[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:01:11] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, we have a most excellent guest coming up in the second segment. How would you describe him? Bodacious. Most bodacious. Can you say most bodacious? I don't think you can. No, no, just bodacious.

[00:01:27] I shouldn't have. But my real answer is that he's a super nice guy. We should say who we're talking about. Yeah, we're talking about Chris Matheson, who is probably most well known for being one of the writers along with Ed Solomon of the Bill and Ted movies.

[00:01:44] Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, and a new movie coming out later in 2020. Bill and Ted faced the music. So we had a good conversation with him. We just talked to him yesterday. We recorded it.

[00:01:59] And actually a lot of what we talked about was his book. We had both read The Story of God, which was a book of his that came out in, I think, 2015. It was a great conversation. It was about religion.

[00:02:12] It was about comedy and the role of comedy in the world. And yeah, I'm excited for our listeners to hear it. And in honor of Chris Matheson and the Bill and Ted franchise, we thought we would have

[00:02:25] a first segment about stoner movies, listing our favorite stoner movies, talking about what makes a stoner movie. So yeah. And Dave, you're a little bit at a handicap here. Yeah. Not being a stoner. I'm not a stoner. I've definitely smoked weed and watched things.

[00:02:44] But I think that, well, you could tell me if I'm right or wrong about my picks because I guess there maybe is a Je ne sais quoi to a stoner movie, or maybe there is a list of necessary and sufficient conditions of what a stoner movie is.

[00:02:58] And I will honestly say that even thinking about this, like pondering my list, really made me kind of want to smoke again, which I haven't done in years. Take Edibos. You might like Edibos. Yeah. As long as I know the dose because you fuck around with that.

[00:03:12] No, I know. Now you can buy him. You don't want like that piece of brownie that had all the weed in it. As someone who like four months ago collapsed on the sidewalk and tell your ride Colorado, I know that you have to be careful with the dosage.

[00:03:26] Well, as someone who for the one and only very bad wizards meet up. Yes. I ended up not reading. I don't seem to learn my lesson. But yeah, no, I've figured out my dosage and I think you would like it.

[00:03:40] I mean, things have changed since you used to smoke pot. Seriously, they have. Yeah. Before we go into our picks, like how did you interpret? Because we haven't talked about this at all, like a stoner movie. Like what was the way that you understood that category?

[00:03:56] There's to me kind of two kinds of things that I consider stoner movies. One is a movie that directly references pot smoking in a way that's like super, you know, pot friendly, like that where the characters are clearly, you know, they're like shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Right.

[00:04:15] Like they're just pot heads. And those are usually, I think, comedies, like, you know. So they're actually smoking pot in it? Yeah. We're like it's either clear that they're pot smokers or it's heavily hinted at, you know, in times past, I guess that they're pot smokers.

[00:04:30] And those, I think, capitalize on the giggles. You know, like that what's the Chappelle movie baked? Half baked. Half baked, like that kind of movie is it's like just meant for stoners or like Pineapple Express, that kind of, you know. Yeah, exactly.

[00:04:46] That is meant to be watched stoned. It was designed for that. The other thing that I that I think is just a trippy movie, like the kind that really the aspect of weed that stretches time or distorts time and also makes you make loose connections,

[00:05:03] you know, those the slowness and the visuals, like it capitalize on that aspect almost. And that's what's hard. What I was going to ask you is is somebody who has not done psychedelics. That's what's hard to distinguish the kind of movie

[00:05:17] that would be made for more like a psychedelic trip than a than a weed trip. But everything trippy like that, I consider kind of a stoner. I would say that it's a good question. I think the psychedelic and stoner movies, it's a it's a subclass of stoner

[00:05:32] movies are also like good for psychedelics. But but I definitely have a category and I'll just spoil that like 2001, the Space Odyssey is a great example of this where it's not that it's a stoner

[00:05:46] movie in any sense that it's about drugs or that anybody in it looks like they're doing drugs. It just enhances the experience when you're stoned or and I've never seen 2001 on psychedelics. I don't usually watch movies on psychedelics.

[00:06:01] The one movie I watched, which was the funniest thing that I've maybe ever experienced was Willy Wonka on Mushrooms. The original. Yeah. Absolutely. Just like it just blew me away. Yeah, it's probably not psychedelics aren't you're almost wasting psychedelics if you watch movies, I think. I think so.

[00:06:18] Yeah. But yeah, there is this kind of movie that is not in that first category that you were talking about it has it's it's not stoner characters or stoner like characters. It's just you go into the movie and it's like you're surrendering yourself

[00:06:33] to the experience of that movie in a way that like being stoned helps you do. Right. Like your senses are heightened. Although 2001 must feel like it takes three days to watch if you're stoned. That movie is long on my most sober day.

[00:06:49] Well, no, it's yeah, it's long, but like you're just so enveloped by it that it doesn't like time is not the is not a thing really. It's like you're just and even those long slow scenes in the spaceship,

[00:07:04] you know, where a guy is giving up a really boring like it's almost it's purposely boring and mundane a lot of those scenes. But you're just still so in it that I we saw recently my whole family actually we went it was at an Alamo

[00:07:19] draft house and the guy gave a little speech because it was part of some series they were doing beforehand just was it in the original like what 70 millimeter? It wasn't that. No, I had a alone experience seeing that the unrestored version that Christopher Nolan did.

[00:07:35] I think I've talked about that on the podcast. I saw it in New York. That was incredible. I was just like kind of alone in this massive movie theater. And I was just like in the front row of a balcony by myself just watching it.

[00:07:47] And it was yeah. And I was totally so I was very stone. Now, this time but the guy that was giving the introduction. First of all, just made a joke about how many people have prepared to watch it.

[00:07:57] And then said that apparently when they released 2001, it didn't do well at first. And then they switched the marketing up to make it clear that this could be a good movie to see on something. You know, and it had this resurgence of popularity once they did that.

[00:08:17] They did a whole roadshow of it. And then all of a sudden because you know, it's like what 68 69. So all these like stoners and people on acid are just coming to see it religiously at that point.

[00:08:29] And then it did and they made a lot of money after that. That's so funny. You know, have we we haven't done a Kubrick movie? Have we for a movie episode? Yes, we have. Clockwork. What did we do? Oh, clockwork.

[00:08:43] Fuck, which is a could be it did not make a list of mine, but you but it definitely could, although it might make you just too upset. Yes, rape scenes are not good for stone. So all right, shall we start our list? Yeah, you let's do it.

[00:09:03] We came up with three. Your assignment was three. Yeah, I might have more than three. I have three categories because I also did categories where one was what you said that kind of it enhances the experience to be

[00:09:16] stoned because your senses are heightened and your swallows you up. So I've talked about 2001. Shall I just start the other one in this category that I wanted to highlight or two other ones. Paul Thomas Anderson's inherent vice, which is also kind of in that

[00:09:35] zone that you talked about the. I mean, it's definitely a movie where almost everybody is stoned and it feels like you're stoned watching it. But it's just a great but it is one of those experiential movies.

[00:09:45] It's not like a Cheech and Chong movie where it's like the point of it is for you to be in it and kind of not know what's going on. Just like the stoned character, the detective, Joaquin Phoenix doesn't know what's going on.

[00:09:59] And it's based on the Thomas Pynchon novel. And so there's all these conspiracies, all this kind of massive capitalist, Illuminati-ish, I don't know, just stuff going on. And the main character is just trying to piece all of this together

[00:10:16] while totally high and not knowing what's real and what's not. So it's really have you seen an inherent vice? I was just thinking like I was like, have I seen this movie? And I embarrassingly, I think I have, but I don't quite remember. It sounds super familiar.

[00:10:34] I know it's been on my list forever, but I may not have seen it. I think you'd remember if you saw it. Yeah, it also has a kind of a long draggy quality to it.

[00:10:42] But again, in a really good way, if you're in the right frame of mind. No, I don't think I've seen it. I don't think you have. I want to highlight one other one, Jacques Tartier's movie Playtime. Great movie to watch stoned. Never even heard of it.

[00:10:57] What's it? What's about? It's a very strange movie. It's just it's about a takes place in Paris and it's the Miss you who low character, who is a character that appears in few other of his movies. He's kind of like a chaplain-esque kind of figure.

[00:11:11] And even though it takes place in Paris, it's exclusively in like modern Paris where there's this convention and these American tourists who go through and they never see like any of what you associate with Paris. It's all these modern and there's a convention of like contraptions,

[00:11:29] new inventions that people are making. And then it's just Miss you who low wandering through it. It's like a very it's impossible to describe. Very funny to watch stoned. It's like good slapstick plus just yeah, I won't even try to articulate. And then I have honorable mentions.

[00:11:46] I'm not even going to talk about them at all. Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse fantastic movie to see stoned spirited away. My two animated pics. Also, one of those just swallows you up and then two documentaries, Winged Migration and Microcosmos, one about birds, one about bugs.

[00:12:03] Yeah, it's amazing how restrained you were in our top three list. Well, that's number one. I know that's our number number three. If we're going. Yeah, number three. OK, my number three is in that category of movies that are funny and include stoners in them.

[00:12:30] And that's the 1995 comedy directed and written by Ice Cube and written by DJ Poo Co written by DJ Poo Friday with Chris Tucker and Ice Cube. And this I have actually seen high. I've seen it many times, but I've seen it at least once high.

[00:12:48] And, you know, it's like a cult sort of like has a cult following. But it was also just a very, very funny movie at the time. And it's basically just Chris Tucker trying to convince Ice Cube

[00:12:59] to get high because he got fired and he has a free day Friday. And and he does get high. And it's just fun and funny to watch when you're high. Like it's like smoking right along with Chris Tucker. Why I find hilarious. Yeah, he's great.

[00:13:15] And the movie is great. It was an honorable mention in my next category, which is stoner movies where the goal is just to laugh as much as possible. Like and the pot makes you laugh more like you're the weed. The whatever it is that you're on,

[00:13:32] you're just going to be laughing even more than you would normally. I think there's a there's some movies that might only be funny when you're stoned. Yeah. So I would put like Ace Ventura Pet Detective in that.

[00:13:46] Where like I remember kind of looking down on people for liking that movie and not really seeing it or just seeing a little bit of it. And then one time was really stoned and watched it. And it just, oh, this is really this is hilarious.

