They Are Laughing at You

They Are Laughing at You

Источник: https://drheatherlynn.substack.com/p/they-are-laughing-at-you

There is a t-shirt at Walmart that says blessed. It is on a rack, in the women’s section, between the leggings and Cookie Monster pajama pants, priced at $16.98. The shirt was sewn by a woman earning two dollars a day in a country where she will never afford to buy what she made. It is being sold to a woman whose grocery bill has doubled in three years. The word blessed will sit across her chest while she does the math on whether she can keep her car another year or even afford the gas to drive it.

A few rows over, in the seasonal section, there are Mountain Dew Baja Blast Croc rip-offs. The film Idiocracy put everyone in Crocs in 2004. As director Mike Judge has told the story many times, the costume designer found a small startup selling cheap plastic shoes, and they agreed the shoes were too horrible to ever become popular in real life. By the time the film came out in 2006, everyone was wearing them. The shoe Judge picked to signal a debased future became the actual shoe of the actual present in the two years it took the studio to release his film.

Spotted in the wild. Something is happening. It has a name and a long lineage.

What you are seeing is a humiliation ritual.

I have almost 20 years reading the historical and anthropological literature on the occult and the symbolic architecture of power. Almost none of it shows up in present-day political commentary. Modernity has lost the language for what is being done to us. The older sources kept it and I am going to walk you through it so you can recognize it in mundane life.

A ritual is not a habit or a custom. A ritual is a patterned action that produces an effect by being performed, whether or not the people performing it understand what they are doing. The Roman who whispered memento mori behind the conqueror at the triumph did not need to believe in the gods of mortality for the whisper to do its work.

A humiliation ritual is a specific kind of patterned action with a specific purpose. The purpose is to produce a degraded condition in the person being mocked, in public, in such a way that the person being mocked is asked to participate in their own degradation. The shirt at Walmart is a clear example. The garment names a condition the wearer is being denied by the same economic system that produced it. The naming is the mockery. The wearer is asked to walk around with the inversion stitched across her body. If she objects, she is told it is just a shirt. It isn’t that deep. If she agrees, she has signed a contract.

The Roman Repertoire The Roman triumph is the case study every classicist returns to. A general who had won a major military campaign was awarded a triumphus. He wore the toga picta, rode in a four-horse chariot, and was treated for a single afternoon as a stand-in for Jupiter himself. Behind him, in the chariot, stood a slave. The slave’s job was to hold a golden crown above the general’s head and whisper, repeatedly, into his ear:

respice post te, hominem te memento.

Look behind you. Remember you are a man.

The crowd, meanwhile, was permitted, even encouraged, to insult the conqueror. They sang carmina triumphalia, mocking songs, often obscene, often about the general’s sexual conduct. The Roman historian Suetonius records that during Caesar’s Gallic triumph, the soldiers themselves sang verses calling Caesar a bald adulterer. That was the point. The triumph elevated the man to a god for an afternoon then the mockery reminded him, and the city, that the elevation was a costume.

Now flip it.

The Roman Saturnalia was held in late December, the dead point of the solar year, the moment the sun appears to stop moving in the sky. The festival was named for Saturn, the devouring god of time and limitation, and the rite reversed the social order for the duration of the feast. Slaves were served by their masters at table. A Saturnalicius princeps, a mock king, was crowned from among the household, and his absurd commands were obeyed. For a few days, the bottom of the social order wore the costume of the top. Modern anthropology likes to read this as a safety valve, a release of social pressure that made the rest of the year tolerable. The Romans themselves did not read it that way. They read it as inversion. The crowning of the false king was deliberate. The whole apparatus was designed to draw down the presence of Saturn into the household for the duration of the feast, and to release it again when the costume came off. The slave who had played king was not freed by the inversion. He had been used as the vessel through which the god was summoned, and when the god departed, the vessel returned to its original station, marked by the experience of having held the deity for a week and lost him.

There is a third case, and it is the one Western civilization spent two thousand years thinking about, even when it pretended it was thinking about something else. After the trial, before the crucifixion, the Roman soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium. They stripped him. They put a purple robe on him. They wove a crown of thorns and pressed it into his scalp. They put a reed in his right hand, knelt before him, and said Hail, King of the Jews. Then they spat on him, took the reed, and struck him on the head with it.

Caravaggio: The Crowning with Thorns, 1603. Every element of that scene is drawn from the Roman repertoire of mock kingship. The purple robe is the toga picta. The crown of thorns is the parodic corona. The reed is the parodic scepter. The genuflection is the parodic adoratio. The greeting is the parodic ave. The Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer noticed this in The Golden Bough and could not let it go. He saw the same pattern across cultures, across centuries, in places that had never spoken to each other. The mock king is crowned, mocked, and then killed, and the killing is the end of a rite that began with the laughter.

Christ was mocked before he was killed. The mockery and the killing were not separate. They were part of the ritual.

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What the Demonologists Knew The theological tradition has had a great deal to say about all of this, and most of it has been forgotten by the people who repeat the tag lines. The line every Christian seminary student eventually hears, the devil cannot endure to be mocked, traces to the English statesman Thomas More, and C.S. Lewis put a version of it on the title page of The Screwtape Letters. Martin Luther said the devil is a proud spirit who cannot bear scorn. He was being practical, not poetic. The advice was: laugh at the thing, and the thing loses purchase.

The tradition runs the other direction too. In medieval and early modern demonology, the demon mocks first. Possession accounts from the period are dense with descriptions of demons laughing at the afflicted, mimicking their voices, parodying their prayers, returning their words back to them in twisted form.

The Greek diabolos means slanderer. To slander is to throw an accusation, but the older meaning carried mockery inside it. The slanderer is the one who makes you a joke before you can make him one.

The third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry pushed this further than any of his successors were comfortable with. In On Abstinence from Killing Animals, he argued that the entities that demand the blood and the laughter and the suffering are not the highest divine powers. They are lower spiritual entities, daimones in his vocabulary, that impersonate the gods in order to secure their food supply. The blood feeds the wrong table. The laughter feeds the wrong table. The mockery, performed long enough and at scale, feeds something that grows on the signal and demands more of it. Porphyry’s framework is one the modern reader recognizes under a different name. The occult tradition calls it the egregore: a collective entity produced by the sustained focused attention of a group, which begins as a product of human consciousness and, once charged enough, acquires its own agency and its own appetite. Millennia of blood sacrifice, in Porphyry’s reading, had created and sustained entities that demanded more of the same. The philosophical and prophetic revolutions of the Axial Age were attempts to break the feeding cycle. They mostly failed. The cycle continued. The signal kept being sent.

If both of these things are true, the picture comes clear. Mockery banishes the demon. So the demon mocks first. The pre-emptive laugh is defensive. They are laughing at you so you cannot laugh at them.

The Body Knows The cognitive science fits the theology exactly.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his successor Arthur Schopenhauer worked out the incongruity theory of humor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The thesis is plain. Laughter happens when something violates expectation in a way the brain reads as non-threatening. You can feel this in your own body. Someone tells a joke and you can sense the punchline coming a half-second before it arrives. The laugh is already loading. When the punchline lands, the laugh fires, and the firing is involuntary because the body has already decided the violation is safe.

I used to teach this in a classroom of young men, and the example that landed every time was the one almost all of them recognized from their own kitchens. Mom is angry and yelling. She’s mad that your room is not clean. The expected response is contrition, or at least quiet. What happens instead is that the son starts laughing. He cannot help it. He knows he should not be laughing. He knows the laugh is making it worse. He laughs anyway. His mother escalates. She accuses him of not taking her seriously. He swears he is taking her seriously. He keeps laughing.

For those who remember the iconic Mary Tyler Moore Show episode “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” the gap is the whole episode. Chuckles the Clown, dressed as a peanut for a parade, is killed when a rogue elephant tries to shell him. Mary spends the first half of the episode scolding her colleagues for laughing about it. Then she goes to the funeral, and during the eulogy she begins to laugh and cannot stop. The minister, kindly, tells her to go ahead and laugh, that Chuckles would have wanted it. At which point Mary bursts into tears. The 1975 audience recognized every beat of that sequence immediately, because the sequence is in all of us. The body knows something the situation does not authorize, and the body insists on knowing it anyway, and the more inappropriate the moment, the harder the laugh comes.

Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” 1975. What is happening in the nervous system is what the behavioral scientist Peter McGraw at the University of Colorado has more recently called a benign violation. The frame has been broken. The brain reads the broken frame, computes that the violation is not actually dangerous, and releases the laugh. When the violation IS dangerous, but the body cannot escape, the same circuit fires anyway, and you get the trauma laugh. The funeral laugh. The laugh that arrives at the worst possible moment. Soldiers laugh at terrible things. Nurses laugh at terrible things. Children laugh when their mothers are about to slap them and laugh harder after.

There is a clinical name for the fear of being laughed at. Gelotophobia, coined by the German psychologist Michael Titze. People who score high on the gelotophobia scale show measurable physical stress when they suspect they are being mocked, even when no one actually is. Cortisol rises. Heart rate climbs. The body braces for a predator that is not there.

Mockery is exploiting a real biological vulnerability. The brain treats being laughed at as something close to physical threat. The body responds the way it would respond to an animal predator. You can see why the mock crowning was so devastating. You can see why a blessed t-shirt on the back of a woman who cannot afford to be blessed is doing more damage than a slap would do.

Two Ladders, Two Laughs Here is the thing the tradition knew that we have forgotten. It is the hinge of everything that follows.

Mockery has a direction.

The Roman triumph mocked up. The soldiers were beneath the general. The crowd was beneath the general. The slave in the chariot was beneath the general. They were all permitted, for one afternoon, to drag him back down to the human floor by pelting him with songs about his bald head and his bedroom conduct. The mockery was corrective. The general had been elevated to the position of a god for a few hours, and the carmina triumphalia were the social technology that prevented the elevation from becoming permanent. He was given the costume of Jupiter, the painted face, the chariot. And he was sung at, by his own men, in obscene verse, so that he could not forget which species he belonged to. Look behind you. Remember you are a man.

Mockery aimed up the ladder humanizes. It pulls the deified back into the human community. It is the oldest anti-tyranny tool we have. It is older than voting. It is older than law. It is the reason every working monarchy in history kept a fool in the throne room. The fool was permitted to say what no courtier could say. His mockery was a vaccine against the king’s elevation.

The Saturnalia inverted the ladder for a week. The slave was permitted, briefly, to mock his master. Same direction, same function. The week of inversion was the safety valve that made the other fifty-one weeks tolerable. The mockery flowed up during the inversion, which is what made it corrective rather than cruel.

Now turn the arrow around.

Mockery aimed down the ladder is something completely different. It does a different kind of work in the body of the person it lands on. When the powerful mock the weak, the laugh is no longer corrective. The weak are not in danger of becoming gods. They are already at the floor. Pushing them lower does not return them to the human community. It removes them from it.

This is humiliation ritual proper. This is what the blessed shirt is doing. The corporation that printed it is above the woman who is wearing it. The corporation has named her blessed inside the same economic system that ensures she will not be. The mockery flows down. That downward laugh confirms her position at the bottom of the ladder by dressing her in a word she cannot afford to embody. She is being mocked into place.

The mockery of slaves throughout history follows this exact pattern. The slaveholder’s Christmas gift. The company-store scrip stamped with the company’s smiling logo. The minstrel show, in which the people who had stolen black labor and people dressed up in the costume of black faces and performed laughter at the people they had stolen from. None of these were corrective. They were confirming. The laugh was traveling the wrong direction down the ladder, and the function of the wrong-direction laugh is to keep the person at the bottom from rising.

When the laugh goes up the ladder, it does good work. The peasant making fun of the king. The comedian roasting the senator. The Roman crowd singing dirty songs about the general. This is how a free society reminds powerful people that they are still human. No one at the top should be too important to mock. The minute we decide a class of people is off-limits to laugh at, that class has already crossed a line we should not let them cross.

This is also why your friends or family teasing each other at the kitchen table is different. The ladder between you is short. Everyone is laughing at everyone else, no one is bleeding, and the laugh travels in every direction at once. Bullying between peers is real and it is its own problem. This piece is about something different. It is about the institutional structure and the occult workings behind it.

When the laugh goes down the ladder, something different happens. The corporation above the woman in the blessed shirt. The studio above the conscripted clown. The billionaire class above the working population they sell costumes to and stage jokes for. The laugh only flows one direction. The people at the top are laughing at the people at the bottom, and the people at the bottom are being asked to wear the joke and laugh along.

That is the difference. Equal-to-equal is communion. Top-down is harvest.

The phrase punching down has been weaponized to confuse this. People use it to lump every kind of asymmetric joke into one bad category. The result is that ordinary teasing between regular people gets policed the same way as a corporation mocking its own customers. They are not the same thing. To confuse this allows the powerful to keep their power.

Hans Christian Andersen wrote the answer to this in 1837 in The Emperor’s New Clothes. The emperor parades through the streets in his new clothes, and the entire crowd pretends he is dressed because the swindlers told them only stupid people cannot see the cloth. It is a child who finally laughs and says he is naked. The child is at the bottom of the ladder. The emperor is at the top. The laugh is moving up. Punching down would call that child a bully. The fable calls the child the only honest person in the kingdom.

"The naked emperor," Edward von Lõngus, Tartu, 2015. Painted before the Estonian parliamentary election. Tallinn ordered the same work removed. The diagnostic is the ladder. Look at who is above whom. Look at which way the laugh is moving. Friends? Family? Coworkers at the same level? The laugh is fine. It is good. Keep going. Powerful people who got too comfortable? Mock them. They need it. The boss who pulled rank? The politician who lied? The billionaire who bought your town? Mock them all. That is how a free people stays free.

It is when the powerful aim the laugh down at the rest of us, on screens and shirts and shoes and shows that none of us would have made for ourselves, that the laugh becomes a ritual of humiliation.

The “Holy Fool” and the Refusal The direction is not always single. The court jester was permitted to mock upward in exchange for wearing the cap and bells. The patron extracted both: the corrective mockery he gave them, and the visible humiliation of his body in the costume. The holy fool, the yurodivy of the Eastern Christian tradition, the jongleur de Dieu in the Western, was the figure who refused the cap. He could not be made to wear it, because he had already walked away from everything the patron could offer. His authority came from the refusal. Basil the Blessed mocked Ivan the Terrible to his face in sixteenth-century Moscow, and Ivan would not touch him, because Basil owned nothing the Tsar could take.

John Watson Nicol, The Court Jester (1895). The cap is the price. This is the older tradition the contemporary comic stands inside. The diagnostic is not whether he mocks upward. Most comics mock upward at least some of the time. The diagnostic is what he has walked away from to keep mocking. The cap is offered. The dress is offered. The deal is offered. Whoever has refused them is inside the lineage. Whoever has accepted them is doing different work, and that work has a different name.

Keep that in mind. The simple direction, up or down, is the diagnostic for almost everything that follows. The doubling is the deeper reading underneath it.

Now apply this to the case running on every screen.

In late March, the comedian Druski posted a video titled How Conservative Women in America Act. He wore prosthetics, white makeup, a blonde wig, and a white pantsuit that resembled the outfit Erica Kirk wore at her late husband Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. The character danced to Katy Perry, held a Bible, did a mock press conference about Iran, and said, in front of a black security guard, that we have to protect the white men of America. The video reached over four hundred million views across platforms within days.

Trump, asked about it at an Easter event, told Erica Kirk to sue. Jake Paul announced he would respond by doing a blackface skit, missing that this was not the equivalent move. Candace Owens, who had been publicly feuding with Kirk for months, laughed along on her own podcast and reposted a TPUSA spokesman’s joke saying now do conservative black women. The podcaster Jennifer Welch posted her own video dressed as Kirk, in black, mocking Kirk’s habit of taking time off and then returning to work.

Erica Kirk, on April 29, posted a video that did not name Druski but described what was happening to her as dehumanization. Donning her Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation costume, she said: “if you strip someone of their humanity long enough, you arrive at the chilling conclusion that they don’t deserve to exist at all.”

Erica Kirk is the CEO of one of the most influential political organizations in the country. She has been appointed to a federal board and has had the President of the United States on the phone offering legal advice. She runs a podcast. She has a stage with fireworks. She is on the chariot. Druski is below the chariot. His parody is the carmina triumphalia. It is mockery flowing in the direction the older tradition recognized as corrective. It exists to remind the figure on the chariot which species she belongs to.

What Kirk does next is what I want you to watch. She invokes the language of dehumanization. She uses the framework that exists to describe what powerful people do to the powerless, and she applies it to herself, who is the powerful party in this exchange. She converts, rhetorically, an upward-flowing corrective mockery into a downward-flowing humiliation ritual, so she can claim the protections that belong to people at the bottom of the ladder while continuing to operate from the top of it.

This move is the one I want to name, because most of what passes for political commentary right now will not name it.

It is the inversion of the laugh itself, dressing up as the slave while standing on the chariot. It works on the audience because the audience can see that there is genuine grief and genuine vulnerability in the figure performing it. The grief is real but the vulnerability is selective. A widow can be a widow and a CEO at the same time. The mockery of the CEO does not become mockery of the widow simply because they share a body.

Watch what happens to the cycle once the inversion lands. Each new participant has to claim a higher quotient of victimhood than the last to remain visible inside it. Trump performs aggrievement on Kirk's behalf. Jake Paul performs aggrievement on white people's behalf. The cycle rewards whoever can convert their position into the appearance of being mocked from above, even when the mockery is actually flowing the other way. The cycle rewards the inversion and has a vested interest in confusing the direction of the laugh.

What Kirk is doing has a deeper register and the readers who followed me through The Dark Kabbalah Behind the Kirk Assassination will recognize it.

The widow who emerges from a violent public death as the carrier of the next phase is not a new figure. She is one of the oldest figures in the Western symbolic archive. In the rabbinic tradition she is Rachel weeping for her children. In Lurianic Kabbalah she is the Shekhinah in exile, the divine feminine separated from her source, mourning, waiting for restoration. Her grief has cosmic power. Her mourning is the precondition for what comes next. Jeremiah promises her: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded. She does not get to keep weeping. The weeping is a phase, and the phase has a function.

Erika Kirk has stepped into that archetype. She is also, on the symbolic path, the mourning vessel through which the donor architecture and the political infrastructure her late husband’s movement carried forward continue to flow. The mourning is what authorizes the continuation. Without the mourning, there is no transfer. With the mourning, the transfer becomes a sacred ritual.

This is why the parody hit so hard. Druski did not parody a CEO. He parodied a Rachel figure, a Shekhinah-in-exile figure, a publicly performing widow whose grief is doing institutional work. The reader's confusion about whether the parody was satire or cruelty is a confusion about which figure was being mocked. The CEO is fair game. The mourning vessel is sacred. Both occupy the same body. The costume changes depending on which question you ask. In the archetypal framework, Erika is playing the wounded feminine. Most of the audience sees her as having power. The cognitive dissonance is real, and it is the engine of the cycle.

The humiliation ritual works on the CEO. It cannot work on the Rachel figure, because the Rachel figure is supposed to be mocked. Her mourning is supposed to be public. Her grief is supposed to be witnessed. The Saturnalia inverted the household for a week. The widow’s mourning inverts the political order for a season, and the season ends when the next phase begins.

The Costume For at least four decades, a specific pattern has run through American comedy. A black male performer, usually one whose comedy is sharp enough to threaten the system that elevated him, is offered a major role or a major opportunity contingent on doing one specific thing. He has to put on a dress.

Martin Lawrence in Big Momma’s House. Tyler Perry as Madea. Eddie Murphy in Norbit and across the Klump family. Wesley Snipes in To Wong Foo. Jamie Foxx in In Living Color before he refused to keep doing it. The Wayans brothers in White Chicks, which is the same operation in inverted costume. Dave Chappelle has talked about this on stage and in interviews for almost twenty years. So has Katt Williams. They do not call it humiliation ritual. They call it putting the dress on. The terminology in the comedy world is exactly that specific.

The same pattern runs through the music industry. Britney Spears spent her childhood being made to perform sexualized choreography at fifteen and was passed through a public collapse, a head-shaving incident framed as madness, a thirteen-year conservatorship, and a slow public reclamation of her own voice. Kanye West has spent more than a decade on stages and in interviews trying to articulate something he variously calls a contract, a deal, and a system, in language that gets him called crazy by the same press that benefits from the calling. Kesha sued her producer in 2014 and described her years inside the contract in terms that map directly onto humiliation ritual. Megan Thee Stallion has described being passed through a label structure that demanded specific transactions before it would release her work. Frank Ocean walked away from his contract by releasing an album the label could not own, and he has not made a major label record since.

The dress shows up here too. Harry Styles on the cover of Vogue in a Gucci ball gown. Sam Smith at the 2023 Grammys in horns and a top hat performing Unholy. Lil Nas X in pregnancy photoshoots, giving birth to his album. Bad Bunny in skirts at the 2020 awards circuit. Machine Gun Kelly in pink dresses on red carpets. Jaden Smith fronting a Louis Vuitton women’s campaign in a skirt at sixteen.

This is not an argument about creative expression. The artist who wakes up one day and chooses a dress is doing something different from the artist who is offered a contract conditional on wearing one. The diagnostic is not the costume itself. The diagnostic is who chose it.

The doubling explains the rest. The performer, on the visible axis, looks like he is on the chariot. He has the deal and the budget. He has the platform. He is famous and wealthy. By the simple up-or-down reading, mocking him should be corrective. The dress should be carmina triumphalia.

It is not. The artists who have lived inside it know it is not.

The reason is that the visible axis is not the only axis. The performer is also, on a second axis, a client of an apparatus he does not own and did not build: the studio, label, network, agency, algorithm, and the patron. The performer was elevated by the patron and can be unelevated by the patron. He serves at the patron’s pleasure. On that axis, he is below the people who put him on the chariot in the first place.

The costume operates on the second axis.

To the public, it looks like a wealthy famous artist putting on a costume for a paycheck or for liberation. The actual transaction is downward, from the patron to the client. The performer is being required to perform his own degradation, in public, on his own body, as the price of continued access to the chariot.

This is the conscripted clown. The court jester wore the cap and bells in exchange for the license to mock upward. The conscripted clown wears the costume in exchange for the license to make the patron money. The patron extracts both: the comedy or the music, which generates revenue, and the humiliation, which keeps the performer in his place no matter how high his visible position climbs.

Chappelle saw this. He has said so, more than once, in language anyone paying attention can decode. In 2006 he walked away from a fifty-million-dollar contract with Comedy Central and went to South Africa. He has described the moment that made him leave as a sketch in which he was asked to wear a costume and play a character he sensed was being used to do something other than what the laugh appeared to be doing. He did not articulate it cleanly at the time, but has spent the years since articulating it more and more directly. The walk-away is one of the most significant refusals in contemporary American culture, and the reason it lands so hard on the artists who follow him is that they recognize the pattern. He turned down the patron. He left the chariot. He did the holy fool’s defining act on the largest possible stage.

Katt Williams has been telling us about this for fifteen years on every podcast that will have him. He names the operators and the specific transactions. He has been mocked, deplatformed, sued, and called crazy for it. He has continued to work, in smaller venues, for less money, because the patron’s offer was conditioned on a transaction he refused to make. He walked away from the dress.

The late-night television hosts are the foil. Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, Oliver. The work varies in quality but their position is identical. They are permitted to mock the political opposition every night because that mockery serves the patron. They are incapable of truly mocking the patron: the network, the parent corporation, the advertising base, or the apparatus that elevated them. They can only mock in the directions the patron approves, which are the directions that increase the patron’s revenue and consolidate the patron’s position. They are wearing the cap (often as a suit and tie). The cap is invisible because the patron has done excellent work hiding it, but the cap is on every one of their heads, and every comic in their orbit can tell you the cap is there.

The dress and cap are the real costume, but so now is the blessed shirt or the Mountain Dew “Crocs.” They differ in cut, fabric, and the price the patron paid for them, but they do not differ in what the costume is for: control.

However, there is a deeper esoteric level, as there often is.

What the Laugher Gets What does the laugher get when the laugh is flowing downward rather than up toward the people with real power?

The clearest answer the tradition has ever offered is that the laugher gets the energy that the laughed-at loses. Pleasure-based extraction needs cooperation. Suffering-based extraction needs duration. Downward mockery extracts on contact while upward mockery does not. Upward mockery redistributes. The general is dragged back to the human floor and the soldiers walk away no richer or poorer than they started. There is no harvest, because there is no actual fall from the pedestal.

The downward laugh is the steady signal. It runs on shame, helpless rage that produces more shame, and on the social isolation of the laughed-at, who learns that their tribe will not protect them and that the only way to rejoin the tribe is to laugh at the next person.

The Saturnalia summoned Saturn for a week and released him. The downward laugh, run continuously through every screen and every aisle and every joke nobody finds funny, summons something that does not get released, because the festival never ends. Porphyry called it daimones. The modern occultist calls it an egregore. The ancient demonologist called it a demon. The vocabulary differs. The signal is the same. Something is being fed, and the feeding is constant, and the appetite is growing.

The crowd is already laughing in the wrong direction. There is no purchase left for the victim’s laughter, because all the laughter has been used up flowing the wrong way.

Comedy is power. The power flows in one direction or the other. The direction is the working current of the ritual.

The Crowd Is the Engine There is one more thing the ancient tradition knew.

The ritual requires you.

The Roman triumph did not run on the general alone. It ran on the crowd in the streets, singing the carmina, throwing the laurel, watching the slave whisper into his ear. The Saturnalia did not run on the mock king alone. It ran on the household that bowed to him for a week and then put him back into his collar. The mocking of Christ in the Praetorium did not run on the soldiers alone. It ran on the crowd outside the gate that, a few hours later, chose Barabbas. Every humiliation ritual in the historical record requires the laughing crowd. The crowd is the engine.

When the laugh is flowing the wrong direction down the ladder, the crowd is what makes the engine run. The patron at the top sets the cycle in motion. The victim at the bottom is where the harvest lands. The crowd in the middle is the mechanism that converts an isolated act of cruelty into a working extraction system. Without the crowd, the slaveholder's mocking gift is just one cruel man. With the crowd, it is an institution.

Every documented form of ritual human sacrifice required a witnessing crowd. I traced this in You Are the Crop: the Aztec pyramid, the Roman amphitheater, the medieval public square were all extraction architecture. The crowd was never just an audience, but rather, the active agent without which the rite did not function.

The shirt is the crowd’s signature. The Crocs are the crowd’s signature. The laugh at the office joke nobody finds funny is the crowd’s signature.

Every time a person at the bottom of the ladder agrees to wear the slop the corporation above them designed for them, the hierarchy laughs all the way to the bank and eventually, their bunkers.

The Mountain Dew Baja Blast Crocs are not a neutral object. Idiocracy picked Crocs because the people making the film could not imagine anyone choosing to wear them. Twenty years later the actual shoe exists in the actual seasonal aisle, painted in the colors of a beverage that is poison, and selling out. The shoe is the costume. The costume is the consent. Wearing it is the signature on the document the cycle needs to keep running.

The shirt names a condition the wearer is being denied by the same economic system that produced it. This is not a lecture about consumer choice. It runs deeper than that. The slave in the Saturnalia who agreed to play king for a week was signing a document. The general who climbed onto the chariot was signing a document. The woman who buys the blessed shirt is signing a document. The man who pulls the Baja Blast Crocs onto his feet is signing a document. They do not know they are signing. That is what makes the rite work. If you knew what pact you were signing, you would not sign it.

So I will tell you what you are signing.

You are signing the document that says the blessed shirt is just a shirt and the Crocs are just shoes and the joke is just a joke and there is nothing happening here.

There is something happening here.

The Latin word for what is being stripped from you is dignitas. It originally meant a person’s standing in the public order, the recognition of where you belonged and what you were owed. The modern English word dignity inherits that older meaning and adds a Christian one, the inherent worth of a person regardless of station. Humiliation ritual works by attacking both at once. The shirt names your worth and the price tag confirms your station, and the contradiction is the wound, and the wound is the harvest.

Dignity is the thing they are taking. Reclaiming it is the only response that ends the cycle.

The way out is not protest and it is not silence. The way out is refusal. Refuse to wear the costume. Refuse to laugh on the wrong side of the laugh. Refuse to carry the patron’s mockery into your own house on your own body for the patron’s benefit.

Your dignity was never theirs to give. It is not theirs to take.

Take it back.

This post is public so feel free to share it with someone who needs to reclaim their dignity.

Why is Erika Kirk being humiliated now? She lost her husband seven months ago. The grief is not new, nor is the CEO position or the political alignment. Druski did not parody her in October, when she was newly bereaved and the cycle would have been read as cruelty. He parodied her in late March, after a specific window of mourning had passed, and the cycle that followed has been intensifying ever since. None of this is random. It is sequenced.

Public humiliation cycles of this intensity and duration have a name in the older literature, and the name is one the mystery cults of antiquity used. The candidate is stripped, mocked, ridiculed, and exposed before she can emerge as the vessel for what comes next. The Eleusinian aischrologia, the ritual obscenity directed at the initiate, was not incidental to the rite. It was the rite. By the time the initiate emerged, she was no longer the person she had been when she entered.

Saturday, paid subscribers get the full framework. The mystery-cult precedent. The four-phase pattern that turns a mourning widow into the vessel for the next phase and the blood sacrifice of Charlie Kirk, which some of you have been asking me to follow up since the day it went live.

This one goes deeper into the occult ritual magic behind the cycle. The Lurianic Kabbalah, the mystery-cult precedent, the four-phase working that began in September and is running on schedule. The names of the figures who have been tracking it. What I could not say in the free version.

The H Files is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Bibliography and Suggested Reading Beard, Mary. The Roman Triumph. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Harvard University Press, 1987.

Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Harvard University Press, 1985.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Macmillan, 1890.

Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford University Press, 1987.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. 1790.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. Geoffrey Bles, 1942.

Luther, Martin. Table Talk. Compiled posthumously, 1566.

McGraw, Peter, and Joel Warner. The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. Simon and Schuster, 2014.

More, Thomas. A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. 1534.

Otto, Beatrice K. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Porphyry. On Abstinence from Killing Animals. Translated by Gillian Clark, Bloomsbury, 2000.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 1818.

Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves, Penguin Classics, 2007.

Titze, Michael. “Gelotophobia: The Fear of Being Laughed At.” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2009.

Versnel, H. S. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual. Brill, 1993.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian and educator tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.

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the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day so uh first of all thanks for being here appreciate it great to see you again thanks for having me yeah my pleasure I watched Idiocracy this morning oh boy dude it fucking holds up it holds up oh my god it's funny I've never saw the whole thing before it was one of those movies that I just for whatever reason I just never saw the whole thing it was just well it kind of yeah I didn't have much of a release so it didn't no they it was um I mean to be fair like it was a weird movie it was hard to mark it it's a funny fucking movie man it's funny I mean I watched it in the gym while I was working out I was cracking up oh nice to hear it was really good it was like surprisingly funny there was some great stuff about it when it shows the very smart couple that's holding off and having children and the dumb people keep fucking yeah that was uh I feel like I really made the whole movie just to make that sequence that was one of those rare times Patrick and uh Darlene the two actors that it's the only time I think this has ever happened they I think they were auditioning them in pairs and they auditioned and I kind of looked at like two or three more people and then said okay let's just cast them it's it's perfect that guy was so good Patrick Fisher yeah it's it was such a good movie man it's just like thanks and it's so interesting like looking at the world in 2022 it's like the only thing you missed was social media yeah I mean I I keep thinking about all the stuff I missed I I yeah I feel that movie was I feel like it was cursed to begin with um everything that went wrong went wrong everything that could go wrong went wrong like and it was so many things like we shot it here in Austin supposed to take place in a drought and it was like the rainiest summer we had to keep killing grass which feels really awful to do oh god but but we um how do you do that oh yeah you put a like a giant piece of like tarp and cardboard over it for like two nights or something but then sometimes I have to put gasoline on it or something it just feels horrible to kill grass um yeah I don't know and then I feel like the curse of the movie kind of just spread out into the world or something but uh when I was just thinking about this because I can't I have a hard time watching it because it just brings back so many stressful memories but um because it was difficult to make yeah just we were you know barely had an impossible schedule and and then in post you know they they just cut we had a bad test screening and they just cut the effects budget down and but I mean you know they did pay for the movie to get made so I appreciate it but um yeah I was just thinking that so there was the wardrobe uh woman whatever I don't know what what are you costume designers the official title she you know she had a limited budget also and for the shoes so this we shot in 2004 she goes she tells me okay there's a startup and it was Crocs but they weren't out in the world yet but it was a small company and she goes look at these are these horrible plastic shoes so we could really save a lot of money just put everyone in these things and then I said well what if but what if by the time the movie comes out what if everyone's what if these become popular people are wearing them she said oh these are never going to become popular no one would ever wear these things are horrible and then yeah and then but then it took two years for the movie to come out then everyone's but then people go like oh that's pretty funny that you put everyone in Crocs they did kind of become popular right yeah and then they're they're not around much anymore but they were really popular they're really popular right now they came back they came back in the last like two years all of a sudden what do you mean who's wearing them uh post Malone had a like a deal with them I think Justin Bieber did too people are putting like pins on them and stuff they're very popular pins yeah like little like literally like pins yeah oh like shirt pins yeah yeah yeah I should stop talking shit I know people wear them a lot of guys wear them like in camps you bring them to camp like their camp shoes oh they wear Crocs around camp because they're light you know if you're wearing like hiking boots all day and then you're camping you wear Crocs at night and you're hanging around oh this is a new thing I've only seen it popping up because they were I'd heard they were they were in bankruptcy like five years ago or something maybe I heard wrong wow maybe they were maybe somebody came in with funding and took a distressed property and I don't get it I was always confused like there's so many options for shoes why would you ever buy those there's all kinds of slippers you could have yeah there's no need for those I don't get them for camping though like can't you gonna get like ticks all over here no I think the idea is socks on like hunters wear them well so like when you're in the woods and you're hiking you're wearing these like very kind of rigid hiking boots and then when you're just around the campfire oh they wear these little Crocs okay they weigh nothing you know they're very yeah they are light yeah and they provide you with protection from sticks and shit okay and then wear them like you know over socks I see so they're horrific looking they don't look good that's why that's why I wanted them in the movie I wanted them what the fuck is this there's six hundred dollar Crocs these are fashion Crocs cut the fucking shit I thought they were fake they are those are real they're real six hundred dollar Crocs with a some kind of a heel what does the bottom of that heel look like like a nail it was like a nails going through that is so strange you know what I don't get this prediction correct what's the story with the strap oh that's like sport mode they all have straps like yeah the one thing about us when you need to run and you gotta you need to do some action you put that in your new movie yeah yeah I know I wish I could remake that what would you do different well like you said I probably probably would have had more staring at phones and stuff I mean I nobody saw that coming though yeah well there's also all right cuz you filmed it it was released in what 2005 2006 six filmed it in 2004 yeah so if you think about like phones back then it was all flip phones yeah they're starting to come out with a Nokia but yeah the iPhone I don't think was there that was seven it was a yeah it was about to come out yeah and but and even then like everybody thought that was kind of like a novelty nobody ever thought it would be like a rec almost a requirement for life yeah and also I wrote it in 2000 I started writing in 2001 and then uh it's writer Eitan Cohen I wrote a draft with him I wrote a outline and then so that was like 2002 I think or 2003 that we wrote it so it was like pretty far away from all this stuff happening that's the only thing you missed though I mean yeah I don't even like a dumbing down of people nailed yeah I was I was sort of I was thinking of it like so I had I had the idea in the 90s but I remember um when uh in 2001 in the summer um I was with uh well it was it was the year 2001 I'd seen the movie 2001 again and thought wouldn't that be wouldn't that have been funny if that movie instead of everything being pristine advanced civilization it was like giant Walmarts and the Jerry Springer show and like what if what if that movie made in the 70s was actually that accurate and I just kind of thought of a graph of like everything from from whenever that movie was made like 71 to the year that it was 2001 if you just kept that progression going and just like more crass foul language in the mainstream more like just everybody getting dumber and dumber and just advertising everywhere I don't know it was just it was sort of a I also wrote it I owed Fox a screenplay and I pitched two or three different things and they said oh that's the commercial one that's one you should make and um I didn't think they would make it I just it was fun to write why didn't you think they would make it just seemed too weird but uh you know they saw it you know anything in the future sounds fun and like a big broad comedy um but uh yeah then they it just it was more fun to write than it was to make I mean nothing against anybody involved it was just like a very difficult schedule and a lot of stuff went wrong had 65 speaking parts in it wow which you don't even when you're writing you say oh and then there's this and it's like oh yeah you have to cast every one of those people well it's still funny it's still funny it really it really holds up it's excellent thanks I remember moving to LA uh in 1994 and uh I got a I think someone I knew at MTV hooked me up and they gave me a VHS tape of all the Beavis and Butthead episodes and I didn't have cable hooked up yet so I was my TV was hooked up but cable wasn't hooked up yet and so I was watching VHS tapes of Beavis and Butthead and I remember me and this girl that I was dating at the time laughing our fucking ass off I didn't even have furniture I just had a big TV and we're sitting on the carpeted floor just crying laughing at Corn Julio oh okay so you got to the good ones then yeah by that season it was we started to find our stride yeah that was that was fun to do that was uh wait were you doing a did you have a gig at MTV or no well I did at one point in time I did uh MTV half hour comedy hour and then I um auditioned for another show at MTV and the negotiations of that actually wound me getting up on a Fox show called hardball which got canceled then I got news radio oh okay so that was that was how I moved to LA but I was still in contact with someone at MTV and they hooked me up yeah I thought I remembered some MTV association with you yeah that was what it was it was like uh they were trying to do a thing with me but MTV was like insanely cheap back then I think they wanted to give me five hundred dollars for a pilot and uh if the if the pilot went I would be exclusive to them for several years so like yeah they would own me for several years exclusive here for five hundred dollars which is hilarious well I think the way Dan Cortez got out of his deal I don't know this for sure whatever happened to that guy oh I don't know but he but they had a deal with him that actually violated labor laws it was so like it might have been the same thing you're talking about where it's actually might have even been slavery laws yeah they were really egregious they just would yeah it was well you know why they did that they did that because they created a few stars that they became huge stars and they felt like those stars left and they made these people stars but they didn't profit off of it so like Dennis Leary was one of them and Paulie Shore was another one like you know oh so Paulie Shore got yeah he got away he got away yeah well so he had did totally Paulie and then totally Paulie uh he left that and wound up doing all these big movies and then Leary was that sort of the same thing you know he did those little snippets where he would like rant to the camera yeah those were really good there was popular and he was on remote control to remember remote control yeah yeah I remember seeing him on I think comedy well it's called the comedy channel it went and then it was about yeah central so I think that was their overcorrection their overcorrection from losing guys like Paulie Shore was to create something where they you know yeah they over violated overcorrected on me I forgot about that Dan Cortez guy yeah that show is great it was TV sports yeah he was a huge star for a while yeah what the fuck I don't know what happened to him how does that happen where a guy just is everywhere and then yeah he was like the heartthrob it seems like it yeah he was I don't know when it fell off like 95 or something you just I don't know maybe yeah at some point he just disappeared I don't know what he does now maybe maybe he's got some great gig yeah maybe all about find him where's Dan Cortez I mean I found his Instagram is yeah he's like he's hanging out where's he at I'll show you uh it's a Cortez with a there he is yes just seems like a normal guy now dude hanging out oh that's an old stuff oh Bill Murray Wow yeah how you become that guy what was his how you become Dan Cortez yeah well I think he was working like on a set or something like that and then someone had the idea I think he was working like on a set or something like that and then someone had the idea to put him on the show he started acting after that and then I don't know well I hope he's having fun yeah but um so how did you guys wind up with Beavis and Butthead there um so I had I was making these animated shorts in my house and uh just mailing out VHS tapes of them and uh there was a show called liquid television well I had gotten I had gotten um I made three shorts before Beavis and Butthead was the fourth one I'd made and the first three had gotten like the first one I made was on the show on comedies it was called the comedy channel um uh night after night with Alan havey um oh I remember Alan havey yeah and so and then I'd gotten in some animation festivals and so people were starting there was a show called liquid television on MTV that um was on Sunday nights and uh they would license animated shorts so I got uh I got like three or four of mine on there it all happened very quickly very quickly like I had they were gonna they asked me to send my first three and I said I have a new one and it was Beavis and Butthead and um and then it so it got on that show and then there was a long weird cryptic negotiation where they said they want to buy it and I said what for and like and then I negotiated it was colossal pictures liquid liquid liquid liquid television and then finally they said it's over oh it was a long ugly thing thing and then finally MTV came to me directly I still didn't know what they were going to do with it I thought those little station IDs or something and I was elated I was like this is amazing I'm just making these things in my house outside of Dallas and it's going to be on MTV that's amazing and then I sold it I sold the whole thing to him for something like $18,000 the whole property everything yeah I mean I I retained something that you'd never see any money from but I was able to get it back later years later but how'd you do that just because they needed me to do it and I just you know but it was yeah I sold it uh but this was after months of negotiating and I'm like well it takes me it would I was animating everything by myself it would take me like six to eight weeks to make two minutes and after two Beavis and Butthead shorts I was kind of out of ideas anyways I thought like okay I'll just this will be my you know admission fee to show business I'll just sell this off just to meet people and have them know about me and and I you know after like I went to different lawyers and they're like there was a this mob lawyer in Dallas It was just like, don't sign it. I said, well, then I just don't do this? Like, I mean, I don't regret it because I think they were ready to walk away. It had been months, you know, like five or six months, which I guess in show business isn't that long of a negotiation all the time. But, yeah, and then they flew me up there, and then they started talking about we're going to do 65 episodes. And I was saying, okay, am I going to be involved? And they said, of course, it's your baby. And, you know, but they didn't say any of that until they already owned it. They didn't want to – maybe it was part of the, you know, the whole Pauly Shore of it all and those people that had gotten out of there. But they did – their lawyer had all the bad intentions of a good lawyer, but she wasn't all that great and didn't know animation. So there were some big holes in the contract that I was able to – Exploit? Yeah, exploit later. Yeah, she thought that I was going to be doing the entire – all the animation myself. So there was like a per-minute fee that was like three seasons in. I got – still my manager, Michael Rotenberg, who's also a lawyer, said, hey, this thing says they owe you a ton of money. So, yeah, we had – we were able to – I was able to get it back, and now I own it like 50-50 with them, so. Oh, okay. That was after the movie, and they wanted a sequel and all that stuff. And so this movie that you got coming out, when did this start getting developed? Let's see, I had the idea for it a long time ago.

It was really about three years ago. And then right before the lockdown, because it was Friday the 13th, March 2020, I had lunch with the Chris McCarthy and Kize Hill-Edgart, the Paramount Plus guys, and just sealed the deal right then and then made the entire movie with everyone on Zoom and every cast. So when you pitch a movie, like a Beavis and Butthead movie, are you pitching – are you just saying, look, I want to do a Beavis and Butthead movie? Are you saying this is what happens with Beavis and Butthead? Like what's the process? Well, with this one, with the sequel, they've been wanting a sequel for years, and I've pitched different – usually – When did you make the first one? First one came out in 96. So it was like a couple years – was it like – So the show – the short first aired in 92. The series started in March of 93. So the show had been on a while before the movie came out, like three years. They wanted it sooner. And when did they stop – when did you stop doing the television show? Fall of 98. Oh, wow. So it was off for a while. But, yeah, I just – I usually write an outline. I think that's – I pitched – I don't think I pitched either of them. I think I just started writing outlines – well, for the first one and for this one, too. And there was almost a sequel in 90 – I mean, sorry, in 2001. And then they violated another contract with me, and I got really pissed and said, no movie. Jesus.

Yeah. I mean, they're – now I don't know what – I don't know what MTV even is. They've sort of been absorbed. Is it still there? Yeah, the beginning of the movie, they have a whole thing with the astronaut and the flag. Really? Yeah. So MTV is now mostly that, like, Rob Drydeck show, right? That's basically the whole channel. Oh, is – I don't even – like, every now and then a show comes along that's a hit. Like, it was, like – after Beavis, I don't know, it was, like, Tom Green, then Jackass, then Jersey Shore. Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's always a show that – Jackass started at MTV? Yeah. No shit. Yeah, that was – Wow. That came along and saved them for a while. Of course, Tom Green. What was the – well, Jersey Shore was huge. Was that MTV, too? Yeah. Really? Wow. Yeah, so they fucking gave up on music videos. Oh, completely. That's what it used to be. It was the music video channel. We would go there to watch – do you remember when they released Michael Jackson's Thriller? Oh, yeah. And it was like the release of a movie. Like, everybody watched it. I want to know, like, how many people watched Michael Jackson's Thriller the day it came out? Because I want to say I was in high school at the time. It was somewhere around that range. And it was a thing that everybody was talking about. Like, you have to watch it. It was huge. And it was – I remember being at an amusement park and seeing a guy who was just dressed up and had the hair of Michael Jackson and girls screaming, even knowing it wasn't Michael Jackson. Just the way he looked. Yeah. Yeah, just that a guy looked like that. But he – well, you had to have cable to watch it, right? I don't think – Yeah. They wouldn't – and then he – they played it on regular TV eventually, but it was so huge. I mean – It was so huge it's hard to imagine anything. I remember going over someone's house to watch it. Yeah.

Because there wasn't that many channels back then. Yeah. So, like, when something was on that was, like, a big deal, everybody watched it. So, like, a good hit television show today, I don't know how many millions of views it gets, but it's not a lot. Yeah. I don't know. It used to be – yeah, the numbers are way down. Yeah, the – When you had a network hit show, you'd get, like, 10 to 20 million. Oh, yeah. Yeah, a big show like Seinfeld or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. Friends. Yeah, those – they got shit tons of people watching them, which – that just doesn't happen anymore now. It has to be, like, the Super Bowl for something like that now. Yeah, there was a while where American Idol, I think, was getting those numbers, but I don't think – I don't think anything, any scripted show does. But that was a big thing for MTV was these videos that they would have, and they would have video premieres. So, they'd have a premiere, you know, like David Bowie, video premiere, and everybody would be like, oh, got to be there for the premiere. And there was no DVRs back then either. So, either you VCR'd it, either you recorded it, which most people didn't, of your – a real wizard, you knew how to program your VCR. Remember those days? Yeah, I briefly knew how to do that, but sometimes I just get a really long one and just leave it turned on right before. Yeah, you do that, right? Yeah, you do low resolution, like a six-hour recording. So, I think when you – if you unplugged them, the clock would go off. Mm-hmm. You'd have to reset it. Yep. Everybody's clock was always flashing. You go over to people's houses, the clock in the VCR was always flashing. That was one of the gags I wanted to have in Idiocracy. I don't think we did, was just that everywhere you see just 12 – I think I wanted a big clock tower, like Big Ben, with just a 12. I don't know if I – I haven't even looked if that's even in there. I don't think it is.

When you make a movie like that and you're done, like, what is the feeling like? Is it like – Oh, that's a – Is it like, did we do enough? Is it what you wanted? Because I've got to imagine, like, vision and then execution and then when it's over, like, what does it feel like? It's a very strange mixed feeling. It's like – you know, like, the first one I did was a Beavis and Butt-Head movie and I remember when your whole life, like, however many hours a day is just fucking with it and editing it and making it in a sound mix and everything. And I think the last final thing was the final mix and I remember walking out of that place just – I should feel happy. It's finally done, but it's just that, like, icky, like, oh, shit, I missed something. It's a really weird feeling and sometimes it's – sometimes it's better than others. Sometimes it's sick to your stomach. But, yeah, it's always – that's the other reason I think I don't always like to watch something else. After it's done, because I'm going to go, oh, shit, I should have changed that or done that better. But, yeah, it's a very odd feeling. I mean, it's good to be done, but so many – it's just, like, icky.

Well, it just seems like it's such an enormous amount of time of your life that gets put into it and it's got to be hard to see what it actually looks like. Because you're going over the minutia of it. You're editing it. You're – you wrote the lines. You edited them. You watch people do it. Cut. Let's take two. Take three. Yeah, you've seen – You've seen so many versions. A hundred people audition for each part. You've heard the dialogue over and over again. You don't know if it's funny anymore. You can't tell. And also, all those hours you're spending on it are to change things. That's all. You're just constantly tweaking. Right. And so to say it's done, you get – what it is, it's like a feeling of withdrawal, really. Like, it's sort of a – even if you're really happy with it, it's like – it's sort of like you're just so used to doing that. And to stop suddenly is just a – you kind of want to do it more. You just want to go back and keep editing. I mean, I like editing, and it's fun to do. But, yeah. But finishing editing is the hard part. Yeah, when you're – to just let it go and, you know, not know if – if you have a good test screening, that helps.

But you don't always do that. Like with a TV show, you don't – just like whoever's in the – and if the sound mixers don't think it's funny, if people working on it aren't laughing. And with animation, like especially when I was doing the shorts, like the first short I did, you record the sound first. And I remember thinking, okay, that's a pretty funny take. I think I got something good here. And then – but then you have to – the way I read the track, with a stopwatch, you'd find every syllable and put it on exposure sheets. So you're listening to it about two or three times as many syllables as there are in it just before you even start drawing. And so by the time you're done, you have no idea if it's funny or – you know, and I would just have to keep remembering there was a time when I knew this was funny. And just keep going back to that. Do you ever, like, take a few days off and then try to watch it fresh? Yeah.

Yeah, that helps if you can – if you can afford to do that. Yeah. I've gotten more used to – I don't know, just trusting if there was ever a moment where something was good, interesting, or funny. And if it doesn't seem like it now, just knowing, okay, that was – that did hit me that way at one point. There must be something to it. Dude, I laughed so hard today watching the chart of the people and all the babies that they had. For whatever reason, that scene killed me. And then the smash cut to the intelligent people that still weren't having kids and still putting – and then they start bickering about whose fault it is as they're getting older. Yeah, we can't have a trial now. Not with the market the way it is. Yeah, it's amazing. It's so funny because that's real. You know, Elon Musk warns about that all the time. He's like, we are in a very dangerous moment where people don't realize that they're not having enough children. I know, well, now it's – now it's sort of – Melinda Gates had written something about this, like – or maybe I read a quote about – like, when – as countries become – go from third world to first world, I guess they stop – they don't have kids as much. Well, women have careers. They don't want to have children as often. And they also don't need children to help them with the family business.

So it's not like – in some countries, people are having children because they need a workforce. Yeah. Yeah, I had – we were at some point making that movie. I mean, a lot of the people playing dumbasses were just my friends. Like, I have a lot of dumb-looking friends, I guess. But at some point, we were location scouting this place, and it was – I guess it was a reform school of some kind, like a juvenile delinquent, something right. Or other – I don't know. You're not allowed to call them reform schools anymore. You're not? It was – I don't know. It was called, like, the Institute of Technological – and it had, like, some fancy names. Kind of down by – now, maybe I won't dox the place. It was outside of Austin, just outside of Austin. But I didn't know what it was. And I thought – I was just looking around saying, oh, these people would be good extras. It was, like, when we're – you know, and we had a couple scenes with, I don't know, 250 extras. And one was that ass movie, which we had to – we actually had to shoot the ass. How much footage did you get of that guy's ass? Oh, too much. But I wanted just a nondescript ass, by the way. Like, and I had to look at Polaroids. Oh, a crazy thing happened, actually. So the dude – it's like, okay, let's get this over with. We just, like, set up the camera, shoot the guy's ass.

And my cinematographer and I are just kind of going, okay, let's – that's good. Let's just – I know we shot, like, 10 minutes, probably. But anyway, the – years later, the guy – I'm introduced to this guy and his fiancée. And I'm looking at him, and I go, oh, hey – and he kind of looks at me like, uh-uh, uh-uh. And I realize who it is, and I go, oh. Because I'm starting to say, I think I've met – and then later, he goes, yeah, she doesn't know. Why would she care? I think she does now. That's a bad start to a relationship. If you're about to get married to a lady and you can't tell it, hey, they filmed my ass for 10 minutes for idiocracy. Why do I even want to not tell that? That doesn't make any sense. I think he eventually did. But at that point, he was kind of giving me the – maybe it was like, early on in the relationship. He was trying to be taken seriously? Yeah. Maybe he had, like, a real job. Oh, he did, yeah. What was he? He worked in some kind of, like, finance. Yeah, that's probably it. He was Mr. Serious.

Yeah. What a bummer that must be. We played that movie, though, and, like, I was – we had all those, you know, the juvenile delinquents, whatever in there. They might have been, like – I don't know how old they were, but we put it up there, and I'm thinking, like, okay, I got to somehow get everyone to laugh, like, just laughing hysterically. We start playing it, and they're just laughing hysterically. Like, it's nothing but that guy's butt on the screen. And I was just thinking, we should just release ass and stop writing a script and everything. Like, I think we're already there. Just release this thing. But, yeah, anyway. There was just so many moments like that in that movie where it's, like, it's – I wish I saw it when it came out because I was wondering, like, how's it going to hold up? Because there's some movies that just don't hold up that good, but it held up magically. That's nice to hear. It was very, very funny. The 10-year anniversary in 2016, there were a few screenings, and I still – I watched pieces of it. But, yeah, I mean, I could – I was standing outside the theater at a couple of them, and I could hear people laughing. People seemed to – I mean, they sold out, whatever these – the two ones that I went to, so that was nice. That's got to be a good feeling to just sit there and watch after all that work, after all the editing and all the weirdness of trying to figure out if it's still good to watch people that have never seen it before, have no idea what's coming, laugh hysterically. Yeah. It's a really – I mean, especially something like that that was – both that and Office Space were so difficult to make and didn't do well right away, you know? So it's just like, oh, God, like all that work. Office Space didn't do well right away either? No. Wow, that's crazy. I need to – well, the Beavis and Butt-Head movie was a hit right away, but – How the fuck was Office Space not a hit right away? I mean, it was low budget, but it didn't – it kind of basically made back its $10 million over its time in the theater. But, yeah, it came in like eighth place. Was that in the same time period? When was Office Space released? Ninety-nine it came out. Oh, interesting. Okay. So it was earlier. But then two years after, it was in – back when they did Blockbuster home video charts, it was like in the top 10 around Christmas. It was in the top 20 for – off and on for a while, which was really nice. It's a great fucking movie. Oh, thanks. It's a great fucking movie. I love how you use a lot of the same people over and over again too. Yeah. Well, you worked with Stephen Root. Oh, he's the best. He's incredible, yeah. Stephen Root was a guy that – was the only guy on set that was 100% completely different human being than who he was on television. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's crazy when someone – and Stephen Root, like when he played Milton, just completely different. Like I've told – I remember, I don't know, years I was talking to Ben Stiller and he said, who played Milton? And I said, that's Stephen Root. And he's like, what? He'd seen the whole thing and I had no idea that was him and he had met him and everything. He does that in every movie he's in. But that – he's a different human hanging out on the set. Like he's a regular guy. And then he'd become Jimmy James and he would become Jimmy James. I mean, it was a character that he developed. I mean, Jimmy James had tendencies. He had opinions. He had – like he had a whole like fucking biography for this guy. Oh, such a strong character. Like when I – I saw that – you weren't in the pilot, right? You came in the second or third episode or something? I was – Ray Romano was the original me from the pirate. Oh, okay. From the pilot, rather. And Ray got fired and then they brought in a second guy, luckily, and then that guy got fired because I didn't want to take the job from Ray. So I took the job from the job – the guy who took the job from Ray. Oh. Which is good. Oh, okay. Better. Because Ray was my friend who would suck. Oh, wow. Like if Ray – Oh, I didn't know that back story. Yeah. So obviously it worked out fantastic for Ray because Everybody Loves Raymond he did right after that. Oh, okay. So right after he got fired, then he's doing Everybody Loves Raymond. I'm trying to think when that came out.

I remember I had met Paul Sims in 94 and I was writing the King of the Hill pilot and I was – or no, I guess 95 or 96, but I was – or I had met him before. Anyway, he had just – he sent me a VHS of the pilot of News Radio and I immediately called and said, who's the guy playing Jimmy James? That guy's incredible. I've never seen him in anything. And, yeah, then that led to him – well, he auditioned for King of the Hill and he was just clearly just really amazing. No, he's amazing in everything. You know, he did – one of the most incredible things I've ever seen him do is we had a table read and Troy Aikman was going to be – do a guest appearance in King of the Hill, which he did, I think, but he couldn't do the first table read and just at the last minute – I understand why Stephen was a little pissed. He's like – someone said, okay, can you read Troy Aikman? And he's like, I don't know what Troy Aikman talks like. I don't know. Really? You're just springing me on this? And he proceeded to do the best version of an athlete, pro athlete who can't act at a table read. I wish I had a tape of it. It was so genius. The levels of it. It was like he's doing a guy who can't act, but he's doing a good job acting and he's throwing in an accent that sounds like a football player from Texas and I don't know. It was just amazing. He was great in – did you see that Cowboy movie? I think it was a Coen Brothers film. Oh, yeah. He's been – oh, yes. It was a weird film where it was like a bunch of different snippets. Yes. I just – and it's got Tim Blake Nelson in it. Yes. Oh, he's – yeah, I saw that. Yes. I love that movie. It was a great movie. That movie's like – it's only one of the Coen Brothers, right?

Didn't – wasn't that the first one? I don't know. I don't know. But – Do you know what I'm talking about, Jamie? Do you remember the film? But it was like – No, it's so good. It was multiple tragedies. It's – no, he's been in a few. It wasn't No Country Frozen. It's one recently with Tim Blake. I typed in Coen Brothers, though, and I'm trying to – Type in Stephen Root Cowboy movie. It's only one of the brothers. I think it's – and Tim Blake Nelson's in it, and it's – Oh, Brother Ferrato? No, no, no. It came out more recently. That's another great fucking movie. Just type in Stephen Root Cowboy film. Oh, is that the one? Well, go to his IMDb, and we can find it. He played some fucking – He's got a lot of movies. He's got his IMDb's office space is right at the top, though. Wait a second. Hold on, hold on. These are all too new. It's fairly recent. It's like 2019, I think, or something. Let me see. Go down there. It'll be – Oh, man, he did. Where is this? Here. Do, do, do, do, do, do. I can't – Hold on. You're going through fast. I know. Ballad of Buster Scruggs? That's it. Yeah, yeah.

That's it. There we go. Bam. Am I wrong? Is it? Yep. A hundred percent. Oh, it is both. It is both Coen brothers. I thought it was one of the ones that just one of them did. Yeah. Yeah, that is a really good one there. Tim Blake Nelson is fucking awesome, too. Yeah, he's so good. You know what he's great in? This movie is fucking really fun. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is so unusual, and Root's character is completely insane. Yeah. So good. It's just like – it's one of those movies where you're like, what the fuck is this? But that's all of their movies. Their movies are so interesting. Oh, yeah. They're so weird. They make so many, I haven't even seen them all. Tim Blake Nelson's brother was the line producer on Idiocracy, actually. Tim Blake Nelson is in a great Western called Old Henry. Have you seen Old Henry? I haven't seen that one. It's great. I don't want to give away – there's like a plot twist to it, and you go, what?

But it's a really interesting old Western, but it's not funny at all. Is it – oh. Is it a recent one? Yeah, I want to say it's like 2020, last year. I wonder if Westerns are going to come back. That's it. That's Old Henry. That's fucking good. And that's one I just took a chance on. I was home, and I was bored, and I was like, let me see what new movies are out. And I looked in iTunes, and it was just there, and it was highly rated. So I said, all right, let's take a different chance. Is that Trace Adkins' in it? Oh, man, he's – Yeah. And Stephen Dorff's great in it, too. I had no idea what the movie was about, so I'm like, okay, let's just give it a chance. And it was really fucking cool. Wow. I love a good Western, though. I'm a sucker for a Western. Oh, me too. I like Unforgiven. Oh, Unforgiven's fucking fantastic. It's like one of the greatest ever. That was like – in my opinion, that was like Clint Eastwood doing like a cleanup. Yeah.

You know I did all these films that were kind of unrealistic about Westerns and cowboys. Let me come back and show you what it was probably really like. Yeah, exactly. That's what – like I get like watching – like that's probably what a draw – like a shootout where people are actually screaming and freaking out that someone died. Yeah. I mean, that was incredible. And this one guy who can just keep it together, and that's why he can kill everybody. He just doesn't freak out. Yeah. I like the stylized ones, too, but that one was just – that blew my mind. It still – that one holds up. Oh, it's fantastic. I mean, I love all of his old Westerns. I love Outlaw Josie Wales. Oh, yeah. I love all the spaghetti Westerns. I had the box set of the DVDs. I mean, any time one of those would come on, I would just be glued to the set. It's really incredible that that moment in human history, like when people were making their way across the continental United States, became such a genre for film. Yeah. I wonder – yeah, I guess – There's not a lot of pioneer movies. You know what I mean? There's a few, but it's nothing like the Westerns. Listen to that. They say there was like – the Wild West only lasted like eight years or something, the way it's – like where it was really wild or something. Is that really? I guess it's all post-Civil War, right? I don't know. I shouldn't be talking – I'm not a historian on it. I just remember someone saying that, that it's like – it was like before it was really tamed, it didn't – it wasn't that – but there's like a million movies about it. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. I mean, I think a lot of it had to do with the gold rush, right? Yeah. You know? I mean, that was the reason why people were motivated to make their way out to those weird towns in like San Francisco and like all of these places, Seattle, they were miners. Lay down railroad tracks. Yeah. It's just a very unusual time in history, but as a genre for film, it's such a rewarding genre because it's lawlessness. Yeah. So you can have this one person with morals and ethics who keeps the fucking town together and then this bad guy who comes in and is trying to take over and just such a – you know, it's such a classic story. Yeah, just pure writing, you know, about – yeah, there's also a bunch of – Quentin Tarantino used to do a thing where he'd come to Austin and show – it's just a collection of prints of movies that no one's ever seen. Like maybe now a lot of them are available, but like I remember around 2002, 2004, a couple of Westerns that didn't even have people I had heard of in it hardly, like that were just incredible. I mean, like I don't even try to describe them, but they were like on par with all those whatever Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns. And just totally unknown? Yeah, unknown, I mean, some of them – yeah, I remember there was one where this guy, he goes to a town, he's like a gunslinger and the bad guys are coming and they just desperately need him to save the town and the guy – the mayor promises the guy his daughter if he can defend the town and you kind of forget about it and there's a big shootout and everybody's happy at the end and you think this is a happy ending and then the guy goes, no, I get the daughter. Like he's like – at the end of it, like he's like – and you're like, whoa, this dude wasn't really all – they kind of make him not a hero at the end of it. It was a really interesting dark movie. I can't remember the name of it. And probably what it was really like back then. Right. There probably were no real good guys. Yes.

You know, when you have a time in history where the morals are completely eroded and you see mass atrocities committed left and right, like even – like whatever the bar is for the good guys is probably quite a bit lower. Yeah. It doesn't take much to tip the scales into horrible anarchy. No, it's just – it's so interesting how we romanticize those moments though. Those moments – like that's like one of the big – I mean when we were kids, we played Cowboys and Indians. Oh, yeah. You know, that was – I don't know if that's allowed anymore, but that's what all – I don't think so. I don't think you play an Indian unless you are one now. We had the Pop Gun and you watched Lone Ranger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, people forgot Johnny Depp played Tonto. Oh, that's right. He got in trouble. Oh, he did? People were like, he's not an Indian. Yeah, people were angry. Is he like 164th or something? Is he? I don't know. Oh, not enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just such a – I mean so many shows, Podanza, so many different television shows. Yeah, I wonder if it's going to make a comeback. Deadwood. Wasn't there a Western recently? Didn't? No. Yellowstone. Kind of. Yellowstone is modern though. 1883. Yeah, the prequel, right? Yeah. I haven't seen that. Is that good?

I haven't watched it. I've heard it. Yellowstone's fucking great. I hear it's great. I've got to watch it, yeah. Yeah. Do you do much consuming of films and stuff when you're not making them? I went through a long phase where I wasn't at all. And now I do. Yeah, now I try to watch a lot of stuff. But there's so much stuff I can't keep up. Yeah, it's impossible. People are always telling me about, oh, you've got to see Euphoria. I'm like, how? How do I, where's my time? You tell me how. How I can watch this. You know the thing that I just saw that made me absolutely want to watch it is there's an entire series of Rowan Atkinson trying to kill a bee. Have you seen that trailer? One bee? One bee? One bee? I was laughing so hard at this thing. What is it called? I think it's called something, the bee or something like that. What? We did a Beavis and Putt-It episode where they try to kill a fly. Mr. Bean? Man versus bee. Wow, look at that car he's got. He just gradually fucks everything up more and more just trying to kill this one bee. Is this a British film or it's a Netflix thing? A Netflix, but it's a Simpsons. There was a Netflix series? I'm Trevor from House Sitter's Deluxe. Hello, sweet pea. It's Dad here. I managed to get a job. It means that we can still go on holiday together. Danny, I'll call you back. This guy has been doing slapstick for a thousand years. I guess I'm just like, I haven't seen anything like this in so long. It was so refreshing.

They're going to make an entire series on this premise, which I just got to see how, I think he can pull it off. Yeah, probably. Where are you? Man versus bee. Jesus, that's a series? Which you just, I haven't seen anything remotely like that. He's an acquired taste. Like either you love that guy or you're like, what the fuck is this Mr. Bean guy? It took me a little while and then I was all in. Well, you can watch it in small, like when you're not, you just kind of need something dumb to like fall asleep. I would like to talk to him about his health. Oh, is he? No, because like I have this Chevy Chase theory. My Chevy Chase theory is like, everybody says Chevy Chase is an asshole. And I'm like, I bet Chevy Chase is in constant pain. Because if you think about all the times that Chevy Chase would fall down for decades, all of his comedy was him like doing something and falling into a pile of chairs and slipping off of a stage and landing on his neck. And he was constantly falling down. He was constantly slipping on a banana peel, feet first up in the air, slams down on his head.

