March 26, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:16:08
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The difference that I'm learning between when I do comedy and acting is that like the last thing people really want to see from your own stage is you really get emotional. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, but when you act you have to go to that right away. | ||
| Big difference. | ||
| We're live? | ||
| Is it working? | ||
| Oh my Jesus! | ||
| A candid moment. | ||
| No, I think you're totally right. | ||
| Ron Funches and I were talking about people getting mad. | ||
| First of all, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Thanks for being here, man. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| We were talking about people getting emotional on stage. | ||
| If people get angry on stage, that... | ||
| It shows. | ||
| The audience can feel it. | ||
| You can say the exact same words. | ||
| And with a fake anger, as we were saying, Brody was really good at. | ||
| He would fake be mad at you. | ||
| Lewis Black. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you can see those exact same words, there's like a smile to it. | ||
| You were saying there's a nod or a hint. | ||
| Hint of a nod. | ||
| Yeah, there's a little wink that lets you know that this is a joke. | ||
| I'm not really this mad about it. | ||
| And there's usually an absurdity about the thing they're mad at. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We also see those sets sometimes when someone's recently broken up with somebody or something. | ||
| And then you get that real anger. | ||
| And you could say something funny, but it's too fresh. | ||
| It's too real. | ||
| And people just don't want to hear it. | ||
| They don't want to hear it. | ||
| It makes them feel uncomfortable. | ||
| We were talking about how weird it is that you could actually have something that sounded so similar to that, but we could tell the difference. | ||
| Like with the exact same words, you know, with enthusiasm, just something's off about it. | ||
| Something's off about it that you know it's funny versus something's off about it where you know that person's serious. | ||
| And a person, like I was, we were just saying, try to explain that to someone who doesn't understand English or doesn't understand human communication. | ||
| They'd be like, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How can you tell? | ||
| Like, how can you tell it's fake? | ||
| How can you tell it's fake anger? | ||
| Yeah, that's what makes, I mean, the language so fun. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not just about the words, it's about the intent behind the words. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And body language and posture is what makes comedy so deep, you know? | ||
| That's what I love about it. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, what we're trying to do is convey intent. | ||
| We're trying to figure out a way to sneak ideas into your head where maybe you didn't see the punchline coming. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very strange art form. | ||
| One of the strangest ever. | ||
| I've always said it's almost like a form of mass hypnosis. | ||
| Do you feel that sometimes? | ||
| Like in the middle of the set and you're in the groove? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of ways. | ||
| One of... | ||
| I mean, you're a weird guy, so it doesn't matter. | ||
| It's going to get weird in multiple ways. | ||
| But when I first started my acting class, I was talking about that with my acting coach. | ||
| And I'd be like, there's a point, like, if my set's really going well, where I'm in the present moment of enjoying the set and saying these words, but at the same time, I'm in the future thinking about what's coming next. | ||
| I'm surveying everything that's going around me, and I'm also still kind of like judging myself off of what just happened. | ||
| And so this thing happens where you're kind of like time traveling in a way, where you don't exist in any one space of time. | ||
| You just kind of like remove yourself from that. | ||
| And when your set's going really well, that's the thing that my girlfriend and I have talked about is that you can hear these sets and hear these jokes. | ||
| You can see someone set multiple times, but if they're really good, oftentimes you don't remember the joke. | ||
| Like how many times people go back and quote a joke to you and they've got it half wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because they've heard you a thousand times, but they got the joke half wrong because you've hypnotized them. | ||
| They don't even remember it, you know? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Or some people remember shit you don't remember anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That's a weird one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've had people come up to me and tell me a bit. | ||
| I go, what bit is that? | ||
| And they'll tell me the bit. | ||
| I'm like, when is that from? | ||
| Like, 2014. I'm like, I don't even remember that. | ||
| Yeah, just something you were... | ||
| Trying out every now and then. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what's fun now for me is I'm getting a little bit deeper. | ||
| I've been coming up on 13 years. | ||
| Now I'm getting to the point where I'm like, oh, this bit that I tried two or three years ago now works. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| That's really fun. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that time. | ||
| You're essentially a PhD in comedy when you got 10 years in. | ||
| Like, if you do real 10 hard years of comedy, and then after that, it seems like some guys, I mean, it all depends on the artist, right? | ||
| But some guys have their best work, like 15, 16 years in, are just starting to catch their groove and figure out what it is. | ||
| You know, because it's... | ||
| It's only understood by the people who practice it. | ||
| It's understood in a way by a lot of people who are comedy fans, but that's similar to me being a fan of music. | ||
| I don't know shit about music, but I know what I like. | ||
| I know when it sounds good. | ||
| I literally don't understand any of it. | ||
| So I think there's those kinds of people too. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, comedy is such a... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's what gets great when you're peers. | ||
| That's one thing I loved about doing my special other than, like, people seeing it and being able to, like... | ||
| I wanted to just make something and put something out. | ||
| I had always done, like, small little things or guessed it on people's things. | ||
| And I was like, oh, I've been doing comedy over 10 years and I show a lot of potential. | ||
| I want to present a meal. | ||
| And when I... Put it out, and people's reaction was great, but my peers is what really made me happy. | ||
| When I would get texts from Mulaney or people being like, this was your hour. | ||
| This is you presenting who you are completely. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When people can see the stuff behind it, when it's not just like joke, punchline, joke, punchline. | ||
| When people can see like, oh, you set this up, you did this right, your structure is right, and then you just were yourself. | ||
| That's what really makes me happy in comedy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're a funny dude, man. | ||
| I enjoy watching you. | ||
| I've watched you quite a few times at the comedy store now in the main room. | ||
| You're very, very funny, man. | ||
| It's cool to see a guy like you put something down that's representative of your real stand-up, what you're capable of doing. | ||
| It's a nice group to be a part of, man. | ||
| And you sound like you think about it a lot. | ||
| I really appreciate that. | ||
| When people think about what it is we're doing, how do you do it? | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| Do you write? | ||
| Do you write on paper? | ||
| Do you write with a typewriter? | ||
| Do you just have ideas and you just keep working on them? | ||
| It's all a mix, you know? | ||
| I like to say I'm more of a fisher than a hunter. | ||
| I'm not constantly like, oh, I need to write this down. | ||
| Every day I have the structure. | ||
| But I'm constantly... | ||
| I try to make my house so that we're constantly always joking around with each other. | ||
| There's notebooks everywhere. | ||
| There's little bowls of post-it notes for me whenever I... An idea comes, I have to make sure I catch it, and then I have to make sure that I work on it. | ||
| That becomes a difference, just constantly keeping myself in motion so that I don't get stagnant and I don't just do the same 10-15 over and over again. | ||
| That's where I think, especially when I first moved out here, it was always about, oh, I've got to show these people that I'm good, so I've got to do my best work. | ||
| My best work. | ||
| And I did that for about three months. | ||
| And I was like, oh, I don't have anything in the kitchen. | ||
| I don't have any backup, you know? | ||
| I haven't been building anything up. | ||
| And so I learned very quickly. | ||
| I think the comedy story has been the best for me at that. | ||
| It's just being like, having to follow people who are completely not like me stylistically. | ||
| Having to follow people who I grew up watching. | ||
| You know, I did a... | ||
| Night the other day where I had to follow, it was Sebastian and then Ron White and then me. | ||
| And then I was like, there's no... | ||
| I mean, I'm like, I'm confident in myself. | ||
| Some people know me, but when it comes to that, it's like... | ||
| I'm the bottom of the totem pole on those three, and I had to go out there and just show them that, like, I'm capable. | ||
| I'm not gonna mess up the momentum here. | ||
| I'm just as funny as these people. | ||
| You just don't know me. | ||
| You haven't met me yet. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I've been listening to a lot, like, there's rappers all the time, but, like, there's rapper 2 Chainz where he said, like... | ||
| I just had to wait for the fans and for the game to learn what I already knew. | ||
| And that's where I'm starting to feel now, a new confidence of like, I know I'm good and I just have to wait for people to catch up on my wave. | ||
| And if they don't, they don't. | ||
| If they do, fine. | ||
| Dude, that's very Jazz of you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 2 Chainz was the guy who debated Nancy Grace about weed. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Weed is gonna kill ya! | ||
| He outlasted her. | ||
| Yeah, that didn't work. | ||
| I mean, it's hilarious now when you see how many states have legalized it. | ||
| In full disclosure, Ron and I smoked marijuana with young Jamie before this podcast. | ||
| Yes, we do. | ||
| As I do so many others. | ||
| Finally, the stigma is slowly being removed. | ||
| Slowly? | ||
| Dude, I was a drug addict in the 90s when I first started smoking weed. | ||
| I guess it was not even the 90s. | ||
| It was like, maybe in 98 or 99. Somewhere around then. | ||
| That's when I started smoking weed. | ||
| And you were a drug addict. | ||
| You were a drug addict. | ||
| You're a marijuana user? | ||
| What's wrong with you, man? | ||
| Get your shit together. | ||
| I'm like, man, you guys don't get it. | ||
| There's 2 Chainz. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Nancy Grace. | ||
| They put the stuff on the screen when it was going on. | ||
| How many marijuanas does it take to overdose? | ||
| Jamie sent me that. | ||
| Send me that. | ||
| That is a fucking amazing quote. | ||
| Did she really say that? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's a Twitter user. | ||
| It's like people were tweeting whatever, hashtag pot to blame. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Oh, that Twitter user. | ||
| Oh, Styler. | ||
| Styler2015. | ||
| Oh, Styler2015. | ||
| Dude, but is 2015 the day of the tweet? | ||
| It must be. | ||
| No, it's probably just in his account. | ||
| I don't know when it happens. | ||
| It's a weird tweet, though, because there's a space in there. | ||
| Yeah, I think 2015, well, whether... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Whoever that is, congratulations. | ||
| Made me laugh my ass off. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| She was a ridiculous lady. | ||
| She obviously wasn't that healthy. | ||
| She wasn't a very fit, health-conscious person. | ||
| She was worrying about weed. | ||
| She was a crazy person. | ||
| She was like Paula Deen, but she couldn't cook food. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's... | |
| Marijuana is gonna kill you, Ron Funches. | ||
| People still like that. | ||
| There's a lot of people like that in the middle of the country. | ||
| In the middle of the country. | ||
| Sometimes it's still, like, you know, there's a lot of stigma that depends racially, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Depends. | ||
| They get the soccer weed moms and everybody's like, oh, that's cool. | ||
| And then you still get that. | ||
| Like, I did a podcast the other day and the first comments were like, either you're too stoned, you're not doing it. | ||
| I was like, no, I just did a bad job, you know? | ||
| Like, I could have just done a bad job. | ||
| It didn't have anything to do with me being stoned. | ||
| Yeah, like they know that if you were sober, the podcast would have been way better. | ||
| If you were sober, man, you wouldn't have been so weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's true. | |
| It's all true. | ||
| I used to have to go to this place, the Englewood Wellness Center. | ||
| It was kind of in a hood area. | ||
| A little bit sketchy. | ||
| And then while we were going there, within a year or two later, the guy who ran it got shot and robbed there. | ||
| It's like, that's how dangerous weed was. | ||
| Because you had to do it all in cash. | ||
| They wouldn't let banks use checks. | ||
| They wouldn't accept checks and credit cards. | ||
| So everything was weird. | ||
| Even though it was medical and it was legal, you had to get it through nefarious ways. | ||
| And then slowly but surely, the stigma started to erase. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now you can just go to a store on Melrose. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Like adults! | ||
| Like, how do you feel? | ||
| You're a wise man. | ||
| How do you feel? | ||
| I shouldn't have qualified that. | ||
| I felt like I'm setting you up. | ||
| What do you think about making all drugs legal? | ||
| Do you think that that would ever happen? | ||
| And given what we know about prohibition, sounds like an interview, given what we know about prohibition, like how bad it was for alcohol and how it popped up, the organized crime, and I mean... | ||
| It caused a lot of problems. | ||
| Do you think it would be a wise thing to make all drugs legal? | ||
| That's a tough question for me. | ||
| I think you have to start, I guess that's really trying to give people a lot of credit about their intelligence and their decision making, right? | ||
| And that's what you're trying to lead towards, that the individual is very intelligent and they're going to make their decision no matter what, and that By putting these stigmas to it, just like, you know, prostitution, things like that, you're just adding extra jail time, extra obstacles, extra life-threatening situations. | ||
| And you're also penalizing people for their own life choices instead of propping up organized crime. | ||
| As well as, rather, propping up organized crime. | ||
| But, if you've seen the effects of drug addiction, which I've had on occasion, it's hard to go like, yeah, this should be okay, you know? | ||
| I 100% agree. | ||
| It's not that clean. | ||
| No. | ||
| That would be my answer. | ||
| I don't think it's that clean. | ||
| I think that it is a case-by-case basis. | ||
| Do I think marijuana should be legal? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Do I think that you should necessarily legalize heroin? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think so either. | ||
| But I think there's a real problem with infantilizing adults. | ||
| The real problem is if you are 25 years old or older and you decide you want to try cocaine, why can they say you can't do that? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Says who? | ||
| Says who? | ||
| Why is that a why why if you catch me with that can you put me in a jail it grows from the ground? | ||
| It's a plant they take that plant they process it they turn into cocaine. | ||
| They still use it legally for Lidocaine and medical grade cocaine. | ||
| They still use it for the flavor of coca-cola They still use the leaves they still use the plant like who says I don't even do coke but who the fuck do you think is making money selling coke and Because there's a lot of coke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's one thing that's completely 100% illegal. | |
| That's why Miami exists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's everywhere. | ||
| There's no other industry in Miami and there's so much money there. | ||
| Did you see Cocaine Cowboys? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Dude. | ||
| Billy Corbin, the guy who directed it, was on the podcast yesterday. | ||
| He's fantastic, and he's got this new documentary called Screwball. | ||
| It's about Alex Hernandez and steroids and baseball and all this crazy shit. | ||
| Rodriguez. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Rodriguez. | ||
| Who's Alex Hernandez? | ||
| Is this a different one? | ||
| A-Rod. | ||
| How did I say her name is? | ||
| Was he the guy? | ||
| No, that's Aaron. | ||
| That's the weed. | ||
| I'm thinking of the guy from the New England Patriots. | ||
| Goddamn weed. | ||
| Fuck my head up. | ||
| That is the guy from the Patriots. | ||
| No, that's Aaron Hernandez. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That's where I fucked it up. | ||
| My apologies, Alex. | ||
| Alex Rodriguez. | ||
| Anyway, this guy made a documentary called Cocaine Cowboys. | ||
| And it's all about how crazy during the big cocaine days Miami was. | ||
| And how one year the entire graduating class of the Sheriff's Academy... | ||
| The police academy, whatever it was, they either were murdered or they were arrested for corruption. | ||
| The whole, everyone, the entire class. | ||
| The entire graduating year. | ||
| It was Wild West chaos. | ||
| And there was all these pilots bringing in millions of dollars worth of coke. | ||
| And they had bags of money buried in their backyard. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| It's great, man. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's a two-part series. | ||
| There's two parts to it, too. | ||
| Do you ever hear about the Black Mafia family? | ||
| Do you ever watch any documentaries about them? | ||
| No. | ||
| That makes me always interested. | ||
| What did they do? | ||
| They were a cocaine outlet in the early 2000s out of Atlanta. | ||
| At one point, they were running most of the South, Southeast, head by this dude named Big Meech. | ||
| Then they decided we should legalize and get into a rap. | ||
| But they had never done anything like that before and they were very blatant about it. | ||
| So all of a sudden these people who came out of nowhere were just all on like every magazine. | ||
| They had this thing where they're interviewing police officers and they had this big billboard. | ||
| When you would land in Atlanta, that would just say, BMF, we own the world. | ||
| And they would just out there and they would throw these big parties with tigers and stuff. | ||
| And they only had one recording artist. | ||
| So it was just like they weren't good at pretending not to be drug dealers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So it's very interesting to me. | ||
| Well, that whole rap business, man. | ||
| I mean, if you just stop and think about rap music, other than some country... | ||
| And I mean really, like a small amount of country would talk about murdering men. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. | ||
| A few Johnny Cash, maybe some Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, maybe some of those songs. | ||
| But when you get to N.W.A., you have a totally different level of aggression. | ||
| When you get to Ice-T's body count, when he was doing that hard metal shit and he was doing Fuck the Police or I'm a Cop Killer... | ||
| I mean, it's either NWA's Fuck the Police or Ice-T's I'm a Cop Killer. | ||
| You hear those like, you've never heard anything like that before. | ||
| Yeah, and that was an interesting time because that's, I mean, talking about real anger, we talked about before, these are coming from real places of people who were dealing with Los Angeles at a horrible time and a lot of police corruption. | ||
| And then what's crazy is then you... | ||
| It goes the other way, right? | ||
| They take that real anger that people connect it to, and then they just start manufacturing it. | ||
| And then rap becomes all these fake stories of like, I murdered all these people, I have all this money, and now it's just so far gone that it's hard to find. | ||
| I mean, now my favorite authentic rap is like people who are like, oh, you know, I can't find my Wi-Fi password. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Are people just talking about raising their kids now? | ||
| I love that in rap. | ||
| Because then I'm like, oh, you're for real. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| You can talk about anything. | ||
| You know, today was a good day. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, that was like one of the original ones, right? | ||
| There used to be a song called All You Could Eat, which was just about going to a buffet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But like, today was a good day. | ||
| I mean, that is like a classic example of someone taking the art form and completely switching it up and slowing it down and make it casual and relaxed and celebratory. | ||
| And that's from the same dude. | ||
| The same dude from NWA. Yeah, smart man. | ||
| Smart man. | ||
| He's a wizard of a writer, too. | ||
| His lyrics are fantastic. | ||
| You know? | ||
| There's lyrics in my mind when it comes to hip-hop, there's lyrics and there's Nas. | ||
| Nas does shit that you just go like that backwards song. | ||
| Everything is so... | ||
| It's like a practiced orchestra as opposed to just being rhymes. | ||
| Sometimes he puts things together so So, interestingly, you know, he's got his own special sort of appreciation for things. | ||
| Yeah, he's also a very smart man. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| He invests in a lot of tech companies. | ||
| He's big in investments. | ||
| Why? | ||
| He was young 20s when he wrote that. | ||
| He was like 23 when that song came out. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| His dad was like a jazz musician, so I think he grew up around the culture of creating things and being an artist. | ||
| He's got that feel to him. | ||
| He's like a hybrid, you know? | ||
| In terms of it, he's like jazzy rap, sort of. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There's something to it. | ||
| He's almost like a classical trained musician slash rapper in terms of how he constructs things. | ||
| Yeah, like Hamilton. | ||
| I didn't see Hamilton. | ||
| Did you see it? | ||
| No, but a lot of people... | ||
| Anything that makes a lot of white people get into rap, I go, this is probably not for me. | ||
| I don't need rap about the presidents. | ||
| This is one thing that white guys have managed to infiltrate certain elements of rap, but such a small number of legitimately respected white rappers. | ||
| What's the number? | ||
| Eminem, of course. | ||
| Eminem. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Kid Rock, in a way. | ||
| He's kind of a rapper, even though he doesn't rock. | ||
| I wouldn't say he is a respected rapper. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| But it's fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's accepted. | ||
| McElmore. | ||
| McElmore. | ||
| McElmore was great. | ||
| I used to love them. | ||
| I used to love Third Base. | ||
| They were fun. | ||
| Everlast. | ||
| BC Boyz. | ||
| Oh, Everlast for sure. | ||
| But Everlast has changed and now he raps occasionally. | ||
| I would think he would call himself more of a musician now. | ||
| Jump around, though. | ||
| But he'd still jump around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, still jump around. | |
| Well, not only that, the last shit that they put out was great, too. | ||
| That stuff that he came in and showed us and he did some stuff with Be Real and some other guys. | ||
| What did they call it? | ||
| What was his last project? | ||
| Shout out to that project. | ||
| We'll find it. | ||
| Jamie will find it. | ||
| He's the shit. | ||
| War Porn Industries. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| War Porn Industries. | ||
| That's preposterous. | ||
| What a crazy name. | ||
| How high do you have to be to come up with that name? | ||
| Action Bronson. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Albanian. | ||
| Oh, Action Bronson. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| I've never seen a man smoke more weed in my life. | ||
| Never seen it. | ||
| He just keeps going. | ||
| We took a picture of the ashtray after it was over. | ||
| Show all the expired blunts. | ||
| He's from that Fuck That's Delicious show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You ever watch that? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I'm a big Action Bronson friend. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| He's so interesting to me. | ||
| Do you watch the cooking show? | ||
| Sometimes, yeah. | ||
| It's interesting, right? | ||
| That guy was a legit chef. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| And then just that he's a great rapper, great chef, a great personality. | ||
| Super nice guy. | ||
| He's selling paintings now. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sell for a billion dollars. | ||
| That's one billion dollars, you fucks. | ||
| That's two billion. | ||
| That's a maze. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had to work on that. | |
| That's a rug with a lot of weed burns on it. | ||
| Get that money, Action Bronson. | ||
| Get that money. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I'm all for people selling the most ridiculous shit. | ||
| I went to my agent's house once. | ||
| He had this dope place in Aspen. | ||
| I mean, this place was crazy. | ||
| Aspen houses near the ski lodges and shit. | ||
| And on the wall, he had this painting. | ||
| And I said, I go, did this kid make this? | ||
| And they go, no, that's a... | ||
| You know, some fucking obscure popular artist. | ||
| I go, what is that? | ||
| And they're like, this is a really expensive piece. | ||
| They're like, shut the fuck up. | ||
| You're messing with me? | ||
| They're like, no. | ||
| It was like tissue paper. | ||
| There was like different colors. | ||
| It was stuck with glue and like a little piece of paper and some paint on it. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here with this. | ||
| Like, what are you doing with that? | ||
| Can't count. | ||
| I mean, was it pretty? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, that's why I was stunned. | ||
| I thought it was his kid. | ||
| I thought his kid made it. | ||
| Maybe I was dumb. | ||
| I definitely was, but younger and dumber. | ||
| Maybe I'd appreciate it now, but I don't think so. | ||
| I appreciate all kinds of art. | ||
| I appreciate distorted things, but I don't appreciate just a bunch of splat. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's got to have something to it. | ||
| Like Jackson Pollock stuff. | ||
| That stuff weirds me out. | ||
| It's like, why is it so expensive? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| It's definitely crazy. | ||
| But then you look at... | ||
| You know, you look at a classic, like look at some Frank Frazetta stuff. | ||
| Do you know who that guy is? | ||
| He was a fantasy painter from the 19th century. | ||
| There's a poster of his, or a print of one of his works out in the lobby, that Conan the Barbarian one, with that monster. | ||
| He's got a sword. | ||
| He was this guy that would do all the covers for Conan the Barbarian books. | ||
| Just incredible artwork, like wild, crazy fantasy shit. | ||
| And this is your type of art? | ||
| Oh, just I loved it when I was a kid, man. | ||
| When I was a kid, you know, when I was a young boy. | ||
| This makes a lot of sense. | ||
| This seems like what you would like. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| It was the best. | ||
| His books were incredible. | ||
| Robert E. Howard was this really tortured guy who was a guy who lived with his mom. | ||
| He had fairly poor health. | ||
| He died suicide when he was like 36 years old. | ||
| But he wrote a bunch of these books about a guy that was nothing like him. | ||
| About a guy who was this just unstoppable force of nature. | ||
| He created this place called... | ||
| What did he call it? | ||
| What was his... | ||
| Cimmerian? | ||
| It was Cimmerian? | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| Where Conan... | ||
| Conan the Cimmerian, right? | ||
| C-I-M-E. It created a whole world. | ||
| And in this world, it was very Games of Thrones-y in a lot of ways. | ||
| The original shit. | ||
| No one to this day has really captured the books in a movie. | ||
| Arnold was fun as Conan. | ||
| And then Jason Momoa was a better fit physically. | ||
| He was a perfect fit physically. | ||
| More realistic as opposed to being a bodybuilder. | ||
| But no one has ever captured the feeling of the books. | ||
| Because the books was just some wild shit. | ||
| And it was all created by this one guy who was super depressed. | ||
| You just write these books about this guy who just fucked all these women and killed everyone and just smashed his way through the world. | ||
| Power fantasy. | ||
| Crazy shit, though. | ||
| It was all him fighting dragons and monsters and demons coming for his soul, and he ran for 72 hours and fights him off with a sword. | ||
| When you're 12 years old, like I was, and I got into this shit, you'd be like, whoa, man, this is wild. | ||
| Oh, I get that. | ||
| That's like what ECW wrestling was for me, because there was like titties everywhere and violence and blood and nails. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Dude, I watched one yesterday on Instagram. | ||
| Somebody had a clip of a guy and a girl, and they're in the middle of the ring. | ||
| The guy's making out with the girl, and then he turns on there and body slams her down to the ground. | ||
| And I was like, you could still do that? | ||
| In pro wrestling, you could still fake violence against a chick? | ||
| I didn't know you could do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh yeah, intergender wrestling is still real big. | ||
| They fake slam chicks? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| I saw him do that and I was like, that could not have felt good. | ||
| A lady stuck a blow pop up a dude's butt recently. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| He didn't want it. | ||
| What is this about? | ||
| It's just his dick. | ||
| When you carry around blow pop, I guess, you know? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Just wrestling. | ||
| Well, whatever you gotta do to sell them tickets. | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| Is this the blow-pop thing? | ||
| No way! | ||
| Oh my god, he's really sticking it up his ass. | ||
| Oh my god, and then he sidekicks him in the face, and the guy's got his pants down. | ||
| Wait a minute, that might be the greatest video I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Is that the same guy who did the dick move? | ||
| Oh shit, look at this! | ||
| Look at this great white shark! | ||
| Look at this beached great white shark! | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| Fuck, that's crazy. | ||
| I can't show it. | ||
| The shark was chasing a seagull. | ||
| Oh, you can't show it. | ||
| And accidentally ended up in the beach. | ||
| Why don't these guys grab it and pull it back in the fucking water, man? | ||
| It can't bite you. | ||
| Oh my god, the guy's throwing water on it. | ||
| Just grab it! | ||
| You just grab it. | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| Oh, how do they not know? | ||
| Probably scared. | ||
| That's dead. | ||
| It's dead now. | ||
| They can only last outside. | ||
| Oh, it's still breathing a little bit. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| That is an ancient fucking feeding machine. | ||
| Look at the face on that thing, man. | ||
| Just stop and think about what a motherfucking nightmare the ocean is. | ||
| What a nightmare. | ||
| Things like that are just roaming around. | ||
| And us assholes, we think we're being spiritual. | ||
| Hey man, I'm just going to get on my board. | ||
| I'm just going to get on my board and be monster food. | ||
| No, I put my foot in and back out. | ||
| I'm such a pussy when it comes to the ocean. | ||
| I was in Hawaii and we went snorkeling. | ||
| Dive in the water and you're staring down. | ||
| It was cool. | ||
| We were by this reef. | ||
| But all I was thinking is, I just need one of these motherfuckers and I'm never getting in this water again. | ||
| One of those motherfuckers. | ||
| I kind of want to do that now. | ||
| I was too heavy before I was past the weight limit that you could go do some diving. | ||
| And I would always tell myself I didn't want to do it, but now I want to do it. | ||
| Yeah, you can tell yourself a lot of things, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, Mitch Hepberg used to have a joke about writing that when he gets a funny idea, he writes things down. | ||
| Or if he's lazy, he convinces himself. | ||
| Convince myself it was not that funny. | ||
| How did you lose the weight? | ||
| I really just changed my... | ||
| I got a trainer. | ||
| That was a big part of it. | ||
| I just changed my diet and started exercising a bunch. | ||
| From a guy who didn't exercise at all and ate multiple Philly cheesesteaks a day to a guy who eats a bunch of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and protein shakes. | ||
| And now I work out like six times a day. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just seemed like I was gonna die if I didn't. | ||
| So what do you do for working out these days? | ||
| A lot of weightlifting, a lot of back, little biceps, one arm rolls and whatnot. | ||
| Just general weightlifting. | ||
| But you do it a lot? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Do you find it has an effect on your mood, on how you feel? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, absolutely. | |
| How much better do you feel? | ||
| And do you attribute it to the working out, the losing weight, or both of them together? | ||
| It's a combination, definitely. | ||
| The diet and just feeling better nutrition-wise is very helpful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, just doing two shows a night now. | ||
| You know, that used to be a thing for me. | ||
| I used to be, like, really tired afterwards. | ||
| And now, you know, no problem. | ||
| I do a lot of voiceovers and other little things. | ||
| And so, you know, I'm always bouncing around from going, like, doing shows on the weekend and coming home and then having to go do voiceover on Monday morning and taking care of my son and helping him with his homework. | ||
| Just being able to do that and not being like, oh, I gotta go pass out. | ||
| I'm tired. | ||
| That's really the biggest deal, being able to take on more so then I'm able to make more money. | ||
| I was carrying my daughter around on my shoulders the other day. | ||
| She likes to get carried around. | ||
| She's 63 pounds. | ||
| And while she's on my shoulders, after, you know, 40 minutes or so of that, like, it's fucking rough. | ||
| Like, it starts really hurting your neck. | ||
| You start getting really tired. | ||
| And I had to put her down. | ||
| And I was thinking, like, how crazy is that? | ||
| There's a lot of people that just carry that much extra around with them all the time. | ||
| They're always carrying around an extra 60 pounds. | ||
| And you don't think it's that much of a deal until you don't have it and then you walk with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and you realize like, and it's just like, even if it's not that, like when a kid's sitting on your neck, it's not like the ideal place to carry all the weight. | ||
| They actually make a thing. | ||
| There's a company called the Outdoorsman. | ||
| They make a thing called the Atlas Pack. | ||
| It's like a backpack frame, but at the back of it is like one of those weightlifting posts. | ||
| So you could slide an Olympic barbell or an Olympic plate on and two plates. | ||
| You could put as much as 90 pounds on it, clamp this thing down. | ||
| And then it's sitting more on your hips. | ||
| It's way easier to carry. | ||
| But even that, still, it fucking sucks, man. | ||
| Walking around with just 45 extra pounds on your back sucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just being in my mid-30s and being like, oh, my knees are hurting. | ||
| I never played football. | ||
| I never did anything like that. | ||
| My knees shouldn't be hurting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And just knowing, I think I had to just change the... | ||
| Just changed my mindset about, like, before when I was just doing stand-up to do it and didn't think I was going to be successful, it didn't matter. | ||
| I was just like, I'm just living for today. | ||
| Give me free pizza. | ||
| Give me whatever. | ||
| And then it was like, once things started changing a little bit, I was like, oh, things are happening. | ||
| I still don't even really know what I'm doing. | ||
| Let me, if I give myself a better chance and take care of my health, take care of my body... | ||
| Let me see how far I can push these gifts, push these skills, you know? | ||
| And it became more about not wanting to waste opportunities. | ||
| That's very cool. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| So, your love of stand-up made you sort of concentrate even more on your own body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, not your love of yourself, not your love of your body. | ||
| Of course, you have to go through what you do in your life. | ||
| You're going through it with your body. | ||
| But it was your love of stand-up to be like, God, I gotta do something about this fucking body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Love of stand-up, love of my son, and love of fashion. | ||
| When you get to a certain size, all your shirts got dogs on them. | ||
| I don't want that anymore. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| You get into that triple XL thing. | ||
| I'm happy whenever anybody does anything that benefits their health, whether it's for whatever your motivation. | ||
| The end result is always good. | ||
| It's always good, no matter what motivation is, positive or negative. | ||
| If you want to prove somebody wrong, You know, or you just want to do just do better just have a better path You know, so it's so it's so attainable for so many people so many people could at least Be way healthier at least have way more energy at least like understanding that not that feeling of just being like all day and every time I cheat like with Burgers and fries and and and like milkshakes and shit like that if I really go off the deep end with my diet I I feel like | ||
| dog shit. | ||
| I feel terrible. | ||
| It hits me. | ||
| I'm like, oh! | ||
| And then you gotta realize, hey man, this is how a lot of people feel all the time. | ||
| Yeah, that's the big deal for me. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Just going off, ate half a burger and was feeling so sick. | ||
| And then I was like, man, I used to... | ||
| Live like this every meal. | ||
| My body is just a testament of what your body is capable to adapt to. | ||
| But once you start going the other way and start really getting healthy and your body becomes more sensitive to it, you really are like, oh, I prefer not to cheat. | ||
| You still got to have that balance. | ||
| You got to have fun. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with an ice cream or something like that every now and again or some sort of a dessert, but really it's They just think that your body has to be accustomed to getting what it needs. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| And for too many people, they're running on a nutrition deficit. | ||
| So when your body's just not getting what it needs for long periods of time, then you develop chronic inflammation and all sorts of other problems. | ||
| And this is what people are really suffering from. | ||
| They're suffering from a nutritional deficiency that's probably lasted for years. | ||
| They probably never... | ||
| Some people, they go 10, 15, 20 years without even thinking about their diet and they're just eating dog shit. | ||
| You're just eating stuff that doesn't have enough nutrients and your body just starts to get weaker. | ||
| There's no way around it. | ||
| And if you just... | ||
| Just turn that, start eating salads, eating healthy fish and some healthy meat, and just take some vitamins. | ||
| Just take some vitamin supplements. | ||
| Real simple. | ||
| Get yourself some multivitamins. | ||
| Get yourself a little thing of Athletic Greens or something. | ||
| Get your fucking health online. | ||
| Once you do, you'll be like, oh... | ||
| I feel so much better. | ||
| This is all I had to do? | ||
| And I'm this person now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mentally so much better, much clearer, much happier. | ||
| Much happier. | ||
| It's so hard, though, because we love mouth pleasure. | ||
| But to the point where people are poisoning their bodies to get mouth pleasure. | ||
| Yeah, and it's just, you know, constantly pushed in your face. | ||
| Everybody always knows. | ||
| We talk about all the time, you know, cheeseburgers 50 cents, salad like five, six dollars, you know. | ||
| You have to make that effort. | ||
| You have to be able to want to cook at home and it's not made easy. | ||
| And that's what I think we become as a society less cool and less appreciative of effort, you know. | ||
| Yeah, but there's also something really annoying about people that want you to eat healthy. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| That too! | ||
| Get off your high horse! | ||
| Get the fuck out of here! | ||
| If you're sitting there and you're having a burger and fries and enjoying the shit out of it and some asshole next to you has got kale with shaved pecans and talking shit about your diet while they're pouring fresh olive oil on top of their shitty salad. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Leave me alone. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Leave it alone while I enjoy something gross. | ||
| Yeah, to each their own. | ||
| I think as long as the majority of your diet is really healthy, then you can get in those fuck-off days. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Your body will bounce back. | ||
| Just don't put it in a deficit. | ||
| That's the whole key. | ||
| And that's where I've been coming from, and that's why I have to keep reminding myself because I get frustrated when I'm at these parties or whatever and see food everywhere, crafts everywhere, and I have to stay focused on this diet because I'm like... | ||
| I, you know, I'm 36 now and I want to make sure that I'm at my healthiest and I return this deficit when I'm 40, you know, because when the natural aging process kicks in, I don't want to be, like, kicking off still being, you know, 230, 220 pounds. | ||
| I want to be, like, 200 and be able to coast and be a hot old man. | ||
| Hot old man. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's also way easier to maintain. | ||
| Competition's less. | ||
| True. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's way easier to maintain, too, than it is to, like, if you're in your 50s, and then you start working out then. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| Like, it's hard for me when I get out of shape. | ||
| Like, if I get hurt or something like that, and I take a couple weeks off, you feel it. | ||
| Like, whoa, it's way harder to bounce back. | ||
| Way hard. | ||
| Like, twice as hard. | ||
| As it was when I was younger. | ||
| Like, you gotta be disciplined. | ||
| You gotta stay on the horse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stay on the horse. | ||
| That's what I've been trying to do now is, I think, you know, when you're younger, 20s, teens or whatever, you don't want to listen to anybody saying those things. | ||
| And now I'm like, I'm starting to listen when someone I know, one of my friends are 50 or older and they're like, hey, you need to do this now because one cheat meal for me is two weeks of work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you do anything athletic that's fun? | ||
| That's one way to get good workouts in. | ||
| If you play a game, you like tennis. | ||
| Tennis is very fast-paced. | ||
| People like doing that. | ||
| Callen's into tennis. | ||
| Boxing. | ||
| Callen's into boxing, too. | ||
| You don't even have to box a person. | ||
| I don't recommend you do. | ||
| But just hitting a bag, it's really satisfying, too. | ||
| Yeah, I've been interested in getting into boxing. | ||
| I tried some pro wrestling for a little bit. | ||
| I went to a pro wrestling school for a few months. | ||
| Have you ever thought about actual grappling? | ||
| Like taking jujitsu? | ||
| I thought about it, but it seemed like I would get hurt easily. | ||
| Well, you could, but you're a smart guy. | ||
| I think you'd figure it out pretty quickly. | ||
| It's a very unusual thing because you think of people, like if you thought of someone who does jiu-jitsu, you think like a jockish type person. | ||
| But the majority of them that are really good are really nerds. | ||
| I've met a couple people and they're similar to me. | ||
| They're just kind of like the other side of me. | ||
| Oh, you like comic books and video games too? | ||
| You just beat people up. | ||
| Well, they don't beat people up. | ||
| They strangle them. | ||
| But when I say nerd, I mean it with all due respect. | ||
| Because I'm a nerd in a lot of ways with some things. | ||
| But they're... | ||
| They're very like jiu-jitsu geeks. | ||
| They're like people that are obsessed with anything else, whether it's music or video games. | ||
| They become obsessed, but they're doing it in this physical way that requires you to have a deep understanding of all the potential moves. | ||
| It's very complicated in terms of your ability to... | ||
| When you're rolling with someone, like say if I roll with a guy and I know he's like a brown belt or a black belt or something like that, We're having an argument. | ||
| It's like a conversation with techniques. | ||
| And the more of a vocabulary you have and the stronger your use of those words are, particularly the basic words, the better your chance of winning the argument. | ||
| That's what it's like almost like. | ||
| This really complicated debate with physical leverage and choking and strangling. | ||
| Does that translate to your comedy? | ||
| Because I feel like that kind of reminds me of your style. | ||
| A lot of what I try to do is figure things out in a joke form. | ||
| I try to be like, what? | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| That's what I've been trying to do over the last few years, I think. | ||
| So in that sense, it is kind of similar. | ||
| Because you're trying to figure something out. | ||
| It's like a puzzle. | ||
| I know there's some juice in this puzzle. | ||
| How do I turn this into a bit? | ||
| Why do I think this is funny? | ||
| What do I think I can say out of this that's funny? | ||
| And also people go, oh yeah, huh. | ||
| And if I could do that... | ||
| So in that sense, yeah. | ||
| But it's also very humbling. | ||
| It's very humbling. | ||
| Because you're getting strangled. | ||
| You're losing power. | ||
| You also just know. | ||
| My instructor is John Jock Machado. | ||
| He's this very famous Jiu-Jitsu black belt world champion. | ||
| Super nice guy. | ||
| One of the nicest guys on the planet. | ||
| But every time I grapple with him... | ||
| It's a matter of time before he catches me with something. | ||
| It's not whether or not I'm ever going to catch him. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| It's just a total different world. | ||
| And a lot of that is his deep knowledge and understanding something. | ||
| And you being a smart guy... | ||
| I think you'd get into it. | ||
| Especially because you love pro wrestling. | ||
| At least you have a mindset for watching guys do things to each other, manipulate each other, which is half of what's exciting about pro wrestling, right? | ||
| Some guy pulling off some crazy move. | ||
| Even if it's orchestrated, it's still a crazy thing that these guys are pulling off on each other. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I like that more. | ||
| Because then I'm like, oh, they're friends and they work this out together. | ||
| My problem... | ||
| I know they're getting hurt and they're not even really fighting. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, they're hitting each other for sure. | ||
| They're doing things to each other and slamming each other. | ||
| It's all real. | ||
| But those guys get banged up and they do it way more. | ||
| So if you're watching a guy who's fighting in the UFC, they have practices that they can control. | ||
| So if they know that they have a hurt back or a Well, they will adjust what moves they will do, but I do really like your point about... | ||
| At least they can take some time off. | ||
| Yeah, they can definitely make an agreement with each other. | ||
| Hey, don't slam me. | ||
| My back is fucked. | ||
| But those guys get beat the fuck up. | ||
| Talking to Dallas Page and Jake the Snake, two guys that I've had on the podcast, which were amazing. | ||
| And especially Jake's story is fucking crazy, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When he tells you his story, and what a nice guy. | ||
| Big, giant, nice man. | ||
| Just genuinely friendly and happy that everything's going well for him now. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| But that's a rough business, is my point. | ||
| I'm way rather real grappling. | ||
| I feel like real grappling, if I was going to tell a person what would be safer for your body, I think pro wrestling's harder. | ||
| I think it's harder on you. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| Dude, they get slammed! | ||
| You watch some of that stuff. | ||
| Knowing what you know now about brain damage and knowing what you know now about that it's not even concussions necessarily as much as it's sub-concussive trauma that doesn't knock you unconscious but just rattles your fucking head and the repeated impacts of those. | ||
| Those guys are getting that all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Yeah, no, I go back and sometimes I watch some older wrestling and it really makes me cringe because we got a lot of guys taking all these chair shots straight to the face. | ||
| Straight to the face. | ||
| Yeah, I saw Ken Shamrock take this one to the head that sounded like a gunshot. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, what is it about people getting smacked in the head? | ||
| Tom Segura's been sending me these Russian slap championships, these videos. | ||
| Have you seen this shit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh my god, these guys stand in front of each other and smack each other in the face, full clip. | ||
| But some of them are doing a terrible job. | ||
| They're hitting with their fingers. | ||
| Yeah, they're getting a lot of fingers. | ||
| They're getting fingers. | ||
| And then there's other guys that are basically doing like a ridge hand strike to your neck. | ||
| They're clipping guys on the chin like this. | ||
| And they follow through and it looks like a slap. | ||
| But this is not a slap. | ||
| This is like a karate chop. | ||
| They're like going like that to the head. | ||
| I mean, it's way harder. | ||
| And then some guys are doing like a boss root and palm strike. | ||
| They're hitting like this. | ||
| They're doing like a right hook to the head like that. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| Guys are getting knocked unconscious. | ||
| I like to see it but just with like older black moms they used to be the dumbest thing ever It was called X-Arm, and they would tape these guys' arms together and let them have an MMA fight. | ||
| What? | ||
| It was an MMA fight slash arm wrestling competition, and they were taped together. | ||
| It sounds so stupid, you can't imagine that not only was it real, but that the guy who created it was one of the original creators of the UFC. It's such a crazy idea. | ||
| They just went for it, man. | ||
| Look, they taped these people together. | ||
| Their arms are taped together. | ||
| They can't even move away. | ||
| And then when they say go, they start fighting. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| And they get in arm bars. | ||
| This guy fucks this guy's arm up. | ||
| Dude, he broke his arm on the table. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| If that guy keeps pulling on that thing, he gets his arm snapped. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I don't know if he actually broke it right there, but the way the leverage of that table... | ||
| Look at that guy's getting kicked in the fucking head while he's tied to that guy's arm. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Pin his arm. | ||
| Pin his arm or KO him to win. | ||
| What? | ||
| Didn't work. | ||
| I mean, it didn't last. | ||
| No, I can see why. | ||
| This is how crazy people can get. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Dude, but that's real. | ||
| This is the other one, chess boxing. | ||
| This is a legit one, too. | ||
| I think they box first, and then they play chess, right? | ||
| I think it goes back and forth. | ||
| Oh, they keep going back and forth? | ||
| That's a good move. | ||
| But seriously, if you get KO'd... | ||
| What if you get KO'd? | ||
| Do you win? | ||
| If you win at chess? | ||
| If you win at chess, but you get flatlined in 30 seconds... | ||
| That'd also be really fun if there were just people who were horrible at fighting but really good at chess. | ||
| Yeah, and they would just lay down. | ||
| Like, you win. | ||
| You win this part. | ||
| I'm just here for the chess. | ||
| I know you guys suck at chess. | ||
| Why do they have headphones on? | ||
| Focus. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| While they're playing chess? | ||
| Oh, like to drown out the crowd? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, because people probably say, Night to Rock to! | ||
| It looks like the fight was first, yeah. | ||
| They were sweating. | ||
| By the way, Knight to Rook 2 probably isn't even a real move. | ||
| I just said some numbers and some letters. | ||
| I don't understand anything when it comes to playing chess out loud. | ||
| I was friends with this guy that was in prison. | ||
| And in prison, he learned how to play chess with his words. | ||
| You know, just in his head. | ||
| And he was at this place that we used to play pool at in White Plains, New York. | ||
| It's called Executive Billiards. | ||
| Like a classic old school pool hall. | ||
| I think I... I think it's done now. | ||
| I think they just closed it down or something like that. | ||
| Maybe they're renovating or something. | ||
| But this guy was playing with this kid who was like a world champion chess player. | ||
| And this kid would come by and play pool, this really young kid, like 15, 16 years old. | ||
| And the two of them are sitting there playing chess with each other. | ||
| Like just saying, you know, knight to queen to, you know, whatever the fuck it means. | ||
| And the guy would go, stand there, go, rook to six, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And they would go back and forth like this. | ||
| I was like, what are you, like, I'm imagining what they're seeing. | ||
| Like, what are they seeing in their head? | ||
| Are they seeing, like, these things move around in three dimensions? | ||
| Are they looking at it as a grid? | ||
| How are they keeping track of where their fucking pieces are? | ||
| It was humbling. | ||
| Very humbling. | ||
| No, that's a strategic mind that I do not have. | ||
| Well, it was interesting to me, too, because as a very young man, I think I was like 23 or 24, I got to see how fucking smart this guy was, yet he still wound up in prison. | ||
| So I was like, okay. | ||
| Just because someone's a criminal doesn't mean they're stupid, and just because someone's smart doesn't mean they won't go to jail. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Those are two things I saw talking to that guy. | ||
| He was in the middle of a game once. | ||
| And he was gambling with this guy. | ||
| And this is the guy from prison. | ||
| He was a super smart guy. | ||
| Very sharp guy. | ||
| And he was talking to the guy who was playing. | ||
| He said, dude, my wife told me if I don't get home by 10, she wants a divorce. | ||
| And 10 o'clock rolls around, and he yells out, I guess I'm getting a divorce! | ||
| It's like two hours later, and he just racks the balls. | ||
| He was there until like 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| But it was hilarious. | ||
| He said, as they started playing, my wife says, if I don't come home by 10, Those are weird times, man. | ||
| Growing up in a suburb of Boston, which was a really nice place. | ||
| I grew up in this place called Newton, a real quiet, quaint little community. | ||
| To go from that to these seedy pool halls of New York. | ||
| It was really weird for me. | ||
| Very, very educational. | ||
| I got to see all these, like, street hustlers. | ||
| I got to hang around with these guys, be friends with a lot of homeless guys. | ||
| Like, I had guys that were, like, pool players that wound up staying on my couch. | ||
| They had nowhere to go. | ||
| You know, a couple of them. | ||
| And one of them who became my best friend, this guy named Johnny. | ||
| But it was like, I'd be in all these weird places gambling. | ||
| Like, these weird, strange places with these guys who were, like, these semi-professional players. | ||
| Playing for hundreds, thousands of dollars. | ||
| And there'd be a big crowd of guys all gathered around. | ||
| It'd be one, two in the morning. | ||
| And I'd be thinking, these guys, these are older than me men. | ||
| Like, they don't have families. | ||
| Like, what do they do? | ||
| Like, this is a whole separate culture. | ||
| You know, and... | ||
| You were in the underworld. | ||
| Oh, it was in a lot of ways, man. | ||
| A lot of ways it was very underworld-y. | ||
| I was obsessed with it too, man. | ||
| I just wanted to play pool all the time. | ||
| I wasn't very good, but the guys I was around were very good. | ||
| I was around a lot of guys who were very, very good. | ||
| And you got to see the excitement of these... | ||
| It wasn't just excitement that everybody was gathered around. | ||
| And that they were playing this game for a lot of money. | ||
| It was also the excitement that we were bending the rules. | ||
| We're all just a bunch of men hanging out at this smoky place at one o'clock in the morning on a Wednesday. | ||
| And everyone is in it together. | ||
| We're all just in some way deranged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Derelicts. | |
| You know, some weirdos from society that can figure their way to be able to be at this place at 1 o'clock in the morning on a Wednesday. | ||
| Like, why the fuck are you here, man? | ||
| Like, don't you have responsibilities? | ||
| No one there had to be responsibilities. | ||
| Everyone there was some sort of either a professional gambler or they had, like, one of the guys was a fireman who they would put them on these 24-hour shifts and then they would have a couple days off and just come to the pool hall and hang out, watch guys gamble. | ||
| I mean, it sounds similar to stand-up. | ||
| Oh, yeah, man. | ||
| Lens and misfits. | ||
| Well, that's one of the reasons why I fit in there from stand-up. | ||
| You know, like, starting doing stand-up from 21 and then being around these pool hall guys when I was like 23 or 24. I was like, oh, you guys are like my fucked up friends that I like. | ||
| It's like, too many people out there Think that there's only one way to live your life. | ||
| There's a bunch of ways to live life. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| Yeah, there's a whole lot of worlds. | ||
| And everybody wants you to think that their way of living life is the way you should go about it. | ||
| It's real tricky because they all want this sort of confirmation bias. | ||
| They want you to confirm. | ||
| It's more like a confirmation desire. | ||
| They want you to confirm that they're doing the right thing. | ||
| If you listen to them, then you become happy. | ||
| And they come up to you and they go, Hey, man, I'm really, really excited that you told me how to do it this way. | ||
| Because now I'm just living my life much better. | ||
| People love to hear that. | ||
| Like, yeah, I'm right then. | ||
| I am living my life the right way. | ||
| There's no right way. | ||
| No, so many paths. | ||
| Be nice, be positive, work hard, and do what you want. | ||
| I would have never got here if I listened to people, you know? | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| They don't even know what they're saying. | ||
| People give you advice when they're absolutely not sure of what they're saying. | ||
| They just practice on you. | ||
| Sometimes people give you advice and it's real. | ||
| Sometimes people have great advice. | ||
| Sometimes people really mean well. | ||
| And sometimes people are just practicing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, in general, how can anyone give you advice that doesn't relate to something that happened to them, you know? | ||
| Like, they're only going by their life experience. | ||
| so that's one thing um i learned from the chris jericho another wrestler where he was just like you don't listen to unsuccessful people because they don't know how to do it yeah why would they tell you of course they're going to tell you you can't do it because they couldn't do it a successful person will tell you you can do it most people i know like if you tell someone that hey i want to go try comedy you know if you don't if you have the balls to get up there and do it they're going to support you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And there's plenty of those people out there. | ||
| On both sides, there's plenty of people out there that will give you good advice and really care and want you to do well in your life, and there's plenty of people that don't want to see anybody doing any better than them, and they're not doing that well. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| That's a sickness that we've got to forgive people for, because I had it when I was a young man, for sure. | ||
| And I think many of us struggle with it. | ||
| It's one of the things that made me realize that I was looking at stand-up the wrong way in terms of other people's stand-up. | ||
| I was looking at other people's stand-up as a comparison to mine. | ||
| I was judging, like, who's the best? | ||
| Who's doing better? | ||
| Who's this? | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| And then I realized, like, that is so stupid. | ||
| Like, I should just be a fan of comedy and do comedy. | ||
| And so I shifted the way I thought about it. | ||
| So instead of, like, when I would see someone killing, I'd be like, God, I wish I thought of that bit. | ||
| Or, God, he's doing so good. | ||
| Shit, now I have to follow him. | ||
| Instead... | ||
| Somewhere along the line, I got to a place where you're like, this is great. | ||
| This is funny. | ||
| Like, I love the fact that this guy's funny. | ||
| Now I can become a fan of comedy again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead of, like, being wrapped up in my own creation of it and producing my own stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I always... | ||
| Not that I've always... | ||
| I've been on a similar journey. | ||
| I was very competitive, not but maybe a year or two ago. | ||
| And getting in a relationship that I'm in now has been very helpful because she's a big fan of comedy. | ||
| And she always wants to watch comedy. | ||
| And so then I'm always like... | ||
| Okay, I have to just not be—I just have to enjoy these people, too, because you're right. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| I had to learn, like, I don't want everybody to be doing the comedy that I'm doing, or I'm not special. | ||
| I want to see all these different types of styles. | ||
| I think, I mean, the fact that me and you are in this room together and we both respect each other's comedy and our comedy's worlds apart and different, you know? | ||
| Just two completely different styles, but we both respect each other because we both know that we're authentic in what we do, you know? | ||
| If I were to try to be like you, that would make no sense. | ||
| And if I was trying to be like you, people would go, what's going on, man? | ||
| What are you doing up there? | ||
| Joe smoked too much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're a different dude. | |
| You need to slow down, man. | ||
| He's got a lot calmer. | ||
| You want like that, what is that stuff? | ||
| Kratom? | ||
| Kratom shit? | ||
| A lot of people are on that kratom. | ||
| No, I respect the fuck out of you, man, and I respect your process. | ||
| You know, you're, like, we were talking about it as an art form, as this structure-based, you know, like, you structure things. | ||
| You know how to set things up. | ||
| It's so important, and we don't have anyone to tell us how to do it. | ||
| We have to kind of, like, learn from each other and learn from the greats of the past that we can... | ||
| We could watch, but in a lot of ways, it's sort of an undocumented art form in terms of the creation of the art form. | ||
| And part of the problem is that everybody has their own way of doing it. | ||
| That's why I asked you, do you write down? | ||
| Do you type? | ||
| Some of the best just have ideas, and they don't write shit. | ||
| And then they go on stage a lot, and then they work those ideas out when they're on stage, and they work those ideas out in their head, and they keep everything in their head. | ||
| There's a lot of guys who are really great who don't write. | ||
| They just write in the moment. | ||
| They write on stage and they have ideas and they flesh them out and they continue to work on them and they just stay active. | ||
| And they never have to actually sit and write. | ||
| And they're some of the best. | ||
| And then there's guys who write every day and they're some of the best. | ||
| You know, it's like, fuck, man. | ||
| I don't think there's the right way to do it. | ||
| I think you just have to care and you have to be trying to get better. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's got to be effort and not going back and like what I'm trying to do now is... | ||
| It's be a little bit more picky because I did my special and then I go write a joke and I go, oh, you're basically doing an extension of what you've already written. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| Let's try something new. | ||
| If you don't have it, let's just go up there and relax a bit. | ||
| Live life a little bit. | ||
| Most of my material is personal anyway. | ||
| I don't really do a lot of topical. | ||
| So for me to generate material, I usually have to be active in life and have things happen to me. | ||
| Yes, yes, yeah. | ||
| I think it's really important to be around a lot of other people that are doing it really well, too. | ||
| You know, one of the things I really get out of L.A. is on any given night I can go to a store and watch someone murder, you know, like all the time. | ||
| I mean, like not one person, like six, seven, eight people killing in their own way. | ||
| And you just around that, you just get this like extra juice out of that place, man. | ||
| You know, you get extra juice out of LA, out of the store, a lot of times out of the improv. | ||
| It's like, there's just, there's so many of us here. | ||
| It's a crazy hive of comedians. | ||
| If you really stop and think about it, you know? | ||
| I mean, Gene, Diaz and Burr and, you know, Segura's here. | ||
| You know, You're Here, Delia. | ||
| I mean, it's just fucking every week that place is, Ma, Maren's here. | ||
| It's like, Theo Vaughn's here. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, holy shit! | ||
| You might get a drop in from Chappelle. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the weirdest places ever in terms of a hive of comedy. | ||
| We're so lucky to be in that hive, man. | ||
| To be watching all this shit go down in 2019. Yeah. | ||
| This is an epic time for stand-up. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| I don't like to bring it up all the time, but when something like Brody's passing happens, I have to go like, oh yeah, stop being so in the rat race and so competitive all the time and worried about what you're making and realize that the true gift is the time that you get to spend more. | ||
| With these truly unique minds. | ||
| You know, the people who don't think like me at all. | ||
| People who, like you say, I see jokes every day where I go, oh, fuck, like, how, like, that was in the air for anyone. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes! | ||
| That's the weirdest feeling, right? | ||
| When you're like, fuck, how did I miss that? | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Tony Hitchcliffe has a joke right now. | ||
| I don't want to give it away, but it's one of those where he does it and I go, God, I didn't miss that. | ||
| So good. | ||
| Santino's got this bit about candles that I'm like, ah, Santino. | ||
| I worked with him all weekend. | ||
| I was in Austin with him. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| I took George Perez, too. | ||
| George Perez murdered in Austin. | ||
| Yeah, I did Cap City Comedy Club. | ||
| I wanted to go do the comedy club for a goof. | ||
| I need to do more comedy clubs. | ||
| It's just such a different thing. | ||
| Such a rich comic. | ||
| Do a club as a goof. | ||
| Well, it's like... | ||
| You make a decision whether you want to make a lot of money or have a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| True. | ||
| Truly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not that it's not a lot of money to work at a club. | ||
| It's great money. | ||
| It's not bad. | ||
| But it's a different choice. | ||
| It's like the choice of right now, for me, the choice is about just trying to make my shit make more sense and more reps in front of different people and more feels, more different vibes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every time you go on stage, you're in a different place. | ||
| Audience is different. | ||
| Introduce yourself to new people. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to do. | ||
| I'm getting ready to go out on a tour and I specifically was asking my people. | ||
| I was like, I want to go to Huntsville, Alabama. | ||
| I want to go to these places that you don't expect to see me and I want to see A, because I think it'd be cool to just bring in people who are like, hey, why are you here? | ||
| And I want to see That's why I'm going to Australia. | ||
| I just want to make my comedy travel and I'll learn. | ||
| I'll learn how to... | ||
| I'm sure I'll go in there and I'll say something that's too American and I'll be like, oh, okay. | ||
| And then it'll just inform my writing and I'll start writing more globally and those are the type of things I'm looking for now. | ||
| They're fantastic. | ||
| Australia's great. | ||
| They're like alternative Americans. | ||
| I say that in a good way. | ||
| And they're like a degree nicer than Canadians. | ||
| It's like you get Canadians, where I say there's 20% less douchebags in Canada than there is in the United States. | ||
| You can always find bad people everywhere. | ||
| But then you've got people from Australia, I think they take that another 10%. | ||
| It's like one of the nicest people ever. | ||
| They're so nice. | ||
| Oh, I can't wait. | ||
| They're fucking great, man. | ||
| Their shows over there are amazing. | ||
| And they know most of our shit. | ||
| They understand most references and things that we'll talk about. | ||
| But if you knew a few about them, it would probably help them relate to you. | ||
| It's a weird culture. | ||
| It's a place that I would totally live. | ||
| If I didn't live here, if I didn't live in America, or I didn't live in Canada. | ||
| I don't want to go anywhere. | ||
| I'm not saying I want to leave America. | ||
| But I said, if I did. | ||
| Yeah, but you travel and you find a place. | ||
| This is fun to visit. | ||
| And then you find those places. | ||
| To me, Italy is nice to visit, but I could never live here. | ||
| But then I go to Amsterdam and I'm like, I could live here. | ||
| This is like Portland. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| Like Portland. | ||
| Yeah, Portland sort of fashioned itself after that when it became legal to have weed there too, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| A lot of those places were comparing themselves to Amsterdam way back in the day. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Amsterdam was a place where people would actually go there to get high. | ||
| It's like the very first high destination. | ||
| People would try, hey bro, we're going to go to Amsterdam. | ||
| Get high. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I like going just for the vibe of, like we were talking about earlier, of no stigma. | ||
| There's no, like, someone, if, you know, I drop something on the ground or whatever, the people, oh, you stoner. | ||
| Like, there's nothing like that in Amsterdam, and I love that feeling. | ||
| It's a dumb thing here that's just a remnant of propaganda and dumb stoners that are real people. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's always that time where you run into someone who's too high and you're like, oh man, you're just fucking up the whole stereotype, man. | ||
| You're perpetrating, sir. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, you got to smoke the bowl, now there's snot coming out of your nose. | ||
| There was certain people that just get too high. | ||
| They just get too high. | ||
| Can't handle it. | ||
| They just get too weirded out by life and you're like, bro, slow down. | ||
| Well, right now you're okay. | ||
| Right now everybody's okay. | ||
| Yeah, the end is horrible for everyone and anyone, but right now you're okay. | ||
| So if you can't be happy now when you're okay, and you're worried about the times when you're not going to be okay, that is madness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right? | |
| So you've got to pull yourself out of madness and be in the moment. | ||
| In the moment, everything's fine. | ||
| But that's a tight wire walk when you're high as fuck, right? | ||
| Tight wire walk when you're sober. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| So did you see that they let that dude off, the Empire guy? | ||
| Yeah, I did see that. | ||
| They let him slide. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It makes it so exciting for me. | ||
| I've been... | ||
| I've been walking in the last couple of days telling my girlfriend, I go, the craziest thing would be if they say he's not guilty because then you have to go, what happened? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Did he bribe somebody or did some new evidence come forth that they had a bad investigation? | ||
| Did the two guys that were his witnesses, did they get caught lying about something else? | ||
| You know, the witnesses against them, they might have caught them lying about something else and they don't know what to do and they have to abandon the case because then they obviously know that these guys lied about something. | ||
| Who the fuck knows, man? | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| I can make a guess. | ||
| They won't be educated. | ||
| But just knowing Chicago in general, I mean, my guess is maybe the way they were going after the investigation wasn't really above board. | ||
| And if he's just like, I'm not guilty, and they have to actually go in and present this evidence, they don't have... | ||
| They don't have what they really need to have. | ||
| I don't think anyone's going around like... | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| Well, then those two Nigerian MAGA guys did attack them. | ||
| Nigerian MAGA guys. | ||
| It's so great. | ||
| Also, they sealed the case. | ||
| So fun. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, if you wanted a good twist... | ||
| You know, in the movie. | ||
| Like, this is a crazy scene in the movie where crazy music is playing, and you see Jussie Smollett come out in slow motion and put his sunglasses on and get into the limo. | ||
| He's here, not guilty! | ||
| And the music... | ||
| And he comes out in slow motion and gets in the limo, and then dudes are wearing ski masks, and people are pulling on... | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Like, one ongoing story in one of those Tarantino movies where you've got four stories like Pulp Fiction battling it out. | ||
| He's one of them. | ||
| Where he gets not guilty and he becomes a big twist because you feel like you find out there's some behind-the-scenes shenanigans and shit that led to this. | ||
| Yeah, because what happens? | ||
| People are like, oh, he's never going to work again. | ||
| But now, not guilty. | ||
| So does he get his own show? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What happens? | |
| Well, the other thing is for the longest time, Chicago has been thought to be a place that is like a... | ||
| You know, like, things can happen there. | ||
| You can make shit happen. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Is that a fair way to say it? | ||
| I love Chicago. | ||
| I don't want to be disparaging. | ||
| But there's been some cases of corruption. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, that's where I was raised. | ||
| It's a very corrupt place. | ||
| Most of our mayors and stuff go to jail. | ||
| So I don't think I'm being unfair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was a scene in a movie. | ||
| What was the scene in the movie? | ||
| Where someone said, Chicago is the most corrupt big city. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Illinois 3rd, most corrupt state in the country. | ||
| Oh, we got deep mafia ties. | ||
| Yeah, that's great. | ||
| Published February 15th. | ||
| This is recent. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know about Chicago. | ||
| I'd be talking out of my ass. | ||
| You know. | ||
| I know a little bit. | ||
| Tell me what it's like. | ||
| It's very cold. | ||
| It's very corrupt. | ||
| Oh, it's fucked, right? | ||
| Then sometimes it's very hot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's either usually too cold and shooty, or very hot and shooty, and then spring is delightful. | ||
| Shooty! | ||
| That's the best verb ever. | ||
| Shooty? | ||
| Too shooty? | ||
| There's a little too shooty over there. | ||
| Dude, that's fucking hilarious. | ||
| Shooty. | ||
| Yeah, it's way, way, way, way, way too shooty, right? | ||
| And do you think that people, this is my opinion, I want to know if you agree, I think that people in colder areas, like Detroit, in Boston, Chicago, like there are different kind of people. | ||
| There are hardier people than people that grow up, like in San Diego, no disrespect San Diego, I'm sure a lot of you are hard as fuck. | ||
| But there's like a difference between people that have to shovel snow and deal with that fucking winter and be holed up and really be fucking freezing. | ||
| Like when you come in from outside, you're like, fuck, fuck, fuck. | ||
| And you appreciate the warmth of a nice restaurant or something like that when you walk in from out of the cold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're shoveling snow. | ||
| It's windy as hell. | ||
| And then you got like very aggressive homeless people there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So you're going to... | ||
| Yeah, you're going to... | ||
| We get tougher. | ||
| I had to unprogram that for myself when I moved from Chicago to Oregon. | ||
| Because when I was a teen, it was always like... | ||
| Even my walking. | ||
| My walking was too slow for Oregon because I would walk and I'd take a look back. | ||
| Because that's how my mom taught me to walk. | ||
| In Chicago, make sure nobody's sneaking up on you. | ||
| And in Oregon, they didn't have that concern. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| That's a weird way for a kid to grow up, too, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Always be worrying about danger. | ||
| One of the stranger things about that is that it's very hard for people to get over that hump. | ||
| It's very hard for people to just calm down after they've been in a bad environment for a long time. | ||
| You get wired a certain way. | ||
| And even though you're in a new place now and everything's calm, you're still looking out. | ||
| You're still thinking, this shit could go sideways. | ||
| You've seen people go sideways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why it's hard to be in a relationship with me. | ||
| There's something I miss about when it was snowing and you would go outside and it would be silent. | ||
| You wouldn't hear anything. | ||
| It was one of some of my favorite times living in Boston, or Newton, where I was. | ||
| I lived right across the street from the Charles River. | ||
| And there was this big grassy area in front of my house. | ||
| And you'd just look at all the white. | ||
| It would just be all thick white snow, and it muffled everything. | ||
| It was sound insulation for everything. | ||
| You didn't hear shit. | ||
| You know that feeling, Jamie? | ||
| You grew up in Columbus. | ||
| You know when you get a big snowstorm? | ||
| It's quiet. | ||
| It's just like sound deadening everywhere. | ||
| There's no hard edges anymore. | ||
| Everything is covered with snow. | ||
| And it's just quiet. | ||
| It feels good. | ||
| It would feel good. | ||
| You know, it would feel like, yeah, this is nice. | ||
| As long as you have food, as long as you know it's going to go away, as long as the plows are still running, as long as you have either firewood or a backup generator or something, sometimes that electricity cuts out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then everyone gets scared, noddles up together. | |
| I remember that episode of I Love Lucy. | ||
| Did you ever have that happen? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was terrifying. | ||
| I did too. | ||
| Everybody does if you live in a place where it snows. | ||
| At some point in time, the power goes out. | ||
| I remember these guys in Toronto were telling me their power went out for two weeks, and it was fucking crazy cold, like in the zeros and below zero. | ||
| And they were doomed. | ||
| I mean, there was ice everywhere and ice had made the power lines fall down. | ||
| They had, you know, like frozen rain had come and covered everything with ice and things were breaking off and power was out and like blocks and blocks and blocks. | ||
| And all these people in fucking the dead of winter in a city were in danger. | ||
| Scary, scary shit, man. | ||
| Because you don't even have any firewood. | ||
| You don't have a place to burn it. | ||
| You're in a goddamn apartment building. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Everybody's fucking freezing. | ||
| No one's going to help you. | ||
| The phone doesn't work. | ||
| There's no fucking power. | ||
| This is stuff you think about a lot, though, right? | ||
| Because you always talk about that, like, because we're so coddled with, you know, our phones. | ||
| I think about the thin veneer of civilization. | ||
| That's what I think about. | ||
| And what I think about it more than anything is from natural disasters. | ||
| That's what I think about. | ||
| I think about the potential for natural disasters. | ||
| It can happen at any moment. | ||
| And most people have no preparation for it whatsoever. | ||
| They have no idea what they would do. | ||
| It just seems that if you're paying attention to history at all, you know that it happens all the time. | ||
| It almost just happened. | ||
| That one that you pulled up the other day that happened in December, some asteroid that blew up in our atmosphere that had five times the power of Hiroshima. | ||
| Ten times. | ||
| Ten times the power of Hiroshima blows up in our atmosphere. | ||
| Motherfucker, man. | ||
| If that hits, that hits Chicago right in the face, that can happen. | ||
| I mean, it's happened all over the world before. | ||
| There's a total possibility that we can get hit with a chunk of iron the size of a fucking ocean liner and just slams into a city and nukes that city. | ||
| That shit happens. | ||
| I think of that. | ||
| Does it bother you or does it make you more free? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I would lie to you and say it makes me more free. | ||
| I don't think that's true, though. | ||
| I think it definitely makes me sound paranoid, but I've thought about that a lot, and I'm just being accurate. | ||
| But also, I'm pretty present. | ||
| You can be both. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I try to be pretty present. | ||
| I try to be pretty here, you know, as much as I can. | ||
| And so, if you're here, like, if you're present and you're aware of all these things, it's just a slippery grip on present. | ||
| But you can still be present. | ||
| And we're like, this ain't gonna last. | ||
| This whole thing ain't gonna last. | ||
| These people are building buildings right next to the goddamn ocean. | ||
| The ocean's rising. | ||
| You know, there's a real possibility that rocks are gonna slam into this motherfucker any day now. | ||
| Or a hundred years from now. | ||
| Or five years from now. | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| But one day it's gonna happen. | ||
| And it's gonna be... | ||
| Boom! | ||
| And the fucking earth is gonna ring for a million years. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| I mean, I'm okay with that. | ||
| Because it's out of my control in that regard. | ||
| It's a good way to look at it. | ||
| But it's also seems like horseshit. | ||
| Because this world seems very permanent. | ||
| This moment seems very permanent. | ||
| Life seems very real. | ||
| It's been real my whole life. | ||
| Every day I get up, life is real. | ||
| I don't buy... | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| This too shall pass, right? | ||
| You always know nothing is true. | ||
| I think that's one of the biggest life lessons I had by having a not most stable childhood of moving around a lot and bouncing around to different schools and different states where I learned very quickly that things aren't permanent and I learned also that things are very relative to whatever area you are. | ||
| That's what really helped me I think what helps my voice as a comedian now is that I've learned very young that what's cool is very relative to wherever you are. | ||
| The things that were cool in Chicago, people weren't on in Oregon. | ||
| Things that were cool in Oregon were like Greece. | ||
| That would have gotten me beat up in Chicago. | ||
| So I learned very quickly to just be like, oh man, just... | ||
| Enjoy what I do and just like what I'm about. | ||
| It's really helped my life be more peaceful in that way. | ||
| And that's why I'm a 36-year-old man who owns a shit ton of wrestling action figures. | ||
| Yeah, half of the life is trying to find the balance between being satisfied and being motivated. | ||
| And being happy and just being, again, just being present. | ||
| Just finding out what you actually enjoy. | ||
| Just doing it. | ||
| Just do that thing. | ||
| For you, it's pro-wrestling action figures. | ||
| And that's where it's about, because you think that thing would be like comedy, but then you also learn that you can overdose on that. | ||
| You can be over... | ||
| Because that's the thing I learned... | ||
| When I started headlining, and then you hear these stories when I was younger, like when Greg Giraldo died, or Patrice died, and I just get to these parts where I'm like, man, that's like... | ||
| And obviously, all due respect to them, but I was like, I don't want to die on the road. | ||
| That's not how I want to live my life. | ||
| I don't want to be found in some hotel somewhere. | ||
| I want my family around me. | ||
| I want people who care about me. | ||
| And that really made me be like, okay, I have to think about more than just each individual set. | ||
| I have to start thinking about, what do I want to give back? | ||
| What do I want to do bigger than that? | ||
| What do I want to do if... | ||
| I just want to do the road for fun. | ||
| If I just want to, like, if I want to move into something else, my son's 16, he's going to be going, hopefully, he'll be going to college soon, and I want to be, like, I want to be able to spend more time with him, you know? | ||
| Yeah, your life as a comic, you know, oftentimes, Find that guys go through these stages and then the first stage kind of feel like an imposter feel like a fraud You know you feel like like I'm not really that good at this and then you you get to a stage where you feel like a professional When you feel your professional then you start to take put more responsibility On you on your work, | ||
| you know for me, I think that's right around when it happened with me Somewhere around ten years in I decided like hey, I gotta I gotta treat this like I'm an actual professional and stop fucking off and I fucked off a lot. | ||
| I went through periods of years where I didn't write anything, where I was really lazy and I had the same sex. | ||
| I was doing TV show shit, sitcom stuff, and I just wasn't working on the act at all. | ||
| But it's just such a more energized time right now in comedy. | ||
| Guys like Santino, we were talking about all these guys that are coming up. | ||
| Having all this good comedy around you, it's almost like... | ||
| It raises everybody's vibration. | ||
| The whole community. | ||
| The better everybody gets, instead of how everybody used to approach it, where everybody was competing against each other, and then you have weird feelings when you're around each other, now everything's a different kind of vibe. | ||
| Yeah, it's a healthy competition. | ||
| And one thing I'm really liking is a change of the presentation of people being more cognizant of like, I want to present like just dressing up more, you know, looking nicer, not necessarily trying to like, suit up or anything. | ||
| But I see more and more posters and more and more things where people are clearly putting work into their graphic design and their art. | ||
| And I don't want to speak for female comedians at all, but I'm just noticing a trend more where women are being... | ||
| Because it used to be either like, I am the hot girl. | ||
| Or like, I'm just a dude like you. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| I might be hot, but you wouldn't know because I'm wearing a hoodie. | ||
| And now there's just more of these women being like, I'm just me. | ||
| And so I might be hot, but that's not a part of this. | ||
| And I see that a lot now. | ||
| But they'll still go out there and they'll put out their posters where they're in a bikini or whatever. | ||
| Because it's like, why wouldn't you? | ||
| Just like when I go and I wear a suit. | ||
| But I love seeing people... | ||
| Take charge of that, of what they're presenting. | ||
| That's how I used to dress all the time, which is wear a big purple hoodie or whatever. | ||
| But now I'm more like, I want to look more like a star. | ||
| Well, there's definitely something to that. | ||
| I remember the Martin Lawrence days when he was on top and he'd wear those crazy outfits on stage or Eddie Murphy in Raw where he'd wear this crazy leather jumpsuit. | ||
| He put a lot of effort into what he was going to wear. | ||
| Delirious, that was another one. | ||
| Eddie Murphy had these crazy costumes that you could only wear if you were doing stand-up in a lot of ways. | ||
| I mean, it was the ultimate Eddie Murphy costume. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, if you really think about, like, him. | ||
| Sure, listen to Red Jacket. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, with Kinnison, what do you picture? | ||
| You picture the beret, you picture the overcoat, you picture the white sneakers. | ||
| Like, it was his crazy outfit. | ||
| He had, like, kind of a... | ||
| Like, you kind of expected that look from him. | ||
| But with Eddie Murphy's, Eddie Murphy was like... | ||
| You know, leather. | ||
| Like, colored leather. | ||
| And, you know, it was very powerful. | ||
| It was very bold. | ||
| Which was like his comedy. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It was like letting you know, like, this is a special night. | ||
| This is a night. | ||
| He doesn't dress like this every day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is, yeah. | ||
| He's on stage doing a show like that. | ||
| Yeah, I like it when people think about the full presentation. | ||
| I've been even doing that with the playlist that the club plays before my show. | ||
| I've been setting that up now because I want a vibe of what we're coming into. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mostly fish? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, I got to piss so bad. | ||
| So, I want to keep going, though. | ||
| I don't want to stop. | ||
| So, I just did two podcasts in a row and I drank too much coffee. | ||
| So, Jamie, why don't you guys talk about something you have in common? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Okay. | ||
| What do you guys have in common? | ||
| Can I smoke some more pot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Oh, for sure, bro. | ||
| Here, have a freshie. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Have an extra one for the road, too, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you, sir. | |
| You're welcome. | ||
| I'll be right back. | ||
| I just gotta pee. | ||
| Talk amongst yourselves. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Nice! | ||
| Welcome to the Ron Funches Experience. | ||
| Ron, you have your own podcast too, right? | ||
| I do! | ||
| It's called Getting Better with Ron Funches. | ||
| I talk to people who I admire or people who I want to learn from, people who have accomplished things I want to accomplish or have gotten better in some form in their life and I ask them about it and about setting goals and stuff. | ||
| Do you just set it up that way, like as a conversation? | ||
| Or do you put more thought into, like, I want to ask them these kind of questions and get these kinds of things answered? | ||
| I mean, there's some set questions. | ||
| I usually just ask people about their goals, and I ask them about some advice to give me. | ||
| But other than that, it's usually just some type of free-form conversation. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| You know, it's funny sometimes. | ||
| But for the most part, it's just like... | ||
| The reason why I wanted to do it is because I was a big fan of, like, Patton Oswalt's website, The Spew, and stuff like that when he had that. | ||
| And I noticed, like, when I was on Twitter, there had been a shift from people who were, like... | ||
| Used to be very supportive of me, especially when I was fatter and stuff. | ||
| And then it became this thing of, like... | ||
| Anytime I would try to post something positive, people would be like, well, why the fuck do you, who cares? | ||
| You have money and you just, you know, and I just want to be like, no, I'm not on a different side of the fence because I did these things. | ||
| I'm like over here being like, anybody can fucking do it if my dumb ass did it, you know? | ||
| So it just became more about, to me, talent and success is more like this ocean that we can all drink from, and it's about how did this person get to that ocean. | ||
| I don't think there's people who are talented and untalented. | ||
| Finding out their path to where they are now. | ||
| And what keeps them motivated now? | ||
| Once people have some success, what keeps you going? | ||
| There's a question I would like to know from Joe. | ||
| He just walked back in, so maybe we can find out. | ||
| Hit me with a question. | ||
| What keeps you motivated? | ||
| You're so successful. | ||
| You got a lot of money. | ||
| You're doing okay. | ||
| You're UFC. You accomplished so many things. | ||
| So what makes you go to the store on a Tuesday night? | ||
| To work on stand-up. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Look, when you get successful at something, the best thing that it does is alleviate stress. | ||
| But it doesn't change the motivation. | ||
| The motivation is always to create something that I like, that I can be proud of, that the people enjoy most importantly. | ||
| There's a bunch of people that watch my stand-up. | ||
| I gotta work at it. | ||
| I don't want to be an asshole. | ||
| I don't want to be that guy that you come to see my show and you go, ugh. | ||
| He didn't prepare. | ||
| He didn't care. | ||
| He didn't try. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm not gonna be that. | ||
| So, look, we all have bad sets. | ||
| I'll have bad sets. | ||
| I'll try my best, though. | ||
| I fucking try my best. | ||
| And I'm gonna keep trying my best. | ||
| Because I think if I don't, I leave doubt in my own head that shouldn't be there. | ||
| If I do my best and it just doesn't work, I have to figure out what was wrong. | ||
| But if I don't do my best... | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| You feel like shit. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| But I think that... | ||
| I still feel like shit even if it doesn't work and I did my best. | ||
| You feel like a failure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I feel like a failure rather than a loser. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think when I was younger and doing comedy in my 20s, it might have just been a Portland thing. | ||
| There was always kind of this vibe of like... | ||
| I didn't try my best. | ||
| If I tried my best, I would have crushed it. | ||
| But I didn't try my best, so I didn't really fail. | ||
| Yeah, that's a trap that a lot of comics get into when they are in front of a small crowd. | ||
| You want more of that? | ||
| Yeah, I'll take a little more. | ||
| Damn, Ron goes deep. | ||
| And one of the... | ||
| You know those moments when you're a young comic where someone says something to you and it really gives you a nice boost, like you feel great about it? | ||
| And one time I was at the store and it was maybe like 12 or 13 people in the audience. | ||
| The most was like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You dead? | |
| No, I'll keep going. | ||
| It was... | ||
| And Paul Mooney was in the back of the room. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| And... | ||
| These 12 or 13 people, I'm just doing my act. | ||
| And Mooney starts laughing hard, like a supportive laugh, like he's with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha! | |
| Ha! | ||
| Ah! | ||
| He's clapping. | ||
| And then he came up to me after the show, and he goes, something to the extent of, you're a real comic. | ||
| Like, that's what makes you a real comic. | ||
| You do those real shows in front of all those people. | ||
| You know, you do a real show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't, like, say, oh, there's only 10 people, oh, there's only 15 people. | ||
| You don't have to ask that. | ||
| You go out there and do your best. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Man, there's always just so much to learn. | ||
| That's what I've been learning to get out of, like, every set is the same and, like, this is my material. | ||
| And I've been at that for a little bit, but knowing how to shift my energy for, like, that, like, you do want to be professional for those 10 people, but you're not going to do the same, like... | ||
| Yelling energy as if they were a hundred people. | ||
| You're going to be a little more intimate, you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're going to make it more of a conversation. | ||
| And that's what I'm really learning to do now. | ||
| Watching, I think for a lot of comedians, but that Gary Shandling documentary. | ||
| I still haven't seen it. | ||
| You haven't seen it? | ||
| Oh man, I love it so much. | ||
| But it really helped me about being mindful, about being in the moment. | ||
| So I've been really, like, whenever I write a set list now, because I usually number it and it has, like, a couple words. | ||
| The first, I would write number one, bullshit, for as long as possible. | ||
| Because I don't, like, I don't want to just get into it. | ||
| I want to, you know, unless it's like, I got ten minutes and I have things I want to do. | ||
| But for the most part, I'm like, Let me get in the moment. | ||
| Let me look people in the eyes and see if I see something. | ||
| Not necessarily going in and just crowd work and rip on people, but let me just go in and talk about my day for a second and then maybe that will segue into my set. | ||
| And so it teaches me a new way to get into things. | ||
| I'm more conversational. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, you're very jazz. | ||
| You got a lot of jazz in you, Ron. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| That's a good way to do it. | ||
| Because it always does feel abrupt when someone begins with a joke. | ||
| Sometimes it works, though. | ||
| Like, some people can do it. | ||
| Some people, they would go on stage and they just hammer with a first joke and from there it's off to the races. | ||
| Like, they'll open up with a non sequitur. | ||
| Like, out of nowhere and bang! | ||
| Yeah, Jeff Ross is really good at, like, just changing the tempo in the room. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| He's great at it off the cuff, you know, in the spur of the moment type shit. | ||
| Because all those years of roasting and all those years of fucking with the crowd, and that show they're doing, him and Attell are traveling and doing that bumping mic show, where they just fuck around, man. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| They just get in front of those people and fuck around. | ||
| That's what's so crazy about what really opens your mind about, again, what this job can be. | ||
| Where you could literally just travel with your friend and... | ||
| Fuck around and sell out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's a crazy gig, man. | ||
| It's a crazy gig. | ||
| When you started out in Chicago, what club were you at? | ||
| I didn't start in Chicago. | ||
| I was a young man. | ||
| I left when I was 13 because my mom was in a negative relationship. | ||
| So I went to go live with my dad in Oregon. | ||
| And he was also a negative thing. | ||
| And then I started comedy in Portland, Oregon when I was 23 at Harvey's Comedy Club there. | ||
| And then doing some shows in Salem at this Chinese food restaurant called Lucky Fortune. | ||
| And then I just started some shows there and, you know, struggled for a long time. | ||
| And then I think about five years in, I got Asadou Conan and then was New Face. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Got divorced, and then was like, alright, I'll move to Los Angeles, and now I have my son here, and it's just been me and him, and now my girlfriend, and my mom now lives with me for the last year. | ||
| But, yeah, that's pretty much it. | ||
| That sounds cool. | ||
| Is there a scene in Portland where you started? | ||
| When I started, it was pretty much like... | ||
| There'd been... | ||
| Seattle has a scene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There'd been a bit of an OG scene of Dwight Slade and Susan Rice. | ||
| And then, not really much. | ||
| There's just a lot based off of road gigs, triple runs, going to Idaho. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Everybody was talking about those triple runs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| We had something similar, which is not as exciting because you guys were going through the Wild West. | ||
| I mean, you're going to Montana and Idaho. | ||
| Oh, not me. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Not me. | ||
| But the people that did it. | ||
| The people who did it. | ||
| I didn't seem lucky at the time, but it turned out, in hindsight, to be very lucky that the one time that that booker... | ||
| Saw me. | ||
| I just ate shit. | ||
| Hardcore. | ||
| And so they wanted nothing to do with me. | ||
| And it turned out to be the best thing because then I was in this position where I was like, oh, okay, well, I'm not going to get Idaho shows so I don't have to pander to that type of audience. | ||
| And I'm just going to be here. | ||
| And so I can, right now, it's really just like, oh, just write what you like. | ||
| And that turned out to be the best thing for me. | ||
| Dude, you could perform in Boise. | ||
| They would love you. | ||
| Oh, I end up I have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I love Boise. | ||
| It's like Portland. | ||
| It's a very unusual place. | ||
| It's almost like, I hate talking about it. | ||
| I don't want to give out their spot. | ||
| No, they got a good little comedy scene building over there. | ||
| Yeah, there's, well, I think because of the internet, there's a comedy scene almost in every city. | ||
| People find a way to get together and do something. | ||
| It's just, it seems like too much of an exciting option for people who are fuck-ups, and there's so many of us. | ||
| There's so many of us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, in one way or another, there's so many, you know, one form of fuck-up or another. | |
| There's so many of us. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if that's necessarily the truth or if the way that is set up for us to go, the structure that is naturally just doesn't work as much anymore. | ||
| It made more sense in the past, you know? | ||
| And also, it's been shown to not be sound, because that's the thing that trips me out now. | ||
| It's like, when I was a kid, what was drilled in my head for my mom was, get a good government job. | ||
| Get a good government job. | ||
| And now that seems like the most unsteady job you could have. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That just cut your department. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so one thing I learned, the stand-up taught me quickly was that... | ||
| It's the same stress, you know? | ||
| But now I'm in charge. | ||
| The stress of paying my bills, the stress of taking care of my son is the same whether I'm working for somebody else or I'm working for myself. | ||
| But at least when I'm working for myself, I'm in charge, you know? | ||
| And as long as I have a product that I can put out, if I don't have anything, then I guess I gotta go work for somebody. | ||
| But if I had something, I'd rather have that stress be put on me than have someone just show up one day and be like, we're out of business. | ||
| Find someplace else to work, you know? | ||
| Yeah, and you're 60. Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and they just cut your whole department. | ||
| Well, didn't, I mean, every fucking single politician gets in the office, they want to cut certain departments, right? | ||
| There's always someone that thinks something's being overfunded. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck that. | |
| Most of the time they're just talking about cutting Social Security and food stamps. | ||
| And that seems like the last thing we need right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you can make things. | ||
| It seems like if you could make things, this is a good time to be on your own. | ||
| Because you could sell things on the internet. | ||
| You could sell things in a way that no one could ever sell before. | ||
| You could set up an online store. | ||
| You don't have to have a physical location. | ||
| And you could just... | ||
| If you make something, if you're an artist, if you make pottery or some shit, you could sell things that you create online. | ||
| It's pretty easy to do now. | ||
| Like, this is a place where people can actually, like, oh, well, if I just did this, if I figured out a way to do that, I'm working for myself. | ||
| I can just do it whenever I want, just sell things. | ||
| People like it, they put it in their house, and then a lot of people can go in that direction. | ||
| It's not, I mean, there's people that just aren't creative and they're not interested in it, but there's a lot of people who are. | ||
| And for those people who are, just have a little bit of creativity, that they maybe never really nurtured because they work too much, find a way! | ||
| Find a way. | ||
| Find a way to get through with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Plus, you know who you are because if you're content in how your job is going anyway, you're fine. | ||
| You're not even thinking about that. | ||
| But if you're upset and you're like, oh, I hate this job. | ||
| I hate what's going on in my life, that usually might be the case. | ||
| And people love to say, that's easy for you to say. | ||
| It's easy for you to say. | ||
| You guys are both already successful. | ||
| It's very hard. | ||
| Get started. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It is hard to get started. | ||
| It is. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But don't think like that. | ||
| Just try to find a way through. | ||
| The more time you spend thinking on it, that's easy for you, you know, it's hard for me. | ||
| The more time you do that, the less time you're thinking of an actual solution. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I see that all the time. | ||
| Especially even with my weight loss and stuff. | ||
| People... | ||
| They're always like, oh, you can say that. | ||
| You got a trainer. | ||
| And it's just like, I still had to be the guy that vomited. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| You know? | ||
| I still had to be the guy that worked myself so hard that I threw up and still went back. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like, it is hard. | ||
| Do you vomit on the ground or did you make it to a trash can? | ||
| I made it to a trash can. | ||
| Not at wrestling. | ||
| At wrestling, it was on the ground. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It sucked because then they made me clean it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm like... | |
| It's part of the gig. | ||
| Yeah, it really was. | ||
| Yeah, you can't be puking. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| If you're working out to the point of puking, that's intense. | ||
| Well, you know, when my body was coming from a place of such an activity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long do you think it took you for you to adjust to a constant state of activity? | ||
| Probably like six months. | ||
| That's a great thing, though, that you have the discipline to do that. | ||
| That's a great thing. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's an underappreciated thing because I think it's easy for me to keep doing what I'm doing. | ||
| I always do it. | ||
| It's part of my natural way of doing it. | ||
| But to not exercise and then decide you're going to clean your diet up and you're going to start exercising and you're going to continually do it even though you're exhausted because your body's not really prepared for this. | ||
| So you must have had a long period of like for a couple weeks at least where you're like having your body try to respond to this where it didn't have to do this before. | ||
| And now you're making it stress out all the time and it's got to recover and then you stress it out and it's got to recover. | ||
| And then your body's like, what the fuck, dude? | ||
| What is happening here? | ||
| Is this our new life? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that was pretty much that. | ||
| You nailed it. | ||
| How long did it take? | ||
| To lose, to get to where I am now? | ||
| To where you started feeling comfortable with like normal exercise on a regular basis or strenuous exercise. | ||
| Strenuous exercise? | ||
| Again, I think it would be about six months of where I am. | ||
| And then also just a... | ||
| There were weight goals, you know? | ||
| I was about 360 when we started, and then getting under 350 was just like a real difference. | ||
| And then when I got under 300, that was a big deal. | ||
| And then when I got under 250, and then now I'm about 220, and anytime I go over 225, I can feel it in my knees again. | ||
| Because I had to take a little break for a few weeks. | ||
| And that was really big on my mind because I was like, oh, I have to take a break for three weeks. | ||
| Am I going to just blow up again? | ||
| And going through that and seeing that I can keep my diet and keep my nutrition and that I got a little... | ||
| Less defined, but I didn't blow up. | ||
| And I was like, okay, that made me relax a little bit more. | ||
| And it's helped me as far as my comedy or dealing with executives and stuff where I am very much like, oh, I did that. | ||
| I can figure things out. | ||
| I can do it. | ||
| I have the discipline. | ||
| If I really set my mind to something, I can usually do it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a giant accomplishment. | ||
| And people undermine it because they feel like it doesn't mean as much because you let yourself get to that weight. | ||
| And I think it's a silly way of looking at it. | ||
| I am a firm believer that many of us who are feeling really good about life and having a great time here are very, very lucky in their circumstance. | ||
| Very lucky. | ||
| The people you're around, the positive influences in your life, the good things, very lucky. | ||
| Because shit can be really not good. | ||
| When things are really not good and people go down a spiral, whether it's with booze and cigarettes and heroin or whether it's with food or whether it's with alcohol or whether it's pills, you can go down a spiral. | ||
| It's who out of the person that is in the bottom of the spiral, who can pull themselves out? | ||
| Could you, if you had to start from there, instead of starting from a place of success, and this is why I think people get cocky, you wake up every morning like, oh, I guess everything's okay. | ||
| You know, my life's not in the shitter. | ||
| Instead, think of what it would be like if you woke up and you were 380 pounds. | ||
| And this is your new life. | ||
| Your new life is, you got to get down from 380 pounds to about 220 pounds. | ||
| You've got to figure out how to do that. | ||
| And you've got to figure out how to not lapse when you're aching with hunger. | ||
| You've got to figure out how... | ||
| Your body has no fucking energy. | ||
| It doesn't know how to recover. | ||
| It never gets pushed. | ||
| And you have to push it through that. | ||
| And you have to do that to the tune of 160 pounds. | ||
| That's a lot of fucking weight, man. | ||
| That's a lot of fucking weight. | ||
| Most people are not going to be able to do that. | ||
| It's a lot of weight to lose. | ||
| How long did that take you? | ||
| About two and a half years. | ||
| No matter what, that's an accomplishment, man. | ||
| And it's something that I think when people hear that, that you did that, people realize, like, I can do that too. | ||
| I can do that. | ||
| It can be done. | ||
| Yeah, that's been one of the best things about it. | ||
| And what actually keeps me on it is when I get people reaching out to me, like when I post pictures from the past or now, and they're like, man, like, you know, in some ways it used to piss me off because people would be like... | ||
| Oh, if you can do it, then I can definitely do it. | ||
| But now it's very motivating. | ||
| Yeah, you're setting an example. | ||
| You do something, and then people, because you're in the public eye and you do this thing, they see you do it. | ||
| They watch it happen. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the... | ||
| Cooler things about it. | ||
| Like, you go in real time. | ||
| You could see you two years ago. | ||
| You could see you now. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| You went... | ||
| I mean, you really did it. | ||
| You know, and when people see that, it's not like a... | ||
| If you heard that a guy lost 400 pounds, you're like, wow, that's amazing. | ||
| But if you see a guy, and you watch him on a regular basis, and he's 400 pounds, and then all of a sudden he loses all that weight, you're like, what? | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Watch him do it. | ||
| You see him do it. | ||
| Something about people needing to see shit. | ||
| Like, we need to see someone else do it, and then we go, I can do that. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would you ever even imagine, if you didn't know that people ran marathons or ultramarathons, would you ever even imagine that you would want to just run 100 miles? | ||
| No. | ||
| You'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| No one's doing that. | ||
| But then you hear about it, and you see it, and you go, oh, I still don't want to do this. | ||
| You still don't want to do it, but it changes your idea of what people do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of what's capable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when a guy like you loses all that weight, it changes people's idea of what, if they maybe identify with you, it changes their idea about what they're capable of. | ||
| They change their opinion of themselves based on you pulling your life together in an awesome way, publicly. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Dude, that's dope. | ||
| That has a powerful impact on people. | ||
| You know, there's gotta be a lot of dudes out there and gals that are trying to figure the fuck out of the hole they dug themselves in. | ||
| You know, they're like, how did I get out of this? | ||
| Like, how do I... Jesus Christ, I hate being tired all the time. | ||
| No, that's one of my... | ||
| That's one of the things I love when I talk about a lot of my podcasts is... | ||
| And I try... | ||
| Because people don't know me, you know, and a lot of times on Twitter, if I'm like... | ||
| If I try to give advice or things, or I'm not even really advice, just trying to be positive, people go... | ||
| Like you were talking about, like, what do you know? | ||
| What do you care? | ||
| You were on a TV show. | ||
| And I have to go like, you don't know my history. | ||
| You don't know where I came from. | ||
| You don't know that I'm like, I'm a single dad of a kid with a disability. | ||
| I take care of myself. | ||
| I was poor as crap. | ||
| I had three weeks of a college, community college education. | ||
| And I... Once I was like, oh, I gotta pull my life together for this son who's different from other people and I don't know if he's ever gonna be able to live on his own or have his own job or I have to prepare for not. | ||
| I have to prepare if he does, if he needs help. | ||
| I have to prepare for all these things and it really motivated me and it pushed me forward and I like to... | ||
| Now, for some reason, I don't know if it's like survival's remorse or whatever, I'm always like, man, I feel like so many people can do that, you know? | ||
| Not necessarily comedy or whatever, but I always feel like people have their own gifts, they have their own talents, and sometimes we're not... | ||
| We're not told that. | ||
| We're not pushed in those directions. | ||
| Sometimes we go through traumas or things in our lives that dim our light, you know? | ||
| And I like to be like, anybody can do it because I'm a testament to that because I should not be here. | ||
| Well, you should because you chose the right path. | ||
| This is what's really critical about this kind of... | ||
| When we talk about people's future or what they can and can't do, one of the beautiful things about stand-up is that it's a meritocracy. | ||
| You're really funny. | ||
| People love you. | ||
| We just want to know, are you funny? | ||
| Hey, is that guy funny? | ||
| He's funny? | ||
| Come on in. | ||
| Is she funny? | ||
| She's funny. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Come on in. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And I don't know of that many other jobs where it's that clear. | ||
| There's a lot of jobs where you've got to do a lot of ass guessing. | ||
| You've got to suck that corporate dick. | ||
| You've got to be in the office with Satan going, what the fuck am I doing with my life? | ||
| I don't want to be here. | ||
| I'm writing down goals. | ||
| I just want to do coke. | ||
| I want to get a Ferrari. | ||
| Fuck this job. | ||
| That's what a lot of it is, man. | ||
| There's a lot of weird angst. | ||
| And then you get stuck in this fucking corporate ladder. | ||
| You get muted. | ||
| You get toned down. | ||
| There's no deviation from the standard office worker path. | ||
| You're in this weird groove. | ||
| Whereas as a stand-up, all you got to do is make the people laugh. | ||
| All you got to do is find this shit that's funny, work on it, make the people laugh. | ||
| Get out there! | ||
| Get out there! | ||
| Boom, boom, boom! | ||
| Holy shit, you got to go see Ron Funches! | ||
| Oh shit! | ||
| People start talking. | ||
| People start telling other friends. | ||
| The next thing you go, there's agents, there's managers. | ||
| You keep going, you keep going, you keep getting better. | ||
| Oh my god, you're on TV. Look at you. | ||
| Keep going, keep going, keep going. | ||
| If you just keep going and working at it, nobody tells us what to do. | ||
| It's fucking beautiful, but not everybody can get that gig. | ||
| So then there's other gigs, like what gig do you take? | ||
| Well, it seems like you should take the gig where you make a lot of money, but that's not the move! | ||
| It's not the move! | ||
| Unless you can be sure that you can quit that gig in a short period of time, because nobody ever does. | ||
| Yeah, trap jobs. | ||
| That's what I always would put them. | ||
| And they had a lot of them where I grew up with this bank call center where I was working because it was the only place, this tiny town, not many jobs. | ||
| If you didn't have a college education, you were working at a Subway, you were working at a Sam Goody, or you were working at this bank and you were making like 20 bucks an hour. | ||
| You're making like double what you're making at this Subway. | ||
| There's no skills that transfer. | ||
| So if you want to leave this job, you're going back to Subway, you know? | ||
| So a lot of people end up trapped there. | ||
| And I knew right away, I was like, I gotta get out. | ||
| I can't, I mean, hey, I'm not a bank guy. | ||
| So, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a trap. | |
| That is a trap, man. | ||
| I remember when I was a kid, I was working at this place called Newport Creamery. | ||
| It was an ice cream store. | ||
| They sold ice cream and hamburgers and shit like that. | ||
| And there was a bank that was right next door. | ||
| And I would always go in the bank with my Newport Creamery check, and I'd deposit it, and I'd say hi to this lady. | ||
| And then one day I heard, she had the baby in the toilet, and then left it in a garbage bin. | ||
| And no one even knew she was pregnant. | ||
| And it was one of those like, what? | ||
| Like we had just a window into madness. | ||
| Like right next door to where we were working. | ||
| We were like, what? | ||
| That lady that we always said hi to? | ||
| The lady got pregnant, didn't tell anybody, and gave birth in the bathroom at work and put the baby in a dumpster. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| I wish you hadn't lived, but this was a bank story. | ||
| Well, it was a bank story, and it was just a person. | ||
| A person working. | ||
| She could have been in a cupcake shop. | ||
| This was a person who was mad. | ||
| They were a crazy person, right? | ||
| You have to be. | ||
| You would have to be a crazy person where no one knows you're pregnant, and then you give birth in a bathroom, and the baby winds up in a dumpster. | ||
| It's like, that is, that's the most insane shit I've ever heard in my life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was like right next door to the ice cream place. | ||
| And we were all like, whoa. | ||
| It's like the fabric of reality had rippled. | ||
| We realized like someone can be that crazy in your town. | ||
| In your fucking town. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| I like that your town... | ||
| Oh man, you sound like you got a nice town now. | ||
| It was a nice town. | ||
| I mean, it was very idyllic in a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah, it sounds pretty sheltered up until people putting babies and things. | ||
| Well, it was just... | ||
| It wasn't a big place, you know, and when something would go wrong... | ||
| It would be odd. | ||
| Like you knew the person. | ||
| You know how I know it's sheltered? | ||
| It's because you worked at a place called Creamery. | ||
| Newport Creamery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't even just ice cream. | ||
| It was super sheltered. | ||
| Yeah, that was a sheltered ass place. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| I want to do that. | ||
| I want to make that a reality for my son. | ||
| It was a nice place to grow up. | ||
| And I had lived in Jamaica Plain before that, which was much, much worse neighborhood. | ||
| It was sketchy. | ||
| We lived there for about a year. | ||
| And then my parents were like, we gotta get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Like, people breaking into cars while you're sleeping, and home break-ins, and it was just a lot of crime. | ||
| Especially in, like, 1978 or whatever the fuck it was. | ||
| I guess it was, like, 80. Yeah. | ||
| So then we moved to Newton, which is nice. | ||
| Are your parents still around? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're still together. | ||
| My stepdad and my mom are still together. | ||
| They've been together since I was a little kid. | ||
| They're a nice couple. | ||
| Have a good time together. | ||
| Do you ever wonder what you're going to be like when you're like a 75-year-old man? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think it'd be cool as fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't give a fuck mostly now, and I imagine later, even less. | ||
| Just saying all types of stuff. | ||
| I see it in my mom. | ||
| Especially it's fun because I can take her to random events that I go to. | ||
| And she just... | ||
| I try to be cool because I'm working. | ||
| And she has none of that because she doesn't care. | ||
| My mom sexually harassed Justin Timberlake once. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| She just went right up. | ||
| Security was about to take her out. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| She just doesn't care. | ||
| Have you ever had a guest on your podcast? | ||
| Yeah, she was the second guest. | ||
| Or the first guest. | ||
| Second episode. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I learned a lot from my mom. | ||
| She's super dope. | ||
| She's smoking a lot of pot. | ||
| She lives with you now. | ||
| Yeah, she lives in the pool house. | ||
| Did you get depressed in Portland with the weather? | ||
| Did it freak you out? | ||
| Yeah, you get seasonal depression there easily, yeah. | ||
| People say it's real. | ||
| They say even if you take vitamin D and you sit in a tan in bed. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they'll sell you those lights and all those things, you know? | ||
| That shit doesn't do it, though, does it? | ||
| No, not when you're dealing with three months of straight gray, you know? | ||
| It's the rain. | ||
| Not just gray, but the rain. | ||
| I think it's both because there's this lack of color palette in your life. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You don't get the vibrance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When the ocean looks like a dull gray. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even the ocean looks tired. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, whoa. | |
| Right? | ||
| As opposed to, like, if you go to Mexico. | ||
| Like, I went to Cancun way back in the day, and the first thing I noticed, like, how the fuck is the ocean that color? | ||
| Like, look how pretty it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like a bluish green. | ||
| It's gorgeous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever been to the French Riviera? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| One time. | ||
| And yeah, same thing. | ||
| They have pebble beaches instead of sand, which is horrible. | ||
| But the water is so beautiful. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I grew up in that town, which was next to the Charles River, and that Charles River went all the way through Boston. | ||
| And the Charles River was, like, disgusting, man. | ||
| Like, you'd see condoms floating in it, and you'd see, I saw one pipe, and these bubbles were coming up to the surface. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck is that? | ||
| And then I saw a condom bubble up, and I went, oh my god, it's a sewer pipe. | ||
| And I realized someone was just flushing their shit and piss right into the goddamn river. | ||
| I was like, how did this happen? | ||
| And I was, you know, 14. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| Like, how am I finding this? | ||
| Like, you don't have anybody, like, checking to see if the shit pipe is pumping right into the goddamn river? | ||
| Like, oh my god, it was crazy. | ||
| So it wasn't clean by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| So to see that kind of clean, pure, like, ocean water where, like... | ||
| You ever heard of bone fishing? | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| It's a type of fishing that people do. | ||
| I think they mostly just catch and release them. | ||
| I don't think they even keep most of them. | ||
| But they go to Florida and I think the Bahamas. | ||
| I want to say the Bahamas. | ||
| And they're on these like... | ||
| Special boats that are like these boats you can stand on, and they're fly fishing for this fish that looks like it belongs in the Stone Age. | ||
| This weird, cool-looking fish called the bonefish. | ||
| See if you can pull up a picture of it. | ||
| I don't know why we're talking about this. | ||
| That's how high I am. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Is that a bonefish? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It looks more like a barracuda. | |
| That's a bonefish. | ||
| See, that's a bonefish. | ||
| That other one was a barracuda. | ||
| I think they just had a bad photo. | ||
| You see the difference? | ||
| It's a crazy-looking fish, man. | ||
| And see that water behind them? | ||
| It's hard to tell from this image, but what we're looking at is really shallow water. | ||
| At the most, it's like three feet deep, right? | ||
| And they're just casting out, and they see these fish coming towards them, and they catch it. | ||
| It's supposed to be super, super exciting. | ||
| You do a lot of fishing? | ||
| I don't do a lot of fishing, but I love fishing. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| But this is fun, I would assume. | ||
| I haven't done this kind of fishing, bone fishing, but that's what people love, seeing a fish coming and going and biting your lure. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| Yeah, it sounds exciting. | ||
| But look how clear that goddamn water is. | ||
| There's no condoms. | ||
| There's no condoms. | ||
| Just bone fish. | ||
| I was watching a video today of a guy jumping with scuba gear on into the garbage patch. | ||
| It's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. | ||
| You know, I knew that it was supposed to be horrific, but when you see it in a video, you watch it and just go, what the fuck is this? | ||
| This guy put scuba gear on and jumped into this. | ||
| I mean, it was plastic. | ||
| You couldn't see anything but plastic. | ||
| Everywhere you looked, to the left and the right, it was all plastic. | ||
| Like, this is huge. | ||
| Like, several states large. | ||
| Yeah, this shit. | ||
| This is what humans are doing to the ocean. | ||
| You see him jump in and it's almost... | ||
| Did they show him jump in or is this a different video? | ||
| Probably a different video. | ||
| This is a different video because the other one, the guy starts out on the boat and dives in and what he dives into is just like plastic soup. | ||
| It's fucking disgusting, man. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, like this. | ||
| So there's this guy that we had on the podcast, his name is Boyan Slott, and he created a device that he's using to try to pull the plastic out of the ocean, and they'll maybe convert that plastic into things that we can use. | ||
| And I don't think it worked on the first attempt, but they're... | ||
| They're relaunching it, right? | ||
| They had to do something to fix things. | ||
| They're still in the prototype stage, but it's going to have these machines, these giant nets that move around through the ocean and catch all this plastic. | ||
| How does it stop it from getting fish? | ||
| That's a very good question. | ||
| I don't think there's any fish living in there. | ||
| I bet a lot of fish have eaten that stuff, though. | ||
| Guaranteed. | ||
| There's probably a lot of fish with plastic in their stomachs. | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| That's gross. | ||
| I mean, what kind of shit gets in their system, and then when you eat that fish, what kind of shit are you getting in your system? | ||
| Like, how many people are testing their fish? | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, how many people are, before they eat a salmon, they're like, hold on, let me check for mercury, let me see how much arsenic's in this, let's see what kind of heavy metal pours, what's that stuff, BPBs, that they're worried about that come from, what is the stuff they're worried about that comes from bottles? | ||
| Plastic. | ||
| Yeah, BPAs or something like that? | ||
| That sounds right, yeah. | ||
| I wish I knew what that meant. | ||
| I guess they did a video of their first results from November. | ||
| I don't know what he's saying. | ||
| Oh, so this is their first actual pulling of the garbage? | ||
| You know, listen, man, even if it takes 10 years, if they could figure out a way to get rid of all that plastic and we could figure out a way to not put that plastic in the ocean, we could maybe... | ||
| What I really worry about almost as much as this, maybe even more, is overfishing. | ||
| When you realize how many different ships are out there using giant nets and just scooping everything they catch inside that net and then just serving it to us. | ||
| And we're like, ooh, you want to get sushi? | ||
| Yeah, sushi sounds good. | ||
| We're like, so cool. | ||
| Sushi sounds good. | ||
| It's ocean genocide. | ||
| I mean, it's fucking chaotic, man. | ||
| They don't have real... | ||
| I mean, they don't have real control. | ||
| It's international waters. | ||
| People are just cutting nets and dropping them to the bottom of the ocean and they're catching things all the time. | ||
| There's nets all over the place out there. | ||
| People just release their nets. | ||
| They just litter. | ||
| But you've been very conscious about what you eat and sustainability a lot lately, right? | ||
| Well, I think sustainability, yeah. | ||
| I do think about that a lot. | ||
| I don't know if I'm that conscious of it. | ||
| I'm definitely guilty of not being sometimes. | ||
| I mean, I'm extremely unconscious about it. | ||
| I wish I was more conscious about it because I'm one that will put in my face. | ||
| It makes me all sad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm more conscious about what I eat than I am sustainability in terms of the quality of what I eat. | ||
| I'm more conscious about that. | ||
