May 7, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:15:46
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Oh, hello, David. | ||
| Hello, Joe. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| What's going on with your mask, man? | ||
| Nah, nah, just fucking with you. | ||
|
unidentified
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I just want to see how you react. | |
| All this Rona talk. | ||
| All this Rona talk. | ||
| Sick of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Headphones or no headphones? | ||
| Oh, I'll do the phones. | ||
| Okay, there you go. | ||
| I just don't want to be the only one. | ||
| Nah, nah, it's all good. | ||
| Can I turn them up right here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Check, check, check. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| What's up, fingers? | ||
| He's over there typing every few minutes. | ||
| He goes like this. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Let's do this shit. | ||
| So first of all, man, congratulations. | ||
| You're the first guy to beat the system. | ||
| You're the first guy to get fucked over by the system, go public with it, and then get your money. | ||
| I've never heard it happen before. | ||
| I don't think it's ever happened before. | ||
| Bro, bro, I still can't wrap my mind around it, but I do have to shout out Chris McCarthy over at CBS Viacom, that guy, when we were working this out, his approach was someone who was actually trying to resolve something. | ||
| Came through. | ||
| It was amazing, man. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's a happy ending. | ||
| Because usually those artists gripes, they never get resolved, not to where the artist feels comfortable or happy with it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They always feel bitter and angry. | ||
| They got fucked over and someone else is a producer and they're making millions of dollars off of your work and they continue to sell it and make money off of it and... | ||
| Well, I could say with a high degree of honesty. | ||
| Not to say I was never angry about it, but I don't think I was ever, like, bitter. | ||
| By this point in my life, I wasn't bitter. | ||
| You would joke about it. | ||
| You were angry about it, but not to the point where it fucked with your head, but you would joke about it. | ||
| Well, I mean, you know, the bottom line is no matter what happens to you, you gotta keep going. | ||
| You gotta keep going. | ||
| And bitterness is quite cumbersome. | ||
| Yeah, it's bad for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, jokes is a way of shaking that off or processing something with the alchemy of levity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Holding grudges, bitterness, shit's very bad for you. | ||
| It doesn't ever help. | ||
| No, and now we're getting on an age. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| When we were younger, it was fine to hold a grudge. | ||
| You didn't realize that, you know... | ||
| You didn't realize it was fucking with you. | ||
| What is that expression? | ||
| It's about jealousy. | ||
| The jealousy is the only poison that affects the container that's holding it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| But bitterness, the same thing. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just not good for you. | ||
| You gotta be able to let shit go. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| But... | ||
| In your case, you made a ploy. | ||
| You said what happened, how you felt about it, and they were like, he's right. | ||
| I think, yeah. | ||
| Let's give him the money. | ||
| It wasn't a court of law. | ||
| I don't believe I would have got anything. | ||
| It's kind of amazing. | ||
| In a court of law. | ||
| I think in a court of public opinion, it was a good time for me to say my piece. | ||
| And through the years, it wasn't something that I would harp on. | ||
| When I did interviews and stuff, people would always ask me about it, but it was something I was actually reluctant to talk about. | ||
| It was a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's hard for other people to relate to this idea that you want more money, you know? | ||
| You're talking about regular people, and you're saying this thing, even though it is yours, it's hard for people. | ||
| Money is, if you look at life, anything in life, through the framework of money, you'll miss most of the picture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In business, especially at this stage in our careers, you realize through the years, people play incentives. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If they incentivize a certain way, then that's the way they're going to behave. | ||
| So what they want is never really surprising. | ||
| How they get there is where all the surprises are. | ||
| So I feel like I can forgive somebody for playing an incentive. | ||
| It's disappointing. | ||
| But, what was so remarkable when I walked away from the show, right, is that it was against incentive. | ||
| So people couldn't understand it at the time. | ||
| It was so much money. | ||
| How could you do that? | ||
| And blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But you know, if I had taken that money and finished the show, I would have got the money, but I might never have been the same. | ||
| I think it was one of the most gangster moves in the history of entertainment. | ||
| And it made you a legend. | ||
| And the fact that you then started doing shows like... | ||
| I heard Dave's doing a show in the park in Seattle. | ||
| He's got a box. | ||
| He pulls out a speaker and just starts doing stand-up. | ||
| That was in Portland, yeah. | ||
| Because in that sense, it was freeing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something about, you know, I was geared a certain way growing up because I wanted to make it in show business. | ||
| And boy, that shit fell all the way apart. | ||
| And as far as I knew, my career was over. | ||
| So where do you go from there? | ||
| Yeah, but your career wasn't over. | ||
| You just decided you were going to just sort of lay back for a while. | ||
| In hindsight, yeah. | ||
| But when it was happening... | ||
| You really felt like it was over. | ||
| I'd never seen these things before. | ||
| I didn't see anyone else do this and get back up. | ||
| I didn't see, you know, and the drumbeat is he's crazy, he smokes crack, he's this, he's that. | ||
| It was a wild experience. | ||
| The way people close to you react to it. | ||
| Like I had failed or I'd ruined my life. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| And then when you're cold, that phone don't ring that often. | ||
| And then I had over a decade of sitting in that choice, but I didn't languish in just that experience. | ||
| I started doing stand-up for much better reasons than making it. | ||
| I still enjoyed it. | ||
| I started seeing the places where I was performing. | ||
| Normally when you're successful in comedy, You know, you get off the plane or the bus, you do the hit, you go back to the hotel, you get back on the bus, you don't really see anything. | ||
| Even now, like this last run we did here in Austin. | ||
| We was here for weeks. | ||
| And then I got to see Austin. | ||
| I got to find restaurants I like. | ||
| I met people that I probably called because I'm in town. | ||
| Stuff like that. | ||
| And it was like that all over the world, not just the country. | ||
| I started going around just seeing the world. | ||
| I got overwhelmed with this idea that none of my information was firsthand. | ||
| I just read it in books. | ||
| I heard it from friends, and I was eager to just see something for myself. | ||
| And I kind of... | ||
| Entrench this philosophy that my memories are some of the most valuable things that I have. | ||
| These first-hand experiences. | ||
| Can't take that away from if I reminisce on a nice day, then, you know, it feeds you. | ||
| Remembering something is neurologically almost identical, I've read, to experiencing it. | ||
| Yeah, I think that there's a real value in having experiences where you do it on purpose. | ||
| Like you go someplace to have experiences and think about having those experiences. | ||
| Because most of the time, like you were saying, if we do shows, you just kind of show up, you do the show, and then you go home. | ||
| But if you set aside some days, To do things like that's very valuable for your perspective, which is ultimately valuable for your act. | ||
| It's valuable for everything because you're choosing to take in more information and data specifically to enhance your perspective on life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You learn things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You gain perspective, which is very valuable for a comedian and a person. | ||
| And it's humbling and it's empowering at the same time. | ||
| Yeah because we know comics like that was a big theme during like the 90s right where comics would all tell the same stories about being on the road there were all the jokes were about airplane travel airline jokes hotel food and that kind of shit and the maid do not disturb knocking on your door because that's what they related to right the road warriors yeah that was what that's that was their life's perspective and it's it kind of shows That experiences, interesting experiences, are very valuable. | ||
| But you don't think of them as valuable. | ||
| You think of them as recreational. | ||
| But they really are valuable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I call, you know, any information is valuable. | ||
| I call it expensive knowledge. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's like your buddy that's a war veteran or something. | ||
| You don't want to know the shit he knows if you knew what he had to do to know these things. | ||
| That's what they call expensive knowledge. | ||
| I would not recommend quitting your show the way I did if you can avoid it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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But the way you did it was so cool. | |
| Because, you know, you kind of drifted off. | ||
| I promise I wasn't trying to be cool. | ||
| It was a series of troubleshooting. | ||
| It was like, fuck it, man. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Whatever you go through, you got to live. | ||
| You got to make a way and find your happiness. | ||
| And, you know, I'm lucky. | ||
| I'm in show business, which is... | ||
| It's a multi-dimensional career path. | ||
| This thing could go a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially today. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Yeah, and another time, would I have ever gotten that money? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| No, because there would have been no social media, no pressure. | ||
| Right, no dropping specials on the gram, no comment section, no moveon.org, no... | ||
| And if you had gone to, say, like, The Tonight Show and made a pitch like that, they probably wouldn't even have aired it. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| I had a gripe with someone that owned a six of the media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What am I going to do, tell the media on them? | ||
| It's never going to work. | ||
| Right, they would definitely edit that part out. | ||
| Be like, why is Dave's section only four minutes long? | ||
| Yeah, edit it, spin it, whatever it is they do. | ||
| But again, you know, all parties involved, I thought... | ||
| In repairing that situation, and I don't want to go all into what those conversations were like other than to say, and this is not like I'm just happy because they paid me. | ||
| It was class act. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| It was very encouraging. | ||
| That is very encouraging. | ||
| I think that coming up behind us, these kids are going to be playing on a whole new ball game that we did. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I think there's more accountability now because of the internet, because of, you know, people's ability to express themselves is so much different than it used to be. | ||
| So you can't just be some ruthless, evil executives fucking over the artists like they did during the, you know, in the music business. | ||
| I mean, it's legendary. | ||
| The music business is legendary if you're doing that. | ||
| Man, look. | ||
| First of all, we gotta get into this music business thing in a second, but I was looking on the internet It was a bunch of waitresses talking about what celebrities did or didn't tip them. | ||
| Nobody can fuck up anymore. | ||
| It's true, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they got a whole website dedicated to bad tippers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All of a sudden, breaking news, Ellen DeGeneres is a bitch. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Who knows? | ||
| By the way, I like going a lot. | ||
| I'm just saying, this is what we're faced with. | ||
| Our personalities get yelped. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The thing is, if you talk to enough people, you're gonna have disagreements with people. | ||
| And if someone cumulates, if they curate only those disagreements and only take it from the perspective of those people that you had problems with, they could paint you out to be a piece of shit. | ||
| Even if you're a really nice person who just doesn't take any nonsense from people. | ||
| If you talk to enough nonsense people, you're gonna have enough conflicts. | ||
| And if they only curate those conflicts and make like a compilation, like, Dave talked to this guy and told him to eat shit. | ||
| Well, that's why I usually don't do interviews. | ||
| Because I feel like this is about fame in general. | ||
| And I see you go through similar shit. | ||
| It's like they blow you up like a balloon and twisting all these wild shapes like a balloon animal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Once you're in that thing, they can control the perception of you. | ||
| So why fuck with it? | ||
| Gaslighting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They gaslight people. | ||
| And, you know, again, people play incentives. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| Years ago, not that long ago, you remember when all those writings of Gandhi came out. | ||
| They're like, well, all this really racist shit. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you know the context of that. | ||
| At the time he wrote those things, he was an attorney in South Africa. | ||
| And South Africa had a racist legal system. | ||
| And in order to be successful, you had to be a good racist. | ||
| And he was just succeeding. | ||
| I'm sure he wasn't writing all this nigger shit in India. | ||
| I shouldn't have said that, but, you know, I forgot I was on that. | ||
| We're on the internet. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Didn't Gandhi... | ||
| There's people that were upset at him because he slept with a bunch of girls, too, right? | ||
| Didn't, like, tempt himself? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think he tempted himself by sleeping... | ||
| I think that was the way he described it? | ||
| Like, he would sleep with young girls? | ||
| To tempt himself? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that was the... | ||
| The evil Knievel of pussy. | ||
| And now I will tempt myself. | ||
| What the fuck is this? | ||
| I think I'm remembering that correct. | ||
| That's why I tell my wife, I'm going to the titty bar to tempt myself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He tortured himself. | |
| Tortured himself. | ||
| Is that what he said? | ||
| Yeah, let's get this right, because I actually revere Gandhi. | ||
| Fucking ad bloggers. | ||
| Sexual torment of a saint. | ||
| A new book reveals Gandhi tortured himself with the young women who worshipped him and often shared his bed. | ||
| Daily Mail, so this has got to be true. | ||
| He was killed by an assassin in 1946, huh? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, that part was in the movie. | ||
| I don't know about all this torturing himself. | ||
| I didn't know it was that. | ||
| I thought it was later. | ||
| And then they just show a picture of him walking with some... | ||
| You know, we don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But go back to what it said there. | ||
| Gandhi, a London-trained lawyer-turned-guru, was a ruthless cult leader who enslaved his followers... | ||
| With such bizarre sexual demands that it became difficult for many people to take him seriously, even during his own lifetime. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| That crazy book. | ||
| Oh, it claims. | ||
| Gandhi Naked Ambition claims that Gandhi. | ||
| Someone wrote a book called Gandhi Naked Ambition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It goes so far as to suggest that the draconian practices instituted by this iconic figure in the ashrams he founded prompted the perverted 20th century cults of Jim Jones and Jonestown. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Someone wrote this book. | ||
| I look at Gandhi as the person that fought against white supremacy in his homeland. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| Yeah, so he liked to torture himself a little bit. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| He liked to lay down and get hard on. | ||
| What's the big deal? | ||
| I'm sorry I brought that up. | ||
| I didn't know naked ambition just hit the stands. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Gandhi? | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Yeah, but how would anyone know whether or not he tortured himself? | ||
| Does his writing say that? | ||
| Did he talk about it openly? | ||
| Did he like to just get blue-balled? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Lay there? | ||
| Yeah, see, it's that, though, man. | ||
| It's all this, like, you know, I hate the debunking of great legacies. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, imagine how the whites might feel if they tear down a Civil War statue. | ||
| This kind of thing to me is that. | ||
| My equivalent of that. | ||
| Like, oh, now we're debunking Gandhi. | ||
| You know, it was really funny when they started tearing down statues. | ||
| Trump was like, what are they going to do next? | ||
| They're going to tear down George Washington? | ||
| And everybody's like, well, that's ridiculous. | ||
| They're not going to do that. | ||
| And then they started tearing down George Washington statues. | ||
| They tear down all the statues. | ||
| I mean, George Washington did own slaves. | ||
| He did. | ||
| So did Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Many of the framers. | ||
| It's one of those things where you shouldn't revere what they did. | ||
| But what a statue is supposed to represent is here's an image of some person who's historically significant and established in the country. | ||
| Right, that's the analogy. | ||
| To me, Gandhi fought against white supremacy and was very successful, and then decades later started tearing the statue down. | ||
| Yeah, the worst thing he did was get hard-ons. | ||
| Lay there and get tortured. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not trying to put no value judgment on any of this shit. | ||
| I'm just saying he did expel the British peacefully, which was unprecedented in the world. | ||
| A peaceful expulsion of oppressors. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's interesting how peaceful protest, like, peaceful protest resonates for years and years and years. | ||
| And when someone does something, like, remember that image, I'm sure you do, of that, there's a video of it, of a monk in Vietnam lighting himself on fire to protest against the war. | ||
| It's on the cover of one of the Rage Against the Machine albums. | ||
| Yeah, it was crazy. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Everybody remembers that. | ||
| Yeah, there was another guy who did that underneath the window of the Pentagon here in the United States during the Vietnam War. | ||
| Oh, did he? | ||
| Yeah, a white fella. | ||
| I can't remember his name. | ||
| That's a way to go. | ||
| That's a crazy way to go. | ||
| But Gandhi didn't call it a peaceful protest. | ||
| He called it civil disobedience. | ||
| The idea being that I will not participate in my own oppression. | ||
| It's a fine idea. | ||
| It's a good idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why would anybody concentrate on the hard odds? | ||
| Yeah, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Gandhi got so much pussy. | ||
| Let me tell you about this Gandhi you fuck with. | ||
| He didn't even do anything. | ||
| He just laid there. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| That's a weird move, though. | ||
| What, to just lay there? | ||
| Just lay there and get hard and go like... | ||
| Beat it, bitch. | ||
| Go on and get some sleep. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know where this culture is headed. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck everybody's doing anymore. | ||
| It's COVID year. | ||
| I'm a little packed away. | ||
| I've been out. | ||
| It's doing something to us, collectively. | ||
| We talked about this the last time I was here, and I told you I was going to come to the show. | ||
| I wasn't bullshitting. | ||
| Remember that day I said, I'll come after the inauguration, because we all smelled that coming. | ||
| It's a tough one. | ||
| It's a weird one. | ||
| We're being tested. | ||
| It's testing the foundations of our culture. | ||
| The foundations of our civilizations testing how well we can be peaceful with each other and make sense and get along and how much we value getting along with each other and How much there's just so much divisiveness because we've never been there's never been a time in history where the whole Economy and the whole society basically just got frozen for a year and stuck in some weird weird sort of side patch We had to figure things out fresh. | ||
| How many people lost their jobs? | ||
| How many people lost their lives? | ||
| How many people lost their grandparents? | ||
| Their loved ones, that's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a weird fucking year, and everybody's very sensitive. | ||
| And everybody's quick to pull the trigger. | ||
| And then you got everybody who's... | ||
| There's so many people that have just been online all day long this whole year. | ||
| And that's not good for you. | ||
| I still think at the core of all of this, what you call weirdness, is these profound trust issues. | ||
| Like I said on Letterman, these people that hoarded toilet paper and went and bought bullets out. | ||
| None of these things are good signs. | ||
| I think that something about the nature of COVID punched us square in our American identity. | ||
| We're individualists. | ||
| The mask and all these things, I don't think are actually oppressive, but I can see why Americans would feel they are. | ||
| They just don't trust the messenger anymore. | ||
| There's too many mixed signals. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| In the beginning, when Fauci was saying you don't have to wear a mask, and then eventually they were saying you got to wear one, you should wear two. | ||
| That was a huge mistake. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Yeah, if you give people information that may not be true, even if you have the intention of having them behave in a way that's beneficial for everybody, the misinformation, the way you achieve these things, the separation from ends and means can be a profound problem if you're managing something like a nation the separation from ends and means can be a profound problem if you're managing something We need to be able to trust the institution. | ||
| So now you'll hear Americans say, like, they should fix this. | ||
| They should fix that. | ||
| But in reality, the idea is we are they. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Nobody feels that way right now. | ||
| Well, we did before. | ||
| I think people had faith in the government in the sense that, worst case scenario, even if they're incompetent, everything will stay together. | ||
| Now you realize, no. | ||
| No, it doesn't have to stay together. | ||
| It can be irreversibly fucked, like I think some of our cities are right now. | ||
| I think there's some sections of LA, I don't know how the fuck they're gonna bounce back. | ||
| You drive down the street and you see everything boarded up. | ||
| You go, how does this come back? | ||
| How long does it take? | ||
| Does it take a year? | ||
| Does it take 10 years? | ||
| Like, what is this? | ||
| And I have no point of reference to even make an educated guess. | ||
| I've never seen any of this before. | ||
| Nobody has. | ||
| I'll tell you, like, okay, so my experience during COVID, I live in Ohio. | ||
| I don't live in a cough's distance from anyone I don't know. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's open space. | ||
| So we were isolated, but it wasn't impressive. | ||
| I could go outside. | ||
| I could take a walk. | ||
| I could whatever. | ||
| I go to New York, I was telling you, maybe a couple weeks ago when they opened all the comedy clubs back up, you know, just to show support for the clubs that nurtured my career early on, and it was a tough one. | ||
| I had been there before, like, the Saturday Night Live week. | ||
| That week was, you know, unseasonably warm. | ||
| Biden had just won that weekend, so people were celebratory. | ||
| This time around, I got a sense of the emotional carnage that happened in that city. | ||
| And it was significant. | ||
| It was palpable. | ||
| You would notice it. | ||
| I did. | ||
| And to hear them say it's like, phew, things are getting better. | ||
| And I'm like, better? | ||
| Because I hadn't seen New York since it was, like, incredibly healthy. | ||
| You know, in a non-COVID time, I've heard a $2 trillion economy just in the five boroughs of New York. | ||
| I don't know what's going on there now. | ||
| You know, restaurants open at limited capacity. | ||
| It takes courage just to go to a coffee shop or this, that, or the other. | ||
| Especially with this problem of trust being in deficit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a tough one. | ||
| Well, it's also a lot of people are moving out. | ||
| When people are moving out, you get the sense like it's an abandoned ship, like it's a sinking ship. | ||
| And then people don't want to invest money in it. | ||
| They don't know what to do. | ||
| They're not sure if they should stay. | ||
| They start looking at other states where things are open. | ||
| Maybe we should just move. | ||
| Maybe we should forget about this business and start fresh in Florida or move to Texas or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I can't imagine New York City not coming back from this. | ||
| It'll come back. | ||
| It just won't come back the same. | ||
| It's gonna be different. | ||
| It's gonna take a long time. | ||
| You think anything will be the same after that? | ||
| It'll take a minute, bro. | ||
| It'll take a minute. | ||
| It'll be a new normal, though. | ||
| Well, even Austin, like, it's not the same. | ||
| It's actually bigger. | ||
| It's growing. | ||
| This city grew, I'm sure. | ||
| Grew. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of people from the Bay moved here for the tech jobs. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The weather's good. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The restrictions aren't as impressive. | ||
| People are nicer, too. | ||
| That's the big one for me. | ||
| My feelings here are different. | ||
| I feel less anxiety here. | ||
| I feel like people are nicer. | ||
| They're genuinely friendly. | ||
| But do you think that people are nicer? | ||
| Do you think the circles you were rolling in in California weren't as nice? | ||
| No, it was just regular people that you meet. | ||
| Like, there's a guy in my neighborhood. | ||
| I look forward to waving to this guy every day. | ||
| He's an old dude who works on his lawn. | ||
| And this motherfucker will wave at everybody who drives by. | ||
| He's there digging. | ||
| He sees a car. | ||
| He's like... | ||
| No, that's hilarious. | ||
| And every day I see that guy, I get ready. | ||
| I get ready. | ||
| I'm going to wave to my friend. | ||
| I see him. | ||
| I'm like, hey, waves at me. | ||
| Make a little eye contact. | ||
| It feels good. | ||
| I never got that in California. | ||
| Nobody ever stopped from digging in their lawn to look up and wave at you at every car that passes by. | ||
| This guy waves at every car. | ||
| That's sweet. | ||
| It's sweet. | ||
| How old is this guy? | ||
| Probably 70s, 80s. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Older fella. | ||
| If it was a guy my age, it'd be weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's happening? | |
| Nobody want to see that shit. | ||
| Yeah, that's a little odd. | ||
| He's a little too friendly. | ||
| Call the police! | ||
| Yeah, 20-year-old kids doing laundry out there waving at everybody. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's age-appropriate. | ||
| But there's friendly people out here, man. | ||
| There's less of them. | ||
| People value people when they're not a burden. | ||
| When you get to... | ||
| You know, 20 million people or whatever the fuck LA is. | ||
| People, they lose their value. | ||
| They become annoying. | ||
| There's too many of them on the highway in front of you. | ||
| There's too many of them around you, you know? | ||
| Well, let me ask you this. | ||
| What is the mechanics of your day like? | ||
| Is your day mechanically the same as LA? Minus the comedy, obviously, it's COVID. But I would imagine you work out a few hours a day, no matter where you are. | ||
| You do your show a few hours a day if you're here or there. | ||
| You kick it with your wife a few hours a day and the kids. | ||
| What else do you do here that you don't do there? | ||
| It's just quieter. | ||
| It just feels better. | ||
| It feels better. | ||
| It feels better. | ||
| Like, I just like the vibe of the city better. | ||
| How so? | ||
| It's like, no one's trying to be famous here. | ||
| There's a thing in Hollywood, even if you're not a person who's in show business, Maybe you had an ambition and you abandoned it. | ||
| Or maybe you think now, because of reality shows and because of social media, maybe you don't even have to be famous for your talent. | ||
| You just have to be famous. | ||
| Look at the Kardashians and a lot of people that are famous just for being famous. | ||
| There's a weird currency In having a lot of people know who you are. | ||
| There's a social status to that that exists in LA that is primary. | ||
| That's very true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's above all. | |
| It's above all. | ||
| All right, well, let me say this. | ||
| First of all, when I remember meeting you in the 90s, this thing never really seemed to affect you. | ||
| You seemed serious about comedy. | ||
| I had heard whispering that you did kung fu. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But you weren't like a... | ||
| I mean, you were social with all the comedians, but you weren't like the hangout kind of guy. | ||
| You were always off doing your own thing. | ||
| And even this podcast, even though it grew to be a big thing when it started, I don't even think it started with the intention, I'm going to blow this motherfucker up. | ||
| You just did it. | ||
| Yeah, there was never a thought of blowing it up. | ||
| It was just silly. | ||
| There's a funny video that was in the Comedy Store documentary of Tom Segura talking about leaving my house and talking to Red Band saying, what is he doing? | ||
| Why does he do this? | ||
| And he's like, I don't know. | ||
| He wants to do it all the time. | ||
| He wants to do this stupid fucking podcast that no one's listening to. | ||
| Yeah, it's dope. | ||
| It's dope. | ||
| I mean, but at that time, and even still, the way I remember L.A., it's Winner's Circle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And earlier in my career, if you're doing well in LA, now it's fun as fuck out there. | ||
| All the ropes open up and, oh, Mr. Chappelle, and they accommodate you expertly because they're so proficient with hospitality. | ||
| But if you're not doing good, they'll remind you just as quick. | ||
| Yeah, it makes you feel bad. | ||
| It makes you feel bad. | ||
| I've seen people, the look on their face when you pass through the line and the security guard goes, oh, come on, come on up here. | ||
| And the other people that are waiting, they watch you walk through, they feel terrible. | ||
| Oh, God, I hope not. | ||
| Because I do it all the time. | ||
| I'm a rope-crossing motherfucker. | ||
| No more waiting for me. | ||
| But you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like for those people that are in that line to be that person that gets called to the front of the line and the doors just open. | ||
| They grab that velvet rope. | ||
| Oh, Mr. Chappelle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Flagrant elitism. | ||
| Yeah, they love it. | ||
| They love it. | ||
| They wish it was them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they want to be hanging with you. | ||
| Maybe if I'm hanging with Dave, I'll get through that rope. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm with Dave. | ||
| Oh, you're with Dave. | ||
| Come on in. | ||
| I told you the first time I met Denzel Washington, a guy did that to me. | ||
| He came up to my table like, you know, Dave, I hate to bother you, but Denzel Washington is here. | ||
| Would you like to meet him? | ||
| I'm like, oh my God, yeah. | ||
| And he brings me up to the table. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Denzel Washington is Dave Chappelle. | ||
| I'm like, oh my God, Denzel is very gracious. | ||
| And then the guy goes, and my name is? | ||
| I'm like, oh, this motherfucker didn't know me. | ||
| He used me. | ||
| It is wild out there. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| It's wild out there, man. | ||
| Yeah, it is wild. | ||
| There's social climbers in LA. It's an art form. | ||
| They're skilled. | ||
| They know how to do it. | ||
| I think I moved to Ohio initially to be free of these feelings you described. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This idea that You know, I started so young that I didn't know how to untether the rest of my life from those interests. | ||
| And geography was the quickest life hack. | ||
| I love the way you talk about Ohio. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I've always loved it. | ||
| You do a lot of things that I think are awesome. | ||
| Man, thanks, bro. | ||
| You've always been a kind person, despite all of your success, all the accolades. | ||
| All the love that you get, you've never let it turn you into someone who felt like you were better than other people. | ||
| Like, I've seen you, the way you interact with the door people at the store. | ||
| That, to me, is everything. | ||
| How do you treat the door staff? | ||
| How do you treat the bartender? | ||
| Are you friendly with all those folks? | ||
| And if you're not, man, you're kind of missing the whole point. | ||
| Like, you can make someone's day just by being cool. | ||
| That's what always makes me laugh about Punky. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| The last time I saw her, she was a barback. | ||
| Now she's on SNL. And the next time I saw her, she was rehearsing at SNL. That made me feel real good for her. | ||
| She's amazing. | ||
| And I thought of all the comedians that might treat the barbacks like shit. | ||
| You better be careful. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Security. | ||
| Idris Elba, the famous actor. | ||
| He used to be a security guard. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You used to buy weed from him. | ||
| You know, you used to buy weed from Idris Elba? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know if I should talk about it. | ||
| Yeah, you can talk about it. | ||
| I did. | ||
| It's legal now in New York. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, he had a kickboxing fight. | ||
| He's a legitimate Muay Thai fighter. | ||
| I heard he's nice with it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| And he fought a good guy. | ||
| Like, it wasn't a bullshit fight. | ||
| It was a fight. | ||
| It wasn't like he went out there and just knocked this guy out with one punch. | ||
| They were scrapping. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a good fight. | ||
| And he trained for a long time. | ||
| Pull up some video footage of Idris Elba hitting a heavy bag. | ||
| This I gotta see. | ||
| Idris Elba's got skills. | ||
| He trains hard. | ||
| And I think he did it for a television show. | ||
| So I think they documented his training. | ||
| And he trained for quite a long time. | ||
| And, you know, Muay Thai, that's a fucking brutal way to fight. | ||
| Kicking legs. | ||
| Is that the shit that they do in Thailand? | ||
| Yeah, that's the shit they do in Thailand. | ||
| I went to the Muay Thai fights. | ||
| Oh, look at that. | ||
| Yeah, he's getting after it. | ||
| So he would train at this like legit Muay Thai gym, and you watch him. | ||
| I mean, if I saw him about to fight in the UFC, I'd go, fucking not a good move. | ||
| Look at that, he got dropped there. | ||
| Like, he's training. | ||
| He's doing real. | ||
| I mean, he's getting his legs kicked, the whole deal. | ||
| And you could tell that This is, you know, they're not cutting any corners. | ||
| He's doing the hard work. | ||
| The real hard work. | ||
| Man, I came across it. | ||
| So here's his fight. | ||
| So he had like a fucking real fight. | ||
| Oh, it's a real fight, man. | ||
| A real Muay Thai fight. | ||
| I mean, they were getting after it. | ||
| Is it showing the fight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, so there's a whole documentary on it. | ||
| If you think about most actors, you know, too, I don't know if they got this kind of grit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Or humility to possibly get their ass whooped in front of everybody. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I mean, every human being, you get knocked the fuck out, right? | ||
| We saw that with Jorge Masvidal. | ||
| Jorge Masvidal, when he got knocked out by Usman, Masvidal, he had an iron chin his whole fucking career. | ||
| He'd only been like dropped a couple of times and he was fine every time. | ||
| Like dropped by big guys like Darren Till dropped him. | ||
| But I mean, he's one of the best strikers in the sport. | ||
| And then when Usman flatlined him, everybody's like, oh shit. | ||
| Everybody can get knocked out. | ||
| The human brain, the human body, the way your face is constructed, it's just not designed to get punched. | ||
| So look at this right here. | ||
| That could have easily killed him. | ||
| That would have dropped me. | ||
| Yeah, a good shot. | ||
| I mean, he's got good defense, though. | ||
| He fought well. | ||
| He did everything well. | ||
| I could be any fighter alive at the press conference. | ||
| But that shit, forget it. | ||
| Yeah, it is a real fight. | ||
| They're showing in slow motion. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Fighting's hard. | ||
| It's hard not to look sloppy. | ||
| It's hard to get to a point where you're looking like Andre Berto or Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| It takes a long fucking time to develop that kind of timing and poise and movement. | ||
| A lifetime. | ||
| Yeah, forever. | ||
| What he did, though, is it shows character that he took that chance. | ||
| That's a rare person. | ||
| When my kid was young, my youngest son, he got really into boxing. | ||
| He used to take him down the wild card in Hollywood. | ||
| We were in LA. And he trained with Justin Juco and shit like that. | ||
| Juco was a great trainer because he'd make everything fun for my son. | ||
| And my son got really into it. | ||
| And one day, he was young, he was like, I want to spar somebody. | ||
| So they put him in the ring with this top amateur contender. | ||
| Little guy, but You know, he was nice with it. | ||
| And my son in his little child talk was like, I'm going to fuck this guy up. | ||
| I'm like, no, you're not. | ||
| They got in there and, you know, he did all right. | ||
| But the gym got real amped. | ||
| And I remember one of the fighters came over to me and was like, this thing your son has, you can't train that. | ||
| You're either this way or you're not. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He liked it. | ||
| This tenacity he had. | ||
| So I always thought about that. | ||
| You can't train that. | ||
| You're either this way or you're not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, some people, they can get better at it. | ||
| You can get better at tenacity. | ||
| You can get better at mental strength. | ||
| It's not totally innate. | ||
| Some people are just born with it, though. | ||
| Some people are ferocious from the jump. | ||
| Where did you fall in that spectrum? | ||
| I don't remember, because it took so long ago. | ||
| But I always had... | ||
| I always had unusual power because I have a weird frame. | ||
| Like I have very large hands for my body and I have wide shoulders and I can generate a lot of force. | ||
| And so the problem with that is I would load up and it took me a long time. | ||
| What do you mean load up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry. | |
| I would try to knock people out all the time. | ||
| I can't imagine. | ||
| Taekwondo tournaments, most of the fights are won by points. | ||
| They're won by decision. | ||
| I won most of my fights by knockout. | ||
| A lot of them by knockout. | ||
| Maybe not most of them, but I was always trying to knock someone unconscious. | ||
| What does it feel like to knock somebody? | ||
| Is it satisfying? | ||
| Does it scare you at all? | ||
| It's shocking and it doesn't feel good. | ||
| It never feels like great. | ||
| I would pretend it felt great. | ||
| I'd be like, yeah! | ||
| But meanwhile, I was like, what the fuck? | ||
| Part of me would be like, what the fuck? | ||
| It's always felt weird. | ||
| There was one time that I never recovered from. | ||
| When I was 19 years old, I fought in Anaheim, California. | ||
| Flew out here to fight in the Nationals. | ||
| Won my first fight. | ||
| Then I won my second fight. | ||
| I was fighting this kid. | ||
| And I was there with just me and my friend Junkzik. | ||
| He was coaching me. | ||
| He was cornering me. | ||
| And this guy, they had their whole team with them. | ||
| And there was all these people in the stands that were... | ||
| I remember saying, come on, Johnny. | ||
| Get him, Johnny. | ||
| Get him, Johnny. | ||
| And I knew this dude was just a little slow, and he was doing some things, and I was seeing some openings, and I hit him harder than I've ever hit anybody in my life. | ||
| I hit him with a wheel kick. | ||
| I hit him so hard, I was limping for a couple days afterwards because my heel hurt from hitting his head. | ||
| And I flatlined him. | ||
| He face-planted, he started snoring, and he never got up. | ||
| They carried him off in a stretcher. | ||
| He was unconscious for half an hour. | ||
| And they eventually carried him off, put him in a stretcher, brought him to the hospital. | ||
| But he literally never stood up and walked around. | ||
| That's scary. | ||
| It scared the shit out of me. | ||
| And you liked the dude? | ||
| I didn't know the dude. | ||
| He was from Chicago. | ||
| I was from Boston. | ||
| And we just met in California. | ||
| That's what's weird about boxing. | ||
| Beating somebody up that you're not angry at is a wild thing to think about. | ||
| It is wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They do it all the time. | ||
| A lot of MMA fighters, they're good friends. | ||
| A lot of them train together, and then they go and they fight. | ||
| But I went back to my instructor, and my instructor was a hard man. | ||
| He was a Korean dude who had been taught by General Choi Young-yi, who's the original founder of Taekwondo, who used to train troops in Vietnam. | ||
| And this guy was hard. | ||
| And when I went back and told Mr. Kim, I said, you know, we were talking about the tournament. | ||
| He goes, I heard you had a really good knockout. | ||
| And I said, it was very scary. | ||
| I go, made me nervous. | ||
| I go, because he never got up. | ||
| I mean, I thought he was dead. | ||
| And he goes, Sometimes they die. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then he walked away. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then I was like, oh shit, they is me. | ||
| How old were you then? | ||
| 19. Jeez. | ||
| And that was the decline of my taekwondo career from that moment on. | ||
| My fighting career, I fought for a couple more years, but I lost a lot of my enthusiasm with that one fight. | ||
| Did the fighting and the stand-up overlap? | ||
| They overlapped for three kickboxing fights. | ||
| I had three kickboxing fights while I was doing comedy, and I wasn't committing 100% to either one of them. | ||
| I was half in with both, and then I realized I couldn't do it anymore. | ||
| And I actually got told by a dude who was an open-miker. | ||
| He actually, like, said something that was so true I couldn't even argue with him. | ||
| He goes, yeah, he goes, you started out pretty funny. | ||
| He goes, but you lost steam somewhere along the line. | ||
| And I remember looking at him going, fuck, he's right. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| In what context did he say this? | ||
| Talking about comedy, like who's getting good, who's getting bad. | ||
| We were all like a year in, you know? | ||
| We were all struggling. | ||
| And we were sitting around talking about, oh, this guy's really funny and that guy's really funny. | ||
| He's like, yeah, you started out pretty good, but it seemed like you lost steam. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He wasn't even being mean to me. | ||
| He was just being honest. | ||
| What was he seeing? | ||
| I just wasn't as into it because I was still fighting. | ||
| I was still doing both things. | ||
| And I was still teaching. | ||
| I was still teaching at Boston University. | ||
| I taught a course. | ||
| So you started stand-up in Boston. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a weird circuit. | ||
| It was a good circuit. | ||
| It's a great circuit. | ||
| It's an anomaly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was a good place because they have no tolerance for bullshit. | ||
| There's no dilly-dallying up there. | ||
| They want punchline, set up punchline, set up punchline, bang, bang, bang. | ||
| They want entertainment. | ||
| That Don Gavin shit. | ||
| Don't be late. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Don Gavin, Lenny Clark, Steve Sweeney. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I remember when I was a kid, I used to catch a train up to Boston and work out with these kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was the first circuit I'd ever seen guys making like six figures and never leaving their city. | ||
| It trapped them. | ||
| They would go to bars and shit and you'd think they played for the Celtics or something, like the town embraced the local comedians. | ||
| Like they were stars in Boston. | ||
| Oh yeah, like nothing else. | ||
| There's no other comparison to any other city that's like that. | ||
| What was the guy you used to drink all the time? | ||
| Teddy Bergeron. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You remember him? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, when he was in it, he was a beast. | ||
| Teddy Bergeron had one Tonight Show set that was so fucking brilliant. | ||
| It was so brilliant. | ||
| And then, apparently, he got fucked up on pills and booze, and they made him stick around. | ||
| But he came back, and he was so fucked up on drugs that it, like, tanked his career. | ||
| So he had this one set that was magic. | ||
| And you watch that set, you're like, my God, that guy might be the best comic alive. | ||
| He was so smooth. | ||
| I remember opening for him. | ||
| He was so smooth. | ||
| He was so good. | ||
| He was so good. | ||
| He was such a smart guy, too, such a good writer. | ||
| But, you know, success and the demons, I mean, that's why one of the things that's very impressive to me about people like you that manage the success, it doesn't change your personality. | ||
| Whatever anxiety comes out of all the pressure and all the people paying attention to what you're doing, You roll. | ||
| You roll with it and you handle it. | ||
| But some people don't. | ||
| That scrutiny, being the object of attention, is crippling for some people. | ||
| I think early in my career, I didn't know how to handle that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I was a kid. | ||
| I was immature. | ||
| It was a weird thing. | ||
| But you still handled it well. | ||
| Even though you didn't know how to handle it, you figured it out. | ||
| Like, you did it. | ||
| It was a struggle, but you never became an asshole. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You never fell apart. | ||
| I think life is too just humiliating of a practice. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No matter how you feel about yourself, you get up in the morning, take that first shit of the day. | ||
| You're a person. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Fingers are like gross. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's true. | |
| Yeah, I mean, the more things that I do that are humiliating or humbling, humbling is probably a better word. | ||
| The more things I do that are humbling, the better it is for me. | ||
| Well, the thing I like about your comedy origin story, like, I was fighting, I was teaching, he said, and I was doing stand-up, but I didn't commit to all of them. | ||
| But now, that sounds like the recipe for everything you do. | ||
| Well, the things I do now, they enhance the other things. | ||
| It's like, if I'm doing a podcast, I think it enhances my stand-up. | ||
| It enhances my perspective. | ||
| The more people I can talk to, the more ideas I can take in, more conversations I can have with people. | ||
| I get a better understanding of people. | ||
| Like, I'm building a mountain out of layers of paint. | ||
| Like, every day I'm getting a little bit more understanding of people. | ||
| A little bit more understanding of myself. | ||
| You got a broad base, man. | ||
| Like, you know, I see you talking to people like Malcolm Gladwell. | ||
| I read his books. | ||
| It would intimidate me to just chop it up with him. | ||
| He's a good dude. | ||
| He's easy to talk to. | ||
| He seems like a good dude. | ||
| I don't know him at all. | ||
| But he's a brilliant dude. | ||
| You are a brilliant dude. | ||
| But it's just weird. | ||
| It's weird that I know you. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's just so strange. | ||
| I think back when we were all so young, nobody knew if we were going to make it, not make it, this, that, or the other. | ||
| And what our careers evolved into. | ||
| And I use the word evolved very specifically in your case because none of it was obvious. | ||
| No. | ||
| The MMA thing, it's not obvious. | ||
| This podcast is not obvious. | ||
| And these things were what made you, you know, a multi-million dollar player. | ||
| I mean, sitcoms, that's like the obvious shit. | ||
| We all did that shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you found your lane. | ||
| And it's a really hard thing to do. | ||
| I've just been lucky that I've always listened to my own instincts in terms of like, what do I enjoy doing? | ||
| Whether or not it's a good career move or not, I enjoy doing it. | ||
| Like, the early days, MMA wasn't a good career move at all. | ||
| Like, the people that I was working with on news radio, they would talk to me about it like I was doing porn. | ||
| They were like, why are you doing this? | ||
| You're going to Alabama to do some cage fighting commentary? | ||
| Like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Back then I wasn't even doing commentary. | ||
| I was interviewing fighters. | ||
| I was just interviewing them. | ||
| I was the guy who would interview the fighters after the fight was over. | ||
| Would you call fights? | ||
| No, I didn't call fights until 2001. That was the first time I called a fight. | ||
| 1997, I was just the interviewer. | ||
| I did it for a couple years, and I enjoyed it, but it was just fun to be there. | ||
| It was cool. | ||
| I would just fly into these weird places like Dothan, Alabama. | ||
| Weird little spots you'd obviously never go to otherwise. | ||
| And that MMA thing was just kind of starting out. | ||
| I remember I started seeing the Horace Gracie fights and shit like that in the early 90s. | ||
| They started doing it. | ||
| Shamrock was another place to watch. | ||
| Yep, 93 is when it started. | ||
| I came around in 97, so I did it in 97 and 98. And then I couldn't do it anymore. | ||
| It was costing me money. | ||
| I could make more money doing a club for a weekend, a comedy club, than I could. | ||
| Doing these gigs and then, you know, I just decided I'm just gonna stay a fan. | ||
| Just watch it from afar. | ||
| I did it. | ||
| I did the little interview thing. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| And then the UFC was purchased by the Fertittas and Dana White and I became friends because I was on Fear Factor and he gave me free tickets to come to the fights. | ||
| That's when no celebrities really knew what it was and so if you could get a celebrity to sit up in front row and Then they would interview me, and I knew so much about fighting. | ||
| I started asking him questions about guys that are fighting in Japan. | ||
| And then Dana and I went out to dinner, and he was like, why don't you do commentary? | ||
| And I said, man, I don't want to do commentary. | ||
| I want to get drunk and watch fights. | ||
| Like, come on, man. | ||
| Damn, props to Dana White, though. | ||
| That's a good move. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He saw me on the Keenan Ivory Way-In show, too, making fun of Steven Seagal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We were talking about martial arts and Dana thought it was hilarious. | ||
| And then we started talking about commentary and then he talked me into doing one. | ||
| I did like the first 15 of them I did for free. | ||
| I did it for a while, like more than a year, like maybe two years I did it for no money. | ||
| I just got free tickets. | ||
| He just flew me out. | ||
| It's that, bro. | ||
| You know, these paths in life, they reveal themselves. | ||
| And this goes back to what we were saying earlier. | ||
| If you look at things through the lens of money or monetary gain, you'll miss so much. | ||
| You miss so much. | ||
| This thing about just following a passion, having a good dinner with somebody, yeah, I'll do it. | ||
| That's usually how the greatest things happen. | ||
| When I did Stars Point, I don't do movies. | ||
| I'm so glad I did it. | ||
| And it was just because I liked Bradley Cooper. | ||
| I kept meeting him at parties. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| And I just liked the guy. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, that's being able to just do what you enjoy doing. | ||
| That's the real success of life. | ||
| Because if you're making a lot of money but you hate what you're doing, like when I was doing Fear Factor, I didn't enjoy the job. | ||
| I enjoyed the people I was working with. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| They were a good group of people. | ||
| We had a lot of fun. | ||
| We had a lot of laughs. | ||
| But it wasn't what I wanted to do. | ||
| I was doing it for money. | ||
| But it gave me... | ||
| The good thing was it gave me fuck you money. | ||
| So it gave me money where I had money squirreled away. | ||
| I was like, ooh, I can relax now. | ||
| Now I'll just do what I want to do. | ||
| And what I wanted to do was do this stupid podcast. | ||
| And then do these MMA shows. | ||
| Go and do commentary. | ||
| And I did all that shit. | ||
| Again, it was all just because I enjoyed it. | ||
| And then that became my life. | ||
| My life became... | ||
| Only things I enjoy. | ||
| So now, whether it's podcast, or whether it's stand-up, or whether it's commentary, it's just I enjoy it. | ||
| I look forward to it. | ||
