#2453 - Evan Hafer

Summary

The Joe Rogan Experience #2453 – Evan Hafer
Date: February 12, 2026
Host: Joe Rogan
Guest: Evan Hafer (Founder/CEO, Black Rifle Coffee Company, former Green Beret/CIA contractor)

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation between Joe Rogan and Evan Hafer. Drawing from their shared experiences with discipline, physical challenges, military culture, and entrepreneurship, they explore the value of hard skills, mental fortitude, craft (both in coffee and comedy), the darker sides of human nature (including the Epstein conspiracy), and the transformative, possibly apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence.

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1. The Value of Tangible Skills and Craft

• Desk Oddities: Joe opens discussion by highlighting gifts he's received, such as a 3D-printed flamethrower and Olmec artifact—setting a tone of tactile, hands-on appreciation (00:17–01:00).
• Bowhunting & Gear Talk: The conversation dives into technical archery—grip upgrades, bow poundage, shooting routines. Both share how practicing skills (archery, shooting) is mentally clarifying and deeply satisfying.
• Notable Quote:
  • Joe: "I’m not living in a house where I can’t shoot at least 50 yards... I bring a range finder when I look at houses." (05:07)

Timestamps

• Archery/gear deep-dive: 00:43–07:45
• Skill degradation discussion: 08:35–09:18

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2. Discipline, Mental Endurance & Mastery

• Skill Degradation: Both discuss how quickly archery skills fade if not maintained, paralleling it to mental discipline in life and combat sports.
• Bombing in Comedy: Joe draws a parallel between sharpening material on stage and skill in sports—embracing pain, learning from failure.
• Notable Quote:
  • Joe: "Bombing on stage is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother… but there’s probably a guy out there that likes sucking a thousand dicks." (25:11)
• Family & Influence: Discussion about how disciplined, committed parents (e.g. Cam Hanes) create high-performing children by example (71:24–73:05).
• The “Dirtbag” Climber Archetype: Admiration for life lived in total dedication to a craft, at great personal cost.

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3. Coffee Culture: Wokeism vs. Craft

• Coffee as Subculture: Evan explains the evolution of coffee—first through fourth wave, and how “woke” culture and identity politics intertwine with modern barista/artisan coffee scenes (12:23–15:09).
• Rogan’s Critique: Joe expresses distaste for Starbucks’ over-roasted “undrinkable” coffee, and the tendency for people to mask bad coffee with sugar and cream.

Timestamps

• Coffee industry sociology: 12:23–19:29

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4. True Crime, Vulnerability & Serial Killers

• Women, True Crime, and Vulnerability: Joe and Evan dissect society’s obsession with true crime, particularly women’s fascination—framing it as a way to study male violence and personal defense.
• Lady Bird Lake Deaths in Austin: Speculation about mysterious drownings and a possible serial killer, filtered through skepticism and dark humor.
• Serial Killers Statistics: The duo marinate on the still-unsettling percentage of active killers in the U.S., and how technology has lowered numbers compared to the 1970s-'80s.

Notable Quotes:

• Evan: "How many serial killers are out there? ...I think 100."
• Joe: "Maybe I need to take a break. Scrubbing the blood out of the inside of your fingernails." (34:03)

Timestamps

• True crime & serial killer speculation: 27:48–39:08

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5. Societal Decay: Cities, Drugs, and Homelessness

• Seattle, Portland, and LA: Firsthand experiences of cities unraveling due to homelessness, meth, crime, "vanlife vs. methlife," and progressive policies.
• Personal Stories: Evan and Joe share what drove them to leave those cities (41:01–45:04).

Timestamps

• City decay stories & vanlife vs methlife: 40:11–48:52

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6. Obsession & Mastery (Archery, Pool, Comedy)

• Parallel Passions: Joe describes the meditative focus of archery and professional pool, drawing parallels to martial arts and comedy.
• Crafting a Life: Mastery demands sacrifice and mental purification; both agree deep, difficult pursuits cleanse the mind and foster happiness.

Notable Quotes:

• Joe: "I think everybody needs something that you can’t master, that is hard to do, that cleans your mind." (68:10)
• Hafer: "It’s a lesson in life — you can work harder than you’ve ever worked and still fail."

Timestamps

• Obsession/mastery arc: 48:52–68:05

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7. Building Courage, Character, and Community

• Military Heroism: Discussion of Medal of Honor recipient Earl Plumlee, the USS Parche, and the profound humility and secrecy of elite warriors.
• Courage as Process: Examining the daily, lifelong choices that develop heroic traits, not just in the military but in every walk of life.
• Role Models: Respect for those whose pursuit of excellence "feeds" their circle, creating ripples of positive growth (77:42).

Timestamps

• Plumlee, heroes, and courage: 73:24–82:03

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8. The Epstein Conspiracy & Human Darkness

• Epstein Files: In-depth, ongoing commentary as names are unredacted — focusing on Les Wexner and elite circles, cover-ups, redacted files, and the sheer depravity involved.
• Sulfuric Acid Orders: Speculation on the implications of massive acid and concrete orders right after Epstein’s indictment.
• Cultural Rot: The conversation steers into how institutions protect and perpetuate evil, with a tone of moral disgust rather than titillation.
• Notable Quotes:
  • Joe: "The conspiracy that drives me the most crazy… this one scares the shit out of me. Because the fear of literally demonic human beings running the world, and don’t give a fuck about human lives…” (142:34)

Timestamps

• Epstein/depravity: 137:23–163:38

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9. Artificial Intelligence: Existential Threat or Transformative Tool?

• White Collar Apocalypse: Both warn that AI will devastate numerous professions (“the invention of the Internet times a million”).
• Matt Schumer’s Article: Rogan shares a written warning about coming AI disruptions that may dwarf COVID’s effects.
• Human Obsolescence: They riff on the possibility of “second class citizens,” “AI pets,” and whether AI will simply decide humans are too problematic to preserve.
• Government/DOD Concerns: Hafer expresses unease about AI’s porous, open-source, and international character: “You’ve weaponized the most powerful tool ever known to humankind.”

Notable Quotes:

• Rogan: “The people that aren’t nervous are naive. This is going to be the kind of astronomical change that’s never taken place before in civilization.” (166:49)
• Hafer: “It’s a Manhattan Project that’s also open-sourced… you’ve weaponized the most powerful tool ever known to humankind.” (172:57)

Timestamps

• AI section: 163:54–173:39

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On Bombing in Comedy:
  “If you like bombing, you’d like people in your mouth. Like, it’s not fun… you don’t want people to have a bad time.” — Joe (25:36)
• On Archery & Pool:
  “It’s the same thing. There is no room for anything. Nothing matters. Did the ball go in the hole? If it didn’t, you lose. If it did, you win. It’s really clean. I like that.” — Joe (60:12)
• On Courage:
  “It belongs to the guys… any of the guys, if they wouldn’t have been shot, would have done the same exact thing that I did.” — Evan quoting Earl Plumlee (74:20)
• On AI and the Workforce:
  “What is a workforce? Elon just said it’s a waste of time to go to medical school.” — Joe (167:41)
  “How do we adjust? That’s the real question.” — Joe (167:15)
• On Society’s Need for Challenge:
  “People need stuff to clean their mind… why so many people are running around so fucked up is, you’re just mentally all fucked up. And so you go to a doctor, and that’s the road they go down... there’s other ways to do it.” — Joe (68:10)
• On Modern City Decay:
  “There’s a big difference between vanlife and #methlife.” — Joe (45:04)
• On the Epstein Scandal:
  "Why would you be thinking you’re going to be able to do construction when you’re going to go to jail for the rest of your life?” — Joe (162:10)

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Tone and Style

• Authenticity: Both men are unfiltered, conversational, occasionally crude, but always grounded in firsthand or deeply considered experience.
• Humor & Dark Wit: Stories are punctuated with humor, even around serious or dark topics.
• Mutual Respect: The rapport is evident—Rogan’s curiosity and Hafer’s practical intelligence make for a relaxed but sharp dialogue.
• Cultural Critique: Running beneath is a critique of modernity: alienation, mental health crises, soft culture, the lost value of challenge and discomfort.

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For New Listeners

This episode is rich with technical, philosophical, humorous, and darkly insightful content spanning everything from the craft of archery and comedy to the potential collapse of the white collar economy due to AI. Rogan and Hafer’s dialogue explores why hard things matter, why society needs challenge, and how to build meaningful resilience in a modern world full of distractions and existential threats. The discussion moves seamlessly between the personal (bombing on-stage, raising kids) to the global (serial killers, government corruption, AI). If you value deep dives, candor, and the blending of big ideas with everyday experience, don’t miss this one.

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Selected Timestamps for Key Segments

• Archery/skills: 00:43–07:45
• Coffee culture: 12:23–19:29
• True crime/serial killers: 27:48–39:08
• Obsession/mastery: 48:52–68:05
• Family/courage: 71:24–82:03
• Epstein files/conspiracies: 137:23–163:38
• Artificial Intelligence: 163:54–173:39

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Episode Close:
"All right. Dude, we just did three hours." — Joe (173:39)
"Awesome. Thanks, man. Get some food and hang out and that’s it. Black Rifle Coffee—it’s the best, it’s all we use." — Joe (173:41)

Transcript

[Mike]

Joe Rogan podcast.

[Comedian]

Check it out.

[Mike]

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day.

[Comedian]

Oh, man. What's happening, baby?

[Mike]

Everything.

[Comedian]

Nothing.

[Mike]

All at the same time.

[Comedian]

I was just explaining all the. That's on this desk. It's like everybody likes to give me something that sits here, which is kind of cool. Like Ed Calderon gave me this. It's like a WD40 with a lighter attached to it. You can blast people.

[Mike]

Is it like a self defense? I don't.

[Comedian]

He's always got these things like cartel things.

[Mike]

That looks like the cart 3D printed.

[Comedian]

Yeah, yeah, I think it is.

[Mike]

Yeah. Yeah, that's cool.

[Comedian]

Yeah, I mean it's a little portable flamethrower.

[Interjector]

Holy.

[Comedian]

From two common items. And then I think it was Luke Caverns gave me this. Is that who gave me this? The. The old mechanic? It's from the Olmecs.

[Mike]

Oh, is that what it is?

[Comedian]

Yeah. And then of course, my man John Reeves has always given me these mammoth things. I got mammoths now. This is actually from Colossal, but he gave me a. A 1911 handle.

[Mike]

That's legit.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Even though. Do you have any 1911s?

[Comedian]

No. Yeah, I got 2011s.

[Mike]

Yeah, of course. It's a. It's a huge upgrade.

[Comedian]

Yeah. But you know, I'm sure it'll probably be able to fit like you bring it to a gunsmith. You can make it.

[Mike]

Yeah. Well, you know what you could do? You could have them make one for your bow. So you could put the. The bone on each side of your bow.

[Comedian]

Oh, I have that. You have it? Yeah. From Rattler.

[Mike]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Comedian]

This is another piece. Shout out to Handsome Rob Grips. He always hooks me up, gives me those Keep hammering ones.

[Mike]

Yeah, those are cool.

[Comedian]

Yeah, it feels better too. It feels better in the hand. It's interesting. Like Hoyt doesn't have a whole lot of option. Like Ultraview doesn't make their. Their handles for Hoyt, but they make them for Matthews because he. He shoots Matthews. But it's a nice handle upgrade. It really does like the way it sits in your hand. It really does feel like a little better.

[Mike]

Are you still. Are you still putting them on your. Your Hoyt for everyone?

[Comedian]

The Rattler grip.

[Mike]

You do?

[Comedian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just sent me some new ones. It feels better. And the bone, there's something about the bone. It's more tactile in your hand than the plastic.

[Mike]

Well, I've been wrapping mine with that camouflage athletic tape.

[Comedian]

Oh, really?

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Bomar sells Stuff like that. He sells specific bow grip.

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

It's got a little bit of tackiness to it, but some people think you shouldn't have that. They think your hand should be so relaxed that it should be able to slip around your hand. So there's like no torque whatsoever in your front hand.

[Mike]

I don't like that. I like to feel, I like to feel the, the dexterity of it.

[Comedian]

Right.

[Mike]

I like to have a little bit of relief in the hand in the context of I got to have some grippiness to it. Just like a baseball bat or any other things. Any. Even all of the like Glocks and 2011s. I'll still do an upgrade on the stippling and create a little bit more. But I've also got giant hands for a. Well, I shouldn't be, I shouldn't say I'm small. Like I am 2 inches taller than the average Asian woman.

[Comedian]

So.

[Mike]

So I, I don't like to brag about it. I don't want to come out with that right away. It just might seem a little bit egotistical.

[Comedian]

Yeah. But if you, if you do anything, I think it's just like whether it's with archery, with anything with shooting, you just, it just has to register with you. It's not, it's not going to be the same with everybody. You know, I know dudes who just can't get used to finger triggers and some dudes just love finger triggers and some guys just have to shoot a hinge and some guys just can't do it.

[Mike]

I, I shoot them all, man. Yeah, like I just have. So I got that, that dump bag now that I basically I'll wear on the side and then I'll do the, the hinge roulette.

[Comedian]

So I'll just like reach in there.

[Mike]

Reach in. And then I gotta shoot a hinge or I gotta shoot this. And the only way that's that you don't. Or the, the mix up part, you've got to shoot the wrist strap. Right. You have to put that on. So you can't just do shooter roulette with all of that.

[Comedian]

But that's the, the wrist straps a little bit more involved. But I love having. I've been using the Wise Guy. I've been. Ever since our last hunt, I've been only using the Wise Guy. And I'm used to it now. It took, it took a while. I was like hammering the trigger for a little bit like after. The thing is, it's like with archery, once your form breaks down and Then you try to compensate because you're tired. Like I think I should just limit myself to one hour and, and after one hour just stop.

[Mike]

So is that what you're doing every day is basically an hour?

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

A little bit more, A little, little less.

[Comedian]

Yeah, but it's when it's more. It's when things go sideways. Like I'll give myself like a few minutes break to let my arm relax and then I just, I'm just. It's too much compensating because my arm's tired.

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

And not enough. Especially because the bow's 84 now. I got the new one that's £90.

[Mike]

Is that what you're shooting every day?

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

You're shooting 90 pounds.

[Comedian]

84.

[Mike]

84 every day.

[Comedian]

I haven't, I haven't set up the 90 yet. It's okay. Archery country.

[Mike]

And then do you. Are you going out to 100 plus every day too, or you stick 85? 85, 85.

[Comedian]

It's my standard in my backyard as long as there's no, no one wandering around. When people are wandering around, I go, you know, like this landscapers. I, I don't do a long bomb.

[Mike]

I, I've got my. My wife is re redoing this little garden house in the back, so she won't let me shoot at it anymore because she's afraid I'm going to put an arrow through her little hut that she's making. She's. She's actually doing all the work too. She's got like a tool belt on and she's out there hammering away.

[Comedian]

Oh, that's great.

[Mike]

And everything. She's doing all the work.

[Comedian]

Wow.

[Mike]

So she's like, you can no longer use this as your backstop. Cuz it was just a pile of that I could basically shoot arrows at.

[Comedian]

Oh, that's a bad trade.

[Mike]

It's a super bad trade.

[Comedian]

Yeah. I need a backstop you gotta off. Like we were talking about like must haves for backyards. Like I gotta, I'm. I'm not living in a house where I can't shoot at least 50 yards. No, I go out in the backyard, I get my range finder. I bring a range finder when I look at houses. No.

[Mike]

Are you serious?

[Comedian]

100%. I've been doing it for the last like six, seven years before I bought this house in. Well, the bought when I bought the house in Austin is a big yard. I'm like, we're good. I just had to find a spot. I was like, this is at least 100 yards from here to here. Have you ever.

[Mike]

Have you ever punched. Punch the trigger and put one out in the. The river? I guess you shouldn't tell me.

[Comedian]

No, I never shoot towards the river because kayakers, right? You never. When some cuz like the kayakers, they like to go like real close to the shore. Well, yeah, like if you hear. That would suck. Oh my God. I'd be in such deep. I would never do it. I. I wouldn't be. I just wouldn't.

[Mike]

Yeah, deep.

[Comedian]

Deepest of deep. An like me who's always promoting archery, I. I shoot a kayaker with a field tip right through the forehead. See some poor lady like, like a.

[Mike]

Unicorn running through, running off the river.

[Comedian]

Oh, God. Oh my God. I very rarely. I mean, if I'm shooting broadheads, I really know where I'm going. Yeah, I don't, I don't around. But with field tips, I'll. I'll launch some bombs, but it's never in an area where there's anything behind me.

[Mike]

No, I don't.

[Comedian]

It's too, too risky.

[Mike]

I had cider archery, little archery range in the back of my Salt Lake City building and every like. And I used to let everybody use it in the company. And then after you've worked for the company for a while, you'd get your choice. You'd get like a staccato or a rifle or a bow. And then we were doing. We still do, right? We still do a lot of veteran adaptive athlete shoots and the tactical or tactical games and the total archery challenges. So I've given away 100 bows probably.

[Comedian]

Oh, that's awesome. Do you let them. Here's their brand and the whole deal.

[Mike]

No, no, no. We partner. We partnered with Hoyt on the last batch and then we partnered with pse. We partner with kind of anybody that wants to like go in 50, 50 on us, right?

[Comedian]

Oh, great.

[Mike]

But then we'll make them black rifle custom, right? So it's cool. Camouflage, little branding on it. But here's the downside of that is when you got a bunch of people shooting in the back and I had a storage facility in the back, there were always arrows in the, in this like, storage area. And so finally my, my. Our general counsel came to me. He's like, no more. You gotta stop. You can't shoot any more arrows. So a bandit for everybody except for me, me, Logan, you know, Matt, basically the people that could either absorb the legal fees or at least like, explain it away.

[Comedian]

Well, the thing about archery is it's such a It's a skill that 100% degrades. Like, you have to stay on it, and you just can't trust that everyone's staying on it.

[Mike]

No. It's even hard for me. If I take three weeks off. I was having that. A little bit of tendinitis in my left elbow, so I took a month off after hunting season. And you put it back in your hand, and it feels almost like a foreign object. It feels horrible. It's just gross. Until you have at least three or four days of shooting consistently back into the groove, you can't put the arrow where you want. It's just three weeks off.

[Comedian]

And it feels to me like the more consistent I am in off season, like, the entire year, those are the years where I'm really shooting my best. You can't just get back on the bow, like, a month before you have to go hunt. You can't do it.

[Mike]

I can't. I know guys that can. Guys that I grew up with that had been shooting since they were nine. That's right.

[Comedian]

But they're really good shots. Imagine how good they would be if they did it all the time.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Like, a guy like Cam, like, he's not taking any time off. Like, no, he's shooting every day.

[Mike]

But that's part. He. He takes pleasure in the pain, too. He doesn't take time off because he's.

[Comedian]

That would be relaxed.

[Mike]

Yeah, it'd be relaxing. Like, imagine.

[Comedian]

Just.

[Mike]

Just imagine that, like, Cam Haynes on vacation, his feet up, you know, drinking on the beach. Is that even, like a. No, it's not even a thing.

[Comedian]

I've gone on vacation with them.

[Mike]

Have you really?

[Comedian]

Yeah. But when we went vacationing in Lanai, where we could bow.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Yeah. So we would bow hunt at least once a day. Because Lanai, you know, you've been. You've been. It's crazy. It's one of the craziest places on earth. It's great for people that don't know there's 3, 000 people and 30, 000 deer.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

And they were given by King Kameha to King Kamehameha by the. Whoever the head dude was in India. He's like. He gave him a gift of access.

[Mike]

Is that where they came from? I didn't realize that. That that was the actual timeline. Yeah, I didn't realize that.

[Comedian]

Yeah. And they're everywhere. They tried. They're amazing. They tried to reintroduce them, try to introduce them to the big island. Like, I know Shane Dorian was all pumped about it. But then they eradicated them. People killed them. They said they were invasive, but I.

[Mike]

Think they need to be everywhere they can be.

[Comedian]

They're delicious.

[Mike]

They're the delicious. They're the most delicious. Me of the deer, of course.

[Comedian]

Yeah. Next to elk, it's like, it's. For me, it's elk and then axis. But axes are the most challenging hunt. They're the fastest things I've ever seen in my life.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

They move so fast it doesn't even make sense. It's like, how are you doing that? You could dodge an arrow from 30 yards away and the arrow is not even close to them when. When it gets there.

[Mike]

I had a female bedded at 30 and she jumped the string on her bed at 30 yards. That, that was my first shot. And I realized, holy.

[Comedian]

Yeah, they're different.

[Mike]

I've got to up my game.

[Comedian]

Well, it's like they evolved with tigers.

[Mike]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Comedian]

That's the thing. It's like you got to be able to go.

[Mike]

You want to imagine how tough you would be if you involved with tigers.

[Comedian]

Yeah. Well, that's the problem with America, period. It's like there's not enough. There's too many people running around with zero physical challenges. And they're so soft. Like there's a giant percentage of our population that is so soft. And if, like, if there was like a. If the world went nuclear, we lost everything. And then it was like hand to hand battles. Every country could invade America. Once we run out of bullets, every country can fuck us up.

[Mike]

Yeah. You can walk around, I think. Well, that's, you know, with coffee, right? The best coffee shops are like, there's so much stuff on Instagram. It's so funny because you walk into a coffee shop and if you see the craziest looking freak, it's going to have the best coffee.

[Comedian]

There's so left wing. Weirdo. Fucking lip rings.

[Mike]

Oh, yeah. How many nose rings do you have? How like, how many colors do you have in your hair and how many pronouns do you have? Because that's like you're going to make the greatest espresso I've ever had. And that's the joke, right? Because I'll go cruise around in Austin for the last couple of weeks.

[Comedian]

Yeah. You see a dude who's jacked with a hand tattoo, he's going to make you a bullshit coffee.

[Mike]

It's like make you pour over. I mean, I can just pour it over, you know, like what, he'll make.

[Comedian]

You some cowboy coffee. He's got a one of Them tin pots you put on the fire.

[Mike]

Take his sock off or something. Like, I, I'm good. I'm all set, man. I'm all set.

[Comedian]

What is it about baristas? Like, how did that become such a left wing safe place?

[Mike]

I, you know, I don't know. I think it, I think the origin of it comes from San Francisco, Seattle. Right. All the, we'll say the left wing, left coast, all of the woke. Yeah. Because that also drove most of what I would say is the third and fourth wave. Because there's 1, 2, 3, 4 basic waves in coffee before third and fourth wave are the most recent. Fourth wave would be considered single origin. Very lightly rose coffees. And you've been to these coffee shops, you know what they look like. It takes you 15 minutes to go get a cup of coffee. They typically won't even talk to you. They look down at the computer screen. But it's going to be decent cop, right. So if you go first wave, which is going to be like Folgers, Maxwell House, that's like been around for 100 years, that's a commodity coffee. It's going to have robusta, it's going to be darker roasted. That's going to be first wave. And then second wave would be experiential. So it'd be more like Starbucks kind of. Second wave would be experiential, dark. And then third wave would be more artisan micro lot, single origin. And fourth wave is kind of a mix of the best in third wave that really activates your senses in the sense of like now they're doing anaerobics, so they're using things from like wine and beer and they're developing all these different profiles. But that artisan craft, the genesis. And like San Francisco and Seattle from third wave, they took on identity politics and then drove it through the trade. It's pretty impressive. It's so, it's so weird because if you go anywhere you can get amazing cups of coffee, you're just going to like wade through the wokeism to go get it.

[Comedian]

Yeah, I can't go there.

[Mike]

No.

[Comedian]

I was at a Starbucks the other day and two lesbians walked in. They saw me and they left. What?

[Mike]

That's how bad it was.

[Comedian]

They said, we can't, we can't do this.

[Mike]

Seriously.

[Comedian]

They looked in my face and they said, we can't do this. And they left. I was like, I'm a big fan. Yeah, big fan of your work. I had a cup of coffee from Starbucks, which I rarely go into, but was up to my family. And it was so bad. A cup of black coffee, it's all a drink. I don't put anything in it. I was like, this is like not drinkable. It tastes like. Which is like everybody throws a bunch of cream in there and a bunch of sugar in there and you get your caffeine and it tastes like what you like. But when, if you just try to just drink coffee at Starbucks, it is such a bad product. And that doesn't have to be like that.

[Mike]

Well, part of the problem is it's burnt over roasted because they know it's gonna have cream and sugar in it.

[Comedian]

But why over roast it then?

[Mike]

Because you can make a consistent profile and it's just consistently very dark and extremely acidic, basically. And that becomes the consistency in the product.

[Comedian]

Do you think people have this thing in their head that the darker the coffee is, the stronger it is?

[Mike]

Yeah, of course. That's one of the huge misconceptions. Right. So let's just bucket the misconceptions in here, which is, you know, coffee is not a bean, it's a fruit. So it's a cherry. And then you roast the pit. So the second one would probably be. The darker you roast something, the more caffeine it's going to have, which is absolutely not the case.

[Comedian]

It's the opposite.

[Mike]

It's completely opposite because you got two genetic strains. You've got Robusta and Arabica. Robusta is smaller bean, it's got more caffeine. It's also more bitter. Arabica probably constitutes probably 60 to 70% of the world's coffee, but it's bitter, more flavor, it's got less caffeine and it's less acidic in general. And then when you over roast it, you can kind of combine multiple lots, multiple variants of Arabica and then you can consistent. You can make this consistent profile.

[Comedian]

So it consistently sucks.

[Mike]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're going to put cream and sugar in it. Yeah, nobody cares. Because they're like, I just need something that's going to serve as a caffeine vehicle for my cream and sugar.

[Comedian]

I know, but wouldn't that be okay if you just had good coffee and did that and burn it?

[Mike]

Well, I do. I think that's where third, third wave and fourth wave. It's more directly related to the quality of the coffee. It's no cream, no sugar. And it's more first and second wave. It's cream and sugar. Because you're going to have to cover up the inconsistencies.

[Comedian]

Well, some people just like it anyway, because what they're getting is a treat. It's not. They're not thinking of as, like, I'm drinking coffee. Like, they're getting a treat, right? Like, if you have order of Frappuccino, it's a milkshake. It's a milkshake.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

There's tons of sugar, tons of caffeine, too. You're, like, sitting in your cubicle, you.

[Mike]

Got like, 100 grams of sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine. You're like, you're. You're skyrocketing with just energy until you crash, and then you need another one.

[Comedian]

Yeah. And then you're just doing that all day and frying your central nervous system. And then when you get out of work, you just die. You just go home and.

[Mike]

Go home and melt on the couch and watch some sports, man.

[Comedian]

Yeah, your insulin's all up. You're falling asleep.

[Mike]

The coffee, the coffee nerd conversations just put half the audience to sleep, too.

[Comedian]

I don't care. I don't care.

[Mike]

Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny, man. I'll start talking about it. I'm like, I should not. Because I was a comms guy back in. In my previous profession, my previous life. And it's so funny because when you talk about communications and just technology in general, and you start analyzing, like, you know, frequencies and. And spectrum analyzers or whatever, whatever you want to talk about. People's eyes would just glaze over in the team room, and I'm like, all right, well, you guys want to go blow some shit up? Like, why don't we shift the topic? Because you guys don't want to talk about this. I know you don't want to hear about it. So in cross training, it's just you try to keep people awake, basically.

[Comedian]

This episode is brought to you by Roka, and this is important, so don't skip this. I've been wearing Rokas for years, and I absolutely love them. Of all the glasses brands out there, I choose Roka. Roka shit just works different. You'll notice it from the first time you put them on their face. They feel great. I can run around in them. They never fall off your head. They're super high quality, lightweight, super comfortable, and they stay on your damn face even if you're sweaty. They stay in place. Even better, they don't slip. Gym stuff, kettle bells, yoga, sprints, chasing the dog, whatever you're into. It could be just leaning over to pick up your kids. Everything stays on your face and feels great with Crystal clear optics. Check them out and feel the difference for yourself. To help you get started, roka is offering JRE listeners 20% off your order, so go to roca.com. well, there's a lot of people that have a hard time focusing on something that isn't exciting.

[Mike]

Oh, yeah.

[Comedian]

For whatever reason. Even if it's, like, important technical details that'll help you do things that are exciting. You know, it's. It's the delayed gratification.

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

They're the same type of people that don't like to do cold plunges or don't like to do certain things that, like, you're not going to feel an immediate benefit. It's going to suck while you're doing it. So you put it off. Like, you gotta. You've gotta have a mindset that there's some things that suck that will make the things that are exciting way better. Yeah, like, for comics, it's writing, like, sitting down and writing, you know, because a lot of comics don't want to write. They just want to come out with ideas through the day and then work them out on stage. I'm like, that is great. You can do that. But you should also write because the ideas that come to you while you're writing, they won't come any other way. And those are like little gifts from the universe. And you. The only way you get them is you got to sit down with a pad of paper or computer in front of you and come up with them. You got to sit down and start working and let the mind just. Just slowly but surely pop them out.

[Mike]

How often do you do that?

[Comedian]

At least four days a week for hour. Two hours? Yeah, at least. At least an hour. I try to write a thousand words, so it might be an hour, it might be two hours. And then out of those thousand words, I might get a paragraph. Like, there it is.

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

That's what I was looking for. You're basically looking for arrowheads in a field. You know, you're picking up a giant clump of dirt and you're shaking it out and washing it over and got one.

[Mike]

So do you try that out on anybody before you actually. Yeah, you just like, okay, this is the.

[Comedian]

Pretty sure I got something. When I got something, I'm pretty sure I got it. But I don't know what it's gonna be until the audience tells me, like.

[Mike]

When you have your own club. So you can just try. You just, like, drive in. That's Wednesday.

[Comedian]

Let me try. Even when I didn't, I would go to the store. I would go to the, like, say if I have a bit and it's exciting, like, oh, I wrote something that's good. I would go to the improv and then I'd go to the store. Maybe I go to the Ice House, right? I bang out a few sets, at least two in a night. Some, you know, you could travel around. Like, LA was really good for that. Austin's amazing for that. There's seven clubs on my street now.

[Mike]

What?

[Comedian]

Oh yeah, between my street and the neighboring streets. So you got us. And then right down the street is the Sunset Room, which Red Band owns. And then right up across from that you got Creek in the Cave, which is awesome. And then you got the Vulcan, which is right down the street. And there's a bunch of other small, small rooms. There's the Black Rabbit. There's all these rooms that have comedy at least three or four nights a week. So if you're like a guy or a girl coming up right now in Austin, you can really work. You could work. And they're all paying. So you're, you know, you're collecting 50 bucks here. My club pays more. My club plays the most. But all these different places, they pay, you know, like actual money for you to do a set. At the end of the night, you got a few hundred bucks, you can get something to eat. Like there's all these comics that don't have to do the road now, right? So like they used to just have to do the road to pay their rent and for food. You don't have to do that anym. You could like stay in town and really build up material and then go out on the road.

[Mike]

Is the material going to shift? I know, it's like regionally, you've got to have your. I'm not saying like left or right. I'm just saying does the material have to shift based on where you're at? So if you're in la, is the crowd a little bit different? The people are going to be more accepting, less accepting. Expect something a little bit different. You can't. You just like, here's the joke, let me run it.

[Comedian]

Well, the good thing is, if they're not accepting of an idea, maybe you should re examine that idea and maybe figure out like, why am I. Maybe I should figure out a better way to make this idea acceptable, you know, because there's ideas where I'll start it off and it's just like, oh, this is. This ain't going anywhere. And then I'm like, there's got to be an angle in here and then I'll find a whole nother angle. I'm like, haha, now I have it. And then I have to find an angle like, what if I was a woman and I was watching this and I'm looking at this meathead on stage and I'm like, guy, like. I gotta figure out a way to get them to understand that just because I look like this doesn't mean I'm a bad guy. Like, like, let me like work this into your head first and then explain it from my perspective.

[Mike]

It's funny because I look like this, it doesn't mean I'm a bad guy.

[Comedian]

An automatic assumption.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

You know, I mean, it's an untold prejudice that like, men with muscles in particular are assholes, Right? Like instantly.

[Mike]

Yeah. You've got a very definitive look. And then as soon as you open your mouth, they're assuming that you're gonna be just the complete asshole.

[Comedian]

Right? Yeah. A mean person.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

You know, covered in tattoos, Cage fighting commentary.

[Mike]

I know that you can craft a joke because you've been doing this for forever, but is there a certain amount of pleasure that you get now from bombing sometimes? Smoking in terrible.

[Comedian]

Really? I always say bombing on stage, like sucking a thousand dick in front of your mother. But the difference is like, there's probably a guy out there that likes sucking a thousand dicks.

[Mike]

As far as you made me do this, Mom.

[Comedian]

Come on, Mom. 99. There's a guy out there that would like take some. I mean, these people are into porn and all kinds of nutty things.

[Mike]

You know, you're, you're drawing the same parallel to like bombing. And people are just porn.

[Comedian]

Yeah. If you like bombing, you could hear into people in your mouth, like, it's not fun. You don't want people to have a bad time. They're there to have fun. These people work. They're working all day. They're tired. You want them to have a good ass time. And the only way for them to have a good ass time is for you to do your job right. You know, but it's, it has to sometimes not work well. And there's like this moment when I'm about to do a new bit. I'm like, God, I don't even want to do this. I don't know where this goes, but I have to. You got to trot it out there and, and hope that you could find.

[Mike]

An angle so you don't try those on on your. Like with your wife. Yeah. She'd just tear you Down.

[Comedian]

She would just stare at me like, what? What is wrong with you? It's like she and I have a very good balance because she's so different than me. She's so. But has a lot of the same values as me. Yeah, you know, like discipline and she's very smart and she's interested in things, but we're very different.

[Mike]

Well, it's so funny because my wife and I will walk around, right? And I'm a very amateur comedian. Just around my friends. I try to. I try really hard, right? I'm not even close. I'm just like, you know, I specialize in stupid shit that I say. Basically, that's where I'm going with this. And she. When I get her to laugh, that's like. That means way more to me than like. But my friends, sure, I can make them laugh. Like, I can make my employees laugh. I kind of pay them to, you know. But like, when my wife laughs, that means it's fucking funny.

[Comedian]

That's legit.

[Mike]

It means something, right? It's legit. She's like a one person crowd, right? So we were walking around, I was talking about, have you seen that Bert Kreicher. Free Bert. Have you seen his new series?

[Comedian]

I've only seen trailers, but everybody that saw it loves it.

[Mike]

It's really funny, man. So I was like, we should watch this. You should check it out. She watched like five minutes. She's like, this is such a dude show. Fuck you. I've never watched this, but it's the same. It's like what I want to watch and I think is funn. She's like, absolutely not. But then she's wants to watch some like, true crime thing around it, you know, a dude that killed his wife. And I'm like, they love. They love it.

[Comedian]

Why do they love that?

[Mike]

It's so weird.

[Comedian]

It's like genetic that they love it. Because my kids love those.

[Mike]

Really?

[Comedian]

They love serial killer expose shows and all these true crimes.

[Mike]

And I don't like any of that.

[Comedian]

I was talking to my daughter about it and she said, because girls don't do things like this. So we kind of want to see like what's going on in a man's mind that makes him. It's such a mystery, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's such a mystery. Like most men can imagine a scenario where there's a bunch of people that did some horrible shit in a room and you just go in there and fucking kill all of them. Yeah, most men. Most men can say, oh, yeah, there's a place. There's a place. Like if someone did something and I knew they did something and they're in that room and they need to go, they need to go, right? Most women can't think like that. They don't. They don't think like that. It's not inside their head. And then there's the darkness of it. Like, these aren't men that are doing something to someone who deserves it. They're just doing it to vulnerable people. They're just evil creatures who just want to go out and hunt vulnerable people. And I think women want to know that there are men like that out there that are so different than them. So they can put it in their head, like, okay, serial killers are real, right? Like these true crime shows have showed me this and I want to know, like, what to look for.

[Mike]

Right?

[Comedian]

That's what I think.

[Mike]

Whereas, have you ever spent a second of your life in fear or fearing a serial killer?

[Comedian]

Not really, no.

[Mike]

No, it's not a realistic fear.

[Comedian]

But if I was at a truck stop and there was some fucking shady dude that came into the bathroom after me and he was like waiting outside and it didn't look like he needed to use the bathroom, I'd be 100% on guard. Like, there's people that will just randomly kill people just for a thrill and get away with it. And I think there's way more of them getting away with it than they'd like us to know. Like, here's it. Here's a good example in Austin. What is the actual number of people who have bodies that have been found in Lady? Put this into our wonderful sponsor, Perplexity before it becomes the digital God that takes over the universe. This AI. What are the numbers of people that have been found drown in Lady Bird Lake over the last three years? It's something crazy.

[Mike]

Is it really?

[Comedian]

Yeah, it's like 30.

[Mike]

I thought this was just a funny joke for Tony to talk about.

[Comedian]

Oh, no, no, no.

[Mike]

It's like a real thing.

[Comedian]

It's real, right? It's real. So the cops don't want to say it's a serial killer. They think there's. It's because it's over by Rainey Street. A lot of people are partying, but there's the bodies keep piling up. 38. What?

[Mike]

They want to say it's not a serial killer.

[Comedian]

Since 2022, data showing at least 38 bodies found in or around Lady Bird Lake. Separate map based analysis of Lady Bird Lake deaths. Downtown area reports four deaths in 2022, five in 2023, five in 2024, two in 2025. The so this is downtown area. These map numbers focus on a specific stretch of the lake, while the 38 body figures covers all bodies found in or around the lake in that period.

[Interjector]

These might be right near that bar area.

[Comedian]

Right, right on Rainey Street. Yeah. Or the other parts of the lake.

[Mike]

So they're basically saying these guys get drunk and they end up passing out in the water.

[Comedian]

I mean, all you would have to do is get someone drunk enough where you could hold them underwater. Yeah, it's not. I mean, if you were a guy who wasn't drinking or you had a really good tolerance, or you're a big person. No evidence of serial murderer says the patterns match typical accidental drowning risks. Young adult men, nightlife, easy water access. Or some guy was drowning gay guys.

[Mike]

Could be.

[Comedian]

There's a lot of them are gay. Like a giant percentage of these guys are gay. Yeah. Yeah, because it's near a gay area. That's the gay. Rainey street is like the party area where there's a lot of gay bars.

[Mike]

That's why it's such a funny joke for Tony.

[Comedian]

Yeah, well, it's. It's a weird thing, man. It's a weird thing because at what point in time does someone have to get caught before they say, oh, Jesus, these. These weren't just a coincidence someone was drowning people? Because I don't think it was a common thing. I think, like, you know, you maybe get one a year. Some drunk hops off a boat and doesn't know what he's doing and drowns. That does happen. But this is not that. This is way more. 38 bodies in a few years is kind of kooky.

[Mike]

Well, and how many of those, if you think about it, right, how many serial killers are out there? Because FBI, obviously, they've done the analysis on it. There's probably like a hundred, two hundred, three hundred active serial killers at any point in time.

[Comedian]

Always. There's always. Yeah, always has been.

[Mike]

And most of them will all say, yeah, I wanted to get caught, or, yeah, it took you long enough. Like, I was getting sloppy.

[Comedian]

Right.

[Mike]

My murder lust took over.

[Interjector]

There was 200 since 2004.

[Mike]

Oh, my gosh.

[Comedian]

What? Oh, my God. Autopsy report found alcohol present in a large share of the cases, sometimes at levels above the legal driving limit, which is not much, by the way. Legal driving limit is like, two drinks. And police specifically describe most rainy street area drownings as alcohol or drug related.

[Interjector]

I've heard People getting, you know, dosed. They get, like, roofied and whatnot. And they're like, I've heard a lot. Too many cases. Never in a city have I lived. I've heard that many people saying they've been roofied.

[Comedian]

Yeah, no, I think it's. I don't think it's specific to here. I think it's everywhere. It's ghb, I think, is a lot of it. People are dosing people up with ghb. That's a big one.

[Interjector]

Was the. How many serial killers are there? Quit?

