Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Nov. 17, 2017 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes

01:11:24

Get Off My Lawn Podcast #8 | It Sucks Being Famous

Gavin talks about why fame is really overrated. He tells a story about Justin Theroux's experience with paparazzi on his motorbike. After that he talks about a recent story from the New York Post about him and his former company. The podcast then turns into an autobiography about his life after leaving his former company in 2008.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Ah, it sucks being famous.
	I don't like it at all.
	I remember when I first met David Cross.
	He was very famous.
	This was probably 2000, right?
	And, uh, it's funny.
	He was so famous you could sort of gauge where you were in New York by the reactions you got.
	Like, if he was that Scary Movie 2 nigga, you knew you were in the hood.
	If he was the guy from Mr. Show, you knew you were near a college area.
	If he was the guy from that dream movie with Jim Carrey, then you know the one where they go back in time?
	What's it called?
	The guy who does the thing?
	You know, you were in a sort of gentrified neighborhood.
	So he was sort of like a little, a little GPS where you could tell how safe you were.
	If people, if you're with David Cross and people knew that he was from Scary Movie 2, you should probably get out of there before midnight.
	I remember when I first met him, I was kind of naive about celebrity, and I said to people, they would go, yo, David, you're my biggest, and I'd say, he's your biggest hero?
	You love him?
	You can't buy your hero a beer?
	And his friend a beer?
	And I would get like a couple beers.
	And then of course, nothing's free in life.
	So that was engaging.
	And then engaging means we have to sit and talk.
	For at least, you know, a beer's worth.
	So that was dumb.
	Sarah Silverman always said that the best thing to do is just sort of say, hello, yeah, thank you, yeah, right on.
	Even if they hate you and they're being sarcastic, like, hey, Sarah Silverman, just go, hey, yeah, yep, yep.
	Just keep it going.
	It's not cool.
	And, you know, if they want selfies... This might sound annoying to you, because if you haven't been, you know, privy to it, it sounds like I'm bragging, and you go... I can't imagine you wanting to be famous, though.
	Do you want to be famous?
	You want to be rich.
	It's like Bill Murray said.
	Someone told him, uh, I want to be rich and famous, and he goes, uh, be rich and then get back to me for a little while.
	Just try that out first.
	So I don't really think you want to be famous, do you?
	It's not like people come up to you and they go, hey, in episode 29 of Get Off My Lawn, you were talking to Cassandra Fairbanks, and she was talking about a secret service agent.
	Who was that secret service agent?
	Like, that's interesting, but you never get that.
	It's just like, hey!
	People yelling from cars and they want a selfie, but their phones are never ready, so you stand there and they're like, oh, sorry, hold on, hold on.
	And they've got some Galaxy 500 piece of Google crap.
	And they're getting into pictures and... Ugh.
	Just a waste of time.
	If you see me in public and you recognize me, please don't say a word.
	If you see me in a bar, please buy me a Bud.
	And if I'm alone, I'm happy to talk to you.
	But, man, being famous sucks.
	And I've known, over the years, pretty darn famous people.
	I went to a game with Will Ferrell.
	That was fun.
	He was constantly harassed.
	And he was harassed by the Owners of the stadium.
	Yankee Stadium.
	They said, can you... It was during Land of the Lost.
	And they said, can you say, hey, Land of the Lost and Citi Field and Yankees and blah, blah, blah.
	And he goes, no, I'm just trying to have my beer, thanks.
	And then she got kind of pissy with him.
	This is like the head of PR relations.
	And she goes, well, we just showed a promo for Land of the Lost.
	And he goes, yeah, that's great.
	Appreciate it.
	But I'm just going to try to enjoy the game.
	Thanks.
	And she was mad at him because, of course, he owns shares in Land of the Lost.
	Or Justin Theroux.
	And I were bros.
	Jennifer Aniston's husband now.
	And, uh, great guy.
	Nothing bad to say about either of them.
	We'll say, visiting celebrities who sleep in until, say, 10 a.m., which is normal, right?
	Normal L.A.
	time.
	If you're a New Yorker, you go and stay at their house.
	You're used to getting up at 7 with the kids in New York.
	That's 4 a.m.
	in L.A.
	So say you sleep in like a lunatic, you could probably make it till 6 a.m.
	So you wake up at 6am.
	6, 7, 8, 9, 10, sometimes 11.
	You're basically wandering around a mansion for five hours.
	Just looking at coffee table books and watching a movie.
	It's not that fun.
	Not great.
	But, uh, yeah, Justin Theroux, uh, You know, I can't... Towards the end of our relationship, he dumped me for being a Trump guy, basically, but he couldn't... Like, we couldn't go to a bar in L.A.
	We could go to Smile in New York.
	New York was pretty good about that kind of stuff, but we couldn't go to a bar in L.A.
	because he was a freak.
	And it got crazier than that.
	Did I ever tell you this story?
	He's on his motorbike, and someone pulls up next to him as he's driving.
	And starts hitting him with the door of their car, hoping to get him to crash.
	Hoping that they can get a shot of him going, What the fuck?!
	You know, the kind of thing you say when someone tries to kill you?
	And, uh, so eventually he pulls over.
	He has crazy motorbikes.
	He has three motorbikes and they all go to 10 billion miles an hour.
	I don't like that.
	I purposely buy crappy motorbikes because I don't like, uh, and I'm sure you Americans say motorcycle.
	Sorry about that.
	I like to be rattled and stuff when you get up to a hundred.
	Problem with BMWs with these big fairings is you're just like, And then you look down at the speedometer and you go, oh, I'm going 200 miles an hour.
	If I were to fall or be surprised by anything, I would be turned to sand.
	Anyway, sorry, tangent.
	He's got fancy motorbikes and they're hitting him with the car door.
	And so he pulls over, and he's fine.
	He doesn't let it get to that.
	He doesn't show them.
	He said the secret to paparazzi is you just smile.
	Hello.
	So they'll say, hey, your mother has cancer.
	And you go, hee.
	Because they're trying to get you to go, uh.
	And so they can have their shot.
	So you have to keep smiling no matter what they say, no matter how personal it is.
	But get this.
	So it was thugs who were doing this, like basically Bloods and Crips were doing that to him.
	Hitting him with their door.
	And guess who called the cops on those guys and had them busted?
	TMZ!
	I know, crazy right?
	So apparently, TMZ are the top of the scum list, right?
	Top of the paparazzi list.
	And they don't like the lower paparazzi giving them a bad name.
	So apparently, there are these low-scale paps who will hire thugs for, you know, whatever, say a...
	I'll give you a hundred bucks if you can make Justin Theroux mad.
	They're throwing these bones and there's no connection, it's all cash.
	And they try to get pictures that they can sell to, you know, people or whatever.
	I find the whole thing incredibly disgusting.
	They're banned from my house.
	It's not that my wife's dying to read celebrity mags, but I really think they're unethical.
