Andrew Heaton Interview: Will Be Your Amish Ambassador
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to comedian, author, and political satirist Andrew Heaton. Andrew has performed stand up comedy all over the world and hosts two podcasts, one of them featuring Kyle and Ethan. Andrew's two podcasts are titled The Political Orphanage and Alienating the Audience. Kyle and Ethan dive into Andrew's strange Oklahoma upbringing that deals with a Prison rodeo, eating a rattlesnake heart, and having unknown ties to a family cave. While on his journey out of Oklahoma, Andrew worked for a time at congress and tells Kyle and Ethan about how that experience helped shape him to become politically homeless. Andrew is @MightyHeaton on all social media. Political Orphanage Podcast Alienating The Audience Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Trouble with sleep Political labels and comedy Oklahoma prison rodeo Rattlesnake derby Eating rattlesnake hearts Exploring Caves in Oklahoma Weiner Dog racing Dinner with an Amish community Viking Runestones Working for Congress Beer pong with a Congressman Alienating the Audience Economics of Dune Current Political Art is going to age badly How British politics do it right Owning a distillery in Scotland Getting a van stuck in a bog in Scotland Subscriber Portion Italian Fire Cigar smoking Living in a variety of places Quarantine in a camper Legalizing drugs Underground libertarian drug den Meeting Vermin Supreme Yelling at politicians European Californians GK Chesterton quote History Improv 10 Questions Phil Robertson Stephen Colbert Bombing as a comedian
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Comedy.
It's a funny thing.
Hopefully.
If it goes well.
All goes according to plan.
And nobody knows that better than our guest, Andrew Heaton.
Comedian and author.
Yeah.
And political satirist.
Yeah, so we had, we were excited to have Andrew Heaton because he was in town and he traveling in a egg-shaped camper.
Yeah.
Because he tours the world spreading his funniness.
He's like the Walter White of comedy.
Right.
It's like a meth lab, but it's a comedy lab.
The purest.
That's some good.
That's some tight, tight-high comedy, bro.
Yeah, so he is here in person and he was a lot of funny.
He had a lot of crazy stories.
Eating a beating rattlesnake heart.
I like that part.
Wiener Dogs?
Yeah, you know.
What I liked about this is he's political, but we didn't talk politics a whole lot.
We just talked about crazy stuff.
I got to apologize.
I was yawning a lot.
I was so tired.
It was Monday and I was just out of it.
Oh, yeah, you were out of it.
Why don't you ask the question?
Oh, sorry, Kyle.
I haven't let you speak.
I'm looking at you and be like, it would look like I was looking at like promotional material for The Mandalorian.
He's just like gazing at me like that guy, Pedro Pascal or his name is.
And I'm like, okay, Kyle's not with us.
He's no longer with us.
So you know how comedians, like, they always tell stories on stage and you're like, yeah, right, that didn't happen.
They're like, so I was going through Oklahoma.
And it's just a setup for the joke.
But I think he actually did this stuff.
Yeah.
So it all sounded really legit.
So, yeah, I enjoyed this.
We had a really good time with Andrew.
And he's the kind of guy that we could do another one with at some point because I think there was a lot to delve in with politics that we didn't get into.
We groked.
That means like it went well.
Grok comes from Robert A. Heinlein's stranger in a strange land.
And I think it's a weird concept, but it's you understand something.
We grok with each other.
Can you grok with somebody?
I think so.
Okay.
Anyway, I tried to use that word properly.
That's fine.
So, yeah, Andrew Heaton, and we were on his show once.
You can look that up.
Me and Kyle were on, was it the Political Orphanage, maybe?
I don't know.
He has two shows.
We weren't on the alien one.
We must have been on.
We were on a weird news one.
It was like a political podcast.
I'm sure.
What?
It wasn't the weird news guy.
Oh, yeah, we did weird news stories with him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that was, that wasn't.
We were on a portion of his show, I think.
Oh, okay.
Maybe it's just like his weird news.
Boing, boing, oing.
Maybe.
Weird news.
Anyway, enjoy this interview.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to introduce him, like what he does and stuff.
Well, I already said a comedian, a political satirist.
We do these things to give you details before the idea because we never do it well in the afternoon.
And then we just do it even worse in the bumper.
He wrote the book Laughter is Better Than Communism.
i agree uh and it's a little he kind of he calls himself independent but he's always been a little more he's libertarian but libertarian A lot of guys don't want to limit themselves.
Yeah.
But we get into that.
So here we go.
Andrew Heaton.
Andrew.
Oh, here he is now.
Here comes our shirts.
So, my theory, because they're always like, hey, if you don't sleep, you know, this many hours every night, you knock this many years off your life.
So, I looked at the math and I started doing the math because, like, because when you're dead, you're like this.
And then also when you're sleeping, you're like this.
And so, I did the math, and it actually turns out that you do this less if you just stay up late.
Okay, okay, gotcha.
So, if we're trading, if we're making a graph of when you are, when you're in a plank position, plank state, yeah.
Okay, so just based on vertical, being vertical, it's better to get minimal sleep.
All right.
And you're going to be awake more as an old man, like a really old man.
Yeah, true.
Or in your prime, which I've always thought.
I think the trick might be because I feel like you should just, we should learn to utilize being asleep better.
Like, I wear nice pajamas because I'm asleep, you know, six to eight hours a night.
I should look good while I do it.
And I think maybe like if I could train myself to lucid dream, because I don't, I don't like sleeping either.
But if I knew, like, oh, sleep when I get to fly and make out with Natalie Portman, like, that's my evening every night.
I would go to sleep early.
But now it's like I go to sleep when I'm bored.
That's when I go to sleep.
Yeah, I have to tire myself out.
Yeah, I'm not good at sleep.
I really resent it.
Every night, I'm just like, got to do this again.
Just lay here silently, do nothing.
Anyway.
Well, we have Andrew Heaton here in the studio.
Hey, it was good to talk to you guys.
Have some happy holidays.
Thanks for the Diet Coke.
Kyle's here, too.
He's a random guy pulled up in a van and walked in and like I'm the guest for today.
Yep.
Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
I offered, I was like, hey, if I wash some dishes, could you guys give me some food?
And they're like, oh, no, our last guest canceled.
Could you come in?
I was like, okay, no problem.
I'll put on my weird ostrich skin jacket.
And they'd come in and say colorful things about sleep for 15 minutes.
That's what we assumed happened with Jack Dorsey of Twitter when he had to give us testimony before Congress is that they just went out and knocked on an RV out on the street in San Francisco.
And hey, you look like a tech CEO.
Can you come up and testify before the Senate?
So that's what we did here.
And it's working out.
I mean, you did ask for food.
That was the first thing you asked.
Yeah, I did.
You guys have coffee and stuff.
So we kind of figured.
Yeah, and I refuse to even address anyone or make eye contact until you brought me coffee and Diet Coke.
You're eating coffee and Diet Coke back to back.
Yeah, this is, I feel like I'm doing like the teenage version of double-fisting drinks where I was like, yeah, I'll go ahead and down the coffee and the Diet Code.
Get really animated for your podcast.
Sing show tunes on the way back at full volume from being pepped up.
So you're a libertarian comedian, right?
Is that what your title is?
But you're also not.
I remember we talked to you before.
Yeah.
Yeah, you came on my show.
Yeah, we were on your show.
Well, like, I'm going to, I'm just going to say independent.
And here's why.
I think that we're at a point where I view politics as an engineering exercise of just how do we fix stuff.
And I think that the country is largely moving to this position of politics is the new religion.
Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?
And I don't want to play that game.
And I find that when I really engage in labels, one, the libertarians oftentimes find me insufficiently libertarian, which is a fun game.
Meanwhile, if I go with that, my progressive friends want to argue with me about why I think children should work at coal mines, which is nothing I've ever said, but they'll pick that fight.
So I'm only going to own the independent thing.
But yeah, but I do, I'm a comedian, and I host two podcasts.
I host a show called The Political Orphanage, which has comedy on Fridays and regular politics on Wednesdays.
So this week, the one that you and I are recording in, I am alternately talking to Leo Kurse, who is the Scottish Communion of the Year from two years ago, and Lord Martin Rees, who's the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom.
We're going to talk about existential threats.
So they should both be super funny, but there'll be a lot of accents.
And then I do a sci-fi podcast called Alienating the Audience as well.
But anyway, yeah, I wear a lot of hats, and I oscillate between being funny and substantive.
It should be jarring for your audience today.
We like random people.
You just go anywhere, talk about anything.
Are you quiet today?
Are you being substantive or funny right now?
You just sadly neither.
I just try to drink that Diet Coke.
You guys keep bothering me.
I was going to play Pokemon.
You want to be substantive.
You drink the coffee.
You're going to be funny.
Yeah, exactly.
You ask the question and then you.
Yeah, I look at what I'm drinking and go, okay, I'll say something about Confucius.
And then I start drinking the other thing, and I'm like, all right, time for a pun.
Well, libertarians are kind of a joke anyway, so you already have at least one joke, just being a libertarian.
That's like you're not.
He's not a libertarian, though.
I'm only going to claim the independent thing.
I find that the labels just get everything bucked up.
I like just about every libertarian.
It's like, I'm a libertarian, but not one of those libertarians.
Like, immediately distance yourself.
Yeah, there's a lot of that.
Anybody but a Democrat.
Like, Democrats own it.
Yeah, I'm a Democrat.
But everyone else is like, I lean that way.
Yeah, I'd say I'm a moderate who leans libertarian.
I think it's a pretty good description for me.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
You got any moderate jokes there, Kai?
You want to lob that at me?
Nothing really to joke about there.
Well, I know what I want to talk about, but it's like a really random because we were doing our research on you.
And I'm flattered.
There's this great list of things that you've done.
Wow.
And I want to go into detail on each of them.
Great.
By researching me, did you go to the bio on my website?
I probably.
I don't know who did it.
It was Joel Duncan's part.
We have a whole team.
Yeah, 50 people.
Well, I know.
I know.
We're on the eighth floor of the tower here, the Babylon Tower.
Right, yeah.
All the other floors are Andrew Heaton Research Labs.
Floors one through seven.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I noticed that.
We're on the cutting edge.
Okay.
In Oklahoma, you attended a prison rodeo.
Yes.
Yeah.
So Oklahoma's got a bunch of weird, cool things to it.
So like anybody who visits Oklahoma, where I'm from, there tends to be this very dismissive attitude driving through the state.
Because if you go along I-40, there's not a lot to see.
It's just a lot of planes, right?
The deal is you have to have a car and you have to know cool people because there's weird stuff in the state.
There's a Bigfoot hunt.
Sadly, the McAllister Prison Rodeo has shut down.
That finally shut down.
And I say sadly because that was a cultural institution in Southeast Oklahoma.
The McAllister Prison Rodeo was, they would always say the oldest prison rodeo in the country, which implies that there's multiple prison rodeos, which I don't think is the case.
So is this a voluntary rodeo?
Or are they like, you're a prisoner?
Get on the bull.
I have to be careful here.
The prisoners are not voluntarily prisoners.
However, the prisoners have voluntarily entered the rodeo.
So they don't like go get the prisoners with their striped shirts and the balls, the ball and chains, and then like prod them in with cattle prods or anything.
Rather, they find prisoners that are on good behavior, and they say, if you continue to be on good behavior, we will allow you to do the rodeo.
Because it's apparently, I've never been to prison, but someday probably, and I'm told that it's very boring.
And so they will go do the, and so they bring in, or they brought in a regular rodeo team, and then they'd bring in the prisoners, and they'd do it.
The only bit that I think was a little questionable is the big event at the end called Money the Hard Way.
And they would just, they'd tie a string around the horns of a bull.
And I don't know if you've ever been to rodeo.
Bulls are not happy.
They actually put a little, I don't know what you call it, it's a scrotum, like a scrotum tightener that they put on them to irritate them.
So they're not just natively angry.
They're actually constricting their testes to make them mad.
And they've got this string along the horns, and they would tape a $100 bill on that string and go, get it.
And then that was it.
It was just a free-for-all.
And this bull who's actively trying to kill every human being on the planet until they release him from this testes tightener is running and trying not to get gored.
And if they got it, they got it.
And that's a lot of cigarettes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's huge.
See, when I heard Prison Rota, I envisioned like you get the guy from, is that movie Eight Seconds, like the guy that writes the bull?
Is that the rodeo movie?
I don't know.
I just get that mixed up with Eight Mile, which is Eminem.
But anyway, so imagine like a rodeo guy.
He walks out there and like the guy, this giant guy in a black and white striped suit, and he looks like Gary Busey, just escaped from the prison or whatever.
Okay, yes.
He asked to come back on board.
Yep.
Bucking on Gary Busey.
I gotta say, this sounds like a Gary Busey event.
Like if Gary Busey were made like czar of games in Oklahoma, it's like, what are we gonna do?
It'd be like something involving like chickens and bingo and then alternately like, yeah, we're gonna have rodeos involving felons.
Yeah, yeah.
Ferrets and motor oil.
The other event that is still going on in Oklahoma is the rattlesnake derby, and that happens town by town in Western Oklahoma.
I think I was going to get a question here.
Shall I let you?
The last one, we can mix them.
We'll bounce around.
It's not half-book order.
The weird thing, I apologize because they gave me the script before we sat down, and I was supposed to memorize all this, and I've really done a poor job.
So I'm sorry.
I should have.
We didn't give Kyle any lines.
It's weird.
Tell us about the snake thing.
It says here, you ate two beating rattlesnake hearts.
Yes, I have.
The first question is, why you eat one, and then why did you do another?
Yeah, great questions, all.
Great questions, all.
The snake thing, the beating rattlesnake hearts.
So in western Oklahoma, as with much of the plain states, the smaller towns are shrinking as people are moving to the cities.
As that happens, kind of the old grain silos fill up with rats, then fill up with snakes.
So snakes are having a really good time right now.
There's more rattlesnakes now than there was 50 years ago.
So what a lot of these towns do, and a lot of these counties do is they'll have like whomping day from The Simpsons.
Wamping?
Yeah, do you guys know that reference, Wamping Day?
I was not allowed to watch The Simpsons growing up.
Really?
But I did just recently watch all of the first 11 seasons.
It's new to him.
Yeah, okay, great.
So this is, yeah, you've got like childlike wonder.
You're experiencing season 10 for the very first time.
Season 11 is where I am.
And I've been told, my friend over here told me, just stop.
Now's when you switch to Futurama.
Your friend is correct.
Thank you, Fred.
True.
Okay, so then I'll scuttle that reference for everybody that doesn't know The Simpsons.
But basically, everybody goes out and hunts these snakes.
So people will go out with pillowcases and I don't know what snake picker-upper poles.
There might be a name for them.
And they put them in there, and then they all show up in the town and go, pardon me.
They go, all right, here's the snakes.
And so Mangum, where I've been, which is real far out in the southwest corner, they've got a big old pit that they dump all these snakes in.
And when you show up, you measure how big snake is.
They throw Indiana Jones in there.
No, they put in the snake handlers.
So there is the Free Church of the Scream of Jesus that's in the middle of there.
That's doing snake handling.
And they always get bit because one of them has insufficient faith.
So that's going on.
Throw them in.
And they measure how, like, whoever has the longest snake.
I think the year I was there was like nine feet.
It's crazy.
And I went the first time I went there.
And this is pretty rural.
Maybe Mangum.
Shout out to your Mangum listenership.
Maybe it has become a cosmopolitan bright spot in the plains.
But when I went there, speaking as I currently do, a kid ran up to me and went, are you from France?
And I think I was wearing a blazer.
And so I must have been a European.
And then my buddy and I, we went, we saw a bus, like a tour bus, going out into the Badlands.
So we went and these two like 70-year-old Rotarians gave us a tour of catching rattlesnakes.
And apparently their vision is based on heat.
So if you're out in the desert, you know, they can't really see you.
And one of them comes up and goes, Andy, do you know how far a snake can strike from head to tail or from tail to end or whatever?
What the striking distance is?
And I was like, I don't know, probably four feet.
And he rolled his sleeve back and showed me these snake pock marks and goes, my experience about this much further than you thought.
And anyway, so we went back to the town proper, and they had a butcher shop set up.
And there was this hulking black guy with an apron covered in snake guts, and he had rattlesnake earrings and like a rattlesnake bolo tie, just lots of rattlesnake accessories.
Decked out.
And he went, my man, did you know in Thailand that snake gallbladders are a delicacy?
And he talked my friend Evan into eating a gallbladder.
And I was like, I don't want to eat a bladder.
And he's like, well, I do have this beating rattlesnake heart.
It's been beating for an hour and a half.
And I was like, that sounds like pretty high-quality heart.
It's been beating for an hour and a half.
So I had that, and nothing happened.
I assumed that I probably have salmonella or some kind of superpower.
And when I went back a few years later, I was like, well, you know, when you're here, you might as well eat a rattlesnake heart.
So I had another one.
Did you up your striking distance a little bit, maybe just a little bit?
Yeah, I think so.
I think as a result of that, I could probably throw a frisbee slightly further.
You probably wouldn't jump out and bite people very often.
Also, if you did.
More rattlesnake terms I learned.
Apparently, a rattlesnake sperm can, like, once deposited in a female rattlesnake, can hang out for six months before impregnating them.
So I like to think that I now have a similar ability for when I'm married or living in sin.
So I just really, you know, can't do the Catholic thing.
You have to be much more careful.
I want to know more about this rattlesnake pit.
Are they like a, so the snake handlers and they legitimately go out there?
Is that a joke?
No, they had them.
They have like a blob set up and launched their instruments.
So they have a pit and a pavilion over the pit because it's quite hot.
And then they just everybody's dead?
Rattlesnakes or alive?
Yeah, either way.
They're alive.
So they measure the snakes.
A lot of them are, there's an excess of snakes.
There's more snakes than they know what to do with.
So say there's a plethora of.
I would say there's a plethora of snakes, yes.
The literal cornucopia.
Yeah, too many muscles.
To be really clear, I don't know the exact protocol.
It might be that all of the snakes are measured.
It might be that if they're clearly below five feet, they need not go through the rigors of snake measuring.
It might be that half of them go to the snake handlers in the pit.
It might be that half go to the butcher shop.
It might be that they're all funneled through the pit.
I don't know.
But there's a lot of, I would say at least 50 snakes are in the snake pit.
And there's not a constant amount of snake handlers, but that is an ongoing activity within that pit is that preachers will get down and handle the snakes and all that kind of thing.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
So anyway, that was Oklahoma Tourism Board, I think, has really got the shoe on the wrong foot by promoting like, wow, we have basketball now.
And I'm like, I think you really need to go for the weirdo bit, like really lean into that.
It says you went spelunking without a helmet and you gambled at a weeder dog race.
Yes.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All of which happened.
I'm curious as to where this research actually came from.
Yeah, no, it's all very Oklahoma specific because I don't think that's on my website either.
Weekends of awesomeness expeditions.
Yeah.
So when I was in college, the aforementioned Evan, who foolishly ate a snake gallbladder, so I'm kind of yokel.
Oh, yeah.
Can you imitate the heartbeat of a rattlesnake in your experience?
And that's after being dead for an hour and a half.
Yeah, they last for a long time, too.
The other weird thing about them is when you cut the head off, the spine has so many neurons in it, it's basically like a second brain.
So the headless snake will just keep moving.
And the second time I did it, when I went back there, he was giving me my, you could pick your snake out the way you could pick out lobsters in certain restaurants.
And he was like, which snake do you want?
He kept cutting their heads off.
And then one of them, he held his hat out and it like hopped and bit the hat.
And I was like, that's the snake I want.
I want the decapitated, like, dead Frenchman from the revolution that is so angry it bit your hat.
I want that heart.
So I had that one.
You know, the rattlesnakes are ready.
Yeah.
Squeezing an orange or something like that.
So when I was in college, I went to the University of Oklahoma and Evan and I would lead these things we called weekends of awesomeness.
So we'd pick a quadrant of the state and we would visit wineries and we'd play bocce ball and we'd try and find whatever weird thing we could in the area.
And when we were in Northwest Oklahoma, my family's from Alva and I mentioned I was going to be up that way and Uncle Gary went, do you want to go to a cave?
And I went, we have a cave?
And he went, yeah, we got a cave.
And it was apparently there's some like long-standing clan alliance between my family and the McGillicuddy family.
I don't know who it is, but in any event, there's some like just non-public cave.
And so we showed up and like, and it was the most, because I've been to like proper caves before where they make you wear, like, you know, you do a walking tour of like Carlsback cabins or something, you know, and they like they've got it very well cordoned off and you wear a hard helmet.
There's a flashlight and all that.
And I had a like a light-up pin flashlight and we would literally walk around and Uncle Gary would go, that hole looks deep, jump down there.
And I would just jump down there and be like, it's pretty deep.
And that would be the extent of us testing things.
So it's amazing we didn't lose anybody there.
And then the wiener dog racing, yeah, that's apparently a sport, is wiener dog racing.
And it is both glorious and really stupid.
Stupid and that wiener dogs are not raised to race.
What are they raised for?
I think they're ratters, I believe.
Oh, really?
I think they're ratters.
But when you raise the chutes, the humans are funny because there's a bunch of humans that have dedicated three years of their life trying to train a wiener dog to race to no avail.
And they're all screaming, go!
Go, widget!
They're just screaming at the top of their lungs.
And then meanwhile, the wiener dogs all shoot.
They start like fighting and mating, and then like one of them will accidentally walk across the finish line, and that becomes it.
So it's a fun thing to gamble on.
So I've done that one.
So I would totally go back to wiener dog racing.
That's a lot of fun.
I like to see like handicapped wiener dog racing where all they're like quadruple amputee wiener dogs.
There was one of them.
I can't remember the guy's name, but there was one that like you read the program.
Because you could read the program to try and figure out which wiener dog you were going to put your muddy on, right?
And like one of them has, it was like, I don't know, it was Captain Bayless has had a tough year.
He had to replace his tear ducks with taste buds or something to the saliva.
And I was like, you should have just killed this dog.
This dog should have been euthanized and you're forcing it to race for the amusement of strangers.
What is wrong with you?
Did you get to eat a still-beating wiener dog heart?
No, I don't think I've eaten up for that.
I haven't eaten any part of a dog yet.
Really?
The guy decked out in wiener dog armor?
No, not yet.
Maybe someday, but as of yet, no.
I love seeing a whole cape of wiener dog pelts.
Wiener dogs are inherently funny.
Yeah, no, this guy could be like the dachshund.
That could be my superhero costume because I'm this guy that, I don't know, lives in the sewers or something and has like wiener dog pelts all over me.
Yeah.
Did we get everything on this list?
No, there's more.
But wait.
There's more.
You also, oh, this doesn't sound as exciting, but it might be something funny to talk about.
You had dinner with an Amish family.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I did.
They were very entrepreneurial, which I didn't know about because I called them.
It was for one of these weekends of awesomeness.
And I found out we've got a cabin in Wagner, Oklahoma, the Kenny Bunkport of Oklahoma.
And so we were going to be out there anyway.
And I found out that there was an Amish community nearby.
So I called him and a guy picks up.
They have phones?
Exactly.
He picks up.
And I went, is this the Amish?
And he went, yeah.
And I went, how?
And he explained to me, well, you know, there's one phone in the village and it's in my barn.
And you happen to call me and I'm here.
And it's like, we've decided it's okay if we're using them for, you know, we can't call.
I don't know what, like, they've got some rules about it, right?
Powered by potatoes.
Pretty, yeah.
And I, and I went, well, I'm told that your, your family will, we can have, we could request to have dinner with your family, and I would love to just see what it's like to be Amish.
And he went, yeah, yeah, we'd be happy to have you if you want to come by.
Now we do.
They have this like on the internet or something, like requesting somebody made like a 1982 GeoCities webpage for them that they have that I found.
And there's like a message for this for them.
And that's the thing is that he was like, now we do ask that you contribute to the meal.
You know, if you would, $20 should cover it.
And I was like, okay, well, that seems like.
And we got there, and what he'd done is there was his house, and he built a massive extension of the house that looks like a barn.
And we were billed.
We were going to be sitting down to family dinner with an Amish family.
We went to a restaurant that happened to have an Amish house attached to it, in effect.
So I'm impressed with their entrepreneurial zeal.
But that's about it.
The only thing that I did find odd about it was that I did manage to signal a couple of them and talk to him while I was there.
And I was like, how do you have lights?
And he was like, oh, the lights are all gas-powered.
And I was like, what about the fridge?
And he's like, it's gas-powered.
And I was like, from my perspective, if the problem is technology, I don't know why natural gas would be less sinful than electricity.
That strikes me as the set.
Like, if you had like gas-powered porn, I wouldn't be like, well, that's fine.
As long as it's not electric, that's okay.
But that was their thing, though.
So everything's running on generators.
Exactly.
I don't know the ins and outs of the power systems of Amish, Amish gas.
That was gas.
Did anybody go on a Rum Springer?
No, but I think I'd be great for that.
I think I would be a really good, because I grew up, Oklahoma is like for anybody who's never been to Oklahoma before, picture 1956.
And we're good.
That's it.
That's the whole, like, you're, that's it.
It's lovely.
But I, but I basically grew up in like, it's like somebody took a Norman Rockwell painting and just shook me till I fell out.
And then I landed in California.
And I'm like, oh, my God, what's happening?
What is this stuff?
So like, so like me, I feel like I've already had Rum Springer by virtue of being raised in a very sheltered environment and a little bit of an atavistic, quaint place.
And so I think I'd be a great ambassador to like, like, if there's any Amish kids that like right now are listening to your podcast secretly behind a hay barrel and hay bale and they're like smoking one cigarette, they're like, man, I don't want to go full-blown.
Like, I don't want to do ecstasy, but I would love to drink a light beer with some interesting fella.
Like, I could be that guy.
Yeah.
Be like a tour guide for Rum Springer.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I think I'd be a great tour guide for Rum Springer.
My Rum Springer was watching The Simpsons.
Yeah.
I remember that, though, because The Simpsons now is bland and wholesome, but in the 90s, it was very controversial.
And like, it was like, because I was allowed to watch it as a kid, but I had to watch it with my parents because they would say butt and B-U-T-T.
And they would say shut up, which was a curse word in my family growing up.
We've relaxed slightly.
We even played Cards Against Humanity a couple winters ago.
Like, it was, I mean, I don't know the extent of the, I'm glad we were all drinking.
I'll put it that way.
I think Cards Against Humanity with my parents dead clean sober, where all of us had to look up terms to learn them would have been very awkward.
It's a card game.
I've heard of it.
Okay.
Did you play with the Amish family?
No, I think that would be too much.
I think that would really just catapult them to a place they don't want to be.
Visit their torture chambers.
The last thing on the list, were you going to say something?
Did I interrupt you?
No.
I'm just seeing what you guys talk.
You went looking for alleged Viking runestones.
Yeah.
Yes.
Did you find any?
That's the main question.
I found the alleged rune stone.
Alleged.
Yeah.
So there's in the eastern part of Oklahoma and throughout the Mississippi Valley, there are Nordic runestones.
Now, because of the way lithography works, it's difficult to date them precisely because there's no organic material that you can carbon date, right?
Because it's just stone.
So you're going off of the scratches on it.
Now, the scratches are authentic Viking scratches.
So there's a theory that Vikings came up through the Mississippi, they came to Newfoundland, as we know, and then came around the eastern seaboard, came up the Mississippi, and then just carved Glom's Valley into a bunch of rocks in the middle of the country.
I don't think that's the case.
I think we would find a lot more evidence.
There would have been a lot more blue-eyed Cherokee running around, and there would have been swords and things.
So my theory is that I think that Norwegian tourists, like around maybe 1800, would come over from Arkansas and then they, in the same way that English fops knew Latin very well, you know, in 1800, I think that they probably knew Viking glyphs and would like vandalize, or it might have been a great prank, in which case hats off to the Norwegian tourists that came over.
That's all I got.
That's the thing I want to ask you.
I'm impressed with the deep dip, because these were all very Oklahoma specific.
And I remember tabulating this at some point, but I don't think it's on my current website.
So I'm impressed with the research you've done.
Good job, Joel.
So you had a career in?
I wanted to talk about that.
What do you want to talk about?
Being in politics?
You were in politics for a short period or how'd that work?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I was interested in politics for a long time.
I did a lot of stuff in college and then ended up working for a couple of members of the House of Representatives.
So I worked for Dan Bourne from Oklahoma, and then I worked for Tim Holden from Pennsylvania and was out there.
Had a very good time.
I left because I got a scholarship to get a master's degree in Edinburgh.
And so I had to leave, but I had a good time.
It was fun.
Working for Congress is the closest thing to being in college I've done since college, including getting a graduate degree.
It is and like Washington, D.C. is basically, it is a lot of marble floating in bourbon.
Just picture like a sea of bourbon with some monuments tossed in for good measure.
It's a very, it's a fun environment to be like, I think I was there when I was 25.
It's a fun place to be when you're 25.
And everybody's from somewhere else.
And even people that have lived there for like 50 years, no one in D.C. claims to be from D.C. If you're from like you moved there when you were 18, I'm from Tennessee.
I'm not a politician.
I'm not a career poll.
I'm just, I just like football.
I'm a regular Joe.
No, we're from Memphis.
But as a result, there's a lot of people that are in flux there all the time.
They're there.
The downside to D.C. is that it is an entire city populated by former student council presidents.
So it's smart, but it's one specific kind of smart.
It's just a very narrow bandwidth of smart.
Very smart, but one kind of smart.
But it was fun.
It was a good experience.
It was also, as a limited government guy, I walked away more impressed by the institution that I came in with it.
And I was also surprised at it is a lot more bipartisan behind the scenes than people realize.
So Jim Inhoff, who's the senator from Oklahoma and a very, very conservative member of the Senate, is very good friends with Diane Feinstein, senator from California.
I think she's still senator here, right?
Yeah.
And it is a very progressive Democrat.
We just disregard them.
We don't even have to.
They fight on camera.
They lash at each, and then the cameras go off and they go get dinner.
They've been friends for a very long time.
I remember hearing somebody talk about that that worked in D.C. for a while, and they said that's one of the things that was shocking to them that you'd see these people, they'd fight for the camera and then behind the scenes, because they all work together, they're around each other all day.
Well, a lot of it's performative.
It's very in me, actually.
They all agree.
You want to know they have like a knife fight in the alley?
It goes both ways because a lot of them are former attorneys.
And attorneys, I like this about attorneys, that like attorneys can fight with you and it's not personal.
So if you get into an argument with attorney, very rarely have I had like a friendship in Pode with an attorney because we're fighting about some policy thing.
They can separate that.
Most politicians are attorneys.
So they already have that performative element.
And I think the other thing is that the good and bad side of D.C. are kind of the same phenomenon, which is most of the people that I met in D.C. do not view politics as religion, which is a good thing.
I don't think you should view politics as religion.
I think it's exceedingly dangerous.
So they tend to view it as either a job, it's just a job, or it's a game.
And the upshot is it's much easier to work with people that think that they're just on the other side of a different football team as opposed to the other side of a religion.
The downside is that there's also a lot of chummy establishment sludge and that kind of thing that doesn't really get flushed out because it's all you need to be civil and all that kind of thing.
But it was good.
I enjoyed it.
I've still got a lot of friends there.
I'm a contributor at Reason, which is a libertarian magazine, and I do a lot of funny videos with them.
And they're based out of D.C., so I'm back at D.C. periodically and have a great time.
And if anybody moves there, get in on the embassy circuit because that's a thing I learned is that the embassies are all doing events regularly.
And if you go to one or two events, then you can just kind of drink hop throughout the week.
And you just be like, where are we going this week?
We're going to the Austrian embassy.
And you make friends with them.
And it's a fun town.
Fun town, fun town.
Did you eat the still-beating heart of any congressman?
No, I've played beer pong on a congressman's desk.
There was a congressman from Northern California who sadly, his wife died, and he just checked out, just checked out.
Like he was done.
And he, rather than retiring, he just decided not to run for re-election and just didn't come back, like just went AWOL.
And his chief of staff was retiring also.
And so it was just like, it was just a hangout.
It became a clubhouse for me and the other.
It wasn't my office, but I was friends with everybody in the office.
So they would just call me at like 4 o'clock on a Thursday and be like, hey, you want to come play beer pong?
And I'd go, oh, yes, that meeting on the thing about tariffs.
Okay, you know, I'll be right over there.
Okay, I got to do it.
Then I'd go play beer pong for a bit and come back.
So I got to do that.
And I'm trying to think of there any other like crazy, I don't think I ate anything particularly weird in D.C.
But yeah, drank a fair amount while I was there.
And I got to meet some interesting people.
Like I got to briefly hang out with Leon Panetta, who was at the time head of the CIA, and got to ask Antonin Scalia a question and a few other things like that.
With the former head of the CIA I mentioned, we don't swear on your podcast, correct?
You are welcome to.
It will get bleeped.
It gets turned into a display in a funny way.
Okay.
One of the things that I learned in D.C. is that all politicians, all of them, have some kind of trick they use to indicate to whoever they're talking to that, like, I'm not a real politician.
Those guys, oh man, right?
Politicians, but like us Joes, us regularly, and they all have something like that.
So, what Leon Panetta does, the charming, is like if you're sitting around with him talking and like you ask him some question, like, did we actually assassinate anybody in Iran?
Or like, whatever the thing is, right?
He'll look around the room real quick and he'll lean forward and go, These flower beds.
They think such and such, but I'm telling you that, but he, but he does it in such a way that you feel like he was like, You're cool, so I'm going to drop the F-bomb in front of you.
And like, you feel like you've been really like, it's very impressive.
Like, there's a craft to being a politician.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You ever see any politicians like change out of their human suits, like behind the scenes?
I saw, I walked past Barney Frank one time where he was noticeably drunk and just bumping into the wall.
But I was also drunk, so I don't want to, like, I don't want to throw anything.
At least that was my interpretation of it.
But I don't think I saw anybody like, yeah, anybody completely go into full lizard mode.
No, no, lizard, no.
Yeah.
I bet I have to become like a third-level Mason before I'm inducted into that level of politician.
I'm still in the first level.
Oh, man, Masons.
As weird as rural Oklahoma sounds, like, I feel like I would rather live there than D.C.
Yeah.
Based on your two descriptions.
Yeah, the downside to it, and like, because I, Reason wanted me to come work for them full-time, but I was going to have to move to D.C. and I turned it down because I like I view myself as a comedian who is political, not a political person who's kind of funny.
The noun is comedian.
No, for me to judge it.
The answer is neither.
But I thought if I go to D.C., like, D.C., like, kind of had like a moment of coolness when Game of Thrones came out, like, where everybody had a hobby outside of politics.
And when Game of Thrones stopped, it was like, nope, we're all back to politics.
That's the only thing people talk about.
They like football and stuff.
Like, everybody's very teamsy.
People love teams in DC.
They love teams.
But outside of politics and teamsy stuff, there's just not as much breadth to it.
Right.
And I thought that would get exhausting.
And I would love to get to the point where the political thing is kind of a hobby for me.
And, you know, right now it's the mainstay.
Political media is what I do.
But I would love to like, oh, that guy hosts a travel show or something.
And now he's saying these funny things that PGR work told him, whatever.
Yeah, it feels like our whole cultural climate is just very political right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People want to talk about it.
It might get better now that we've elected President Grandpa.
Like he might, he might just like, he might spend the next two years just giving America Benadryl, which is what I hope happens.
But yeah, the preceding, man, the preceding four years were wrecked like that.
So like when I lived in New York, I was a writer for Fox Business.
And it was fine.
I had no problem.
I was living in New York, which is a very bright blue cosmopolitan city.
I would go on dates with very progressive Democrats.
And they'd be like, where do you work at?
Fox Business.
Love gay people.
And as long as I said that, we're like, you know, where should we eat?
Well, I love immigrant food.
Let's go eat that.
As long as I. Something diverse.
Yeah, as long as I indicated that I was, you know, I'm tolerant, everybody was fine with me.
No one had any problem.
And then like the day Trump got elected, it was just immediately like, are you Catholic or Protestant?
And I was like, I guess in this equation, I would be a Buddhist.
And they're like, oh, so you're like an extreme Protestant.
And I'm like, nope, I don't factor into your weird binary.
And I also do not want to play that game.
And, you know, it became, that was, man, that was just a real swog for four years.
Was it you, you guys, like, you're at least, you are full-time funny and you are, you are satirists, but not necessarily political satirists.
Did you find in your experience the last four years was like that as well?
Or could you at least get people to talk about other stuff?
The political stuff goes crazy.
I mean, that's what goes far and wide because that's what everyone wants to talk about.
Yeah, everything became about Trump.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And what I just kind of started doing towards the end, because I interview a lot of people that are experts in fields.
I talk to a lot of policy people and I talk to, and I have to read all their stuff so that I don't sound like an idiot.
