"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

"Most men live lives of quiet desperation," said Joe Rogan.

On the new episode of Duncan Trussell's podcast — audio and transcript here.

The guys were not talking about Henry David Thoreau. They were talking about men struggling to live with women. Here's the context (which begins at 00:57:11):

ROGAN: I had a buddy of mine who was an actor and he got this part, I think it was in a movie. It was good, you know, good little, small part. He was real excited and his girlfriend started crying and she said, when is something gonna happen for me?... That was her response....

TRUSSELL: Jesus, dude. That's so dark.

ROGAN: I think about that guy sometimes. 'cause I was, I was on a, a show with him, one day, just bit part on a show. And I was like, this guy's gonna be a movie star.... But I remember him telling me, he's like, she started crying, man.... She was crying saying, when is it gonna happen to me? So [he says] I don't know what to do. And I was like Captain Fucking Jettison — I'm Captain Fucking Pull the Parachutes — that's me.... So I was like, dude, you gotta bail out.... You gotta bail now. This one, you can't fix that girl....

TRUSSELL: That's so fucked up.

ROGAN: But she's pretty hot.... 

TRUSSELL: Dude, I wouldn't have bailed.

ROGAN: She had the heavies... she had natural heavies.

TRUSSELL: Natural heavies. It's worth it!

"Crazy thing that we still do as human beings. And the problem is, I don't see a way out of it because terrorists are real."

"Criminals are real bad. People are real. This is the world we're living in. Unless you take mushrooms, we gotta get mushrooms legal for the entire country, the whole country and just force them down. Everybody's throat, force people to do mushrooms do it for everyone else."

Said Joe Rogan, an hour into his 3-hour podcast with Duncan Trussell.

The "crazy thing" under discussion was war and "any kind of violence — like stabbing your neighbor."

The question whether the category "any kind of violence" includes forcing drugs down "everybody's throat" was not noticed by Rogan or Trussell. Obviously, the answer is yes. Note the incoherence: If "mushrooms" were the cure to violence, someone who's had the cure would not recommend violence.

I wanted to add a note about the decades old idea of putting LSD in the water supply and googled "plan to put lsd in the water." I was thinking about hippies, but my screen filled up with items about the CIA. I'll just link to this BBC article from 2010: "Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD?"

"The History of Lobotomies and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

 

At 1:02: Duncan Trussell starts talking about "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" — "It's completely different from the movie... Ken Kesey, he was like..." — and Joe Rogan, who'd just said he read the book, blurts out: "Ken Kesey wrote it?!" Trussell lets that go and proceeds to put the story, as told in the book, into his own words.

At 3:22: Duncan and Joe discuss the real-world medical practice of lobotomies: "They really did that"/"They really did that.... What happened to the person? 'They became a really good patient.'"

At 4:45: Duncan and Joe discuss Thomas Eagleton and electroshock therapy for depression. "Today, in this victimhood society, if you said he suffered from clinical depression but he sought help, [he]'d be a shining example: Look at him!... He's a hero!"

"Maybe we shouldn't give charismatic people recommending various forms of genocide or apocalypse or self-negation or whatever — maybe you shouldn't give them a bullhorn that can reach the entire planet in a second."

"You should be at least allowed to have that thought — right? — like: shit, I don't know if that's the right thing to do. You know what I mean? If you saw a very charismatic dude in a park making a very convincing argument for why everyone on the planet should kill themselves, you wouldn't be like: hey, man, do you mind if I project you into the homes of everyone on the planet, so they hear your message?"

"So, if you have no censorship, that is what's possible."

"So, from compassion — from wanting our kids to be safe and us to be safe — there's this this thing that sounds like censorship — which it is — but the problem is just what you're saying, which is: Okay, let's do it. You're right! I don't want that weirdo, who's so charismatic, that if I listen to him just for a few minutes, I'll be like: You know what, maybe I should cut my dick off. Whatever the fuck. I don't want that guy talking to everybody."

"That was the Heaven's Gate guy that castrated those dudes."

"They sure did. They did. That was part of the thing. You gotta cut your dick off to get on the spaceship."

"Just your balls. I think you've just got to cut off your balls."

"Oh, just your balls. Whew. I misheard him. That's good news."

***

That's from the Joe Rogan podcast, Episode #1806 — with Duncan Trussell. I did the transcription of the discussion that begins at 1:26:56. As you can infer, they've been talking about the problem of censorship on Twitter. The one doing most of the talking is Trussell. I've put Joe's contributions in italics.

Here's a video to sharpen your memory of Heaven's Gate: 

 

"So take a closer look... Do you notice anything about them? Their haircuts, exactly alike. Baggy clothes. No gender. And with every move, they fix their adoring gaze on one man in the room. They call him Do...."

To what extent do we want free speech when the speech shoots instantly everywhere? Joe and Duncan don't mention this, but Elon Musk is a charismatic guy. With a spaceship.

"There’s something quietly disconcerting about the mix of whale music pumped into the pod and the vaguely medical scent of the floatation solution...."

"The liquid was just over a foot deep and heated to what I assume is body temperature.... Moving my limbs was about the only entertainment. Occasionally a shimmer of something passed across my eyes. Hallucinations, but nothing revelatory. Then, from beneath me, I heard a low rumble. Just the muffled clattering of the Victoria line. Once I recognised it, it proved a comforting sound.... I emerged with a feeling of almost artificial serenity, as if someone had dialled down the radio in my brain. I returned into the Vauxhall evening, to join my fellow earthlings."

From "My strange night in a sensory deprivation tank" by Gus Carter (The Spectator). 

Actually, it didn't seem strange at all. The article caught my eye — and grabbed the 3rd of my 3 free monthly reads in The Spectator — because I was just listening to an old Joe Rogan podcast where there was discussion of a sensory deprivation tank.

 

It's an especially interesting topic to me because many years ago when I was a law clerk in federal court I worked on a copyright case about the book "Altered States."

"What's that thing, I think, Voltaire said — 'Not that I should succeed, but that my friends should fail'?"

Said Duncan Trussell, near the end of a new 3-hour Joe Rogan podcast. 

Voltaire?! 

I love Duncan Trussell, who is also, and very obviously, Joe Rogan's favorite guest, but I think he's got the attribution wrong. 

I associate it with Gore Vidal, but in the form "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail." No friends in that picture. 

But Quote Investigator looked into a set of similar quotes, one of which was "It is not enough to succeed; one’s friends must fail."

I think it's better without dragging the friend relationship into the concept, but the oldest appearance of the approximate idea was: "Now that I’ve grown old, I realize that for most of us it is not enough to have achieved personal success. One’s best friend must also have failed." 

That's Somerset Maugham (quoted in 1959). There's an older appearance if you count this as the same thing: "In the misfortune of our best friends, we always find something which is not displeasing to us." That's La Rochefoucauld (in the 17th century). He also said, "We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others." 

Gore Vidal's name comes up in a 1973 NYT article by Wilfrid Sheed. Vidal is quoted saying "Every time a friend succeeds I die a little," and then Sheed goes on to credit La Rochefoucauld for the quote, "it is not enough to succeed; a friend must also fail." 

The first use of the form that I think is best — "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail" — comes from Iris Murdoch in 1973.

Anyway, leave Voltaire out of it. He wouldn't say that. Would he?

IN THE EMAIL: 2 readers — policraticus and dksd — independently thought of this New Yorker cartoon by Leo Callum (from 1997):

I like this TV show "Midnight Gospel."

 

Here's Duncan Trussell talking to Joe Rogan about it: