Henry Rollins and Joe Rogan explore Rollins’ proposed six-part miniseries with Ted Nugent—despite their musical bond (Detroit punk legends like MC5, Stooges) and mutual respect, Rollins struggles with Nugent’s inflammatory rhetoric, including his 2012 "subhuman mongrel" remark about Obama. Rollins’ Showtime special Keep Talking, Pal traces back to his 1983 Lhasa Club debut, where humor defused punk-era confrontations, now repackaged as a career reflection. His self-published books (27 titles) and strict diet—no sugar, carbs, or soda—fuel his discipline, though he dismisses supplements, relying instead on beet-carrot juice and intermittent fasting (one meal/day in India). Rollins’ motivation stems from internalized "vengeance" against doubters, driving him to work relentlessly despite jet lag, while Rogan’s platform fosters progressive change, contrasting Trump’s perceived naivety with younger activists. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I know that there's some people, that's how they get their next book deal or whatever.
For myself, I would never want to trade in that because my reality coming up through punk rock and all of that is very, very immediate in that I don't say anything about anybody.
Without expecting them to hear it, and with me turning the next corner, like going to my car in your parking lot, and having that person waiting for me at the car, saying, hey, you said this, and having them be able to hold it up on a tablet and say it.
I watch what I say, because in my mind, I answer.
I will have to answer to all of it.
And so I would never say something where someone would go, really?
Well, today's the day we're going to see who can kick who says ass.
Because, you know, men have this wrong idea that they can't be beat.
Are you kidding?
Anyone can get knocked on their ass.
You think you're tough?
There's always, you know, you're in the business of tough guys.
But more than that, it's like you don't – most of the conflict that you get in when you're talking shit about somebody, like someone like you or I can do an interview and talk shit about someone and then go public and you don't think twice about it.
But now it extends to social media and pretty much anybody could do it at any time and it just seems so easy to do.
But – I always try to think if that person was in front of me, how would I treat it?
And if I would say, fuck this guy, like when he's in front of me, then I have a real problem with this person.
Like some member of Congress, I think, is just an inactive waste of food.
That'll say anywhere...
Hoping it'll bring him to me so I can say it to his or her face.
But for the most part, the way I was brought up in the world of music and the street is if you say something, that guy will be lining you up for a broken jaw.
So you better mean it.
But maybe just wait until you guys are in a room and see what you really want to say.
Because sniping from a windowless room from somewhere or being a keyboard activist, that doesn't mean much to me.
Friday, August 10th, 10 p.m., East Coast, West Coast, Showtime.
It's called Keep Talking, Pal.
And so the...
There it is.
10 seconds on that.
They said, what are you going to name it?
And I said, keep talking, pal.
They go, what does that mean?
It's just how you talk yourself in and out of trouble.
Like, you're about to get punched out?
Like, keep talking, pal!
If you don't get a laugh, you're not getting out of this bar.
And that's kind of how I came into talking shows, was being, as a young guy, skinny, on Ritalin, Not a good fighter.
Not a good fighter at all.
You know, just not into it.
And, you know, the local bully, I've said something snarky or funny, and all of a sudden he's got me by the scruff of my shirt with a fist in my face.
And the only thing you can do is, like, imitate him so much that everyone else laughs and, like, he has to drop you because he's now, like, drop your collar, not your body, because you're now making him laugh.
And so when in doubt, keep talking, pal.
And the fact that I have a, quote, comedy special on Showtime is so unlikely from some guy from the minimum wage working world.
I don't believe it myself.
And so they said, what are you going to call it?
A lot of these people, they have a lot of confidence.
1983, a little venue on Hudson, right off about 10 paces north of Santa Monica Boulevard.
It's like a street that dead ends onto Santa Monica Boulevard.
There's an art space there called the Lhasa Club.
There was a local promoter in town, amazing guy, and he would get like 25 people on stage in one night, everyone gets five minutes.
And it'd be the singer of that band, the drummer of that band, that artist, that poet, like real artists who speak for a living, and then the guy with the funny tour journal, or the guy from the band that we all like, and he's going to be an idiot for five minutes.
these shows were really fun because it just people are off stage all night long like running off stage and The bass player in black flag truck to Kowski the fed fantastic intellect He would get invited onto these bills I would go with him because we were beach guys We lived in the sticks and the gigs were in Hollywood.
So we'll go into the big smoke.
We'll go see the big city I'd go with him because he had the band van He'd go into town.
I'd tag along.
So he'd read out of some notebook his apocalyptic rantings.
And one night the promoter said, you got a big mouth.
Next week, you.
Five minutes or like whatever.
Seven minutes, five bucks.
All I could think of was the five bucks.
We were starving, as any band was.
And so the next show, I got on stage at Lhasa, told a story about what had happened at band practice the day before, where a white supremacist in a car tried to run over our guitar player, because we had brown-skinned people at our band practice.
And so he yelled, he accused our guitar player of being a beep lover and tried to run him over on his way to the liquor store to get some orange juice.
So our guitar player comes back a little shaken.
I nearly got run over by a neo-Nazi and let's go back to practice.
And so for us, that was this Tuesday in the life of Black Flag.
For an audience, they're like, you hear Joss hit the ground.
Then I read something I'd written.
I go, well, my five minutes are up or whatever it was, and I left the stage.
And it felt right.
I felt like a fish dropped into water for the first time.
Like, hey, I'm a fish.
Like, I didn't have a band, but I had no stage fright.
And just me and a microphone, it felt...
More natural than music ever felt, which was cool to do, but never felt natural.