So I like, while I might, I might very well be wrong, but I'm at least informed about whatever I'm wrong about.
And so I don't like getting into arguments with people who don't know what they're talking about.
I'm happy to talk to friends that know what they're talking about and get into an argument with them because I might learn something.
But if it's just like with, I've never been a pro-Trump guy, but I'm also not emotionally incontinent.
And so I might be there like, oh, Trump.
And I'm like, I know, I don't like him.
I didn't vote for him.
And they're like, but how could you, why aren't you also angry and shrill?
And I'm like, I don't know, because I'm an adult and I control my emotions.
And then somehow I've now become like the Trump guy.
I'm like, I'm not the Trump guy.
I'm just not yelling like you are.
And it was, and I don't know how to win that game.
Because when I get uncomfortable, when I'm in a position to stress, I go Vulcan.
I become like a very sedate British man when I become stressed.
And so if everybody else is going to go dial it up to a 12, then I appear to be okay with whatever heinous thing has happened.
And so, yeah, I would love for whatever the weird last four years thing happened to just turn down.
You should have just voted for Trump, to be honest.
Just go, I'm going to get crapped for this anyway.
That's what I did.
Yeah.
I'm like more libertarian.
I haven't really supported Trump the whole time.
Election day, I was like, screw it.
Screw all you people.
I voted for Trump.
Did you vote for him in 2016?
No.
You never voted a day in his election.
I don't vote.
Okay.
But I voted this.
But you voted for Trump.
So did you, so out of curiosity, because like, have you had Scott Adams on?
We did.
Yeah.
You just got out.
Like, I know that Scott Adams doesn't vote because even though he's a very big Trump guy, he theorizes that the moment he votes, he's like committed to a objective.
That's how I have always felt.
Did you feel like there was a psychological click for you once you voted where you were like, okay, I'm on Team Trump now?
And like, like.
No, I still think he's kind of an idiot.
He bought four MAGA hats, though.
But I did, yeah.
It was for a sketch.
It was for a photo.
Wait, the voting was for a sketch?
The red hat.
Oh, okay.
I really did find a bunch of them.
I'm in denial.
I'm a huge Trump fan.
But we'll ask the questions around.
Sure.
My apologies.
My apologies.
Do you want to talk about Dune?
We can.
Yeah, well, I mean, so I do.
I do.
So I do.
So, as I said, I've got two.
I've got the political orphanage, which has the Wednesday substantive interviews as previously noted.
And on Fridays, more of the snake handling stuff we were talking about.
Friday release valves where I bring on comedians.
We just joke around.
Then I've got an unrelated podcast called Alienating the Audience, where my goal is to, by the end of it, be so nerdy that my virginity grows back and feel like I have very much come close to that.
And so we do really deep dives on that.
I think the episode I assume you're referring to is I did an episode on the economics of Dune, where we went in and we did all of that.
Here recently, we just did one on the philosophy of the Matrix.
Last week, we did one on there's an abundance of science fiction where an alternate universe where the Nazis won, usually not a good thing.
By the end of it, everybody okay?
Oh, yeah, the mailman.
Yeah, dropping through the mail site.
Consider it.
So did that.
So, yeah, I just like it.
And I got to say, there's been a fun release for me, too, because I don't have to make it political.
And I can kind of like, I can just like, nope, we're not going to do that.
And it's also much easier to get sci-fi guests than it is to get political guests because all the political people are really skittish right now because they're like, are you a fascist or a commie?
Yeah, which team are you on?
Yeah, and I'm like, I'm not a fascist or a comedian.
They're like, ah, so a fascist.
And a lot of the comedians are that way, too, because the title of my show is the political orphanage.
So if I tell them, I don't want to bring you on to talk about politics.
I just want to joke about whatever Florida's up to.
And they're like, I don't know.
I saw the Pudder.
But the sci-fi thing, though, conversely, people love, like, if you can, if you find just like this niche thing, you're like, you want to come talk about this thing?
People really enjoy that.
Yeah.
I'll have to do that.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks for the tip.
You're welcome.
Yep.
We're going to start a Dune podcast.
You could do it play by play of The Simpsons.
Let people know what's happening.
That's true.
We'll call it Room Springs.
Yeah.
The Room Spring podcast.
No, is that it on Dune?
Did we talk about it?
On Dune?
I don't care about it.
It was an episode from a year and a half ago, so I don't remember a lot of it.
Let's see.
The spice is representative of oil.
It's like OPEC, right?
And there's a bunch of other things that I can't remember off the top of my head, but that was like a year and a half ago.
Yeah.
It interests me because it is such a complex political machine that he sets up at the beginning of the book.
Yeah.
That's why I fell off.
I read like three chapters.
Frank Herbert, I think he's great at world building.
I don't think he's good at writing.
What I mean by that is the world building is amazing.
His ability to put a sentence together is really boring, in my opinion.
And I kind of tuned out by the third book because the third book, I read the first two.
The third book would be like he poured him a glass of water, but what did he mean by it?
And then like six pages of analysis.
And then I'm like, I'm done.
You need to just talk more about mentats.
That's why I'm here.
Yeah.
Here for the sandworms.
Yeah.
Eat the still beating heart of a sandwich.
Exactly.
Yeah.
They last a really long time.
Their sperm lasts six months.
I've never watched the movies.
Have you ever seen the Lynch film or the Patrick Stewart's in it?
And I love Patrick Stewart.
And they've got these cool, the shields are these like very blocky, like, I guess, cartoons, but they look really cool.
It looks like you're wearing a translucent, like, boxy Lego suit kind of thing.
It's neat.
I like it.
Yeah.
New movie coming out.
Yeah.
We'll see.
They were going to do one in the 70s that it never got made, but they were going to do, it was like a weird but really cool cast where like Salvador Dali was going to be in it.
He was going to be the emperor.
Orson Welles was going to be the Baron.
And I don't remember who the director was, but he's a man of note and it just never came together, but it would have been really cool.
Well, you talk about Dune being like this almost this allegory for like oil and things that they represent.
But I feel like he does a good enough job of making it timeless, you know, where these are themes that come up in human history throughout.
And one thing that's happened with fiction now is that everything is like the bad guy represents Trump, you know, whether that's read back into the text or it's put in.
I feel like all the fiction in the last decade is going to age really poorly.
Very likely because it doesn't tend to do that with like, you remember when Bush was in office?
Yeah.
Now there were like, like, so the Big Lebowski, this is news to me.
The Big Lebowski is apparently based off of, I think, George H.W. Bush.
Like, it's about the Gulf War, which I'm allowed to do.
He never picked up on.
But there's a bunch of references in there.
And like that one, great.
But it's also very light to the point where I, the guy that does political stuff for a living, didn't pick up on that.
But then like other stuff, like Star Wars, like you remember in episode four, when they're doing the pod racer thing, and there's those two announcers, their names are like Newt Gunray.
Like because the George Lucas wanted to slip in a thing about Newt Gengrich and Ray Gunn.
So it's Gunray, and it's like that.
No one cares now.
And like the name of the General Grievous, his ship is the invisible hand.
And I'm like, I'm a classical liberal.
I'm offended by that.
That like this billionaire is besmirching the market.
Yeah, I don't think that stuff ages really well.
I've been afraid with that with like sci-fi.
So like Picard, the latest Star Trek series that came out, what I was really afraid of was going to be that there was like the Federation's been taken over by an orange villain.
And I was like, I don't want to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, like, but Trump, Trump galvanized everything the last four years.
Everything became Trump-centric.
And I thought it was horrible for political satire.
I thought it was awful for comedy.
