Get Off My Lawn Podcast #11 | As a cop, I've seen things that would make you crap a book on how to puke
As an entrepreneur, I’ve done very well for myself but as anyone who makes money will tell you, it’s one big win for every dozen or so failures. I made tons of money in real estate but lost tons of money to the restaurant business. I made great money in media but also lost money in media. I had a successful career writing TV pilots but, at the same time, I consider my TV career a complete failure. This episode documents my 15-years in TV making great money failing.
As a cop, I've seen things that would make you crap a book on how to puke.
That's my favorite line in a sitcom ever.
I believe it was written by Dan Harmon.
It's from the Sarah Silverman Show.
Or was it called the Sarah Silverman Project?
I talked to Sarah about that quote and she didn't know who it was.
They had a team of writers.
Dan Harmon was the most prolific back then.
He was fired because he's impossible to work with and I was fired from the TV industry because I'm impossible to work with.
That's what I want to base today's podcast on.
I've had a whole career in television and there's very few successful people in TV but there's a lot of unsuccessful people who make a good living.
I mean if I had a, I haven't checked my IMDB, I guess because it's mostly pilots, but if I just lived in LA and my TV career was the only thing I'd ever done, writing pilots, and yeah, not acting, although I've had sort of an acting career too, but just writing pilots, pitching pilots, I'd be like a lower middle class guy, family man.
Uh, and that's the weird thing about TV.
It's sort of like the music business before MP3s, where there's just money floating around.
They're signing all these crappy bands, hoping they'll get a Celine Dion.
And so I was one of those crappy bands.
And I think it's, millennials have this disdain for entrepreneurs that's very unhealthy for the country.
That they talk about how they want to end capitalism, smash capitalism, it's time for communism.
And you go, guys, you have to, being an entrepreneur sucks.
It's 12 failures for every success.
And in many cases, it's 12 failed careers for every success.
And you have to just take it on the chin.
Now, it's sort of like being a cop.
It's a job that sucks, being an entrepreneur, and you don't, you know, you don't want to be carried on people's shoulders, but you just, you appreciate a little tip of the hat.
Hey Gavin, you had an entire career in TV that nosedived and never went anywhere.
It's a failure.
Thank you.
Thank you for going out there, flying to LA a hundred times, Over the course of 20 years and trying your hand at TV and failing miserably.
Thank you for that.
Because that means the other guys who did it are better at it and we got better TV.
You know, culling the herd and all that.
But my career started in, it's funny talking about a failed career, it's like talking about a divorce.
Like I was taking notes, and I was looking up some old files, which aren't even on my desktop, I found them as mail attachments of old scripts and stuff, and I went, oh my god, I totally forgot about that whole thing!
There was like 50 different scenes I was in.
Now you might, this is also about you getting into it.
Uh, I hope that my story encourages you, but I'll go, I'll jump to the very end as far as you go.
Don't do this.
Don't pursue this.
If you want to make a TV show, I think you should do it the workaholics way where you just make it, you make it crappy on your own and then you, um, That has its own following and then when you're pitching it to Comedy Central or whatever.
There's already three seasons in the tank I believe that was the deal with workaholics and the beauty of that too is They can't change it.
They can't say, what if this guy was... Because they have no idea what they're doing, by the way, these people, the top brass of TV, all these execs that you talk to.
They're all incompetent.
I'd say, with the exception of maybe three, like Kent Alterman, the guy running Comedy Central, at least he was when I last checked, he's a hilarious dude.
I think he did Strangers with Candy, which is probably the greatest show ever.
You should check it out.
Amy Sedaris plays a high school student who's in her 40s.
And Stephen Colbert is in it, back when he was amusing.
Anyway, Kent Alterman knows what he's doing.
He's about it.
Before Kent, you had Lauren Correo.
And she was known in the comedy scene as the killer of comedy.
She was the head of programming at Comedy Central for most of the time I was trying to pitch to them before Kent.
And I believe she just got the job because she was head of sales for South Park.
South Park run Comedy Central.
They are more important than any CEO there.
Oh, that reminds me of Kenny's story.
Yeah.
So because she was head of sales, when South Park exploded and became more valuable than Comedy Central itself, they got to just put anyone remotely associated with it got the top spots.
So they said, hey, sales lady, you're the head of programming.
So now all of a sudden, some chick who does sales is deciding what's funny or not.
And again, she's not funny.
Isn't that bizarre?
I mean, I guess coaches can't necessarily play football, but If you're running programming at a comedy network, you should be funny, I believe.
So anyway, these people are incompetent.
So while you're pitching your show, you're dealing with unfunny people, and it's a total roll of the dice if they're gonna, you know, sign you or not.
Okay, a pilot.
But the beauty of having previously made shows is, It's a solid thing and you can see it works.
And plus, you've ironed out the kinks.
You've noticed from the comments or whatever that people don't like this particular character.
And you've fleshed out plot lines.
You've developed arcs organically.
And that's what I really hate about these pitches too, is they need to know the arc.
You feel like going, whatever, we'll figure it out.
What was Jerry Seinfeld's arc?
How did he grow?
By the way, I also feel the same way about books.
The way you get a book deal these days is you spend six months on the proposal and it should have like five chapters written and you have to do this long story about why you're writing the book.
I mean, it's thick.
It's maybe a third of a book in and of itself.
And at that point I go, just write the book.
Just write a book.
And then if the publishers aren't going to give you a big advance, like say more than $40,000, then just do it yourself on Amazon and you get 50% of the sales.
So, publishing is over and I think TV is over.
I think it's up to you to do.
Now, my one big piece of advice for you shooting it yourself, I know you're doing it on a shoestring, is audio.
You need mics.
You need lavs.
I don't care how cheap your camera is.
I don't care how bad your filming is.
If the audio sucks and you're just using the ambient noise of the room, like there's just a, whatever the directional mic is on the camera, you're an idiot and a loser and you don't deserve to have a show.
But I went the old route.
I was coming from the old school, uh, when I did my TV career, and, uh...
It, uh, sucked.
*laughs* So it started...
So it started with Vice, actually.
We were just losers in Montreal.
And I saw there was an article recently about orgies and stuff with Vice back in the day, and how we would have sex with our employees.
Before we moved to New York, we didn't have any employees.
It was me, Shane, and Saroosh living in our loft and working in the same place.
So my bed was six feet from my desk.
We only got employees after we got money, and we only got money after we got bought, and when we got bought we went to New York immediately.
It was a test.
He wanted to see if we had balls enough to leave.
Yes!
I'm not married.
But, Richard Sawinski was this eccentric billionaire who bought us, and moved us to New York, and he said, he had a really high-pitched voice, and he said, Guys!
He's a weird dude.
He was a nerd, who got involved in CGI early, and then the company that he invested in, I believe they're called Animalogic, they ended up doing Jurassic Park, and won all these awards, and they became worth hundreds of millions.
He was their guy.
So he was worth a bundle of money.
So he was a nerd with glasses with a high-pitched voice, but he would wear Gucci suits and stuff.
One time we wanted coffee, so we bought a $10,000 espresso machine.
I mean, he was nuts.
I liked him, though.
He was fun.
I mean, nuts in a good way.
So he goes, bring out to me a multi-channel brand!
So I want you guys not just to be a magazine, I want everything!
TV, furniture, stores, a clothing line, movie theater, TV!
It's a good concept.
It's a smart move that we hadn't thought of.
Because you're already interviewing these people, so you might as well have a camera there.
Now you've got a show.
And we had a very unique take on things.
My motto was smart in a stupid way, stupid in a smart way.
So if you're going to go to Israel and talk about the conflict with the Palestinians, you make that whole thing about where to find a good cheeseburger in Jerusalem.
That's it.
Because the background will be, you know, people with Kalashnikovs or whatever guns they have, M16s, all these, you know, when you walk around Israel, everyone has their gun because the worst thing that could happen is your gun to get stolen and used in a terrorist act.
So when you're in the military, your gun is like a teddy bear.
You sleep with it, you bring it to a dance party.
You bring it on a date.
You'll see two teens on a date with these machine guns around their necks.
We're wearing like a suit and a gown.
Anyway, that will be in the background.
So we already got that message.
Now just make it about cheeseburgers.
Conversely, if you're doing something like the Vice Guide to Shit, You don't just have like, this one's called a stinker, woo!
You have, you talk to doctors and scientists and about colonons and, and you know, get super serious and make it a definitive guide that a doctor would go, wow, that's really conclusive.
Smart in a stupid way, stupid in a smart way.
So that's a good kind of a brand.
We did clothing.
That sucked.
Way too competitive.
We did retail.
That was brutal.
Way too competitive.
We didn't do restaurants, although I did that later and failed miserably.
But anyway, I gotta do, they said, why don't you do TV?
Okay.
So I did a pilot that sucked balls.
It was really bad.
And I brought it to MTV.
I can't remember exactly how I got the meeting at MTV.
Because I know you're listening if you're into this and you go, how do I get through the door?
What's the first meeting?
My meeting at MTV was with a very low guy.
This is 99 or 2000.
And I was sort of like, he could have been an intern, basically.
And so it was someone they pawn off the loser meetings to, and I definitely was a loser.
When I think of the thing I had made, it had stuff from the magazine like a gross jar and it had Derek Beckles eating a goldfish and it was just weak.
100% on me, by the way.
So we go there, just me, I go there.
And I show him the thing and I say, it's on a VHS tape by the way, this is how long ago that was.
And he goes, let me show you something.
And he puts in a tape and he shows me a guy getting shot in the chest with a bulletproof vest on.
And I think it's an illegal gun, because after they do it, they go, let's go, let's go, go!
And they take the vest off.
And he had these guys doing other things.
And it was the dudes from Big Brother, a skateboard magazine.
And it was this guy named Johnny Knoxville and his friends from the skateboard magazine were doing just what they usually do, but recording it, like jumping off a ladder onto a bed of nails or whatever, a bed of tacks, and breaking bottles on their heads.
And he goes, this is the kind of thing we're interested in.
And I just looked at him and went, out of my league!
Like, this is unbelievably good, and I cannot compete.
So, buh-bye!
And, uh, Jackass, of course, went on to be one of the biggest things ever, and they were really smart about it.
Spike Jones, I don't think he ever sold MTV anything.
He gave them the rights to show it.
He licensed it, but he kept it all.
So, they, and they controlled the budget, they controlled everything.
So I believe the first Jackass movie cost five million dollars to make, and it grossed something like two hundred million.
Of course, that's bad for the rest of us, because they go, can you make me a Blair Witch project that costs about a hundred grand and makes fifty times that?
Uh, no.
Okay?
And also, all those guys almost died.
Oh, it only grossed 80 million?
I've been telling that story so long that I keep adding zeros.
Yeah, those are a one in a million.
Stroke of luck.
No, I can't do that.
Anyway, so then I meet David Cross and we go around and we start pitching shows.
And by the way, this is how you pitch a show.
There's all this stuff about how you go in and you describe the world and the characters and you do kind of an episode.
Yes, that's true.
You do have to have that core structure, but it's really just stand-up.
You've got to understand, when these guys get pitched, they're usually pitched by writers, and writers are boring losers.
They may make a crazy thing on TV that's fun to watch, but the people themselves are manic-depressive spadas.
They're short and skinny.
They look like Elmo with alopecia.
They wear little cardigans, and they have thick glasses, and they just sort of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They're boring.
You know, one of the few exceptions to that is Derek Waters, the guy who does Drunk History.
He was pitching a show about a college town that was like his town in Baltimore, and when he would do his pitch, he brought the town with him.
He had made a mini village with a gas station and everything, like a four feet by four foot little village he constructed, like in that Lego movie at the end.
He had a little society with little people there and trees and everything, like a little train set type of setup.
I think that went on to be that college show that Dan Harmon ended up doing.
Derek and Dan had a real, there's a lot of drama that goes on in TV that no one wants to know about because they don't want to be known as hard to work with.
Or they don't want to be known as a drama queen.
But I think Derek Waters and Dan Harmon had some real back and forth.
I think that, uh, I think Dan was accused of stealing Community from Derek Waters.
I remember Derek was, was, when he was, I'm probably screwing up this story, but Derek finally got a meeting with HBO, and they were interested, and maybe it was Drunk History, and Dan Harmon saw him at a funeral, and even though they were friends, Dan said something like, oh look, it's Mr. HBO!
At a funeral.
10 is a mental case.
That when you get that level of talented, like that Dino Flopadopoulos, who wrote most of Mr. Show and works with Jay Johnson a lot, that guy's a weirdo.
A genius, hilarious weirdo, who I believe lived with his dominatrix for a while, and her husband.
So she'd go downstairs and beat him up once in a while with chains, I don't know.
I hope none of this are secrets.
But yeah, for the most part, it's just a boring person sitting there.
Even when it's a celebrity, like Will Ferrell will come in, say, hi, I'm Will Ferrell.
They're all thrilled to meet the celeb.
But he just says one or two jokes, and then it's back to, um, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.
The writer mumbling.
So I would just go in there and dazzle them.
Treat it like stand-up.
Totally unoriginal jokes.
For example, in one of the shows that I was pitching, I talk about how they ended up going on a gay cruise, because it was less expensive, and they're kind of homophobic, and they end up bonding with the homos, because they're so fun, and there's all these weird drinks, like it's a potpourri, pina colada, appletini.
And he goes, God, this is delicious.
What is this thing?
And he learns how to make it, and they're playing volleyball, and they're saying, you faggot, to the other team, because he's with the Bears, you know, like the tough gays with the leather.
He bonds with them and they make fun of the effeminate gays, so one of the characters blends right in and the other character is totally uncomfortable.
Not an original concept.
I believe it's a movie with Kevin Williams and Horatio Sanchez from SNL.
It's been done to death, but it does well in a room.
So it's like poo-poo jokes, gay jokes, fart jokes.
So I would do those, dazzle them, they'd laugh their heads off, And then they know that you're pitching around to all the different networks.
You can cram.
You can cram.
If you watch traffic, you could do four pitches, four or five pitches in a day.
So in three days, you basically got every single network easy.
Comedy Central, FX, HBO, uh... Well, I never did the mainstream... I think I did NBC and CBS and those, like, once, but that was a whole other world.
We had to do the sort of fringe ones.
Even at Cartoon Network, you could only do Adult Swim with Nick Wedenfeld.
You weren't pitching a mainstream comedy show.
So you do all the weirdos, and I would count FX and HBO as weirdos.
You know, ones where you could swear.
Showtime.
Cover them all in a few days.
And that includes travel time to LA.
And LA is so boring that you want to cram it in.
I mean, there's nothing worse than having nothing to do in Los Angeles.
There isn't even any bars.
There's that one bar near Jimmy Kimmel's studio, Baxter or something, that's got booths in it, Ballantine's, something like that.
But even then, they open at like 4.
And, by the way, four is seven p.m.
for us.
And after a high-adrenaline pitch sesh where you're running from meeting to meeting and dazzling them, like shucking and jiving and, Hello, my baby!
Hello, my honey!
Will you buy my show?
You want to just chill out after that.
But no, no bars.
Sorry.
So, um... Uh... Yeah, we would go and we would... I'd make them laugh.
And then, oh yeah, they know you're going to all these different places.
So you get the call Within about 15 minutes, you get the call.
If it's a no, then you don't get a call.
But they go, we're taking it.
And then you go, okay, well, I have to finish my meeting, sir.
They go, all right, all right.
So ideally, you get another yes, and then they can fight about it.
But a pilot back then was going for 40 grand.
And you wouldn't write it until you got the money.
And it would go through four or five drafts.
Now writing a pilot, I swear to God I could write a pilot right now in 20 minutes.
It's watching TV with your fingers.
You have the whole beginning, middle, and end sort of ingrained in your brain from watching TV your whole life.
You know that there has to be conflict, and it has to be resolved, and there has to be a storyline, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's done.
Sorry to drink coffee.
It just occurred to me that I'm going to be doing a bunch of shows later on.
I'm going to lose my voice.
So, yeah, it's insane that it's $40,000.
And the other problem with it is they say, yes, you have two months to do it.
I don't want two months.
I want 20 minutes.
And then they send it back.
Oh, before you even write it, by the way, there's this insane amount of paperwork.
The contracts are an inch thick.
It's like a book deal.
And that goes back and forth and back and forth, redlining.
What will happen in Season 3?
Will I still own this percentage?
I don't care.
Let's work it out.
Whatever's normal, I would always say to the lawyers, take what's normal, see if you can get a tiny bit more, and that'll pay for your salary, your 5%.
But don't drag it out.
So, uh, so let me go back.
So I meet David Cross and I say, let's do a Vice TV thing.
I actually said, I need a celebrity to help me sort of pitch this.
And he goes, yeah, I'll see what I can do.
And then he calls me back later and says, how about me?
So we get a pilot with Showtime.
Now that's good.
Cause that's, you get 40 grand or so to write it, and then you get a budget if it gets okayed for a pilot.
See, there's a lot of phases here, and you're not gonna make it through them all.
So I stayed in the writing a pilot, shooting a pilot.
Writing a pilot, shooting a pilot.
I honestly did that... 20 times.
And writing a pilot's 40 grand.
Shooting a pilot is... well...
$250,000 would be amazing.
That was the budget for Mr. Show back in HBO days.
But my experience was $150,000, $100,000 was more normal for a pilot.
But that's plenty for me.
I could make a movie with that much money.
Unfortunately, there's all these unions and stuff you have to follow, so that instantly gets drained.
But if you just give me the money and let me shoot it run and gun, as they say, everyone bring their own lunch, I could shoot a movie for nothing.
$100,000.
Anyway.
So we get an OK and we shoot it.
I go to the UK and I do a thing on garage music, which was a big thing back then.
We're talking about 2004.
And David goes to Atlanta and he interviews this amazing old black stripper named Blondie who crushes beer cans with her tits.
It was pretty good.
And the pitch was for that was Jackass meets 60 Minutes.
A lot of humor.
But David decided he didn't want his face to be in it.
I guess the long-term plan was then it could just be anything, and I didn't know what I was doing, so I said yes.
I think that was a mistake in retrospect.
I think David's face should have been all over his segment, and I should have been all over my segment.
And there was some other stuff in there.
Dave, can you go let those guys in?
And so, got the pilot okay to write, got the pilot okay to shoot, and then they didn't want it.
That's my TV career in a nutshell.
So then, I meet Johnny Knoxville.
Fun guy.
He introduced me to Adderall, which was a rocky few years.
I remember once I went to his house, and he had two Adderalls and a gun in the microwave.
And he said, don't touch the gun.
Here's Adderall.
There's beer in the fridge.
And then I just sat on his couch and watched rodeos.
Rodeo bloopers.
For maybe three hours.
See, that's the thing about L.A.
too.
With famous people, they're busy.
So you spend a lot of time just hanging around their house.
I was friends with Justin Theroux for a while.
He dumped me for Trump.
Everyone dumped me for Trump.
But I'd be at Jennifer Aniston's house.
I'll do one on celebrity encounters because those are fun.
But I wake up, you know, dad time for me is 7 a.m.
Which is 4 a.m.
in LA.
Normal adult people without kids, they sleep till 10 or 11.
That's six hours to kill at someone's house.
So I'm just walking around the Anniston residence like a ghost.
Looking at coffee table books.
Like the help doesn't show up immediately either.
The butler's not there yet.
The cooks aren't gonna show up until it's time to cook breakfast.
Not at 5 in the morning.
So I just watch a movie alone?
That's what L.A.
is to me, just floating around.
It's like the afterlife.
It's like the Hotel California.
You can check out anytime you like.
So Knoxville really accelerates the Jack Has 60 Minutes thing.
Hanging out with those guys is super fun.
They are exactly what you'd think they are.
Women, by the way, hurl themselves at Knoxville.
Hurl themselves.
They, well, he's married now, but, and I guess he was married then, but I think they were on the rocks.
There'd be a lineup of women.
And he would schedule them.
How about Thursday?
How about Friday at noon?
And there was no, like, courting.
It was just like an assembly line.
Now, I'm faithful to my wife, but...
It's easy for me because no one's knocking at this door.
No one is interested in having sex with Donald Sutherland with AIDS.
They don't want to get AIDS.
No one wants to make out with a guy who looks like you put an apple in the back of a car in July and then licked it and then rubbed it on a barbershop floor.
No one wants to have sex with Beaker if he was a homeless man.
But men are only as loyal as their opportunities, right?
So this goes back to Trump and the pussy thing.
People don't get that when you're in a position of power, whether you're ugly or not, women hurl themselves at you.
Now, I'm sure Harvey Weinstein, it happened once or twice, and then he multiplied that by 1,000.
But for the most part, it's a Knoxville scenario if you're not hideous and you're famous and rich and powerful.
So we would go and pitch shows, and that's easy pitching with them.
You can get any meaning you want.
They're incredibly popular, and they're professional, and they go through the whole thing, and all I have to do is just be a little bit funny, and we're good.
That was going well.
Now we're up to like 2008, 2006 and 2007 around then.
You know, they kick each other in the balls so often that when you're around Jeff Tremaine and Steve-O and Knoxville, the normal position for you to be in is your hands cupping your balls.
So no one can kick you in the balls.
Now I'm not saying that's like at a jackass shoot.
I mean that's at a meeting, that's waiting in a hallway, that's going to get fries.
They have their hands on their nuts 100% of the time they're around each other because they don't want to get kicked in the balls.
I don't like that stuff.
I don't, I want, this is back before I had kids, or I'd only had one kid.
Don't kick my balls.
Those balls make human beings.
You're, you're hurting children, future children you're kicking in the head.
And I heard Nacho told me once that he had his ball, his sperm examined on a Petri dish and they were destroyed.
They were all crippled and cross-eyed.
I don't like that kind of game.
Another thing they would do is tase.
I don't like that.
Don't ever tase me.
There's nothing worse than being electrocuted.
You could punch me in the face for a fortnight, but the idea of some creature, electrical creatures inside your bones all of a sudden?
Ugh!
Can you believe there's a video game where you hold on to joysticks and you see how much shocking you can handle?
No fucking way!
Ugh!
No way!
I remember I went to a stag with that guy.
Now I'm doing Celebrity Encounters.
That guy, Ryan, what's his name?
The guy who died with the beard.
I think I was at his bachelor party and they had an MMA guy there randomly grabbing people and choking them out.
That's not like being electrocuted.
That's just very weird.
Some big guy grabs you.
You say, well, it's not going to work on me.
And then, yeah, Ryan Dunn.
And then darkness falls.
And the next thing you know, you look, you wake up and you're staring at people's feet in a bar.
That's hanging out with them.
So we pitched that, and that was around the time of my split with Vice, and so that just sort of diffused in the divorce.
Got lost in the divorce.
Obviously, what am I going to do?
Do Vice TV on my own?
And then it's normal when you split with a company, you have a bunch of things that are very common, and one of them is a non-compete.
So I couldn't really work anywhere after I left, but I had tons and tons of money.
And so I said, I'll just make sketches.
Now, I met these guys, Last Pictures, that was Chad Harbold and Brian Gaynor and their friends from college, film school.
And we just started shooting sketches just for fun.
Like Sophie Can Walk, I think was the first one.
The conceit there was that I didn't realize that babies are born unable to walk and they can't walk for the first year.
So I bought a tiny wheelchair.
It was actually a wheelchair for dollies.
There's a thing called My Twin, and say you're a one-eyed black kid with ten fingers and red hair, and you feel weird.
You get a doll, and it looks exactly like that.
So now you feel normal, and it's a doll like you.
Now, what if you're a little girl, you're nine, and you're in a wheelchair?
Well, you can have a My Twin that looks just like you, and she's in a wheelchair.
So it's a tiny wheelchair.
And I bought that, and I put my daughter in it, and I wheeled her around town.
And that, to go back to what I was saying about YouTube, that's a great little business card.
That's better than pitching and all these hypotheticals.
Viral video.
And also, when you're talking to people, later when I got into advertising, they'd go, we want to do a viral video because it's a really cheap way to get a lot of eyeballs.
And I'd go, yeah, it's called being funny.
And they'd go, OK, well, this is what you should do.
So we want to advertise SparkPlugs.
And we want this.
And I'm thinking, have you ever made a viral video?
Just tell me what to sell.
Tell me what the budget is.
And then I'll handle it, thank you.
I'm not looking for tips from you.
I am better at this than you.
But they're writing the checks.
I mean, you think TV rapes your creativity.
Advertising?
I have never seen people with less talent make more money.
And they will rape your joke to shreds.
I did an ad for, I think it was Realtor.com.
I'm not exaggerating.
It went through 1,000 versions.
Gavin, what are you talking about?
You mean 10?
No.
We did the ad, and then the client would come in.
I don't think the client was even Realtor.com.
We were like a sub-agency, so the main agency would just say, yes, get the money and then farm it up to us.
We would do all the work, and then they would sit and watch it.
So they sat in our editing room.
And they said, what about this?
What if the first guy is the last guy?
And then we show it like that.
Okay.
So we'd move that.
I count that as one version.
So it was five days of eight hours of people sitting going, what about this?
What about this?
What about this all day?
And then the client seeing it and the client wanting changes and the client saying, actually you shows the, this is the wrong website.
Major deals like that.
And then you finally watch the final product and you go, that isn't even in the same universe as what I had in my head.
That's not even close.
And TV can be like that too.
I remember I sent a pilot back and forth so many times to the client that I looked at it and I was reading it and I realized not one sentence in this entire pilot is a sentence I wrote from scratch.
And so when they finally rejected, I go, good.
I didn't want to do this either.
It wasn't my show anymore.
It was your show.
So, we make these viral videos, and they do well, and then I meet up with this guy, these guys, uh, Defcon?
Something like that?
I can't believe I'm forgetting their name.
And that was Sebastian Eldridge, the guy I ended up starting the ad agency with.
We said, okay, let's become TV guys.
We did a documentary about Netflix, where we stayed up for five days.
I lost my mind.
And Netflix saw it and said, we don't want anything to do with this.
You can have it.
And we go, okay, you know I'm holding a mic that says Netflix the entire time, right?
But, uh, so that got, that's somewhere in the toilet somewhere, another one of my many failures.
That's called a million in the morning.
Cause that was from a quote where I was, I think I was high and I was just saying, it's what, it's about a million in the morning right now.
And, uh, that was the movie watching World Championships.
They watched movies for five days straight.
Non-stop.
Two people finished it.
Some weird guy from Bangladesh.
No, Sri Lankan.
And then some crazy German.
But they cheated.
They were on Adderall.
Well, I don't know about the Sri Lankan, but the German was on Adderall and her contention was, well, it's, um, that's my prescription.
So it's a drug I need.
So it's like a diabetic.
I have the right to do this.
And the judges went, okay, I'm not going to argue with that.
Anyway, that's when I sort of had a, the vice days was sort of half-assed and it was a thing on the back burner.
And then after a million in the morning, I had nothing else to do but TV, and so I said, let's go full bore with this.
And part of the reason for that enthusiasm, too, was this guy, Jimmy Miller, Dennis Miller's brother, Jimmy Miller.
He's a big manager in comedy.
He does Will Ferrell, Jim Carrey, huge guy.
And he saw Sophie Can Walk, and he liked it.
He said, come down.
He's a big alpha dude, this guy.
He says, come down to LA.
I want to meet you, faggot.
That kind of guy, you know what I mean?
Like Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, but funny.
He flies me to L.A., and you get business class and stuff when rich people want to meet you.
That's fun.
Because the best part of L.A.
is if you can get a really late-night flight, then you just party until you're hammered, and then you sleep on the plane the whole time.
And if it's a business class, well, now it's almost as nice as my bed.
One time, Sebastian and I were in a rush.
I've probably told you this story before, but we were in a rush to catch the plane and we thought, we gotta get hammered.
Because when you're hammered, coach becomes first class.
And we gotta get hammered, we gotta get makers in us.
So we run to the bar and we go, two makers on the rocks!
And the guy goes, relax.
He's shaking a drink.
And I think, what the hell?
What are you making?
And he goes, none of your business, sir.
Just be patient.
Oh, for crying out loud.
And then I see him pour it out.
It's like blue barf.
And it's two guys that are sitting there, and they smile at me.
And they have a large water.
And they also just got, and by the way, it cost me maybe two drinks, because it took about ten minutes for the bartender to make this.
I'm at the airport now.
This is JFK.
And they smile at me, and I look over, aghast.
And, uh, there were two blackberry margaritas.
That's right.
A margarita's not girly enough for me.
I need it to be mushed into mushed blackberries with crushed ice.
I need a blueberry smoothie, by the way!
And then I look, what this made me even madder, I look next to these, and I'm not even going to call them fags, because gays don't do that.
The gays would be with me, trying to slam a Makers.
So, homosexual has, was an insult in the 70s and 80s maybe, but now beta males are way more gay than gays.
Now a gay calling them a fag would be a compliment.
I'd be masculinizing them.
And woman!
I couldn't even call him a chick, because guess who was sitting next to these guys?
A woman with a big glass of Stella Artois, which is Budweiser in the Netherlands.
It's a blue-collar beer over there.
And it tastes great.
It's not even a fruity beer, you know what I mean?
She wasn't having a pumpkin ale or something, or a Corona.
A Stella, I would count as a man's beer.
Anyway, so we pile down these drinks.
We have to get doubles.
No ice.
I'm not messing around here.
I need this gasoline down my gullet so I can sleep on the plane.
And, uh, I look at the guys and I want to fight them.
And one fun thing to do to insult people without getting beat up is you become a foreigner.
Like say, you know those black guys who dance in the subway and they go on the polls?
You want to say to them, hey guys, that's what strippers do.
You're a really talented stripper.
You're going to get in a fight with 12 young black men and the odds are pretty low you're going to win.
Unless it's a movie.
You're not going to beat teenage boys.
So, but you could go up to him and go, excuse me, I'm a bit confused here.
I'm just in Fee Scotland.
And is this, is this stripper pole?
Is this what, my understanding is that strippers do similar dances.
Is this like an homage to stripper culture?
I'm not, I don't understand.
And then they can go like, no man, this is called beatboxing super rap breakdancing.
It's a, it's a sport that's part of street culture.
And you go, oh, I'm sorry.
Okay.
That's fascinating.
And now you've planted the seed.
And then that night, the guy's gonna be looking in the mirror and he's gonna go, wait a minute.
We are just strippers.
We're doing what strippers do.
And not similar to strippers.
It's actually exactly what strippers do.
We're swirling the pole and slowly going down it from the top to the bottom.
The only thing we're doing is not showing our vaginas.
So I go up to the margarita guys and I go, uh, excuse me!
I'm a bit confused here.
Am I um...
You guys are having blackberry margaritas.
And the foreigner thing works too well.
They like talking to this Scottish guy.
I had a tartan blazer on at the time too, so it really, my character was well formed.
And they go, yeah.
And I go, and she's got a beer.
And then they see the one with Estelle and they go, oh yeah, yes she does.
And they go, and you drink, and you have a water with your blackberry margaritas.
And they go, hey, I know, right?
And then one of them sort of leans over the other one and goes, not normal!
And then the other guy goes, it's kind of a tradition of ours.
Now I want to stab them.
Now I want to just, if I had, I'm glad it's not legal to carry a knife at the airport, because I just wanted to just slit both their necks, just watch the jugglers just spill all over their suits.
So I was mad that my little character was coming across as too benign.
So I just, as I walked away I go, DID YOU GET A FUCKING SPRAY TAN TOO?!
Just to establish here that I'm Trojan Horsing an insult and you're liking the Trojan Horse too much.
So I had to jump out and stab a little.
And then we got to the gate and we went and we go to meet Jimmy Miller.
And I'm wearing my tartan suit and he walks in, bald guy, he looks like Dennis Miller.
I actually didn't know he was Dennis Miller's brother for the longest time and I used to say, you look like a bald Dennis Miller.
Which he would say, what a weird thing to say.
Like he'd look at me weird and I thought, I think it's pretty astute.
And then I found out later, yeah of course he looks like Dennis Miller, it's his brother!
So he walks into the board meeting and there's this guy Sam that we used to work with.
I forget his last name.
And he sort of has a strut to him.
And he goes, look at this guy.
And I'm just sitting in my chair smiling.
He goes, I bet this guy's got big fucking balls.
And he walks over.
I can't even remember if he grabbed my balls or not.
But he went over and he looked, and my balls did look pretty good in that suit.
I mean, I have a very large genitalia.
And in a tight suit, you can see the contours of all the details.
And by the way, a little off topic here.
And I'm talking about this with Roaming Millennial on Monday.
This is the world of big money business.
They talk about your balls.
They mighty grab your balls.
And these women come in, and imagine you walked in a room and said, look at those tits.
Now that's a pair of fucking tits.
She would have a conniption.
But it's not, like you're not supposed to be a victim.
You go, yep, these are my tits.
What do you think?
Now, I'm sure there are women who are like that.
They tend to be lesbians.
Barbara Corcoran comes to mind.
She's not a lesbian.
But I bet she could go like, yeah, they're the best tits you'll ever see, and you'll never even get a glimpse of them.
You'll have to live with that, Jimmy.
That would be the normal return, and he would appreciate that and go, ha ha ha, we'll see.
One day.
Maybe your husband will have an accident.
Maybe he'll have a problem with the brake cables.
Uh, that's all normal alpha joking.
So, Jimmy and I get along great.
And, uh, he introduces me to Will Ferrell.
Went to a Yankees game with Will.
Right behind the plate.
I think I got drunk and ruined it.
We weren't friends.
I didn't get a ride in the limo back.
I think that's an indication that you, uh, you weren't cool to hang out with.
I remember, being a celebrity sucks.
Now, I'm a little bit famous and it's really annoying, but if you're as famous as Will Ferrell, I mean, everyone's staring at you.
You're like a burn victim.
The head of City, we were at Yankee Stadium, the head of Yankee Stadium comes over and asks, hey, can you just wave to the camera and do a little promo and say hi, I'm at Yankee Stadium?
And Will doesn't want to do that.
Plus, that's a commercial.
You got to pay him like a million bucks to do that, lady.
And he goes, I'd rather not.
And then she goes, oh.
And they were showing that movie, Lost.
Lost Earth, whatever, Lost World, that movie where they go back in time.
It's, remember Chaka, the little monster kid?
It's Land of the Lost.
They were showing the movie Land of the Lost.
And she doesn't take no for an answer.
And she goes, well, we're actually showing promos for Land of the Lost.
And we're doing that for free, and that's a lot of people here.
So I think it'd be fair to just do a little promo.
And he goes, well, I'd rather not do that, thank you.
And he's not even talking to the, she's not talking to the manager.
She's just going right up to Will Ferrell.
And then people are buying him beers.
I had one good joke, I go, you make all these people laugh, you bring so much joy to the world, and they reward you with one beer?
That's disgusting.
And, you know, he went with it and said, unbelievable, pathetic.
A beer's what, eight bucks?
You're paying me eight dollars for all this joy and merriment I bring you?
I throw, I do a little name dropping in this, in these stories to, to keep you interested.
So, the number of shows... Oh my god.
I can't even tell you.
I mean, I was looking at these files, and there's... We did one show... The first show was The Aging Hipster, it was called, and it was about a guy who made a bunch of money in media, and his wife has beautifully evolved into the upper middle class, whatever, and she's a happy New Yorker on the Upper East Side, but the man with the money still wants to be cool with the kids, and he's hanging out with people half his age, and it's frustrating, and...
Basically my life.
We didn't shoot that, we wrote that for Comedy Central.
Dazzled in the room.
Killer Comedy was there at the time.
Oh yeah, the Killer Comedy, what did I call her again?
Lauren Correo?
She got fired, I believe.
And the thing they do in TV networks is they want a clean house when they fire someone.
So they fire everyone remotely associated with that person and all those projects get washed down the drain too.
That's the thing about pilots.
Half the time you get a no at the very end, it's got nothing to do with the pilot.
It's a terrible industry.
It's totally disorganized.
I did a pilot for what became Al Jazeera.
It used to be called Current TV.
I did a pilot called The Immersionist.
I think it's on Vimeo.
And it was about me submerging myself into subculture.
So I wouldn't just go there and say, what's going on here?
I would live with them, hang out with them, become one of them.
And I did it with the sailing gang.
I did it with the bikers.
And there was a new guy who had some hippie name after he took over right before it was Al Jazeera.
It's incredible that it became Al Jazeera, isn't it?
It's run by the most wealthy family in Qatar, with a guy whose name is, like, seven names.
Mohammed bin Hamad bin Lajjad bin Marab Mahad.
I'm not exaggerating.
It's at least seven names.
He took over Al Gore's network.
But I talked to the guy.
His name was, like, Ocean.
And I go, what happened to my show, The Immersionist?
And he goes, I saw it.
I thought it was brilliant.
I loved it.
And I asked, what happened to that show?
And they go, we lost it.
That's why my pilot was killed.
Someone lost it.
So they didn't want to say we lost it, so they just said, um, we're not doing it.
Meanwhile, I have another copy.
It's digital.
I could have sent you a new copy.
But yeah, so that was a typical example of the show we would pitch.
And sometimes we would come up with ideas while we were pitching for a better show.
Like Sam and I at Jimmy Miller's company were obsessed with this idea, Quado.
And it would be Michael Cera, kind of a wimpy guy.
Remember in True Lies?
Or was it?
No, not True Lies.
Maybe it was True Lies.
The word Quado comes out of Marshall Baldwin's stomach.
Quattro, Q-U-A-T-O.
What if that was a guy who just regularly lived there in this sort of hipster kid's body, and he had a smoking problem, and he had ex-girlfriends, and he had debts he had to solve, and gambling debts, and then Michael Cera guy was always like, oh no, we're gonna get in a fight again.
But sometimes he would help Michael and, you know, give him the balls to stand up for himself.
It's sort of like every man's personality, right?
Sometimes we're weak and soft, and then other times, after a whiskey, of course, we're ballsy and don't- No, no, I'm not doing that!
By the way, back to women in the workforce, if a man wanted to have sex with me and it was going to protect my job, I would say, I'm looking for a new job!
The idea of lying under someone and letting them penetrate me, or having them penetrate my head, my face, for- to grease the wheels of my career?
I don't want to be in that career, thank you.
Hey, I got a good deal.
You're a welder.
You're gonna be working on this skyscraper.
Only thing is, you're kind of expected to blow the foreman.
Uh, no.
I'm not doing that.
Now, I'm not saying that women should be prostitutes if they want to be in business, but I don't know.
It's not working, is it, ladies?
So, shot that show down the tubes.
I wrote a great show for Adult Swim with Jay Johnson, who's the funniest man in the world.
Look up Jay Johnson.
It's illegal that he's not more famous.
He should be running everything in comedy.
But comedy's not a meritocracy.
The funniest guys are not at the top.
So Jay and I wrote a pilot called The Two Bennys, we did for Nick Wedenfeld at Adult Swim, who wears scarves a lot and is seen as cool to a lot of nerds.
I think he ended up going to do an Adult Swim type of thing for Fox that I don't think ever materialized.
But he made a lot of money.
A lot of these big players, like Charlie Corwin was a guy I worked with.
You know, these guys would just sort of come up with some ideas.
They worked.
I'm not saying they didn't work hard, but some of these, the guys who actually just work with the creative people and say, go pitch that and say yes, and then hire this guy, but don't actually make anything.
They're loaded.
I'm not disparaging Corwin, by the way.
That's the position that he filled.
But, uh, and he works his ass off, but.
Um, yeah, the writers, they don't make money.
And the funny thing, too, about the TV thing, and this is why I wanted to talk about it today, I'd come back to New York and I wouldn't tell anyone because it's not impressive.
What do you do?
Oh, I write pilots for the garbage.
Oh, so you work for the garbage.
Yes, I'm a garbage man.
I would just have these 15 spinning plates at all times pitching different shows simultaneously.
And, uh, L.A.
moves so slow that one of them would take.
Sometimes they'd overlap.
Like one time, I pitched a show to IFC to some girl.
Oh my God, she was so insanely hot.
I couldn't look at her.
You know when Irish people look Asian?
Like Evangeline Lilly from Lost.
They have kind of chinky eyes.
I'm using now a racial epithet in a comedic context.
That's my cup of tea.
I really like that.
So she was there, and the guy from The Whitest Kids You Know was... I was always attached to some celebrity.
They're good to have at meetings, but they would get bored and leave.
So there was David Cross, there was Knoxville, and this time it was this guy.
I forget his name.
Max, I think.
So we go in there and we pitch a travel show.
And they're into it.
