Television Personalities

"I personally think confession was just someone's idea of a sick joke. One dude came up with it, then he died, and he forgot to tell everyone he was only fuckin' around. Think about the idea of confession … you take a guy who's not allowed to masturbate, or have sex, ever, then you make him wear a costume, then he has to sit in a dark booth, and listen to fuck stories whispered through a hole in the wall!"

"Richard Dawkins: I think that eternity is what is frightening about death. And eternity is best spent under a general anesthetic—which is what is going to happen.Joe Rogan: Right. Gonezo. Out go the lights. Maybe, or maybe not. Have you had any experiences with psychedelics?Richard Dawkins: No.Joe Rogan: Do you have any interest in that? […] I would think that a person like yourself, who has this sort of rigorous belief that the lights go out, and then that's it … I would think that that would be attractive to just at least dip your toes in.Richard Dawkins: Yes, yes. Well, don't you think the lights go out?Joe Rogan: I don't know. I have had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences that make me wonder what thoughts are and what consciousness is.Richard Dawkins: Well, I wonder what consciousness is, but it's pretty clear that it's to do with brains, and brains decay. So I wouldn't hold out much hope if I were you.Joe Rogan: Well, you might be right. Certainly, consciousness does have to do with brains. We know brain damage severely perturbs consciousness. But there's some interaction with certain chemicals that makes this experience far different than what it is when we're on "the natch".Richard Dawkins: I believe that, but it's still brains, though.Joe Rogan: Still brains … but that's it? Reductionist?Richard Dawkins: Nothing wrong with reductionism.Joe Rogan: Nothing wrong with it. Not saying there is."

"When women go to see men strip, we never accuse you of hating men."

"Just because I'm staring deep into your birth canal does not mean that I'm fucked up. It means you should have paid more attention in high school and I have a dollar. I have four quarters and you have a bad job. Don't get pissed at me because you didn't learn how to type, you no-back-up-plan-having pain in the ass."

"I am not homophobic; I am cock-conscious."

"Here's the craziest thing about life. This is the thing that nobody really considers: You know as much about what life is all about as anybody who's ever lived, ever. That's the craziest thing about us. We're all just kinda wandering through this, going, "You know what you're doing?" "Yes." "Oh, I do, too. I know what I'm doing." "Okay. Good, then." But really no one has a fucking clue."

"Some people don't believe in aliens. I do believe in aliens. But I believe they gave up on people a long time ago. Wouldn't you? I think there's a few liberal aliens out there, still hangin' in:"

"Hamilton Morris: I had a very traumatic and formative experience myself. My best friend had a psychotic break while I was with him tripping, so I have seen this firsthand. I know exactly what it looks like.Joe Rogan: Yeah, I've had friends have really bad experiences too with screaming and yelling and disassociation, and afterwards, become very strange and have a really hard time with reality for a bit. I've never seen someone have a complete psychotic break.Hamilton Morris: This was that. He never recovered.Joe Rogan: Never?Hamilton Morris: He never recovered. He was my best friend at the time, and he never recovered.Joe Rogan: So he was fine before the psychedelics?Hamilton Morris: Yes.Joe Rogan: Jesus Christ. So now, he's still fucked?Hamilton Morris: Yes.Joe Rogan: Damn."

"Brian Cox: I'm damn sure that there's nothing going on in my head other than what is allowed by the laws of nature as we understand them.Joe Rogan: So, eliminating "woo", you mean. The idea of the soul being some sort of a divine thing that's inside the housing of the body.Brian Cox: Yeah. I would say we can rule that out, actually.Joe Rogan: Rule it out? How do you rule it out?Brian Cox: I have argued that we can rule it out in the following manner: here is my arm, right. It is made of electrons and protons and neutrons. And if I have a soul in there—something that we don't understand, but it's a different kind of energy or whatever it is we don't have in physics at the moment—it interacts with matter, because I am moving my hand around. So whatever it is, it is something that interacts very strongly with matter. But if you look at the history of particle physics in particular, which is the study of matter, we spent decades making high-precision measurements of how matter behaves and interacts. And we have looked, for example, for a fifth force of nature. So we know four forces: gravity, the two nuclear forces—called the weak and strong forces—and electromagnetism. And that is what we know exists. And we have looked for another one, with ultra-high precision, and we don't see any evidence for it. So I would claim that we know how matter interacts at these energies. It is room temperature now. At these energies, we know how matter interacts, very precisely. And so, if you want to suggest that there is something else that interacts with matter strongly, then I would say that it is ruled out. I would go as far as say that it is ruled out by experiment."

"Joe Rogan: What do you think consciousness is? Do you think consciousness is clearly a factor of brain tissue and energy, or do you think it's possible that what our brain is is something that "tunes into" consciousness?Brian Greene: Well, I've spent some time thinking about this question, and I think it is perhaps the deepest question that faces science, or even humanity at some level. My own personal perspective is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy, gray structure that sits inside this thing that we call a "head". Do I have any proof for that? No. Does anybody have any proof of what consciousness is? Not at all at this moment. But the history of the reductionist program, where we have been able to take some of the more spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize that they are nothing but the product of their ingredients and the laws of physics, leads me to extrapolate that idea to the experience of consciousness. Now, having said that, there's a deep puzzle. It's called the hard problem of consciousness, which is: if electrons and quarks and particles and laws of physics are all that there is—and if you buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world, that quarks don't have an inner world—how can it be that by taking a collection of those particles, you can "turn on the lights"? How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience? And that's a deep question that science has not yet answered. My own feeling is, when we understand the brain better, that question will evaporate. We'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding—maybe it's a hundred years in the making, maybe a thousand years in the making—and we'll say: "Aha! When electrons and quarks and protons move in this particular configuration, one of the byproducts is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience." And that, to me, is the likely answer that we will find. But there are some very smart, well-respected people who go in a very different direction. There are some who say: electrons and protons and quarks, they do have a fundamental proto-conscious quality. They themselves are conscious beings of a sort. Now, it is not like you are going to have electrons that are crying, or quarks that are anguishing, but if you have a little proto-element of conscious experience that is imbued into a particle, and then you take a lot of the particles and then you put them together, the idea is, that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're familiar with. I don't buy into that.Joe Rogan: Why do you pick a position?Brian Greene: Well, I take a position on this because I guess my view is, you look out at the world, and what you do as a physicist is, you move the smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing. And to move from our current understanding of the world, to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious and quarks are conscious, to me is such a fantastically radical move that I don't consider it justified to make that move with our current level of understanding. There was a time, back in the 1800s, when life itself was so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing: how could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together and yield a living being? They said that they can't. You have to induce a life force, you have to inject a life force, and that's what sparks the emergence of life from lifeless particles. I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today. I think most serious scientists say: "Yes, life is wonderful, life is in some sense miraculous, but life is nothing but the particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules of DNA and RNA, the complex cellular structures, the cells come together to yield the more complex multi-cellular organisms, and that is all that it takes to have something that is alive." No life force is necessary. That way of thinking about the world has gone away. And my own feeling is that that kind of progression is going to happen to consciousness. Today it's utterly mysterious how it is that I have this inner voice talking inside my head, how it is that I look around the world and I can see the color red, and I can experience the color red. I don't just have sensors that can call that "red". I mean, an iPhone can do that. I actually have an inner world where I feel that color red. Where does that come from? Hard to answer, that question, but I think, a hundred or a thousand years from now, we'll look back and smile at how we in this era invested consciousness with such a mystical quality, when in the end, it's nothing but particles and the laws of physics, and that's all there is to it."

"My dad went through a sea of deaths. The oldest of six, he buried his four younger brothers and four of his children. Yes, I was it. His philosophy after grieving was to laugh. To try to bring some joy to others, because life is just so hard sometimes. Because it ends. My father also had a huge amount of dignity. This Mark Twain quote sums up the way my father and mother felt about life: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." As crazy and dark as I would imagine some of these stories sounded, I am very proud of the life I have led so far. I have a lot of love in my life. And a lot of laughs. And I wish that for you all. I wish that even for the guy in the audience with his arms folded."

"What I wanted to share were my feelings about how humor gets you through this life and through all the dark times. For me, it's occasionally irreverent and immature humor. But funny is funny. Like my friend Rodney Dangerfield used to say, "It is what it is." As I was adding those words earlier in this book, I was inspired to call my friend David Permut, who was Rodney's dear friend as well. I don't call David that much — good friend that I am — and I called him on his cell, unblocked. David answered the phone: "You're not going to believe this." I said, "What did I do? Have one of those psychic moments that I'm always bragging I have?" He continued: "Bob, I am standing at this moment on Rodney's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame." He'd had a meeting to go to and visited Rodney's star because he had a half hour to kill. He hadn't been there since the day he and I were there for the ceremony when Rodney got the star. The morning he got some "respect." A moment of synchronicity like that tells me that everything is where it's supposed to be. We all have them; they give us chills and let us know we are truly in the present. The key is to remember the moments. Don't take them for granted. I learned from everyone I treasure — my daughters, my parents, Don Rickles, all my friends and relatives who went through huge losses our entire childhoods — that humor, however you define it, gets us through the saddest of times."

