They look like they were in ecstasy. You could tell that this was one of those performances where the crowd, the artist and the music all just synched up perfectly – that rare burst of wonder and magic when you see a truly inspired performance. A really amazing performance like that isn’t just “entertaining,” it can change our expectations of human potential and lets us all know that unseen heights of connection are possible. It lets us know there are things in life that are really fucking cool and that these things that people create can actually make life more enjoyable.

It doesn’t have to be a song, it could be an athletic performance, or it could be a painting, or even the written word crafted so perfectly that it sneaks into your perceptions and rewires your imagination.
You can call it the zone, you can call it Zen, you can call it brilliance, but however you describe the particular expression – whatever the fuck you want to call it -
there’s something unmistakably satisfying about seeing a fellow human hit some rare air.

There’s a special strain of bliss that pumps through the cerebral passageways when you know you’re in the presence of the purest expression. When a person has tapped into that frequency where their whole being has tuned in, and they’re awash in a mad dance between selflessness and ego, directed by a radiant consciousness and opened up wide in front of a multitude of strangers who came there with hopes of seeing just that very thing. With the fuel of their awe, and the energy of their appreciation it bursts to even greater heights, and if it’s captured on TV it’s a motherfucking historical moment.
It doesn’t happen all that often, and sometimes you can go years without seeing someone really nail it, but when it happens again it will be all worth the wait.
Every now and then someone steps up in front of the world and really fucking smashes it, and it makes sitting through every other uninspired performance by every wannabe, bullshit artist, and mediocre hack more than worth your time. Every now and then human beings are exposed to a new benchmark.

I search for that shit. It’s a precious inspirational fuel for me. I love it when I see it, and in all my years on this planet searching for it, very few people have ever grabbed it, held it down, fucked it, lit it on fire, and blew up the fucking solar system with it like Pink did at this years Grammy awards.
Her performance was like Jimi Hendrix doing the star spangled banner while Michael Jackson moon walked and Susan Boyle sang back up.
The shit was fucking EPIC.
I was floored.
I watched it 5 times in a row on youtube.
Even with the shitty, grainy, pixilated youtube footage and compressed sound coming out of computer speakers it was fucking stunning.

I don’t even want to see it in High Definition on a big screen TV, because I’m afraid I might watch it and then jump out a fucking window.
I’m not worthy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pretty trippy shit when you think about it, but really, where else could all this technology stuff lead? I’ve always wondered what the human thirst for innovation is really all about.
I think the original desire stemmed from a need to improve the quality of life, create tools, get more food, etc., but it’s moved way, way past that now. It almost seems to have a destiny of it’s own today.
While people suffer all over the world from poverty and starvation some of the most complex and expensive scientific projects have nothing to do with fixing any of that shit.

No, the “great work” of the scientific community – the single project that is the most exciting and incredible technological undertaking humans have ever taken part in has nothing to do with improving the quality of life for people in trouble right now. It’s an immense and amazing machine called The Large Hadron Collider.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a $10,000,000,000.00 project involving 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries where they’ve built this monstrous 27-kilometer long machine designed to send particles flying around this loop just a cunt hair slower than the speed of light, slamming them into each other to try to recreate the conditions milliseconds after the big bang. What they’re looking for is a theoretical particle called the “Higgs Boson,” otherwise known as the “God Particle.” The only possible side effect of this fantastically complicated experiment is the ever-so-slight chance that it might produce a black hole that eats its way through the earth.

Don’t worry about black holes or any other space-time ripping complications and side effects though, because there’s no way the half-insane, socially detached super-geniuses operating that thing would ever let that happen, right? If they thought it was possible for everything to go horribly wrong and destroy the world they would certainly shut the whole project down. Right? I mean, forget about the fact that they’ve invested an enormous chunk of their finite lives designing, constructing and completing this thing, if they thought for a second that it might possibly cause harm they would shut it all down and walk away willingly, right? Right?
I’m not so sure that those motherfuckers might not just roll the dice and take a chance.

It’s a little known fact that before the detonation of the very first nuclear bomb there was a very real concern amongst some scientists that the explosion might create a chain reaction that would destroy the entire Earth’s atmosphere. No one had ever caused a nuclear explosion before, so no one really knew exactly what was going happen.
So what did they do? They said, “Fuck it… Let’s see.”
Now, there are people that will say that those scientists with concerns back then were just misinformed, and that the destruction of the Earth was never a real concern, but that’s real easy to say today.
Truth is, they really didn’t know exactly what the fuck was going to happen, and there was a lot of trial and error involved with the effects of spitting atoms. Anyone that disagrees with that need only look at the old videos of soldiers willingly running directly towards a nuclear blast as a part of a military drill. Obviously that shit is frowned upon today, and if you tried to get a U.S. soldier to do that in 2010 they might fucking shoot you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why do we have this constant thirst for technological innovation? You can chalk it off as simple human curiosity – the very reason we evolved from the lower apes in the first place – but I have a feeling there might be a lot more to it than that.
As time goes on and I spend more and more time in the isolation tank under the magical trance of the sacred plant contemplating the mystery of life – I’m increasingly leaning towards the notion that it’s not all that cut and dry.

The idea I’ve been bouncing around in my head over the last couple years is that life, the planet we live on, the universe it resides in and everything that takes place in the entire dimension is really just a gigantic, impossibly complicated mathematical program moving towards a predetermined outcome. That everything; from subatomic particles, to hyenas, to the blow jobs, to solar flares – everything that exists in the entire universe is really just a part of an infinitely complex program totally beyond our comprehension that is moving towards a very certain goal.

In “nature” we see natural patterns in all life forms; the alpha male wolf forces the weaker beta out of the pack because life as a wolf is hard as fuck, and the only way for the species to survive is if only the strongest of males are allowed to breed. The powerful genetics of the Alpha are passed down creating robust offspring to insure that hunts will be successful, keeping the wild game population in check and maintaining the survival of the species and the balance of nature.

Their behavior makes sense to us, and we deem it “natural.”
We see bees pollinating plants and building their fascinatingly complex hives, and we just write it off their “natural behavior.” They’re doing what they’ve been put here to do, but how many people apply this type of thinking to the human race as a whole?
It’s kind of a funny thing about people; we don’t really like to think of our own behavior and purpose here as natural.
Since we’re conscious we like to believe that we have control over our path and purpose.
We generally concede that there are certainly some unavoidable human tendencies; sexual desire, jealousy, anger, etc. But we like to think that these “instincts” can all be brought under control in a “civilized” world, and that we have control over our outcome as a species.

I’m not entirely sure about that.
I wonder if that notion is just a matter of us not looking at ourselves as deeply and objectively as possible. I wonder if it’s not the same arrogance that we display when we classify all of these other living things as animals, but not ourselves. We’re “humans,” a completely different distinction.
I’ve been called an animal- both as a compliment and an insult – but that designation is always to imply that somehow you’ve crossed the line of normal behavior or performance and entered into a place where people are not supposed to go.
I wonder if that lack of objectivity in viewing ourselves is a part of a system that nature has set up for us to make sure that we stay on track to achieve our collective goal. With the tool of conscious self-awareness comes the puzzling spectacle of infinite questions and possibilities. To manage this chaos, we’re given a pattern to follow. We almost universally don’t consider ourselves as animals. We’re above that, and because we’re above that, we don’t even consider the possibility that every single aspect of our behavior, from laziness, to ambition, to curiosity, to violence might just be a part of an insanely gigantic living, progressing program set in place to move us towards a predetermined outcome.

We think we’re lusting after a new car or a bigger TV is because of a foolish desire to keep up with the Jones’, but what if that compulsion is really just because our need for the newest, coolest shit is really something programmed inside of us to insure that we consume and continue to support innovation and the creation of new technology by spending our money on the latest, greatest shit. Our need for “newer, bigger, better, faster” is really just a progression we’re instilled with that’s no different than a bee’s instinct to produce honey and pollinate trees.
What we see and think of as “blind” instincts all over nature might naturally exist in the most complicated species in the most complicated way. Our entire, infinitely complex world we live in might actually be formulated exactly for the purpose of a single goal, and we might exist to facilitate that very thing. That might very well be why we’re here, we’re just a little too arrogant to consider it.