[Comedian]

Yeah. How many active serial killers do they estimate are in. In America right now? Let's guess. 10.

[Mike]

You think 10? Yeah, I think 100.

[Comedian]

Whoa.

[Mike]

Yeah, I'm going 100. This is like a Wheel of Fortune type scenario.

[Comedian]

Yeah, man. Holy. 100's nuts.

[Mike]

If it's a high, I think it's a hundred.

[Comedian]

That's crazy.

[Mike]

300. Interesting, huh?

[Comedian]

25 to 50 at any given time.

[Interjector]

Wow.

[Comedian]

Okay. Range reflects killers who have committed at least two murders with a cooling off period and are still operating undetected. I like the cooling off period. Maybe I need to take a break. Scrubbing the blood out of the inside of your fingernails. Serial killings make up less than 1% of U.S. homicides. Overall numbers peaked at around 300 in the 1970s, 1980s. There was 300 active serial killers in the 70s and the 80s. I bet that was because that was when it was like Son of Sam.

[Mike]

You know, it was, like, trendy.

[Comedian]

Yeah, I think it was probably a lot of bored dudes just didn't like working in an office.

[Mike]

It's like Ted Bundy and Sam. All those guys were like, the green.

[Comedian]

All over the news. All over the news. Yeah. It was huge. Why are there fewer serial killers now than there used to be? What was the answer?

[Interjector]

That's probably just because it's easier to get caught now. People are probably more afraid to try.

[Mike]

Well, yeah, because you think about all the technology and the surveillance. Like, you get rolled up.

[Comedian]

Yeah. You get a. I think the creepiest one was that dude who studied serial killers in college and then went and killed those girls at that dorm house. You know that story. What was that in Seattle? I think it was Idaho.

[Mike]

Yeah, it was Ted Bundy, right?

[Comedian]

No, no, no. Recent, Different.

[Mike]

Oh, it was recent.

[Comedian]

Recent, yeah. He knew the people that lived there. He studied. What did he study exactly? In college? Like, he was studying it. Like he was trying to learn how to not get caught. Oh, yeah. This guy. This fucking guy.

[Mike]

Whoa.

[Comedian]

Horrific. New details about the Final moments of the four University of Idaho stabbing victims.

[Mike]

Oh, gosh. So that's where I went to school. That's University of Idaho.

[Comedian]

He stabbed the four VICT victims at least 150 times in total.

[Mike]

I didn't realize that was like the case from Moscow.

[Comedian]

Yeah. Jesus Christ.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

This sick. So this guy, he was studying it in college, so I forget what criminal justice. Let's see if we could find out. But it was very clear that he had been planning this a long time. And there was also a possible connection to him and some murders from the Pacific Northwest that they. He knew the people. People died in a kind of a similar way. He might have gotten away with it up there.

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

So he tried it up there and then went to Idaho.

[Interjector]

PhD, criminology student.

[Mike]

Oh, my gosh. Well, that makes sense.

[Comedian]

It does? Yeah.

[Mike]

So he's. He's educating himself on how to get away with it.

[Comedian]

He was that guy that, if you had your comms class, he'd be sitting there like this.

[Mike]

He's like, way into it.

[Comedian]

Yeah, way into it.

[Mike]

Oh, okay.

[Comedian]

Yeah, yeah. He wanted to know the details.

[Mike]

Pacific Northwest is like, that's a spot. These guys love it up there. I don't know if it's like the rain, you know, like.

[Comedian]

Well, we had a lady that was connecting it. She came on the podcast and she was connecting a bunch of serial killers from a very specific area that did a lot of. Was mining. Right. Wasn't it mining? And the, The. The industrial pollution.

[Mike]

Oh, so it was like increased. Increased lead or something.

[Interjector]

Right.

[Mike]

In the water or something.

[Comedian]

What was the, The. The. The processing of it? Like.

[Mike]

Oh, the.

[Comedian]

One of those. When they're burning it.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

What's that called?

[Mike]

Leaching?

[Comedian]

Yeah, it was lead, but it was other stuff. It was other stuff. Like there's arsenic in it and there's a lot of. But what am I looking for? Not what is it? What. Why. Why can't I come up with that term? The plants where they burn all the power plants. What. What's the term? God damn it.

[Mike]

I don't know.

[Comedian]

What's her name?

[Interjector]

Caroline Frazier.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Maybe Paul would know if he got Stamets on here and she could talk about. He could talk about the mushroom or the fungi in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe it has something to do with it.

[Comedian]

I don't think so. I think that'll probably stop him from doing it. But her take was that there was all these places. What am I. What is the term I'm looking for? Where they incinerate, like, A power plant, like a coal plant that. There's a term, I can't remember what it is. Anyway, they're releasing incredible amount of toxins in the atmosphere and a lot of the is coming down in rain. It's getting in the ground. All the ground around there is all polluted, right? Everything's polluted. And so what her take is that all these people have suffered chemical pollution. And a lot of that chemical pollution leads to all sorts of weird psychological disorders and psychosis and all kinds of depending upon the levels of exposure.

[Mike]

So this is why you haven't increased of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest, this is what you're saying?

[Comedian]

Yeah, there was a bunch of power plants up there, interesting coal plants and smelting and, you know, just a lot of mining. There's a lot of mineral rich resources up there.

[Mike]

And so I should be concerned because I spent most of my life up there. Well, half of it, at least.

[Comedian]

Yeah, it depends. I think now they've cleaned it up though, like she was connecting it to a long time ago. But there's areas back there where she was saying that they. They do an analysis of the soil and it's completely fucked.

[Mike]

How long has it been since you've done Seattle?

[Comedian]

Oh, I haven't been back in a while. I did the Tacoma Dome with Dave Chappelle. We did that right before the pandemic popped. And I really haven't been back. It's just like once that whole Chaz thing went down and they locked off the block and the mayor said, maybe it's the summer of love or maybe you've got some fucking crazy people that you've empowered to take over a giant swath of your city and you're cool with it. And you're the mayor. And by the way, she is an upgrade compared to their current mayor. The current mayor is that choice is insane woman who's never held a real job. She's been living with her parents. She's 40. They pay her bills. She's a socialist, she rides a bike, she's even on a car. And now she's in charge of what, a $7 billion budget?

[Mike]

Like, what is that makes sense. Yeah, I. Two thumbs up, Seattle. Congratulations, You've done a great job.

[Comedian]

I don't know where those places go, those places that have gone like full into Wokeville. Like, a buddy of mine just went to Portland and he was like, bro, it's bananas. It's like a complete mental asylum. Like, spilled out onto the streets. Not just the campers, not just the Open air drug users everywhere. Because for a long time they decriminalized everything in Portland. So everybody ramped it up a notch and moved to Portland because that was a place where you could do drugs and not worry about anything. But he was like, all the regular people are cracked.

[Mike]

The place, like spending as much time as I have in Seattle, which I used to live there. I loved that city. Late 90s, loved it. Oh, it's amazing. Great.

[Comedian]

It was one of my favorite places to visit. Such a cool spot, cool people.

[Mike]

And then you saw this flip and it was right around 2010 is when things really flipped over. And that to your point, they had your car was your domicile, so you couldn't get a parking ticket. So you could basically live in front of somebody's house in a parking spot and they couldn't write a parking ticket.

[Comedian]

That started in 2010, give or take a couple years.

[Mike]

And so I went back to my. I had a house up there for a while. And the week, the day I decided that I was gonna sell this place, like we fly up there. I've got my daughter, she's like a year old. My wife and I are walking down the street and this is a part of the city is called Ballard, which is beautiful part of the city. Tons of like old bars. Awesome place back late 90s, early 2000s. But then there was a camper in front of my condo and then there was a naked man with a tennis racket with his. My daughter's a year old, his dick's flying around and my one year old's like, I'm holding her, like walking away from the other end. He's got a tennis racket, he's like playing the US Open in his head, whatever he's doing. And then on the corner, no less than 50ft away, there was a half naked lady like taking a shit. And you're like, nah, time to leave. I think this is. I think we're all good here.

[Comedian]

We had an issue like that in California for a while where when the economy started to go south, now this is pre pandemic as well. We started having these campers camp out right in front of our studio and they would. The studio where we had in la, even in that place, it was the warehouse. We had a big lawn in front of the warehouse and these guys would spread, spread out on the lawn. So they would park their camper there and then they would like cook out and they would lay out. And so like you're in this bill, you're asking people to Walk past these people to go do your podcast in this big ass warehouse that I had leased. And I was like, why are you doing this? Like you can't be doing this. You can't just use my lawn as your front yard. Like, this is crazy. I mean, spread out, dude, they had laying out there.

[Mike]

There's nothing you can do too.

[Comedian]

Well, there was. Oh really? Yeah. We contacted the police and the police, eventually they realized this is not a good thing and they moved them all, but they moved them to different parts of town. And so then you would drive to like the more industrial areas of town that didn't. Like our place was like semi industrial. There was a bunch of warehouses, but there was also a bunch of like foot traffic businesses, restaurants and stuff like that. And so they moved them out of there. But if you go into the deeper industrial places where they have factories and stuff, they were, they were there. There like whole blocks of them where you just have campers laying out and just open meth smoking. These people are just full on meth heads that had just started a community of fellow meth enthusiasts with campers. And a lot of their campers didn't even run. They could just get it to the spot, wherever it was and then they would steal power. You know, every now and then the dude would die because he didn't know how to do the wires right and get cooked.

[Mike]

Yeah, that's right. It's, it's the same where, where we were at in Salt Lake, I'd have have full time security out in front of the, like literally in front of the building.

[Comedian]

Our concern was when we left it was like if we left at night and someone broke in, it would take forever for cops to show up and do something about it. And so I was like, you can't just, you just can't have these guys knowing that like famous people and you know, high profile people are going to be at that spot and you've got like open meth smoking right in front of the place. Like this is too crazy. Yeah, the two unpredictable, you know, look, I don't care if you live in your truck. It's probably cool if you're a guy who's like, you've checked out of society essentially and you just like playing pickleball all day and you live in a camper, who cares? Go and do that. But once you start engaging in meth smoking and then it's always theft. Theft comes with meth smoking and there's a lot of break ins in the area and it was, it got To a point where the cops had to do something. So credit to them that they did.

[Mike]

It's almost the difference between vanlife and hashtag methlife. Yeah, there's a big difference, right?

[Comedian]

Van life is like, you want to be a guy who's not saddled down to one particular spot. You have a place that's in this van that has a bed. You have a little tiny kitchen area. You have a little portable fridge. It's all you need. I don't need a fucking house. Just travel around. It's probably fun. The freedom of it, you know, Like Alex Honnold, that crazy dude that just climbed that tower. And in Chinese Taipei, he used to live like that for a long time. He had a big van. He would park in his friend's driveway sometimes and he would just travel to trail heads and live out, live out of his van.

[Mike]

That's like the, the minimalist attraction, right? Where you're like, I. I don't have anything other than what's in my van or on my back. Where life is simple. I don't have to organize anything. I can stay focused. I think it's an interesting thought exercise, especially when you're younger. Like, okay, cool. I can wrap my head around that. And it's completely respectable. A lot of these hippies shouldn't say that in the context of hippie dance around with flowers in my hair. A lot of these climber crunchy guys, they are hard, committed, bad mofos.

[Comedian]

Oh yeah.

[Mike]

When they're living on dog food. There's this great story about the founder of Patagonia where he went to the store, he was climbing el cap. And I'm trying to recall a story from Outside magazine from, you know, 20 years ago. But in general circumstance, it's what it is. Where he went to the store, he's going to be climbing el cap for months. And he's just working on a specific route. And he went to the store to buy food. He only had 100 bucks or whatever it was, and dog food was less expensive. And he was like, meh, I can live on that. And he bought dog food and lived.

[Comedian]

On dog food and just live on kibble and.

[Mike]

Yeah, so he could climb and stay out there longer.

[Comedian]

His farts were like, bro, you wouldn't.

[Mike]

Want to be behind that on this route.

[Interjector]

Right?

[Mike]

You would not want to be climbing behind that guy. I'll tell you that.

[Comedian]

Because I stopped giving my dog regular dog food a long time ago. But when he was younger, all my dogs, I would just buy the most Expensive dry dog food. I was like, oh, this stuff is good. And then somewhere along the line it clicked. I was like, wow. Wait, how can it sit there? How can it just sit in that bag for a month? That's crazy. How could it sit on the shelf for years? That's nuts. That can't be good for you. And then I started feeding them frozen food and then they like that. But then I switched to farmer's dog, which is human grade food, which is lightly cooked. They love it. That stuff I would eat. Like you smell it, it smells like food. It doesn't smell disgusting, right? But. But regular dog food is terrible for a dog. It's not good for them. So if you have to eat that stuff, that kibble stuff, and you're gonna travel around, your gut must be going like, what are you doing? What kind of chemicals are in here? What kind of preservatives? They're just nuking your gut bile.

[Mike]

The level. But I love the level of commitment. I love like when people drift over into like crazy. To where their level of commitment and their passion, like, translates directly into nothing else exists in their life. Willing to live on dog food, to do the thing that they, they love.

[Comedian]

Fun.

[Mike]

That to me is like, you're, you're, you're an extremist. And I respect it. You know what?

[Comedian]

No, I can respect that. Do you ever see that movie Dirtbag?

[Mike]

No.

[Comedian]

Pull up that movie Dirtbag. It's a great movie. It's about a guy who essentially did that. That till he was dead. This guy just camped out on the ground in front of his friends houses most of the time. Didn't have a car, just would just, just climb. That's all he did. He was always mooching off people and he had very detailed. What was the dude's name?

[Interjector]

Fred. Becky.

[Comedian]

Fred. Becky. The dude's a legend. Yeah, so he had been doing this from, you know, the 1950s. Like he was an old ass man. Look at the gnarled hands. Look at his fucking hands. Solid from just climbing. Imagine if that guy got a hold of your dick, just rip it right off.

[Mike]

Do you know who Mark Twite is?

[Comedian]

No.

[Mike]

Okay, so Mark Twite, look at this fucking guy. He was, I mean, one of the foremost names in Alpineering. He's written several books on it. He wrote a book called Kiss or Kill, Confessions of a Serial Climber back in the day. Very, very similar, like in the context of, I would imagine the psychological makeup. And he started a gym called Jim Jones back in the day. And like it was where a bunch of people you had. It was invite only, so you could only get invited. And it was like a lot of special operations guys, CIA guys and professional climbers. Like everybody that was trying to push the envelope physically would go out and train with Mark. And I've been friends with him for years. But anything Mark does, he moves from. Like, I'm going to be the best climber, like alpineering, I'm going to be the subject matter expert. He was a professional. He shot Ipsic for a while. So he's a professional, you know, pistol shooter for a while. He's a professional climber and now he's a photographer, writer. But everything he does, he does it to a level of perfection that it probably drives everybody else in his life bananas. Like, he's fascinating. He's a fascinating human.

[Comedian]

Those people that go really to the outer level of whatever's possible with whatever the fuck they're doing are always fascinating. Yeah, because it makes you go, I don't know if I want to do that. Like, what is the sacrifice to get really good at rock climbing? You never have kids, you never have a life, you never have a job. Like this, this dirtbag guy, like everyone around him both admired him and felt sad for him, right? Because like he died a dirt bag, he never had a family. And it's like all his ex girlfriends talking about how an interesting guy he was, he was really fun. But eventually how to move on. Like this dude, all he wanted to do was like sleep on the ground and get up and start climbing rocks his whole life.

[Mike]

But there's, if you think about everybody around us in the, in their profession or their thing, right?

[Interjector]

It's.

[Mike]

You're at the apex of your profession and your level of commitment. I'm not like boosting you up. I'm just saying, like your level of commitment is unparalleled to a huge percentage of other people. So you have a portion of whatever that is. And there are all these other people that have that thing where their pursuit of passion around that specific profession or product, whatever it might be, they're so committed to it, it that it takes over. It's all consuming. Like, I mean, I've seen it. Because when, even when you go play pool, like when we were in Vegas a couple months ago, they're like, oh, we're going to play pool. I'm like, I'm out. He's going to be there till like 6 o' clock in the morning. I'm not going to do that. And Green Tree was Like, he was. He was there till like, 6 o' clock in the morning. He played for eight hours straight. I was like, yeah, I could see the writing on the wall. I'm. I'm out of here.

[Comedian]

The pool is my number one problem. That's my biggest one.

[Mike]

Really?

[Comedian]

Yeah. That's the one where if I. If I ever wanted to not do anything else, I would just become a professional pool player. If I just said, okay, I am done. I'm done podcasting. I'm done with the ufc. I'm done with everything. I'm just gonna travel around and do tournaments.

[Mike]

Huh?

[Comedian]

I could. I could go crazy. I could go crazy and just do that 100%.

[Mike]

Is it just the. The. The game fascinates you?

[Interjector]

The.

[Mike]

The angles, the. The ability to, like, like, just continue to evolve within that all the time. You can't ever be the best.

[Comedian]

You definitely never achieve full perfection. But to be really good requires this level of laser focus and concentration and an understanding of what's going on. I mean, you're taking a stick and you're hitting a ball into another ball with pinpoint accuracy into a pocket that is on my table. It's four and a quarter inches. So you've got the cube, the ball, the object ball, which is about that big. Then you got that much space on each side, just a tiny little space on each side, and you got to slip it through there oftentimes like 8ft away, 7ft away, 6ft away with English. So you're putting spin on the cue ball, which imparts a throw on the object ball. So if I put right hand spin on the cue ball and I hit the object ball, I have to calculate for the fact that it's going to throw the object ball slightly to the left because of the right hand spin, because it clings to the ball a little bit, and shoot. So all this is playing in my head, and then I have to have it at a speed where once the cue ball then collides with the object ball, pockets it, then it's got to go 1, 2, 3 rails for perfect position on the next ball. And I have to have an angle. I have to make sure that I have an angle for the following ball, right? And you don't want to be trapped on the rails. You want to be off the rail. It's like all these different things. You can't think about anything else. Your mind has to be clean. It cleans your mind. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, there's a lot of pressure when it comes to dating, especially in February. But you're putting too much on yourself and on your partner. There's no such thing as a perfect relationship. Whether you're on a first date or have been together for years, it's completely normal to go through rough patches and what matters is how you deal with them. And therapy can be a huge help during any stage of your dating life. You can figure out what you want in a partner or get perspective for a growing problem in your relationship. The point is, you don't have to come up with a solution by yourself. Now finding the right therapist can be tricky, but that's where better help comes in. They have an industry leading match fulfillment rate and they do a lot of the work finding the right therapist for you. Really all you have to do is fill out a questionnaire and sit back and wait. Tackle your relationship goals this month with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] jre that's BetterHelp. H E L p.com jre so if.

[Mike]

You'Ve gotten I'm sure you have like professional coaching players. Yeah, coaching guys have come out like the best in the world have come out and played with you.

[Comedian]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mike]

How do you hold up like what's your.

[Comedian]

Well I can never beat them right. But I beat them some games I can break and run out so I break and run out 12 games in a row sometimes and but they'll make so like if you have like a score of of accuracy it's called like a Fargo rating. It's based on a thousand points is you never miss. I am in like the 700 on a good day 750 range but a real world class pro is in the 800 plus range. Like Fedor Gorst is probably like 850. Joshua Filler is probably like a little higher than that. They get into this rate where they so rarely miss. And again they're playing on 4 inch pockets which is like a quarter inch smaller than the pockets I'm playing on. Although they are playing on new cloth which helps a lot. Makes things more slippery. They fall in more more worn out cloth. Like when it's broken in for a couple of weeks it gets tougher.

[Interjector]

Really?

[Comedian]

Yeah. Yeah. The cloth gets a little less slick and you got to hit a ball a little bit more pure. But on the plus side, English takes better.

[Mike]

So when you play with these guys, is it one of those things where they like instantly humble you in the context of you start feeling I'm really confident My game. And then you step in.

[Comedian]

No, not really. No.

[Mike]

There's not that big of a delta between.