	Like, I saw this picture, and it was Katie Holmes holding her daughter with Tom Cruise, and it said, uh, whatever her name is, Suri, uh, Suri, uh, struggling with the divorce of Tom and Katie.
	It was a big two-page spread.
	And I thought, no, she's struggling with the fact that you're running at this little child with a camera, and her mother is doing that, like, running from a fire hold, where the hand is below the butt, and the other hand is on the back, Like holding the child close to you, like the way you would hold a child if you were running down a mountain?
	That kind of hold.
	And they pretend it's about Tom Cruise?
	I'm no fan of divorce, don't get me wrong, but being attacked by paps is wrong.
	And that's what us famous people, by the way, call paparazzi.
	We call them paps.
	So I thought, yeah, I don't want those magazines in my house.
	They're morally wrong.
	And these people are disgusting human beings.
	Like, paying these thugs to attack someone on a motorcycle so you can get a frown emoji from Jennifer Aniston's husband is just depraved.
	So, um... The word on the street is that TMZ Call the cops on those guys because it's like within crime, you know, like the mob doesn't like certain mobsters to certain gangs to behave a certain way.
	Like I've heard that about the Westies in Hell's Kitchen.
	The Italian mob goes, we can't deal with these guys.
	I threatened his mother and he said, go ahead, fucking kill her.
	So I don't know how to deal with someone who doesn't want their mother to die.
	It's almost like ISIS.
	A lot of these teams are ISIS.
	So within these, you know, these Thick Like Thieves groups, there's a hierarchy.
	And TMZ didn't like hitting celebs with cars.
	We don't hit celebs with cars, guys.
	I kind of feel like that with the Proud Boys.
	I feel like I'm part of this group where we're ensconced in conflict against our will, and we have to say, don't do this, don't do that, but do punch back.
	It's like the Terminator.
	But anyway.
	Being famous blows, because Justin and Jen are in a beautiful castle that they can't leave.
	That's no fun.
	I remember I went to jail for four hours for headbutting a guy, allegedly, who beat up a woman.
	And when the bars went clunk, I felt something primordial.
	I felt a cave pain.
	It was just wrong.
	And it was, uh, it was me being robbed of my freedom.
	And this isn't me, this is you.
	I mean, we think of, you know, prison for ten years is terrible, but everything else, I don't know.
	I'm fine.
	No, no.
	You need maximum freedom.
	Liberty is ingrained in our DNA.
	And if you're prevented from even, like, say you can't go to that side of the park ever, And your kids go that way and you have to stand back as they walk the dog.
	That will chip away at your soul.
	And when the bars, and again, I'm not saying I'm an ex-con like Jim Gode spent two and a half years in prison.
	I was in there for four hours.
	It's called jail.
	But there's something about the...
	Where you feel in your chest as the lock locks and you go, I can't get out no matter what.
	I could burst into flames right now and I can't get out.
	I'm not strong enough to ever get out of this.
	Someone else is conducting my safety and my freedom and I feel that way with a lot of celebrities.
	I feel like they're not safe.
	Now, I'm obviously safe when I walk around and go to Grand Central and blah blah blah, but God, it's just annoying.
	I wish I was like that blue chick in X-Men.
	Commercial break.
	Yeah, so celebrities have a weird life, and I don't envy them.
	And they make tons of money, yes.
	But not that much money.
	Like, they'll make like three million bucks for a celebrity endorsement.
	I don't know.
	How are you spending money?
	You have a chef?
	A live-in chef?
	I have a live-in chef.
	It's called my wife.
	I don't know.
	You don't really need that much money.
	Tom Shalhoub talks about that.
	Him and Jim Gaffigan are both in the same business.
	Tom opens up for Jim Gaffigan.
	Jim Gaffigan's rich.
	Tom Shalhoub is middle class.
	Tom Shalhoub lives in Queens.
	Jim Gaffigan lives in, you know, Manhattan.
	They have the same size house, basically.
	But Jim Gaffigan's is worth ten times as much because it's, you know, in downtown Manhattan.
	It both takes them the same amount of time to get to Times Square.
	He said, you know, one goes to private school in Manhattan, but when you're out of Manhattan, public schools are pretty good.
	So they end up having basically the same life.
	And that's what I say to people who go, I can't have kids, it's too expensive.
	I go, No, they're not expensive.
	I was middle class in Canada in the 70s.
	We had no TV.
	We didn't go on holiday.
	Getting a babysitter was considered wildly extravagant.
	We didn't really do that.
	I had one a couple of times, but it was like, that was like going to the Oscars.
	My mom made all our food.
	We didn't go out for dinner.
	And we were middle class.
	And it was fun.
	And I never was for want of anything.
	I had a bike, which I thought was awesome.
	And then, actually, to be frank, Scottish people are the worst with presents.
	I didn't get the Bionic Man, I got Oscar Goldman, his boss.
	I got very few presents.
	Sorry, Mom, if you're listening, but you were terrible with presents.
	But you didn't want presents that much.
	My wife buys my kids a present a day.
	Every time I come home, they've got a new, like, game or something.
	Oh, it's called baseball, and it's a little sheet with, like, baseball players, and you roll a dice.
	And they'll use that for I'm going to say an hour and we'll never see it again.
	You know, cards against humanity and that thing where you flick the ants in.
	Anyway, I'm sorry.
	I got to pick up the pace here.
	So yeah, being a celebrity sucks.
	Sucks being famous.
	So speaking of being famous, your life is constantly under scrutiny and hot topic this past few days is my sex life.
	When I was 24, And Vice Magazine, Vice Media is under the gun right now because there's been all these allegations about sexual misconduct.
	Now I should say I left in 08 and I have no clue what went on there.
	Could have been Caligula, could have been a hippie commune.
	I can tell you what I suspect.
	And I have no allegiance to my co-founders, Sue Shalvey and Shane Smith.
	I'm not a fan.
	So I'm not defending them.
	They could have had their own little nefarious things going on.
	But, um...
	I suspect that it's just politically correct claptrap and it was women saying, you know, I wrote an article and they didn't like it, and that was sexist.
	I don't know.
	Now, I'm not denying that something more valid will come up, but from what I've seen, it seems like a bunch of BS.
	But I can tell what journalists are doing with this.
	They're taking Shane and my stories from being pigs.
	And again, not a fan of Shane at all.
	But they're taking our stories of being in our early 20s and they're saying that creates a culture of sexual harassment.
	And then that leads to what we hear today.
	And that's lazy journalism, basically.
	So what exactly happened was, they're talking about a 2003, I don't know if you've seen this, but page six in New York Post I'm gonna have to open a Red Bull so I can stay focused.
	It's not a Budweiser at all, obviously.
	What happened in, uh, 2003, we launched this book, The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, and it was a compilation of all our craziest stuff over the past, uh, ten years.
	So, obviously went back to 1994.
	And in the interview, we talked about sex we had had when we were in our early 20s.
	By the way, if you were in your early 20s and you're in Montreal, which is basically France, which is basically sex-positive heaven, and you have anything going on, you're going to be attractive to women.
	Women are attracted to ambition.
	We had ambition.
	We had our own magazine.
	Granted, it was a 16-page black-and-white newsprint, but at least it was something.
	Most guys our age had nothing going on.
	There was DJs like Tiga.
	There was promoters like Crazy Eddie.
	But very few guys had anything going on at that age, especially in Montreal.
	So we did very well with the ladies.
	And I wrote about it in the Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs from Rock and Roll in this interview section.
	So we're talking about sex we had in 1994.
	And I'm not sure how candid I can be here with this particular lady, but I think it's worth mentioning.
	Because you're 24, so I'm a young man, and when we would print the newspaper, it was done with a company called Quebecor, and this guy was a French-Canadian rep.
	Biggest wimps on earth, the French-Canadians.
	I mean, they call their mothers every day.
	They're horrible.
	And he goes, yes, I was with this woman.
	She's from Malta.
	And I was playing house music in the car.
	And she became so horny when I was playing the music that she grabbed my friend's hand.
	It sounds like the wild and crazy guys.
	And she put it on her vagina.
	And I mean, I was just so disgusted.
	And I go, uh, Uh, Cyril, I need to meet her.
	I need to have her.
	I need her in my life.
	If she's that libidinous, like, that's me, but as a chick.
	She goes, oh, she's disgusting.
	Anyway, he, he hooked me up with her and I met her and her name was Amma and she was from Malta.
	Now Malta is a very Catholic island off of Sicily.
	And you're not allowed to divorce there unless you leave the country for a year.
	So she had left the country for a year and come to Montreal.
	And she was just on a sexual rampage.
	So, um...
	I met her.
	We did E. You know, this is back in the early 90s.
	And we horsed around and then my roommate was Shane.
	We both lived in a loft in Montreal.
	That was our office.
	See, the thing about these angles where they go, Vice used to be a sexist place.
	Vice was just me, Shane and Saroosh in a room.
	For a decade.
	We had a couple interns, Eric Lavoie and this British kid with funny teeth, whose name I forget.
	We called them the faggots.
	Which was, I think, a good way to sort of initiate a pair.
	Eric Lavoie ended up, you know, paying my rent after all that abuse.
	He was essentially my boss.
	So it's not like it was a workplace, per se.
	It was just a place where three guys, Shane did sales, Sroosh did music and editing, and I did content and graphic design.
	So it wasn't really a work environment.
	It was just a guy's loft.
	And then Richard Sawinski found us and thought we were... He appreciates shame bravado when Shane said that Richard Sawinski was interested when Richard had never even heard of us.
	Anyway, this is all in my book, The Death of Cool.
	So, uh... We start fooling around with, uh, Amma.
	And, uh, we have threesomes.
	About three, I'd say.
	Probably three or four.
	And they get quite rude.
	Um... And, uh...
	I don't regret them at all.
	I'm very proud of them, actually.
	It was a fun time.
	And I've had people say to me, isn't that gay if you're with a dude and you have sex with a chick?
	And I go, hmm, you'd think of that, you know, from the outside.
	But it's sort of like two mobsters digging a hole for a body.
	I've said this metaphor many times, so if you're familiar with my work, you're familiar with this story.
	But if two guys were digging a hole for a body, right, and their shovels were to clink, clink!
	Would they stop and go, oh, my Lord, my shovel just clinked your shovel?
	No, they would get back to work.
	They'd get back to digging the hole.
	That's what guys do when they have something to do.
	You're focused on your job, and that's digging a hole for a body.
	You don't care what happens to your shovels.
	Anyway, so in the sex, the Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, Shane called those encounters orgies, which whatever.
	You know, when you have a sales guy, you let him be hyperbolic.
	But that is somehow in modern media, and when I say modern media, I mean these past three days, become this like culture of sex and orgies.
	And then they're conflating that with allegations from 2015, And, of course, Louis C.K.
	and everything else.
	And saying that the sort of template of sex that started back in 1994 has spread to today.
	Which, as I said to a New York Post reporter, is like saying Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys, during his Tibet stuff, is a sexist because during License to Ill, in 1985, did a giant inflatable penis on stage.
	I mean, it's that nuts.
	People change.
	People change!
	And companies change.
	So, maybe I should take a moment to sort of explain my old company, which I rarely talk about because I feel like it's talking about my ex-wife.
	1994, I started the company with Saroosh Alvi.
	We went about a year or two.
	He was, had been hired by this Haitian group whose job was, I don't know, they had some fake scam grant to promote diversity.
	And we're supposed to do, he's supposed to do a newspaper on like the local parades.
	There's a Polish parade on Thursday, then there's this parade on Friday, just like a multicultural calendar really was his job.
	And so he pulls me and I go, let's do cartoons in it.
	I was a cartoonist at the time.
	I did a mini comic called Pervert.
	And, uh, So we started doing that, and then we both had the same background.
	We both liked punk rock and stuff.
	He was a Minneapolis kid, I was, you know, Canadian hardcore or whatever.
	And we were both into skateboarding and all that rap.
	You know, youth culture.
	So we started, we just basically abandoned the stupid calendar idea.
	They didn't care.
	And we were doing that, we were plugging along, and we had 16 pages.
	And I would send them to my friend Shane, childhood friend I knew since I was 12, who was teaching English in Budapest, I believe, at the time.
	And so him and his friends over there would make fun of us because the magazine sucked, and it kind of did suck, but whatever.
	How's your 16-page newsprint paper coming along?
	So he comes over, and I go, I want you to be head of sales.
	Make this thing a thing.
	So he goes, no problem.
	And he had said, first thing we have to do is, you know, bundle it up, put it in an envelope, and send it to potential advertisers.
	And our bosses at the time go, no, that's too expensive.
	Too much postage.
	And that's when we realized something fishy is going on here.
	These guys don't want us to grow.
	So, uh, we split.
	We left.
	And we changed the name from Voice of Montreal.
	I changed it to Vice.
	And, uh, this is all in my book.
	And, uh, we got a loft together.
	Shane and I, uh, Lived at the office.
	Sroosh got a separate place.
	He didn't drink so there was kind of a major shift there, you know?
	Like, I like to do cocaine and pot and stuff and I didn't want to be around a sober guy.
	As James Stockbauer says, sober people make me uncomfortable.
	He actually made a t-shirt of that.
	So...
	We built that and we had to pay them tons of money.
	And people go, oh, so let me get this straight.
	You started your company with a government program.
	And we did have to, I had to go on welfare.
	I think Saroosh did too.
	Maybe Shane did too.
	Yeah, we all had to go on welfare because it was, the jobs were provided to get you out of welfare.
	But to say that welfare created our company, It was like living in Russia.
	You had to be French, you had to be part of the government to have anything going on.
	You know, they literally went to stores.
	If you had Joe's shoes, and that was a big sign, and there was a smaller sign that said, Chaussure de Joe, you would get fined.
	They thwarted non-Francophone entrepreneurs.
	It's not a great place to be an entrepreneur, Montreal.
	So anyway.
	We didn't survive.
	We didn't start our company because of welfare and the Quebec government.
	We started our company despite of welfare and the Quebec government.
	It was like the Terminator where you had to pretend to be a robot to be able to walk the streets.
	It's like a zombie movie.
	So we do that, and by the way, to these journalists that are trying to talk about these orgies and that chick from Malta as some sort of pattern, this is just still three dudes.
	There's no one in the office.
	It's, we're alone.
	in there.
	There's no staff.
	There's no office.
	It's not like Vice starts with a million typewriters and well starting a company now.
	Maybe the people have been brainwashed by the dot-com thing but you don't just start a company back then.
	This is the 90s.
	We were just we were taking out the garbage.
	I had the provincial tax in a red shoe box.
	I had the federal tax in a green shoe box.
	I mean this was Bootstraps stuff.
	I knew when the junk day was, I knew when recycling was, I knew when the normal garbage day was.
	I mean, even interns came much later.
	So, to extrapolate anything that went on back then, the drug use and everything, was, to bring that to now is ridiculous.
	Totally ridiculous.
	And I remember, Women in marketing, they sexually harassed us.
	They said, we will give you ads.
	They were hideous women.
	And I'm not going to name names, but the person involved in sales would have to sleep with them.
	We would have to placate them.
	We'd all have to placate them in many ways and flatter them and stuff.
	But power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
	And these women were abusive.
	No, it sounds crazy.
	And here's the thing.
	It wasn't that bad.
	I mean, being abused as a woman is much worse than being abused as a man.
	It's kind of gross to be abused as a man.
	To have to sleep with a woman just to get ads or to get something for your company, it sucks.
	But it's not that bad.
	It's like getting punched in the arm.
	Being violated as a woman is much worse.
	And that's the problem, by the way, with equality.
	That's the problem with feminism, is we say, no, it's all the same.
	Sorry, no, it's not.
	In fact, I would argue that genitalia makes it different.
	Having something go inside you That must be a lot more invasive than just having the thing that's outside of you have to do stuff.
	Know what I mean?
	Like, what would you rather do?
	Spit into something or have someone push a pencil into your ear hole?
	Okay, maybe that's not the best analogy on Earth, but you get what I'm saying.
	Plus, men are different than women.
	Anyway, back then, there was a graphic design firm called Heliozilla.
	And they go, yeah, we have had to sleep with women to get ads, to get design contracts.
	And we call them, here at work, we call them cougars.
	Yeah, you heard me.
	This is the year I'm gonna say 1996.
	Heliozilla Felix was his name in Toronto.
	And he came up with the word cougar.
	He invented the word cougar.
	Yeah, you heard it here first, folks.
	So anyway, orgy culture is a non-existent thing at Vice.
	At 1999, we get this billionaire, Richard Sawinski, and he says, he didn't say anything.
	Shane says he wants to buy us because we're so awesome.
	Richard hears this, appreciates our bravado, and appreciates our lies.
	Basically the same as saying four threesomes was an orgy.
	And he says, you know what?
	I will buy you if you come up with a contract in one day.
	So we did.
	And we said, give us, I think, a quarter million for 25% or something.
	And he says, let's move to New York.
	And we said, no problem, dude.
	Lots of companies, by the way, he had bought didn't want to.
	I think there was a Toronto magazine called Shift and they go, I don't want to move to New York.
	I have a girlfriend.
	And I just thought, God, what a pussy you are.
	So we moved down there and we were rich beyond our wildest dreams from 1999 in New York City till 2001.
	We were so rich.
	I was making 80 grand a year, which I'd never even thought of before.
	I didn't know that was possible.
	That was just amazing and endless drugs and partying and not screwing co-workers by the way.
	There was enough people at Max Fish to fornicate with.
	We didn't really need to.
	There was no sex going on at work.
	The work was graphic design and stuff.
	I don't know.
	You hear a lot of these other stories about, like, Blockbuster, uh, what's... what are they called?
	Tower Records.
	Partying at work.
	I just, like, did my work at work.
	From 11am till 8pm.
	And then I went and partied at clubs.
	I don't want to do coke at work.
	Anyway, so that went on and then Richard Swinsky was, it turned out, had some nefarious business going on and there was bankruptcy going on and we were nothing.
	Overnight, we literally were, we came in and they shut the power off and they were removing the mirrors from the bathroom.
	So we moved to Triple Five Soul's storage space.
	In Williamsburg, which was a desolate wasteland at the time, 2001.
	Horrible place to be.
	I remember my friend Curtis was talking to someone on Bedford Avenue on North 7th.
	No ATMs, nothing, cabs wouldn't go there.
	He's talking to his friend and some Puerto Rican eight-year-old comes up and brains him with a golf driver.
	Knocks him out.
	That's what it was like then.
	There was maybe four bars.
	And so we moved there, and I would argue we built it up into the Williamsburg it is now.
	We sort of created the culture there.
	We gentrified it.
	I've made a lot of movements over the years.
	It's not just hipsters.
	I created Williamsburg.
	I created Vice.
	I created Proud Boys.
	I created the New Right.
	I red-pilled an entire generation.
	I'm sorry to be egotistical, but I've made a lot of stuff.
	I might be the chosen one.
	I might be the prophet.
	So, we're bankrupt at that point.
	And, by the way, the orgies, as Shane put it in 1994, were a couple of threesomes back when we were rockin' in 1994.
	That has nothing to do with hustling to get bought by that billionaire.
	Nothing to do with life In New York, after we moved there, it was just like, I think that we had a staff of maybe six.
	It was me, Shane Saroosh, there was that ugly-toothed guy, there was Eric Lavoie, and there was this chick, Heather.
	There was one chick, and she was just sort of like the office manager.
	We were not molesting her.
	There was no orgies there.
	That's the weird thing about these journalists.
	They go, I'm going to take your company now and just sort of backdate it such that there's a massive audience, you know, a massive staff working in 1994 in Montreal.
	Or they say, well, there was that pupus, that larvae of sexism and it slowly grew over the years.
	They do that with Proud Boys.
	They go, we know you're not racist.
	We know that you're multicultural and you don't care about Jews or anything, but I sense a seed of discontent.
	I sense something bad there.
	And that grew into that.
	That's, by the way, someone with a terrible theory.
	Hey, Dad, you're gay.
	What?
	I've been married to your mother for 50 years.
	Yes, but there's a seed in there, Dad.
	There's a seed of gayness.
	What are you talking about?
	Well, you were seen with a gay man two years ago.
	Who?
	Andy?
	Andy's my brother.
	Yes, but he's gay.
	You know what, pal?
	You're right.
	You're good at this, by the way.
	You've got a skill.
	You're great at conflation.
	You're congregation.
	So, there's all these different vices, and again, I can only defend where I was and what I did.
	I don't know what's going on.
	So I'm not saying nothing bad ever happened to Vice.
	What I am saying is there was no culture of sexual harassment.
	That's BS.
	If someone strayed from the path and got up to hanky-panky, that's none of my beeswax.
	And of course it's terrible if they did that.
	So, there was the bankruptcy, there was 2002, and then we started rebuilding the company, and I got to hand it to Shane and Saroosh, they busted their asses, and I didn't bust my ass at all.
	In fact, I liked it.
	I liked that we were no longer owned by a billionaire, and I could go back to hanging out with weirdos and finding a guy who bought a dirty bomb in Paris, and I would just scour New York with my little notepad.
	And find someone who was like a black supremacist or a white supremacist or a lesbian supremacist and find all these weirdos.
	It was awesome!
	I was doing my job again, and I wasn't beholden to a corporation.
	Great.
	Those poor bastards had to deal with debt collectors and everything.
	And I think that's why they started to build their resentment towards me, because they thought, he gets to do the fun stuff, meet girls and shit, and we have to sit here dealing with debt collectors.
	But eventually, big investors started noticing that we had survived this, and they got interested again.
	And then we got more money.
	So 2005 MTV started calling and Viacom 2006 we started going back to where we were with Richard Sawinski and I sold my shares in 2008.
	Not the best departure.
	It really is.
	You know divorces are never smooth.
	And I would say when I left, like 2008 I left, but by 2007, there was an office again.
	2006, there was an office again with tons of people working there.
	2003 to 2006, it was a pretty small little community.
	And again, my business plan has always been, and would continue to be, ad sales go on this side of the room, editorial goes on this side of the room.
	They should be at odds.
	And I noticed this with the Brits.
	When we sold to Vice UK, and we started Vice UK, they'd go, no, we're doing a four-page feature on Tiger Beer.
	And I'd go, Andrew, how is that?
	How do readers read that and think it's genuinely about Tiger Beer?
	I don't know, but it's what people do here.
	They all do advertorials, and if we didn't do it, we'd go bankrupt.
	What's more obvious than an advertorial?
	Hey guys, 4-page feature on Tiger Beer.
	Please read it.
	Is there a soul on earth who reads an advertorial that says Tiger Beer?
	Anyway...
	So I left in 08 and they went on their merry way.
	They may have become rape central for all I know.
	They could have become feminist central for all I know.
	I have no clue.
	I cannot talk about vice after I left in 08.
	And I purposely avoided it.
	I've never seen the show.
	I've never been to the website.
	I know that sounds crazy but When you're divorced, you don't check in on your ex-wife.
	It just feels weird.
	And talk to anyone who's been through this.
	Talk to like someone who was an executive at Walmart.
	They probably don't go to Walmart anymore.
	They don't like to see that stuff.
	And it's not like you're hurt and you regret it.
	You just, that part of your life is done and you move on.
	So If there is going to be a big expose on how my threesomes and various sexual escapades, and by the way, tons of drug use and heroin and all kinds of rude stuff, that was some sort of template that links to sexual assault allegations in 2016, 2017.
	That's just lazy journalism, is what it is.
	That's just really bad journalism.
	And It just shows why young people are bored of dinosaur media.
	Because they don't try.
	Like, do the math.
	Do you really think a sexual encounter I had personally when I was 24 would affect a company I left 10 years ago and had sexual assault allegations this year?
	Now, again, I'm not saying that sexual assault allegations are not valid.
	What I'm saying is that if you're linking them to my fucking sex life when I was a little kid, you're insane!
	Just, like, do your homework.
	Anyway.
	We've still got some time, and I thought...
	Would it bore you to tears if I was to describe my life after I left Vice?
	If it would, hang up now.
	Move on with your life.
	But I... I'm headed to Restoration Weekend this weekend.
	Sebastian Gorka, Ann Coulter, Ezra Levant, Laura Loomer, myself... We're all going to be doing talks about the Resistance.
	Fighting the Resistance.
	Which sounds kind of Darth Vader-y, doesn't it?
	Fighting Jedis.
	Okay, fine.
	I don't like Mark Hamill.
	He's a shitty cokehead.
	But I am looking forward to seeing these talks.
	I love Robert Spencer.
	He's an intellectual.
	So I... I'm going to get lazy with this podcast and just talk about my life, just do an autobiography.
	But, uh, 2008 I left.
	I got a boatload of money.
	More money than I could ever spend.
	And I put some of it in the stock market, some of it in real estate, which then doubled.
	I'm sure a lot of people don't enjoy hearing that.
	And then I made a lot of money on my own.
	I mean, I started an ad agency with nothing and sold that for a boatload before it was shut down for my transphobic bullies.
	But I started a weird career after that, which was selling comedy pilots.
	So I'd go to L.A., and I'd go to Comedy Central and all these FX and stuff, and I'd just dazzle them in the pitch with an idea for a show.
	And I have all these PDFs of these pilots.
	I should probably send them to you, but there was like... One was three guys who are straight, but they learn to become hairdressers to get laid.
	That was called Blowed or something?
	Blowout?
	I did one about a secretary, where a guy doesn't like the fact that he's called secretary, but he is the president's right-hand man, and he's a machismo dude who's known as a secretary.
	I'm not pitching these very well.
	There was an aging hipster, which was basically my life, and this was a guy who had made tons of money selling a hipster company, and now he's still trying to get something else going, but all his friends are 22, and he's 40, and his wife's disgusted by it, and she's acquiesced beautifully into the upper middle class echelons of society, and he can't seem to let go of his hipster past.
	Okay, no Nobel Peace Prizes for creativity there, but you can imagine, knowing how incredibly funny I am, that the actual content was great.
	I actually wrote a great one with Jay Johnson from Mr. Show called The Two Bennies, and it was an update to the Benny Hill Show, but it was two Benny Hills.
	And it was just like a really exaggerated version of Benny Hill.
	So when a woman, like he did something rude to a woman like, oh, ha ha.
	And of course, this will be linked to the rapes advice.
	The woman wouldn't just like hit them with a purse the way they did Benny Hill.
	They'd beat him with the purse until his head was a pulp.
	That's sort of a Jay Johnson thing.
	Like he had that show, Monster Hunter, where this guy would, you know, beat the living crap out of monsters till they were just jam.
	He had a great James Bond parody that he did where James Bond would go to rescue someone and just destroy, you know, the whole village trying to save this woman.
	Anyway, it was that kind of thing meets Benny Hill.
	And that was a weird job I had for a while.
	It pays great.
	You get 40 grand to write a pilot, but then they don't run it.
	They don't use it.
	So it goes in the garbage and you can't show it to anyone.
	And if someone else wants it, they have to pay the 40 grand to the Comedy Central or FX or whatever.
	And so they'd rather just like, can you just write a new one, dude?
	I don't want to pay them.
	They're my competitor.
	So I was writing shows for the garbage and I did that for two years.
	I wrote, honestly, like 10 pilots where I dazzled them in the pitch, wrote the thing, and then I didn't make it through.
	And, you know, Comedy Central, I believe at that time, was saying yes to 85 pilots and then I don't like making things for the garbage.
	I like it if I fart to have that documented and then make a watercolor and for everyone to have a copy on Instagram.
	I'm very selfish that way.
	So that wasn't fun.
	But as I was doing that, I met this guy, Sebastian, and he goes, let's do more than just pitch TV.
	Let's make videos.
	Let's make comedy videos.
	And I started making comedy videos with these kids, Brian Gaynor and Chad, who my kids call Mouse, because he looks like a mouse.
	I'm reluctant to name names, too, because I'm such a pariah now, I can ruin people's careers just by indicating there's a link.
	But Chad and Brian said, you're funny, let's do funny videos.
	And we did Sophie Can Walk, and we did Working Out With Kids, and we eventually did How to Fight a Baby with 13 million views.
	So that was going okay, but there was no money in that.
	And Sebastian said, let's get money for it.
	So eventually we started an ad agency called Rooster, and we were getting like between five and twenty grand to do sketches.
	And that's how much they cost, by the way.
	People say to me, why don't you do more sketches?
	And I go, I don't know, because you have to do casting, and lighting, and location, and each one of those is $5,000.
	So, unless you have a boatload of money, I don't want to do it.
	And still, even then, even with all the money, like say you gave me $50,000 to do a hilarious comedy sketch.
	Which, by the way, I have an amazing idea for.
	I gotta get up in the dark.
	It's a 13-hour day.
	It's not fun acting.
	Going back to those celebrities like Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston, you're just sitting around all day.
	I've done a few movies.
	I did Creative Control, How to Be a Man.
	You're just really sitting around waiting to shoot, and it's four hours of sitting on your ass for every 10 minutes of shooting.
	That's not amusing.
	That's another shitty job.
	Anyway, so we did the ad agency for a while and we kept building up and Vans was really generous and we did some great videos with them.
	And I was also freelance writing at the time.
	I started, I was always writing for Tacky Meg, but then this dude at Thought Catalog, I think his name's Chris, maybe Rob, you know, a normal dude name.
	He goes, hey, I've been reading your stuff for a while.
	I'm very inspired.
	I'm really impressed by your mentor, Jim Goad.
	I'm hiring him and I want to make Thought Catalog an actual Thought Catalog, as is my business plan.
	So it's not just normal thoughts that all these millennials have, but weird thoughts.
	Stuff out of the box, you know, that will challenge people.
	That's what a Thought Catalog should be.
	And they go, cool, I'm in.
	So I start saying things like, short hair is rape.
	Now, this is in a culture where they think everything is rape, so I say, if a lady has short hair, and you're doing her from behind, you look down and you see a woman's body with short hair, you see a 12 year old boy.
	So you switched you out with a 12-year-old boy.
	You just raped me.
	Now obviously that's not literally true.
	You don't want the woman to go to jail for 15 years, but it's a thought catalog.
	It's a dumb, weird, Jonathan Swift kind of the, you know, the poor should eat their young kind of a thought game.
	And the shit hit the fan.
	And the shit kept hitting the fan.
	And I think he started realizing he's in over his head.
	And I haven't talked to him.
	He won't respond to my calls.
	But I think he lost a boatload of cash from this idea of taking himself seriously.
	Because I did an article called Transphobia is Perfectly Natural.
	And I had a lot of stuff going on when I wrote that article.
	I had the ad agency.
	I was doing a comedy night at Brooklyn Brewery.
	I had a show I was doing with Discovery UK that was called Man vs Myth, where we would bust myths.
	And we had already shot about six episodes.
	We shot me beating tracking dogs.
	You know, like if you escape from prison, it's very easy to beat them.
	You just jump back and over a fence, and you throw your clothes in a bush, and you go through a river.
	Like, they're not that hard to beat.
	I beat polygraphs, and that's where I met my polygraph buddy, Doug.
	And so we shot all these episodes and we had a big staff, you know, they're all British, obviously Discover UK, and we had a staff of like 15 and everywhere we went, we'd have a staff of another 15 of locals.
	To be honest, it's hard to remember all the stuff I had going on then.
	As an entrepreneur in New York, you have 15 spinning plates at all time.
	So when one goes, you don't even notice it.
	Now in LA, they have one spinning plate, It falls, smashes, and they go, oh, that plate smashed.
	That plate, by the way, was spinning for three years, solo.
	And then they go, oh, my pilot didn't get picked up.
	All right, well, soon enough, I should get a plate back up and start spinning.
	Meanwhile, by the way, back in 08, I had started this website called Street Carnage.
	And I thought, me and Derek Beckles, my buddy, Best pal.
	We're going to become the new Tim and Eric.
	He had no work ethic.
	That went nowhere.
	And I realized I'm just really doing a Vice 2.
	And I don't think you can do Vice 2.
	If you're in Motley Crue and you start, you get pushed out or you quit, you can't start Motley Crue 2.
	It's not going to work.
	So Street Carnage was a complete failure.
	It's still up, I believe.
	It's like a... I haven't... I check it pretty rarely.
	But that was sad.
	Now, of course, Derek and I eventually split because I'm a Nazi.
	So anyway, had all these things going on, but that... When I said transphobia is perfectly natural, and I said if your dad cut his dick off and stuff, you'd be freaked out.
	Which isn't true, of course.
	You'd be totally relaxed if your dad cut his dick off.
	You just say, hi mom.
	You wouldn't be nervous.
	So transphobia isn't perfectly normal.
	Right, guys?
	I mean, that's where we're at now.
	When I say boring platitudes that are clearly true, I'm pilloried.
	But anyway, um... Shit, it's a fan.
	Major apocalypse.
	My ad agency had just been bought by Havas, which is a French ad agency.
	And, um, they, I think they were looking for a reason to kill us because, um, we were making just, like, good profits, 20% or something, and that's not good.
	When you buy an ad agency for several million dollars, you want them to make 20 million dollars.
	It's like jackass.
	Everyone wants jackass or Blair Witch Project Where I think Jackass cost 5 million and it grossed something like 200 million, I'm not sure.
	But Blair Witch Project cost nothing to make and it made something like, I don't know, 20 million.
	I'm getting these numbers wrong, but it's shocking how much they spent and how much they made.
	And the funny thing about executives, also in book publishing by the way, they hear that and they go, I want that.
	But at the end of the day, most indie films lose money, most blockbusters sort of do okay, and, you know, books make twenty grand or something.
	Less than the Advance, is the truth of it.
