July 13, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:03:43
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan experience What the fuck? | |
| Tell me the UFO story. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well first, I'm gonna tell you about my dad real quick. | ||
| My dad is... | ||
| Sicilian to the fuck, he born and raised Bronx, okay? | ||
| Grew up in the 1960s in the Bronx. | ||
| Always has to dress nice, you know, very materialistic. | ||
| A man needs a watch, a man needs shoes, okay? | ||
| Me and my brother were in the car one time. | ||
| My father would do this shit. | ||
| We were young, he shouldn't have, but he would be like, he'd be like, look at that, you see that? | ||
| That's a fucking disgrace. | ||
| He'd be like, that's a man in a Honda. | ||
| And he'd be like, there's kids in that fucking car. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| 1982, Jaguar, XJ6, black, white leather, dressed to the nines. | ||
| You know, everybody's crazy but him. | ||
| Fuck them, they're crazy. | ||
| So, tells me and my brother a story. | ||
| To this day, the story's not changing. | ||
| He told me he wished he never saw what he saw. | ||
| 1973, my mother is pregnant with my older brother, Christian. | ||
| He's five years older than me. | ||
| Okay, so she's pregnant with him. | ||
| They're outside in Yonkers. | ||
| There's a little grass lot and my aunt, grandmother, and mother are out there and they're screaming, Tommy, you gotta come out here. | ||
| You gotta come out here. | ||
| So the way my father tells this story, he goes, I'm watching TV. What the fuck? | ||
| You know, I don't want to be bothered. | ||
| He goes, I go outside and he said, Paul... | ||
| He said, sitting where I could throw a rock or shoot my gun at it, there is a fucking... | ||
| He said flying saucer, which is fucking hilarious. | ||
| There's a fucking flying saucer. | ||
| He said it's got a blue tint around it. | ||
| Little portholes, but you could barely see. | ||
| Quiet. | ||
| Quiet as can be. | ||
| And he said they were all... | ||
| And he said the time was weird. | ||
| The time of night was weird. | ||
| It was like that weird time where the sun's going down, you don't know. | ||
| He said the timing of it was weird and he said his time perception during it was very, something was off with the time. | ||
| And he said, he thought, he said, holy shit, I could fucking shoot my gun at this thing. | ||
| But then he goes, he goes, then I freaked out because I don't know if this thing's reading my fucking mind. | ||
| So I went inside because he thought that it might have been. | ||
| So he went inside. | ||
| He looked again. | ||
| He went outside. | ||
| They looked at it. | ||
| They were stunned. | ||
| And he said, like that, it turned into a dot in the sky. | ||
| He said like that it turned into a star like that and he says to this day exactly the same thing. | ||
| He goes Paul I always used to think those people were fucking nuts. | ||
| He goes all those people I thought they were fucking hillbillies somewhere in the Midwest just trying to get attention. | ||
| He goes I know what the fuck I saw and he goes and I wish I didn't see it because I still dream about it and I know what the fuck I saw and I know it wasn't from here. | ||
| That's 100% true. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| 1973. And then I googled 1973 Yonkers and many people saw something. | ||
| But it was right above them. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Man says, 1973 UFO incident turned life upside down. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I'm not surprised. | ||
| No. | ||
| It probably looked just like that. | ||
| That one right there. | ||
| It's funny because when he describes it, it looks like that. | ||
| In my mind, that's what he said it looked like. | ||
| And that's what I always thought about, that right there. | ||
| But he said that it was gone. | ||
| And he said he couldn't believe it. | ||
| And my mother's very religious. | ||
| So the other day we had a party and somebody... | ||
| Might have actually been Giannis. | ||
| He goes, I've got to find out. | ||
| Can I talk? | ||
| And she goes, I saw that. | ||
| She goes, Giannis, I saw that. | ||
| We saw that. | ||
| That thing just disappeared. | ||
| My father said if he had a picture in 1973 of where it was, nobody would ever have a picture like that. | ||
| He goes, I've been a fucking millionaire. | ||
| Yeah, he said, nobody. | ||
| It was right there, he said. | ||
| He said you could have maybe not thrown something, but shoot at it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Well, that thing right there is a copy by this guy Designs by Perry. | ||
| The E in Perry is a 3 on Instagram. | ||
| And he recreated that thing. | ||
| That's a recreation of what Bob Lazar allegedly worked on in Area S4. Yeah. | ||
| And that's exactly how he described it. | ||
| He said this thing was running on something called Element 115. Element 115 is apparently some element that was just theoretical until like the early 2000s. | ||
| I think it was like 2013 or something like that. | ||
| They recreated it in a large hadron collider. | ||
| But before in a particle collider but before that He was saying that these people had he was talking about this in 1989 that these people Who were working on this thing trying to back engineer it they described it as being some sort there's some sort of an engine that works Off of this element and that what it does is it bends gravity. | ||
| So instead of like a rocket where fire comes out the back and it pushes the rocket forward, this thing bends space and time. | ||
| So it bends gravity and pushes it through. | ||
| Yeah, that's why it's totally silent. | ||
| The thing is, it sounds crazy, but all these things that these pilots have seen that they describe having no heat signature, no visible means of propulsion, they all move in that same way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly how your dad described. | ||
| Yeah, and I didn't know that the bending gravity was why it was silent, but everybody that I know says they see one says silent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's never noise. | ||
| Like any sort of engine, which is wild. | ||
| It is pretty wild, but I mean, you know, everybody's like, well, I ain't seen shit, but if one person saw it, if they only came down for like a half hour or an hour, you know, a few people saw it, then it took off and never came back again, those people would be confused, like your dad, probably, for the rest of their lives, just thinking about it. | ||
| Yeah, and he's so detailed every single time. | ||
| And he says, he goes, what I don't like about seeing it was I knew that I was seeing something that was just unexplained and not from here. | ||
| And I know it's out there. | ||
| And he's just fucked up by it. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| What do you think they're doing? | ||
| Probably making sure we don't blow ourselves up probably when every civilization I think there's probably a bunch of different kinds of life forms in space right like Millions of different times, but I think they must know that we operate off of Biological needs, | ||
| like we have a biological need to procreate, a biological need to protect our village and to protect our stuff, and so we're warring still, but yet we're moving this technological age of sophistication where we have nuclear bombs and video that travels on your phone to the other side of the world in a half a second and all the wild shit that we can do now that makes it very complex for us to manage Both our primate instincts and the responsibility of having incredible power. | ||
| So they're probably like, let's just fucking keep an eye on these assholes. | ||
| Why would they care, though? | ||
| Because they don't want us to blow ourselves up. | ||
| Think about how many billions of years it took for us to become what we are, right? | ||
| You go from a single-celled organism to what a human being is now. | ||
| That is a long road. | ||
| For us to just knock the dominoes over, because some guy has a hard-on, right? | ||
| That's Putin, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| If Putin is like, fuck you, and he just fucking nukes Ukraine, and then we nuke him, and then China nukes us. | ||
| That kind of shit is a real possibility. | ||
| And if I was an alien, I was like, look, they're so close to getting it right. | ||
| They're so close to getting it together. | ||
| Yeah, that could be. | ||
| Yeah, dude, I don't know. | ||
| I tell you what, if I saw it, it would fuck me up. | ||
| What do you think it is? | ||
| What do you think they're doing? | ||
| If that's real, let's just assume that this isn't just a mass hallucination. | ||
| What do you think it is? | ||
| I think they're just curious, man. | ||
| I think they're just watching. | ||
| I would say I don't know that they care. | ||
| I wouldn't think that they would care, but I think they're just watching us. | ||
| But what if this? | ||
| I always thought about this. | ||
| What if they created us? | ||
| Like, we're their ant farm. | ||
| Yeah, I thought of that too. | ||
| You know, like one of them fucked something down and just started something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, what if they took like a chimpanzee or they took something that was here first, fucked it, and was like, let's look at this thing grow. | ||
| And then they're just looking and they're showing up. | ||
| That's one of the things Bob Lazar said. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Yeah, he said that one of their, there was a bunch of briefings that they had and a bunch of documents. | ||
| In one of the documents, they talked about how human beings are some sort of a product of accelerated evolution. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| They took us, which kind of makes sense that we're so different than all the other primates. | ||
| You see all the other primates, they're all still kind of stuck in this weird sort of... | ||
| I mean, we know that there were bipedal primates that don't exist anymore. | ||
| Like, have you ever heard of the Hobbit people? | ||
| No, not other than the movie. | ||
| Not the movie. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| There's an animal. | ||
| It's like a human. | ||
| It's called Homo floresis. | ||
| Floresis? | ||
| I think that's how you say it. | ||
| From the island of Flores. | ||
| And there are these tiny people... | ||
| They're not homo sapiens, but they were in the humanoid category, and they were three feet tall, they used tools, and they think they might have even had conflicts with people. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Yeah, those are real creatures. | ||
| But there's not just one of them. | ||
| Like, this is a fact, right? | ||
| This animal, this hobbit person, they didn't find out about this until... | ||
| God, I want to say it was like 2000s. | ||
| Somewhere in the 2000s, they discovered it. | ||
| When did they discover it? | ||
| Is that what it says? | ||
| Does it say... | ||
| I was discovered in 2003. So up until 2003, they didn't even know this was a thing. | ||
| And they know that these creatures lived alongside human beings. | ||
| I think the fossils they found were as recent as somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 years ago. | ||
| So somewhere around 10,000 years ago, there was a creature that was like a tiny human-like, like, had hands like a human, a face like a human, but it was three feet tall, covered in hair, used tools, and lived alongside people. | ||
| But not human. | ||
| Not human. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Not human, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But so there's that one, right? | ||
| And then there's some other ones like Gigantopithecus, which is what they think Bigfoot was. | ||
| That's a giant eight-foot-tall bipedal hominid that existed. | ||
| That's like in the orangutan family. | ||
| Oh, okay, yeah. | ||
| And they think that that existed. | ||
| So there's a bunch of different primates, but the bottom line is all of them, even this one that has tools, they're covered in hair. | ||
| They're all fucking muscular and weird-looking. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| They're not like us. | ||
| We're fucking strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what's funny about the thing that my father saw is he didn't want to tell people. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| So my father was, before my parents got divorced, he was a bigwig at AIG in Manhattan. | ||
| He was like third guy, third or fourth guy at AIG. And the top guy was having a huge barbecue at his place in Long Island. | ||
| And he invites my father to come out. | ||
| So my mother's there, and my father doesn't tell anybody about the UFO. And he goes, then your fucking mother yells across the barbecue, hey Tommy, tell everybody about the flying saucer we saw! | ||
| And he goes, no, I don't know, she's drinking. | ||
| And he goes, what the fuck? | ||
| Because he didn't want, because especially 1973. Right. | ||
| Even in the 80s and early 90s, it was like... | ||
| Even today. | ||
| Today, yeah. | ||
| You bring up today, you saw a UFO. Oh, Verzi saw a UFO. Yeah. | ||
| But at least you have commercial airline pilots going, hey, we see some shit right now that's going, doing some shit that these things shouldn't do. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You know, but yeah, 1973, my mother yelled it out and he was like, you're fucking, you know, he freaked out about it. | ||
| You know, he was like, you can't tell my boss. | ||
| Yeah, get Tom Verzi in here. | ||
| We got to fuck, he's a lunatic. | ||
| Yeah, they would say, you want to pee in that cup, Tom? | ||
| Did they have pee tests back then? | ||
| I wonder when they started doing drug tests. | ||
| Like, when did they first start drug testing employees? | ||
| I think 80s. | ||
| I don't think they did it in the 70s. | ||
| You know, I don't think so. | ||
| No, they probably didn't have drug tests back then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Back then, I bet Coke was real Coke. | ||
| You got Coke, I bet it was clean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They probably didn't even cut it. | ||
| Now you can't fucking, you can't touch it. | ||
| What does it say here? | ||
| President Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Worst workplace drug testing started off after President Ronald Reagan required it for federal employees in 1986. And it peaked during the drug war of the 1990s. | ||
| Fucking Reagan. | ||
| 86? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He probably saw Darryl Strawberry Doc Good and he's like, enough of this shit. | ||
| That was the first steroids of sports, was the coke of sports, because they all did it. | ||
| Right, well, again, baseball players, apparently, they all like to do amphetamines, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, baseball players, that's probably one of the most performance-enhanced sports. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With all the fucking steroids and the... | ||
| Apparently, they all like ADHD medication. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something about it makes you focus. | ||
| And what it does, too, is you play through injury. | ||
| You don't feel the injury. | ||
| So you have a little tear. | ||
| So guys that were at the plate, if they had a little tear in their elbow or shoulder... | ||
| Didn't. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| It didn't matter. | ||
| And their hand-eye coordination was... | ||
| That's why Barry Bonds... | ||
| Barry Bonds was so... | ||
| Barry Bonds was a Hall of Famer before he did it. | ||
| Then he saw everybody doing it, and then he did it again. | ||
| I was sitting courtside. | ||
| Nick, I got hammered at the... | ||
| I'm good friends. | ||
| Pete Davidson's a good friend of mine, and he was at SNL. He goes, dude, come down. | ||
| And I'm a diehard Knicks. | ||
| Diehard Knicks, because I'm a Yankees-Giants, but I've won with them. | ||
| My problem child is the Knicks, and I got my son into it and shit, and we go down, and I'm sitting next to this guy, and he's got his hair slicked back, and everybody's coming up to him, and he's got the beard, and I'm looking at this guy, and I'm drinking vodka. | ||
| They just pour vodkas, and I'm just, I'm fucking hammered courtside. | ||
| And this guy, and I don't know who this guy is, so at halftime, they take you back to where everybody's drinking and eating. | ||
| So finally, they're like, yeah, the guy you're sitting next to is the Mets, the new manager of the Mets, Mickey Calloway. | ||
| And I was like, oh, okay, cool. | ||
| That's who it is. | ||
| So we just start talking. | ||
| We're shooting the shit and everything. | ||
| And I go, all right. | ||
| And I'm hammered now. | ||
| So now I like all of the what you shouldn't do, I'm doing. | ||
| Yeah, I go, can I ask you a question? | ||
| He goes, please, please. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| I go, best baseball. | ||
| He was before he was a Mets manager. | ||
| He was a pitching coach for the Indians. | ||
| And I go, now the Guardians, which is fucking awful name. | ||
| But he said, I go, who's the best baseball player you've ever seen live in all of the years you've been in baseball? | ||
| And he just leans back and he goes, oof. | ||
| And then he just goes, oh, Barry Bonds. | ||
| He goes, nobody in history made a pitcher pay for a mistake more. | ||
| He goes, if a pitcher made one fucking mistake by an inch, over. | ||
| So imagine that guy on roids. | ||
| And he was. | ||
| But he was that guy before. | ||
| And then he was on it. | ||
| So now there's Barry Bonds, monster Barry Bonds. | ||
| No injuries. | ||
| No, you know, nothing's gonna stop him. | ||
| Hand-eye coordination, better. | ||
| More power. | ||
| That guy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, how many... | ||
| They all did it, right? | ||
| Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, they were all on the sauce. | ||
| You could kind of look at the ones that did a certain way because they were square. | ||
| I was in a fucking elevator with Gary Sheffield. | ||
| He was like a book dresser. | ||
| You could tell that these guys were just different. | ||
| I met Canseco in 1986. I was a fitness trainer at the Boston Athletic Club. | ||
| I'd teach people how to lift weights and shit. | ||
| And Jose Canseco came in at the peak of his popularity. | ||
| He was a fucking giant. | ||
| He was so big. | ||
| I couldn't believe how big he was. | ||
| Like, I knew he was, you know, you see him on TV, he's an athlete, but you see him in real life, he's like 260 pounds. | ||
| He was fucking huge. | ||
| Yeah, gigantic. | ||
| Actually, I don't know if Sheffield did it, but he looked like that. | ||
| I don't know if, who got, who was the big, oh, then the guys that denied it in front of Congress. | ||
| Oh, what happens with them? | ||
| Did they go to jail for that? | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| Everybody that admitted it, it was like, okay, but the guys that were like, remember Raphael Palmeiro? | ||
| He goes, I, he fucking like pointed at the guy. | ||
| He goes, I never, never, and like he did. | ||
| The problem with that is if you lie about something like that so emphatically, no one's ever going to believe you again. | ||
| Like if you get in an argument with your wife. | ||
| I was with Tommy. | ||
| We went to the fucking game. | ||
| I drove straight home. | ||
| I got stuck in traffic. | ||
| Yep, that's the point. | ||
| He looks like he's on roids right there. | ||
| That's probably why he's pointing. | ||
| Oh, there's a bobblehead doll of him pointing. | ||
| I've never used steroids, period. | ||
| Mark McGuire did this one. | ||
| They go, Mark, did you use steroids in this? | ||
| And he just goes, I'm not here to talk about the past. | ||
| I'm here to talk about the future. | ||
| And that was his way of just being like, let's clean the game up. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| After I've made my money, let's clean the game up. | ||
| Let's bring everybody's home runs down to a normal, manageable level. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| My wife knows that I'm lying, dude. | ||
| My wife and I have been together almost 20 years and married almost 15, and when she has me dead to rights, she just looks and we both know. | ||
| Well, don't do steroids in front of her then. | ||
| Or don't lie about them. | ||
| No. | ||
| Those guys, like, if you think about it, they made baseball more interesting, though. | ||
| Like, it's so stupid that they busted them for that. | ||
| They should have been just like, everybody shut the fuck up, everybody shut the fuck up. | ||
| They brought baseball back. | ||
| But why'd they make a big deal out of it? | ||
| Who gives a shit if they're doing steroids? | ||
| I just think when it goes from 40 home runs is a good season to 90, it's just like... | ||
| People are getting better. | ||
| Cars are getting faster. | ||
| Why did it go to Congress, though? | ||
| It's pretty weird it went all the way to congressional hearings. | ||
| Because baseball's our national game. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| Because if that happened with, like, pick a sport. | ||
| Darts. | ||
| You think anybody would give a fuck? | ||
| Dart players are doing roids. | ||
| Bring them to Congress. | ||
| Fucking bocce ball players? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is it? | ||
| It's got to be that baseball's a national sport. | ||
| I don't think they would have done that with anything else. | ||
| They definitely would have done it with football. | ||
| Because they know everybody's juiced up on football. | ||
| They'll get McGuire. | ||
| Look at Sosa looking over at them. | ||
| That's Sosa before he turned white. | ||
| He's so weird now. | ||
| It's wild what he did. | ||
| He keeps doing it too. | ||
| He's getting whiter and whiter. | ||
| Like some people, you know, it's just like body dysmorphia, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's wild. | |
| It's like an anorexic or something like that. | ||
| He thinks he looks good. | ||
| But it looks wrong because his features... | ||
| No, is that real? | ||
| That's real, dude. | ||
| That's what he looks like today. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Why? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's out of his fucking mind. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that like that Michael Jackson shit when he just kept- No, no, no, no, no, no. | |
| The Michael Jackson shit is vitiligo. | ||
| I have that. | ||
| That's like you see like white spots on my hand. | ||
| You don't notice it as much because I'm a white guy. | ||
| But with Michael Jackson, he 100% had vitiligo and his whole body started de-pigmenting. | ||
| Sammy's doing this on purpose. | ||
| Oh, he's putting shit on himself. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You can buy that stuff. | ||
| When I was in Thailand, I noticed that they sell these things. | ||
| They had billboards everywhere for whitening cream. | ||
| And you take this cream and it destroys the pigment on your skin. | ||
| He apparently likes it. | ||
| He was doing an interview talking about how he likes the way he looks now. | ||
| That's so weird, dude. | ||
| He looked so healthy. | ||
| He was a good young player. | ||
| He says, it's a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and it whitens my skin some. | ||
| He said, some. | ||
| No, bro, a lot. | ||
| Sammy said in a 2019 interview with Univision after a photo was taken at the Grammy Latino Awards. | ||
| What happened was that I've been using the cream for a long time that combined with the bright TV lights made my face look whiter than it really is. | ||
| I don't think I look like Michael Jackson, he said then. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ha ha ha ha. | |
| Like, scroll up to that photo again? | ||
| Bro, that's crazy. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Because his face, you know, it's like he's got the features of a darker man, but he's got a... | ||
| Well, that one is almost like he's purple. | ||
| And the thing, too, is, like, the fucking pink hat. | ||
| He looks like a Batman fucking villain or something. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| He's losing his mind. | ||
| A lot of guys lose their mind. | ||
| You have kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where do you stand with, like, what they can do as far as, like... | ||
| Tattoos, piercings, doing shit like that because my kids are not ready for it. | ||
| My daughter's 10 and my son is 13. You know, my daughter has earrings and stuff like that. | ||
| I don't know if my son's interested in certain things yet, but are you gonna be one of those to be like, you know, be careful like I don't want you doing that or it's like whatever? | ||
| I don't think that I have any control over my children's bodies once they become adults. | ||
| You know, I think I want to be kind. | ||
| I want to give them as much information as I can. | ||
| I want to, you know, make sure that they do a lot of things that build up their character and their self-esteem and then allow them to make choices. | ||
| I think the best thing that you could do is have a dialogue with your kids where they know they could always talk to you about things. | ||
| So, like, I... My wife is more restrictive than me when it comes to television or computer use. | ||
| She puts screen time on their phones and shit like that. | ||
| I feel like you've got to be very careful to not be too controlling because then your kid will try to rebel. | ||
| People don't like being told what to do. | ||
| It's like when your boss isn't looking and then you go do things you're not supposed to do. | ||
| It's a natural thing. | ||
| If you've got a boss that's like, as soon as he leaves, fuck him, you put your feet up on the desk. | ||
| If you give people freedom, they don't rebel. | ||
| They don't want to rebel. | ||
| I have restrictions, like time restrictions and tell me where you're going to be and that kind of stuff, but I'm all about communication with my kids. | ||
| I talk to them I definitely talk to them like I'm their father, like I love them, and I treat them, I always tell them I love them, I treat them like they're my daughters, but I also treat them like they're my friends. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I do too, and one thing that I tell my kids too is, You know, you're great and worth all your insecurities are normal because we all have them and you're gonna have them and you're gonna walk into a public situation and feel less than for some reason. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| And don't. | ||
| You know, when we say we love you and you're the fucking best, you are. | ||
| And I got that from when Mike Tyson went to Customato and he was a broken kid from Brownsville, Brooklyn. | ||
| And he was either going to be, he had friends that were gangbanging, he was either going to go to jail or get killed. | ||
| And this guy, Customato, takes this 17 year old, whatever, was he 13? | ||
| Oh yeah, that's right, he started to compete at that age. | ||
| Takes this kid and he said he's sitting in his house eating dinner going, I could rob that, I could take that vase, I could take this shit. | ||
| And there's video of Customato being like, you're great, you're going to be a champion, lifting this kid up. | ||
| And I always tell my son when he feels bad, I go, it's normal to feel like that. | ||
| But you're a great kid. | ||
| You're a great kid. | ||
| You're smart. | ||
| And don't feel like that. | ||
| And I don't think I have to worry about drugs with him, Joe. | ||
| Because my brother-in-law passed from an overdose at 30. And it fucked the family up. | ||
| And they're just like... | ||
| My son, too. | ||
| My son is very, very good in school and a good athlete. | ||
| But he's very... | ||
| He's afraid of that. | ||
| And I'm hoping that he can learn something from that. | ||
| You can definitely learn from people's mistakes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a tough thing. | ||
| And, you know, my wife's devastated and stuff. | ||
| So, and he's just like, we're like, look, you know, you know what happened to... | ||
| Now, if my son goes out and has a beer, I get... | ||
| He comes home and, you know, your son's been funneling beers he's throwing up. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| You know, that's... | ||
| I'll be there for him. | ||
| But I'm gonna... | ||
| I'm just gonna make sure that he doesn't do things to be cool. | ||
| That he doesn't want to do. | ||
| I don't want my kids doing things... | ||
| They don't want to do but they're just doing it to be because I did dumb shit cuz I come from a broken home So I had no security in my family. | ||
| My parents got divorced So I would I would you know at 13 years old I was drinking. | ||
| Yeah doing dumb shit. | ||
| I think that You know, it's it's very important for kids to know that you went through a lot of bad shit too in terms of like the way you think about things when you think about yourself and Because, like, they see you now, and you're successful, and you got a Netflix special, and you're fucking doing great on the road and everything, and it's like, oh, dad's a successful comedian. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Dad's so funny. | ||
| He's so confident. | ||
| He goes out there and talks to all those people. | ||
| You got to let them know. | ||
| Like, no, I used to bomb. | ||
| I sucked. | ||
| I hated myself. | ||
| I this, I that. | ||
| I think all that stuff is very important for kids to know because people have this tendency to look at other people like they have it all sorted out. | ||
| They have it solved. | ||
| And the kids look at themselves and they say, I don't have those characteristics. | ||
| I don't have those qualities. | ||
| And they feel like they're never going to have them. | ||
| So if you could tell them that... | ||
| One of the things I always tell my kids is whenever they fuck up, Whenever they do something wrong, one of the first things I say before I say, hey, you shouldn't have done that, I'll say, listen, I did that and more. | ||
| I did all those things and more. | ||
| I'm not upset at you. | ||
| I'm upset that this happened, but this is just a part of being a human being, and now we're going to learn from this. | ||
| We're going to grow from this. | ||
| So you don't like it, you're upset with the way the result is and the way things turned out, good. | ||
| That's how we learn in life. | ||
| Yeah, and I'll tell them, I'll say, you know, Gaining confidence came from a lot of years. | ||
| Gaining confidence came from a lot of years. | ||
| I would walk into... | ||
| And you know what's funny, and you know this as a comedian, is some of the best shows I ever had was the most insecure and fucking scared I was. | ||
| Scared. | ||
| Do I belong here? | ||
| These fucking Montreal... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You look at the names and you're just like, I looked up to that guy, I looked up to that. | ||
| And now you're on there pacing, but you go out. | ||
| And one of the best sets I ever had in my fucking life, to this day, was I opened for Burr at the Garden in the round. | ||
| And dude, it was like, it was, I was, I was fucking, before I went out there, I was just like, it was like a surreal nervous. | ||
| Just because I was prepared and ready, but I was like, I envisioned what I wanted to do. | ||
| But I was nervous as shit. | ||
| And then I went out there and it all came together the way I wanted to. | ||
| But I tell my kids, I'm like, they were at my taping. | ||
| They were at my Netflix taping. | ||
| And you know, my daughter is 10 and she's just a little, you know, she's like me. | ||
| She looks like me. | ||
| She's like Greek and Sicilian. | ||
| My son's like blonde hair, blue eyes, because my wife is Scandinavian and stuff. | ||
| So they look so different, you know? | ||
| And my son is like, I don't know if I'm, is he going to be all right, Mom? | ||
| Because he's looking at the crowd. | ||
| And I was like, yeah. | ||
| That's why I'm gonna tell you this right now, dude. | ||
| UFC fighters bringing their kids to the octagon? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy, right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Listen, daddy might get put to sleep by another... | ||
| Fuck that! | ||
| Did you see when Michael Chandler knocked out Tony Ferguson? | ||
| With the kick? | ||
| Front kick, yeah. | ||
| One of the first things he did. | ||
| Got on top of the octagon and said, where's my son? | ||
| He started pointing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That, my son wouldn't be able to, you know. | ||
| He was confident. | ||
| I mean, that's a tough fight. | ||
| But the way he won, for him, it must have been a giant relief that he won in front of his son. | ||
| And then just he wanted to celebrate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's heavy. | ||
| That's so much extra weight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So much extra weight. | ||
| Your kids, your wife. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| What if they see you get fucking head kicked? | ||
| People don't understand the insecurity and emotion that go into this, man. | ||
| I'll be honest with you, Joe. | ||
| I've been doing this for 20 years. | ||
| Nobody said, everybody said no to me for 15 years in this business. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| That's probably good though. | ||
| Every fucking body. | ||
| If everybody said yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| For 15 years. | ||
| Yeah, but after like 10, I was like, what the fuck? | ||
| I was like, I just fucking killed, you know? | ||
| And I would have people going, yeah, man, it's called Killing in Obscurity. | ||
| And I would be in a fucking hotel room and Stacey, my wife, would go, how'd the shows go? | ||
| And I'd go, You know, I got fucking waitresses and people that have been there, like, years, going, dude, we see comedy all the time. | ||
| Like, you're one of the funniest guys that come here. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I'm fucking—nothing's happening. | ||
| Yeah, but it's supposed to be like that. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| But time went on, and time went on, and time went on, and then finally— When I was really nervous before the Netflix release. | ||
