take some of that advice to heart. You know, the number one thing is budget too. No matter how much money you make, you still need a budget. And the reason why is you just need to know where your money is going and you need to be conscientious about every dollar that you spend. So like you were just saying, like you need, you and your wife need to sit down and make a choice. We're sending our kid to private school. That means this is our nut. We need X, Y, and Z amount per month. This is how it looks like and we're saving and this is what it looks like.

• 2:13:09Matt McCusker?

  With I'm still I have an open mind right now. I'm like, I'm I've looked at like four schools and it's like I've noticed a huge difference. But it's like if I see a public school that works, I would go, I don't, I don't not like one or the other.

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  But I went to both so I can make the case. So I was very lucky. So I grew up in College Station. I went to pub- public school for the first 16 years of my life. My last year is the high school. My parents, we moved to Qatar and I got to go to a very fancy private school. They didn't, it was part of the deal.

• 2:13:34Matt McCusker?

  Like an international.

• 2:13:35Speaker 02

  An international, the American School of Doha, right? So I went from a school where probably the median income of the parent was like, let's say like $40,000. To a school where the median income of the parent was probably like $300,000.

• 2:13:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah, an elite school.

• 2:13:48Speaker 02

  It was, it was an outrageously nice school. And we like, we were flying for school trips, like everybody there, their, their parents worked for Exxon and.

• 2:13:55Matt McCusker?

  Dude, that was one of the schools we looked at, like we're going to send your fourth grader to France for a week. I was like, what the fuck? I was like, no.

• 2:14:01Speaker 02

  That's what my last years of high school were like. And I will tell you, I definitely loved it. I loved it, but I would worry that if I had grown up in that environment and anybody out there, if you've ever interacted with people who are in that bubble, there's a lot of downside that, man. Like that's when you were talking about the first class thing. We went on a school trip once and one of the kids had never flown economy before and we were all flying economy together. He was like 17 years old.

• 2:14:25Matt McCusker?

  Like what the fuck is this?

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  He had never been in economy class. He only ever flown first and frankly, he was a pampered little bitch, you know? It's like, and I, the people like that, like there is, there is something important and I think about it too. Where, you know, about the people that I grew up with, I didn't even love them that much. I'll be honest with you, but there was, it was, it was important. I got to interact with people from all across different walks of life. I think public education is very important and I actually think at a young age too. You know, I think in high school, I could make a really good case if you have the money to go to private school. If you look at the stats, private schools send the vast majority of their kids to Ivy League and to other uh, schools, especially if that's what you want for your child. But K through what, middle school? It's not really about education. It's about socialization.

• 2:15:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09Speaker 02

  And so for. Socialization purposes, I don't really want my children, just me personally, like to be growing up in a bubble. And in that bubble, like I've spent enough time now in elite circles that I can see how dangerous that it really can be to the mind. And to how that person can eventually use that privilege in others. And first of all, they're overinterpreting their own success. Like this idea of like, they'll be like, oh, we're doing pretty good. I'm like, you are not doing shit. Yeah, I mean, I'm doing good. You're not doing good. Like, you have not done anything.

• 2:15:42Matt McCusker?

  And, uh, Yeah, dude, it is weird, man. That's the kind of the thing I've been struggling with. It's like, you know, because I don't want to be like, get them older and be like, what the fuck? You could have sent me to a nicer school. And I'm like, I don't want you to be a dickhead.

• 2:15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you can also just track each of your children. And like, what if them, one of them is real, like, there are different types of schools. There's magnet schools, there's math schools, there's sports, there's drama, there's like all these other ones, like you gotta, what I would do is I would be like, okay. First of all, again, K through eight is about, it's not about education. Actually, a lot of that education, my man, is on you.

• 2:16:11Matt McCusker?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:16:12Speaker 02

  If anything, you're trying to pay somebody else to teach your kids how to read better. That's, that's about you.

• 2:16:16Matt McCusker?

  You gotta do it.

• 2:16:16Speaker 02

  You need to step up in the house.

• 2:16:17Matt McCusker?

  I'm fucking, what are you talking about, dude? We spelled her name the other day.