[00:14:01] That's not my pick, but that's an example of one where it might be that like you can't watch it not stoned. I don't know. Have you seen it? Ace Ventura. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is something that you're saying like it's on

[00:14:15] almost any movie that's trying to make you laugh will be success more successful when you're stoned. Right. And and Ace Ventura also has like it becomes more surreal, I think, when you're stoned. Like the effort that they're making to try to make you laugh in

[00:14:31] like when you're not stoned is that effort comes through a little bit more. You know, and like I find Jim Carrey's comedy oddly to be just a little like trying so hard that it's no longer funny.

[00:14:43] But when you're stoned, of course, like it just gets you in that zone. No, exactly. It's a delicate line that he is he's walking to be from really annoying and just like idiotic to just kind of

[00:14:56] in a weird way, sublime, you know, like my main pick in this category are the Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers directed by Blake Edwards and especially Return of the Pink Panther and the Pink Panther strikes

[00:15:10] again, which are just I can't even think of how many times I've watched those movies. Inspector Cluso Peter Sellers character is my favorite comic character of all time. It's not very close. That kind of combination of arrogance and it's a kind of haughtiness too.

[00:15:26] It's like kind of pretentiousness with his utter incompetence, just slapstick incompetence is so perfect. Peter Sellers is just it's dumb to call him underrated because I know that he's hugely respected, but I still think his comedy is underrated and his his performance,

[00:15:47] like his ability in Inspector Cluso to portray that person who thinks thinks Ohio himself, but is still but he's still doing comedy in a way that he's, you know, Mr. Bean is somebody who's just dumb and silly and he's Cluso thinks that he's not.

[00:16:05] And that's a hard thing to pull off. He looks down like the way he just kind of looks down on people. All right. And sometimes it's just to cover up clear incompetence that he'll do like and so the way he covers it up is

[00:16:18] but other times, yeah, he just he's living in his and it has a Mr. Magoo quality too, which is that everything kind of works out. And I think the most underrated part of that series is Chief Inspector Dreyfus played by Herbert Lam, who is the the

[00:16:34] chief that Cluso drives insane, murderously insane as in both of these movies. He is trying to kill Cluso, but he can't idiot. I was I to know he was the bank manager. How are you to know the bank was being robbed? That is correct. What is correct?

[00:16:51] I did not know the bank was being robbed because I was engaged in my sworn duty as a police officer. You didn't even arrest the old beggar. There was some question as to whether the beggar or his minky was bragging dealer. Minky. But you said minky.

[00:17:09] That is correct. Yes. Chimpanzee minky. So I left him both off with a warning. The beggar was the lookout man for the gang. That is impossible. Why? He was blind. If you haven't seen those and God forbid if you've seen the Steve Martin like just travesties,

[00:17:27] I had a category that I didn't know if I would have time to talk about which I told you about earlier, which is cartoons that are great for being stoned. And I had the pink panther cartoons on that because really those things are odd and super just surreal.

[00:17:44] And there's even a spin off called the inspector, which is just about Cluso. And it's it's the pacing is slow like the joke. It's very odd, but it's like I think perfect for being stoned. And the the openings for the pink panther are all those animated

[00:18:02] cartoons that are so trippy, like they're just deliberately trippy. It's it's so brilliant. And I think Peter Sellers is very celebrated at the time. I think now like a lot of people probably don't know who he is. Our younger listeners. So just sad. Very sad.

[00:18:18] Harold and Kumar go to White Castle is just. That's totally that category. This is it's so funny. Like the anti pot commercial in it is. I don't remember that favorite. Don't you want to be cool? I'm so high, nothing can hurt me. He's got a shot.

[00:18:38] He's got a rifle in his mouth and then he just blows his head off. You know, it that makes me think that there are some movies that are so obviously catered for stoners that they might get ignored by people who who might dismiss it because like even

[00:18:54] Harold and Kumar go to White Castle is a stoner title. Like they're just like munchies. They have the munchies. Yeah, yeah. And that's not one that you need to watch stone. It's not like a adventure. It's very funny and sweet and has that kind of goodhearted.

[00:19:07] I think a lot of stoner comedies have that kind of goodhearted. You know, they're good natured and like Bill and Ted, for example, is a great example of that. I also have Step Brothers in here.

[00:19:16] And this is the end, both of which I love great to watch stones. Step Brothers is it took me like a one time to watch it and not like it. And then to watch it again and just to think it was hilarious. That's the Will Ferrell one.

[00:19:30] Step Brothers, yeah. John C. Riley and Adam Scott is so funny in that. Yeah, that's what Will Ferrell, I think, is can be a comic genius. He's not all not always. I mean, he has that like you see this in Elf.

[00:19:47] He has the ability to play a completely sincere person who is like unwittingly hilarious. There is something that he does comically that nobody else does. Is that are you done with your categories? Yeah, well, no, I have one more category.

[00:20:02] Well, all right, so my pick number two is is animated, but it's not in the same category as what I would call stoner cartoons. It is an animated film from 1973. It's a French film called an English Fantastic Planet in French. It's called La Planète Sauvage.

[00:20:22] I don't know if I that right, but it is wild planet. Yeah, it's the wild planet, but it's called. I don't know why it's called Fantastic Planet in English. Fantastic Planets and where to find them? It's it is a super duper trippy movie where it's essentially.

[00:20:41] Oh, it's amazing. And it's like that great cell animation. Like you can just you know, you could just see the the hand cell animation in it. Yeah. And it's about basically a planet of aliens that are who are giants in comparison to humans.

[00:20:55] They have big, you know, blue heads and they keep humans as pets, not not thinking of humans as anything other than kind of wild animals. And in sort of so some humans who escape into the wilds actually rebel. And it's great. It's just like, I mean, it's great.

[00:21:14] The music, which is something we could I could have a list of albums to listen to. Why? But but the music in this is so good. It's been sampled by some of my favorite hip hop producers.

[00:21:25] I think I sampled it a couple of times in my beats very, very well done. And I highly recommend it. It's sort of a cult classic. I didn't know I didn't know about this. Look at you. You'll like it. You'll like it.

[00:21:36] And don't listen obviously listen to the French and watch the subtitles. Don't please don't. I actually know a little French. You are you do you studied French. I mean to our audience, like don't voice performances, even in animation should be treated as performances.

[00:21:52] Like don't ever listen to dubbed. Look at I mean, I bet if listen, if if listeners knew that one on one of our lists was a French animated movie from 1973, they wouldn't think it would see it. They wouldn't think it was me. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:08] It's it's it was also it's like French and Czechoslovakian. I think it was like a collaboration, but it's it's awesome. But while I'm here in animation, I'm just going to say the other cartoons that I think are weed worthy because I don't know they fit anywhere else.

[00:22:23] And there's there is a few. There's one that I think is obvious, which is Aquatine Hunger Force, which makes absolutely no sense. It's the main characters are a meatball, a big soda and a flying French fries. And it's one of those adult swim cartoons from the early aughts

[00:22:43] that I thought was hilarious, even as a non-stoner. It's but it's very just, you know, like weird. It's extremely weird and oddly violent. I already mentioned the Pink Panther. The last thing I'll mention is what I think of as some of the trippiest cartoons.

[00:23:01] And this is these are Tom and Jerry cartoons, but not for like one season or whatever you call it of Tom and Jerry. This one guy named Gene Deitch, Deitch produced a set of sort of shorts. And they are universally panned as horrible Tom and Jerry cartoons

[00:23:19] because I think he even admits he had never watched Tom and Jerry. He thought it was too violent. And he went on to to produce a bunch of these. And they're so odd. There's one in particular called Dicky Moe,

[00:23:32] which is like a weird telling of the Moby Dick story. It's just a trip. It's and I think totally worth it. If you're going to get higher and watch Tom and Jerry, you'll appreciate the universally panned season.

[00:23:41] I wasn't going to get high and watch Tom and Jerry, but. Maybe I will. No. They were even like work that like the animation was worth. There's one where they go to space. It's just super odd. How is never a big Tom and Jerry fan? I don't think.

[00:23:58] Well, I remember as a little kid watching Tom and Jerry all the time. And then these and then these specific episodes, I didn't learn till way later. There was like a different person behind them. But I remember being really tripped out by those specific others.

[00:24:11] I was like, this isn't like normal Tom and Jerry. Like what is I had no idea that that that, you know, they would be enjoyable, maybe high. I think now that I'm thinking of it, there's a Simpsons episode

[00:24:21] where, you know, itchy and scratchy are the Tom and Jerry kind of parodies. And there's an episode where it talks about like us, like a year of itchy and scratchy. That was just so probably they're referring to that. Oh, yeah, I think so.

[00:24:36] All right. My last category is stoner hangout movies. So I looked into this category and what I didn't know is that the term hangout movie was coined by Quentin Tarantino. And I believe he brought it up in reference to his Jackie Brown, which is a great hangout movie.

[00:24:58] But it's I don't I'm not familiar with the term even. So what does it mean? It's the kind of movie where you just want to hang out with the characters. You just love the characters and the plot isn't what's driving it.

[00:25:10] It's just you want to be around the characters that are in this movie. So the Big Lebowski, which is not allowed on our list because we've devoted quite a bit of time to the Big Lebowski last summer. But yeah, it wasn't an oversight. He was an intentional intentional.

[00:25:24] But I think that's a that's a kind of a hangout movie where the plot is secondary or a distraction and really you just want to hang out with the characters. Jackie Brown, which Tarantino referred to it in contrast to pulp fiction and reservoir dogs.

[00:25:39] He said Jackie Brown was just you want to put it on. It's fun. Like you don't need to be have all the lights turned out and all the you know, you don't need it's more just you want to be there. You want to be there.

[00:25:50] You want to have them on. You could be folding laundry. I think he said while you're watching it. It's just fun. It's comforting kind of. And it's like your friend.

[00:25:57] I get that where they create a world where you want to you want to be just in that world. Although, I actually think of pulp fiction that way. Maybe just because I'm so familiar with it. Like I like having it on in the background,

[00:26:08] but I get why first time you watch it. Yeah, I mean, the first time you watch that you should be within a theater with other people kind of reacting to the surprises where, you know, Jackie Brown is very different that way.

[00:26:19] It's one of the things I have because I love this genre of movie in general. The other thing I learned about Tarantino in this category is that he and I agree about the greatest hangout movie of all time. Days and Confuse, the Richard Linklater movie. Just so phenomenal.

[00:26:36] And you can watch that. I was thinking about waking life actually as being something that bluntly didn't make my list, but but yeah, Days and Confuse. I mean, it's I don't think waking life is a stoner movie

[00:26:48] in some sense because of the animation and the philosophy of that. It's trippy. It's not it's not a hangout movie in the way. It's not a hangout movie at all now. Days and Confuse is just so great. And it's, you know, Matthew McConaughey's character is so iconic

[00:27:05] and just you want to you. Yeah, I could watch it over and over again, never get sick of it. I really liked the sort of college follow up, the spiritual sequel. Everybody wants some too. Did you see that? No, I never saw that.

[00:27:18] It's like that that same kid who is a freshman in high school or going into freshman year in high school is now essentially in college and he's on the bay. He gets there freshman year and it's the same thing.

[00:27:27] It takes place over, I think not one night like Days and Confuse, but or one day, but like two days or something, two or three days. But it's just your hanging out with these. I was looking like I'm trying to keep track of the things that you say

[00:27:40] to put links and like Days and Confused is in my mind didn't come out in 1993. It came out earlier, but it's a 1993 movie and I kind of can't believe it. Yeah, that's right because of that's weird. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

[00:27:55] Well, why do you have to bring us down by reminding us how old we are? I'm done. What about you? Do you know? OK, so my top one, this is my last one. I don't even this isn't even a category and there's no honorable mentions

[00:28:09] because it stands alone. I don't think there's anything quite like it. And that is simply the Wizard of Oz with the dark side of the moon like Wizard of Oz with the dark side of the moon playing in the background. Really? Have you ever done that?

[00:28:26] Yeah, I've seen that. Oh, man. So this is it's you. So various people there's various instructions, but the most common instruction is you mute Wizard of Oz and on the third MGM Lion Roar, you start the dark side of the moon. Yeah.

[00:28:45] And this has been like an urban, you know, sort of like an urban legend for a long time. But the the cool thing about it obviously is that there are moments in the film that sync up to the lyrics and the tone of the album

[00:28:59] that really, really, really feel like they aren't a coincidence. Of course they are like and of course the band had nothing like they they they say like obviously we didn't do it. I mean, it's not even like the dark side of the moon album ends way before

[00:29:14] the Wizard of Oz. It's not a very long album, right? No, it's not a very long album. Yeah. Which by the way, it is the first time I got high for real. I sat down in front of my speakers in the apartment I was living

[00:29:27] and I put dark side of the moon on and that the thing that you were describing before of like sort of being enveloped by something. I it's like a peak experience in my life. And I thought to myself, I understand like I'm inside this album right now.

[00:29:44] Like it was amazing. It was amazing. This has been something that a ton of people talk about. Some people call it the dark side of the rainbow or the dark side of Oz. And you can YouTube and they'll show you some of the scenes

[00:29:59] that link up like really like that, you know, while the tornado is going on, the great gig in the sky is playing and the scarecrow is dancing during brain damage. Like that if there is a category to this, it's something that I was mentioning

[00:30:12] earlier, which is what what we one of the things that we can do to you is make you see connections where there are none. Like you have loose connections and this is like a characteristic of just normal human thought.

[00:30:26] Like some people see it, see connections, like in find meaning in random things. And I think we just enhances that. But, you know, at its extreme, it's called Apophina. And it's a symptom of schizophrenia. And if you watch some people talking about the crazy coincidences

[00:30:44] between dark side of the moon and the Wizard of Oz, it borders on being a little crazy. But that's what we can do. And this is a great way to like exploit that feeling. Yeah, that's I can't wait to do this.

[00:30:54] And maybe I've heard of it, but I don't remember hearing about it. And I definitely do that. I see connections in things where they aren't where. I mean, part of that is what makes people, you know,

[00:31:05] like a good philosopher or a good scientist or something like that's to see similarities in the world and generalizations is, you know, what abstract reasoning is and but you can have like, you know, these false insights with weed.

[00:31:19] You know, Wizard of Oz is a huge inspiration for David Lynch and a lot of his movies like either directly reference it or indirectly that's packed with references to it. And his movies are classic examples of connections that you're constantly making,

[00:31:35] especially some of the most puzzling ones, the most opaque ones. You can like, I think that it's part of the it's part of the palette where it wants you to start coming up with theories and coming up with ways of making sense of it.

[00:31:50] Like it's like a social experience, it's a end. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things he loved about the Wizard of Oz, which is definitely a trippy. It's a trippy movie on its own. Yeah. But with Dark Side of the Moon, I'm really excited.

[00:32:02] I love Dark Side of the Moon. Oh, it's like on the top. I don't know if I ever talked about this on the podcast, but I am a huge Pink Floyd fan, which is very, you know, people might not know

[00:32:12] because I love hip hop so much, but I saw them in concert in 1994 on their last tour because I'm just a stand for Pink Floyd. So so I saw them that. So that's post Roger Waters leaving and I saw them also post Roger

[00:32:26] Waters on the momentary laughs of reason tour. Oh, holy shit. Yeah. And I was like, 1990, 1991 or something like that. So Roger Waters had already left, but he had just left. Yeah. Yeah. But it was still like that, like the pig and the. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:43] So they put on the most amazing show. And what's great about them is there's it's a band with almost no ego. They're like world famous, one of the most famous bands ever. And they could walk down the street and nobody would really know who they were.

[00:32:58] Well, I think that's true, except for Roger Waters, who have a huge ego. That's why it's Roger Waters. Yeah, it's just that there's they the the last album that he was on. It was a right after the wall. The final time. The final cut in 1981, I think.

[00:33:15] I didn't know you were such a. I am. We could talk for it. Yeah, I can talk for it. That that album is so ego. It's so Roger Waters said it's like fucking get over your dad died when in the war, you know, just chill, chill.

[00:33:31] But that reminds me the one honorable mention that I was going to have to was the wall. Like, I think the wall is an obvious choice if you're sure. Watch. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, it was fun.

[00:33:44] Hopefully for our listeners who like to get stoned and even for ones that don't, we gave you some good picks. What's funny is we didn't even talk about like the stoner aspect with Chris. Yeah, we didn't not at all. Yeah.

[00:33:57] I have a fact we were going to even try to get his favorites or whatever. And then we forgot because it was it was a really fun conversation and we'll be back with it. This episode is brought to you by the great courses plus streaming service,

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[00:37:46] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the very predictable time of the show where we like to take a moment to thank all of our listeners, all our supporters for the various ways in which you engage with us, engage with other listeners.

[00:38:18] We very, very much appreciate it. We appreciate all your comments, all your messages, all your emails, all your discussions on various social media. If you want to engage in a discussion with us or with other listeners,

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[00:39:27] Except fuck those people who like are only focused on that one episode. So you guys can all fuck yourselves. Go seriously. Eight years, eight years of, of, you know, giving you guys just our hearts. Goodwill. Our kind of will.

[00:39:43] And one time we say something you disagree with, but it's like one star. No, yeah. So right there on iTunes, you can rate us on Spotify. Also just share us. You know, that's that's how we our audience has grown organically over the years.

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[00:40:20] Probably our favorite just because it's so easy and reliable is Patreon. So you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash very bad wizards. You can join at one of three different levels at this point. That's all we've been able to figure out.

[00:40:40] We just put out a bonus episode for our $2 and up per episode listeners on dark that has prompted some discussion. We lot of agreement, a lot of agreement with my with my tepid take on this. Yeah, well, let's not spoil it for for other people.

[00:41:02] The yeah, we don't we we got to do another one soon. So if you have any ideas, let us let us know what you'd like us to talk about for our next bonus episode. You also get volumes of Dave's beats

[00:41:18] and you can decide if you are a five dollar and up listener, you can help us decide what we are going to talk about a couple times a year. And in fact, that's on the table. That's coming somewhat soon and probably be maybe the first episode

[00:41:35] in September that we will talk about the myth of illness. Yeah, which is something that we yeah. It's a daunting, it's a daunting subject. So we're looking whole book. We should learn. We should start of the semester. And the reason I'm saying that it's so daunting

[00:41:57] to read a whole other book is because we are currently reading a very yes. And so before I get to that, you can also give us a one time or recurring donation on Patreon. I'm sorry. We can also give us a one time or recurring donation on PayPal.

[00:42:13] We appreciate that a lot. There have been requests for us to make some of the bonus material available because those people can't support us on Patreon. It's we're trying to figure it out, but it's just hard and we're already stretched so thin,

[00:42:30] but we will do our best on that part. And finally, we are going to in about a month from now release a little under a month release a five part mini series on the Brothers Karamazov. So now is the time to start reading it or rereading it.

[00:42:48] If you haven't if you haven't started already and you're interested in hearing us talk about it, we will our next our next episode will have what will feature one of them. It'll be the episode on the Grand Inquisitor and the rebellion just the

[00:43:11] the parts of the Brothers Karamazov that's most often exorted. We will release it on our main feed for the next episode in the second segment. It was a really fun conversation. It was really good. I don't know. I remember you said you got Borges. Yeah, Borges lives.

[00:43:29] I mean, there's these episodes that I always described to you as ones where our energy goes up the longer we talk. And that definitely definitely was one of them. Our Patreon supporters, by the way, will also get access to the Karamazov mini series.

[00:43:45] Yeah, at least at certain levels. I think that we have to negotiate that with. I think our five dollars and up. Yeah, right now it's our five dollars and up that we'll definitely get it. So so yeah, this will be a five part series.

[00:44:00] The whole thing itself, I think it will cost five dollars. This is through this was an opportunity that was given to us by Lyceum and Himalayas. Those apps, the podcasting apps and we're excited and it's fun and it's fun to read.

[00:44:20] It's fun to talk about and I hope it'll be fun to listen to. So also T shirts. Oh, in T shirts. That's the last thing, right? You're wearing one right now. I'm wearing one right now. I love this T shirt I wear it.

[00:44:32] I have another one I have the other color too. My whole family has T shirts. It's they're great. And we've heard from a bunch of listeners that that love their T shirts, too. It's so soft and and it looks good.

[00:44:48] Yeah, so you can find a link to that on our page on our Bear Bed Wizards homepage under support. You'll find a link to the Cotton Bureau page. All right. And now we've been dragging this on for a while, but we're very excited to get to our guest.

[00:45:04] And that is Chris Matheson. Chris Matheson probably best known for being one of along with Ed Solomon, one of the writers of the Bill and Ted franchise. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was the first one. And then they have another new movie coming out after,

[00:45:25] I guess, almost 30 years, right? Yeah. Bill and Ted Face the Music, which comes out on August 28th. It'll be released in select theaters, I guess, where COVID is not raging, but also on demand, video on demand.

[00:45:45] And it sounds we talk about it a little bit at the end of what of our interview with him. It sounds really interesting, and I'm excited to see it. Chris Matheson is also the author of The Story of God,

[00:45:59] a book that we talk about with him at some length, The Trouble with God and Soon to Be Released, The Buddha's Story. These are satires or, I don't know, maybe he wouldn't like them described as satires, but they are different takes on famous religious texts.

[00:46:21] And they're very funny and they're very interesting. And we had what I think was a really nice conversation with him. So let's get to it. All right, we're really happy to be joined by Chris Matheson. This is a real honor to have you on the podcast. Welcome.

[00:46:39] Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. You, your dad was also a writer. Yeah. And he wrote some pretty famous things, including a bunch of Twilight Zones and The Story button button. Yeah, he also wrote I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man and Duel,

[00:46:55] which is Steven Spielberg's first, you know, the truck chasing the guy through the desert. Did you grow up in Hollywood? I did. So yeah, I did. I grew up in LA and I grew up kind of around the movie business and the TV, TV business and sort of.

[00:47:14] So how the hell did you not want to like avoid it at all costs? Like what? I did. I actually did until I was in my mid 20s. I wanted to do theater because I thought theater was different and

[00:47:28] theater was, you know, it's in the moment and you're creating it and you're dealing with whatever Shakespeare and Brecht and Eugene O'Neill and so I pursued that. I first wanted to be an actor and then I wanted to be a theater director.

[00:47:42] And so I was doing that for a number of years, but then a strong interest in comedy manifested itself in me. It probably had been there the whole time, but as I hit a certain age, I realized that I wanted to make comedy that I really loved comedy

[00:47:59] and it had had a very profound impact on my life. Things like Blazing Saddles and Monty Python on the Holy Grail. You know, they really changed my life. And once I thought once I felt that, then I felt that film

[00:48:15] was the place that I wanted to do it because I thought film was a better place to make comedy than theater. And I think it is actually. So then I started moving in the direction that I'd avoided

[00:48:27] and it came reasonably naturally because I had grown up around it so much, I think, and I'd had so many conversations with my dad about writing while I grew up that it didn't feel strange or alien to me to do it.

[00:48:44] But I did but I did want to try to steer around it for a number of years. Yeah. So you were young when you wrote Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Like you were were you out of college? Yeah, this must have the idea that was brewing it.

[00:48:58] Yeah. Ed Solomon and I and we co-wrote Bill and Ted. We went to college together. We both went to UCLA and we both graduated in 1982. And then in 1983, we came up with the characters of Bill and Ted.

[00:49:13] We just hung out a lot in the latter part of college and we laughed a lot together. We thought a lot of the same things were funny. Then we came up with these guys. Yeah, we formed like a little improv group, not for an audience,

[00:49:26] but just for ourselves, Ed and myself and a few other friends. So we could just play with comedy, play with characters, play with ideas because we all wanted to think of funny things, I guess.

[00:49:37] And the idea of the the suggestion was two teenage boys studying for a history report who don't know anything about history. So and Ed and I played the two teenage boys and we started talking to each other

[00:49:50] as Bill and Ted was like, how's it going, dude? How's it going? That's, you know, we just kind of they we those voices and that energy of theirs we we seem to stumble into pretty quickly. And we liked them very much.

[00:50:03] We thought they were they were just really fun to play, to play with. And we started working out backstory for them and their their their parents and their families and their siblings and their and what they and what they

[00:50:15] wanted to do and certainly music we knew was was part of it, that they wanted to have this band, even though they didn't know how to play. And then it is. And so we just played with Bill and Ted for a while.

[00:50:24] And we would we would talk on the phone as Bill and Ted, because I went to graduate school and theater directing and he was working on a TV show in L.A. So we would just get on the phone and talk as Bill and Ted.

[00:50:35] And we wrote some letters back and forth as Bill and Ted. And then at a certain point, I think we both wanted to be in movies. And we thought, well, let's put them in. Let's can we put them in a movie?

[00:50:44] And my dad actually played a role at that moment because we were going to put them in a kind of a skit movie because we loved Python so much. We wanted to do a kind of a rolling series of things.

[00:50:55] One thing blending into another and Bill and Ted was just going to be one episode. And my dad said, no, but that Bill and Ted idea, you can make a whole movie out of that. And so we started working on that.

[00:51:06] And then and then we just tried to figure out, well, what are we going to do with these guys? Where are we going to put these guys? What's a funny story for these guys on the time travel kind of?

[00:51:14] I don't know how we got to that, except that throwing them up against big substantial important things and having them be very sort of nonplussed every time that seemed funny to us. So therefore, I think time travel seemed good. What was the path to getting it made?

[00:51:32] It took a little while. We wrote the script in 1984 and we wrote it very quickly because we knew the characters very well. We heard them. And when you can do that, when you're more or less just transcribing,

[00:51:44] what you know the characters would say, then you can move quickly. And so we wrote it very fast, like four days we had a draft, which is remarkably fast. I've never done anything like that any other time.

[00:51:55] And then we started putting it out and we didn't get immediate positive response. There were people who didn't much like it and didn't think it was very funny. But then it caught on and we found an agent who liked it a lot

[00:52:11] and he started sending it out and people started liking it. And we finally got it made in 1987. And then the studio that made it went out of business. So it was just doomed, kind of. It was going to go straight to video back in 1988, I guess.

[00:52:25] And people kind of felt sorry for us. I remember going to a few meetings and they were like, oh, that's too bad about Bill and Ted because that was a pretty funny script. I was like, so it had been shot at this point.

[00:52:34] Yeah, yeah, it was filmed in Spring of 87 and it didn't come out until Spring of 89. So it just it languished and it and it was going to go straight to video. And it was perceived as kind of a failure in Hollywood, like, well, that's a shame,

[00:52:48] you know, and they must have done some recutting or something or they did something or they just put it in front of a different kind of audience because that can happen to they'll do previews. And this audience liked it and that got people more reengaged

[00:53:04] and to get it out there into the world. But it did take a while. I mean, it was five years from the time we wrote it until it was actually in movie theaters. So then you have a new one coming out? Yeah, it comes out next month, actually.

[00:53:17] It's called Bill and Ted Face the Music and it's picking these guys up at the age of 50 and seeing where they are and how this all turned out. I'm weirdly excited about it, but that's that's because I love Keanu Reeves as listeners of this podcast.

[00:53:35] Well, he's very lovable, actually. He's a very, very lovable man. He is very. Yeah, I can say that I understand that. And you and it's you and Ed Solomon again are the writers and who's directing it? This one is directed by Dean Parasso, who directed Galaxy Quest.

[00:53:55] Oh, I love that movie. Yeah. Oh, he's great. Yeah, Dean's Dean's great. Dean is kind of a perfect comedy director. You said something about your move to comedy. So like you went from from this desire to do theater and and you really

[00:54:12] but you realize that comedy was something that you loved. And it's clear to me at least in reading the book that I read the story of God and Bill and Ted, there is a very Monty Python, I think, influence.

[00:54:28] And I want to just get your thoughts a little bit on Tamla and I are huge fans of comedy and we've talked about what the role it might play about the role in my playing society. But I want to get your thoughts on what.

[00:54:41] What can comedy do as a way to communicate with people that you can't do with other genres? I think comedy can do a lot in a lot of different ways. I think comedy can have a tremendous power to deflate.

[00:54:59] As you guys know, there's essentially the three theories of comedy. There's the superiority theory, the Plato Aristotle superiority. And then there's the Kant incongruity. And then there's Freud. You're I love the conversation about civilization and its discontents, by the way. I thought that was great.

[00:55:16] I thought that was really it was really great. And what you said about that book, I have the exact same experience of jokes and their relation to the unconscious, which is half of the time. Like this is brilliant. These are the deepest insights I've ever come across.

[00:55:32] And I think they kind of are when it comes to comedy. And then the other half of the time, like, what on earth is he talking about? What the hell are you even? It's really uncanny. It just goes back and forth anyway.

[00:55:44] I think comedy has an incredible power to deflate the the overblown, the the pompous, the gassy. It is the it can prick it and deflate it. And I think that's hugely important. And I think for whatever reason, people like to make claims that are excessive.

[00:56:06] They're just they're bigger than they're unearned. They're just these huge lofty claims about absolute truth. And comedy, I think, is is the little boy says the emperor has no clothes. And so I think that's really, really powerful. I think also I don't like absolute truth claims.

[00:56:25] They just they rub me the wrong way. Are they annoying me? I think they just they irritate me. And by the way, going back to Freud for a second, one of the things that he does that I so love is there's given that he's

[00:56:35] Sigmund Freud, there's a weird modesty to it at times. As you guys pointed out, where he's like, well, I don't really know. I don't really know. I mean, I don't really know much about that. It's like whoever says that what great thinker ever talks that way.

[00:56:46] They tend to they might say it's a knock to. I mean, Socrates says that all the time, but it's always a question of whether he means it or not. I never think he means it. I always think it's insincere with him.

[00:56:59] He's like he's like the frozen, unfrozen caveman. Yes, exactly. I really don't know very much, you know. But I think that there's the it's the Freudian theory ends up being the biggest theory and the most interesting theory of comedy.

[00:57:19] And that is essentially it's a way of dealing with pain. It's a way of dealing with deep. It's the same thing. It's like these repressed things, the sexual instincts and the aggressive instincts and just the pain of being human being

[00:57:32] that the suffering that we experience as a child and their wounds and and comedy is a way of of playing with it. Comedy is a way of laughing and finding kindred spirits and and and finding the lighter side of it.

[00:57:47] And Bill and Ted as light as it is. Now, there's there's like these guys, they don't have mothers. And that's not we didn't we weren't even aware of it when we wrote it. But as years went by, we're like, they don't even have mothers

[00:57:59] and their fathers are really unkind to them. Like like overtly unkind and creepy. Yeah, like Bill's dad is like get out of your own bedroom so I can have sex with with with with Missy and with the chick from your school. And so there's like a lot of

[00:58:17] there's a lot. There's actually in sort of a weird undercurrent of pain that I think we were dealing with. And then in the second movie, there's like a lot of self hatred even. There were I think at least I was dealing with it.

[00:58:30] They basically the evil versions of them come back and kill them and they go to hell. I mean, that's the plot of the second movie. So I think that all that I think that's the deepest source of comedy.

[00:58:42] And I think that's the most powerful use of it actually in the end. I was just going to say with Missy and the stepmother, you might have inspired an entire massive genre of stepmother porn. Oh, wouldn't it be cool if that was your legacy, Chris? Yeah, fingers crossed.

