Fahim Anwar and Joe Rogan explore comedy’s shift from traditional venues like The Tonight Show to DIY entrepreneurship, with Anwar’s Hat Trick special (filmed at Vulcan in February) contrasting Netflix’s ideological constraints—like Cuties—with raw, organic stand-up. Rogan defends evolving humor standards, citing Louis C.K.’s divisive return after a 10-month break, while praising Anwar’s grind: filming by day, performing by night. They debate societal fear of rare threats (e.g., demons, pandemics) over mundane killers like obesity and critique LA’s COVID-era restrictions, noting how viral media—from golf misreporting (Kim Jong-un’s "five ones") to Yeonmi Park’s harrowing escape—distorts reality. Ultimately, the conversation champions authenticity in comedy and art, warning against gatekeeping while celebrating relentless creativity. [Automatically generated summary]
Like on any given night at Vulcan, we'll have Ron White, Tony Hinchcliffe, Tim Dillon stops in sometimes, Tom Segura when he's not on the road, Christina Pazitsky stops in.
I think that's part of the charm of that place, too, is just people don't know who's going to pop in.
And even when I was here, I was here for like three months during the pandemic, it was cool.
It almost felt like a festival city because it's that midpoint between New York and L.A. So I would see like Giannis, I would see guys I just wouldn't see unless I was doing Montreal or something.
When you're doing a special, you're essentially saying, hey, this is like an advertisement to come see me live, which is, it's way better live anyway.
Like, I always say that coming to see someone in a club or in a theater or what have you is probably, it's at least 30 or 40% better than watching on TV. Oh, for sure.
Honestly, and I think I'm getting better about this, just giving compliments and giving flowers to people.
Like, my hat goes out to Schultz.
I think he really kind of broke it for all these comics and shifting our thinking.
Because for the longest time all of us were just hoarding our material because we were still in that old legacy Hollywood, traditional Hollywood mindset.
We're like, alright, I have this polished stuff.
I'm waiting to be tapped.
I'm waiting for Netflix to say you can do the thing you can do.
I'm waiting for Comedy Central.
We're waiting.
We're asking for permission to do something we already know we can do.
And he just saw the power of YouTube and was like, nah, this is powerful enough on its own.
And when he did that, and all the comics kind of saw, oh, that's a route?
Now look, it's a clip economy on Instagram, and everyone isn't so precious with their material.
They're taking their lead from music with SoundCloud and mixtapes.
I mean, I asked them, obviously, but I just had very skeleton, maybe one guy with a camera shooting from afar, and it just picked up organic conversations.
I'm not having the entire conversation on there, but you get little vignettes and slices of what it's like in the hallway, in the parking lot.
You know, Brennan driving up, fist bumping, you know, like, it's what it's like to be a comic in the store.
It was kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure in L.A. with COVID. So you'll see like maybe one person with a mask in one shot or...
Yeah, but it was like up and running.
It wasn't limited capacity.
It was it was running enough to do this type of special Nice Yeah, I can't believe no one had done one this way.
So it was just my ace in the sleeve.
I'm like Because I'm in this weird place where I've been doing stand-up 20 years.
I'm a comics comic like comics like me and stuff and like artistically I'm further along than I am visibility wise and Why do you think that is?
I think...
I think I would enjoy...
I naively, when I was younger and a younger comic, I just thought if I'm funny and crushing the clubs and stuff and I have representation, I trust my representation is getting it done.
Like, they will make it happen.
My job is just to keep writing material, doing well in the clubs.
I would get validation from other comics.
Like, oh my god, that's great.
I don't know why you're not popping or you're under the radar.
I'm like, oh, thanks, man.
That feels good when you get validation from other comedians.
That means more than anything.
When Burr texts me about a bit or whatever, that means more than getting a guest star on something.
Because I respect Burr.
Because I love stand-up.
I respect the craft.
When you do it, that means more to me than these little Hollywood things.
So I just trusted that my people would get it done.
But they have big rosters.
Your people don't care as much as you do about you.
Yeah, because that just fell in my lap because stand-up wasn't happening and then they were a fan of my stand-up and they were like, do you want to ride on the show?
Because when you were out here, when you first came out here and you stayed in that apartment building, I remember there were certain gigs you couldn't do or you had to show up late because you had to be in Zoom prison.
It was kind of nice being in this Zoom writer's room, and it's almost like you have this superpower, because we'd be writing all day, and I'm like, hey guys, can I leave early?
I have to do this show with Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle.
Yeah, you know, they just they just have a thing and they know and obviously He's got a system completely down and they hire great writers and you know They've got the people at Comedy Central are smart enough to leave them the fuck alone Which is rare, you know to have a network it just sort of goes go ahead But it's always it's nice when you do have a conglomerate like that to just trust the artist because look what gets produced I think it's tough when you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen who don't My favorite things,
And then when he came back, you know, he came back and started doing shows and kind of got into the groove again and then started killing it and then started putting out specials and then getting attacked.
Well, for sure, the Will Smith thing opened up the door to the idea to that guy, the guy who attacked Chappelle.
And it's also, you know, there's a narrative that his jokes are transphobic.
They are not.
That set is not transphobic.
That set, if you really watch it and pay attention to it, it has a transgender person in it who he loved, who was a good friend of his, who he had open for him at shows, at least one show, and talked about with great love and respect.
With humor.
But it wasn't transphobic.
It wasn't.
It had to do with a trans person.
But we live in this weird era where you can't even make fun of a thing unless you're a bad person.
You're a hater.
Like, fun equals hate now.
It's like Ricky Gervais is catching a lot of it now for his latest special.
That fucking first 15 minutes of that special is fire.
Yeah, and I was telling you too, it's like the Rotten Tomatoes just shows you the disparity between what's going on in the country and what the critics are saying.
And that system is like, either it's a system that's propagated by social media, or it's a system that, you know, they're on a website that is almost, they're almost all like left-leaning websites that have a problem with it, which is really interesting.
