Henry Rollins, a former rock icon turned globetrotter, reveals his chaotic yet disciplined life—traveling solo to 100 countries, including North Korea during Kim Jong Il’s final years and Antarctica in 2015, where he witnessed environmental destruction like broken glass from whale killers on Deception Island. His spoken word tours, spanning 198 countries by the late '80s, blend humor with political critiques, dismissing Trump’s policies as either absurd or self-serving while favoring local activism over systemic change. Fueled by childhood ADHD and a defiance of societal norms—abandoning music after creative burnout, writing 1,000 words weekly across five books, and avoiding drugs—he thrives on solitude, comparing himself to an unstoppable racehorse. Rollins’ relentless work ethic and unconventional path prove that obsession over routine can turn chaos into fulfillment, inspiring Rogan’s admiration for his "contagious motivation." [Automatically generated summary]
And I saw yours, and I think I did like the month after you, so I saw yours on the internet, and then I did one, and he's the host, and that's how I met him.
Yeah Yeah, and that's usually, like, say I'll go to a place like Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for like five days or whatever.
For two days, you get a tour guide, just so you can get the history, like this museum, not that one, this temple, not those two, just whatever.
And what I always try and do in a place like that is get the tour guide and break them.
And I'm like, okay, so tell me about the corruption in your government.
Well, sir, we don't have any.
Ma'am, I'm going to ask you one more time.
And by the afternoon, they finally submit.
I'm like, okay.
And when I was in Mongolia, the woman, by the end of the day, she said, you know what, I called this guy.
He's like this total insurgent rebel guy.
He wants to meet you.
And I'm going to be the translator because he and his guys are starting movements in this country to overthrow the government and he really wants to meet you.
I said, I really want to meet him.
Because they're rebelling against the government who's selling out that country for the titanium, the copper, all the mining.
I think to some Ivanhoe, some Canadian extractive firm.
Anyway, we go like an hour out of town to some spy bar.
Where there's like nobody and you walk and everyone's like, you must be on the up and up.
And I sit at this table with this guy just because I was able to take the tour guide and be like, tell me everything.
And I'll do that for a couple of days and try and get a real understanding of where I am.
And then I just leave the hotel or the tent, whatever I'm staying in, with my camera, my backpack, with some water.
And I just start walking.
I go, well, here's the street.
Look at that slum or that village or that souk or that bazaar.
And I go.
And so far, all ten fingers still work.
And I've been to about a hundred countries in all seven continents.
And the only times I've almost been killed, which was twice, was America.
By comparison, the rest of the world has been very friendly.
In California, a couple of times, nearly stabbed to death, and a guy shot at me and my friend, and he killed my friend but didn't kill me.
And so that was real close.
You know, that's real.
But the rest of the world, by comparison, I was in Pakistan when Bhutto was assassinated.
She was killed in Rawalpindi.
I was in Islamabad, a few miles down the road.
And I was there for a week because the airport shut down.
And I went outside every day.
And no one...
They just asked if I was lost, if I needed help getting back.
They thought I was like a journalist or embassy.
I went, no, I'm just a traveler.
And they said, basically, sorry, you have to see our country in this state.
I'm like, no, I don't get to judge.
And so I've had...
Travel experiences all over the world where I'm met by just amazing generosity and kindness and humility, and it informs kind of how I comport myself.
But that's what I try and do.
I try to live an eventful life.
Like, I work at it.
It's not by chance.
Like, you give me six weeks off or I know I'm clear, I just whip out my high-res GIF file of the map of the world, and I pick one country and go, okay, then I'll just go east from there.
Like China, Mongolia, Bhutan, Tibet, Vietnam, back to LA. And I'll just go do that.
But, you know, it changes everything that you think about everything.
I mean, I think everyone goes through trauma like that in their own way because it taps into everything you've ever done in your life beforehand.
But that was, you know...
Not to be crass, but that was a game changer.
But on the bigger topic of danger, the world is a dangerous place, as you know.
But at the same time, I don't think it's to be feared.
Because then you don't get anything done.
I mean, you live in America.
I live in America.
We're the roughest room I've ever been in.
I mean, we're a coast-to-coast Phillies flyer game.
You know, we are blood and teeth on the ice.
I mean, we are...
Because of freedom.
We're very free.
And people just, you know, walk up and, you know, smack you.
I And I've never been to a country as free as America.
I've been to countries that were way more hectic, like don't get caught outside at night, like, you know, downtown Nairobi or, you know, parts of Russia are kind of scary, just because they're living hard.
But as far as a place where anything can happen, America is like easily the hairiest place I've ever been day to day.
When I was young, I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. And I lived down the road from the National Geographic Museum with a big whale in the front.
And the Smithsonian.
And whenever there was a snow day, my mom, she worked for the government downtown.
I'd get on the bus with her and we'd go downtown.
I'd spend the whole day at the Smithsonian.
Dinosaur bones, astronauts, you know, all that kind of stuff.
It was fascinating.
And my mom would save up her meager pay.
And she would save up for years.
She was like art nut.
So we'd go hit the museums in Italy, go to the museums in France, go to see all the islands in Greece, go to England, see the National Museum, look at Shakespeare and Chaucer's handwriting.
And so by the time I was a little kid, by 11 years old, like fifth grade or thereabouts, I'd been to Greece and Italy and England and different countries.
And so I kind of...
Wanted more of that and when you grow up with National Geographic magazine you look at the pyramids you look at the sinks and you like I want to see that like that doesn't look real and Then eventually I did go to all those places You know I stood in front of the stinks more than once in the the Great Pyramid in Giza It's bigger than you think it's like you kind of just it hypnotizes you stare at it all day.
He's been trying to educate people on Egypt for a long time because he's a scholar when it comes to ancient Egypt, and he's one of those people that's actively trying to kind of rewrite the history of Egypt as far as how far back it goes.
They've got some pretty rock-solid evidence to point to the idea that Egypt is a civilization that was probably very, very advanced many, many, many thousands of years ago, and then some sort of a natural cataclysmic disaster, probably asteroidal impacts or something like that, around 10,000 years ago, sort of reset society and civilization, and then they rebuilt from there with whatever was remained.
Because the Nile, you know, the water's rich with nutrients, so agriculture was huge.
And people lived good lives.
You know, the Nile, it's massive.
There's parts of it that are still like a lake.
And then when you see it, like in northern Uganda, South Sudan, like right when you cross the border, you go across this river, like, you know, Category 5, whitewater roaring.
I Did conventional you know I used to do a lot of rock and roll and rock and roll will get you all over Europe Japan Australia New Zealand Places like that, but it won't get you to Egypt Morocco Tunisia Mongolia necessarily and so in the 90s, you know I'm like anyone else in this business you do every interview and And they say, you're pretty well-traveled.
And I always have to say, well, caveat, I've never been to the African continent.
And then one day I went, well, why not?
And so I did some research.
What do you got to do?
You got to go get a bunch of shots.
Like a lot of them.
Makes you sick for like a whole day.
They put so many vaccines into you.
And so you go to the travel doctor and you show them what countries you're going to.
They go, well, and they just line up syringes.
And they got on either side of me and just like just were just Charlie horsing me in both arms.
And they said, now you're ready to go.
So I just said, well, I'm going to go to Kenya.
I'm going to go to Maasai Mara on the Tanzanian border to see giraffes and zebras and lions and all of that, and the Maasai.
All of that was great.
I went from there to Madagascar.
I just said, Madagascar, you better go.
Because I saw it one day.
I was on a flight from Melbourne or Sydney to Perth, going across Australia, and I was whipping out the map on the airplane magazine.
I said, so there's Madagascar.
I did not know.
I better go.
And it was one of the better trips I ever did.
I was at my office one day, near the end of 1997, I think.
And I know that Black Sabbath is getting back together with the original lineup to do two shows at the Birmingham NEC in England.
So I called Sharon Osbourne.
I said, Sharon, I got this great idea.