[00:59:02] You know, you I totally agree with you about the role that comedy can play in covering up pain. Like I think that's the most powerful powerful use of comedy. You see this a lot and I love I love black comedians talking about race

[00:59:18] relations because it's, you know, and Tamler, I'm sure loves the Jews talking about the Jews. You know, it's such a weird thing that the things like I'm so perplexed at how the kind of laughter you can elicit from a three year old

[00:59:34] can turn into an like an existential cure. But like it starts off with like poopy jokes. But then like the adult poopy jokes are also existential. It's almost as if it was humor was designed and conceived to

[00:59:49] to be an opiate for us, but but it can't have been right. It's like a lucky accident. So it's a weird phenomenon. It's considering how essential it is to our lives. I don't think anybody's ever really figured out why it's even there. What what it's ultimately for.

[01:00:06] But I kind of view it as like our secret. It's a secret weapon for coping and also and then so, you know, the Kant theory is like, well, no, it's surprise, surprise, surprise. What's funny is surprise.

[01:00:20] And you know, it's sort of right, but sort of vague because if that was actually true, then car crashes and earthquakes would be really funny and they're not only a very limited number of surprising things are funny. But I think what he's getting at is also really profound.

[01:00:37] And then and then I think Schopenhauer takes it even further as, you know, conceptually, it's like change happens. It just surprises happen. And the more we can be ready for them and in fact enjoy them, not be terrified, but actually welcome them. In fact, love it.

[01:00:54] In fact, want it and hunger for it and be delighted by it. That if you can get your head to that place, that's advantageous. That sort of Dan Dennett take on humor. Yeah, then I think wrote that inside jokes book recently. Yeah, with a bunch of other people.

[01:01:12] It's kind of a funky. Well, there's something like if you're at a funeral and people give speeches about the the person who is deceased, the most meaningful ones, the most memorable ones are the ones that invoke humor.

[01:01:28] There's something like it just it brings out a kind of fullness of your heart in a way that just owes to what a special person they were don't. There's something about comedy that gets the complexity or fullness of what everybody is dealing with. Yeah, it is.

[01:01:46] It's like I like that. I love that way of describing it. It's like a secret weapon. It's like our yeah, it certainly it served me well in my sad moments. Just and you know, comic films too.

[01:01:57] Like that's what I turn to all the time if you know, if I'm going through anything. Yeah, I real I was a very I was and I continue to be a very anxious person. But I was a very, very, very anxious kid, a very worried kid.

[01:02:10] You know, kid who's always just biting his nails and just never really comfortable on my own skin. I was just worried, worried about something bad happening. You know, I like it constantly. I was like a kid who like in the San Fernando Valley

[01:02:23] who was worried about like Nazis marching over the hill to our house. And I don't know. I don't know why. Well, we had the Russians and earthquake. Yeah, big one to worry about. Definitely. So but then when I would laugh, then I wasn't scared.

[01:02:39] And I that man, man, I loved that. Oh my God, to not be scared, to not be scared. And to see and to see big, important things kind of deflated and put in perspective and that you can laugh at them. I just thought it was incredible.

[01:02:58] It was it was fantastic. It was really life changing as somebody with anxiety in his genes. You know, I see it in my daughter and her mother as well. There is nothing like humor. Like the the genes for humor run, I think, just as strong.

[01:03:16] And we're not for that. I don't know that we could survive like the, you know, the poor, scared Chihuahua nature of life sometimes just overwhelming. I love that the poor scared. Well, I mean, it is right, though. It's we're not the descendants of like grizzly bears or tigers.

[01:03:35] We're the descendants of these little, you know, like scared little hominids who were like eaten by eating constantly eaten by cats. So like that's us. That's that's us. We're really scared in our in our souls, I think. And so laughter, it's just so liberating.

[01:03:54] Oh, my God, it's so liberating. It gives you. Yeah, it just there's all this tension that you don't notice that builds up in you and it's a way of releasing that. Should we talk about your book?

[01:04:07] So or maybe as a transition or a bridge, what made you decide to turn to writing? I mean, I guess your father also did both. He did screenwriting and and also wrote fiction.

[01:04:20] Is that and is that sort of how you wanted to branch out in that direction as well? I didn't really think I would ever write a book. I didn't even think I had it in me. I just didn't think I was that kind of a writer.

[01:04:37] I thought I would just do screenwriting, I guess. But at a certain point, I partially I was done with screenwriting because it just it's a limit and the parameters of it are pretty strict. And partially, you know, they were done with me.

[01:04:55] I mean, they didn't really want, you know, nobody was really interested in what I was doing. So so what was I going to do? And I didn't really know. And I had this interest in in religion. And I've which is long standing.

[01:05:11] And when I was in my 20s, I think was more in earnest. My wife, when we first met, she was convinced that I was going to convert and become some sort of, you know, like I was going to convert to Catholicism

[01:05:24] or something because I just I was I was drawn towards it. I just was interested. I just was interested. I remember the first time I walked into a cat because I didn't have any religious upbringing at all.

[01:05:34] So so you were coming to this with fresh eyes when you were. In fact, I remember the first time I walked into a Catholic church, a big Catholic church and it was in it was in Italy.

[01:05:45] I'd never and I was in my late 20s and I'd never set foot in one. And I just walked around and I was just transfixed. I was like, oh, my God, like everything means something. Everything symbolic. It's so dense with with meaning.

[01:05:59] And I and I just really had an effect on me. So I started reading those books. And at first I I didn't know what to make of them. And but I kept going back to them and at a certain point

[01:06:10] and I don't know why I just thought it just they started striking me as funny, like really funny, like sounds like sound comedy. And at that point, I thought, well, no, I think I can write a book about this and I want to write a book about this.

[01:06:25] We're sponsored this week by Better Help. Tamela, I don't know about you, but covid has messed with me in a whole variety of ways. In fact, last night I barely got any sleep for no good reason.

[01:06:38] Just my sleep is messed up just because just because I don't have to wake up. If you were going to tell me what your primary psychological problems were, what would they be? My primary psychological problems. Well, where to begin? Yeah, I'm just kidding. That's the truth.

[01:06:55] I've already diagnosed you in my head. My mother died at, you know, this is good. This is actually really good. So I want to keep talking here. Well, please, I am not a professional licensed therapist,

[01:07:09] but if you do want to keep talking, you can go to Better Help. They actually have trained licensed professionals who will be able to talk to you in under 24 hours. If you signed up right now, you would be within one day

[01:07:24] be able to get help from a professional therapist. You could send a message to that counselor any time you get timely and thoughtful responses. You could schedule weekly video or phone sessions, which I don't need to say is, I think, a very, very good thing

[01:07:40] when many people can't get out of their house. They have licensed professionals who can help you with things like depression or stress or trauma, anger and, in my case, sleeping. Anything you share with them is absolutely confidential because again, they're professionals. It's convenient.

[01:07:59] It's affordable and Better Help allows you to even change therapists if you're not happy with the therapist or counselor that you're working with right away. If you're interested in learning how Better Help has helped other people,

[01:08:15] you can check out the testimonials that are posted daily on their website. So yeah, if you want to try to deal with some of the psychological issues as minor or as serious as they might be, feel free to go to BetterHelp.com.

[01:08:32] And if you're one of our listeners, you'll get 10% off of your first month. If you go to BetterHelp.com slash VBW. So join over one million people who are taking charge of their mental health by going to BetterHelp. That's B-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P.com slash VBW.

[01:08:53] We'd like to thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizard. The story of God is the premise of the story of God is what if every word in the Bible is true? What if it's all literally true?

[01:09:08] Who does this guy have to be for that to make sense? What is a lot? What is a who is the character that would do these things? So it's taking the character of God from Genesis to Revelation and telling it not exactly first person, but almost first person,

[01:09:26] kind of from his shoulder point of view and telling the story from his. What does he think he's doing from beginning to end? Right. Yeah. Getting his inner his inner life, which we don't get too much of in the actual. The question I wanted to ask,

[01:09:44] it's blurbed by a bunch of people who have new kind of new atheist leanings who often look at religion in a kind of contemptuous way. The book didn't seem like it was doing that exactly.

[01:09:59] It wasn't making fun of the Bible and all the people who believe in it. But it wasn't. I remember Matt Stone about the Book of Mormon said that it was an atheist's love letter to religion. That's how he described the Book of Mormon,

[01:10:12] which is a really, I think, an apt description of what it is. It didn't seem exactly like that either, though, your book. It didn't seem like a love letter to religion. It seemed somewhere in between a kind of, you know, brutal satire

[01:10:28] that, you know, from the superiority theory of comedy is trying to, you know, look how stupid it is if you take this literally. But I it doesn't have that extra maybe bit of affection that you get at the end of Book of Mormon, especially and throughout.

[01:10:43] So, yeah, I was wondering where you think it is on that spectrum. Well, I think it probably started off clearly in the superiority theory approach that I just looked at it and I thought, well, this is absurd. And I'm going to point out the absurdities of it.

[01:11:01] And I'm going to do it from the inside. But at a certain point, and I can't tell you exactly when I started to feel for this character, I started to think he was sad. I started to think what a horrible existential nightmare this is to be

[01:11:19] so alone, to be so isolated, to be so. And he seems so self-hating to me and so self punishing and so self tormenting. And why does he create this reality that constantly infuriates him and drives him kind of insane so that by the end,

[01:11:43] he by revelation, he just seems to want to he's just blown out and he just wants to torture and murder almost everybody on earth. But I thought at a certain point, I kind of there was a pain of sympathy for the concept of this character

[01:12:01] who never had a mother, never had a father, never had a sibling, never had a woman in his life, never, you know, the way his one child he brutally murders for some dubious reason. He never has a friend. He has an enemy. He has an enemy.

[01:12:19] And then he has a bunch of kind of toadies, basically, who tell him how how great he is all the time, but he doesn't really seem to have any use for them. And so that I thought was when I got there emotionally,

[01:12:33] that felt like a stronger place to write from. And I was glad that I got to that place because really just sitting on, you know, on the sidelines and chucking rocks and breaking windows. Well, it's fine. I mean, it is fine. But I don't like pure satire.

[01:12:47] I really don't like the greatest satire ever written. Like I don't like Candid. I think Candid is really obvious and bombastic. And I don't think it's funny. I don't think Oliver's travels is very funny. I don't think they're very funny. I think they're too mean-spirited.

[01:13:02] I think they're too contemptuous, too constantly contemptuous. And so I think that I wanted to try to find a way to blend in some kind of humanity and warmth. And I mean, I hope I hope that I could do that to some degree.

[01:13:17] I don't know to what degree I succeeded, but I wanted to. Well, like I will tell you right now, when I started reading the book, I at first thought you were going for mean. And I was kind of sad that that's what would happen.

[01:13:32] And as I read the book, well, my background is also that I was raised super religious with, you know, in a religion that almost thinks that it's taking everything literally. So this is what I get to later. This is hilarious to me in that it reframes

[01:13:50] like all of these stories in a way that I just was not very capable of because you hear him being told so seriously to you. But as I kept reading it, you won me over. It there is weirdly some compassion

[01:14:04] to these fucked up stories in the way that you tell them. And I like I think people should read it. Like I think and if you think that it's going to just be somebody shitting like Chris shitting on the idea of God, I don't think that's it.

[01:14:19] It's actually not only that, I learned a lot. Like I'm so I'm someone who love collecting weird as texts like, like, you know, the weirdest things. And as I was reading your book, I'm glad that you were giving references

[01:14:30] because I was actually going to the Bible and be like, wait, did he really say to make images of your hemorrhoids? Like I didn't remember that one. So I went and looked back. But I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

[01:14:43] And I think I'm not I'm not the sort of person who would have gone into this thinking that I would. I'm glad I'm glad to hear that. I didn't, you know, that I probably did. As I said, I did start with just, you know, bomb, bomb throwing,

[01:14:56] but I didn't want to end there because I don't think that's an interesting place to make. It's not an interesting place to write from. It's too easy and you have no skin in the game.

[01:15:05] And I had to find a way and this is going to sound very weird, but it had to be true. I had to find a way to make him more like me. I had to identify with them

[01:15:16] because otherwise it was just going to be me standing outside it and going, ha, ha, ha. And I don't, yeah, I don't like that kind of comedy. I think it's really, it's too easy. I'm with you on that. And it's also it's not just too easy.

[01:15:29] And like there is a way that, you know, it will appeal to a certain kind of audience, but in a way that's ugly or I don't know, that misses a lot of the value of the thing that you are a sad or

[01:15:42] sad arising. And even if you have negative thoughts about it, you know, I think the Bible, like a lot of these religious texts, there there is value there. Actually, I should just ask you, do you believe that there is value in the Bible?

[01:15:55] I do. I think some of it's actually beautiful. And I could only touch on that glancingly because I didn't think that my character of God would have much of an like he has really bad taste. That's sort of one of the jokes I make throughout.

[01:16:07] Like he'd like he always likes the worst cheapest thing. So he wouldn't even appreciate force for skin. Yeah, he wouldn't appreciate how beautiful Ecclesiastes is, for instance. But Ecclesiastes is really beautiful. And he wouldn't appreciate my guy, the character I wrote,

[01:16:25] he wouldn't he wouldn't grasp that the Job, in fact, is really poetic. Well, Job is, in fact, really poetic, you know, but he's my character gets caught up in what a fool he's made of in the story. So I think there's value there.

[01:16:39] I think there's also value in, like, there's only so many ways to ask these big questions. Right now, I like philosophy the best because philosophy ultimately doesn't pause it or at least the philosophy I like. It doesn't really pause. It's like some big, absolute truth answer.

[01:16:57] Like, well, here it is. You know, I mean, Plato does, it seems to me, but that in a way. But I'm much more interested in like Nietzsche and Freud and the human stuff, stuff like that.

[01:17:07] But it is a way of asking, dealing with gigantic questions about human life. What are we doing here? What is the point of this? What and. Now, do I do I agree with the answers that they come up with? No, I don't. I really don't.

[01:17:25] But I but I appreciate the asking of the questions. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I was not raised religiously. So I was like you and never went even through a kind of a phase where I was open to it.

[01:17:36] If anything, I'm probably at the most open to it right now of any point in my life, which is still not very open. But the I've been teaching this course for the last 12 years where we do ancient

[01:17:47] texts. So it'll be Plato, it'll be the Bible, it'll be the Odyssey and the Iliad every year. And with the Odyssey and the Iliad, both of which I think are like two of my four favorite texts of all time. It I think a lot of the existential question.

[01:18:03] You're going to have to say what the other two are. Yeah, I don't even know. You can't leave that. The existential questions that you're talking about from the God's perspectives are kind of more explicit. You know, they are these characters who have an interest in humans,

[01:18:20] but at the same time, they never die and the humans die. And so they can never get too attached to a human because the human, you know, this it goes on forever for them and just that idea of living for eternity.

[01:18:34] While all these other people just kind of cycle through and, you know, the gods in the Odyssey and the Iliad like maybe the Old Testament God in parts is can be pretty nasty and pretty petty. But maybe that's just what happens when you never die, you know,

[01:18:51] and what that and just to think about what that means. And you know, this is one of the things I loved about what you did here and what you is that you because you don't get the God's perspectives

[01:19:03] as much like you do in the Odyssey and the Iliad, you don't get to really think about that and what it would be to be God in the Old Testament like you get it. And so I think that's really fascinating.

[01:19:16] And that's like again, it finds something unhidden in the Bible like that wasn't there before. I love the idea that like being eternal just would make you petty. That's a truly great joke because kind of what? Well, you know, toward the end of our lives,

[01:19:36] we just turn into shrill like people who are annoyed by everything. So you can imagine it does seem like I know it does. My final my mom passed away a few years ago. My final conversation, my final conversation with her,

[01:19:47] she's days from dying and it's just like she's just in a bad mood. She's just a bad and she's complaining about everything and she's just kind of like, Mom, you're like, come on, like some perspective, some perspective. But, you know, whatever.

[01:20:03] I just wanted to chime in and say that I what Tamler said is exactly, I think, right? And it's something that I didn't even stupidly for a book called the story of God, like I didn't even realize that the value would be

[01:20:16] in the gall that you have of telling this from God's perspective because again, was raised in a way where you're like, we had to know the Bible, but it was it was blasphemy to try to think what God was thinking. Right? Like what his perspective is,

[01:20:34] is something that we were effectively shut off from. So all of the stories have to be told from the perspective of the humans. And we're always saying things like it's mysterious. God has his ways, you know, trying to make excuses for him.

[01:20:48] You want him four skins to be cut and dangled at his feet. And and I love that this is just let's take quite seriously the premise that this God's like he's a novice, like he's making some ruckus. He's all shit.

[01:21:02] I didn't realize that like I would hate gay people so much. Like or do I? Why do I hate them so much? From a comedy perspective, having done Job ourselves I loved what God thought of is it Elihu? Elihu. Yeah. Elihu, that was my reaction.

[01:21:27] This guy, it's been hyped up to such a degree like what the speech is going to be. And it just makes no it's like it's no is worse than the other speeches. Never stops. Fizzles. Yeah. It's absolutely. And what I love the great joke in that thing is

[01:21:45] nobody even acknowledges what he's right. Nobody even acknowledge because you get the image of this kind of jerk, this talk just barging in and just starting to talk and just holding forth and saying what I'm what I'm saying is really important.

[01:21:57] What I'm saying is listen now, listen now and they no one even comments. God doesn't comment on it and nor do the guys comment on it. So it's just like they ignore him. It's like a freshman that just comes back from college

[01:22:08] over the summer and starts giving speeches to people. You know? Yeah. OK, I have to listen to your guys thing on Joe, but I haven't I haven't listened to it. I've got to listen to that. We also did one on the Klesiastis,

[01:22:23] which was one of our favorites that we've ever done. Do you like the Klesiastis? Yeah, I love it. Oh, we love it. It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. It's so completely incongruous with the rest of the book. And you're just like, wait, what?

[01:22:37] If this is true, the whole rest of the book is just completely invalid. And it's the fact that it's in there is so interesting. Yeah, I think. Oh, I love it. Love it. Love it. I have this idea that Solomon's kind of the big important guy

[01:22:51] because Solomon gets because he's a great writer, I think. And he gets stuff in the book that you just can't believe is there. Like some of Solomon, too, like what on earth is this doing in here? But I'm so glad it's in there. I love it. It's beautiful.

[01:23:04] Snuck it. He snuck it in right before it went to print. I mean, this is actually my problem with the new atheists is or at least some of them is not recognizing the value that's inherent in it. It's just contemptuous and contempt is a really narrow

[01:23:21] starting point always for looking at anything, really. I mean, unless it's just, I don't know, some things are worthy of that, I suppose, you know, but but not not these not the Bible. I don't think. Yeah, good. So happy. Yeah. And and yeah.

[01:23:37] As you say, contempt, some things are worthy of contempt, perhaps. But I find contempt to be a like an unfair form of communicating. You're like it's very easy to point out bad shit and get everybody riled up about it.

[01:23:53] Like I don't mind if you've come to, you know, have contempt for some of the people in your life like fine. But there's a difference between that and using it as your tool of communication that I find just kind of ugly. I totally, I totally agree.

[01:24:08] And I think, you know, snark is kind of a word that gets it a little bit snark maybe trivializes it sort of. But snark is just sort of adopting a superior position where you're just kind of crossing your arms and looking at something

[01:24:23] and rolling your eyes and mocking it. And I've done plenty of that in my life, by the way. I mean, I've done plenty of it. It's not like I've been immune from that. I've done a lot of it.

[01:24:31] But I don't think it's I don't want to do it anymore. I don't think it's worth doing. And I think it's very seductive for people because it's easy and it's safe. And it's kind of a it's like a little virus that's just running rampant, you know, to me.

[01:24:47] Yeah, it's a very tempting way. Like I don't know if it's a particular age or, you know, being like I just as a as say, like a teenage young man or a man is really 20s.

[01:25:00] Like I could I think I had an arrogance that I look back upon with cringe. And I think that arrogance and contempt go hand in hand sometimes. And it's just something that like I hope I've gotten over.

[01:25:12] But that's also why I like comedy so much because as Tam, I've talked to many times, you can express the absurdity of somebody's position. And if you make them laugh, you're giving two gifts, right?

[01:25:26] You're giving them the gift of laughter and you're giving them the gift of insight. In a way that doesn't, you know, immediately turn off the very people you're supposed to be communicating. It's very, very true. And those satirists who've been able to do it with a human touch,

[01:25:42] with some empathy and that's a really, really, really short list, I think. There's just not many. I mean, to me, that's like Jane Austen, Molière, Mark Twain a little bit. You know, it's like, by the way, you're totally right.

[01:25:56] That thing where Sigmund Freud refers to Mark Twain. Oh, my God. Isn't that fantastic? And you're just like, oh, my God, don't you hope they went out for a beer afterwards? I want to write something just I want to write a play or something about that.