Usually, you sort of find out what they're looking for.
That's another thing about TV, by the way.
If you have the greatest show in the world, but they're looking for a cowboy show, the answer is no.
If you have a crappy cowboy pitch, and they're looking for a cowboy show, you're probably going to get a yes.
So there's so much variables, and they have nothing to do.
There's so many variables, and they have nothing to do with making a good TV show.
So in this case, I can't remember how I heard this, but I always wanted to do a sketch show.
Because I'm good at making comedy sketches.
But there's no market for that.
They don't do well.
And there's mad TV, and that's about it.
So no one was interested in the sketch show.
They always want low-budget things with cheap actors.
Travel shows are great because the actors are the people in the place you're traveling to and you don't need to pay anyone.
And if you're funny, just be funny in Kuala Lumpur.
I hate traveling, by the way.
I've lived all over the world.
The reason I say the West is the best is because I've been elsewhere.
I hate everywhere but the West.
And even within the West, I'm not a fan of Germany.
I don't like the way Portuguese sounds.
Anyway.
I hate the way Northern Europeans, like Scandinavians, will wear those little puma shoes that barely have any treads and they look like ballerina shoes with a little puma on the side.
And then they have their hair teased like they're in Kajagoogoo with their blonde bangs going over their eyes.
These are men.
And then they'll have that soccer zip-up hoodie zipped right up like a turtleneck.
And then their stress denim that's slightly torn with articulated knees.
And then maybe, like, striped orange socks.
Oh, God.
Hey white supremacists, you want to live in a world that's only white?
Get ready for a lot of teased bangs.
I don't know.
Multiculturalism, for all its faults, it leads-- it keeps us-- it stops us from turning into weird homo backup dancers from the '80s.
So, uh, we sh-- we sh-- shot the show-- I forgot what I was talking about.
We, uh, uh, oh yeah, the travel show with IFC.
So that was going to be, you know, dirt cheap.
And then I thought I was talking to IFC and they were talking about getting, no one has a budget.
This is up to like 2010 now, 2011.
And, I'm hearing about these budgets.
By the way, the head of programming at IFC, Dan Polanyk or something like that, I looked up his resume and it was, I wrote this pilot, I shot this pilot, I wrote this pilot.
None of it had aired.
Like in TV, my terrible career that was for the garbage was considered pretty darn successful.
Oh, you've written 12 pilots for networks?
You're a star.
Have any of them aired?
No.
It's weird telling your dad on the phone, too.
So what are you doing?
What's going on now?
Well, Dad, I got a pilot.
Comedy Central.
Oh, great.
And what do you do?
Well, I'm just writing it.
It hasn't been okayed.
Oh.
So, what will happen if it's not okayed?
It will get thrown away.
Can you sell it elsewhere?
Well, no.
Someone will have to buy it from me.
Buy it from them, because they paid for it, so it's their property.
So where does it go?
It just sits in a digital vault somewhere in sort of space.
So you write for the ether?
Yeah.
Congratulations.
My son works for a nebulous cloud that can't be touched.
So, travel at the time, I was working with Michael Hirshhorn, who I had on my old show, great guy.
He goes, let's do a show called America on $0 a day.
And then I go, okay, but I'm working with IFC now.
And then we both go, it's taking them, it's gonna take a year.
Why don't we do both and assume that one of them's not going to hit?
Kind of a sketchy deal.
Kind of immoral.
Kind of dirty pool.
But my agent at CAA ratted me out, Greg Kavik.
I think he told IFC that I was doing this, working behind their backs as they were developing a deal.
By the way, developing a deal takes months and months and a year.
Takes a year!
One time back in my early days with David Cross, I go, what is this about?
And they go, well, they're mad that David doesn't want to appear in it.
And I go, I call him, Dave, can you just appear in like some of the episode?
Yeah.
Okay.
I called him.
He says fine.
He'll be in some of them.
And they go, okay.
Now that was me on the phone for 10 minutes in the world of LA lawyers who want to make their money.
That was like a two month back and forth.
Why can't we all just sit in a big room and hammer it out in one day for crying out loud?
So, back when I was naive about all this, I said, let me see the contract.
I'll do it!
So they sent me the contract, and it was written in Chinese.
I did not understand one sentence.
Heretofore, the witness shall therein be, and from heretofore referred to as, Exhibit A. Exhibit A will then, under the property, will take back those rights, wherein to, they will write up to, subjugated in perpetuity of, and I said, alright, back to work guys.
Sorry, I can't help out here.
So I figure, let's just let these spinning plates spin.
And so I do this show, America on $0 a day, where I just walk outside my front door, hitchhike, and I travel America on absolutely nothing.
And it was easy.
I'd get a job washing dishes.
I'd make 40, 50 bucks.
I'd go out, get drunk, stay at a hostel, or sleep on a bench.
This was in the summer.
And then hitchhike.
Now I had cameras with me and stuff, so people would be more inclined.
Like I'd bet some lady I could beat her at a slut car race, and if I win I get to stay at her bed and breakfast, that kind of thing.
Great show.
It gets cancelled, of course, because that's the way it is.
Travel, by the way, this is, this is, you can go right up to, like, I shot the upfronts.
I'm like, hi, I'm traveling on zero dollars a day and I throw my wallet in the garbage and travel, the sign travels behind me and Anthony Bourdain is there saying, hi, I'm Anthony Bourdain, I have a show too.
And we have a big dinner and I'm sitting next to the head of programming for travel and everyone's so thrilled.
Oh, you're going to be a new thing.
People are going to travel on zero dollars a day and then become a hashtag.
This was before hashtags.
And then, you know, it'll be a whole cultural phenomenon.
You'll invent a whole new thing.
The Hobo Traveler.
It's going to be awesome.
Yay!
Crusty Punks.
And then just one day, no, it's over.
Oh.
That guy, the head of programming, he was the laughing stock back in, I think, 2000, because he bet all his money on some loser named Zach Galifianakis.
And he said, Zach is a genius, and he's going to be huge.
And he gave him a show.
Back then, he would wear this sort of Peruvian hat with the ear flaps.
And the show didn't do well.
And then everyone said, see, dummy?
You're a loser.
Zach sucks.
And then a couple years went by, and Zach became the biggest thing since sliced bread, and all of a sudden everyone went back to that guy and said, oh, actually, you are smart.
Sorry.
And so he became head of programming at Travel.
But I don't know if he's still there.
He's the guy who invented the puppy bowl at MTV.
He said, look, everyone's watching the Super Bowl.
Women who don't like football want something on in the kitchen.
Let's make puppies have a Super Bowl.
They said, you're an idiot.
That's insane.
Again, biggest thing since sliced bread.
So then I went back to IFC, and I was persona non grata.
Exed forever.
Bridge burned.
Poop.
I also wrote a show with Jay Johnson called The Two Bennys, and it was an update of the Benny Hill Show, but there was two.
Me and him.
It was so funny.
I have all these PDFs I can send you.
But, uh... A typical example of a sketch was a guy's Benny Hill is looking at a girl, and I do this sometimes.
If I'm looking at someone, and I usually start with the shoes, because if you're wearing platform flip-flops, then we can't be together.
So I start with the shoes, see if those pass, then I work up, look at the boobs, whatever, then I look at the face, and sometimes I'll be not happy with the face.
I have a very particular type.
So, as she leaves, when she's behind me, I'll go... Or something.
And then the joke was, her twin sister is ten feet behind her and sees me doing that to essentially her face.
So they come by and they start hitting me with purses.
But in our version of it, instead of him going... They beat him and beat him with purses until he's just jammed.
And you just see like bones and an eyeball and guts everywhere.
So it was like...
Benny Hill in super overdrive.
I thought it was hilarious.
And you know what?
Working with Jay Johnson was such an honor.
I remember one time we were in a bar.
We did most of the writing in a bar, and we'd just write bits, and then I would type them out into Final Draft.
But he would... I said some joke, and he just stares at me.
And I go, what?
You didn't like that?
And he keeps staring.
And I go, you didn't think that was funny?
And then he looks at me and he goes, let's put it this way.
Did you think that was funny?
I don't know.
That really stuck with me.
It's such a good insult.
But yeah, so, Two Bennys, Aging Hipster, we did a show, I did a show for, I did a bunch of pilots for FX.
And there's two guys that run FX.
FX is a professional operation, I gotta say.
I talk about how incompetent everyone is in the top brass, but these guys forget their names.
But if you're in their meeting, you're good.
And I pitched them Vice TV, and then later I said, look, I've been here, what, 20 times over the past 10 years?
You have to take my show.
OK.
So that show was based on a Warren Beatty movie where he's a hairdresser and he's straight and he bangs all these chicks.
So ours was these three guys who want to get laid so they open a hairdressing salon and they go to the schools and they learn how to become hairdressers.
And it's just three dudes out meeting chicks.
I think it was hilarious.
They get into all sorts of trouble and, uh, uh, that bombed.
But again, these are all 40 grand.
So you do two or three in a year, you got 120 grand in your pocket.
That's a great salary.
So you're making $120,000 a year for the garbage.
I know, it's bizarre.
And it's so inefficient.
Like, how about I write, I think, actually I think the way it is now is you have to have written the pilot and shot a teaser, a seven minute teaser, because shooting has become so cheap now.
You don't need movie cameras.
So now it's become streamlined, but this was back in the early 2000s, 2010, back when it was basically the 1970s record business and they were all looking for their next kiss.
And by the way, going over this, I realized there was entire times I didn't, I forgot happened.
Like, I did this with Charlie Corwin, me and Scott Campbell, this tattooist.
We did a show called Mama Tried about a tattoo shop.
And by the way, when we started this, Charlie goes, I want to do it about the art business.
Read these books.
I read three books about it.
And then he goes, nah, I don't want to do that.
Let's do like do's and don'ts stuff.
OK?
No, I don't want to do that.
So much gets turfed even before you get to the pitch.
But we did pitch the show called Mama Tried about a tattoo shop called Mama Tried, and this guy, he's an ex-junkie, and he's clean, but he starts getting in over his head because his tattoo shop's going under.
We're moving up the ladder.
I mean, we're meeting other people, and we're pitching it, and then I met this guy, Jim O'Doherty, I think his name was.
He did the Tracy Morgan Show, and our pitch was insane!
Like, we had a beatbox in it, where we play the theme song from the show.
We had got a band to record, and we have special effects, like bloop, bloop, bloop.
We're pitching it, and then he's done all these 90s sitcoms, and then we pitch it to FX, and it was amazing, and then FX calls after, and they go, Why don't you just pitch us a 90s sitcom?
That's not you.
I'm trying to sell out, guys.
I thought you'd like that.
No, no.
No, we don't want to do that.
And then-- so here was sort of my last kick at the can.
I did a show called Man vs. Myth for Discovery UK.
Flew out to London a few times and they were interested.
By now I've been doing this for so long that when they ask for samples or they ask for ideas, I have the 15 pilots I've written and a hundred ideas.
Like, I don't like traveling.
I like youth subculture.
I wanted to hang out with the Mexican Morrissey heads and do a fun little sort of Louis Theroux look at those guys.
Maybe get drunk with them or something.
That was my idea of interesting.
Or, you know, finding out who's the coolest person in the world.
You have to define cool first and then you have to go find him.
It might be Josh Homie, the guy from Queens of the Stone Age.
I've been through this for hours and hours examining it.
That could be a whole other podcast.
So we come up with this idea, man versus myth.
And I beat out some other contestants.
It's funny, this is going to sound crazy, but going to London and competing to be the host of this show, everyone in England is so ugly that I'm basically not Brad Pitt, but I'm breathtakingly gorgeous in London.
In Scotland, oh my god, I'm a freak.
I'm like, I'm Tom Hardy in Scotland.
And I think it's because the Vikings came.
And they raped and pillaged and they stole all the beautiful women.
So you go to Scandinavia and every... a 10 is ugly and you go walk through the streets of Glasgow and it looks like a Mad Magazine comic.
I mean, everyone is hideous.
They look like a... what's his name?
Basil Wolverton cartoon.
So I won easy-peasy in London for the host because I'm obviously incredibly tall at 5'11", broad-shouldered and in great shape.
I don't have a nine-month pregnant beer belly and I have all my teeth.
Wow, this guy's a looker.
And so, we shot episodes.
Man vs. Myth.
The first one was Lie Detectors, which I met our buddy Doug, who I've had on the show a few times.
I'm blanking on his last name.
Great guy.
He wrote a book called Insidious Orwellian Machines.
I wrote an article about him.
He went to jail for two years for simply pointing out that polygraphs are complete BS.
And it's amazing how mainstream it still is, this scam.
It's a Ouija board.
It's not even sort of true.
They wrap you in wires, and they put stuff on your finger, and they sit you on a butt pad, and they put Velcro around your waist to intimidate you so you'll get nervous and spill the beans.
And it sounds so funny when I hear people go, she's actually agreed to take a polygraph.
Ooh, you've agreed to use a Ouija board.
I'm so scared.
Still, to this day, you hear about it all the time.
And it ends arguments.
Amy Schumer stole jokes.
I'll take a polygraph that I didn't steal jokes.
Oh, OK.
Well, we're dropping it.
You want to take a polygraph?
I'm so scared of you!
What's his name?
Doug Williams.
Sorry, Doug.
I've talked to this guy for a hundred hours.
There's something weird about being on a mic where names just vanish.
I could forget Dave Kast's name, my producer.
So I beat it three times.
And it was so easy.
You just, what you do is you tell the guy a lie.
Like I, the lie was I was cheating on my wife.
And we tell him something that's true.
I sometimes, back then I would look at my wife's texts.
I don't dare do it anymore because I don't want to see bad stuff about myself.
But back then I would read my wife's text secretly.
That's true, not having an affair.
We told him the opposite.
We said he's having an affair, he doesn't read his text.
And lo and behold, The polygraph guy discovers whatever you tell him is secretly going on.
Like, I could say, uh, I was in Afghanistan, but I'm, I don't like talking about it, so I always lie about it.
The lie detector, someone else will plant that in the lie detector guy's head, he'll go through his sheets, and he'll discover, oh, yes, he was in Afghanistan.
You can make them say anything!
It's completely fraudulent, yet Doug Williams goes to jail for two years for pointing it out.
He's out now, by the way.
Old man, too.
75 to 77 in prison is a lot longer than 40 to 42.
You're eating crap food when you're an old, weak man.
You're eating just swill.
And by the end, you could only eat from the commissary.
And it wasn't minimum security.
I couldn't send him stuff.
I wanted to send him, like, Rubik's Cube-type stuff to kill time, but I wasn't allowed.
And then the other one we shot was escaping from tracking dogs.
Also, easy peasy.
There's so many things.
You run along a fence.
You jump over the fence.
Run along the other side.
Jump back over the fence.
Meanwhile, getting a dog over a fence is a big deal.
So just jump back and forth over a fence a few times.
You're good.
Or run in a direction for a long time that goes to a river.
Then throw like a sock of yours or something over the river into the bushes.
Then get in the river and go upstream in the opposite direction.
Maybe for a quarter mile and then go back on the trail.
The dogs and the hunters are going to keep going in that direction you were originally and lose the scent.
Hop from tree to tree.
There's a million things you can do.
We did that.
We're shooting that.
Now this is around when, and by the way, I was, I was do this with this guy, Sebastian, and it was fun.
We would go down, he would get 10% and we would razzle and dazzle him.
We always got a yes.
Always.
I mean, there's seven networks.
They know you by now.
You just dazzle them.
And you get a yes.
Oh, by the way, another reason these pilots bomb is, you come back, you're ready to submit it, and they make you spend a couple months writing it, even though you could do it in 20 minutes.
When you come back, no one is there from the original cast.
They're all gone.
And so they go, who are you?
And you go, uh, I'm your client.
You made me write a pilot.
Oh, we don't want it.
OK.
Well, can I pitch you a new show?
New group?
Who wants new shows?
So, uh, um, we pitched this show, uh, uh, yeah, sorry, Man vs. Myth with Discovery, and we did that, and this is when my, uh, article came out on Thought Catalog.
Thought Catalog is this, is this website, it's, it was like Huffington Post or something, but it's all sort of, uh, new concepts, right?
Thought Catalog.
It's brain games, like, I don't think we should eat food!
Or sleep is a myth, or just outside of the box.
But of course, because it's millennials who are incapable of counterintuitive thought, the only time they could think outside the box was anti-white male patriarchy stuff.
So, um, uh, work is rape.
Capitalism should be abolished.
All those kind of crazy, kooky thoughts.
Men are better at home than women.
Men aren't funny.
That kind of stuff.
So I would do the opposite.
And I did an article, short hair is rape.
Yeah, you heard me.
Because if you're having sex with a woman from behind and you look down and she has short hair, it looks like a 12-year-old boy.
So you just switched yourself out with a 12-year-old boy.
That's rape.
Now obviously you don't want someone prosecuted, but it's just a dumb sort of... It's like when Taylor Swift... When Jonathan Swift said the Irish should eat their babies because of the population.
It's satire with a point.
Um, so that was, that made them apoplectic.
And then, and by them I mean the readers.
And this guy, Chris, who runs it, he was a noble dude, like he wanted to have people thinking outside the box, but it wasn't working.
Uh, oh shoot, we gotta be on the, we gotta get on the train soon there, Dave.
But anyway, um, I'll wrap it up shortly.
But, uh, uh, I wrote an article called, uh, Transphobia is Perfectly Natural.
And that was, um, that was true.
I said, you're not a woman, you're a mentally ill gay.
Something I still stand by.
I kind of enjoyed that controversy, because it was something I believe.
With all this, like, you're a Nazi stuff now, it's, it's tedious, because someone's mad at you for something you don't believe.
So you're like, what quote are you talking about?
Yeah, I'll explain it, blah, blah, blah.
But back with, uh, trans people are just mentally ill gays.
I'm like, let's discuss!
You got the right guy!
You were right, I did say that.
I do not believe that a woman is something you can just accrue.
But anyway, while that controversy was going, the company who owns Discovery said, uh, no.
You're fired.
The whole show is cancelled.
And I've told this story a million times, but I'll never forget the sound guy.
He was a local sound guy.
And I just saw him piling up the milk crates of his equipment back in his truck.
He was fired because the host of the show he was shooting doesn't think that trannies are actually women.
He thinks they're dudes dressing up as women.
And you're not allowed to record the sound For a show where the host's beliefs include that belief.
Can you believe that?
I mean, he looked like a deer in the headlights, and I totally understand it.
Understand his confusion, I should say.
It's insanity.
And by then, I was sort of like, you know what?
It's kind of good that I'm a pariah, because I'm sick of this business.
I love attention.
I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to write a poem, so I wrote out a bunch of words that rhymed, and then I showed it to my mom before writing the poem.
I go, mom, mom, mom, check it out.
These are the words I'm going to use for a poem.
And then I'll just assemble those.
And she's like, that's nice, dear.
But that's not impressive.
Write the actual poem first.
And I go, I will, I will.
I just want you to see that.
Like, I want everything I do to get out there.
And shooting all these pilots, it wasn't legal for me to release them, because the person who bought them owned them.
In fact, I ended up using some of them for pranks.
Like, I had one where, well, this wasn't for a TV pilot, but I was, you know that, like, that saying, uh, who pissed in your cornflakes?
Uh, I actually pissed in cornflakes and ate them.
And it burns your tongue like acid.
Um, and I was grumpy after.
So the colloquialism makes sense.
I did that because I noticed, I did a card trick once, you can find it online, it's called like street card and street magic, and I put a card in a condom up my butt.
And then I was doing street magic with tourists and I pretend I can't find the card and I go, oh wait!
And then I pull it out and go, is this your card?
And it was your card because the entire deck was the same, it was an ace of spades.
Trick deck.
And I noticed I was grumpy when I had that card up my ass and the saying what's up your ass makes sense So I pissed in the cornflakes that makes sense, but I couldn't use it So then I went I said I had some challenge out like if you can find me doing this wrong I'll eat a bowl of pissed cornflakes And then I made up someone catching me and then I had to eat them and Gawker and all these lefty blogs They absolutely gobbled it up.
They loved it the way it happened Ha ha!
Cell phone!
You loser.
And they took the bait.
I did it again with the immersionist.
There was a scene where I fought this giant MMA dude in the ring and he knocked me out twice in one fight.
And so that footage just sitting there.
I can't show it.
So I can't show the pilot.
So I put out this challenge to say, I will fight anyone in America.
And then I pretend that that giant Chinese MMA guy said, fight me.
My name's Meatball or Meathead.
Yeah, Meathead was his nickname.
And I go, no problem.
I'm flying down to Oakland tomorrow.
And I'd like blogged it and stuff as I was heading down to this fight that had already happened.
And he beats me up.
And then, of course, Gawker and everyone goes, too sweet.
Gavin gets owned.
That's more fun to me.
Doing stuff.
Getting it out there.
Money's not really been a driving force.
I want to influence society.
I feel like my voice is relevant.
And if you feel that way, then don't go with the gatekeepers and ask them permission.
If you don't feel that way, then don't.
If you don't feel like your voice is crucial, maybe it's not, and that's not a big deal.
If you just want to weld, weld!
We've been lied to by society that we have to be creative, and we have to get your voice heard.
You should have a podcast.
You've got to talk.
No, you don't.
And there's nothing wrong with that at all.
Every career is equally valid.
In fact, I think evolution... I say God, you say nature.
I think nature has certain talents.
LeBron James was meant to play basketball.
Shaquille O'Neal was born to play basketball.
He's really, really good at it.
Christopher Hitchens was born to debate.
Christopher Hitchens shouldn't play basketball.
Shaquille O'Neal can't debate.
Anyway, I think my voice is relevant, and I think I have a lot to impart.
And one of the things I want to impart on CRTV is that I waited too long to have kids.
I had poo-pooed the post-cool phase and thought, I'm going to be cool forever.
I'm going to be a party guy.
I'm going to do Coke when I'm 40 and never have a chick, never have kids.
And that was stupid.
I'm not disparaging the party years, as I discuss in my book, Death of Cool.
That was, uh, uh, I could have cut that off around thirty.
Thirty-two.
I didn't have to wait till my late thirties to have a kid.
And I certainly wish I had my youngest, Johnny, when I was ten years younger.
I can't even chase the guy.
And he wants to be chased.
Kids want monsters to chase them.
And don't do it before bed, by the way.
They get too amped up and then they won't sleep.
So what I want to impart is all this smashing the patriarchy, all this old people suck, all this don't have kids, all this America sucks, all this traditionalism sucks stuff is BS.
Give it a chance.
You don't have to do it.
Women don't have to stay at home.
But the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
Now, what has this got to do with TV?
That career was not something I was cut out for.
I clearly wasn't talented enough to make it to the air.
Um, and it was also hiding my message.
Yes, I was writing comedy and fiction and stuff, but my message was still in there.
You know, I was still a family man in these characters, for the most part.
And I still wanted to get my voice heard.
And I was writing for the garbage.
I was writing behind the gatekeepers.
I was asking permission for my work, my creativity, to be seen by others.
And one of the great things about Millennials, yeah, you heard me, is they've circumvented the gatekeeper.
Now, if you want to make a TV show, make it for YouTube.
And eventually, the gatekeepers will come to you, begging.
The privilege of leasing it the way they lease Jackass.
Say you want to write, you write on a blog on your own.
You tweet, whatever.
And then eventually you get followers and they want to read your books.
Now Simon & Schuster's begging.
Milo's making 10 times the money he's making self-publishing than he would have made at Simon & Schuster.
Most books sell about 10,000 copies.
That's the big best-kept secret of publishing.
So if you're gonna sell 10,000 you should keep 50% of the profits yourself.
So, my point is today, that if you feel like you've got an important message that's gonna save the world, don't let the gatekeepers decide how that message goes out and when it goes out.
If you have something you want the world to see, and it's not a message to save the world, it's just something you think is funny, then don't let the gatekeepers tell you how it goes out.
Because I've met these people, and they're not omnipotent.
They're not sentient beings.
They're bureaucrats, they're incompetent, and they're less talented than you.
If you want to know how to do something, just do it yourself.
That's something we learned in punk.
You want to have a show, rent the venue, book the bands yourself.
You're good enough, you're smart enough, and you're not a molester like Al Franken.
No, but seriously folks, that is my moral of today's show, is if you've got something you want to get out there, do it yourself.
Because I wasted tons and tons of hard work and content trying to get a TV show.