I fly out and hang out with Black Sabbath and bro down with a band and go to band practice and have a really good time and you put me on the guest list for the shows and I hang out for free and it's like the best time I've ever had knowing she'd hang up on me and she said let me call him and ask him if that's okay because I already knew Ozzy but I didn't know the rest of the guys and she called me later that day she said oh they think it's fine here's the address just let us know when to expect you so I booked it I booked it around my trip to Africa So I went USA,
London, bus up to Wales where they were practicing.
Taxi, no, no, Ozzy's assistant came and got me.
So I hung out with Sabbath at band practice, me and the band in full band rehearsals, the best.
Watched the shows, the two reunion shows at the soundboard.
And then the next day I flew to Kenya.
And so it was just a good, you know, that was a good chunk of travel.
And I ended up in South Africa after all of that and said to myself, okay, I'm going to come to Africa once a year.
And I just started picking out different chunks of it.
And it just started going.
And that was 20 years ago.
And I've been there, I don't know, like 20 sometimes.
Yeah, he's always been involved in martial arts, and even the way he sort of approached hedonism, I always felt like it was sort of like an applied approach to hedonism.
Like his rock star lifestyle thing, what he was doing, it's almost like, look, not a lot of people get a chance to do this, I'm gonna do it.
Yeah, one time he, when we were working on his book, he said, you know, I go home to Pasadena now and then, where, you know, born and raised, and some of his high school buddies see me, like, well, Dave, you know, must be nice, you know, being David Lee Roth.
And he said, you know what?
On graduation day from high school, we all were on the same starting blocks.
You chose the bank job.
That's a sure thing.
You're going to die in that cubicle.
I choose, and he said, to sail the seas of consequence.
I was like, I love it!
And I was like, yeah, man, that's daring.
And so he won.
I mean, like, he's had a pretty good ride, I reckon.
And so in my own way, you know, I come from minimum wage work.
I'm nobody from nowhere.
And I got into music via punk rock because the band Black Flag said, hey, you're a crazy guy.
You want to try out to be our singer?
I'm like, what do I have to lose?
Yeah.
And so I went for that.
And it led to everything else and ultimately why I'm here in this room with you today.
But what I like with you, what you're saying is that you had already figured out all these other paths in life that you were enjoying, putting your creative energy in.
I have those woozy afternoons where I take the seven-minute power naps in my chair at the office.
But I just try and, you know, what I have found, if you want to not have to sleep eight hours a day, if you maintain a really good diet, you can shave about an hour of sleep off.
You keep your proteins and your carbohydrates lean and stay away from food that's really fun to eat, you know, burgers, french fries, and all that, which is, I'd live on that if I could.
But if you keep your diet really together and you keep your workouts up, I have found that you want to not get tired during the day.
Work out at 5 in the morning and the rest of the day you're just kind of buzzing.
You think you'd face plant onto your desk.
Sometimes when I'm really humming, I'm up at 4.30 and I'm in the gym by 4.50, 5 p.m.
It was so, you nailed it because it was so honest and it was just so highlighted what is so beneficial about forcing yourself to do hard work and Yeah, and the fact that you are going, okay, I'd rather not, but here we go.
Yeah, and that's more important than any brawn you're going to have.
For me, the workout, I go to the gym to get my head right.
The benefit is, you know, you get in good shape.
But, like, I just finished a bunch of shows.
I did 27 shows in America.
I just finished a bunch of shows.
I did 27 on, one day off, 27 on.
Two and a half hours on stage at night, no notes, talking at a high rate of speed.
The only way I got through that was really good diet and three days on, one day off workouts.
It was the workouts that alleviated the stress that made the sleep restorative, the muscle tissue absorbed into nutrients, etc., and made the shows good.
And so, for me, the workouts, since I was about 15, that's been as much a part of my day as Anything.
Just to, otherwise I get, you know, kind of mentally clogged.
Oh, in the early 2000s, just because I felt problems in my back.
And, you know, for squat day, I'm like, you know...
I'm belting up.
I'm wrapping my knees.
I was really going for it.
And my frame just can't support my attitude.
And so my attitude is like, I'll lift the whole damn gym.
And I was reminded.
My body went, nah, not really.
You're more of a swimmer-runner type.
You're not trying to...
And so I was lifting a lot for a guy my size and my bone mass.
And so at one point my back and shoulders started hurting and like a different kind of pain like you know that you shouldn't be doing this anymore And so the workouts I do now if I can't lift it ten times I just don't I just pull the weight down so I can so a lot of it's you know treadmill elliptical and stationary bike and a lot of pull-ups push-ups and Like you know a lot of compound lifts like you know bench press stuff like that but mainly a lot of pull-ups TRX,
the straps, the guy who invented them gave them to me as a gift.
Uh-uh, but I admire it because you see people who do yoga and they're so, not only are they flexible, but you can tell they're really grounded in themselves.
Like they're really, they're coming on with an energy that I don't have.
That's why I started working out when I was in high school, because I couldn't throw the ball straight, so the gym was always empty, so I just went in there.
Well, the good thing about yoga class is no one talks.
So even though you're around those people, there's no interaction.
You kind of feel each other, and it's kind of cool because you push each other a little bit without communicating.
But I'm a big fan of it, man.
And I think as far as increasing your longevity of your body, the use of your body, it seems to me that what it does is kind of forge all the connections between your joints and your body and your core, and it just makes everything better.
I don't have nearly as much back pain as I used to.
I'm more flexible than I have been in years.
I've been like a year and a half, maybe almost two years.
Realizing the most gratifying thing in my life consistently is coming up with an idea where it goes from the cerebral to the physical.
Like, I'm going to write this book.
Okay, three years from now, I'm still going to be working on this thing.
It's a long journey.
So here we go.
Or I'm going to get to this country.
Or I'm going to get back to this country and come in through that way.
And you just make these plans.
And then months later, boom, there you are.
Like, I was in Thailand making a documentary years ago.
And I was reading in the Herald Tribune at breakfast one morning, I was in Chiang Mai, that the following year was going to be the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster in Bhopal, India, when Union Carbide India Limited, the methyl isocyanate tank exploded, killed a bunch of people.
I said, I'm going.
I'm going to be there for the 25th anniversary.
So I took an entire year and researched.
And I was there for the 25th anniversary.
I was in the march.
I snuck onto the Union Carbide India Limited site.
Panel where tank 610 blew up.
I found the switch.
I went all the way to where I was standing in front of it with the tag on the thing that says MIC, methyl isocyanate.
I think that's it.
That was the gas that hit the water and blew up.
They're making bug spray there.
And so I went all the way to, like, here is where the guy was flicking the switch going, oh no, oh no, the gas scrubbers, the neutralizers aren't working.
And I was sneaking around.
There's like armed guards.
They're not going to shoot you, but they'll tell you, they'll kick you off.
And so I just make these decisions, and then ultimately you're booking the tickets, you're booking the hotel, and then one day you are crawling through the weeds, avoiding security guys on their motor scooters with your camera, sneaking in and out of buildings getting your shots.
I mean, I love to take these things from like sitting in a coffee place going, Oh!
To, like, wow, here I am in Laos, in Zien Quang at the Plain of Jars.
It's a place I've always wanted to go to.
I saw it in a documentary.
And then two years later, I'm at the Plain of Jars.
And we're walking to the, whatever that room is, the room where the north and south meet, where they come in through the northern door and the southern door, it's that blue room.
The DSJ, I'll come up with, the joint, the JSA, the Joint Security Area, something like that.
I pulled one of the Australians to the side.
I said, can you please call your friends off me?
Because my tour spy is starting to ask me really weird questions about why people want their photo with me.
And if I'm caught being in movies, writing books, rock and roll, I'm going downtown for a meeting that I might not get out of.
And so he cooled out all his Australian friends.
But then there's this one British guy who just kept getting in my face with the camera.
Because you're all getting taken to the same places.
