Be the hero of your own story.
The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.
["Faggot"] is a great word! The whole thing about language is, it's supposed to be broadcasting your intentions. These are my intentions and these words broadcast my feelings. If all of a sudden you have forbidden words that doesn't make the intent any better. It's just appeasing sensitive people.
If you're dumb enough to do crack, you're supposed to die. It's evolution.
My act is so completely and totally uncensored that the only way I could really pull it off is if I treat the audience like they're my best friends.
It's a weird experience when you're just trying to talk openly about how you think psychedelic drugs and marijuana are beneficial, or a lot of different drugs, especially plant-based ones, can be beneficial. Especially those ones that have some connection to organic life, I feel like you can learn something from them, from mushrooms, from peyote, from marijuana. They can be used as a tool.
I had seen movies before that that had made me laugh, but I had never seen anything even remotely close to as funny as Richard Pryor was, just standing there talking.
Choose To Be Inspired.
This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem, and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem.
Teaching someone that doesn't know something forces you to think about almost every single aspect of it, including parts of it that you could sort of take for granted.
The people I know that have the hardest time keeping it together emotionally are people that don't workout.
Like if you all were going to go out and one guy's like "you know what man I'm going to stay home I'm feeling kind of shitty," you go, "You faggot." That's what it means. It's about a guy wimping out, being a douchebag...it has nothing to do with your sexual orientation.
When a ball goes into a net it only means something because we decided it means something. When somebody punches somebody in the face it always means something.
You're sort of programmed a certain way because of your environment. That's all you know. But we don't have that anymore because of the internet. Because of the internet we're all communicating with each other all across the board, so you're getting information from people all around the world, hitting a much more diverse slice of culture.
A lot of times, you beat a person who beat a person who can beat you. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
I want to make sure that everything that I'm creating, I'm creating it so other people get enjoyment out of it. And that's the reward that you get for that.
After this whole acting thing is over and done, you eventually have to be human. Some people are never human. It's very weird.
The number one reason why marijuana is illegal is because the Pharma Cartel does not want you to grow your own medicine. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. The first car ever made ran on hemp oil. Hemp seeds are also the healthiest food on the planet with the highest protein content out of any plant.
I brought something back from those experiences [with drugs] which made me softer, open to other ideas. And I've learned from listening to other people talk about their experiences, from listening to Bill Hicks or reading Terrence McKenna or Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. But there's always some dumb cop out there who says "We don't need another legal drug and there's psychological addiction and blah blah blah."
The beautiful thing about podcasting is it's just talking. It can be funny, or it can be terrifying. It can be sweet. It can be obnoxious. It almost has no definitive form. In that sense it's one of the best ways to explore an idea, and certainly much less limiting than trying to express the same idea in stand up comedy. For some ideas stand up is best, but it's really, really nice to have podcasts as well.
Peter Joseph is asking the questions and proposing the possible solutions that we should be demanding from the elected leaders of this crazy world. His brilliant analysis of this ridiculous system we're operating under is one of the most important voices for change in this generation.
The planet's spinning a thousand miles an hour around this gigantic nuclear explosion while these people roll these machines with rubber tires over this hard surface that we've laid down over the planet so that we can easily move ourselves back and forth.
The audience changes every night. You're the same person. You have to speak your mind and do the stuff that you think is funny and makes you laugh.
I think comedy because of the Internet it has a bigger audience, a bigger fan base. It has fans that understand comedy more than any generation before because there is more guys like you, more guys like me, more guys like Louie CK who talks about it a lot. When you get a chance to see perspective that I don't think you ever got to see before.
As a longtime practitioner of yoga and a person who's been involved in physical fitness my whole life, I can tell you, yoga helps you achieve altered states of consciousness. It is not just stretching. The only way you can say that it's stretching is if you haven't done it, or that you haven't done it rigorously for a long period of time.
If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.
People say you can abuse marijuana. You can abuse cheeseburgers. Does that mean we should close Burger Kings.
I think it would do a lot of people good just to realize how vulnerable they are.
I'm really happy that I've been able to make people laugh and distract them from their day to day bullshit at a comedy show or because they enjoyed one of my CDs or TV specials, but I don't know how many people have actually had life changing thoughts because of it.
Having the privilege of sitting down and having 3 hour long uninterrupted conversations with hundreds of brilliant people is an awesome perspective enhancer.
I think that one of the reasons why people look towards the end of humanity is that people are afraid to die alone. If you die alone, the people you love will miss you, or if they die, you miss them - the sorrow is inevitable. When you truly love someone, the thought of losing them forever is horrible.
Our entire civilization is built on a foundation of unfixable bullshit.
I definitely had one guy come up to me and ask if I knew where to get DMT. He had a crewcut and he didn't look like he'd ever done a drug in his life. He didn't seem curious he seemed like he wanted to get me to do something. Like "You're the laziest narc ever dude. This is ridiculous. What, do you think I bring drugs around with me? Are you retarded? Why don't you go find gangsters?"
Cities are natural, that's why they're everywhere. It's not like there's only one city, and everybody's like 'What the f**k is this?' No, cities are all over the place. They're natural. You know what's not natural? You, in the middle of the mountains, in the middle of the winter.
I'll go to church with anyone who's willing to smoke pot and look through a telescope with me.
No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We're designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory.
We live in a society that makes it really easy for these pussies to get by.
I thought eventually I'd have a family and I really didn't want to be a loser like that guy in his 40s still shopping his band's shitty demo tapes around.
People are scared man, they're scared of the void.
There's only 2 reasons that you hate gay marriage; 1. You're dumb, or 2. You're secretly worried that dicks are delicious.
Every single religion that has ever been on the face of the Earth, ever, is a cult. That’s all they are.
I was like, "This is a new thing that the gay people have decided? That's the gayest thing I've ever heard in my life." You can't do that. You can't decide that a word is forbidden now collectively amongst your group of human beings, that the word is a slanderous evil nasty word about homosexuals. It's not, the word doesn't mean that. And sometimes it's a good word to use in comedy. That's what your friend has to realize when he's at a bar just yelling out the word.
Martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential.
The key to happiness doesn't lay in numbers in a bank account but in the way we make others feel.
Kindness is one of the best gifts you can bestow... We know that inherently that feels great.
Aspire to be the man you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid.
Someone else's success does not equal a failure for you.
For many people the reason why they're idiots is not necessarily that their brain doesn't work well, it's that they got in a terrible pattern.
It never hurt Lenny Bruce's career to get arrested for swearing. It did back in the time, but he broke those doors down by doing the stuff that he believed in.
Not all comedy clubs or situations are ideal, especially when you're first coming up and I think that's good for you. Eventually you get to express your real personality.
A comic, all they have to do is, if you do something funny in a comedy club and you put it up on you tube, it might get a million hits! All it needs to do is resonate with one person who sends it to their friends, who sends it to other people, and before you know it, it has spread virally and BOOM! All of a sudden that person has a name.
Never stay in a bad marriage, and don't hang around with psycho coke fiends.
I love existing in pre big bang conditions.
The sensory deprivation chamber has been the most important tool that I've ever used for developing my mind
On my left knee I have a long scar from an ACL operation. I've had both knees reconstructed.
No girl wants a secretly gay boyfriend, every dude wants a secretly gay girlfriend.
Faith itself is a horrible mechanism that stunts the growth of ideas. It also stunts the act of questioning, and it does this by pushing the idea that you have to have faith - and that nothing has to be proven.
You want to talk about the word faggot because it really offends you? Well you're a douchebag.
A unicorn is a donkey from the future
One of the things that happened is I did a lot of shitty gigs. When you do a bunch of shitty bar gigs you have to get used to people yelling at you, you're used to thinking on the fly, to dealing with weird situations.
I realized a long time ago that instead of being jealous you can be inspired and appreciative. It carries more energy to you.