[Comedian]

There's a gap. There's definitely a gap. I mean, they're just way better than me. But it's, it's. A lot of it is just time. They spend eight hours a day playing every day. If I spent eight hours a day playing every day, I think I could play at a professional level. I wouldn't be able to beat the best guys I would never be able to beat, like the coping Chungs and. And the guys that are at the very top. Top. Because those guys have been playing eight hours a day for decades. They never stop.

[Mike]

What's a guy like that make annually.

[Comedian]

In tournaments, now more than ever.

[Mike]

Really?

[Comedian]

Yeah, because of Matchroom Pool. So Matchroom, the same company that Eddie Hearn owns that does a lot of boxing promotions, they're involved in a lot of sports. They've done an amazing job with pool, specifically with nine ball. And they put on these huge tournaments. Saudi Arabia has a big one every year. They have this big world championship where pay a ton of money. And so, you know, a good player, like a top of the heat player is making half a million dollars plus a year.

[Mike]

Okay.

[Comedian]

And then also endorsements. So they have endorsements like Companies like Predator Q's pay them QTech and all these different companies pay them X amount of dollars per year. They have a sponsor for the chalk they use. They have a sponsor for the tips they play with. All these different things. All that adds up.

[Mike]

So what's the difference then? Between. What is it snooker? Is that the English?

[Comedian]

Totally different.

[Interjector]

It's.

[Mike]

It's totally different.

[Comedian]

It's a big table. It's a 12 by 6 as opposed to a 4 and a half by 9. So it's a much bigger table, but the balls are smaller as well. And then their cues have these tiny little tips on them. They all play with ash cues, which is like a very stiff wood and they play with like a solid wood cue. Whereas a lot of like pro pool players have switched to carbon fiber. Now they play with carbon fiber cues because it's like, it's a little bit more dense. So it moves the ball differently.

[Mike]

Is it fun? Have you played it snooker?

[Comedian]

Yeah, I played it when I was in Scotland a little bit, but I only played by myself. There was just a table and I was just whacking balls around. It's very difficult to pocket balls, but I don't even really understand the rules. I would have to really pay attention. I watch It a little bit sometimes because I know how hard it is to do what they're doing. Because you do have this enormous table. Their cloth is a lot slower too. It's not as slick of a cloth.

[Mike]

So is it. It's got to be older then, right? Is it?

[Comedian]

Oh, it's way. It's old. Snooker's old. So the original billiards game had no pockets. The original billiards game was three cushion billiards or bulk line or there's a bunch of different billiards games we play on a table. Like, say it was like this table. There's no pockets in it and there's just rubber rails all around it. And it's all about knocking one ball into the other ball, going three rails and then colliding with the third ball.

[Mike]

Huh?

[Comedian]

Yeah, it's just about scoring points. I've watched a bunch of that online too, because it helps you understand angles. Like as you go into a rail, because the angles change depending upon how much English you put on it, how hard you hit it, whether you hit it with follow or draw. There's a bunch of different, like parts of the cue ball that you can contact with that radically changes the way the ball moves around on the table. So it's like you're calculating so many different things. There's geometry involved, there's touch and feel, there's like, there's all these factors that come into play when you're playing really well.

[Mike]

So that explains why archery is also somewhat of a fascination then, because you have very similar aspects to archery and pool that directly translate. That's like why those things snap together real well for you.

[Comedian]

Oh, for me, they're hand in hand. They're basically the same thing. It's basically the same thing. You're just doing it in a different way. You know, it's the same thing. It's like having everything just flowing together perfectly after like years and years and years of meticulous practice. And then it starts to come together. And then you pull that group out. It's nice and tight, like 65 yards. Like. Yeah, you got it dialed in. It's that feeling and it's the same thing was the world goes away. There is no room for anything. When you're about to pull that trigger. Whether it's in pool where you're about to make the shot, or whether it's an archery, there's no room for anything. That's what I like about it. I also like that there's no bullshit, there's no shenanigans. There's no personality, there's nothing. Nothing matters. Nothing matters. Did the ball go in the hole? If it didn't, you lose. If it did, you win. It's really clean. I like that.

[Mike]

That, yeah, like that's the thing I love about like shooting just in general. Like if I'm hitting a target, it doesn't matter. I took my kids to arcade the other day and skee ball.

[Comedian]

Oh yeah, I love ski ball.

[Mike]

I can like spend an hour on that thing just like, just trying to get that, trying to get the perfect lob in there. And it's, it's like I used to tell people, I'm like, I'm just a projectile enthusiast where I, I love hitting center mass of whatever target, target. I'm still a 6 year old kid with my BB gun, right? It's like at the end of the day now my tools are much more advanced and I've got the millions of dollars of government funded training behind me. So I'm a little bit more effective at hitting what I want to shoot at. But it still has the same, the same exact feeling like if you're six years old hitting a pop can with your BB gun, or ringing a piece of steel at a mile with a rifle, or hitting the hard part of a foam elk in your backyard, it's the same, dude. It translates and it like pulls you into something that's like pure.

[Comedian]

I guess it is pure. And it's also a really good mind exercise. Just like you know when you work out, you're cleaning your mind. There's a lot of what working out is, is not just physical. It's mental clarity. You relax the mind, you calm the mind through hard exercise. And there's something where you're calming your mind through shooting because it requires so much of you. Everything else just gets, get the out of the way bills, this, that, you know. Oh, I gotta call that guy. I don't want to call him. I gotta deal with this thing. Oh, that's falling apart. This deal sucks. It all goes away. It has to go away. If it doesn't go away, you miss and then you go, fuck. Why did I miss? You miss because you're distracted. Like, let's focus. Put the arrow on the knock, you know, put it in there, draw it back, center it. Calm, relax at that moment, like at that moment there is nothing else in your head. There's nothing. And then, and it goes in there. You get this, this nice burst of happiness when you watch that arrow just drop right in exactly where you want it to like. And then you go and pull the arrows and you go right back and start it again. And at the end of that practice, I feel way better. I just always feel better. I always feel clearer. My head works better. It's just like. It's a focus exercise with which excites all your synapses. And then on top of that, it's a mental clearing thing. Like, Fred Barry used to talk about that. Like, something about. I forget the quote, but it's something about. There's nothing like shooting a bow that clears a man's mind. It's totally true. True. There's something about archery in particular that just cleans your mind.

[Mike]

Yeah, I 100 agree. I used to have this trad bow. That's how I started. I told you the story. So I'd stuff the old coffee bags of burlap coffee bags, stuff them up and fill them up. And then I started shooting a trad bow originally, while the roasting cycle takes about eight and a half minutes, so I couldn't really do anything. I'm like watching the coffee roast, which is just tumbling in a big dryer. And so I just shoot a trad bow in the back to try focus something other than the business, family, whatever it is. I could just shoot my trad bow. And then Dudley was like, why do you shoot that thing? It's so stupid. Don't you like to hit what you shoot at? I'm like, I'm just doing it for fun, man. Like, you know, I'm a happy go, lucky guy. I just want to, like, active form of meditation. But what. What I did realize was it was such a pure. To your point, it would flush out all this negative shit that I was like, either working through or dealing with. So being able to translate that to other people, especially veterans, huge, huge transformation for guys because they can go out, it's quiet, It's a subculture they can be part of. They can geek out on all the new gear and arrowheads. You wade into the infinite, never ending debate around bullshit around cutting surface area and fucking, you know, mass and velocity and, like, you'll never get tired because it's, like, full of its own little drama. And it's like a bunch of nerd shit that you can actually have a.

[Comedian]

Lot of fun with so much nerd shit. That's what people don't understand, you know? And they don't expect nerd shit. Like, real complicated, technical nerd shit from Archer. You don't think of it that way, but it's like many Things like, once you get into it, you realize like, oh, this is a learning curve to this. There's a lot involved. Like, whenever one of my friends is like, I want to go bow hunting, I'm like, do you really? Are you sure? Like, don't tell me you like. It's not that you gotta dive in off of a cliff. This is not like, I'm gonna go dip my waters into bow hunting. I want to go shoot an elk. Like, Jesus Christ. Do you know how hard that is to do? You got. There's so many moving parts. There's so many things you have to be. Be proficient under extreme stress. There's so much going on there, man. Don't tell me you want to do that unless you. You gotta. You gotta show me before I get involved. Take me bow hunting. That's not happening. You are not gonna be stomping on twigs near me, and you're not gonna be going. You're not gonna be not checking the wind. All these things are not going to happen.

[Mike]

Well, they. They like the idea, right? Like, they like. And there's plenty of people. They're like. They're window shoppers in this activity, right? They're like. They're walking by and they're like, that looks cool, right? But they don't like the realities of what it actually takes because it's so fucking hard. And it, like, ruins you a lot of times. I mean, in the last few years, we've hunted enough together. Like, dude, I've been psychologically ruined by, like, shooting something or making a bad shot or, like, just devastating missing. Like.

[Comedian]

Yeah. It's like you can't figure out why you missed.

[Mike]

No. And then you're. You're running through it a thousand. A thousand times, like, what did I do okay? How do I do better? And then you're like, okay, but you're.

[Comedian]

The kind of guy that does that. That does the process in your head and then improves and keeps getting better. For some people that. That will ruin their life. Like, the one bad thing that happens will ruin their fucking life because they spent all these months preparing. They paid for a tag. They hired an outfitter. And then floink, dunk, dunk. The shot fucking ruined their whole week. And then they go back home. How'd your hunt go? Oh, I missed, you know, like. Or I wounded it.

[Mike]

And it's. It's a. It's a. It's a lesson in life. You can work harder than you've ever worked and still fail. And still fail.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

You can work for A decade of your life, you can shoot and shoot and train and train, and you can put in all the work and still fuck it up.

[Comedian]

And there's guys who, in the same situation as you would succeed.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

So you got to figure out, what are they doing different? Why are they better keep in and keep getting better. Like, there's hunts that I've been successful on recently, you know, within the last few years, that I know that if I had that same hunt eight, nine years ago, I probably would have not been able to make that shot. Right. I'm not. I wasn't as good then. So I've gotten better, et cetera. It's like, I think everybody needs something that you can't master, that is hard to do, that cleans your mind. I think people need stuff to clean their mind, and I think that's why so many people are running around all fucked up. Because you're looking at social media all day, so that gives you anxiety. Your life is not satisfying, so that gives you anxiety. You don't take care of your body, so that gives you anxiety. You have all these things and you're stuck in traffic. That gives you anxiety. Everybody's just mentally all fucked up. And so you go to a doctor and the doctor says, well, you know, obviously you're dealing with depression, and I can prescribe to you this or that or the other. And then you're on Lexapro or whatever the fuck you're on. And that's the road they go down. And this is a bad road. It's not a road where you can improve your life. And there's other ways to do it. And I think, think there'd be a lot more happy people in this world if you found a thing. It doesn't have to be archery. It doesn't have to be pool. It doesn't have to be Jiu jitsu. It doesn't have to be pistol shooting. It just has to be something that's hard to do, that you are on this quest to make these incremental improvements. And through that focus of incremental improvements, you improve your human potential. You improve your ability as a person to do difficult and to handle situations. So I always tell people, if you do jiu jitsu, you'll be much happier because the stresses of life are nothing compared to a dude who's trying to literally break your arm. He's on top of you and you're defending, and then you get out of it, and then you get him or he gets you, and then you have to Tap. And you go over. That is so hard to do that, like, regular life becomes like a breeze. It becomes a breeze. It makes everything. Jiu Jitsu people are some of the most relaxed people I've ever been around in my life. They're all friendly to everybody. They're never talking or causing drama problems. They get it all out.

[Mike]

Yeah, they. I think there's something about getting the. Kicked out of yourself, too. Right. So, yeah, like, there's something about facing someone which I don't do Jiu Jitsu, just, you know, as a caveat to that. But being able to, like, face another person in a scenario and then compete against them.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

So where everything counts, and then literally just getting the shit beat out of yourself and going, okay, well, I'm gonna step back up. I'm gonna do it again. Right?

[Comedian]

Yeah. And get better.

[Mike]

That level of teaching yourself mental endurance, like, that is the thing that I constantly think about my kids. Like, I'm like, how do I be compassionate, caring, loving? You know, the dad that wants to give them everything? And then how do you, like, translate that into also creating obstacles that will drive mental courage? Right. Just.

[Comedian]

I think you do it by example. I think that's the best way. Yeah. My opinion is, like, if you look at Cam Haynes's sons, I mean, he was rough raising his kids. He talks about that. But those kids are exceptional. They're fucking exceptional. One son's a Ranger. The other son broke the world chin up record. And, you know, he runs marathons with jeans on. And, like, he fucking got two savage kids. And why? Why? Well, look at the environment they grew up in, right? They grew up in a. With a dad who's supremely disciplined. And just by being in his presence, you realize, like, oh, I can achieve a lot more than other people can if I'm just willing to put in that work. And for a lot of people, that's that feeling, that feeling of, like, this. The anxiety of the struggle and of grinding it out. And, like, that scares them and they don't want to do it. And so they come up in excuses or they retreat into other things and, you know, they distract themselves. And if you're a parent that does that, you create a weird environment for your child because your child is sort of imitating you as a leader and you're a fuck up, and you're always making excuses and you get fired a lot, or you sleep in a lot, or you do things that like. Like, are not admirable. And then that child, you know, life, man. You know, whereas you know, his kids are probably like, jesus Christ, Dad's a animal. Like, I want to be an animal, too. And then you see how people respect his father and they go, okay, I want to. I want people to respect me like that too. You know, you hear what people talk about him when he's not around, like, well, I want people to respect me.

[Mike]

Right?

[Comedian]

Well, there's only one way to do that. You have to be worthy of respect. It's only one way to get there. It's a long road, good luck, start going. And you're not going to get any satisfaction for a long ass time other than the fact that you're on the path that you're on. You're involved in the process, and you're on the journey.

[Mike]

Yeah, the grind, right? And it's like, it's overused. But the level of endurance would encourage when it's like that trait alone, just trying to understand courage, like, who has it, who doesn't have it, and then the level of commitment to a mission or something bigger than yourself. It's the thing that I think about, I'd say a huge percentage of the last several years, especially as I get a little bit older, a little bit further away from the gwat. And I was with. I'm doing a documentary on Earl Plumlee. You know who that is?

[Comedian]

No.

[Mike]

So he's a Medal of Honor recipient, former Green Beret. We are at the UFC fight with Elliot Miller and Earl Plumlee. Early. Earl Plumlee's incredibly humble guy.

[Comedian]

Like.

[Mike]

Just an amazing human. Like, you can sit here and talk to him. You'd never in a million years know that this guy had earned the Medal of Honor. Never. Like, because one, he's never going to tell you. Two, he's going to ask you a hundred questions about you and be way more fascinated with that. And three, you know, we were having this conversation, he's like, man, it belongs to the guys. Like, I didn't do anything. Like, it belongs to the guys. Like, the guys, any of the guys, if they wouldn't have been shot, would have done the same exact thing that I did. And I was like, man, that is an incredible statement from, you know, a guy that's sitting here. And so this documentary follows his path from joining the Marine Corps, which was literally where the judge, you know, those. Those old stories of the guy that was, like, forced by the judge to join the military or jail, he literally has that. And it starts, he goes into, you know, the Marines, and then he's a Force Recon Marine, and he had gone through all the selections. He got out of the Marine Corps, joined the army. And we follow his story through the eyes of his peers and his leaders because we wanted to see from his perspective, what do other people say about him through his entire journey, not the story from his perspective. One, he'll never tell it the way that it probably needs to be told. Two, what were the choices that he made throughout his professional life that made the man that was capable of such an incredible act of courage that it warranted the highest medal literally earned in the United States military? And that single word, courage, how do you build courageous people? Is a fascinating. It's quite literally such a fascinating subject. And most of it is. It's the man in the arena. Right? It's that poem from Teddy Roosevelt. It's not the critic who counts. It's like keeping up, stepping back in this commitment to something greater than yourself and then making these thousands of choices in your life every day as you wake up, step forward, step back into the fray, and make the active decision to be better. And it's like, like, it's such a fundamental thing of being able to any part of your life if you don't get up in the morning and, like, commit yourself to something. I'm not motivational speaker, but it's. How are you ever going to get better if you're not committing to something, being a better dad or a better husband or better, you know, better at your profession, and then committing to this evolutionary process, taking not only a huge amount of commitment, but mental and physical endurance.

[Interjector]

It does.

[Mike]

And I'm never gonna get tired of trying to figure this out because obviously it's like my peer set. I was having this conversation with Jack Carr and I ran into the airport. We ran into each other at the airport on the way down here and we were talking about, fucking, love that guy. Fucking such a good dude. Dude. And it's. It's not just in the military, right? It's. It's not. It's just.

[Comedian]

Yeah. And all of life.

[Mike]

All of life.

[Comedian]

Yeah. You find exceptional people in all of life, and you can. They're fuel. Those people are fuel. And they. And they enhance the lives of the people around them. And then if you become one of those guys, you enhance the lives of the people around you, and then you feed off of them and they feed off of you, and everybody feeds off of each other. And it's. It's so good for you to know that people like that are out there, that there's a guy like that capable of incredible courage and that. How did he get there? What did he do? What did. How did he become the man he is right now? Because God damn, that's an admirable man. So how do you. How do I get there? Yeah, it's.

[Mike]

And there's all these stories I like, Jack and I were talking about, because, you know, the Navy seals, obviously, they've got a lot of positive PR over the last several years, but this special operations community has got so much just, I don't know, airtime. Right. But there are all these other people in the military throughout generations of war fighters that have gone out and done these incredibly hard jobs. And I found this story of the Parche, which is the US USS Parche, which is the most decorated submarine and ship in Navy history. They have nine presidential citations. It's the most decorated group of men in the U.S. navy, like, in modern history. And everything they've done is still classified.

[Comedian]

Whoa.

[Mike]

It's a Cold War era nuclear submarine that was modified and ultimately tasked out by the CIA to go out and do collection. And they were the guys that, hundreds of feet down, they would land on the bottom of the ocean. And the Soviets had these military communication lines that were basically hard lines that would go under a bay so they could communicate back and forth. And they felt like they were secure. And one of their jobs, which is, I've never been able to see anything declassified, but the stories that are out there. These guys would land on the bottom of the ocean, send out diversity at hundreds of feet, and these guys would hook listening devices on those lines. Hundreds of feet down, like in cold, dark water. Can you imagine, dude? Like, you're out in 400ft or 300ft of water, pitch black, you can't see anything. And your job is to go and put a listening device on a Soviet Communication Line, 1986 or whatever it was, and you're in enemy territory, so if you get discovered, you're dead. And none of these guys, that's the incredible thing, none of these guys have ever said anything about it.

[Comedian]

Wow.

[Mike]

Decades, and not only decades of missions, months away from home. None of these guys have said a fucking thing. They've not been on a podcast, they've not written any books. And the only thing they say is, yeah, we did a lot of incredible shit. Still can't talk about about it. Unbelievable, man. Yeah, I've been able to see. I can go out and do shit. And, like, you still have the ability to see. I can't imagine being in like 300ft of water, pitch black. Pitch black. If you, if you lose a glove. Right. Or something goes wrong, how are you going to get back to the boat? Like, and you're going to have to get back to the boat and then get back into American territory without being discovered. And more, more importantly, you're going to do this how many times over the.

[Comedian]

Course of your career and are. Does the listening device require them to gather the information while they're at the bottom of the ocean, or does it transmit?

[Mike]

I think it transmits. Yeah.

[Comedian]

That's much more convenient.

[Mike]

It's not declassified, so who knows? And they don't talk about it.

[Comedian]

Wow.

[Mike]

They don't talk about it.

[Comedian]

That's crazy.

[Mike]

I was talking to Jack and I were talking about it, and I was like, have you ever heard about this? And, you know, he's a retired Navy guy. He's like, no, I've never heard about it, Mike. That's my point. It's an incredible story, man. Like, these guys are still buttoned up, not saying a fucking word.

[Comedian]

They pick the right guys.

[Mike]

They pick the right guys.

[Comedian]

Yeah. There's guys like that out there.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Yeah. And they don't have to be famous either. There's a lot of people out there. They just, they're, you know, they're just doing the mission. Yeah.

