Ron White critiques cigar smoking techniques, revealing his transformative quit using hypnosis and ayahuasca in Costa Rica after a $70K rehab failure, while Joe Rogan debates comedy’s personal nature and platform censorship. They contrast Ron’s 36-year career—built on discipline and niche venues like the Mirage—with Eddie Murphy’s ageless appeal and Martin Lawrence’s retirement, questioning how fame sustains relevance. White’s legal battles and Rogan’s UFC fight underscore their shared defiance of norms, yet both lament comedy’s pressures, from arbitrary TV rules (like Canada’s Massey Hall fine) to the toll of touring. Ultimately, their conversation reveals how resilience, reinvention, and raw talent clash with industry constraints and aging. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, because if you don't, if you just suck the flame into it, you'll burn it.
You'll burn the inside of it instead of just toasting the outside of it, get most of that surface hot, and then just a little quick one to get it really going nice.
I started smoking them on the golf course because if I have a $15 cigar and I put it down on the tee box and somebody steps on it, I'm mad at them all day long, even though it's totally my fault.
You know, pheasant, duck, but you're just laying out in a field freezing cold with my father and I could do nothing right and it wasn't a particularly good shot.
He had a 12-gauge with no pad on it that would just knock my 13-year-old shoulder out of socket and And so I never thought it was that great.
And I really didn't enjoy any of the experiences that I had with him.
He was also a golfer, but I rarely played with him because he was just kind of mean about it.
Then he was also a natural athlete, lettered in every sport, and had a football scholarship to A&M to play right guard at 195 pounds.
I still have a fake drink on stage, and I don't know who I'm trying to kid, because sometimes I say I did, and then sometimes I act like I didn't, and I can't even decide.
I don't know, Joe.
I just can't make up my mind.
My fans, the dudes that are fans of mine, I'm like their fantasy drinking partner.
They want to have a drink with me.
Every time I see somebody, let's do a shot right now!
I don't know.
I don't even care.
Not drinking doesn't bother me a bit.
Except when I'm up at the club and you guys are having a cocktail before you.
I miss that, but I do not miss being trashed.
And I got trashed every night way too early.
And then when COVID hit, that tequila bottle went from the cabinet that I kept it in to the kitchen table.
Then it eased to the end of the kitchen table.
Then it hopped over to the coffee table that I was sitting in front of.
And I'd start drinking at three and drunk by five.
And, you know, it's just I was just caught in a fucking whirlwind of I couldn't.
And I'd also didn't think I could quit because I tried to quit 12 years ago and I went into a rehab for a month for $70,000 in Malibu.
And I got the sweats and the shakes, and they were giving me medication.
And so I was waiting for that to happen this time, and it didn't ever happen.
And so now I just have a little bit clearer head, and it doesn't seem to bother me at all, you know, to go out on stage with just a fake drink.
But, you know, for a while, you know, I started hitting comedy clubs and trying to get my chops back because it really did affect me being off so long, really a lot.
I tell this story to people all the time, because it's a funny story.
The night that we did it at Vulcan, the place that we're going to be at tonight, you had done stand-up in about eight months, and you had been talking about retiring.
No, I went to the other one that you were going to buy, and I was dragging other people through that place, going, yeah, this is the place Joe Rogan bought this place.
What did Joe—I mean, listen, I don't know what Joe does.
I don't know what he says on his podcast.
I tried to listen to the one I was on, and I couldn't listen to it.
And I know it's the biggest thing in the world.
But I didn't know that the first time I did it.
I mean, I had no idea.
You know, people, there's so much...
There's a relative of ours that's staying in the Fairmont, we had dinner with him last night, that didn't know you did stand-up.
And a lot of people don't.
And I guess that you don't talk about it much, I don't know.
But, oh, he does stand-up?
I'm like, yes, he's a great comedian and has been for decades.
But, oh, I thought I just know him from Fear Factor and The Fights, and this guy listens to the podcast all the time, and he was bent out of shape about something.
Well, you know, I remember how I found out about it, which is weird because it was a friend of mine's wife.
But I'd heard that ayahuasca word before, so I knew a very, very little bit about it.
So then I started kind of researching it.
What is it?
Where does it come from?
It's a strong hallucinogen, you know, which I've always had a tendency to like anyway.
So I thought it sounded like it was right up my alley.
But for a long time you had to get on a canoe, you know, and go down and find a corrugated tin shack and sleep on a dead floor.
And so it wasn't very appealing to a lot of people.
So the guy that opened the place...
He had money, and he said he bought part of a JW Marriott Beach Resort.
Well, he bought their overflow area, which was not on the beach, but in the jungle with a big fence.
Fucking howler monkey is the most useless animal in the world.
They scream at the top of their lungs.
Other monkeys must just hate them.
Can you tone it down a little bit?
Howl, howl, howl.
So I thought, well, I'll sign up for that, and I'll use that to get off liquor, because a lot of people do come away from there with a different perspective, right?
Which I did.
But then I was honest with them about how much I drank, and they go, oh, no.
You can't come here.
We don't want you coming here and getting into DTs.
We're not a detox facility, and we're not set up for it.
So you have to have 14 days of sobriety before you come here.
And I'm like, fuck.
Right?
I don't know if I could do that or not, because I was drinking so much.
And then I knew about this guy.
There was a hypnotist in Marina Del Rey, I think.
That's not it.
It's whatever.
One of the coastal towns down there.
And my assistant, Anthony, I worked for a guy that had a lot of problems and went to this guy and quit all of them.
So I'm like, well, I could go over there and see how that works.
So I went over there, and his office was in his garage.
He was the least impressive human being I've ever met.
And they had a brown wig that was on crooked, and I don't know if that was part of it, that you get focused on, dude, what's up with your wig?
And that maybe got you offbeat a little bit.
And then he had a tall glass of water with no ice in it, and he took these little tiny sips out of it.
Now, I don't know if that was part of the setup or not.
But the garage thing was like a velour recliner that had to have been 30 years old and it wasn't well kept or anything.
So I sat in there and he just talked about...
You know, kind of what was going on with my body and all this liquor that I was pouring into it and kind of like how your heart and your lungs and your kidney like to work together to keep you living.
And I've had an all-out assault on all three of them for 50 years and, you know, whatever.
And so we got through with the first session, and he would put me under, and I would go under, that's for sure, because he would have to snap me out of it.
And I was just sitting there, conscious of everything he was saying.
But in a whatever hypnotic state, for sure.
So he was good at that.
And obviously it was kind of weird because he said, imagine you're on the 22nd floor of a building and you're getting on the elevator.
And it's kind of weird because I live on the 22nd floor of a building.
He didn't know that.
But odd.
And so I finished the first session.
He says, okay, don't quit drinking.
I'm like, great, great.
I like this program.
So I came back and I thought maybe it was four sessions over a period of a month.
But after the second one, I quit drinking.
And I was just waiting for the shoe to fall.
I was waiting to start getting sick off of not drinking.
And it didn't happen.
And it really didn't bother me not to drink.
It was set up for as soon as I was finished with that.
I'd go straight to South or whatever.
Whatever that pill I took.
Costa Rica.
And I checked into this place.
And it was really, really nice.
You can go where you can share a room with somebody, which they recommend that experience with somebody you don't know.
But I didn't want to do that.
So you can also get your own room.
And it's not...
Overly expensive compared to rehab in Malibu, which I repriced at $100,000 for 30 days.
$3,000 a night, and they recommended a minimum of 30 days, and that was on the street I lived on in Beverly Hills up at the top of it.
And, um, so this is like, you could do this for like, if you shared a room with somebody for like, like 1800 bucks for a week.
And mine was like five grand, but I had a nice room and it was, you know, really nice place.
They cooked all your food and it was healthy, but it was really good.
You know, it was, uh, no soda pop, no alcohol, no, you know, uh, a lot of shit I wouldn't advertise if I was trying to get people to go down there.
And, uh, but, uh, You know, pineapple juice and coconut water.
Fucking great.
And so you get down there and you have a group of about 50 people, I think, was in our group.
Everybody has their own room, but then there's this one space where everybody gets together for this experience of ayahuasca.
So there's...
50 mattresses on the floor that have, you know, really nice sheets and pillows and blankets and they're on the floor.
And it's very ceremonial in that, you know, there's a guy, a shaman that looks like a shaman, feathers and shit, and you stand in line with your little cup.
He gives you a cup of this mud, awful tasting stuff.
And I did mine.
I just talked to him like he was a regular person.
And I said, so what do you do?
And he says, well, outside there was a bunch of hammocks.
It was beautiful space.
Really couldn't have been any better.
And hammocks all around.
He goes, go out there and sit in the hammock and whenever you need to, when it's time, you just come back in.
I said, how do I know when it's time?
He goes, oh, you'll know.
I said, okay, all right.
So I took my ayahuasca and I went out there.
And I'm like, oh, it's kind of like mushrooms a little bit.
I felt myself coming onto it.
And then I opened my mouth and the entire forest poured into it.
And I'm like, that's probably the signal right there that it's time to go in.
I think I get it.
So I went in and I laid down on my bunk.
Now some people throw up on it.
So you have a puke bucket too.
But some people get the shits.
I got the shits.
Vomiting is way better.
Because you can vomit from your bed.
But if you've got the shits, you've got to get up and find some place.
There's bathrooms, a lot of them.
But I never thought I'd see people throwing up in a bucket and go, Lucky!
So I laid down and I tripped so hard and it was really dark.
And they said lean towards the dark side.
So if there's a...
A rainbow and a unicorn, and then there's a guy you don't understand in your yard, go towards the dark guy in the yard.
Don't hop on the unicorn and jump over the rainbow.
Go the other way.
And don't fight it.
Just let it happen.
But I think I just struggled with it the first night.
And I was getting really distorted images of people's faces when they got close to me.
And I was tripping so hard that it was like my head was itching and I just couldn't figure it out, you know, how to make my head stop itching.
And I thought about scratching it, but I wasn't exactly sure how to use my hands anymore.
And somebody walked by and I asked them to scratch my head.
And they're like, yeah, sure.
Like this.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
That's good.
And I really thought towards the end of that.
That I wouldn't do it again.
Because I just didn't see the benefit of it.
You know, it scared me.
It didn't scare me, but it wasn't pleasant at all.
It wasn't like mushrooms, and it wasn't like acid.
To me, it wasn't.
And you could almost see somebody's skull when they were too close to you, and I was just wanting it to be over.
And the beautiful thing about ayahuasca is it is over.
I mean, it only goes for like two hours, and when it's done, it's done.
And so they time it, so you can do more, you can do all you want, but not past a certain point.
And then at one point, they turn on the lights and go, good morning, and it's over.
You know, you can't just go home, go back to your room and go to sleep real fast, but it's over.
All those things are gone.
It gets out of your system completely so fast.
And then there's, you know, there's music, there's, you know, a live band or, you know, people in Congos and guitars and shit.
So it's funky.
And some people are, even while I was in my wildest point of this trip...
They were up just dancing around the room.
I'm like, Jesus Christ, how are you doing this?
I don't understand.
And I think that's about enough, right?
And then by the next day, once I got out of it, people would kind of sit around and share their experiences and whatever.
And I was into the whole thing.
And I was really trying to surrender myself to the experience.
I was trying to do what they were asking me to do.
And get the whole ride, you know?
So the next night, I went in, and he gave me...
It was a different shaman every night, and he gave me about half a cup, and I said, the other person gave me a whole cup of this, and he said, yeah, the mother ayahuasca said to give you the night off and tone it down for you.
And he...
I don't know if he talked to the other guy, and I don't know why he said that, but...
So I took that dose and I went outside and I sat for...
And I noticed it had been a while and it started coming on to me and I just felt this overpouring of love.
I mean, it was just amazing for everything.
I felt it just filling my body with just love and happiness.
And so that night...
I was really just digging on the music, got up and danced.
Everybody wears white.
And I thought, I didn't know why at first, but that's so they can see you sneaking off to your room to get some smokes.
Because they busted me doing that the first night.
I was like, trying to creep away.
I didn't know you could smoke out here.
But...
So, that was great.
And afterwards, I really felt a deep connection to the whole place.
I felt like this was a journey that was designed for me because I just felt wonderful about myself, about decisions I was making, about the direction I was headed in my life and all this stuff.
And then the The next night was a bigger dose, and I went back and got a bigger dose, and went back and got another dose, and just rode it out and fucking loved it.
And it was really just that first...
And he said that the first night was kind of a death, and the second night was kind of a rebirth.
And I'm like, okay.
Whatever.
So the last night, you start it.
At like 7, I think, and it's over at 12.30, that experience.
And then the last night, you start at 5, and it goes till 10 o'clock the next day.
So you do smaller doses, but you do them all night long.
And that was really groovy for me, but this one chick...
Completely wigged out.
And, I mean, kicking, screaming, yelling, really unpleasant.
And they had to take her outside and tie her up before she hurt somebody.
And I thought, why aren't these guys wigging out over this?
Because I am.
Because it looked like she was going to hurt somebody or hurt herself, and they were having a hard time controlling her.
And she didn't even know that it was an ayahuasca place.
She thought it was a yoga place.
And her husband signed her up for it.
Now, she had done ayahuasca three other nights and was fine.
But this time, she just fucking lost it.
And so they took her outside and they just bound her up and they stayed with her.
But, here's the thing.
When it's over, it's over.
And even though everybody was really concerned about her, she came back in with the biggest smile on her face.
And she had some demons.
And she needed to work through it, and it was horrible.
And I decided to go ahead and do what it took to get my chops back and go perform and say goodbye in a proper way, you know, and not just, you know, go out on COVID. And I'm glad I did.
So we're going to, you know, do as much.
I'm only doing two days a week next year as opposed to three.
At the end of it, I should have a pretty good special to do, and I'll film it and see what I do with it.
I don't know what I'll do with it.
I didn't like the last Netflix deal for me, and I know they're great for some people, but for me, they were pretty tight and very demanding, and they wanted the rights to the material forever, and a cut of the album.
If I sold an album, they got a piece of that, and So I don't know.
I went ahead and did it, but then I regretted it.
But I don't know what it did for my exposure worldwide, but I'll never find out because I'm probably not going to go to Australia next year, and I'm probably not going to go back to London next year.
So who knows?
But I just thought it was fine, and I think it upped my...
Exposure for sure, you know, and I thought it was a decent special.
So I'll have it, I'll film it for sure, but I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'll have it just to have it in the can.
Well, it's like they have the ability to say no, so they choose to.
It's a strange thing.
The streaming world is very odd.
And they're a large corporation, so they have to deal with shit, like people complaining about material.
This is the time of complainers.
This is an interesting time where people try to get material pulled and they don't like it.
They don't like what you're making fun of or joking and they feel like they should have the right to edit it or tell you to stop saying it or tell the company to stop saying it.
That helped, for sure, but it was also a great decision that, you know, I think YouTube has a very difficult position in the world.
They're managing this platform where millions and millions and millions of people are uploading things every day, and they have to manage this at scale.
They have to manage millions of millions of hours of content every day.
And it's insanely hard to do and they've chosen to do it in a way where if anything goes against a narrative that they support, they censor it.
They pull it.
And this is a fairly recent thing over the last few years.
They either demonetize it or they will out and out delete your videos.
And that's a problem.
It's a problem.
It's a problem with a show like this.
It's controversial because I will occasionally have someone on that will say things that I don't agree with, but I want to hear their perspective and the way they say it and why they think the way they think.
And maybe I'll argue with them about it, but sometimes those things, those subjects can be deemed hostile or that someone will be offended by it, so it shouldn't be up on their platform.
Yeah.
You don't have a problem with that with Spotify.
Spotify is not an American company.
They're from Stockholm and their perspective is very different.
It's kind of ironic but they're very much in support of our First Amendment rights and they think that you should be able to Artistically speak your mind.
And, you know, I'm not doing anything hateful.
I'm not doing anything evil.
But when you talk about certain subjects, some people think that it's dangerous or it's, you know, that there's something wrong with just even discussing certain things.
Spotify doesn't think that at all.
They've never once told me not to talk about something.
They've never once tried to censor me.
I haven't changed anything about the way I do the show.
I do the show exactly the way I used to do it, and they don't have a problem with it at all.
But at the end of the day, what they thought I said versus what I actually said is very different.
You know, and that's a part of the problem today.
This is a problem with Dave Chappelle's special, right?
A lot of people are saying Dave Chappelle's special was transphobic.
But here's one you didn't hear.
You didn't hear any quotes of anything that he said that was transphobic.
You just heard a narrative.
The narrative is the special is transphobic.
If there were specific things that he said that people had a problem with, they would have repeated those things.
But it's just he was telling a story about a friendship that he had with a trans woman, a person he loved, and he told this whole special.
There's a good friend of his that he would take, I mean, he even had her open for his shows, and she wound up committing suicide.
It's a very touching story, but they had deemed that transphobic just because he's talking about trans people, and they've decided that even talking about it is transphobic.
But the problem with that is all of comedy Then hateful because all of comedy is talking about subject making fun of everything from your own parents to your Relationships to your children.
It means like People have this unique ability today to give their opinions about things and they have power You know, they can organize groups of people that want to boycott stuff And it's exciting.
It's exciting to cancel things.
It's exciting to shut things down.
It is.
I mean, it's like if you give a person a bag or...
Do you remember during the George Floyd protests, like these pallets of rocks would just show up places?
Nobody to this day has given me an adequate explanation about why these things were there, but at some of these protest sites, there was pallets of bricks and rocks and shit, and people used them.
They threw them against windows.
They broke into stores with them, and nobody can adequately explain why they were there.
You know, some of them, I'm sure it was a coincidence, they were there, there was a construction site and the bricks happened to be there.
But other ones are real weird.
And you gotta wonder why.
But at the end of the day, my point is, if you leave a bag of rocks around and there's a bunch of windows, there's gonna be people that wanna throw those rocks.
If you give people the ability to shut things down or silence things, they will exaggerate what you're saying, they will distort your perspectives, they will change what you're actually trying to say, just so that they can justify what they want to do.
And, you know, this ability to cancel people, one thing it does make people, it makes people more aware of the impact of what they're saying.
It makes you, you know, you want to be able to justify what you're saying.
You know, instead of just being, like, just going for the laugh as quickly as possible, look at it in a way like, okay, is this the right way to say this?
Is there a better way to say this where it doesn't hurt people's feelings?
Is there a way to say this where it makes sense rather than just throw it out there because it'll get a laugh?
What she said was just so untrue that at a charity event, at a photo shoot, at a charity event, that I touched her pussy.
And I'm like, no, I didn't.
What are you saying?
While lights are on and people are, you know, that I reached under your dress and found out you weren't wearing panties and decided to touch your...
That didn't happen.
And then she said she had a witness that was her friend that saw the whole thing.
And her friend wrote it out.
But her friend said I touched her butt.
I'm like, that could have happened.
You know, I don't know.
I was having fun, and I was pretty drunk.
But I know that I didn't do what she was saying, but I know that didn't carry any weight.
And so they said, give us $250,000, or we're going to put this on the front page of every newspaper in Texas, which they could have done.
And so now you're in a position where...
I know that I knew...
Kind of knew Scott Baio, and I played golf with him once, and he got accused, that 17-year-old girl or whatever said that he had sex with her, and it was big news, and he got canceled, and everybody was, Scott Baio's a bad guy.
Well, guess what?
It didn't happen, and she recanted it.
But the recant was so small that nobody knew it.
But the news of him doing it was so big, and I knew that that was going to happen to me, and I still wanted to fight it.
But my manager is, oh no, Ron, he's British.
You can't do this.
You've got to settle.
No, I'm not going to do it.
And then they got down to $40,000, and I'm like, well, I got $40,000 in a sack over here.
I'll give you that.
And I still, to this day, hate myself for doing that.
But it made sense, right?
Because then I don't have to fight this fight.
But it's amazing that people can say, we're going to say things about you that aren't true.
And we don't have to prove it.
And we can put it on the front page of every newspaper that'll put it on the front page of their paper and destroy your credibility and your image.
And then later we would just have to go, sorry.
And so it didn't make sense to go through all that.
But it seems like it should be illegal.
We can make these claims that are not true.
I'd say that...
There should be a law that they should have to wait for a conviction or something.
You know, you want to run it through a court system, fine.
But let's just print the outcome of the trial, which I would have won hands down.
And so they can just print that accusation, and all of a sudden, to people that are just casually reading, which is most people, Most people just barely read the headlines and then maybe read like a paragraph in and then they bail on the article.
Because I remember the first time I did it, I had a headache.
I was driving.
I had no idea how big it was.
You just asked me to do it.
And I got driving over there in the middle of the day.
I hit a curb, busted my fucking wheel on my Range Rover.
But it moved every needle in my camp.
Ticket sales, book sales, every single thing I do, it moved the needle.
And I'm like, fuck, really?
And they're like, yeah, like eight or nine million people downloaded this thing.
I'm like, that's more people than have ever watched me do anything, ever!
By a lot.
I mean, you know, a lot.
I had albums that sold a couple million copies early on.
Two million.
And so it's just so big, it's hard to get your arms around, the power of it, you know?
And so it's a weird thing to be able to do, and I'm really lucky to be able to come on your show, and I do this because...
Because we're friends, and we're kindred spirits in stand-up comedy, and we hang out at comedy clubs, and we like all the same shit, you know?
But it's like the people that knew Letterman when he was doing stand-up.
Those were the people that were on his show, you know, where his buddies did a lot of them, you know?
And it was because you just happened to be friends with this guy and he got real fucking famous and all of a sudden you hook your wagon to it and all of a sudden you're on Jake Johansson did Letterman's show 45 times or something like that.
They were really good friends and he's a great comic.
But oddly enough Still can't go into theaters and sell tickets, and I don't get that.
I don't understand why somebody like Joe Hanson, as good as he is with the exposure that he's had from that, but now if you do Fallon, you do a tenth of what Of what I'll do with you today.
You know, there's like seven, eight hundred thousand people or something.
So we're staying in this five-star cabin resort, right?
And we just got there, didn't have reservations, so we got the littlest, furthest away little cabin, but on the But right on this gorgeous river that it's on, just rocks in the stream.
It's so beautiful.
And you can take these Adirondack chairs and you can go put them out in the river and just sit in the river, you know, because it's shallow.
And just watch the world go by.
It's the most relaxing place I've ever thought of in my life.
And right by the river, there were these cute little bitty storybook houses.
I know that my room was like 700 bucks, 150 yards away, and a little bitty thing, so I don't know how much these were.
And Jeannie was with me.
We're sitting out there, and I started thinking.
I told her, this is what we ought to do.
We ought to just put my money together with your money, and she has money too.
And we just live here.
And so we just live out there and sit in that water and eat.
There's a five-star restaurant right on the water, too.
It's part of the hotel.
We eat there.
We just sit out here and enjoy ourselves until the money runs out.
And then we lie to them for about a month saying there's a check coming.
By now, we've been there for a while.
They know us.
They like us a lot, right?
So they kind of let it go for a little while.
They believe my lie that there's money coming when there's not.
It's all over.
And eventually they have to do something about it, right?
Because I'm out there in the river with Jeannie.
And so I call the police.
And as the cops wading out into the river to throw us off the property, we pull out a gun and shoot ourselves.
And then we just float down the river.
It cleans up the mess.
It's the suicide retirement plan.
Live however you want, and when you run out of money, kill yourself.
But that was easier than what I do now, which is move to a different city every day.
Doesn't pay anything either, but I didn't care about money then, and I thought I was doing fine.
And I wasn't paying my taxes, so it seemed like I was making a lot of money.
And then Blue Collar came around, and I got really, really lucky.
So when that thing went into DVDs, it sold 4 million copies, which is a record, or it was.
But people passed it around, and it was just everybody knew it.
And I couldn't even go into Walmart without people just throwing a fit, you know, because they were watching it, and they loved it.
And so then overnight, I could sell out any theater.
We decided to put a theater on sale.
It sold out in two minutes.
And I'm like, wow.
And instead of making $2,500, I made $80,000 for one show.
And then we'd sell out five shows in that market in a weekend.
And I'm like, wow.
This is amazing.
And that was fun.
That had me smiling every day, and I was having a blast with it.
And then it got to where I was doing 140 cities a year, and that's moving.
You know, that's four and five cities a week with hardly any weeks off.
And I did it because I didn't think it would last.
I thought, this is going to be a brief period of time where I'm making a lot of money and I'm just going to go make the money and work as hard as I can.
And that went on to this day.
It never quit.
It never stopped.
The fans locked in.
I was lucky in that I had the exposure to get me there.
And then I tapped into this huge baby boomer audience that was the same age as me and aging at the same rate I was aging.
And they were interested in what I had to say.
And they liked the way I did stand-up.
And because I did so much of it, I was really good at it.
And, you know, even when I was doing big shows, I was coming out to the store just like you, you know, every night when I was off doing sets.
And it was...
It was completely consuming, but I liked that too.
I loved going down to the store and seeing you and all the guys and shooting the shit and doing the set.
It was the greatest thing on earth.
Now, I don't like to travel, and I don't like to have every weekend consumed by travel.
Even this weekend, I just did Saturday and Sunday.
I flew to Hershey, Pennsylvania, which really does smell like chocolate.
It's really nice.
And did a show and then caught a plane over to Raleigh and did a big show and caught a non-stop out of Raleigh back to Austin.
So that's a pretty easy week, right?
But usually it's get on the tour bus, go and go and go and go.
I want to do something else in my life.
I want to see the world.
I want to get out and travel.
I want to go on long cruises.
I want to go do whatever I want to do.
I don't want to die in a fucking hotel room, Joe.
I don't want to die in a hotel room.
Even though it would be a pretty nice one, but it would probably be we found him on his bus or whatever.
And I think what I love is just hearing their love for me, you know, that they really do care.
And when I talk about retirement in front of them, they'll start booing because they would rather see me just die of a heart attack right there on the stage and have the story to tell.
I'm like, well, you still got a chance because I'm going to do it for another year.
I think he was doing shows in Vegas and died in his hotel.
And he was older, and he had a bunch of problems with pills and several stints in rehab for that, and those are very hard on you, very hard on your body.
But most occupations, you get to 65, and people assume that you're going to think about settling down, relaxing.
But not our business.
There's something about it.
It's so rare.
I always say that to people.
Me and Tony have talked about this before.
Can you imagine going through your whole life and never have been killed on stage?
That feeling that you get when you hit a big punchline and the audience is just roaring.
You got hundreds or thousands, how many people are there, people just feeling so good, having so much fun, slapping their knee and slapping the table and laughing so hard and just having a great fucking time.
It is a full-time job, and you can lose your chops at this.
And so I think that, I don't know if it was Seinfeld that I heard say it or somebody, maybe it was Chris Rock, but that you should be on stage every day.
And I know that you try to do that.
I mean, you do a million things.
I don't even know how, but you also get your sets in every single week.
And so...
I used to watch guys that got famous.
They were like club comics and they got famous in TV or something.
They'd come back to the clubs and they would suck.
Yeah.
But then there were these guys that worked the circuit that were doing nine shows a week that were just blistering good.
Well, it can be done, but man, you've got to really understand what it is.
And I think something happens to people when they become famous where you just think that you've already got it and that you don't have to work hard at it.
You know, you think, like, I'll just go and do a set.
And you can't do that.
And that's one of the things the store will show you.
Because the store, you know, you would be going on after Joey Diaz, or you'd be going on after Anthony Jeselnik, or, you know, there's a million murderers in that place.
And we would be going up all together on these shows and seeing each other's new stuff and, you know, talking about our new stuff and complimenting each other and having fun together.
And then you would take that kind of energy and then go on the road with it.
And you had the momentum of the store and the camaraderie that the store brought.
And there would be two big SUVs of people that got there before him, and then they'd set up rails, and so you couldn't touch him, and he would come in.
I'm like, that's no fun.
Go out there by yourself, and hang out with your friends, and say what you want to say, and do what you want to do, and you don't have to worry about somewhere they're sitting, or Cokes.
And somebody asked me for tickets to you and Chappelle's show, and I said, no, I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to pester those guys for tickets.
I'm just not going to do it.
And I don't know why, because I know it wouldn't have been a big deal to you.
But it's just, I just don't, I just love this experience without all that hassle.
You know, you're there fucking around, having a good time, and everybody enjoys it, and you're working on this weird art form.
It's a weird art form of talking shit.
I remember we were in the back, and we were in the bar, the Secret Comedians bar, and you and I were sitting there, and you were telling me this fucking story about the time when you were in Hawaii, and I'm laughing so fucking hard.
I go, are you telling this on stage?
You go, oh, I don't think I can tell that on stage.
I'm like, the fuck you can't.
I go, you gotta tell that on stage.
You went right from there on stage and murdered with that story.
It's one of the weirdest things about comedy, isn't it?
It's like, what is funny?
What do I talk about?
I always have this thing that I do, like right now, I'm thinking about filming a special, and I'm probably going to film a special sometime in the spring.
I'm trying to figure out where to do it, and then when it's over, even right now, I'm in a panic, because not that I don't have the material to do it, I do have the material to do it, but then once it's done, I'll have no material.
Then I have to throw it all out and start from scratch, and that's the panic phase.
And, you know, I used to, I would wait until I had a show, you know, and then I would always, you guys, a lot of, a lot of guys spit out a special a year, and I just, I can't do it.
I got to let that stuff sit on the vine because it ripens on the vine.
It's become three because of COVID. It's actually going to be four because we lost a good solid year and it's going to be 2022 soon.
And I was going to do one in 2021 or in 2020. My last one was 2018. Yeah, I think mine was too.
The COVID thing rolled around literally like a few months before I was thinking about filming, but now I look at that material and I'm like, it's better now than it was.
And then sometimes your friends will watch it, and then they'll give you a tag, you know, or whatever, and it works out.
That's also one of the great things about having friends that are really good comics, and sometimes they'll see something in a joke that you don't see.
There's also those moments when you do a show, like if you do a weekend at a club, and you do a show, and you do like two shows on Friday, and then on the first show on Saturday, you have a different way of doing it, and then it becomes a whole new bit.
It is a weird brain, because I remember one time I came in to do your show, and you had already done one podcast that day, and I'm like, what are you doing now?
I don't even know if I'm telling you this, but I was in jail like...
12 different jails.
Wow.
But back then, they were locking kids up, you know, and I was, you know, smoking pot, had long hair, doing drugs, driving drunk, you know, all kinds of things that they put you in jail for.
And so they made it Ron White Day in the state of Texas, but they didn't check to see this fucking long arrest record.
I look like a hoodlum.
It's all years old.
You know, well, one of them not, but one in Florida.
But this Texas Supreme Court justice was getting all these complaints, and he pulled it up on his magic computer and went, delete?
I don't see what you're talking about.
Wow.
So, and I had, I can't remember the guy's name, but I had lunch with him, and he was like, yeah, it's gone.
It's gone from here, but he didn't have a button in Canada.
I think about pot the same way I think about alcohol, the same way I think about anything that alters your state of consciousness.
We're never taught how to do it.
It's a thing that's probably one of the most profoundly impactful things that people do, is getting drunk.