And I'll never forget this.
My tour guide, who for the previous three days was like, his English was from school.
Like, Henry, he went from that to, how does this guy know you?
And all of a sudden his English was as good as mine.
I'm like, oh no.
And I'm not good at lying.
So I said, I met him in the breakfast room.
I don't know, maybe he's hot for me.
I just tried to explain it away.
And I just had to kind of go, I don't know.
And I had to try and avoid this guy.
And I was really nervous.
The last day I was there, when they finally took me back to the airport in Beijing, I'm like, damn, man, am I really getting on this plane?
And when the plane took off, man, I just like, okay, I did that.
And just told Obama, you know, just call your pal Kim.
Sure, that'll work out great.
And same thing when I was in, I went to Tehran via Dubai, and the guy who met me at the airport, after the airport people got done grilling me, he said, look, I got your visa.
I know who you are.
I'm not your tour guide.
He's a government guy.
Don't tell him what you do for a living.
We'll never get you out of here.
The last day I'm in that country, I'm eating dinner with this guy and his amazing wife.
They're both like rocket scientists.
And they get by with a website that gets visas done.
So his cousin, her cousin, Anusha, the woman, her cousin calls her and says, your friend Henry's on TV. And Ahmed dropped his fork and said, we've got to go.
We have to get you to your hotel.
You've got to pack up right now.
We just go to the airport, check in, check your luggage, find a corner, put your face in it, and wait for the flight.
And I got to the airport like four hours early because he said, you've got to go.
Whoa.
And so I just sat there in the airport with my face down and then eventually got on like, you know, the 3 a.m.
Just been in an election, or there's going to be an election, or there just was a war, where there's conflict, where you see signs of the wrath of globalization, the wrath of global climate change, places that are politically hot.
All of these are of great interest to me.
During the Bush administration, he said, don't go to this country, this country, this country.
I went to all of them.
I went to every Axis country they had.
And I even went to the ones that Ms. Condoleezza Rice told me not to go to.
And so I tried to go to all of those places, and I'm fine.
I came back in one piece.
But in the last few years, I've started doing more eco-travel to learn about biodiversity, codependent ecosystems.
So two years ago, summer 2015, I had time off because So I wasn't on tour.
And so I went to Easter Island via...
I was in Ecuador for a while on the Napo River, which is a tributary of the Amazon, and I went on a science boat.
And I just sat with scientists, botanists, bird people, and learned about how the jungle interconnects and how this parasite kills that tree, which fertilizes that tree, and it's really integrated.
It's amazing.
And they're losing their force because of timber and oil, you know, the big money.
But when I was in the interior, and it's all about hardwood and oil, and all those, you know, the Rouhani people, the interior tribes, are just getting discovered.
And, you know, their land is getting cleared out.
And the government's making a ton of money off cannibalizing their own land.
And in November of 2015, I went to Antarctica.
And that's the most substantive trip I've ever made.
That was the most mind-blowing trip I've ever done.
You go on Deception Island and you look down and there's bits of broken glass from the whale killers.
They use that island to process and render whales.
So it's like chips of whale bone and all the crappies people left.
Tin shacks.
There's like a transmission in the sand from some vehicle.
And you see what unregulated slaughter looks like.
Where they're just like, hey, let's make a bunch of money.
Screw the animals.
We'll grow back.
And they nearly hunted down the seals and whales, those particular species, to extinction.
And so I got on a ship full of scientists, and you take lectures every day, and you walk around amongst the Gentoo and the Chinstrap and the Adelie penguins, and you learn a lot, and it's hard to take, because it's almost destructing in front of you.
Wow.
And it's sad, and it's beautiful.
It was like being on the moon.
I mean, you didn't want to sleep just for looking out the window or walking around with some penguin walking by you.
It was surreal.
And hopefully November of this year, I'll have some time.
So I made friends with the scientists on the ship, and they said, look, obviously you're really into this.
You should come back, because we have a longer trip we do that starts in the South Georgian Islands.
I went, oh, I'm there.
So I'm going to see if I'm not working in November.
I don't have my schedule yet.
If I'm free, I'm going.
And you go down through Argentina, and you leave from there.
So there's like three days on either end where there's kind of nothing to do but take lectures in the lounge about history and all of that, which I did with my notepad out and questioned the lecturers afterwards and got a ton of information.
But I learned a lot about MMA just because these people, these fighters become relevant to me because I'm saying their names over and over and I'm watching the footage.
And, you know, I met BJ Penn.
I interviewed him once for the Independent Film Channel.
Or, no, for Participant Media, I think it was.
Anyway, I started...
Be more aware of these fighters and all of this stuff.
And then, you know, that's when I saw you.
And I was thinking about you the other day, knowing I was going to meet you, thinking, like, here's this guy with this, you know, very interesting life, because I've seen the stand-up on TV. And there he is in the middle of the octagon with, like, you know, some guy who just got finished knocking the crap out of someone.
That's a very eclectic life you've got.
I'm sure you didn't grow up anything like the rest of your family and all the kids you went to high school with.
And just, it would occupy all my thoughts, and I couldn't wait to do it 24 hours a day.
And then, when I got out of high school, I took a year off before I went to college, and the only reason why I went to college was because I didn't want people thinking I was a loser.
I was tired of telling people that I wasn't doing anything, so I went to college.
I went to Boston, UMass Boston.
The only reason why I went was because I didn't want people thinking I was a loser.
And I knew that I could not exist in a regular job.
Well I think there's a lot of people out there like that and for some Awful reason they never find whatever it is that can break them free.
They never catch a ride on that river out Yeah, you know and I got lucky I found stand-up comedy and I had already I think a lot of it had come from martial arts too I'd fought a lot and then competed a lot in martial arts tournaments and I think that from that I realized that like these Unconventional paths they brought me something that I wasn't getting from regular life.
I brought It brought me self-esteem.
It gave me this feeling that I wasn't a loser.
It was the only thing that I'd ever done my whole life where I said, wow, maybe I'm not a loser.
I kind of thought I was an outcast and a loser, and then all of a sudden I was successful at something, only because I was obsessed with it.
But then I knew there was no way I was ever going to be able to hold a regular job, and then I got lucky when I was 21 and I found stand-up.
And so from then on, I'd kind of like locked into this thing where I'm just going to do what I like and fuck what everybody says because everybody's giving me advice to do this and advice to do that and it never seems to be what I want to do.
Yeah, and some people, I guess, like the corporate world.
I just, I got lucky and I found a bunch of shit that I like.
And if you had said to me, you know, if you asked me if I was, you know, outside of my life, and if I didn't know that I existed, and you said, do you think it's possible to be a cage-fighting commentator slash stand-up comedian?
It's the easiest one to do because then they go, oh yeah, I know you, and then they let me in and it's easy, you know, if you're getting your passport stamped.
But most of the time I write comic, stand-up comedian.
There is a dance that when you discuss these things like you don't want to disparage anybody that it genuinely has Shown courage and grinding it out because for their family does take courage.
I just don't have it I'm saying I consider them People in the real world and in my life.
I don't think I really live in the real world that much I live in my self-invented Henry world right and I saw this video with Lady Gaga I don't know much about her music, but she did this long intro, the $80 million thing.
And she said, she was like, reality, I hate reality.
I was like, I, there you go.
I just can't handle a lot of it.
And I don't shy away from it.
I go into situations that are hyper real.
But that kind of flatline existence that a lot of we adults engage in, I think that would have destroyed me.
I would have found alcohol or something really destructive.
But if you had a friend that was doing that, but you know that friend really wanted to be a novelist, wouldn't you just fucking go, dude, please, just try it.
Well, definitely not like you did it, but a lot of rock stars, a lot of bands, a lot of musicians, a lot of artists, they pursued their goals, they went out and chased things, and you knew that it was a path.
The ones I had met before I was doing music full-time were all broke.
Like I met some punk rock bands like from England, you know, like whoever.
And you're like, yeah, you're broke too.
And they're just crazy people, and I identified with that.
But sometimes, have you ever done a show where you meet that actor who...
Has had like 80 years of acting class and all they talk about is their acting coach.
And after I get off the set today, I'm going to go back to my class.
And all they do is take classes.
You're like, man, if all you're going to do is ever take classes, the rubber's never going to hit the road because you're always in the...
On pause with the acting.
Some days you just gotta go like, I'm doing this.
And like, that's me.
And if it doesn't work, man, it's really gonna hurt.
So, here we go.
Like with music, I never was like, are we gonna make it?
Make what?
I'm just trying to do a good show.
I never thought...
I would ever make money doing music.
I never thought I'd ever be able to pay my rent.
I just reconciled my life to a life of fighting, bad tasting food, and sleeping, you know, next to the drum roost snort all night in the back of the van hoping the bass, the bass player, the guitar player didn't drive us into a tree because we didn't have a driver.
It is what it is.
It's independent music.
And you just crawl through these tours.
It makes you pretty tough.
You're like a junkyard dog.
But I never thought it would ever change.
I just figured this is your life and eventually, you know, The guy hits you with something and you die in the hospital.
I was not a fatalist, but I'm like, this is it.
And I never saw past that.
And then in the 80s, the band got bigger or whatever.
But I've always run at things going, well, this is it or die.
I never thought there was any wiggle room or any cushion or much alternative.
I'm not that resourceful.
I'm just kind of crazy enough to run at it.
And by running really hard, I've gotten through it.
But it's not because I'm smart or good looking.
It's just because...
As Richard Gere once said, I've got nowhere else to go.
And that has really helped me.
Well, I'm going to get through this tour because I've got nothing else going on.
I'll stay in this band because I've got nowhere else to go but be in this incredibly hard-to-be-in band.
And that's been very helpful to me.
Like, this really hurts.
Well, it's better than the pain at standing with the apron behind the counter.
Many, many years ago, in 1983, there was a local promoter in Hollywood, and he would take like 20 people, give everyone five minutes.
And it'd be the singer in the gun club, the guy from the Minutemen, the guy from this band, the girl from that band.
And I would go to these shows, because even when it was bad, it was great.
And everyone was cheering.
You know all these people.
So if it sucked, you'd applaud even harder.
Black Flag's bass player.
Would be on these gigs.
And he'd go up and, you know, read from his notebook.
He has an amazing intellect.
And I would always go hang out with him.
And one night the promoter said, you got a big mouth.
Let's get you up there next week.
And I go, you know, what am I going to do?
He said, like, you know, 10 minutes, 10 bucks or whatever it was.
I said, man, I'll take that money.
And the next week I got up there and I read something that I had written and told a story about what had happened at band practice the day before when a white supremacist tried to run over our guitar player with his car.
And the audience was like, ah!
I go, yep, that was Tuesday in the Life of Black Flag.
Well, my time is up.
I gotta go.
And so I walked off stage, big applause, and everyone came up to me and said, when's your next show?
I said, well, I'm going on tour.
I thought they meant the band.
They went, no, no, just the next show where you just talk.
I go, well, I got this $10 bill.
That was it.
And the promoter said, you're really good at that.
You're a natural.
How about you open for two of my poets next week?
We'll give you 15 minutes.
And a few times around with that, those poets are opening for me, which they didn't like.
And by 1985, I had done a cross-country tour and, you know, 12 to 15 people a night.
And they called it Spoken Word, which I thought, there's a way to starvation.
I was like, I don't want to go see a gig that says Spoken Word, the Snore Fest.
So I've always just called it a talking show.
So I would read things and anecdote between pages.
And then one day, I just stopped bringing the things to read on stage and said, look, here's what happened when I was in Holland.
And I just tell stories.
And by the late 80s, I was doing the entire continent of Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, and it went on and on.
But every once in a while, I'll do like the Melbourne Comedy Festival, the Sydney Comedy Festival, or like three nights of comedy, and I'm like doing an hour on one of those nights.
I did a comedy club on this last tour.
There was a night off or doing a thing at like the Laugh Bucket or one of those places.
And, you know, the PA is like bolted into the wall.
There's no monitors.
There's one light.
And me and my big tour bus out front.
It's like right next to the strip bar.
And I went in there and I went, okay.
All those little 8x10 frame photos on the walls.
I don't go into places like this.
It's not below me.
It's just not my world.
Sold the place out.
The audience couldn't have been nicer.
And the owner thanked me.
And I said, man, if I'm ever back in this part of Illinois, I'll do this venue again.
And he said, we'll be here.
And it was a really good time.
And so a lot of what I do kind of lends itself to comedy in that life plus time.
Most of the time is funny.
And comedy, I don't try and I don't write material really.
But I just basically report on that which is funny.
And many things occur to me.
Either ultimately or eventually to be funny like almost anything then obviously some things are never going to be funny, but Most things are like I don't know which way your politics lean that much But you can look at the president administration go like ie we're all you know going down the drain or you can go man This is the lowest hanging fruit This dude has just jumped up on a table onto the silver platter with his ass in the air and an apple already in his mouth.
Like, this is gonna be great.
Like, he's serving himself.
He's jumped into my lap.
This is great!
And so there's different ways of looking at all of this.
And I guess comedians just look at things differently.
I've met many of them.
I'm not one.
But there's a lot of comedy, or at least humorous moments that inform what I do on stage, which allows me to go for a long time on stage, because if it had no humor in it, it would be stultifyingly boring, for me and for the audience.
In a lot of ways, when an administration is really fucked up, Comics do take joy in it because they know, like during the Bush administration, there was eight years of gold.
And Trump is that times five or ten.
But it's also when you find that goldmine of humor, it also equates on the other end to a disastrous time for the country.
There's a proposal now to get rid of public lands and to make public lands private and start tapping into them and sucking out the resources and ruin all these places that people go and hunt and fish and hike.
Well, Teddy Roosevelt and a lot of the people that established the national park system in this country many, many years ago, they had an incredible vision.
They realized that we have this amazing landscape, and they decided to preserve it and put it in the trust of the public, make it a public thing where anyone can go.
You know, I'm not one who gets up every day with a hate list of people.
And I don't think Donald Trump wakes up every day going, how can I screw a bunch of people?
I really don't think that's on his menu.
But I do think he's a businessman who's looking to make deals.
The tell for me was when the president said, if Vladimir Putin agrees to help us in the fight against ISIS, I'll consider lifting those sanctions.
It's not, you know, we'll make a deal.
He does that, I'll do this.
We'll get that, he gets that.
That's a deal.
He's a dealmaker.
That's not really a deal.
In global affairs, necessarily all the time, especially not with that guy on that particular issue.
And I think he's kind of tone deaf to some of the more nuanced things that it takes to...
America in an ever more interconnected world with ever more diminishing resources and to start privatizing America, chopping up the parks and all that.
It's real sad if that happens, because I really enjoy being able to go into a place and go, "I can walk in here?" Or even like, I grew up, you know, a shy kid who didn't play well with others.
So I would go to the library all the time.
So I had that library card.
And I go, I can take this book home?
Well, yeah, you got to take care of it.
Okay.
And I'd read the book and take it back.
All those Alfred Hitchcock, you know, stories for kids or whatever.
I read all that stuff.
And the library was a big deal for me because I felt like an adult.
I have my card.
I can walk into this massive library.
Interesting, smelling, cool building.
And it's mine.
The whole thing is mine.
I couldn't believe the freedom I had in there.
These ancient seats and the place smelled of books.
And it was mine.
I never got my head...
It was never not amazing to me to walk into the library and go, like, any damn book I want, I can walk into any section and no one's going, hey, kid, get out of here.
So you better bring some humor and a little bit of like, hey, it's okay.
And I see that in New Yorkers, this really great greatness.
And when you make us cheap and petty and we turn into some Twilight Zone episode, that is what I fear in this country is us kind of cheating ourselves out of how great we are when you don't scare the crap out of us all the time.
