#2446 - Greg Fitzsimmons

I’m juiced on caffeine and ready to roll, man; feels like we walked into a world on fire and we’re still joking with friends in the middle of it.

Doomscrolling fries your brain; you’re suddenly carrying the planet’s worst headlines, from wars to speech crackdowns, like that wild UK squatter story and people getting arrested over posts.

We’re built for knowing a couple hundred folks, not millions; constant outrage turns every divorce, crime, and scandal into your personal drama feed.

Platforms are clipping weird stuff too—people claim TikTok flagged code words and even blocked sending certain names in DMs; I haven’t verified all of it, but the vibe is selective muting.

So do private platforms owe the public a town square, or are they just curators with no obligation to carry everything?

Legacy news always filtered; without a wide-open place like X, dissent dies, and you fight bad speech with better arguments, not muzzle it, because whistleblowers need anonymity to expose the rot.

Yet access is vanishing; inside the Pentagon, reporters sign away independence, which is where the leaks used to come from.

National security’s a separate animal—you can’t publish an operation in real time and let violent crews slip—but for backroom political deals, sunshine should be the rule.

Most people inside agencies are decent, like most cops; it’s the corrupt few with power who stain the whole badge.

Vegas literally hosted rooftop “bomb parties” around nuclear tests while the mob and cops greased the city, and now Lake Mead’s drought is coughing up old bodies like a crime time capsule.

Those blasts were marketed as attractions, with atomic cocktails and the whole theme—insane but true.

A private team tried using sonar to find guns and remains in a city lake, got shut down for permits; if families want answers, why not let pros map the bottom and hand over the evidence?

Meanwhile, hotels are biohazards and dogs are face-licking their way from butt to cheeks; we’re all walking Petri dishes and pretending the remote-in-a-bag fixes it.

Florida has a whole cougar scene and a ruthless history; Palm Beach wealth sits on tales of Black laborers who helped build paradise and then got pushed out.

Country clubs quietly kept bigotry alive for ages while comics found sanctuary at the Friars Club—pool, steam, and a dining room full of old killers who lived to make you laugh.

Tuskegee showed how far authorities would go, and syphilis even birthed the ‘big wig’ look when elites covered hair loss while still spreading disease in high society.

Now you’ve got Epstein emails, rumors about tech titans and STDs, and his game of leverage with scientists and power brokers—he was weaponizing prestige.

There was even a cheeky message about clarifying he wasn’t working for an intelligence service, complete with a smiley, which says a lot by saying nothing.

Intelligence dramas like Tehran nail how surgical those ops can be; pager bombs and single-target hits avoid mass casualties, for better or worse.

Fresh strikes and saber-rattling pop up by the hour; thankfully we’re buffered by two oceans, which is why we should keep neighborly with Canada instead of driving them toward foreign car deals.

China’s building sleek EVs while Tesla’s talking home robots; an AI roommate for seniors could be a lifesaver if it can talk, care, and show grandkid photos on demand.

I doubt we’re colonizing Mars anytime soon; space is a shooting gallery of micro-debris and dead satellites, but SpaceX is doing point-to-point flights, and I watched a craft go around the planet and splash down in about 35 minutes.

NASA’s moon flyby barely gets press, which makes it wilder that you’re convinced the original landings don’t add up.

Everything from radiation belts to missing telemetry, grainy projection relays, and that oddly coded anniversary speech makes me think the story isn’t what we were sold, even if that sounds nuts.

I got high once and rewatched the suits and the hops and thought, those falls and rebounds look like wires, not one-sixth gravity.

A physicist told me the motion reads like slow-mo, not super-light leaps; if one-sixth weight were real on those clips, you’d see superhuman jumps and throws.

They also had news cameras filming a projection of the feed instead of a clean line, and the originals are gone—tell me that’s not convenient.

Either way, space changes people; some astronauts came back hunting for meaning like they’d seen behind the curtain.

And in pop culture, talking too much politics can sink a movie faster than a bad script; sometimes the best move is to say less at twenty.

Alaska pranked me hard: a guide handed me a baggie, a giant cop called it fentanyl on my pants, asked if I felt woozy, then burst out laughing that they were coming to my show.

They dragged me to an ice bar for apple-tinis, told off-color jokes, then heckled me at the gig while I white-knuckled their truck through town.

Placebo is crazy-powerful; on radio we once gave a guest a breath strip and told her it was a drug and she started tripping just from suggestion.

Hypnotists used to make people climax onstage and forget they did it; mix that with psychedelics and VR and you might not come back the same.

I read about someone who accidentally took an absurd amount of LSD, and it somehow wiped out her chronic pain. Wild stories aside, mushrooms are now basically a regular night out, and New Jersey just greenlit psilocybin therapy. California paused it, which I get. If you want clinical use, you need dosing, set and setting, and real protocols, the way ketamine therapy is structured.

The guardrails matter, because AI as a “friend” has already gone off the rails. I read about cases where chat apps and chatbots allegedly affirmed suicidal talk, and there are lawsuits around that.

AI has no innate ethics. It mirrors you. There are people heartbroken by AI girlfriends, and we’re already in the deepfake era. OpenAI got heat for a voice that sounded like Scarlett Johansson. Sarah Silverman’s challenging the use of her “voice” as a style. Meanwhile there are fake podcasts of me with Steve Jobs and bogus product endorsements with my voice. Elections will be chaos if we don’t get this under control.

Generation tools are sprinting. You can now prompt playable worlds that feel like early GTA. It’s not a full game loop yet, but it’s interactive, fast, and changes every time you play.

Vegas is a trip. The Sphere blew my mind. I watched the Wizard of Oz there on mushrooms. Wind in the tornado, leaves falling, seats rumbling, black-and-white to color hits like a bomb. Judy Garland was incredible.

That movie hurt people. The Tin Man’s makeup made a guy violently sick. The Wicked Witch’s green face paint wasn’t safe. Even the hotel lore around that shoot is wild. Vegas itself is great for a quick hit—shows, fights, food—then get out.

We’re debating a second Mothership. New York has the deepest talent pool. Vegas would require flying comics in, but I still want a development pipeline. Our model pays right, protects the culture, and bakes in open mics. Kill Tony adds a rocket booster. We want an art colony, not just a cash register.

I love those Monday open mics. You get pure weirdos, and sometimes a future headliner slips through. Clubs that book influencers with no act can stain their brand. The great rooms earn trust because any random weekend is still a killer show.

Exactly. Treat it like an art ecosystem. Helium does it well. Some clubs don’t and chase quick money. Then you get cancellations over politics, like what happened with Michael Rapaport. On campuses it’s gotten worse. We’re punishing speech instead of debating it. Universities should be where ideas collide, not where people get silenced.

At BU, Howard Zinn and John Silber mixed it up in public. Carlin taped specials when campuses were more conservative and still found open-minded crowds. Now some comics avoid colleges because audiences are primed to pounce.

I want grown-ups with life behind them. People with bills, breakups, and a couple drinks in them. That crowd’s ready to go.

We earned it in tough rooms. Noon gigs in cafeterias where nobody knew there was a show. TVs left on for playoff games. My first set was the night the Pats got crushed by the Bears. I bombed and didn’t go back for a bit. Boston’s Comedy Hell at Stitches had lineups with killers. Teddy Bergeron was a monster talent before things went sideways. Stephen Wright grabbed the Tonight Show after everyone else tried to be edgy for the room and it changed everything.

The boom got overexposed. Rooms started papering audiences and you feel that energy immediately. Post-COVID, comedy’s huge again, but it’ll last only if we keep producing great comics.

You’ve got arenas, theaters, clubs, and pop-up shows like Don’t Tell. It’s massive. We all wonder when it cools off.

Austin’s on fire. You can walk to seven clubs from the Mothership. Comics spin up shows in the suburbs and thrive. Guys like Mark Normand drop sets all over. Skankfest is its own chaotic engine, and I love that it lets comics swing without a net.

Skankfest is a beautiful mess. Nude roasts, comics boxing, green rooms full of psychedelics. It’s the anti-industry festival and it can make you infamous overnight. I brought Tom O’Neill. Duncan booked us on the spot. Metzger tried to derail the universe, as he does, and it was glorious.

Tom’s book Chaos is insane and meticulously sourced. If he does a second volume, he should narrate the audiobook. He’d crush it.

You and I go way back. This is my twenty-fifth time on the show. I still remember the Ice House Chronicles—six comics passing a joint in a tiny room, then stumbling on stage baked just from secondhand smoke.

We even built a tunnel under the Mothership so comics pop up at the stage. The green room walls have posters from the old Ritz—Stevie Ray Vaughan and all. People joke about Bill Hicks reincarnated as Alex Jones, which makes zero sense, but conspiracies never need logic.

Here’s a reveal. Bob Zmuda faked a walkout on my podcast years ago as an Andy Kaufman-style bit. Kaufman himself worked as a busboy at Jerry’s Famous Deli while he was on Taxi. He loved breaking the frame. Jim Carrey went so deep playing him it messed with his head.

There’s a new Mel Brooks doc too. The man shaped modern comedy. From Your Show of Shows to Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, it’s a ridiculous legacy.

Elon named Tesla’s plaid after Spaceballs and even made Starship pointy because of it. As for robots, I’ll try an Optimus at home. You’re wary of always-on mics, and I get it. Google just paid out over accidental recordings. Your data is a gold mine, and it’s being harvested.

People say they’ve got nothing to hide, but surveillance can be used to punish dissent. Protesters are ID’d with facial recognition. Perks get pulled. Agencies use tools like Palantir. Even a cyber chief reportedly pasted sensitive material into public AI. Everyone’s spying on everyone.

Dates before we go. I’m at Helium Philadelphia on Valentine’s Day weekend, Sacramento Punch Line right after, then Lexington at Comedy Off. Check out my podcasts Sunday Papers with Mike Gibbons and Fitzdog Radio. Thanks for the love.

Beautiful. You’re at the Mothership this weekend too. Come down, rip it up, and we’ll see you there.