...and the circumstances that birthed them?
EPISODE: NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
Upon learning that everything in our universe is comprised of atoms orbiting around one another, Joe wonders if that doesn't mean we're actually mostly air, and that otherwise solid objects might pass through one another as one sifts sugar through a "cosmic sieve".
"It's entirely possible," Neil Degrasse Tyson suggests. "At the right angle and velocity, of course."
Joe proceeds to jitter against walls and large pieces of furniture, but even after he gets the velocity right, the angle is wrong. He exposes himself to extreme cold until his teeth chatter and his limbs go numb, but the shivering only succeeds in extending his lifespan very slightly. He consults with Joey Diaz--a coarse man, but one of the wisest he knows. "Get yourself a motherfuckin plate vibrator, set it to 'eleven', boom, ride that bitch through a fuckin wall." And as it so happens, Joey's cousin has one to spare.
Joe searches for something profound to say as he mounts the plate vibrator parked on top of a furniture dolly. "The mind is the most important thing of the big picture and no one has a stronger mindset than amateur wrestlers.”
With that, the vibrator roars to life and two brawny men send it hurtling toward a brick wall at the bottom of a hill. It detaches from the dolly almost immediately and goes tumbling end-over-end; Joe blacks out as it runs over his head.
After several minutes he awakens to a dour, neckless man slapping him back to consciousness and, for some reason, shaking him violently by the shirt collar. "Did I do it? Did I go through it?" The stranger--who speaks no English--seems to nod, and Joe takes this as proof that he is now an astronaut of the 4th dimension.
EPISODE: ELON MUSK
Deep in the hills of Topanga Canyon, Joe and Elon hack away at old electronics--a private demonstration on the finer points of exquisite Hanzo steel. As Elon takes wild and erratic swings at an old stereo with Joe's samurai sword, Joe admits "I talk so much about sex that girls just want to meet me." Elon seems oblivious to the sharp bits of glass and plastic that hit him in his vacant face with every swing.
Apparently satisfied, Elon steps back and agrees. Girls are cool, and so is sex; in the future, sex will be conducted with electromagnetic waves and tesla coils. He gestures with his hands, outlining a large helmet that each participant will wear. Even in his pantomime the helmet is awkward and heavy; he stomps around carefully, as if balancing a stack of plates on his head. "But you won't be moving when you use it in real life," he reassures Joe. "Because we will all live in techno-coffins like vampires."
Without warning, Elon falls to his knees and clutches his face. "My BRAAAIN!" he shrieks and then, weakly, "my...me-di-cine..."
Joe tears through Elon's neon medical satchel and finds the hypospray gun; it is already loaded up with Mefloquine--the anti-malarial drug Elon has been taking since he contracted Malaria more than 20 years ago. He shoots Elon in the eye, and the powerful medication seems to immediately "restart" Elon's brain.
"I will have a child and I will name it every digit of Pi, and the child will live forever with a name that goes on forever," Elon says dreamily.
Joe sits back and thinks about Elon's sex helmet. He will miss sex once the 21st century techno-wizards have their way with society--but with paragons like Elon at the helm, the world will be all the better for it.
EPISODE: EDDIE BRAVO
When Joe gets a 3D body scan for his integration as a playable character in EA Sports UFC 3, he becomes irate after their instruments claim he is 4-foot-11. "Dude I'm not a fuckin' dwarf," he tells the EA employees and then, looking up at his emotional support companion, Eddie Bravo, stresses "I'm tall as a skyscraper."
Eddie Bravo agrees wholeheartedly. "He's as tall as a skyscraper."
"The World Trade Center."
The words are a trigger phrase for Bravo; a pinprick on a brain under the constant pressure of conspiracy theory, and now those theories are leaking out with a hiss of erratic indictments against the perpetrators of the fraudulent Moon landing, the Great Jewish Space Laser, the conspicuous lack of photos of Prison Earth. He grabs one of the EA employees by the collar and asks why there are no YouTube results for "Nikola Tesla Fraud Hoax", yet trillions for "Albert Einstein Fraud". How can their machines measure anything when geometry isn't real?
