Dusty Slay - Moon Landing Conspiracies, Flat Earth, Aliens and the Nephilim | SRS #344

Episode Overview

• Host Shawn Ryan (CEO of Vigilance Elite, Former Navy SEAL, and Former CIA Contractor) interviews stand-up comedian Dusty Slay—only the second comedian ever on the show after Dusty's friend John Crist (who Dusty notes is currently doing great and getting married)—to explore Dusty's journey from an Alabama trailer park and working-class jobs to national touring success.
• The conversation traces Dusty's turbulent youth, including a derailed military enlistment just before September 11, 2001, years of recreational drug use and blackout drinking, and how getting sober in January 2012 transformed his life and comedy career.
• Dusty explains the spiritual convictions that define his life today, including how a non-Christian friend inadvertently inspired him to work clean, why he reads the New Testament through an Old Testament lens, and why he has abstained from pork and shellfish since 2013.
• The final third of the episode delves into family life, prepping, questioning the Apollo moon landings and biblical cosmology, and personal encounters with sleep paralysis and paranormal phenomena.

Key Concepts

• Speaker Backgrounds, Business Ties, and Sponsors: Shawn Ryan discloses his ties to Vigilance Elite (which produces Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears and Vigilance Elite Productions), his Patreon account (patreon.com/VigilanceElite, which funded the show when it started in his attic), and his role as co-founder of Glacier VPN (an encrypted VPN app on the App Store that he helped build). Dusty Slay is the author of We're Having a Good Time (published by Simon & Schuster), star of the Netflix specials Workin' Man (2024) and Wet Heat (2025), host of The Neighbourhood Guy Tour, and a regular performer at the Grand Ole Opry (having debuted there in 2019 and performed over 40 times, hanging out with Brooks & Dunn, Trace Adkins, Jamey Johnson, and Tracy Lawrence) alongside appearances on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Comedy Central. Episode sponsors read by Shawn Ryan include: Mars Men natural testosterone support supplement (mengotomars.com/srs for 50% off for life, free shipping, and 3 free gifts; claims SHBG binds up testosterone as men age, contains clinically dosed ingredients, Vitamin D, and Zinc, with a 90-day money-back guarantee); Ultra Pouches (takeultra.com, code SRS for 15% off; 0 nicotine and 0 caffeine nootropic focus and sleep pouches providing smooth energy lasting 1 to 2 hours); Mando (shopmando.com, code SRS for 20% off plus free shipping; whole-body deodorant sticks, creams, and sprays clinically proven to block odor all day and control it for up to 72 hours); ROKA (roka.com, code SRS for 20% off; prescription eyewear, sunglasses, and "Wind Down" red-lens eyewear developed with Dr. Andrew Huberman); and Glacier VPN.
• Early Childhood and Working-Class Roots in Alabama: Dusty was born in Chambers County (Lafayette), Alabama, and moved to a trailer park in Opelika, Alabama, after his parents divorced when he was 2 or 3 years old (he hedges that he said 2 on 2 albums before his dad corrected him that he was 3). He has two older half-sisters (9 and 11 years older, different father), and when his father remarried when Dusty was 5, he gained two older stepbrothers for 10 years until that marriage ended in divorce (in total, his mother married 2 times and his father 4 times, with his father's current marriage lasting over 20 years). His family history includes a paternal grandfather born in 1900, a father born in 1947 (drafted for Vietnam but denied due to a heart murmur), and an uncle born in 1926 who earned a Purple Heart in WWII and died around age 56 to 58 (Dusty hedges: "50-something like that, 58"). While his mother worked third shift, Dusty spent summers at his grandmother's house in 100-degree heat with no air conditioning or cable TV; he hedges that he thinks his grandmother lost her first husband in WWII and his grandfather was injured in military training before dying at age 65 when Dusty was 4 or 5. At 21 months old—hedging "at least that's what they tell me" because there were no car seats and he doesn't remember—Dusty was left in the front bench seat of his mother's car, pulled the gear shift into drive/neutral, crashed through a fence, steered between two trees (which slammed his open door shut), crashed through a second fence, and sank in a pond; his mother, who couldn't swim, rescued him through the back door, and the insurance adjuster totaled the car when the windshield wipers turned on by themselves. Despite growing up in a trailer park—where Hurricane Opal knocked trees onto their trailer when he was in 8th grade before he and his mother moved into a house 1 mile from the high school—Dusty showed early aptitude and was moved into an advanced math class in 2nd grade.