| I had a year like that, right, maybe like a year before I did Chappelle's Show. | ||
| It was just like I was saving up to take a chance. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when it came time to do Chappelle's Show, you know, the money was terrible, but I'd saved up. | ||
| I could take the shot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I could come off the road and take a real shot. | ||
| And it made all the difference in the world. | ||
| When you take a chance, it's such a weird feeling, taking a chance, doing something, even just moving here. | ||
| It's so exciting. | ||
| So exciting when you don't know how it's going to play out. | ||
| It's so nerve-wracking. | ||
| It gets you. | ||
| You're like, fuck, is this the right move? | ||
| Maybe I should just play it safe and stay where I am. | ||
| I mean, LA's got to open back up eventually. | ||
| No, this was a great move. | ||
| I can't imagine what you saved in taxes. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a lot, though. | ||
| It's gotta be. | ||
| 13% is what California state taxes are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| I'm not even good at math, and I know that's $13. | ||
| It's gonna get worse, too, man. | ||
| It's gonna get worse. | ||
| What? | ||
| Because they're jacking the taxes up. | ||
| They're trying. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're jacking them up in New York. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Yeah, they're fine. | ||
| Listen, if I felt like it fixed things, I would be happy. | ||
| It's that. | ||
| You know, I was with Jon Stewart. | ||
| We were in Copenhagen. | ||
| And, you know, socialized country. | ||
| And Jon Stewart said to me something. | ||
| He said, you know the difference between a taxpayer here and a taxpayer in America? | ||
| He said, these people think they get something for their money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think socialism or something like that only works in homogenized countries. | ||
| Like, everyone in China is Chinese. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a lot of white people in Copenhagen, I think. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I think in America, it's the them or the they of it all that fucks us up. | ||
| It's also small populations, right? | ||
| It's like one of the things I was saying about Austin. | ||
| One of the ways Austin works is there's only a million people in the city. | ||
| And then there's another million on the outskirts. | ||
| That's not a lot of people. | ||
| That's not a lot of people. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why it works. | ||
| It's like people are valuable. | ||
| They're not a problem. | ||
| Even when you're in traffic, it's like five minutes. | ||
| Like, oh my god, so much traffic. | ||
| Took you an extra five minutes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| No, not coming from LA. Nothing is traffic after LA. Maybe Atlanta. | ||
| Yeah, Atlanta's rough. | ||
| Chicago's rough. | ||
| I remember doing radio in Chicago. | ||
| I was doing the Schaumburg Improv, and you do radio in the city, and then you got to go back out to Schaumburg, and you're like, holy shit, this is far. | ||
| There's so much traffic. | ||
| There's so many people. | ||
| Big cities, that's the rub on big cities is that people, they don't value each other as much. | ||
| When you're in a place like Copenhagen or any of these, whether it's Denmark, these places are not that big. | ||
| They're big enough, but they're not that big. | ||
| The United States is so big. | ||
| It's so big. | ||
| It's so big and it's so different. | ||
| There's so much going on. | ||
| So many cities. | ||
| Everywhere is different. | ||
| So many climates. | ||
| 350, whatever the fuck it is, million people. | ||
| Yeah, but if you see an American when you're outside of America, you know they're one of us. | ||
| A lot of times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of times. | ||
| The lines are getting blurry now, though. | ||
| How do you mean? | ||
| You might think someone's American, you talk to them, like, hello, mate. | ||
| Oh, look at you, motherfucker, with your backwards baseball head on. | ||
| Oh, that is true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I play overseas a lot now. | ||
| And I used to do it when I was a kid. | ||
| It was more challenging. | ||
| This internet makes all the crowds kind of the same. | ||
| They know every reference. | ||
| And American culture is still a marquee culture. | ||
| You know, they know so much about our political lives. | ||
| They know so much about our cultural lives. | ||
| So much more than we would know about them going over there. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And on stage, like, I was doing a show in Tokyo. | ||
| I'd never worked in Tokyo before. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| If I took a picture from the stage and asked you where I was, you'd think I was playing San Francisco. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| It was interesting. | ||
| Yeah, some of the people who came didn't even speak English. | ||
| They just wanted to see the spectacle of... | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Because they had heard of me. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That must be wild. | ||
| It's Netflix, man. | ||
| Like, look, you get out in that world, Joe, you're famous everywhere. | ||
| You've never been to these places, but when you get there, they're going to know you. | ||
| Or, there's a thing that happened to me years ago in London where I was in a restaurant and I was kind of waiting for the table and when the lady, she asked me my name. | ||
| She said, what's your name? | ||
| I go, David. | ||
| She goes, well, this is David on the list. | ||
| What's your last name? | ||
| I go, Chappelle. | ||
| And she looks up. | ||
| And I look around and everyone's kind of looking. | ||
| I could tell they had heard of me, but they didn't know that that was me. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right. | ||
| It was that kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This was after I quit the show, but not long after, like 05, 06. What did you do for those 10 years? | ||
| A lot of shit. | ||
| I learned a lot. | ||
| I mean, but it was a humble existence. | ||
| You know, I had had young children, and I was raising my kids. | ||
| I was living a suburban life. | ||
| And then every once in a while, I get this feeling like I'm the funniest guy. | ||
| God, I gotta get out there. | ||
| And I would fly to Denver, do a week in Denver or something. | ||
| And that's when he would read, I was doing these six-hour shows. | ||
| I'd perform like I was desperate for it. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And at one point, I had done one of these big comedy tours that Live Nation put together, that Oddball tour. | ||
| And I did alright. | ||
| I had a good run. | ||
| I wiped out in Hartford. | ||
| And that was all over the internet. | ||
| That was the first time that thing had happened to me. | ||
| But for the most part, the tour went good. | ||
| But it was a tough tour for me. | ||
| Because it was a long show. | ||
| I had to close it. | ||
| You know, my chops weren't as tight as they normally were. | ||
| But I didn't suck by any means. | ||
| But, you know, it could have been better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Humbling. | |
| It was humbling. | ||
| But it made me want to go back. | ||
| And the shows were like, every show was like 20,000 seats. | ||
| There were like all these... | ||
| What year was this around? | ||
| Shit. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| Obama was president, maybe. | ||
| I don't know, 8, 9, 10. But you were famous for just showing up places. | ||
| You would just fly into places. | ||
| That's the one. | ||
| That's when I started. | ||
| In the summer, I started riding motorcycles, which is very uncharacteristically. | ||
| But I loved it. | ||
| I said, I'm going to ride my bike across country. | ||
| And I did. | ||
| I cheated. | ||
| I had a tour bus with me. | ||
| It was a trailer, so if it rained or something, or if I just wanted to bail, I could. | ||
| But I rode across the country, and I'd never seen America like that. | ||
| We talk about how big it is and expansive. | ||
| Man, I saw all the little pockets. | ||
| On a bike, you really feel the environment, you see things. | ||
| And I would. | ||
| I'd stop and play. | ||
| One of my favorite birthdays was here in Austin. | ||
| I'd never been to Austin really, and I pulled up on 6th Street. | ||
| I'd been to Austin, but I'd never seen Austin. | ||
| Pulled up on 6th Street. | ||
| It was my birthday. | ||
| I was riding with the guy. | ||
| He's like, what do you want to do for your birthday? | ||
| And at that time, I wasn't drinking or smoking or anything. | ||
| I said, I want to do stand-up. | ||
| And I found a bar. | ||
| It was right around closing. | ||
| And I saw the DJ packing up, and I said, can I use your microphone? | ||
| And he recognized me, so he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I went up there, and I just started talking shit. | ||
| You know, but it was just like, you know, teasing the bar staff as they're cleaning up, talking to patrons, you know, get home fast, buddy, and all that shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And people laughing. | ||
| It was like doing, they used to do street comedy in New York. | ||
| It kind of reminded me of that, like building a crowd. | ||
| And in a while, people stopped and listened. | ||
| Now, I'm not a tech-savvy dude. | ||
| Twitter had come out. | ||
| And I guess people had started tweeting like, yo, this is crazy. | ||
| Dave Chappelle's just in here ranting. | ||
| Man, it might have took like an hour. | ||
| That place was packed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I must have stayed on stage three or four hours. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And, you know, they closed the door. | ||
| They locked the door because it was after hours. | ||
| And I was in there killing it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Best birthday I ever had. | ||
| One of the best birthdays I ever had. | ||
| Sometime around when I turned 40, I just decided that I'm gonna have fun. | ||
| You know, like right now, you know, this is a weird thing to talk about, but after DMX passed and Black Rob, you know, now far more often people from my peer group pass away. | ||
| And it just makes me feel like, it's not a midlife crisis, it's almost the opposite of that. | ||
| It's like, look, I know I don't get to stay here forever. | ||
| My time is limited and precious and I don't take any of these things for granted. | ||
| I don't take this money for granted, this platform, and I'm not talking about the fame platform, I'm talking about comedy. | ||
| This genre, like, this genre It's been so good for me, my social life, the people that I've met, the friendships that I've had, some that I've lost along the way, these memories we make, you know, As the years go on, I'm like, what a special, special way to live your life and to see the world. | ||
| It's like when we did those dates, where were we? | ||
| In Seattle and Utah, was it? | ||
| Salt Lake City? | ||
| And one of those nights, there was a massacre in Dayton. | ||
| It's not far from where I live. | ||
| People where I live hang out in Dayton. | ||
| Was that the night we were there? | ||
| We were together when that happened. | ||
| That same night, the guy that owned one of those comedy clubs in New York was murdered, too. | ||
| It was like a really dark night. | ||
| And I found all this out right before I was going on. | ||
| You didn't know. | ||
| You were already on stage as this news was unfolding. | ||
| I'm sure you got an earful when you got off. | ||
| But I was like phew. | ||
| You know during the run we would go places and I'd see flags at half staff and I'm like oh shit that's for like my city. | ||
| It really hit home. | ||
| And the best part of that experience was being with comedians. | ||
| If anything bad ever happens comedians are who you want to be with. | ||
| You know, 9-11, I was in a room full of comedians because I had to, you know, I was staying on West Broadway and Canal Street, which is not far from the Trade Center, but Canal Street, I'm on the north side of the street. | ||
| From the south down, the city was evacuated, so I got to stay in my hotel. | ||
| But during the day, we didn't know that. | ||
| I had a new baby, and I ended up going to a comedian's house. | ||
| They lived in Greenwich Village. | ||
| Bunch of comedians were there. | ||
| As bad as that day was, that was the room to be in. | ||
| It's something that these guys and girls have always inspired courage in me and levity in me. | ||
| There's some subtext of comedy that everything's going to be okay. | ||
| I spent the day with Joey Diaz and Ralphie Mae. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| 9-11? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who else would you rather have been with? | ||
| When you think back at the tragedy, I bet you can think of four or five things you laughed at that day. | ||
| Not about the tragedy, but we just laughed. | ||
| We were high as fuck, and we were just freaking out about the fact there's no planes. | ||
| Like, look at this guy, there's no planes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's no planes. | |
| Yeah, it's that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Comedians... | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's funny that this genre is under attack, because to me, this is the everything's gonna be okay genre. | ||
| It's under attack because people have this ability to complain about things now and then people pile on. | ||
| It's a new thing. | ||
| And they realize it's very useful. | ||
| It's a good weapon. | ||
| And if you choose targets, you can take targets out. | ||
| You can go after them. | ||
| And so it becomes a hobby. | ||
| It becomes a hobby like if, you know, if you see a window and you got a rock, You feel like throwing that rock. | ||
| And so a lot of times these targets aren't justified, but you can find a justification. | ||
| You can say, oh, they put these words together in this order, and if you look at it in quotes written down on paper, you go, oh, well, this is ableist, or this is this, or this is that. | ||
| This is something we can attack. | ||
| Let's attack. | ||
| This is transphobic. | ||
| This is homophobic. | ||
| Attack. | ||
| Attack. | ||
| And it becomes, it's a recreation. | ||
| It's recreational outrage. | ||
| It is exactly, you know, the last time I came on your show when Donnell was here, and I fucked up, I looked at the comment section. | ||
| I'll never do that shit again. | ||
| I'll never do that shit again. | ||
| First comment is, somebody said, Dave looks like he stinks. | ||
| Word. | ||
| Word. | ||
| What did I do? | ||
| What did I do to you, bud? | ||
| When RZA was on with Donnell, that was the first thing I said to Donnell after the show. | ||
| I go, hey man, that was fun. | ||
| Don't read the comments. | ||
| Don't read the comments. | ||
| And Donnell just dove right into that comments. | ||
| And he was on a deep spiral of mental illness for several days. | ||
| Yeah, he said, man, I kept saying I interrupt, son. | ||
| Yeah, I heard all about it. | ||
| We was on tour after that. | ||
| He was traumatized. | ||
| He got shook. | ||
| I told them, stay out of there. | ||
| Don't read that shit. | ||
| You're the same person. | ||
| You don't want to be affected by those people. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| No, because they just want to bring you down to their level. | ||
| They're miserable. | ||
| Whoever wrote that comment that said, Dave looks like he stinks, is probably going to watch this and be like, nailed it. | ||
| So congratulations, motherfucker. | ||
| And I can't wait to read your comment about me commenting on your comment. | ||
| You're in the big time, bitch. | ||
| Your mother stinks. | ||
| Comment on that, too. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird thing, comments. | ||
| Comments are a weird thing. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| But like you say, and here's the rub, you can just not read them. | ||
| Or you can just not click on that special that's gonna hurt your feelings. | ||
| At a certain point, you gotta look at this shit like food. | ||
| What are you eating? | ||
| What are you putting in your mind? | ||
| That's what I keep saying about me when people get outraged about my podcast. | ||
| I'm like, well, you don't have to listen to it. | ||
| Like, why are you listening to it, looking for things that are pissing you off? | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| Yeah, it's like listening to someone's ass when they take a shit and be like, ew, you farted. | ||
| What the fuck are you doing in here anyway? | ||
| What's wrong with these people? | ||
| Well, people are looking to get mad. | ||
| There's plenty of things to be authentically mad about. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But those are confusing and frustrating. | ||
| And it takes time, patience, research. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot going on with those. | ||
| Why do that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why do all that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I'm optimistic about the future, but I think because I've never seen these things before, I can't quite call where it's going. | ||
| It's a challenging time, but human beings have always done better than the previous generation. | ||
| Every single generation, if you follow like Steven Pinker's work, From the beginning of time, from recorded history to now, it's the safest time to be alive ever. | ||
| And it's a very clear trend. | ||
| We struggle. | ||
| We have conflict. | ||
| There's ups and downs. | ||
| There's mistakes and there's good decisions. | ||
| But ultimately, things become safer. | ||
| They become better. | ||
| We accept each other more. | ||
| I mean, think about when I was a kid, gay marriage was impossible. | ||
| You couldn't get married if you were gay. | ||
| Whenever they would propose it, people would freak out. | ||
| Now it's nationwide. | ||
| It's like things change. | ||
| Even though there's more violence now than ever before. | ||
| I mean, there's not more violence now than ever before. | ||
| You see it. | ||
| You see violence now more than you ever have before because of social media. | ||
| You could pull up Instagram videos or car accidents. | ||
| Gun fights and crazy shit, but the reality is there's less violence than ever before. | ||
| There's less murder than ever before. | ||
| It's a slow trend. | ||
| And Pinker gets criticized for this because people don't want to hear that because they go, but what about all the injustice? | ||
| What about all the murders? | ||
| What about all the crime? | ||
| There is all that shit. | ||
| There is rape. | ||
| All that stuff is real, but it's way less than ever before in history. | ||
| And I think as time moves on, it'll get even better. | ||
| There'll be hiccups. | ||
| There'll be ups and downs. | ||
| It's not less because people are sick of that behavior. | ||
| It's not like these things happen less often because People had to do things to make these things happen less often. | ||
| It didn't organically just be like, man, that's enough murder for us. | ||
| We had to do some shit. | ||
| People had to do some shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We had to, you know, gay marriage. | ||
| People had to be made aware of how people are struggling. | ||
| One of the great things of that movement was when everyone started coming out of the closet and everyone realized, oh, like five of my best friends are gay and were embarrassed when we were saying this, that, and the other. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you realize you like this person more than you like whatever prejudice you're carrying around. | ||
| These types of actions are what... | ||
| Information. | ||
| Information. | ||
| Information, yeah. | ||
| And as more information gets out about what's avoidable and unavoidable, and the more we get to understand each other, the more we realize we have way more in common than we don't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's... | ||
| As time goes on, I think we're gonna get better. | ||
| I think our culture, our civilization will be improved upon. | ||
| What we have now is a very unique struggle that's never existed before because it's a combination struggle, right? | ||
| It's a virus, a disease, it's fear, it's anxiety, and then economic depression all thrown in together and it scares the fuck out of people. | ||
| Because they're powerless. | ||
| Because all of a sudden, the government comes along and says, you can't work. | ||
| Or your business is not essential. | ||
| Imagine being told you don't have an essential business. | ||
| I was. | ||
| Well, comedians are, yeah, in a way. | ||
| We're not essential. | ||
| Fortunately, podcasts were, for whatever weird reason, an essential business. | ||
| So were liquor stores, which is kind of crazy. | ||
| Well, because your podcast was like a beacon of some semblance of normalcy. | ||
| I didn't look something like Joey, you look good, and the world's going on. | ||
| But there's also something illusory about it. | ||
| Because if they see us on yachts popping bottles while they're going through this thing, they're going to feel like, well, is something wrong with me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of tone-deaf folks out there that didn't get that. | ||
| They're out there taking that photo in front of a private jet with a Gucci bag, smiling. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, hey, hey, this is not the time for that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| This is not the time for flossing. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| But for some people, that's like a part of their image. | ||
| You know, part of what they do. | ||
| Yeah, many people. | ||
| I think in their understanding that that's almost definitively what celebrity is. | ||
| It's like, how am I going to be successful without doing that? | ||
| And they sell something different than, say, you or I might be trying to sell. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| You're not selling that if you're a comic. | ||
| You've got to be careful. | ||
| Nah. | ||
| I'm trying to think. | ||
| Is there a comic that flosses? | ||
| Kevin Hart flosses a little bit. | ||
| Never bothered me though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He's a happy... | ||
| Well, first of all, who the fuck works harder than that guy? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Not me. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| He makes me feel lazy. | ||
| He's always like co-producing some project and... | ||
| Animating some movie and doing a voiceover of this and starring in that and then doing a theater tour. | ||
| And then he's got Jumanji 5 coming out. | ||
| He's always got something happening. | ||
| And he's relentlessly kind. | ||
| And everyone that works with him looks elated and happy. | ||
| He's not a tyrant. | ||
| He's like hanging out with a self-help book or some shit. | ||
| He just makes you feel good. | ||
| He's a powerful, powerful guy. | ||
| It's impossible not to like him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, in fact, in my mind, he's a great case scenario that a good person can do well in life. | ||
| Because there are some cynics that believe that they can't. | ||
| I don't know about any crying behind that fortune. | ||
| You're just a good dude. | ||
| No, he's just a good dude. | ||
| You can be a good person to make it. | ||
| It's just the problem is, like, making it is usually connected to ambition, which is usually connected to aggression. | ||
| It's usually connected to, you know, someone who's like... | ||
| Really, fiercely trying to succeed. | ||
| And a lot of that is usually, in a lot of people's eyes, that's at any cost. | ||
| You know, ruthlessly trying to get through the maze of show business, of life, to succeed. | ||
| And some people, back to incentives, adopt this ruthlessness, thinking, well, that's how things get done. | ||
| If I can't do this, then I'll never make it. | ||
| And that's a myth. | ||
| Sylvester Stallone had a great quote on the acting studio. | ||
| He was talking about Rocky being a metaphor for acting. | ||
| And saying that some of the best actors he knew were so sensitive that they couldn't survive the environment. | ||
| So some of the greatest talent that he witnessed, the masses will never see because they couldn't navigate the rocks as far as commerce is concerned. | ||
| And that was his fight, so to speak. | ||
| Yeah. - Yeah. | ||
| I would imagine that that's... | ||
| I mean, there's actors that are, like, real artists. | ||
| When they're putting together a role, whether it's Denzel Washington or Daniel Day-Lewis or... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There's, like, levels of acting. | ||
| And there's a certain level where they're not, like, just a regular guy trying to be famous. | ||
| They got some thing that they've tuned into. | ||
| They can become... | ||
| Gary Oldman. | ||
| They can become a person. | ||
| Man, Daniel Day-Lewis. | ||
| That motherfucker. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| When he's not working, he's like making shoes and shit. | ||
| He's not on what I call the whole stroll, that red carpet. | ||
| He ain't doing that shit. | ||
| He's a serious actor. | ||
| He's a great artist, and that's why he makes a premium for his work. | ||
| I think he quit acting. | ||
| He said he retired. | ||
| Him playing Abraham Lincoln was one of my favorite things I've ever seen someone do. | ||
| And it's not my favorite movie he's been in. | ||
| But it's a movie about the passing of a bill. | ||
| I can't think of a more boring process than fucking the bureaucracy of passing a bill, no matter what the bill's about. | ||
| But man, something about that performance made me excited about art itself. | ||
| For me, it's the There Will Be Blood. | ||
| It's the fucking greatest movie ever. | ||
| There Will Be Blood is the one. | ||
| That character, it was so many things. | ||
| He was a murderer, he was evil, he was kind, he was ambitious, he was a victim of circumstance, a victim of his environment, and also, you know, kind of a tyrant. | ||
| Yeah, I picture myself as an actor reading that script and just being like, I don't get it. | ||
| Let alone untangling an emotional life for this guy and a rationale for behaving this way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Man, this guy nailed it. | ||
| Yeah, he nailed it. | ||
| But that's when people think of the worst aspects of ambition, they think of that kind of person, that character that he portrayed. | ||
| The worst aspects of it, the dehumanizing aspects of Of ambition. | ||
| Yeah, geez. | ||
| Some dark shit. | ||
| Yeah, dark shit. | ||
| I drink your milkshake. | ||
| Beats a guy dead with a bowling pin and I'm finished. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No spoiler alert, my bad, everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fucking heavy. | ||
| Great, though. | ||
| Yeah, brilliant. | ||
| You know, it's kind of like... | ||
| One of the things I did... | ||
| After I left the shows, I got into boxing. | ||
| I don't know, I used to just go to the fights. | ||
| And part of it was because that era was like Manny Pacquiao was fighting, Mayweather was fighting, Marquez was fighting, all these guys were great fighters. | ||
| And I got this notion that anytime I can be a witness to greatness, I should see it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's like the fast food of greatness. | ||
| Floyd fight, you know that's going to be good. | ||
| A Pacquiao fight, you know what I mean? | ||
| I was there when he got knocked out, like these moments. | ||
| Oh, you were there when Marquez knocked him out? | ||
| Boy, was I. With my Filipino mother-in-law. | ||
| She sang the national anthem and everything. | ||
| thing. | ||
| I was like, sorry. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it was crazy, man. | ||
| That was a crazy punch. | ||
| That was. | ||
| Now, who do you have on Saturday? | ||
| Canelo and Billy Ray Saunders? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Billy Ray Saunders is a problem. | ||
| That guy got good feet. | ||
| He can move. | ||
| He can move, but there's no one in the business harder to hit than Canelo right now. | ||
| He learned something from Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| Man, that was like a Harvard ass-whooping Floyd gave him. | ||
| And it wasn't even like a... | ||
| Yeah, it was a clinic, bro. | ||
| Trouncing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a trouncing. | |
| Yeah, it's a trouncing. | ||
| It wasn't an ass-whooping, but... | ||
| Floyd didn't hit hard enough to really give him a real ass whooping or really hurt him and punish him and have him in real trouble. | ||
| But he boxed him up. | ||
| Boxed him up. | ||
| It was like watching a Globetrotters game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| He was beat handily. | ||
| But then if you watch Canelo, because Floyd was impossible to hit, and I think Canelo thought he was going to be able to hit him. | ||
| And then he realized somewhere in the fight, like, this guy knows everything I'm going to do long before I do it. | ||
| Like, my language, the way I'm speaking with boxing is so slow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's just like... | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's just many steps ahead. | ||
| But then you watch Canelo now, like... | ||
| He's slick. | ||
| He's so slick. | ||
| The Danny Jacobs fight's a great example of that. | ||
| Yeah, that was. | ||
| He's standing right in front of him, just moving the head. | ||
| His head movement's phenomenal. | ||
| And that's not indicative of a classic Mexican boxer. | ||
| No, they come straight at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dying their shield. | ||
| He's not that guy. | ||
| He's so skilled. | ||
| He got the rub. | ||
| That's what we call it. | ||
| When a great fighter fights another great fighter, they learn something. | ||
| You learn something from the higher levels. | ||
| Like when you get beat by a guy, you get that rub. | ||
| You see a lot of times a guy will come out of a fight with a great fight. | ||
| He might have lost, but then the next fight you see like, oh, he recognizes the higher frequencies, the higher RPMs of the real true great ones. | ||
| I think that was a problem in boxing, this idea that people were addicted to undefeated fighters, but there's something to be said in greatness for getting beat up sometimes. | ||
| If you can come back from it with your wits intact and learn the lessons that the ass whooping taught you, you might see something even more special from a guy that got a loss or two on his record. | ||
| Yeah, but there's a fine line. | ||
| There's a type of loss that you never bounce back from, like the Julio Cesar Chavez, Meldrick Taylor loss. | ||
| Meldrick Taylor lost to Chavez. | ||
| He got knocked out with like... | ||
| Richard Steele stopped the fight with like two seconds to go in the last round. | ||
| But Chavez was just getting to him. | ||
| Just getting to him. | ||
| And Meldrick was so fast. | ||
| Meldrick was a part of that team. | ||
| That 76 Olympic gold medalist team. | ||
| Not 76. Was it 84? | ||
| 84 team. | ||
| Where it was like Mark Breland... | ||
| Riddick Bowe. | ||
| Was Riddick Bowe on that team? | ||
| No, Tyrell Biggs. | ||
| Mark Breland, Tyrell Biggs, Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor. | ||
| There were so many great fighters, all gold medalists. | ||
| And Meldrick Taylor was so fast. | ||
| He was so good. | ||
| But Chavez was relentless. | ||
| Julio Cesar Chavez was relentless. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He just would bob and weave and bob and weave and come pop, pop, pop, pop. | |
| And started getting to him, started getting to him. | ||
| And then finally, last round, boom, drops him. | ||
| And Richard Steele looks into Meldrick Taylor's eyes and he waves it off with two seconds to go. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And everybody's like, oh, shit. | ||
| And he never came back from that. | ||
| Never came back from that. | ||
| He fought after that. | ||
| He always looked like Julio Cesar Chavez took a piece of him. | ||
| He never returned 100%. | ||
| I tell you, it's a guilty pleasure fighting, because I see what it does to guys. | ||
| He brought a Riddick Bowe. | ||
| I talked to him once in a fight, and I'm like, man, this guy took some shots. | ||
| Took some shots. | ||
| And I'm not saying this disparagingly. | ||
| No, it's just reality. | ||
| Yeah, it was a tough one, because... | ||
| You know, I think about how much I enjoy watching these fights and then coming face to face with the price that so many paid. | ||
| I saw Terry Norris at a fight once and he was talking to a fan and I was moving on my way to the seat and I heard Terry talking to this guy and I was like, oh no. | ||
| It was bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was bad. | ||
| Muhammad Ali, my hero. | ||
| It's tough to watch. | ||
| Tough to watch. | ||
| And it happens to all of them eventually. | ||
| If they keep going, it happens to all of them. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta hang them gloves up at some point. | ||
| That's what makes Andre Ward so special. | ||
| Andre Ward wins a gold medal in the Olympics, wins two world championships in two different weight classes, retires undefeated, They offer him money to come back. | ||
| He goes, I think I'm better served as a commentator. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| He talks perfect. | ||
| Talks perfect. | ||
| Had him on the podcast. | ||
| Brilliant guy. | ||
| Thoughtful. | ||
| Articulate. | ||
| Smooth. | ||
| Classy. | ||
| One of my prized possessions is some gloves he signed for me. | ||
| I'm a big fan of the Bay Area. | ||
| Before the Warriors were champs, Andre Ward was carrying Oakland. | ||
| He was their champion. | ||
| And he's doing it with one arm. | ||
| You know that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Andre Ward's right shoulder's basically been useless. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Most of his career. | ||
| Yeah, this was when he was, I don't know what kind of contractual disputes he had. | ||
| He had the shoulder surgery. | ||
| He was going through all that. | ||
| And we had a conversation about it. | ||
| I was really, like, inspired meeting him. | ||
| And we had a conversation about exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| Well, he was talking to me. | ||
| You know, we didn't know each other. | ||
| I just happened to meet him. | ||
| Hanging his gloves up. | ||
| It's a crazy thing for a comedian to hear. | ||
| Imagine saying, okay, I'm done with comedy. | ||
| I could quit. | ||
| I could say I quit the limelight. | ||
| I don't know if I could quit doing stand-up in some way, shape, or form. | ||
| I don't know if I could take 30 years off like Eddie. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, Eddie keeps talking about coming back, right? | ||
| But he still hasn't. | ||
| Listen, bro. | ||
| He's funny as fuck. | ||
| As far as a naturally athletic comedian, I don't know that I've ever seen his equal. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're right. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| That speech where he talked about them taking Bill Cosby's Mark Twain prize away. | ||
| I was there when he said that. | ||
| I can remember, too, all the comedians who were there crowding around the monitor because it was the first time he did anything that looked like stand-up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And he was smooth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He stopped doing stand-up in 87. It's the year I started. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| This entire time. | ||
| And so if he does come back, I'd be the first person to buy a ticket. | ||
| I would watch a bad Eddie Murphy show. | ||
| If he was really trying to do a thing, before I would go see one of my own. | ||
| I remember we were, I forget what club in New York, we were talking, and Chris Rock was talking about how good Cosby was. | ||
| He went to see Cosby. | ||
| At the Apollo. | ||
| I've heard his story. | ||
| And Bill Burr and I were planning on seeing Cosby. | ||
| We were trying to figure out where we should go. | ||
| I'll tell you where, the correctional facility in Pennsylvania, that's where he's at. | ||
| As we speak. | ||
| It was before all that shit happened. | ||
| We were thinking about going to see him somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, like, I look at these kids coming up, and there's things that they do much better than we did. | ||
| They can all produce. | ||
| They can all generate their own. | ||
| They make heat out of nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In the 90s, you go to the fucking comedian's parking lot at the comedy store. | ||
| That shit used to be filled with shitty cars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now you'll see a guy you never even heard of getting to the hottest whip. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's that now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| These guys look like straight-up contest winners. | ||
| Like, who the fuck is this guy? | ||
| But they're killing it. | ||
| Internet money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What's too bad about it is we're from a process of refinement that doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The road when you're anonymous. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The road when you're anonymous. | ||
| Just being on the strip or in a smoky nightclub. | ||
| Well, not smoky. | ||
| No one smokes anymore. | ||
| But then being in one of those nightclubs. | ||
| That's a lot to miss. | ||
| Yeah, the grind, the long grind of developing a real act. | ||
| And to do it also where there's no cell phones, there's no distractions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're competing with too much, and that's too bad for them. | ||
| But I don't fault them for it. | ||
| I'm impressed that these kids... | ||
| Made a new way. | ||
| But I like the way we do it. | ||
| There's a new way that they're doing where one of the things that showed a lot of people's ability to improvise and to change was during COVID, a lot of people started doing things online. | ||
| And like Andrew Schultz is the best example, I think. | ||
| He started doing those things like turn your phone sideways and those long rants like 10-15 minute rants with photographs and punchline after punchline after punchline and then they did a whole Netflix special about it like he did a series of Netflix pieces on it And what he did was, he said, okay, I can't do stand-up, but this isn't stand-up, so I shouldn't do stand-up like this because there's no audience. | ||
| And he figured it out. | ||
| He's like, the key to this is you've got to hit it fast. | ||
| The punchlines have to come one after the other. | ||
| It's got to be fast-paced and with images. | ||
| So he would use all these visuals while he was hitting punchline after punchline. | ||
| He figured out a new way to do comedy. | ||
| He figured out a way to do internet, Instagram, 10-minute comedy. | ||
| Well, okay, but that's not, like you say, that's not stand-up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Like, this thing that you're describing, God bless him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not what I do. | ||
| Yeah, it's different. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| It's different than the way he does stand-up, which is interesting, because his stand-up is slower. | ||
| He holds laughs. | ||
| He holds pause. | ||
| He laughs at shit. | ||
| He fucks around. | ||
| He works a crowd a lot. | ||
| His stand-up is loose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He has fun. | ||
| He's comfortable up there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But these little clips that he does on Instagram are rapid fire. | ||
| Bang, bang, bang. | ||
| And he works with a series of writers. | ||
| They all work together. | ||
| They put these things together. | ||
| They work it out, man. | ||
| By the time it's done, I mean, it is a polished machine. | ||
| But he used that time and innovated. | ||
| That's clever. | ||
| I'm not interested in it because, no disrespect to him, I like happening in real life. | ||
| Even during COVID, the fact that we found a way to get in front of audiences again meant the world to me. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| Yeah, it's a different thing. | ||
| I could throw a slideshow and the shit if I wanted to, but that crowd's not there. | ||
| What's the fucking point for me? | ||
| I know what you mean, but for him, he's coming up still. | ||
| You know, you'd already made it. | ||
| You just wanted to get back in there. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a whole different ball of wax. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| That thing, that evolution he was able to make, I'm like the old guy who has that hot outfit from the 70s. | ||
| Fashion going without me. | ||
| I look fine. | ||
| I'm that. | ||
| I'm good with what I do. | ||
| Those shows we did at Stubbed felt real special. | ||
| It might not ever be that special again, because it was hard. | ||
| It was hard to do, and it was weird, and it was the fact that you could do a show in a pandemic, like a real legitimate pandemic. | ||
| And what it did for the people who were able to come. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And for the comedians who were able to participate. | ||
| We all felt better. | ||
| We felt a lot better. | ||
| We had some wild fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wild fun. | ||
| Life might be okay. | ||
| Just to laugh around other people during a shit show of a circumstance. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| I wish that we could have done a more diverse array of shows, but we were locked into the circumstances we were locked in. | ||
| We tested everybody. | ||
| Everyone who bought a ticket got a COVID test, free mask. | ||
| And as a comedian, it was a new experience. | ||
| Being in a room full of people, or whatever that venue was, full of people that just realized that they don't have the dreaded coronavirus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're at a show, and the music's playing, and comedians they recognize come on the stage. | ||
| It was like pure joy in there. | ||
| No matter what we said, at a certain point, we were all happy to be there. | ||
| Comedians didn't take You do a million sets, you start thinking it's just another night at the office. | ||
| But every night at the office could have been the last night at the office. | ||
| Yeah, that was the thing about it, too. | ||
| It's like you're never going to have another day like that or another series of nights like that where there's a first real pandemic of our lifetime where things are shut down, but yet we do have this weird opportunity to do shows. | ||
| So they felt electric. | ||
| They really did. | ||
| They felt electric. | ||
| Those shows that we did will remain etched in my mind. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| That was special. | ||
| The fact that, you know... | ||
| And also, man, no gas to nothing, but the fact that you're as successful as you are at all these things, you're wildly famous, you're also very unaffected, but you got nervous before your first set. | ||
| I respected that. | ||
| I said, okay, see, this guy makes all this money, still cares. | ||
| It's that. | ||
| You see some guys, you can see that you're a fighter. | ||
| Sometimes the fight gets out of them. | ||
| Yeah, they get soft. | ||
| Your belly gets full. | ||
| You don't feel like going as hard as you used to. | ||
| Or you might start worrying about what they say in the press and all that shit. | ||
| None of that shit ever got to you, bro. | ||
| You was going hard in the paint. | ||
| It was fun to watch. | ||
| I'm like, yo, you're going hard in the paint, bro. | ||
| But it was fun, man. | ||
| And the spirit that I love about the genre was That's right. | ||
| I know guys that you know, and they're famous, but they struggle with this thing. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| And they stop coming around, and I miss their presence and their voices. | ||
| And a lot of these young comedians, this process of refinement is gone because they don't have these guys to look to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because, you know, they're making money, and I don't want to upset anybody. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Kids are in college or whatever it's gonna be. | ||
| They don't want to ruin what they already put down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They laid down some nice roots. | ||
| They got a good thing going on. | ||
| They don't want to fuck it up. | ||
| Would you ever leave the limelight? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Does it bother you, the limelight? | ||
| You don't live in a way where... | ||
| I don't do limelight things. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, I don't go to parties. | ||
| You gotta try some of this shit out, bro. | ||
| It's not bad. | ||
| You gotta try some... | ||
| I mean, look, you don't have to do it all the time. | ||
| Once and again. | ||
| Once and again. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I have needs, and my needs are like exercise, keep my mind straight, all those needs, those have to be fulfilled. | ||
| They have to be filled for mental clarity. | ||
| If I don't do that, I'll lose my way. | ||
| You also have a lot of access to shit. | ||
| Who were you talking to yesterday? | ||
| Yesterday was David Holthouse, who's a documentary filmmaker. | ||
| He's a journalist. | ||
| Yeah, every day you talk to some kind of jogger nut in some field. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Elon Musk or Malcolm Gladwell. | ||
| What do you think about this shit? | ||
| Elon's going... | ||
| It's puzzling. | ||
| No one is woke enough. | ||
| They can't appreciate the fact that you're dealing with literally one of the most brilliant men that's ever lived, who's gonna come do your show. | ||
| You're talking about a guy who simultaneously runs multiple World-changing businesses, whether it's Tesla, whether it's SpaceX, whether it's the boring companies making tunnels underneath the fucking Earth. | ||
| He's putting satellites into space to put high-speed Internet around the world. | ||
| He's doing all these things simultaneously. | ||
| But can he write a monologue is what we're going to find out. | ||
| He's not funny. | ||
| He's a brilliant guy. | ||
| He could probably do anything if he set his mind to it, but the fact that they've decided somehow that he's problematic, like, it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I mean, yeah, but no one's really saying what. | ||
| Is it just because he's rich? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| It doesn't matter anymore. | ||
| They just decide. | ||
| Like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| And everybody's like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| Why him? | ||
| So there was no obvious catalyst for this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay, I was just curious. | ||
| There was some people that felt like he dismissed COVID's danger at one point in time. | ||
| They didn't like him because of that. | ||
| But he did it just because he's intelligent. | ||
| Because his perspective was, he's a reductionist, or I should say, like, his perspective on it was like looking at the numbers and looking at what it is, instead of looking at the emotional impact of people losing loved ones. | ||
| So sometimes someone who's like a genius might say something that appears to be... | ||
| Appears to be insensitive. | ||
| I don't think he's insensitive. | ||
| I think he was just looking at it in terms of what is the odds that you're going to die and saying that children are essentially immune. | ||
| He was saying things that a lot of people felt were insensitive. | ||
| But first of all, A, it was a long time ago. | ||
| And B, he was just explaining his perspective on the disease. | ||
| And he wasn't as fearful as they thought he should be. | ||
| And then, you know, he came to our shows and his pictures of all of us hanging out maskless. | ||
| And then people got COVID afterwards. | ||
| A lot of people thought that it was his girlfriend that gave us COVID. By the way, he and she were very incredibly kind. | ||
| Super nice. | ||
| Unaffected. | ||
| I teased him about being the richest man in the world. | ||
| He took it with good humor. | ||
| And what's funny is I had hung out with him years ago after I quit Chappelle's show. | ||
| When I was on that tour that I was telling you about that was a tough one, we hung out on a tour bus, and he says to me that night when we was all together here in Austin, he goes, I met you before. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| I have no recollection. | ||
| And he looked kind of hurt. | ||
| It was a long time ago. | ||
| It was like two, three companies ago. | ||
| I just thought it was funny that he was the richest man in the world. | ||
| I think these, whether the people that are complaining that he's going to be on Saturday Night Live, I think what's going on now is they want someone to be 100% compliant to whatever ideology they're a part of. | ||
| And any deviation of that is problematic. | ||
| Whether it's because they think, like I saw an article that said Elon Musk donated $150 million to some charity and they called him a cheapskate. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| How hilarious is that? | ||
| We'll wait until they see when I'm a billionaire. | ||
| Get ready for this cheapskate. | ||
| No, my brother. | ||
| But it was such a shitty article. | ||
| It's just a poorly written knucklehead article. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, like you say, no one can be woke enough. | ||
| I'm torn because I like a warrior for a good cause, but I'm really into tactics. | ||
| You're not going to nag people into behaving in a way that's... | ||
| In fact, if... | ||
| If you continue with this tone, even if you're right, you'll be very hard to hear. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| It's just, I don't mean, maybe it was the COVID thing, like I'm saying. | ||
| But again, if I think back on his statements, I don't think they were particularly insensitive. | ||
| I think they were just, you know, it was more of like a factual bluntness to the way he discusses things. | ||
| Because he's a numbers guy. | ||
| He looks at things in terms of equations. | ||
| I mean, he's trying to put people on Mars. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I remember seeing him on your show once, just like on one of these YouTube clips. | ||
| But I dug the clip. | ||
| It was just one sound bite. | ||
| He said, I have so much in my mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You remember this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I asked him, I'm like, what's it like to be you? | ||
| Like, what's it like to just think? | ||
| He goes, you wouldn't want to be me. | ||
| It wasn't bragging. | ||
| He's being honest. | ||
| You wouldn't want this. | ||
| His brain is like a hurricane. | ||
| You could see it while he's sitting there. | ||
| He's trying to sit here and just have a conversation with you. | ||
| He's probably going over fucking equations and thinking about concepts and new ideas and plotting things. | ||
| I remember talking to somebody once, I'm not going to say who, but they go, more than half the people on earth live on a dollar a day, and at least half of them are happy. | ||
| He says, I know 20 billionaires, and all of them are miserable. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| This is reminiscent of a thing my father used to tell me about, just the nature of money and what he wants your life to be about. | ||
| Now, I mean, I'm a lucky guy. | ||
| I've met some billionaires. | ||
| I don't know who's brimming with having this. | ||
| Elon seemed like he had a good time that night. | ||
| Kanye, sometimes he's having a great time. | ||
| But I don't know when they're having fun if it's the money that's doing it. | ||
| No, it's probably not. | ||
| The money gives you a certain amount of freedom to do whatever you want to do, but it also comes with so much pressure, so much responsibility, and so much scrutiny. | ||
| Think about how many people are looking at every single thing that Elon does. | ||
| Like, this Saturday Night Live thing is a perfect example. | ||
| They've just decided that it's not good that he's on Saturday Night Live. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Maybe there is a specific thing they're upset about, but I haven't heard it. | ||
| I'm literally asking. | ||
| I'm not indicting the cast members saying that I'm fond of all of them, but this one puzzles me. | ||
| What I'm talking about, what I'm saying, I see people online going, what the fuck is this? | ||
| It's not even people that were the cast members that were saying that. | ||
| It's just folks online that were upset. | ||
| I'm like, I don't get it. | ||
| Why are you upset? | ||
| What do you think is saying it for Elon? | ||
| If I was the richest man in the world, Would I do Saturday Night Live? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I might, just because I love comedy so much, but what do you think? | ||
| I guess he loves comedy. | ||
| Yeah, he loves comedy. | ||
| Yeah, he does. | ||
| I've seen him at the store a bunch of times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, well, probably cool. | ||
| That's probably the thought. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I thought it'd be cool. | |
| Yeah, I'll do it. | ||
| They probably called him. | ||
| Saturday Night Live wants to know if you want to host Saturday Night Live. | ||
| Uh, okay. | ||
| He probably just said okay. | ||
| Yeah, there's something about that that's endearing. | ||
| It's going to be interesting to watch his monologue. | ||
| I'm gonna watch. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Depending on where that fight is. | ||
| I gotta watch the Canelo. | ||
| Oh, that's this Saturday, right? | ||
| Canelo-Sunders. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Hopefully they won't be against each other. | ||
| Is that fight out here in Texas? | ||
| Dallas, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit. | |
| 70,000 cap. | ||
| 70,000 people. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Country's about to open up, man. | ||
| It's open. | ||
| I did Jacksonville, Florida. | ||
| We did the UFC a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Holy shit, it was wild. | ||
| 15,000 people. | ||
| Oh yeah, I'm scared to go to Florida. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was wild. | |
| You probably see that Corona cloud from space in Florida. | ||
| These motherfuckers been out there getting it. | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| Nobody had a mask on. | ||
| It was like there was no COVID. You go everywhere you go, people were just out there walking around, normal. | ||
| Remember the last time when I was here when we were doing the shows together? | ||
| And gosh, remember we increased the cap so maybe we were up to like 700 people a night on a busy night, right? | ||
| Man, we must have tested a few thousand people that week. | ||
| I don't know that we got a single positive that week. | ||
| I think we did. | ||
| I think we got, out of all the weeks we did it, we only got like four positive tests. | ||
| Out of thousands of people. | ||
| Yeah, thousands of people. | ||
| That's when I was like, okay, this is... | ||
| I just remember feeling like... | ||
| Well, we're gonna do the MGM. That's gonna get wild, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Let me tell you something. | ||
| That's gonna get wild, David. | ||
| Joe, let me tell you something. | ||
| That gig, I'm not going to say the dates, but I know we're talking about doing another two dates, maybe towards the end of the summer. | ||
| I'm very excited about this gig. | ||
| I'm very excited, too. | ||
| We're going to get wild. | ||