We see this pattern all over the natural world where there are levels of complexity; amebas are simple compared to worms, and worms ain’t shit compared to monkeys, and monkeys ain’t shit compared to us – but what life form trumps the mighty human? I think it might be technology.
We don’t like to think about it this way, but technology might very well be a life form of it’s own, but since we create it, and since it’s nothing like us and doesn’t have a heart or a nervous system, we just think of it as some shit we make.
I have a feeling it might be more complicated than that.

If you were an alien, objectively looking at life on this planet you might very well look at technology as a type of life form.
In nature we see many patterns of parasites infecting a host and causing the host to destroy itself so that the parasite may be born. There’s a aquatic worm that grows inside of a grasshopper, and once it’s developed sufficiently to live outside the host it programs the grasshopper’s brain to head towards water, jump in and drown while the worm burrows out of it’s body and hatches into the water.
The superior organism has lead the inferior one willingly to it’s own destruction so that it can reach the next stage in it’s development.
I think that very well may be what’s happening to us.

Technology; a thing that we think of as something lifeless that we create might actually be a life form that’s living in a symbiotic or even parasitic relationship with human beings. Just like other life forms the old models die off and are replaced by the new ones with a constantly flowing pattern of improvement and adaptation.
Just like you can search the fossil record and find the ancient hominid ancestors of man you can look in my garage and there’s a box of old cell phones and computers that eventually lead to the iphone.
Maybe it’s not the Large Hadron Collider that blows a hole through eternity and becomes the end of everything and the beginning of a completely new cycle, but maybe it’s a new invention created from the lessons learned from firing the collider up that does the trick. It’s not like we’re going to complete the experiments with the collider and stop there.

No one is going to say, “OK, we’ve made black holes, now lets stop making newer, even crazier shit and turn our attention to feeding the poor.”
Not a fucking chance. It’s going to keep moving… and where’s the end? What’s the finish line? A portal to unseen dimensions? Time travel? What if it’s the creation of the next phase of the universe itself? One of the greatest mysteries in all of science is the “birth” of the universe. Because of our own biological limitations we’ve imposed the concept of a “birth” and “death” on the very universe itself. They’ve even come up with an incredible theory of the entire infinite vastness of space emanating from an impossibly small, infinitely dense point and exploding in milliseconds to become everything that we know of today – The Big Bang.
The thought that I’ve been tossing around over the last few years – is what if it’s the human race itself that creates this moment. I mean, if the most sophisticated and complicated experiment human beings have ever undertaken – the very culmination of our technological mastery – is a machine that’s designed to recreate the moments right after the big bang, do you really think we’re going to stop there?

Not a fucking chance. It’s going to keep going. It’s going to keep moving forward despite the protests and concerns of those paying attention. It’s going to be buried deep in the back of your list of priorities when it comes to things to pay attention to. Between sex, and sleep, and work and play, and love and hate, and John and Kate you’ll barely even know it’s going on. You’re going to be sitting at home smoking a joint, drinking a beer watching celebrity rehab, and some half-mad, obsessed genius that sleeps 5 hours a night and pounds redbulls all day is going to come to a point where he’s not exactly sure what’s going to happen if he takes his life’s work to the next level. He’s going to stand there, looking at the button, not exactly sure what to do. Then he’s going to take a deep breath, and say, “Fuck it… Let’s see.”

BIG BANG, and the Universe starts again from scratch, this time doing everything a little bit better and a little bit faster, until it’s time to say, “Fuck it…” again. This process will go on for infinity, every time getting further, more complex, more advanced, but never finished. You and your life and me and mine are just a part of a cycle that’s been around forever. There was no beginning, and there will be no end.
Happy New Year, bitches. We’re just getting started.

We’re going make this a weekly thing, and I’ll be converting my office to make it more accommodating for us to hang out in here and broadcast from it. I’m also going to set it up soon to accept skype calls and upload video for you guys to watch so that we’ll have some interesting things to talk about. Right now we’re looking at keeping the broadcasts roughly around the same day and time, but that could change. When it does, I’ll of course update my ustream page and announce it on twitter.
If you don’t follow me on twitter, please do. It’s the best way to keep up with tour dates, and it’s the social networking site I use far more than any other. I comment and joke about just about everything on there.