| I should be more conscious about sustainability, but sometimes it feels like... | ||
| What are you showing me here? | ||
| Is that a crocodile, goddammit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| What is that? | ||
| Big catch with an exclamation mark is the name of this video. | ||
| It's got 40 million views on YouTube. | ||
| It's a net that's full of stuff. | ||
| Oh, they caught a net. | ||
| Oh, this is... | ||
| Oh, a net. | ||
| This is a fishing boat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, look at that. | ||
| Look how it works. | ||
| They just scoop up every fucking thing that's in that ocean. | ||
| It's really amazing. | ||
| I mean, what a horrific place to be if you're a fish. | ||
| Imagine if fish were, like, super smart, and this is their demise. | ||
| I mean, this is an insane net filled with living creatures that we're going to eat. | ||
| No, bro, it's just tilapia. | ||
| Relax. | ||
| God, you're getting so dramatic. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| It's a crazy bundle. | ||
| Of these ocean creatures and how often does this happen a day? | ||
| Is it all day? | ||
| I bet it is. | ||
| I bet this is all day. | ||
| I bet this is all day for years and years and years and years and I don't think they take time off. | ||
| I think they keep going and if they're not there someone else is there too. | ||
| I think this is happening as long as they can make money selling fish and we're willing to buy fish. | ||
| It's kind of insane. | ||
| You think people ever feel bad about it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Do any of those people feel bad? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| They're not monsters, right? | ||
| They might develop a... | ||
| Well, that guy just stepped right on a fish, though. | ||
| Yeah, they get desensitized, I'm sure, man. | ||
| He doesn't seem like he cared at all. | ||
| Well, this is crazy. | ||
| I mean, this is not... | ||
| A person's supposed to be able to catch a fish, or a two fish, or three fish, and then you eat it. | ||
| Like, this is chaos, man. | ||
| This is some crazy thing where you have to make Filet-O-Fish sandwiches because there's, you know, 320 million people and 100 million of them want junk food anytime they want it. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if that went to Filet-O-Fish or if that's expensive fish. | ||
| I really have no idea. | ||
| I'm just talking shit. | ||
| Don't listen to me. | ||
| And I also eat fish, so I'm a hypocrite. | ||
| But it is kind of crazy when you watch this video. | ||
| And I'm not a... | ||
| You know, I'm not opposed to you eating fish, but I'm just saying the reality of what this is is crazy. | ||
| This is a crazy scene. | ||
| And to deny it's a crazy scene, I'm still going to eat fish. | ||
| You know, I feel awful about this. | ||
| It does slightly make me want sushi. | ||
| Looking at this, when I was a server, a big question people would always ask, is it farm-raised or is it wild-caught? | ||
| If this is wild-caught versus farm-raised, I don't know why it would make a giant difference. | ||
| It seems like it's bad either way. | ||
| Yeah, it's hell, no matter what, for these organisms. | ||
| But they're delicious, and they're really good for you. | ||
| But how are they going to ensure that there's going to be some left? | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| Like, the human governments need to get together and go, hey, we can't kill the whole ocean. | ||
| Because that is possible. | ||
| If you keep going at the pace that it's going now, if you really stop and think about what the ocean must have been like when you hear about those Japanese tuna fishermen, like, did you see Jiro... | ||
| Dreams of Sushi. | ||
| Remember when those gentlemen were at the fish market and they were talking about what it used to be like? | ||
| Used to be tuna everywhere. | ||
| So much tuna and now it's like a small amount and you gotta check to see if it's good. | ||
| Like they're watching it happen in real time. | ||
| If you go from that point where that guy was talking about to today and then go 50 years from now at the same pace like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, you gotta be... | ||
| But it seems like that it wouldn't be that hard to be more conscious about it. | ||
| Well, at the very least, they have to take into consideration the fact that they need to maybe develop some sort of an international program to breed these things. | ||
| They've done that with Yellowtail. | ||
| They have this ocean, almost like a corralled-in area, and they're out in the ocean. | ||
| But they're only in this one trapped area, and they're feeding them. | ||
| You know, and occasionally they get out. | ||
| Like, they get those yellowtails in Hawaii. | ||
| There was a storm, and the storm wrecked their little enclosure, and they got out. | ||
| Now they're everywhere. | ||
| So all these hamachi-grade, like, sushi-grade yellowtails are swimming around all over the place outside of Hawaii. | ||
| That's one of my favorites. | ||
| And they're breeding, and they're getting bigger. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| It's interesting, but I was thinking when they were telling me that, well, so if that's what they did, like, maybe they should do that and just keep releasing them. | ||
| Maybe it should be a program That all the people who buy sushi fund into that just takes a little piece of the sushi money and uses it to develop these programs to make sure that these fucking fish keep breeding so you can have more sushi. | ||
| I think people will pay extra for that. | ||
| They should, right? | ||
| Then they would feel good. | ||
| Yeah, I feel a little better. | ||
| You helping out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I think we can leave this next generation. | ||
| They have a real good possibility of making things work out better. | ||
| I really think that. | ||
| I think it's totally possible. | ||
| I think it's possible that the world is just going to keep getting better and better, and there's going to be terrible things, but it's going to keep getting better and better, and then we'll be able to come to some kind of time in our future where it seems like things have improved. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I think we're headed towards the age of a new golden era, a new enlightenment, because, and I think a lot of times these things that we think are negative are kind of indicators of that, because These are things, a lot of these negative things we talk about were happening either way, but now we're more aware of them and people fight them and people are more upset about them and they're more public because of things like social media. | ||
| And I think that's a positive, not a negative, that people aren't able to pull the wool over your eyes as easily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think what's really interesting about this time is that you got so many people that are able to communicate. | ||
| Whether it's yourself or Joey Diaz or Ari Shafir or Marc Maron or whoever these people are that have these podcasts. | ||
| So many people have this ability to communicate. | ||
| So many people have this ability to... | ||
| You show your world in a different way. | ||
| And everybody gets to compare all these different ways that people are communicating. | ||
| And we kind of come to... | ||
| Maybe a better understanding of why we think the way we think, in which I think, especially one of the reasons why I'm so hell-bent on having people be reasonable and try to talk to each other, is that I think that everybody could learn something from each other in this world. | ||
| Whether you're left or right or in the center or religious or atheist or whatever, there's too much conflict that's unnecessary. | ||
| There's too much of what people are or aren't that has nothing to do with you. | ||
| And you should be able to talk about politics or even religion and be completely calm about it and not be angry and not get emotional and childlike. | ||
| But we're programmed to think you're supposed to. | ||
| We're programmed to think that every fucking conversation about something you disagree with is supposed to be this angry battle of one-upsmanship. | ||
| And I don't think it has to be. | ||
| I don't think it does. | ||
| No, I mean... | ||
| There's certain issues that, like, where you're like, oh, I don't want to argue over my, like, civil rights or things like that. | ||
| You know, you're like, I don't want to be like, oh, okay, well, you don't think I'm a full person? | ||
| Okay, let's have a point-counterpoint. | ||
| There's issues like that. | ||
| But I think now... | ||
| get wrapped up in politics that people do forget to be civilized and do forget that we've always disagreed and we've always had different sides and that's what's made us a country you know is the fact that we we're supposed to take the like you said the mix of those conversations and that's the way that we kind of head in you know that's the way we find out who we really are as opposed to who our side is painting the other side as | ||
| I feel like what I meant by people being able to get along is you can have opposing thoughts And still be a nice person. | ||
| If you're a really super conservative person, sometimes I want to know why. | ||
| I don't want to oppose you as much as I want to know why. | ||
| I want to know what you're thinking. | ||
| What's pushing you in this direction? | ||
| What makes you think this? | ||
| As opposed to if you are a really progressive person. | ||
| What makes you think this? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| That conversation can be had in a way more peaceful way, or maybe we could all examine why we think about things a certain way. | ||
| And I've been thinking about it a lot when it comes to religions lately. | ||
| We're so fucking tense about religions. | ||
| So fucking tense lately. | ||
| And if it's not for, like, kids getting abused or wars getting started over it, the vast majority of it is just a guideline for people to live their life. | ||
| And if you take that away from them or tell them that that's bad for them or tell them they can't live that way, then you've created this conflict that's really not your business. | ||
| Right? | ||
| In a lot of ways. | ||
| I didn't think like that before. | ||
| I used to think before that, like, that's not what I believe, so, you know, these people, there must be something wrong with the way they're thinking. | ||
| Well, a lot of times that's what certain organized religions paint it as, right? | ||
| If you don't believe, you can have the same branch of Christianity or whatever, but if you're not Protestant, then you're not following it completely. | ||
| To me, so many of these rules end up just being like, hey, be a nice person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't be a jerk. | ||
| Don't murder people. | ||
| Those are kind of constant through all those things where you're like, that's something I can take from you, but to judge someone else's life based off of their sexual orientation or something of anything, that to me never jives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I'm always like, I'm open to whatever you want. | ||
| Whatever makes you not be a fucking jerk, I'm for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I'm with you 100%. | ||
| the first time I found out there was other religions like I don't know I was raised a Catholic when I was a little kid and I found out there was other things other than being a Catholic and I was like what are you talking about it's like there's other things because my uncle was converting to Judaism and so I was like what does that mean Oh, he's going to become Jewish. | ||
| Like, what does that mean? | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I was like, you know, five or something like that. | ||
| I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| There's different ones? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, what do they think? | |
| Like, who's right? | ||
| I remember being like six years old going, shit, there's more than one story that you have to follow? | ||
| And we're not sure who's right? | ||
| And my uncle is going to switch over to the other story? | ||
| Now he believes a different story. | ||
| I can't believe this. | ||
| He's got an adjusted story. | ||
| And, you know, you fall into this pattern. | ||
| Now you're in this story's pattern. | ||
| Like, wow, you know, we lost him to the Marvel Universe. | ||
| He's DC Comics for so long. | ||
| He was all about Batman and Superman. | ||
| And now he's like, fuck them. | ||
| I'm with the Avengers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Crazy. | ||
| That's a fun way to look at it. | ||
| It's an interesting way of looking at it. | ||
| Without being disrespectful to either side. | ||
| It's like, wow, okay. | ||
| You know, I don't know who's right. | ||
| We know who makes better movies. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, the Jews do an excellent job making movies. | ||
| It's amazing how much they've been involved in show business. | ||
| You know, when I'm watching that marvelous Mrs. Maisel, it makes you realize, like, oh, yeah, Lenny Bruce was Jewish, this guy was Jewish, that guy was Jewish. | ||
| There were so many Jewish guys in the early days of stand-up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got a little mafia. | ||
| You know, at the same time, there was a lot of Jewish boxers back then, too. | ||
| It's a thing that people probably don't know. | ||
| It was they were underclass in a lot of ways, or, you know, and, like, that's, like, now it's Russians. | ||
| Like, you get a lot of Russian boxers now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bah! | |
| Badass motherfucking Russians, dude. | ||
| Hard men. | ||
| Hard men. | ||
| Because they're coming over here from a hard place. | ||
| And they're fucking people up, you know? | ||
| And it's like, one day it'll be someone else. | ||
| It's interesting how it goes in these waves, you know? | ||
| Yeah, for whatever country is not doing well. | ||
| Yeah, and it's interesting when you see the waves of stand-ups come out of these countries, too. | ||
| There's different styles of stand-up now in different parts of the world. | ||
| Stand-up is really a global thing now. | ||
| English guys have their own style. | ||
| There's a lot of those guys. | ||
| I've never been to Edinburgh, but R. Shafir goes all the time. | ||
| He's like, dude, they'll do these hours on just a subject. | ||
| Yeah, it's all these themes. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's a different vibe, different style. | ||
| A lot less rowdy, a lot less boisterous, just people listening. | ||
| They're great at listening. | ||
| We did... | ||
| Sweden. | ||
| And we played Stockholm, me and Tony Hinchcliffe. | ||
| And Tony was like, dude, it's just like they didn't like me. | ||
| I go, no, no, they're just polite. | ||
| I go, in between the jokes, they're just quiet. | ||
| They're listening. | ||
| You're not used to that. | ||
| And he's like, okay, okay, okay. | ||
| And he went out the second one. | ||
| He's like, you're right, you're right. | ||
| They're just so nice. | ||
| I thought something was wrong. | ||
| But it's all put in for your timing because it makes you have to have more material because you're used to like waiting for a few seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, exactly. | |
| Yeah, I am great. | ||
| Well, it's also, you know, that's, it's not, I don't think it's a that common art form over there. | ||
| I don't think they have a long history of having stand-up in Sweden, do they? | ||
| Not that I'm aware of. | ||
| I mean, maybe they do and we don't know, but for whatever it is, it's diminutive in comparison to any of the places that we know of that have scenes, whether it's New York scene, you know. | ||
| LA has seen San Francisco. | ||
| There's like some big scenes here where you know funny guys and girls who've come out of these scenes. | ||
| You don't hear like a lot of guys from Sweden, do you? | ||
| Yeah, but they're starting to get more of them. | ||
| They're starting to get more of them. | ||
| Everybody all around the world is starting to get more comedy. | ||
| It's an interesting time in that way. | ||
| It's very similar to jiu-jitsu. | ||
| You know, jiu-jitsu at one point in time, there's only a few places you get it outside of Brazil. | ||
| It was hard to find someone who's really good at teaching it. | ||
| Now it's everywhere. | ||
| Now it's in New Zealand and Australia. | ||
| It's in Africa. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| There's jiu-jitsu in Canada and fucking Puerto Rico. | ||
| There's jiu-jitsu everywhere. | ||
| All over the world. | ||
| Cuba. | ||
| Everyone has jiu-jitsu. | ||
| You know, it's just spread. | ||
| Found out it was awesome. | ||
| That could be the same with stand-up. | ||
| Then it forms back into the practice, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| Everybody's doing new styles. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And everyone is like, there's a really accelerated learning growth from the time where it starts getting put on the internet, which is like around like 95, 96, and the internet kind of becomes alive. | ||
| From that point on, people comparing jiu-jitsu techniques and watching matches and then, you know, new gyms opening up all around America in particular. | ||
| It's like the whole level of the sport went through the roof. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's very similar to comedy because I think a lot of my personal growth was I was able to do because I was able to watch so much comedy and also I was able to get on the internet and read about a lot of comedy and Twitter and YouTube or Twitter was just starting and YouTube was going and I watched a lot of watching the videos with you and Mencia and those things, | ||
| you know, and a lot of that stuff Inform my comedy at an early age about making a style or just how I wanted to write for myself. | ||
| Especially when you're first starting, a lot of what will work when you're first starting will set you up for failure later as far as pandering to people or writing for these rowdy rooms or bar rooms. | ||
| And those things don't work when you go to travel. | ||
| And so if I didn't have... | ||
| Like, the internet or all these things to watch to go like, oh, don't worry about this time. | ||
| Don't worry about this local scene as much because you don't want to be a local act, you know? | ||
| And that was very helpful for me. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, no, for me too, man. | ||
| I know exactly what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, man. | ||
| Let's wrap this bitch up. | ||
| Thank you for doing this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's do that. | |
| Tell people, where can they see your special? | ||
| Oh, they can get it. | ||
| It's called Giggle Fit. | ||
| It's available on iTunes, Comedy Central On Demand, Amazon, your Xbox, your PlayStation, anywhere, really. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Just find it. | ||
| And your Twitter handle is? | ||
| At Ron Funches. | ||
| I have my podcast getting better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Instagram. | |
| Instagram is... | ||
| Instagram, Ron Funch. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, Ron Funches. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Appreciate you, man. | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| Appreciate you, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye! |
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