[01:26:08] It's an amazing match up. Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain. Oh, it's I love it. I just absolutely. And the story that he tells about Twain is great. It actually is really funny. But but that's a rare thing.

[01:26:18] That ability to kind of gently comedy can do so many things and it can be so mean and destructive, but it can be very, very helpful. What Mark Twain does is a great example. You never get the sense that he's standing above it.

[01:26:32] He he's in the shit with whatever he sat sat satirizing. And that's, I think, like a big thing is is when you're doing it from a place of, look, I'm just as fucked up and and I have all these questions too.

[01:26:46] And you're not doing it from a place of, oh, look how stupid these poor people are. And I have it all figured out. That's the kind of comedy and kind of satire that that really works. I agree with you. I think the secret ingredient is love.

[01:27:01] Yeah. And to be a sadist who loves is rare. They don't usually they're usually really scornful. Can I ask, you know, we Tamela and I did a episode once on humor that I think is by far the episode

[01:27:14] where at least because it's such a such a difficult thing to talk about. But we talked a little bit about, I think, arrogance and comedians who who are as as Tamela just described, like put themselves in the shit versus those who are above.

[01:27:28] And it made me immediately think of something you might know something about, which is Carlin. Oh, yeah. You got Carlin forgotten about that, right? Which is first of all, how did you get Carlin and Clarence Clemens? Yeah, like those two.

[01:27:43] Yeah, how about that? Right in the same scene? Right. And I was too. I was so nervous that I didn't talk to either one of them. So I've got nothing. Oh, really? I was so nervous. I was so intimidated because I was a big Bruce fan back then.

[01:27:56] And, you know, as a comedy guy, it's like, oh, shit, it's George Carlin. So I can imagine. I can imagine. But what a good get. But I never resonated too much with Carlin because I felt and this is I could I can be convinced.

[01:28:09] Like it's not like I've watched his whole body work. But I always did feel like he had an attitude of superiority that made me not get into his comedy as much. I don't disagree with you.

[01:28:21] I would I would look at prior and say prior is really the one that from my standpoint in that at that time, prior is the one where you just it's breathtaking what he's doing because he's making comedy about his near death experience. He's making comedy about almost dying.

[01:28:41] I mean, you just can't believe what you're seeing and it's beautiful and it's art. And so I can't I can't really completely argue. Sunset strip, I just remember. I'll always remember the end of that where it just looked like he gave

[01:28:58] his everything, he gave his soul to that performance. And it just comes out and it's beautiful. Yeah, it's it is. It's transcendent. It's beautiful. And the last thing he ends with is he basically he he he just stands there for a minute because he's done.

[01:29:15] He's told the whole story of the free basing thing. And, you know, people have just held with laughter. And he's had the pipe talking to him and it's magnificent stuff. You just can't believe where he's going. And then he just stands there and he lights up a cigarette.

[01:29:30] Somebody's like, no, don't do it. Don't do it. And he lights it up and he stands there and he says, all right, I'm going to tell Richard Pryor on fire joke now. And then he ends with that and he waves. He likes it.

[01:29:39] He has his lighter or a match or something and he waves it around. And he says, what's this? Richard Pryor running down the street and then he walks off stage and that's it. Oh my God, what a beautiful soul that guy is.

[01:29:51] What a what a profound what that hit that's you know, when it comes to comedy. That's one of the highest achievements in the history of comedy. I think I really do. I 100 percent agree. Yeah, there is there is comedy before prior and there's comedy after

[01:30:06] prior and in my mind and nobody's really gotten to prior. I mean, I love Dave Chappelle, but time will tell. Chappelle is really, really good, but he's not he's not rich because rich's pain. Is so deep. Yeah, you're right. And so profound.

[01:30:23] Chappelle is a more confident man, you know, I dig Chappelle. He's really funny. Chris Rocks are really funny too. They're both really, really good. But with rich, oh my God, you feel the wounds and the suffering. And so again, it's the third thing. It's like it's the pain.

[01:30:41] It's the pain, you know, because for me, another one of the greatest documents of comedy ever made is Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. And again, it's the same thing. This guy's in he's clearly a pedophile.

[01:30:55] He's in love with a little girl and he's in love with her. In a bad way. I mean, he's sexually attracted to this little girl. And that's the nature of these books. And so like what he's dealing with is so heavy and difficult and dark.

[01:31:10] And he knows it and yet he writes something silly and playful that you can mistake for being and that it's a children's book. Is like the greatest joke of all. It's like as a children's book. It's like grooming. And it's still. Yeah, God.

[01:31:26] But all that darkness, I think is really the thing. It's totally. Yes. I never really thought. I mean, I don't know if I've ever thought of that in that way. I don't know why. Like, I know about Lewis Carroll and girls and the photographs and all of that.

[01:31:41] But but yeah, that's that's fascinating. So to turn that not just pain, but also just this shame and guilt. This is Victorian England. And like he's he's a pedophile. Clearly he's in love with this child. Yeah. Oh my God. And he writes these books.

[01:31:59] I never thought of it. Oh, it's wonderful. I don't think I can read it now. No, it makes it great. It's like in forms. Like it's super great. Have you ever seen the roast of Richard Pryor? No. Oh, my gosh. Tamal, I think we've talked about it.

[01:32:14] It is which this leads to a question that I'm sure our listeners will want. Some of our listeners want to ask. It is perhaps the single most offensive. It quotes like whatever 45 minutes of television I've ever seen in my life.

[01:32:32] The jokes that they tell like about sexuality, about race, like are things that you think to yourself like could even then could they were they allowed to say that in the 70s? Like I can't I can't imagine.

[01:32:46] And then Richard Pryor gets up after he's gotten roasted by like among the people there, Sandra Bernhard is just a host of very good comedians at their time and then Richard Pryor gets up at the end of them all

[01:33:00] and delivers just clearly off the top of his head. Just the most scathing jokes of all to each and every panelist. And I think I think to myself, I think to myself, I want to show

[01:33:15] at some point I want to show this to my daughter because she is being raised in a time and place where it is so unthinkable that people could say those things that it's that it's she already has knee jerk reactions, that it's impermissible. And I don't know.

[01:33:34] I'm comedy has had to change and I just wondered if you had any thoughts about about the changing landscape of comedy. It has. That's a hard one, you know, because on the one hand, you think it should just be like, well, anything goes in. Anything does go.

[01:33:50] I mean, Chappelle is not scared. Ricky Gervais isn't scared. These guys are going to say whatever they want and they're not going to go to jail for it. They're not going to they're not going to lose any they're not going to lose any money for it.

[01:34:02] They're it's there's a greater sensitivity, I think, or we're aspiring to a greater sensitivity with regard to, you know, matters pertaining to race and sex. And I don't know, you know, I'm kind of I have mixed feelings about this was is that is that better? Sort of.

[01:34:26] But if you looked at the surrounding reality of the early 80s or late 70s when it came from and you looked at the kind of the prevailing assumptions about, I don't think we'd want to go back to 1981, you know, absolutely. Right. I don't. Right. Don't know.

[01:34:43] I think that comedy has to it on some level. It just there's a deep river and it just is and the funny is kind of like the funny, but it changes and it has to it has to move through different. I don't know that that's really vague.

[01:35:00] That's it. Yeah, I get what you're saying. It has to evolve to these circumstances of greater awareness and greater sensitivity to certain issues. But I feel like it can do that and it can do it without losing the edge and the cuttingness.

[01:35:18] And it just has to negotiate those because, you know, in the end, like you said, if first of all, if you're a chappelle, people say mean things about him on Twitter and people will say, you know, write articles about his transphobia or whatever, but he's doing fine.

[01:35:32] And those Netflix just released like four specials or something. So for younger comedians, probably it's a little harder to negotiate the terrain. But I don't know. It seems like this has happened before and people figure it out. Yeah, I think so.

[01:35:49] And I think the best kinds of jokes are still funny. They're just as funny. They're to a degree, there's a timelessness to the to the truly funny, the deeply funny that doesn't pertain to just because a lot of those jokes have historically tended to be

[01:36:05] kind of cheap and, you know, they're punching down and you're laughing at the outgroup and you're, you know, those are they're not they're not great jokes, but Rich is rich and, you know, but if Rich was here, he'd be saying whatever popped into his head. Yeah.

[01:36:19] And then not editing it at all. No, before we let you go, you have a new book coming out, right? This, the Buddha story, the Buddha story. The Buddha story. And I'm I just wanted to give you a chance to talk about

[01:36:37] that a little and maybe as a way of leading in, have you have you flirted with Buddhism at all? Have you gone through a phase where you have meditated? I mean, you've clearly looked into the text, but is that something Buddhism for people who were not who are

[01:36:53] not believers seems often like a pretty attractive option? Is that something that you have have tried? No. Not written. No, I perceived I finished with the God project and I even tracked him through a second book because I just thought

[01:37:13] he was a funny enough character that I wanted to follow and kind of through the Korean and through the book of Mormon, because it's kind of the same character popping up in all these books. And every time essentially saying one more thing, one

[01:37:24] more thing, I'm not quite done, which is very funny in itself. But I finished finished with that. And I thought, well, I have this really strong interest in religion. What should where do I go? And I started so Buddhism was of interest to me because

[01:37:41] it seemed to me to kind of get a pass in Western culture, you know, like, Oh, it's the cool one. You know, well, now that's the cool one. Like you can be really smart and sophisticated and believe in science and like, you know, you're not so lame

[01:37:57] and kind of ridiculous. And like, no, it's like it's the cooler one. So that interested me. And from a satirical standpoint, that intrigued me, right? Because it's like, well, what is this really? You know, what is it? Because I didn't know very much about it.

[01:38:14] Just the basics, just the most rudimentary things. So I started reading it and I thought, you've got to be kidding me. Got to be kidding me. This is just as laughable. It's really, it's really it cloaks itself in all this compassion, but it's really ugly.

[01:38:31] It's really mean spirited. It's really overblown, you know, laughable stories and completely fraudulent, I thought, complete more fraudulent even than the Judeo-Christian thing because it's ostensibly on one of the basic ideas is no ego, right? You know, strip away your ego. The whole thing's about this guy's ego.