| And I knew what we did. | ||
| I knew that the show was good. | ||
| I knew it was better than my first one. | ||
| And I knew that it was good. | ||
| But I knew that it was better. | ||
| And I knew that we put together a really good show. | ||
| But the night before, you get fucking like, you're like, hey, you wake up. | ||
| And I woke up and I looked at my phone and the review started to come in. | ||
| I don't like to look a lot, but I just wanted to look at the initial. | ||
| I was driving to the airport, and it was the first time I actually got emotional. | ||
| I wasn't like that, but I started to just think of... | ||
| Leaving my family, getting on fucking airplanes, you know, all of the hotel rooms, everything, 20 years, telling my wife like I'm working, my wife's seeing it, and then just everybody hit me up saying this and that, and I just started to tear up, and I was just like, you know, wow, like in my mind, not like made it in like industry's mind. | ||
| Not made it rich fame-wise, but for me, to all of the shit that I did, to have a Comedy Central special, which fucking nobody saw, and then to end up doing this and having something out that people were just like, man, I laughed the whole time. | ||
| It made me feel good. | ||
| And I got emotional, man. | ||
| And I thanked my wife. | ||
| I just called her. | ||
| I said, thank you for, you know... | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| It's coming together. | ||
| That's what it's supposed to be. | ||
| And when you say the industry... | ||
| There's no industry anymore. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's not real. | ||
| This is the industry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right here. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| This is the industry now. | ||
| Like, no bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is a real network. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| In terms of all the comics that come in here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're all very supportive of each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Everybody is out there telling stories on the road and doing their thing and having a good time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And saying, hey, you gotta go see Mark Norman. | ||
| Hey, Shane Gillis is fucking killing it. | ||
| And anybody who hears, you hear on Twitter, you hear on Instagram. | ||
| And that's the real industry now. | ||
| The industry is... | ||
| Live stand-up and then recording live stand-up so people can see how good your shit is. | ||
| That exists still. | ||
| But it only exists with us. | ||
| We are the industry now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's no more gatekeepers. | ||
| That shit's gone. | ||
| It is. | ||
| There's still Netflix, but guess what? | ||
| They're not necessary. | ||
| You can put your shit on YouTube. | ||
| You can put your shit anywhere. | ||
| Look, Gillis is fucking killing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he released his shit on YouTube in the height of his cancellation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right after his cancellation, he puts out this fucking phenomenal special on YouTube, and he's even better now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's the real industry now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is the best part of 2022 for comics, is that we don't have gatekeepers anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The gatekeepers are each other. | ||
| Yeah, you don't have to dance for somebody that's never lived in your shoes. | ||
| Well, they like you dancing, too. | ||
| That's what's gross. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember those meetings. | ||
| It's like, who are these fucking uncreative people, and they have terrible ideas, and they all want to put their fucking greasy little mitts all over your stuff. | ||
| Oh, I told them to wear that shirt. | ||
| I told them to do it. | ||
| I told them to open with this material. | ||
| The material he was going to open for, it would have ruined the whole special. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I'd get up from dinner on a Tuesday to go run to the city for a $25 fuckin' spot for a fuckin' booker that everybody was afraid of. | ||
| I think COVID put things into perspective though, Joe. | ||
| I think the hamster wheel of what people were doing and then you sat back and you're like, wait a minute, let me slow this down a little bit and fuckin' figure things out. | ||
| Do things my way. | ||
| A lot of people changed their life during COVID for the better. | ||
| I mean, for a lot of people, it was terrible. | ||
| They lost their businesses and lost family members and shit, but it wasn't a good thing. | ||
| But it was an opportunity to advance from adversity. | ||
| Adversity gives you little doors where you're like, hey, you don't like what you're doing, and now they're taking it away from you, so here's a chance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Here's a chance to, like, think. | ||
| Because sometimes people get too comfortable in their patterns. | ||
| And, you know, you think you're working hard, but are you? | ||
| You know, like, I mean, how much do you want this? | ||
| What are you trying to do? | ||
| Could you be putting in more effort? | ||
| Could you be getting things done better? | ||
| Well, what about having short-term and long-term goals? | ||
| That's really important. | ||
| Because a lot of people don't have that. | ||
| A lot of people are just on that hamster wheel. | ||
| Like, I'm going to run around and do this spot and do that spot and do that spot. | ||
| It's like, all right, well, you're getting that money, you're paying rent, but what's the end game? | ||
| What are you ultimately trying to do? | ||
| Well, what's your end game? | ||
| I always was stand-up, man. | ||
| I just want to get better at stand-up. | ||
| Every hour I put out, I want it to be better. | ||
| I want to do some acting, because I love that a little bit. | ||
| Here and there when I get parts, I'm like, this is actually kind of fun to do, but my end game is to just keep getting better at stand-up and putting stuff out. | ||
| I didn't drop out of college to do anything else. | ||
| I didn't drop out of college to do anything else but stand-up and get better. | ||
| Now I'll do everything else that I have around it. | ||
| You have to adapt. | ||
| You know podcasts and do all that stuff, but I you know, I love I love telling a joke I love telling a story and that's why I got into this man and Mikey, you know, yeah The best do you remember when you were an open mic or knew this thought of the dream was just Greg Fitzsimmons and I started out a week apart from each other and You know, I just saw him a couple days ago in LA. We were super tight. | ||
| Yeah And we would just sit around going, imagine what it would be like to pay your bills with comedy. | ||
| That's the goal. | ||
| The goal was just to be a professional. | ||
| We saw those guys in Boston that were pros, and I looked at them like, how did they do it? | ||
| Like, the impossible dream. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They don't have a job. | ||
| These guys just golfed all day. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And they were drinking, and they'd go on stage and kill, and be like, oh. | ||
| They were just, they were fucking heroes. | ||
| I couldn't believe And that, to this day, has always been the thing that I wanted the most that I didn't have. | ||
| Like, when I think about things that I wanted, it wasn't like being a movie star or even a TV star. | ||
| It was never those things. | ||
| It was be a professional comedian. | ||
| Like, to me, it was like a dream. | ||
| Like, could it possibly happen? | ||
| I know. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I know. | ||
| What's amazing is the things that you dream of, you get when the work is put in and you put it out there. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| I know a bunch of people that still suck 20 years later. | ||
| Well, then they should have fucking... | ||
| After 20 years, what do you... | ||
| At some point, did somebody that loves you go, hey, man... | ||
| Yeah, but someone could have done that to you a year in. | ||
| If they came up to me a year in and said, you suck, I'd be like, I kind of do suck. | ||
| But... | ||
| Yeah, that set was, you're right. | ||
| Who's to tell you that you can never figure it out? | ||
| You have to have a level of awareness, self-awareness. | ||
| I think one of the things that holds people back is they're delusional. | ||
| They think they're better than they are, and they think they're doing great. | ||
| There's no laughs, the audience isn't laughing. | ||
| And they think they're better than they are, like they're protecting themselves from the truth. | ||
| Yeah, but do you think they know? | ||
| Really know? | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that run through this world and they think they look great when they look like shit and they think they're skinny when they're fat and they think they're smart when they're dumb. | ||
| There's a lot of people. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there. | ||
| They're just delusional. | ||
| I just pictured some fat fucker going, I look great! | ||
| I'm looking fucking great! | ||
| And you're like, nah, dude. | ||
| But the thing is, the feeling that sucks about not being good, about being fat, about being a loser, that feeling that sucks is a motivational tool. | ||
| And some people don't like the feeling. | ||
| No one likes the feeling, right? | ||
| No one likes the feeling of being a loser. | ||
| But being a loser is good for you because it teaches you that that sucks and it feels awful. | ||
| And if you can get some progress going in your life and start moving forward in your life, you'll feel good. | ||
| And then you'll remember. | ||
| What it felt like to be a loser, and you're like, oh, that is my fuel, that's my motivation. | ||
| And then the good feeling that comes with a successful set, or filming a successful special, it's like, my god, that feeling is magic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's two things though. | ||
| I think being funny and being a good comedian are two different worlds. | ||
| From day one, I would get laughs, but it wasn't with good shit. | ||
| It was dumb shit. | ||
| But that's just because you're trying to do well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember one of the first jokes I had, one of my first openers, and it killed his fucking time. | ||
| I was like, yeah, I broke up with my girlfriend. | ||
| She said I wasn't close enough with her family, so I fucked her sister. | ||
| And then they got more mad. | ||
| I was like, it wasn't gonna be your brother. | ||
| Like, it was horrible, you know? | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| I actually like it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you should bring that back. | |
| But here's the thing. | ||
| So I would get laughs, but it wasn't really a good construct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it was like you want to be the best of the shittiest at that moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like when you do the open mics and there's eight, nine open mics. | ||
| You want to be at the top of that and you move. | ||
| But then when you start to really craft a joke and you start to watch a joke. | ||
| And the best is when somebody who's like one of the motherfuckers in the game is like, that joke you just did? | ||
| And then you're like, oh shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People don't realize what that does. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Nothing is worse than when a fucking great comic is rude or passes you over because it hurts. | ||
| It hurts you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It hurts. | |
| And you don't forget it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You never forget the good, but I'm Sicilian. | ||
| I never forget the fucking bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A nice... | ||
| Which is a bad thing, but... | ||
| A kind word from someone when you're just starting out can go a long way. | ||
| People don't realize what that does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What that does, you go home and you're just like... | ||
| It was giant. | ||
| Oh, I was... | ||
| The set that I had at the Garden, somebody was like, dude, Questlove and Chris Rock are in there. | ||
| Chris Rock just said you killed, right? | ||
| So then I'm all excited, but listen to this shit. | ||
| So then I walk out, Joe, of our dressing room. | ||
| I was in the dressing room. | ||
| It was like me and Joe Bardic had our own thing, Bill's in the other thing. | ||
| And we were just... | ||
| And I go, hold on, let me go get something. | ||
| And I walk out, dude. | ||
| And it's me and Chris Rock after the set of my life. | ||
| And he said I killed. | ||
| And I'm going, here it comes. | ||
| And he's walking. | ||
| And I'm walking. | ||
| And we just made eye contact. | ||
| And he just kept walking, dude. | ||
| And I was like, fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, fuck. | |
| I know you wanted to. | ||
| You just saw it. | ||
| You just said I killed. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| You fucking, come on, give it to me. | ||
| Oh, dude, you'll love this. | ||
| One of the first times I'm headlining, I'm in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, right outside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, at a place called Carolina Comedy Club. | ||
| It's not there anymore. | ||
| And I was just able to headline a B room. | ||
| Okay, so you figure there's a good 45 minutes, nothing great. | ||
| And they got the local radio guy opening it. | ||
| And this kid's fucking killing. | ||
| I mean, he's fucking, he's doing local shit. | ||
| Local shit. | ||
| People are just fucking, people are jumping off, you know, and I come out there, and I can have them, like, look at this fucking Yankee, like, you know, and I'm fighting through it, I'm fighting through it, but you know who is? | ||
| Jordan Rock, Chris's youngest brother, who does stand-up. | ||
| He was hosting. | ||
| I don't know him, I know Tony. | ||
| Yeah, there's three of them. | ||
| There's like seven of them, but there's three that do... | ||
| Oh, Tony's fucking incredible, man. | ||
| He's fun. | ||
| Tony's so underrated. | ||
| I said that. | ||
| I said Tony's one of the most underrated... | ||
| Dude, I opened for him like eight years ago, and I went in to go watch him for five minutes, and I just stayed there for 40 because he was killing. | ||
| But their younger brother, their youngest brother, Jordan, he was hosting. | ||
| And I'm up there in South Carolina. | ||
| They love the middle. | ||
| I started to win them, but there were two people in the crowd that were smiling and laughing that gave me the strength and energy to just... | ||
| I mean, I had it anyway, but like they... | ||
| I was like looking to them and it was Chris Rock's mother. | ||
| It was Chris Rock's mother and her friend. | ||
| And she's just laughing. | ||
| And she had the New York thing. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| And then afterwards, I went up to her and I said, hey, I got to tell you something. | ||
| I said, I was up there. | ||
| I was struggling, you know, and I was trying to find it. | ||
| And you're laughing. | ||
| And she's like, oh, my God, no, that was so good, this and that. | ||
| And I told her, you know, and she was telling me about how Eddie was Chris's guy because my hero is Eddie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Eddie, for me, my dad took me and my brother to see Raw when I was 10, 1987, at Movie Land in Yonkers. | ||
| And my grandmother and mother were like, you can't take him to that. | ||
| And he's like, nah, okay, I won't. | ||
| And he took us. | ||
| And I just remember being there. | ||
| And... | ||
| For you, it was probably delirious, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, for Eddie, yeah. | ||
| Eddie, it was delirious. | ||
| But for me, my parents took me to see Live in the Sunset Strip when I was like, I guess I was like 14 or 15. I was like first or second year of high school. | ||
| And I'll never forget that moment. | ||
| Because I couldn't believe how funny he was. | ||
| I had seen movies like Stripes, really funny movies. | ||
| And I laughed really hard, but not like this. | ||
| I remember very clearly looking around while the movie was going on, while everybody was just... | ||
| Falling out of their chair laughing, like laughing so hard. | ||
| And I was like, this is incredible. | ||
| All he's doing is talking. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know! | ||
| Dude, when Eddie was just walking around talking about his drunk father telling his mother she can't leave the house. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When the Lillian may never... | ||
| And I'm just, I'm 10. So how does that resonate with a 10-year-old? | ||
| And I just was like, oh my god, he put me in a movie. | ||
| Like, he put me, I pictured his father in the kitchen writing that, and I'm just sitting there locked in, and I was like, this is the dude, man. | ||
| This is the dude. | ||
| And how nuts is it that he was done at 25 as far as Stan? | ||
| He did Raw at 25 and Delirious at 22. How fucking nuts is that? | ||
| He's still so good. | ||
| We played a thing the other day when we did a Protect Our Parks podcast with Gillis and Norman and Ari, and we watched this clip of him accepting an award, and he goes up and accepts an award and then does some stand-up. | ||
| He talked about Bill Cosby, did a Bill Cosby impression about them taking away Bill Cosby's awards. | ||
| It was fucking good, man, like solid timing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If he got back into it now, he would be one of the fucking greatest comics alive. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| He could still do it. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| There was talk a few years ago about him doing a Netflix special, but I think for a guy like him, it's just like, you know, it's hard to like, you gotta do, you gotta just show up and start doing sets and then, you know, it's so easy for him to just show up on a movie set and he's the fucking man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He doesn't have to worry about anything. | ||
| His catering's there. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I think it would be great, but the work he's got to do. | ||
| It's a lot of work. | ||
| He's got to go out for a couple years, year and a half, two years, and really hit the clubs at least. | ||
| At least. | ||
| What does it say here? | ||
| This is an interview he gave to Kevin Hart about a year ago. | ||
| Because my plan was to do Dolomite, Saturday Night Live, Coming to America, and then do stand-up. | ||
| And then the pandemic hit. | ||
| Motherfucker! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it shut the whole shit down. | ||
| Then I was going, the whole time last year, I would have been out working on my act, trying to get my shit right, and then the whole thing shut down. | ||
| Hey, when the pandemic is over, and it's safe for everybody to go out and do it, then the plan is to do it. | ||
| Alright, well the pandemic's over, Eddie. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Come out. | ||
| Come out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Come out. | ||
| Come down to the Vulcan. | ||
| Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Austin, Texas. | ||
| Come on down here, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That'd be amazing. | |
| We had Roseanne go up. | ||
| Roseanne went up. | ||
| She hadn't done stand-up in fucking years. | ||
| And it was Stan Hope, me, Ron White, and Roseanne. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And Tony Hinchcliffe, and I think Hans Kim was on the show, too. | ||
| Yeah, Hans Kim was on the show, too. | ||
| And Roseanne went up and fucking murdered. | ||
| I mean murdered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Murdered. | ||
| How long has she not been on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Years. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| Years. | ||
| Since all that shit happened. | ||
| I know that shit with her was at least, when she got canceled and kicked off her show, that was at least four years ago, right? | ||
| Wasn't it like three years ago, four years? | ||
| Because we were at the old, old studio. | ||
| Yeah, I think she had mentioned doing something with Dice briefly, but it was right around that time, too. | ||
| So maybe she did like a couple sets with him or something, but I don't know to what extent. | ||
| She's moving here. | ||
| Is she? | ||
| Yeah, she's moving to Texas. | ||
| She sends me messages all the time. | ||
| She sent me a text message the other day. | ||
| Fuck yeah, Texas. | ||
| Just out of nowhere. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| It's for me. | ||
| Dude, I'm such a fan. | ||
| I get a text message from Roseanne Barr. | ||
| Every now and then I'll get one from Dice Clay. | ||
| And I'm like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| Dice Clay texted me. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It's crazy, man. | ||
| You know who influenced me that probably has nothing to do with my style but was Rodney because my dad was such a Rodney fan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| So he took us to Radio City to see Rodney during the back-to-school time, during the height of that. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| My parents had this brutal, weird, awful divorce in the early 80s. | ||
| I only got to spend time with my dad on Sundays. | ||
| The courts were always more difficult for the father, but in the 80s especially. | ||
| But my father had all day Sunday with us and three hours Wednesday. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| So my father had like 12, 11, 12 hours with his boys a week. | ||
| And, you know, but we just, he loved comedy. | ||
| He loved movies. | ||
| They would have, even when they were married, I remember I was five years old before they got divorced, but like Johnny Carson would be on. | ||
| They would, it was always around. | ||
| And like, that's the one thing, even though this horrible shit went down, it was like they had good senses of humor. | ||
| And it was like, so Eddie and Rodney were like the things that introduced me to stand up. | ||
| Comedy is important man. | ||
| It's I mean I know I'm not saying that to be a self-important person because I'm a comedian But I mean for me just for me if I never did comedy again Comedy is important for me just because like to laugh at things. | ||
| You know what I fucking love? | ||
| Memes. | ||
| Oh The the fucking internet provides me with so much goddamn the the my friends like the memes that we send each other back and forth Yeah, they just fine. | ||
| I don't know who's doing them. | ||
| I don't know who's making them and You know, I mean, I wish I knew all the guys who made all the memes so that I could credit them, but my God, there's some funny shit. | ||
| It's a totally different kind of comedy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, I don't watch stand-up now. | ||
| I don't really watch... | ||
| If a clip pops up... | ||
| Now that I'm trying to work hours and going, I don't like to watch stand-up and I don't watch specials. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But if a clip pops up, like, dude, this one kid, we were talking, oh my God, his last name was Koff, I think I'm going to screw it up. | ||
| I should remember his kid's name. | ||
| Koff? | ||
| Koff or something like that. | ||
| K-O-F-F. But he had a joke, not my style, and I was fucking crying. | ||
| He goes, I love when things just pop up. | ||
| He goes... | ||
| I don't know the guy. | ||
| But I messaged him after. | ||
| I go, dude, I don't know you. | ||
| I go, this is fucked. | ||
| He goes, I don't know why people are afraid of werewolves. | ||
| He goes, we already have wolves. | ||
| And they're wolves all of the time. | ||
| He goes, that'd be like somebody going, you know what would make this grizzly attack worse? | ||
| If this bear was sometimes an accountant. | ||
| And I just fucking thought about this. | ||
| And it's so true. | ||
| It's like, because a wolf is always a wolf. | ||
| And we worry about the man turning into the wolf. | ||
| And I go, dude, that's so funny. | ||
| And I probably even butchered it a little bit. | ||
| But dude, I was just like, that is real. | ||
| So I love shit like that. | ||
| When something out of nowhere just gets you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's a beautiful thing. | ||
| That's one of the things that separates us from all the other animals. | ||
| We communicate and we say absurd things, and it's like a drug. | ||
| It's like there's something about watching someone kill that to me, even to this day, it makes me feel better. | ||
| It's like I just took a drug that made me feel better. | ||
| I'm laughing. | ||
| I'm having a good time. | ||
| The feeling you get when a big group of people is crying laughing and I'm talking about like when you see somebody like I love seeing the couple but I love seeing the woman go like I love seeing the woman go like this and the husband comes up after like dude she she she was crying laughing I love seeing my wife that's just such a cool emotion to give somebody because it's the only job it's the only job where that happens We actually make somebody, | ||
| you know, and what about when somebody's like, hey man, things were going really, you know, I went to Buffalo right after that shooting. | ||
| And I felt bad. | ||
| You worked there? | ||
| And I felt bad, Joe, even promoting the shows. | ||
| I can imagine. | ||
| Because I'm like, I didn't want to be like, hey, I'm going to be at Helium and, you know, and it was right after. | ||
| But I went out there, and the people came out, and I could tell it was weird. | ||
| And after the show, they were like, hey man, thank you so much. | ||
| And it ended up being a great time, and people were just like, hey, things have been really weird in this town. | ||
| And it kind of felt good to just, I did a one-nighter there. | ||
| I just, you know, working on some stuff. | ||
| I went out there, did a Thursday night in Buffalo, and they were just like, that was awesome, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This town needed it. | ||
| That is the only, this is the only job where that really happens, man. | ||
| And it's a special thing, and it's an amazing thing. | ||
| On the other hand, if you bomb, people got babysitters and they fucking... | ||
| Didn't you see the shooting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck? | |
| They have to go to work in the morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| So they're up late, they're mad, meandering through your fucking shitty set. | ||
| Ugh, that would be brutal, dude. | ||
| After a shooting? | ||
| Not even after a shooting, just a regular day. | ||
| Yeah, I know, but I don't want to kill my dumb- Any time. | ||
| That's the flip side. | ||
| You can make people feel- It's a great responsibility. | ||
| You have all these people's attention that it's on your head. | ||
| That's why I hate a bad special. | ||
| When I watch someone do a lazy special or a sloppy half-cooked special, I'm like, my God. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Do you watch them all? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I don't watch all of them. | ||
| I watched some specials. | ||
| I watched Ricky Gervais. | ||
| Not all of it, but I watched the first 15 minutes, all the trans stuff. | ||
| Fucking hilarious. | ||
| And he went for it. | ||
| In this day and age, I was kind of shocked that Netflix put it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they put out that letter before they put it out saying, like, if you don't want to work with people whose content you don't agree with, please leave. | ||
| I love that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love that, too. | |
| I think more comedy clubs should do that. | ||
| Well, it's not a comedy club. | ||
| It's Netflix. | ||
| Yeah, no, but I think comedy clubs should have a disclaimer outside before you walk in. | ||
| People are still in New York City, and as much as I love New York City, man, and New York City... | ||
| I'm going to tell you, man, when New York City is... | ||
| Popping and there's no pandemic and the comedy clubs are packed. | ||
| I don't know where is... | ||
| I mean, it's as good as it can be, but now, lately... | ||
| There's always, always a table or two of, you know, and don't say that. | ||
| And you could see them shut down and you could see this, you know. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| But that's just, you know, what Ari said it best. | ||
| He said, those people aren't even from New York. | ||
| He's like, they grew up in Maine and they had this idea of what you're supposed to be when they come to New York. | ||
| So they come to New York, they dye their hair blue and they start complaining about everything. | ||
| That's true, but there are some New York liberals that are like, you know, that's really, really like over the top. | ||
| You know, over the top. | ||
| Yeah, Schultz was telling me that. | ||
| He's telling me that he did some sets and like two sets in a row people got upset at a subject matter. | ||
| He's like, give me time. | ||
| I'm going somewhere with this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, don't just fucking get upset at a premise. | ||
| Like, the thing about comedy is you could set up a premise where it seems like you're gonna say something awful. | ||
| It seems awful. | ||
| And then by the end of the joke, it's on you. | ||
| Because you're the one who's the brunt of the joke, and it's not awful. | ||
| But if you interrupt it in the fucking beginning, you're gonna ruin everything. | ||
| See where I'm going. | ||
| I'm gonna take you somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, I had this bit, and this lady, it turned out she was like an executive at some television network, which makes sense that she was so confident. | ||
| She interrupted twice. | ||
| She interrupted my set. | ||
| I was doing this bit. | ||
| I said, women can do everything men can do, right? | ||
| And she was like, yeah. | ||
| I go, no, that's not true. | ||
| I go, here's why it's not true. | ||
| Because men can't do everything men can do. | ||
| That's why we have the Olympics. | ||
| I'm like, there's different shit people can't do. | ||
| It was a bit about this, there was a woman who was guarding the White House. | ||
| She didn't have a gun. | ||
| She was at the front door of the White House. | ||
| And some crazy guy hopped the fence, ran across the White House. | ||
| The dude who was supposed to be with the dogs was on the phone. | ||
| So there's a guy with a dog, he's on the phone, probably talking to his girlfriend or something like that. | ||
| And the woman who's guarding the front door, the door is wide open, she doesn't have a gun. | ||
| The guy opens the door, and the whole bit was like that this guy's running probably. | ||
| Is this my last step? | ||
| Is this the last step of my life? | ||
| Like he's thinking at any moment they're going to fucking shoot him. | ||
| He gets all the way to the door, opens it. | ||
| There's a girl there, no gun. | ||
| Smacks her to the ground and goes running through. | ||
| It's a crazy story. | ||
| And the Secret Service guy who's having coffee, who wasn't even on duty, guy who's having coffee, sees this guy run through the White House and tackles him. | ||
| That's how they caught the guy. | ||
| Nobody knew if he had a gun, nobody knew if he had a bomb, no nothing, right? | ||
| And the idea was like, the premise was that they shouldn't have a woman guarding the front door of the White House. | ||
| I go, you know how I know this? | ||
| I go, because I shouldn't be guarding the front door of the White House. | ||
| You know how I know this? | ||
| Because I met Shaquille O'Neal and his dick is where my face is. | ||
| I'm like, if the White House is experiencing a Shaq attack, I'm the wrong dude to save the world. | ||
| What did the dog do? | ||
| Well, the guy had the dogs. | ||
| He's got them in a kennel or something like that, and you would just release them if somebody went running through. | ||
| But the guy wasn't paying attention. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| People get sloppy. | ||
| They get lazy, and that's when shit happens. | ||
| Yeah, get lazy at a hospital fucking entrance, not at the White House. | ||
| Yeah, but people are fucking lazy, man. | ||
| Days become days. | ||
| It becomes normal that nothing happens, and you get slack. | ||
| Yeah, that's why. | ||
| But this lady interrupted. | ||
| She kept interrupting. | ||
| I go, no, I'm gonna explain to you where the bit goes. | ||
| See, the bit is making fun of me. | ||
| I'm gonna get to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then so I had to, like, explain. | ||
| And then she fucking did it again. | ||
| I'm like, get this cunt out of here. | ||
| And then I called her a cunt, which is not, because it's all, like, clamped up. | ||
| I'm like, please, if anybody's a cunt... | ||
| This lady who just keeps interrupting jokes. | ||
| She had been doing that to the person before, too, though. | ||
| And they were trying to work their way through it, and it wasn't working out. | ||
| So I was kind of prepared for her. | ||
| I tried to be nice. | ||
| I gave her two chances, but she kept doing it. | ||
| And then we got her kicked out. | ||
| I was doing... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, it's... | ||
| People don't understand. | ||
| Like, I was making fun of the lunacy of punching... | ||
| That Asians were getting punched in the face randomly in New York City because of COVID. And I was just making fun of the lunacy of it. | ||
| I was joking around. | ||
| I think I said something like... | ||
| I just go, guys, any jokes off limits? | ||
| Like, it was like right when things got back. | ||
| Any jokes off limits, guys? | ||
| And they go, no, bring it. | ||
| I go, come on, guys. | ||
| I go, this is liberal New York, guys. | ||
| Guys, any jokes? | ||
| No, bring it. | ||
| And I'm like, all right. | ||