• Derailed Military Enlistment and Flipping His Childhood Trailer: Dusty hedges that the timeline of his late teens and early 20s is "a little fuzzy" because he was using substances (including weed, acid, ecstasy, and pain pills from roughly age 17 to 21). At age 18 or 19, while working at Western Sizzlin in Opelika (which he jokes his Netflix bit about a guy sweating in the green beans shut down, though he hedges the owner had owned it for 30 years and was genuinely ready to retire), Dusty enlisted in the US Army to go Airborne at Fort Benning and become an Army cook. The night he completed his physical in Montgomery, his recruiter told him he had 30 days before shipping out and if he wanted to smoke weed one last time, to do it that night. Dusty was arrested that very night for underage consumption of alcohol (open container) and possession of marijuana (stuffed into a beer bottle under his seat by a friend). The arrest disqualified him from shipping out—meaning he would have been in boot camp on September 11, 2001, whereas his high school wrestling teammate of the exact same weight joined after 9/11 and now runs the Army Ranger School in Columbus, Georgia—and resulted in a 9-month suspended driver's license, 2 years of probation, and $1,000 in fines. At age 18 or 19, Dusty bought his own childhood trailer back from a dealership for $1,000, installed $2,000 worth of misplaced custom cabinets via his brother-in-law, lived in it for 2 years, and sold it at age 21 for $3,500, splitting the profit between paying his brother-in-law back for court/lawyer fees and funding his move to Charleston, South Carolina.
• The Long Grind in Charleston and Nashville: Dusty moved to Charleston in 2003 at age 21, working at Office Depot for $7.25 an hour. After seeing an ad in the Charleston City Paper, he took improv classes at Theatre 99 and tried stand-up from late 2003 to 2005 before moving to Folly Beach, bombing a couple of times, and quitting stand-up for 3 years to party, wait tables, and work a salaried pesticide sales job (with health benefits and retirement, working 50 to 60 hours a week). He returned to stand-up at Theatre 99 in 2008 completely sober for a bit about the alphabet, then performed for 4 years while drinking. After failing to make the finals 2 times, he won the late 2011 Charleston comedy competition by 2 votes; after getting sober in January 2012 and waiting tables 3 days a week, he won the 2012 competition by a landslide. Moving to Nashville to be centrally located for road work, he lived on Annex Court in an 1800s house with 5 other dudes, paying $250 a month for a poorly insulated attic apartment. Early on, he drove a used Volvo S60 (paid in cash with 100,000 miles and later traded in with 317,000 miles—also referenced as 300,000 miles—and no A/C) to weekend gigs that paid $250, spending $100 on gas and food. He also bombed terribly at the Funny Bone in Richmond, Virginia, going up cold for 20 minutes to open a two-man show for Aries Spears. After 6 years of comedy in Charleston without ever performing in a comedy club and 4 years as a full-time comic, Dusty landed an unrepresented spot at the Just For Laughs (JFL) Unwrapped festival, had the set of the night, and signed with the biggest management company that offered—where both his LA-based manager (from Colorado Springs) and his agent (originally LA-based, now in Nebraska) are Christians, leading Dusty to perform for his agent's children's Catholic school 2 times. When Simon & Schuster later offered him a book deal and brought in a ghostwriter to rework the full manuscript Dusty had written himself, Dusty liked the collaborator so much he insisted on putting the ghostwriter's name on the cover.
• The Mechanics of Sobriety and Breaking Habits: Both Shawn and Dusty bond over recovering from blackout drinking (Shawn has been sober from alcohol for 4 years; Dusty has been sober for 14 years since late January 2012). Dusty explains that reading the Alcoholics Anonymous "Blue Book" (Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book) helped him realize he was an alcoholic—not because he drank in the morning or hid liquor, but because a single beer triggered an inability to stop until blacking out. When Dusty quit drinking in 2012, he had to throw out the mattress he had slept on for 10 years because he had thrown up and peed on it while blacked out (and once peed on a couch next to an ex-girlfriend, covering it with a towel). He also quit his 1 to 1.5 pack-a-day cigarette habit the same day, using dip for 3 days before quitting nicotine, weed, and alcohol entirely for 1 year (today, he occasionally uses a tiny amount of weed at night—though never for shows or podcasts—and smokes cigars heavily). When Shawn asks how to stop saying F-bombs after being unfiltered since age 12 (now in his 40s), and Dusty recalls opener Jordan Jensen accidentally saying the F-bomb about 40 times after being asked to work clean, Dusty explains that habit change starts with awareness and repentance in real time, which gradually rewires default mental pathways. Around 2009 or 2010, after a non-Christian friend pointed out the hypocrisy of Dusty cutting dirty jokes only when church members attended, Dusty began this gradual transition to clean comedy—now avoiding all swearing on stage except saying "ass" once in Wet Heat when quoting a homeless man in San Diego who asked, "Would you like me to whoop your ass?"
• Reading the New Testament Through an Old Testament Lens: In 2012–2013, after reading blog posts by Maria Merola (whom Dusty hesitates to name, hedging that she may believe other things he doesn't agree with), Dusty began reading the New Testament through an Old Testament lens and has abstained from pork and shellfish since 2013 based on Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Shawn notes that Catholic Cardinal Burke recently told him on the show that the New Testament reinforces rather than obsoletes the Old Testament—and reveals that less than 1 week after releasing that first episode in a planned series covering every book of the Bible, a long-time sponsor canceled their contract because they do not advertise on faith-based content. Dusty explains the practical and spiritual logic of biblical dietary laws: clean animals (cows, deer, sheep) eat grass and have multiple stomachs, whereas pigs have 1 stomach, eat anything, do not sweat, have skin tough enough to resist snakebites, and (citing Dr. Axe) retain higher toxins; similarly, clean fish have fins and scales, while shellfish (shrimp, crab, lobster, oysters, scallops) and catfish are bottom-feeding filters. Addressing mainstream Christian objections, Dusty argues that Peter's vision of the sheet with unclean animals 3 times in Acts 10 was explicitly interpreted by Peter himself as meaning he should not call Gentile men (like Cornelius) unclean, and cites Jesus in Matthew 7:22–23 warning against "iniquity" (lawlessness). Still, Dusty hedges his theology ("I'm not saying that I know"), noting that salvation comes through Jesus, the law is simply how to live on earth, and if he is wrong, all he did was skip pork and shellfish.
• Family Life, Prepping, and Homesteading: Dusty married Canadian comedian Hannah (from Toronto, now a naturalized US citizen) in 2017 (9 years married) after meeting at an NYC open mic (when he rented a room for 1 month and she visited for 1 week) and dating long-distance for 1 year while she got an entertainment work visa. They have 3 children: a 5-year-old daughter (homeschooled for kindergarten with a weekly co-op), a 3-year-old son, and a 5-month-old baby boy. While hedging that he doesn't know if the world is genuinely scarier for kids today than it used to be ("but it feels like it"), Dusty and Shawn discuss protecting children from technology and cultivating nature. Dusty catches tadpoles from a 5-gallon bucket to raise into tree frogs, lives on 3 acres in Nashville with a 100-year-old oak tree (where he grew 50 little oak trees from acorns last year, and where he hedges that planting rosemary, oregano, thyme, or basil supposedly repels insects, though he has never made it work), and owns land in McMinnville, Tennessee, with a Mennonite-built cabin, swales, a creek, and fruit trees visited every 1 to 2 months. He also maintains a prepper room stocked with food, heaters, and sub-zero sleeping bags, while balancing family life by recording 2 podcasts a week and flying out on Fridays for 2 nights of theater shows (drawing 1,000 or more people).