As for everything else, I’ve been severely lacking in my blog updates, but something has to take a hit with me writing a book and living my life, and that seems to be it.
I’m going to promise at least one new blog update a week, though. It’s been over a month since my last one, and that feels like shit.
Thanks for all your support, and lets start this 2010 off with some serious momentum! Less than 3 years to go until December 21st, 2012… whatever the fuck that means.

That, and disco, opened the door for Donna Summer.
Just stop and think about the difference between the 50’s and what kinda shit Donna Summer was rocking 20 years later.
Pause for a second and consider these lyrics, all sung by this sexy black chick with an amazing body and a voice that just screamed sex.  Big, fat, juicy lips painted bright red moaned these lyrics, and she’s in Lingerie on the cover of the fucking album.

“… Gonna bring a wild man back home.
Gotta have some hot love baby this evening, I need some hot stuff baby tonight, I want some hot stuff baby this evening, gotta have some loving, got to have love tonight..”

Are you fucking shitting me?  I mean was there anything even remotely similar in the 50’s?  Not a god damned fucking chance.  They used to freak out when Elvis thrust his pelvis around onstage, and 20 years later here’s this hot bitch in heat begging for dick, and it’s a gigantic hit song.
There was no Facebook to blow up their spot, and the diseases were few and far between.  Even if you did catch something exotic, all you had to do was take a shot of penicillin and you were back in action in a week.

There was no texting, no cell phones, so there was a different type of urgency when it came to fucking.  You had to get it while it was there.  Women were running around, doing cocaine and taking hot loads from guys they barely knew.
If must have been a fucking fantastic time to be alive.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve been working on a lot of new material lately, hence the lack of blog updates.
I’ve also been working on writing a book, and my internet output has unfortunately taken a back seat to some other stuff I have to get done.  Fear not, my cyber chums; I haven’t forgotten about you.   I would promise that I’m going to update more frequently, but I’ve said that before, and we all see how that went.

During the course of the show in Manchester, in the middle of one of my more spirited bits, my pants tore from my ass crack to ¾ of the way down to my knee.  That was a first.  What was surprising was that for a few seconds right when it happened I was actually self-conscious about it.  I informed the audience immediately, and then brought up how silly it was that after all the fucked up shit I said onstage with no worries whatsoever, I was actually embarrassed for a moment that people could now see a part of my leg.

Ah, what strange animals, we humans.

Someone in the audience was doing some highly illegal bootleg filming when it ripped, and at somewhere around 4:00 in you can see it happen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s me after the show with Dave Bishop and my good friend Victor Davilla, the Spanish color commentator for the UFC.

Saturday night rolled around, and I once again had the best seat in the house for the most exciting sport in the world.  Even though I’ve been doing commentary for the UFC for the past 7 years or so, it still shocks me sometimes that one of my jobs is to call the action for the biggest cage fighting organization in history.  I always enjoy it, and appreciate every second of it, but it still seems crazy every single time.
This particular event was a fantastic showing for the UK fighters.  Having the UFC in their homeland is fairly rare, and they were suitably pumped up for the opportunity.
Over the past few years that the UFC has expanded it’s attention over seas we’ve really seen a dramatic increase in the skill level of the fighters over there.
MMA truly is becoming a world wide sport, and the fighters from England are as good as any in the world now, and it happened FAST.   They just really took to the sport, and their enthusiasm is infectious.   If you ever happen to be in the UK for a live event and you’ve got the scratch, I urge you to take a chance and witness the spectacle.   It’s quite a sight to behold.  The roars for the English fighters were deafening, and often times in the middle of a bout the whole crowd will break out into song.  It’s pretty fucking trippy, and it’s one of the extra cool things about having fights over there.

The traveling road show that is the UFC employs over a hundred people.  From fighters and managers to cameramen and production crew it’s quite a big group of humans.  After the work is done, we usually wind up hanging out in the hotel bar, or checking out the local haunts together.   There was a rule that was once instituted somewhere along the line that the crew wasn’t supposed to drink, but I’m pretty sure the powers that be realized how silly that was.  Sure, it causes the occasional minor problem, but in the long run a pop or two after the work is done makes the whole experience more enjoyable for everyone.