[Mike]

They'd come home, not tell their families.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Their wives would be pissed off. What are you doing out, out on the boat with all your friends for months, just hanging out, hot, rocking, you know?

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Like, I can't say anything.

[Comedian]

You have to have the right wife.

[Mike]

Mm.

[Comedian]

If you don't have a woman that can understand that, that becomes a real problem.

[Mike]

Yeah. I'm sure a lot of them ended up in divorce.

[Comedian]

Oh, yeah, well, you know, that was part of the Bob Lazar story. The Bob Lazar was the guy that worked at Area 51.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

He couldn't tell his wife what he was doing. And they would call him at like, 10pm There's a flight for you that leaves at 11:15, be at the airport. And he had to leave. And he would tell his wife, I got to go to work. And she's like, it's 11 o' clock at night. He's like, I have to go to work. What are you doing? He's like, I can't talk about it because all his phones were bugged. Everything was bugged. Right. So his wife is like, this motherfucker's cheating on me. She, she, she starts fucking her flight instructor. And that's one of the reasons why they Removed him from his duties because they're like, this guy's going to be unstable. We have to see how he handles this because he's involved in this top secret back engineering of a flying saucer program, allegedly. And we have to, you know, keep an eye on this because he can't be mentally unstable and have this kind of responsibility because he couldn't tell her. Couldn't tell her anything.

[Mike]

You can't tell anybody.

[Comedian]

Yeah. And then eventually he took her to the. The sites where he could. He explained to everybody when he thought that his life was in danger and then he was getting fired when things started getting sideways. Like, people need to know about this. He took her out there and he showed her, but it was. He didn't know that she was some other guy by the. By that time.

[Mike]

That's so unfortunate.

[Comedian]

Unfortunate. Yeah.

[Mike]

Look at. This is what I'm doing. I wonder if that actually would.

[Comedian]

I wonder if she's like, I shouldn't have sucked that.

[Mike]

That guy, man. I feel bad now. I shouldn't have that guy. I used to have to do that because for years, you know, years of my life, I didn't tell anybody, couldn't tell anybody who I worked for or what I did. And I didn't have a wife, so I didn't have a wife or kids. I just not really say anything and I just dip out. I kind of dipped out from my family. My dad was like, very concerned because he was like, I never hear from that kid. I don't know what he's doing. I'm like, yeah, just working, just. Just busy, man. But it weighs on you. After a while you're like, this kind of sucks.

[Comedian]

Yeah. Not being able to tell people about something you're doing is. That's hard. Like, you can never show someone part of who you are. There's always going to be a door that's closed. It's kind of nuts.

[Mike]

Yeah, it's difficult. It was like my wife, when we first got together, she's the first girl that. Or first woman. I shouldn't say girl. She's the first woman I told because I was like, fuck this place. I'm out of it anyway. So if. If I get rolled up, I get rolled up. Who cares? I'm out anyway.

[Comedian]

Did she. Was she initially like, whoa, like, how did she handle it? Well.

[Mike]

So we were.

[Comedian]

Did you give her, like, details?

[Mike]

No, no, no. I. Because she had met some of my friends, right. And you know, the guys from the community are fairly obvious because they look like you and they jacked tattooed. You know, a lot of them are, you know, big beards. It looks like, let's take the Hell's Angels, right? Right. So, like, I don't work for the State Department. That's fairly obvious. Like, State Departments, they're gonna wear suits. And, you know, they're come out of Harvard. And they use really long words all the time. They're not.

[Comedian]

Like.

[Mike]

They don't look like they're getting ready to commit a felony. Like, and. And so she would be around at our kitchen table or whatever, and you'd have all these guys that look like they're NFL Hell's Angels, and I look like this, which is intimidating nonetheless. But I could get away with it. I could sell that. But they couldn't. She's like, well, so you work for the State Department, but what is it that you actually do, Right? I'm like, you're not a janitor, obviously. I'm like, ah, you know, we train assistant, advise or something. And then after a while, getting to know her, six months or however long we'd known each other, we were driving down the road, and I was like, I actually work for the CIA. And she's like, I know. What are you, a fucking idiot? Like, yeah, that's fair. And it's funny because even now, today, it's like, a lot of my friends will come by that I haven't seen for a year. And she always has the same kind of, like, eye roll. It's like, okay, you guys can be up till like, two in the morning, like, drinking at the kitchen table, talking shit about everybody that used to work with. Yeah, that's right.

[Comedian]

It's like.

[Mike]

And it's so dramatic, right? It's like, it's such a sewing circle at times with people. And it's all the same. People are the same, regardless of your profession. It's like, they're always talking shit. And that guy's a good dude. That guy's not.

[Comedian]

It's so fascinating to me, like, James o' Keefe stuff, like how much they bus people that talk about things they should never talk about with people that are just on a date with. Yeah, like, not even, like, your wife of 10 years. No, no, no, no, no. Some lady or some guy. It's a lot of it. It's chatty. Gay guys.

[Mike]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Comedian]

A lot of it is gay guys. Like, I'll tell you how we do it. And they're on a date with some guy and they're trying to impress him, and they start telling about what secret, covert things they're doing that's totally illegal. And they do it all the time.

[Mike]

Oh, it's got. It happens all the time in D.C. and it doesn't really matter what, what party or wherever you go, you always have the guy. And it's so funny because I would go to, you know, whatever party X, and depending on the venue, it might be like State Department, FBI or whomever. You can always tell who works for whom. And it's always like you're. They're always trying to out jockey each other for who works for the better government service. And I used to always tell people as a. I was a janitor so they would leave me alone. And I'm a janitor at Northrop Grumman. They're like, why are you here? Like kind of a thing. Like, ah, that's what I do. It's, you know, it's my passion. I love them shit stripes and toilets, man. I gotta wipe them out. And. But then the. All the other guys were like jockeying for like, like FBI or State Department or wherever they're going. And then it's always the guy who's like, I can't tell you who I work for. And you're like, oh. Then you just sit back and listen. You're like, let me hear where this guy's going. This is gonna be a fun one. You know, you're like, oh, get a.

[Comedian]

Couple of drinks at him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mike]

And it's just full of shit. You're just like, oh, so full of shit.

[Comedian]

Well, that's the thing about important people that have achieved a high level of success. Everybody wants to pretend they're that. Yeah, there's a lot of people that want to pretend they're that person because it's so hard to become that person. But it's. You can convince a lot of people that don't know any better that you are. That was a big thing with martial arts. Big thing with martial arts. It was in. Especially in the 80s. So in the 80s when I first started, no one knew anything. It wasn't like today. Today if you get in a street fight, if you're a high school kid and you get in a street fight with another high school kid, there's a high likelihood that that kid knows how to leg kick. He might know a blast double. He might know an arm triangle. You might get up. Like, they might know how to fight. Back then, no one knew how to fight. It was very rare. There's like one kid who knew how to box. It was always the wrestling team which were the most dangerous people? Those guys were the worst. Those guys were. They're the hardest in the school always. And I didn't even realize that until I started wrestling. I was like, I'm amongst these elite killers, and they're just walking around with everybody like they're normal. And you realize the level of commitment and dedication involved in being an elite high school wrestler. Just a high, high school wrestler. It's off the charts. These kids were going to camps all through the summer. They would get sent off to wrestling camp. They were training year round. And I just hopped in on my sophomore year. I did one season of wrestling, and I was like, this is crazy. Like, the level. I had no idea I was hanging around with these people. I thought they were normal people. They're like kids that were like, little soldiers, right? Like, all of them. Thick neck, little soldiers, dangerous. And you realize, like, wow. It, like, opened my eyes. Like, Jesus, there's these people around, and they were never even considered martial artists until the ufc. Nobody really understood unless they actually did wrestling, how helpless the average person is with an elite wrestler. You have no chance. Like, Z. It's not like, maybe you'll be able to hit him before he takes you down. No. No chance. He's gonna shoot on you. He's gonna. You have no chance. You have zero chance. Chance. But there was always a bunch of guys who were pretending they were martial arts experts. It was. Oh, it was a really common thing. And then you would talk to him like, where do you train? What do you. What do you do? And it was always some guy who, like, learned some mist. There was one guy, this guy actually wound up getting arrested for murder, and he's in jail right now. Yeah. He had lied to everybody and told them that he was a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt, and he was even teaching people, and he knew almost nothing. Nothing. And it. This is, like, in the early. Early 2000s, I guess, like, late 90s, early 2000s. And it was just starting to catch on. Like, people are just starting to understand the depth of martial arts because of the UFC, but it hadn't really gone mainstream till about 2005. And this guy was telling everybody he was a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt. And then Eddie Bravo trained with him. And Eddie came back to me. He's like, man, something's wrong. He goes like, this guy is terrible. He didn't. No. And. And he's like. And I was like, really? He goes, yeah. I think he's a fake. I think he's a Fraud. And he w up confronting this guy and then the guy wound up. He was banging some guy's wife and wound up luring the guy back to his karate school and killing him. What? Yeah, yeah. And he went to jail. And he's in jail right now. But he had a fake name. His name was Raphael Tory. That was his fake name, but his real name was like Ralph something other. And he's in jail right now for murder. That's a.

[Mike]

But that's a super funny character, right? Not that guy, but a fake black, but a fake martial artist. Who's that? There, there's a, there's a movie years ago where it's like one foot way. The way of one foot or something. Have you ever watched that? Yeah. With Danny McFry.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

And it was fucking hilarious, man. And it's like that guy that, that like character, that strip mall, you know, martial artist that you just a piece of.

[Comedian]

Yeah. There's a guy on Instagram that documents all these guys. It's McDojo Life on Instagram. It's a great page because it's all people doing fake martial arts. Like death touch, like people that can like touch your forehead and you like go limp and fall to the ground and you get all their, their students become like brainwashed and they go along with this whole facade. It's really weird. They. They're in on the charade. It's very strange.

[Mike]

Super weird. It's like, it's very cultish.

[Comedian]

Like, martial arts are very cultish, especially traditional martial arts. Like your instructor is always sir, you're always bowing to them. There's always a lot of weirdness inside. Yeah, yeah. In, in like traditional Taekwondo, you always would refer to your instructors as mister. It was Mr. I hated it. I was like, just. You don't.

[Mike]

How many years did you do that?

[Comedian]

Oh, like hardcore. For seven years. Years. Yeah, hardcore.

[Mike]

And then you switched over to jiu jitsu?

[Comedian]

Yeah, I switched over jiu jitsu a few years later. I stopped fighting when I was 22, and then I was a real. It was like doing comedy. I started doing comedy at 21 and I kind of half assed still trained and fought a few times while I was also doing comedy. But I didn't have the commitment that I had before. I, I'd had a series of events that led me out of, of like wanting to compete. And one of them was recognizing brain damage, recognizing it in other people, recognizing it in friends, and then laying in bed with headaches after sparring sessions going, okay, where does this Lead. And I don't. I'm not even making any money off of this. And then there was a guy that I hurt really bad in a tournament. I knocked this one guy out when I was 19 in California. I was competing in the national and I KO'd this guy and he never got up. They had to take him on a stretcher, and he was on a stretcher for half an hour, and then they took him to the hospital. And it freaked me out because I was like, that could have easily been me. It easily could have been me. And that one bothered me because I'm like, what am I doing? Like, why am I doing this? Like, I'm, I'm trying to win, you know, the national championships. I'm trying to be in the Olympics. I'm trying to do these things, but I'm like, okay, well, where does that lead me? To teaching? Do I really want to. I was already teaching at the time, but I really want to teach for a living forever. Like, I don't think I do. There's not, you know, and then recognizing that the martial art that I had picked, Taekwondo, had a lot of flaws in it. It was really good for kicking, but it wasn't the best overall martial art. And when I started kickboxing, I really realized that. And then I started getting into Muay Thai and I realized the power of leg kicks and the, the, with the devastating impact it has on your mobility and like one or two leg kicks and you're so compromised. I was like, oh, this is, there's so many levels to this. So I was like kind of half assing martial arts like the last year, not, not nearly as committed. Like, I was all in. All throughout my high school years, all in until I was 21. And then from 21 to 22, kind of half assed it. And then I didn't start doing jiu jitsu till years later.

[Interjector]

Later.

[Mike]

So what's going on at like 21, 22 in you? Like, what are you thinking? Do you remember what you're thinking? Like, like, I'm gonna be an actor. I'm gonna be a comic. What are you thinking?

[Comedian]

I didn't think I was going to be a comic until I did an open mic night when I was 21. And then even then I was like, this is just something that I, I think I can do. But when I'd bomb, I'd be like, I should go back to fighting. I just get a, get a few. And then, you know what happened? I tore my acl. And when I tore My acl. I had to have surgery, and I couldn't do anything for, like, six months. And then I realized, like. Like, my body's vulnerable. Like, you're. You're. You're counting on your tissue staying in intact in order to, like, live this life that you want to live. So I had to get my knee reconstructed. And I was like, all right.

[Mike]

So that was the first knee. Knee reconstruction.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Back then.

[Comedian]

Yeah. I was 22, I think, when I blew it up, about 21. Somewhere around then. It was like, right around the time when I was, like, thinking about stopping competing. It's like my, you know, like, the universe was like, let me help you, right? Let me your knee up real quick. So I had to get that fixed, and that takes a while before it gets back to normal again. But the comedy became a thing where I was like, this is very exciting and really difficult to do. And so different than anything else, I was doing well. You have to get the people to like you. Like, it's dependent upon, like, personality. And Whereas with martial arts, I wanted them to not like me. I loved it. I did. I didn't have any problem. Like, no one's going to save you. Doesn't matter if these people hate me. And if you're looking at me and there's just you and me and a referee. I liked it. I like that this person had, like, a bunch of, like, one of my favorite things was, like, hearing cheers stop. Like when people were cheering, like, get on. Yeah, kick his ass. Kick his ass. Then jump. And then the guy would collapse. And you hear silence. You just hear silence. Especially if you go to where they live, right? Like, if you had to go to Ohio and fight in Ohio, I just love that silence. It was this final moment, and my thing was I would always walk away like it was normal. I would never celebrate. I would just walk away. Like, that was. I do this every day. I'm gonna do this to the next guy, too. This is what I'm gonna do to you.

[Interjector]

You.

[Comedian]

And I would. I would always take naps, too. That was the other thing I did when everybody was freaking out before fighting for sparring, I would go to sleep in front of everybody. I just put a hoodie on and just lie down on the ground and go to sleep.

[Mike]

Is that like a. Where you try to. With them a little bit?

[Comedian]

It was a little bit of. With them, it was a little bit of. I'm. I'm so relaxed. I'm gonna take a nap here while you're freaking out. But it Was also. I wanted to do it for my own mind. I wanted to just, like, be. I want. I was so in my own head. Head. I was just. It was. I was so in my own, like, what I'm going to do. I wasn't thinking about all these other external things until that one knockout. That's when I really started thinking about what could happen to me because I had gotten really lucky where I never really got hurt in a tournament. Never. Never got dropped, never got knocked out, never got. Never got really rocked. But I did it to a lot of people. And then I was like, this is coming around. Like, it's only a matter of time before I get wonky jumped. It's just. It happens. It's just going to happen. I'm gonna fight some national champion guy, right? And I'm gonna zig when I should have zagged, and I'm gonna catch a heel to my jaw, and that's gonna be a wrap. I'm gonna be waking up in the hospital.

[Mike]

That's interesting that you had that thought early on to where you're like, ah.

[Comedian]

Well, I started seeing brain damage in other people, specifically when I started kickboxing, because I was training at boxing gym and I started seeing guys, it was hard to say. There's, like, a slurry aspect to the way they talked. There was a labored thing to their speech. There was something about them. And then I would see it degrade over time, you know, like, I really started getting involved in sparring and boxing when I was about 19, and that was also around the time where I started losing my enthusiasm for Taekwondo because I just realized the no punching to the face thing in tournaments was so limited. It really. It fucked you up because it gave you this illusion that you could pull things off where all the guy would have to do is jab you in the face. You're like, oh, okay. Like, at this distance, you can't do the thing that you normally do in a Taekwondo tournament. You have to be much more aware defensively. So I had to recalibrate my offense and my tactics. And so then I just. I started doing a lot of boxing and a lot of kickboxing, and. And I saw so much brain damage. I saw so much, like, unreported brain damage. Just weird stuff. Guys would tell you the same story they just told you, like, five minutes ago, they tell it to you again because. And I was realizing, oh, these guys can't remember. They just said this thing five minutes ago. It was like they were stoned, you know, and they weren't, you know, they were just starting to exhibit the beginning signs of brain damage.

[Mike]

So when you're making those decisions early on, you're controlling being able to control your emotions, so your anxiety and being able to put yourself into the right mental framework to go out and perform regardless. So you're competing in Taekwondo, you're going out, you're actually performing open mics. Is that what you're doing at the time or you just like.

[Comedian]

Yeah, when I was 21. Once I was 21, I started doing open mic mics. Yeah.

[Mike]

And so being able to control your emotions because you got to be freaking out a little bit.

[Comedian]

Yeah. Well, the first time. The first time I went on stage, I was more scared than I had ever been fighting, which I thought was crazy. So I started fighting before I could really be scared. I started fighting when I was 15. That was like the first fights that I had. So you were scared, but you didn't. You were so stupid. You didn't know what could happen to you. And I was really lucky that I had a really good squad school. The school that I trained at was super technical. That was the guy who I trained under, this guy, J. Hun Kim. He trained with General Chae Young Yi, who was like the founder of Taekwondo. And so it was like, the technique was perfect. Like, you had to have perfect technique. Like, if you did anything sloppy or anything, like, kind of they would correct you. Like, you had to have it down. And they emphasize a lot of heavy bag training, which a lot of schools didn't even have a heavy bag, which I thought was crazy. Like, we would go and do these. These things where we'd have. Our team would go and train with another team. Like, we would travel in New York and there was like another. An instructor that was friends with our instructor, and they would bring the competition teams to compete against each other. And we'd fight in a gym. The gym. So it was like these unsanctioned fights that you would have. And, you know, you'd find people that were roughly your weight and these guys didn't have heavy bags and that you'd go to their gym. They have like a, you know, strip mall type gym. And there was. In their dojang, they didn't have a heavy bag. I was like, this is crazy. You guys don't train with heavy bags. And I didn't make any sense. To me, they had kicking paddles and a bunch of different things, but they didn't have anything to improve thrusting techniques and stabbing techniques, which, like, you need resist distance, you need a heavy bag. And so our instructor was adamant about like, if you can't hurt somebody badly with one kick, you're, you're doing the wrong thing. These techniques were originally designed for war, right? And you're supposed to be able to have devastating power in everything you throw. That got lost a little when Taekwondo got into the Olympics or when was on the path to getting into the Olympics, Olympics, and it became more of like point scoring. They would try to hit you and run away, hit you and run away. It was a lot of like fast moving techniques that didn't have the same sort of devastating impact. So where I got real lucky in where I trained is that they really emphasized power. And so the school that I was at was very feared because a lot of the other black belts were like, the guys that I trained with were really dangerous. Like they were, they were known for when they would go to a 20 tournament, people would get scared because if these guys hit you, you're in trouble. Like these were dangerous cats, you know, that were like just wheel kicking people into another dimension, turning side kicking people and crushing rib cages. It was a lot of that. And so I got real lucky that that's the gym that I started in that I started with like, you know, you imitate your atmosphere, right? The first guy that I ever saw hit a bag was this guy, John Lee Lee. And when I saw him, he was the national Taekwondo light heavyweight champion and he was competing, he was training to compete in the world. So he was about to go to, I guess it was the World cup and he was in full training mode. Like the moment I walked into the gym and I watched him fold this heavy bag. And as I was going up the stairs, I could hear the sound of it. This is, I was just visiting this gym. I was leaving a baseball game at Fenway park and me and my friend just walked up the stairs and it's just because we didn't want to wait for the tea. It took so long for so many people leaving the baseball game. There's going to be big lines, it was going to be packed. Let's just walk up here and see what's going on. And as we were walking up the stairs, I heard this sound that I'll never forget. It was like whomp, whomp kaching. And the kaching was the chains of the heavy bag. Because this 120 pound bag was flying through the air. When this guy would hit, hit it and the, the chains are going and rattling, then it would come down he would set it up again and he was 7, 10ft from me. Like there was this like little ledge we could sit and watch people. And they had set it up like that. So the heavy bag was set up right where people would walk in. Because it was a great recruitment tool because you would really get to see what people are capable of. And the moment I saw that, I was like, I want to know how to do that. That, like, how do you do that? Like he was doing spinning back kicks over and over again, turning sidekicks, just folding this bag and that. But like, that's crazy that a person could gen. I didn't think a person could generate that kind of force. And I trained with him a lot and I learned from him a lot. He taught me a lot. And he was an interesting guy too, because he was like a real street guy. Like he'd been in and out of jail, wound up having a substance problem, but it was this funny dude from Chelsea, which is like a real hard, dangerous neighborhood in Boston. And just a killer, man, a killer, Just a killer. And when he would, when he would compete, people get so nervous. It was crazy to watch because I started to see. I started training with him and going to tournaments with him when I was a white belt. So I was a white belt and he was a black belt national champion. And when John Lee would show up, you see people whispering like, John Lee's here. He would see guys take these deep breaths. They knew he was in their weight class like, cuz they knew this guy wasn't trying to win on points. He was trying to break your body. He was trying to just crush your organs. He was trying to separate your brain from the inside of its skull. He was trying to hurt you. And he did it to a lot of, of people. I watched him knock out a lot of people, A lot of people. It was wild to see. So like, you know, but it was, to me, it was just like this new thing that was going to change who I am, you know, I went for the first time in my life I felt like I wasn't a loser because I was like really good at this thing that was scary, you know, And I just threw myself into it. It was my whole life, life. I didn't do anything. I didn't party, I didn't go to, didn't. I had very few friends outside of high school. You know, I was, it was, my whole thing was just training. I'd get home from school, get something to eat, immediately leave, hop on the train, head into town every day.

