Joe Rogan and Tom Green revisit Tom’s 2007 studio—packed with servers, G-Raid drives, and a Sony switcher—that inspired early monetization experiments like Kat Von D’s MySpace embed, costing Tom $40K. They joke about pandemic prepping (Lysol, sardines) and YouTube’s censorship of health advice, while debating genetics vs. lifestyle in heart attacks and gym resistance. Rogan warns of surveillance tech tracking sleep, vaccines, or behavior, comparing it to dystopian dopamine control, as Green shares skydiving fears and ad-tech’s creepy precision (2B monthly YouTube users, 5B daily views). Their chat pivots to gaming VR, porn-driven tech, and Rogan’s blind dating flop, ending with mutual respect for pioneering home-based streaming. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, my first time in five weeks that I've left the house, and yeah, I got tested, and I'm And everything's great, but I'm not paranoid or anything like that.
Right before this happened, and I kind of think to myself sometimes, I think, okay, imagine if I had been in a relationship that hadn't been going well, and this happened, and then you have to make the decision to isolate with somebody.
I'm not in that situation.
I'm home alone, and...
I've been talking a lot to my friends on FaceTime and I've been socializing and I've been, you know, living life in this world, but alone in my house.
I'm going through my computers, started going through old footage.
I found that clip from when you came up to my house back in the day.
And yeah, I just, I saw this moment where I'll jump right into this if that's cool.
Because I saw this moment in the clip where we started talking about my old web show and you'd come up to my house back in the day and it was so cool that you came up then.
And I remember at the time, your website was like way advanced, right?
Like it had all sorts of extra stuff on it that people weren't really doing on the web back then.
And you came up and we just started talking about the web.
What we got to do is figure out how we're going to make some money off this.
And I'm like, yeah.
And I'm like, yeah, I know.
I mean, I'd been trying.
I had been trying.
I'd been going to, you know, advertisers and stuff.
They were like, what?
What do you mean, internet?
You know?
But it's kind of funny.
I saw that clip.
I thought, that's hilarious because, you know, Not to blow too much smoke up your ass, but clearly you figured out how to make money off of it, and it was hilarious.
I'm like, that's a hilarious and prophetic moment.
How can we make money off of it?
Now we're here in this beautiful studio, and it's incredible.
I mean, I'm just making this up right now, but I think sometimes people that have never done stand-up who do radio are afraid of it.
Yeah, maybe.
It's a scary thing getting on stage in front of an audience if you've never done it before, but you get comfortable behind that mic.
But anyways, yeah man, it was so cool when you came up because I remember like, I think there was like Entertainment Tonight was there that day or something like that.
Mania TV was the only people that were really doing live streaming.
And I said, hey, you know, I want to build this TV studio.
And they helped me build the studio.
But I wanted to be autonomous of them as well.
So I got my own servers through this company, BitGravity, where they basically invented the technology to upload video and then serve it out.
So I would link that to my website, TomGreen.com.
Completely autonomous of the other website, Mania TV. So, you know, it was funny shit that happened there because I remember I think back, I go, I really made a few mistakes.
I go, I want all the stuff to be on my website.
And then YouTube started.
What's this?
Oh, YouTube.
Oh, that's cool.
They're doing a thing out of an apartment in San Francisco.
I remember at one point, somebody called me from YouTube and said, hey, man, we really like what you're doing with your thing.
I'm like, oh, that's cool, cool, man.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm kind of doing my own thing over here.
Yeah, that's cool.
I like what you're doing, too.
And never really kind of connected with them.
Because I thought, I was thinking at the time, It's got to all be on your server, right?
So you have those views.
Not thinking, okay, we could have it out, spread it, send it out, just get the eyeballs on it.
Like just being able to get it onto the website and make sure it streams and all the technical stuff is super complex, but just the concept is pretty simple.
You, with your phone or a video camera, you film it, you can upload it.
Like, real simple.
Anybody can do it.
And then anybody all of a sudden can get views.
Like, that is amazing that one company has that locked up.
It's kind of crazy!
Because you would think that, like, boy, that would be something that everybody would want to get involved in.
I haven't thought about that, but I guess the amount of advancement that happens every six months in technology and they've got the funding to be able to stay right on top of it and just make it the strongest platform possibly.
I mean, there's Facebook, and I guess people hold discussions on Instagram, but if I read...
One of the things that drives me crazy about Instagram is, like, if I go to your page and I'm reading one of your captions, someone will say something in response to someone, they're like, hey, fuck you, dick boy, or whatever, and then I try to click and find out what they were talking about, and I get to the beginning of the comments.
And then I gotta go through all the comments to try to figure this out.
I've gone through sort of cycles of the way I handle comments.
I've become an indiscriminate blocker, is what I do now.
The first sign of negativity is a boom.
And I know some people say, oh, that's not very democratic, but whatever.
The way I look at it is you create an environment.
I'm trying to create a positive environment on my social media.
But the problem is, and what you're saying is making me...
Second-guess myself, to be honest with you, because I know I spend far too much time on that shit, and I'm thinking, man, I really should just not read that stuff.
Even now, when people are forced to not work, you can do one of two things, right?
You could either drink all day, which a lot of people are doing.
There's a hilarious video of this guy who's out jogging in his neighborhood, just passing by people's recyclables, pointing out all the empty wine bottles and empty vodka bottles.
And he just jogs over, let's see what this guy's got.
Boom, same shit.
Whiskey, wine, bam, bam, bam.
People are just getting lit up.
You could do that, or you could use this time to get in shape.
You could use this time to write out a workout program.
You could use this time to start reading books online.
You don't even have to leave your house if you have a Kindle.
Or one of those Barnes& Noble, the Nook, is that still around?
And bookstores were hurting already because of Amazon, because you just order it online.
Like, if I want a book, it's there tomorrow.
There's something about that, like not having to leave.
And now that people are getting used to getting groceries delivered, if you live in a neighborhood that has a grocery store that delivers, you can just order online, they'll send it to your house.
Well, again, just to be safe, I did disinfect them, and then I take them and I put them with gloves, with rubber gloves, and I put them into another room, and I let it sit for three days for the virus to die.
Well, I feel better reading the latest statistics about the mortality rate.
I wonder what the actual- there's an infection rate, hospitalization rate, mortality rate, and what was it- was the study that was- was it UCLA? Is that what it was?
For sure?
And it showed a very low fatality rate in comparison to infection.
So that's good news.
But the bad news is this, you know, it could still kill a lot of fucking people.
And people that are immune compromised, people with diabetes, people that are overweight, people with lung problems, people with cigarette habits, all those.
And particularly one of the nurses was saying people who were into the Juul.
People who smoke with Juul.
They said there's a high instance that he personally was seeing of people.
It just seems like for some people, it's a death sentence, and then for other people, it's nothing.
That just doesn't make any sense to me.
Clearly, I'm not a doctor, and clearly this is a new virus, but it's just so weird that something could be asymptomatic for a huge amount of people, but some people get it and they barely even notice it.
They just feel a little bit of fatigue.
Some people get a little bit of a cough for a couple days, and then nothing, and other people are dead.
YouTube said that they're going to take down anything that doesn't coincide with the World Health Organization's ruling on, you know, what to do about this pandemic.
YouTube is taking down things, and I don't know how specific they're going to be about this, but they were saying alternate therapies like vitamin C and things along those lines.
Which is kind of unfortunate because unless they're not being that strict about it because I would say if someone's saying how do you if somebody made a video someone who's a nutrition expert and they made a video how to protect your immune system from COVID-19 or maybe Just protect your immune system during the time of COVID-19.
So I'm not even saying that it's protecting it from that, but how to boost up your immune system in this very dangerous time in terms of viral infections.
Well, there are strategies.
There's things you can do, like get more sleep, drink more water, eat healthier, keep your body healthy with nutrients, and making sure you're eating clean, and don't drink alcohol, and don't smoke cigarettes.
If you just do those things, this is real.
This has actually been proven.
Mm-hmm.
So I don't know what you can get away with saying and what you can't get away with saying, but you can't always just hope that doctors come up with a cure.
Because yes, the doctors are going to come up with a cure, and yes, we need them to do that.
But you can't always think that medicine is going to fix you and you can just keep doing what you've always been doing that got you sick in the first place.
Because a lot of times when you get sick, it has to do with how you've been living.
Not always, but a lot of times.
Like, is your immune system already compromised?
Are you already weak?
Are you beating up your body and abusing it?
And then boom, then you catch a cold.
We all know that's true.
So advice on how to strengthen your immune systems, it's important for everybody.
Now, if you want people to say, don't say that this is a cure for COVID-19.
So do you think you had a premonition or do you think you saw what was going on in China and you were like, you know what, it would be a good move to have a month's worth of food here.
It doesn't mean that I'm, oh, I think we're living in a simulation.
Oh, I think that we, you know, doomsday is coming.
Not necessarily, but I do love the thought experiment of talking about it and thinking about it.
And so after I was watching that show, your show, I was really thinking about it a lot.
I had a long conversation with my mom about how, you know, we could be living in a simulation.
What do you mean?
Well, I mean, the computers are getting so fast.
I mean, they're going to be able to program computers that have conscious...
You know, that little character on the computer might be able to start to think, and then it might start to be able to self-determine, and then we could just be an advanced version of that, and how would we ever know?
And my mom's sitting there going, oh, what are you talking about?
And then I had a pretty long day of talking about this with my mom and trying to convince her not that we're living in a simulation, but that it's possible we could be living in a simulation.
My mother wasn't really buying it, right?
And then two weeks later, this happens, and I'm thinking...
Is this like because we're living in a simulation?
Because if you were living in a simulation and then you started talking about it and then the creator of the simulation heard that, he might start a pandemic.
Because if you're living in a simulation, then it becomes your whole life.
Like, is that simulated anymore?
Like, what is that?
Like, maybe it's always been a simulation.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe if you stop and think about events that take place that ultimately all seem to be leading towards events, right?
When you think about the invention of electricity and then the electronics of the 80s and the 90s that led to everyone having a home computer, that led to everybody having a computer in your pocket, that listens to everything you say and takes pictures and uploads video.
Just keeps getting more and more advanced and more and more intertwined with you being a person until one day you enter it and you become a part of it.
And they create something inside the world of computers that's far more compelling than the regular world itself.
But maybe that's just a natural course of progression, and that's where life is going anyway.
Like, maybe that's just a new kind of life, a new dimension of life, and that all these things just come about through that.
They come about through either natural causes, like, you know, star supernova-ing, and, you know, everything coalesces, and things become carbon-based life forms emerge, and life becomes what it is in 2020. Or those things figure out how to open up new realities and that what a simulation would be would just be another reality.
That we were created by some person doing the exact same thing that we're doing right now.
That one day we get to the point where technology is so spectacularly advanced That you could have a new world that's indiscernible, like you can't tell that it's not real.
It's impossible to tell.
You are in that world now, and that's where you exist.
Because when you got a guy that intelligent and he's saying there's a 1% chance or one in a billion chance that we're not living in a simulation, you think...
So, because it's big, it takes up a lot of shelf space.
Maybe everyone's talked about this already, but it takes up a lot of shelf space.
So, all of a sudden, everybody went to the grocery store at the same time, and there's probably far less toilet paper at the grocery store than it would appear, just because it takes an entire aisle, because it's big.
So, everybody bought one piece of...
Package of toilet paper on the first day.
It was instantly all gone.
It's instantly an entire empty aisle, which is dramatic looking.
And it was the first sign of shelves being cleared.
And it was the toilet paper was gone.
And everyone went on their fucking phones.
They're just putting a run of toilet paper.
And all of a sudden, that compounded it exponentially.
And now everyone's going for the toilet paper.
And they don't need to be going for the toilet paper.
And we had the great toilet paper shortage of 2020. This is the type of investigative reporting you do when you're alone for five weeks.
Everyone grabbed a can of corn, everyone grabbed a can of beans, but it didn't create an entire empty aisle that then got people thinking, talking, and tweeting, and typing, and Instagramming.
Sometimes it's repetitive, unfortunately, because the people that are listening in, they listen to me having conversations with people that haven't heard the other conversations, and we wind up talking about the same shit.
But that seems...
The more I think about doing it, the best way to do it is just talk to people.
Just have a talk.
Just talk.
Just think about how would you normally talk.
You'd have to talk about this.
If I didn't see my friend Tom Green in a long time, then all of a sudden we're here, and you're like, bro, what the fuck is going on?
And then you're talking about it again, and you know you're talking about it again, and they know, and then you're trying to pretend that you haven't heard it before, and you're kind of doing this sort of, can't really force the laugh, but you do, and then it doesn't feel right.
But I love the rhythm to these kinds of conversations.
That's something that I really love.
As you know, I love doing what you do.
I love doing this.
I love talking to people.
I love creating, whether it's an interview or a conversation, I love listening to people and just...
Waiting and feeling that rhythm of it.
It's something that's very interesting to me, which took a long time to figure out.
And that's what's kind of exciting about doing this stuff, is you do learn as you do these shows.
And where else would you ever have the opportunity in the history of broadcasting, right, to have built your own studio and go, oh, I'm going to do, you know, how many thousand shows have you done now?
I'm going to do a thousand shows, right?
I mean, you've got more, you know, Time as a interviewer than anyone, like in history, other than the few handful of people that had shows that didn't get canceled, right?
Everyone else, they got a chance to do a talk show.
They got to do it for a few weeks or a few months or a few years and then they get canceled.
But you could never have a place like this if you had, like, a real company behind you.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you were an employee, like Showtime, if Showtime put some Tom Green show together and you're like, oh, I want an indoor archery range, like, listen, we can't do that.
But was there a moment, though, in your house when you were doing it where something happened that made you say, this is, you know, like, did anyone ever come up and not want to leave after?
You know, sometimes we'd have a few too many, sometimes turned into, every time we had a few too many, turned into, it turned into a party every night, it turned into a party that never ended every night, it turned into, you know, I remember like, we had great stories too, don't get me wrong, it was bad.
I mean, I remember Norm MacDonald would come up, and I, you know, I'm from, Norm's from Ottawa, okay?
I'm from Ottawa, Canada, the capital of Canada, okay?
I grew up loving Norm, okay?
Because when I was a teenager, I was doing amateur night, they called it.
That's what they used to call open mic nights at Yuck Yucks in Ottawa, amateur night.
I'd do that.
And Norm would come through town.
He hadn't blown up yet.
He was Norm.
He was 25 years old.
He was my favorite.
Him and Harland Williams and Jeremy Hotz.
Those guys were my favorite.
And so...
Having grown up idolizing those guys.
And then all of a sudden, they're up at my house.
And now we're having a drink.
And now the show ends.
Now the show ends.
And Norm's having fun.
I'm having fun.
Let's go look at some YouTube videos.
So now we're watching YouTube videos until 4 or 5 in the morning.
And then that starts happening every night with other people and everybody.
And all of a sudden, it's like I wake up in the morning.
You know, there's...
Beer, like the floor is sticky.
Like the floor in my house, you know, I've got a nice place, right?
The floor is sticky, right?
And then the housing crash, the housing market crashed, and I was doing this thing.
You know, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with my inability to monetize it, okay?
Because it just wasn't really what people were doing quite yet.
And I had people all over the world calling in and watching.
We were getting a lot of views.
The moment when I realized something cool was happening...
With the views, we figured this thing out.
Kat Von D came on the show.
You know Kat Von D. She came on the show.
She had a MySpace page with like a gazillion followers.
This is a funny story, actually.
I hope it is, at least.
We embedded the feed to her MySpace page.
All of a sudden, we had a million views on that one feed.
Oh my god, this is amazing.
Then...
The end of the month comes, I get a bill from the server company.
We hadn't talked about, if you had a million views, a bill for $40,000.
I'm like, what?
They go, oh, well, we charge per clicks.
I mean, no, we always had this thing, but now we have a thing where it's...
So, I mean, in fairness to them, they didn't make me pay it, but they wanted me to pay it until I was crying on the phone.
I just got new cameras.
This is great.
The ceiling's got holes in it.
So they didn't make me pay it.
Thank you very much to everybody.
I won't even say their name in that story, but thank you to them for that.
But it became a lot of pressure, financial pressure, to keep it going.
I'd been doing it for a long time.
I'd grown kind of...
You know, I started to find myself annoyed with doing it, you know?
And then I just one day just realized I want to start doing stand-up again.
And I just – I had always wanted to, right?
I did it when I was a kid.
It always felt like a thing that I – When I was doing stand-up, I stopped when I started my public access show because I'm a focus.
I focus, right?
So I had the public access show.
I don't have time to do that anymore.
I focused on that, right?
For 10 years.
And in the back of my mind, I was always like, man...
I left that on the table, you know?
So I found that that was going to be my way of monetizing my web show, was I'm going to go on tour and all of a sudden I started, I jumped up the comedy store and I felt that feeling, you know, that feeling I hadn't felt since I was, you know, 19 was the last time I'd done it, you know?
And I did well, right?
It was like the fear of like, oh, am I going to bomb?
It was just instantly gone.
And I realized, shit.
And then I went back.
I started going back.
Then I started getting booked.
All of a sudden, six years of doing the web show and paying for it out of my pocket and worrying about it, and all of a sudden, whoa, I'm like making good money doing stand-up.
I like this idea, getting paid to do what I love to do as opposed to paying for what I love to do.
And so then I'd come home from the road.
And the equipment was getting more obsolete, too.
It was like it was dust on it, and the camera worked.
You turn it on, it wouldn't work as well.
You'd have to figure it out.
And I'd come home, and I'd look at the house, and I was tired from being on the road.
I didn't want to turn on the studio.
I thought, yeah.
I'm going to take the studio out of the house and I'm going to go focus on trying to become as good of a stand-up as I can possibly be.
And then I've been on the road for the last 11 years.
I've talked a bit about this, but I've been going hard, man.
I've been going everywhere.
I've been all over the world.
Every club in the U.S., I'm loving it and I just love doing it.
What I love about stand-up is I'm not sure if this is true at your point, but for me, I still feel like every time I get on stage, I feel like I'm learning something and getting better at it.
Well, it's clearly something that the more you do it, the better you get at it.
If you're enthusiastic and you're concentrating on it, the more you do it, the better you get at it.
And the more years you have in, it's like the more data You've processed how to do it right and how to do it wrong and what to avoid and what to emphasize and all these different things.
They just get to a greater and greater understanding of this thing.
So really, there is a difference between like 10 years and 20 years, 20 years and 30 years.
As long as you really are still passionate about it, you will still get better at it.
Dom Herrera said this to me, and Dom's been doing it longer than me.
I remember watching Dom on TV when I was thinking about doing comedy.
He was already on TV. And when I became friends with him, he was like one of the first guys that was friends with.
He was like, I can't believe I'm friends with Dom Herrera.
And to this day, Dom's been doing comedy probably 40 fucking years.
To this day, he still says, you know, you just keep concentrating on it, you still get better.
I'm like, that is the craziest thing, isn't it?
As long as you're still locked in, and some guys like Dom are still locked in, he still crushes.
It's like whatever you're doing, whether it was your public access show or whether it's you doing stand-up or maybe you become an author, whatever the fuck it is, that thing, you just have to really be all in on that thing and really be interested in that thing.
And if you are, you're going to get better at it.
You're going to get better at it.
You're going to have bad times and good times and jokes that suck and jokes that are better.
Some jokes you have to abandon.
They're never going to work.
You try them.
You're like, what is wrong with this?
I can't seem to get—let me just put it aside for a little bit.
And you might come back to it two years from now.
You're like, oh, that tomato joke.
And then you go back and then you start fucking around with the tomato bit again.
You bring it—you reintroduce it to the crowd.
You never know, man.
It's like a living forest of ideas.
That's what an act is.
It's like a life form.
And it's like you fertilize it with information and knowledge and you keep paying attention to it constantly.
In a good way, too.
Just like you're supposed to sing to plants.
Pay attention to that act.
Go there with enthusiasm.
Be happy that you can do it.
And this is one thing that's going to happen to a lot of comics.
After this break, when you come back you're going to be so thankful, so thankful that you can make people feel good, that we can all have a night out together where people come and they're on dates and they're just happy to be there and they're there to have a good time and the comics are so happy that everybody's there and everybody gets just a good old love fest out of it.
Just let's appreciate what we had.
I think we all appreciated what we had at the store.
But I think now everyone's gonna really, really appreciate how special that place is and how special stand-up comedy is across the world.
It's a special thing to be able to get in front of people and make your ideas change their physical state.
You know, when people are laughing about something, they're having a great time, someone's killing on stage, it changes.
It's like you're giving them a happy drug.
When someone makes you laugh, it feels good.
That's why we gravitate towards stand-up.
When Joey Diaz is on stage crushing, you feel good.
You're like...
That feeling that you get, it's like everything feels amazing and you and I get to feel that all the time.
We're so lucky.
We get to hang out with some of the best, funniest people in the world and make each other laugh and just joke around and hang out in that back bar and Tell war stories and just laugh and have so much fun.
And I think one great thing about this for us is it's going to make us appreciate how special and how fortunate that is.
I think for a lot of other people, during this time off that have been on the fence about quitting what they do, I bet a lot of people are going to change course in their career.
I bet a lot of people are going to realize, you know what?
This could all be just taken away from me.
I'm playing it safe.
And even though I'm playing it safe, doing something I don't want to do, it still got taken away from me.
And I didn't even have a chance to take a chance.
I was trying to do this thing and do the right thing and follow my degree and...
Now they're going to go, since this can be taken away from me at any time, I'm going to do what I want to do.
I'm going to try to find out how to make a career, whatever their interest is, whether it's making tents or fucking painting, whatever it is.
I think the most miserable is rain because cold you can get warm like I've done Montana we did the Missouri me and Brian Callen with my friend Steve Rinell and his crew for the meat-eater show we did the Missouri breaks in Montana in October and it was cold as fuck it was like nine degrees some days that was cold but that's not as miserable as wet wet's more miserable one time we did Prince of Wales which is the most rainy part of Alaska Yeah,
it's an island, and it was rough.
It's like all day long, you're soaking wet.
The tent is wet.
Your sleeping bag's wet.
The air you see when you turn on your headlamp, you go piss in the middle of the night, just mist.
There's water everywhere.
Everything's wet.
You're never going to dry off, and it's not warm out.
When I was 14 years old, I got really into skateboarding.
I'd already been doing it, but when you start to become a teenager, somehow, I don't know how this happens, but somehow with skateboarding, you equate I think it's a male energy thing or like a – you know, you start to feel like – I gotta be the best skateboarder.
So all of a sudden, I don't know what kind of energy it is.
All of a sudden, Dad says, I'm sending you this summer on a canoe expedition.
It's eight weeks in northern Canada.
You're going out with this, like, group of 12—it was this whole organized thing.
It was actually an American group.
I remember it was called Lorien.
It was an American group from upstate New York.
They drove up, a group of 12 people, and they were divided into, like, five groups of 12 that would go out into the middle— You know what it's like in northern Canada.
It's like you're in the middle of nowhere.
You're going out into Lake Kippewa in northern Quebec.
Because the voyageurs, right, were the French-Canadian fur traders who came down from northern Canada with the Hudson's Bay Company selling their beaver pelts and all this stuff.
And you'd have to carry your canoe, and then you'd have to go back three miles, and then you'd have to pick up all your food and all that stuff.
It was a pretty intense thing, you know?
What they had was every two weeks, a float plane would come in, would land, they'd resupply the 12 groups of people, and then everyone would go off in their own direction.
So we were off there with, like, maybe 12 people.
And I don't think they would do this anymore.
It was, like, one instructor guy who was probably 25 years old.
The best fishing experience I ever had was nighttime with my dad.
I was probably six years old.
We were in a canoe.
It was...
You know when you're up past midnight and we're going along, it was up late that night, maybe it was probably 10 o'clock, but it felt like midnight because I was up late as a kid.
And I was like literally six and we were going along the shoreline pitch black, you know, hardly see anything.
There's like a lot of mosquitoes up there too.
And I had A floating lure.
I think it was a Rapala.
I think it was a jitterbug.
They make that sound along the top.
And this bass hit it.
It was a four-pound bass.
Ooh, that's a good bass.
I got it in, in the canoe.
Got it in.
We went back to shore.
We were at this little cottage.
My parents had this little, tiny little cabin when I was growing up.
The neighbors came out because they heard because how excited we were.
You ever get those moments, I just had one moment like this, where I'm sitting here and I'm looking at you, you know, in front of the American flag, on the show, I watch the show all the time, and I'm sitting here and it's just, it's awesome, man.
If you were watching, would you be watching this going, this corny motherfucker's full of shit.
Would you be watching and saying that, or would you be watching and going, well, that's probably a difficult position to be in, but in that position, that guy's showing some character.
He's showing some grace.
He's showing some compassion.
That's what you hope for.
The whole thing is weird.
Anytime you're talking like this and people are listening, and how many people are listening?
Millions?
What does that number even mean?
How many stars are there?
Does that mean anything to you anymore?
The universe has been around for 13 billion years.
You lost me.
These numbers are too big.
I don't understand what they are.
But what you can control is how you would view yourself.
If you're not a sociopath, You're trying to be authentic, right?
You're trying to be better than who you were yesterday.
Because we all realize that this is a complicated game and no one's great at it.
Everyone's fucking up.
The game of life is a mess, right?
It's a war zone.
So you're trying to get better.
And so you want to pay attention to other people that are trying to get better and people that are legitimately tuned in, people that are legitimately sensitive, people that are legitimately expressing themselves in an honest way.
It's very nourishing because it makes you realize it's possible.
And that's what we all give each other.
We all give each other through these moments of grace and these moments of intuition, these moments of inspiration, of observation.
Sometimes you have the ability to express a thought that you didn't have yesterday.
Like a thought will come into your head and you'll be able to express it to people and then they say it and then they'll say it back to you and you start talking and you realize like, oh, you just popped into something.
You just...
This is it.
It's right there.
I found something.
I found something about myself, and I found something maybe you could relate to.
And then other people listening go, oh, and if they know you really did find something, they know you're not bullshitting, they listen to it and they go, hmm, is he right?
Maybe he's not.
Maybe I think differently.
And then they can maybe think their own.
And all this shit branches off from that.
But it's, as long as you're authentic.
You can be wrong.
We're all going to be wrong.
But are you authentic?
That's what everybody really wants.
People say they want honesty.
They certainly want honesty.
But honest and stupid and unaware, that's not helping anybody.
You feel like there's going to be, and we sort of touched on this, but when this thing ends, I feel like stand-up comedians are going to be so happy to be back on stage and have had a break, you know, because so many comedians have been go, go, go, go, go for years.
Is this the longest you've been without being on stage in your life?
Yeah, I think it might have been right after I filmed my special, too.
I think I filmed a special, and then I think I took some time off after that, which I like to do sometimes, just kind of reset my perspective, make sure I'm not bullshitting, like I'm talking about things I'm actually interested in.
So sometimes when you're working too much, like one thing that does happen with stand-ups, they spend all their time either traveling or doing stand-up, you're not living enough.
And if you're not living enough, you don't see enough things.
That you have an opinion on, you're thinking about your career, you're thinking about your set list, you're thinking about a lot of shit that doesn't factor in with the, you know, it's very narrow-minded in a sense.
So not only have all of All of comedy, every comedian has been forced to take a break, to go do something else, but also to do something else during a crazy, scary time where we're all being forced to think about our mortality, think about the world, think about the environment, think about...
When you go, go, go all the time, sometimes you get stuck in a pattern of momentum, right?
Where you don't have enough time to evaluate and go, am I doing the right thing?
I think there's a good lesson to be learned in a reset in that you could kind of, if the world is crazy and it's not anything, nothing's the same now, and I think we can all safely say that.
When the whole world shuts down, you're not allowed to work and Everyone's supposed to stay six feet apart and everyone outside is wearing a mask.
When you get to a point like that, you can kind of agree.
Also, through surviving that experience, you probably feel incredibly lucky.
So you feel fortunate.
So you feel like you want to get things done and accomplish things and go for things that maybe you held back on before because you wanted to play it safe.
Yeah, it's these moments of history where things shift and change.
I mean, clearly, if you go back to as far as we're aware of, you know, go back to, you know, 1100 A.D., pick a spot, pick a year.
Now, compare that to now.
Well, we're definitely better at life now, right?
Why did we get better at life?
Because there was trials and errors.
Just like you get better as a human.
We get better at life.
You know what bothers me, man?
This bothered me.
We were just discussing this.
I was like, I wonder when I see a civilization like China that's like completely in control of their citizens and it's so old.
It's such an old civilization.
Like as time goes on.
If a civilization lasts a long long time, does it get just tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter control?
And is that what the magic of America is?
What the magic of America is is that it's only been around for 300 years, not even.
So like is that the thing?
That you have to have a young fresh movement of freedom and then eventually human nature sort of fucking chokes it and gets it in the rear naked, puts it to sleep.
Is that what happens?
Is that over time Life and nature, human nature and greed is basically like a jujitsu black belt.
You could defend it for a little while, but eventually it's going to put the choke on you.
Is that what it is?
Because it seems like all these older civilizations, the oldest ones that we're aware of, are run by military dictators.
The old ones.
Is that because they've always been like that?
Because they were like that thousands of years ago, and they're like that still now?
They never had a chance to make that clean break?
Or is it because as civilizations go on, as long as power is maintained, there's no overthrow of it through this whole cycle?
They always get to a point where they just try to control the citizens.
It's just too difficult.
And I want all the money, and I want all the bitches, and I'm going to shoot the bombs, and I'm going to control all the people, and I want all the food.
And the thing that I find interesting about China though, having had never been there before, Hong Kong, of course, that's different, right?
It's British colony and it's very...
But Shanghai, same thing.
That was the only part of...
Communist China that I went to.
Shanghai, right?
And you get there, and they got a Louis Vuitton store.
Everybody's walking around shopping.
You drive from the airport.
I'm thinking it's going to be some driving from the airport.
There's big mansions.
I'm like, well, I thought...
Crazy rich Asians.
I was like, why?
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm like, well, I thought...
I was saying to the guy that picked me up at the airport.
I was like, well, I thought this was...
Communist, how come they have big mansions?
He's all, it's not really the way it works, and it's just sort of the economic system's not communist.
I forget even how he explained it to me, but you sort of got over there and you realize, like, It didn't seem a whole lot different, to be honest with you.
I went to a mall, you know?
They had one of the pianos in the mall.
Anybody can play, you know?
I sat down and played, people came around, you know?
Like, just the same kind of dumb shit that they got here, you know?
And, you know, so I came back from that thinking, okay, well, I mean, obviously I know it's a lot different, but...
Well, you got there and within five minutes I went to a Starbucks.
Oh, I did a USO tour.
That's a bad example.
A better example is I went to a USO tour.
So I'm thinking I'm going to the Middle East.
We got to Bahrain.
We landed in Bahrain, went to the Marriott.
Okay.
And then we said, can we take a walk?
You can take a walk.
We took a walk.
There was a Dairy Queen.
I ended up getting Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I had some Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bahrain after I've just flown to the other side of the world and I was thinking this is going to be so different and it wasn't that much different.
So, well, in Bahrain, we were staying at a Marriott, and then we went into Kuwait, and then we went into- So where'd you get the Kentucky Fried Chicken?
It's almost to me more exciting that when you would go to a place like that, it would already be corrupted by McDonald's.
There's something ridiculously thrilling.
Look, I would love to land somewhere.
Don't get me wrong.
I would love to land somewhere and deal only with the authentic culture.
But there's also something kind of weird about flying for 18 hours and landing in some country and ordering a Big Mac and Seeing it being served up by people who live in this strange land different different than you You know grew up in a different environment different culture different language different alphabet Here you are eating a quarter pounder in the same place.
It's like there's something about it that I like when things don't make any sense.
I like when things are haywire.
I like when you're like, what in the fuck have you done?
There's something about that that I like.
And I like a Burger King in the middle of Thailand.
I like it.
I don't want to eat there.
I don't want to eat there.
But there's part of me that's like the ridiculous folly of humans and their decision making and what we do and what we don't do.
I'm thrilled by ridiculous videos of dudes getting on a slip and slide trying to ride a fucking beer keg down the side of a hill when you know it's gonna go wrong.
I'm thrilled by that, you know?
And this is a part of me that I'm trying to really suppress that I'm not thrilled by people dying from this virus.
I'm not thrilled by you if you feel ill.
I'm not thrilled by any of that.
I'm not thrilled by anybody suffering, but I'm thrilled by chaos.
I'm thrilled by the fact that this whole system gets thrown into a fucking, just a blender and spun around and no one knows what's going to get spit out.
And a lot of these people, you're getting really clearly revealed that they're frauds.
These people that are in positions of leadership are bizarre human beings that don't even live in reality.
I was watching Nancy Pelosi trying to dance her way out of saying that in February she was telling people to go to Chinatown, hang out, have a good time, don't worry about it.
You are doing the same thing you're accusing the president of doing.
You're accusing Trump of not warning people.
Well, you didn't warn anybody either.
Everyone's playing gotcha with this.
Nobody saw what the fuck was coming.
Like I said, the fucking World Health Organization in a tweet was saying it can't be transmitted from person to person.
No one knew.
So this is all this chaos of all these people getting revealed.
Because I think that one thing that we have above all the people that live before us is that we have more access to information.
We see the flaws better.
We see the flaws better.
Whereas before we were lied to and bullshitted.
Now you can see it better.
Doesn't mean those flaws aren't gonna exist, but those people are gonna have to be they're gonna have to be authentic They're not authentic right now Like when you see someone the record will show that I was there in Chinatown to tell people to not be racist The record will show you can't do that anymore.
You can't do that anymore We demand you be authentic and if you made a mistake Like that?
Like in February?
Look, man, if you were hanging out with me in February and we were barbecuing, I'd be like, it's probably like the flu.
People are going to get sick, they're going to die.
But I'm not a fucking expert, okay?
I'm not a politician.
And if I said that, I'd be like, man, was I wrong.
Here's why I thought that.
Here's what I wouldn't say.
The record will show.
unidentified
The reason why I said that is I want you to not be racist to Chinese people.
Well, I feel good about that, and I really feel good about, I guess it was what we're saying, it was the UCLA study that was saying that it has a much smaller rate of mortality than was initially thought.
So early antibody testing, we talked about this...
You've got to take care of your immune system, folks.
This is number one.
You've got to shore up the troops.
Take care of the troops.
They're going to fight the war for you.
If you have an army and your army is malfed and you're feeding them junk food and bullshit and you're pumping them full of cigarettes, you expect them to fight With all they have, what they have is going to be less.
Okay?
It doesn't mean they're not going to fight to the death or whatever, but what they have is going to be less than if you took that army and fed them healthy food and gave them eight hours rest a night and taught them how to meditate and kept stress low, like legitimately.
And that's how you have to think about your immune system.
The same way you would think about an army.
Think about your immune system as this is going to be what protects you from the invaders.
And the invaders are invisible viruses.
And they exist.
And they've always existed.
And we know it.
This is not a rumor.
This is not alchemy.
This is not nonsense.
This is a fucking scientific fact.
And even knowing that scientific fact, beautifully intelligent people that are some of the most creative and innovative people the world has ever known still ignore their own physical health.
Because they don't think of it as a primary concern.
They think of it as a frivolous, egocentric, narcissistic endeavor to look good and work out.
And what, are you going to wear fucking tank tops and flex your guns?
Get the fuck out of here.
I'm doing research!
But we all need to take care of our bodies.
This is something that needs to be like, it should be like brushing your goddamn teeth.
Did your teeth fall out of your head?
Well, hey, stupid, you should have brushed your fucking teeth.
Alright?
Did your body start falling apart?
Yeah.
Hey, stupid, did you do your exercises every day?
You didn't.
You don't exercise every day.
I can't help you.
You're not helping yourself.
Exercise.
Doesn't mean you have to be Mr. Olympia.
Means you should be doing jump rope or push-ups or whatever your physically you can, if you have some limitations, whatever you can withstand.
They should until the actual scientific experts tell them that they should go out.
But here's the thing.
Who are the experts?
And are they different in different states?
And I think that's one of the benefits of having 50 states.
When I was talking about the different styles of living, Arizona lets you have a gun.
Just carry it on your hip, right?
You can't do that in San Francisco, right?
There's different styles of living.
Let's find out what different styles are the right way to reopen the world.
We know the world's got to be reopened.
We're not going to just stay in our house forever.
We're going to run out of food.
We have to do things.
So do we have to do things after the vaccination, and can our society survive that?
Do you know how many people are committing suicide right now?
A friend of mine, I heard he said Nick Swartzen.
I said it yesterday.
Sorry, Nick.
He told me he was talking to the sheriff, and the sheriff said they used to deal with one suicide a week.
Now they're doing five a day.
This is something that needs to be factored in.
Another thing, there's a Bloomberg, there was an article that was written that were talking about the drop in the economy equivalent to the loss of a certain number of lives.
And that every time the economy drops a certain percentage, it's equal to X amount of lives.
We might get to a place where it's conceivable that more lives are lost because of the ensuing depression and economic shutdown than we would have been lost if we didn't close down anything and we just let everybody get sick.
It is a complicated thing.
And this is one thing that we have to really rely on the people that are supposed to be in power to address accurately and honestly.
No one knows the right way to do this.