Some folks like to take it DEEP.    I’ve known a lot of people that enjoyed getting fucked up in my day, but none of them that like to take it to the place my best friend on the planet, the brilliant, and wonderfully flawed Eddie Bravo hits.  That motherfucker gets DRUNK.
I enjoy people that approach life with reckless abandon, and Eddie dives in as freely as anyone I’ve ever met in my life.  Self-control is all well and good if you want to leave a good impression with your co-workers on your way up the corporate ladder, but when it comes to being entertaining, the cold hard truth is that it’s very rarely the guy getting up for the 7am yoga class that has the funny shit to say.  No, that guy is usually way too self-conscious to hit the high notes.  The fun times are to be had hanging out with the blackout drunks.

Eddie is an incredibly creative guy both with his Jiu Jitsu and his music, and I firmly believe creativity and an attraction to chaos are very closely related.  He fearlessly dives into the creation of his music, and the teaching and training in Jiu Jitsu, and he applies that very same ballistic energy to his partying.

It’s been the subject of many a conversation amongst our friends, to the point where I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really two dudes living inside Eddie; “Sober Eddie,” and “Drunk Eddie.”  Two totally different humans, and they apparently don’t talk to each other about anything.  They seem to share no information whatsoever, because when “Drunk Eddie” is gone, “Sober Eddie” usually has no fucking idea what happened.  Now, it’s not that he gets violent, or does anything stupid when “Drunk Eddie” is working the controls, and as long as I’ve met him he’s never been arrested or done anything offensive while hammered, but the bottom line is that when he’s gone, he’s GONE.

I’ve never blacked out from alcohol, so I don’t quite personally understand the mechanism behind the event, but because of Eddie I’m absolutely convinced that it’s real. I used to think it was just a cop out, and that people claiming they blacked out when they were drunk were full of shit until I met Eddie, but he’s an honest man, and when he tells me he has no idea what happened last night I fucking believe him.
The drunkest I’ve ever been in my life by far was in public, and I remember most of it.  It was a show at the House of Blues in Vegas where I drank something in the neighborhood of 15 shots inside an hour and a half.  It wasn’t my idea, but those motherfuckers in the audience just kept sending drinks up there.  In the beginning I didn’t turn them down because I didn’t want to be rude, but after the 4th or 5th tequila I think it sort of became a game with those fucks to see how many I would swallow.  After a while, when good judgment had long left the building and was safely tucked into bed for the night, I became curious myself to see where this was going to go.   I wasn’t sure what my personal drinking record had been up to that point, but I was pretty certain I had at least doubled it.

I don’t remember too much of the show, but I do remember being backstage and immediately hurling an ungodly amount of liquid from my mouth into a trash can right next to these security guards that were saying that they wanted to put me in a wheel chair. I insisted that wasn’t necessary, that I just needed a wee bit of time to recover, and I wasn’t really into them pushing me through the casino all drooling and rubber necked with vomit on my breath.  An hour or so later after drinking a lot of water and a couple red bulls, I was able to move my body towards my hotel room.  I slept for 3 hours, and when my alarm went off, I somehow got up like I always do, and I made it to the airport and caught my flight on time.
I have no fucking idea how I did it, and I felt like shit afterward for 3 days, but for the most part I remember what happened.

Eddie goes through nights all the fucking TIME where he doesn’t remember a single thing that took place.  Not even the slightest memory.
It’s the craziest thing ever to observe.  You can see it clearly in his eyes when he crosses over to the land of no memory – the forth drink pours down the hatch, and he gets this look in his eyes that’s a cross between a man sleep walking and a monkey that just escaped from the circus.

Alcohol, like most drugs, interacts with different people’s unique biological quirks in different ways, and produces varied results.  The combination of the accumulative stress piled on by this crazy life and the inhibition-releasing surge of alcohol can be quite a volatile mixture for some folks.  Then, you have to take into account genetics, or what my friend Joey Diaz calls “The Indian” factor.  Eddie is Mexican, and according to Joey, Mexicans are a combination of Spanish and Native American Indian, and the Indians never really developed the gene for moderate drinking.