You guys are very talented comedians and very talented comedy writers.
You're not.
Exactly.
Yes.
I enjoy the Babylon B.
I think you guys are brilliantly funny.
So maybe you have cracked this code.
I have not.
I find that as a joke writer that I want to be able to exaggerate things.
And if the real life headline is President Trump hits golf balls at Rosie O'Donnell from battleship, I'm like, I don't know where to take that.
I don't know how to go anywhere with that.
And so there's a lot of that happening.
And then on top of that, so much of the comedy was just like, Trump is stupid.
And I'm like, I agree.
Can you do some jokes now?
Like, I agree, but like, go back and do a jokes later.
No, that's the joke.
Yeah.
And it just so much of that.
And so, so many subpark comedians snuck in the back of the room over the last four years where they, they, this is where my bitterness is coming out from the New York comedy scene, where they realized that they really couldn't get a lot of laughter in a normal environment, but they could get applause.
And they could, they could sneak in and just say, like, you know, maybe this isn't popular, but I think Donald Trump's committing war crimes.
And everybody would like give him a standing ovation.
How are brave?
How brave of you to say that here on 4th Street of Soho.
And on top of that, like, again, like, I don't even, like, I'll walk with you.
Just do the joke.
Do a joke.
And so much of that just kind of stopped.
So, you know, but I'm sure that everybody will be very rigorous and Biden jokes extremely cutting.
And all the political satire will really be good now in the next four years.
We're going to get a lot of puff pieces about his pets, aren't we?
Yeah.
You see that tweet in the New York Times guy?
I was like, we will.
What do you say?
Yeah, we'll hit it.
We'll hit Biden just as hard.
Just as hard as Trump.
We will be as rigorous in our investigations.
Yeah.
I don't think it was the Dirac Times, but somebody was one of the prominent news groups, CNN or somebody.
Their news checker just went on vacation.
The fact checker went on vacation.
I was like, this is like a very good time to be checking stuff.
All our jokes come true.
We do animations, and one of ours was our news reporters.
They had prepared ahead of time.
So when Biden won, they were already on vacation for four years.
So they're out by the beach.
Can we make sure you get a fact check up that the pod racing was episode one?
Oh, you're right.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
Somebody needed all our lives.
I was thinking about.
He was talking really fast and I couldn't endure it.
You are correct.
I would have got hate mail on that.
You're right.
It was episode one.
I was thinking after the, you know, in my convoluted logic, yes, thank you.
I'm being like comic book guy from The Simpsons.
Yes.
Yep.
That's a mixed reference.
This is, there are layers here.
There are absolutely layers.
The other thing that happens, I think, a lot too with political satire is like the Daily Show for a long time, they would say, man, what I love about the Daily Show is they hit everybody.
They hit everybody hard.
And it's like, Mitch McConnell is an evil turtle that eats babies.
And Diane Feinstein sounds like your mom.
Isn't it funny how much she sounds like your mom?
And I'm like, this is not equal-handed humor application when you're making fun of her, like, man, Elizabeth Warren, she's just so brilliant.
Isn't that funny?
And I'm like, this is not.
Yeah, this is, you're not, you're not being even-handed here.
Yeah, that koofs me out how much the I mean, it koofs me out now on the right because it seems like Trump has become a figure that the right holds up like that in this kind of like religious way.
Yeah, the left has always done it and always has creeped me out.
They hold them up and they have this admiration where they can't see the funny.
Who I think has it who's figured this out?
And they didn't do it on purpose.
They backed into it.
But the British.
They nailed this.
Because like in America, we came up with separation of church and state.
Good call.
Well done, America.
Excellent.
Right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I want to thank you.
Thank you very much for doing that.
And meanwhile, what the British stumbled on to, and they didn't plan it, but they stumbled on to separating power from reverence, which I think we absolutely should do, and is a dangerous lack of foresight on our part over here.
So, like, I lived in the UK a couple of times, and in the UK, the head of state is the queen who is married to a vampire and wears a flower pot on her head and doesn't do anything that actually affects killing people.
Like, she cuts ribbons and she meets other monarchs and things, but she didn't kill anybody or affect taxes.
Meanwhile, the head of government is the prime minister, and the prime minister comes down every week to get yelled at by parliament, and then on Sunday goes by Buckingham Palace and has to kneel before the queen.
So that's good humility for the prime minister.
When you're talking to British people, and in my lengthy experience, British people will generally be pretty respectful to the head of state.
Like there is something, there is something weirdly tribal about that.
Of like, nope, that's our alpha.
But then when you talk about the prime minister, they all make fun of the prime minister.
Like when I lived in Scotland the first time, Gordon Brown, who is Labor and Scots are very, very left-leaning, and he was Scottish.
He was the prime minister.
So home run for the Scots.
You've got a semi-socialist Scotsman in Buckingham in Parliament.
And they're like, oh, no, he's a tough.
I don't care for him at all.
No, not good.
I don't like it.
But they'd be like, but the queen comes by, well, straighten up the pins here.
Straighten up.
And so I think they've nailed that.
And we've not done that.
And we've basically made our president is now and has been since Wilson our chaplain and our head of government and our head of state and the father of the nation and a seer and all these.
And it's dangerous.
You don't never give reverence to people that can kill anyone.
You should always separate those things.
So, Kyle, if you could pass that on to America.
What about God, though?
Okay.
How does he affect taxes?
And how often does he lob wars now?
He ordains all things, man.
We'll get to that in a second.
He doesn't want to kill people, though.
He just moves them to another place.
Or you haul guys in America.
I think it's your ages.
I want to credit this, but John.
Oh, I just went blank.
One of my friends in New York has this joke about how, like, the any God smiting people is just really lazy because he's.
No, no, it's not.
No, it's not that.
He was saying like the terrorists serve a lazy God because he has to outsource the killing.
Like a God, Fuglesang.
I believe that's a John Fuglesang joke.
That God ought to just be smiting people with lightning.
He's not doing that.
He's really taking a step back.
He needs to be more active as a manager.
If anybody gets upset by that, please direct your anger towards email Heaton and then I will pass it on to John Fuglesing.
So speaking of the Scots, you own one square foot of a Scotch whiskey distillery?
I do.
Scotland?
I do.
I do.
One square foot.
So how does that?
One square foot.
So I like Scotch.
And my go-to, or one of my go-tos is LeFreue, which is a few.
Do you guys ever drink or have you had alcohol before?
Okay.
No, okay.
So his parents watched this minute.
I'm going to talk to Ethan for a minute.
No, mom.
So for people that kind of know what whiskey is, but they don't know Scott, LeFroue's a very, it's like you're inhaling a campfire.
It's very smoky.
I like peaty, smoky scotch.
And they occasionally run this thing where you'll open up the bottle and it's kind of like a drunken version of Willy Wonka, where like a little thing falls out and you're like, oh, like you've, we're going to give you a deed to a square foot of land.
And if you, if you fill this out and send it to us, we'll send you a deed.
And I was like, all right.
So I got this thing and I called them and I was like, hello, Scotland.
I was like, yeah, I got a square foot of land.
Like, first question, can I drill for oil?
And they're like, no, you can't.
Can't do a little foil.
And I was like, all right, now, if I get four of these, and they're like, oh, no, you can't build anything.
Because that was my next thing.
Was maybe I'd get four of these and I could build some kind of bungalow.
No, no, you can't do that.
It's just a lifelong easement.
It reverts back to us when you die.
But if you ever come, we'll loan you some Wellington boots and give you a GPS.
We'll try and show you where your land is.