That guy fell hundreds of times. He fell every night on Saturday Night Live, didn't he? Constantly. Always. Well, I think he does have injuries, right? He has to. Like Johnny Knoxville has so, like he's- His dick's broken. All of his dick's broken. He's beat up all kinds of ways. Yeah. Well, he did it to himself. He did it in a different way. Like he did it in a way where like- Like an evil Knievel- 100% going to get hurt. Yeah. There's no controlling it. At least Chevy was responsible for his falls. He's getting thrown in the air by bulls and shit. Like, oh my God, that guy gives me anxiety. But the Chevy Chase one I'm fascinated by because when I found out that Chevy Chase was considered an asshole by so many people, I'm like, what? Fletch? That guy? He seemed so cool. I'm like, how could he be an asshole? And then as I got older and I, you know, I have this deep concern about brain damage and brain injuries from fighters and stuff. And then I was like watching him like, how bad is he fucked up? Like, I guarantee you he's thinking irrationally. I guarantee you he's very impulsive. I guarantee he has CTE. 100%. Oh, all that stuff gets your, even if it's not hitting your head, it can- Yes. Oh. It affects your impulse control. You know, a lot of guys that do that wind up being heavy drinkers or gamblers. Oh. They're like, the way I describe it is like, imagine if all day long you're like irritated. Like, ugh. Yeah. But you're going through life like that. So you're going through life constantly. And also impulse control is fucked because of CTE. I wonder, well, you know, all those, it seems like the UFC guys, the MMA guys don't have that as bad as boxers, or do they? No, they have it bad. They just haven't gotten old enough yet. There's plenty of guys that have it pretty bad. Oh, yeah? Yeah, there's guys that get out, and in boxing, there's guys that get out. Like, Andre Ward is my favorite example. He's brilliant, eloquent, like, incredibly good at commentary and talking and explaining things. And the guy was a two-division world champion and Olympic gold medalist, and he just decided, you know what? I'm getting out while the getting's good. I'm perfect.

I'm in my 30s. He was in prime, the prime of his career, world champion. He said, I think I could serve boxing better as an example of what's possible than as a guy who keeps fighting. Oh, wow. Yeah, he's brilliant. Brilliant guy. And one of the best commentators ever. And that's rare, though, you know, for every guy like that. Yeah, everyone wants to hang on too long. Well, it's like the thrill of doing that is so much more exciting than the thrill of doing anything else in your life. Imagine if, like, you know, you do this one thing that gets you to tens. And you've got to remember, with Andre, there was no real agony of defeat. He was an undefeated world champion, an Olympic gold medalist. He looks handsome, so his pristine face didn't get busted up. Wow. Really never got, other than Kovalev. Kovalev was the only guy that really hurt him in a fight. Never really got hurt bad. And even in that fight, he wound up winning. He didn't get knocked out? Nope. No, he won every fight. He was undefeated. Yeah, and if he had stayed in, probably would have... Who knows? I mean, they usually stay in until they get knocked out, don't they? Well, until something goes bad.

Bernard Hopkins is a good example of that, but he was in his 50s when he finally started getting really... When he lost to Joe Smith Jr. and he fell through the ropes. But UFC fighters most certainly get brain damage. Wow. You can get out without it. It's possible. But, you know, we did a thing yesterday. We were going over NBA players, or excuse me, NFL players with CTE, and they said 99% of NFL players that have been tested have CTE. Oh, really? 99. Yeah. Jesus. It's wild. So is that almost worse than fighting? I think it's worse. Because I think it's uncontrolled. Because with fighting, like say if you're a skilled fighter, you can choose to engage or not to engage. With MMA, I think it's better than boxing because you could choose to tie someone up and take them to the ground. Yeah. You know, there's options. I guess that's what I had heard. Yeah. There's options, but... People get... The thing is, you're getting hurt in sparring.

Sparring is hurting you almost as bad as the fights themselves. There's a lot of people that wound up getting really bad brain damage that never even fought. They just sparred a lot. Oh, wow. Jesus. Yeah. I mean, sparring is hitting. You know, you're getting hit. It's just... That's where the brain damage comes from. Do you know people get CTE from jet skiing? Really? From hitting the water? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, you do hit the water pretty hard when you... Yeah, we were on the lake the other day, and I was watching these guys because there was a boat that was... We were on jet skis, too, but I don't fuck around like that. I just ride. They're fun to ride, right? I don't need to jump in the air and shit, and I had my daughter on my back, the back of the jet ski, but we're behind this boat, and these guys are, you know, they're making waves with this boat. Like, it's a wake surfing boat, you know those things, so people get behind them on the boards. Right. And these guys were riding those waves on the jet skis. And they have these super-powered jet skis now that are so fucking fast. Oh, shit.

And so every time they land, it's like a car accident. It's like, boom. Oh, God. You know, so the mush inside your brain is just slamming against the wall, and that soft tissue that keeps your brain in place. It's all getting jumbled up. Is that going all night while you're... You live right on the lake, right? Yeah, it's not going at night. Jet ski guys don't go at night. The boat guys, though. Occasionally, you get a boat that goes out at night. But, you know, a lot of the reasons why they do that is they go fishing at night. They do catfish. Oh. Yeah, or the bowfish, which is kind of cool. They take a boat, like a fishing boat with lights hanging over the sides, and the fish come near the light. Oh, they just come for the lights? And they shoot it with bows and arrows. Yeah. I want to try that. I haven't done that yet. Yeah, so you got into archery, huh? We were talking about... You saw the range that we have here. Yeah. Yeah, it's really addictive. It is, right? Yeah. Started doing it in my backyard. Well, then I have a place outside of town with lots of room. But, yeah, I still have never killed a mammal, but I figure I eat meat, maybe. Also, there's a really bad hog problem. On your ranch? Feral hogs, yeah. Everywhere. How bad is your ranch? Well, right now, I mean, I don't know. There's some people that they kind of come and go. Like, about 10 years ago, some friends of mine went out there and hunted a bunch of them. But, I mean, they'll come through, and it's just like a rototiller. Like, they'll just rip everything up. It's kind of crazy. A friend of mine said that he was raising sheep. They killed, like, 20 lambs. And one night, hogs came through and just... Yeah, that's something that people don't realize. They're predatory. Yeah. Yeah. The first time I saw one, it's like big old tusks. Like, they're crossed between, I guess, European wild boars that were brought over and escaped just domestic hogs, I guess, that the Spanish brought over. And they get big, yeah. Well, they're all the same animal, believe it or not. Pigs are a weird animal. And this is one of the reasons why pigs are weird. When you take a domestic pig, say a male domestic pig, and he's, you know, eating, feed, and whatever you give him, and then you open the gate and let him loose. Within weeks, he starts to change. And they'll grow tusks and everything just by the conditions that they're putting? Yes. Oh, okay. That makes sense. Not just tusks, but their face changes. Yeah, they have a different face. Yeah, their nose extends. Yeah, they get longer. Yeah. See if you can find anything on this, because it's really fascinating. I was just reading. Yeah, there's a book. This author, Neil Stevenson. It's called, oh, shit, what's it called? Termination Shock. It's set in the near future where hogs are just out of control. That's possible. But he goes into the history of it. But I didn't know. So a regular hog would just start going wild if you... I don't think there's another mammal like it, not that I've ever heard of, that when you release them into the wild... Physical traits. They have a physical transformation. Like a cat could become a feral cat, right? And then they act differently and they're afraid of people. But hogs, their nose grows longer.

Yeah, they look different. They look like a wild boar. Their fur changes. It gets thicker and bushier. Their tusks grow. So when you see those pigs... Yeah, see? Yeah, they get that... Yeah, that's what they look like. They get that face like... It's wild. It changes their fucking face. Wow. And it changes their nose. I don't understand what causes it. Well, I just Googled this. When Domestic Pigs Change in the Wild. Okay. Eric, just check that. Let me see that right there. It didn't say much more than what you said, though. But this is good right here. It says domestic pigs can quickly revert to wild pigs. Although domestic pigs as we know it today took hundreds of years to breed. Just a few months in the wild is enough to make a domestic pig turn feral. It will grow tusks, thick hair, and become more aggressive. Wow. Just a few months. That's crazy. And their nose changes. Like, it grows and extends their snout. Yeah, they look more evil. It's the same genus. They're all called Sue Scroffa. But obviously, it's just like dogs, right? You could even, say, a dog like a German Shepherd. There's big German Shepherds and small German Shepherds. If you breed the big ones, you make a big one. Yeah, yeah. And that's how it is with wild pigs, too. But with domestic hogs and wild pigs, it's not like it's a hybrid.

They're literally the same animal. Oh, okay. I also heard, yeah, when you – well, the ones that my friends hunted out in my place, they're – like, you don't get the bacon off the – No. Like, when they're wild, there's, like – they're still really good, but not as – They're not fat. Yeah, they're very lean. And they're darker meat, too. It's, like, almost like a reddish meat. Yeah, it looks different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, the ones that you get are in the supermarket, essentially like veal. They're just sitting there in a pen. They've just been pampered. Yeah. And they're fattening them up until they're ready to slaughter them. I mean, that's really where you get bacon from. Bacon is from obese pigs. Yeah, it only comes – Yeah. They have to be super obese to get that – yeah, it comes off – was it, like, off their ribcage or something? I think it's, like – I don't know what the difference is between pork belly and bacon is. Bacon is – Pork belly – I mean, I think bacon is almost like brisket. I think it's similar.

There was a writer on The Simpsons. I forget who it was. He wanted to see – he loved bacon so much. He wanted to see if it was possible to ever – to eat so much bacon that he doesn't want anymore. So he did an experiment on a weekend. He just woke up on Saturday. He started making bacon, just eating bacon. And there's a ton of salt in it, and his tongue and his cheeks started swelling up. And he had to actually go to the hospital because he's having trouble breathing. But while he was in the hospital, he said he still wanted more bacon while he was in the hospital. He never found the point where he didn't want more bacon. Oh, my God. I forget the guy's name. That much salt? There's really that much salt in bacon? Yeah, I guess that's the – it's cured, salt cured. Yeah, that's what makes it bacon. Yeah, like it's like a – Pork belly versus bacon. What's the difference? The most basic difference between pork belly and bacon is the pork belly cut isn't smoked or cured, and it only comes from the belly of the pig, the softer meat that is interchangeable with most recipes that call for pork, whereas bacon can be derived from the belly and is cured and sometimes smoked. Oh, so it is the same area, it's just turned into bacon. So streaky pork bacon is pork belly, but pork belly isn't bacon. Instead, pork belly is the whole slab cut from the fleshy underside of a pig. Streaky pork bacon is cut from this slab, and pork belly is unsmoked and uncured. Have you ever gone to Daidue in town? Have you ever eaten there? Oh, that sounds familiar. No. It's a fantastic restaurant made by – the head chef is this guy, my friend Jesse Griffiths. And Jesse, who's been a guest on the podcast before too, is – he runs a school. What is this school called again? He's got like a – it's basically a school where he teaches people from scratch and takes them – he does it in very limited numbers. The new school of traditional cookery. So he takes people out from scratch. This is how you shoot a gun. This is how you pull a trigger. This is how you sight a rifle. This is how you kill a pig. This is how you butcher the pig. Oh, wow. This is how you cook the pig. And he's an incredible chef. His restaurant, Daidue, is one of my absolute favorite places in Austin. I think I have heard of it. It's amazing. Where is it? I want to say it's on Congress. I think I have heard of this. We'll pull it up. Yeah, when I saw the – Pull it up just to let them know. What's it on? Does it say what street's it on? Oh, yeah.

Over there on – yeah, yeah. Oh, that's right by – yeah. Just give me a second. That used to be – Read out the – It's by Hoover's. It's called Manor. It just disappeared when I got close. It's called Manor Road off of – Manor Road. Yeah, that's east of Texas. Manor. Yeah, that's over – yeah, by Hoover's. You go to Hoover's all the time. But the way you spell it is D-A-I-D-U-E, right? Is that how you spell it? It's fucking great. He makes a ceviche with antelope, with Texas antelope. It's a Neil guy ceviche. So is the antelope raw then? Yes. Oh, okay. Yes. It's like – like if you would imagine a version of like tartare, like a beef tartare, but more – because it's raw. But think more in terms of like ceviche where it's cured with lime and he'll put it on like chips. You know, like you'll serve it with tortilla chips. It's fantastic. Wow. I've never heard of ceviche that wasn't fish. He has fish and chips from local Texas fish, like Texas redfish. Oh, so it's all kind of – All local. Oh, wow. Yeah. And it's all – like a lot of it is wild, like wild game. Well, antelope, yeah. Yeah. Neil guy antelope. Wow. Texas is an interesting place in that you can serve wild game in restaurants commercially, which is not legal in a lot of other places. Oh, it isn't legal. Oh. Most places, like say if you go to a restaurant, say in like Michigan – I don't know about Michigan, like California, a good example – and you buy elk, you're not getting elk from the United States. You're getting elk most likely from New Zealand. The law is just – Yeah, they can – That's weird.