Just felt like this thing is in me.
It's got to come out.
I'm serving a monster.
Where the talking show is like, yeah, this is me.
And after the show, people came up and said, what's your next show?
I said, well, I'm leaving on tour.
They go, no, no, when you're just talking.
I said, well, no, that's a one-off.
I got this $5 bill.
I'm out of here.
And so the promoter guy said, okay, you're very good at that.
You're a natural.
So how about this?
I promote all these different poets and performance artists.
I'll give you 20 bucks.
You'll do 20 minutes opening for this guy.
Okay.
So I did 20 minutes.
And then after a handful of those shows, those poet types were opening for me.
Because the Black Flag aspect kicks in.
Like, who's the dude from Black Flag?
People show up.
And I guess I was good enough.
And so those poets weren't that happy.
Like, I'm now opening for this guy?
Okay.
And that was 83 turning into 84. By 85, I had gone to Europe for some poetry festival, which I kind of blagged onto in Holland.
I had done a cross-country tour.
12 to 50 people a night's sleep on the promoter's couch.
Go buy Amtrak.
And started my little book company, 8384, self-published to this day.
And now it's a 14-month tour that takes in 20 countries, multiple nights in cities at nice theaters and Do you only use yourself for your publishing company, or do you publish anybody else's books?
We used to.
Many years ago, people I knew who I thought were great writers, I put them out.
We licensed Nick Cave's books from his publishers in Europe.
We licensed a few different titles.
We did photo books and a couple of novels, short story collections.
And it's very hard to have a book company.
It's hard to sell a book in the world unless it's like Stephen King or Danielle Steele.
It's mega, you know, at the...
At the cash register at the airport store.
If you're selling poetry books, different kinds of literature, you are nothing but uphill.
My books did okay.
They always do okay.
Everyone else's books is like trying to sell dead animal guts.
You know what I mean?
No one's that interested.
They'll look, but they don't want to take it home.
And so we stopped signing new writers, sold through the press runs, let the licenses run out.
Everyone got to keep their masters.
And then we just concentrated on me because I keep a whole staff busy with all the stuff I've got going.
And Heidi, who runs all my company, she's the smart one.
So I showed her the manuscript.
She goes, okay, the book is great, but let's not do it on our company because it's a lot of startup money for a photo book.
It's just a lot of setup cost.
Let's get you a literary agent and do it somewhere else.
And so it's a smart idea.
And so we got a literary agent.
And we did get a book deal with a very good Chicago.
It's a Chicago company.
Chicago Review?
I'm forgetting.
And they put out the photo book.
And that was a learning experience, like working with an editor.
Like, I'll go, well, here's the cover.
They go, well, we're going to have a meeting about that.
I'm like, you're having a meeting?
It's my book.
It's my book cover.
So I'm used to owning my own machine.
But when you work with other people's money, everyone has a big opinion.
So that book came out and continues to do very well.
And many years ago, I did a kind of a best of, if I have any best of material, I did a best of for Random House many, many years ago that you still see.
It's in print.
And that's a lot of people's first book of mine because it's in stores.
We pulled my company's books out of circulation because of Amazon because they can actually sell it cheaper than we can because they don't mind making five cents on a book because they're selling 80 billion books a second.
So we pulled ourselves out of distribution and now it's very much the website and it live shows.
And we have less returns.
We don't get a pallet of damaged books coming back that were, you know, abused in some bookstore in a shopping mall in the Midwest, like heavily thumbed but never taken home.
Also, I'm just kind of moody in that, yeah, we're going to go out and do this thing.
And then I don't want to see anyone do anything until 2028. And I don't want to cancel.
Besides hanging out with you, my big social thing is many, many years ago, 2003, I did a song with William Shatner, Bill Shatner, on his album, and we became pals.
Henry, come by the house for Monday Night Football.
And he invited me to the house for Monday Night Football.
He lives a few traffic lights from me.
And I'm walking up the stairs to the living room where the big TV is.
And I heard all this laughter and voices and I froze.
And I was right at the threshold of the door and I said, turn back, turn back, turn back.
I'm turning back.
Henry!
And he saw me.
And I'm like, hey, Bill!
And I walked in and met all his really cool friends.
And he, at least for me, Bill is one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life.
And it's one of the oddest Friendships I have in that I've been going to Bill Shatner's house every year since 2003. So what's that?
The other thing I would do once a year, and sadly it ended, but for a few years, I would go to Gail Zappa's birthday party on January 1st.
Because I would play a lot of her husband's music on my radio show, Frank Zappa.
And one time someone in the family wrote me and said, Hey, thanks for playing Dad on the show.
I'm like, are you kidding?
I love those records.
And Gail, the mom, the wife, wrote and said, Hey, thank you.
And, you know, we know who you are here and we like you.
I have a birthday party every January 1st.
Why don't you come up to the house this year or next year?
And I did.
And that was like three or four years in a row I did that until Gail passed away.
And, you know, you get there or whatever it is, like two in the afternoon.
Two hours before, I'm genuinely nervous to go be in a room full of extraordinarily nice people with fantastically good food.
And everyone was always so nice to me.
And it's like a who's who.
You walk in and you're like, wow.
It's just all these people you recognize.
I'm not here to name drop, but some of the tables I sat at at that thing, I'm like, really?
Am I really talking to, like, really?
It's fantastic.
And she was always so nice to me.
And last time I was up there, one of my books is in the living room.
I'm like, wow!
And when she passed away, I wrote one of the family members.
I said, I am so sorry.
Thank you for the hospitality.
Your mom was so great to me.
And I'm kind of like the rescue dog.
I'm used to being outside.
So I don't...
Come inside very often.
And I went to that birthday party because just the friendliness of that, as socially nerve-wracking as those things are for me, I had such respect for that extension of kindness.
I cannot disrespect it by not going.
I wouldn't dare.
The samurai in me says, you must be respectful, even if it makes you nauseous with social anxiety, because I just don't know what to do.
I can't say no, because it's such a nice thing to do for someone.
She must not really know how I am, otherwise she never would have invited me.
So, but things like that, out of sheer politeness and respect for someone being friendly to me, I'm kind of a pushover just because I'm like, wow, that was so nice.
I think it's so good that you're open about your social anxiety and then about how you feel like being around all these people because a lot of people on the outside they see someone like you you know black flag All your spoken word things, your books, your fucking...
I mean, I always go back to that The Liar song.
Your fucking neck was like the size of my waist and you're screaming and you're painted red and like you're this crazy intimidating guy in a lot of ways so to hear you talk about Social anxiety and how weird you feel and I think we all can We all feel that.
I always feel like that.
I mean, it doesn't matter.
I think no matter how famous you get, if you're paying attention, you're going to have an imposter syndrome.
You're always going to feel like you don't belong there, if you're actually paying attention.
And if you don't, you're probably delusional in some sort of a way.
Before I go into that, on your point, it's easy for me to be in front of people.
That's a very different thing than being with people.
I can be the party, but going to the party is difficult.
Put me in front of like five people, 5,000 people, stage fright.
No, I can't wait to be out there.
You're a performer type.
Like, you'd love that audience if they showed up.
Like, are you kidding?
I'm a dog with a wagging tail.
I want to get out there and get it going.
I can't wait.
I wait the whole day on tour to get out there.
The whole day is about 8 o'clock, you know, stage time.
Being amongst people, like going to a gallery event, I go see a Shepard Fairey thing or something, and people are super nice to me, and I'm always polite back, but I'm a little nervy.
But if they say, can you get up and speak for five minutes?
So every 500 years, I go to one of those premieres.
I get invited.
And you're in a room full of tons of really good food, and none of those people eat.
So I just go in there and come out nine pounds heavier, a bunch of shrimp.
I just eat.
But I was at a big Hollywood premiere, big movie years ago, and it's like that one, that one, that one, that one, and they're all like, ah, it is their lives.
And I'm with a buddy of mine.
We blagged in there and we're like, what are we doing here?
This is so cool because we know we shouldn't be here.
And after shaking Ike Turner's hand, 10 minutes later, I'm back in my own kitchen going, that was so weird.
Like, what a surreal evening.
And because my friend and I were standing next to each other, and he said, that looks like Ike Turner.
I go, no, man, that is Ike Turner.
He looked like a human barracuda.
He's like, terrifying.
I said, let's go meet him.
I'm like, come on!
Like, we bought a ticket.
We're at the dance.
Let's go talk to this guy.
He's like, no, no, no, no.
I just walked right over there.
I said, you invented rock and roll, Rocket 88. And he went, yes, I did.
It sucks and they're already insecure in the first place and then they sort of try to model their behavior based on what they think the casting agents and the producers want to hear.
And they change and they develop this style of communicating that's very actory.
I mean, I've never relied on acting as my source income.
In 1984, when I was 23, I had a thing that has been serving me up to sitting here with you now.
I was very young and 23 years of age, a young idiot, and I looked all around me and all my peers were super talented.
Who are my peers?
Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Husker Du, The Meat Puppets, The Dead Kennedys.
I'm just surrounded by really talented people who are brilliant, great songwriters.
And between tours, many of them are waiting tables, living with mom, living on couches, sleeping at band practice with a kick drum, a pillow as their pillow, just like roughing it.
And I reckon that I'm less talented than all of them.
And if they're waiters between tours, the only reason I'm not is Black Flag never stops touring.
The ball never hit the ground because we'd starve.
And so I better get plans B, C, D, E, F, and G ready because music's not going to sustain me.
Ironically, it went very well for me.
And so I was doing the writing.
So I said, I'm going to really get better at writing.
I'm going to really bear down on this.
The talking shows, I'm getting 35 people a night.
I'm going to get 50 people a night.
And then voiceover people started coming like, hey, can you do a voiceover?
I got a voice.
What do you want me to put?
I better learn to say yes to stuff.
And by the mid-80s, hey, you want to be in a movie?
Yeah!
What do I have to lose except calories from starving?
And so it was fear of not eating and knowing I better have a plan.
And so I started developing that in the 80s and 90s.
And from that came...
When I'm done with this, I'm going to go immediately into this documentary, and then I'm finishing this radio show, and then I'm going off to do this film, and then I'm going on tour, and then I'm coming back and finishing this book.
And it turned into this, like, juggling all these things.
So I never had to be a full-time actor.
Like, that's how I pay the rent.
That would be terrifying.
Right up there with being a professional comedian.
Like, I don't know how someone acts for a living without being really good or out of their minds with anxiety.
You know, for a band, I think the venues are more limited.
Places you go are more limited.
And I think that's interesting that it was almost like a desperation to not have to work a job as a waiter that kept you just hustling and figuring out other ways.
I just knew that the straight world, because I'd been in it, I come from it, you know, minimum wage work and everything, and I knew I couldn't survive in it.
As a young adult, you start to figure out who you are.
And I go, okay, I'm not an artist, but I'm an artist type.
I'm nuts.
You can't put me in a straight job.
I can pass for normal just because I can task it.
I can totally do it.
You can put me in a Ralph's, a Kroger's, a Starbucks.
I will totally get in there and hit the work and clean it all and serve it up with a smile.
There was an article written about happiness, and that was one of the things that they said that one of the things that seems to sustain people's happiness or facilitate happiness is accomplishing tasks.
Setting goals for yourself, accomplishing those goals, and getting this sense of completion, that you've actually done the work and you did it and you disciplined yourself and got through it, and that this is one of the major keys to happiness for a lot of people.
When you and I were talking before, We're at your place and you said some mornings you feel like training this way and you'll go to that gym or you'll train like judo or whatever and then the next day it's going to be kettlebells.
You really like to mix it up.
I think it's good for a body to always be guessing what's coming next.
I think I need at least one day of hard cardio a week.
And I think I need at least one day of hard lifting weights a week.
But I also think I need at least one day of yoga a week.
At least.
Yoga is...
To me, it's one of the most important things that I do because for that 90 minutes, I can't go anywhere.
My phone's not in the room with me.
It's just me and a jug of water and the yoga mat and the class and a bunch of old ladies that are kicking my ass.
These old ladies are fucking tough, man.
This is this old lady.
She goes to this workout class with me.
I see her there all the time.
She's got to be close to 70. She doesn't even bring water.
She just toughs it out.
She's there for 90 minutes sweating and grunting through the postures.
And you're doing an hour and a half class, those last 20 minutes in 104 degrees.
It's so hard to get through.
But when you get through, you just feel better.
While I'm in it, I can't wait to do it again.
While I'm struggling, and I was like, God, I need to do more than this.
I need to do this more often.
I can't wait to do this again.
I always feel that.
And it just lengthens everything.
All the backwards.
Things and the leg things, the hamstring things, just stretches everything out, lengthens it, and all the tension, it just straightens it out and loosens it up.
And I just feel like for a guy like you or I, who does a lot of a lot of like, especially like used to a lot of heavy lifting, you were saying a lot of deadlifts and squats.
But, you know, I know them because they have a mat.
But you can also see how they walk, how they sit.
They're so in their body, and there is a grace to, I'm not trying to put anyone in the pejorative, but a yoga person, where not only are they limber, they're just really okay Their body articulation, you're like, okay, I don't have that.
I'm a herky-jerky, uncoordinated person, but there's a hum coming from that person's overall body.
It's a beautiful machine, the way they articulate themselves and the way they sit.
You want to bolt, but you also start going over your life and your mind and dealing with all your bullshit and your to-do list and all the things you're doing wrong or slacking.
There's something about really struggling in these static positions for like a minute where you're trying to like hold your leg up there and your sweat is literally pouring off your arms and your head and- There's something about that band that's just really cleansing.
It just really empties you.
I just think it's a thing that you're missing that you would really love if you tried.
I bet if you did it and you came back and we did a podcast a year later, you'd be like, FUCK! Yoga!
Well, the family—Hoyce Gracie's the most famous because he's probably the most important figure ever in the history of martial arts because he won the first Ultimate Fighting Championship and showed that a small man can actually beat larger men with technique and skill.
Well, his brother is Hickson, and his brother is like— He's universally regarded as one of the greatest jiu-jitsu guys, if not the greatest of all time.
And he was different than everybody else in that he did yoga.
I'd never heard of a martial artist that got into yoga, but Hickson would do these breathing exercises and he'd do these balance beam exercises and he was always doing yoga and stretching and that was a giant part of his workout.
And he was a Above and beyond everyone else in his time period, like in the 90s, everyone was scared of Hickson.
He was the man.
It wasn't like there was any debate.
It's very rare that you get something that is so antagonistic and so tightly contested as two men using martial arts techniques trying to strangle each other, and one guy stands above all by such a large margin, and that was Hickson.
And I really do believe that part of it was his mind, part of it was his physicality, but a lot of that physicality was enhanced by his dedication to yoga.
Yeah, he's a legit yogi.
He does that fire-breathing shit where he sucks his stomach in in that weird way and has it move up and down.
You ever see someone do that?
Yeah.
He does that like a real yogi.
It's a real trip.
I think because of his, like, physical...
Like, you can see there.
He's got this video here.
You can see him do this fire-breathing shit.
Like, watch what he does with his stomach.
It's kind of fucking crazy.
He sucks his stomach way, way, way up deep into his ribcage.
He does this breath of fire thing, and then as it gets going, he starts pumping his...
Yeah, I've done a, you know, every once in a while, I've worked out with someone else and they go, okay, we're going to do this and this and then you work out and then you let them, you let yourself be trained.
And I know that a lot of athletes, and I know that you use it, Joey Diaz, but on their brochure, apparently all these sports teams, like it's just part of what you do.
Yeah, sauna seems to be really good for muscle injuries.
There's something about the sauna, for any time, muscle tissue or soreness or weird shit, sauna just blows that all out.
And sauna is also one of those things that, what it is, is your body reacting to extremes, right?
Whether it's extreme cold or extreme heat, your body produces heat shock proteins and cold shock proteins in an All those things you're doing is reducing inflammation.
That's the number one thing.
You want to feel better?
Reduce inflammation.
One of the best ways to manipulate your body is either through cryotherapy or through sauna.
Like, I'm going to starve and nail myself to this chair.
But, you know, if I'm too distracted to work because I'm hungry, I need to address that.
But what I have found...
Is if I just kind of don't eat a lot after a couple of days, I'm like a jet in the high air where you're burning no fuel because you're just in the thin air.
Where I walk pie food going like, nah, I've had like two meals in the last, two and a half meals like in the last three days.
And I feel fine.
Actually, I feel like...
Really bouncy.
I don't need the post-workout seven-minute power nap.
You know, the body's like, as it's processing, it's incoming.
Like, really?
Another order?
It never gets to realize digestion.
Like, we're done.
It's always, you know, you're like a cow.
They're always processing nutrition.
And I wonder if that's a Western model.
Because in other parts of the world, people live very differently than we do.
It is what it is.
And a meal is almost just a thing that happens now and then.
It's not like it's dinner time and we're going to talk about dinner.
Report cards and it's not a gathering.
It's like the whole family works all over the city and they're gonna eat, I think, at some point.
Even sleep.
You go to parts like Vietnam and people are just sleeping behind the counter of the store they work at because they've been there for a day and a half because mom can't come in, so they're running the store.
And sleep is this thing that you get now and then.
And I think food is like that in a lot of parts of the world.
When you go to these places, and I know you travel pretty much all over the world, do you go out of your way to try to sample in as wide a variety as the local cuisine as you can?
And I'm not that guy who just brings it all from home and I never leave home when I'm abroad.
But I can't afford to eat a bad meal and be bedridden for the next day when I should be out hitting the streets looking at stuff.
And so I've had, you know, as you do, you run into the bad meal where you're like hugging a tree, watching the arc of vomit like, wow, Linda Blair.
And I've done that from here to Myanmar and Russia, wherever I've had some bad meals.
And so when the food looks dodgy, like in the interior of Africa, when you point at the meat object and go, what is that?
And the guy will say, I think it's goat.
Cliff bar!
Just because...
I just can't.
And so what I've learned to do, and it's hard on your back because it's a lot of weight.
Say I'm going to be out in Africa for two weeks.
I bring about two meals worth of chow with me.
That's a lot of nuts, a lot of Clif bars, a lot of peanut butter, things that just don't go bad in heat.
Where I can just look at the food and go, no, not tonight.
It's going to be...
A handful of almonds, and this, and water.
Also, in parts of the world where water's dodgy, you find a store, you buy the box of water, rip it open to make sure it hasn't been tampered with, buy the whole box, put it in your backpack, and lug 40 pounds of water for the next five days.
It sucks, but you can't be somewhere and go like, I'm thirsty and I don't know about that water.
Have you thought about bringing, you know, they have these portable backpack filters and SteriPens and things that a lot of backpack hikers, they use, they're very small now.
They're very small and lightweight, and you can get some, like, if you're staying in a place and you think it has dodgy water, you can get a gravity filter, or you put water, like, you could literally get rainwater from outside in a puddle, and I know a lot of people do that.
And they take it and they put it in this large gravity filter and it'll drip down.
It looks like someone's peeing at the bottom of this huge bag, a 60 liter bag of water.
But it filters it all and it allows you to drink basically puddle water.
I've been in some pretty dodgy places, but I've always been somewhere in prep.
Like a city before I go into the countryside, where I go, okay, it's going to be five days before I see anything like this again, so I'm provisioning for eight days of water.
Yeah, I've been working on and off with a water NGO for many years called Drop in the Bucket.
And I've been to Uganda and South Sudan with them.
They drill at schools.
And, you know, as a Westerner, water is just the thing we sing in the shower with.
You know, it's just like it's always around.
You know, you trip over the bottles.
There's so much water.
Right.
In other parts of the world, as you know, not so much.
And when you see the impact of water on a school, there's so many things you don't think about.
And so I was at this one school where they had drilled, dropped in the bucket, had drilled, like, before, and we were there to visit the well and meet the kids in Masaka.
It's, I think, north of Kampala.
And what one of the drop in the bucket people say is like, they now have toilets and running water.
Do you understand what that means for female literacy?
I'm like, what do you mean?
A woman, a girl hits a certain age, she goes through a major physiological change.
If there's not running water in a way for her to clean herself up, There's a lot of potential shame and self-consciousness.
You stop going to school because there's not a way to keep yourself together.
And your learning stops at young adulthood.
But with running water and a way to, you know, as we Westerners just do so easily, you keep yourself hygienic and you can go back to class and learn to read.
And I was like, I never would have thought of that had I not come on this trip.
And it hit me like a truck.
Because you just think, water, I'm thirsty.
Water means so much more.
Just dignity.
Like, I want to be clean.
You and me, we throw our clothes in the laundry every day.
Clean clothes, I mean, you see these women walking eight miles each way with the jerry cans of water.
Some of that's for drinking.
A lot of it's for cleaning clothes because they're sending their kid to a school.
They want the kid, you know, human dignity.
Water and all of that is a big thing.
You know, you can't have dignity without the water because water means I don't stink.
And you must respect me as a person because I don't smell like I've been living in these clothes for a week.
And I learned a lot of that by traveling.
But traveling with that NGO was, you know, like going to class.
So these little creeps, but just you see what people do.
They're not trying to be rock stars.
All they want to do is what you and I do just without even thinking twice.
And that, you know, it's made me as an older guy, I'm pushing 60 and It's made me really reconsider human relationships, like our current political climate, the way people talk to each other now.
It's sometimes kind of terrifying.
And it makes me really reconsider human dignity, respect, patience.
Like there's a lot of people I disagree with, but they're coming from something real, like something very real and honest.
Propelled them to make that sign or to do that thing and The the cause and effect I think there may be wrong-headed but the cause is real and the effect is Sincerely the action is sincerely held the the motivation and it's that kind of travel and Looking how looking how people they don't want much.
They just want to get by by and large and um It's made me reconsider kind of how I voulez-vous with everyone out in the world.
I think I'm getting better at it because it's so hard.
Even when you're doing your live speaking shows, you're having these discussions, and you're talking about crazy things that you've seen, you don't swear?
Many years ago, almost 10 years ago, I was going out with a woman who never cursed.
And I work with people who don't curse, and they get their point across.
And this girl I was going out with, she's fantastic, and she never cursed in my sailor-speak.
I was like, wow, I don't have any company here.
And also Barack Obama, and presidents traditionally don't curse.
But he's had such a good way with words.
I just admired him on the stump.
I'm sure it was all written for him.
But nonetheless, I just like how the man carried himself.
And I said, I want to be more like that.
And I was just in Australia a couple of weeks ago, I was speaking, and I was on a very interesting panel about Me Too.
I was the only male on the panel, it was fascinating.
And a guy came up with his kids, like, hey, I'm a big fan, and I want my kids to meet you, and my son's 11, and I want him to come see one of your shows one day.
I said, oh, I think he should see me on my next tour here in 2020, when he'll be like, what, 13?
No problem.
And I'm not saying my show is Namby Pamby, But I want to be unavoidable, where you can't write me off, say I'm wrong.
Fine.
Disagree with me.
That's fine.
Like, oh, he's just a foul mouth, so we don't have to take him seriously.
I don't want to give you that handle to jerk me around by.
I have plenty of other handles you can jerk me around by.
And so I'm just trying to not give people that angle.
And it forces me to evolve my point of view.
Where those words are fun and hyperbolic, but they just don't serve me.
But yeah, if you just drop it all the time, and I believe in the First Amendment, but to me, when you use that stuff, you come in as one thing, but the result is you're something else to a lot of people.
When I'm out in the world, I'll be out all day, like, taking photos or whatever, vou-lay-voo-ing with the locals, getting information.
Then I come back somewhere, and I write it up.
Or I'll take, you know, sometimes in a place like Haiti, you don't want to be outside at noon.
The sun will just, like, beat you up.
So you find shade, make your notes.
So I'm always trying to make notes.
And then at night, I write it all up.
A lot of that turns into a book.
Like I use every part of the deer.
Like when I go somewhere, I make soup, jewelry, a coat, every part gets used.
And so the books come from that.
But some stories from those travels, I mull them over in my mind.
And the show for me, when I'm on stage, it just can't be mere reportage.
There has to be something.
There has to be an aroma coming from it.
There has to be a lilt.
There has to be a wisdom or some kind of melody that comes from the raw information.
Like I took all these notes and got the Houses of the Holy album, which is just its component parts, but it was mixed together in a way where it's like this beautiful thing.
And so that often takes weeks.
We're like, so I saw this.
What was the story?
Well, the guy fell over.
But no, it wasn't at six weeks of thinking about it.
It wasn't him.
He's not the story.
It's the guy who was watching and did nothing.
That's the story.
And all of a sudden, the whole angle changes.
And so I'll mull these things over because I have a lot of time.
I live alone.
And so by the time the story gets to the stage, it's like a stone that's been rolled and polished.
There's parts of the valley, Ventura Boulevard, where at night there's nothing but dog walkers and joggers.
All the shops are closed.
I will park in a parking lot and I'll walk about a mile each way talking out loud, saying the stories out loud.
Right, yeah, like there's a thing about stand-up is, part of it I really like because it forces you to use economy of words and boil your ideas down into this very clear rhythm where you like keep hammering them with laughs.
But part of it is, I mean, where I get my freedom is from this.
From doing podcasts.
So I can express myself in ways and get thoughts across where it doesn't have to have any form.
The thing about stand-up is that you're always getting a reaction, and if you don't get that reaction, it is not successful.
You can call it whatever you want.
You can say, oh, this is stand-up, but I'm talking about stand-up, or I'm talking about things that are tragic in my stand-up, so it's deeper and more meaningful.
Can I ask you a professional question or feel free to edit this out when you're on stage and like you're doing like a big theater like where you're the main guy like a big Saturday night somewhere How long are you on stage for usually an hour and 10 to an hour and 20 minutes okay?
I work alone, and I don't have a peer group, really.
If I do, I'm not trying to find them.
And I'm just curious about how other people do their thing, because I live alone in a tour bus, like with a road manager and a bus driver and a merch guy, and I have no opener.
Except in Australia, there's a rule they want one for one.
I noticed when Obama welcomed the President-elect Trump to the Oval Office for that 90-minute meeting that Trump thought was going to last 15 minutes, Obama looked like Tutankhamun.
Well, a thing I've noticed, I look at people when I travel, I just find our species is fascinating all over the world.
You look at people's teeth in parts of the world where sugar and corn syrup is just not normal.
And you see, like, these 75-year-old women, like, carrying a couch up a hill, and their teeth are these bright white tree trunks, just like of, like, they're never going to fall out of their heads.
Right.
No dentistry, you know, no noticeable dentistry, and the teeth are gleaming white, maybe darkened from tobacco or tea, but nothing like in the West where their teeth are just getting assaulted by our own diet.
And you see people of great age with, like, they're just ripped.
And you look at what they're eating, like fish, rice, vegetables, and it's all lean, smart products.
Food.
And the sugars are all monosaccharides, like fruit sugar.
And then that guy could go and look in the mirror and go, fuck, I really do need to lose some weight.
And then they'll lose some weight and they'll be healthier and they'll talk to you four or five months later and go, you know, you fucked my head up that day.