Like you drive cars, you smash into cars, you kill yourself, you drink yourself into a disease, you say horrible things that you shouldn't have said.
Alcohol can do wild things to people.
And no one teaches you how to use it.
No one teaches you how to use it.
They just let you drink.
And it's when you're a kid, when you're 21, and you can drink legally, the difference between not drinking or very rarely drinking and drinking all the time with your buddies is so profound on the way your brain works, so profound on the way you're productive, like the shit you can get done versus the shit you can get done if you were sober.
In fact, there's actually like a jiu-jitsu promotion where everyone gets high and then competes against each other.
It's called high rollers jiu-jitsu.
High rollers Brazilian jiu-jitsu or high rollers jiu-jitsu?
This dude, Matt, who puts it together, he came up with this concept of having people get stoned and roll and film, and they show them smoking weed, and it's like...
They're very friendly with each other.
It's a weird thing.
Jiu-jitsu and weed have always gone hand in hand for a lot of people.
A lot of high-level guys used to smoke weed and roll.
260 pounds running and colliding with another dude who's 260 pounds.
They're going full clip and they're super athletes.
They're the freakiest specimens that we have.
If you look at an elite football player or an elite mixed martial artist, anyone who's at this crazy combat sport level, when you see the highest of the high, those are freak athletes, man.
And in football, they're literally running at each other full blast.
I mean, literally drops him down on his fucking head like a movie.
It's crazy.
Like, that move isn't even legal in the UFC. I don't think you're allowed to spike people in the UFC. But this is the end of the fight.
The end of the fight, I mean, the fight kept going because Minotauro at the time was the toughest man on earth and is one of the toughest guys that's ever lived.
Like this guy that's on the bottom is known for being unbelievably tough, but also like a wizard off of his back, which is a really rare thing for heavyweights.
So he was triangling people and armbarring people.
You can only do it at an elite level, as good as Nogueira was in these Pride days.
You can only do it like this for so long, because the body just takes so much of a toll.
But he was absolutely one of the greatest of all time.
And Minotauro submitted Bob Sapp.
People think of Minotauro sometimes, unfortunately, now, based on his later fights, when he was older and kind of beat up.
Because he'd been through all these wars, but even then he was still a warrior.
But these fights, when he was the man, when he was at the peak of his powers, this was an incredible man.
This is him armbar and Bob Sapp.
Bob Sapp was so much bigger than him.
Like a solid hundred plus pounds bigger than him.
And he armbarred him.
And after getting slammed on his head.
And, you know, he did that for years.
And then, you know, eventually he made his way to the UFC. And he's one of the elite guys.
And this guy is talking about the soccer player and about how, even maybe just for a little while, that one moment, what that guy did was so amazing and so impressive and when he scored, it elevated everybody.
But it's true in anything, you know, that at the top level, It takes so much, even in golf, that it doesn't matter how bad you want to do what that guy does, you can't do it for any reason, no matter what you put into it, because you don't have the desire, I guess.
It's really good even if you don't like wrestling.
It doesn't matter.
It's a great movie.
But if you're a wrestler or if you're a person who does any kind of martial arts or something, some sort of solitary pursuit where you have to push yourself, it's an amazing movie.
It's like a bow hunt or really more like a slingshot because the movement in that club head and the inertia and the rotation and all those things have to be perfect and it's hard to do.
And it doesn't matter really how strong you are or whatever.
It's just like keeping a...
A weight on a string, you know, except for you got a stiff shaft, but it's got to be that same motion that keeps that item away from your hand when it's on a string.
So, and then to learn how to aim it and then learn how to, you know, it's just, it's really like hunting a lot in that it's something that you fire and then you aim at and see if you, only it's really fucking hard.
It's fun to do it.
I just started doing it.
I mean, I did it when I was a kid, but I was one of those comics that killed the day playing golf while comics like you were out making a billion dollars of plans to rule the world.
And, uh, you know, but, but to be in the air that I got to watch Tiger Woods be so much better than anybody that's ever touched one of those sticks.
It was an amazing, amazing, amazing thing to me because I know exactly, uh, how hard it would be to even move me to a level that's still miles behind that.
Yeah.
You've got to dedicate four hours or six hours a week just to shave two strokes off your game.
Whatever.
So that's why I play golf.
I think it is challenging, but it doesn't beat the shit out of me.
It's very engaging, and you're trying to solve problems.
And every time you do something, you haven't done it exactly before, because it's always now there's a tree over there, but it's 156, the wind's coming from here, you got a little ball, you want to hit it that way, the green's up, elevated, so you're shooting uphill, you know, it's a lot of information to process.
And then you make a decision on which one of these things it takes to do that, and you get it out and give it a try, you know, and then go find it and do it again.
It's just weird that if there's certain animals, like, again, like alligators, that if they were from somewhere else and someone brought them here, we'd want to kill them all.
But because they're here already, we're like, oh, let them eat babies.
The vampire book, it's real weird because they have like this insanely high IQ and they hunted people, essentially.
They fed off people.
And the idea is that they eventually either hunted down or died off.
I forget the premise.
I haven't gotten fully through it.
I'm going by what Neil had told me about it.
But this idea was that somehow in the future they brought them back.
Like they're bringing back woolly mammoths and shit like that.
And they figured out vampires are real.
And this vampire leads this crew through space in this book.
In this adventure to meet some alien species.
It's very strange.
Very strange book.
Really intense.
But the idea of vampires comes up as like a thing that is to people like we are to other animals.
Like when we see, you know, when we're hunting, you see a deer, like people move slow and you figure out a way to outsmart it and you're way smarter than it and you get it.
It does cut down a little bit on your consumption of television because it takes time to get ready and go to the show and hang out and figure out where the next town is.
We drive at night, so my bus will pull up.
Wednesday night, and my crew will crawl on it, and my dog and Jeannie, and we'll head up to Arkansas, then over to Houston, and then back down to Austin.
And I've lived that life for so long, it doesn't even seem weird.
That's a little extreme, but the sauna is 100% good for you.
It builds your body's ability to work with inflammation better.
It produces something called heat shock proteins.
They did this study out of Finland that we've quoted a hundred times.
I'm sorry, I have to quote it again if you've heard this before.
But they did a study where they studied a whole group of people with regular sauna users versus non-sauna users.
And the people that used the sauna, an average of four times a week over a period of, I think, like 20 years, they had a 40% decrease of all-cause mortality, 40% decrease of heart attacks, stroke, cancer, you name it.
Everything was way less because of the sauna use.
It was one of the factors, for sure.
It's hard to tell.
The people that use sauna, maybe they'd be more inclined to work out as well.
Maybe they'd be more inclined to eat well.
Who knows?
But the sauna was a part of this group.
And by using the sauna, I think it was 175 degrees for 20 minutes four times a week.
I think that was the protocol.
These people, I mean, they were just way healthier because your body produces this reaction to that extreme heat.
And I don't know if that works with the infrared saunas, but that study was done with the regular sauna, which is just real hot in there.
And when it gets real hot in there, your body has to deal with that, so it produces these cytokines.
And these cytokines are very good just for general inflammation, for problems in your body.
But this is just one of those things that I got obsessed with because I'm obsessed with human performance.
I'm obsessed with trying to figure out what's the best way to let your body repair and recover.
What are the best modalities?
And sauna is one of them for sure.
There's also a guy named Dan Gable.
He's one of the greatest wrestlers of all time.
And he was raving about the sauna and how when he was an Olympic wrestler he won the gold medal.
In the 1970s, I forget what year, but he was one of the only guys to ever wrestle in the Olympics that had zero points scored on him and won the gold medal.
I mean, he was just a fucking monster, just an animal.
And one of the things that he found out was that the Russians, the Belarusians, and all these Eastern Bloc countries, they all use the sauna.
A lot of these European athletes, they all use the sauna.
All these countries that they realized that after training they would get in the sauna and the sauna was very difficult because you're already tired.
You trained all day.
You trained for a couple hours.
The sauna gives you more cardio because it actually keeps your heart rate elevated.
It's like doing cardio while you're sitting.
And it also gives you more red blood cells because your body's dealing with all this heat right after training.
Your body kind of freaks out.
And in that freak out produces something that's very beneficial for your endurance and for your just overall vitality.
If you just swing a club through it, it'll measure every single angle of that and how fast it's going and tell you exactly what would have happened if there would have been a ball there.
But this thing that he does, I was watching and I was like, this is genius, because this is something that allows you to drive, to do that sweeping motion over and over and over again, and you can perfect it without having to chase down a bunch of balls.
They invented this thing, I think it's called the brake rack.
And I had one at one point in time, but I don't know what the fuck I did with it.
But it's essentially a thing that kind of does that for pool.
Because the break shot is like one of the most important shots.
And so you can either practice it, and if you practice it, you gotta rack again and gather all the balls and rack again, gather all the balls and rack again.
But this thing is just one ball that's like solid and kind of connected to the table so it allows you to practice just the idea of squaring up on that one ball and hitting it just as square as possible right down the middle which is a lot in a lot of ways like golf it's this coordination of your movement your stance and everything Yeah, so pool doesn't look that hard when somebody's really good at it, does it?
I saw, I read a really, really great article about What it takes to make somebody want to get better at their job.
So they would change the environment, change the pay, just to see what would get them to produce more in what circumstances with this boss, this boss, you know, paint it blue, whatever.
And they could come up with nothing.
But in their spare time for no money, people will teach themselves how to do impossible things for nothing.
Whether it's guitar and trying to get really, really good at that and doesn't pay a dime or jujitsu, which most people will not make much money at.
I know Bourdain did it every day of his life, and it makes sense to me.
You know, but I don't want to do it, but it makes sense to me that I can see what would be fun about it.
I mean, I don't remember how many seats it was, but it was a big fucking place, and I think when you would sell it out two shows, I think it was close to 5,000.
I couldn't imagine that that was possible, and that you would sell two shows like that in a row, and you would do that every fucking night of the week.
And it's a good thing, because if I would have had money when I was young, I was making dumber decisions then.
So I can't imagine another way.
I did the 15 years of clubs and got...
Good at it, and then, you know, the worst thing that can happen is somebody get famous before they spend that 15 years getting good at it, because they're fucked.
It was blue-collar, and I often wonder, you know, what would have happened to my career without Jeff's generosity to share a stage, you know, with his friends, because that's what did it.
No doubt about it.
No doubt about it.
You know, the most, you know, prolific comic alive, you know, for sure, you know, putting out albums that were selling through the roof and, you know, doing it.
He let me go with him.
So just like Tony's going with you now and my opening act going with me.
And then he came up with this blue collar and he told me about it on a jet that he had chartered.
Well, that was the whole beauty of it, Joe, is I only did 10 minutes in the movie.
And then I told the Tater Sal story at the end, which is about six.
And I was sitting there thinking about it when this movie was coming out.
I was going, you know, if this happens to work out right, I didn't burn any material doing this at all.
Like the least amount of material ever to get famous.
But I had this backlog of material nobody had ever seen that I'd been working on for 15 fucking years.
And it was tight.
So when I got famous, I had the goods to beat them up for as long as I wanted to.
And that was...
That's perfect.
I thought it got me when I was completely ripe and not before.
But I saw it coming.
The way it was working out, I was like, wow, this looks like what's going to happen here.
It looked like I got a chance of getting famous with 18 minutes, 16 minutes of material.
That's amazing.
Well, you know what a big deal that would be.
Because most people get...
Whatever fame they get, burning the only act they've got, you know, and then they've got to start over again, and that act you don't have 16 years to write.
No, that was a real problem with a lot of comics once those HBO specials started coming out.
You know, I remember that was an issue with Kinnison, because Kinnison was going on the road, and it was after his HBO special, and he had the same material, and people knew the material.
So they said, I went down there with Lori, my son's mom, and...
And Alex Ramundo went down there with me.
And so I was backstage at a 2,000-seater in No Sign of Kennison.
Bill was there, his brother.
And he was doing a remake.
And so Kennison still wasn't there.
And he goes, all right, we'll go out there.
And he said, a lot of times Sam's opening act is a sacrificial lamb because...
They want to see Sam.
So apparently LeBeau really struggled some nights with them screaming and stuff and getting too anxious to get to Sam.
So I went out and I blistered this crowd with 10 minutes and Sam still wasn't there and Bill was over there stretching for me to go longer.
So I went longer than I did.
I only had about 15 or so.
And so after that, I just had to say goodnight, but I killed.
I mean, just killed.
And to come back, Sam's still not there.
And he had kind of a dressing suite with another room in the back, and I had like a six-pack of beer, I think they gave me.
And we're smoking pot back there.
And all of a sudden, there's limos pull up.
And Sam and his entourage and strippers and all this stuff, they come in.
And as soon as they get there, there's 2,000 people waiting, right?
They've been sitting out there 15 minutes now since I've got off.
He sends a body guard to come get me to my room.
They said, Sam wants to talk to you.
And I go back in the room.
Sam's chopping up a rail of Coke.
He's got a vial of Coke, and he's banging it on the table.
Probably a lot of people didn't know Sam did blow, but he did.
And so he looks up at me and he goes, Heard you killed them, cowboy!
And I said, Yeah, Sam, they're great.
They're going to have a good time.
He goes, How about a cup of coffee?
And I said...
Yeah, yeah, I did a rail with Sam, and then he faked a heart attack and fell on the floor and started turning, I don't know how he could make himself turn blue, but he was doing it, and nobody fell for it but me, because I guess they'd seen him or whatever, and there's 2,000 people.
He's doing this show, you know, trying to freak me out about him having a heart attack after doing this big bump of blow, so...
After the whole thing was over, there were people there from the Punchline, people there from the Laugh Stop, people there from the Funny Bone that I already kind of worked for a little bit in town.
And they were like, let's go to dinner.
We want to talk about putting you on the road.
That was on one shoulder.
On the other shoulder was Sam Kinnison going, how about going to some strip clubs and get real fucked up in the limos?
And I was like, yeah, I'm going to go with Sam.
So I went with Sam, and we caught up about the career later.
But literally, that's what put me on the road.
Yeah.
And they offered me 50 weeks a year as a middle act, making 500 bucks, and I said, okay.
And then I opened for him later in a comedy club, and it was not too much before he died, and it was not that kind of experience at all.
And he hadn't done stand-up in a while, and he was about to do a big show, and he came into Omaha, I think it was, and I was the headliner, so I opened for him.
And he was late to that one.
I was supposed to do 10 minutes.
I did an hour and 10 minutes, and then he showed up.
And he came on stage and he really looked bad and he had on a black shirt and it looked like he'd like wrestled with a cookie or something and had sunglasses on and went up there and staggered around for a while.
I believe there are bridge builders and then people that walk across those bridges.
And there's very few builders.
And the bridge he built...
He taught us that people can find you genuinely disgusting and you can still make them laugh as hard as they can laugh.
And not pretend Don Rickles stuff, but really be truly darkly edgy, funny, and a lot of people did that afterwards, but I feel like that was something that he built and that people walked across.
He's one of the greatest of all time David tells like a genuine national treasure There's just not you know, he's got his own style of talking his own rhythm Yeah, and you get caught up and it's a it's a beautiful ride There's um, you know, there's those guys and but Kinison was one of the first ever for me Because I couldn't believe that that was comedy too.
Like I thought comedy was like Seinfeld and I loved it I loved Richard Jenny I loved all these people then I saw Kinison I was like Oh!
I was 19. Yeah, because it was 86. There was a lady that I worked with.
She worked the front desk.
She was a girl.
She was basically my age.
And she was like this hilarious girl, like a real athletic, big volleyball player.
She was really fun.
And she goes, and she knew I loved comedy.
And she was like, you gotta see, with her fucking heavy Boston accent, you gotta see this fucking guy.
Oh my god, he was so funny.
He did this thing about being dead and guys fucking him.
Hold on, let me show you what he did.
So he does his thing.
So she gets down and she does Kinison's bit, which is one of his classic bits, about homosexual necrophiliacs who pay money to use the freshest male corpses.
And so she's lying on her stomach in the parking lot.
And she goes, and she goes, and then he's like, oh my god, is that a dick in my ass?
You mean life keeps fucking you in the ass even after you're dead?
He hasn't tried to do it, but here's what he did do.
He had a speech at some award show, and he did a speech on the podium, and he talked about them taking Bill Cosby's honorary degree away from him, taking awards away from him.
What was it about?
Was it awards or degrees?
But they took something away from him because of the allegations when he went to jail.
So he always did a great Bill Cosby impression because Bill Cosby fucked with him early in his career.
So he had that whole bit about calling up Richard Pryor because Bill Cosby calls him up and he does an impression saying...
Cosby's certainly one of them too Cosby's one of them as gross as it sounds that he's a rapist his art if you could separate the man from the art he was a Masterful stand-up comedian and then in a bridge everybody walked across I mean everybody that's ever done his comedy special watch Bill Cosby himself and Yeah, so look at this, because this is fucking funny shit.
Even that little spot of misdirection went right before he said Bill, like he forgot for a second, which makes the whole thing look improvised, which is genius.
A lot of people, like the pressure of creating, the pressure of live performances, People, after a while, they don't want to deal with that shit anymore.
Some of the greats.
He's one of the most talented guys that's ever existed.
Yeah, you know, Martin quit because he figured out that he was really a parody of a comic and knew it and invented it and built that bridge and then didn't think it could be reinvented again, that he couldn't keep going down that same path and Yeah, well, you get to be a different person as you get older, too, right?
It's people getting used to being in sports or whatever, having that live reaction to what you're doing and the love and all that energy that you feel that's transferred to you by those people that adore you when you're on stage.
And just nothing I did ever had that huge television-type exposure every week.
I'm the least famous guy ever.
At the Mirage, but I'm their top comic.
I mean, a lot of people, if they wanted to do more, you could own the place if you wanted to, but they still work me more because my fan base is big, just people don't know who I am if they're not part of it, you know, I guess.
It's the worst way to try to experience a tragic moment of your life, to do it in front of the whole world in a reality show where they edit it for sensationalism.
The only way I would see that that would make any sense is if they had some sort of union regulation that applied to the theater that they were filming in, and they couldn't do anything about it.
I mean, that's how they get away with it at comedy clubs.
I mean, Chappelle smokes all the fucking time.
He smokes everywhere.
I mean, that's how he gets away with it.
It's a comedy prop.
It's a stage prop.
But it's also an indication that you don't want to be working with those people.
Like, there's too many people.
Too many people's ideas.
If someone can actually say, hey, you, one of the funniest guys alive, whatever you do, I'm going to change some of that because I have an arbitrary rule, even though I have ventilation in this place and even though it's a cigar.
I have an arbitrary rule where I'm going to decide that you can't do that.
But in Canada, they were like, well, no, they actually hold all your money, and then they decide how much of it they're going to keep because you smoked at Massey Hall.