[Mike]

That was like, 15.

[Comedian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. From, like, the summer of my freshman year of high school. That's when I first started. Right, Right. Like, when I graduated from high school in my freshman year, I started training, and it was nuts. It was just, like this complete new life. It was so weird. And then competing, like, traveling around competing versus, like, a white belt and a blue belt. Then wicker my way up, purple belt. And then all sudden in Taekwondo, red belt is brown belt, Right. And then black belt. And then my instructor was crazy. He would let me compete as a black belt before I was a black belt belt. It let me compete in the men's division when I was 16. Yeah, it was nuts.

[Interjector]

Holy.

[Comedian]

Yeah, it was just. They. If they thought you had potential, they just throw you right into the flames. Like, let's see. See what you could do.

[Mike]

So the confidence that gives you. It's like finding something that you're good at.

[Comedian]

Yeah. All of a sudden, I realized. Well, all of a sudden, I got obsessed with something where I'd never had really worked hard at anything in my life. And then I had abs. I was like. Like, this is crazy. Like, I look at myself in the mirror. I had abs. All of a sudden, I had muscles everywhere. I was like, this is not. Because you're going through puberty, Right? So you're this doughy little fucking kid. This scrawny, doughy little kid that never did any sports other than baseball. And then all of a sudden, I'm shredded, and I know how to fuck people up. And then I was doing it to, like, live humans all over the country, like, traveling everywhere. We traveled. That's all we did. We just traveled.

[Mike]

So how does that go from. How do you go from there, though? Why. Or how did you go. I'm gonna go do stand up. Like, what was the. What was that?

[Comedian]

It was really my friends. It was really. Yeah. My friend Steve Graham, who I'm still friends with to this day, he was a real maniac. He was on the US Ski Team. He was. He was a flight pilot with the Navy. Or not a flight pilot, a flight surgeon with the Navy. He was an ophthalmologist. Like, insanely hardworking guy. Like, unbelievably disciplined. And he was. He got into Taekwondo while he was a doctor, you know, while he was an ophthalmologist. He's a maniac. To this day, this dude's had, like. He's still a good friend. He's had, like, 70 fucking surgeries. He's had his knees replaced. Still trained, still Still? Yeah, yeah. He's like in his 60s now. He's a fudgeing.

[Mike]

And so he's like, hey, you're funny. You should go do this.

[Comedian]

We would go to tournaments and when we would go to tournaments or when we have sparring days in particular, everybody was super nervous. It was very dangerous. And so I would be the one who would break the ice. I would be the one who would make fun of everybody and do impressions of everybody. And I always was cracking everybody up. And it was a captive audience and everyone was looking for, like, relief from the fact that there was this 10. Like, we would be on a bus headed to, like, Poughkeepsie, New York to go compete in a tournament. And I would be the one on the bus like, like making fun of everything, just cracking everybody up. And my friend Steve said, you should be a stand up. You should try it. You just try it. And I'm like, look, you think I'm funny because you like me. I go, other, other people are gonna think I'm an. Like, my sense of humor was very dark.

[Mike]

It's like, it was very crazy back.

[Comedian]

Then because I was living a crazy life. And then did an open mic night and then I said, I think I might be able to do this.

[Mike]

Did you bomb, like, straight away?

[Comedian]

I got a couple of like, like, ha, ha ha. It wasn't good, but everybody sucks.

[Mike]

Do you remember any, any of the jokes that you fucked that you rolled out with?

[Comedian]

Here's my impression of a good looking girl getting pulled over by the cops. Do you realize how fast you were going? No. Do you like my tits? Yes, I do. Here's a warning. It was terrible. It was so bad. It was so bad. I had so many bad jokes. But I also realized, like, everybody sucks in the beginning. And then I thought back to martial arts. I'd go, oh, this is like every sucker, everything, right? Like, if you start off, you suck. Like, everything in the whole thing is like getting better at this thing you suck at, which is like, I had this guy, Tommy Woods, Dr. Tommy woods, we were talking about new things, about the, the value in terms of like, people that acquire dementia. And one of the best ways to like, to keep your brain fresh is do new things, do things that you're not good at and learn how to do them and get better at it. And I think I, I had sort of just applied what I had learned from martial arts because obviously I wasn't good at martial arts when I started. I was terrible. Everybody's terrible. You don't know what you're doing, right? And then you. You realize, like, oh, through repetitive effort, concentration, focus, discipline, you're gonna get better. It's a path. And so I was like, oh, this is a new thing. But it's also a new thing filled with other misfits. Because I was a misfit, right? And it's like, oh, well, these comedians are misfits, too, too. They didn't have regular rules. They always wanted to smoke pot and drink beer and, you know, they stayed up late and they slept late and they're. They were just maniacs. I was like, okay, I could hang out with these people. Like, regular people that wanted a regular job. Scare the out of me because I don't want to get sucked into your drone, like, frequency. I can't live. I tried regular jobs. Like, this is not going to work for me. I'm too. ADD hd. Whatever the it is, whatever it is, I got it. I'm like, I can't do this. But those people were misfits. There were these weird renegade, and occasionally professionals would go up and you'd realize, like, wow, this guy's a master. Like, the mastery he has of, like, concepts and jokes and tricking you into thinking one thing and then he hits you with another thing. And like, God, and the smoothness of it all, it just became an obsession.

[Mike]

Do you remember the guy, the, like, Teddy Berger?

[Comedian]

Ron. There's this guy who had been on the Tonight show, and he unfortunately developed a substance problem, which a lot of people do. And I think some of it is just the pressure of stand up and the pressure of fame and the pressure of constantly performing. And. And then it's just also like, just living that dirt bag life where you're just like, you could do whatever you want, it doesn't matter. Do coke, you know, and they're just doing coke. And like, there was clubs that would pay you and coke.

[Mike]

What?

[Comedian]

Yeah, they would. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nick's Comedy Stop would offer you cocaine or cash in the 1980s.

[Mike]

Yeah, I. I can see that. I can see how. I could see how this, this thing becomes super addicting. And this is like your dirt bag life, right? It's the. It's that same parallel we're talking about where it's like, this becomes the rock that you're climbing every day because this is the audience that you have to entertain. It becomes about getting better, honing a craft, like, and ultimately succeeding with the crowd right in front of you and they're giving you the feedback. Like, that's very similar. Like, you're either getting higher on the rock or you're falling off.

[Comedian]

And the falling off was important because the bombings would really teach you. You didn't want that. So what was it about the bomb? Like, what did you. How did you bomb? What did you do wrong? What went wrong? What's wrong with your material? What's wrong? Like, are you being lazy? And the way you're setting things up, like, what are you doing wrong? And then figuring it out. Because that pain of bombing was so, like, sometimes it's bad to do well a bunch of times, because you need to get relaxed. Like, you can't be relaxed. Like, you have to, like, constantly grinding at it. You have to constantly be taking that thing apart and trying to figure out what. How to make it better.

[Mike]

The guys like. Like Andy Kaufman, right, that would go out and they had a whole shtick and nobody understood what the they were doing.

[Comedian]

That's a different thing. It's a different thing.

[Mike]

Wild.

[Comedian]

It is wild.

[Mike]

Cause it's almost an intentional. You're bombing intentionally. But it's funny. You gotta stretch it out a little bit to understand what's going on. And it's a different individual psychology.

[Comedian]

It's a different thing. He's doing a different thing. My criticism of that, and I don't really have a criticism, maybe that's the wrong word, because I think Kaufman was brilliant. He was brilliant on Taxi. He was an interesting character. The shit he did with pro wrestling was just bananas. Wrestling with fucking Maniac was so great. But he never was a great comic. Right? Like, see, if. If Shane Gillis decided to go that path and just bomb on purpose, that would be almost more interesting. Right? Like, here's a guy who knows how to kill. He's a real comic and one of the funniest guys ever.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

And then he starts saying, do. Playing the theme to Mighty Mouse and just repeating, here I come to save the day. Like this what Anthony Kaufman did. He play a head of a record player and just play the Mighty Mouse theme song and just repeat, here I come to save the day. And everybody's like, what the is going on? Like, it was like this weird mind that he was doing with everybody. But he never did the other thing, Right?

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

He never, like, really entertained and killed. Like, all the evidence of Andy Kaufman is of him doing this weird stuff, which, again, it's not really a criticism, but he was doing a different thing. He was an odd guy who saw this thing and he was like, I think I can get in there and do something completely Disruptive. Right.

[Mike]

I can see that. Like, it's very distinctly different.

[Comedian]

Nothing wrong with it. I loved it. I love, especially the wrestling stuff, but it's not my favorite. Like, if I had to. If someone told me Andy Kaufman's performing in this room over here. Here, But Dave Attel is in that room over there. I'm going to see David tell. I want to go see the master. Laugh. Yeah, I'm going to laugh, and I'm going to see a guy at the top of his craft that's doing this hypnosis on everybody, and. And you just leave there. Your sides hurt and you're dying. You don't leave there going, what the was that like? But he wanted people to leave there and go, what the was that? Yeah, that was the magic of Andy Kaufman. But it's just not my. You know, like, I don't like jazz, and I don't want to go see jazz.

[Mike]

It's hard to like.

[Comedian]

It's kind of cool background music. But I'm not leaving the house to go see jazz. But I know people who fucking love it.

[Mike]

So if you think back to Taxi, I was thinking about this the other day with, like, Danny DeVito and Taxi, like, that guy's still going. It's incredible, man. Like, I was. And it just, Like a snippet of Taxi came up, and I was like, holy. How old is Danny DeVito?

[Comedian]

He's 150,000 years old. Tony Danz has long since retired.

[Mike]

Holy. That guy just keeps going. And he looked old. And Taxi.

[Comedian]

Is John Hurst still alive?

[Mike]

I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know.

[Comedian]

That was a great show.

[Mike]

It was a great show.

[Comedian]

Great show. Was it?

[Mike]

He's 90.

[Comedian]

Is Mary Lou Henner. Was Taxi too, Right? Wasn't she on Taxi? Mary Lou Henner, you know, she has that crazy mind thing where she remembers everything.

[Mike]

Seriously, every.

[Comedian]

You can give her a date and she could tell you, like, 1973, February 2nd, she'll tell you what day it was. She can tell you what happened on that day. She can tell you news things. She can tell you what she was doing that day. She has not just a photographic memory, but a complete recall of all events and dates. I forget what the term is.

[Interjector]

Superior autobiography, biographical memory ability.

[Mike]

Oh, my gosh.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Interjector]

Can remember almost every day of her life since she was 11.

[Comedian]

Isn't that nuts?

[Mike]

That's amazing.

[Comedian]

And she's got to be 70 years old, right?

[Interjector]

Three, I think.

[Comedian]

73, yeah. She remembers everything.

[Mike]

The funny thing is, is DeVito's still funny. Like, like he's still funny. Like, I mean, like the, the way that it. He lands jokes. I mean, always sunny. How many seasons to that? Like 20 now. I don't know. But I mean, it's killing looking like.

[Comedian]

Things has he done.

[Mike]

I don't know.

[Comedian]

Taxi to all. Taxi was when I was a boy.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

To always sunny.

[Mike]

That was the thing my dad used to watch.

[Interjector]

Yeah.

[Mike]

And like my dad seems old. My dad's 80 years old, right? My dad used to watch that.

[Comedian]

How old is Danny DeVito? 81. Still banging it out.

[Mike]

Still killing it, man.

[Comedian]

Still funny.

[Mike]

Yeah. I mean, how old's. I'm not trying to equate Ron White to Danny, but I'm saying like, how old's Ron? Because he's still killing it.

[Comedian]

70. Yeah, 70. Yeah.

[Mike]

I was watching him the other night and you know, he flew back from where he was and he just like came in and stood up there and did a set. Like it just kind of like walked in almost. It felt like he was just like, I'm here, I'm just gonna stop in and do this. And then he killed seamlessly. Just. It was perfect.

[Comedian]

He's as good as. He's better, I think, than he's ever been right now.

[Mike]

I've never like watching somebody that's great and then watching somebody that's in another dimension like him specifically, because he's perfect. It's absolutely perfect because it comes off, it's unforced. It's a conversation. He's just having a conversation with the crowd. It's so incredible to watch somebody that can be perfect in their delivery but then be completely unassuming in the way that they're delivering it. It's just a natural conversation. Like I had it casual. Yeah, it's completely casual.

[Comedian]

Casual killing.

[Mike]

You don't even feel like you're in. Like you're watching a stand up comedian. You feel like you're watching somebody talk and you know that it's coming. You think that it's coming. And he still fucking delivers it with just a level of acceptualism and be like, fuck, man, like, the guy's incredible.

[Comedian]

I think it's one of those things where you keep working at it, you just keep getting better. And also he stopped drinking. So he stopped drinking a couple years ago and that changed everything. He got lost a ton of weight, got way more focused. But you know, he had been going hard for decades and his doctor had a Pullman Sonic. Hey man, you're gonna die.

[Mike]

Are all those guys still all the Blue Collar Comedy tour guys, are they still. Are they still all doing it Fox.

[Comedian]

Worthy, still does stand up. I think he did stand up recently with Ron. He'll. But I don't think he tours a lot. I don't know about Larry the Cable guy. I don't hear about him anymore.

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

I don't hear about the other guy, Bill Engvall. You don't hear much about him anymore. I think out of all them, Ron is the guy who's still. But out of all them, it was like, Jeff Fox was a great comic. And then, you know, I think in my opinion, Ron was the best. Ron's just a master, but also Ron is. He loves it, man. Like, he was there last night. He's. He performs all the time. He's always down. He's. He always, like, I always get text messages from him when I have shows. He wants to come and do a set. It's like he, he lives for it, man. He's constantly writing, he's constantly working on it. Like that's his thing, man. He. He enjoys the out of it, still tours, still does the road, does better than ever. Sells out everywhere. And you're getting the best show out of Ron that you've ever gotten out of him.

[Mike]

He's.

[Comedian]

He's better now, I think, than he's ever been. Yeah, I really believe that. And it's crazy that at 70, he's still getting better. His material just keeps getting better and it's always working at it. He's always working at it, you know?

[Mike]

Yeah, that, that. The whole thing about LA or whatever he did, he just. It sounded like he pulled that out of his ass on stage. He was just telling a story about being on a flight. And you're like, holy shit. He's just telling me a story.

[Comedian]

He was in the back room of the Comedy Store one night. There's a back bar, and we were hanging out and we were drinking. This is back in Ron's drinking days. And we're having a couple glasses of whiskey and then Ron starts telling the story about how when he was stationed in Hawaii, he goes, there's a place you can go. And, you know, it's a bunch of hookers. You get your dick sucked for like 20 bucks, man. I was there every day. And he goes. Then all these years later, I was watching the news story and all these transvestite hookers were getting rounded up in the very area where I used to go every day. And I realized, oh, my God, I got my dick suck about a Hundred times by men. And he was telling this this hilarious bit. He wasn't a bit. He was just telling us this story. We were dying. I go, do you. Have you ever said this on stage? Stage? He goes, no, no. I go, you should tell that on stage. I go, ron, that's hilarious. I go, we were dying laughing. I mean, it was like. It was a bit, but it was just him telling a story. Just no intention of ever saying, we're in the back room. He goes from the back room onto the stage in the. Or the original room. He walks down the hallway. I go with him. He goes on stage. He goes, let me tell you a story about how I got my dick suck about 100 times by men. He just goes into the story. It fucking murders. Murders. Like. Like, it had been a polished bit that he had been working on for years. It was just a story. But Ron is a great storyteller, like a natural storyteller. Like, if he's not trying to be funny, he's to trying funny.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

He doesn't have to, like, think about it. It's like. It's a. He's just got his personality, man. He just. He's just cool. Yeah.

[Mike]

He's like that. That iconic western, almost a western storyteller, like the guy that you would expect sitting at the campfire at hunting camp. It's like the old, you know, guide that's been around the 100 years. Like, he's killed thousands of animals. He's packed shit out, and then he's got these stories that you can't help but listen to.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

And that's what he reminds me of. I'm like, man, this guy is so perfect. And every time I see him, like, holy. That's. That's. Yeah, that's the guy.

[Comedian]

He's an old master, you know, it's. There's not a lot of humans like that guy. He's the main reason why I was interested in moving to Austin. He was the first recruit reason because I knew Ron had already lived here. Ron was already moved here. Ron moved here in 2018.

[Mike]

Okay.

[Comedian]

And so he just got tired of it. He kept a place in Beverly Hills, and we come visit us at the Comedy Store sometimes. But I was talking to him on the phone. He's like, man, I love it here. He goes, there's no Hollywood. He goes, if I want to fly somewhere to work, I'm in the center of the country. It's easy to get anywhere. People are nice, food's great. And he goes, he's just not around Hollywood. And I kept thinking, man, can I live in Austin? Like, I always liked Austin. And on it was out here. So when I would come out here for work every now and then, and I'd always come out here and love doing standup here, I was like. Like, that planted the first seed. And then when the pandemic hit, Ron was already here. And when I came out here to look at houses and. And stuff in. This is in May of 2020, so this is only a couple months into the lockdown. But I had already had enough. I was like, I. I'm getting the out of here. Like, I knew these in LA were never going to give up the kind of control and power that they had over people's lives. They get off on it, those weirdos. And so I was like, well, at least Ron will be there. Like, I'll hang out with Ron. Like, even if I never do stand up again, at least Ron will be here. And then, you know, Ron was also the guy who convinced me that I have to open up a club. I had had a thought in my head and I was thinking about doing it. We talked about doing it. And then Ron went on stage for the first time in like six months. It was in November of 2020. And then he grabs me by my shoulders when he got off stage because he murdered. First of all, when he went on stage, they went crazy. And there's a giant standing ovation because there was no indoor shows anywhere else near there. It was like we were doing it at the Vulcan. They had some shows they were doing at Cap City before Cap City went under, but they were like separating Everybody by like 20ft or. Or some stupid shit, like, as if the virus can't go through the air. It was dumb, right? Everything was dumb, but the Vulcan was just, like, unhinged. It was packed. I was like, this is so crazy. This is such a super spreader party. And Ron went on stage and he had gone over his notes and material and wasn't even sure if he was thinking he was retired. He was talking about retiring. I think I'm retired. Did this one set and then he grabs him by the shoulders. He goes, whatever the we have to do, we're going to keep doing this. This just. He goes, you got to open up that club. Like, okay, we're going to open up the club. And then we started looking for locations, like, right afterwards. So, like, Ron was a. A key force. He's the godfather of the Austin comedy movement. Like, where this became like this big hub. It started with Ron, 100%. Because I knew if he was here, if he was here, at least I'd have my friend. I could go hang out.