"I'm always amazed when I go to do stand-up dates and the ad in the paper says, "For Mature Audiences Only." Nothing could be more immature than my stand-up. It's all derived from the silly humor my dad instilled in me. Poop and penis jokes. I really should be billed in perpetuity as "For Immature Audiences Only." I'm in the process of evolving past that. Could take a while."

"The Internet has opened the door wide to the world of haters. I'm a viral kind of guy so I know that being on Twitter itself is just asking for it. But thankfully, I see a lot more lovers than haters. And the haters I get, if I happen to see them I block 'em. I just don't need to do negative anymore. When you perform live, eventually you're going to make direct eye contact with that one guy in the audience with his arms folded staring back at you. But I process it differently now. Maybe I misread that guy. Maybe he was just cold or checking his armpits for sweat or just had a really bad day. And the great thing is, if I ever need a counterpoint to the arms-folded guy, I can just go right to my Twitter account and read, "@bobsaget is my favorite person in this entire world." And then at the last minute I can decide not to post it."

"As I wrote this book, a lot of people asked me if I had a ghostwriter. The answer is yes. It was Ernest Hemingway. And my house is full of his ghost vomit and urine. Hemingway said something that helped me get through this, my first book: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.""

"I don't call her my middle child, I call her my center child, Because the world revolves around her."

"I've banged half the girls in this room, and that is f**kin' not true. I haven't banged anyone here. I've put my pinky in your butts, couple of you."

"That would be a good public service announcement for Nickelodeon: "Hi, this is Bob Saget. Don't f*ck that sh*t. Stay in school. And read!""

"As a kid I often heard from my mom, as well as from the teachers in every school I attended, that I needed to behave myself and watch how I spoke. Apparently I was a mischievous little bastard. By the time I started out in stand-up at seventeen, I was careful about my language; this helped me get on television shows and go on the road opening for musicians like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and Kenny Loggins. But one day in my early twenties, I snapped. I didn't want to disappoint my mom, but I couldn't take the censorship of it all. Some of the comedians who fascinated me the most — Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor — had also felt oppressed by the things you could and couldn't say in public."

"In my career I've had the fortune of being able to work continually in radically diverse creative worlds. By day I've done some of the most family-friendly TV imaginable. Then, often in the same day, I've gone onstage in the L.A. comedy clubs and whirled off with an adolescent's delight about my grandma's projectile diarrhea. That in itself could, by many psychiatrists' standards, be a bit of a call for help. I never do it to shock anyone, even though people have sometimes thought of me as a shock comic. If it is a through-line or a constant to what I do, it's not something I'm proud of. But I'm not ashamed of it either. It's more of a handicap. Or, depending on your perspective, a gift. It's what I used to think of as my mania. Now I've come to embrace it. You have to love yourself. But not in a movie theater, because they will tabloid your ass."

"Kids, do not f*ck that sh*t; you'll get an infection."

"I get vaccinated five to six times a day and I feel great!!"

"Full House gave me Tourette's. We would be on the set, and, action! "Okay, Michelle, you can't have a horse in the house--" and, cut! "Cock sh*t f**k!""

"People ask me what my favorite episode of Full House is; it was the last one!"

"This woman woke up to see me and John Stamos banging on her windows. She must have thought she died and went to sitcom hell."

"If you laugh at that, you lower the bar, and I will limbo under it because I am a f*cked-up guy!"

"[On the lack of female presenters on Top Gear] The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blond-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian."

"I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit."

"Like many men, I can never find anything that I’m looking for, even when I’m actually looking at it. In a fridge, I think milk is actually invisible to the male eye. And so, it turns out, are dirty great holes in the fence."

"I have bought a farm. There are many sensible reasons for this. [...] Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The Government doesn't get any of my money when I die. And the price of the food that I grow can only go up. But there is another, much more important reason: I can now have a quad bike. I have always loved the idea of such things."