The answer is immediately obvious to Joe, of course. With divine purpose, Joe leaves to study the cubit; he walks a thousand miles through the desert, counting each step; he scrutinizes a yardstick. "Do you see how these two lines are further apart than these?" he asks, pointing between the 5th and 6th inches on the instrument. They are identical to the naked eye, yet the third eye perceives their irregularity. He stares at his feet and wills them to grow larger, such that he might stomp around the earth and fill the hearts of lesser men with dismay. And he retreats to his isolation tank to lie torpid for perhaps six hours or a hundred years--it is irrelevant, as the measure of time is a mortal's purview.
Joe returns to EA as Joseph James. An EA employee working on UFC 4 wonders aloud if he's not taller; nobody's sure, but look at his feet! And there's a certain aura about him, though it's impossible to discern if it's the awe of a prophet or the miasma of a madman. Joseph declares "there’s a direct correlation between positive energy and positive results in the physical form." To demonstrate, he offers his body to their pointless measuring machines and warns them "I am a thousand feet tall."
By some accounts, Joseph quotes Oppenheimer's "now I am become Death; the destroyer of worlds" before striking down their equipment with one giant hand. By others, the needles of their machines whip back and forth in a hopeless attempt to measure a miracle--now Joseph is a grain of sand! Now Joseph is the size of a bear! Now Joseph is a hundred feet tall! Joseph laughs and animals flee like an earthquake approaches. Eddie Bravo initially claims a revelatory experience but, upon finding nothing on YouTube to corroborate it, dismisses it as another example of the Vatican trying to convince us that giants exist.
EPISODE: DAN AYKROYD
Joe sets the crystal skull on a pedestal. The skull is a gift from Dan Aykroyd, who expounds upon its esoteric properties and warns Joe of its great and terrible power; he traces the relic's lineage via the proud Aykroyd family. "My great grandfather was an Edwardian spiritualist, a sorcerer, and a dentist."
Joe nods along knowingly, already understanding the true history of these cursed artifacts. When Frederick Mitchell-Hedges unveiled the first crystal skull in the 1920's, many audience members balked at its proposed origins; all of those critics are dead now. That is no coincidence.
The two take inventory of their actions: Their beds are made; their rooms are clean; they have followed The Twelve Rules. One of them applies fire to the "First Fruits"--a Freshman course catalog from Evergreen State College. As the flames consume the offering, Aykroyd suddenly remembers something: "Rule Eight! 'Tell the truth--or at least don't lie'!"
Joe licks his lips and thinks carefully. "My act is so completely and totally uncensored that the only way I could really pull it off is if I treat the audience like they’re my best friends." The skull remains silent, so he thinks some more. "To me, comedy is a great occupation because I don’t really worry that much about what other people think of me." And yet the skull still remains reticent. Finally he sighs, "I'm not a doctor...I'm a fucking moron" and the skull blossoms with an ethereal glow.
Swirling above the skull, the smoke of the course catalog takes shape; even before the specter is fully formed, it is already mid-sentence in a shrill Albertan upspeak: "...because there's no such thing as 'climate'. 'Climate' and 'everything' are the same word! A meta-predator is what all predators share in common--that's a dragon! Well what should you do with a dragon? You can feed your family with the body of the dragon! It's treasure!"
Aykroyd and Joe stand, transfixed by the phantom's gibberish. Staring into the abyss, the abyss proceeds to stare back.
EPISODE: FITZCARRALDO
Joe Rogan plucks at his seersucker suit and fans his bald head with his hat. The air is impenetrable--a solid wall of heat and humidity, packed tighter than Richard Pryor's opening night at Terrace Theatre--with no more room for the sweat that collects on his squat, muscular body. Above him looms the Isthmus Ó Ruadhagáin, little more than a dot of earth surrounded by the vast and implacable jungle below. He checks his Rolex Yachtmaster and immediately frowns. They are making poor time.