Yeah, well, I mean Trump is just such a polarizing figure.
I hope that it unites us in a lot of ways so that we realize how good we have it and we realize what really is important and that having this guy who so many people are opposed to and having these policies that so many people are opposed to, even if you're not opposed to him.
I know a lot of people that supported him that are now looking at some of these policies, particularly the public land policy, and they're kind of freaking out.
I think a lot of that is going to unite folks, and it's going to make people understand what is important.
It was because he's got this perceived attitude about women and this is a rejection of that Yeah, and I think he's getting used to being on the global stage where you know every hiccup every cough is Shifts the world's markets.
I mean, and I think other presidents have rocked that responsibility far more gracefully.
Even presidents I don't necessarily agree with, they really understood the awesome weight of that job, and they really kind of feared it and tried their best.
Even presidents whose policies I disagree with, I think they really got the magnitude.
When you think about your life, you know, you have this wanderlust and this passion for exploring new environments and learning about new cultures and, you know, and we're also talking about just the fucking great pull of death because it is there and it's always to be considered.
When you're looking at a guy like that who's older than us, he's 70-something years old, right?
And that fucking life is a meat grinder.
That job is the greatest aging job we've ever seen.
When you have $4 billion or whatever the fuck he has, when you have your name on all these buildings all over the world, like, what is the motivation to continue?
I've always wondered with the Koch brothers, the two angriest men in America, and the tyranny of Obama, they'd always opine about, like, dude, you've got $34 billion.
You can have me killed right now and all the pizza you want.
And why are we so angry again?
Where's the tyranny in your life?
$34 billion?
Shut up!
And I think with some people...
I did a movie many years ago, one of the first ones I was ever in with a very big movie star, and someone told me how much he makes in a year.
And I went, that's...
wow!
And why does he...
What's up with that?
He said, well, all his friends have $100 million, and so he wants to catch up.
I said, but after the first 50, it's like going out in the rain while you're soaking wet, going, ow, it's raining.
Like, pal, you're already wet.
Like, what do you do with the other $80 billion?
Like, what is it?
And I think with some people, it's maybe coming from some gnawing insecurity, and nothing's ever big enough.
Like, you've been around famous people.
I've met a number of big actors, or Big rock stars.
And the bigger the rock star, just my experience, the bigger the rock star, the more humble and cool they are, the more...
They love music, and they're humble in front of it, and they ask what you're doing.
I've been lucky.
I've met a lot of my rock heroes, and they're just really hoping...
When I met George Carlin once, I'd just done the Beacon Theater, and he was about to go do one of his HBO specials there.
And he said, did people get the jokes?
I said, what do you mean?
He's like, did people understand you when you were on stage?
Do you think it'll be okay?
I was like, you're asking me if your show will be okay?
You're George frickin' Carlin, man.
I mean, like, are you kidding?
And to see that kind of, not insecurity, but that kind of like, hey, did it go okay?
Because I've got to go there next.
Yikes!
Like, you're George Carlin!
You walk on water!
But the fact that he was still wanting it to be okay, that he didn't think, I've got this on George Carlin.
I was like, damn, he's still open.
He's still knowing that he could go south.
He might have a stinking night while the cameras are on.
And he still fears having a bad show.
It means so much to him.
And I think if you're in that mode, you can greet the day better.
But when you look at things like, well, I don't have as much as he has, or some guy made a nasty tweet about me, and I'm going to get on Twitter and answer back, oh no.
And I'm the president.
The point I'm making is nothing satiates that thirst.
Like, he's in the top executive slot and he's still probably grumbling about something.
Or just wanted to win.
And now that he's got it, when he did his acceptance speech, I was in Washington on the night of the election on stage at the Lincoln Theater.
I watched the whole damn thing until five in the morning when he made his acceptance speech.
And the look on his face, on Mr. Trump's face, was...
Wow, I've just sawed off a big chunk of meat for myself.
Oh, no.
It wasn't joy.
It was like, now I got to go to all those meetings.
Oh, damn.
This is a big dog I just bought.
This is a lot, a lot of, you know, a big deal.
And I just, I think one of the ways he'll escape the stress of it is I think he'll put it off on other people.
He'll delegate.
Mike Pence will be, it'll be President Pence.
And, you know, the other guy just looking good for the cameras.
And so I think that's how he'll get through it, because it destroyed Bush.
Eight years of the presidency took Bush, who was a very handsome man when he walked into office.
The presidents don't get that three in the morning phone call.
Mr. President in Maine, the cat that was in the tree, the fire department got the cat down.
The cat's fine.
God bless you.
God bless the United States of America.
They come down to the Situation Room and look at the high-resolution video footage of the girls' intestines sailing through the air for the drone strike that zigged when it should have zagged.
They get bad news, and they make gut-wrenching decisions where they're like, yep, we're going in, and all those people are going to die.
Every president makes those decisions, and it's a job you couldn't pay me enough.
I wouldn't want a day of it.
And I think you either have to be either a nut or truly think, I've got this.
I'm neither.
And so I'm not that kind of megalomaniac, and I just don't ever think I got it.
And I don't know what Trump is going to do with a job that has not...
You see the last days of Johnson, and he didn't even serve two terms.
The Vietnam War destroyed Johnson.
His face was falling off his skull.
There was those sad shots of him and McNamara in the Situation Room.
His hand is on his cheek, and his face is falling down his chest.
Because every one of those deaths, I think, really aggrieved the president.
He's an interesting president.
The more you read about him, the more interesting he becomes.
But I think it's a job that fairly destroys.
The only one it didn't seem to really destroy was Clinton.
I don't know why he seemed to kind of walk out of there like, you know, hey!
Well, I like the fact that he's talking about rebuilding the infrastructure and putting people to work in that regard and rebuilding American manufacturing.
I hope that really does happen and people do get good jobs and the economy does rise up.
What I worry about is all this corporate raider mentality backed by these people that think that he's somehow or another looking out for the little guy.
I just wonder.
I wonder what his motivations are, and I wonder how this is all going to play out.
Yeah, but to me, when someone says, oh, this new president, what he's doing is unprecedented.
I'm like, no, America's a broken 45. We just keep repeating trickle-down economics with more parts or less parts per million, in that in the early days of slavery, To be well-landed gentry in America was great.
You bought land, you bought the materials, and you built your plantation.
You bought livestock, human and animal.
When they bred, you kept the offspring.
Human, offspring, chickens, all of it was yours.
And you got free labor.
Things were great until 1865, the 13th Amendment, the abolishment of slavery.
And so that mentality of like...
You had a good day today because I didn't beat you.
That's your good day.
And here's your gruel.
And what do I pay you?
Here's your gruel.
Get back to the field and have another day where I don't beat you.
That's a good day for you.
That was an unbothered road to a brutal utopia.
And what you have over the years is these speed bumps.
Civil rights.
And that's where you get institutionalized apartheid.
You get Jim Crow.
You get an expansion of the Klan.
You get segregationist laws that sat on the books until, like, Brown v.
Board of Education, 1954. Virginia v.
Love v.
Virginia, that's the miscegenation laws, 1967. Obergefell v.
Hodges, marriage equality, 2015. And these are speed bumps.
If you're oppressive and you just want to pay this guy what you feel like giving him, minimum wage and all that stuff is your enemy, because you don't want these people being able to stand up.
And I think when Mr. Trump said, make America great again, I hate to say, I think he was talking about 1861 and the years before, when I paid you what I wanted to.
It's my factory.
How dare the government tell me what to pay you, like minimum wage?
Now, you're a guy that's really seen probably more of the world than one-tenth of one percent of the population of America.
I mean, you've been to so many different places.
Now, do you think that because of that, you have a unique perspective on what is possible today?
Because, like, in 2017, if you just live in America, this is the only thing you've known.
You think of the world as sort of this sort of state that we exist in.
But you having gone to North Korea, having gone to Mongolia, having gone to all these different places, we see oppressive regimes, you see very bizarre cultures where people are rigid in their ability to move around and rigid in their ability to behave and express themselves.
And you see that it could have turned out like that here.
You know, but it didn't.
We have this unique sort of experiment in self-government, and it's sort of hobbled along, and it's patched up with duct tape and Gorilla Glue, but it's here.
But I went to go, because I buy all these records from Mali and bands, so I wanted to go see them do it in the desert.
So I went in 2008 and 9 or 9 and 10, something like that.
And I went over land through Dogon country one year, and then the next year I hooked back up with this guy, Mahmoud, and we took the Niger River on a boat.
The guy chain smokes every day.
And I said, Mahmoud, man, you're a freaking chimney.
What are you trying to do?
And he laughed.
He said, I'm 30. I was supposed to be dead two years ago, because people in his tribe get about 28 to 30 years.
And he just kind of laughed and kept smoking.
I'm like, okay.
And so what I've learned by travel is what humans can still, how they can still live in spite of what their circumstances are.
And what that means to me when I get back here is you have a lot to lose.
I mean, it can get so much worse and you'll still get by because humans are so resourceful and we're so tough.
But we shouldn't ever have to go near that because we're smarter than that.
And, you know, me and this other guy might disagree and he might call me a bunch of nasty names on the Internet.
But ultimately, does he really want to kill me?
Nah.
If I was in a burning car, would he try and pull me out?
Probably.
If I had a sandwich and he was hungry, would I give him half?
Yeah.
And I think to forget that aspect of us, since at least the Bush administration, where the polarization in this country has been so extreme, I think we have started to forget that we can be there for each other.
And I'm not saying we all need to have a big group hug.
people being able to stay alive.
Why are we arguing instead of just making a system where like the little old lady doesn't have to be in fear of dying alone with heaters that don't work or whatever, like, come on, We have such a beautiful patch of land.
Because, you know, I've been all over the world.
There's some parts where people live.
You're like, what are you people doing here?
Like, this part of Africa wants you dead.
Why are you here?
That's where we live.
Where America, we are, this is one long vacation we have in America as far as climate.
It gets cold, but you can always boogie down the road to Miami in a Greyhound bus in seven hours, be in your shorts.
I mean, we've got it good here in every possible way.
Now, I think it's really important what you were talking about, about people on the internet and that sort of bizarre communication that we experience today.
Yeah.
You remember pre-internet?
I mean, you were a grown man before the internet came around.
Don't you think that this existence that we have right now, where we are sort of communicating without looking at each other, without being there in front of each other.
Yeah, and it leads to a lot of pettiness and just really mean stuff where the issuer of that, whatever that mean email or whatever, I wonder if they look back at that a week later and you're like, man, who was I that afternoon?
Because there's stuff you can read.
It kind of, you know, it peels the paint off your car.
I mean, I go on these chatroom websites and I just read.
I don't ever post things.
I just read.
And when we had our last president, there was things said about him and his family.
You're like, did you just read?
We're just depressing.
I read like three hours of it one night in 2000 and something.
Well, what's interesting is when they get found out and someone exposes whoever wrote that and then they focus on them publicly and you see the scrutiny of thousands, if not millions of people come down on those folks and how they fucking panic.
And so I come, and I'm sure you can identify with this, I come from the world of, if you say something, that guy comes around the corner and goes, like, what'd you say?
Not expecting to turn the corner and be face-to-face with that person.
And so if I ever talk about a politician or, you know, I had a lot of disagreements with Judge Scalia and people like that, and I'd write about it in the LA Weekly.
I would have loved to have debated the 14th Amendment with Antonin Scalia who said it didn't have any of the traction that I think it does.
And any politician I bucket on, including Trump, I do, which I have fun with.
I mean, he's served under like five presidents or something.
I mean, he's not a boring guy.
It's been a very interesting life.
You know, Nixon, Ford, Reagan.
He's been in the Oval Office a lot.
He's been in that building a lot.
He knows where all the bodies are buried.
And I don't...
Want to live with these people, but as far as like seeing, you know, reading what they have to say, I'm curious in that way, in that I want to know what is on someone's mind I might not agree with all the time.
Everyone is essentially coming from the truth, their version of it.
That's acting class, right?
You've got to be in that moment or whatever.
And when I see these Trump rallies, these people really do hate Hillary Clinton.
They hate Barack Obama.
And they really do want to build that wall.
It's all as real as me sitting here with you right now.
And I might not agree, but you can't not say they're sincere.
They're burning analog.
It is as real as anything you've ever felt is real.
I don't necessarily want to get into the inner mechanics of that person, because I kind of already know where it's coming from.
A lot of xenophobia and half knowledge.
But you can't say that they're not legit.
And you just saw that they spoke quite loudly, and Mr. Trump won, well, not the popular vote, but the Electoral College, certainly.
And so I want to know more about who I share a country with.
I can't spend all day with it, but I do designate some bit of the day to try and figure this out.
Otherwise, how do you get up the road if you don't know?
Because I don't want...
My enemies in America.
I don't want enemies in my own country.
People I disagree with, yeah.
But ultimately, I want to get up the road with them.
In order to do that, I don't want to get beat up by some guy getting out of his pickup truck to drill some freedom into my forehead with his fists.
Because, you know, I'm just not built for it.
And who is?
So I'm looking for a higher way to get up the road.
I'm not all that hopeful.
But I still try and dissect or forensically go through that American id.
I travel...
Through America, it's what I've been doing for 36 years.
I meet more Americans than any president.
I hear the stories, like you hear the stories.
Henry, my friend died in Iraq, and he loved you, and I hear that story.
My friend killed himself last month, and I'm really screwed up about it, and I want to tell you about it.
So I hear, I get a lot of input.
And it makes you like all these people.
Like, I'm the fat gay guy in Utah, and no one likes me, and my parents kicked me out of the house when I was 18 because I'm gay.
And like, you go, oh man!
You don't want to be mad at anyone when you hear stories like that.
All you want to do is give them a Devo record and go, keep breathing, kid.
Don't self-harm.
And so the more stories I hear, it makes me want to be more decent to my fellow Americans, understand us better.
And that's one of the reasons I travel globally.
It's one of the reasons I do a lot of shows in America.
And I do a lot of listening.
And I think that's what we don't do anymore.
But when you log on to Patriot 185 and you give some liberal snowflake, whatever they call these people, some grief on the internet, you're only listening to yourself.
You just like disagreeing with people and piling on.
Well, I think what you're saying is beautiful because, I mean, it is a good idea to have an open mind and try to find out why these people think in a diametrically opposed way to the way you think.
One of the first things that happens is these trumpets jump on board and they start attacking what you're saying and then tweeting like, I don't know if they've researched it or not, but it's just like immediate attitude that the people on the right seem to have.
Where they immediately want to dismiss anything that diminishes industry, anything about climate change, anything that protects the environment, whether it's about this Dakota pipeline access thing that Trump is just getting involved with.
That was going on during the Obama administration.
That's something that people need to recognize.
There's not a single fucking president that's really looking out for you.
There never has been one.
There's not one that you can really enjoy.
Every single one of them is doing some creepy shit.
And that whole thing where they were cutting easements through private land, they were arresting people on their own fucking land, they were saying that they had the right to drill through their land, that was during the Obama administration.
Started during his administration, supported by his administration, and they stopped it towards the end.
But it's almost like I kind of know that they stopped it knowing that Trump was gonna start it right the fuck back up as soon as he got in office.
I think Obama had some fun on the way out, knowing that Trump is, you know, first week is going to turn it all around, and everyone gets to point the finger.
That's politics.
And that's why I don't love any politician.
And I've never wanted to meet one.
I wouldn't walk.
I come from Washington, D.C. You'd see him all the time.
By being a good person, because there's so much of it you can't fix.
The only way to fix it is to go local.
And, like, when Trump became president, I just did eight shows at Largo in L.A., and a lot of people were kind of, you know...
And I said, look, when they start pushing against LGBT rights or women's reproductive health rights or freedoms, we'll neutralize.
You know, we'll be doing benefits.
We're going to, like, you know, Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, any LGBT activist group, we can get involved and start kind of neutralizing this and slowing it down.
This is not a time to be dismayed.
This is punk rock time.
This is what Joe Strummer trained you for.
It is now time to go.
You're a good person.
That means more now than ever.
Because as a voter, you know, you throw your penny and throw it in the sea.
That's all a vote is.
It's just like nothing.
Like, you don't even hear it fall.
But you can be thunderous in your own life and being cool to the eight people around you.
But it happens when enough people change their street.
And so, as a Los Angeles resident, I'd be happy to work inside the county of L.A. doing good stuff.
Whatever I can figure out to do.
You don't have to...
Because you're not going to push Congress around.
They seem to be loving to sit still.
So you can work locally.
And so going forward in this country, when it gets better is when the electorate gets better.
It's what Jefferson taught you, a vigorous, educated electorate who votes and votes and votes to keep American government and democracy a transparent lens, as transparent as possible.
And that's what you can do in this time like don't you're not gonna move to Canada like the Canadians are gonna have you but you can be your decency now means more it's a it it's a more into a Fruitful currency.
It's it's a help your help basically I also feel like great things get done in times of conflict absolutely We have something to push back against people organized like that women's March, you know exactly I Where you go, wow, decency is under threat.
And so, I... I've learned that you can't take too many notes.
You can't write enough.
Like you have to take 80 details of the last hour.
You forget it the next day because you're tired.
And so when I'm on stage, I have no notes and it's all in the front of my brain pan.
So if I'm going to quote the Constitution or quote a president or years that the Supreme Court did whatever, I just have to put it.
I memorize all of it and I just carry it around with me.
And before I go on stage, to center myself, I quote Lincoln from his speech, the speech to the perpetuation of our governmental institutions, I think it's called.
It's the speech to the Young Men's Lyceum.
It's been quoted.
One of his first ever speeches, he's really young, 1838, I think it was, in early January.
And I just quote parts of it to myself and kind of get ready to go out there.
Sometimes I'll, at the beginning of a tour, just to kind of get back in that groove, I'll write a page of notes.
I'll talk about this, into that, into that, and I look at it and I kind of walk it through in my mind.
And like, okay, you basically memorize where all the furniture is in the living room so you can run through it with your eyes closed and not bump into anything.
And so when I go on stage, one thing tends to go into the next.
And I just, all of a sudden, I have a stopwatch.
I bring it on stage and put it down for the audience's benefit, not mine.
Because if I'm not careful, the shows will go well over two hours.
And I look down like, oh no, these poor people.
I've got to start landing this thing.
And any story takes you like 20 minutes to get in and 10 to get out.
So I'm like, okay, we're taxiing.
I can see the runway and I'll let them go in 15 minutes.
And I apologize.
I was like, I've kept you here for like two hours and 20 minutes.
I'm really sorry.
I swear I'll be done with you in like 10 more minutes.
And has had to run more than once because he's a black guy in a wig.
I mean, someone wants to beat him up.
And he's just one of the more extraordinary people I've ever met.
And I met him at band practice in the 90s.
He practiced down the hall from us.
And we became pals.
And so I talked about the time I was on RuPaul's Drag Race as a judge, which was hilarious.
But I talked about that story because I was just on his show, RuPaul Drives, where he puts a microphone on you and a GoPro camera, and he drives you around L.A. doing errands, and he interviews you, and he chops it up into content.
And so I was able to tell my being a judge on RuPaul's Drag Race story because I could segue into...
The day we ran errands, the normal places I go, because I live alone.
I'm very much a solitary type.
I made this story about how I walked into all these places, and the only time I've ever come in with someone else is the one time I walked in with a six-and-a-half-foot-tall black guy.
And everyone who knows me in all these stores goes like, oh, Henry's finally found someone.
And it was a story about perception, because you'd see the looks on their faces like, oh, hey, Henry.
Right, I always thought so.
It was hilarious.
And RuPaul and I would leave these places, and we'd just laugh hysterically because they think we're an item.
And we eventually had lunch in West L.A., and we were recognized by everyone on the sidewalks immediately.
People taking photos.
And I said, RuPaul, I think we've become a power couple.
And this, to me, is an anecdote I would tell on stage.
And it's funny...
But I'm not making up humor.
I'm telling you something that happened that was funny.
That's how I get to humor.
I basically stumble into it.
Like, whoops, I got humor on my shoe.
And it was funny.
Because I got email like, dude, you're not going out with RuPaul.
And I would write back these really funny, ambiguous email letters back.
I'm like, well, as a new couple...
We don't want external factors to determine what this thing is going to be, so right now we're just going with the flow.
And there's some kid in the Midwest whose head just exploded because I wrote him back, well, you know, we're just checking it out.
Let him post that wherever he wants.
I don't give a damn.
And so that's what informs the shows as the tour rolls out.
That story will be in the, you know, I'll do like 20 nights with that and then it falls away and it comes back like three weeks later.
Sometimes, like, in Australia, they have a rule where if, you know, four people in your band, your American band, then four Australians have to play, too.
And I like that.
And so, a couple of times, I've had a comedian, really good guy, he opens for me on some of my bigger Australian shows.
He didn't do it this last time, but his name is Bruce, and he'll go do, like, 20 minutes, just so we can say, we did that.
I don't want to run out of this building now, but if someone said, hey, you want to go to Iceland tomorrow?
I'm like, yeah, I can be packed in.
Give me 20 minutes, man.
Just keep the car on.
I'll be right out.
Yeah, and I'll go.
I'm hoping for some good location work this year.
If they said, you want to go move to the Czech Republic for a year and a half and make two seasons of a TV show, I'd say yes before I asked what the part was.
But for me, every day I'm not out in the world, I'm thinking I'm trying to dodge the ball instead of deflecting it or catching it or getting hit by it.
Yeah, I'd rather be out.
Wow.
The people I travel with, my road manager and our merch guy, we've been traveling the world together for about a decade.
And we all, like, wow, we're off this bus in two days.
Yeah, which is not easy that you write for a Rolling Stone of Australia once a month and then I write I try and write a thousand words a day for myself and I have right now Five different books in various states of completion and that's not some college guy saying my manuscript these are they're done and I'm by day I edit and I'm editing the next journal book, travel book, and then at night I'm writing another journal book and working on one of two different music books.
I do a series of music books called Fanatic, where I, you know, rare records and labels like music geek stuff.
Because it's what they were doing in America with a lot of young people who talked too much or, you know, had bad social skills.
Well, I had attention deficit and couldn't concentrate.
I got thrown out of the D.C. public school system for being, you know, he's yelling, he's doing this.
And I actually read a couple of teachers' reports about me years later.
And I said, I had no memory.
I said, I did all that?
They kicked you out of school.
Yeah, and I got kicked out of a few schools until they put me in a prep school where the advertising is like, oh, your kid has problems with studying?
We'll cool him out.
And the first few days of school, some kids spoke out of class, and I watched this one teacher pick this one kid up and just kind of toss him into a blackboard.
I went, right!
In his class, you shut up.
And so I didn't want to get a thrashing by a teacher, so I was always really careful.
But having that difficulty sitting down.
And I was fine with topics I liked.
I didn't, you know, I didn't groove on math or any of that.
But at lunchtime, I'd go to the library and start memorizing the Latin nomenclature of every North American snake.
I'm always very confused at these medical distinctions, whether it's ADHD or hyperactive or ADD, whatever the fuck it is.
Is that real?
Or do some people just have a different composition, a different passion inside of them, and they resist doing things they don't want to do, and they don't want to be a part of any structured school curriculum?
I think all of it.
But yeah, and is that a disease or is that or do you just have more fucking looking right now?
You don't have any pills.
You're not on anything and yet you have all this passion for life You have all this isn't that the same shit that you had when you were six?
And it really screws with you, because you can feel it when you take the pill.
You can...
You're basically...
You're a propeller that spins so fast.
It looks like they're spokes of a wheel, like the wheel is still, but it's actually going really fast.
That's how it felt.
Like, on the outside, I'm like this pale, skinny...
But inside, I'm like the last few minutes of Dave in 2001, where he's going through the space-time continuum, and everything is flying by.
That was like 10th grade for me, where I just kind of held onto my desk and fairly flew through classes, like not being able to retain much, because I was just speeding my brains out.
And then the pill would wear off around dinner, and all of a sudden you're like eating two meals.
And the next morning you take the pill and you don't eat again.
But when I had the summer jobs, that's when I kicked ass.
I never had an allowance.
My mom never said, here's 20 bucks.
I'm like, where'd Henry go?
He's got three jobs over the weekend.
I'd wake up in the morning, go to the pet shop, work all day there, run home, shower, change my clothes, do the night shift at the movie theater, take the bus out to the surf shop in the suburbs and I'd repair skateboards and whatever on Sundays.
So I always had pocket money because I liked working a cash register on my keychain in school.
I had the keys to stores.
Bosses trusted me because I'd never steal.
So I would work like 20 hours a week and go to school in high school.
And part of that was informed by the weightlifting, and I like getting out of the house and being responsible.
But in school, it didn't mean much to me.
But showing up on time at the pet shop and cleaning out 20 cat pans, man, that was like I had to be there at 8 o'clock, not 8.01, man, because we got things to do.
I felt a real fealty.
And to this day, if I'm ever on a film shoot, who's the guy who's there early, man?
That's me.
I'm there.
I memorize the whole damn script.
I'm so happy to have a job.
I'm amazed anyone cares.
And so all of that, it keeps me on the straight and narrow.
I call myself a human frozen yogurt machine, just output.
I don't want the applause.
I like to build ships.
I don't want to sail in them.
And the best part about finishing the ship is it sails off to sea and you can build another.
So I love finishing a book.
Get this thing off my desktop.
Now I can start a new one.
Like, where can I go now?
And so that's how I live.
To achieve and to output.
But it's not...
I don't ever look at...
I have a thing on my computer.
It's called The List.
And I keep a list of every show, every book I've written, every movie I've been in, every album I've ever made.
And I never get to that point where I've been to enough places, or I've written enough books, or I've done enough radio shows, or I've bought enough records.
There's never enough records.
There's never enough time to do everything.
And I like living with that kind of...
Aspect of desperation, we are always kind of like, oh, come on, man, let's go!
And I like that, because it keeps the, as I say, it keeps the blood thin, and it keeps complacency at the door.
I'll go and do it, but I'm not good at setting it up.
And so she locks in the coordinates.
And so I work with people who are used to kind of my velocity, like the road manager.
In a way, I'm very easy on Road Manager Ward.
I wake up, I go to the front of the bus, and he's already written out the map for me to walk to a gym.
So I wake up, I go right to the gym.
And I always want the same thing.
I want a gym, I want this, I want a gig, and then I want some sushi, and I want to go to sleep.
But it's intense, and there's hardly any days off.
So he knows how to...
Keep all of that going and the phone is ringing because I work in different media all the time and so Heidi's always juggling eight chainsaws and so I'm around people who can allow me just to really run at it and go as fast and as hard as I want to.
I call it living at the speed of life.
You just kind of go You let your imagination and your resolve dictate everything.
And to be able to do that and still keep the lights on, I'm just a lucky bastard.
But they also at the same time know that they're not going to take the same caning that a lot of really good people who don't deserve it are going to take.
It's what Bukowski wrote about.
He said, man, you've got to beat the grind because, man, this life will kill you.
It'll just use you up.
And so I'm not looking to escape any beatings, but to have an idea and get to do it and turn it into something that kind of pays me.
Like I can go into the world, have these crazy things happen, come back with photographs and a story, take it on stage and I can tour on that and people show up.
Damn, man, I should just be saying thank you every other breath.
Yeah, you type him in and your laptop will go, oh, damn!
I'm sure he knows what he is.
It's a good system, but the one thing I miss when I'm on the road is my music, just easy access to analog.
And so when I'm off the road, I have a file on my computer called I Heard That, and I write down every record I listen to in the order I listen to it, the exact pressing.
Like last night I listened to a David Bowie single, Golden Years with Can You Hear Me, but it was the pressing from El Salvador, and I had to write that down.
Because I'm that guy.
Do you have a picture of the Wilson Alexandria Threes?
What I'm getting involved with and I realize I can't hack it.
Because here's the awful thing about being an adult in a relationship, seeking to be an adult in a relationship, I have found.
When I was young and I was a boy and I was dating girls, It's boys and girls and she's an idiot, you're an idiot, you do dumb things and everyone cheats and whatever.
Then you hit a certain part of your life where she's a woman and you're a man and you have adult expectations.
And you can't be running around being an idiot with someone who kind of wants you to be at the table because they are sincerely giving time of their adult life to this thing that you were doing together.
And when you come in still thinking you're in ninth grade and she's coming in like...
This is part of what my life is, is being with you.
I have never been able to answer that in a mature enough way to where I would have been able to maintain it.
Because, like, say, next weekend, if I had a girlfriend, she might say, it's Friday, what are we doing?
I'm like, oh, watching me write for four hours?
laughter And so that's not the way to be.
You can't do that.
And so I can't be a good person's other half, because the work has always attracted me more than coming home to someone.
I can't stand the idea of living with a person.
I can do it on the bus because it's Das Boot and we're going down the road.
But I never would want to wake up and she's there.
And I have no aversion.
unidentified
A fucking expression that you just made, where you like, look to your right, she's there.
She's imagining holding your hand, coming to your spoken word shows, going to dinner with you, talking about your day, and you're in front of your fucking crazy speakers and you're writing.
I unplug it on the weekends except on Sunday my best friend since I was 12 and he was 11 were still best friends.
Ian, you ever heard of the band Fugazi?
Yes.
Okay, well Ian McKay, he's my best friend and we grew up together doing music and everything and we talk almost every Sunday and so we've been best friends since the Carter administration.
I make the best hash I possibly can, and then I sling it with everything I've got.
I just don't want to hang around afterwards and talk about it.
I'd just like to do it.
If I could just say thank you, goodnight, walk out of the building into a moving vehicle and be 10 blocks down the road before they get up out of their seats, that would be fine.
I don't know what else there is to do except hit it and then quit it.
And so it makes some interactions a little uncomfortable.
I like these people a lot.
They have no idea how much I just want to just rock their world with like a book or a show.
But beyond that, I... Hey, come and hang out with us.
Yeah, and the only reason is if I had my way, I'd be on the road every year, and I'd have hours of new material, and no one would ever get tired of me coming to their city once a year.
And I used to tour like that for years.
I'd go out every year.
And people are like, Henry, we love you, man, but you've got to start coming here less often.
It's a little offensive.
You just keep coming like, hey, it's me again.
And so then I started doing it every other year.
And then my promoter types, who are happy to take their 15%, they said, Henry, we love you, man, but you can't keep coming so often.
People are just getting a little up to here with it.
And so I did what everyone told me to this time around, because I know these people are all smarter than me.
And they said, can you wait a little while longer?
And so the last big tour is 2012. And I went out again in 2016. That was four years.
Basically, I went from one presidential election to another.
And the ticket sales spiked everywhere.
London was like 1,500 more tickets than I've ever done there.
I sold out two nights at the Sydney Opera House in Sydney.
It was amazing.
And I said, what's that about?
They said, you waited.
He gave people a time to forget how long you talk for.
And so it's sad to think that I have to wait until 2020. But I can do a little weekend here, a weekend there, but I can't go do the lap I just did next year.