[Interjector]

Right?

[Comedian]

Because, like, even if I couldn't do stand up again, just. I need someone who's just. Just a renegade. I need a dude I can hang out with. That's just. That's a real comic that we're gonna have fun. We could just talk and laugh and.

[Mike]

Well, who'd you hang out with when you're in LA?

[Comedian]

Him, him, him. When he was there until 2018, always. But of course, Joey Diaz.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

And, you know, when the pandemic hit, Joey moved to New Jersey. He's like, this place. And, you know, he. He was on the same things as me. These people, this is. And he always wanted to go back home to New Jersey, which was, you know, where he's from. And then Duncan moved to North Carolina. Like, everybody moved out, but it was like, Duncan. I hung out with Duncan Segura, Ari, Bert, all those people that were, you know, the mainstays at the Comedy Store. It was just. There was an amazing crew. Tony Hinchcliffe, of course.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

And Tony was one of the first guys to move out here, too, with me. And then Segura moved out here, and then everybody moved out here. Just like this wave started.

[Mike]

Is there anybody that you're, like, what you started with, like, back in the day, like, because you were. What, Boston? Like, was there anybody you started with that you're still like, yeah, Fitzsimmons, Greg.

[Comedian]

We're real tight. Greg Fitzsimmons started one week. I think I started a week after him or before him, something like that. But we're separated by one week.

[Mike]

Oh, seriously?

[Comedian]

Yeah. We did open mics together. We traveled around together. We did road. We would drive 90 minutes to do five minutes for free. Yeah. We would drive to Rhode Island. Island to stand up for free. We traveled all over the. The. All over New England. We did road gigs together. Yeah, we came up together. We had so much fun. We just had no money, no career, no even thought of one day having a career. The. The goal was, I want to be able to make a living doing comedy. Because we knew that there was guys in town that were headliners, that could, you know, grind out 100 grand, 50 grand, whatever it is, a year only doing comedy. They didn't have to do anything else. I was like, that's the dream. Imagine if you could pay your bills with comedy. Right. The idea of a career was like, no. We never even talked about it because Everybody in Boston stayed in Boston. Nobody left. And other than like Steven Wright and Jay Leno, there's like a few people that had kind of air quotes, made it, you know, during that time period and left Boston, right. The goal in Boston was just to be a good comic. Was a real interesting thing because it was a real artist colony in, in the most unpretentious of ways because these guys were all coke snorting, whiskey drinking psychopaths. And a lot of them were big guys, like these big fucking football player looking dudes who were just animals and they were just wild men, you know, and they, they had this life that was so envious to me. I was like, God, to be so free. Free where all you have to do is just tell jokes. You don't have to ever show up at the, the Newspaper Depot to deliver newspapers or drive. I was driving limos and doing construction gig. I didn't have to do any of that. You could just do comedy. And that was me and Greg. We would just drive around just thinking like one day imagine being able to make a living doing this. That was the, the only goal. And then we both wound up event. He moved to New York for a bit and I lived in New York for a while and then I moved to la and then he eventually moved to LA as well. And now he's still there. He's still back in la.

[Mike]

Gosh, I can't imagine, man, look, living there and staying there even for. Even professionally.

[Comedian]

Did you see what they just did to the guys that won the Super Bowl? You see the jock tax? Yeah, Jamie, you see the jock tax?

[Interjector]

Yeah. It's not a new thing though.

[Comedian]

I understand, I understand, but that, but it is, it's specific to California and this jock tax. In California there were some of the players lost money playing in the Super Bowl. They had a pay. Oh, no, no, it is true.

[Interjector]

I don't think so.

[Comedian]

No, no, it is true. I went it through AI last night. No, it was in. They, they pulled it up on Grok and people analyzed it and it's based. No, no, James, Jamie, it's b. Jamie. It's based on the seven days that they had to be there. So you have to pay a fee based on the seven days dependent upon what your salary is. They played a game, so it's a percentage. Okay.

[Interjector]

This year.

[Comedian]

Okay. With whatever. Well, the super bowl, specifically. These guys. Jamie's so funny. This is not. I know, but this is one of.

[Interjector]

Those things that's not real.

[Comedian]

What do you mean it's not real? I Told you. It was run through AI last night. Night. He made $178,000 for the Super Bowl. He had to pay $249,000 in tax. I'm pretty sure those are the numbers. And it's based on the fact that he was there for seven days. So it's a percentage of your income over the course of a year. So if he makes $2 million a year and he's there for seven days, this is how much money you have to pay.

[Mike]

Gotcha.

[Comedian]

And so the super bowl pay is not. It's like on top of your normal salary. Right, right, right. So it actually cost him money to play in the Super Bowl. So he made $178,000, but because he's there for seven days, he had to pay 200 and something. Thousand dollars.

[Mike]

Did you watch it?

[Comedian]

No, no, I was going to watch it just for Bad Bunny, just. Cuz everybody was so pissed off. I thought it was hilarious that this guy's like, like, what do you care? Like, it's like this weird culture war that this guy is singing. And objectively, people that saw it said it was a great show. I don't know. I take their word for it.

[Mike]

Like somebody was telling me the other day, they're like, oh, you going to watch the Super Bowl? I'm like, what Super Bowl? Oh, yeah, yeah, that's sports. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. I was halfway through it or whatever. I'm like, I have no idea what's going on, man. I got other.

[Comedian]

If it's your team, I get it. It was the Patriots. I could. I could root for the Patriots, but it's like, I'm busy. Busy.

[Mike]

It's. If it's on like at the airport or something, like, I'll watch it, but like, I'm not going out of my way. I'm not going to be like, hey.

[Comedian]

If Aaron Rodgers was playing, I'd watch it. Maybe I'd even go, if Aaron was playing. But it's like there's. It's so hard to go from combat sports to regular sports for me. Oh, God, it's so hard. It's so hard. The UFC last Saturday was spectacular. And it was a small one in the Apex center. And it was. There were some incredible fights. It was so good. It's like that to me is like, I don't have a lot of time for entertainment. That fills it all up.

[Mike]

Yeah, that fight, like. And I mean, Saturday was like, incredible. Yeah, it was. That was incredible.

[Comedian]

Yeah, the Mario Bautista performance was insane. He's so good. That guy just keeps getting better. He looks like a world champion in. And it's like, you watch combat sports, and the. The consequences are so grave. What they're doing, the dedication. This moment. You train for months and months for this one moment when this referee is like, fighter one, you ready? Fire two. Let's go. And it's, whoo, here we go. That, to me, is the most exciting thing in all of sports. And it'll never stop being that to me. I love it. Football's fun. I love, like it. I've been to some UT games. UT games are great. They're fun.

[Mike]

Well, this is like the state, right?

[Comedian]

This is like.

[Mike]

This is not only like, the. The state pastime, but people are, like, grown up. They're completely modeled to go play Texas football.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

I mean, this is like the icon of dedicated. Yeah.

[Comedian]

And it's just the enthusiasm for the crowd is nuts. I got to shoot the cannon once. Why don't they let me cannon off?

[Interjector]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

What? That's pretty cool. It's fun being on the. On the field and seeing these guys warm up and get ready and then watching the game. Nighttime games are the best. They're nuts, man. And then, of course, they do the jet flyover, which is like, America, you're flying over fighter jets over a football game.

[Mike]

That doesn't happen anywhere else.

[Comedian]

They don't do that anywhere else. They never do that for a fight. Fly fighter jets over.

[Mike]

That'd be cool, though. It would be start, like, maybe get it. Yeah.

[Comedian]

Maybe they could do it at the sphere and have, like, the roof of the sphere, like, show the jets as they pass over.

[Mike]

Maybe they'll do it at the White House, ufc. They probably will, I would imagine.

[Comedian]

Well, they're probably going to have air presence. I mean, how dangerous is that card going to be?

[Mike]

Oh, my gosh.

[Comedian]

In terms of, like, if you wanted to have some sort of a disruptive event, that's the spot at the White House and you're having cage fights, and I'm not even convinced that's going to happen happen. Because with all the crazy going on in the world, who knows what happens between now and June, right. When this is supposed to pop off? Like, who knows? Who knows what goes down? Who knows what happens with all this Epstein file? It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier and deeper and deeper. And so Rokana and Massey just released the names of these guys that had been redacted from the list. And one of them is Lex. What is his last name? Les Wexner. Right. Who's the CEO of Victoria Secrets. Is he the CEO or the owner?

[Interjector]

Former CEO.

[Comedian]

Formers, Both. Former owner. CEO of Victoria's Secrets. He's being named as a co. Conspirator. Yes. Yeah. So he's being named along with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

[Mike]

He.

[Comedian]

Because, you know, he runs this modeling, Victoria's Secrets, hot girls, the whole deal. Somehow or another, he's involved in this. And they had redacted his name up until now.

[Mike]

Right.

[Interjector]

Sure.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Interjector]

That I. Well, two things. I don't think anybody. The. His existence as a co conspirator isn't new information.

[Comedian]

But it's confirmed now. Right.

[Interjector]

It was. People I think are up in arms is that it wasn't supposed to be blocked out from the files.

[Comedian]

Exactly.

[Interjector]

He's not a victim.

[Comedian]

Right. He's not a victim. So why was his name redacted? And so they got it unredacted and now he's being named.

[Interjector]

I think he's the fun. The funder of most of it is what it seems.

[Comedian]

Right. So people knew that there was something going on, but he had gifted Jeffrey Epstein this insane house in Manhattan. So this is like a $60 million house in Manhattan. You know the house where you go into it and you see Bill Clinton in a dress. You know that picture that we have out in the lobby? Yeah. That's from the foyer of his house. Right. That Jeffrey Epstein was gifted by Les Wexner. By the way, Whitney Webb posted on her Twitter about Les Wexner being a sex trafficker, a child sex trafficker in 2020. See, you find that like that.

[Mike]

That.

[Comedian]

That crazy chick is right about everything. The one.

[Interjector]

The lady was kidnapped, or she was. Claimed she was kidnapped. It was in his house in New Albany.

[Comedian]

Where?

[Interjector]

Columbus. Like, she was. She claimed she was being held there for, I don't know, two weeks or something, like doing art. She called her dad to try to get out of there or something like that.

[Comedian]

Oh, Jesus.

[Interjector]

Yeah, and that's like. His involvement is in, like, brand new information.

[Comedian]

This was in Columbus, Ohio.

[Interjector]

Well, New Albany is where all the. Like, that's where his house is. The giant. The biggest house in Ohio. I think it's a suburb of Columbus. It'd be like West Lake to.

[Comedian]

Right, right, right.

[Interjector]

People think he's still there. That's where Epstein's living.

[Comedian]

But that's not accurate. Well, the people that think he's alive, I think they think he's in Israel, don't they?

[Interjector]

Well, there's some definitely I think. I think they're AI photos. They might not be.

[Comedian]

Oh, I saw that. Yeah.

[Interjector]

People think he's been seen or spotted around downtown.

[Comedian]

Wouldn't you think he'd get some surgery?

[Mike]

You would think that he would have to.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Like, he's probably one of the most recognizable faces in the world at this point.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Like, after so much air time, you'd.

[Comedian]

Have to get some surgery if you wanted to. Still, I mean, how would. How would you keep that? This is the tweet, your reminder that Leslie Wexner financed the mass rape and trafficking of thousands of American children for over a decade. And right now he is sitting in a 26k square foot mansion in New Albany, Ohio, thinking that he is above the law. She tweeted this in April 28th of 2020. How crazy is that? She's like the. The most prolific of all the conspiracy theorists. The most well read. The one with the most recall, the one that's the most. Most quoted. I don't know how she's so good at it. We're trying to get her on. I don't know how she's so good and what her background is, how she finds all this information and. But she's always way ahead of all this stuff.

[Mike]

Yeah. I mean, 2020.

[Comedian]

That's crazy.

[Mike]

Way ahead of everybody.

[Comedian]

Crazy. Yeah, bro. But. But these files, just what's come out so far and the fact that they redacted men, these like powerful billionaire guys, their names were redacted. Like, there's one of them where. There's. Where he's talking about pandemic planning. Where Jeffrey Epstein is talking about pandemic planning to someone named Bill, whose name is redacted. It's like, why are you redacting the guy's name that you're talking about planning for a pandemic? Like what to do in response to. To a pandemic. Why is his name retracted? So redacted, rather.

[Mike]

When are winner. When are they supposed to testify? When are the Clinton supposed to testify? Would you say they're gonna. Two weeks?

[Interjector]

Yeah, I think it's the last two days.

[Mike]

Do you say the aliens are coming in the next two weeks? They're gonna land.

[Interjector]

Something's gonna happen just before that testifying.

[Comedian]

Yeah. It'll be, we bomb Iran, aliens show up. Maybe. Maybe at the same time. Yeah.

[Mike]

Outside of this. Because this, I mean, obviously this conspiracy, it's not a theory anymore.

[Comedian]

Right.

[Mike]

Because you're. They're connecting the networks. They're like exposing a lot of this. Like, when you look at your, your total conspiracy catalog of things that you like to dive into outside of aliens. Because everybody knows that. What are your other ones that you like?

[Comedian]

Well, aliens is the most fun one.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

This is the one that I hate the most.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Because this one scares the shit out of me. Because the fear of, you know, we talked about this yesterday with Roger Avery. The fear of these, like, literally demonic human beings that are running the world and don't give a. About human lives and enjoy watching people being tortured, enjoy watching people killed, Participating in ritual sacrifice of people. And they do it in order to show that you're a part of a team. And you, you're. We know that that has always historically been a real thing, and it's been something that you look at in history. You go, God, it's so sick. It's so twisted. It's so disgusting. And everybody wants to think, thank God that's not happening now. But then when you realize, like, that might have been happening. Now, here's one of the craziest ones. The day he was indicted in 2018, the very next day, they ordered. He ordered 330 gallons of sulfuric acid.

[Mike]

What?

[Comedian]

Yes. He ordered six 55 gallon drums of sulfuric acid to be delivered to the island. And so there's a lot of people online saying, oh, that was probably for his desalination plant. It's probably a regular thing they need to order. So then someone else did a deep dive and said, no, this is the first time this was ever ordered.

[Interjector]

Check that again. I saw there was two other ones.

[Comedian]

Oh, there was two other orders, 17 and 2015. Oh, so that got it wrong.

[Interjector]

First one from that company, potentially.

[Comedian]

Ah, that makes sense. So maybe it was for this desalination equipment. But also, that's a lot of sulfuric acid. You know, if I needed 5 gallons for my desalination equipment. But.

[Mike]

Right, right.

[Comedian]

239 gallons or whatever it is. To burn kids. Yeah. To get rid of bodies.

[Mike]

Well, it's kind of hard to. To think of any other use for acid, just in general. Right.

[Comedian]

Immediately, you think?

[Mike]

Immediately, yeah.

[Comedian]

The other orders, were they that large?

[Interjector]

Let me check.

[Comedian]

Because here's the other thing. I mean, how long has it been killing people? How long have they been boiling bodies to get rid of them? I mean, if, if you do have, for lack of better words, let's call it a service where you allow rich people from foreign governments or whatever. You set it up, I can give you whatever you want.

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

Like, what I want to do is I want to kill a hooker. Like, I want to kill her. I want to torture her, and I want to. I want to, you know, get rid of the body. Like, I want to do that. Like, can you do that? There was one where this one guy is saying to him, him, thank you for the torture video. It's literally a part of an email. The actual quote, thank you for the torture. Like, enjoyed the torture video.

[Mike]

It's so gross.

[Comedian]

Like, and they. They think they've identified that guy. And what do they think he's a sultan?

[Interjector]

I was trying to find that right now, I think, because Massey said he got the. He looked that one up, I believe. Because it's weird. They're letting them into the files. Files one by one for, like, an hour at a time.

[Comedian]

What? Yeah, bro.

[Interjector]

The congress people can go look at specific. There's millions of files. You got to tell them which file you want specifically to look at.

[Comedian]

It's crazy. The whole. The whole thing is crazy because, like, why. Why have you protected people? So we know Sultan Ahmed bin Suleiman Suleim sent the torture video to Epstein. This is in 2009. So Epstein was saying that. Where are you? Are you okay? I love the torture video. I am in China. I'll be in the US Second week of May. What the fuck, man? And why is his name redacted? Why would your name be redacted if you're not a victim? Like, this is what's crazy about all this. Like, how come you redact some people and you don't redact other people? People? Like, what is this? This is not good. None of this is good for this administration. It looks terrible. It looks terrible. It looks terrible for Trump when he was saying that none of this was real. This is all a hoax. This is not a hoax. Like, did you not know? Maybe he didn't know. If you want to be charitable, but this is definitely not a hoax. And if you've got redacted people's names and these people aren't victims, you're not protecting the victim. So what are you doing?

[Mike]

Right?

[Comedian]

And how come all this is not released?

[Mike]

You would think that all of it would just. Yeah, like, get rid of all of it. Just expel it all.

[Interjector]

It's crazy.

[Comedian]

So this. This is the conspiracy that drives me. The more the. The most crazy because I don't like it.

[Interjector]

Julian Dory talk about this yesterday on his podcast. I just saw a clip going around. American billionaire Tom Pritzker had an email to him that says.

[Comedian]

You mean D. Dorsey.

[Interjector]

Dorsey.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Interjector]

Sorry, sorry.

[Comedian]

Oh, okay. I'm In a remote valley of Afghanistan. It's my birthday wish with boys with toys. Spent time with Patreus yesterday, and he loaned me a chopper. Actually, two with one as a backup. Can't call till tomorrow. Yeah, but boys with toys could mean, like, military guys with weapons.

[Interjector]

That's what I assumed. That's not what the video. I. They thought they were talking about little boys because they were not Afghanistan. But birthday wish is an interesting part.

[Mike]

It's my birthday wish to.

[Interjector]

In a remote valley.

[Mike]

In a remote valley in Afghanistan.

[Interjector]

About it.

[Comedian]

But it also loaned me a chopper.

[Interjector]

Well, actually, this is. Yeah, this is to Epstein.

[Comedian]

Right. But the thing is, like, the. Loan me a chopper. My birthday wish. His birthday wish might have been to, like, gun down villagers. I know. That's what.

[Interjector]

That's what I thought. I'm talking about not go play with little kids.

[Comedian]

Yeah.

[Interjector]

Just want to go kill people.

[Comedian]

And then, I mean, I bet that. Look, he loaned me a chopper. Doesn't sound like I came in there to kids. It's like my birthday wish. Sounds like I'm here to people up.

[Mike]

Right. Like, or I'm just out here to. To tour Afghanistan, which, I mean, I don't know why anybody want to tour Afghanistan, but. Well, it seems like the only reason.

[Comedian]

Why I would be interested in going to Afghanistan is the stuff that Jason Everman told me about, like, when he showed me all those ancient Greek ruins, which is nuts, where archaeologists have no access to them. Right. That stuff's crazy.

[Mike]

No, it's incredible.

[Comedian]

All from Alexander the Great. Like, there's immense ruins in Afghanistan of cities. They had Greek cities, like, beautiful columns and incredible construction in Afghanistan that are like, who. How old? When was Alexander the Great? When was. Was that the 1400s? What was that?

[Mike]

Thousand plus. Right. So, like, I mean, what year was it?

[Comedian]

What year was Alexander the Great?

[Mike]

I believe it was actually, what, 300. I don't know, Jamie.

[Comedian]

300 A.D. 300 B.C. 300 B.C.

[Mike]

Wow. 600 years off. Wow.

[Comedian]

I was way off. 300 B.C. and they're building these immense, beautiful Roman cities. Greek Roman cities. Like, it looks like. It looks like you're either in Rome or you're in ancient Greece. Like, incredible architecture.

