#156 – Tim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom

Tim Dillon is a comedian and podcaster. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Rev: https://rev.ai/lex to get 7-day free trial EPISODE LINKS: Tim’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimJDillon Tim’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timjdillon Tim’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4woSp8ITBoYDmjkukhEhxg Tim’s Website: https://www.timdilloncomedy.com Tim’s Merch: https://www.bonfire.com/store/the-tim-dillon-show/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:00) – Tim Dillon’s tombstone (09:55) – The horrible people are the most fun (14:06) – Charles Bukowski (19:46) – Robots (22:56) – YouTube algorithm (29:04) – Parler and Amazon (33:32) – Social media (36:09) – Alex Jones (54:42) – OJ Simpson (59:22) – Politics (1:05:52) – Donald Trump (1:13:09) – Humor (1:20:44) – QAnon (1:27:13) – Conspiracy theories (1:32:50) – Bill Gates (1:35:20) – Elon Musk (1:37:35) – Jeffrey Epstein (1:40:14) – Ghislaine Maxwell (1:47:55) – Greatest comedians of all time (1:57:53) – Love (2:01:24) – Fear (2:04:38) – Mom (2:08:10) – Mortality (2:10:13) – Advice for young people (2:16:47) – Moving to Austin (2:24:40) – Meaning of life

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Tim Dillon, a stand-up comedian who is fearless in challenging the norms of modern day's social and political discourse. Quick mention of our sponsors: NetSuite Business Management Software, Athletic Greens All-in-One Nutrition Drink, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and Rev Speech-to-Text Service. So the choice is business, health, sanity, or transcripts. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount at the support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I will continue talking to scientists, engineers, historians, mathematicians, and so on.

• 0:42Lex Fridman?

  But I will also talk to the people who Jack Kerouac called the mad ones in his book On the Road. That is one of my favorite books. He wrote, "The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars. And in the middle, you see the blue center light pop, and everybody goes, ah." Some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble in that I have no idea how they will turn out.

• 1:27Lex Fridman?

  But I'm willing to risk it for a chance at a bit of an adventure. And I'm happy and honored that Tim, this time, wanted to take a chance as well. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by NetSuite. This one's for the business owners. Running a business is hard. If you own a business, don't let QuickBooks and spreadsheets make it even harder than it needs to.

• 2:12Lex Fridman?

  You should consider upgrading to NetSuite. It allows you to manage financials, HR, inventory, e-commerce, and many more business-related details, all in one place. I dislike the bureaucracy that companies sometimes build up around this. NetSuite can probably help, but I am sure bureaucracies can still flourish. They always find a way. I think efficiency and excellence are essential, NetSuite or not. Anyway, whether you're doing a million or hundreds of millions in revenue, save time and money with NetSuite. 24,000 companies use it. Let NetSuite show you how they'll benefit your business with a free product tour at netsuite.com/lex.

• 2:56Lex Fridman?

  If you own a business, try them out. Schedule your free product tour right now at netsuite.com/lex. Netsuite.com/lex. For some reason, NetSuite is really fun to pronounce. This show is sponsored by Athletic Greens, the all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. I do intermittent fasting of 16 to 24 hours every day, and I seem to not be able to shut up about it. And I always break my fast with Athletic Greens. I honestly can't say enough good things about these guys. It's probably one of my favorite sponsors. Love them.

• 3:38Lex Fridman?

  It helps me not worry whether I'm getting all the nutrients I need. One of the many reasons I'm a fan is that they keep iterating on the formula. I love continuous improvement. The other thing I've taken for a long time outside of Athletic Greens is fish oil. So I'm especially excited now that they're selling fish oil and are offering listeners of this podcast free one-month supply of wild-caught omega-3 fish oil when you go to athleticgreens.com/lex to claim the special offer. Click the athleticgreens.com/lex link in the description to get the fish oil and the all-in-one supplement I rely on.

• 4:17Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also sponsored by Magic Spoon, low carb keto-friendly cereal. I've been on a mix of keto and carnivore for a long time now. That means very little carbs. I do binge eat cherries or apples sometimes and regret it later, but love it in the moment. Just like I used to regret eating cereal because most have crazy amounts of sugar, which is terrible for you. But Magic Spoon is totally new thing. Zero sugar, 11 grams of protein, and only three net grams of carbs. I personally like to celebrate little accomplishments and productivity with a snack of Magic Spoon. It feels like a cheap meal, but it's not. It tastes delicious.

• 5:00Lex Fridman?

  It has many flavors, including cocoa, fruity, frosted, and blueberry. I tried all. They're all delicious. But if you know what's good for you, you'll go with cocoa, my favorite flavor and the flavor of champions. Click the magic spoon.com/lex link in the description and use code Lex at checkout for free shipping. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. Check it out at betterhelp.com/lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I chat with the person on there and enjoy it. Of course, I've also been talking to and following along with David Goggins,

• 5:42Lex Fridman?

  who is definitely not a licensed professional therapist, but he does help me meet his and my demons and become comfortable to exist in their presence. Everyone is different, but for me, I think struggle is essential for creation. But you can struggle beautifully in a way that doesn't destroy you. Therapy, I think, can help and BetterHelp is an option worth trying. They're easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Check it out at betterhelp.com/lex.

• 6:17Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by Rev and their service Rev AI, which is by many metrics, the best speech to text AI engine in the world. Rev in general is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by AI. I've been using their service for a couple of years and I'm planning to use Rev to add both captions and transcripts to some of the previous and future episodes of this podcast, to make it easier for people to reference various parts of a podcast episode, if they would like to do that. I'll do a separate video on that so people can provide suggestions on how to best sort of deliver those transcripts. They've processed over 16 billion minutes of audio and video to date.

• 7:00Lex Fridman?

  Rev.ai is the API part of Rev that allows you to use speech to text programmatically as a service. And this opens up a lot of different cool applications. You can check out how well Rev AI performs in a seven day free trial at rev.ai/lex. That's rev.ai/lex to tap into the world's most accurate speech AI. I love this company. I'm a huge believer in them. That's why they're a sponsor, but you should go definitely check them out to support them with your love, with your money, with your business. I guarantee you, you won't regret it. And now here's my conversation with Tim Dillon.

• 8:00Lex Fridman?

  What would you like your tombstone to read? It's a good way to summarize the essence of a human being.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I would like it to say, this has not been paid for. And I want, I want my, my living relatives to struggle to, to pay for it. And I think I would like them to be hounded every day. I would like people to call and go, listen, we don't want to ever excavate a body, but we will, because this has not been paid for. I love the idea of leaving the, like debt, leaving the world in lots of debt that other people have to deal with.

• 8:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  And I know people that have done that. And I know people that have been in families where that's happened where.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Someone has to sit and and just curse the sky because they they don't have a physical person anymore to be angry at and they but they still have to deal with the decisions that person made and that's deeply tragic but that's always struck me is very funny.

• 8:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's a kind of immortality, the debt, because you can if the debt lasts for a long time, the anger lasts for a long time and then you're now immortal in the minds of many. You arouse emotion in the minds of many.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  My mother's best friend in the town I grew up in, her husband shot himself in the the driveway and my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve because he owed so much money, she would come over and go, I hate him. I fucking hate him. And it was just such an interesting thing to see somebody who and her kids ended up getting angry at her for that because they didn't understand why she would hate a guy who was clearly, you know, suffering and but she goes, he took the selfish way out. He fucked us. And it was always interesting for me to just remember that, like, you can leave earth and still be a problem.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  That's kind of a special person. So that's, I think, what I'd like my tombstone to read.

• 9:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a there's a show called Louis with Louis C. K. I don't know if you've watched it.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  I'm aware of it.

• 9:59Lex Fridman?

  There's this moment, I think, where an old guy is talking to Louis about the best part about love is after you break up and it's remembering that, like, remembering the good times and feeling that loss, the pain of that loss. The worst part about love is when you no longer feel that pain. So the pain of losing somebody lasts longer, is more intense and lasts longer than the actual love. So his argument was like, the pain is the re is what love really is.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 10:33Lex Fridman?

  In the same way that anger, your tombstone would arouse is would last longer. And that's that's deeply like a human thing. Like, why do we attach happiness to the way we should remember others? It could be just anger.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  I know so many people who will have deeply complicated feelings when I I you know, I did drugs for many years. So and I I spent time with some wild people and their parents were also wild people and some of their parents have done crazy things to that.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And you know, have created situations that were not uh productive for child rearing. Yeah. And so I know that when those people die, it's going to be a very mixed bag. Yeah. Like, there's going to be a lot of complex emotions, like, hey, we loved that guy, but also when we look back, uh, he was a horrible father, a horrible husband, but he was fun. And, and, and we don't put enough stock in that, but that will be a push and pull. Yeah. And I'll be the one kind of bringing up like, hey, he was a lot of fun. Yeah. He was a lot. Remember when he, he stuck us, you know, one of the things, this particular person I'm talking about, we were, we were at a bar, me and my friend were there, we're having dinner, and his father, who was,

• 11:53Speaker 01

  you know, a, a, an alcoholic, and a, a, you know, a guy that would go out every night and didn't work, you know, refused to work, would lie and say he was going to work and then go to a bar. I mean, just a fun person. And uh, he, he, we were sitting at this bar restaurant, and the bartender, we see his father walk up to the bartender and say, point at us, point at our table, and go and put the thumbs up, and the bartender nodded, and then the father walked over to our table, and he said, listen, I just want to let you know, I just bought you dinner. And I looked at his son, I said, he's a pretty good guy. And then he, he climbed over the little fence down to the water, got in his little boat, it was a little cigarette boat, and he just drove away. And then about an hour later, we uh, we went, we said, I think uh, that guy took care of the bill.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  But she said, well, go talk to the bartender. So we walked to the bartender, and he goes, he handed us a bill, and the bill was for like a thousand dollars. And we said, wait a minute, what the hell's going on? And he goes, the guy that left an hour ago said you were gonna take care of his bill, he's been drinking here all week. And we go, what are you talking about? And he goes, remember, he pointed at you, he put the thumbs up, and you guys waved? Yeah. You remember that? And the guy go, and we went, yeah, and I just looked at my friends, my friend and I went, you know, your, your dad is just, we're gonna remember him for all kinds of reasons. But to you, he was fun. He was a lot of fun. He wasn't my dad, but I spent a lot of time with him. I was in two boating accidents with him. You know, two boating accidents.

• 13:18Lex Fridman?

  Alcohol involved, drugs.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yes, he was usually alcohol was involved when he left his house. Um, and when he was at home as well. But I was in two boating accidents. And do you know how fun someone has to be to get in a second boating accident? Do you know what a good time someone has to be?

• 13:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  To get in a boat with them after you've already gotten in one wreck?

• 13:39Lex Fridman?

  Never get fooled again. What was that line? George Bush, never get fooled again?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, so if you're getting fooled again, you know, there's a reason for it. But he was, he was a fun guy. He did have a death wish. The second boating accident, he grabbed me and said, you can't hang out with me anymore. And I said, why? He goes, I'm trying to kill myself. And I was like, oh. And then I understood that like, oh, the fun, under the fun, lived a very destructive person who not only was destructive, but wanted to die.

• 14:05Lex Fridman?

  So speaking of fun people that want to die, I, I don't know if you're, we can go Hunter S. Thompson, but, uh, Charles Bukowski, I don't know if you're aware of the guy.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  I'm aware of him. Sure. I've read some of his stuff.

• 14:18Lex Fridman?

  So his tombstone says, I just want to ask you a question about it. His tombstone says, don't try.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 14:25Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about that advice as a way to approach life?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  I, I, I think for many people, it's a good, good advice. Uh, because the people that are going to try will do anyway. And the people that need to be told, there's a whole cottage industry now of motivational speakers and life coaches and gurus, uh, that tell people, uh, that they all have to own their own business and be their own boss and be a disruptor and get into industries. You know, that's incredibly unrealistic for most people. Most people are not suited for that. And, you know, the Gary Vs of the world that tell everybody that they should just hustle and grind and hustle and grind, very light on the specifics of what they should actually do.

• 15:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think a lot of people, that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people. I think, I think my generation got horrible advice from our, our parents, from our teachers. And that advice was follow your dreams. Uh, and nobody, and that was it, by the way. There was no like, what are your dreams? Are they realistic? What happens when they don't work out? Will your dreams make you happy? Are your dreams real? Do they exist on earth?

• 15:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Can you follow? Follow your dreams. You can be anything you want to be. Horrible advice. Horrible advice. Worst advice you could ever give a generation of people. Really, truly, I mean, think about, think about it. If you were talking to somebody and you were trying to make them succeed, are there any two uh worse pieces of advice to give them than follow your dreams? And you can be anything you want to be. Those to me are the two most destructive pieces of information I've ever heard.

• 16:02Lex Fridman?

  So let me push back because.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Okay, that's fair. Many people do.

• 16:06Lex Fridman?

  So uh yeah, this is like a rigorous journalistic interview. Larry King, by the way, passed away today, so I'm I'm taking over the.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Very sad.

• 16:15Lex Fridman?

  I'm carrying the.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Very sad. R and B King.

• 16:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What was I even gonna say? Oh, let me push back on the follow your dream thing is I come from an immigrant family. Where I was always working extremely hard at stuff like in in a stupid way. I would, I love, there's something about me that loves hitting my head against the wall over and over and over. Until either my head breaks or the wall breaks, just like I love that dedication for no purpose whatsoever. It's like the mouse that's stuck in a cage or whatever. And no, and everybody always told me, my family, the people around me, the sort of uh the epitome of what I could achieve is to be kind of a stable job.

• 17:01Lex Fridman?

  You know, the the old like lawyer, doctor, in my case, it's like scientist and so on. But I had these dreams, I had this fire, you know, uh about I love robots. And that, nobody ever gave me permission to pursue those dreams. I know you're supposed to grab it yourself. Nobody's supposed to give you permission. But there's something about just people saying, you know. Fuck what everyone else thinks, like giving you permission, a parent or somebody like that saying, do your own thing, go become an actor, go become like, do the crazy thing you're not supposed to do, an artist, go build a company, quit school, all that kind of stuff.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yes, sure.

• 17:42Lex Fridman?

  That's to push back against the, uh, follow your dreams as a bad advice.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  In mass, if you were to look at, in mass, if you were to look at statistically, how few people that works out for, I'm just, no, but let's be very honest.

• 17:56Lex Fridman?

  This is very true, yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Be very honest. So I mean, like, yeah, if you're gonna go be an act, hey, I was broke for 10 years before I became a, before I was making money as a comedian, I get it. I didn't need Gary Vanyard Chuck to tell me to follow my thing, right? And here's the other thing, I was kind of funny and like, I was kind of, a lot of things were in my favor of being a comedian, right? I had this kind of crazy fucked up life. I had a lot of stories. I had exhausted, I was willing to fail. I had failed before. I was broke. I didn't care about being broke. I knew how to be broke. Um, I had, I was shameless to, to a degree. I was, I would get on a stage night after night and be laughed at. I would, uh, I had a high threshold for being embarrassed. I had a high threshold for people thinking that I was

• 18:39Speaker 01

  a scumbag, right? And showing up at family parties and being like, yeah, I still really don't have a job and I'm just, I work at comedy clubs, kind of, and I get booked when I can. Um, and I, I, I, I was, you know, suited for it. There, there's this idea that people can just roam around the world, injecting themselves into other things they have no aptitude for at all. And will that to happen? A small percentage of people might be able to do that, but the vast majority of people have something they might key into that they're meant to do. Like you loved robots, you love technology and you found a place in that world where you thrive.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  But I think many people, a lot of people love robots, right? So a lot of people think everything you do is interesting. I think your shit is fascinating. I, I watch you or podcasts and I, I think it's very interesting. I have no place in your world. You know what I mean? I have no place in that world. I, I don't like remedial math.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I don't like community college math. I think it's a waste of my time.

• 19:46Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about robot? Would you ever buy a robot for your home?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yes. What will it do?

• 19:52Lex Fridman?

  I'll be a companion, a friend.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I would like to start replacing friends and family with robots immediately. I mean, truly, truly. I mean, I'm not even kidding. Like, I would like to have a Thanksgiving with four robots. I'm dead serious. Are they into QAnon? Like, are the robots, when do the robots start going crazy? That's my question is like, how long do the robots live with me before they are also a problem? And I gotta replace them. You know what I mean?