There are some real good protocols that are in place for keeping people healthy and protecting each other and staying away from each other as much as possible and wiping things down and using hand sanitizer and stopping the spread.
Yes, for sure.
But no one knows how to get this thing started again.
No one knows what's going to happen.
No one knows what the risks are.
Are we going to wait?
And in the meantime, What about the other diseases that are still around?
What about the colds and the flus?
What about all that stuff?
You know what kills more people than any of these things?
Including COVID-19 projections?
Heart attacks.
Heart attacks killing people left and right.
How come there's no alarms to stop people from dying of heart attacks?
Heart disease was number one.
The flu and all these other things that we're all terrified of...
This is lack of, first of all, lack of information, not knowing.
I mean, you don't know if you can prevent this, right?
You know you eat well, and you look after yourself, you'd be less likely to have a heart attack, but you don't know if you can't breathe in a heart attack.
Because you're walking a very fine line, and I think you're walking it incredibly well in a way that many, many, many great many people are not, right?
It seems like we're in this world now where, because everything's so polarized, oh, I've got to choose to say this, because that's what everyone's saying.
And they're just kind of saying it because everyone's saying it.
Whereas you definitely straddle that...
Line in a way that to me seems incredibly astute, but also must be some pressure to make sure that you're right.
It's the vast number of interactions that most people have with each other are positive, right?
Otherwise, the world would be a war zone.
Most of the time, you're dealing with people like, hey, how you doing?
Hey, what's up?
Hey, this.
The same thing with podcasts.
The vast majority Of the stuff that you do is going to be good.
There's going to be moments where some guy, you were taking a left turn, and he honked you, and you said, fuck you, and he said, no, fuck you, and, like, that guy's got a bad opinion of you, you got a bad opinion of him.
That's going to happen, too.
Well, that's the same in podcasts.
There's going to be these moments where things just fall apart or go off the rails.
I loved, like, because I was, you know, in the eighth grade, and Johnny Dangerously came out, you know, you're firing ice holes, and it was like, he was the funniest thing to me.
I remember in the eighth grade, we were coming in, you farging ice holes, and we thought it was so hilarious because we're swearing, but we're not really swearing.
But then all of a sudden, he became Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there was a decision that got made there at that point.
I'm just curious because I'm not really around a lot of the – I don't go to the gym.
It's like this weird sort of, you know, you got to do it, but I often make the decision like, because I've made this decision every time I go to a new hotel when I'm on the road.
I say, this weekend, I'm going to work out.
I pack my gym clothes.
I put them in the thing.
I say, okay, tomorrow morning when I get up, I'm going to go to the gym.
Whether or not it's real, but the concept of the muse is You settle in and receive creativity almost like as a divine gift from this magical entity, the muse.
Now whether or not it's real is not important.
What's important is if you treat it as if it's real, it does work.
And what works is if you dedicate your time and your focus, like realistically, with a professional, disciplined effort to creativity.
You show up every day, like a professional, but you show up to be creative if you just do it.
On a regular basis, ideas will come to you.
Where are these ideas coming from?
Well, his concept was to think of it as, you're a professional, and you're getting these ideas from the muse.
And this is what you do.
You show up and you do the work, you focus on it, and these ideas will come to you.
And that's really true, if you really stop and think about it.
If you write something, whether it's the most brilliant thing you've ever written, or whether you're not good at editing, and it turns out to be dog shit.
Where is that coming from, man?
You're just sitting down in front of your laptop and these thoughts are coming to you and all of a sudden you're talking about a kid who's riding a bike and he gets attacked by a werewolf.
Like, where the fuck is this coming from?
If it's not coming from the muse, where is it coming from?
Well, it's coming from my creativity.
Okay.
Do you know how to access your creativity like you can blink?
No, you don't.
Do you know how to access your activity like you can lick something or perform any sort of physical function that's repeatable?
No, you don't.
It's a non-repeatable thing.
Treat it like it's magic.
But treat it like you're a professional, and you show up to engage with the magic.
So every day, at the same time, you sit down in front of your keyboard, and you start working.
And just put in the work, put in the work, and force yourself to do it.
Force it like a muscle.
Like the same muscle that you develop when you go running every day, and then you get to the point where like seven days in, you start fucking feeling good running.
Not only are they telling you what to do, but they're going to chart progress.
And they're gonna challenge you like a good trainer is look it's a very valuable resource Like if you can afford a trainer if you can't there's a lot of great resources online on YouTube man YouTube is for someone who wants to learn Exercise routines and wants to learn like a body weight routine that they can do just in their living room There's never been a better time to be quarantined You don't have to pay for a gym membership.
A lot of people are going to realize, hey, if I have a fucking chin-up bar in my house and one kettlebell, I don't need a gym membership.
I got gravity boots for stretching my back out.
I can do sit-ups on that thing.
I can do leg lifts.
I can do a million different things with kettlebells.
It's amazing the obscure things that people decide to do, right?
I mean, that to me seems obscure.
I'm sure it's probably a very big thing, but I just watched the movie about the free climbing movie that's playing on the plane, about the guy that climbed...
Dude, he was telling us a story in the podcast of one time he was halfway up the side of this fucking mountain and he realized he didn't bring his chalk with him.
So he found some other climbers.
That were on their way up, that were on ropes, and he said, hey, do you think I can borrow some chalk?
And the guy goes, yeah, I have an extra bag.
Here, take it.
So he's fucking a thousand feet up, just hanging on, finding other people who are connected to the ropes, and they give him a bag of chalk, and then he leaves it at the top of the mountain, because he passes them, and he's not using any ropes.
But I still ended up doing it because we drove out there together, a group of people, and I realized on the drive that I was the only person that wasn't jumping out of the airplane.
You go, and the craziest thing is you go, and you flip, you flip, and then immediately you see the plane.
The plane is filling your peripheral vision, and then immediately the plane goes from...
Gets small.
And you realize, wow, that perfectly good airplane, as they say, that perfectly good airplane is getting a lot further away.
And now the weirdest part about it was...
This was 20 years ago now, but...
Or 18 or whatever.
But now you're doing this, right?
And you kind of realize, hey, we've got some sort of control because there's another guy over there.
He's kind of far away.
And all of a sudden, you lean into it.
And you fly up to him like Superman.
And now you're this far away.
He's got a video camera on his head.
I don't know where the tape is.
And you're looking at each other.
And it's amazing and exciting.
And then the thing that was weird about it is then you pull the chute, or the guy on your back pulls the chute, and now you're hanging from ropes.
Your chute's open.
And you'd think that would be the time where it's...
You can relax.
But to me, the one time I've done it, talking about parachuting like I know about it, the one time I've done it 18 years ago, that's the scariest moment.
Because now, you're sort of...
But realizing that the only thing preventing you—and you're looking at your feet.
Now you're looking at your feet hanging below you, and you're feeling these ropes.
You're holding—and so I'm holding the ropes.
I'm going, these ropes, Giff?
Like, nothing between me.
And it was an amazing experience.
Huge adrenaline rush.
We'll never do it again.
Because now at least I can say I have done it, right?
Even though I didn't ever want to have to be able to say that.
Now that I have said it, there's no reason to do it again.
I ended up being, you know, whenever you're going to get in a situation where you end up going out to a parachuting thing with a bunch of people unless, you know, you're in a relationship and the person you're with is going and you go with them because they're going and then all of a sudden you're there and you're going like, I'm not going to be the chicken shit.
What about what Edward Snowden, I believe, I've researched this, but I heard he was saying that this is sort of an attempt to get us to get implanted with, you know, biological testing, have our phones set up more to follow us.