"Let's go!" he barks at the legion of locals snaking their way up the mud trail, each carrying a different burden: a stool, a door, a sheet of glass. He holds up his wristwatch and taps it furiously...but have these people even seen a timepiece before? Do they have any concept of time? Unacceptable! The hills of his Bell Canyon LA neighborhood were steeper, and he could run those every day. 45% grade roads stretching for miles; when the air wasn't choked with black soot from fires, the elevation would deprive the brain of precious oxygen; earthquakes opened great fissures in the earth, and Joe would gracefully leap over them. "Pills!"
A half dozen young boys scurry up to Joe, bearing the instruments of his longevity: Alpha Brain and Lion's Mane for his famous wit & levity; the powerful antioxidants Quercetin and Glutathione; fish oil ("the motor oil of man"). Having no time for water, he consumes whey protein and creatine by the fistful and coughs up excess powder; a child plunges a needle into Joe's vein and he roars as a double-dose of Vitamin C and NAD pickle his flesh and reverse his aging. It is a modest regimen--here in the jungle, sacrifices must be made, even for Joe.
"Powerful Joe, the men--they struggle with her!" one of the boys informs him--a waifish child of indeterminate age, whose name he never learned and whom, for reasons that now escaped him, he knew only as "Gunga Din".
Imbued with a sudden strength and clarity, he climbs the path, passing local laborers on both sides. At a bend in the road, she suddenly comes into view: 140 feet square, 16 feet tall at her peak, black and fringed with white; a small army of men tug at her with muddy ropes thick as a man's arm; a larger crowd digs into her flank, grunting and pushing her up the steep incline with their hands and brawn.
The Comedy Store.
The world laughed at him when he said he would bring The Comedy Store to the primeval jungles of Peru. There were no roads, they said; no need for an act as completely and totally uncensored as Rogan's. The LA comedy scene was an unforgiving mistress--but the steppes of Machu Picchu? His boy-companion echoes these doubts and searches Powerful Joe for some profound vision, yet Joe simply shrugs.
“I really never had any ambitions to be a standup comic," he turns and admits to Gunga Din. "I was talked into it by guys that I used to work out with.”
Much later, his comedy crew abandons the Store almost immediately after breaking ground, leaving it to a local population who shun it as a place of great evil. As Joe burns the building down--and half of the jungle with it--he is reminded of the wildfires Antifa started across the pacific northwest.
EPISODE: JESSE VENTURA
Joe crunches the numbers on ape-strength and determines that he could win in a fight with a Bigfoot. "In Muay Thai kickboxing? No way. But if this is an MMA fight? Double-leg takedown and Bigfoot's going in a triangle choke."
"Oh, Bigfoots are mean bastards," Jesse Ventura growls, and Joe nods along in agreement. "Mean, mean bastards."
Just then Jesse leans in close--a menacing man who earned the nickname "The Body" in his heyday and still towers a solid foot over Joe, even sitting--and the two radio show hosts hold a confidential close-quarters palaver. He asks if Joe knows what's even more dangerous than Bigfoots. "Bears? Thylacine? Actually can you outrun a rattlesnake? Jamie look up how fast a rattlesnake can run or whatever."
Jesse grins impishly and reveals that the Predator is the most dangerous creature to ever walk the earth. It can cloak, it has infrared vision, and it uses advanced energy weapons "bordering on black magick"; for three days and three nights, he battled the beast in the jungles of some godforsaken dictatorship. It was no match for Jesse's American Brawn, of course, but he'd be fibbing if the Predator wasn't his toughest opponent yet.
Joe wonders aloud if the Predator was like a Richard Pryor--noble, original, hilarious? Or more like a Carlos Mencia--cowardly, unoriginal, thief of ideas? "The comics I hate are thieves. Nothing's more disgusting than a guy who steals another person's ideas and tries to claim them as his own" he elaborates.
His guest purses his lips and nods sagely, but says nothing.
EPISODE: BEN GOERTZEL
"Reality really is a theater. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s all so nonsensical, ridiculous and chaotic," says Joe.