• 20:22Lex Fridman?

  You're gonna indoctrinate the robot.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  The robot's gonna call me like my aunt does and talk about coronavirus for an hour every morning and tell me everyone in America who's died of coronavirus?

• 20:32Lex Fridman?

  One of the things I enjoy in life is how terrified people like you, I'm a huge fan, by the way, get of robots.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Well, I am concerned about AI like completely getting rid of the need for human beings because human beings, I mean, you go out in the street and you go, so few of these people are necessary, even now. Even now, you look at people and you go, they're hanging on by a thread, right? And you could just imagine how many jobs are gonna get replaced? How many industries are going to be completely remade with AI? And the pace of change worries me a little bit because we do a very bad job in this country of mitigation when we have problems. We don't do a great job. We did not a great job with COVID, right? We don't do a good job. It's just something we don't do well. We kinda, we're good in booms and busts.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  We're good when it's good. And we're actually, we kinda know how to kinda like, hey, we're bottomed out. We're like a gambling addict in this country. We like, we know what it feels like to be outside of an OTB at 9:00 AM, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes going, I'm gonna build it back. And we know what it's like to win. But anything in between, it seems not that great. So to me, it feels like, are we gonna be able to like, help people that are displaced? And that have their jobs taken by, I mean, do you not fear sort of a world where you have a lot of, you know, artificial intelligence replacing workers? And then what happens?

• 22:02Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence. One of them is, yes, displacement of jobs, workers. That's technology in general, that's. Just any kind of new innovations displace jobs. I'm less worried about that. I'm more worried about other impacts of artificial intelligence. For example, the nature of our discourse, like social, the effects of algorithms on the way we communicate with each other, the spread of information, what that information looks like, the creation of silos, all that kind of stuff. I think that would just make worse the effects that the displacement of jobs has. I think ultimately, I have a hope that technology creates more opportunities than it destroys.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  I hope so, too.

• 22:49Lex Fridman?

  And so, in that sense, AI to me is an exciting possibility. But, you know, the challenges this world presents will create divisions, will create chaos and so on. So I'm more focused on the way we deal as a society with that chaos, the way we talk to each other.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  That's huge.

• 23:08Lex Fridman?

  Creating the platform that's healthy for that.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Now, as a comedian, creator, whatever you want to call it, people that put out content, the gatekeepers are now algorithmic, right? So they are kind of almost AI ready. So if you are a person that puts out, you know, YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever you're doing, you are, it used to be a guy in the back of the room with a cigar saying, I like you, or get him out of here. Now, it's an algorithm you barely understand. Like, I talk, I've talked to people at YouTube, but I don't know if they understand.

• 23:43Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  The algorithm.

• 23:44Lex Fridman?

  They don't.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  They don't.

• 23:45Lex Fridman?

  This is fascinating.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fascinating, because I speak to people at YouTube and I go, hey, man, what's going on here? One of my episode titles of my podcast was called Knife Fight in Malibu. It was about real estate. And it was because a realtor in Malibu, I was trying to get a summer rental, which I can't really afford, but I don't, I don't think that's a huge problem. I, you know, I follow my dreams. So I called a Realtor and she said, listen, she goes, I don't know what the government's saying. But she goes, it's a real knife fight out here. You know, an old grizzled woman, real Realtor, tan skin, cig out the mouth, driving a Porsche, you know, it's a real knife fight out here. You know, her entire life had become real estate. Her soul had been hollowed out. Her kids hate her. You know, no one's made her come in years, but it's just, she just loves heated floors and views.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Fun. She's a demon from hell and we need them. Truly. We're getting rid of them. It's not good. And she goes, a real knife fight out here. So we put that in the episode title. And of course, I guess some algorithm thought that we were showing like people stabbing each other in Wendy's. And we, we got like demonetized. Did we get demonetized?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  We lost a lot of views because we were kicked out of whatever, like we were just kicked out. And I was asking YouTube about it. They, they were kind of understanding it, but even the people that worked there didn't truly seem to understand the algorithm. So can you explain to me how that works where they barely know what's going on?

• 25:04Lex Fridman?

  No, they do not understand the full dynamics of the, the monster or the amazing thing that they've created. It's the amount of content that's being created is larger than anyone understands. Like this is huge. They can't deal with it. The teams aren't large enough to deal with it. There's like special cases. So if you fall into the category of special cases, we can maybe talk about that like a Donald Trump. Where you like actually have meetings about what to do with this particular account. But everything outside of that is all algorithms. They get reported by people and they get, they give enough people report a particular video, a particular tweet. It get, it rises up to where humans look over it.

• 25:45Lex Fridman?

  But the, the, the initial step of the reporting and the rising up to the human supervision is done by algorithm and they don't understand the dynamics of that. Cause we're talking about billions of tweets. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of video uploaded every day. Now, the hilarity of it is that most of the YouTube algorithm is based on the title.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 26:18Lex Fridman?

  It's and the description is a small contribution in terms of filtering, in terms of the knife fight situation.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:24Lex Fridman?

  And that that's all they can do. They cannot. They don't have algorithms at all that are able to process the content of the video. So they try to also infer information based on if you're watching all of these like QAnon videos or something like that, or Flat Earth videos. And you also watch, are really excitedly watching the whole knife fight in Malibu.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:48Lex Fridman?

  Video. That says, that increases the chance that the knife fight is a dangerous video for society or something like that.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Interesting. Wow.

• 26:58Lex Fridman?

  Based on their contribution.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  People are watching something, because I watch QAnon and Flat Earth videos to ridicule them.

• 27:04Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  That, you know what I mean? I watch these videos and I make fun of them on my show.

• 27:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  But what's interesting is if I then go watch something else, I'm increasing the likelihood that that video is going to get looked at as potentially subversive or dangerous.

• 27:17Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  That's why.

• 27:18Lex Fridman?

  So they make decisions about who you are, who you are as a human being, as a watcher, the visual user, based on the clusters of videos you're in. But those clusters are not manually determined. They're, they're automatically clustered.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  It's so weird. We have titles where they got upset about, and I don't even understand.

• 27:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Like, we had a title that was so innocuous, in my opinion, and the title of the episode was called Bomb Disney World. And I was asking people to consider bombing Disney World. And YouTube got angry at that. So you don't know why. You can never understand.

• 27:56Lex Fridman?

  You could have said Disney World is the bomb.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 27:59Lex Fridman?

  Say, it's just rearranging. That's what he probably meant.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Do it, but I was saying, let's start thinking about.

• 28:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Plans to do, like, not let's do it, like, but let's, let's get in the mine. Let's change the conversation.

• 28:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  I think it's very interesting, because as a comedian, you don't want to live in that world of worrying about algorithms. You don't want to worry about deplatforming and shadow banning. I mean, all these conversations that I've had with other comedians about shadow banning. I mean, it's hilarious. We all call each other, I think I'm being shadow banned. Are you being shadow banned? And nobody knew what that word was a month, I mean, a year ago. But everyone now is convinced that everything they do that isn't succeeding is being shadow banned.

• 28:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So it's this new paranoia.

• 28:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  This algorithmic paranoia now that we all kind of have, because. There are genuine instances of people being taken out of an algorithm, you know, rightly or wrongly, for whatever, however you want to believe. But then there are also things that just don't perform as well for a myriad of reasons. And, and then we're all saying like, well, they're against me. They're shutting me down and you don't know if that's true or not, you know?

• 29:04Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about this moment in history, which was really troubling to me? We could talk about several troubling aspects, but one is, uh, Amazon removing Parler from AWS. To me, that was the most clearly troubling. It felt like it created a more dangerous world when the infrastructure on which you have competing, uh, medium of communications now puts its finger on the scale, now influences who wins and who loses.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You're right. And what you're always told is like, if you don't like Twitter, create your own service.

• 29:46Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Or if you don't like something, you can do your own thing. Or if you are, uh, and, and, and basically because, you know, tech, you have to be in business with one of five companies. I think it's like Amazon, Facebook, Google, uh, YouTube and Twitter, whatever. They're like, you know, I mean, Amazon puts everything on the cloud. You know, Google and YouTube, it's, it's all basically the SEO and the advertising. And you got to get your name out there and you don't want to be buried and everything. Like because you have to do business with the, you're, it's a cartel of these companies. You understand it better than anybody, uh, that you are prevented truly. And I, I think whatever you think about Parler, whatever you think about what people are saying on Parler, whatever you think about, uh, Alex Jones, whatever you thought about Milianopoulos,

• 30:28Speaker 01

  the state has an interest in, in, and has always had an interest in, in crushing dissent. This is what the state has done. This is how they. You know, retain the the power they have by eliminating dissent where they can. Now, because you don't have, you know, three broadcast networks anymore and a handful of newspapers that were all run, by the way, by people that had been either compromised or happily, you know, happily going with the program. And you have this Wild West of the internet. People like me, people that make, I make funny content that I hope is funny, but a lot of it is wild and crazy.

• 31:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I say a lot of wild and crazy things. They're very funny. I say a lot of wild and crazy things about powerful people.

• 31:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you mock the powerful in there by bringing them down a notch. We'll probably talk about it, but humor is one of the tools to, to, to, uh, to balance the powers in society.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Well, sure, and to make people feel better about things and to, you know, whatever the case may be, right? That's my goal is to kind of like, hey, people have had a shitty day. If this video or podcast makes you laugh, that's great. I think that it won't ever, it was never going to stop at Alex Jones. Not that I think he should have been taken off everything the way he was, but this keeps going until we have sanitized all of social media. And they, what they really want it to be is what Instagram is kind of becoming, which is a marketplace of you could just go and buy sneakers, go buy a sweatshirt, go buy jeans, go buy this, go buy that. And the idea of the free exchange of information seems to be the old internet. And it seems the new internet seems to be, uh, you know, hyper,

• 32:11Speaker 01

  and I'm a capitalist, but this is like hyper capitalist in the sense of like, they only want you consuming things and they don't want you thinking too much. And that seems to be where it's heading. I've even seen that with Instagram where it's like everything on Instagram is like, buy a sweatshirt.

• 32:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  You know, and I'm like, all right, man. Hey, man, if I want a sweatshirt, I'll get it. Like, relax. You know, just every ad seems to be encouraging consumption, but very few things seem geared towards, hey.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Let's have a dialogue or let's not that Instagram was ever great for that, but like very things are geared now towards content on Instagram. A lot of it seems geared towards shopping.

• 32:54Lex Fridman?

  See, I don't know. It's an interesting point. I don't know if the consumerism that capitalism leads to is necessarily gets in the way of nuanced conversation. I feel like you could still sell Tim Dillon sweatshirts and have a difficult nuanced conversation or mock the current president, the previous president, mock the powerful, all that kind of stuff.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we try, we try to balance that.

• 33:16Lex Fridman?

  Do you have sweatshirts?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  We do. We do. They're not, are they on sale now? Fake business? Uh, we do fake business sweatshirt with the Enron logo fake business. Cause I like, I do fake business all the time.

• 33:26Lex Fridman?

  It'd be nice if you talk about Alex Jones, if you plug the sweatshirt during that conversation.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll do that. Absolutely.

• 33:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Um, but what I tend to worry about with, uh, I, I, I see social media and technology existing to flatten society. It makes people very boring. All of the experiences kids have right now are online. Many of their closest friendships are online. Their first relationships are online. Uh, the culture is, is very homogenous and that's, I think it's eliminating characters. It's eliminating interesting people. It's making people into AI. Uh, all of their tastes.

• 34:02Lex Fridman?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:04Lex Fridman?

  AI could be Charles Bukowski as well. Let's not get crazy.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  It's not there yet, right? I mean, the $75,000 dog is not doing anything, you know? So I mean, we're not there yet. Uh, listen, I hate, I get why you like AI so much. I hate people too, and I'm very amenable to AI. And I, I, I agree with you. Like, listen, I think the future, we gotta get everyone out of here. I'm with you on that. So don't think I'm.

• 34:26Lex Fridman?

  I love people. He's manipulating my mind and my.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Uh, that's why the flash of light in your eyes when you talked about that dog was so much more than any person. And I get it, by the way.

• 34:37Lex Fridman?

  You're right. I love people, but if we.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  They're not excited.

• 34:40Lex Fridman?

  If it can just use robots to kill most of them, I think that would be good for society.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I, I'm with that too. But, uh, I, I think that social media flattens people.

• 34:49Lex Fridman?

  Flattening the personalities, the characters.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Personalities of people, man. And it's just, you know, when's the last time? Like I like the idea of like, you know, and I'm, you know, somebody showing up to, uh, you know, high school with like a backpack and taking out an old CD and being like, hey, man, here's this band you've never heard of that I love or whatever. You gotta get into this. And I'm like, you know, when I talk to young, you know, I have friends that have younger brothers and everything every, and I know that the dominant culture was always dominant. I'm not an idiot, but like, I feel like it's harder to be unique and original now because so much of, of what's promoted is just this way to kind of corral people into believing and thinking a certain set of ideals that's constantly shifting and evolving. And people are just caught up in that.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  And to me, it gets very boring, very quickly. I hate being bored. And that's what it is.

• 35:38Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what to do with that because at the same time, podcasts are really popular, long form podcasts are really popular and people are, people are hungry for those kinds of conversations. There's a lot of dangerous ideas, quote unquote, flowing, uh, being spread around through podcasts, meaning just like debates.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 35:56Lex Fridman?

  You know, so that's still popular. So I don't know what to.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I agree with you.

• 36:00Lex Fridman?

  That gives me hope, I guess.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  I hope so too. And like I said, I, I, I look at the negative a lot because that's what I usually make fun of, but I'm, there's a lot of positive stuff happening too.

• 36:09Lex Fridman?

  Let's talk a bit about Alex Jones. I, so you've gotten a chance to talk to him while you were on the Joe Rogan Experience.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  I've talked, I've been on Alex's show. I've talked, I've had Alex on my show. I've talked to Alex for three hours in front of, I guess it was maybe like 15 million people, right? On Joe's show. It was a really wild conversation. I think it was one of the coolest moments in broadcasting that, that I, clearly that I've ever been a part of, but I think it's, it goes in the lexicon of like, these are big podcasts. Like I think it's one of the biggest podcasts. A week before the election, Alex Jones. I'm really grateful that Joe gave me the opportunity to, to be there. And I, it was just an amazing conversation to watch.

• 36:50Lex Fridman?

  What was the shirt you wore?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Freezer Lane. It was a fun joke that no one in tech got because we all know how funny they are. Uh, but the tech writers, which is mainly.

• 36:59Lex Fridman?

  I do not agree with the.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  It mainly blue haired people whose, you know, goal in life is to find things to give them orgasms with, you know.

• 37:06Lex Fridman?

  If you want to dye your hair blue, it's your choice. I respect it.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And but is it your choice? But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, all the tech writers, like a lot of people just. And I'm not, I'm just maligning tech unfairly, but a lot of people that senses humor were like, he's advocating for human trafficking. I'm like, it's clearly a joke because we're coming off the believe all women.

• 37:25Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  We're coming off that. It's very funny to just say Freezer Lane, hey, man, believe all women like. It's just our politics and our, and our public sphere is so schizophrenic right now. That when you point that out, people are going to be angry with you, but that was a fun shirt to wear.

• 37:40Lex Fridman?

  But on Alex, you know, I was one of the people that found him really entertaining. That, that the same kind of thing is with Bukowski, these kinds of personalities that are wild, crazy, full of ideas. Uh, they don't have to be grounded in truth at all, or they can be grounded in truth a little bit. It like, he's just playing with ideas like a jazz musician, screaming sometimes. Obviously he has some demons. Sometimes he's super angry for no reason whatsoever. It's some weird thing that he's constructed in his own head. Sometimes he's super loving and peaceful, especially lately that I've heard him. I don't know if you've seen with him with Michael Malice where he's doing a, like, uh, Malice was doing.

• 38:23Lex Fridman?

  Like, well, telling Alex Jones, I love you, Alex, you know, just this loving kindness, softness and kindness underneath it all. I don't know what to make of any of it. And then there's this huge number of people that tell me that Alex Jones is a, is dangerous for society.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:38Lex Fridman?