You know, it's like the right-wing website.
It's like, who would have thought that If you look back on the early days, what we used to think of as conservative versus liberal.
Liberal was pro-free speech, people were open-minded, non-violent, you know, and people were open to other people's ideas.
And the right was like suppressive, you know, nanny state, you know, condemned certain language, condemned certain behaviors.
That's not the case today.
Today the left has gone so fucking far left, It's so radical that the right are the ones that are celebrating comedians and celebrating Chappelle.
But I'm a compassionate person, and I believe that there's...
Boy, I'll tell you what, though.
One thing that happened during this pandemic was it opened my eyes about human nature.
I used to be very pro-universal basic income.
My thought was, wouldn't it be great if you just had enough money so you could eat and you could pay your rent and then you could pursue what you wanted to?
But the reality of human nature came fully into focus when I realized that when some people got all that money from the government, the COVID money, and then they got unemployment, they didn't want to work!
And one buddy of mine, a bartender told him, I can come back to work, but I can only work for 20 hours a week because that way I get unemployment.
So he wouldn't work more than 20 hours a week so he could get free money.
So he could have made more money, but he didn't want to because he didn't want to work.
So he was getting that free money, and then my friend was like, what the fuck, man?
Like, okay.
And now he's always short-staffed, and it's a mess.
You see a lot of...
People that own businesses that have a hard time finding people who work for them.
So there's pros to that, right?
The pros are it's a marketplace that favors the worker so workers can ask for more money.
So you're seeing a lot of places like bars and restaurants and stuff that have to pay more money per hour.
Which I guess is good as long as the restaurant can stay open because it's at a challenge.
Well, not so much in Texas, but in California, it's at a very challenging time because the time where everybody was shut down in California was radically extended as opposed to other parts of the country.
Yeah, but it's just sort of like, even with the agendas and stuff, and that's why I kind of did my thing on YouTube, too, because I never fit into that Netflix mold, or there's just certain people who pick certain things, and they have a certain brand of comedy that they want to cultivate.
And I think the stock prize and what's happening, because there's the mega-famous people who have their specials, and sure, it's great, Home Run, Netflix.
But then the up-and-comers, they're not...
I'm not knocking all of them.
Some of my friends are on there and they do well, but they are under-facilitating this whole market of comedy that is just underserved.
There was a thing about young boys that were doing drag shows, but I don't think that was the Netflix thing.
But the point is, it's like, you know, there's like an ideological capture that happens when you're connected to these kind of corporate systems that are embracing wokeness.
And so you say, well, we're going to find comedians that reflect our ideals.
Well, he became, I love this quote, I use it all the time, be undeniable.
He became undeniable.
His shit on Netflix or his shit on YouTube and his shit on Instagram, the Turn Your Phone Sideways stuff, was so genius that they were like, this fucking guy needs a show.
And they were like, yeah.
And then when he put the show together, it was excellent.
And so it was like, and a lot of people complained about it.
But that's about everything that's funny.
You're not going to make everybody happy if you're doing it the right way.
But, you know, if you go on a Tonight Show, I don't want to single out to a Tonight Show, but any kind of late night talk show, they don't fucking pick those people.
It's like, you know, Jimmy Fallon's going to the clubs and making good friends with all the comics and trying to figure out who's the best guy to get on.
Man, like, there is this shift, I think, before podcasting and before YouTube and Instagram where you can pull back the curtain to what comedy and stand-up and this world really is.
All we had was the gloss of The Tonight Show and all that.
But now people really like the nitty gritty stuff.
And they're a little more savvy.
They know about the comedy store, for instance.
It's talked about so much on podcasts and everything.
And me doing my special there, it's like people get to see the hallways and stuff.
And people want to see that element of it.
They just don't want to see the five minute Tonight Show thing or a special glossy paid audience.
I just tagged along on a regular night of operation at the store.
People didn't know I'm shooting a special.
Very small footprint.
People had no idea I was taping.
And it was conscious because when I did my CISO thing, it's like you load in the audience, there's lights, and it's sort of a recreation of your act that you've been developing in grimy clubs.
I got asked to, but I just, that's kind of like a writing thing, too, where you can go down that rabbit hole and people will only view you as a warm-up act.
Yeah, which is what everybody would do if we all had jetpacks.
Imagine if everybody could fly.
All your borders would be bullshit.
That's the only thing that keeps people in countries, like the only way you have border protection and all that shit is the fact that you have people stuck on Earth with gravity.
My god, can you imagine once jetpacks become ubiquitous, like Border Patrol is going to be like the Mandalorian just fighting people trying to come over in the sky?
I mean, ultimately, look, I think right now, especially given the laws that we have now and the fact that fentanyl comes across the border and terrorists come across the border and there's a real situation, the world is not at peace.
But wouldn't it be great if people could kind of go anywhere they wanted?
And everywhere was a place where you could live and thrive.
Like, imagine a world where every place was like a city that had opportunity and freedom and democracy and was thriving and had good food and nice people.
Like, Austin has good food, nice people, polite, not too overcrowded, plenty of resources.
Wouldn't it be great if the whole world was like that?
That's why I like being out in LA and being at the store.
Just seeing some of the guys, you see what they're doing, and then it makes you do inventory with yourself.
And you know where the bar is.
Whereas if you're in Ohio or something, sometimes you'll do the road, and someone's featuring for you or something, and they're like, Yeah, this is like my second time getting up this month.
I get up twice a month and it's like your heart goes out to them because you're not going to be able to develop with just those few data points.
So, like I'll go in with some rough stuff, like it's just clay, and then the laughs dictate these polished bits, and like I love that about stand-up the most.
That's why, like, I always tell comics that you have to have, you don't have to, like, let me stretch this, like, you can do it any way you want.
Some guys don't write at all, and they're great.
They're great fucking comics.
They just go up a lot, and they remember what they said.
And some guys write exclusively, and they go up, and they basically have, like, a fully formed bit when they get to the stage, and they kind of tweak it and edit it.
And then some guys just improvise, like literally just go on stage with a premise and just under the pressure of the audience, improvise.
I think you should do all those things.
I think you should write, I think you should improvise, and I think you should go up as much as possible.
People say I write on stage.
I'm like, I can write on stage too.
Anyone can write on stage.
But I actually sit down.
Like last night I got home.
I sat in front of the fucking computer for two hours.
And you also, when someone's as good as Bobby is, you want the world to know that this is, you know, people that have seen him know, but I want everybody to see it.
Yeah.
But it's a thing.
I think there's a lot of anxiety and fear in almost every profession that people do.
I mean, how many people work for someone and become like a very valuable asset to the company but really feel like they're not getting appreciated enough and they have to decide to make a leap and go on their own?
There's a lot of people like that.
And then maybe you have a wife and children or a mortgage or a family you're taking care of, family members that depend on you, and you can't really take that chance.
You don't know how you take that chance and also take care of all your obligations.
It's fucking hard, man.
That's why comedy is a young person's game in the beginning, in the struggling days.
He's inspiring too, just to see, cause like I remember when he started, like I was many years in when he started and like, you don't know, you don't think someone, cause Dean's an outlier.
Most guys that age starting will do it for three years and like, I'm out.
You know, I'm friends with the band Honey Honey, the formerly band formerly known as Honey Honey.
And Suzanne Santo is a really good friend of mine.
And I went to see her live the other day in Austin.
And, you know, I know how talented she is.
I've known her for at least 10 years.
But when you see someone live that's that talented and that good, and she sings and she plays musical instruments, she's playing violin, she's playing guitar and singing, she's so fucking good.
I'm like, how is she not famous?
How is she not like uber famous, like Taylor Swift style famous?
There's some music I listen to, some artists, where they just resonate with a certain vibration with me, where I'm like, this should be the biggest thing in the world, and it's not.
And I will do whatever I can to blast it out if I like a song and all that.
And you want that for them.
But I think all of art is just, you are compelled to do it, and it's just bursting out of you, and whatever happens, happens.
But like...
Like the special, I'm proud of it.
Hopefully it does what it does.
I don't have any expectations.
Like, I just made the thing that I wanted to make without any interference.
Well, when you see guys like Schultz that sort of pioneer that level of hustling, like he hustled so hard and put his stuff on YouTube and became like this giant theater selling act because of that.
Did it all in front of our face.
Everybody watched him do it all on his own.
That's like, guys like that, they set the bar and they change people's ideas of what's possible.
If you're really smart and you have a really good focus and you come up with a game plan, Yeah.
There's too many tools at our disposal nowadays that if you are not doing stuff like what Schultz is doing or this or doing it on your own, then that is your fault.
If you were in the 70s or 80s, you were kind of beholden to the system.
You couldn't reach the masses on your own.
So you had to have the right person like you at The Tonight Show.
I was even thinking about this.
Remember back in the day, the path for a stand-up, you would try to get on The Tonight Show.
That was like early stand-up, right?
And then you would try to get a sitcom, say like in the 90s.
You would try to get a sitcom, act in the sitcom, and then that would boost you as a comedian.
So it became like a well-worn path and everybody would want to get on a sitcom.
You get on a sitcom or on some other show like The Soup or some kind of a show where you could be on television and showcase that you have a funny personality.
And then that would be an ad to get you to come to the clubs.
Stanhope said that best.
We were talking about doing TV projects, and he goes, let's be honest, every time you do a TV project, it's really just an ad to get people to come see you at the clubs.
I was like, you're 100% right.
You're 100% right.
But the problem with that way is that everybody wanted to do a specific kind of comedy because you wanted to get a television show.
So, like, you wouldn't try to be, like, I remember there's a guy who was the host of an open mic night when I was up and coming, and he was, like, a local headliner in Boston, local professional.
And he was telling me to stop swearing and telling me that I should stop talking about sex and talking about things that make people uncomfortable.
And I said, but my favorite comedians all do that.
I go, like, my favorite comedians are, like, Sam Kinison and Dice Clay.
He goes, I got news for you.
You're not Dice Clay.
And I was like, well, how do you become Dice Clay?
Like, what are you saying?
Like, you're saying that there's only one style of comedy, even though the best ones are like Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, who didn't follow that at all?
Like, what are you saying?
And this is me back then trying to figure out what was going on here.
And so, the path was, and Jay Leno still believes this to this day.
We actually talked about it when we were doing that Comedy Store documentary.
He still thinks to this day, you gotta be clean, and that's the way you get the big, long market.
You know, you're just gonna get short-term success if you're dirty.
In the day, when you were Tim Allen, if you could be Tim Allen and get on Home Improvement, you're one of the fucking richest guys on earth.
Like, those guys, like the Jerry Seinfelds, when they developed a show, they were the owner of the show, they were the star of the show, and they got ownership in the show, they made preposterous amounts of money.
And that's what everybody was chasing.
And a lot of guys weren't happy, like Richard Jenny was, like, notoriously not happy.
Because he never became that sort of Jim Carrey movie star guy.
Even though he was, for comics, he was one of the best comics alive.
You know, I think for a lot of comics, there's a lot of self-hate, right?
And so you're chasing love when you're doing stand-up.
You're chasing the love of the audience.
The way you get that love is to come up with the funniest shit.
And some guys develop funny shit just because they're funny, and some guys develop funny shit because they just really want that love, and that's the best way to get to it.
And you know, guys are like a combination of those things.
Different people that do the art are doing it for different reasons.
Like I know women that do it that came from a great family.
And then I have some of my funniest friends who also came from fucked up families when I talked to them about it.
And I think for a girl it's probably even harder.