• 2:16:20Speaker 02

  But that's what I'm saying. We, you gotta be keeping that shit up every day after school. Not even tutors. You, you need to be engaged, you need to be making sure that you're sitting there and making stuff, is this stuff done? Because that's where the parent really is, is the most important. Of course, you know, middle school, high school, when we start talking about SATs and that's when I think education and the quality of teacher can really make an impact on them. But that's by the time they're starting to become like formed as a human being and may have an idea of what they want to do. But those initial years, I think it's really just about learning how to like be a person in the world, about how to interact with others, following rules. Like what does it mean to like live in a society and be in like this ordered, weird thing that we call, so that's the purpose of school, man.

• 2:17:01Matt McCusker?

  For sure.

• 2:17:01Speaker 02

  At the end of the day. That's why homeschool people are fucking weirdos. Can we all be honest? Have you ever met a normal one? They're freaks, alright? It's true, man. Like, it's true.

• 2:17:11Matt McCusker?

  I know people who are homeschooling right now, they're gonna be pissed at you, dude.

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  I don't care. I mean, every,

• 2:17:15Matt McCusker?

  We met one homeschool kid.

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  Sometimes they do it in pods and they're okay.

• 2:17:19Matt McCusker?

  We met a homeschool kid in my baseball team and like we drove him to tears.

• 2:17:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you should. And he deserved it. Yeah, I mean, like, to be honest. He deserved it dude.

• 2:17:28Matt McCusker?

  There is a huge aspect of the socialization for sure.

• 2:17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's important.

• 2:17:31Matt McCusker?

  For sure, but then it's like with the public schools, like, well, what are they getting socialized into? Then you look at all the other shit they had going on with like, you know, like when they're like, don't tell your parents. If you want to trans, come to us and we'll send you to.

• 2:17:39Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 2:17:40Matt McCusker?

  That was the shit that was free.

• 2:17:41Speaker 02

  You're living here in Texas, dude. What are you worried about? You're actually worried?

• 2:17:44Matt McCusker?

  Dude, these schools, dude, now all the, in Austin.

• 2:17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:46Matt McCusker?

  So the schools are like, dude, they're pretty fucking, they go pretty hard with that shit. And that's the stuff that I'm like, eh, but I don't know.

• 2:17:52Speaker 02

  What about the rest of the burbs around it? Round Rock, Fredericksburg, all those other, it can't be there. I mean, I grew up around here, man. Like, that's, those people, those are, those are some Bible belters.

• 2:18:00Matt McCusker?

  You've been going for a long time, dude.

• 2:18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. You're right.

• 2:18:02Matt McCusker?

  This place changed. You left, bro.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, that's, I guess, true.

• 2:18:07Matt McCusker?

  But that's, that's kind of, yeah, I don't know. I, I went to a, well, I won't, we can get out of here soon. How long have you been in Josh?

• 2:18:13Matt McCusker?

  Damn dude, we almost did it again. Uh, yeah, I'll let you out of here in a second, but.

• 2:18:16Speaker 02

  Sweet.

• 2:18:17Matt McCusker?

  I was laughing. We, we, today we toured a, cause again, it's like, I'm going to public schools. You know, I'm just trying to find like, I just, that's the one thing I will try to give my kids the best in education.

• 2:18:24Speaker 02

  Well, you should. I mean, look, there's nothing wrong with, uh, doing private school or.

• 2:18:27Matt McCusker?

  But I will say today, so we, so I was thinking that, I went to a Waldorf school today. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Waldorf.

• 2:18:33Speaker 02

  I know, I know, I'm familiar with what it is.

• 2:18:34Matt McCusker?

  Dude, I've never seen anything like that in my life. And it was like, almost, I theoretically, I'm like, it's all the stuff I like, I like. And I saw the reality of it and I was like, no. It was just like, almost creepy.

• 2:18:44Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 2:18:45Matt McCusker?

  There was a, there at one point, there was one, there's one dude in the tour, no matter what the person said, he would go, oh, it's so important. And like, dude, at one point, at one point, they were like, we have climbing trees and we have trees we don't climb. Those are the climbing trees. And he goes, oh, so yes. And it, and then they, we're in another room and they're like, for math, we have a tactile sensory aspect where we have these marbles. And they're actually counting the mar, and the guy literally over marbles goes, oh, yes. I was like, dude, would you shut the fuck up?

• 2:19:14Speaker 02

  That's so weird.

• 2:19:14Matt McCusker?