"[Reviewing Japanese kei cars in this passage.] Then there’s the styling. Or rather, there isn’t. Any attempt to give these cars a tapering roofline or a curved rear end is wasteful of precious capacity, which means all of them look exactly – and I mean exactly – like chest freezers. And because they have such tiny wheels they actually look like chest freezers on casters. And that in turn means they look absurd. And no one is going to spend their money on something that makes them look foolish."

"It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more."

"The newest Ferrari of them all, the 458, the Italia. The GT3 was good, but nowhen near as good as this... almost nothing on Earth is as good as this... Set that something I've just told, involving Cameron Diaz... and some honey... then it comes that even that isn't as good as this."

"Nothing can prepare you for the yawning chasm of time that passes in Canada before the healthcare system actually does any healthcare."

"He genuinely looked terrified. The poor man, he's actually seen the books. In England we have this one-eyed Scottish idiot."

"This is a hard job and I’m not just saying that to win favour with lorry drivers, it’s a hard job. Change gear, change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That’s a lot of effort in a day."

"It is almost impossible to win a VC. In the hundred-and-fifty years since it was created, the number of British and Commonwealth troops who've seen action is in the tens of millions, but only 1,351 of them have been awarded the Victoria Cross. The chances of surviving a VC action are just one in ten, but if you do survive, the medal can never be taken away from you. You can go to the gallows wearing it. And no matter how many letters you have after your name, VC always comes first."

"First off, the whole point of airborne troops is surprise: you don't know they're coming until they're there. But because Cain arrived 24 hours after the first wave, the surprise was gone. And to make matters worse, the landing zone was some eight miles from the bridge. So, thanks to some incompetent planning by the top brass in England, the Germans knew that Cain and his men were coming, they knew where he landed, they knew where he was going, and they had the wherewithal to do something about it."

"You know, we've a rather warped sense of what constitutes bravery these days. I mean, even David Beckham is called a hero for scoring a penalty. But when you look at VC winners and hear their stories... well, enough said."

"In order for a car to have personality, an X factor, the company that makes it must be able to take guidance and inspiration from one man, the man who started the company in the first place. This did not happen with the car outside my window, which was undoubtedly built in a jungle clearing by a company that makes cars to make money. No one began Proton or Hyundai or Daewoo because they harboured a dream of making something extraordinary or special. They are just enormous engineering and construction conglomerates that have been told by their respective governments to make cars so that the locals can get off their oxen and get modern."

"Jeremy Clarkson is not a comedian, but his basic approach to the world is comic. He is anti-earnest, anti-solemn, anti self-importance as all good comic writers and presenters always have been."

"My views are and have always been clear when it comes to misogyny, bullying and the treatment of women by the media. I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything that my dad wrote about Meghan Markle and I remain standing in support of those that are targeted with online hatred."

"Jeremy Clarkson heads the program Top Gear at the BBC, one of the funniest shows on TV."

"Jeremy Clarkson fans have never killed anybody because of flippant remarks he's made on TV, fact."

"I don't know exactly what happened. He is a constituent of mine, he is a friend of mine, he is a huge talent. [...] I see that he said he regrets some of what happened. All I would say - because he is a talent and he does amuse and entertain so many people, including my children who'll be heartbroken if Top Gear is taken off air - I hope this can be sorted out because it is a great programme and he is a great talent. [On Clarkson's then suspension] I don't know what happened. Every organisation has to be able to be free to manage its talent and to say to people, 'you can do this', or 'you can't do that', so I don't want to interfere in the running of the BBC. [...] The Prime Minister has many responsibilities, sadly securing the future of Top Gear isn't one of them."

"Change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That's a lot of effort in a day."

"And it isn't only fast in a straight line. You ever wondered what Blenheim Palace would look like going sideways? Well, I'll turn the traction control off- and you need wonder no more."

"[on the Aston Martin DB7 sat-nav] Then there's the satellite navigation system which is the most complicated sat-nav system in the world. And the wrongest. Always wants to take you to Bedford. Even if you want to go to Manchester, it wants to go to Bedford, that's all it knows. You want to go somewhere? "Sure, I'll take you to Bedford.""

"If Hollywood were to make a trailer for this car, I know how it'd go. [In an American 'announcer voice'] "Bentley. Fear beyond your wildest dreams. In a Bentley, no one can hear you scream.""

"I used to work on a television show called Top Gear and every week the films were edited to a length that felt right. They felt balanced. They felt good. But every week there simply wasn't the time to fit them into the programme- so they'd have to be shortened. And without exception they were better as a result."