Because it's not a situation where if you're in front of a bunch of guys, like it's not a situation where you get treated equally the moment you get on stage.
They don't just go, boy, can't wait to see this really funny chick.
There's a prejudice that men have towards women controlling the microphone and then also talking about certain things like women who have opinions on politics.
A lot of guys, they don't want to hear that.
It's a weird thing.
I think there's several steps if a girl does stand up.
Also kind of an inspiring person where you look at someone who just doesn't do stand-up, like is a grinder, has always been, like sells the show, is always moving, always doing things.
This is just an excuse to beat the fuck out of each other.
But these people, I mean, they're getting really hurt.
If you're having gang MMA fights like that, you're gonna get really hurt.
Because people can hit you while you're getting hit from one side and the other side at the same time.
The odds of you getting really hurt are pretty fucking high.
So how do you play Calcio Florentino?
The teams change sides with every cacha or goal scored.
It is important to shoot with precision because every time a player throws or kicks a ball above the net, the opposing team is awarded with a half cacha.
The game ends after 50 minutes and the team which scored the most cacha wins.
But the point is like, that's when I'm pressed for time.
But if I'm not pressed for time, I cook over wood.
So I get dried oak, and I start like a little tiny fire, and I get the oak set up, and I get it cracked, and I get it turned into coals, and then I put a couple of fresh pieces on it to keep it smoky and fresh, and then I slide that steak over the top.
I got one of them Argentine grills, crankity crankity crankity crank.
So I can have the steak way above the fire, and I have a little probe in it, And so I have a probe that tells me the outside temperature, and it tells me the temperature of the meat.
And I can see it on my phone, this thing called Meter.
So I'm watching it cook slowly over these hardwood logs.
And then at the end, I sear it.
When you cook like that, and you eat it, it has this insane flavor of smoke.
You get this real, fresh, smoky flavor in the meat.
It's fantastic.
And there's a thing, I think, in your brain There's some weird, like, trigger that goes off when you have meat that's cooking over fire.
I think it's, like, programmed into us.
From all the years when people would have successful hunts and they would cook meat over fire, they would feel good.
Like, everyone's going to eat.
We're going to survive another day because we were successful.
Because it's hard to be successful.
That's like the feeling you get when you catch a fish, right?
Even if you're going to release the fish, there's a feeling, like, I got one!
Like there's something about that that I think is primally connected to the idea that back in the day when it was hard to get food if you caught that fish you were fucking very excited because you're gonna live yeah you're gonna live so like when you watch like bass angler sportsman society a bunch of guys in these tournaments and they're like look at it and they're holding up by the lips and everybody's cheering they're basically playing a game you know where they're not even they're releasing the fish yeah They're just fucking with them.
And, you know, holding them up and showing everybody, I caught these motherfuckers.
It's just called OG. My problem, I was trying to do cast iron skillet, the steak, and then I would season it with salt and pepper and everything, you know, the coarse grain.
I thought that it would just sort of grill on it and crust and be fine when I... No, you're going to get some of it to come off in the pan, but it can't be precious.
I'm eating with all this rich family, and I'm just the guy with the hand-me-down blazer that I'm swimming in, eating this food that I never get on my own.
Mark Hunt was one of the most durable heavyweights of all time, and Melvin Manhoff is, like, easily 60 pounds lighter than him, and he knocked him out with one punch.
He was a monster, but he wore these, like, it was like a skirt.
They had freaks fights, like freak fights, where they had Nogueira, who was the Pride heavyweight champion, who was an immensely talented jiu-jitsu black belt.
He fought this guy, Bob Sapp, who was 375 pounds with abs.
I'm not kidding.
Like, if you've never seen Bob Sapp before, when you see him fight, you don't believe it's a real person.
You think it's a video game character, or this is CGI. I'm not kidding.
You need to see this.
Bob Sapp versus Noguera.
He's so big.
So big.
And he pile drives Nogueira within the first opening seconds of the fight.
Like a literal pile driver.
375 pound man driving another 240 pound man's head first into the ground.
Look at the size of Bob Sapp.
Yeah, dude, look at the fucking size of him.
So this is the beginning of the fight.
Watch this.
Pile driver.
Boom!
This is how the fight starts.
So Noguera literally gets his spine crushed in the very first seconds of the fight fighting a guy who's a legitimate 130 pounds heavier than him.
Look at the size of the guy!
And they had a lot of fights like this.
Like, Bob Sapp wasn't the most talented MMA fighter, but he was certainly one of the biggest.
You couldn't survive if you just had brute strength.
He definitely trained in martial arts, and he trained with my friend Maurice Smith, who was the UFC heavyweight champion, and he won multiple championships in multiple different organizations.
Maurice was a legit striker, very, very talented, very talented fighter, and he trained him.
So he was training Bob Sapp when Bob Sapp was kickboxing, too.
But he was just a freak.
You were like, what am I seeing?
He was so big, dude.
He would start walking towards guys with his fists up, and you're like, how is that a real person?
The UFC bought Pride, and when the UFC purchased Pride, they basically just closed shop.
They were going to keep it running for a while, but I think it was so chaotic, and I think they decided to just absorb it into the company.
And they took a lot of the fighters.
The only guy they didn't take was Fedor.
Well, there was a few other guys, but Mark Hunt came over from Pride.
I think Mark Hunt, he wanted to fight in the UFC. They wanted to buy him out, and he said, no, I want to fight it out in the UFC. And then there was a few other guys that came over as well.
But it was, um, Krokop, of course.
But it was, you know, the end of an era, unfortunately.
For people who are fans of the sport, there was something about the Pride era that was a really unique time in MMA. Like, we'd have to watch it at 4 o'clock in the morning because it was airing in Japan.
Like, right away, pulls clinch from the guard, and then he's standing up with the guy.
Now he's got the guy grappling.
And even as he throws a kick, he falls onto his back.
Like, he's allowing the guy to lay on top of him, and he's obviously strategized for what he would do when he's off of his back, and he's gonna isolate an arm.
So he's isolated Aki Bono's left arm, and he's pulling his foot across the face, and Aki Bono knows what he's doing, but he can't stop him.
And so he pulls it back down again, and now he gets his left leg over the top of his right foot, and he locks it in place, and he's got a fucking arm bar.
And this dude's fucked.
And he's fighting a guy 200 pounds lighter than him, but the guy knows better technique, and he taps.
You know, the COVID thing opened up a lot of people's eyes about what they can just take away from you.
And taking away people's ability to make a choice as to whether or not you want to go out or not.
Five months into the pandemic, eight months into the pandemic, a year into the pandemic, where the rest of the country, there's all these spots that had opened up.
They made choices in LA that I don't think they should have made.
And I think in retrospect, most people would agree.
It's hard to be a Monday morning quarterback, right?
It's hard to look at it and go, I would have done it differently.
But everybody's going to do that anyway.
But when there was no data that showed that outdoor shows were a problem, and they still weren't allowing the Comedy Store to do outdoor shows...
arbitrary nature to some of it where it was different some places than other places and it wasn't it was like there's a real problem when people have the ability to tell you what to do they like it they like doing it and it has to be factored in to anything that happens And when a bunch of people are saying, why can't I make my own choices?
Or what if I've already had the disease and I have the antibodies?
Or what if, you know, I'm a very healthy young person and they're like, well, you could spread it to other people.
Well, shouldn't those people isolate?
Like, where's the logic in isolating everybody?
And does that even work?
Is there any real data about what happens when communicable diseases like respiratory viruses, which are highly contagious?
Is there ever a history of containing them?
Ever?
No.
The answer's no.
No.
All the virologists will tell you everyone's gonna get it.
Or you're gonna be exposed to it and you're, you know, you might be one of the rare few that has a very good natural immunity to it.
Very, very few people apparently just, they don't catch COVID for whatever reason.
But what I've heard from people that do understand this stuff is that generally speaking, and this is only generally speaking, it doesn't have to go this way, viruses become more contagious but less virulent.
Because for the virus to survive, really, it wants to get as many hosts as possible, so it kills the host.
It kind of defeats the purpose and it stops its ability to spread, which is really wild.
Because if you really think what's going on...
Imagine if that was demons and there was weak demons and really, really powerful demons.
And the really powerful demons, they would come and they would snatch young people and they would take them.
And they would take them and they would take their souls and take them to hell.
It would be so terrifying.
But if the same exact amount of people get killed by a flu, you don't really weird out.
Like, it's terrible, but it's normal.
Now, if it's a novel virus, like coronavirus, then people get super anxious and afraid.
Or if it's heart disease, which kills fucking everybody.
There's so many people that are dying of that.
That doesn't even get discussed.
Imagine if obesity, imagine if sugar was a demon.
All those things were demons.
And they just, you know, some people are just better at not listening to the demons.
The cream film on the inside and the chocolate on the outside was, oh, my favorite guilty pleasure.
But I remember one time we went to Maui and we stopped at Krispy Kreme and got like a, not even one time, I think we did it twice, stopped and got like a dozen donuts and we're pigging out in the car.
And then by the time we got to the hotel, which is only like 20 minutes away, we couldn't think.
It says here, Samantha, why are you drinking that Mountain Dew?
Don't you know it has Yellow 5 in it?
Andrew, do you honestly think they would sell a product that shrinks your testicles and not even put a warning label on it or even sell something like that at all?
It's like, we send each other the links, we have a little chat in the Sober October Crew chat, and 50% of those links lead to that guy with a big dick leaning over the bed.
I will say I do appreciate this music live because I'll see the dance stuff like a DJ it's like a guy in a cubicle yeah and everyone's going live but I can't appreciate it like a live singer and a band and this music is being created in the moment you gotta understand That this song represents a different time of limited information distribution in the world.
It's a different world.
We didn't know what a rock star was.
They didn't have reality shows.
We found out about who they were from their songs.
When we hear a song about a young guy, which we all wish we could be, the young guy who becomes a music superstar.
Every fucking kid in my neighborhood thought this song was about them.
Everybody wanted to be Johnny.
You know how many fucking people started bands because of this song?
There is a romance to that period of time where the entire world and consciousness was focused on one thing, where everything now is kind of segmented and fractured.
I was thinking about SNL. I have a buddy who's on SNL now.
Right, but I mean, but the information that you're containing inside a song, like the fact that you can do that, You know, like you remember shit from when you were little kids where they would teach you about grammar.
You know, conjunction, junction, what's your function?
Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.
Like, it's amazing that you would never be able to repeat, like, someone's lines if they were reading that in a television show.
You would never be able to repeat it like that.
But because it's attached to music, it's like, it's stuck in your head.
All you have to do is kind of get the rhythm of it and then you can remember where the words go.
It's wild!
What a weird thing, that aspect of the way our brains work.
Like, that we connect information to sounds and songs, and then we do that really well.
There's always, I mean, that's one of the interesting things about places like the store is that you're forced to do that because there's 10 people on the lineup and everyone's doing 15 minutes.
But for an audience member, it's a real treat because you get to see all kinds of different styles, all sorts of different approaches.
If you're a real comedy fan, how many people have decided to come see comedy and then decided to try to do it because they've gone to one of those sets and seen so many different kinds of comedy that you go, God, I must...
I think he would do that for like the guys coming up.
You weren't allowed to swear.
Which I don't mind.
You know, actually my first two or three years of stand-up, I put it on myself to not swear or drink later on too, because I didn't want to become a crutch.
I didn't want to have to drink before I go on stage.
Like, I'll do it now sometimes if it's like a second show.
Like, I'll have a drink before I go on stage.
But I don't use it.
I want to be able to be enough as me sober.
And it was nice having that foundation of, I don't need to swear to form a joke.
And then I swear now and stuff.
I allow myself to use all the words and paint with all the colors.
But I think it was good just to not rely on, like, fuck.
Like, out the gate, when you don't know the foundations of comedy yet.
But if the crowd laughs that like that's the bottom line, you know as long as the person is being true to themselves and It's like We're all we're trying to do is be funny That's it.
Attell, I think, of the current guys, he probably influenced the most guys out of New York.
Because if you watch Attell right now in particular, that's a guy that's probably the most underappreciated and underrated, even though I know the fans rate him very highly.
I'm talking about the general public.
Every comedy fan that knows Dave Attell rates him very, very highly.
He mightn't be the best comic alive, but criminally underappreciated, as far as the general public goes.
And if you see him, he's so good, and his jokes are so sharp, and you get into that Dave Attell rhythm, And that's all you want to hear.
And then guys start doing jokes like him.
You start doing that, he's got this way of talking.
And it's so addictive.
I've seen so many guys, and they're not bad guys, but you see a little bit of a tell in them because they're insecure.
And they don't know how to be funny, and they're trying to be funny, and so they try to do it like a tell.
You know, and they have that, like, very pronounced sort of accentuation of words.
He might be the one of the best of all time and right now he's in his prime and I think a lot of it is like he stopped drinking unlike us and Turned his life around When is the last special?
Because at first I was a little skeptical of it, but now it's become so widespread and so many people support artists and comics and all kinds of shit through Patreon now.
Yeah, if you can get to a just purely donation-based income, it's probably the best way to do it.
I know Sam Harris essentially operates that way.
He does his podcast purely...
Not only does he do it, this is what he does.
He does it through this system where you have to subscribe.
He'll give you the first 30 minutes of the podcast.
Then you have to subscribe to get the rest of the podcast.
So it costs money to subscribe.
But I think you get to donate whatever you want to.
I think it's one of those deals.
And then on top...
Check to see if that's true.
I don't know if you get to donate whatever you want to get to Sam Harris' podcast.
But one thing you definitely do is if you can't afford it, he doesn't want it to be an impediment to you getting the show.
So if you can't afford it, he doesn't want it to be a barrier.
So he gives it to you for free.
All you have to do is email.
If you just email, I can't afford it.
He goes, and we grant 100% of the requests.
I go, that is crazy.
And it works.
It works.
Are you going to have some scammers?
Yes, of course you are.
But you're going to have a lot of people that appreciate the will behind that, that it really is honest, and it's an even exchange.
It's like, I'm going to do my best to create the show, donate, and if you can't afford to donate, I don't want it to be the reason why you can't watch the show or listen to the show, so then you can have it for free.
I think I'm conflating him with somebody else who did a thing.
Someone else had one.
I forget who it is.
Obviously I forget.
But someone had one where you could donate as much as you want.
So it could be a dollar or it could be $100, whatever the fuck you want.
He had it set up that way, but it wasn't Sam.
So Sam has a specific model, like a subscription model.
But because he's so good and because he has this reputation from all of his debates that are online and all of his talks online, he puts on rock solid, very fascinating, very intellectually challenging content.
So it's worth the money.
If you can set up a model like that where even if you can't afford it, all you have to do is ask, then people are like, well, this guy's legit.
He has to be legit.
This is not something that a business person would create.
They wouldn't create that kind of a loophole where the Redditors would capitalize on that, or 4chan, I should say.
But there's also something cool about having that intimate relationship with the fans, and you just kind of trust each other.
Because I'll get 50 bucks, I'll get 60 bucks, and if I charge that much for my special, no one would give me 50 bucks for the special if I had that paywall.
But because it's free, there's so much goodwill, they go, I enjoyed it so much, here's 50 bucks.
And I think if you're connected to a network, unfortunately, like if you're on a television show or if you're doing something else, they don't want a small group of thriving fans.
They want the largest, widest reach possible.
And the best way to do that is to water a town and to make sure you don't...
I'm saying other people that are saying cancel culture isn't real.
If they're saying that, that's just because someone can still work.
It doesn't mean they didn't get a horrendous experience that they may or may not have deserved.
And it's sort of sport.
There's a sport to it.
There's a lot of people that pile on.
Tim Dillon and I became friends because of a thing that he wrote about Louis C.K., and I reached out to him.
He wrote about all these people that are mediocre, not very talented comics.
They were shitting all over Louis C.K. And I was like, he's right.
Because I see that.
I recognize that there were certain people, not all of them, but there were certain people that were highly critical of Louis in a way where it was almost like, They were trying to make sure that this uber-talented guy never entered back.
It wasn't even what he did.
It was more of the social status.
They're going to reclaim or they're going to claim higher ground by pushing him down.
It was a weird sort of like kick them when they're down thing.
It wasn't like anybody that was really brilliant, that was killing it, that came out against Louis C.K. like that.
It wasn't.
It was guys that were terrible at stand-up, or okay at stand-up, but they suck at women and life, and they're depressed, and maybe their career was going good, and then it started to falter.
It's like those guys.
Those are the attackers.
There was people that were critical of him, but it's the attackers, the way they did it.
It's almost like you didn't want to recognize that he's a human being.
And it's human nature is also because if someone like Will Smith does something really stupid, like smack Chris Rock, it's not just he did something stupid, but it's also he has lived a life of extreme...
I don't want to say fortune because he's super talented.
But it's a very, very unusual life and unattainable to most people.
Oscar winner, movie star, recording artist.
I mean, he's a super, superstar.
So for him to do something where we can all go, boo, fuck you.
It's not just boo, fuck you.
It's also boo, fuck you and now you're not going to be as big as you used to be.
Now I'm not going to support you.
Now I'm not going to go to a meeting.
Now I'm going to boycott you.
But if a rapper, like some unknown rapper, went up and smacked Chris Rock in the face, that guy would be huge.
If he was with his girlfriend.
So let's say Jada Pinkett breaks up with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett is at the Oscars.
And the Will Smith slap never took place.
And she's with some young rapper.
And the rapper responds to Chris Rock's joke by going on stage and smacking him.
That guy would be huge.
He'd be ballin' out of control.
He would make 15 songs about it.
He would have like stacks of cash on a private jet talking about slapping Chris Rock.
If we shut off, people will catch us and they'll bring us to a nice hospital and I don't have to see this fucking needle go in this guy's arm in a movie theater.
And also, it's like your mind and your central nervous system just can't handle the shock of what just happened to it.
So it just shuts down to try to almost try to reboot, I think.
I mean, that's probably a shitty way of describing it, but it's just the trauma of brain injury that causes a concussion and being knocked unconscious.
It's just a ruthless situation for the whole body.
The whole body.
If you see people get knocked out, like Javante Davis just scored a stunning knockout this past Saturday night against Rolando Romero, and he hit him with this fucking left hook, man.
It was so beautiful, this counter left, because the dude was like a super powerful knockout puncher.
And he wades in with a right hand to the body and he throws another right hand.
There's a few of those that are out there that do stuff with MMA fights, too.
It's, again, just like comedians.
It's an interesting time for anybody to create things.
As long as the gatekeepers understand the reason why it's so cool in the first place is because you let so many diverse ideas and opinions and styles of thought and styles of creating things get loose.
I almost feel like that was just a ploy from China.
Like, Alright, yeah, we're just going to have your youth do dancing and all these pranks in grocery stores, and we're going to limit our people with what they can do with it.
It's going to be education-based.
We're going to shut it off at a certain time, and then you guys are going to idiocracy it, and then we're going to take over.
Let's not pretend that any civilization has ever done social engineering where it worked long term.
I mean, just the horrors of this single child household that China imposed for years.
Just the horrors of what happened to female babies.
It's terrible, terrible shit that doesn't just make a disproportionate amount of males to females, which is a huge problem in China right now, but also all those people that had female babies that had to be killed.
That's not a small amount of people.
And all those people whose family was ratted out and someone found out that the woman's pregnant and so they forced her to have abortions when she's nine months pregnant or forced her to give birth to a dead baby so they would literally inject the head of the baby with a poison to kill the baby while it's in the womb so that it's stillborn.
I'm reading this about it in this Douglas Murray book called The War on the West, and that's one of the things that he talks about.
The single-child household in China, it was a terrible thing.
And that's a form of social engineering.
There's too many people, so you can only have one kid.
And people with no kids are like, yeah, well, how do you enforce that?
This is the problem with any idea with socialism or Marxism.
How do you enforce it?
With violence.
It's the only way.
If you want to get everybody to give their money up and no one has any weapons and you decide how much everybody gets paid and whatever your task is, it's the same as the fucking guy who makes pizzas, it's the same as the guy who builds jets, it's all the same.
Like, how do you enforce that?
Violence!
It's the only way.
And so then the state becomes your daddy, and then the state decides that, you know, like in the case of North Korea, that its daddy is super powerful and plays golf better than anybody that's ever lived.
You ever read the account of Kim Jong-un playing golf?
You want to talk about a lady who just doesn't want to hear any bullshit?
When you escape North Korea and you make it into China as a sex slave when you're 13, you have no tolerance for bullshit.
None.
No tolerance for bullshit.
Just, what the fuck, man?
The fact that that is going on right now, and that in 2022, while you and I are sitting here drinking whiskey and talking shit, there's people that are slaves in Korea, in North Korea, and they can't get out.
They're trapped, and they're barely alive.
They barely survive in terms of their ability to just have enough food to live.
And they live in concentration camps, and they work for the state.
You live in slave camps.
And you might even not have ever done anything.
You might be born in that slave camp.
She was explaining how if one generation, say if your grandfather does something that's bad against the state, they will curse multiple generations.
So you'll be imprisoned, and your children will be imprisoned, and their children will be imprisoned before their children get released.
of golfers struggle to break 90. So it goes on and explains how he talked to some people there.
They explained to him that there was a scorekeeping shorthand that is used there, and then someone who ever found that in the North Korean state news most likely didn't know that, and then ran with the...
Okay, so it says unfamiliar with the score keeping shorthand, the North Korean state news agency covering the outing had read the five ones on Kim's card as holes in one.
Forget the fact that Kim, a ranked beginner, probably never sniffed bogey all day if you were keeping score for a brutal autocrat.
Would you dare tell him he'd made nothing but snowmen?
I don't know what you fucking dorks talking on your little weird jargo.
I don't wanna hear!
Shut your mouth!
Maybe.
I would like to pretend that I didn't read that.
Just go with the original propaganda piece because I think it was awesome that they said he scored 15 holes in one.
I would definitely look at Tony Hinchcliffe and Jamie and Ron White play.
It'd be fun to play with them.
I think what I'm going to do one day is when Jamie and Tony finally play, I'm going to film it on the iPhone and just get super baked and just talk shit to them What if you're amazing with your bakes?
And then occasionally it was him getting big games.
So you'd play for money.
But those are...
When you're playing big games, you're playing a good player.
And so if you're betting $100 against Jamie and you're both A players, who knows, man?
You might be real loose that night and you might run out.
Or he might be loose and the balls might roll bad for you.
And you could lose 13-12 in a race of 13 for like $100.
Now you're fucked.
So when you're really good, it's hard to make any money because you're playing against other people that are really good.
You know, and then also, like, two people don't want to give money away.
They want a chance.
And so, like, if you're, like, say, Ko Pin Yee is, like, one of the top guys in the world, and you want to play Shane Van Boning, who's another top guy in the world, who the fuck knows who's going to win that?
They have to figure it out.
So guys bicker.
The guys are like, I want 2-1 on the money.
I want 10-9 on the score.
Like, he has to go to 10, but we only have to go to 9. Like, they try to come up with advantageous games.
And sometimes people are more hungry to gamble than they are smart.
And so they agree to these stupid games.
Like, fuck it!
Fuck it!
You want to rob?
Let's fucking play!
And they'll play, and they'll have a terrible game that they probably can't win just because they got cajoled into it by some guy who talks a lot of shit.
So there's that, too.
Yeah.
It's not just ego.
It's also you're dealing with the fact that the person's a junkie.
They're gambling junkies.
They're action junkies.
They want the action.
And the action of playing pool for money is very exciting.
Like if you watch a guy like Jason Shaw, he's one of the best guys in the world.
There's videos of him, Jason with a J-A-Y-S-O-N, Shaw.
He practices and puts videos of his practice sessions on YouTube and on Instagram and he just lines balls up and he shoots the ball and gets position in the next ball and shoots the ball and gets position in the next ball.
He just has like a line of balls and he has to place it perfectly to get position on the next ball and maneuver his cue ball around the table.
It's like this drill that he does.
So instead of just playing, he does specific shots over and over and over and all the best guys do that because that's what separates the guys who are truly elite from guys who are just really good players.
The really good players, they don't practice like this because this shit is fucking boring.
So this guy is making the eight ball on the side.
That's on purpose.
Like watch this shot.
This is a bank shot where he's gonna bank it off the long rail here, bang, and it'll go right into the side off the cue ball.
You know, there's like a handful of guys that consistently win.
Like watch one of these.
This is these practice things that he sets.
By the way, this guy just broke the world record for the most amount of balls run in straight pool.
And it's either in the 600s, depending on one person's, because apparently he touched one of the balls at one point in time, or it's in the 700s because the rules don't state that you can't touch a ball.
Like it's only fouls on a cue ball, meaning you can't accidentally touch the cue ball or the cue ball scratch.
But what you can do is accidentally brush up against the ball, like say with a fingertip or with your clothing or something like that.
We're doing a lot of sets in town, doing a lot of sets at the Vulcan, doing a lot of writing.
But right now, like, one of the problems with having an hour that's pretty much ready to go is when I release it, then I'm going to have to write a whole new hour.
But it's beautiful because I still was working at the time, but at night, I just knew I had to do this.
This was my North Star.
I did that thing by day but there's so many things when you're a comedian like what do I do what's the move and all that and you can get really clouded with what I should do but I'm like make this special just forget about everything else make this and then worry about everything else so I just did the writing job by day I made this thing at night just funneled all my energy into it I'm like make a great piece of art that is you And then figure out that shit later.
But for some reason, I don't know if it's the stars aligning or some spirit, it just said, make this thing.
Yeah, I will take my hat off to Peter Shore because I had the idea and I called it because I couldn't do it without their sign-off, you know, because they're very protective of the name and the building and I call them and I go, I've always had this idea to do this type of special at the store.
I was kind of preparing for them to say no because they are pretty hard-lined about It's a magical place, you know?
They don't want anyone filming in the OR because it's where we work on our stuff.
They're very protective.
Because sometimes the Laugh Factory would just release clips of like Chappelle and they didn't want it, you know?
When you think about your career and think about times where you wanted to record and how much...
How much travel you have to do to get to the spot where you're happy with your material.
If at any point in time it gets cut off and it gets released, that was one of the things that annoyed me greatly about people's response to Louis C.K.'s leak set.
You're talking about a guy who didn't do stand-up at all for 10 months, and then this is what he does when he comes back.
I mean, he didn't do it at all.
And then this is what he does when he comes back.
And he was killing.
And people say, oh, he lost his heart, he lost his way.
No, he's doing the exact same shit he always did.
The exact same shit.
And when people were criticizing that, I'm like, hey man, you're literally criticizing a baby step.
You're criticizing the first steps of a whole set.
Get the fuck out of here.
Do you know how to make comedy or not?
Do you know how to make comedy or not?
Well, if you do, then you're a fucking liar and you're pretending that this isn't how it works and that you don't go on stage with some ideas and just fucking swing.
He might have got 15 killer fucking minutes of that.
You don't know.
Like, all those great ideas that he had sat on for 10 months while, you know, he was canceled, whatever.
It's one of those things, man.
I get why people will be upset at certain things.
That's not what my problem is.
What my problem is is the way people handle stuff and this tendency towards looking at someone through a distorted lens because it benefits you to do that.
You know, like choosing to frame things in a way that benefits you.
Well, if you are really upset by those things associated with it, and you maybe have had a bad experience, your own with a man, and you just decide, he's not funny to me.
That's your prerogative.
You are allowed to do that.
That's 100%.
You're allowed to listen to or watch whatever the fuck you want for whatever the fuck reason you want.
But when you make an assessment, Of, like, something that is clearly what a guy is just practicing for the first time in ten months.
He's just going on stage and fucking around.
And you're trying to pretend that this is his material that's ready for judgment.
Well, it's also like you're signaling to the crowd that you're on the right side and that you're not like him and what he did was bad.
And I get that too.
I get the need to express your disgust.
I get that.
But if you're an actual comic and we're talking about stand-up comedy, like to attack that set was like, okay, come on.
comedy for 10 months and see what you have to say.
Probably terrible too.
And if you're a guy who's always pushed the buttons and been rewarded for it, because that's what Louis has been, always pushed buttons, always been rewarded.
You go back over his stuff like post-cancellation and go back and watch some of his bits, you're like, oh my God, imagine if he released this now.
We progress as a society, and the bits I did three or four years ago, I wouldn't do today, maybe because I've grown as a person, and society has evolved, and I'm a different person.
But people will hold the standards of today to yesteryear.
Just because it makes you feel good that you've done something.
The worst thing is when you're talking to someone and they want you to believe that something they've done is really good and then when you have to watch it, you gotta go...
It's a bummer.
You have to be that guy to yourself first before anybody gets a look at it.