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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:51 - Tim Dillon's tombstone
3:46 - The horrible people are the most fun
7:57 - Charles Bukowski
13:37 - Robots
16:46 - YouTube algorithm
22:54 - Parler and Amazon
27:23 - Social media
29:59 - Alex Jones
48:33 - OJ Simpson
53:12 - Politics
59:43 - Donald Trump
1:06:59 - Humor
1:14:35 - QAnon
1:21:04 - Conspiracy theories
1:26:41 - Bill Gates
1:29:10 - Elon Musk
1:31:26 - Jeffrey Epstein
1:34:05 - Ghislaine Maxwell
1:41:46 - Greatest comedians of all time
1:51:44 - Love
1:55:15 - Fear
1:58:29 - Mom
2:02:00 - Mortality
2:04:04 - Advice for young people
2:10:38 - Moving to Austin
2:18:30 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Tim Dillon, a standup comedian who is fearless in challenging the norms of modern day social and political discourse.

Quick mention of our sponsors, NetSuite Business Management Software, Athletic Greens All-in-One Nutrition Drink, Magic Spoon Low Carb cereal, BetterHelp online therapy, and Rev speech-to-text service.

So the choice is business, health, sanity, or transcripts.

And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount at the support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I will continue talking to scientists, engineers, historians, mathematicians, and so on.

But I will also talk to the people who Jack Kerouac called the mad ones in his book, On the Road, that is 1 of my favorite books.

He wrote, the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

And in the middle, you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, ah.

Some of these conversations will be a bit of a gamble in that I have no idea how they will turn out.

But I'm willing to risk it for a chance at a bit of an adventure.

And I'm happy and honored that Tim, this time, wanted to take a chance as well.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Tim Dillon.

What would you like your tombstone to read?

It's a good way to summarize the essence of a human being.

I would like it to say, this has not been paid for.

And I want my living relatives to struggle to pay for it.

And I think I would like them to be hounded every day.

I would like people to call and go, listen, we don't wanna ever excavate a body, but we will because this has not been paid for.

I love the idea of leaving the world, like debt, leaving the world in lots of debt that other people have to deal with.

I know people that have been in families where that's happened, where someone has to sit and just curse the sky because they don't have a physical person anymore to be angry at, and they, but they still have to deal with the decisions that person made, and that's deeply tragic, but that's always struck me as very funny.

Well, it's a kind of an immortality, the debt.

Because you can, if the debt lasts for a long time, the anger lasts for a long time, and then you're now immortal in the minds of many.

My mother's best friend in the town I grew up in, her husband shot himself in the driveway.

And my mother's friend never got a chance to just grieve because he owed so much money, she would come over and go, I hate him.

And it was just such an interesting thing to see somebody who, and her kids ended up getting angry at her for that because they didn't understand why she would hate a guy who was clearly suffering.

But she goes, he took the selfish way out.

And it was always interesting for me to just remember that you can leave Earth and still be a problem.

So that's, I think, what I'd like my tombstone to read.

Yeah, there's a show called Louis, with Louis C.K.

There's this moment, I think, where an old guy's talking to Louis about the best part about love is after you break up and it's remembering that, like remembering the good times and feeling that loss, the pain of that loss.

The worst part about love is when you no longer feel that pain.

So the pain of losing somebody lasts longer, is more intense and lasts longer than the actual love.

So his argument was like the pain is what love really is.

In the same way that anger, your tombstone, what arouses is, will last longer.

Like why do we attach happiness to the way we should remember others?

I know so many people who will have deeply complicated feelings when, I did drugs for many years, so and I spent time with some wild people and their parents were also wild people and some of their parents have done crazy things to them and have created situations that were not productive for child rearing.

And so I know that when those people die, it's going to be a very mixed bag.

Like there's going to be a lot of complex emotions, like, hey, we loved that guy, but also when we look back, he was a horrible father, a horrible husband, but he was fun.

And we don't put enough stock in that, but there will be a push and pull.

And I'll be the 1 kind of bringing up like, hey, he was a lot of fun.

He was a lot, remember when he stuck us, 1 of the things, this particular person I'm talking about, we were at a bar, me and my friend were there, we're having dinner, and his father, who was an alcoholic, and a guy that would go out every night and didn't work, refused to work, would lie and say he was going to work and then go to a bar.

And we were sitting at this bar restaurant And the bartender, we see his father walk up to the bartender and say, point at us, point at our table and go and put the thumbs up.

And then the father walked over to our table and he said, listen, I just want to let you know, I just bought you dinner.

And I looked at his son, I said, he's a pretty good guy.

And then he climbed over the little fence down to the water and got in his little boat, it was a little cigarette boat and he just drove away.

And then about an hour later, we went and we said, I think that guy took care of the bill.

But she said, well, go talk to the bartender.

So we talked to the bartender and he goes, he handed us a bill, and the bill was for like $1,000.

And we said, wait a minute, what the hell's going on?

And he goes, the guy that left an hour ago said you were gonna take care of his bill, he's been drinking here all week.

And he goes, remember he pointed at you, he put the thumbs up and you guys waved.

And the guy goes, and we went, yeah, and I just looked at my friends, my friend and I went, you know, your dad is just, we're gonna remember him for all kinds of reasons.

He wasn't my dad, but I spent a lot of time with him.

Yes, he was usually alcohol was involved when he left his house and when he was at home as well.

And do you know how fun someone has to be to get in a second boating accident?

Do you know what a good time someone has to be to get in a boat with them after you've already gotten in 1 wreck?

If you're getting fooled again, you know, there's a reason for it.

The second voting accident, he grabbed me and said, you can't hang out with me anymore.

And I was like, oh, and then I understood that like all of the fun under the fun lived a very destructive person who not only was destructive but wanted to die.

So speaking of fun people that wanna die, I don't know if you're, we can go Hunter S.

Thompson, but Charles Bukowski, I don't know if you're aware of the guy.

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

So his tombstone says, I just wanted to ask you a question about it.

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

I think for many people it's a good advice.

Because the people that are gonna try will do anyway.

And the people that need to be told, there's a whole cottage industry now of motivational speakers and life coaches and gurus that tell people that they all have to own their own business and be their own boss and be a disruptor and get into industries.

That's incredibly unrealistic for most people.

And the Gary V's of the world that tell everybody that they should just hustle and grind and hustle and grind, they're very light on the specifics of what they should actually do.

Yeah, I think a lot of people, that's not horrible advice to give to a lot of people.

I think my generation got horrible advice from our parents, from our teachers, and that advice was follow your dreams.

Can you follow, anybody who follow your dreams, you can be anything you wanna be.

Worst advice you could ever give a generation of people.

If you were talking to somebody and you were trying to make them succeed, are there any 2 worse pieces of advice to give them than follow your dreams and you can be anything you want to be.

Those to me are the 2 most destructive pieces of information I've ever heard.

So yeah, this is like a rigorous journalistic interview.

Larry King, by the way, passed away today.

Oh, let me push back on the follow your dream thing.

I come from an immigrant family where I was always working extremely hard at stuff, like in a stupid way.

There's something about me that loves hitting my head against the wall over and over and over until either my head breaks or the wall breaks.

Just like, I love that dedication for no purpose whatsoever.

It's like the mouse that's stuck in a cage or whatever.

And everybody always told me, my family, the people around me, the sort of, the epitome of what I could achieve is to be kind of a stable job, you know, the old like lawyer, doctor, in my case it's like scientist and so on.

But I had these dreams, I had this fire, you know, about, I love robots.

And that nobody ever gave me permission to pursue those dreams.

I know you're supposed to grab it yourself.

Nobody's supposed to give you permission, but there's something about just people saying, you know, fuck what everyone else thinks.

Like giving you permission, a parent or somebody like that saying, do your own thing, go become an actor, go become like, do the crazy thing you're not supposed to do, an artist, go build a company, quit school, all that kind of stuff.

That's the pushback against the follow your dreams as a as

If you were to look at in mass, if you were to look at statistically how few people that works out for, I'm just no.