| Oh, it's a fight weekend, too. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's UFC weekend. | ||
| It's McGregor's fight, right? | ||
| Conor and Dustin Poirier. | ||
| Who's Dustin Poirier? | ||
| Dustin Poirier's the last guy who beat Conor. | ||
| He knocked him out. | ||
| Oh, so this is a rematch. | ||
| Yeah, they fought twice. | ||
| One time, I think six years ago, Conor knocked him out, and then he just knocked out Conor. | ||
| Oh, they traded Naka. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Oh, it's a good one. | ||
| It's a real good one. | ||
| Maybe I'll stay an extra night. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| You know, I've never been to an MMA fight. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's outrageous. | ||
| This is the one to go to. | ||
| It's funny, man. | ||
| I'm such a boxing fan because it's the gentleman's sport. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| MMA, all that ground and pound and shit. | ||
| It's like really intense. | ||
| I remember talking to you one night at the store. | ||
| You were like, Dave, I see so much violence. | ||
| I'm starting to worry about myself. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I worry because people get hurt. | ||
| It doesn't bother me. | ||
| Yeah, that's normal. | ||
| Yeah, that's a tough one. | ||
| This is one of the things that happened. | ||
| My wife cut her head. | ||
| Like a hatchback, you know, the car thing was up, and she was pulling something out of the car and didn't realize that the corner of the thing, she miscalculated, and it stood up, and it dug right into her head, and blood was pouring down her forehead. | ||
| And I was like, handle it, bro. | ||
| I just looked at it. | ||
| I was like, that's nothing. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| She's like, what are All this blood! | ||
| I go, it's a tiny cat. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| And I'm like, oh Jesus, what's wrong with me? | ||
| I'm so accustomed to people being broken. | ||
| I'm so accustomed to lacerations and concussions and broken bones and blood all over the place. | ||
| I'm so accustomed to blood. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I can't even conceive this. | ||
| It's a weird thing because I've definitely become desensitized. | ||
| I've seen I don't know how many thousands of fights up close. | ||
| I've seen so many people get fucked up. | ||
| And then there's my time from being a young guy and competing in martial arts tournaments and seeing so many people get fucked up there. | ||
| So I've just seen, like, my whole life people get fucked up. | ||
| If you had, like, a... | ||
| If there was, like, a chart of all the people throughout history who've seen people get fucked up, like, just the fuck beating out of them, I'm right up there. | ||
| I'm at... | ||
| The Genghis Khan level? | ||
| Yeah, there's not, like, a lot of people that have probably ever lived... | ||
| Other than, like, warriors who fought with swords and shit. | ||
| There's not a lot of people in the modern era who've seen as many people get the fuck beat out of them as me. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That is a crazy thing to say. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Super desensitized to violence and injuries. | ||
| It's real strange. | ||
| Do you think you'd ever come back from it? | ||
| Do you think if you took a break? | ||
| No. | ||
| And someone's getting in their knee, you'd be like, oh, I'm too used to it. | ||
| And then there's hunting, you know, so I'm used to it with animals. | ||
| I'm used to taking animals apart. | ||
| Okay, see that's some next level shit. | ||
| Yeah, you get used to things like that. | ||
| People get desensitized, like doctors talk about that, like trauma room surgeons, stuff like that, they talk about that. | ||
| They get very desensitized to injuries. | ||
| I remember talking to a doctor once about just that, but this conversation was more about, from their work, realizing the fragility of life. | ||
| Man, it's fragile. | ||
| Yeah, humans are fragile. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very fragile. | ||
| We're so easy to injure, you know? | ||
| It's so easy to hurt people. | ||
| And not just physically, you know, emotionally. | ||
| Emotionally and... | ||
| Yeah, I don't know, bro. | ||
| I feel like recently our biggest export is heartbreak. | ||
| Like, we gotta do better than this. | ||
| Not just our country, the whole world. | ||
| Emotional heartbreak, like emotional pain being given out online. | ||
| That would be interesting to see. | ||
| The emotional impact of, like, online interactions and harassment and people just fighting with each other online, how much different the emotional content of, like, online interactions, how much of an impact that's had on human beings, if that could be measured, if, like, there was a number that you could attach to it. | ||
| Quantifiable? | ||
| I tell you what, I tell you what, it's a weird thing, but with comedy... | ||
| Most comedians that I know, and a matter of fact, this even goes with proficiency to a degree, the more proficient they are, usually somewhere you can see that they're wildly sensitive or empathetic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They do have a profound acuteness to how awareness of how they make other people feel. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, people would think comedians are callous, but they're not. | ||
| Mostly not. | ||
| But sometimes they appear callous because they'll go after somebody just for the laugh. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't even know that that's callous. | ||
| It's almost like, well, I gotta sacrifice you for the joy of the rest of the room. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Comedy without victims can be boring. | ||
| Sometimes people gotta take a hit. | ||
| I once roasted a guy that lost both his legs in the war. | ||
| And I roasted him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| The crowd was uncomfortable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I bet. | |
| Him and his buddies were laughing so fucking hard because it was one of those things where you're like, I don't know if I should talk about it, but when you, yeah, let me just, and then this guy was dying to talk about it. | ||
| He had a real interesting story, like, you know, met the president many times and was like, you know, he sacrificed everything for the country, but His sense of humor was paramount. | ||
| He survived this thing, and I can tell that his sense of humor was very instrumental in doing it. | ||
| And the laugh that we had together, that was one of those special nights where it was like, people are dope. | ||
| People are dope. | ||
| For the most part, people are dope. | ||
| And they're dope when you're in front of them. | ||
| They're dope people to people. | ||
| You look in each other's eyes, being around each other. | ||
| I think it's part of the problem that we're dealing with with the online shit is that all the normal cues of looking at someone and talking to them, being right there, it's not there. | ||
| So you have this ability to write things in text and say mean shit to people and you think it's okay. | ||
| Yeah, that disconnect. | ||
| You don't see them cry. | ||
| You don't feel their pain. | ||
| You're just pushing buttons. | ||
| You're just pushing buttons. | ||
| Metaphorically and literally. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it is. | ||
| How do you like doing this podcast that you're doing? | ||
| It's very good, by the way. | ||
| It's very interesting because it's produced. | ||
| You have music and it's edited. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| It's dope. | ||
| Now, there's a weird reason why it's done that way. | ||
| Because ultimately they'll all exist on vinyl. | ||
| That's why the shows are the duration that they are, so that they can fit on sides of vinyl. | ||
| I'm curious to see how people will react to it, but I love doing it. | ||
| They're gonna love it. | ||
| The people that I'm working with, Yasin Bey, formerly known as most deaf, Talib Kweli, These guys are like great, great friends of mine. | ||
| They're great artists. | ||
| And, you know, it's like you. | ||
| I could talk to you guys forever about a diversity of stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, in that sense, it was a joyful experience. | ||
| It was during COVID. And the whole concept or the genesis of this show was just literally us finding an excuse to be together. | ||
| You know, everyone's... | ||
| Always so busy, you know, as we get mature in the business and we got kids and we got this and we got that. | ||
| And we never catch up as much as we should. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm telling you, in this season, when we keep losing people that are important to our culture and important to our community, it was almost like an emergency. | ||
| Like, yo, why are we fucking around? | ||
| Let's just do something together. | ||
| It was one of these things, definitely wasn't about the money or anything like that, but it was about... | ||
| You know, spending time with your friends. | ||
| And, as you well know, there's an art form of conversation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you're great at it. | ||
| Most quality, I could talk to them forever, they're well-read, they're well-traveled, and they're hilarious dudes, and they got an interesting perspective. | ||
| Some friends you have, you know, you go around the world and you don't see each other often. | ||
| But when you see each other, it's like you'd seen each other just a moment ago. | ||
| And you can download all these obscure and wild experiences and it's safe and it's comfortable and there's no judgment in it because you're friends. | ||
| You're truly friends. | ||
| And that's the way I feel about those guys. | ||
| And I think that's one of the things that makes the show so special, like fun to do. | ||
| I look forward to it. | ||
| Yeah, that's everything. | ||
| Enthusiasm is contagious. | ||
| If you're having an enthusiastic conversation with someone, that's one of the things that makes it interesting to listen to. | ||
| Because when you're listening, it's like you're a fly on the wall. | ||
| That's what people like about a good conversation. | ||
| You could be in the room without being in the room. | ||
| There's folks listening to us right now in traffic, and they're here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's not much different. | ||
| I mean, they don't see us if they're driving, but maybe they're watching it on a video. | ||
| It's not much different than sitting in the room. | ||
| There's a missing element because you're not physically here, but it's pretty damn good in terms of the ability to be a part of a conversation, and it changes the way you look at things. | ||
| Because the more people that I can talk to and get their take on how they think and how they do, it enhances my own way of looking at things and talking to people. | ||
| Yeah, and that's, again, the big problem with all the lip-buttoning now. | ||
| I kind of like hearing all these different perspectives, whether I agree with them or not. | ||
| You can't silence people. | ||
| You've got to let them fuck up. | ||
| If they fuck up, and you know, there's nothing wrong with apologizing either. | ||
| If you fuck up and you say something wrong, there's nothing wrong with apologizing. | ||
| I don't disagree with that. | ||
| I think context is everything. | ||
| It depends on where I am when I said it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If I'm on a comedy stage and you fucking print a joke I wrote like it was a stump speech, that's a fucked up thing to do. | ||
| It's a fucked up thing to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, if I'm at a press conference and I whoopsie poopsie, then there you go. | ||
| Sorry, everybody. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| Well, it's just... | ||
| You know, especially with stand-ups. | ||
| I mean, Jesus Christ, how many times is stand-ups just going out to dinner, having a couple drinks, we say the most ridiculous shit ever. | ||
| It's the greatest. | ||
| It's like one of the joys of my life. | ||
| Now, think about being a politician now. | ||
| Who's signing up for that shit now? | ||
| All these Republicans talking all that shit. | ||
| And I'm not trying to be partisan, but when them motherfuckers rushed to Capitol, did any of you guys go to greet your constituents? | ||
| No, you ran to the bunker. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| You know, but constituents aren't like fans. | ||
| Did you ever see those videos of cops opening the doors and letting people in and opening the gates and letting people through? | ||
| I did. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| In fact, there was an investigation about that. | ||
| I don't know the results of it, but I'd heard about it. | ||
| You know, what's ominous about it is, you gotta think, there's probably like 300 cops on duty, Capitol Hill, right? | ||
| By the end of it, D.C. police get called in, Homeland Security gets called in, you know, FBI's, and so now there's a thousand guns. | ||
| Inside of the Capitol. | ||
| It could have went a million different ways. | ||
| You have members accusing other members of Congress of giving tours and showing people sensitive areas. | ||
| This kind of suspicion within law enforcement, within government, it's a very ominous sign. | ||
| This type of partisanship is a very ominous sign. | ||
| This lexicon now, so binary, Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, this is not doing us any favors. | ||
| In a perfect world, the best idea wins. | ||
| And in this current situation, I don't know that people even agree on what the truth is. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| Chris Rock had a great bit about it. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Remember that bit about gangs? | ||
| Like that people just join gangs? | ||
| No. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| I don't want to fuck it up, but it's basically how whether they're a Democrat or a Republican, they really just get into gangs. | ||
| It is that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just decide that this is my gang. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And their constituents are worried that they're feckless. | ||
| And like you say, the speed of information is so much faster now than the speed of bureaucracy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| It'd be like if you turned the air conditioner on your car and it came on four months later. | ||
| We needed the heat right now, bro. | ||
| Especially with the stimulus checks, right? | ||
| Like, how long did it take before they actually sent checks out in the mail? | ||
| Remember all the talk about it? | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| Took forever. | ||
| I wonder why they never, I guess I know why. | ||
| I was gonna say, it's a stupid question, why they never suspended the gift tax? | ||
| Like, if I wanted to give my brother or my sister or my friend some money during a time like this, why tax that transaction? | ||
| They want the money. | ||
| Well, not just the money. | ||
| Think about how rich people would move their money around. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| If they unfettered that shit. | ||
| It's the greed that's killing us. | ||
| They agreed, I agreed. | ||
| It's killing us. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| Nah, it's not good at all. | ||
| But you know... | ||
| It's again like what we were talking about before, like you would give the taxes up if you felt like it was for something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If you really felt like it did, like if you knew that your tax money was really enhancing the world, really helping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Instead of going to some fucked up... | ||
| We're bringing crowns to the ghetto. | ||
| What? | ||
| Why are you doing that with the money? | ||
| Because kids need crayons in the ghetto. | ||
| It's like, who's prioritizing this shit? | ||
| I don't know, bro. | ||
| I mean, not to be cynical, but this thing. | ||
| It's tricky. | ||
| This one we're doing now. | ||
| I hope everyone does anything that they can do to help foster trust amongst each other. | ||
| I'm not talking about government and politics. | ||
| I don't give a fuck if someone likes Trump or anything. | ||
| I know a lot of good, decent, hard-working people that have political ideas that I think are nonsense. | ||
| But I don't conflate that with their character. | ||
| I don't conflate that with culture. | ||
| These things are all different issues. | ||
| What they say, throw the baby out of the bathwater. | ||
| They can't do that. | ||
| I'm not going to throw a whole person away because they have four ideas I don't like. | ||
| I just hope that if the economy can bounce back, people will start to relax again. | ||
| And if not just vaccines, but also some form of effective therapy, so that even if someone's not vaccinated and they get COVID, there's a very effective way to treat it if that does happen. | ||
| All right, what about this? | ||
| This is a what if. | ||
| Say they didn't cure COVID. They had no vaccine or nothing. | ||
| It was just like, let's call it six months ago, right? | ||
| But during that time, they stumbled onto a cure for AIDS. Do you stay in or do you go out? | ||
| Stay in it or go out? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Do you stay inside or do you go out? | ||
| COVID's still out there, but AIDS is cured. | ||
| Oh, I keep going out. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I keep going out. | ||
| Yeah, no A's. | ||
| Break out that disco ball. | ||
| We're going to the goddamn disco. | ||
| Fuck COVID-19. | ||
| The real problem is if it becomes not even COVID, but something else that's worse, like some really bad one, like a Spanish flu, like something that kills a large percentage of the people that get it. | ||
| This one's pretty bad, though. | ||
| But it was less than 1%. | ||
| I'm talking about something that kills 10%, 20%. | ||
| Jesus, I couldn't imagine. | ||
| Those are real. | ||
| I mean, those have existed throughout history. | ||
| This one, when we say it's pretty bad, it's pretty bad, but it's pretty bad because of the sheer numbers of human beings. | ||
| We got lucky in the sense that, I mean obviously not lucky for anybody who died and nothing but love and respect to all those people that lost loved ones. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But we're talking about just raw numbers and I think this is also what got Elon in trouble. | ||
| When you look at the 99 point whatever it is percentage of people who survive when they get it, especially when they're young, especially people with no comorbidities, that is a relatively mild pandemic in comparison to what's happened in history. | ||
| If you look at any sort of real plague, like horrific ones, again, like the Spanish flu. | ||
| I mean, this last one, New York City, for a month straight lost 2,000 people a day. | ||
| It's hard to wrap my mind around that. | ||
| It's hard to wrap your mind around that. | ||
| I met some woman who was an ER nurse in New York, you know, who had a witness. | ||
| The carnage up close. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| There was a lot of mistakes made that I wonder if they would go back. | ||
| First of all, the respirators. | ||
| Remember when they were all looking for respirators? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, New York City needs respirators. | ||
| Then they realized, no, no, no. | ||
| Respirators kill people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I do remember this. | ||
| Yeah, they didn't know. | ||
| But that's the thing with COVID. It's like getting COVID. When I got COVID, the first few days, you just sit around and wait to see what it'll do to you. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And I was incredibly lucky. | ||
| I was largely asymptomatic. | ||
| You know, so I was smoking cigarettes the whole time, the whole shit. | ||
| But I was waiting to get flattened. | ||
| How many days did it take before you tested negative? | ||
| Maybe inside of 10. Inside of 10 days. | ||
| Whatever my immune system did, that shit worked. | ||
| And you take vitamins? | ||
| Do you take carriers? | ||
| I did all the shit. | ||
| As a matter of fact, you gave me a vitamin regimen. | ||
| I took it very seriously. | ||
| I took all that shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good. | |
| What was it? | ||
| Zinc and all this other shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Quercetin. | |
| Yeah, I took the shit. | ||
| D3. You know, whether that was what was doing it or not, I don't know, but I did it. | ||
| Well, it most certainly would help. | ||
| It didn't hurt me. | ||
| Yeah, it didn't hurt you. | ||
| It didn't hurt me. | ||
| And like I said, I was largely asymptomatic, so I felt very lucky. | ||
| But there was other people that I knew in that same outbreak. | ||
| You know, and they had a tough time with it. | ||
| Everyone, thank God, is healthy, but it's just not, you know, it just doesn't do the same thing to everybody. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| And that's what, I guess, vitamins are everything. | ||
| And that's one of the things that made me furious during this time, that there was no emphasis on taking vitamins. | ||
| They didn't make it seem like it was a big deal, and there was no emphasis on getting healthy and losing weight. | ||
| Not in the media, but every healthcare professional I talk to, because I have access to decent healthcare, did bring up the importance of vitamins. | ||
| And when you said that, it wasn't completely foreign to my ears. | ||
| I'd heard such things. | ||
| You just gave me a very specific regimen, and I tried it, and it worked. | ||
| It didn't hurt me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, you cruised through it. | ||
| So did Donnell, which is hilarious. | ||
| I know, because he's in terrible shape. | ||
| If Will Smith thinks he's in terrible shape, he needs to take a look at Don L. For real. | ||
| I mean, oh yeah, Will Smith did pose to dad bod people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hilarious. | |
| It's hilarious. | ||
| I'm not going to lie to you. | ||
| I'm in the worst shape of my life. | ||
| Oh, he's a funny dude. | ||
| With a big smile on his face, though. | ||
| He's a funny dude. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think what Will Smith is probably going to do, Will Smith's one of those dudes that just, like, sets his mind to things. | ||
| I bet what he's going to do is take that photograph, and then you're going to see him four or five months from now shredded. | ||
| That's what I bet. | ||
| Oh, I could see that happening. | ||
| Yeah, that's the motivation. | ||
| The motivation is he takes a pose, looks terrible, looks like shit, tells everybody, hey, this is the worst shape I've ever been in my life. | ||
| And then he's like, all right, now it's go time. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. | ||
| He still looked like a movie star in Bad Shake. | ||
| How the fuck are you doing this, Will? | ||
| Remember when he played Ali? | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| Dude, he looked great. | ||
| He looked fucking great. | ||
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| He looked great. | ||
| I mean, he got in tip-top magoo shape. | ||
| He looked fucking fantastic in that movie. | ||
| If you think about even the courage it would take to take on a role like that. | ||
| How about Jamie Foxx? | ||
| Who's he playing? | ||
| Tyson! | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, that's going to be dope. | ||
| Because Jamie, I'm sure probably by now, if he couldn't before, can talk just like Mike Tyson. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Probably memorize the rhythm of Mike Tyson. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And he'll probably look like him somehow. | ||
| Jamie's an alien. | ||
| He's so nice with it. | ||
| I remember watching Ray being like, I can't believe I know this dude. | ||
| And he was doing Ray Charles so good. | ||
| And then he took the sunglasses off. | ||
| I'm like, oh, he's Jamie again. | ||
| He's so talented in every way. | ||
| He's so talented as a singer. | ||
| He's talented as a comedian. | ||
| He's talented as an actor. | ||
| He's just got a way. | ||
| He's got a thing. | ||
| There's no fat in his portrayals. | ||
| He just cuts through it. | ||
| It's clean. | ||
| He just knows how to do it. | ||
| He's also one of those feel-good people. | ||
| Super positive. | ||
| Yeah, he's just fun to be around. | ||
| I've never seen him as a party pooper ever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He's fucking jacked right now. | ||
| Is he really? | ||
| Jacked. | ||
| Yeah, because he's building up to play Tyson. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Jeez Louise. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, he's not even done yet. | ||
| He's building up into Mike Tyson's shape. | ||
| Yeah, that's never going to happen to me, by the way. | ||
| I got swole for a minute, but then I was like, this is stupid. | ||
| You did. | ||
| You got pretty big for a while. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| COVID. Well, before COVID. I stopped working out in COVID. Last time I can remember being in a gym was like February 2020. You know what I mean? | ||
| And then after that, it was just like, you know, I was on the road. | ||
| I was in London. | ||
| Why'd you get jacked, though? | ||
| What made you decide to start working out? | ||
| That Chappelle show shit, bro. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, honestly, what I think one of the catalysts was, not the catalyst, but one of them was the fact that they kept saying I smoked crack and I was a skinny dude and felt like I can't defend myself in this. | ||
| Like, I'm so skinny that this thing is believable. | ||
| That bugged the fuck out of me. | ||
| How many people said you smoked crack? | ||
| Was it in articles? | ||
| What was it in? | ||
| I believe it was an article in Newsweek. | ||
| They didn't say I smoked crack. | ||
| It was some legal precision. | ||
| There was some guy saying, I'm not saying it was the drugs. | ||
| At the time, I wouldn't do nothing. | ||
| I was like, this is fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, cracks, that's one of those, like, if you were going to do something to ruin your life, that's the thing. | ||
| I mean, I was from D.C. Our mayor smoked crack. | ||
| D.C. seemed fine. | ||
| Well, it's just coke. | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't that obscure. | ||
| It was poor people with cocaine. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| Do you know who Dr. Carl Hart is? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's a really interesting guy. | ||
| He's a guy who is a clinical researcher and was real straight-laced, but he was a university researcher. | ||
| I forget what university is he at. | ||
| I forget. | ||
| Columbia? | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| Brilliant guy. | ||
| I've had him on the podcast a couple times, but was researching the effects of drugs and started realizing The depictions of drugs and drug use are all fucked up. | ||
| People have this distorted idea of what these drugs do to you. | ||
| He loves heroin. | ||
| He talks about it. | ||
| He does heroin. | ||
| He snorts heroin all the time. | ||
| He's like, pure heroin is wonderful. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It enhances my relationship with my wife. | ||
| He talks about trying pure cocaine and all these different drugs. | ||
| He does drugs all the time. | ||
| And he's a professor. | ||
| He's a professor at Columbia. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Brilliant guy. | ||
| And it's tough to argue with him because he knows so much about drugs from the perspective of an actual researcher and plus a guy who actually uses them, but goes out of his way to tell him he has dreads. | ||
| He doesn't look like a typical professor in that sense. | ||
| He looks like a cool guy. | ||
| But wait, what is he a professor of exactly? | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Okay, psychology. | ||
| Psychologist. | ||
| Okay, so a psychiatrist prescribes drugs, correct? | ||
| But a psychologist diagnoses... | ||
| Mental illness. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Psychologists try to help you work through things, right? | ||
| Isn't that the idea? | ||
| Yeah, but this guy, he sounds like any functional drug addict I've ever met. | ||
| And in my line of work, I have met and do know many. | ||
| Yeah, but he's not a drug addict. | ||
| He's actually, in fact, purposely does whatever drugs he wants. | ||
| Let me guess, he can quit anytime he wants. | ||
| He's actually put himself through withdrawals on purpose to document it. | ||
| So he's put himself into a situation where he did heroin multiple days in a row to a point where his body became physically addicted and then got off of it just to document what the withdrawal process is actually like. | ||
| And he says it's like having a flu. | ||
| This is the most clever drug addict I've ever heard of. | ||
| I'm not sick. | ||
| I'm documenting sickness. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I don't know, bro. | ||
| I've seen so many wonderful people They'll never know in the same way again. | ||
| Because of drugs? | ||
| Because of drugs. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's heartbreaking. | ||
| But what makes one person fall apart due to drugs and another person not? | ||
| That's where it gets tricky. | ||
| Because some of it's biological, some of it's... | ||
| Right, but it's just like COVID. And why did I feel fine in 2,000 people a day in New York? | ||
| I mean, don't start because I know fat people don't like hotcakes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was a lot of things going on in New York. | ||
| It wasn't just the obesity, but I have a friend who was a doctor there and he did say it was a lot of obese people, unfortunately. | ||
| If you eat bad food, bad things happen. | ||
| And that's just the reality of being a human being. | ||
| I mean, but I also think it's the reality of being a drug addict. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Take bad drugs, bad things happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This shit is nothing to play with. | ||
| And how many minds are strong enough, like this professor, to responsibly do hard drugs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is a rare—it's like an X-Men superpower. | ||
| Well, he's also a guy who understands the actual physical reaction these chemicals and compounds have on the brain and on the body. | ||
| He knows it from an academic perspective. | ||
| I mean, and Michael Jackson OD'd by drugs that was administered by a physician. | ||
| Well, that was weird shit, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
| Imagine the kind of stress that that guy was under. | ||
| He was under so much stress he had to get anesthetized every night. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't imagine anything Michael Jackson did. | ||
| Once he bought that first giraffe, I was like, you on a whole new level, bro. | ||
| I don't know any of the emotional content of a guy's life like that. | ||
| There's people that were pioneers in the fame game. | ||
| And you think about Michael Jackson's one of them. | ||
| Elvis is another one. | ||
| There's people that were pioneers in being super famous. | ||
| To the point where nobody had been super famous like Michael Jackson before Michael Jackson. | ||
| I don't know that anyone ever will again. | ||
| Be what he was? | ||
| Or Elvis was? | ||
| Or the Beatles were? | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| No. | ||
| I think that shit is done. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| I can't think of one thing that everyone will agree on that much ever again in this context. | ||
| I remember Michael Jackson, I've told this before, but Michael Jackson, I was listening to WBCN, The Rock of Boston, and they were going, look, I know this isn't rock, but it's so fucking good, we're going to play it anyway. | ||
| And they played Michael Jackson. | ||
| Oh, it's that. | ||
| It was that good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was so good they played it on rock stations. | ||
| He was ubiquitous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, who knows what the fuck that scope was like. | ||
| The closest thing that I've ever seen of that up close would be like Eddie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the guys who's been, you know, on that level. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Eddie is a cool motherfucker. | ||
| In fact, if you're in his orbit, it feels normal in there. | ||
| He'd go to his house and bowl and talk shit. | ||
| His kids would come in and out. | ||
| It seems like a sitcom, but it's really hilarious. | ||
| Eddie got the heat. | ||
| He's funny as fuck, bro. | ||
| Can talk like anybody. | ||
| Says wildly imaginative things. | ||
| Why do you think he doesn't do stand-up? | ||
| This shit ain't no bicycle, man. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He's an anomaly in the sense that I'm sure it would come right back to him. | ||
| When he cuts up in the house, it should be real funny. | ||
| But I don't know what it would mean. | ||
| I don't know what it means to him, having been this person we're describing. | ||
| What's also, he feels like his material, when he goes back and watches Raw, he's kind of embarrassed by it. | ||
| He's, you know, that it's... | ||
| You know, it's funny, when I put out my first two Netflix joints, I think I was on Kimmel. | ||
| It was the only press I did. | ||
| But there was a thing going on in the press where everyone was saying that the specials were dated, because there were jokes in there that they considered transphobic. | ||
| And I still don't think those jokes are transphobic. | ||
| I'm not going to have that discussion, but if I ever have to, boy, I'm ready. | ||
| But the point is that the thing I said to Kimmel was, I don't get mad at a photograph because it wasn't taken today. | ||
| In other words, whatever was going on in 87 when he laid that set down, it was working in 87. That's where people were at. | ||
| And a good comedian It's an indicator of the time or their context. | ||
| And I look at Eddie's shit like that, like, I wouldn't look at any of his old material as embarrassing. | ||
| Sometimes I'm starting, like, wow, I could never do that now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it makes it even more fun to see that there was this time when he was just saying these things. | ||
| You know, I'm a comedian. | ||
| I don't smell any malice in it. | ||
| I don't think he's trying to hurt anybody. | ||
| No. | ||
| This guy is just cracking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He was doing comedy that was relevant during the time that he was doing it. | ||
| The world was a different place. | ||
| Right, and it's not irrelevant now. | ||
| The thing that's remarkable is he's a different guy now, which is why he feels embarrassed. | ||
| It's not even about what happens to the world. | ||
| It's what happened to this guy in the world. | ||
| He sees the world different now, and this happens. | ||
| The crazy thing is he doesn't look a day older. | ||
| He looks great. | ||
| He looks amazing. | ||
| He looks great. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| One time I was watching TV with Eddie. | ||
| And Sand for the Son rerun was on. | ||
| And he says, I'm as old now as Red Fox was in this episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Sand for the Son. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Right, and then I look at the television, I look at Eddie, I'm like, damn. | ||
| He goes, yeah, I'm as old now as Carol O'Connor was in All in the Family. | ||
| You think how Archie Bunker looked, that motherfucker looked terrible. | ||
| That's crazy, he looked terrible. | ||
| There goes Eddie looking like his 1987 and shit. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| Yeah, he's just taking so good care of himself. | ||
| What does he do? | ||
| Does he exercise a lot? | ||
| No, I have no idea. | ||
| It's like Prince. | ||
| I've never seen Prince eat or drink anything. | ||
| I'm sure he does it. | ||
| I don't know what Eddie does. | ||
| He bowls. | ||
| He's a family guy and stuff like that. | ||
| He's really into his family. | ||
| It's good to see. | ||
| It's normal, bro. | ||
| For all the things you'll hear about Hollywood, I'm always startled how normal everybody is. | ||
| I don't know if it's just the angle I get to see or... | ||
| But all that pageantry and shit, that's completely unsustainable. | ||
| Nobody can do that all the time. | ||
| Somewhere, somehow, you're just going to be yourself. | ||
| Isn't it weird that that's what we think about when we think about Hollywood? | ||
| We think about red carpets and people with tuxedos on and ridiculous watches and purses and all just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| ...staying on the red carpet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's a tough one. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I mean, I don't knock, and by the way, I don't knock anybody for doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I don't think, but that, you know, that ain't what we doing. | ||
| No. | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| I'm not interested. | ||
| No, it's fun sometimes. | ||
| It's just so weird. | ||
| It's so different than real life. | ||
| Yeah, but in a weird way, that is their real life. | ||
| That's a work thing. | ||
| It's a peak work thing. | ||
| It's like, this is peak glam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ta-da! | |
| But this thing where, and I think this is changing in the culture. | ||
| Remember, there was this thing about celebrities could never be unhappy. | ||
| Fuck that, man. | ||
| I'm not saying they should display that, but just assume everybody has a bad day. | ||
| Fuck that red carpet face. | ||
| I don't want to make that fucking face for the rest of my life. | ||
| I think, you know, as I get older, I'm overwhelmed by how human we all are. | ||
| It really makes me like people more. | ||
| And forgive people more. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| That's everything. | ||
| Forgive people. | ||
| And forgive yourself. | ||
| Yeah, forgive yourself. | ||
| I just think that the... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| In this season of my life, I'm into... | ||
| Hopefully, I'll do something. | ||
| I will make this mean something other than just the trappings of success, how hot my whip is or... | ||
| How pretty my bitch is and all this stupid shit that we have been trained to focus on. | ||
| I wanted to be better than that. | ||
| What do you want to do? | ||
| Do you have an idea? | ||
| I have some ideas. | ||
| I don't want to make any public declarations because then I'm going to have to do this shit. | ||
| But as just a general rule, and by the way, there's so many surprising ways that you can be of use to people. | ||
| Not big things. | ||
| Everyone's always trying to hit a homer, but sometimes it's a smile you muster for a person, you know. | ||
| There's a lot of things you can do. | ||
| I just try to walk softly on the earth and have some fun. | ||
| But I just know that investing celebrity into getting more celebrity is a treadmill I don't feel interested in running on in the twilight of my life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that. | ||
| Yeah, no, you get it. | ||
| You know what it's like to be famous. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I'm not mad at fame. | ||
| When you say fame, I'm not mad at that celebrity. | ||
| Well, that's the one. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I was talking to Letterman about it. | ||
| Celebrity is the role. | ||
| That's the one on the red carpet. | ||
| You're famous. | ||
| It's not that you're not a celebrity, but it's not like you're sticking your pinky toe out on the red carpet. | ||
| You're not going places where people are saying, what are you wearing? | ||
| You didn't make your life about that. | ||
| You're not tethered to endorsements and this, that, and the other. | ||
| You're tethered to yourself, to your journey, to your life, which makes it meaningful. | ||
| You know, for you to talk the shit that you talk, even in this context, there's a courageousness that you have to, you know, your subject is so much outside scrutiny, you know. | ||
| But you do it anyway. | ||
| That's why it's courageous. | ||
| You know, you're relentlessly yourself. | ||
| This is a practice skill. | ||
| This takes some consistency. | ||
| You have to choose in the beginning. | ||
| You have to take an inventory to know who you actually are. | ||
| Some people think they are the famous guy. | ||
| Fame is your circumstances. | ||
| It's not necessarily who you are. | ||
| Trust me, when I left the show, I wasn't famous. | ||
| It was circumstances that I left behind. | ||
| I mean, I was famous, but it wasn't that thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| And I realized, you know, when we came up, we coveted that thing without even knowing what it was. | ||
| Well, because it seemed unattainable. | ||
| You would see other people that had it. | ||
| You know, someone would show up at the club and walk through, and you'd be like, oh, shit, look at him. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Everybody knows who he is. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right, but it was still an abstraction. | ||
| Martin walks in and he's brimming with happiness. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Martin was the first guy that I ever saw that walked in with security. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| I was like, wow, he's got security at the store. | ||
| And needed it, probably. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| People forgot how fucking strong Martin Lawrence was. | ||
| Goddamn, his act was powerful. | ||
| I used to have to follow him. | ||
| Mitzi Shore was hilarious. | ||
| She used to always, she thought you were funny, she would put you on after the best comedians and just throw you right to the wolves. | ||
| She always thought it was funny. | ||
| She always put me on after, I was, you know, 27, 26 years old, whatever I was, she would put me on after Martin Lawrence all the time, and I would just bomb. | ||
| But that's how you get great. | ||
| I remember the first time I met Martin, I was in high school. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I saw Martin do a show, him and Tommy Davis, this might be one of the best single comedy shows I've ever seen. | ||
| It was like a local D.C. club. | ||
| Marlon Wayans was there. | ||
| He was going to college in D.C. at the time. | ||
| It was the night I met him. | ||
| And man... | ||
| First of all, Tommy Davidson went on. | ||
| He, man, this motherfucker Tommy can crack. | ||
| He's a funny, funny, funny, funny guy. | ||
| Great performer, great impressionist. | ||
| Every skill set that you could think of, he has in abundance. | ||
| And Martin was headlining. | ||
| I watched Tommy's show and I was worried for the headliner. | ||
| When has that ever happened? | ||
| Lauren was fine. | ||
| Martin was fine. | ||
| Like the shit he did on that stage that night. | ||
| And this was like in the area that he grew up in. | ||
| So he had that set. | ||
| You know, there's probably a couple girls in high school that dissed him that was there and that kind of shit. | ||
| He did the thing, bro. | ||
| And I'm telling you, that Martin Lawrence was a beast on stage. | ||
| He was a beast. | ||
| People forgot for some reason. | ||
| I'm from D.C., so I can't forget. | ||
| When I was starting out, he was the local legend already. | ||
| Well, when I first came to L.A., it was in 94, he was in his peak. | ||
| In his peak. | ||
| That was you-so-crazy days. | ||
| Yeah, that was some Elvis shit. | ||
| He was hosting Def Jam. | ||
| He had the sitcom. | ||
| He was putting out specials and just started getting big in that movie game. | ||
| When you watch his sitcom, people forget. | ||
| He did a bunch of different characters on that show. | ||
| It was all him. | ||
| The show was all him. | ||
| Yes, he was nice with it. | ||
| He's probably still nice with it. | ||
| I mean, I haven't seen Martin in a long time. | ||
| I haven't seen him in forever. | ||
| I ran into him at the store a few years back, which is briefly. | ||
| He was doing a few sets every now and then. | ||
| He called me after I won the Mark Twain Prize. | ||
| You know, because I'm from D.C., I gotta tell you this call means a lot to me. | ||
| He was one of my early local heroes. | ||
| I came up on a good circuit, too. | ||
| Wasn't Boston, but D.C., Wanda Sykes would start out with me, Patton Oswalt was around, Tony Woods, Martin Lawrence, Tommy Davidson. | ||
| There were some great comics. | ||
| That's one thing that comedy always needs. | ||
| You need to be around other great comics. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| The circuit. | ||
| And back in those days, no internet, nothing. | ||
| Every city has some different energy. | ||
| And the comedians, they're like, it's always exciting to go to a city and check out the other acts. | ||
| Boston, like you say, that was one of those cities. | ||
| It was a weird city. | ||
| It was. | ||
| But it was a trap. | ||
| That's what we were talking about before. | ||
| Those guys can make six figures staying in town. | ||
| But that's what they did. | ||
| Because if they went on the road, they'd actually make less money. | ||
| What made you go to Hollywood? | ||
| Why didn't you fall for that? | ||
| I saw what they were doing and even though they were great comedians I saw that they couldn't do the road and I was like if you want to get on HBO or if you want to you know you have a special you gotta you gotta get out of town and the young guys coming up kind of saw the old guard these some of the best headliners I've ever seen in my life I've seen Don Gavin have sets Steve Sweeney have sets that I mean I would put those sets up against any comic I've ever seen ever you know it was funny the first night I saw Dane Cook They go | ||
| yawning after so-and-so. | ||
| You know, it was a cocky deal. | ||
| I didn't really worry about none of that shit. | ||
| But I heard the crowd scream so loud I thought they had introduced me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It was Dane. | ||
| He was just starting out. | ||
| These were crowd reactions. | ||
| There was a thing in Boston. | ||
| Everyone was a room ripper. | ||
| They were all about volume. | ||
| Intensity. | ||
| Yeah, Don Gavin. | ||
| That rapid-fire style, I'll never forget. | ||
| He was... | ||
| And then, in the midst of all that, you'd have a counterweight like Stephen Wright, this wonderfully understated, dead-paying comedian. | ||
| That shit was fire. | ||
| Boston was a good circus. | ||
| Have you ever seen the documentary When Stand Up Stood Out? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a comic named Frans Solomita. | ||
| He put together this documentary on Boston. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It just shows you what it was like back in those days. | ||
| They kind of invented a movement. | ||
| Really, a lot of it was Barry Crimmins. | ||
| Rest in peace. | ||
| Who's Barry Crimmins Barry Crimmins was like the godfather of Boston comedy in a lot of ways because he was this really brilliant guy very politically savvy and He kept everybody from being a hack because everybody was scared of him like he was like this fucking both boys like loud bold Guy who he would go on stage and he had a jacket on he would pull Budweiser out of the inside pocket of his jacket and set it on the table had like these things he would do but it was a great comic but | ||
| Maybe more important was like a cornerstone of the scene like if if Barry didn't like you you were fucked right If Barry thought you were a hack, you were fucked. | ||
| Then they didn't tolerate hacks. | ||
| He didn't tolerate thieves. | ||
| He was quality control. | ||
| Quality control, yeah. | ||
| Every circuit, I guess, needs to. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it's the thing that Dane Cooks talked about this, too, that they were all men. | ||
| These guys were all these big guys. | ||
| They were all, like, six-foot-plus big, burly guys who did a lot of coke and got in street fights. | ||
| All those comics, they weren't like nebbishy comics who would talk about their insecurities. | ||
| They were wild dudes who were partying. | ||
| They were like rock stars. | ||
| I remember doing a show in Boston. | ||
| Again, I don't like saying names, but I just remember seeing a guy who was heckling me and the security threw him down the steps. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'd never seen anything. | ||
| But so casually, like, this is what we do with trash. | ||
| Like, Jesus, man. | ||
| Yeah, there was a lot of violence in Boston. | ||
| It was. | ||
| It was a weird... | ||
| And I never really got a feel for that city. | ||
| I would meet these intellectuals and idiots in the same block. | ||
| The fuck is this place? | ||
| Well, there was more colleges per capita in Boston than anywhere else in the country. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I used to go up there and play college gigs all the time. | ||
| And, you know, I remember the Boston police felt particularly menacing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those fucking high boots they wear with no horse to match. | ||
| Fuck, I used to stop all those dudes. | ||
| It's a weird city. | ||
| But then it produced so many great, you know, sources of comedy. | ||
| Even people who aren't from Boston, a guy like Howard Stern that went to BU, A guy like Patrice O'Neal came out of the hood, moved down to New York and cleaned shit up out there. | ||
| It was an interesting scene. | ||
| Patrice is a similar type of thing, right? | ||
| He was like a cornerstone of comedy in New York. | ||
| When people talk about people getting silly or being stupid, they go, God, I wish Patrice was here to see this. | ||
| Yeah, Patrice, yeah, he had that world-weary kind of swag about him. | ||
| Early on, man, it didn't get along, but we became friends, because this guy was a real deal. | ||
| He was a real deal. | ||
| God, I wish he stayed alive. | ||
| I do, too, man. | ||
| The comedy he would have put out during all this shit? | ||
| Well, that's interesting, because I don't know what would happen to a guy like him in this context. | ||
| Mmm, he's not buckling, I'll tell you that. | ||
| I know, so I say, I don't know what's going to happen to him. | ||
| Yeah, it would be interesting to see. | ||
| It really would be. | ||
| You know, one can only imagine. | ||
| One can only imagine, but he was, man, he was something else. | ||
| He was a funny dude. | ||
| I remember him and Kevin got to New York around the same time. | ||
| I used to think Kevin was from Boston because I'd see them together so much, I just assumed. | ||
| And their arrival on the scene was like, both these guys, when they got on the scene, it was noticeable. | ||
| It wasn't like they came in quietly. | ||
| They was doing some shit. | ||
| That's another thing that every scene needs. | ||
| Every scene needs a rocket. | ||
| Yeah, someone that shakes shit up. | ||
| Yeah, like, whoa. | ||
| Like, someone who's not stagnant, they're not complacent, they're going for it. | ||
| I got to tell you, New York City in the 90s, some of the greatest comedy I've ever seen. | ||
| It was weird, too, because I was one of those guys that would be in New York and then go out to L.A. a little earlier than everyone else. | ||
| I did Montreal, and then I'd go out for this, and I'd go out for that. | ||
| And I started auditing both scenes. | ||
| New York was the dream. | ||
| But L.A., Those comics were like, the work ethics were different. | ||
| New Yorkers write more, you know, in general. | ||
| If you do ten spots in a night, you come up with a new joke on a third show, you got seven cracks at it. | ||
| By the end of the night, even though you just started the thing, it's refined. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| Yeah, L.A. didn't have any opportunity to do that. | ||
| That's a different world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| LA people were so competitive about stage time. | ||
| That shit's like the Karate Kid tournament. | ||
| These motherfuckers got killed every night. | ||
| Sweep the leg. | ||
| But Sensei, you got a problem with that? | ||
| That's LA. No mercy. | ||
| LA in the 90s was everybody trying to get a sitcom, too. | ||
| That was part of the problem. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It was a gold rush. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They saw what happened with Roseanne and Jerry Seinfeld. | ||
| I don't even know if that was coming completely from the comedians. | ||
| The studio system was so hungry for comedians to build these shows around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They would give you these crazy development deals. | ||
| Yeah, I did a million of those. | ||
| It took me like 13, 14 of them shits to be like, man, fuck that shit before you get a Chappelle shirt. | ||
| But the good thing is I learned how television works, basically, how it was supposed to work and what I'd like to do with it. | ||
| What was interesting is they basically gave you free money. | ||
| People don't understand this. | ||
| They would give you a half a million dollars or a quarter million dollars, and you would get this development deal, and they'd attach you to a bunch of writers. | ||
| They'd put together a script, and it may or may not go. | ||
| And if it didn't go, you just got a free quarter million dollars, and you worked on a script, and maybe it went to pilot, maybe it didn't. | ||
| Yeah, but if it didn't go, you were a bad investment. | ||
| You had a couple of those in you. | ||
| And it could hurt you. | ||
| Yeah, it could. | ||
| You know, if they ever look at you like you're a bum investment. | ||
| Thing was with me, I was funny, but they didn't quite know what to do with me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I didn't know either. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Those days, the Montreal days were weird, right? | ||
| People go out there, just go out there to showcase. | ||
| Showcase their talent, try to get a deal. | ||
| And then, do you remember Chicken? | ||
| Do you remember that guy? | ||
| I do remember. | ||
| He got some huge deals in the mid-90s. | ||
| Late 90s. | ||
| It flopped terribly. | ||
| For whatever reason, they thought he was funny and nobody else did. | ||
| Yeah, the name Chicken should have tipped him off. | ||
| Maybe this is a bad idea. | ||
| Who should we make the checkout to? | ||
| Chicken? | ||
| Well, he had a big, crazy act. | ||
| It was like a lot of energy. | ||
| I never saw him work. | ||
| I saw him work. | ||
| I worked with him in Montreal. | ||
| But that name is stupid. | ||
| No disrespect, Chicken, but that's a stupid ass name. | ||
| So it all fell apart and then he wound up hanging himself in front of a school. | ||
| Oh, now you gotta bring that up. | ||
| I feel bad because I just shouted out Chicken and this nigga's dead for five years. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| He hung himself in front of a school? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Because of comedy? | ||
| It didn't work out. | ||
| It fell apart. | ||
| So he thought he was on this rocket ship to fame, like, oh my god, I got the biggest deal ever. | ||
| He got the biggest development deal anybody had ever heard of. | ||
| I remember. | ||
| And then they were like, they're going to make a show around him. | ||
| I forget what kind of show it was going to be. | ||
| And then it didn't work out. | ||
| And then he slowly faded away. | ||
| And then he vanished. | ||
| And then one day he killed himself. | ||
| How long after the deal fell apart? | ||
| Quite a long time. | ||
| More than a decade. | ||
| He never got over the experience of almost making it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| I mean, maybe he was mentally ill. | ||
| Maybe he was suffering from depression from the beginning, and maybe that big, crazy, wild act was his escape. | ||
| So it may have not had anything to do with show business. | ||
| Totally possible. | ||
| But it's not a good narrative. | ||
| The good narrative is show business got him, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See if you can find that guy. | ||
| I never saw a set. | ||
| I remember everyone in town was talking about it, but I'd never seen him. | ||
| Comedians couldn't understand what was going on. | ||
| He would make a lot of noise and bounce around on stage and screaming and yelling, and everybody's like, what is he doing? | ||
| I've seen a few comics like that. | ||
| They'll be killing though. | ||
| And I'll be like, I don't understand. | ||
| Well, the agents thought they had it. | ||
| They're like, this is it. | ||
| He's going to be huge. | ||
| We got him. | ||
| And, you know, they played against each other and got this giant deal. | ||
| This is tragic. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Now I'm mourning the loss of chicken. | ||
| I never even met this motherfucker. | ||
| There were quite a few people that thought they were going to be giant. | ||
| I remember quite a few people who got development deals and all of a sudden they had assistants. | ||
| Like, you know, you got an assistant? | ||
| People would show up with an assistant and someone would take notes while they're on stage and they'd have their coffee ready for them and they drove a Mercedes. | ||
| It's like, what are you doing? | ||
| I got a development deal. | ||
| My show's going to go. | ||
| It's got a guarantee. | ||
| And then they do the pilot. | ||
| That's why I call my company Pilot Boy. | ||
| You know how many of them fucking pilots I did? | ||
| I was like, fuck this. | ||
| This is going to be forever. | ||
| It was hell. | ||
| That's why you call it Pilot Boy? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| It was a development hell. | ||
| I spent over a decade of my life tinkering around with that shit. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Do you think you're going to do more of these podcasts, the ones that you have produced? | ||
| You're going to keep doing that? | ||
| I'd like to, yeah. | ||
| It's not like this gig. | ||
| It's as joyful as this. | ||
| I talk to people I enjoy talking to. | ||
| I don't want to tip my head too much because I want people to listen and see for themselves what it is. | ||
| I don't like describing. | ||
| It's like telling a girl how you're going to fuck her before you do it. | ||
| Let's see what it feels like. | ||
| But I enjoyed it, man. | ||
| Again, who I'm talking to. | ||
| I hope you do it one day. | ||
| You've got to hear it, though. | ||
| I've heard it. | ||
| I've heard episodes. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| I would love to do it. | ||
| I would definitely do it. | ||
| I love what you did in Yellow Springs, too. | ||
| Because you were the first guy to figure it out. | ||
| You were the first guy to say, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to do comedy. | ||
| We got to it early, man. | ||
| When did you start? | ||
| Like, what was the first shows? | ||
| June 6th. | ||
| The first night was the night I did that video that was on YouTube, 846, that George Floyd. | ||
| That was the very first night. | ||
| Seventy people, maybe, in Five Acre Field. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I was like, as soon as I... You know, what was happening, so many people in live entertainment were furloughed that I started finding out from the production world who had gotten furloughed and I'd stop picking them up. | ||
| It was like, you know... | ||
| And a lot of these people, I'd pay them in cash because if I did it, you know, straight down the middle... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They lose their benefits. | ||
| And if for any reason I had to cancel the shows, then they're just stranded with no benefits. | ||
| I couldn't do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it was like the 80s and shit. | ||
| I was paying everybody on the table. | ||
| Even though we wouldn't do anything illegal. | ||
| You know, and the night before the first show, I was like a condemned man. | ||
| I had to put a call into the governor's office. | ||
| I'm a fucking nightclub comic. | ||
| I'm calling the governor. | ||
| And it was a long shot. | ||
| But shout out to Governor DeWine. | ||
| He hit me back. | ||
| And he let me do it because, you know, after that massacre in Dayton, we had done a big... | ||
| Thing that really, I think, really helped heal the community. | ||
| And because of that, he was like, okay, I'll let you do it. | ||
| But the COVID protocols were so strict. | ||
| And we had to learn from scratch how to do it. | ||
| Nothing's going to be perfect. | ||
| It's a pandemic. | ||
| Everything you do is going to be risky, but we had to figure out how to do it as safe as possible within the parameters or guidelines that the government saw fit. | ||
| But we were able to work. | ||
| Did you sell booze? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We had to give it away. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| There was a lot of stuff that we were building to get the mask and all these things that You know, we try to make it accessible. | ||
| The shows are expensive to produce, so I didn't make any money. | ||
| I'd lose money every night. | ||
| But, you know, here we are a year later, I might be 105 shows ahead of everybody. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Because I was working. | ||
| You stayed active. | ||
| Yeah, we might have done a good 30, 40 shows here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's that. | ||
| We found a way. | ||
| And the best part, like I said, is we all got to be together. | ||
| So, you know, people would fly in from L.A. and New York and we'd work three nights a week and some people would stay and we, you know, we could chill because eventually we got access to testing. | ||
| That was the game changer. | ||
| So we'd test every day. | ||
| So when you first started out there was no testing? | ||
| No, it was for the comedians. | ||
| But the crowd, it's like going to the grocery store. | ||
| You come at your own risk, everyone mask up. | ||
| Everyone was outside. | ||
| Everything was outside. | ||
| Everything was probably socially distanced. | ||
| One of the things I learned early on is selling tickets in pairs. | ||
| You know, that was a game changer because it allowed us to get more people in. | ||
| And, you know, it just made everything easier. | ||
| Because imagine if there's two single seats, you can't put two strangers together in a time like this. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Well, you know, it worked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As far as the audience was concerned, not a single reported incident I've heard of someone getting sick or infected in one of these shows. | ||
| We were very careful. | ||
| And then eventually you started testing the crowd? | ||
| Right. | ||
| As testing became more available in the beginning, having tests was like, oh my God, I can't believe we got our hands on these. | ||
| It was very difficult to get testing. | ||
| And... | ||
| The test weren't as rapid. | ||
| It would take longer. | ||
| So you wouldn't have time to test those people. | ||
| I mean, the staffing that you'd have to do to give a few hundred people a test that takes 30 minutes for results. | ||
| Who has that kind of time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you can't wait 30 minutes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But now, when we play in Vegas, we have the capacity now. | ||
| We could test all 13,000 people and get them in a reasonable time. | ||
| Sounds crazy, but... | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Yeah, now it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Early on in the pandemic, there was, I think, like, you know, remember when Trump said something like, just stop testing everybody? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm telling you from experience, that's a terrible, terrible idea. | ||
| It's a ridiculous thing to say. | ||
| Yeah, like, I can't believe that motherfucker was in charge at a time like that. | ||
| That was a wild thing to say. | ||
| He was saying the reason the numbers are so high is because we're testing more people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yo, my man. | ||
| Like, come on, let's think this through. | ||
| Take a swig of Lysol, motherfucker, and think about what you just said. | ||
| What the fuck is this guy talking about? | ||
| That's your leader. | ||
| It's so interesting that that guy's not on social media now. | ||
| He tried to get back on Facebook, and they're like, no, come back in six months. | ||
| It's like he was up for parole. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's a weird thing being a comedian, because there's a thing about Trump that if the circumstances weren't so dire and the consequences so high, that would have been hilarious to watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, man, people died, and the country's all fucked up now, and the Capitol looks like jail. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Wow, it's crazy. | ||
| It looks like a green zone now. | ||
| Yeah, I'm from D.C. I gotta tell you, that shit was particularly offensive to me. | ||
| In D.C., that's the town business, is government. | ||
| And those people that were in that building, so many of them are people from the neighborhoods. | ||
| It feels like you fucked my city up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a scary precedent when you decide you're gonna break down boundaries and you're gonna rush the Capitol building. | ||
| And you're gonna do it with no real plan. | ||
| And you're gonna take pictures on Pelosi's desk with your feet up and take pictures holding the flag wearing a buffalo helmet. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no one to negotiate with. | ||
| Who should I talk to? | ||
| This motherfucker with the zip ties or this bullwinkle nigga? | ||
| Like, who the fuck are these people? | ||
| Man, fuck these people. | ||
| You guys are fucking the country up. | ||
| Changed everything. | ||
| One day. | ||
| One day changed everything because then people knew that that was possible. | ||
| That never happened. | ||
| Yeah, it then happened at the Million Man March, and they was ready for us. | ||
| But look at this shit. | ||
| And the president was the catalyst for it. | ||
| Whether you want to say he's legally responsible or not, that's fine. | ||
| But he did say go take the building back. | ||
| You gotta be strong. | ||
| Did he say go take the building back? | ||
| Is that what he said? | ||
| He said, you gotta take our country back. | ||
| He said, let me not put words in this fellow's mouth. | ||
| And I'm not an anti-Trump guy. | ||
| I'm not pro-Annie. | ||
| This shit is like theater to me. | ||
| I remember when he won. | ||
| You had a great speech. | ||
| He said, let's give him a chance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you know why I said that? | ||
| Because he was duly elected. | ||
| And stormed the Capitol and rubbed my shit on the wall the next day. | ||
| Fucking stupid. | ||
| Did someone rub their shit on the wall? | ||
| I believe a person did. | ||
| It was his first time in the Capitol he got excited. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's kind of amazing only one person got shot. | |
| You know, as sad as that was, it is amazing because, I mean, that could have been a terrible, terrible, terrible situation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And miraculously, you know, it could have been so much worse. | ||
| If there was like carnage there, Jesus, could you imagine? | ||
| If one shot went off in the wrong context, that whole building would have been lit up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There were four or five different law enforcement departments in there by the end of it. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You know, seeing your officials flee their constituents. | ||
| Well, that's crazy. | ||
| You know what's crazy is that was five months ago and they're still catching people. | ||
| Oh, that's not going to stop, I doubt. | ||
| I doubt that will stop. | ||
| They're getting people off of photographs, facial recognition software, videos, people turning their friends in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is all like ominous shit, bro. | ||
| But hopefully it's a growing pain. | ||
| And on the other side of this, people will be more willing to do, you know, right by each other. | ||
| Yeah, we just need a legitimate leader. | ||
| I'll put an ad in the paper. | ||
| Someone who can inspire. | ||
| Everybody that you actually want to do that job, don't want to do that job. | ||
| If it's this hard being a comedian, I can't even imagine. | ||
| Even a guy like Obama, I think about it. | ||
| That shit looks really hard to do being black. | ||
| It sounds trite, but it's not. | ||
| That was a cultural, it was like the moon landing, seeing somebody who's not white be president of the United States. | ||
| Especially with a name like Barack Hussein. | ||
| Barack Hussein Obama. | ||
| My God, man. | ||
| We did that. | ||
| You know, I'm fond of what that meant culturally. | ||
| You could argue about policy, this, that, or the other. | ||
| But, you know, Ohio, we voted for Trump twice. | ||
| We voted for Obama twice, too. | ||
| It's an interesting swing state, Ohio. | ||
| And normally we pick right. | ||
| Like, whoever we pick is the president. | ||
| This last go-around being the exception. | ||
| Maybe the only exception. | ||
| You know... | ||
| Yeah, fuck politics, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, literally, that's feckless. | ||
| I'm telling you, I'm on my kindness conspiracy. | ||
| As long as I'm kind to people, like, if we live by an ethic of kindness, if we foster trust amongst each other, it will matter less what corporations and politicians say because we'll be able to trust our society's cohesiveness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you politicize these things, it's going to become increasingly difficult to come to an understanding and agreement. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| And I think it's just, it's so difficult when people get attached to whatever political party they're in. | ||
| It's very difficult for them to disagree with that party, and so easy for them to go along with it, and then so easy for them to hate the people that are opposed to it, the people that are on the other party. | ||
| It's such a binary thing. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| It's also a cold thing to do in front of all of us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I don't think people feel that way. | ||
| No, most people don't. | ||
| No. | ||
| But when we're talking in groups, that's when it gets weird. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Talking in tribes. | ||
| Yeah, it's getting tribal here. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| More than ever before. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| I don't even really know what you politically believe or don't believe, but who gives a fuck? | ||
| I get along with you every time I see you. | ||
| I know you're funny, you're a nice dude, we laugh about shit, we learn shit from each other. | ||
| You're from Boston, I'm from D.C. It's two very different types of places and types of cultures. | ||
| But this culture of comedy, this common denominator, makes me feel like we're of the same tribe. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And there's trans people in my tribe, and there's white and black and Asian and all kinds of people, and all of them are committed to this culture. | ||
| Concept of levity and we all get there different and interesting and unique ways. | ||
| And what's wrong with that? | ||
| It works. | ||
| And we say terrible shit to each other all the fucking time. | ||
| Everyone's fine. | ||
| But it's fun. | ||
| We look forward to it. | ||
| But it is a tribe. | ||
| It's a different kind of tribe. | ||
| Normally I get up in the morning and I dread getting on a plane if I have to go do a work thing. | ||
| I was excited to come here today. | ||
| Not to be on a big podcast. | ||
| I'm gonna fuck around and hang with Joe. | ||
| I'm sure I probably said four things that I wiped already. | ||
| I don't even know it yet. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, take a look at the comment section. | ||
| Yeah, that's good shit. | ||
| Everything you said is dead on. | ||
| Likewise. | ||
| Hey, man, you got any of your cups? | ||
| What is this thing you got with this buffalo water? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't see you and not celebrate. | ||
| Now, obviously, is this some cheap shit, Joe? | ||
| No, that's the shit, bro. | ||
| Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. | ||
| Buffalo Tracy has been around longer than America. | ||
| That's 1773, that company. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Tastes like slavery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's get it. | |
| Hey, Fingers, you don't got a cup, do you? | ||
| Right here. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Pour out your water. | ||
| Oh, my man. | ||
| Cleaned it out. | ||
| That's good, okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Celebration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, so celebrate to Joe Rogan. | |
| Celebrate. | ||
| We don't need ice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on, man. | |
| No, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No ice. | ||
| Thank you, Jamie. | ||
| Marlon Wayans was at my house in Ohio. | ||
| Salute, my brother. | ||
| Cheers, man. | ||
| Salute. | ||
| Marlon Williams, I gotta tell you, is one of my favorite people. | ||
| He's a wildly consistent dude in my life. | ||
| I used to hang out in Hollywood and sometimes I drank too much, but I knew where he lived. | ||
| He's like one of the only people who knew where he lived, and I'd just knock on his door. | ||
| He'd open it. | ||
| He got some room in his basement. | ||
| He just stole blankets and then I'd sleep. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because I trusted him. | ||
| Yeah, he's just a fucking cool dude, man. | ||
| He's a funny guy. | ||
| He's a cool dude. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Anyway, I brought him up because... | ||
| He came to my shack. | ||
| That's where I do my show. | ||
| It's like my little hangout. | ||
| I got a little clubhouse in the corner from the crib. | ||
| We all just hang out there. | ||
| Nothing nefarious. | ||
| But Marlon was so incensed that I didn't have ice that he bought me an ice machine. | ||
| It was the weirdest gift. | ||
| He didn't even tell me. | ||
| He just sent it in the mail. | ||
| Who does that? | ||
| Tell me about this club that you're opening. | ||
| Comedy club? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Had a conversation once with Chris Rock. | ||
| Yeah, I love Chris Rock, too. | ||
| I love all comedians, but Chris and I were talking about... | ||
| This is an interesting question. | ||
| I'm going to see how you feel about... | ||
| I said, how many seats are you optimal? | ||
| Like, when you look at a crowd, how many people do you want to see out there where you feel like I'm home? | ||
| Chris said, like, 6,000. | ||
| And I forget sometimes, got big, big star. | ||
| Me, 200. 200. That's like a sweet spot for me. | ||
| That's why I love playing the punchline, you know. | ||
| But I don't even need that many. | ||
| The belly room, one of my favorite rooms on earth is the belly room at the Comedy Store. | ||
| That's like 70 seats soaking wet, right? | ||
| I would make this club 120. This club is not for people who are trying to count the gate. | ||
| This club is for people who want to rock, like really get into some shit, like try some shit out. | ||
| It's like when that alternative scene, in the 90s, for people at home, Joe, I'm not saying this, I know you know, but in the 90s it was an alternative, what they called an alternative comedy scene. | ||
| This was Patton Oswalt and Janine Garofalo and Dave Cross, Bob Odenkirk, these type of people. | ||
| And it became real popular. | ||
| It became like a scene. | ||
| And I would check it out. | ||
| Now, traditional club comics hated that scene. | ||
| They resented it because the things that was going on there, these jokes weren't structured. | ||
| It was like a lab almost. | ||
| People would go there and trash it out. | ||
| What was interesting about it to me wasn't what the comedians were trying. | ||
| As much as it was The way the crowds would listen to them. | ||
| It was one of these setups, if you went there and just did your act, no matter how funny your act is, that's not what they wanted to see. | ||
| What they wanted to see was someone take a chance. | ||
| And that shit was like heaven on earth. | ||
| When a crowd pushes someone, just try some stuff. | ||
| You don't have to land the trick, but the beauty is in the attempt. | ||
| Just try it. | ||
| Whatever this thing is that you're worried, it makes you nervous or uncomfortable. | ||
| And that... | ||
| That scene made a profound impression on me that that was possible, that you could make a crowd into that. | ||
| Because I'm, you know, comedians are addicted to the process of refinement. | ||
| You know, a guy like Seinfeld, he would never do a podcast because it's such a spontaneous, off-the-cuff endeavor. | ||
| And his skill as a comedian, one of his super, super-duper powers, Jerry Seinfeld, Is like a well-refined comedian. | ||
| He can take an abstraction and make it a refined piece. | ||
| This scene didn't have any of that refinement. | ||
| Seinfeld does that, but then he also does that cars, comedians getting cars, in cars getting coffee show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where he's like a podcast. | ||
| He's loose. | ||
| I did that show. | ||
| I enjoyed it, actually. | ||
| We did it in D.C. What kind of car did you drive? | ||
| A French piece of shit. | ||
| It like broke down. | ||
| I don't think they cut that out. | ||
| It was a good looking car, but it was a piece of shit. | ||
| Well, he's mostly into Porsches. | ||
| Most of his thing is Porsches. | ||
| If he's driving those other cars, it's really more for show, I think. | ||
| But it reminds me, that show reminds me of you a little bit in the sense that it's about his passions. | ||
| He loves cars. | ||
| He loves comedians. | ||
| He loves comedy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And apparently he likes coffee. | |
| Jay Leno, you ever done Jay Leno's Garage? | ||
| No. | ||
| I've done that. | ||
| He is so much better at that show than, at least the way, not that he was bad at hosting The Tonight Show, but he's himself. | ||
| He really is himself. | ||
| He doesn't have to dress up. | ||
| He wears the same shit every day, like a jean shirt and jean pants. | ||
| He doesn't give a fuck what he looks like. | ||
| He's got no hair and makeup on the set. | ||
| He just wants to talk about cars. | ||
| The guy's got hundreds of cars. | ||
| He's got warehouses filled with cars. | ||
| Full-time employees all over the place working on it. | ||
| All these people. | ||
| He's got fabricators. | ||
| People that make sheet metal, like, fix fenders and shit and all kinds of stuff. | ||
| And the fucking man loves cars. | ||
| And I brought my 1965 Corvette in. | ||
| And just, he and I just geeking out over lines. | ||
| And Steve Stroop, the guy who built my car, he came with me. | ||
| And, you know, we talked about all the various aspects of the car and all the improvements, all the different things that he had done to it. | ||
| And you can see Jay Leno going over it. | ||
| He knows the details of the 1965, the original motor. | ||
| He starts talking about all the different things, and then he drove it. | ||
| He's the only one other than me that's ever driven that car. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and he takes it out, boom, and go out to the hills and went up to Los Angeles, Crest Forest, you know? | ||
| Man, you took me out one night. | ||
| You had a hot one. | ||
| That Porsche you used to drive. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I still got that. | ||
| That was a hot one, bro. | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| That night was wild. | ||
| And you started doing the motherfuckers. | ||
| You know, we was up in them Hollywood Hills. | ||
| You started doing them James Dean turns. | ||
| I got scared. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I got scared. | ||
| I said, Joe, what are you doing? | ||
| That car's glued to the ground, though. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| That's what you were demonstrating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You were whipping that shit. | ||
| Oh, that was the night we went to Naomi Campbell's book release party. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That shit was fun, though. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| It wasn't that weird. | ||
| It was weird to me. | ||
| Well, because you weren't expecting it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You were just at the comedy club I ran into you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And was like, yo... | ||
| We were so high, too. | ||
| I was like, okay, let's go. | ||
| It was fun, man. | ||
| It was really fun, but it was like, you know, I thought it was just going to be a regular night at the store. | ||
| Next thing you know, we're in an elevator that's going up the side of the hill. | ||
| Oh, that mountain. | ||
| Yeah, that was crazy. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| It's a nice house. | ||
| Giant naked picture of Naomi Campbell on the side of the building. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| No, of course I do. | ||
| Of course I do. | ||
| It was like 40 foot tall nude. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| And then you get in there and there's all these famous people. | ||
| This is one of my favorite parts of the night. | ||
| We're sitting around and you and I are talking. | ||
| Man, I would not want to be famous like these people. | ||
| And I look to you and go, do you the most famous person here? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Turns out it was you, Joe. | ||
| And you're like, no, am I? I go, you are the most famous person in this fucking room. | ||
| I don't have, you know... | ||
| You know, I could forget about it. | ||
| Yeah, you could forget about it. | ||
| You know how to let it go, but Lenny Kravitz was there, and Demi Moore, and there was all these famous people. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| I was like, oh, there's that guy. | ||
| You know, again, I'm always shocked. | ||
| Lenny Kravitz is a cool motherfucker. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
| I really dig him. | ||
| The first time I met him... | ||
| Sherman Helmsley, they used to play George Jefferson, introduced me to him. | ||
| I did a movie with him years ago. | ||
| It was me, Norm Macdonald, Sherman Helmsley was in it. | ||
| I remember I didn't know him well, but I was awestruck because I'm Jefferson's fan. | ||
| Any Norman Lear show is what I was watching. | ||
| And he invited me to come to this concert with him. | ||
| And I didn't realize at the time that Lenny Kravitz's mother was on the Jeffersons, which is how he knew him. | ||
| Man, I smoked a joint with George Jefferson, and we went out to see this Lenny Kravitz show. | ||
| And Lenny couldn't have been nicer. | ||
| Yeah, he was very normal. | ||
| Doesn't he, he lives on a giant ranch in Brazil. | ||
| He has a giant ranch in Brazil. | ||
| Oh, he doesn't live there? | ||
| He just goes there occasionally? | ||
| Yeah, he's one of them dudes. | ||
| He got a beautiful house in Paris. | ||
| I've never been, but I've heard stories. | ||
| He's got, you know, spread in the Bahamas where his family is from. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And then he got the Brazilian jump off. | ||
| So, you know, he does it big. | ||
| And Lenny is a style guy, like. | ||
| Everything he does is just fly. | ||
| Prince was like that, too. | ||
| Everything just kind of fly. | ||
| They did a tour of Lenny's house. | ||
| It's a video. | ||