And because of that, I really started changing the way I eat and I'm so much healthier and I feel better.
Fat shaming doesn't work on people who aren't fat, okay?
It works on people who have a problem but don't want to address that problem.
So you bring up that problem, and then they go, oh, you're making me feel bad by thinking about my problem.
You're a bad person.
No, you have a weak spot.
That weak spot shouldn't be there.
You shouldn't belabor it and constantly ridicule someone for being fat, but the idea that you're never supposed to bring it up even with someone you care about, even in jest or friends busting balls, like, no, no, no, you should bring it up, because that bad feeling is a gift.
It makes you realize, like, oh my god, I've been remiss.
I haven't been paying attention to my own physical sovereignty.
I have control over what goes in my body.
I have control over the amount of calories I take in, the kind of calories.
I have control over how much body fat I'm carrying around.
I mean, we spoke for a while on his podcast, had a great time, and he's one of those guys, if he called me at 3 in the morning, hey, I'm in trouble, I'm in San Diego, I'm like, hold on, give me three hours.
Yeah, I was told by someone who had him at his venue in Northern California, he just sits in front of the mirror before the show and does the whole show at hyperspeed in a low voice.
I did that on a TV show once, me and the actors.
It was one of the actors' ideas.
Okay, everyone in my trailer.
And we did the whole show at hyperspeed in a low voice, standing in a huddle.
It was really cool because we were just like in each other's face going on.
It's funny.
And we just kind of did it like this, like crazy mumbling fest for like 20 minutes.
Especially his speech from like January 19th, 1838. Give me some.
It's a famous speech.
He said when he was talking about will America ever be taken over by anywhere else?
And he said, no, the only way America is going to fall is from within.
So he said, should we fear some transatlantic giant to cross the ocean and crush us at a blow?
Never.
All the country, you know, Asia, Europe, and Africa, with their war chests combined, with the treasures of the world, are unaccepted.
And Bonaparte as a commander could not, in a trial of a thousand years, so much as take a sip from the Ohio River or lay a tread on the Blue Ridge Mountains.
If destruction be our lot, We must either live through all time or die by suicide.
And I just take chunks of that speech because he's like 28, 29 years of age.
He's so eloquent.
A sentence of Lincoln is worth 10 of anyone else's.
It's all online for free.
But it's called The Speech to the Young Men's Lyceum or The Perpetuation of Our Government Institutions.
But I use Lincoln and amendments from the Constitution.
The 14th is – it's in like four parts or five parts.
It's the top parts for we the people.
The rest is legalese.
And I'll do that, or the Fourth Amendment, the privacy one, that's a great one.
It's not completely in the front of my brain pan.
But I carry a copy of the Constitution with me whenever I travel, and I open it like people open the Bible, and I'll just pick an amendment and read it.
Yeah, and I have one of those, the Constitution for Idiot books, where lawyers write about, here's when it was brought into law, here's why, here's what it means in layman terms.
So we got to put this person in checks because he might be a failed businessman, bad reality show actor who doesn't understand.
I have to read 1,500 pages of stuff this weekend and have five lawyers advise me.
No golf or fun for me.
I'm the president.
And a lot of presidents do understand before they go in, like, boy, this job's going to be boring.
And a lot of people are going to be mad.
And in my lifetime, we finally have a president who really is from the people, who says, he looks at like, you know, here's eight folders of stuff to read.
And, you know, it's not for me to sit and rip on the guy because he's not here to defend himself.
But never in my life have I ever watched an American president and thought to myself, I could have done better in that situation.
And there's presidents I've had nothing but disagreement with, but they were way better for the job than I ever could be.
I look at this guy and go like, man, you just got played.
And When I knew I was going to be talking to you, there's a thing I was thinking about.
I heard you speak many years ago about these politicians are gangsters.
You said like, okay, what that guy did, that's gangsta.
And what this guy just did, straight up gangsta.
It was during the Bush administration.
I think it was like Halliburton, all these people in the Cheney world.
And you're like, that's a gangster move.
That's a gangster move.
I'm like, I can't disagree with anything he just said.
And on that kind of level, I think what I never hear is that Donald Trump is a guy who gets consistently played, rolled, got rolled by his wife, a woman I have nothing against, but she comes from a really tough part of the world, Slovenia.
That's just a rough patch of real estate.
She's smart and she's tough and she got out.
Got to America, well, he's not much on looks, but It's a way in from the storm.
So he got played by his wife.
He got played by Paul Manafort.
He got played by Kim Jong Un.
He got played like Jimi Hendrix at Monterey, that particular Stratocaster by Vladimir Putin, and gets played like Rachmaninoff every single day.
And anyone he does high-stakes business with or negotiations, he gets played.
And Manafort just used him to try and, you know, get out of debt.
And all these other people, they just roll all over him.
I mean, like Anna Politkovskaya, one of the greatest journalists of our time, she was critical of Putin and she got assassinated in her apartment building.
Her books are great.
Her books from Chechnya are amazing.
And she was critical of him and she had to go.
And when you see our president cozying up to this guy, I just want to go Bro, let's talk.
Let's take a walk in the garden for 20 minutes.
You can't be friends with this guy.
My theory is there's some kind of finances where he's got to stick up for him.
I don't think it's a tape of people urinating on anyone.
But the fact that we're becoming okay with this guy, that is the part that bugs me the most.
And why people in Congress, or a guy like Sean Hannity, who probably likes communists as much as my dad, even me, I don't trust people like that at all.