So I mean, like, yeah, if you're gonna go be an actor, hey, I was broke for 10 years before I became a, before I was making money as a comedian.

I didn't need Gary Vaynerchuk to tell me to follow my thing, right?

I was kind of funny and like, I was kind of, a lot of things were in my favor of being a comedian, right?

I would get on a stage night after night and be laughed at.

I had a high threshold for being embarrassed.

I had a high threshold for people thinking that I was a scumbag, right?

And showing up at family parties and being like, yeah, I still really don't have a job.

And I'm just, I work at comedy clubs kind of, and I get booked when I can.

There's this idea that people can just roam around the world injecting themselves into other things they have no aptitude for at all, and will that to happen?

A small percentage of people might be able to do that, but the vast majority of people have something they might key into that they're meant to do.

Like you loved robots, you love technology, and you found a place in that world where you thrive.

But I think many people, a lot of people love robots, right?

So a lot of people think everything you do is interesting.

I watch your podcast and I think it's very interesting.

Would you ever buy a robot for your home?

Oh yeah, I mean, I would like to start replacing friends and family with robots immediately.

Like, I would like to have a Thanksgiving with 4 robots.

Like, are the robots, when do the robots start going crazy?

That's my question is like, how long do the robots live with me before they are also a problem?

And I gotta replace them, you know what I mean?

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

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

Well, I'm concerned about AI like completely getting rid of the need for human beings because human beings, I mean, you go out in the street and you go, so few of these people are necessary.

Even now, even now you look at people and you go, they're hanging on by a thread, right?

And you can just imagine how many jobs are gonna get replaced, how many industries are going to be completely remade with AI, and the pace of change worries me a little bit because we do a very bad job in this country of mitigation when we have problems.

We did a not great job with COVID, right?

And we're actually, we kind of know how to kind of like, hey, we're bottomed out.

We're like a gambling addict in this country.

We know what it feels like to be outside of an OTB at 9am drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes going, I'm going to build it back.

But anything in between, it seems not that great.

So to me, it feels like, are we gonna be able to like, help people that are displaced and that have their jobs taken by, I mean, do you not fear sort of a world where you have a lot of, you know, artificial intelligence replacing workers and then what happens?

There's a lot of fears around artificial intelligence.

1 of them is yes, displacement of jobs, workers.

That's just any kind of new innovations displace jobs.

I'm more worried about other impacts of artificial intelligence.

For example, the nature of our discourse, like social, the effects of algorithms on the way we communicate with each other, the spread of information, what that information looks like, the creation of silos, all that kind of stuff.

I think that would just make worse the effects that the displacement of jobs has.

I think ultimately, I have a hope that technology creates more opportunities than it destroys.

And so in that sense, AI to me is an exciting possibility.

But the challenges this world presents will create divisions, will create chaos and so on.

So I'm more focused on the way we deal as a society with that chaos, the way we talk to each other.

Creating the platform that's healthy for that.

Now, as a comedian, creator, whatever you want to call it, people that put out content, the gatekeepers are now algorithmic, right?

So if you are a person that puts out YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever you're doing.

It used to be a guy in the back of the room with a cigar saying, I like you, or get him out of here.

Now it's an algorithm you barely understand.

Like I've talked to people at YouTube, but I don't know if they understand the algorithm.

Cause I speak to people at YouTube and I go, hey man, what's going on here?

1 of my episode titles of my podcast was called Knife fight in Malibu.

And it was because a realtor in Malibu, I was trying to get a summer rental, which I can't really afford, but I don't think that's a huge problem.

So I called a realtor and she said, She goes, I don't know what the government's saying, but she goes, it's a real knife fight out here.

You know, an old grizzled woman, real realtor, tan skin, cig out the mouth, driving a Porsche, you know, it's a real knife fight out here.

You know, her entire life had become real estate.

Her soul had been hollowed out, her kids hate her.

You know, no one's made her come in years, but it's just, she just loves heating kitchen floors and views, fun.

She's a demon from hell and we need them, truly.

We're getting rid of them, it's not good.

And she goes, it's a real knife fight out here.

And of course, I guess some algorithm thought that we were showing like people stabbing each other in Wendy's.

We lost a lot of views because we were kicked out of whatever out like we're just kicked out.

But even the people that work there didn't truly seem to understand the algorithm.

So can you explain to me how that works, where they barely know what's going on?

No, they do not understand the full dynamics of the monster or the amazing thing that they've created.

It's the amount of content that's being created is larger than anyone understands.

Like this is huge, they can't deal with it.

The teams aren't large enough to deal with it.

So if you fall into the category of special cases, we can maybe talk about that like a Donald Trump, where you actually have meetings about what to do with this particular account.

But everything outside of that is all algorithms.

They get reported by people, and they get, if enough people report a particular video, a particular tweet, it rises up to where humans look over it.

But the initial step of the reporting and the rising up to the human supervision is done by algorithm, and they don't understand the dynamics of that.

Because we're talking about billions of tweets, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of video uploaded every day.

Now, the hilarity of it is that most of the YouTube algorithm is based on the title.

And the description is a small contribution in terms of filtering, in terms of the knife fight situation.

They don't have algorithms at all that are able to process the content of the video.

So they try to also infer information based on if you're watching all of these QAnon videos or something like that, or Flat Earth videos, and you also watch, are really excitedly watching the whole knife fight in Malibu video, that says, that increases the chance that the knife fight is a dangerous video for society or something like that.

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

I watch these videos and I make fun of them on my show.

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

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

We have titles where they got upset about and I don't even understand.

Like we had a title that was so innocuous in my opinion, and the title of the episode was called Bomb Disney World.

And I was asking people to consider bombing Disney World, and YouTube got angry at that.

So you don't know why, You can never understand why.

you do it, but I was saying let's start thinking about plans to do, like not let's do it, but let's get in the mind.

I think it's very interesting because as a comedian, you don't wanna live in that world of worrying about algorithms.

You don't wanna worry about deplatforming and shadowbanning.

I mean, all these conversations that I've had with other comedians about shadowbanning, I mean, it's hilarious.

We all call each other, I think I'm being shadowbanned.

And nobody knew what that word was a month ago, I mean a year ago, but everyone now is convinced that everything they do that isn't succeeding is being shadow banned.

So it's this new paranoia, this algorithmic paranoia now that we all kind of have because there are genuine instances of people being taken out of an algorithm, you know, rightly or wrongly, for however you want to believe.

But then there are also things that just don't perform as well for a myriad of reasons.

And then we're all saying like, well, they're against me.

And you don't know if that's true or not.

What do you think about this moment in history, which was really troubling to me?

We could talk about several troubling aspects, but 1 is Amazon removing Parler from AWS.

To me, that was the most clearly troubling.

It felt like it created a more dangerous world when the infrastructure on which you have competing medium of communications now puts its finger on the scale, now influences who wins and who loses.

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

Or if you don't like something, you can do your own thing.

Or if you are, and basically because, you know, tech, you have to be in business with 1 of 5 companies.

I think it's like Amazon, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, whatever.

I mean, Amazon puts everything on the cloud.

Google and YouTube, it's all basically the SEO and the advertising, and you got to get your name out there.

Because you have to do business with those, it's a cartel of these companies, you understand it better than anybody, that you are prevented, truly.

And I think, whatever you think about Parler, whatever you think about what people are saying on Parler, whatever you think about Alex Jones, whatever you thought about Milianopolis, the state has an interest in, and has always had an interest in crushing dissent.

This is how they retain the power they have by eliminating dissent where they can.

Now, because you don't have 3 broadcast networks anymore and a handful of newspapers that were all run, by the way, by people that had been either compromised or happily going with the program, and you have this wild west of the internet, people like me, people that make, I make funny content that I hope is funny, but a lot of it is wild and crazy.

I say a lot of wild and crazy things, they're very funny.

lot of wild and crazy things, they're very funny.

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Tim Dillon: Comedy, Power, Conspiracy Theories, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #156