Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1801 - David Mamet
Uploaded: 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1801 - David Mamet' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-04-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1801 - David Mamet' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-04-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1801 - David Mamet

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
How are you, sir?
I'm great, happy to be back in the United States.
I've been in California for the last...
The People's Republic of California?
Yeah, exactly so.
Yeah, it's an interesting turn of events.
California has become a strange new place.
Yes, it has.
Almost unrecognizable.
Yes.
Well, it'd be recognizable to George Orwell.
Well, yeah, right?
Even he probably been like, wow.
He was probably...
If you could get George Orwell from, you know, the time he wrote 1980...
When did he write 84?
Oh, that's pretty good.
I don't know.
I think it was the late 40s.
We can look it up.
And then to see, you know, in 2022, he was in the neighborhood.
He definitely was pretty close.
He was off like 1.2%.
There it is, 49.
Yeah.
Wow, interesting.
You know, George Orwell said he was an interesting guy.
He was a cop in Burma.
He was a...
Really?
Yes.
He was a colonial cop, and then he was roused about, and he wrote Down and Out
in Paris
and London.
He was a bum.
And he said, when thought control comes, it will come not from the right, but
from the
left.
I wonder why he thought that.
Well, because he got around.
I mean, that guy had seen a huge bunch of life, and he looked at what things
were from every
angle, right?
He was a well-brought-up Englishman, and then he was a tramp and a dishwasher
and a cop, and
he saw it all.
He saw it clearly.
But it's when, classically, like when we think about depictions of totalitarianism
and authoritarianism, when I was a kid, we always thought of it as being a
right-wing thing.
It's like a, there was always like a right-wing dictator-type character that
imposed censorship and authoritarianism.
You didn't think of it as something that would be coming from the left.
Well, but, you know, who was Stalin?
Who was Trotsky and Lenin?
They're certainly the left.
Right.
And Pol Pot and all of the Chinese.
Also, if you look at the history of this country, that Woodrow Wilson imposed
strictures against talking about the war.
Anybody who talked about the war and said anything that could be construed as
unfavorable was thrown in prison.
Really?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
A lot of people were thrown in prison.
A lot of people had their businesses wrecked.
What year was this?
Wilson would be 1917.
Wow.
1917, 1918.
They were throwing people in jail.
Yes, they were.
For talking badly about World War I.
Yes.
And then, of course, Roosevelt did the same thing.
Really?
Yeah, sure.
And also, he tossed all the Japanese Americans in prison.
Right.
He said, go into a concentration camp.
By the way, all of our loyal German Americans in New York and Yorkville, we're
going to leave them alone because they're white.
Meanwhile, Yorkville, New York and Baltimore were full of Nazi spies.
They were – you could see the shipping being torpedoed from the beach at Coney
Island because they were giving away all that information.
So, the left has always believed – the idea of fascism means a bundle,
everything's together, everything's for the state, nothing against the state,
nothing outside of the state, as Mussolini said.
And with the exception of those particular fascists, the Nazis, it's always
been the left because they don't believe in the individual.
So, you think that that's the root cause of it, not believing in the individual,
believing in the collective, that that automatically lends itself to erasing
individual rights?
Yes.
I mean, it also goes back to the – to the enlightenment, to the idea that God
doesn't exist and the idea that the human being is the measure of all things.
Well, if the human being is the measure of all things, what does that mean?
Our reason.
And our reason is completely flawed.
All of us do things every day which are unreasonable, sinful, wrong, and absurd.
Right?
And the reasonable person says, wait a second, why did I do that?
What do I have to refer to in my confusion and my self-loathing?
Well, the Bible was a pretty good bet, you know, for the Hebrew Bible for 6,000
years, right?
The Canadian Christian Bible for 2,000 – it's a pretty good bet.
Say, wait a second, let's talk about human nature.
You really aren't that smart.
You really aren't in charge of the world.
You really aren't.
Although you think you are, you think that because you're human.
But God's in charge of the world and there's a certain way things are and if
you'd like to get out of your wretched self-consciousness and self-delusion,
you better get your ass into church.
But don't you think that, you know, when atheists talk about religion and they
criticize organized religion and criticize the Bible, they talk about things
that are in the Bible that seem preposterous, right?
They talk about people rising from the dead and walking on water, particularly
the Old Testament, right?
Like, to use that as a guidebook for life, you have to kind of ignore some of
the stuff that doesn't make sense.
Well, the Bible's a myth, okay?
The Bible, especially the Christian Bible comes out of the Jewish Bible.
It's a retelling of the story in a different way.
But the Jewish Bible is a myth and the myth is the myth of creation and the
myth of human experience.
So what it does is chapter by chapter, story by story, it challenges us with
disturbing and bizarre images.
And it says, why don't you try to understand this?
See if you can understand this.
What does it really mean to escape from Egypt?
Does it mean escaping from your inner Pharaoh?
What does it really mean to part the Red Sea?
So these stories are told, any myth is a dramatic retelling of an underlying
reality that can't be expressed rationally, right?
So the atheists say everything can be expressed rationally.
For example, you know that the earth is burning up.
You can tell that because sometimes things get warmer and sometimes things get
colder.
You can also tell that when things get colder, that's obviously because the
earth is burning up, because the sun is melting the glaciers and the glaciers
are raising the temperature.
You can also tell, of course, that to be fair to everyone, children change sex.
You know that, don't you?
And you can tell that men can compete as women and women compete as men.
This is all human confusion because we trust our senses and we trust our mind
and the mind just, it doesn't work real good.
We're very cunning, but we aren't very smart human beings.
And that's the message of the Bible.
And so if you look at Moses, sorry, Moses, Moses was, they tried to, the
Egyptians tried to kill him all of his life.
The Egyptians tried to kill him.
He didn't have any trouble with the Egyptians because God was on his side.
He had trouble with the Jews because the Jews were always saying, who the hell
do you think you are?
So that's, that all, the Old Testament is the story of atheists really saying,
who the hell do you think you are?
So when, when you're talking about the Bible, right?
What, I mean, and the lessons in the Bible, isn't part of the problem is that
you're, people translated it from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek and all
these other languages.
And eventually to English, like a lot's lost along the way, right?
And a lot is open to interpretation.
Like a lot of what we're talking about in these myths and stories that people
take as factual occurrences, they probably were some sort of a, there's some
sort of a lesson in the myth, some sort of allegory.
There's, there's, there's things about these stories that probably have hints
of truth, but isn't it hard to kind of decipher it all?
If you can't speak the mother language?
That's a very good question.
So I want to, first of all, let me ask you, okay, I'm going to tell you a story,
okay?
Okay.
These two octopuses walk into a laundromat.
Okay.
See, that's what a myth is.
I said two octopuses walk into a laundromat and you didn't say, wait a second,
octopuses can't walk and they wouldn't be in a laundromat.
Well, I thought about it, but I'm being polite.
So what you said is, yeah, tell me more.
Okay.
I'm hoping it's a good joke.
Okay.
Well, I'll get to that.
But it's the same thing with the, the Bible is really two octopuses walk into a
laundromat and say, I'm going to tell you a story.
I want you to suspend your disbelief because there's something in this story
you might get a kick out of.
You might, and you might, there might be some wisdom in it.
There might be yes and might no, but if you listen as you would to a story,
which the Bible is, it's a myth, rather than to a factual retelling, you might
get a kick out of it.
Now, as far as a translation goes, I can read the Bible in Hebrew.
I started learning when I was 40.
It's an easy language.
And there are a lot of mistranslations, but the main point is not the mistranslations
because there are some pretty good English translations too.
But the main point is saying that doesn't make sense.
That doesn't make sense.
So what do you think the Bible is?
Do you think the Bible is a bunch of very wise people got together and they
formed these stories to sort of illustrate the folly of mankind and how one
needs to have like a moral compass and guiding principles that are set in stone
and that you have these rules to live your life in a moral and just way.
And that will make for a better society.
Like, what do you think the Bible actually is?
Well, a friend of mine, a rabbi was a reformed rabbi was applying to get into
an Orthodox yeshiva, an Orthodox college.
And he's a reformed rabbi.
So the guy says, he says, you have very good credentials and you're very well-learned.
Do you think the Bible is literally the work of God?
Rabbi says, no.
So the guy says, well, is it possible?
Rabbi says, yes.
Guy says, okay, you're in.
Right?
So Dennis Prager, you know, who I'm crazy about, said the other day, he said,
you know, I don't believe in the Torah, the Jewish Bible, because of God.
He said, I believe in God because of the Torah.
So if you read the Torah, the Jewish Bible, and the Christian Bible is just an
extension of that, you say, my God, this is incredible wisdom.
This goes back to the beginning of time.
People who've tried to figure out everything.
And they didn't have the language that we have, but they had the language that
they had.
And this was thousands of years of experience progressed and compressed into a
myth.
So we know that this is true because, like, liberals have always been in love
with the myths, especially Jews, with the myths of other cultures.
Right?
We say how beautiful it is that this culture has that myth.
That the Haydn Indians say the world was formed by a large beaver, and when the
beaver slapped his tail like that, it made the oceans, and when the blah, blah,
blah.
It's a gorgeous myth.
Nobody says of that myth, wait a second, you can't have a beaver that big.
Right?
That's what I would say.
Yeah, okay.
I would step in and go, hey, man.
Yeah, but there's a purpose to having myths, right?
This is like Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, all that stuff.
Yeah.
Of course there is, because we need myths, right?
So when you destroy the old myths, you're always going to get a new myth,
because we need to mythologize our life.
We need to have something to hold on to.
I've been very curious about this lately, because it seems like, as you're
saying, like, from the left, you're getting a lot of what seems like very cult-like
behavior.
And this very cult-like, this ignoring of basic truth to fit a narrative.
And I think that in the absence of religion, it's almost like we're hardwired
for some sort of guidelines that we all collectively agree to follow, whether
it's Judaism or Mormonism or whatever it is.
Like a collective group of guidelines, it's almost like human beings are hardwired
to follow some sort of a guideline.
And if we don't have one, we create one.
And even though we don't say it's a religion, we behave exactly if it's a
religion.
Like, if you question it at all.
There's no question about it.
Yeah, yeah