[01:38:52] It just couldn't be more about this guy's ego. He's allowed to have one. He's the perfect one. I mean, I have no ego, but please call me perfect one. Because not because I have an ego, but just because I because that's an acknowledgement of just

[01:39:06] reality, I just am a perfect one. I thought he was laughable. I don't know, you know, like his birth story, which you guys probably already know, is like he emerges from his mother, not through her birth canal, because, you know, that's really impure,

[01:39:20] obviously. He emerges from her side and then followed by some gods who hold an umbrella over him. He runs a bunch of few steps and then he stands and holds his arms up and says, I am the emperor of the world. Well, that's the beginning of it.

[01:39:35] And then he grows up and he's like, and these are their stories, by the way, because it's kind of the same starting point as the story of God. I'm not making stuff up. I'm using their books, their stories. It's like, this is what you say about your religion.

[01:39:52] And I don't know, did you guys have either one of you guys ever read Richie Rich when you were a kid? The comic strips Richie Rich, the poor little rich the poor little rich boy? Yeah, well, he's Richie Rich. He's the poor little rich boy. He's absolutely insufferable.

[01:40:05] He's a complete, I mean, it's really funny because he's a complete asshole everywhere, everywhere, every way. He's horrible to his wife. He's horrible to his stepmother. He's horrible to his son, brutal to his son. He's awful to his little sidekick best friend. He's just mean.

[01:40:23] He's mean and he's a dick from beginning to end. And so I thought, well, so what's the purpose of this? You know, I don't really know. I mean, if criticism of religion could knock it down a notch, then, you know, the antichrist would have done it,

[01:40:38] you know, Nietzsche kind of did it, you know. I don't know if it can even be done. I'm not even sure whether that's doable. But like, I don't like that it's gotten such a pass. And so I thought, I want people to kind of at least,

[01:40:50] I want to at least take a shot at illuminating this. It's not what you think it is. It's not what you think it is. But isn't there something about Buddhism? And maybe it's just that we don't, we live in a country that is Judeo-Christian

[01:41:03] at its roots, but that lends itself to metaphorical interpretation more so. And I think actually the Bible does this too. But maybe not as obviously and especially not as obviously if you live, you know, in certain parts of the States or you were raised in a particular way.

[01:41:22] I don't know. And I haven't read the text, the text that you're satirizing in any detail. But there is something, I think the reason for its popularity is not that people are drawn to the story of the, the, you know, the founding figure. Said Arthur Buddha.

[01:41:40] It's more that there's something about it. The philosophy of it that is open to a more metaphorical interpretation. I agree. I think it's the ideas, but I found the ideas were not attractive to me. I don't think they're beautiful.

[01:41:59] I think when the starting point and it is the starting point is life is suffering, life is pain. That doesn't resonate with me. You know, it's like, I get it. Yeah, life's hard. That's true. Life is hard. Life's filled with difficulties.

[01:42:11] But when the starting point is life is pain and everything is built on that, I think life's beautiful. I think life's wonderful. I think we're incredibly lucky to be here. I think we have love and we have nature and we have play and we have music.

[01:42:28] And so this basic belief system, I thought, well, this isn't really nihilistic because you know, the point of Buddhism is don't exist. That's what you're aspiring to. I think that's pretty nihilistic. Like it's just ended. Like you don't want to come back. You will keep coming back.

[01:42:48] It's all bad no matter what you come back as, it's going to be bad. It's really bad to be an animal because animals are idiots, he says. It's bad to be a God because if you're a God,

[01:42:57] even it's bad to be a God because it just sort of breaks. You know, you just deteriorate because you don't stay as pure forever. It's bad to be a hungry ghost, which is a character, a kind of character that I find quite funny, the hungry ghost.

[01:43:11] They're all bad. The only thing to aspire to is absolute extinction. And I find myself thinking, well, I don't agree with that at all. And also I think it's fake. I think it's fake. I think that it's built on this made up reality

[01:43:28] where it's like, oh, no, no, it goes without saying that we live, you know, a bunch of lifetimes. I mean, it's almost eternally essentially, of course we do. So all we want to do is end it. Well, I don't think that's right. I think we get this one,

[01:43:42] I believe we get this one lifetime and I want to make the most of it. And I don't like it. So yes, you're right. I think it is the beliefs. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, that is this, you're right. That's the starting point and that's the end point.

[01:43:54] Along the way, though, you are supposed to cultivate a kind of loving kindness towards everybody. But it's a kind of loving kindness. Here is my issue with some of the philosophy that is detached. It is not, you're supposed to minimize your attachments.

[01:44:12] It has in like the way Stoics kind of want you to minimize your attachments to others because those attachments are sources of suffering. But there is, and certainly how it's being taught, I'm more familiar with the westernized version of it.

[01:44:30] It is the loving kindness aspect of it is pretty prominent. And I don't, it doesn't sound like it has its source in what you're reading there. No, and I always find it very fake because when I go to a Buddhist website and they're so cloaked in compassion

[01:44:51] and loving kindness and lack of ego. And I think I don't buy this at all. I don't buy this at all. I think I just don't buy it at all. Yeah, I find it hard to buy as well.

[01:45:04] And I think in our discussions, maybe it was with Sam, I had the same objection as Tamer like attachments. It's not only that I don't want to minimize my attachments, it's that that is what I draw so much of my life's meaning, my relationships with other human beings.

[01:45:19] And I do believe that it's a huge source of suffering. Even the thought of my dog dying made me for years not want to get another dog. But without those attachments, then you're just living a life that's, I don't know,

[01:45:37] like you're right, we get one shot at this. And I think my theory is that Buddhism got to the West, got stripped of all its objectionable elements and introduced as a novel way of teaching kindness and compassion in a way that could easily be done with any religion.

[01:45:56] And you could do that with Christianity. You could take the best teachings of Christ, strip it of all of its literalness and the history and the theology and just say, no Christianity is about like healing people. I guess I would disagree with that

[01:46:11] because there are texts that I'm familiar with like the Shuangzi which was written in fourth century, fifth century BC. So well before it came to the United States but it lacks all of the sort of literal elements of the Buddhist tradition

[01:46:33] and is in fact just like a deeply puzzling and like fascinating book that raises questions that it pretty much refuses to answer at any level. But yeah, but the whole tradition is the whole tradition. So like Ecclesiastes is an exception to the Bible like in the same way.

[01:46:50] But I don't think, I think when the West adopted it, it was like the cafeteria style approach to religion which is let's take these aspects that we like and that's why Zen Buddhism for instance became so popular in the US and reality is not that popular anywhere else

[01:47:04] because most Buddhist, practicing Buddhists have the same religious beliefs that are as odd as people taking the Bible literally I think. Yeah, I think that there's even in the early stuff which is you feel that it's coming pretty much from him. It feels like kind of raw material.

[01:47:27] There's a hatred for the body that I don't resonate with and there's a misogyny because of course there is, right? Cause that goes everywhere in all these major religions it seems. Yeah, I think there's a kind of a fraudulence to this guy at the center of it

[01:47:50] which to me going back to just the title of your show it's pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, pay no attention but I, but it's always about the man behind the curtain. Islam's all about the guy behind the curtain

[01:48:06] and the Mormonism is all about the guy behind the curtain and I think this one's all about the guy behind the curtain. Now I will say a couple of positive things about it though cause I think they do exist.

[01:48:17] It integrates animals in a way that the Western religions don't and I do appreciate that. You know you could come back next time as a crow or a bear or an insect or something and that I think is it broadens the picture and I appreciate that.

[01:48:30] And I think that the fundamental insight of life is really hard and that's just central to our existences and it's inescapable. Yes, I think there's absolutely true. That is absolutely true and even when we get the things we want that doesn't bring us happiness

[01:48:46] because then instantly we're scared of losing it. I think that psychologically that's kind of right but Freud did seem to sort of address it and civilization in this discontent. He seems to just kind of go, yeah, well, good luck with that. Correct. Good luck with that.

[01:49:02] I don't see it happening but you know. I don't see it happening. What do I know? I'm just Sigmund Freud. All right, well this has been really, really fun. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Do we have anything else, Dave, that you wanted to ask?

[01:49:23] I don't wanna take up too much more of your time. My last question was simply gonna be did you have to come back to writing Bill and Ted as somebody who's middle aged? Did that pose a certain challenge to you to like get back in that mindset

[01:49:40] or are Bill and Ted like you now? Like have they matured? Yeah. So we're going from that big, big question of existence to like a rather small one. We wanted them to be, we wanted to take them seriously. We wanted them to have grown up.

[01:49:57] We didn't want them to be still 17, 18 year old boys now inhabiting 50 year old bodies because that and we thought that would be kind of just, that would not work. We didn't think it was funny and we thought it was kind of, it would be vaguely pathetic.

[01:50:15] So we didn't wanna do that. So we knew that we had to write them as they are and I guess in order to do that, yeah we had to draw on ourselves because Ed and I have both been married and had kids and had,

[01:50:29] and when we were 25 maybe we thought in some weird stupid way that we were gonna save the world or something like that. There's some fantasy of it. And now we're like 60 and it's like, right, that yeah that didn't happen. That's not how it went. And what is that?

[01:50:50] I think we drew on ourselves and we wanted to group them in what's actually happened and that it hasn't, that it didn't go the way it was supposed to. That they didn't, that song that was supposed to save everything they didn't come up with.

[01:51:03] And so they're 50 years old and they haven't accomplished what they were supposed to accomplish and that's really painful and difficult for them. And how... It's a little too close to home. Someone very close to 50 myself. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting.

[01:51:21] I take it it was gonna get a theatrical release but now probably not or are they still gonna try to put it out in the theaters? I mean given the tenet just got pulled and tenet was the one that everybody was hanging their hopes on.

[01:51:37] I don't know when's the new movie really gonna be in a movie theater at this point? I really don't know. And I know there's movies that have pushed back to October and November but I don't really see why that's gonna be better and make more sense.

[01:51:50] I think that's not super likely at this point because it's just, it's a health thing. Yeah, it was made to go in theaters and when we were early in COVID I remember thinking like, wow that would be like if we could be the first comedy

[01:52:07] in the theaters on the other side, how fantastic. And it would have been, but that's not where we are. So I don't know. Well, I'm looking forward to it. If it doesn't hit too close to home. But it has a happy end. So it all works out.

[01:52:26] Everything works out. Cause it's a comedy. Yeah. Thanks for bringing a little bit more humor to our lives. Yeah, Chris. I think you guys are pretty funny actually. Thank you. Thanks for taking your time to talk. Oh, it was great. Appreciate it. I enjoyed it completely.

[01:52:45] So, all right guys. The Great Little Brains in U.S. Anybody can have a brain? Very good man. Just a very bad wizard.

Episode 194: God Has No Mother (with Chris Matheson)