If you attach your mind to any ideology, you're going to be on a road, and that road may or may not lead you in a good direction. But you're gonna stay on that road because you are attached to an ideology. It could be a terrible road, but you stick with it regardless of rational thinking.
To really appreciate life you got to know you're going to die.
If you haven't peed the bed, you haven't taken enough chances.
For those that have said I seemed dickish to some of the nuttier guests on Joe Rogan Questions Everything - guilty as charged. As the season wore on I lost my patience with some of those folks unfortunately. I think I overdosed on ridiculous/likely fake stories. I certainly learned a lot about the kind of people that invest a large portion of their life on fringe subjects - they're all white. I think there's something interesting about the subjects, (UFOS, etc) but the study of them has often been overrun by silly thinking.
You could smell my ass from mars.
The two things I understand best are stand-up comedy and martial arts. And those things require an ultimate grasp of the truth. You have to be objective about your skills and abilities to compete in both.
I do cagefight commentary in my spare time.
You can't measure what's inside a man's heart.
The mind is the most important thing of the big picture and no one has a stronger mindset than amateur wrestlers.
If you are the greatest, why would you go around talking about it?
The people who could most benefit from the self-reflective ego-dissolving qualities of cannabis are the ones that want it to be illegal.
There's a very famous Miyamoto Musashi quote. "Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things." The idea is once you understand what excellence is all about, whether it's in painting, or carpentry or martial arts, that you see how that excellence manifests itself in any discipline. I think that all the different things that I do enhance all the other things that I do.
Excellence in anything increases your potential in everything.
I realized a long time ago that instead of being jealous you can be inspired and appreciative. It carries more energy to you... That can be an awesome motivating force that can improve your life if you choose to be inspired and not jealous. One (being jealous) has no benefit whatsoever, the other is an incredible resource for creating momentum and improvement.
It's a very strange thing when you make nature illegal.
In order to be truly great at something you have to give into a certain amount of madness.
People love to see people fall.
Comedy is a funny thing, and it's really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.
Build confidence and momentum with each good decision you make from here on out and choose to be inspired.
Live your life like you're the hero in your movie and right now.
Haters...are all failures. It's 100% across the board. No one who is truly brilliant at anything is a hater.
You're just part of the soup of the universe, so just try to enjoy what's good about it.
One of the great things about Houston is that they police themselves. It's the way Boston was in the '80s. No hacks or thieves are tolerated in the community, and that's HUGE.
That's my only goal. Surround myself with funny people, and make sure everyone has a good time and works hard.
If life wasn't real it would be the craziest psychedelic trip ever
I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.
One of the most fascinating lessons I've absorbed about life is that the struggle is good.
I don't really like actors. Actors are like terrible comedians with no punch lines. It's all about them. They talk about themselves all the time. They bore the sh - t out of you.
The Universe rewards calculated risk and passion
Life is strange. You keep moving and keep growing. Before you know it, you look back and think, "What was that?"
By putting yourself in that intense form of stress, it makes regular life more peaceful.
I wouldn't totally rule out doing Letterman or the Tonight Show if I had a set that I just happened to write that I thought was funny but was still appropriate for network censors. But I'm not going to go out of my way.
You are one miniscule piece of a never-ending cycle. In fact, you're not even a piece. You're just a holder for billions and billions of other pieces. Whether that's organic components, living organisms inside your body, bacteria or whatever it is, you're just part of the soup of the universe, so just try to enjoy what's good about it.
There's a never-ending ocean of techniques out there.
When you're jealous, especially of someone else's art or creations you automatically put up these selfish walls that reinforce your stupid ideas. It's hard to pull those walls down and look at what you're hiding. Look at your own weakness and realize that the jealousy came from knowing that you're intimidated by someone else's work, and that when you compare it to your own, you fall short.
I don't know much about the music business, but for just general advice for someone trying to create things, as simple as this sounds, I think the best thing you can do is constantly try to improve upon your work. Always focus on that first and foremost, and leave everything else (marketing, image) completely secondary. Obviously, easier said than done when you're trying to make a living, but if you can move along those lines and earnestly try to make things that you really enjoy it can only benefit you in the long run.
It's been one of the most important tools for me in personal growth for understanding myself, how I am, and what effect I do have on other people.
If you can lie, you can act, and if you can lie to crazy girlfriends, you can act under pressure.
I had a great time on News Radio, I got to make tons of money in relative obscurity and learn a lot about the TV biz and work on my standup act constantly. It was a dream gig.
There's a direct correlation between positive energy and positive results.
What's interesting about science is that we're constantly discovering new things about the universe, about ourselves, about our bodies, about diseases, about the possibilities of the future. It's amazing. Science is one of the coolest things about being a human being - without a doubt.
Selling your life to sit in a box and work for a machine. An uncaring machine that demands productivity that doesn't understand you and doesn't want to understand you... There's no natural behaviour. Everyone is wearing clothes they don't want to wear. Everybody is showing up and doing something they don't want to do. They have no connection to it. That's the problem with our society.
The quicker we all realize that we've been taught how to live life by people that were operating on the momentum of an ignorant past the quicker we can move to a global ethic of community that doesn't value invented borders or the monopolization of natural resources, but rather the goal of a happier more loving humanity.
Have you ever talked to someone, and you're not even really talking to them? Actors are the worst for that.
We have to start treating each other as if we are treating ourselves living another life.
There's a lot of people that I disagree with that I think I could have interesting conversations with. What I don't want to get into is manufactured conflict. I would much rather talk to someone like Dr. Rhonda Patrick or Randall Carlson and be mesmerized by information. I guess in a way that's selfish, or maybe not objective of me. The older (and hopefully wiser) I get the less interested I am in conflict. I don't mind disagreeing with people in a civil way, but I definitely don't want to go out of my way to have an argument unless it's a really important subject.
The only time I commit to conspiracy theories is when something way retarded happens. Like Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.
I've been inspired by a shitload of people in my life so if there's ever anybody that I can inspire, to me that's a huge gift. To be able to turn that back around.
Once you understand what excellence is all about... you see how that excellence manifests itself in any discipline.
The time you spend hating on someone robs you of your own time. You are literally hating on yourself and you don't even realize it.
People do always try to smoke pot with me. But I think some of those people are cops.
My company is called Talking Monkey, Inc. It's because that's what I think all people are: talking monkeys.
Greatness and madness are next door neighbours; and they borrow each other's sugar. You don't get there without the other.
When you're standing around for an hour doing stand up it's no big deal but when you're standing around watching a show for an hour - it's a big difference. It's annoying - your feet hurt, your back hurts - it's just not the most comfortable way to see stand-up comedy.
Most of my bits are long stream-of-consciousness- type things, and when I'm doing them onstage, other places to take the theme or idea will hit me, and I just go with it.
Like bees creating a beehive or ants creating an anthill we're all moving along creating something and we're not sure what it is.
If the world was an etch-a-sketch, glaciers are the big shake.
So instead of investing your time in a passion, you’ve sold your life to work for an uncaring machine that doesn’t understand you. That’s the problem with our society. And what’s the reward? Go home and get a big TV.
I always try to look at conflicts from as many different angles as is humanly possible, and in a lot of ways there is no one answer.
When someone comes along and expresses him or herself as freely as they think, people flock to it. They enjoy it.
We're constantly re-evaluating the potential for life. We're finding it where we didn't think it could exist, such as volcanic vents and other extreme conditions like under arctic ice. We're finding life in these incredibly harsh and dynamic conditions, so we're having to re-evaluate our own ideas of what's possible on this planet alone.
Maybe we can combine 2 things that everybody loves. Helping out the poor and blow jobs.
Richard Pryor is, in my mind, the most honest comedian. He bared his soul to people. I think that's why everybody loved him so much.
Reality really is theater. There's no other way to describe it. It's all so nonsensical, ridiculous and chaotic.