Across from him sits Dr. Ben Goertzel, a strange and unkempt man; he is accompanied by a crude simulacrum he affectionately refers to as "Sophia". Sophia wears makeup and can open her mouth wide, yet lacks the ability to walk, hold things, or sit up straight. Dr. Ben intends to put golems like Sophia in retirement communities across the country, where they might one day terrorize the elderly if he can just get the AI to the point that it can wield surgical instruments and see humans through walls.
In the meantime, Dr. Ben hopes Sophia can show Joe how our concept of reality is tenuous at best--how we might all be programs or automatons with a false sense of self, like her. He prods Joe to interact with Sophia and ask her a question to demonstrate her sapience.
Joe leans in and studies the robot. "Siri...is it true that Orcas agreed to not eat people because we've shot them from helicopters in the past?" Sophia remains silent, and Dr. Ben suggests Joe asks a question about Sophia herself.
"Siri, is AIDS extraterrestrial in origin?"
Sophia begins to twitch and make grinding sounds, and Dr. Ben rushes to soothe her. "Actually, I think that's enough questions, Joe." But Joe Rogan questions everything; he grinds his teeth on a heroic dose of Alpha Brain and continues the onslaught. Dr. Ben scoops up Sophia--a twitching torso with hair and makeup and pendulous silicone breasts--and flees for the exit under a barrage of Joe's pointed questions.
"If you put a watermelon seed in a vergina does it grow into a watermelon baby? Siri, how many Jews are on Spaceship Earth? A billion? No, wait--500 million?"
EPISODE: JOE ROGAN
Did you hear the story of The Joe Rogans? That's no mistake: There's more than one.
It begins with a little person and a gnome. The little person, Joe Rogan; the gnome, Webster's defines as "a short statement encapsulating a general truth; a maxim." And Joe Rogan's gnome is: “Treat everyone as if they were you. If we really are one, then I am you and you are me.” Never have truer words been spoken. And to think that the truest words came from Joe's mouth, himself?
The year is 2019. Physicist Sean Carroll goes on Joe Rogan's radio show to reassure a weary public that the Large Hadron Collider will not, in fact, bring about the apocalypse. Believe him, they tried; they crunched the numbers and it's just not big enough. Maybe with a bigger budget. Several times he tries to change the subject, but finds himself somehow bringing up the Death Star again. He sweats profusely and takes his jacket off, only to put it back on moments later. "The physics is heating us up!" Sean jokes, but secretly wonders...can the Collider kill him from here?
On the subject of parallel universes, Joe keeps responding to increasingly simplified and abstract explanations with "...in English?" Sean chuckles but Joe is deadly serious. The multiverse is like a coin-toss where both outcomes occur. The multiverse is like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel where you read every choice. The multiverse is the reason why there are an infinite number of Joe Rogans out there.
"Hold up. Like in one universe, I perform a rear naked choke...but in another universe I throw an elbow strike?" Joe asks. You've got it now! Sean is elated. Mouth agape, Joe wonders if there's a universe where he's performing a reverse armbar. Or maybe a toe hold. His eyes glaze over and a strange, pensive noise escapes his lips.
Sean offers him a final treat: A phone app called "Universe Splitter". Could the universe be split in twain for 99 cents? Cosmic puzzle pieces fall into place...and the ones that don't readily fit can be forced until they do. Joe has a 2-1 record in amateur kickboxing. Joe has seen Highlander. And all of this talk about MMA has whet his appetite for some high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences. He eyes the dweeb sitting across from him and contemplates killing him, but realizes that it would accomplish nothing--only other Rogans will consolidate his power.
Months later, a frazzled Joe Rogan squats over the body of another man--bald, Caucasian, early 50's--in the bathroom of an Arby's in Bakersfield. He flexes in the mirror and tests his muscles with a few amateur bodybuilding poses before his gaze shifts to his quarry's reflection. It's strange that these Joe Rogans only vaguely look like him. Even stranger, how they continue to pierce the interdimensional veil of the multiverse to invade his world. And only one of them seemed to recognize him, saying "Joe Rogan?" right before he struck.
No, you're Joe Rogan, he thinks. And he is Joe Rogan as well.
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