  So what do you do with that? Do you think he's dangerous for society? Do you think he is one of the sort of entertaining personalities of our time that shouldn't be suppressed or somewhere in between?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  I don't think that Alex per se is dangerous for society. I think the greater danger for society comes again from stifling. All dissent, right? All like anybody with a voice that uses it to critiques the government. And, and, and, and putting all of those people in a category and getting rid of them is incredibly dangerous to me more so. I think the biggest problem that Alex has ever had was when he questioned the Sandy Hook shooting. And that really was because it really is this identifiable incident that you can look at where it did get away from him and a lot of his fans who the people that are attracted to conspiracy stuff, and I have some of those fans, some of them are really smart people.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Some of them are mentally unwell. A lot of them happen to be mentally unwell. So when you have a fan base of people where some of them are mentally unwell, and you are questioning, you know, tragic events. Okay. And, and Alex was right about Epstein. He was right about a lot of things and he's, he's got no credit for that. And I understand that this piece, but sometimes when you write about 10 things and you're wrong about something, and the thing you're wrong about is so offensive to people, you're never going to get any credit for being right, even though you were right more than when you were wrong. The problem was a lot of his fans who were crazy, stalked, harassed these families and accused them of being actors and accused them of like

• 40:10Speaker 01

  faking their children's deaths. It was just horrific experience. And Alex is tied to that. And, and, and, and, and, you know, how much he inspired that by what he did on his show? I don't know, because I haven't watched hours and hours of that particular thing, like the whole Sandy Hook thing. If you listen to him, he says, I really covered it. I kind of covered it and moved on. Other people go, no, he spent a long time on it. But that's the real danger of going into that territory over and over again, going everything is, is, everything's a false flag or everything's fake. I think, I think Alex has actually been kind of reasonable. Like he's resisted a lot of the, the politics of like racial resentment on like the alt-right,

• 40:53Speaker 01

  for example, he's resisted that. He's resisted the anti-Semitic currents of a lot of that politics, right? He's resisted a lot of the, the virulently anti-trans or anti-gay stuff. No, he does dip his toe into the water of like the culture wars. Of course he does. And, but I've never really seen him. And I could be wrong about this, embrace white nationalism or identitarianism. I've never seen him really go anti-Semitic. I've never seen him take that route. When I grew up and I would turn him on every now and then, he was talking about NAFTA, the WTO, he's talking about 9/11, he was talking about, you know, the world trade organizations and a lot of these big conferences, whether it was the Bilderberg Group, whether it was

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Bohemian Grove, which he infiltrated. And he was talking about, hey, here are the most powerful people in the world, here's what they're doing. And here's how it affects you. And that was interesting to me, because it was never, no one else was really talking about it, except Alex Jones. Occasionally Art Bell on WABC, you'd listen to him at night, right? I think Alex became very controversial when he decided to back Donald Trump. And then he has a considerable following and a considerable audience, that he was then able to marshal in the direction of supporting Donald Trump. That was when the spotlight, because then he was talking to Trump, Trump did his show, Alex Jones just got bigger, right? And he

• 42:16Speaker 01

  blew up. That's the term, right? You blew off. Like, he, he, he had the good, he put out the good HBO special, whatever you want to call it. He has a hit song. He blew up. And then people started looking at the things that, you know, he was associated with. The Sandy Hook thing is a blemish on his record. I do believe he regrets it. But again, I do see the point of the families who are like, dude, fuck this guy forever. This is the worst thing I ever went through. It's a very tough, I understand the people that say that. I understand, and I, and I understand the people that go, when you coordinate, when you have tech companies that act in a coordinated manner to just get rid of someone, they don't have any way to defend themselves. It's, it's a little terrifying when you think about

• 42:58Speaker 01

  that power being abused. And how wouldn't it be?

• 43:02Lex Fridman?

  Do you think he should not have been banned from all these platforms?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I, I don't think, I do think that if you are a private company, right? I do think, and this is where you run into this, this problem. Like, I, I don't know, if these tech companies were government utilities, would that decrease people's likelihood of being banned? I don't know. Right? So I'm, I'm, I, I, I understand the benefit of them being treated like public utilities and people thinking they have the right to a Twitter. I'm, I've never I don't know. I have very little confidence. I mean, the government's trying to roll out a vaccine in California and we vaccinated like five people. I mean, in terms of what we need to do in the state, right? So maybe if it was a government utility, I do think someone like Alex, like there should be

• 43:47Speaker 01

  some process. So if you're gonna get rid of someone, they should have a way to defend themselves. There should be more democratic process that you can go through than just being unilaterally taken off something. But like, then you run into the, you're like, am I gonna say that everyone deserves? No, if you're threatening or harassing people or threatening to kill them, publishing their private information, if you're committing crimes on these platforms, obviously, the people that own these platforms are gonna be like, we can't, we're not gonna allow this to happen. So I understand that there is a line, right? There is some, like, people that say there's no line aren't really thinking, like, there is a line. I just don't, that line seems to be moving all the time, and it

• 44:32Speaker 01

  seems to be a very hard thing to police. But I don't think you can remove a guy off everything. And then also, bank accounts won't give him debit cards or credit cards. I don't know if you talked to him about that. But like, you know, there were financial institutions that were refusing to let him, you know, park his money there. So I mean, it really does get pretty terrifying pretty quickly.

• 44:53Lex Fridman?

  Probably without any transparency from those companies. So you're right, it feels like there should be a process of just having, for him to defend himself.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I think there needs to be a process for people to defend themselves. I, every day I wake up and I go, is something I said in a video gonna get taken out of context? Is somebody gonna get angry? Is somebody gonna be, you know, I say wild stuff, because that's what makes me laugh, that's what makes my friends laugh, and that's what makes my audience laugh. So I never, ever, people, you know, whatever, whatever political side you come down on, I think if you make your living speaking, it's always interesting to me if you are pro the deplatforming. That's odd.

• 45:36Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting to consider a kind of a jury. Context to where, you know, there's transparency about why your video about bombing Disney World might be taken down, like it's, it gets taken down and then there is, it's almost like creating a little court case, a mini court case and not in a legal sense, but in the, in the public sphere and then people should be able to have, you know, you pick representatives of our current society and have a discussion about that and make a real vote, you know, just have like jury locks himself up in a discussion, that kind of, that kind of process might be necessary. Right now, what happens is Twitter is completely,

• 46:20Lex Fridman?

  first of all, they're just mostly not aware of everything they're doing. There's too much stuff, but the stuff they're aware about, they make the decision in closed doors, meetings and without any transparency.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:33Lex Fridman?

  To the rest of the company, actually, but also transparency to the rest of the world. And so, and then all they say is we're doing, we're making the decisions because the people, they use things like violence. So violence equals bad. And if this person is quote unquote inciting violence, therefore that gives us enough reason to ban them without any kind of process. It's, I mean, it's interesting. I'm, I'm torn in the whole thing. If it was indeed, there's no transparency about it, but if Parler was indeed inciting violence, like if there was brewing of violence, potential violence where, you know, thousands

• 47:13Lex Fridman?

  of people might die because of some kind of riot, like this is scary thing about mob, about when a lot of people get together.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:24Lex Fridman?

  Who are good people, like legitimately good people that love this country that don't see enemies yet around them. But if they get excited together and there's guns involved.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  It's a problem.

• 47:36Lex Fridman?

  And then some cop gets nervous and shoots one person, another person shoots the cop, and then there's a lot of shooting involved. And then it goes from five people dying in the Capitol to thousands of people dying in the Capitol.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Well, in fairness too. To defend the people at cap, they didn't shoot the cop, they bludgeoned him to death with a fire extinguisher. Yes. So I do, I do wanna just kinda put that out as a, as a defense of them. Listen, I'm sure there was some wild shit going on on Parler and I think the problem, here's the problem, right? There's a lot of people that just wanna go on these sites and say they wanna kill everyone. Yeah. And the problem is, you know, at what point do you shut them all down? Like, I think a lot of people are just living in a world where they're powerless. Yeah. They don't have any political power. They don't have any economic power, right? They can't throw their money around. Uh, they don't have healthcare. Their, their job security isn't great.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Uh, they might be living in a community that doesn't have the resources they would like it to have. Uh, they're, they're not happy and thrilled. And then they have these sites where they can go on and just say, man, I'd like to fucking burn it all down. And distinguishing a guy blowing off steam and saying wild stuff from a genuine threat is a very hard thing to do. You know? Like, I ha- I've threatened to kill, uh, I got banned from Airbnb, I threatened to kill the people, um, that banned me comedically. Yeah. Comedically. This is a joke. I'm not going to kill you. Yeah. This is a joke, cuz I'm blowing off steam and I'm angry. Do you know how many people that my parent, like, my dad's like, I'm gonna fucking kill this guy, and my mom's like, I'm gonna fucking kill? Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  You know, they were talking about each other. But it's, but none of it ever happened, but we should be, I think you, you, you have to create a space for people to threaten to overthrow the government. Yeah. As long as they don't violently do it. Yeah. Like, I mean, does that make any sense? Like, I mean, as long as they're not gonna go hurt innocent people, what are you gonna do? Like, there's so many people out there that she's, that's why a lot of these things, like, you know, 4chan, these sites, a lot of people going on there, they just wanna say the most fucked up shit. Yeah. Because they, it's the thing that gives them, they can laugh or they can release steam and it's, it is immature, it is stupid, it's not productive, it's not, you know? But, at the end of the day...

• 50:03Speaker 01

  If you're not going to give people health insurance, you gotta give them something. It's like when someone in this country dies that everyone disagrees with, right? Political figure, media figure. A lot of people dance on their grave online. And then everyone, people goes, and the other side will always do it. Like if a conservative dies and everyone goes, great. Conservatives goes, this is grotesque that you. And then when RBG dies, they all have parties and the conservatives go, great. You have to let people in this country enjoy the deaths of their enemies. You do because they don't have much else. Again, if you gave them other things, you might say, guy, you can go get a knee operation. Why don't you stop?

• 50:46Speaker 01

  But if, if they're working for shit wages and you haven't figured out a way to, to, to treat them, treat their cancer diagnosis and they don't like, I mean, life, you know, it, it, you know, you gotta, you gotta derive pleasure from something, right?

• 51:03Lex Fridman?

  It's an interesting point that anger is a good valve, like to, for, if, if your life is suffering, that there's something very powerful about anger, but I still have hope that it doesn't have to be. I mean, that kind of channeling into anger that then becomes hate led us into a lot of troubles in human history. So you have to be careful empowering people too much in that anger. Especially, I think Mike, I think I understand why people were nervous about Parler, about Twitter and so on.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 51:39Lex Fridman?

  Because all that shit talking about violence was now paired with, let's get together at this location. This was a new thing. Like it's not just being on whatever platform, talking shit. It's saying, we're going to in physical space meet. And then everybody got, all these platforms got nervous. Well, what happens when all these shit talkers, all these angry people that are just steam, letting off steam meet in the physical space. And there was probably overreach. Almost definitely overreach, but I can understand why they were nervous.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  I agree. There doesn't seem to be, and this is when Trump got elected and when you have like, whatever you have, right? Whether you have riots in Portland and Seattle, where you have the Antifa people doing crazy things, you have like, you know, the people storming the Capitol. There never seems to be a ton of, uh, an examination of why these ideas are becoming popular. Why are people so angry?

• 52:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  What is leading people to this?

• 52:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Why are we here? What about their lives is to the point where they need to show up at these places? And like, and now obviously there's, there's going to be people on the fringe. There'll always be the mentally unwell. There'll always be people that want to destroy society. But when you look at how popular largely, you know, long discredited things, whether it's fascism, you know, totalitarian communism, all of these things are like, why are they back? Why are they back in a big way? And why are, why are people so fed up with the status quo? That they're finding, you know, solace in the most extreme, uh, discredited theories of how to run and operate societies.

• 53:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Theories that have led to deaths of a lot of people. So to me, I'm like,

• 53:23Speaker 01

  if those people at the Capitol, yes, if they were going to work, if there's, you know, if they were able to go out and drink at Chili's, if they were able to get a fucking checkup, right? Like if their job paid a little bit better, and I'm not saying that this is all the reason, right? I'm sure that there's a lot of people there that are doing quite well and they're still nuts. But like the anger and the rage that's boiling to the surface of this society, does it come from the fact that across the board, people in very different areas and, and with very different political beliefs feel like they are being fucked over? And there's nothing they can do about it?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  That's what the, the baseline to me, they look at the people that run the country and run the world, whether they're tech titans, the guys that you talked to, or whether they're people that run the government, whether they're people that run large banks, large media companies, the people that have created this kind of, you know, infrastructure that everyone lives in, these people are incredibly powerless. And when you push people to that point. Logically, sadly, and unfortunately, the next thing does seem to be violence.

• 54:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the thing that troubles me a lot is you said, uh, nobody's asking why these beliefs are out there, but sometimes it's not even acknowledged that people are hurting, people are angry, just even acknowledging that all the conspiracy theories that are out there, acknowledging that they're out there and then people are thinking about it and talking about it just because otherwise, so it's not acknowledged in this nuanced way. What happens is you say, okay, 70 million people are white supremacists. It's just throwing a kind of blanket statement.

• 55:21Lex Fridman?

  And of course that gets them angrier and more makes them feel more powerless. And that ultimately that that's what's been painful for me to see is that there's not an acknowledgement that most people are good.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:41Lex Fridman?

  It's there's circumstances where it's just you're pissed off.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:46Lex Fridman?

  Because you are powerless. I mean, most of us are powerless.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  You could fall in with a bad crowd. That's the thing. You can just fall in.

• 55:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  And it doesn't mean that you're you don't, there's not blame. You know, you're obviously you're you have agency, you're a person, you know, but the idea that like you could be rehabilitated, you could do something stupid or you could fall into the great, you know, a group of people that are, and then in a few years you could go, what the fuck was I doing?

• 56:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  You know, I'm an ex-drug addict. I know what it's like to go from being one thing to being another thing. Right? I'm still a drug addict. If I would have used drugs right now or drank, I would still be addicted to them. Right? I mean, it's not something that I can ever change about myself, but I know what it's like to go from one thing to another thing. So when you look at racism or whatever ism, homophobia, misogyny, whatever, whatever you're looking at antisemitism and you go, that's a fixed condition where nobody's ever going to be able to change. Nobody's ever going to be able to be rehabilitated. Nobody's ever going to be able to reimagine themselves in a different way. To me, you're just, you're throwing away someone and you're making them feel helpless and worthless. Um, and that's going to lead to antisocial behavior that spills out into the violence. We don't have

• 56:55Speaker 01

  a very redemptive society.

• 56:57Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  That's a huge factor. We don't have a redemptive society. That's why I like OJ Simpson, because OJ Sim- yeah, yes, he did a bad thing supposedly.

• 57:07Lex Fridman?

  Allegedly, yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  But he's very kind now on Twitter and he makes very nice points about how we all have to get involved in the political process and he's on golf courses and I like watching people golf. I don't do it, but I like watching him do it. And he's like an elder statesman because I remember him from The Naked Gun and I choose to forgive him, um, you know, for, for, for whatever happened there, which I don't know.

• 57:29Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  But, um, I choose to forgive him really for, I mean, obviously, you know, say that what they say is he cut his wife's head off, but I, I can look past that.

• 57:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  And redeem him because he's very like stable on Twitter and he's a good, like, I see all these people going crazy on Twitter and I'm like, there's maybe, OJ's lived a full life.

• 57:50Lex Fridman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  I think there's a benefit to that. There's a benefit to kind of living a full life.

• 57:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. How many of us have not at least tried to murder somebody?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Listen, OJ's had the highs and the lows, but he did it on his terms and there's a real-

• 58:06Lex Fridman?

  It's like a Frank Sinatra song.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did it my way. I mean, like, there, there's a benefit to that and he seems like a very well-adjusted person now. So, I mean, I don't know. How is, how is that a fact? But it is a fact and that's an uncomfortable fact.

• 58:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, this is a strong case for forgiveness in a, in one of the more extreme cases, I suppose. Uh, but yeah, there's not a, a process of forgiveness. It seems like people just take a single event from your, or sometimes a single statement from your past and use that as a, a categorical, like, capture of the essence of this particular human being. So murder might be a thing that you should get a timeout for a little-

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Murder is bad. Murder, and, and let's just say that.

• 58:51Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Murder is not good.

• 58:53Lex Fridman?

  I'm glad you make this definitive statement.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  OJ, OJ's an interesting cat because you're, you're like, he's very stable on Twitter. He's very like, he's like, let's take a look at it, guys. Like, we need more of his energy. That's what I'm trying to say.

• 59:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  I know, like, yes, it was bad. He killed the woman in the waiter.

• 59:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Um, was not for that.

• 59:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  I wish he didn't do that, but the trial, the OJ Simpson trial was such a fun-

• 59:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And like you said, we need more fun people in society.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Well, we might.

• 59:22Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of fun people, you've, uh, your politics have been all over the place.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  I hope so. I hope so. I mean, that's imagine not imagine someone whose politics weren't all over the place. It would seem odd.

• 59:35Lex Fridman?

  Right, like.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  In the 10 years that I've been politically conscious, just because I'm, you know, 35 and 20, no, I've probably been conscious for over two decades, but like Democrats have become Republicans, Republicans become Democrats. I remember when Ann Coulter said, we need to, he defended George W. Bush, when he said, we need to go out and Christianize or, you know, modernize the Arab world. We need to democratize the Arab world. And then Ann Coulter backed Donald Trump. And the, the, all, all the right wing in America believed in nation building. They believed in going out and democratizing areas that might breed radical terrorists, whether it was Iraq, or wherever you were going, toppling regimes and instituting new democratic norms in those countries. That was the right wing point of

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  view when I grew up. Then, the right wing switched to, we are going to be isolationist, we're going to take care of America, first and foremost, we're not going to go into other countries. And then the Democrats, who when I grew up were doves, and, and, and the right wing people were more hawkish, and the Democrats were like, the military solutions aren't the way. We need to have multilateral diplomatic coalitions to solve all the problems. Now, you know, Rachel Maddow's like, let's nuke Russia every night on MSNBC. The Democrats are like, we need, we need strong presence in Syria. We need a strong presence. We need to counter Putin all over the globe. We need to, so they are more hawkish

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  on things. So, literally, I have watched two political parties literally flip.

• 1:01:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  And it's crazy to watch.

• 1:01:04Lex Fridman?

  And in some sense, I've watched that as well, because I, when I first saw Barack Obama, I admired that he was against the war. This is whatever, uh, when, maybe before he was a senator, he spoke out against the Iraq war.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:19Lex Fridman?

  And, and then, you know.

• 1:01:23Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't feel like, it feels like his administration was more hawkish than dovish. In a sense with all the drone attacks, with the inability to pull back, or at least en masse, efficiently pull back from all the military involvement that we have all over the world.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:44Lex Fridman?

  And just the language.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  What I think is interesting about that, what's interesting about Obama, because it's a very interesting study, is that presidents are controlled in very different ways, right? You know, presidents can be controlled by different factors, power factions within Washington. You know, I think one of the reasons that Obama was maybe, you know, he had a very close relationship with John Brennan, he was the CIA director, and Obama was very close with John Brennan, and Obama was very, you know, I think malleable to the extent that, you know, the CIA, and I've had CIA agents on my show, John Kiriaku, a guy who went to jail for exposing torture, was saying that like, you know, you get into the Oval Office, all of a sudden you're having the presidential daily briefing every day, and

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  the intelligence people come in and they go, listen, man, I mean, there's gonna be a terrorist attack on your watch if you don't do X, Y, and Z. They go, we have, you know, they call it like Blue Book information, which is five levels above top secret, and they go like, hey, man, a guy in Iran at a cafe said he's blowing everything up next week, and you know, I mean, it's the same thing as Parler, you don't know if it's true or not. But now the president's making decision on usually a lot of uncorroborated intelligence that goes into a presentation for the president where you're just terrified every day, and you don't want a terrorist attack on your watch. Now, so why are they getting all this information? Because a lot of the people in Washington have an interest in perpetual, constant, ongoing warfare. And there's a lot of financial gain to be had from that.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  So they're sneaking their information into the presentations that are going to the president, and then the president is now behaving and going, fuck, I don't want a bomb going off, we gotta do what we gotta do. And whatever version of that happens, that is really kind of what is happening. Whereas presidents are being controlled by forces that are outside of the political sphere, but very much still in it, and they have a lot of, that's what the deep state is, you know, Trump, there's a lot of ridiculing Trump of going, the deep state doesn't exist. It absolutely exists. There's been books about it written by liberal journalists. The deep state is only a term for unelected largely power factions in Washington DC

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  that outlive any presidential administration. These are people that might work at the State Department. They might work at the Defense Department. These are people that are not always working officially in any government capacity. They might be private companies. They might be military contractors. They might be people at Boeing or Raytheon or General Dynamics. And they constitute a group of people that Trump kind of called the swamp. But Trump had really no interest in draining the swamp, but he articulated these things. And this is what it is. You have a lot of interested parties that have budgets that they want. Big budgets. Everybody wants a budget in Washington, whether you know what it is. They want money.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  And these are the people who really control presidents. So this idea that the president is the be all and end all has got to be smashed, which is why the horse race model of politics and being like, is it right wing? Is it left wing? Is it what team am I on and what color am I wearing? It's very simplistic, but the reality is this is an empire. It's past its peak. We're in trouble.

• 1:04:59Lex Fridman?

  The United States is an empire past its peak.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's just his. You could prove that case in court.

• 1:05:05Lex Fridman?

  Well, let's go to court right now, but I do love the more complex idea that there's just human beings who crave power and seek ways to attain that power through different ways. If you have Barack Obama or George Bush or Donald Trump, there's different attack vectors.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:05:24Lex Fridman?

  Different ways to attain that power and then you can use that to leverage. It probably doesn't have to be just in Washington DC. There's people who crave power all over the world.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Of course, not in, but where we are now in Los Angeles, these people are all good.

• 1:05:40Lex Fridman?

  LA.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Studio exec. Yeah, good people that I, from what I understand, they treat everyone fairly and they're nice. But he sees the bad guys, but out here in LA.

• 1:05:50Lex Fridman?

  West Coast.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Everyone's lovely.

• 1:05:52Lex Fridman?

  So amidst this fun exploration in your mind through the political landscape that you've done over the past couple decade that you've been conscious politically, where does Donald Trump fit into this picture for you? Is?

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Great question. Well, he didn't, right? Because we didn't, he wasn't political until four years ago, right? He got political very quickly before. I mean, he was firing off crazy tweets about where Obama was born or whatever. But he was, he got into politics like very quickly and then he became the president, right? So it was like, we didn't, I knew him as Donald Trump, this crazy New York City character, the host of The Apprentice. I didn't think much about him. He was just constant, you know, like, he was just this constant figure. Like, I don't think much about Warren Buffett. Like, I know, like, Trump's like, he's married to a new showgirl all the time, and he's always opening another casino, and he's on TV.

• 1:06:50Lex Fridman?

  Warren Buffett, really?

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  No, Trump. But like, Warren Buffett is the opposite, right? Warren Buffett is like, been married for a billion years, lives in a little house in Omaha. But these are the, that's what I associate Trump. Like, I don't think about Warren Buffett. I don't think about these people. They're just guys that I've known forever that have like, you know, a, you know, you associate certain things with them, right? And Trump, we always associate with kind of vulgar, garish, new money, billionaire, married a lot, you know, casinos, Miss Universe pageants. But again, you know, but it makes perfect sense that he, he really was able to become president at the moment where we were had, we were about to have Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush. And I think Americans felt like this

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  is now the oligarchy is spinning right in our face. You're not even making it feel like there's an appearance of democracy. We have two crime families vowing for control of the country every four years. And then there was this rogue kind of upstart guy that was really about himself. You know, Trump doesn't really care that much about the, I mean, really was summarized perfectly when he left and he just said, hey, have a good life. That's what he said before he got on Andrew's Air Force Base. If you watch his speech, he goes, hey, have a good life. That's what he really feel like, hey, have a good life. I'm, I'm gonna get on a plane right now and fly to a castle I own in Mar-a-Lago,

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  in Florida. And really, I'm not gonna think too much about you people outside of how I can get more attention in the future.

• 1:08:21Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you like a therapy question?

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:23Lex Fridman?

  What is your favorite and least favorite quality of Donald Trump?

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  So my least favorite quality of Donald Trump, I think, because there's a few of them, his lack of empathy, complete and total lack of empathy. I don't feel that he cares about human beings on any level. And I feel like that's maybe or should be a requirement, right? I mean, I don't think he cares. I think it's obvious that he doesn't care. I mean, he's sent, you know, basically, he's saying like, they're in there, Mike Pence is in there, he knows that his people are going to get, try to get into a capital. I mean, those motherfuckers are not going to have jobs, they're going to go to federal prison, and he doesn't care.

• 1:09:09Lex Fridman?

  He doesn't care.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  As long as they're storming the Capitol to prove the point that he thinks he won the election, he has no concern for these people, his followers. He leads them lambs to the slaughter, right? So that's, that's, that's not a respectable quality. My favorite quality of Donald Trump is his willingness to call bullshit. So his willingness to call bullshit out. He doesn't play the game. He will, you know, when people say about Putin, Putin kills people, he goes, we kill a lot of people here, too. Like, he's, he's willing and able to break the fourth wall and say things that no politician has ever said. He's willing to call out hypocrisy, you know, of course, not his own, but the media, the members of the political establishment, that's a laudable quality. It's an entertaining

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  quality, right? We all like it. I love to, I'm like, this guy's saying something that a lot of people want said.

• 1:09:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  That being said, it's coupled with no real work or action.

• 1:10:02Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  So it's not coupled with anything behind it that he just wants to, we did an episode of my podcast once where it's like essentially, he's like criticizing the deep state, he wants a deeper state. He wants a deeper state, like he hired his daughter and her husband. I mean, this is not a guy that's interested in transparency and openness. He's a guy that would just prefer, he wants to run the mafia state.

• 1:10:25Lex Fridman?

  But he shakes up the norms of social discourse, political discourse, and that people are just hungry for that.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:33Lex Fridman?

  Like, he got banned from Twitter, from all the different platforms. Do you think, is there an argument to be made for and against banning?

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  There's always arguments to be made for everything. A permanent ban seems to be an overreaction to me. He's the president of the United States. It also rearranges the power, like, whether you like him or hate him, love him, hate him, he was the president. We've elevated Twitter is now more powerful than the president. It's like, do you want that to be long term, the salute, that the reality like now Jack at Twitter is more powerful than the president of the United States? Is that a good paradigm going forward? I don't know. I'm not, listen, maybe give him a little time out for a few days.

• 1:11:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  I think a timeout, a little spanking.

• 1:11:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Certainly, but I don't know if a permanent ban across the board on every social media. I mean, they banned him on Grindr. I mean, this is how hilarious, right? They banned him across the board on everything. I don't think he could get an Airbnb now, neither can I, but like, I don't think he can do anything. Again, I just, I look back and there's so many people, I have very smart, intelligent friends that go, yeah, but who cares? Yeah, but he's bad. Yeah, but blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but I don't like Milianopoulos. Yeah, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you have such faith. You have such faith that it's always going to be the people you disliked that are banned.

• 1:11:49Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  It's always going to be the, it's never going to be you. Man, you have so much faith in the government. You have so much faith in tech oligarchs you've never met. You have so much face, faith in the security state that they're going to always make the right decisions. And they're not going to penalize people that shouldn't be penalized. To me, I'm like, wow. I've never had that much faith in any human being ever, including myself. I wouldn't want that power. I would start deplatforming people that I hate. I would deplatform my aunt. You know what I mean? I would deplatform everyone I know. I mean, so that it's like, it's such an insane power to give somebody like, who gets heard? Who gets to speak?

• 1:12:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm worried about the effect it has on people like you, actually.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:12:29Lex Fridman?

  Of being like, everybody's a little more nervous in what they say.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:12:37Lex Fridman?

  And that, that's a big problem.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:38Lex Fridman?

  Because then you're just like, long-term unmasked, like we're talking about. It has an effect where people just become more bland.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, self censorship.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Anxiety, all of these things go into it. We try to fight it. I try to fight it. I think, I think I gotta still do what makes me laugh and what makes me laugh is often fucked up. And it's often, you know, it's not always fucked up in a way that, you know, it's gonna get me thrown off something, but like, I think pushing certain buttons is funny to me, so I gotta keep doing that. Part of, part of the problem is that so many of the lines are blurred, right? So you have comedians that are commentators and commentators that are comedians and politicians. So it's like, it's harder to defend of like, hey, I'm a comedian, leave me alone.

• 1:13:20Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  That defense becomes harder when like, all of these lines are blurring. Everybody's kind of everything now. So like, people say to me, you should run for office and they're serious. And I'm like, you're crazy. But they're serious, like, so the blurring of everything means that people aren't in their lanes as much. And that you go, well, this guy is dangerous because he's not just making a joke. He's doing something else and he's using humor. And I'm like, I'm really not. I'm really just trying to make a joke. That's all. That's really what I'm trying to do. But I do think that because of the flattening, uh, there's a lot of people out there that go, they take aim at humor because they go, humor is where bad ideas can kind of, you know, start and flourish.

• 1:14:03Lex Fridman?

  But don't you, uh, to put some responsibility on you, uh,

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Lex Fridman?

  don't you think humor is a way to, uh, that you are the modern, like, Jordan Peterson style intellectual, that humor is actually a tool of

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  It can be.

• 1:14:17Lex Fridman?

  changing the zeitgeist, changing the social norms.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  But it also cannot be. I don't think it's any one thing. And I think there's a lot of pressure, uh, for a comedian. You can be funny and right. You can be funny and wrong. If your goal is to be right, you might end up being right and not funny. So the reality is funny has to come first. There are brilliant people that have been funny and, and correct according to people, right? But, uh, at the end of the day, people that put way too much Faith in what comedy is, most of what comedy is, is people showing up to strip malls and, and telling jokes for an hour while people eat chicken fingers and they all get drunk and they laugh and they feel a little bit better about their lives. That's really the majority of comedy. Then there's like 10 famous people that are really famous that do a version of that in an arena.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  But the amount of cultural power they have has always been greatly exaggerated. My uncles loved George Carlin, who was anti-military industrial complex, anti-this, anti-that. And then they would go vote for Ronald Reagan. They didn't care. It doesn't, it doesn't really, it does, it's not as powerful as you think. I wish it was. It feels good. It feels good for me to say, I am the new thing. It really isn't. It truly isn't. No one is, comedians are the people that get on stage and say, we're fucked up. We're, we're, we're, we're drug addicts, we're sex addicts, we're fat, we're gross, we can't manage our money. We can't stop eating. We can't stop fucking doing horrible things. We're liars, we're narcissists, we're scumbags. We're the people that get out and say that.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Only a psychopath would look at us and go, show me the way. Like, it's not.

• 1:15:52Lex Fridman?

  I disagree with you.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:15:54Lex Fridman?

  Then I'm, then I'm a psychopath.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Well, and that's, that's, I mean, I don't think, I don't think, no pushback here.

• 1:16:00Lex Fridman?

  That's, it's another issue.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  But you know what I'm saying.

• 1:16:04Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't because, I mean, I understand you using this as a psychological tool for yourself to give yourself freedom.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:12Lex Fridman?

  But the reality is you are one of the rare comedians like a George Carlin, who is, besides being funny.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. When I hear things like that, I'm like, okay, you're being very sweet, but like, I agree. I understand what you're saying. I do stuff that makes, hopefully makes you think.

• 1:16:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  I hope that's what good comedy is. But I think, I, I, I try to do that. But I also would hate to feel shackled to the idea of that I had to make a point and that point had to be correct. I think the best comedy makes fun of everything, it makes fun of both sides. And then there's a deeper truth about hu- humanity revealed. But then what happens is people take that deeper truth and go, let's politicize it. But what does he mean? Is it the right or the left? And I'm like, I'm doing something that I think speaks to hopefully people on both sides for everybody because I'm making fun of people on the left and the right and in the center and people that don't care and people that do care. And I'm trying to figure out a way to do it, but then immediately anything of value in this culture right now is like, how do we politicize it?

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  How do we put it in a box? So yes, I think comedy could produce a lot of inherently valuable things, reflective, thoughtful things. But then immediately, can it be put in this box where all of those things can be used politically? No. And unfortunately, like when they say like comedy is a great way to speak truth to power. It is, but I don't know how much it changes things. I don't know how much a joke can dethrone a king. I know the idea is nice, but let's look at the practical applications. I mean, we had brilliant comics, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Richard Pryor.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  We had people talk about so many problems in society, illustrate them, put a spotlight on them. And we still have them. They're worse now than they've ever.