| So things said, like, ah, man, I'm exhausted. | ||
| I go, I was... | ||
| Running around Times Square all day looking for Chinese people to punch in the face. | ||
| Totally, totally just goof. | ||
| And like, people laughing and I'm making fun of the people that fucking do that. | ||
| And this one was one like really woke. | ||
| He was like... | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious, huh? | ||
| You're hitting... | ||
| And I was just like, dude, come on. | ||
| It's like everybody... | ||
| Even an Asian dude in the front is laughing his ass off. | ||
| Like, I'm not doing that. | ||
| I'm making fun of the lunacy of it. | ||
| But that's what you get in New York. | ||
| You know my WNBA joke. | ||
| You're just one guy. | ||
| Misogynist! | ||
| And then they'll yell and put their head down. | ||
| That, unfortunately, is going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but that's why you should get the fuck out of New York. | |
| Polluted, shitty city. | ||
| Oh, dude, I did the Vulcan. | ||
| I headlined the Vulcan here and I was just like, this is fucking incredible. | ||
| It's wild, right? | ||
| Texas is a lot more fun. | ||
| It felt like what it should be, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Texas, I mean, this is Austin. | ||
| Austin's a very progressive city, very liberal city. | ||
| But they're healthy liberal, like, for the most part. | ||
| There's crazy people here. | ||
| But it's a healthy level of liberal. | ||
| You know, they're just kind people, progressive, educated people. | ||
| But New York has like a, there's a thing going on there now where they think they're gonna revolutionize culture, they're gonna change culture, and they're gonna force everybody to think the way they think. | ||
| I got no problem with liberal, it's beyond liberal. | ||
| Like far, far right and far, far left, that's like the issue. | ||
| I got no problem with somebody, Democrat, Republican, it's the people that take it to a level that's just like, can I say something? | ||
| Can I have a fucking opinion on something? | ||
| And if that opinion doesn't fit, You know, one thing that I saw, and I know people talk about the Kanye West thing, but it's fucking really abusive to call somebody crazy because they don't agree or they like somebody that you don't like. | ||
| Now listen, I know Kanye West probably has his issues, like we all do, but calling somebody crazy because they don't fall with the narrative or because they may like somebody politically like that, that's fucking evil, man. | ||
| Well, he's crazy. | ||
| He's crazy in a brilliant way. | ||
| Like, Kanye West is a genius. | ||
| He's a legitimate genius. | ||
| Yeah, no, you could tell. | ||
| He's a fascinating guy to talk to, too, because you could tell. | ||
| He has a hard time having a conversation because I think ideas are just spinning around that dude's head like a mile a minute. | ||
| He wanted to redo the studio. | ||
| When he came in to do the podcast, he wanted to design a studio. | ||
| He was going to get a warehouse and have a studio built that looked like the inside of a womb. | ||
| Dude, he had drawings. | ||
| He was showing me, we're on a FaceTime, and he's showing me the images that he had drafted that people had made for him about this design that he wanted to do. | ||
| The only thing that fucked it up was that Jamie got COVID. And it would have been complicated to move everything to another place and Red Band sat in for Jamie. | ||
| You guys thought about doing it? | ||
| Yeah, I was like, fuck it. | ||
| You want to do it? | ||
| I thought it'd be fun. | ||
| Kanye wanted to do it. | ||
| Look, the fact that he wanted to do the podcast was cool. | ||
| And the fact that he wanted to make his own set, I'm like, fuck yeah, let's do it. | ||
| But it got to the point where I was like, listen, man, we're kind of fucked here, so let's just do the other studio. | ||
| And he's like, I understand. | ||
| He's reasonable, but I think he's grappling with a level of creativity that most of us could only dream of. | ||
| You know, I think the ideas that are bouncing around in his head. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, I had my own misconceptions about him before I met him and talked to him. | ||
| He's actually a very nice guy. | ||
| But it's just, you know, he's a mad genius. | ||
| Would he have been as demonized, though, if he didn't, you know, support Trump? | ||
| Or, you know, that's my only thing. | ||
| And I'm not saying everything he says I agree with. | ||
| But as soon as he did that and said, hey, like, let's see what this guy has to say. | ||
| And I would do this for anybody, whether it was Trump or the other side, but as soon as he said that, since the media didn't like that, it felt like it was just like, is he okay? | ||
| Yeah, he was definitely not demonized before that the way he was afterwards. | ||
| I mean, everybody thought he was, like, eccentric before that, and then they thought he was crazy. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| One of the reasons why he did that is because Obama called him a jackass. | ||
| Obama shit on him. | ||
| Called him a jackass? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Which is kind of crazy for the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But uncharacteristic for Obama, who's very, you know, statesman-like. | ||
| But he called him a jackass, and I think it's stuck in Kanye's head. | ||
| He's like, I'll show you, bitch, you know, and, like, I'll support the next guy. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I didn't know Barack did that, said that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think also, like, Trump just lets him talk. | ||
| Trump had him in the White House. | ||
| He's like sitting there. | ||
| It's one of my favorite videos is Kanye with a MAGA hat on and he's in the White House with Trump and Trump is just sitting there listening to him. | ||
| Kanye's ranting and, you know, Kanye goes down roads and he just keeps ranting and just ranting about things and talking about things. | ||
| I think that's the way his mind works. | ||
| I think it's just a fucking, there it is. | ||
| Like, look at this. | ||
| Give me some volume on this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at Trump's face. | |
| Give me some volume and play it from the beginning. | ||
| Go from the beginning. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Look at Trump! | ||
|
unidentified
|
How old is he? | |
| How old? | ||
| 68. | ||
| 68 years old? | ||
|
unidentified
|
68 years old. | |
| Look at, first of all, how orange is he? | ||
| What's up in his eyes? | ||
| He doesn't spray tan on his eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Showing that he actually had power, that he wasn't just one of a monolithic voice that he could wrap people around. | |
| So there's theories that there's infinite amounts of universe and there's alternate universes. | ||
| This is me if I spark the joint and went to the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the kind of shit I would talk about. | |
| Look at Trump! | ||
| Don't these motherfuckers have silent cameras? | ||
| They're so distracting. | ||
| You're interrupting his rant. | ||
| There's Jim Brown next to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
...said that welfare is the reason why a lot of black people end up being Democrats. | |
| They say, you know, first of all, it's a limit to the amount of jobs. | ||
| This goes on for 20 minutes. | ||
| Does he really just keep talking? | ||
| Trump is just sitting there like, hmm, interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't really say don't, I don't say negative words. | |
| I mean, at this point in time, what is trouble? | ||
| I love that he showed the fucking password of his phone. | ||
| They filmed his password. | ||
| If you ever get a hold of Kanye's phone, it's all zeros. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a hydrogen airplane and this is what our president should be flying in. | |
| See, he designed a fucking airplane. | ||
| This is what our president should be flying in. | ||
| He went like this and tilted his head. | ||
| That's what you do to a little kid when they show you something. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| If my two-year-old made a drawing, I'd go... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That does look like a flower. | |
| That does look like a flower. | ||
| Don't suck on your crayons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I just don't like, you know, I just don't like if anything is different, you just really do get fucking, you know, you get demonized or you just get the way they go at you, man. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| And I gotta be honest with you, man. | ||
| And I'm serious, dude. | ||
| And I say this before. | ||
| I'm not just saying this because I'm on your show, man. | ||
| Like... | ||
| The way you take, the way you fucking, the way they come at you or whatever and you just, you know, it's really fucking remarkable, dude. | ||
| It's remarkable and it's inspiring. | ||
| I'm not even joking. | ||
| I'm not even bullshitting. | ||
| It's inspiring to see... | ||
| I get pissed off if someone's like, I didn't like that bit. | ||
| I'm a fucking mess. | ||
| You got all this shit. | ||
| It's an inspiration, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It can't be easy. | ||
| We're all human. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, we're all human. | ||
| But I've been doing this for long. | ||
| I'm amused by people. | ||
| I'm fascinated by it. | ||
| You know, like when I'd see little Fats O'Brien Stelter talking shit about me on CNN, it made me laugh. | ||
| I'm like, you're a dork. | ||
| Of course you don't like me. | ||
| Like, a dork not liking me and telling me I should be fired. | ||
| Like, shut the fuck up, man. | ||
| Like, look at you. | ||
| How can anybody say somebody should be fired because they don't... | ||
| Some people should be fired. | ||
| But it's like... | ||
| What goes on is people love to pile on people and they love to try to get people fired. | ||
| It's like a new sport. | ||
| When people talk about cancel culture isn't real or cancel culture is real, whatever you want to call cancel culture. | ||
| But what is real is that people, especially with the advent of social media, because everybody has a point, Everybody has an opinion that they can express. | ||
| They love to pile on and then try to do something about it. | ||
| They love to try to attack someone's sponsors. | ||
| They do that with various people where they'll go after their sponsors or they try to get their videos removed from YouTube or they're doing things like that. | ||
| It's just because people have the ability to enact change. | ||
| And it only really works if companies give in to it. | ||
| And to Spotify's credit, one of the brilliant things that they did was nothing. | ||
| They just said, you know, we're not going to censor rappers. | ||
| We're not going to stop them from saying what they want to say. | ||
| We're not going to stop Joe either. | ||
| This is what he does. | ||
| This is what he's always done. | ||
| We're going to leave him alone. | ||
| And also what Netflix has made statements, you know, backing people up. | ||
| That's been amazing. | ||
| I'm glad they did that because they, well, Also, they took a giant fucking hit in their stocks. | ||
| Their stock came fucking tumbling down when Elon was talking about how they're unwatchable because of their woke ideology. | ||
| And then, you know, that Cuties movie. | ||
| There was like a bunch of things that happened where everybody's like, hey, hey, what the fuck are you guys doing? | ||
| And so then they kind of reeled it in and with the Dave Chappelle thing the Dave Chappelle thing pissed me off more than anything because first of all Dave's a good friend and he's amazing. | ||
| He's an amazing guy He's an amazing comedian and the bits that he had on his show were not transphobic. | ||
| They just weren't What they were was him talking about someone that was a very close friend of his that committed suicide. | ||
| Someone he cared about. | ||
| It was almost like a love letter to a friend that committed suicide who happened to be transgender and along the way there's some jokes about it. | ||
| And it's not transphobic. | ||
| He's not never saying there's something wrong with these people, they shouldn't be that way, we should get rid of them. | ||
| There's none of that. | ||
| There's none of that in that. | ||
| But no one cited any individual bits. | ||
| That was the most fucked up thing about it. | ||
| They didn't cite any individual bits. | ||
| They didn't say, he said this and this is bad. | ||
| They just put this blanket of transphobia on it, and then a bunch of people chimed in, including other comics. | ||
| You know, it was weird. | ||
| Wild! | ||
| No, that can't happen. | ||
| It's all comics that sucked, though. | ||
| It was all comics that sucked. | ||
| It was all comics. | ||
| There was a few that are pretty decent, but they're captured by their woke crowd that had disparaging comments, not too specific. | ||
| But there was a few that were terrible comedians that decided this was where they were going to declare war on good comedy. | ||
| Somebody said, it might have been Bobby Kelly said, we should be like we're in the mob. | ||
| Keep it shut. | ||
| Talk to each other amongst each other. | ||
| You don't go out publicly and say that, man. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| Well, the ones who do it are just terrible. | ||
| You know, you see that all the time. | ||
| The ones who are constantly attacking other comedians for their material, their act. | ||
| Generally speaking, they're not doing well. | ||
| It's never people that are doing really well that are attacking people. | ||
| It's always people that are struggling. | ||
| Yeah, like you're not satisfied with what you're doing, so it's a projection. | ||
| Well, it's like you try to bring people down because they're doing better than you. | ||
| Yeah, it sucks. | ||
| If you see someone and they're attacking someone like a Chappelle or a Chris Rock or someone who's at the top of the game or Louis or Bill, a lot of times those people are doing it And they're coming at it from a place of envy. | ||
| I actually just had a conversation with a comic about this last night. | ||
| He was shitting on this comic and I said, hey man, I'm like, that guy is a nice fucking guy and he's funny. | ||
| He was shitting on John Mulaney. | ||
| I was like, he's a nice guy and he's a funny guy. | ||
| And just because he's doing well and you're not, don't come to me with that shit because you could be doing that about me when I'm not looking. | ||
| Yeah, and there's no reason for that. | ||
| One success story is not going to hurt anybody else. | ||
| If anything, man, it's just good for comedy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's just good for comedy, man. | ||
| God bless you, you know? | ||
| Go get it. | ||
| Yeah, I feel the same way about music. | ||
| I feel the same way about films. | ||
| There's films that I don't like, but other people love. | ||
| There's music that I don't enjoy, but it's very popular. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| I'm obviously very different than other people. | ||
| Everybody's different. | ||
| You know, some people are... | ||
| Yeah, it's subjective. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking... | ||
| The world is filled with options and choices. | ||
| The problem with comedy is, like, everybody feels like other people's success somehow or another detracts from their own. | ||
| And so they compare themselves. | ||
| What is that old... | ||
| Is it Thomas Jefferson who said that? | ||
| Comparison is a thief of joy? | ||
| I love that quote. | ||
| But that's a great quote. | ||
| That's a great quote. | ||
| Comparison is a thief of joy. | ||
| You start comparing your life and like, my God, man, you could be living in a third world country under the rule of a dictator, you know, with food rations, barely getting by, watching your children go hungry. | ||
| Instead, you're out there killing it, and you're upset because someone's killing it more than you? | ||
| And just go your way. | ||
| A lot of guys try to, like... | ||
| Theodore Roosevelt. | ||
| Comparison is a thief of joy. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| You know who's got great quotes is John Wooden. | ||
| He's got two of my favorites. | ||
| One is failure to prepare is preparing to fail. | ||
| It's a great one. | ||
| But another one is the greatest thing a man could do for his children is love their mother. | ||
| That one hits. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| He's got some really good ones. | ||
| But going back to what you said, it's like... | ||
| I cut people like that out because, you know, coming up there would be people like, you know, because I would be, the knock on me was always, oh, Verzi's too positive. | ||
| Oh, Verzi's too positive. | ||
| He's too happy. | ||
| He's too positive. | ||
| He's never, he's a, and people would. | ||
| Who said that? | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| I saw, like, just, just, no, just come. | ||
| Name, name. | ||
| People would be like, oh, here goes Verzi, glass half full. | ||
| And that's how I am. | ||
| That's a weird knock. | ||
| That sounds like a positive quality. | ||
| Yeah, but I saw it was because they didn't have it. | ||
| And it was a projection. | ||
| And listen, I was as insecure as could be, but you know what? | ||
| It doesn't matter, man. | ||
| Run your race. | ||
| You know what it reminds me of? | ||
| There was a pitcher, you might know this pitcher, Mariano Rivera for the Yankees. | ||
| Closer. | ||
| Best pitcher. | ||
| Best relief pitcher of all time. | ||
| It's not even close. | ||
| Best relief pitcher. | ||
| When Mariano Rivera would come into a Yankee game, the percentage of them winning was 98%. | ||
| He would just come in and it was a fucking rap. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It was a rap. | ||
| And the reason why it was a rap is because he reinvented himself after 97 and he threw what they call the cutter. | ||
| He threw a cutter. | ||
| Right? | ||
| 94 miles an hour. | ||
| Everybody knew it was coming. | ||
| And he would saw your fucking bat off and he would strike you out. | ||
| You would see him. | ||
| The point of this is you would see him in the bullpen showing pitchers how to throw. | ||
| Everyone would be like, dude, you have the best pitcher. | ||
| And he would be there. | ||
| But he was a very skinny, lanky guy. | ||
| He would be showing other pitchers with different body types. | ||
| They would go and it wasn't because that was his shit. | ||
| The way his mechanics, the way his hips would turn, the way his lanky arm would release it. | ||
| That's why his cutter was so effective. | ||
| So these other guys were the big fucking pitcher trying to do it. | ||
| It wasn't effective. | ||
| And I always look at it. | ||
| It's like when I hear comics try to do what other comics are doing, like, well, look what that one's doing. | ||
| You always hear that, too. | ||
| You always be at a comedy club. | ||
| Well, look what so-and-so's doing. | ||
| Look what so-and-so's doing. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Do your shit. | ||
| Do your path. | ||
| And if my path is that I'm too positive and that I'm a fucking happy guy and I'm kind of content with my life and my family and shit and you're going to knock that, then knock it. | ||
| Because I'll be honest, dude, I don't have time for it, man. | ||
| I've been to hell. | ||
| I've been to hell with anxiety and depression. | ||
| I've been to hell with shit that happened when I was younger. | ||
| What the fuck can you do to me? | ||
| All it is is gravy for me. | ||
| Nothing is going to hurt me because I've been to fucking hell. | ||
| So if I'm going to see some guy doing good, or I'm going to see somebody going good, but man, if somebody does shit that I don't respect, I may go, if me and you were smoking a stick, I'd be like, dude, I wouldn't fucking, you know, I don't know if I would do that. | ||
| But it would never be in like a, because that's just not who I am. | ||
| And if people want to knock that, but it's projection. | ||
| It's really projection of what people have going on with themselves. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of that. | ||
| It's a lot of just, they don't like where they're at, and so they compare, and they don't like what other people are doing because it makes them think about what they're doing. | ||
| I used to not like alt clubs for that reason, because you'd go to an alt club and people would be mad if you tried hard. | ||
| Like, I remember, like, there was some comics that were making fun of this guy for being so physical. | ||
| Yeah, like, lazy shit was cool. | ||
| Like, just staying up there and, like, you know, just my friends were hanging. | ||
| It's like, no. | ||
| Really casual, low-energy comedy. | ||
| Yeah, I remember I was talking to this guy. | ||
| He was making fun of Brewer. | ||
| And I was like, are you out of your fucking mind? | ||
| Do you know how funny Brewer is? | ||
| And he's, you know, Brewer is all physical and energy and he's all fucking, he's just a character. | ||
| And he was killing. | ||
| And they were like, you know, like you're fucking up there dancing. | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| Like, what do you mean what is he doing? | ||
| He's being entertaining. | ||
| Oh, you mean he's doing something that you don't have the fucking ability to do? | ||
| Well, it's not even that they don't have the ability. | ||
| They choose not to because then you're putting yourself out there, you know? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So they don't want to release that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I mean, maybe they don't have it in their personality. | ||
| It looks like Stephen Wright didn't have energy, but he's still brilliant, you know? | ||
| You don't have to have energy. | ||
| But some people, that's how they do it. | ||
| Like Kinnison. | ||
| You're trying to tell me Kinnison should have been an alt-comic? | ||
| What the fuck are you saying? | ||
| That was his whole thing, was that he had all this energy. | ||
| You want to tell me that's not good comedy? | ||
| You're out of your fucking mind. | ||
| Because he's one of the greats. | ||
| It's like there's different ways to do things. | ||
| You just got to figure out what works best for you. | ||
| And one of the best ways to figure out what works best for you is to concentrate on you. | ||
| Don't concentrate on other people. | ||
| Yeah, because, and everybody, even people that are doing good, were aware that person was, right? | ||
| We all had that shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's, uh, it's comedies, like, in a lot of ways. | ||
| It's analogous to life. | ||
| Like, the amount of energy that you spend focusing on yourself and trying to do better and being honest and objective. | ||
| That's going to benefit you in all areas of your life. | ||
| Because if you could apply that sort of strategy to other things, your friendships, your relationships, your job, whatever else you do outside of that, it's the same thing. | ||
| Just do your best and try to figure out what's wrong with the parts that suck. | ||
| Try to make them better. | ||
| Try to see if you can improve upon things. | ||
| It's a constant process. | ||
| And in that constant process, there's a lot of joy in watching things get better. | ||
| Yeah, no, absolutely, and sometimes you need people outside of you to see it. | ||
| I remember my wife, a couple of people I'm talking about that, oh, too positive, too this and that, they're not doing comedy anymore, but I remember my wife would go, every time that person calls you, something happens to you. | ||
| Like, there's an angst, there's something like that. | ||
| She would go, and she would, why don't you just get that person out of your life? | ||
| But I had this thing like, hang on, and maybe I could, you know, but she was like, there's no reason for that. | ||
| No, people will rob you of your time. | ||
| You have to be very careful about time, vampires. | ||
| Because there's people that they will rob you. | ||
| They'll just fill your time up with bullshit. | ||
| You know, I've had friends before that would just complain all the time, and it just got to the point where I was like, Jesus Christ, I can't keep this person in my life. | ||
| All they do is complain. | ||
| It's one thing if you're complaining, like Burr complains a lot, but it's funny. | ||
| It's like he's complaining in a comedic style on purpose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, that's what he's doing. | ||
| And it's great to be around. | ||
| It makes you laugh. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But some people are just bitching about stuff, and that shit doesn't get anybody anywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| When Bird does that sometimes, I'll leave the joke and be like, what happened? | ||
| Did something happen on the way in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, he's got an interesting muscle because the way he does this podcast is really fascinating to me. | ||
| It's him and Tim Dillon. | ||
| They both have the same muscle. | ||
| And it's this rant muscle. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons why is because they do a podcast with no guest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Bill will fill up, you know, hour and a half, two hours of just talking shit about things, and the amount of premises that he pulls from that are huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he's always got this thing, like, he's aware that people are listening, so he's got to kind of keep it moving constantly, and there's always something to talk about, and in this uninterrupted ranting style that he has, it's like one of the best gardens for material, because he can just pluck material out of that. | ||
| I remember when I started doing the Verzi effect, which is a lot of the time alone. | ||
| I don't go two hours, but a lot of time alone. | ||
| And then sometimes with the guest. | ||
| But he said to me, watch what happens to your stand-up after. | ||
| I remember he said, he goes, watch how much better your stand-up's going to get after doing the podcast. | ||
| And I remembered some things that I would talk about or I'd get excited about and start getting... | ||
| Then all of a sudden you'd be on stage somewhere and you'd... | ||
| See something or feel something, put the act aside, and then that muscle activates because that's what you're used to doing. | ||
| And I said to him, like, holy shit, you're right. | ||
| He's like, yeah, because you're really almost doing a show at nobody there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're doing a show at nobody there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you got to keep, like you said, you got to keep it up. | ||
| Yeah, the two guys that I know that do that, Tim Dillon and him, are two of the fucking best guys at coming up with new shit. | ||
| I saw Dillon about a month and a half ago, two months ago at the Vulcan. | ||
| Holy shit did he kill. | ||
| I pulled him aside, I'm like, dude, you're on a whole new level. | ||
| You're on a whole new level. | ||
| And he's like, I've been doing The Road, and it's The Road, but it's also those goddamn podcasts that he does solo. | ||
| Yeah, I think the combination of the two just give you something, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, you know, you're aware that people are listening, so it forces that muscle. | ||
| It forces that muscle to grow. | ||
| I should probably do a solo podcast, like one solo episode a month or something like that. | ||
| It's just like really, yeah, just for material. | ||
| Maybe I don't even release it. | ||
| It probably would fucking... | ||
| Dude, it does something, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's probably a good move. | ||
| Because just conversation skills. | ||
| Like, you develop conversation skills from talking to people. | ||
| Like, you know, this kind of conversation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So many people don't have conversation skills. | ||
| They're just not good at talking to people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of comics are bad at it because they're thinking about themselves all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did a podcast once and I told a story, a really funny story about being on a Judd Apatow thing. | ||
| And I was fucking... | ||
| And it was really awesome. | ||
| And they just... | ||
| Thinking about what they were going to say next and I saw it. | ||
| You know when you talk to somebody and you just see their fucking eyes and I'm telling this story and they go, oh yeah, so then I did it and I'm like, alright, what the fuck am I doing? | ||
| Yeah, they're not connecting with your story at all. | ||
| That's a real narcissistic and just whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the problem with comedy, right? | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are just self-obsessed. | ||
| Especially people that haven't quite gotten to a level where they're comfortable yet. | ||
| They're still sort of struggling. | ||
| And I think I know another reason why. | ||
| I think another reason why is because I don't think a lot of people have, not everybody, I don't want to speak for everybody, but I think a lot of those people don't have other things like families and like things in their life, you know, because that's number one. | ||
| And when you see people that, you know, are living in a studio, one bedroom apartment, running around, just doing spots, don't have anybody, it's just all me, me, you know, and then you're like, I'm going, you know. | ||
| I remember one time somebody knocked me for having a family. | ||
| They were like, what do you got now, Versi 6 kids? | ||
| I'm like, no, still two. | ||
| You just have none. | ||
| Who? | ||
| Your guy was making fun of you for having children? | ||
| No, it was actually a female... | ||
| Sure wasn't Ari? | ||
| Actually, Ari came up to my house with my son. | ||
| He was so great with kids. | ||
| The funny thing about Ari is he doesn't want kids. | ||
| He's amazing with kids. | ||
| My kids love them. | ||
| He's giving my kids high five. | ||
| They're playing wiffle ball in the backyard. | ||
| I'm like, what are you? | ||
| He would come over to my house and give my daughter t-shirts. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He'd have cool t-shirts for her. | ||
| How good of a dad would that guy be? | ||
| I think he'd be a great dad. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He gets it in his head that he doesn't want the responsibility, but he loves having a dog. | ||
| It's like he thinks it's going to take away from his fun and all that stuff, but everybody's got their own path. | ||
| Do what you want to do. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I think comedy is what I do. | ||
| It's not who I am. | ||
| Who I am is... | ||
| And I look at it like that. | ||
| Because if it's who you are and everything around you, then all you can be is narcissistic, me, me, me, because that's what the business calls for. | ||
| Yeah, especially if you want to concentrate on your act, right? | ||
| You're concentrating on yourself all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think having a varied life is very important. | ||
| Well, at least it is from my mind. | ||
| My mind needs other things to do. | ||
| I can't just concentrate on one thing. | ||
| I always have multiple things going on. | ||
| When people say, like, I'm bored, I don't even know what that means. | ||
| I don't have the ability to be bored. | ||
| I have so many interests. | ||
| I don't have enough days. | ||
| I don't have enough hours in the day. | ||
| I wish I had multiple lives to live simultaneously. | ||
| I would be a race car driver. | ||
| I'd be a professional pool player. | ||
| I would have a bunch of different things that I would do. | ||
| Are you one of those guys when you're home, like you'll build a deck and shit? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I got friends that do that. | ||
| They come home and they just start making shit. | ||
| They start building shit. | ||
| I'm just like... | ||
| Well, that's cool, too, if that's what you're into. | ||
| Yeah, I can't. | ||
| I probably would get into it. | ||
| I bet if I started building a deck, I'd probably take great satisfaction in it. | ||
| But I also don't get into things that I know are going to take too much time because I don't have that. | ||
| That's why I won't play golf. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you play? | ||
| I just got, Bill just called me up and he goes, Verzi, you're going to be real fucking happy. | ||
| And he goes, I just did this golf thing and I'm in. | ||
| And he goes, we got to, even though we don't work together anymore, he goes, we got to do something where we do one outing a year. | ||
| So, oh yeah, I, I, I, cause this is the thing about golf. | ||
| It gets a bad rap. | ||
| It's, it's you versus your brain, dude. | ||
| And it really is. | ||
| And all these guys are like, fuck golf! | ||
| Golf is like, you know, it's hard and you suck at it. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| And it takes a lot to get good at it. | ||
| And it does. | ||
| Because all it is is your score getting lower. | ||
| And Joe, it is the most mental. | ||
| Because one inch wrong. | ||
| One turn wrong. | ||
| The fucking ball's gone and your score is shit. | ||
| And when you're sitting there and you go, that's why Tiger, man. | ||
| When Tiger was at the height... | ||
| And like, remember when Tiger was, I'm talking about when he was winning the Masters by like 18 strokes. | ||
| The second guy was so far behind. | ||
| His mental thing, he was like, he just knew. | ||
| But you stand over that ball and you have to make a shot to save that hole. | ||
| It's a mental game between yourself. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| And golf, I was just actually talking to one of your guys out there. | ||
| There's good golf out here. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Do you play or no? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Jamie does. | ||
| That motherfucker's obsessed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you? | |
| Jamie has a machine out back where he whacks golf balls into this giant net. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| And it shows him on the computer how fast his drive is. | ||
| Wait, you don't have that here, do you? | ||
| Yeah, he does. | ||
| In this thing? | ||
| This place is big. | ||
| There's a lot of shit going on in this place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll show you afterwards. | |
| Can I whack a drive into the screen? | ||
| God! | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Golf is a four or five hour mental break. | ||
| And you know when the best time to go? | ||
| I go on Father's Day. | ||
| I tell my wife, don't call. | ||
| Just don't call for five hours. | ||
| I'll come home. | ||
| Because sometimes you're on the course and they're like, hey, you want to pick up dinner? | ||
| When you're coming home, what hole you on? | ||
| Ruins it. | ||
| You know, I ruined it, but... | ||
| You need a little escape. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| It's an escape. | ||
| It's a mental... | ||
| It's a four-hour vacation, even when you're close to home, because it's outdoors. | ||
| You see wildlife. | ||
| You just see shit running by. | ||
| I bet it's awesome. | ||
| And you can bring booze, sticks. | ||
| I bet it's awesome. | ||
| It's like a fucking guy party. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And when he says sticks, he means cigars, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| A lot of people are like, what is this stick talk? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
East Coast. | |
| I'm sorry, yeah. | ||
| Oh, is that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| East Coast cigar talk. | ||
| A stick is a cigar, so, yeah. | ||
| These are good, by the way. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a Connecticut wrapper. | ||
| Is that you out there? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Who's this? | ||
| Oh, that's the guy with the fucking grizzly bear, yeah. | ||
| I sent this to Jamie. | ||
| This guy's trying to nail this putt, and there's a literal fucking grizzly bear behind him. | ||
| Where is this? | ||
| Do we know? | ||
| No, but there's been a few videos like this where there's a lot of bears on courses. | ||
| Can you make that bigger? | ||
| Is that a brown bear or a black bear? | ||
| That might be a black bear that's a color-faced bear, which is not as dangerous. | ||
| That looks like a grizzly. | ||
| That looks like a grizzly with the different shades of brown. | ||
| Well, you get that in black bears. | ||
| Oh, do you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're called color-faced bears. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mammoth Mountain. | |
| Mammoth Mountain. | ||
| Let's find out where that is. | ||
| Where is that at? | ||
| Mammoth Mountain. | ||
| Mammoth is in California. | ||
| Mammoth? | ||
| Oh, then it's a brown bear. | ||
| Then it's a black bear then. | ||
| If it's Mammoth Mountain in Mammoth, California? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, that's Mammoth. | ||
| That's not as dangerous. | ||
| That's less dangerous. | ||
| Not a lot less dangerous. | ||
| When they attack you, generally they're trying to eat you. | ||
| The difference between them and grizzly bears. | ||
| When grizzly bears attack you, usually it's because you startled them, like you ran across a mama and the cubs or something along those lines. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had a black bear go into my wife's garden, and he ripped the, like the Hulk, dude, he ripped the bars, and he went in, and he ransacked the place. | ||
| And she was devastated. | ||
| She put this beautiful garden together, and this thing just destroyed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where was this? | |
| Long Island? | ||
| No, no, I live in northern Westchester. | ||
| Oh, there's black bears out there? | ||
| Yeah, there's black bears out there and bobcats. | ||
| There's a lot of black bears in Jersey. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yes, Jersey has a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah, check this out real quick. | |
| Sorry, why are you talking about a black bear? | ||
| Well, this guy's hitting a drive, but there's a bear right here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Watch what happens after he hits it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, whoa! | |
| It rushed him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Dude, that was... | ||
| That's pretty gnarly. | ||
| That is nuts. | ||
| Why did it rush him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonder why it rushed him. | |
| It's a loud-ass noise. | ||
| I think the sound, yeah. | ||
| It still doesn't make sense that it would rush him. | ||
| That's kind of dumb for him to do that, though, dude. | ||
| I got to be honest, because that's a little too close to make a sound like that next to that thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's this baby with it behind it, maybe? | |
| Maybe that's why. | ||
| Is there a baby there? | ||
| Oh yeah, there might have been a cub there. | ||
| Yeah, when you see a bear, excuse me, when you see a bear with a cub, just get the fuck out of there. | ||
| Just get the fuck out of there. | ||
| Yeah, what are you doing? | ||
| Get the fuck out of there. | ||
| Yeah, go in the car, go fuck, yeah. | ||
| You know how your wife is with your kids. | ||
| She saw something, get the fuck out of there. | ||
| Women get crazy around their kids. | ||
| And my wife doesn't fuck around. | ||
| My wife will fuck somebody up, man. | ||
| Yes, it's mama bear instincts. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| My wife is a strong woman and does not, yes, she would, she said the other day, she said if somebody, she fucking, she just gave me, she goes, if somebody hurt our children, she goes, I would rip their fucking head off. | ||
| And I was just like, alright. | ||
| I had a conversation with Brewer about this once. | ||
| Like, it was like right after he had kids. | ||
| And he goes, I understand murder now. | ||
| I could never understand murder. | ||
| He goes, once I had a kid, he's like, oh, I understand murder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I could murder somebody who harmed my children. | ||
| Yeah, I watch a lot of crime shows. | ||
| I'm really big on that. | ||
| Are you a girl? | ||
| I'm a big one. | ||
| No, I watch, I'm obsessed with like serial killer shit. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Isn't it wild that girls like those? | ||
| Well, they fall in love with them. | ||
| Well, some girls. | ||
| But most women, they're watching those true crime shows. | ||
| They're not getting wet. | ||
| Does it? | ||
| I don't know why they watch them. | ||
| I just have... | ||
| But I can't watch the ones, like the forensic files and shit, I can't watch the ones with the kids. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| That's another level. | ||
| That's something that I just... | ||
| I can't do it, man. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| It's sick. | ||
| Yeah, that's like a level of sickness that's just fucking... | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to bring shit down. | ||
| I wonder, like, if we need evil in the world to appreciate love. | ||
| Like, you know, there's this, like, balance of life. | ||
| There's a balance of life that I don't want evil in the world, right? | ||
| But, I mean, is it possible to have a world with no evil? | ||
| Like, we've literally never had a world with no war, which is wild if you think about it. | ||
| I guess, technically speaking, if you go back to the most primitive of primitive man, they couldn't wage war because they were just trying to find food, but I'm sure they attacked each other. | ||
| They definitely had violence. | ||
| There's never been a time, like giraffes even beat the fuck out of each other. | ||
| Yeah, dinosaurs. | ||
| They beat the fuck out of each other. | ||
| Animals have always competed with other animals. | ||
| And unfortunately for humans, the ultimate game of competition is to conquer land and conquer villages and conquer countries and shit. | ||
| And that's the ultimate form of a competition, like trying to physically take... | ||
| That's what's going on right now in Ukraine. | ||
| Russia's trying to physically take Ukraine. | ||
| They wanted to take control of this country, this sovereign nation that used to be a part of the Soviet Union. | ||
| What do you think's going on with that? | ||
| Because I asked somebody, I go, Ukraine? | ||
| I said something along the lines of, I give Ukraine credit, man. | ||
| And the guy I was talking to, he just goes, ah, you know, Putin. | ||
| Like, in other words, Russia could do it if they wanted to do it. | ||
| Like, Putin is just kind of playing this game, and it's like, I don't know about that. | ||
| What game is it? | ||
| Yeah, like... | ||
| I don't know what... | ||
| I know Russia's more powerful, bigger, but... | ||
| The really scary thing is if it keeps ramping up. | ||
| I mean, how long can those people take it? | ||
| I know. | ||
| And then we keep sending them stuff. | ||
| It's like, what are we doing? | ||
| Are we having a war by proxy? | ||
| Are we supplying them in a sense? | ||
| Are we part of the war? | ||
| Like, what the fuck is happening? | ||
| And where can this go? | ||
| And if I was the aliens, I would be paying very close attention now. | ||
| I'd be like, oh, this is not good. | ||
| You got this evil dictator who kills his rivals and he has cancer, allegedly. | ||
| Oh, does he? | ||
| Yeah, supposedly he has blood cancer. | ||
| Oliver Stone said he had cancer when Oliver Stone went to interview him years ago. | ||
| He had cancer then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| So it's very likely that he has cancer. | ||
| And aren't they saying he's losing it a little bit? | ||
| I mean, he must be losing it now because the economy's destroyed. | ||
| Russia is in this state of isolation from the other nations other than China's eyeing it very carefully. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From what I understand, it's like some of these Chinese interests are divesting in the West, which is also very scary. | ||
| Because if they're looking at the way we do sanctions on the Russians, they might say, you know what, there's a weakness that we rely on America and the West for money. | ||
| And maybe what we should do is sell all that stuff off and then attack Taiwan. | ||
| At what point do we just stop, like, giving to them? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I guess everyone's just trying to have some sort of harmonious relationship. | ||
| The really fucked up thing is that we need them for stuff and we don't want to think about it. | ||
| Like, we need them for cheap labor for cell phones and stuff. | ||
| Not even cheap. | ||
| I mean, it's essentially almost like slave labor. | ||
| We don't even know. | ||
| What are they doing with the Uighur Muslims? | ||
| What are they doing with these people that they have in prison camps? | ||
| Are they making any of our stuff? | ||
| How much stuff are we buying that's being manufactured by slaves? | ||
| Yeah, and you know, as you were saying that, what about that WNBA player that's still there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
| Another six months and it's like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| Is that what they're saying? | ||
| They just said that she's going to be detained for another six months. | ||
| They just said that? | ||
| They just said that like two days ago. | ||
| And I just saw that and it's like, that's not good, man. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| That's like, you know, get her out of there. | ||
| I don't know what we could do. | ||
| They want to trade her for an arms dealer. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Britney Greiner appears in court, gets detention in Russia, extended for six more months. | ||
| That's insane, man. | ||
| That's fucking really insane, man. | ||
| It's really brutal, man. | ||
| And she had a CBD vape pen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which is wild. | |
| That is, yeah, like... | ||
| Wild, right? | ||
| I mean, she's got a vape pen for... | ||
| I mean, she's a fucking professional athlete. | ||
| The people that love her probably are going, is she ever coming back? | ||
| Like, that's... | ||
| Imagine loving... | ||
| Like, her wife is going, like, trying to talk to Biden, going, like, can we get her back? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think they wanted to trade her for an arms dealer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| There's an arms dealer that we have in detention, like an illegal arms dealer, and they wanted to trade her for him, and they keep saying no. | ||
| I don't know what they're doing. | ||
| A vape pen? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's like she had a kilo of cocaine or something. | ||
| It's like a vape pen. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| She could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| The pending outcome of a trial is scheduled to start on Friday. | ||
| She made an appearance in Russian court with order to stand trial on cannabis possession charges following her arrest more than four months ago. | ||
| So she's going to be in there a year at least. | ||
| Sullivan said on Tuesday that he and the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have both spoken in the last few days with Greiner's wife to convey our very deep... | ||
| That ain't helping. | ||
| Sherelle Greiner last week said she hasn't spoken to her wife since February and that she tried to call through the U.S. Embassy in Russia for their anniversary, but they were never connected. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Yeah, dude, it's bad, man. | ||
| That's horrible, man. | ||
| It's over nothing. | ||
| It's like she's the clearest form of political prisoner. | ||
| She really is. | ||
| You know what's weird? | ||
| I was walking in the hallway with her at Mohegan Sun, and I just saw her, and I'm just thinking that she's over there in Russia. | ||
| It's just a really bizarre thing for nothing, man. | ||
| And where do you think they're keeping her? | ||
| Do you think it's a good situation? | ||
| It's a publicity thing. | ||
| They're showing their big dick. | ||
| Like, fuck you. | ||
| We'll just keep your girl and we'll lock her up in a cage. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Biden could get her out. | ||
| He should get her out. | ||
| He's got to be able to get her out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Like, is there? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| And I'm not saying that shit. | ||
| No, listen, I'm one of these, like, I'm one of these Americans that I root for every president. | ||
| I'm like, I root for every president. | ||
| Like, I'm not, you know, I mean, obviously we goof on presidents as comedians, but I root for fucking, I want everybody to do good. | ||
| Well, if they do well, the country does well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Supposedly. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know, man. | ||
| I'm not a very political person in that sense. | ||
| I would like them to work this out, but I think it's just a part of a bigger problem. | ||
| The bigger problem is that Russia's invaded Ukraine. | ||
| Like, if she went over there a year and a half ago, it would have been no big deal. | ||
| Nobody would have given a shit. | ||
| You know, they wouldn't have detained her for that, I doubt. | ||
| I don't see an outcry, like, enough, though, to get her back from, like, it's weird. | ||
| Well, the other thing is homosexuality is illegal in Russia, too. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Is it legal? | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Freeing Griner, according to speculation raised in Russian news media, could acquire the US to free Viktor Bout, a Russian arms trader nicknamed the Merchant of Death. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. | ||
| He was arrested in 2008 after undercover agents asked Bout to sell them missiles capable of shooting down American planes and other weapons that could kill American troops. | ||
| He was arguably the largest and most sophisticated arms trafficker on the globe when he was arrested. | ||
| Michael Braun, the DEA's former chief of operations, told Yahoo Sports in May, he was the guy who could deliver virtually anything with certainty to any bad actor all over the world. | ||
| So that's what they want a woman who's a professional basketball player who just had a CBD vape pen, and they want to trade her for a guy who sells murder weapons. | ||
| To Killers. | ||
| What was she doing there? | ||
| There was a game? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of the WNB players play over there during their offseason because they only play during the summer here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They make more money playing in Europe. | |
| Jesus, I didn't go to Italy because I was afraid of Russia, let alone playing fucking basketball there, dude. | ||
| You didn't go to Italy because you're afraid of Russia? | ||
| No, me and my wife, we were going to go to Italy. | ||