| He's going over all the art pieces and who designed this chair and who made all these things and showing this video of this place in Brazil. | ||
| It's beautiful, man. | ||
| He started making furniture, designing furniture, stuff like that. | ||
| Now, you know, it's funny. | ||
| I don't have really... | ||
| Kanye is like this. | ||
| Kanye West is a design genius. | ||
| It's not a trick. | ||
| People call Kanye genius all the time. | ||
| This is not just a label that's slapping on it. | ||
| If you ever see him in a studio session, this motherfucker look like Captain Kirk. | ||
| He's running the bridge. | ||
| He's nice with it. | ||
| I've been very lucky to get to see people who are great at things up close. | ||
| Even being on his podcast. | ||
| I feel like you didn't make podcasts up, but you kind of make podcasts up. | ||
| And I know you. | ||
| It's fucking a strange neighborhood in life. | ||
| It's one of the joys of my life getting to know these people and knowing and seeing them be human. | ||
| We struggle through these things. | ||
| We bellyache about decisions. | ||
| None of these people that I know are contest winners. | ||
| They all work very hard to be great at what they do. | ||
| Everyone is gifted, but these people spend time refining their gift and getting rejection and taking all those shots that you take in life. | ||
| And they made something of it. | ||
| I can't begrudge them that. | ||
| And I always hope that none of us are white. | ||
| I hope we all survive it. | ||
| And I think that's why that cancel culture shit bothers me. | ||
| I'm not even opposed to the ideas behind some of these cancellations. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You want to do good things. | ||
| I get stopping harassment. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| Racism, harassment, everything. | ||
| This ism, that ism, this phobia, that phobia. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Let's fight it. | ||
| And the inclination in all of it is to make the world a better place. | ||
| That's the inclination. | ||
| It gets abused and misused sometimes by the wrong people and bad actors. | ||
| But at the end of the day, what they're trying to do, at least what they think they're trying to do, is eliminate bad aspects of our culture and our society. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what they're trying to do. | ||
| Right, because the society doesn't correct itself. | ||
| And in that sense, I appreciate it. | ||
| My kids make me very hopeful for the future. | ||
| A lot of people say, good people I know, I don't want to bring kids into this world, like my age, no kids. | ||
| Don't do that shit. | ||
| If you think you're a good person, please, have a kid. | ||
| Put all your good ideas in that kid, so that the world will be better. | ||
| I quote you all the time because of something you said to me in the parking lot of the Comedy Store. | ||
| You said, my children didn't just increase the amount of love in my life, they increased my capacity for love. | ||
| Oh, that's very true. | ||
| They saved my life. | ||
| I wasn't in dying straits, but man, I wouldn't be fractionally. | ||
| I think what I am or have some of the courage that I was able to muster. | ||
| It's not like I'm not scared. | ||
| I'll be scared, but I just do the shit anyway. | ||
| Everybody who knows me says there's like me pre-children and post-children. | ||
| I'm like a different person. | ||
| I'm so much nicer. | ||
| I always liked you, Joe. | ||
| I never saw you as a mean guy. | ||
| You're always kind. | ||
| You're always edgy. | ||
| And everyone was scared of you because you know Kung Fu. | ||
| But, you know, it's not like you was in the comedy club sweep-kicking niggas and shit. | ||
| We was kicking it. | ||
| And I don't know, bro. | ||
| Like, I just feel real grateful for the years I got to do this. | ||
| Like, I don't feel... | ||
| I feel grateful, too. | ||
| I think we're so fortunate. | ||
| You look at people that are living their life, and that famous quote that I love, most men live lives of silent desperation. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Who said that? | ||
| And why did they say such a thing? | ||
| Walden Pond, what is his name? | ||
| Emerson? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thoreau. | |
| Thoreau? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was Thoreau's quote. | ||
| It's a great quote, and it's so true. | ||
| Most people are just fucking, God, every day is a struggle. | ||
| They're not doing what they want to do. | ||
| They don't feel loved. | ||
| They're not surrounded by interesting people. | ||
| They're not stimulated. | ||
| Like, every day. | ||
| My problem is I just have a lot of shit to get done. | ||
| That's my only problem every day. | ||
| It's funny, though, because a lot of the shit you do, there's less social capital in it. | ||
| This is an easy existence now. | ||
| Men don't have to lift heavy things anymore. | ||
| You're out here hunting your own meat, shopping your kung fu, lifting weights. | ||
| I'm not doing none of that shit. | ||
| But I realized a long time ago I have to do all those things to keep my head right. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| I don't know that I have a similar passion, but you know what? | ||
| I find my solace in people. | ||
| There's so much shit that I see. | ||
| I'm talking about circumstantially what they'd say, normal circumstantial people who have these incredible capacities in them. | ||
| It's harder now that I got notoriety to be around the people that move me the most. | ||
| But it's people like that, the guy that goes to the job he doesn't like. | ||
| I respect this guy. | ||
| There's so many people I've met. | ||
| That's will. | ||
| That's a real willpower. | ||
| People who do actual public service. | ||
| Not these fake woketivists, but the woman that works at the shelter for the abused women or helps women get out of relationships that are abusive with their lives. | ||
| Or helps veterans cope with PTSD or get counseling. | ||
| This guy I met that lost both his legs and was cracking up laughing with me when he was talking about it. | ||
| These people blow my fucking mind. | ||
| Yeah, as they should. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of exciting people out there. | ||
| And just because someone's famous doesn't mean they're exciting. | ||
| Oh boy, ain't that the truth. | ||
| I ain't gonna start naming lemons, but some of these niggas is lemons. | ||
| Lames. | ||
| Lames! | ||
| It's so true. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| They're so bland. | ||
| Yeah, but then I'll meet somebody who doesn't have any notoriety and they humble me because they're such spectacular people. | ||
| Yeah, I've been very fortunate to meet a lot of interesting people and I think doing this show has really changed the way I look at life. | ||
| But your kung fu has suffered, Joe. | ||
| It has a little bit. | ||
| Well, it's age, right? | ||
| That too. | ||
| But it's also just the lack of practice all the time. | ||
| I just couldn't keep getting injured. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| You would never fight again, would you? | ||
| No, not now. | ||
| I'm 53 years old. | ||
| Would you fight another 53-year-old like on some Mike Tyson shit? | ||
| No, Mike Tyson's still fighting demons, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Those demons are still there. | ||
| Mike Tyson is the reason why this desk is this width. | ||
| Did I tell you that? | ||
| No. | ||
| This is real? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I had a smaller desk that I was planning on using for the new studio. | ||
| This is the exact same width as the studio desk in my old place, the exact same one. | ||
| And I had a small one. | ||
| I'm like, maybe it would be better if I'm a little closer to the people. | ||
| But then I did a podcast with Tyson. | ||
| I did two of them with Tyson. | ||
| One, when he was high, when he was running Tyson's Ranch. | ||
| He had a little bit of a belly. | ||
| He was jolly. | ||
| He was just high all the time. | ||
| We had a wonderful conversation. | ||
| And then, next time he came in is when he was preparing for the Roy Jones fight. | ||
| And he was jacked! | ||
| And he had these big-ass muscles in his forearms, and he just looked ready to go. | ||
| And he made me so nervous. | ||
| Like, he was so keyed up. | ||
| You could tell. | ||
| Like, he was Ready to go. | ||
| He was ready to go. | ||
| And I'm like, no, no, no. | ||
| Fuck this small table. | ||
| I need to not feel so nervous. | ||
| I need to have some distance. | ||
| So I was thinking if I was any closer to Mike, so instead of like here, if I was like this, and he was that amped up, it would probably affect the way I was communicating with him. | ||
| I'd be nervous. | ||
| He's an intimidating guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I am fascinated with him as a public figure. | ||
| Well, he is so multifaceted. | ||
| There's so much going on. | ||
| If you just looked at him as this brute who used to be one of the greatest knockout artists of all time, you'd miss so much. | ||
| He's a scholar of boxing. | ||
| There's probably not a man alive who knows more about the all-time greats. | ||
| He could talk to you about Harry Greb and Jack Johnson and Stanley Ketchel. | ||
| He could talk to you about guys that you never even heard before. | ||
| Even the tattoos he's got. | ||
| Arthur Ashe and Mao. | ||
| Is Che Guevara on him too? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Does he have Che Guevara? | ||
| He's definitely got Mao and Arthur Ashe. | ||
| Yeah, if he has Che Guevara, I hope he lasered it off. | ||
| That one's like the bad boy eyes or keep on trucking or something. | ||
| He said keep on trucking. | ||
| It's such a silly... | ||
| Does he have Che Guevara? | ||
| Yeah, I think he does on his stomach, right? | ||
| Yep, yep, right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, okay, I thought I was making that up. | ||
| The Arthi Ash one, though. | ||
| And then, you know, he's got one on his face. | ||
| One of the only celebrities that pulled off the face tattoo. | ||
| I mean, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro did take over Cuba when they were in their early 30s. | ||
| Like, when I was doing the second season of Chappelle's show, all these motherfuckers was taking over Cuba. | ||
| Negotiating with the United States and Russia. | ||
| Fidel ran Cuba till he fucking died. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| But, you know, he's one of these guys, and I know, you know, as an American especially, people always kind of frown at Fidel Castro. | ||
| But I remember the deployment of Cuban doctors and the reason they were able to do that is because the education system was so good. | ||
| Cuban doctors, some of the most renowned doctors in the world, aid packages that Castro sent to Africa. | ||
| It wasn't like Cuba was rolling in dough. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| I say these things, people are going to think of days of communism. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| No one's all bad. | ||
| Very few people are all bad. | ||
| And I'll be the first to tell you, communism does not look fun to me. | ||
| No. | ||
| It removes incentive. | ||
| Everybody that looks at people like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, look at these billionaires and say, they have too much. | ||
| We've got to eliminate billionaires. | ||
| They have too much. | ||
| They're the outliers. | ||
| They're the weirdos that have figured out how to accumulate so much wealth that it's preposterous. | ||
| But you can't take away all incentive for people to perform because if you do that, you're not going to get any innovation. | ||
| You're not going to get all the things you enjoy. | ||
| You wouldn't have iPhones and Shure microphones and fucking Samsung TVs if people couldn't make money. | ||
| It's funny because in our business, we make, you know, millions of dollars and all this shit. | ||
| We're like famous and they still have award shows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, like, this is funny. | |
| And I got a trophy too. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's really funny. | ||
| And a red carpet to take pictures on. | ||
| Yeah, it's just so... | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| Yeah, it is very strange. | ||
| Do you think you're ever going to do any more acting? | ||
| Or are you just sticking to stand-up now? | ||
| Man, I got this weird idea. | ||
| I want to go to Africa and do some of these Nollywood movies. | ||
| I've been watching them. | ||
| I was telling Naomi about it on her podcast. | ||
| It's the same thing I'm talking about with these Cuban docs, how people can solve problems with so little resources. | ||
| This is what these African directors are like. | ||
| The movies look crazy. | ||
| But it's funny how crazy they look. | ||
| But it's also awe-inspiring because I can't believe this guy with no resources solved a complicated filmmaking problem with this type of ingenuity because they had to. | ||
| What if somebody had a reputable American star to apply these tricks to? | ||
| I'll come with the funny. | ||
| You just give me that look, baby. | ||
| Don't you worry. | ||
| It's all going to work out. | ||
| I want to do that. | ||
| I want to just see what's popping over there. | ||
| Africa's popping right now. | ||
| Do you have an idea of like a script or an outline of a story? | ||
| I don't know that I need one. | ||
| You gotta see one of these movies to know what I'm talking about. | ||
| But it's just like something about it makes me feel like joyful when I watch it. | ||
| Like someone is just, I don't know. | ||
| I just want to try some shit. | ||
| Tell you what, Africa's taking over in the UFC right now. | ||
| Are they really? | ||
| Three African champions and they're three arguably the best of all time. | ||
| What countries? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| Cameroon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is the guy you were telling me about. | |
| They kept trying to get him in gangs. | ||
| He fled the country. | ||
| He found a way to train. | ||
| That was a great story. | ||
| It's a crazy story. | ||
| They kept catching him when he was trying to get into Morocco, or from Morocco to Spain, and they kept sending him back to the Sahara Desert to die. | ||
| They just drop you off in the desert. | ||
| Like, good luck. | ||
| And he made it back seven fucking times and finally made it across to Spain. | ||
| They put him in jail in Spain for two months, which they do when you get over there. | ||
| And then finally they released him. | ||
| He was homeless in France. | ||
| Slept in a parking lot and made his way to a gym. | ||
| And he wanted to be a boxer. | ||
| And they're like, man, you should try MMA. Yeah. | ||
| And he was like, you know, I want to be a boxer. | ||
| But they paid him 500 bucks to fight. | ||
| So he's like, okay, I'll do it. | ||
| So he beat the fuck out of some people. | ||
| And now he's the heavyweight champion of the world. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And not just the heavyweight champion of the world. | ||
| The most terrifying heavyweight champion of all time. | ||
| Nice guy? | ||
| Nice guy. | ||
| Super nice guy. | ||
| Super friendly. | ||
| Just the sweetheart of a guy. | ||
| Terrifying in a cage. | ||
| Terrifying. | ||
| Just nukes people. | ||
| It's Joe. | ||
| Oh dear! | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Get Idris Elba on the phone. | ||
| Idris, I want you to fight somebody. | ||
| He's such a specimen. | ||
| And he just won the title beating the greatest heavyweight of all time, Stipe Miocic. | ||
| He just nuked him in two rounds. | ||
| What do you think of a flick like that? | ||
| What does he weigh? | ||
| He's 265 when he gets on the scale, but he's about 270-something when he gets in the cage. | ||
| He has to lose weight to make the heavyweight limit of 265. Because the UFC has a heavyweight limit. | ||
| And he's, without a doubt, the scariest heavyweight that the sport's ever seen. | ||
| Because he flatlines people. | ||
| How tall is he? | ||
| 6'5"? | ||
| Oh, he's a big dude. | ||
| He's huge. | ||
| See, show the video of him knocking out. | ||
| Yeah, go to the top KO finishes. | ||
| Yeah, watch this. | ||
| Go full screen. | ||
| I mean, he just fucking flatlines people. | ||
| It's different because you can't make any mistakes with him because as soon as he touches you, boom, see? | ||
| Dudes just go down. | ||
| As soon as he touches you, you're just like, what in the fuck just hit me? | ||
| And he can do that to everybody. | ||
| Give me another one. | ||
| What is the UFC ref looking for? | ||
| That was, would you back up a little? | ||
| That was where you just were, that was the Stipe fight. | ||
| What is the UFC referee looking for? | ||
| Watch this one. | ||
| He's clearly out. | ||
| Okay, that guy, yeah, he did the right thing right there. | ||
| That fight is a beat up a dead body, wouldn't it? | ||
| Well, the thing is, guys recover. | ||
| Devastating uppercut. | ||
| He's devastating with everything he does. | ||
| And then he goes in. | ||
| That guy's clearly sleeping. | ||
| No one's faking sleep in the octagon, are they? | ||
| No, but you know what? | ||
| By the time he's throwing that shot, he doesn't know if that guy's going to get up on the way down. | ||
| He's something special, man. | ||
| Like, real unique, because he's just a top-of-the-food-chain specimen of an athlete. | ||
| How old is this fellow? | ||
|
unidentified
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34. That's old for a fighter, no? | |
| No, not for a heavyweight. | ||
| For a heavyweight, it's a good age. | ||
| A heavyweight's mature later in life. | ||
| Joe, the shit you know. | ||
| If you ever wrote a book, what would it be about? | ||
| Nonsense. | ||
| Yes, I think I'm the same. | ||
| I think I'm the same. | ||
| But every time I talk to you, I can't stump the band. | ||
| Anything I can talk about, you tend to know something about it. | ||
| I know a little bit about a lot of stupid shit. | ||
| It's all useful if you got a job like this. | ||
| Yeah, if you got a job like this. | ||
| But it's all because of talking to so many people. | ||
| But unfortunately, I forgot so much of it, too. | ||
| Because it's like my hard drive's just over spilling. | ||
| It's like a garbage pail that's just garbage has fallen out of it. | ||
| There's like too much in there. | ||
| Does Spotify give you time off? | ||
| Can you take a break? | ||
| Would you take a break? | ||
| No. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| I know you enjoy it, but... | ||
| All these podcasts that I book, it's all based on my interests. | ||
| Like, I get a list of people that are trying to get on, and I go, what did that guy write a book about? | ||
| Oh, I want to talk to that dude. | ||
| And it's just entirely based on me wanting to talk to this person. | ||
| Do they solicit you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Spotify has nothing to do with it. | ||
| No, I'm saying the people on the show. | ||
| Some of them, yes. | ||
| Yeah, like I called you. | ||
| Yeah, but some of them, I'll call them. | ||
| Some of them, I'll watch a documentary. | ||
| I'll go, hey, can you get this guy? | ||
| Oh, that's dope. | ||
| Yeah, and then, you know, reach out and try to get him. | ||
| Or some of them, I'll have read their book, or someone else will recommend something to me. | ||
| It's all different. | ||
| If you could cast a dinner party for a guest, who you invite, and you don't say me. | ||
| I'd definitely bring Elon. | ||
| He's one of my favorite people to talk to. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| People I know that know him really do like him a lot. | ||
| I like him a lot. | ||
| He's a sweet dude. | ||
| I gotta say, that night when we were all just sitting around talking, he's one of these guys who seems actually shy. | ||
| I don't know if shy is the word. | ||
| He doesn't need attention. | ||
| No, which is an anomaly in our walk of life. | ||
| But he's cool to talk to. | ||
| He's genuinely there. | ||
| Even though I'm a moron in comparison to him, when I talk to him, he'll talk to me in a normal way. | ||
| He'll just communicate. | ||
| I'll go, well, how do they do that? | ||
| And he'll explain it. | ||
| And I'll go, what is interesting about that to you? | ||
| And then we'll have these weird conversations where he'll explain his thought process about what's intriguing about something or what made him interested in pursuing something. | ||
| And he doesn't mind explaining these things. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| Sometimes you think a person like that would lose patience with your layman intellect. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And he does not. | ||
| Does not. | ||
| He was explaining to me that night we were hanging out how they decide when and where to do a launch from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| I got to tell you, I have a public school education. | ||
| That was tedious. | ||
| I was gonna write a Saturday Night Live tweet, oh, we don't explain that shit on the show. | ||
| Let's get it. | ||
| That becomes a problem with people that are really smart, is that some of the subjects do get tedious. | ||
| Like I read in some article that Albert Einstein used to fuck a lot of bitches. | ||
| Yeah, so did Richard Feynman. | ||
| Yeah, they just made me laugh, like Einstein picking up girls at a bar. | ||
| I think they were professors, and girls threw themselves at them. | ||
| I think it was like a celebrity thing. | ||
| Yeah, he was a renowned academic. | ||
| Marilyn Monroe had said she had a crush on him. | ||
| And he had the crazy hair. | ||
| I mean, he just looked like a character. | ||
| And he had that mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, most of us walk around in a state of complete befuddlement. | ||
| We feel a certain way, but we don't really know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This guy... | ||
| He was also of an age where public intellectuals were celebrated like stars. | ||
| You know, he was celebrated I mean, if you think about his contribution to modern life, that's a hell of an equation. | ||
| Not just that, but all of his contributions. | ||
| He was just constantly evaluating the very nature of the universe itself. | ||
| The very nature of matter and life and energy and gravity and all these different forces. | ||
| Wasn't Oppenheimer one of his students? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm making shit up now. | ||
| Look, internet people, look that shit up for yourself, I'm guessing. | ||
| Oppenheimer's quote when they detonated the nuclear bomb is one of my favorite quotes ever. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| He said he quoted the Bhagavad Gita. | ||
| They detonated the first nuclear weapon. | ||
| And he quoted the Bhagavad Gita. | ||
| He said, I am become death, destroyer of worlds. | ||
| That's what he said after the first atomic bomb got detonated. | ||
| There was a black guy named Earl Charles who was there when it happened, and he has a famous quote from that very moment. | ||
| He said, shut the fuck up. | ||
| What the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| What the fuck is he talking about? | ||
| I am become death, destroyer of worlds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a wild thing to say when you just see a bomb detonate. | ||
| But imagine being there when the very first nuclear bomb gets detonated and imagine it's from your mind. | ||
| It's a bunch of other people working on it. | ||
| The Manhattan Project had a lot of people working on it, but a lot of it was Oppenheimer. | ||
| Oppenheimer. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Oppenheimer and Einstein. | ||
| So right here, let's fuck the world up. | ||
| Let's sit down and draw out some planes and fuck the whole world up. | ||
| Let's get it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man. | |
| Genius. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, Einstein looks exactly like my grandfather. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Like, so close, it's terrifying. | ||
| Take away the hair. | ||
| You know, my grandfather didn't have crazy hair like that, but with that mustache and his face, he looks so much like him. | ||
| Especially in that picture right there. | ||
| Like, he could have been my grandfather's brother. | ||
| It's startling how kind his face is. | ||
| Yeah, wow. | ||
| That makes a mean dude, though. | ||
| Imagine being a guy who's just that much smarter than everybody else. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And you're trying to explain to people. | ||
| Will you shut up, bitch? | ||
| I'm thinking about math! | ||
| No, it seems like an island. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know what that, I can't imagine, honestly, I can't imagine what that would be like. | ||
| I do think that I don't know. | ||
| The shit that his mind conceived in his lifetime. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If he were a comedian, he'd have the angles that none of us saw. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's that kind of thing. | ||
| I mean, the thing is, Elon Musk is not Einstein in the sense that he's not creating equations. | ||
| That are going to shape the way our universe is thought of and perceived. | ||
| But what he is doing is creating these businesses and these Articles of technology, whether it's Tesla or whether it's SpaceX, these rockets that they're designing. | ||
| He's changing the potential of our future. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, he's changed what it means to have an electric car. | ||
| He made an electric car instead of a thing that's practical. | ||
| He made this dope spaceship that goes zero to 60 in a little over two seconds. | ||
| Have you been in a Tesla, like a Model S? Yeah. | ||
| When it accelerates? | ||
| A lot of people know they drive, you know. | ||
| They're preposterous. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| The self-driving shit. | ||
| You know, it's weird because I feel like we live in the future. | ||
| When we used to watch the Jetsons and all this and Dick Tracy, it's better than what they thought it would be. | ||
| They didn't think of the internet. | ||
| No. | ||
| The Jetsons didn't even have an iPhone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know, yeah. | ||
| Neither did Captain Kirk. | ||
| He had to go, Kirk out! | ||
| Yeah, man, I got a phone in my pocket. | ||
| I can watch the news. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All this information at my disposal. | ||
| You can FaceTime people. | ||
| It's that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kirk didn't even have FaceTime. | ||
| Yeah, and it's just an amazing piece of technology, and then people set it up in the house, in the room by themselves, and twerk in front of it. | ||
| What the fuck are we doing, man? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Tick-tocking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Strange. | ||
| I hope everyone's gonna be okay, Joe. | ||
| David, I think they are. | ||
| I think they are going to be okay. | ||
| I think it's going to take time, and it's going to be like most moments in history. | ||
| It's not going to be smooth. | ||
| It's not going to be one clear ascension to enlightenment and peace and love, but we're going to get better. | ||
| We're going to get through this rocky era that we're in right now. | ||
| It'll take time, but I think we're going to get through it with the lessons of the pain and suffering that's been caused by bad decisions and the way we live right now. | ||
| Well, let's minimize the pain and try to expand the upside to all this bullshit. | ||
| Let's make these motherfuckers laugh, David Chappelle. | ||
| Let's get them. | ||
| Let's go out and get them. | ||
| Salute, my brother. | ||
| I love you, Joe Rogan. | ||
| I love you too, brother. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cheers. | |
| Let's wrap this bitch up. | ||
| That's a wrap, fingers. | ||
| That's a wrap. | ||
| Bring it home. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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