• 1:17:59Lex Fridman?

  Ah, that's not true. I think the society is better and I so to push back in my perspective, it's very possible that those voices were the exact reason we have the world today, which I do believe is actually, uh, I mean, on, um, on the, on the boring old measures of what makes a good world, which is, uh, you know, the amount of violence in the world, the amount of opportunity, that all those kinds of the measures, even happiness, all of those things measured, things have been improving. And Stephen Pidker gets a lot of shit for this, but he's really good at articulating how the data says pretty clearly that the world is getting better. And it's arguable that the freedoms we do enjoy currently are thanks to the comedic voices or the people who mock. So to me,

• 1:18:45Lex Fridman?

  It's possible that humor is the very thing that saves the world. Humor is the very thing that keeps, is the balance of power in the world.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  It might, but I think a lot of the things that those guys criticized, whether it was militarism or the elites, the lying, the corruption, the bribery.

• 1:19:01Lex Fridman?

  It's still there.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  That's still going on and it's always gonna go on, right? Because that's the nature of human beings. We call it out, we point it out, but we don't have a plan to change. It's not really our job.

• 1:19:11Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  And, and I think that too much now is like, well, comedians should have a, like, I don't tell people who to vote for. Like, the idea that comedians went and told people who to vote for is like, to me, is crazy. I, I understand, like, people have strong opinions, but like, I, I believe I have a job. And my job is to make you laugh or whatever, maybe make you think, but like, my job is not to tell you who to vote for. I mean, it's absurd.

• 1:19:33Lex Fridman?

  But see, the thing you do.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35Lex Fridman?

  By the comedy, like, on your Twitter, that people should definitely follow.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  I believe that, at Jim J Dillon. I agree with you.

• 1:19:42Lex Fridman?

  Oh, on the, on this point of, uh...

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with you.

• 1:19:45Lex Fridman?

  That people should follow you. Yeah, you, you give me, you give me freedom to think on my own. Meaning like, you're shaking things up to where I'm, I don't feel constrained about what I can think about.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Well, that's awesome.

• 1:20:02Lex Fridman?

  And that...

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  I thank you.

• 1:20:03Lex Fridman?

  So you're not telling me what to think. You're giving me the freedom to think. And that's what great comedy does, is, you know, I don't, I, I don't often agree with George Carlin. Like, he can get pretty political sometimes. But, you know, just the ability to do that, it's so rare. Podcasts do that too now. Like, there's certain people that can really just challenge you to, uh, even when you disagree with them, to sort of be like, "Oh, it's okay to think about this kind of stuff."

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I appreciate that, because that's awesome. And I mean, that, that's great. And to a guy like you, who's a brilliant guy, that's great. If I'm giving you the license to think, then man, the world is completely fucked. But I'm happy about that.

• 1:20:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:44Lex Fridman?

  Speaking about the world being completely fucked, Alex Jones turned on QAnon. I know almost

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  It's a very tough marriage. They had a rough marriage. They fought it. They fought it out for years. And eventually, we just knew someone was gonna leave someone. QAnon tried to leave him a few months ago.

• 1:21:01Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so it wasn't mutual?

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, QAnon was staying at someone else's house. The car wasn't in the driveway. Yeah, well, the thing about QAnon that makes it a lot of fun is it's kind of a make it up as you go along. I'm a drug addict, right? So often, my lies aren't planned. They're in the moment. A lot of what I do on the podcast, a lot, you know, it's all in the moment. I'll have an idea what I want to talk about, and I rant, and I go. And I've been like stoned, and I show up at home, and my parents are like, what's going on? There was $50 on the mantle, now it's not there. And I'm like, well, and I gotta make something up on the spot, right? I've been, you know, are you drinking again? No, I'm not. And then you gotta have a, well, you were gone for two days, no one

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  knows where you were, and somebody said you left your car. Well, I was, well, this is, I was at a sales conference, and I left my car, I flew to Phoenix. Like, I understand what that is. QAnon is an ever-evolving conspiracy theory, where the events are happening in the past, in the present, and in the future. It's kind of hilarious. Every conspiracy theory is like Kennedy, something like that, that there's a lot of truth in that, or all truth. But at the end of the day, it's like you're looking back from 30,000 feet, analyzing little things that have already happened. QAnon's like, so I think Alex is kind of like, I'm a little tired of the constant, evolving nature of that conspiracy theory.

• 1:22:20Lex Fridman?

  So he's not a fan of like, the jazz that is QAnon? So they're not, because they're improvising constantly?

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  Correct. They're improvising. Alex is like, hey, man, I was on board a little bit, but at the end of the day, it's getting a little annoying, because it can turn on you. Eventually, you become part of the conspiracy. They'll, Alex is controlled opposition, that's what they'll say. Eventually, you, because QAnon just eats things. So it's a conspiracy that just eats things. The minute you start to say, hey, man, maybe that's not, it'll just eats you, and go, well, you're in on it. Everyone's in on it. Everyone's a satanic pedophile. Everybody. Everyone that questions it is, uh, eating children. And you go, wait a minute, that seems illogical. And but now There's not enough children. Now there's not enough. And I think QAnon's over now, unfortunately, uh, um, because for these people, but I think fortunately for them, they're gonna have to find a new hobby. But I think it's over now because even the best QAnon people now are starting

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  to go, hey, man, this might not be going down the way we thought. Yeah. But they've literally gone as far as to say that like Biden and Trump switched faces. Trump's actually still the president, except Biden's, you have to be a real moron now. You gotta be real stupid now. You it's at the end, like when it was cool, like when the Epstein stuff happened, QAnon was like, it was party at Q. Yeah. And then when the Hunter Biden laptop stuff started to happen, they were like dancing, like it's time. And then Biden wins and they're like, wait, whoa. And it's just like, it's the day after the party. QAnon, if you ever went to a party in high school or college, QAnon right now is the day after the party. You wake up, it's, it's, it's 12 noon, the

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  sun is hitting you in the face, you're hungover, there's a stench of disgusting beer and cigarettes all over the house. You're like, what the fuck happened here? Yeah. I gotta get out of here and get a bacon, egg and cheese. That's what QAnon is. They gotta sober up, get out of that house, get a bacon, egg and cheese and go, man, we were fucking whacked. We were high, dude. I thought Nancy Pelosi was eating children for four years and that Donald Trump was gonna put her in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. Wow. That was, cause I mean, it's interesting. People had to do that after the 60s. They were like, yeah, I just did a bunch of acid and I lived in a ranch in Malibu and fucked everyone I ever saw. Yeah. And they're like, I thought that was the way the world was gonna go. And I followed some shaman guy, some guru who just wanted to fuck me and 10 other people that were

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  living there. And, uh, we did that for three years. Apparently we never created the utopia we thought we were gonna have. And now I'm back working here, you know, at Allstate Insurance. And we have great policies and we'd love you to come in the office and we can break them down for you. It all ends, folks. All the law, all the bullshit ends, but it's fun. They had so much fun. QAnon was hard to get mad at because they were, this was all they had. Yeah.

• 1:25:03Lex Fridman?

  And they were, they were quite good at it.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  And they were good at it. And they, and, and, and, and it was a lot of desperate people, but they were also rich idiots. There's also like dumb, rich people and you, the, those are like the saddest people in Q. Cause it's like, they should, they have the resources to do other things. But they just love Q. They're like, I'm just into this. I'm like, you're rich. Go do something. How incurious are you? Go to the Amazon. Go bird watch. I don't know, but they're, you know, so.

• 1:25:34Lex Fridman?

  Play golf.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  It's sad, but they're like done now. I mean, they're, they're, oh, it's over.

• 1:25:38Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so you think this is the, uh?

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  I think everything's ending. My, my whole thing is that Trump's out, QAnon's over, quarantine is gonna end. Everything's gonna go back to something that's more recognizable. I think that.

• 1:25:51Lex Fridman?

  Are you optimistic about the 2021 and what the world looks like?

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  To a, in certain aspects, I have optimism and then I have, I have short-term optimism and long-term pessimism.

• 1:26:01Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Meaning that I think in the short-term, things can get better. I think long-term, because there's so many forces that are out of our control, that are evolving in ways I barely understand, that are carving up society, it's gonna be very tough long-term to be completely optimistic, like, hey, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be good forever. But short-term, I think, yeah, this quarantine will end, things will get better, the economy will get a little better. Uh, the constant Trump craziness will die down a little bit. Uh, that's my hope and people can go back to focusing on things that matter. Which is, you know, the things that are near you and close to you.

• 1:26:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the humans around you.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Humans around you, not Nancy Pelosi. I have my, I have uncles that talk about Nancy Pelosi. I'm like, you've never met her. You'll never meet her. Shut up.

• 1:26:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And I, I, I have a belief that this kind of local love and kindness that you naturally can have for human beings that you actually know, can be expanded at scale through the social networks that we use, that we build. Twitter is currently failing at that miserably.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  That would be great.

• 1:27:04Lex Fridman?

  But that's.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  If we were able to increase the love through the social networks, that would be great. It feels very hard to.

• 1:27:12Lex Fridman?

  It's a worthy challenge. Uh, you've tweeted, "One of the underreported reasons conspiracy theories take hold is because some of them are true."

• 1:27:22Lex Fridman?

  What conspiracy theories do you believe that are sort of important for people to think about, would you say?

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Um, Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman with no connections to any other situation, government, you know? I believe that JFK was removed from office by a group of people that had very different interests, but-

• 1:27:49Lex Fridman?

  This is the question of like deep state, so these are powerful people-

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:53Lex Fridman?

  -that are able now to dictate through basically the threat of violence, what the presidents, the surface powerful people in our society-

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've not, again, I'm not, I, I, I want another investigation into nine 11, not because I think that George Bush pressed a button and made nine 11 happen, but because we invaded the country of Iraq and then we, you know, 15 out of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. There was tons of stuff in the nine 11 report that didn't make sense to anybody. There's tons of stuff about that day that I feel like we just don't know.

• 1:28:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, sorry to interrupt, that's when I, my little ant life touched upon conspiracy theory world and first learned about Alex Jones-

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:35Lex Fridman?

  -is when nine 11 happened. It was very frustrating to me how poorly the reporting and the transparency around what exactly happened, who knew what, all that kind of a basic information that you would hope the government would release, reveal and use as like a lesson for how we prevent this. Instead, it felt like a lot of stuff was being hidden in order to manipulate some kind of machine that leads us to war.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's fair to say. Yeah, I mean, I just don't feel like we've gotten the full story. I don't know what the full story is.

• 1:29:07Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  I can't, I don't know what it is, but I don't feel like we've gotten the full story. Yeah, there are, there are groups of powerful pedophiles, right? Whether they're in the Catholic Church or they're in the government or wherever they are, they are able to cover things up that they do, they're able to silence people that try to out them in terms of like, you know, disrupt their operations, that's true. QAnon has nuggets of truth, it just went crazy. Any conspiracy theory that involves the Knights Templar and also Chrissy Teigen is probably wrong.

• 1:29:36Lex Fridman?

  What's the Knights Templar?

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Well, it was just this group of knights back in the day, you know, it's that supposedly secret meanings and like in every conspiracy, they talk about like, you know, if you go deep enough, it's like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, you know, all of these secret groups throughout history, the Illuminati, the-

• 1:29:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh, and there's a thread that connects all of this-

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, it connects it all to David Spade. I mean, it's a little much.

• 1:29:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, how do you, if you're David Spade, defend yourself, by the way?

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  You ignore it because it's hilarious and I know David Spade. It's like Hollywood's kind of boring. Yes, there are sex orgies. I'm not invited. I'm sure there's shit going on. Kids do get abused, women get abused-

• 1:30:11Lex Fridman?

  I'll invite you to one, if you want.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  We got the $75,000 dog and then we'll get one. But, you know, me and David Spade, we go out to sushi restaurants, like, and you sit there and you listen to people complain. That's what a lot of it is. What a lot of Hollywood is, is deeply sad tragedy that people don't understand that some of it is nefarious and dark and there are problems and there are real power brokers here. It's a dark town, 100%, but they did it. Everybody that lives here is in some wide-ranging, vast conspiracy isn't true. It ignores how humdrum, boring, deeply sad, most people's lives are in Hollywood, and it ignores how sad fame is in general. Fame's a sad thing. Not always, but a lot of times, it's a sad

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  thing. It's fleeting, it's ephemeral, it doesn't last, it separates you from other people, it's isolating, it can be traumatic, depending on what's going on. Obviously, it's better than the alternative. If you're trying to be famous, it's better to be famous than not famous, right? I'll say that. But it's a mixed bag to a degree. There are things about it that aren't great, and Hollywood has a deep undercurrent of sadness, of people that have not realized their dreams and people that have realized them.

• 1:31:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, dark, right.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Both of those people-

• 1:31:30Lex Fridman?

  The people that win Olympic gold medals can sometimes suffer from depression.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:31:34Lex Fridman?

  They've lost-

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  Well, somebody said, and I forget who said it, it's a great quote, it's not mine, I think it's from a book, or it might be from a TV show. Sometimes they quote something and they're like, that's from like, Charlotte Webb. I'm like, oh. The two worst things are, oh, I think it's from the movie Limitless. I'm like an idiot. But anyway, thanks for having me on. Tomorrow-

• 1:31:52Lex Fridman?

  I will not publish this.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  It's from the movie, and I think he says, uh, the worst, two worst things in the world are not get, oh, you know, it's not from Limitless. I think it's from the ma, the, the movie where Nicolas Cage sold weapons. It was called Lord of War. It's a little better than Limitless. Anyway.

• 1:32:09Lex Fridman?

  That's a good movie.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  It's a great movie. He said, the two worst things in the world are not getting what you want and getting it. So the undercurrents of sadness that run through Hollywood are, they're two rivers that converge, and there are people that just never had it and people that have it and go, now what? And so it's a sad place. It tries to put, and there's a lot of, it's boring. That's what people don't realize. It's like, it's actually kind of boring.

• 1:32:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, life is kind of boring.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Life is kind of boring. But there's also like, you know, so I think QAnon is this way to make a lot of it seem like it's super exciting.

• 1:32:37Lex Fridman?

  Exciting.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  And listen, I don't want to diminish the experiences of people who've been abused, because there is a lot of horror here.

• 1:32:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  But the whole QAnon thing was like, everybody in everything is doing, and that's not true.

• 1:32:47Lex Fridman?

  Well, see, the, just to linger on that a little bit is, uh, Bill Gates, the conspiracy theories around Bill Gates bother me. Because, this is me dumb naive Lex, thinks that Bill Gates did a lot of good for this world.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:33:03Lex Fridman?

  First by creating a company that empowered personal computers. And second by donating a ton of money for like treating malaria in Africa and all those kinds of things. And there's these huge amounts of conspiracies, I think, based on like just replies to whatever.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:22Lex Fridman?

  Uh, Bill Gates does anything, like, to me, the, the top replies should be about how inspiring that guy is to donate so much money.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think that.

• 1:33:33Lex Fridman?

  And so sorry to, and the, the, the thing I'm struggling with is if I'm Bill Gates, like, how do you behave differently? How do you show people that you're, if you're not, I don't know, doing creepy stuff that they're saying he's doing?

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think part of it is that he, he's done some really good stuff, right? He's an innovative guy. He's on the vanguard of a lot of things. But he's also the Antichrist. And I think that that is, you know, they're not mutually exclusive. He is the prince of darkness as well as some, no. Here's my thing with Bill Gates, he's a Batman villain billionaire, meaning that he's not a villain, but he's got all this money, right? Here's the thing, and I love Musk and all these guys, I know you love these guys. Listen, when you have the kind of money that these guys have, and you have the vision that they have, and they want society to look a certain way, and a lot of them are doing great things, people, they need to get better at the pushback. They need to get a little better. When somebody says, hey, man, what's going on over there? Bill Gates needs to be a little better at going, here's what.

• 1:34:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  Because, you know, Bill Gates has the money. You know, I think he, he, once he wanted to shoot a missile of dust at the atmosphere to help global warming. And a lot of scientists were like, hey, man, that might not be the way to do it. But no one in history, like so few people in history have had the resources to even have that thought.

• 1:34:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  That if you have the resources to have that thought, and you have designs on the way you want society to look, whether it's public health policy, vaccinations, whatever, you have to get a little better at dealing with legitimate critiques. And obviously, you're not defending yourself against people that say you're the antichrist, but like, you need to get a little better. And I feel like Bill Gates and some of those people at that level are like, oh, PR is kind of like, you know, beneath that.

• 1:35:07Lex Fridman?

  They're terrible at it.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  They're terrible at it, they're terrible at it.

• 1:35:09Lex Fridman?

  Him and Zuckerberg are really bad at it.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Zuckerberg's horrible at it. He seems especially, um, bad at public.

• 1:35:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and it makes me feel so bad because the problem with being a billionaire is you lose touch with reality if you're not careful. I think Elon is good at, at least so far, maintaining touch with reality.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  No, if you look at the, the name of his child, you can clearly see. Listen, I do like him, and I do think what he's done with Tesla, you know, my producer has a Tesla, and he never shuts up about it. And most people that have Teslas never shut up about them, and they thought they think they're part of the development team at SpaceX. And I, I like that he's created a world where people can get excited about a $37,000 car.

• 1:35:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  And never shut the fuck up about it to the point where I have to threaten people with physical violence to get them to stop telling me about that their car drives itself.

• 1:36:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you should get a Tesla.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  If you have a few less drinks and a few, a few fewer Vicodin, and you can drive yourself.

• 1:36:05Lex Fridman?

  Have you thought about getting a Tesla?

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  I've never thought about it. I don't like them, they're, they're minimalist. I don't like, I want more. I want more.

• 1:36:12Lex Fridman?

  Get the Cybertruck.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  I want to.

• 1:36:13Lex Fridman?

  I'm just being a.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  I want it.

• 1:36:14Lex Fridman?

  I'm trolling you by being a salesman.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Dude, my, my producer wants a Cybertruck. I want a stagecoach. Old school, stagecoach, horse thief shit.

• 1:36:23Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  It's going, it's going back to that. I live in an area with a lot of horses. I, it's going back to like whipping a horse. I want an animal to shriek while I go by.

• 1:36:34Lex Fridman?

  You want more suffering in the world, not less.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I think we need it.

• 1:36:38Lex Fridman?

  Okay, but I just don't like that billionaire is a bad word. And it's not, not every billionaire is a pedophile.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  I know, but the problem is a lot of like, it's just, you know, Epstein was very smart at like just getting people at that house and taking photos of them. Uh, you know, nobody knew what they were doing, but it's like, it was one of those things where it's like, Epstein was the most social guy ever. Like every photo, he's like, hey. And it's like, everyone that's ever done anything in the world has been at that fucking island. Every human being is like in a photo. It's just weird. Like I'm in like, it's funny. Me and my friends get together. We don't ever take photos, right? Like last night, a few people, I was at my birthday yesterday. I'm 17. And my, my friends came over and we're just eating dinner, right? And we had a fun night and just four people that are over, nobody, right? Nobody ever thought like, let's, let's, hey, I want to remember it. Let's take photos. I'm 36. Woo!

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  But, but, but everything Epstein did, there's just photos of everybody. It's interesting.

• 1:37:35Lex Fridman?

  Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself?

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  No, I think he was killed by that guy, that, that, that, that guy that they put in this cell, that lunatic. Uh, who's that big muscled guy? I think he was just, he did it for money, kept his mouth shut.

• 1:37:50Lex Fridman?

  Money from whom do you think?

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Mossad, MI6, CIA, all three.

• 1:37:56Lex Fridman?

  So there's a lot of pressure from a lot of different powerful people.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Probably Mossad, CIA more.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it seems very clear that he was working inside of a honeypot intelligence operation. Just Lane Maxwell's father was an Israeli super spy. Just Lane Maxwell is working for Israeli intelligence. It would be odd, I think. And of course, the CIA knows about everything that Israeli intelligence is doing with Americans. So I would think that it's a very cozy relationship with those two intelligence agencies. And I think if you ran it by anyone, I think if you ran it by French intelligence, they'd go, yeah, no, get, get him. I don't think there's any intelligence service in the world whose job is to protect the powerful people that live in their countries that was against him getting whacked.

• 1:38:36Lex Fridman?

  But do you think it's possible that he is just an evil person who is after manipulating people and also was a pedophile?

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:38:43Lex Fridman?

  So that there's a bigger thing.

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  No, it's factual that there's a bigger thing. Evil people don't get handed.

• 1:38:48Lex Fridman?

  Those are your facts, Tim Dillon.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  No, there's the facts of the case. You don't get handed a 65. Show me another evil guy who was handed a $65 million place by Les Wexner. Show me another evil guy that got that type of handshake deal where he was basically let off without anything after a judge had made a very sweetheart deal for him after he was accused of, of, you know, molesting a 14 year old. Show me another evil guy that doesn't have that kind of backing, that has those type of friends, those connections, those type of properties. Show me a, you know, multiple passports all over the world. So show me a guy without anyone backing him that's doing it. Why did they, you know, so you think he's just an evil guy who is doing

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  this for whom it's his own just shits and giggles? He's just getting off on it?

• 1:39:37Lex Fridman?

  Human nature, yeah.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Human nature, huh? It's human nature? $70 million limestone man.

• 1:39:42Lex Fridman?

  I'm visibly mocked.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is it human nature?

• 1:39:46Lex Fridman?

  And it's like poetry.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  I don't think it's human nature. I think it's, I think it's, I think they manipulated human nature, but I think they, I think they did it. I think Just Lane, I think Epstein was really just a functionary and I think Just Lane was kind of a pimp and Epstein was kind of a guy that, you know, made the money. Okay. And, you know, hid money and things like that and worked for a lot of powerful people. I don't believe in lone pedophiles anymore. I don't even believe that. If you're a pedophile, you're like in a group. You know what I mean? You know?

• 1:40:16Lex Fridman?

  Well, I'm not even, I'm not even going there, but staying on just saying, so you believe there's some power in her. What do you think happens to her now? Like, what, what are the?

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  Great, great question. I mean, I don't know what'll happen to her, but I imagine she'll get some type of deal, a closed door thing years from now, when people don't really care about the case and she'll serve some time in a, in a very lax thing, or she'll be killed. I mean, again, it's like, if she was doing what she was doing, which is, I believe the fact that she was compromising powerful people so that they could be blackmailed by, you know, the intelligence services of the US and Israel, probably, I don't, I don't see how she wasn't doing that. Someone's black, someone's using the photos and the tapes, right? Someone's using that against these people. Someone wants to control these people. Well, who and why?

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  That's the real question. And I think the real question is, you want to, you want to exert control over congressmen and senators and presidents because they have the power to make decisions to affect about the CIA just works for a lot of very wealthy people. That's what the CIA, so how the CIA started, right? Was lawyers, bankers, they're protecting financial interests of multinational corporations all over the world, overthrowing democratically elected governments, going in and doing subterfuge campaigns, encouraging terror, they're doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I don't see why that would change. I think that's who they still represent. And I think those people want certain policies and certain people pushed forward. And I think those people are controlled. And I think one of the ways

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  to control people is their sexual problems. And, and that's the way they did it.

• 1:41:58Lex Fridman?

  I wish there was a way to, because everything you just said now is-

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

• 1:42:06Lex Fridman?

  I'm being indoctrinated on air. No.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  You think there's just a, Jeffrey Epstein is just a fun, random guy who just wanted to make home movies of presidents?

• 1:42:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, you think I'm just some random guy. I'm just trying to sell myself as somebody who's friendly with the American audience.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  I believe you are backed by people that want people to be more comfortable with robot dogs. I believe that. I believe you're pushed to be the happy face of AI.

• 1:42:32Lex Fridman?

  Which is why I will edit this part.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  They should have picked the happier face.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  No editing. Joe Rogan's rule, no editing.

• 1:42:39Lex Fridman?

  This is live. No, I mean, I wish there was a way to, for some of the conspiracy theories to prove that that's not the case. Like what the CIA is, there is some possibility in my mind that institutions like the CIA, different kind of organizations are driven less by organized malevolence and more by just incompetence, just bureaucracy being incompetent.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  I think that argument gets less and less persuasive when you look at all the things they've been able to do.

• 1:43:11Lex Fridman?

  Right. It's, it's, it's very certain, just like you said, that there's a bunch of them that have done, because there's some conspiracy theories that are dramatic and true. The question is, I wish there was a way to prove that some of them are not. And it's very difficult because so much is shrouded in mystery. Like one of, you know, one of the things I'm bothered by is when people accuse other, like athletes of using steroids, for example.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:37Lex Fridman?

  And it's just, yes, a lot of people use steroids, but it sucks the, that people just don't believe you. Like, there's some incredible athletes that look shredded, that look just incredible performers, and everybody just says that they're on steroids. They kind of assume.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, and that, and people accuse me all the time of being on performance enhancing drugs and steroids. And it is hard, but what I remind them is, it's what my, my, my, my, my appearances results in dedication. But it's hard work, diet, exercise, dedication.

• 1:44:11Lex Fridman?

  Are you on keto?

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  I'm on, I'm on keto. I'm doing a version of keto. You're keto, right?

• 1:44:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  So I'm doing a version of keto right now with bread. And it's, do you see what I mean?

• 1:44:22Lex Fridman?

  You carb up.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  So it's keto with sugar. It's called keto plus sugar. And it's a very, it's a good diet for, I grew up in the 90s when nobody ever lost weight sadly, because every diet was like, you can eat what you want, just be accountable. No one even knew what that meant. So it would be like my mother being like, if you have chocolate chip pancakes, have a glass of water.

• 1:44:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Just take a walk around the block.

• 1:44:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  You can go to McDonald's three times a day. Just walk around the block. It's what my parents used to say. My mother be like, just walk around the block. You're fine. I'm gonna have a cigarette, walk 20 steps, walk 20 steps back, it's exercise. So, um, you know, I, there's too many conspiracies out there. A lot of them aren't true. A lot of them are bitter, angry people trying to justify their own, uh, impotence, not being able to do anything in life. And they're like, the people that have done something in life, they're all nefarious. It's all that the card just act against me. That's a hundred percent true. 100%. It attracts usually people that have not figured out a way to succeed. And or haven't succeeded on the level that they want you.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  But that also being true, there are, there is a fair amount of fuckery going on and provable. And, you know, we just have to, I think, separate, uh, separate, know that these things are often inflated or not true. But know that sometimes they are true. Otherwise, they wouldn't exist. If there was no, if there was nothing to JFK, there was nothing to 9/11. If there was, if people felt like they were being dealt with honestly, this wouldn't exist. I mean, this exists because there are real questions that people have that don't get answered for whatever reason. And then the vacuum of the refusal to answer those questions, that that information vacuum is filled with people like Alex Jones,

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  who are curious and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're horribly wrong. And sometimes they're all over the place.

• 1:46:16Lex Fridman?

  They're good storytellers and people love stories.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Lex Fridman?

  When there's an absence of actual.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  Alex is a uniquely American person, like a very interesting. I don't know how many countries, like, how many people make a living as a conspiracy theorist, a good living in other countries, right? It's very rare, right? I mean, it's very interesting and he became like, I know people that knew him when he was a kid, because I'd go to Austin and perform a lot. And, you know, he was a guy that would take a bullhorn and yell at cops because he thought DWE checkpoints were unconstitutional. That's what he was doing in college. And he's just went through, he was hated by the right. He was hated by the Bush people. He was hated by the, and he went from being this, this, this guy that was considered like a leftist even. Like even though he was never leftist, he was considered this like enemy of mainstream conservatism. Like he was not, and they considered a guy that wasn't a patriot, wasn't this, wasn't that.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  And he just wow, like he winds and winds and ends up just being this confidant of a Republican president, very divisive Republican president, and he becomes this populist and everything like that. It's really wild to watch that, but I mean, I do think he should retire eventually just so we could get, you know, some, I don't know, it seems like a, it's a lot to keep doing.

• 1:47:24Lex Fridman?

  Well, I hope this world allows for Alex Jones to continue having a voice because just like you said, he's a, I use the word fun, but really he, he shakes up the norms of our discourse.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  I do too. I do think we need to put more value. I think entertainment, you know, we knew, we do need to say that like, there are people that should be allowed to have a voice for entertainment purposes.

• 1:47:47Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  And that's part, and that's part of what Donald Trump, now that he's not the president, come on, let the guy, let him talk.

• 1:47:55Lex Fridman?

  Who do you think is the best comedian of all time?

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great question. Greatest of all time.

• 1:48:02Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Carlin, your uncle's liking Carlin.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  Well, Carlin is great. Carlin is really hard to argue with, but Chappelle is also really great. Um, Louis C K is really great. I don't know that there's what Joan Rivers is great. I don't know. You smile at that, but she's a beast of a comic.

• 1:48:27Lex Fridman?

  I'm not aware of her standup actually.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  She's a beast of a comic. Ask Rogan, ask any of them. Um, Kinison's great.

• 1:48:33Lex Fridman?

  So what makes a great comic, do you think, in the history of comedy?

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Just said something at the moment in a way, found a way to communicate with people in the funniest possible way at that moment. And illustrate, you know, illustrated larger truths about life in what they did. And I think that guys like Louis and Chappelle and Pryor and Kinison and Hicks, people like Joan Rivers, uh, have done that. And even, you know, modern people, people like Maria Bamford is an amazing comedian. It's just a different style of comedy per se, but she's an amazing comedian. Uh, you know, Cat Williams is an amazing comedian. Now he really is.

• 1:49:15Lex Fridman?

  Does he have any well, see the one of the things you kind of mentioned, the comedians you mentioned, they were kind of fearless in saying the difficult things that needs to be said. Cat Williams is more, I don't remember his comedy, but I think it's just more wild out there.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Well, to an extent, but you can watch it. He's got stuff. He talks about stuff. He talks about race brilliantly. He talks about America brilliantly. No, I think there's a lot of stuff there.

• 1:49:37Lex Fridman?

  Of course, Chris Rock.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  Of Chris Rock, of course. It's so hard. You can't really pick one. You just gotta, there's a class of people that throughout this history of this business, which is not that long of a history, it's, you know, pretty much within the last century. You know, that are, have been really influential. Sometimes it's style, the way they deliver things. Sometimes it's substance of how they, you know, what they're saying, or sometimes it's just the style of what they're saying. I mean, and we're only talking about stand up comedians, right? So there's a million great comedians. I mean, if we're going to talk about Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. I mean, these are brilliant and those guys are bigger influences on comedy, I think, than stand ups really, truly. So there's, there's, there's so many brilliant people in the, in the business.

• 1:50:18Lex Fridman?

  Who was for you like influential, just the early on?

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Hicks was influential because I'd watch Bill Hicks and I'd be like, this guy's saying crazy shit on stage. And this is the only way he can get away with it is because it's so funny. And he was calling out like, you know, the military industrial complex and, and he was talking about the first Gulf War. I remember he said a joke that I heard it made me sit up straight. He goes, he goes, he was in Canada and he said, we had a war in the States. He was talking about the first Gulf War and he said, I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops. And to me, I love that joke. It was so funny to me. And I was like, oh, you can't get away with that anywhere other than standing on a stage. You could never say that in an office, really. And this was before, like, it was like PC and this and the other thing. I always knew the comedians had to say shit

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  and have it be funny enough that you couldn't get away with it in polite society. That was the whole point. That was why it was a dark theater or a dark nightclub. That's when people had a few drinks. That's what the art form was. And that's why, so a guy like that was influential because I started watching him. And then of course, like, you know, I loved SNL when I was a kid and I would watch Chris Farley and I would watch, you know, people like even John Belushi going back in the day, but I'd watch Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell and all these guys. I mean, the, there's so many funny people, but Bill Hicks was kind of funny. And then Patrice O'Neal was like probably my favorite comedian who's made me laugh more than anybody else.

• 1:51:39Lex Fridman?

  Um, I, I think it was you actually that, uh, maybe on your podcast, we're talking about Patrice O'Neal, that he was actually vicious to others.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I think he was a little mean to other people, but he was very good to people that he liked. I guess. I think he was like, not, I mean, he wasn't, and I've never met him. I have no inside info, but from what I've heard, he was like no nonsense guy, right? He just said what he wanted to say. But I think in terms of comedians, I don't know of anyone funnier than Patrice O'Neal, who said in modern times, that said more about our society than him. I mean, he was just a brilliantly funny guy. On the radio, he was funny. On his specials, he was funny. Everywhere he was funny.

• 1:52:19Lex Fridman?

  And there's something else to be said about the whole medium of comedians doing podcasts.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Lex Fridman?