  There, there becomes a point of it where it is like.

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  There are some millennial trends.

• 2:19:18Matt McCusker?

  Fake favor, like, we did the odd, entire Odyssey school play in fourth grade. It's like.

• 2:19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:23Matt McCusker?

  All right, dude.

• 2:19:24Speaker 02

  There's some millennial trends, like the Waldorf. I don't, I need to look more into them, not 100%.

• 2:19:28Matt McCusker?

  I think they do well. I think it has like, but go ahead. I'm sorry.

• 2:19:31Speaker 02

  Well, I was gonna say gentle parenting is the one that I've become familiar with.

• 2:19:34Matt McCusker?

  Yes.

• 2:19:34Speaker 02

  This millennial trend of being like, they don't say the word no, right?

• 2:19:38Matt McCusker?

  Yes.

• 2:19:38Speaker 02

  Everything is about redirection. And the Indian in me is like, how can you possibly turn out like, well, for like, actually a huge, well, I would say majority of adulthood is learning how to deal with the consequences of the word no.

• 2:19:52Matt McCusker?

  That's what adulthood is.

• 2:19:53Speaker 02

  Oh, you want a job? Fuck you. No.

• 2:19:55Matt McCusker?

  There's a giant no.

• 2:19:56Speaker 02

  Fuck you. No.

• 2:19:57Matt McCusker?

  There's a giant no hovering over your entire life.

• 2:20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really like, you're like, or you're like, oh, you want to go on a date? It's like, what are 99% of these women gonna tell you? No, absolutely.

• 2:20:07Matt McCusker?

  I know.

• 2:20:07Speaker 02

  You're a loser, actually.

• 2:20:08Matt McCusker?

  I know. Yeah, I go back. So it's like, I, I grew up in like the rigorous old school, like, yeah, if you get in trouble, you get hit, all that stuff.

• 2:20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:14Matt McCusker?

  I do think that's not a good idea to do.

• 2:20:16Speaker 02

  Probably, I think that's right.

• 2:20:17Matt McCusker?

  I think it's genuine. It's like, you know, it, I, I don't think it's the end of the world, especially if you're not like getting drunk and like coming in for no reason. If there's like a rhyme and reason to it, it's not the worst thing. But I do think the, um, punishing physically makes you as a kid, like, I'm not gonna tell my parents anything.

• 2:20:32Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:20:32Matt McCusker?

  Cause I don't wanna get smacked in the head.

• 2:20:33Speaker 02

  No, but they need consequences of a kind, right?

• 2:20:35Matt McCusker?

  Yes.

• 2:20:36Speaker 02

  Like you need to take away the things that they like.

• 2:20:38Matt McCusker?

  Yes.

• 2:20:38Speaker 02

  Or be like, you're in the silent treatment or stuff like, I, I do, I think consequences are really important. Because man, when you get shielded from it, and honestly.

• 2:20:45Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:45Speaker 02

  You know, even, even I remember like that first time when you're 22 years old and you graduate from college and you're actually out on your own and you really are, you're like, oh my God, like, this is, this sucks. Like, you're like, so now you make a bad decision and you're sitting there, you know, and you're like, holy,

• 2:21:01Matt McCusker?

  Dude.

• 2:21:01Speaker 02

  And this is on me and I'm by myself right now. Nobody's gonna bail you out right now.

• 2:21:06Matt McCusker?

  I'm telling you, the worst, the worst possible is when you're making bad decisions and it's paying off because eventually it all hits you and you go, oh, and it, it comes for everybody, dude. And you go, oh, man, and the older you get, you go, there's no way, I gotta live my way through this now. And it's like.

• 2:21:21Speaker 02

  You're right, bro.

• 2:21:22Matt McCusker?

  Like, great.

• 2:21:23Speaker 02

  It's very important.

• 2:21:23Matt McCusker?

  Dude, thank you so much for coming. I could talk to you forever.

• 2:21:25Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you for having me.

• 2:21:25Matt McCusker?

  I could talk to you forever, dude.

• 2:21:26Speaker 02

  I really enjoyed it. This was actually pretty fun.

• 2:21:27Matt McCusker?

  Dude, thank you, man. Appreciate you.

• 2:21:28Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:21:40Speaker 04

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• 2:21:45Speaker 05

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