When Eddie crosses over to sleep-walking-monkey-land, Joey will shout out, “The Indian is here, cock suckers!  Put up your teepees and look out for tomahawks!  Tonto is on the MOVE!”

It was 6:45 am in morning in Manchester when the car arrived to take us to the airport.  I was still awake from the night before, since because of the time difference my sleep schedule was completely out of whack. I had slept until 3pm that day and I just never got tired, so I stayed up.   I watched the masterful boxing performance Manny Pacquio laid on Miguel Cotto, and fucked around on the internet until the car came.
We had gone out for Chinese food after the fights, and Eddie had 2 drinks with dinner, which doesn’t usually mean you have to look out for stray arrows, but it does mean that drums are playing in the distance, and tribe is on the move.  We got back to the bar, I bobbed and weaved my way though a sea of affliction shirts and body odor, had a beer, took some pictures and said my good nights.  That was the last I saw of Eddie, so in my mind ANYTHING could have happened last night.
I called his cell.
Nothing.
Shit.
I called again, still no answer.  I had the front desk call his room – nothing.  Again… nothing.  Shit.
I went down to his room with the hotel staff, and we banged on the door.
Nothing.
Shit.  “Can you open the door?”
“Certainly, sir.”
God damn, that’s a cool fucking accent.

She opened the door, and we saw Eddie’s shit scattered all over the floor, and the bed where Eddie – lights on and all – was still fast asleep, fully clothed and tucked into bed.  It was “Last Stand at Little Big Horn” all over this motherfucker.

“Eddie!”
Nothing.
“Eddie!!”

Movement, his head pops up, and without the slightest sense of urgency he says, “What’s up?”

His eyes looked like someone held them open with tooth picks and had a snake piss on his retinas.

“We gotta go to the airport, dude.”
“Really?”
“Really.”

All I could think of was at least he didn’t take my car like that time in Germany.
That was the craziest Indian invasion ever.
The car was picking us up at 9:30am, and I was up at 8 to have breakfast.  The last I had seen Eddie he was heading out with a bunch of English jiu jitsu enthusiasts, and that was around midnight.  I called him the next morning to see if he wanted to get some grub, and as soon as he picked up the phone it sounded like a fucking John Wayne movie was playing in the background – battle cries, war drums, and “Drunk Eddie” on the lead horse.  He answered the phone practically shouting, trying to talk over the sounds of gunshots and flying arrows in his head.
“WHAT’S UP, MAN!?”
“Are you still drunk?”
“Helllllllll yeah!”
“OK, I’m getting something to eat, and the car is picking us up at 9:30.”
“I’m gonna power through!”
“Alright, man.  See you in an hour and a half; make sure you’re awake.”

Of course when I call his cell phone an hour and a half later there’s no answer.  I call his room.
Nothing.
I pound on the door.
Nothing.
I go to the front desk, and when I ask them to call his room again, they inform me that he’s already checked out.
Here we go.
I head outside to see if he’s waiting for the car and can’t hear his phone or something, but he’s nowhere to be found.
I look around for the car that’s supposed to be taking me to the airport, and when I can’t find it I ask one of the guys working at the valet.
“What is your name, sir?”
“Joe Rogan.”
He raises his eyebrows with a puzzled look on his face, “Joe Rogan just got into his car 15 minutes ago.”
“What?  What did he look like?”
“Long hair, tattoos…”
“Fuuuuuuuuuck!”

I frantically call Eddie, and after the forth or fifth time he picks up.  The phone call ends “Drunk Eddie’s” time for the evening, and “Sober Eddie” starts his shift by waking up to his phone ringing in the back of a speeding car headed down a German highway towards the airport without a SINGLE fucking memory of the night before.

Last thing he remembers he was out with the English Jiu Jitsu guys, and that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 hours ago.  If that was me I would be in a fucking panic, thinking I was drugged, checking my underwear for blood, etc. – but for Eddie, it was just another day in the life of a wild man.

Luckily I caught a cab and made the flight on time, so it was all-good in the end.  Sure, it got a little stressful, but it gave us something funny to talk about on the 10-hour flight home, and it sure beats hanging out with Mr. morning yoga and his boring fucking stories.
Live it up, bitches.  We only go this way once…  I think.

Jihad to you all.  http://www.kroq.com/

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