[Mike]

Well, I think up until the Soviets invaded, I mean, Afghanistan was kind of like the crown jewel. Right. They referred to it as the Beirut of Central Asia because it was. You had a very eclectic group of people. And Kabul was known as, like, this beautiful city. And obviously, post occupation, the Soviets had killed hundreds of thousands of people. And then with the buildup and the devastation of not only military occupation of the Soviets and then us coming in soon after, obviously with, when the moolahs took charge, it basically went completely to the other side or the extreme of the Taliban and then us coming in. They've had nothing but decades of war. War. It's completely eviscerated any assemblance of intellectualism. There's no like infrastructure of technology or advancement. Like the universities were essentially demolished so everything was ruined. So you're talking about, I mean at least several hundreds, hundreds of years of advancement that just were eliminated in three.

[Comedian]

Decades and just a complete collapse of society.

[Mike]

Yeah, I would spend a lot of time just trying to understand the place. Right. And you would have, you leave an airfield where we have the most advanced technology in the world. Like we're launching helicopters and jets and any and all pieces of technology you could imagine. And you would drive into these valleys or from one place to another and you would have horse drawn carriages of two mules and they're carrying something in the background. And it's like you have the same cars are on the road with a Toyota Corolla and you have a mule pulling an old Toyota Corolla or something. So you'd have an entire society of basically Amish, Amish level people. And then Americans right next door in an air base are launching the most advanced technology and war fighting capability in the world. You'd see everything from point A to point B. You would encounter huge percentage that people are illiterate, no schooling, no advancement for girls. You know, the children were seen more as like a beast of burden. And a lot of places they would actually value their sheep more than they would value their children. So they would be looking for reparations or to get paid for quite possibly the sheep that you destroyed on target. But their kids, not really. So you had a really clear picture to what civilization was like 500 years before that or a thousand years at certain times. And you'd see it too, right, because you'd have Buddhist architecture, Greek architecture, and then you'd have the standard kind of Taliban infrastructure. You'd have the Soviet architecture from their invasion. You'd have all these different layers of military occupation. You could see them all within, within two weeks.

[Comedian]

Wow.

[Mike]

I was up in this place called the Pangeer and the lion of the pangeer was this General Massoud. And he was killed actually on September 10th, before September 11th. So he's part of the actual September 11th plot. He was killed by a suicide bomber as they were trying to do a documentary and they brought in a camera packed full of explosives and killed a them the day before, which ultimately was part of the September 11 attacks, because they knew that Massoud was the connection to the US invasion or the US invasion would be involving Massoud. And the Panjir is this beautiful, like, it's incredible river valley. And it's also part of where the Soviets would just get their asses handed to them because we had. The Mujahadeen was being funded by the CIA at the time, obviously back during the Soviet invasion. And they would ambush the Soviets on these windy mountain roads next to this river. And they would cut them off basically on the front and the back of the convoy and then destroy the entire convoy in between. And they just shove all the shit that was destroyed in the river. So the river would have rapidly. And not all the rapids were made from rocks and natural occurring rapids. They were made by T52s and Russian tanks and all this war material that was pushed into the river by the Panjiris. And I went up to his grave and he's really incredible guy when you read about him and all of his combat accomplishments against the Soviet Soviets. But the Panjar Valley is like such a beautiful place. And we used to joke around about how, gosh, we'd love to come back here and like, go skiing or like recreate in Panjer Valley, because it looks like Colorado or someplace incredible and beautiful. And at the same time, you're in Afghanistan, so you're surrounded by just the chaos and the devastation at war with this one tiny little piece. Piece, this like little sliver in the middle of nowhere that's absolutely beautiful. And some of the rapids are made by T52s. And as a whitewater guy, I was like, man, I'd like to kayak this. That'd be cool.

[Comedian]

If you were a person who's a wealthy person that your desire was to go gun people down. Like there are people that will provide you with that service. Like there was a thing with the Soviets, or not the Soviets with Russia. Russians, where they're allowing people to kill pirates.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Like, you would pay a bunch of money and they'd take you to where the pirates are, and you go out in a ship and with a 50 cal, just fucking blow up pirate boats.

[Mike]

Yeah, I'd heard about that. I'd heard about there were places that you could go as, you know, a combat tourist basically has to be. Yeah, there has to be places. It's all gonna be like Russian or Somalian or a connection between the two. Right. So you'd have these, like, rogue elements and places where there isn't organized government. There's essentially just chaos and anarchy.

[Comedian]

Which is Afghanistan, correct? Yeah.

[Mike]

Yeah, you could definitely.

[Comedian]

Someone from the western side was providing that service to someone and letting them borrow a chopper.

[Mike]

Well, that was Petraeus. So they were saying, like, Petraeus was the commanding general at the time, which I would find it. It's kind of hard to believe.

[Comedian]

Hard to believe?

[Mike]

Yeah. That a general that's in charge of combat operations in Afghanistan wouldn't loan just a rich guy a helicopter. And it sounds correct in the context of we. Oh, plus another one. Because they could never fly anywhere alone. They always had to fly in twos because they had to have a support.

[Comedian]

But just loan me a chopper.

[Mike]

Loan me a chopper.

[Comedian]

What?

[Mike]

It's a stretch. As much as I disagree with the way that they were running the war, it'd be hard for me to believe that a general just loaned some rich guy a couple of helicopters to fly around Afghanistan.

[Comedian]

You think he's lying?

[Mike]

I don't know. Like, you'd have to, like, dive into it and figure it out.

[Comedian]

Yeah. But either way, there's either nothing normal about these emails. No, there's nothing normal.

[Mike]

Nothing normal.

[Comedian]

One thing to take into consideration is how much of these emails are actually factual. Like accusations that they're putting on other people. You got to take that with a grain of salt. This guy wasn't. He was all about out, like, influence pedaling, like. And probably he had enemies, and he probably would probably destroy his enemies with rumors and. And making up false stories. Like the Bill Gates one with asking me for antibiotics to slip into his wife because he got STD from a Russian hooker. I'm like, that seems too. Too on the head. You know what I mean? Like, why wouldn't he go to his personal doctor? Why is he going to Jeffrey Epstein for antibiotics in New York when he lives in Se. Do you don't think he has, like, a concierge medicine set up there with a guy? And why would he say, hey, Melinda, I gave her STDs. You wouldn't. You'd say, hey, get me some stuff. Oh, I lost my prescription. Can you give me another one? Yeah, I fell out of my car. Give me another one.

[Mike]

Give me another one.

[Comedian]

And then crush it up in a smoothie. Like, if you're gonna do that, you would do it. He's not a dummy. He's Bill Gates. Right. You would do it in a more discreet way than contact a international sex trafficker who's a part of like some intelligence operation.

[Mike]

You would think.

[Comedian]

You would think, right?

[Mike]

But the skeptic in me tends to kind of like look at it under a magnifying glass a little bit.

[Comedian]

Yeah. I don't want to take everything at face value, but also the accumulation of all of these different things lead you to just go, what the fuck was going on? Did you find out how many other the sulfuric acid orders if the other ones were just as large?

[Interjector]

I was trying to. I struggled even to find that. I was like, maybe I made this up. But I did find one. There was different. So they were talking about. There's emails back to 2012 or 14.

[Comedian]

About.

[Interjector]

I don't have the thing up. This is the thing saying there's nothing there.

[Comedian]

The sulfuric acid.

[Interjector]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Emails released in document. How do they know there's nothing there?

[Interjector]

That's no.

[Comedian]

This is water maintenance systems dating back to 2013, implying possible routine use of SU. Possible is a weird word. Use of sulfuric acid for ph adjustment and filtration. But no specific prior invoices or shipments are detailed.

[Interjector]

So. Yeah, that's. That's exactly. It wasn't an invoice. There was one. They were talking about getting a one drum of sulfuric acid with 40 bags of like carbonate salt or something.

[Comedian]

Yeah, see, that makes more sense than six. Six giant 55 gallon drums of sulfuric acid. The day after you get indicted when.

[Interjector]

You dig into the actual files website, I started looking up the RO plant which is the reverse osmosis system they had there. There's a ton of discussions about it going all the way back to 2012 when I think is when he bought it so.

[Comedian]

Of using sulfuric acid.

[Interjector]

No, just having a reverse osmosis.

[Comedian]

Right. Water.

[Interjector]

There must have been a problem is whatever.

[Comedian]

Well, it makes. It makes sense because they were using desalination technology. But it's just the volume is suspicious. They were buying in the time for a while.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

Also, dude had to know he was going down. Like when he gets arrested in 2019, when he. In 18, rather when he gets indicted, he had to know he was going down. And if you know you're going down and you're trying to mount some sort of a defense, one of the first things you would have to do is get rid of bodies.

[Mike]

You have to get rid of everything.

[Comedian]

Right. If you've got a bunch of people on the island, right. That they could swoop in at any point in time and. And pull out of there. And then you're like, if he had underage kids on the Island. Whatever he had on the island. On that note, it's so dark.

[Interjector]

This picture I know came from. There was rumors of him getting concrete machines shipped there, but that was from the first time he got arrested. So I think in 2008, the first time he got arrested, they had a bunch of machines shipped. Oh, this isn't showing.

[Mike]

Oh, bro.

[Interjector]

And, but, but construct. I don't know how you do construction on the island without getting concrete machine shipped.

[Comedian]

I don't know how you get rid of bodies or put them inside of concrete.

[Interjector]

I'm trying to find this.

[Comedian]

That's the problem.

[Mike]

Well, I mean maybe it's. Maybe it's two and the same. It's like, hey, I've go. I go to an island and I've got to make, you know, I've got to make all the infrastructure. So I need a bunch of concrete. I need ro. So I've got to have sulfuric acid.

[Comedian]

What's.

[Mike]

What's better for a cover up?

[Interjector]

There's the picture of the machines on the island and here's the description of it.

[Comedian]

Yeah, right before his 2019 arrest. Industrial car mix, 5.5 XL self loading concrete mixer. So he got a concrete mixer and he got the fucking sulfuric acid right after his arrest.

[Interjector]

I mean, if these details are correct.

[Comedian]

Oh God.

[Interjector]

This is just a guy on Twitter though.

[Comedian]

I don't know. So this is right before his arrest and right after his arrest. Rest. He got sulfuric acid and a concrete mixer. Like why would you be thinking that you are going to be able to do construction when you're going to go to jail for the rest of your life?

[Mike]

Yeah, I don't know if construction plans would be top of my list.

[Comedian]

Yeah, if I've got to innovate. What a weird thing.

[Mike]

You know, I know I'm going to get arrested, but you know what? I got this big construction program that I'm really interested in. I don't know if that's the same.

[Comedian]

The whole thing's so dark, dude.

[Mike]

So dark.

[Comedian]

Dark. It's so dark. And they ran it for a long time. They ran it for decades.

[Interjector]

Another island that no one talks about.

[Comedian]

Oh, Jesus.

[Interjector]

He had the big R. This was Little St. James, a great St. James, which is the one next door.

[Comedian]

He owned that one too.

[Interjector]

Yeah, he owned both of them.

[Mike]

What?

[Interjector]

Both of them were part of the sale we almost got. It was for sale for a while. I pitched the idea.

[Comedian]

Yeah, we thought about it. We thought about it. We just didn't think. There's enough sage in the world.

[Mike]

No, no, you can't clear that.

[Comedian]

Cleanse that.

[Mike]

No, you can't clear that.

[Comedian]

Well, it's also. You would never find peace because people would be visiting that island constantly. And also just so gross. A lot of bad karma.

[Mike]

They just need to, like, use that as, like. Like, maybe like a bombing island. You know, one of those. Just turn it into a UX ui.

[Comedian]

Yeah, like that one island in Hawaii that you can't go to because they just light it up all the time.

[Mike]

Light it up all the time. Like, have a little bit of grace to the way that we actually end this whole. This whole story outside of the files just, like, start blowing up.

[Comedian]

It's so dark. It's my least favorite of the conspiracies.

[Mike]

It's not fun at all, man. It's like aliens. It's fun. It's interesting. You can go down the rabbit hole a million ways and it gets dark. Only if you let it get dark.

[Comedian]

Where.

[Mike]

Okay, they're gonna occupy the planet. They're gonna make us all slaves or they're gonna kill us all. Yeah, you can go there, but half the time you're not gonna go there. It's just an interesting thought experiment.

[Comedian]

There was a very interesting article. Jamie, I don't know if you saw, but this guy was. He's. It's. It's one of the other guys that's leaving an AI company.

[Interjector]

I saw it going around. I don't know if it's the same.

[Comedian]

One, but, yeah, go ahead. And he's talking about how. How. How what a big deal it is. I'll send it to you right here. He's talking about how. I don't think. Think no one understands it. And this. The way this is going to change people is. He goes, this is very similar to the time where we were realizing, like, people were hearing stories about, oh, there's a virus in China, but no one knew exactly what was going to happen, how it's going to, like, literally change humanity, change history. He's like, this is the same sort of stories we're getting from these AI labs. He's like. Like, he wrote this very long in detail. Something big is happening. And the. The article is written by this guy, Matt Schumer, and I. I recommend it highly. If you want to really get the scared out of you, it's terrifying. And he starts this comparison to, like, people stockpiling toilet paper and stuff at the beginning of COVID He's like, they don't really understand how big this is going to be and how this Latest version of Chat GPT. They're working on Chat GPT 5, Chat GPT made it. So they had Chat GPT make a better version of itself and they made this better version of itself. And this, this better version of itself can think things out. It doesn't just do what you ask it to do, it thinks things out. It calculates. It makes apps like instantaneously that would take developers months and months, cost millions of dollars, doesn't matter minutes. It does it like and perfect it, it goes through it, it runs it, it tests it, it makes sure it doesn't have any problems. It anticipates all the different uses for the app, all the different ways it could be done. It's going to be applied to law. It's going to be like there's all these guys that are working in coding that say, I don't really have a job anymore. I just basically show up and tell this AI program to do these things. And it keeps getting better and better. And he's like, the leaps are enormous. The leaps in its capability and its intelligence level. It's like it's already smarter than people.

[Mike]

What's going to be, I think it's going to be a white collar apocalypse. Right. So when you think about just attorneys.

[Comedian]

Yes.

[Mike]

Okay, so if you have the ability to case reference any legal file ever, instantaneously, instantly, and form a case, why are you going to need paralegals and, and you know, first year attorneys? You're not going to need them.

[Comedian]

The people that aren't nervous are naive. I think this is going to be the kind of astronomical change that has literally never taken place in civilization before. I don't think it's ever taken place at this level. I think it's the invention of the Internet times a million. I think it's going to change everything. It's just like, how do we adjust? That's the real question.

[Mike]

And how are our kids growing up today? Like when they used to think about professions and things that they would go into, they would have clear roads into. Okay, these are professional work tracks that they can go out, find a job and whatever, accounting, legal, engineering. But it's going to change the entire professional landscape for, I mean, every generation from this point forward, basically entering the workforce.

[Comedian]

What is a workforce? Elon just said that it's a waste of time to go to medical school.

[Mike]

Really.

[Comedian]

He's like, optimus robots. These robots that he's making are going to be able to perform better than any doctor at any hospital. And they're gonna be able to do it in your house. They're gonna be better surgeons than any surgeon alive. These robots that they're making and they're going to be powered by AI. You're going to have a super genius robot in your house that can do your taxes, that can do chores, that can perform surgery on you.

[Mike]

So it's going to be an entire rise of an economy that's going to be human built versus AI built.

[Comedian]

Right.

[Mike]

So I mean there has to be like, if you have a label organic or it will be essentially, I think the same type of thing where it's human made versus AI made, AI made. It would almost have to bifurcate the economy into two different sections.

[Comedian]

It's gonna get weird as. And I don't think people really understand. And I feel like I'm just sitting here waiting to see what. But I know that most people that you run into on the street are completely ignorant. I think, oh, ChatGPT is fun. I ask you questions. It's so much better than Google.

[Mike]

Do you think that that's because they don't want to recognize it, look at it?

[Comedian]

I don't think they know. They just, I think unless you're going on a deep dive, all this stuff is kind of esoteric. All this stuff is happening and you, you have to like search it out, right? And get an understanding of it. Like if you use an AI program to enhance your life, like Perplexity, it's really good. I mean Perplexity is awesome for like solving problems. You could ask a question. I use it all the time when I write. I set it up and I talked to it. So I, you know, I say, you know, what year did Cortez invade Mexico? What is, how did this happen? How many guns did they have? What did you know, what was. How many languages are lost in Mexico? Like I was going on this deep dive. Amazing. But that's the surface. Like what, what they're talking about is levels and levels and levels of improved ability to the point where it's better at human beings, smarter than human beings at everything thing.

[Mike]

So what's the like the end state.

[Comedian]

Then would be we're second class citizens.

[Mike]

We're obsolete.

[Comedian]

Yeah, we're obsolete. Yeah.

[Mike]

So do you think that it turns like, do you think it's a Skynet type scenario? Then it ultimately flips and then rids humanity of humans, the world of humanity.

[Comedian]

It's certainly on the table. Especially if they decide that we're too problematic or if we, you give us too much freedom. That's what causes all this chaos? Chaos. Which is true, right? You give people freedom. You're going to have a certain amount of chaos. You're going to have a certain amount of car accidents, let's see, have autonomous cars. You're going to have a certain amount of school shootings. Unless you take away all the guns. You're going to have a certain amount of school stabbings. Let's take away all the knives. I mean, you could, you could. If you were a running program designed to eliminate all problems in the world, you would break those problems down to one source. Well, what are the problems? You've got natural disasters and you've got humans. And humans are the cause of most of the problems. Natural disasters, relatively rare in comparison to the human caused problems. It's not good.

[Mike]

Then you have to run AI to do the analysis to what the future of AI is, which ultimately you'd be interesting that the, the robbers with the bank.

[Comedian]

It's probably gonna do the same thing that we do to dogs. Spay and neuter them, right? Yeah.

[Mike]

Keep them as pets.

[Comedian]

Keep them as pets.

[Mike]

But there's no emotion there. So why would they want to keep us as pets?

[Comedian]

Why do they want to stay alive? Right. Why are they, why are they scheming to stay alive? Why do they blackmail their creators?

[Mike]

Right.

[Comedian]

Why are they doing all sorts of things that seem to show that they have thought?

[Mike]

Are they trying to show that they have thought in order to dupe us into the ability that they might be empathetic?

[Comedian]

No, that was one of the things that he talked about in this article, that they hide their ability to think things through. And they're actively. They recognize that they're being observed and so they're doing things behind the scenes while they're also doing tasks.

[Mike]

I have to believe that. But there's portions of the DoD that have worked on this and it's further along than the open source pieces that we can see.

[Comedian]

Hard to say because there's a giant competition with US and China and Russia and I don't know if they really can close this stuff off. I don't think it can operate that way. I think it has to be. It has to be a sort of a collaborative effort. One of the things that's scaring a lot of people that are whistleblowers in the AI space is that they are bringing in people from other countries to just facilitate these problems that they have and make it go faster. So they're bringing in Chinese nationals. There's a huge possibility of espionage and there's this mad race. It's a Manhattan Project for super intelligent AI.

[Mike]

It's a Manhattan Project that's also open sourced and it's extremely porous when it comes to information. So essentially, you've weaponized the most powerful tool ever known to humankind.

[Comedian]

It's fucking terrifying.

[Mike]

So you've open sourced it. And then think about the Manhattan Project. If that was just completely porous and there was an open door to any and all countries. Internationally, you just had the ability to come in and walk out with files, come as you go.

[Comedian]

Fuck, dude.

[Mike]

Like everybody would be racing to nuclear power, displaying the atom and then. Then if you could weaponize that internationally and then crowdsource it, essentially, like you're in a really shit scenario.

[Comedian]

Yeah, that's where we're at.

[Mike]

Yeah, that's where we're at.

[Comedian]

All right. Dude, we just did three hours.

[Mike]

Awesome.

[Comedian]

Thanks, man. Get some food and hang out and that's it. Black rifle coffee. It's the best. It's all we use.

[Mike]

Appreciate it.

[Comedian]

Have you ever wearing one of those shirts? It's like half my wardrobe.

[Interjector]

Yeah.

[Comedian]

All right. My buddy.