	And then, you know, the Fifty Shades of Grey pays for everything else.
	Am I being interesting or am I sounding too negative here?
	So, uh, the ad agency was, Havas, was waiting for a chance to shut us down, and this trans thing was a perfect opportunity, so they shut us down.
	But here's what I'll never forget about all those things.
	Everything in my life was completely extinguished by the trans article.
	Everything.
	Over.
	I'll never forget, I was in Atlanta where we were doing a thing about running from attack dogs, like search dogs.
	And there was a guy, a sound guy, a local who had been hired.
	And he had these ear things in his ear that just were super small, but I noticed them because I'm incredibly perceptive.
	And he said they cost him $7,000.
	And I go, what's that in your ear?
	Is that like a hearing aid?
	And he goes, yeah.
	These saved my marriage.
	These little puppies.
	Because my wife was so sick of screaming shit at me.
	Then I got these and, you know, she could talk to me normal again.
	Seven grand.
	And I saw him the next day.
	And he was loading up his truck with all the sound equipment.
	And he just looked dazed.
	He looked like he had a flashbulb in his face.
	And I go, hey man!
	And he goes, hey.
	And all he knew was that the host of the show had done something so terrible, it shut down the entire show.
	And it was like I had fucked a kid, obviously.
	I mean, it was really, I use that analogy a lot, but it's shocking how common it is.
	People had trouble looking me in the eyes, and all I had said is, it's normal to be uncomfortable about your dad cutting his dick off.
	And by the way, even if I had said, like, I don't know, I'm a pedophile, how does that affect the show?
	Okay, that's a bad analogy, because obviously that would affect the show.
	Discover UK cancelled Man vs Myth.
	There's three great episodes floating around in the digital abyss out there.
	And I'll never forget the guy, the sound guy, with his crates, piling them up into the back of his own truck.
	Just piling up these crates of chords and booms and mics and lavs and whatever.
	And he'd only ever heard of a tranny as a transmission from a car, but because of the host's opinions on trans people, he's out of a job.
	Isn't that insane?
	So anyway, I'm a pariah.
	I'm out of comedy.
	I can't pitch comedy anymore.
	That stupid writing pilots for the garbage job is done.
	My advertising career is over.
	Our entire ad agency is shut down.
	Havas dumped us.
	Those guys all moved on and actually started their own company after that without me and did a great job Good.
	I mean, I love those guys.
	I still talk to them all the time, but I'll tell you with advertising I've never seen people with less talent make more money.
	I do not miss advertising at all, but the money was mental Um, and then I'm sort of floating around in the abyss and then Ezra Levant says, you can do a show with me.
	Do me a video a week for 500 bucks.
	I do such incredibly good work that I end up getting three or four videos a week.
	And then I talked to Anthony Kumi and he says, you can come on here.
	We're actually a pariah network of outcasts, the Island of Misfit Toys.
	He's very generous and he says, you know, whatever you want, dude.
	I'm not going to censor anything at all.
	You can Holocaust deny.
	I mean, he didn't say that, but that's that was the implication.
	So I go do those things and I basically start a new career focusing more on sort of right wing politics.
	And a lot of my old friends like Sean Reverend from Cult and I forget all his stupid companies.
	This black guy I used to be friends with that stabbed me in the back.
	They go, you're a sellout, you bigot.
	Now you gotta be right-wing to make money?
	And I go, actually it's the opposite of that.
	I've been constantly painted into a corner by you creative types saying you can't do this and you can't do that.
	That I'm sort of stuck doing right-wing news, which I'm fine with, by the way.
	You could stick me with juggling.
	You could stick me with carpentry.
	And I would enthusiastically do it.
	So...
	I didn't go there to make money.
	I went there after I lost money and figured out how to make money there.
	And what's ironic, by the way, Mr. Creative Pants, is you couldn't do the same.
	If I ostracized you, you Rastafarian, who clearly must hate gays because that's part of Rastafarian culture, if I painted you into a corner, you would have to blow your head off because you'd have no idea what to do because you're a loser.
	Yes, that was me leaving the podcast and getting into my own id for a moment.
	So yeah, so I did Kumia for a while, and I started getting so many followers, and I mean that in the best of ways, that I thought I could do this by myself.
	I could probably get 10,000 guys to spend $4 a month.
	And while this was going on, by the way, I said, let's start a men's club.
	Just a place where guys can be guys, and guys can be alone, away from chicks, and just do normal stuff like the Shriners used to do.
	And I joined the Knights of Columbus, and I loved it.
	Uh, you know, I don't really belong with these guys in Hell's Kitchen.
	I couldn't have a more different background.
	I'm an English middle class kid who moved to Canada when I was five and made a bunch of money in New York.
	And now I am, you know, taking the train into Hell's Kitchen to talk to these blue collar dudes.
	About their lives and about growing up with the Westies in Hell's Kitchen.
	Fascinating to me.
	But, uh, I realized, you know, the first degree, second degree, third degree, fourth degree process here...
	This is a lot of fun, and I feel a real camaraderie.
	Like, if someone called me right now and said, yeah, there's a Knights of Columbus in Albany.
	He needs your help.
	I would, like, wake up my wife and say, sorry, I gotta go somewhere.
	And I would go do it, and I wouldn't be mad or sad or happy or angry.
	I would feel nothing.
	It's just something I have to do.
	It'd be like if my daughter was sick.
	It's a family thing.
	So I go, let's do a similar thing.
	I mean, this used to be the fabric of society.
	We used to have men's clubs.
	We used to have the Know Nothings.
	We used to have the Bowery Boys with Bill the Butcher, Daniel Day-Lewis and Gangs of New York.
	Why can't we have that again?
	Ann Coulter talks about her father being in these groups.
	I said, I'd love you to come to one of our meetings, but you're a woman.
	And she goes, I don't want to come to one of your meetings.
	I totally revere this concept of men's clubs, and I wouldn't want to tarnish it.
	She said, finally, conservatives are punching back.
	But we weren't really meant to be violent.
	I mean, we were just guys who would meet every third Saturday and drink beer.
	And then I was doing a talk at NYU.
	And this is, by the way, this is way after advertising is over and being banished from comedy.
	And I'm stuck on the Kumia Network, but I bust my ass.
	I get there every day at 10 o'clock.
	I do an hour and a half show.
	I get tons of guests on my own.
	New guests no one's ever heard of and regular guests people have heard of and introduce new concepts and you know I just I don't sit on my ass and the story I'm trying to tell today on this podcast is not that I'm special though I am.
	The thing I'm trying to get across today is I know you're gonna be ostracized if you like Trump, if you're a right-winger, you're going to be banished if you like Bannon, but the beauty of this country is you just keep plugging away, and you will succeed.
	You will make money.
	I don't care what you want to do.
	I honestly don't.
	If you want to make children's wood puppets, Where they're marionettes, and you use fishing line for the wires, and there are little wood guys that dance around, and you practice and practice and practice.