  Cause that's a, it unlocks a weird, special, new thing that changed everything. I mean, Rogan started with that.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Lex Fridman?

  You're doing that. It, I think that's a whole nother form of like standups.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:38Lex Fridman?

  The ones that have a lot to say, almost like, uh, we get to witness the process of the creation of the jokes in a way, or the mind.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:52:49Lex Fridman?

  That the sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes, which is.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  Comedians relate to social media. Comedians, comedy, comedy is a, it's a performance based medium. So it's about getting up and doing it, getting up in a club, getting up in a theater, getting up in a bar, getting up wherever you can get up. And comedy for years was about performance. And then on the higher end, it was about movies and TV shows. But we were very slow to get on YouTube. We're very slow to adapt to technology. We're very slow to monetize anything we did on the internet. So podcasting was a way for comics and funny people to kind of get into that space, start earning money. And now, because of the pandemic, it's really become essential. And it, it helps you, and even

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  without the pandemic, it was where people, it was how you were building a fan base. And that's like, you know, but comics were very reticent to embrace social media at all because they thought it was cheap and they didn't like it. And they thought the people on it were idiots and were unfunny. And it was just a blatant, you know, whatever it was, whether it was a money grab, or it was just too commercial. And in, in, in a sense where they're like, hey, look at me. Like, it was just goofy, right? Um, and then comics, I think, got. Displaced because all the YouTubers came in and all the social media stars came in and they really knocked comics off because now people are much more like if you ask anyone under thirty who their famous favorite comedian is, they say David Dobrik and there's nothing

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  wrong with that. David's a funny guy, but like what you, you know, I don't not especially to me a ton, but that's okay. I don't, you know, but he makes people laugh. So he's funny. But he's what people, you know, that's a comedian now. So comics got beat by other people coming into a digital space before they did laying the groundwork and taking it over. And now comics are just trying to stay alive. Like even my podcast, which is people really like it. Thank God. And I love doing it.

• 1:54:52Lex Fridman?

  The Tim Dillon Show.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I was late, you know, I mean, I was, I just, you know, it, I've been podcasting for a long time, but really dedicating myself and putting the resources behind it. I was late to it. Like I was like, Hey, I'm, I'm telling jokes on stage, which is great, but I should have been allocating more time to building an infrastructure online. And I wasn't doing it. And a lot of comics weren't doing it. Funny comics weren't doing comics that should be doing it. And I think when the pandemic ends, a lot of comics will just keep doing live standup. But I will keep, obviously I'm going to go back on the road and do live standup, but I will keep doing this podcast and building digitally.

• 1:55:26Lex Fridman?

  But you're also exploring ideas. You're doing like short videos and so on. You're, you're trying to look for different mediums of.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  I want to be funny everywhere. I want to be funny everywhere. I love making things too. My producer, Ben Avery, is like a brilliant editor and comedic mind, even though he's not a standup. He's able to, he understands funny, understands what makes me funny. We're able to make these really, I mean, some of those videos, they're just brilliant little videos, even though they're tiny little videos, they're fucking as funny as anything. And it's not me. It's me working with somebody else to make something really great. And if, and, and it's that relationship that's very important.

• 1:56:05Lex Fridman?

  In some sense, the, the medium of a short video is a challenge, just like the medium of a short tweet.

• 1:56:13Lex Fridman?

  Say something, I mean, whatever the flavor is of what's in your heart, what's in your mind, how to say it, whether it's the goal is funny.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:21Lex Fridman?

  Or something, or just an express an idea.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  I think it's the whole thing that's important to us is that it's an extension of really like an extension of your friendship in a way, like, are you guys laughing at it?

• 1:56:33Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Are you guys making each other laugh about this idea?

• 1:56:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  And if that's the case, other people are going to laugh at it, you know? I think so much of the old medium was like, everything was top down. Okay, pitch me this idea, I pitch it to the showrunner, they pitch it to the network, they pitch to the this, to that, to the, you know, standards and practices, sales, and we gotta go through everything. Now it's just like, are me and a few buddies, or even just one buddy, laughing at this idea? Does it captivate us? And do we see it visually? And also, a great line from Roseanne, a guy, not Roseanne, but a guy that worked on Roseanne,

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  the old Roseanne, the great one, he said, is it funny with the sound off?

• 1:57:15Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  That's what we try to do.

• 1:57:17Lex Fridman?

  That's brilliant.

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  Is it funny with the sound off? When you see me in the dumb things, or me in the Meghan McCain.

• 1:57:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Or me in the thing, is it funny with the sound off? And if it's funny with the sound off, you have a good starting point.

• 1:57:27Lex Fridman?

  That's hilarious, because you, I would say you're one of the people, because most people are not funny with the sound, or most comedians, like you, Will Ferrell's another example of that. There's something about when I click on one of your videos, it's funny, just like the first thing I see, just your face.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  We, well, thank you, that's very sweet. But I mean, thank God, I mean, that's what we try to do, right? We're trying to be funny.

• 1:57:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  So we're trying to be funny.

• 1:57:54Lex Fridman?

  Can you talk about love a little bit?

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:57:57Lex Fridman?

  So, you came out of the closet as being gay when you were 25.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was late, very late.

• 1:58:04Lex Fridman?

  Very late. Before then.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  By today's standards.

• 1:58:07Lex Fridman?

  During and after, how has your view on love evolved?

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  Interesting. It's ho- it's so hard to say because like I would, I would, I'd like to make a very like Disneyfied statement about like that you can't be in love secretly. You should be honest. Love should all be about honesty, but that's not true. Right? There's people that are in love that are lying to everyone else, but they're deeply in love. I would love to say something like honesty is an ingredient for love, you know, but I don't know, maybe honesty with each other. But I mean, I know, I, I think there's a lot of people in the world that aren't honest. My view on love is super important. Uh, I think that it's, we, a lot of society in America is all about love. We don't tend to focus on other

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  uh, things in terms of like, you know, uh, friendship or sustainability of that. Cause I think that a lot, I know a lot of people in relationships where it's like, I don't know, they're not, they are, they love each other, but like, it's also a rock solid couple because they are, they're very compatible in many other ways.

• 1:59:18Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  So I think that like

• 1:59:18Lex Fridman?

  They're friends.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  They have, right.

• 1:59:20Lex Fridman?

  I see friendship as, and love as the same thing.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  There's, there's parts of it that are, right? So it's like, I look at it as like, there is, there needs to be more than just like that, like amazing, like chemistry or physical attraction that is this chemical thing that happens. There should be like some underlying. I mean, again, that's from what I, that's what I've observed as really long lasting, successful relationships.

• 1:59:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, is there something about coming out that

• 1:59:51Lex Fridman?

  that was, uh,

• 1:59:54Lex Fridman?

  that you took away that you remember as

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:56Lex Fridman?

  profound and insightful and so on.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  That it was my, that I, it wasn't society, it was me. So there were kids that were out in my high school that I waited years later to do it. That was no one's fault but my own. So I was taking a cowardly way out and a lot of people, so I could blame society or like, oh, I lived in a conservative area and I grew up in, da, da, da, da, da. You should take responsibility for your own decisions. And if you're being cowardly, admit that you're being cowardly. So that's what I took out of it is that it's not society's fault that you chose to be a coward. Society will never be perfect. You have to be honest when you're ready to be honest or however you want to be honest, but it's not somebody, too much now is it's everyone else's fault that you didn't take, make a hard choice or a hard decision. So that's kind of what I took out of it.

• 2:00:42Lex Fridman?

  See now in retrospect, you see yourself as were being afraid.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00:48Lex Fridman?

  Do you think at the time?

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  Well, I wanted people to like me, which is the, which is the disease of humanity, right? Is that we want to be liked and what happens is if you want people to like you and love you even, you want people to feel comfortable with you.

• 2:01:01Lex Fridman?

  And those were people like your family?

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  Friends more. My family, I would always, you know, could always throw in the street. But my, I'm kidding. I mean, but I am not.

• 2:01:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Uh, but my friends, my circle of friends, which I were my family at the time when you're a senior, when you're 10th, 11th grade in high school, your, your friends are your fam, you know what I mean? Like that's your, so you don't want to do anything that puts you on the outside of the circle.

• 2:01:24Lex Fridman?

  This is thinking back to that fear. Is there things you're afraid of now? That you're not doing, you're afraid to do?

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of not being good at my job, not being funny, letting people down, uh, not putting out products that are good, you know, whether it's the podcast every week or stand up or the videos. Like I'm afraid of like, there's a ton of people that really enjoy what we do. So when you're in that position, you're nervous that you're going to start doing things that they don't like. So the new things you want to do, the evolution you want to do, you want to make sure you're evolving in the right way. You know, you want to make sure that you're doing things that are consistent with why people liked you. But also you don't want to put yourself in a box and limit what you can be going forward. So like I had a talk with the CEO of NBC Universal once.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  I was doing some internal sketch for, for them and I was playing like a cab driver and he was a, and he's not the current CEO, but he's a former CEO. And I said to him, what's the hardest part of a, a running a corporation of this size? And he said something very interesting. He said, the hardest part is maximizing the current profit model of what you have. At the same time, getting ready, getting ready, getting the company ready for where it's going to be in five years. He said, those are often at odds and that's the toughest thing. He goes, cause I could just bang out everything I got to do right now and we're going to make a lot of money doing this. But am I devoting enough resources into digital so that in five years, when that's where everything lives? Are we competitive in that space? So as funny as I am now, hopefully to people and a lot of the things that I want to do now, I'm going,

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  what am I, what groundwork am I not laying for three to five years down the road? So that I can be adapting to the trends that are important then in terms of not so much comedic trends, but like the technological trends, like what is the? What is, you know, I should have done podcasting earlier. What should I, should I have a bigger presence on TikTok? Should I have a bigger presence here? Should I have a business? Or should I be on Twitch? Should I be doing this? Should I be doing that? What am I not doing? That I should be doing that I'll regret not doing? And those are, those are the conversations I think I have in my own head all the time.

• 2:03:30Lex Fridman?

  And I guess there's parallels to coming out as gay or just parallels in, in like, uh, career paths you're taking all, all that. That's ultimately just fear.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  Fear.

• 2:03:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  It's the fear of, you know, the, the, the best thing that happened in my career was that I came to LA. I didn't have an idea of what was going to happen. I met somebody who was really, uh, committed to making funny things. That we just wanted to be funny. No one would let us be funny. We didn't have Comedy Central letting us be funny. We didn't have HBO. We didn't have Netflix. We just had a garage and a phone in the beginning and then a camera. And then a thing and we just wanted to be funny and that was the greatest risk really I took because I was like, well, I don't know what else is going to happen right now, but I just want to be funny. And funny saved my life, right? I mean, funny got me out of drugs. Funny probably got me out of the closet. Funny was the thing that I was able to do that made everything okay in my own head.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  So I was like, as long as I'm being funny, something good will happen. So we did that. And then something really cool happened that we were able to do a lot of cool things. But, you know, that's what it is. It's fear that keeps you from being the better version of yourself.

• 2:04:38Lex Fridman?

  Your mom, I mean, you have so many complicated, fascinating parts to your story, but your, your mom, uh, as you were growing up suffered.

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  Schizophrenic, yeah.

• 2:04:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, from out the illness, yes, schizophrenia. Can you tell her story and how that relationship has changed over the years?

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, she was always eccentric and always, you know, the terms for schizophrenia in an Irish Catholic household, where we didn't talk about anything were eccentric, fun. She's fun.

• 2:05:06Lex Fridman?

  There's a theme to this.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  Unpredictable. She's, uh, a, a, a wild, she was a live wire. Any of the words you would use to describe somebody who was a fucking lunatic, but you wouldn't say that.

• 2:05:20Lex Fridman?

  Podcast spin.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  Right. She, she started experiencing, uh, symptoms probably early on in her life, but she also like, I think, started really manifesting them when I was in my mid teens. So like 14. Thirteen, fourteen area. And she got really, really bad. And then I think she was institutionalized about 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago. And she could really no longer live on her own. She was unable to go to work. She was unable to function. So I visit her when I can. Obviously, I'm not in New York. Whenever I go to New York, I visit her. She's aware of what I do, my career and everything like that. You know, she has good days and bad days, but you know, mental illness is a thing. It's very tough. We don't talk about it as a society. People with mental problems don't get that much attention.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  We tend to think that they did something wrong, or that they deserve it, or that they are, you know, to be ignored. And we don't devote a lot of resources into it, which is unfortunate, because then you have the junk gurus come in and go like, let's diagnose your mental illness off Instagram. And it's like, that's not the move. Um, yeah. Do you, uh, do you love her? I do. I do. I love her, but I also remember her that isn't her now. And when someone has mental illness that's severe, you make peace with their death before they die. Wow, yeah. Because the part of them that you love and remember, a lot of cases is, is, is not

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  evident or obvious. Now, my mother's still a loving person that I love, but the fun, her ability to be present in the moment and to not, you know, that is lost with the progression of her illness, so that you still love her. And I mean, again, you know, your parents, you know, the time horizons you have with your parents are unknown. People don't know. You could, I have friends that their parents were in their lives for their entire life. And I have friends whose parents were in their life. But my mother was a very, she knew what I was. When I was a little kid, I was an actor. When I was like six to 12, my mother knew that I was a performer. She knew what I was and what I'd ultimately do. She recognized that in me. And when I said to her, I want to audition for shows. I want to be on stage. I want to be on this. I want to do this. She let me do it because she knew who I was,

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  and she didn't want to get in the way of me being a human being, a fully realized person at six. So that's probably the best thing a parent can do for a kid is let them be who they are. And my mother did that. So that, I mean, that's good. We, we ate too much fast food. There were negatives, but she did let me be. Well, that's why you want to throw them out into the street. Yes, sometimes.

• 2:07:59Lex Fridman?

  But coming, coming to accept the mortality of her, I guess, identity as you remember it from childhood, do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death?

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  I'm afraid of death. I don't like the idea of death, but I know it's happening, you know? I know it's gonna happen eventually. I don't love it.

• 2:08:22Lex Fridman?

  Think about it?

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  I think about, I wanna do some good stuff that people can look back at. And I think I'm proud, I'm proud of the show where if people look back at the show, I don't know how comedy ages or whatever, but like, I think I put out a lot of stuff and I wanna continue to put out stuff and I wanna put out a few specials that people can look back at and go, oh, this guy was really funny in this really crazy, you know, he lived in the latter part of this century when all this shit was going on and he kinda made fun of it and he did something to make people's lives a little better just by having, you know, a few laughs, you know?

• 2:08:52Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about, this is something like in a podcast context, do you think you'll have just one or two or three shows out of thousands, maybe, that are like the truly special ones?

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  That's probably the case.

• 2:09:07Lex Fridman?

  Or do you think it's the entirety of the body of work?

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  I think people will take 10 minute clips from all different shows and put them together and-

• 2:09:14Lex Fridman?

  It's a highlight?

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a highlight reel of just like, these are like the best things that he's ever done or the best rants he's ever had, the best things, whatever.

• 2:09:22Lex Fridman?

  So the legacy would be that this was an important voice in a very weird time of your history?

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  I would hope, I would hope that that's part of it and I hope that I continue to be in, you know, you say important, I say funny, but hopefully I continue to be a voice and that's what I think, when I think about death, I think about like, what did people, what did people come on earth to do? And I think I came, I think my main purpose on this planet, other than to experience whatever love or, you know, worthiness or whatever, is to make, to entertain people. And there's a lot of people in comedy right now that are not entertainers and that's really the problem.

• 2:09:59Speaker 01

  But, and they got into comedy sort of the way that, you know, you can walk into the wrong store in a mall and then not realize you're in the wrong store and try on a bunch of clothes and then go, fuck, I wasted my whole afternoon. But I think I've always kinda been an entertainer and that's what I wanna do.

• 2:10:13Lex Fridman?

  There's, unfortunately, sadly, a lot of people that look up to you.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  That is a horrible thing, but life is a nightmare.

• 2:10:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:23Lex Fridman?

  If you were to give them advice, young, young folks, people in college, maybe even high school, but people in their twenties about what to do with their life, whether it's career, whether it's just life in general, what would you say?

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  Ignore everyone, make a few good friends, truly have honest conversations with yourself about your, when do you feel the most alive? Figure that out. When and how do you feel the most alive?