You know, New Zealand is a weird place because New Zealand doesn't have any predators and almost all the big game mammals that are brought into New Zealand were brought into the – I believe it was the 1800s. Yeah, there's not native. They tried to create – Yeah. Elk aren't native. No, no, no. They have stag there, which is a very similar animal to elk, very similar tasting, but they – and they're similar looking too. But they brought these animals over there to create like a wild game preserve for Europeans. So the Europeans would come over, we've gone to New Zealand to hunt. And they were hunting these animals that didn't have any predators. And so the populations boom to the point where, unfortunately, they have to call the populations of these incredibly nutritious, delicious, beautiful animals. And they shoot them and just leave them there. Like they'll gun them down with helicopters. Oh, so they're not even – There's so many of them. They're going to waste? There's no predators. So you have these mountainous, beautiful landscapes filled with these animals. And it comes a time where they have to keep the populations in check. So they do farm them. And they do sell – they sell a lot of lamb. A lot of lamb comes from New Zealand. And a lot of elk comes from New Zealand. Did you ever see that cane toad documentary?

No. That's another example of – they brought these cane toads to – Australia? Yeah, to Australia to get beetles off the sugar canes. And the sugar canes grow taller there, so they didn't even get the beetles. And then they just reproduced no predator. Oh, and then they brought in cats to deal with the cane toads, I think. Oh, I think they did, yeah. But this documentary – And then the cats are out of control now. It's all these Australian hillbillies and just millions of cane toads. It wasn't supposed to be funny, and then it became like a viral VHS hit in the early 90s. But, yeah, any time they bring up a species – like nature is so delicate, you can't fuck with it. Well, that is all of Australia, and that is all of New Zealand. Australia is filled with non-native animals. Jared Diamond writes a lot about – he wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yeah. Like he writes a lot about – Australia is like a really interesting example of a lot of just, yeah, humans wrecking everything. Yeah, as is New Zealand. New Zealand is – God, it's such a beautiful place, but – I've never been. I've never been either. It looks incredible. It looks incredible. All the surf pictures from there. Lord of the Rings was shot there, which is – it seems like – it's a very small population and a fucking staggeringly beautiful landscape. Wow. But that's a very big spot for hunters. They go down there, and they go to hunt these animals that don't have natural predators. Does the guy who serves antelope, does he go hunt in West Texas? He goes to South Texas, I believe, is where he gets the Neal guy. He also will buy Neal guy. You can buy Neal guy from ranches.

There are certain ranches that commercially sell Neal guy, but the way they do it is they, you know, they have these wild free-range animals, and they just – they don't, like, have them in pens, and they go out and they hunt them commercially, like long-range rifles and stuff like that. They shoot them, and then they collect them, and then they'll sell, like, a whole Neal guy to a restaurant, and then, like, Jesse will part it up and, you know, make steaks and roasts and all these different things from it. But his restaurant is so good. But it's – the point is, like, one of the things that he loves is wild hogs. And he has all these different recipes for wild hogs. He makes sausages and, you know, loins and all these different stews and all kinds of – I don't know if he makes stews. I might have made that up. But he makes a bunch of different really cool recipes with wild pigs. It's really – I mean, it's really good, and there's – I mean, like I say, I haven't hunted yet. I think if I do it, I'll do it with a bow, but – You think so? Just, I don't know, something about a gun just, I don't know, doesn't seem as – Sporting? Yeah, I guess just because I love shooting the bow so much. It's fun to shoot a bow, but – Yeah, I guess you're more likely to not – Miss. Yeah. And injure an animal. That would feel bad.

Yeah. It's – I mean, this is coming from someone who hunts with a bow almost exclusively. But I did shoot a wild pig last year in California with a rifle. Oh, with a rifle? It's so much more effective. Yeah. Let's just – you just get it in your crosshair. Boom! Yeah, I was going to – I was working on, like, 20 years ago, it was going to be like a Caddyshack-type movie about hunting guides and just hunting in general and started watching hunting videos, and it's a funny world. I mean, it's very – It's an interesting world. Yeah. I mean, it's – There's different worlds, though. Yeah, there are. In hunting. Yeah. Like, there's the Texas, like, people that sit over feeders. Yeah. You know, so this is – they call it hunting, but it's really just harvesting. You're just shooting. Yeah. You know, you just sit in a stand and you wait, and then the feeders go off, and the deer gravitate towards the feeders or the hogs gravitate towards – Yeah. And you just blow them away. Yeah. So there's that way. And then there's big game hunting in the West, which is, like, you really have to be an athlete. Like, is – Yeah, that's when I start – like, some of these – like, there's a guy with a traditional bow, kills a bear, and the bear almost jumps in the blind with him. And I'm like, okay, that's actually pretty fair. Like, you're taking a risk there. I mean, not completely, a little, tiny risk. It's like 75-25. Yeah. It's still – Which is about as good as it ever gets for the bear, probably. Yeah. You're highly favored. I mean, most of these – a lot of these videos are just – the ones that, like, 20 years ago, that when you'd go to, like, Texas Trophy Hunter Convention or something, these videos are, like – they have the rhythm and production quality of porn. They're, like, deer snuff films or something. They're, like – it's, like, the – and, like, it's kind of going along with cheesy – whatever needle drop music was back then. And then it's just, like, bam! And then everyone's all kind of excited and adrenaline out and shaking hands too many times and everything. Like, but most of those that, like, that we were looking at were just kind of for the comedy of how easy it is, like the timed feeder and there's just – Yeah. You know. Like I said, there's totally different kinds of hunting. Yeah. I remember me and my friend Duncan once, we were doing this sci-fi show. We were searching for Bigfoot, and we went, and we were in the Pacific Northwest, and we went to this spot that was, like, this weird little diner, and we ate lunch there, and they had a television on that was showing a compilation of all the kill shots on deer. So it was, like, an hour-long video. Boom! The deer getting shot in the rib cage and jumping up in the air and running to his death. And it was, like, a cum shot compilation. Yeah, that's what it is. It was, like, people are too lazy to watch the whole porn. You just want to see people jizz. That's what it was like.

There's something – like, some of these videos, it's, like, there's one woman taking her kid who looks like he's 10, squirrel hunting, and the whole thing – like, it's this happy music playing. I mean, he kills a squirrel. I don't know, it looks like the Zabruder film or something. It's really – I mean, at the time, I wasn't used to hunting, and I was just like, oh, yuck. This is, like – but then, yeah, there's some of them that are just – there's a video for – and it's an ad for something called the Barnes varmint grenade. It's just like a bullet that just vaporizes groundhogs. In the Silicon Valley writers' room, I was just saying, you've got to – like, I guarantee, like, there's vegans in the room. It's like – and they were laughing. It's so – it's like watching Monty Python. It looks so silly. But it is an animal getting blown away. But, like, it's so – So, oh, no, you've got the Barnes – not this one. No, no, that's – What is this one? You've got to go to the ad, because the guy's voice is like, the Barnes varmint grenade. Let me see what it – what is that? Go back up. I can't tell which one was – Oh, down, down, go down. The one – Like this? Oh, yeah, try – is that the one? Maybe. Barnes doesn't make only all copper bullets. The varmint grenade is a new lead-free varmint bullet that gives explosive results. I apologize to anyone who – Originally developed for military applications, the bullet has a copper-tin composite core. This highly frangible core greatly reduces the chance of ricochets. Jesus Christ. The new flat-based hollow-cavity bullet remains intact at ultra-high velocity. Yet fragments instantly on impact.

Here's how a .36-grain .22-caliber varmint grenade bullet reacts when hitting a grape. Oh, my God. Here's another view in slow motion. The varmint grenade bullet comes completely apart while it's still inside the grape. Oh, wow. Here's what happens when a .62-grain 6-millimeter varmint grenade strikes a cherry tomato. That's out of sync. That's just over an inch in diameter. That's way out of sync. Look again. Here's what's left of the bullet. Wow. The varmint grenade vaporizes ground squirrels and prairie dogs at extended range. The thing is, it's like – The coyote doesn't get it. Don't worry. The coyote and bobcat pelts are virtually undamaged. Delivers sniper-like accuracy. Oh, it's just ridiculous. Barnes is a famous ammunition manufacturer. They make copper bullets. Oh, okay. So they're a known – this isn't like a fringe – No, no, no, no, no. They make great bullets. And so I guess they branched out into the groundhog killing. People hate those little fucking groundhogs and prairie dogs, rather. Prairie dogs leave holes and a lot of horses and cows step in them and break their legs. Yeah, people get – yeah, groundhogs are – Yeah, especially prairie dogs. There's a lot of videos of – there's a video of a Brock Lesnar from the UFC shooting prairie dogs with a .50 caliber rifle. What? Yeah, which is very similar. Bullets that are like a – Uh-huh, yeah. They're like your forearm. Half a foot long. Yeah. It's so crazy. And these things just fucking explode. Someone brought one of those out to my place. Here it is. Prairie dog hunting with Brock Lesnar. Every time that thing was fired, it was so loud.

There's like a shock wave you can see in the air. Yeah. Well, it's an enormous round. Oh, God. Yeah. That's not a .50 cal. That's just a regular rifle. He doesn't need a gun to kill – he's like a – Yeah, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it wasn't him with the .50 cal. No, he's retired from fighting. He went back to the WWE, and he does that, and I think that's all he does now. Wow. See if you find .50 cal. Did you look up .50 caliber? Yeah, Brock Lesnar, prairie dog, and then look up .50 caliber. I might have conflated him with someone else who was shooting prairie dogs of .50 calibers. There it is, Brock Lesnar. Okay. Oh, interesting. They might have taken it down. He might have gotten too much hit. Look at that. Here we go. It's like – oh, yeah, there it is. It's the same day, just a different gun. Oh, God. No, that's a very different gun, though. That's the .50 cal. Yeah, that's the – Yeah. Hold on. Scroll back up so I can see what the title says there. Brock Lesnar, murdering prairie dogs of .50 caliber sample rifle. Where's PETA? Oh, God. Oh, my God. Where is PETA? What do you want to do, PETA? You want him to die with a regular rifle better? Like, what's the difference? That's the thing. It's like, is it ethical to shoot him with a .50 cal? Well, it's not unethical. I was just at the beginning of the video. Jesus Christ. Oh, he's not even bracing it on – oof. No, he's huge. That's not a normal human, man. That's a Viking. That's what Vikings used to be like. I remember, yeah, he's got to be straight, pure Viking. Oh, 100%. Yeah, that's like – he had probably, like, a Viking grandma and a Viking grandpa. He's from the upper, like – Minnesota. The Vikings all kind of – I mean, the Norwegians all settled in that area, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look – my favorite example of Vikings is Iceland. That's like more strong men come from Iceland, like guys who win those strong men competitions. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah.

It's – Vice did a whole piece on it. Isn't that where you run, like, a – like, yeah, it's like – No, that's just – it's mostly like they throw barrels over the top of, like, goalposts and they pick up cars. I'm thinking Iron Man or – Yeah, you're thinking of Iron Man. Yeah, the strong man is the – yeah. Yeah, but they're just giants. It's like that guy Thor from the Game of Thrones, the guy who was the mountain. Oh, yeah, yeah. Perfect example. Like, preposterously huge men. And if you were alive, you know, 2,000 years ago and those guys showed up on your shore, you know, with animal skins over their dick holding a sword, it was over. Yeah, they went up the rivers and just – Your village was over. Raped everybody. Yeah, raped and murdered everybody. Just a bunch of Brock Lesnar's coming. Yeah. That's literally what it was, which is really crazy to imagine that we've come so far that now – Oh, yeah. Now the result is this guy's out there shooting prairie dogs. Yeah. It's like, placate him. Do whatever you can to keep him calm. Give him a gun. Let him shoot the prairie dog. Yeah, there's a former marine country singer here that – him and – he's like a gun expert. But he brought one of those out. And, yeah, like I said, like me and my friend just started laughing every time someone fired. It was so absurdly loud. Like you can feel this wave go across your face. And I guess those bullets go like two miles or something. Like didn't somebody in Afghanistan or somebody set a world record for – with a .50 caliber? Was it a .50 cal? Oh, maybe it wasn't. I don't know, like – I know there's one video. There's a crazy – find this video where a guy shoots a deer with a .50 caliber and misses the deer but still kills it. He kills it because the bullet passes right by the deer's head. Oh, God. And the force of the bullet passing by the deer's head sucks its eyes out of its head.

Oh, Jesus. And just immediately pulverizes his brain. Okay, I don't feel like such a wuss then for being like – No, it's crazy. Just the shockwave that that thing – and this is with, like, noise-canceling headphones and earplugs in. It's just like – No, it's a preposterously loud round. So, like, yeah, and it looks like an Estes rocket or whatever. Yeah, it's a big round. It looks like – yeah, like a Red Bull can. Yeah. So this is – yeah, that's how big it is. Look at the size of that. So see if you can find the deer. The guy kills – that's it. That's definitely it. Yeah, somehow that – So he shoots, and the deer goes down. But then when he gets there, so he's sighting in on this deer. And watch this. Oh, no. But watch this. He shoots it. The round goes off. Oh, Jesus. And the deer goes down. Oh, Jesus. Right? But – so you think he shot the deer, right? So they go over, and there's no wound on the deer. Wow. It didn't hit it at all. Oh, God. Isn't that crazy? Oh, that's kind of hideous. Like it sucked his eyes out of his head. Oh, God. And his mouth. Like the deer's instantaneously dead, but with no impact. I guess that wouldn't be a horrible way to go. Watch this, though, when they show it. See, it just passes by his head. Oh, man. Watch this.