Anytime there's an opening for people to take advantage of that opening, anytime there's a moment that happens where there's some scrambling, and maybe they can gather up more power, maybe they can gather up more surveillance tools, maybe they can...
Make it easier to do things that they'd like to do that have nothing to do, like the Patriot Act.
There's a lot of stuff for the Patriot Act that had nothing to do with terrorism.
They just decided, let's add some stuff in.
Let's control these motherfuckers.
They always want to control people.
It's hard to control people.
And as the population gets bigger and as time moves on, they slowly give in to this idea of controlling people more and more.
So they're going to definitely use this.
As a way to ensure that they have some sort of extended reach, whether it's some sort of a reach to make sure that you're vaccinated or some sort of a reach to make sure that your antibodies are clear, some sort of a reach to make sure that you're not drinking, are you?
Because if you drink, you get your immune system shattered.
If your immune system fucks up, what if you get sick and you pass it on to your friends?
If you're drinking, you're being a bad citizen.
Who the fuck knows what could happen once someone's tracking whether or not you're healthy?
But it's almost like we're taking a step closer and closer towards the digital world with this.
And that's I'm not a conspiracy theorist in the sense that I don't think that robots are out to get us.
I don't think that the electronic world is looking to consume us.
But I am concerned with some steps that we could take that make our life more digital to take away too much of what it means to be a person.
Some of what it means to be a person is like fun.
There's fun in the weirdness of the world.
There's fun in the danger of the world.
You take away all that shit with apps and alerts and like, I can't go down that street.
There's a guy down that street that was arrested at one point in time.
Shit.
What are we going to do?
We're going to lose out all the mystery of life for safety?
And then we become what?
What do we become?
These unromantic, boring, bullshit, digital things that are locked into pleasure sources, things that pump them pleasure because they've taken the place, you know?
I mean, really?
If they could do that, if they could get to a point where you wear an implant, it just keeps your dopamine levels up at a very high, high note.
You get augmented reality glasses where everybody's hot.
But because of your risk-taking, because you were the guy that was willing to set up this crazy setup in your house, and because I knew you, and I'm over your place, and I'm like, wow!
You really went deep.
I remember being around your house going, Tom Green, what have you done?
It was the first time I ever saw somebody kind of goofing on the network, taking the fruit basket over to the security guard at GE, messing with them, getting in trouble.
His boss was like, are you biting the hand that feeds you here?
And he got on Letterman and would go on Letterman with his jet black hair and like this sardonic wit and like sharp punch lines and he was the fucking man back then.
Again, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
He's authentic.
What Jay Leno really is, is a guy who loves cars.
There's no joke in that, man.
He doesn't have to pretend.
He doesn't give a fuck if you have like a dune buggy you made out of a VW, or if you have some crazy souped-up Corvette, if you have some crazy NSX from 1994. He loves cars.
He loves them.
Like, I've been around the guy.
First of all, he has like 11 warehouses full of cars.
One of the things that I said when I was talking to him when he and I were driving around Was like, hey man, you're really you when you're doing this.
It's so much better than doing The Tonight Show and having to pretend that you give a fuck about some teeny bopper's new, his new fucking top 40 hit.
And you gotta go, wow, that's amazing!
Like, you don't give a fuck about that.
You care about 65 Corvettes.
You know, Jay Leno's around a 65 Corvette.
You see him like, oh, the lines.
And you see him looking at the steering wheel and the seats.
Like, that fucking guy loves cars, man.
He loves them.
To his bones.
He loves them.
He loves, oh, that's the one with the 454, the 70 Chevelle SS. He gets into the gritty details of it.
And I remember thinking, man, it was too bad that you ever did The Tonight Show.
Should have just done this.
If somebody had figured out in 1970, whatever, that this is what Jay Leno is best at, oh my god!
Who would have been the greatest car man, not that he isn't right now, but the greatest car celebrity that's ever lived in terms of a car guy on television?
Because it's authentic.
Because he really does love it.
And he's funny.
When he does that show, that car show, Jay Leno's Garage, he's so loose.
I was interviewing my friend, but I was telling him stories like this one I'm about to tell you right now.
And when I was a kid, I would go down when he would come to Yuck Yucks.
And at the time...
And this is probably not exactly a fully accurate statement, but for whatever reason at the time it seemed like there wasn't a lot of that kind of weird, like, breaking the whole mold of comedy comedy.
There was stand-up, and then he was the one stand-up that was...
Really surreal, really strange and silly.
And so at the time, it really popped out for me as a goofy kid.
When I was 15 years old, I was doing the amateur night.
He was my favorite.
He'd come into town.
And I remember one day, I went up to him at the bar at the comedy club.
15 years old.
For some reason, they let us in.
I went up to the bar with my friend Phil.
And we went up to him and I said, Mr. Williams, would it be okay if tomorrow we took you out for a submarine sandwich?
And he's like, well, that sounds good to me.
And the next day, Saturday, we went out in Ottawa, took him out for a submarine sandwich, and he was drinking his Coke like, thanks for the submarine sandwich there, fella!
He was one of those initial things, though, in my mind, where I saw somebody saying, I'm gonna do something that nobody else is doing, and I'm gonna be.
So like that weird sense of humor is intoxicating.
It draws you in like a siren to the rocks.
And he just starts talking his nonsense and you just get sucked into the trance.
He just figured out That, like we were talking about before, there's no right way to do it.
There's no right way to do stand-up.
This is the right way for you, and maybe you're an interesting person.
People vary so much, man.
It's all in, like, can they figure out how to make their own unique weirdness come through and make jokes out of it?
Some guys like Harlan figured it out perfectly where if you wrote it down It's like you want to steal Harlan Williams act you'd be fucked You would never be able to do it, right?
Like Theo Vaughn's too.
There's no way No one's doing that.
No one you have to be that guy, right?
Yeah, he's he's figured out how to make his own unique mannerisms hilarious top-flight comedy I love him.
What's one of the cool things about living in a place like L.A. is that there's a lot of people like you and Harlan and, you know, we can keep going, fill in the blanks, Joey Diaz and Duncan Trussell and all these fascinating people.
Listen, there's a lot of people that are under incredible pressure right now, financially.
When people are under pressure, that's when they act the most erratic.
I was watching this guy yesterday.
He cut in front of me, and then he cut into the left lane, and he passed in the oncoming, and then he cut in front of the people in front of him, and I was like, what, buddy?
I had it, and I didn't have it, and I had it again for the Comedy Store.
I had it from 93 to 2007, then I didn't have it from 2007 to 2014, then I had it from 2014 to today, and I'm better off with it, especially the version of the Comedy Store that exists now.
We are all better off for it.
It's an amazing place right now, and I'm committed to keeping it amazing and doing whatever I can to get it back to financial health and whatever we can do to get everything rolling.
I think if we had to get out of LA for some strange reason, as long as the Comedy Store exists for the comedians that are here, I'm good.
When I was an open-miker in Boston, we did some cable access shows.
Same thing, I think, as your public access TV thing in Canada.
They had cable access shows, and I think there was some sort of a rule that if you had a cable channel, you had to leave a certain amount of hours open For people to just, like, regular people to just sign up and do things.
So me and a few other comics, we put together these terrible sketches.
So if it was one billion, that would be like one in eight people, which seems like a lot, but it also seems like a number that you would imagine them saying it would be.
Like young kids, that's why you've got all these young kids who are like incredible musicians, because they go on YouTube and they see it, and they replicate it, and then they improve on it.
By creating your Tom Green show, you allowed people to think about streaming things from their house.
I bet you were a part of a lot of people's desire to jump in and do something like YouTube.
Because if you really stop and think about it, before you were doing that, before you were doing it from your house, or you were doing it from that public access station, how many people were doing that?
No, you know, listen, I've always loved technology.
That's one thing that's kind of interesting.
When I was a kid...
My dad was in the military, but when he retired from the military after 26 years in the service as a tank commander, he continued working for the Department of Defense as a COBOL programmer.
So he went and took a computer course, and he learned COBOL, and he would go off and he'd have the cards, and he'd show me these big computers, because Ottawa's the capital of Canada, so there's the government there, and there's these big computers.
And I remember in the 80s, early 80s, they had this thing in Ottawa.
It was called the Naboo Network.
It's the weirdest thing.
You would order it, and you can Google this, N-A-B-U, if you don't believe me.
And it was essentially like a VCR-sized box.
You could rent it.
You would hook your television cable into it.
And it was the internet.
It was basically the internet.
You could talk to people.
There was video games got pumped through it.
So you could play, like, real arcade-style video games on this thing.
And it was really, like, way advanced.
Yeah, there it is.
That's it.
I had that.
And my dad always got, like, the computers that no one else had.
Like, everyone had Atari 2600, but he went and got the Naboo.
Because he said, no, that's Doug Henning, by the way, the magician, the Canadian magician Doug Henning, who did the ads for him.
Yeah, so you're sitting there as a kid and you're playing like Dig Dug, the arcade game.
Same graphics quality.
And it's streaming through your cable.
You don't have a cartridge.
It's streaming through your cable.
So you're thinking about that.
And then a lot of my friends were very advanced.
My friend Phil Giroux, who was the guy who drank coffee in the window in the background of my show on MTV. He was my best friend.
He's a...
So we started doing stand-up together when we were teenagers, and then he kind of had to quit when he was 17 because he got hired as a computer engineer for the National Research Council because he was a computer genius.
So there was always this really early sort of computer sort of thing.
So I've always loved looking at that technology and going, okay, well, what's going to happen?
So now it's like, what's going to happen next?
That's the question.
What's going to happen next?
What's the new technology now?
What's the thing that's happening now that's going to...
I don't know what it is really, but it's fun to try to figure out artificial intelligence.
But if you had sunglasses, like aviators, you put on some aviators, and you have a whole new view of the world with navigation, with emails, with voice calls with people where they're translucent.
You can see the people in front of you so you don't stumble into someone, but you still know that you're talking to your friend Bob.
You see each other while you're laughing.
You can split from your view to his view.
All that stuff is coming, man.
That's coming.
That's the next step.
That's the next step.
My real concern is what I was saying about earlier, about if we have tracking on our phones to make sure that we're not COVID-19 positive and like that.
You're giving up too much.
I feel like you're giving up too much there.
I think people need to...
People need to be conscious of their health and take care of their immune system and make sure you follow all the protocols and wash your hands and don't touch your face and all the things that everybody's been saying.
But I don't really know if we want to give in to that level of scrutiny, that level of tracking, that level of connection.
And I'm watching this, and I've probably watched it four or five times since then, but when I'm watching, I'm looking at it and I'm going, what are you doing?
Like, where is this going?
You're going to allow a company?
What if Xerox fires you and you get their chip in your forearm?
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
Are you going to just be walking around with that Xerox chip in your arm?
Listen, I think if we looked at ourselves in like 1980 and then looked at ourselves in 2020 and said, okay, how did this attachment to phones get so deeply ingrained in the culture without people figuring it out?
I don't think there's a cabal of super geniuses that are trying to manipulate people in a way that get them to get addicted to likes.
I think it's something that people realized along the way and they took advantage of it.
And I also think that what really, what started it What started it was people trying to figure out how to get people to be more engaged.
What's the best way to get them engaged?
And the best way to get them engaged, it turns out, is to get them upset.
And then they figured out how to get people upset is to fill your feet up with things that you engage with.
But they're just trying to get you, if you were really interested in positive, intellectually enriching ideas, that's what would be in your feed all the time.
So you're blaming them for you having this shitty desire to eat Snickers bars all day.
You're eating mental Snickers bars.
But that's really what it is.
What they're doing is, like, Ari Shafir did a test on YouTube, and he only searched for videos of puppies.
And that's all that YouTube recommended.
Videos of puppies.
So all these people are like, they're trolling me.
It's a Bluetooth device that checks your pulse and vitals, basically.
Because that is what it is, it is sending out a Bluetooth signal or a near-field signal to devices, probably the person's phone who owns it or is connected to it.
But it's also sending out looking for other devices.
And my phone also is looking out for Wi-Fi signals, for Bluetooth signals.
There's got to be a connection there somewhere where it's tracked.
What devices have been logged in or connected to this within the last 6 hours, 12 hours?
So the possibility would be that this thing, I'm just talking about it from a moron, that this thing on your finger sends out a pulse or reaches out to find out what, like, maybe Google programs are open.
I'm really worried about what the next grab is going to be.
Because the next grab, in order to ensure that people be safe from this COVID-19...
It's hard, man.
Once they get some sort of control and power over you, it's hard to give that shit up.
And when we're looking at these studies that show that it's not at least as far as the amount that it's been contained and hasn't spread through the population, but the amount of people that actually have been infected, how many of them actually died, that it's much smaller than they were fearing it would be.
When are they going to let us be normal people again?
If you prevent it from scaring the shit out of you, then you're not paying attention to it.
You'd have to block it out completely if it wasn't terrifying.
Because if you're paying attention to it, it's going to be terrifying.
If you're not blocking out completely, you look at the randomness of just the fact that we're in this planet with no roof, and we're hurling through the galaxy, and there's all these asteroids out there, and sometimes they don't see them because they're coming from behind the sun.
They just fucking slam into us and kill everybody.
You're never gonna land, you're never gonna touch ground, you're just gonna float through forever for billions and billions of years without ever talking to anybody, but you're never gonna die.
You know how bored you'd be after the first billion years and realize you have an infinite amount of billion years left where you're still gonna be alive, breathing air with no need for food, no friends.
You know what you know now, but you've been transformed by the gods into this symbol of psychic torture.
You're the God Green.
Tom Green, in 2021, God came back to show us all a lesson.
He let Tom Green breathe in space and fly on forever and live forever.
And there's moments in that movie where when you're a kid and you're seeing that and there's no internet and you're seeing something that you've never even fathomed before.
And when you don't have instant access to seeing anything you can imagine, then your mind has to use its creativity to come up with ideas and visualize it.
The fact that we're young enough to enjoy all the technology now, you and I are young enough to enjoy it the same way young, but we also are old enough to have remembered as adults living life without it is kind of a luxury.
And we're the only generation, we're the only age group that will ever experience that.
Yeah, it was probably, I would have been fifth grade, and I would go over to his house after school, and I was like, I remember, I remember, he was like, yeah.
What?
You're controlling the movement of the television?
Like, there's one where, what is it, Deadwood Mansion, that's what it's called?
You put, you have a haptic feedback vest on, and you have a rifle, and you have these goggles on, you put the headphones on, you have things that go around your wrists and things that go around your ankles, so it tracks your movement.
And will it be gradual, or will it be one big leap?
We don't see it coming, and we're all like those buffalo that the Native Americans used to push off the cliff, where one of them would go off the cliff, and then the other one would go, fuck, there's a cliff!
But there's like a thousand buffalo behind you that don't know it's a cliff, so they just keep pushing.
Because they realized that we live a bullshit life and they want to ride a dragon and then fucking shoot bows and arrows at the bad guys.
They got Avatar Depression.
It was like a real thing because so many psychologists were talking to these people, so many psychiatrists were treating these patients that they just started calling it something.
Like, how many guys are you getting every day that are sad?