• Cosmology, Skepticism, and the Paranormal: Emphasizing heavily that he is "no scientist," "just asking," and "just a guy who's inhaled a lot of pesticides probably," Dusty questions the Apollo moon landings (asking who filmed the lunar module landing/takeoff, how astronauts called President Richard Nixon on a landline, and why they looked somber at their press conference), while Shawn notes that 90-something percent of respondents in his X poll didn't believe the moon landing, photo shadows don't line up, and NASA claims to have lost the technology from 1968. Dusty also explores biblical cosmology, questioning how gravity holds oceans to a spinning ball while letting butterflies fly, referencing the firmament in Genesis 1 and the "circle of the earth" in Isaiah, and describing the hypothetical flat-earth model (with a local sun moving between the Tropic of Capricorn, Equator, and Tropic of Cancer, and an outer ice wall) while hedging "I have no idea" and "I'm not saying I believe it." Both men agree that "aliens" are likely spiritual beings or fallen angels rather than extraterrestrials, with Dusty citing the Nephilim of Genesis 6 as a possible origin for demons and ghosts. Finally, Dusty shares how he stops sleep paralysis by forcing himself to say "Jesus" aloud and recounts shadow figures seen at his 1800s Nashville house and his dad's rental house (hedging "who knows if it's true"), prompting Shawn to share two paranormal encounters in College Grove, Tennessee: hearing 2:00 AM wall banging and loud cowboy boot footsteps (which recorded as static) at a Civil War-era Airbnb cabin where roughly 30% of reviews warned of banging walls, and seeing kitchen lights flicker uncontrollably right after his wife mentioned spirits using electricity at a 30-something-acre farm with an 1800s farmhouse, cemetery, and old slave quarters.

Quotes

• At 0:03:26 - "And he said to me, he goes, 'It's interesting that you care about what people from the church think, but you don't care about what God thinks.' And I go, 'Whoa.'" - Dusty explaining the exact moment a non-Christian friend convicted him to transition toward clean comedy.
• At 0:04:51 - "It's not that I'm necessarily worried to offend, but I just want everybody to feel good. I want them to leave the show not feeling worse about themselves." - Dusty describing the philosophy behind keeping his stand-up sets clean and uplifting.
• At 0:07:36 - "Well, I think every time you become aware of something, then you—then when you do it, you think about it, and then maybe over time it just becomes less and less because you're now aware that you're doing it." - Dusty explaining to Shawn how real-time awareness is the first step to breaking deeply ingrained habits like swearing.
• At 0:08:16 - "That's what I think for me is it's like when I realized that I wanted to be a cleaner comic, it didn't happen overnight because my mind already—like I wasn't thinking that way. I was still thinking of dirty jokes." - Dusty illustrating that rewiring mental habits takes patience and gradual cognitive shifts.
• At 0:09:54 - "I'm fine really to not drink, but the moment I have a beer, then I'm like—I'm—I get—it's like something comes over me and I'm fueled and I'm ready to go." - Dusty sharing the insight from the AA Big Book that helped him recognize his alcoholism.
• At 0:15:48 - "And then she's able to get the back door open as the car's sinking, and she grabs me out of the front seat. And they—my—my—they towed the car out of the water later, and as the insurance adjuster's there, he's trying to decide if they're going to total the car, and he says the windshield wipers just came on on their own, so they totaled it." - Dusty recounting the story of driving his mother's car into a pond at 21 months old.
• At 0:22:05 - "The word 'prepper' comes from 'preparation,' and somehow we've made being prepared a weird thing." - Dusty destigmatizing emergency preparedness and keeping supplies for his family.
• At 0:26:37 - "One of my best friends, Ryan Montgomery, has a saying, you know, when you give a kid a phone, you don't give your kid access to the world, you give the world access to your kid." - Shawn sharing why he and Dusty are cautious about exposing children to smartphones and technology.
• At 0:34:27 - "But I don't know if a successful marriage is anything other than just staying in the marriage no matter what." - Dusty reflecting on commitment after growing up around multiple divorces and being married to his wife Hannah for 9 years.
• At 0:38:20 - "My problems are not my kids' problems." - Dusty explaining how his mother shielded him from adult financial stress in the trailer park, a principle he now applies to his own parenting.
• At 0:40:46 - "He said, 'Nashville is very centrally located to the country, so you could start working all these other clubs, learning to work the road, and in a short time you could become a full-time comic while learning the comedy business.'" - Dusty recounting the career advice that led him to move from Charleston to Nashville to build his touring career.
• At 0:51:50 - "He goes, 'I probably shouldn't tell you this,' he goes, 'but I know you like to smoke weed.' And he goes, 'In 30 days you're going to get shipped off, and so if you want to do it again, do it tonight, because this is the time that you have.' So then that night I got arrested for underage consumption of alcohol and possession of marijuana." - Dusty describing how following his Army recruiter's advice derailed his military enlistment right before 9/11.
• At 0:55:02 - "So I go to the dealership and I ask, 'Can I buy the trailer?' And they sell it to me for $1,000. So my childhood trailer, at 18 or 19, I now have back." - Dusty explaining how he purchased and later flipped his own childhood mobile home.