• 2:10:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  Figure that out. Try to figure out a job or a career that can replicate that feeling. Don't listen to anyone. Don't listen to your parents. Don't listen to the gurus on the internet. Don't listen to me. Don't listen to anyone. Figure out, you know, where you feel the most alive. Where do you feel excited? Where do you, where does your pulse quicken? What do you feel matters? When you're in a situation, do you feel like it matters? What situation was that? What got you excited? What thing did you walk into where you looked around and were taken back and you're like, wow, this is amazing and I'm, I'm filled with awe?

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  If you can figure out a life where you, you can excite yourself, you might not use drugs or alcohol or a sex addiction or gambling or irresponsibility. You might not have to get your fucking kicks in very destructive places if you can get them in a productive place.

• 2:11:58Lex Fridman?

  We got a, you had a pretty weaving life.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:12:03Lex Fridman?

  That's full of mistakes and so on.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  Many mistakes.

• 2:12:07Lex Fridman?

  Is that, are mistakes a bug or a feature? Like, do you recommend embrace the mistakes, like make a bunch of them?

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Depends what they are, right? So.

• 2:12:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, you, you've had the full spectrum.

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  I've had a lot, but a lot of mine could have sunk me.

• 2:12:21Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  Like, they sound like fun when I talk about them, but they actually could have sunk me. And they were all part of what made me funny, but I don't know. I would never tell anyone else to just light their life on fire and hope it works out on the other end. It would be pretty irresponsible. But, hey.

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, it's like you're gonna, we get, there's, you know, I think one of my themes is that there's too much, we give the power, we think we have too, the power of choice has been elevated in our society to an unhealthy degree. I think people are, I think you could, you could get really good at something, but you're born with a certain aptitude. It might be to be a dealmaker, might be to be an athlete, it might be to be an artist, it might be to be a romantic, just fall in and out of love, in and out of love, in and out of love. It might be to be like a world traveler, like, but whatever you are, I think you are. I think that there's something about you that makes you something. And if you can figure it out and then refine, you're not going to be good at it per se.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  But if you're, if you're an athlete, it might not mean that you're going to be a great athlete in the history, but it might mean you're the best coach anyone's ever had, or you're the person that, you know, builds a local scene for young athletes or whatever. If you are a really good dealmaker, it doesn't mean you're going to be Warren Buffett, but it might mean you're somebody who enjoys making deals all the time and things like that. Like, if you're an entertainer, it might mean that you are an entertainer. It might mean that you are in the world of entertainment because you love it so much that if you lack the skillset to really pursue it on a, on a degree, you just want to be like, there's, there's a, there's a thing inside of you that makes you what you are. I think, I look at certain people and I go, you were born to be that thing, you know?

• 2:14:08Lex Fridman?

  And the whole purpose is to find it.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  I was a juror on that murder, on a murder trial in Long Island and the, the woman who's the DA, I'm like, you were born to do this, you were born to put murderers away. And this guy killed the, the mother of his children and he was a bad guy. But like, I was like, you are really good at what you do. She has a strong belief in whatever her moral code is and what her justice and ethics are. And she wants to communicate that to people. She was very good at, at doing what she did. I don't know the facts of the case, I didn't really listen, he seemed guilty, so I just voted guilty. But she, I didn't really listen to her, but I heard the shape of her mouth was very bovine, like a cow. And it conferred a certain level of expertise that I enjoyed.

• 2:14:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's funny, I mean, you could see you're half joking.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Yes, but I'm serious.

• 2:14:53Lex Fridman?

  You can often see that people just, they found their place, they found their role.

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  They found their thing.

• 2:14:58Lex Fridman?

  They found their thing and that's kind of the, the purpose of life. And once you are in a, in a place that seems sticky, like. The place that seems right, you know, that's one of the problems with the generation that you're speaking to is there's always a feeling like I should keep exploring, keep exploring. But it's okay to stay in a place that you found that works.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and listen, sometimes the best place you'll find is like when people are like, when did you feel really excited and alive? It's like doing nothing.

• 2:15:26Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  You know, like, that's the other thing. It's like, some people are gonna be like, I feel really excited and alive, and I'm laying in my backyard in a hammock.

• 2:15:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  And I just want to have the simplest life and not have to do much, and I don't like doing anything. And I love laying around and go, wow, this guy looks good today.

• 2:15:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  Bill Gates goes, this guy looks good today, let's shoot a missile into it. He wants to do shit, right? So it's like, in between that and nothing is you can find something.

• 2:15:51Lex Fridman?

  But in that process, for you personally, I mean, for me, for others, I think there's a struggle. When you look in the, when Tim Dillon looks in the mirror, do you love yourself or do you hate yourself?

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of times I think I'm Amy Schumer, so I'm confused.

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  I'm at détente with myself all the time. I don't love myself or hate myself. Addicts have a very bad problem where you can't just fall in love with yourself and you can't hate yourself. Both of them lead you to a negative place. You try to stay kind of even keel. I don't go like, hey, man, you put out a video, I got all these views, things are great, you sold a bunch of tickets, let's fucking go out, like, maybe let's, hey, man, let's have that drink that you've been waiting for for 11 years. And I don't look at myself and go, you ate a burger yesterday, you're a piece of shit, you're horrible, you'll never, you know, get into the shape you want. Like, I try not to get too low or too high. Both of them are not good for my particular mind.

• 2:16:47Lex Fridman?

  Okay, I gotta ask, we kind of spoke about 2021 and you being potentially hopeful. Hopeful, short term, cynical, long term.

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask, I forgot to ask, are you moving to Austin?

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I don't think so immediately, you know? I love Joe, I love what he's trying to do down there. I'm appreciative of everything that he's done for not only me, but for comedy in general. And I think as things happen in Austin and unfold is such a political answer, but as things unfold, I will consider it more and more. But I mean, I think I got another year in LA.

• 2:17:23Lex Fridman?

  So you, you've spoken so nicely about this magical place that is Los Angeles.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  LA is very funny.

• 2:17:31Lex Fridman?

  You think there's a place for comedy in LA?

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. There'll always be a place for comedy in LA. So is it gonna be a place for comedy in New York? I mean, the question is, how thriving of a comedy scene is Austin gonna be? And Joe can probably make it one, but as of right now, it isn't. So that would be him doing that.

• 2:17:49Lex Fridman?

  But the question, there's a lot of people escaping Los Angeles, but I know better about New York. There's a lot of really brilliant people.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Let them go. There's, there's other people. This is the thing. It's like, this is the fear thing. It's like, no, but all the brilliant people are leaving. There'll be other people and they'll fill their shoes, the way that they've done throughout history. And I think that New York and LA, listen, maybe in five to 10 years, they're not the two cities. It would be real rough in five years when this pandemic's over for people in, in Australia to go, dude, you gotta go to America. You gotta visit Charleston and Austin.

• 2:18:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  Stop. Let's be adults here. Let's be adults. It's still gonna be New York and LA for a while. LA is, is an absolute hellscape, but I don't think you're gonna replace California with another place.

• 2:18:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  And also everyone's making decisions now because we're literally in the midst of a pandemic we've never had before. We've never had this before. Joe, Joe loved California up until the pandemic. He had problems with it. Like, we all have problems with it. There's a lot of benefits to being here.

• 2:18:51Lex Fridman?

  I think a lot of us made pretty bad decisions in 2020 because we were all locked up and stuck with our own thoughts. But, so it's funny, there's parallels because I don't necessarily, you know, I'm obviously a fan of comedy, but I don't care where comics move.

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:19:08Lex Fridman?

  But there's a parallel move that's happening, set of decisions which do influence my decision-making, which is where to start a business that's tech-centered. And that's more about the San Francisco Silicon Valley. And there is a lot of people leaving there. That's already-

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  And they're going to Austin.

• 2:19:25Lex Fridman?

  There, well, Austin, there's a, I think-

• 2:19:29Lex Fridman?

  There's a, there's a bunch of different places. Phoenix, there's Denver.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Austin will probably be a massive tech hub. Elon's there. It seems like it's all, everything about Austin says that it's going to be a massive tech hub. I just don't know if that means it'll be a massive comedy hub. It might.

• 2:19:45Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if those two can actually coexist. It's interesting because.

• 2:19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I, I think, you know, comedy suffered in New York and LA when everyone got super rich. Like, you know, it just wasn't as cool. It's still much more fun on the road. It's still more fun to perform for people that want and need to laugh in strip malls than it is to perform for hedge fund managers on, and with their dates. And, uh, you know, Instagram models in LA. It's just what it is. Comedy on the road is much more fun. So maybe in the spirit of that, Austin becomes, but you know, you know, Austin is just colonized by tech bros and stuff like, yeah, I mean, sure, sure. It'll be fun and it'll be great. I think Joe's made LA a scene. So if anyone's gonna make Austin a scene, it's Joe.

• 2:20:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And I like the, on the Elon side, which is what I'm much more familiar with. The promise of the possibility of what that could become, because there's a lot of problems in Silicon Valley. And of course it might be naive to think that just because it's like the grass is greener thing, which is just because the place where you come from has a lot of problems, doesn't mean you can just create a new place that's not going to have.

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's homelessness in Austin. There are problems in Austin. I mean, I, I think that with, by the way, with the influx of very rich people to an area. Sometimes that helps things, but sometimes it just makes things more polarizing and it, it spots, puts a spotlight on those problems and makes those problems even bigger. Right? So, I mean, I don't know that it's necessarily, it's, it's hard to predict. I just know that LA right now is funny. It's funny that there's 15 year old TikTokers making millions of dollars dancing in a house while the world burns. That is very funny.

• 2:21:16Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's for your, for, for your style of humor. Yes. The absurdity of.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  It's funny that no one cares about Hollywood starlets and actresses and actors. And everyone goes, hey, fuck you. Even though they've won three Academy Awards, they're all being replaced by just mediocre dancer 15 year olds. I mean, it's like, there's something hilarious about this city and it will burn in hell, but so will everything. So what are we talking about?

• 2:21:40Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, eventually the, the sun will die out and we will all be gone unless we colonize uh, outside of our solar system. But you know, I, I stand, I just sit here. You know, I'm struggling with this because Boston, I'm currently at MIT, Boston doesn't feel like the right place to start. A business uh, in the tech sector. And so I'm choosing, I'm looking at San Francisco, the way it is, and I'm looking at Austin.

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  Oh, Austin, uh, clearly.

• 2:22:07Lex Fridman?

  So it seems clear, but it's, it's such a difficult thing to uh, to predict what a place will look like in 10 years and 15 years or 20 years.

• 2:22:18Speaker 01

  And it's so hard to predict if you'll like it or not until you're there.

• 2:22:21Lex Fridman?

  And you know, this is speaking to risk. Um, there's not really a good reason for me to move anywhere. Uh, there's not a good reason to do anything in life. Part of me wants to, uh, just fucking do it and whatever and see what happens.

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  You like Boston? Do you like other things about Boston besides the tech thing? You like MIT?

• 2:22:41Lex Fridman?

  MIT, that's the problem and but.

• 2:22:42Speaker 01

  Do you like, do you like like the food in Boston? Do you eat food?

• 2:22:45Lex Fridman?

  I haven't been, I haven't eaten food or been outside for years.

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  And I mean, that, that's probably the better version. But you're keto forever. You've been keto for a long time.

• 2:22:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, keto fasting for a long time. Uh, 15 years fasting. Uh, the eating, eating once or twice a day. I'm, I haven't, uh, and then.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  But no sugar ever? No like?

• 2:23:07Lex Fridman?

  No sugar.

• 2:23:07Speaker 01

  And no pasta ever? No bread ever?

• 2:23:10Lex Fridman?

  No pasta, no bread, no, uh, except like, uh, so my source.

• 2:23:15Speaker 01

  You could kind of live anywhere because like going out is such a big part of what city you live in and like, you like the food there? Do you like the restaurants? Can you meet people? Whatever. But it's like, you really can just kind of.

• 2:23:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So not married, no kids.

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  Right. You have freedom. I'm me too. I have freedom.

• 2:23:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  And that, that's, we, we have the curse of too many choices.

• 2:23:34Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:23:35Speaker 01

  That's the thing. We have too many choices. We don't have somebody else going, what about like, we don't have to justify our decisions to anyone? So we can just kind of like let our minds run wild.

• 2:23:43Lex Fridman?

  So you just gotta hone the instinct of just what feels right and just fucking do it.

• 2:23:50Speaker 01

  And I think Austin with Joe down there and Elon down there, Austin seems like a real no brainer move for you.

• 2:23:55Lex Fridman?

  To try, you know?

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  To try.

• 2:23:56Lex Fridman?

  Why the hell not?

• 2:23:57Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 2:23:58Lex Fridman?

  Why not?

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  And then I think I should go to MIT. Like, I mean, I mean, I think I should give those nerds a piece of my mind. And you should go to, I was in an Uber pool once with a kid from MIT. And I was eating this thing from Bova's Bakery. I forget what it was. It was like a, it's so good. I don't know. You don't know Bova's Bakery, right? Yeah, it's in Boston, it's famous. And I was eating a thing and I was like covered in chocolate and this kid, like this little nerd, like this little like, you know, USB drive with feet was just staring at me and they just dropped him off at MIT and he like scurried away.

• 2:24:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  But that's a big school. Doesn't the NSA recruit out of there heavy, like MIT, places like that?

• 2:24:36Lex Fridman?

  I can't, I can't speak to that. But what, this is ridiculous question I sometimes ask myself when I'm alone. What is the meaning of life? Do you think about the big existential kind of why the hell we're here?

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  It's a cosmic kind of joke, kind of in a weird way, right? I mean, Joe said it the other day on, maybe it was you saying that like, he was just like, you know, by the time you figure out what it is, you're out of here. You know, it's kind of interesting. Or you even start to figure out what it is, you're out of here. It's like, it's like, that's kind of funny. It's like, you don't get enough time to truly, I think the meaning of life is just like,

• 2:25:17Speaker 01

  at the end of the day, do you feel you, it was time well spent? Was it time well spent? That's, that's really what it is. If you look back, do you go, hey, it was time well spent. Like I-

• 2:25:29Lex Fridman?

  Pretty good ride.

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  It was a pretty good ride. I did, I did, I did a lot. I did a lot of things. I, I, doing what you say is a part of it, I think. If you say you're gonna do something, maybe doing it. Uh, that seems to be extrapolating the meaning of life question to like, you know, what did you come here to do? I think it goes down deep of like, who are you and what do you want? And, you know, what are you suited to do and what?

• 2:25:56Lex Fridman?

  It does seem that, like, the people who are most enlightened that I've ever met or read books by, they ultimately land on humor. Like, they don't take shit seriously. They embrace the absurdity of it all and just kind of laugh at, laugh at it in this kind of simple way. So it does seem that humor is like- One of the fundamental truths of this universe we're in.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  And it's love. It's love. Humor, humor can be love, right? People laughing, that that sound is kind of like Carolyn Knapp, who wrote a book called Drinking a Love Story, which is a really good book about not drinking, drinking and then not drinking. And she said, you could understand things as love. That you, I think one of the last lines of the thing is like, people talking about their experiences in life, that that could be love, like, you know, laughter is love. Like, I feel like love and finding it wherever you can find it is why we're here. That's that connection. And laughter can be love. And, you know, figuring out, you know, something that makes life better for a lot of people can be

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  love, you know, whether it's a vaccine or a technological advancement or whatever. Like, you know, all of those things, I think, can be that feeling. And I think that's what's important. It connects you to a larger frequency, you know?

• 2:27:20Lex Fridman?

  I don't think there's a better way to end it, Tim. I hope you're one of the voices, I truly believe that your legacy be one of the most important voices of our time, because you're fearless and challenging all the absurdity of the nonsense that of our social and political discourse. I hope you keep doing it. I'm a fan. I'm still a bit starstruck, so.

• 2:27:42Speaker 01

  Oh, stop it. Listen, I, I, God, with your intellectual capacity, enjoying anything I do only underscores how truly fucked we are. But thank you very much.

• 2:27:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Thank you for talking today.

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  Thank you, brother.

• 2:28:00Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dillon. And thank you to our sponsors, NetSuite, business management software, Athletic Greens, all in one nutrition drink, Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, BetterHelp Online Therapy, and Rev's Speech-to-Text Service. So the choice is business, health, sanity, or transcripts. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you some words from George Carlin. Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

• 2:28:38Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

• 2:29:00Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.