	You can do a funny little dance with them.
	I guarantee you, you'll make 50 grand a year after three years.
	Now, I usually say two years, but I said three years because you chose such a stupid profession.
	Dancing puppets, what the hell's the matter with you?
	But still, you'll do a good job.
	No, sorry, you'll get paid if you do a good job.
	So, one little side project was this Proud Boys thing.
	And, um, I go to NYU and I have no plan.
	Actually, I did have one funny plan.
	I was going to go up on stage and say, and I did actually end up doing this.
	Uh, I said, um, there are three problems with America today.
	As the woman, The Negro and the Jew.
	That's what I said.
	And, uh, Jaws hit the floor.
	And I let it breathe for about ten seconds, and I go... No, I'm just kidding.
	Um, but seriously, do you think that's a guy?
	Like, do you think that's a guy that would do a talk at NYU?
	Is that why you're here?
	Is that why you're protesting?
	And the fact that their jaws dropped when I was that fake guy for those, you know, five seconds, shows that they don't really think that that's a guy either.
	They just like, like, we don't like you.
	You're a poo.
	You go poo-poo in my poo.
	They don't, they don't really, their heart's not in it.
	And when you present the guy they're screaming about, they go, wait, what?
	You are that guy?
	I didn't know that guy existed.
	Yeah, he doesn't exist.
	Dummies.
	You fools.
	So, uh, It was the same night as a Proud Boys meetup.
	So I go, come with us.
	Come with me.
	And let's, you know, they gave me a secret door in the back.
	And I thought if I was there to talk about how sexy babies are, I would understand.
	Yes, I will go in the back door.
	That is an unusual belief.
	I don't have unusual beliefs at all.
	So I go, we're going through the front.
	So we walk through the front and we sing, Proud of your boy from Aladdin, Aladdin.
	And all these rich kids, yes, they're all rich white kids, start attacking us.
	And then the front doors of NYU say, no, only you can come in.
	So, and one other guy.
	So my guys are left there, Proud Boys, fighting this mob of Antifa.
	And, uh, eight Antifa get arrested.
	Two of my guys do.
	By the way, our two Proud Boys were non-white, and all of Antifa people were white.
	That says a lot right there.
	They all go to jail.
	And, our guys were joking around.
	They'd been arrested before.
	The Antifa guys were panicking in the paddy wagon.
	Freaking out.
	They'd never been there before.
	They didn't know what to do.
	Their parents are gonna be so mad.
	So I did the talk with these crunched up eyes.
	I call them baby vaginas.
	And finished it, and then Proud Boys became this thing where it was like they must be racist or something if they don't agree with the left.
	I actually had Alan Foyer, a journalist at New York Times, he said, why don't you just lie there and take a beating?
	It would mean so much.
	It would be like the Freedom Riders.
	It would be like Martin Luther King.
	And I go, yeah, no.
	I don't want to do that, thank you.
	That's a nice thank you for the tip, but I don't want to do that.
	So what is this all?
	How does this all come together?
	Well... In 1994, I was a cartoonist.
	I was in a bunch of punk... I just left a bunch of punk bands.
	And Sue Shalvey said, uh, why don't you join me in this thing?
	And we'll just make it like a cool fanzine.
	And you seem to like fanzines.
	You do a mini-comic.
	Yeah, that's exciting.
	And then when I realized we weren't going anywhere, I brought in my childhood friend Shane.
	I said, let's make some money.
	Um, we started generating cash.
	You know, that, more money, more problems.
	Eventually it led to a split with all of us.
	Started my own thing.
	And I've always been offensive.
	I think I've always been punk rock.
	I've always been wanting to, you know, push the boundaries.
	And that led to my demise in comedy.
	That led to my demise in advertising.
	It led me to where I am now, which is clearly not selling out, but it's still lucrative.
	Very lucrative.
	And there's been some serious downs over the years.
	Serious bankruptcy, serious borderline divorce, serious, you know, hemorrhaging cash, serious a year with zero money at all coming in, eating away at savings, losing savings, you know, having to move in with friends over the years, crash on couches.
	There's been all of that, but the beauty of the Western world is you keep plugging away at no matter what it is.
	I don't care if it's being a mime.
	You keep plugging away and eventually you get back up to a very healthy salary in America.
	Now you got to get up on a Monday at 7 a.m.
	You know, I don't care how stupid your profession is, you gotta get up early.
	You can't be hungover, you can't take a day off.
	40 hours a week's a bare minimum.
	60, 70, 80.
	If you're in your 20s, it should be more like 80.
	You should never be not working.
	Always be hustling, as the blacks in Harlem say.
	Always have something going on.
	But if you have that correct attitude, then you'll make cash.
	And you don't have that in, uh...
	The East.
	You don't have that in Russia, in China.
	You don't really have it in Taiwan.
	You don't have that in India.
	You don't have that in a lot of European countries, to be honest.
	They are so mired in socialism that they don't reward entrepreneurs the correct way.
	Canada has a huge problem with that, crapping on entrepreneurs and discouraging them from being independent.
	But America Still rewards the entrepreneur.
	They still, I mean Shark Tank is a popular show for a reason because as John Steinbeck said, the poor in America vote Republican because they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
	So I started this podcast to say that these journalists that are trying to imply that my rampant sexual encounters when I was a young man in 1984 are somehow linked to an inexorable culture of sexism in 2016 is retarded.
	Similarly, to say that Proud Boys, a men's club where we happen to defend our friends if our friends get attacked, is somehow a gateway drug to Nazism is also lazy journalism.
	And you might like lazy journalism because your editors comply and they go, good job.
	But young people don't appreciate that.
	They're savvy.
	And they go, yeah, yeah, I've read this kind of crap before.
	You're lying.
	And I'm actually never going to this site again or this show again.
	So, you may get in under the wire and pay your bills and temporarily appease your employers, but lying doesn't work in America, because America is ultimately a meritocracy.
	And you can be a pariah, you can go against the grain, you can be a witch during Salem, you can be a communist during McCarthyism, you can be a truth teller during political correctness.
	But eventually, if you bust your ass in the West, you will succeed.
	I know it's frustrating being ostracized.
	I've seen being a Trump supporter ruin marriages, get people fired, get bricks thrown through windows, believe it or not.
	That's probably a whole other podcast.
	But the big picture is the West is still the best.
	And this is still the only part of the world where you get rewarded for busting your ass.
	It's still the only place in the world where if you persevere, if you get up early, if you're not hungover, and if you GIVER from dawn till dusk, you'll get paid, you'll have two cars, you'll have a house you own, you'll have a happy wife, and you'll have a bunch of kids.
	Who else can say that?
	And I think it's time that we look at the situation we're in with these kind of rewards and say, thank you.
	Thank you, America.
	God bless America.
	God bless the West.
	And thank you, God.

▲