• At 1:04:19 - "If you pray first, then you may actually hear God's advice. But if you ask everybody else in your life first and then pray, are you hearing God's advice or are you just being influenced by the other voices?" - Dusty explaining why he brings major life and career decisions to God in prayer before consulting friends or peers.
• At 1:14:33 - "Cuz I feel like what a lot of us do is we read the New Testament, and then we read the Old Testament with a New Testament lens, whereas if we read the New Testament with an Old Testament lens, maybe it's not all done away with, right?" - Dusty summarizing the theological shift that led him to adopt Old Testament dietary laws.
• At 1:20:48 - "And I've already started losing sponsors because of it. Like less than a week in, we had one cancel cuz they don't advertise on faith-based content." - Shawn revealing the immediate financial pushback he faced when starting a podcast series covering the books of the Bible.
• At 1:22:28 - "And then COVID came, and I lost all my gigs. And I just felt like it was like God saying to me, 'You can lose all your gigs anytime. I can take everything away from you immediately.'" - Dusty sharing how the 2020 lockdowns cured his fear of losing bookings over being outspoken about his Christian faith.
• At 1:24:00 - "Well, I'm not trying to get into heaven this way. Jesus is how I'm getting into heaven, but now that I have that, how do I live on earth? And I think the law is how you live on earth." - Dusty clarifying the distinction between salvation through grace and practical living through biblical law.
• At 1:57:01 - "Somebody in the audience makes a weird noise and I go, 'Oh, someone's dying out there,' and this guy goes, 'No, you're dying up there.'" - Dusty recalling a brutal heckler comeback during his worst comedy club bomb opening for Aries Spears in Richmond, Virginia.
• At 2:46:09 - "It's not about the money, it's about finding a life that you enjoy." - Dusty concluding the episode with advice on prioritizing fulfillment and family over chasing a bigger paycheck.

Takeaways

• Use real-time awareness to break entrenched habits: Rather than expecting an unwanted habit (like swearing) to vanish overnight, set an internal intention to notice every time you slip up; that conscious awareness gradually rewires your default thought patterns over time.
• Evaluate alcohol use by your ability to stop, not just frequency: As Dusty learned from the AA Big Book, you don't have to drink every morning to have a problem—if taking a single drink consistently removes your ability to stop before blacking out, complete abstinence may be necessary.
• Clean out physical reminders when making a major life pivot: When committing to sobriety or a fresh start, eliminate the environmental reminders of your old lifestyle—just as Dusty threw out his 10-year-old mattress and his cigarettes on day one of getting sober.
• Pray before polling other people for advice: When facing a major decision, take it to prayer first before asking friends, family, or colleagues so that outside opinions don't drown out or confuse your internal spiritual discernment.
• Shield children from adult anxieties: Follow the example of Dusty's mother by keeping adult financial and personal stresses between adults ("my problems are not my kids' problems") so children can grow up feeling secure regardless of income level.
• Delay smartphone access and foster outdoor curiosity: Remember that giving a child a phone "gives the world access to your kid"; instead, intentionally engage children with the physical world through hands-on projects like raising tadpoles into tree frogs or growing oak trees from acorns.
• Normalize household emergency preparedness: Treat "prepping" simply as responsible preparation by maintaining a dedicated space stocked with shelf-stable food, backup heaters, and sub-zero sleeping bags so your family isn't panicked during supply chain or weather disruptions.
• Position yourself geographically to master your craft: When building a touring or field-based career, consider relocating to a centrally located hub (like Nashville) where cost of living is manageable and you can drive to multiple markets to build real-world reps.
• Reframe career setbacks as reminders of what truly matters: Use sudden industry shutdowns or lost contracts as perspective checks that strip away the fear of people-pleasing and reinforce standing firm in your personal convictions.
• Read scripture in its full chronological context: Try studying the New Testament through the foundational lens of the Old Testament (including passages like Acts 10 and Matthew 7) rather than assuming earlier principles were entirely discarded.
• Give generous credit to collaborators who elevate your work: Set ego aside when working with editors or ghostwriters; if someone helps make your project significantly better, acknowledge their contribution openly—even on the front cover.
• Design your work schedule around the life you want to live: Avoid working 50 to 60 hours a week solely for money at a job you hate; structure your schedule (as Dusty does by touring only Friday and Saturday nights) to maximize time at home with your spouse and children.