Putin is a criminal, should be in jail for a million billion years.
He may very well live, because he looks like he's watching his weight now.
He's looking lean.
He might live to be like 105. And so he'll never go to jail.
And like, how many millions does he make a year just from his dividends from whatever?
Like, who knows what you do with that kind of money?
I don't know what you do with it.
And so I don't think he goes to jail.
I don't think Jared Kushner goes to jail.
I think at most they leave, like maybe next year, and they go like, I drained the swamp, I did what I came here to do, and the fake news media brought me down.
And all his people buy one of everything he makes forever.
If I make a point, as my dad used to say, you want to score, hit them where they ain't, the baseball idea.
And so if I can make a point, like if I was on stage tonight talking about Trump, I would roll out that idea of Trump is a guy who's been played by so many people around him.
And no one talks about his wife playing him.
Like there's no love in that marriage, I don't think.
She saw a way out, came to New York and went, that guy.
Gets naked with the toad a few nights a month, a handful of Prozac, some Stoli, and a credit card, and a seven-figure expense account.
You can take a shower and make it go away.
And I think he kind of knows that she was not like, wow, what a hot guy.
She's like, hey.
And that happens a lot in this town.
You'll see...
That, you know, the couple, and you're like, okay.
Well, yeah, but you see that a lot in this town where you see the old weird dude with like the eight-year-old girlfriend.
You're like, oh yeah, that's a setup.
That's an agency.
That's an agreement.
Someone's getting a salary or an implied, you know, there's some kind of quid pro quo.
There's a credit card.
There's an expense account or there's just a big fistful of hundreds and just let me chew on you for the next four weeks.
You know, whatever the agreement is.
So if I was going to say anything about Donald Trump on stage, it would be, he sucks!
And I never talk about any problem on stage, and I learned this from, of all people, President Clinton.
Because some of his later speeches post-presidency, I'm not a huge fan of the guy, but he's a good speaker.
And he did some speeches in the UK a few years ago, and I happened to be in England when he was there, and I watched him on TV. The last part of the speech, the last 10 minutes was, here's a problem and here's three solutions.
Here's another problem, here's three solutions.
We're like, for $60 million, we could put internet through this thing, or we could open this waterway, or we could reconfigure this workforce to upgrade so everyone can get a paycheck.
He just had logical ways forward.
So what I took from that is, to my audience, don't propose a problem.
Well, he sucks, thanks, goodnight.
Don't give them a Gordian knot unless you can go, actually, it's not a Gordian knot.
Here's three ways to get out of this burning wreck.
And so when Trump became elected, I was on tour.
I was doing a bunch of nights in L.A. And I said, okay, you have a new president and some of you are depressed.
I said, I know.
And so gay people are on the endangered species list as if they've never been.
Brown people, black people, women people, people with ovaries.
These are all...
On the, you're screwed list.
So, instead of becoming depressed and oh no, we get up, we start doing more benefits, Now all your words matter.
Your actions matter.
How you stick up for your LGBT friends really matters now.
How you stick up for women.
How you stick up for racial equality.
Equality in the workplace.
Like how you check yourself when you vous les vous with other people.
Words matter.
Actions matter more than ever.
And so to me it's an exciting time to show how great you can be because now it's all on the line.
The fat is off the land.
We're being tested.
I love a test, so let's get it on.
It's like in your line of work when the guy goes, here we go!
That's how I saw it.
Like, okay, let's get the money to the ACLU. Let's get some money to Planned Parenthood.
Let's get a conversation going about child suicide, intimidation through Facebook.
Let's start making things better because this guy is not our ally.
Government's not necessarily going to help.
At its best, it's inactive.
At its worst, it's divisive and predatory.
So let's be the antidote by being cool.
By not throwing rocks through windows or like getting a guy with a tiki torch and beating him up.
Come on.
You're never going to convince that guy that he's wrong.
So get to the people you agree with and let's start sticking together more and raising more money and get some more interesting people in office.
Let's get some young people in office.
And I think that's what's happening.
Like you're seeing all these young people, like 20s, 30s.
Sadly, there's a bunch of kids who died at a high school in Florida.
But look what happened.
Look at all those kids hitting the streets.
Look at all these kids who threw cell phones and selfies and Instagram and Snapchat.
They're already ready for prime time.
You see these high school juniors in front of a CNN camera going, hi, I'm 17 years old, this happened to my school, and next year I'm going to vote, and here's what's going to happen, and here's the march I'm starting.
Like, uh-oh, that's a future senator.
That school shooting just birthed a voting demographic.
Are you kidding?
All those kids are going to vote.
All of them.
All those kids who marched?
There's going to be no millennial apathy with those kids.
They're all going to vote.
I kind of have an idea what side they're going to vote with.
And if you think you're going to sell those kids on their grandfather's drunken homophobia, racism, and overall bigotry and xenophobia, You're wrong.
He never had a passport.
I don't need to travel.
I don't want to meet some damn Mexican.
Trust me, the kid's going to travel.
He's going to go to India.
She's going to go to Colombia and meet other people and get a more global sense of the world, a sense of water, food.
Energy, where it comes from, what happens with money, what happens with mediocrity, the danger of it.
So I think we're in for some tough times, but I think they're going to lead to good times.
And so if I get political on stage, all I say is, like, here's five ways forward.
Because the despair part, you need me to tell you?
You watch the news.
So don't get down in the mouth.
Start burning more calories.
And that's not my job, but I would never weigh in on stage any other way about that stuff, because all I would be is obvious.
And my audience is pretty sharp, and they don't need to be told twice.