Watch it in slow motion. Oh, whoa. It doesn't hit him. Oh, my God. I wonder what the range of just sucking eyeballs out is. That's so awful. It looks like – I mean, it looks like he misses it, by like an inch. I mean, if you watch the vapor trail, I mean, it's just passing right by his head or her head. And then the deer's like, that's a wrap. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Just the force of it passing through the air. I didn't grow up hunting. Like, I don't – it's sort of – I mean, even, like, my family on my dad's side did, but, like, I didn't – so it all just seems, like, hideous to me. But then, I mean, you know, it's – depending on – I mean, there's – well, like New Zealand, you know, it's like – They have to do it. It is our – yeah. Yeah, and that's the thing about the wild pigs here. I mean, Native American is, like, that was their – yeah, the wild pigs are really, actually, really bad for the environment. Are you still connected on here? We've got, like, a weird feedback. You hear that? You don't hear that? No, we're good. I hear a great low, low hum, but, I mean, it's super quiet. Yeah. It connects to the fan. Just so – I should probably go around 3 just to catch my flight. But, anyway. Where are you headed to? I'm going to go back to L.A. I'm in L.A. for the summer. Oh, yeah? Too hot here? Too hot. Texas people like to do that. They bail. They either go to Colorado. A lot of folks here go to Aspen. Yeah, everyone goes to Colorado, and they go to New Mexico, too. I grew up in Albuquerque, and my dad was always griping about Texans coming in. How long have you been here? Well, in Texas since, wow, 88. But Austin, 94.

Yeah. Yeah, moved. I was in New York for Beavis and Butthead for, like, a year and a half, I guess. I remember I came out here once for a UFC, and you were backstage, and I was surprised. I was like, what? This guy likes the UFC? It's weird. Like, yeah, I got – I'm not even a big sports fanatic, but for some reason I got really addicted to UFC. You're missing it. It's here this weekend. That's what I heard, yeah. Yeah, it was a good one. It's a big one. Saturday night. Yeah. Yeah. My friend was asking if I was going, and I got to get back. But – wait, who is it again? Well, the main event – Are you doing it? No, I'm going to watch. I haven't been in the audience of a UFC in 20 years. Oh, really? Yeah, I get to just sit. You're only there when you're – I'm only going to watch, which is great. I'm not working. I'm excited. Wow. And so the main event is Calvin Cater versus Josh Emmett, which is two – they're two featherweight contenders. But there's Cowboy Cerrone is on the undercard. Oh, nice. Oh, nice.

Joe Lozon. Just a bunch of very good fights. What is it? Very exciting fights. Cowboy Cerrone is from Texas, isn't he, or no? No, he's from Colorado. Oh, yeah, Colorado. That's right. Yeah. So here, Tim Means versus Kevin Holland, that's a great fight. Joaquin Buckley versus, I don't know, Albert Duryev, but Joaquin Buckley is a fucking assassin. There's great fights, really great fights. Oh, wow. Interesting, that guy Duryev is the favorite. Ooh, interesting. Wait, who – he fought someone – didn't he beat somebody big? Oh, Buckley? No, Duryev. I don't know. Let me see what his record is. I kind of – I was – I kind of stopped watching for a little while and started getting back into it. But I used to be addicted to it. I was – oh, yeah. You were addicted to it. Yeah, it was – when I saw it, when you were there, was that – that was like 2011 or something in Austin? Oh, he fought Anthony – oh, he's going to fight Anthony Hernandez. That got canceled. Now he's fighting Buckley. So this is only his second fight in the UFC and his favorite over Buckley, which is wild. He must be talented. I did not see his first fight, though. Lausanne's been at it forever. Forever. This is kind of a retirement fight for both guys. I mean, Donald Cerrone is in a new movie right now with Gina Carano. Actually, a Western that's coming out soon.

Oh, he acts? He's been – Yeah, he's starting to act. I mean, that's what he's going to transition to, I believe, you know, out of fighting. He's going to transition to acting. He's perfect for that. He's such a character. A bunch of MMA people have gotten into – When you're casting films, like, that's got to be one of the weirdest parts of making a movie. Like, you have this idea, you write it out, and then you meet a bunch of people, and you've got to get them to try to become this thing that you've created on paper. Yeah, it's my – I mean, I actually am proud of who I've cast. I think I'm pretty good at – but it's my least favorite part of the process. The audition part of it, like – I mean, it's like going on some weird, horribly awkward date every five minutes for however many hours you're doing it. Because every person comes in, and they want to – they're looking for any sign on your face of how they did, and a lot of times they're really great, and you want to tell them they're great, but they may not just be the type for the part, and you want to say that, but all they want to hear is that they got the part. Yeah. There's nothing you can say that's – so you just kind of go, okay, thank you, and, you know, it's – you want to give the part to everybody, but you can only pick one. It's just – it's such a – yeah, and also when you're – yeah, if you wrote everything and you're hearing it done horribly, sometimes that makes you – shakes your confidence in the material.

And, I mean, usually, though, like my first experience with it was – well, I mean, doing animation, I was doing a lot of the voices myself for most of them. But, like, with Office Space, when I did start having good people read for it, it makes the writing seem better. Like, actors can make the writings – make the dialogue seem better than it is sometimes, I think. Like, I remember thinking for some of – I mean, then sometimes it doesn't work at all, and it makes you think it's horrible. But I remember thinking, wow, I'm a pretty good writer, but a lot of it's just because the actors are just making it seem so real. Terry Crews was the perfect president for that movie. Did you – did you have him in mind? Like, who did you have in mind when you wrote it? No, I mean, I think maybe it's okay to say now, you know, it's – like, I was sort of thinking Benicio Del Toro, actually. Oh, he would have been great, too. Yeah, and he turned it down, I think. But I don't even know if it got that far. Once – when Terry auditioned, he just stole the part. Like, I was showing it to people. It's one of those things where when something's that good, you just keep watching it, you know? And I kept – and I just kept watching it. He's a rare, funny guy who's also jacked. Yeah, I was just saying that. Like, he's – yeah. He – he's – not many people can pull that off. Very few. He kind of has to be jacked to be funny. He might be the only one. Yeah. He might be the only guy that's built like that that can – is really funny. There's something that – where it all works, like, with his face. And when he was doing that, I was just – I kept going, like, wait, this is amazing. Like, this – he's the president, and he's that jacked, and he's making these puzzled faces, and he's got so much charisma.

And he was a porn star and a WWE champion. Yeah. Was the character a WWE – look at him there. Look at him. I mean, how – When he gets that, like, yeah. How many people are funny and are built like that? It was like fucking nobody. I know. It's really rare. So rare. And you buy into it. Like, it makes you laugh. Yeah. And when you wrote it, did you write as a WWE champion? Was that already in there before Terry was there? Yeah. That was in there. Yeah. That was in there. And so I guess – like, I actually auditioned, not for that part, for some of the other ones. There's a lot of WWE people, and something – there are – a lot of them are decent actors, but there's something just that wasn't funny in the right way. But they didn't read for that. But we had – yeah, we had – at one point, Tank Abbott read for – not for that part, but for – I think the doctor in the hospital. And he was actually pretty good. He was pretty funny, actually.

Smart dude. Yeah. Like, he's – He's a surprisingly smart guy who just likes to beat the shit out of people. Yeah. He seemed smart. He seemed like a funny – I mean, I've heard – I've heard he's scary or something, but I thought he was really funny. Oh, he's a very nice guy. Yeah, he seemed like a nice guy. I've gotten hammered with him before. He actually just came upon hard times, I believe. Yeah, he had a liver transplant. He had a liver cancer. He had a transplant? Is that what it was? Yeah. He had a liver donor, yeah. He had some – Which is not surprising if you know how hard that guy partied. Well, he was saying – he was saying to – because he came close to – I came close to casting him for – he had read for a couple different things. But he was a really, really nice guy, but he'd say, like, okay, you guys can call me. I might be drunk. Like, he kept saying, I might be drunk. But he had a – he showed me a – like, he – I guess all the fights he would – he would do these, like, pit fights on the beach for the Hells Angels or something. And he just, like, takes these teeth out and goes, like, yeah, see, I just finally got these so I could just take them out. Because, I don't know, teeth kept getting knocked out or something.

But, yeah, what a legend. Yeah, he was a real character in the early days of fighting. Yeah. And he was the first guy that I ever saw that figured out to put on gloves. Oh, oh, that was – He didn't have to wear gloves back then. Oh. When he first started fighting, gloves were optional, and he did it to protect his hands. Very smart. Did he invent those kind that – or I guess were those – not full boxing gloves, but, like, the MMA gloves? No, he definitely didn't invent them. They were around – I think Century might have had them as, like, bag gloves at one point in time. And he started wearing them. It was him and Vitor Belfort. Those were the two guys, the first guys that I ever saw wear those gloves. And then – but I think Tank was first. And then they wound up being a thing. You know, where people would wear them, and then it became standard. Yeah, those old ones were great. You know who – John Crisfalusi, the Ren and Stimpy guy, was way into that. And he claims to have given Spike TV the idea for the UFC reality show because he was saying, yeah, you guys got to follow Tank Abbott around when he's installing air conditioners. You get to see what he's like during the day, you know. He installed air conditioners? I think that's what John said when he was doing back then, yeah. He had a regular – some kind of – 9 to 5. I didn't know that. Yeah. That's what John Crisfalusi did. Yeah, I don't know if he came up with the idea. But that kind of really boosted the UFC.

Oh, that was it. Yeah, that was 2005. Yeah. That was right around the time Idiocracy came out. Yeah, I was doing the – I was in the editing stages of it when I started watching that actually. It got me hooked. Yeah, it got everybody hooked. The finals with Stefan Bonner and Forrest Griffin was this insane fight that – during the fight, the amount of people increased substantially. That's what I've heard, yeah. Which was like people were calling people up and go, oh, my God, you got to watch Spike TV. Yeah, I was watching it. This fight is insane. Yeah, it was live on Spike. It wasn't a pay-per-view, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was live on Spike. It wasn't a pay-per-view. There were – there's no – I mean, nobody was really watching the UFC. I mean, there was pay-per-views that were still on. I think back then we were just on DirecTV. I don't know if we had gotten back on cable yet, but it just wasn't that popular. Were you on – you were commentating at that point? I started commentating a couple years before that. I was commentating in 2002. That's when I started. Oh, wow. Well, I actually started in 97. I was the post-fight interviewer. Oh, really? Yeah, I did that for a couple years. Way back then. That was in like UFC 12 was the first one that I did. It was in Dothan, Alabama. We had a fly-in and a puddle jumper play. Oh, I've seen that one, I think. And that was – Vitor Belfort made his debut, and he knocked out Trey Tellegman and Scott Ferrozo to win the tournament. It was the early, early, early days. You could wear shoes back then.

It was a completely different sport. Oh, right. You look at those old ones wearing shoes. Yeah. You could still pull clothes. People are pulling ponytails. Uh-huh. You used to be able to punch people in the nuts. There was a lot of crazy shit that you could get away with back then. But it was a different world. And I did it for a little while, but I thought it was like a novelty. And it was something that I – as a martial artist, the question was always like, what would happen if a judo guy fought a karate guy? So the UFC came along, and they said, let's see. And so for me, it was exciting just to be there and watch. And I was always a fan of it and a lot of the Japanese organizations. And then it was just – I was losing money doing it, and so I quit. And so then I got on Fear Factor, and I would go to – once the UFC was purchased by Zufa, the Fertitta brothers and Dana White, I would go to watch the fights in Vegas. And I became friends with those guys, and they would get me ringside tickets, and I would say, hey, why don't you – do you know about this guy who's fighting in Japan? Do you know about this guy from Russia? And they would go, hey, you want to do commentary? I was like, no, I don't want to do commentary. I just want to watch fights. Like, I want to do it. Yeah, you're the voice of it now, though. It's crazy. It's all because of Dana. Dana talked me into it 20 years ago. Wow. And that's the story.

All right, so Beavis and Butthead, it's out when? What is the date it's out? Let me get this right. June 23rd. June 23rd. Okay, so we'll release this. Paramount Plus. We'll release this the day comes out so that it juices it out. Look at that. Beavis and Butthead do the universe. I'm fucking very excited. Very excited to see this. Streaming June 23rd, and what's it on? Paramount Plus. Yeah, another, and then it's where Yellowstone is. Oh, okay, cool. And then the new episodes come right after that. There's episodes where they're old. Yeah, if you click on that one, we're doing a little spinoff where they're middle-aged. How many episodes do you guys do? There's going to be 24, but there's two in each half hour like it used to be. Oh, nice. They're going to be watching TikTok videos and music videos and all kinds of stuff. And when is that going to come out? When does the series do? August. I think first week of August. Fantastic.

Yeah. Mike, thank you very much for coming in here, man. I'm a giant fan of everything you've done. Thank you. You're awesome. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Anytime. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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