We'll give you some whiskey.
And I was like, all right.
I'll see you next month.
And so, because I was going to go do stand-up over there.
So I went there and showed up and they were like, oh, okay.
You came.
All right.
All right.
Well, it's over there.
And everybody put little flags.
So I kicked over the Russian flags and built a Lego castle.
And so I had that.
That was my thing.
So I've got that one square foot.
It's great marketing on La Freug's part because now I'm like, well, I'm a landowner.
I have to.
Yeah.
You don't get any free scotch out of it?
No, they gave me free scotch.
Yeah, they gave me like, they gave me like a troll, whatever the appropriate amount is to drink while walking in a field.
I don't know.
I don't know what the ethic is that.
Three fingers.
And then when I came back, they're like, oh, good job.
All right.
You didn't knock any flags over, did you?
Plus, they were Russian.
I was like, oh, no, of course not, Wink.
They give me more whiskey.
So yeah, I got a lot of whiskey out of that one.
Yeah.
Did they cook you up some haggis?
Not that trip, but I have consumed probably my body's weight in haggis over the years because I go back every year.
12, 13 pounds.
Exactly.
For people that are only listening that can't see me, I'm like a very handsome scarecrow.
I'm like, imagine because I'm wearing this ridiculous ostrich skid blazer.
I look like if a hat rack owned a strip club is what I look like.
You could use me as a tent.
That's like my one Star Wars reference.
Good job.
Yeah, good job.
Good job.
Yeah, I know.
Scottish food's basically, it's basically just carnival food with sheep.
Like if you've ever been to a carnival and you're like, yeah, deep fry that thing, that's everything the Scottish have.
Like there's no genteel Scottish food.
All Scottish food is just a bucket of pork that's been subject to some kind of frying treatment.
It's really tasty, though.
Yeah, I can't go wrong.
Yeah.
I've never actually, I don't even see the picture of Haggis.
I just imagine you're eating guts.
Is that what it is?
I mean, technically.
You are.
But it looks just like, basically, like Shepherd's Pie.
Have you ever read Shepherd's Pie?
Really?
No.
Honestly, I don't think you'd be able to tell the difference.
It is a little bit spicier than Shepherd's Pie, but the texture is exactly the same.
So if you like Shepherd's Pie, you'd like Haggis.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, there's that, and then there's like deep-fried pizza, deep-fried Snickers.
There's Leo's.
Yeah, you can get that in like Texas.
Carnivals, yeah.
And then like Leo Kirst, the Scottish comedian, a friend of mine that's coming on my show this week, he talks about how he's Scottish and he's looking at the COVID data and he's like, well, COVID's supposed to kill people in Scotland that are like 62 and up, but the average life expectancy is 57.
Well, with the alcohol and the stabbings and the foodies, basically that anti-oxidant.
So, yeah, no, I like the food, but you're not going to get thin eating Scottish cuisine.
Sad.
That ship has sailed.
Scotland is a great place.
They're very friendly.
Like the English are a little bit like southern England, so like south of Birmingham.
They're a lot more reserved.
And then you get up to Scotland and they're much more chummy.
Like last year, I was over there for the French Festival and I rented a camper van and I drove around the top northwest part of Scotland.
So like way out in the highlands and way out there.
In like day one and a half, I hit a bog because like where I'm from, the earth is flat and honest.
If you pull off the road, you're going to be fine.
But in Scotland, it's all basically a sponge.
And so I pulled over to let a car come by, and I had this van and it completely slid into this bog at like a rakish 45.
Like imagine a fedora hat that like kind of a like a really saucy guy's wearing.
It came to that level and I couldn't do anything.
Like if you'd popped it, it would have just rolled into the bog.
And I hailed some kid, put out my thumb, and a kid who drove barefoot because he was insane and he would drive like 90 miles an hour and he wanted to be able to feel the pedals with his feet drove me around.
And he's like, what happened with that?
And I'm like, well, I got my van here stuck in your bog.
He's like, oh, no problem.
We'll find you at Fanny Marn.
But all the farmers were drunk because there was an agricultural festival going on.
So none of them felt competent to try and get me out of the soup.
And so I was like, well, I guess I live here.
So he took me to some, he took me like the local inn, which is also the local pub.
And I walked in and it's me and then like a bunch of guys, like motorcyclists, all wearing black leather.
So like, I don't know, I think you'd call it a motorcycle club.
I thought it was a motorcycle gang.
They were very fastidious about that term.
And I came in and they're all looking at me kind of side-eye.
And I go, oh, I've had a hell of a day.
I got my van stuck in a bog.
And the alpha biker went, was it North of Town by the cannon?
And I went, yeah.
And he's, oh, we've all done that.
And they all leapt into action.
Like, they all started getting out on the cell phones to try and find me their farmer buddies.
And they're like, you should talk to, we'll get old cheesy.
Old Cheesy would be great.
He'll haul you out of the drink.
And I was like, who's old cheesy?
No, don't get old cheesy.
Old Cheesy killed that steer.
And I'm like, wait, what?
And they're like, oh, don't worry about it.
One time, old Cheesy's steer got stuck in the barn.
And old Cheesy, he wrapped a chain around his neck to try and hold it up, but the head popped off like a tick.
I don't think that would happen with Yirvan.
I think he'd be okay.
And I went to like biker prom with them and got really drunk with them.
Yeah, they had like, they were doing a community dance.
And so like, I would like, and I was a hit because I could do anything other than a Kaylee.
And then the following day, they drove me out and popped it out of the bog.
And I now know everybody in Lebster, Scotland.
I think I'm mayor.
Yeah, it was a good time.
Nice.
All right.
So anyway, for people listening, either go to Oklahoma or Scotland.
Those are the two best places to go to.
All right.
We're going to go to our subscriber portion.
Yeah, we're going to go to the bottom.
We're going to go to our subscriber lounge.
Ooh, nice.
So this is, now I can start swearing and saying racial epithets.
It'll still get bleached because we're absolutely Christian young men.
We're going to go drink some non-alcoholic scotch, hang out in the lounge.
You're going to tell us lurid story.
We heard that you used to do improv.
You take any situation from history or like thing and you comment.
So we're going to throw some things at you.
Nice.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm part of a team which is somewhat dormant called Lost History where we go up on stage and go, what's something that you enjoyed in high school history?
And then we do a scene about it.
Like we did one at the Austin Austin Comedy Festival here two years ago where somebody went, Samuel Gompers.
And I was like, who's that?
And they're like, Samuel, he was a labor movement leader.
And I like, and I'm from free market science.
And we made a whole thing about the whole sketch was just FDR was faking being paraplegic.
That was the whole thing.
You were really pissed off the person.
Didn't ask for it.
Anyway, yeah, I'll join you for that.
Thanks to your regular listeners for hanging out with the rest of the day.
Yeah, thanks for the freeloaders.
So check out Andrew Heaton's podcast.
Yeah, he's mentioned.
Political orphanage and alienating the audience.
If you want to talk about dude, or at least one time he talked about dude.
Yeah, a year and a half ago.
All right, let's do it.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
We told him, we said we were going to get some improv from you.
Okay, yeah.
You do one-man improv?
No.
Do you need Kyle to join you?
Yeah, I can do it with you.
Sure.
Okay.
There was an underground libertarian drug den to drug den.
It's kind of like, yeah, how'd you find out about this?
I've hung out with Phil Roberts, the guy from Duck Dynasty.
That's as close as I can get.
Didn't I read that you lived in a tool shed or something like that?
Yeah, I did.
I lived in a tool shed for about six months.
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