| When was this? | ||
| No, right when this thing broke out. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| When this thing broke out, I wanted to take my family to Sicily and Greece because that's what I am. | ||
| I'm Greek and Sicilian. | ||
| So I told the kids and Stacey, I go, let's go and let's go to Greece, Sicily, we'll have a good time. | ||
| And then all this like... | ||
| Is World War III? I'm talking about at the very beginning when we were about to book. | ||
| Is World War III coming? | ||
| And my wife was kind of like, should we book this shit? | ||
| And stupidly, I didn't. | ||
| But, you know, I wish that I did because I see people in the Colosseum taking pictures and shit, and everybody's having a good time in Italy, and we didn't do it. | ||
| Have you been to the Colosseum? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's pretty wild, isn't it? | ||
| It's fucking wild, man. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| It's so run down and beat up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, like, you just look in the middle there, the history of what went down there, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fucking wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you do the Vatican? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's wild, too. | ||
| But my favorite place on Earth is Venice. | ||
| You been to Venice? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I've been to Venice. | ||
| I fucking loved it, man. | ||
| It's pretty interesting. | ||
| It's very touristy. | ||
| Apparently, they're going to stop the boats from coming in, though, because they have these cruise ships come in, and then they just dump out thousands of people, and they just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they fart everywhere and buy stupid T-shirts and then get back on the boat. | ||
| But the problem is the congestion that comes from it and the pollution of the water and all that stuff. | ||
| Apparently they're doing something to mitigate the amount of cruise ships. | ||
| But Venice itself is spectacular. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Remember when the water got cleared up after all that? | ||
| The water got cleared up during COVID and fucking dolphins returned. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what's going to happen when we die. | ||
| I did a cruise there, too. | ||
| I flew to Venice, and then we did a cruise back to... | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, like transatlantic. | ||
| Four days, nothing but ocean. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| Fucking scary, dude. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was one night we caught a bad thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Waves? | |
| 18-foot waves were blasting windows out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Yeah, and my father is very, he loves dressing up. | ||
| So there was one night where people were throwing up and shit. | ||
| You just heard, like, I'm not joking. | ||
| And everybody had trays outside their thing. | ||
| And my dad is sitting in the fucking dining room with his tux on with a big smile on his face. | ||
| Just so happy to fucking be there eating, dressed up. | ||
| Because that's all he wants to do. | ||
| My father cares about food and dressing up. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| If a man is in a pair of sweatpants, he can't, he's just like, I can't, I can't even, yeah, he's another type of dude, man. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Yeah, he's a, he's... | ||
| We all got fitted for suits today for this Vegas show. | ||
| That's what we were doing when you got here. | ||
| Hans Kim and Tony and Brian Simpson. | ||
| Brian's probably here right now. | ||
| And then, you know, it's like we decided, we're doing this big Vegas show, let's fucking dress up, let's dress up nice. | ||
| So, you know, we got a tailor to come down and get everybody's suits and shit. | ||
| Oh, dude, if my dad walked in when I did, he'd be like, good for this kid knows, good for this guy. | ||
| This fucking kid knows what he's doing. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| If my father was a comic, he would probably be three-piece suit. | ||
| Did your dad like John Wick? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When John Wick gets dressed up when he's about to kill people? | |
| He puts a tie on when they're about to come into his house and he's about to kill everybody. | ||
| My dad had a fur coat on in a fucking pizzeria, like in August. | ||
| He said one thing. | ||
| One thing he said, Joe, I never heard... | ||
| This is one of the most gangster things. | ||
| My dad is a sight when you see him. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| He's a presence. | ||
| It's just dressed up. | ||
| It's overly... | ||
| Like, the hair, the... | ||
| Like, he's just my... | ||
| Big, gaudy jewelry. | ||
| Gaudy fucking jewelry. | ||
| He goes, you know, he goes... | ||
| I talked about this in a special. | ||
| He goes, you know, I don't go for this hip-hop shit. | ||
| You know that, right? | ||
| And I go, yeah, dad. | ||
| Nothing about you says... | ||
| And he goes, but these rappers, they know their jewelry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| He goes, I was watching one of these shitty videos, but they fuck, because he likes that, but this woman's staring at him. | ||
| He's got a fur collar, big, like a suede thing with a fur collar, and this woman is just staring at him, and he just stops, and he looks at her, and he goes, I owe you money? | ||
| And she goes, excuse me, what? | ||
| He goes, no, I'm just curious. | ||
| Do I owe you money? | ||
| Because the last person that stared at me like that, I owed her money. | ||
| And she just fucking froze. | ||
| He goes, okay, have a good day and got in the car and she just fucking, I never said anything like it. | ||
| He just said, do I owe you money? | ||
| And she just goes, no, why? | ||
| He goes, why are you looking at me like that? | ||
| The last person that looked at me like that. | ||
| But see, my dad always talked to me against the mob. | ||
| That's the one thing. | ||
| He would always, because he knew them, because he was Sicilian. | ||
| But he would always be like, you can't get out of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's street stuff. | ||
| You're smarter than that. | ||
| Use your mind. | ||
| Like, he would always do that. | ||
| My grandmother went to jail for bookmaking. | ||
| Did she? | ||
| Yeah, she was running numbers. | ||
| My grandmother was running numbers. | ||
| No! | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| We would always go, where's grandma? | ||
| Oh, she's visiting Aunt Marie. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| She was in jail knitting for the guards. | ||
| She wouldn't say shit to anybody. | ||
| Are you Italian? | ||
| Yeah, mostly. | ||
| Three quarters Italian, one quarter Irish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| You're more Italian than I am? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Sicilian or Northern? | ||
| Mostly that, yeah. | ||
| My grandmother, I think, was part. | ||
| And she was just a gangster old lady. | ||
| She wouldn't rat on anybody, so they kept her in jail for six months. | ||
| What? | ||
| Your grandmother was a fucking numbers runner? | ||
| Yeah, my grandmother ran numbers. | ||
| She was a gambling addict. | ||
| She would always want to talk to me about the numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was going to play 5-4-3 and I said to myself, I'm going to change it to 2. 5-4-2 and 5-4-3 came in! | |
| It was one of those things. | ||
| She would always think she was psychic too. | ||
| It was really interesting because she never could predict anything. | ||
| What neighborhood? | ||
| It was in New Jersey. | ||
| Newark. | ||
| They lived in Newark. | ||
| We lived on North 9th Street. | ||
| I lived with them actually when I first moved to New York. | ||
| It was a real wake-up call for me. | ||
| That was a very important moment in my life because my grandmother had an aneurysm and she should have saw that coming too. | ||
| She was psychic, right? | ||
| She had an aneurysm outside and she fell. | ||
| And she was there for hours before anybody knew. | ||
| My grandfather came home, we found her, the ambulance, the whole deal. | ||
| They gave her, they think they gave her 72 hours to live, and she lived for 12 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| She's a tough, tough old broad, but she was hurting, and she was in agony, and she couldn't move. | ||
| She had bed sores, and there was a full-time nurse at the house, and my grandfather would have to take care of her. | ||
| And I remember just realizing, like, life is fucking fleeting. | ||
| Life is fleeting. | ||
| And here I was, I was 23, 20, somewhere around there, 24 maybe? | ||
| And I moved to New York because I had just signed with my manager and I needed a place to stay. | ||
| And so my grandfather said, come stay with me. | ||
| So I stayed with him in New York, in New Jersey rather. | ||
| And New Jersey, where they lived, In the 1940s was an Italian neighborhood. | ||
| It was all Italian. | ||
| There was still some bakeries in that area. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they did this thing called blockbusting, where they would go door to door and say, hey, black people are moving into this neighborhood. | ||
| The real estate values are going to crash. | ||
| Sell your house now. | ||
| And they got everybody to sell their house. | ||
| My grandfather was like, fuck you. | ||
| I like black people. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| And so he was like this one Italian guy that lived in this neighborhood and it was originally all black people moved in and then it became other immigrants like Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and the like. | ||
| And when I was there, the kid next door was selling crack. | ||
| And the kid next door was a drug dealer, and they battering rammed his house. | ||
| He had an Audi, a nice Audi. | ||
| I remember looking out the window. | ||
| This fence and fucking locks and everything. | ||
| He's got a nice Audi there. | ||
| What is this guy doing? | ||
| He was selling drugs. | ||
| And my grandfather just lived this life for the last days of his life where he's just taking care of my grandmother. | ||
| And then when my grandmother finally eventually died, he died like a year later. | ||
| Yeah, that happens. | ||
| Yeah, just riddled with sadness and it was horrible. | ||
| He just was just lost, you know? | ||
| But it was, for me, as a young man, just starting this dream of trying to be a comic and being around people that were at the last chapter, the last few pages of their story, it was like a real wake-up call. | ||
| Like, you gotta do something in this life. | ||
| You gotta go out there and take advantage of this youth and the fact that you have a healthy life, you have a healthy body, you're active, you can still do things, because you can be like your grandmother. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You just brought me back to, you know, you think about life, dude, and how quick and how wild it is, but, you know, 2016 was one of the worst years of my life. | ||
| I talked about it a little bit on Honey Do It with Ryan Sickler, who I love, Ryan. | ||
| Shout out to Ryan. | ||
| I love that dude. | ||
| Yeah, I love Ryan Sickler, but... | ||
| No, dude. | ||
| 2016, I caught this darkness that I just didn't fucking know why or how. | ||
| Because, you know, not on my father's side, but my mother's side, the Greek side is a lot of... | ||
| Greeks are very... | ||
| I don't know if Giannis talked about it. | ||
| The Greeks are very neurotic, anxiety-ridden, always kind of, you know, a worry. | ||
| My mother was a worrier. | ||
| If something happened on the news, somebody fell down the stairs. | ||
| You can't go to the stairs. | ||
| But always, always, always. | ||
| And so you get that mental thing from that side. | ||
| But, dude, I was in a 90-day clinical. | ||
| Over what? | ||
| Did something cause it? | ||
| What happened was I was going through something mentally and it was causing my body to do things and I thought that it was my body. | ||
| What were you going through mentally? | ||
| I was just getting really sad. | ||
| Over nothing? | ||
| I started feeling like something was wrong with me physically, but it was my OCD and my mind telling me that. | ||
| So my body and my muscles started to, things started to get weakened. | ||
| I started to feel something was wrong and I would tell my wife something was wrong. | ||
| She goes, nothing's wrong and it just kept going and going. | ||
| And dude, I was in a bedroom for 90 days. | ||
| Going to get a glass of water was the fucking biggest task in the world, and I couldn't even look at my kids because I didn't think I'd be around. | ||
| I didn't think I'd see them grow up. | ||
| Jesus Christ, so there was nothing physically that was happening, just something, nothing caused it? | ||
| I went to the doctor. | ||
| I was on stage in Hartford, Connecticut. | ||
| And I'm on stage having a monster set and I'm having an out-of-body experience. | ||
| I'm in a full-fledged panic attack. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And you're killing. | ||
| I saw tables laughing. | ||
| And so, oh, we're here to see you tonight. | ||
| I saw tables laughing. | ||
| I was in a full-fledged panic attack and it was like I was standing next to myself and I was dizzy and I didn't want to fall down so I kind of put my hand on something and I drove home 100% convinced I had a brain tumor. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| So I called the doctor and the doctor was like, I go, I have, and I told my wife, I said, I have a brain tumor. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| And they were like, what? | ||
| So I went to the doctor for weeks and he goes, Paul, I, and he's, he's, they put me, he's like, if this is what it's going to take. | ||
| So I went to the scan and I'm going through a brain tumor and I was like in the waiting with my brother and I'm hugging him. | ||
| I'm saying, I love you. | ||
| I go, dude, they're going to find out, they're going to find out some shit right now. | ||
| And they didn't. | ||
| And then it went to something for 90 days and I was like convinced. | ||
| So when you found out that you didn't have a brain tumor, was it a relief at all? | ||
| It was a relief for the moment. | ||
| But then it was something else. | ||
| I was in this place where I couldn't accept from professional doctors. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That something wasn't wrong with me. | ||
| And it was 90 days and my kids were like, you know, dad still... | ||
| And I was just like, dad will get better. | ||
| But it took 90 days. | ||
| I didn't think I was coming out of it. | ||
| And then I realized that it was on my mind. | ||
| And it was a really deep, bad depression, man. | ||
| Real fucked up. | ||
| And it was at that moment when I got better, I was like, fuck it, dude. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So nothing caused it? | ||
| There was no, like, trigger? | ||
| Therapists say that something probably was happening and going on that I, you know, that I don't even know. | ||
| They were trying to talk to me, talk to me about things when I was younger and stuff, but I just, it was, it started physical and my mind went to something wrong with an illness. | ||
| And I was in, I was in a dark place and my wife was, I was gone. | ||
| Do you ever, do you run? | ||
| Do you ever do cardio or anything like that? | ||
| That's what they told me to do that. | ||
| I was going to the track and running and trying to get... | ||
| Did that help? | ||
| It helped a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, it definitely helped a little bit and started to slowly get me out of it when I did it. | ||
| So it was really hard to get up and do it. | ||
| And they told me to walk my dog first. | ||
| That was the first step. | ||
| The doctor said, go walk your dog for a long time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I would have, you know, panic attacks while I was walking them and shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| Yeah, man. | ||
| And then I got out of it and I got better and I got stronger. | ||
| And I had friends and good friends, you know, to, you know, be there for me and talk to me about it. | ||
| But it was, dude, it was like 90 days. | ||
| I don't think I was coming out of it. | ||
| And then after that, I was like, and then I learned a lot. | ||
| I read a lot about mental health. | ||
| I read a lot about OCD, anxiety, and because I'm not a fully depressed person, but it goes to that with the anxiety and the OCD. And it's something that I think is in my family, so I try to fight it, you know? | ||
| Do you think it's the way you were raised? | ||
| Do you think it's a genetic thing? | ||
| I think both. | ||
| I think that what happened to me, you know, the way things went down when I was younger, and then also some things maybe on my mom's side. | ||
| But yeah, it would suck, man. | ||
| It would suck to be there. | ||
| And I would never kill myself. | ||
| See that's that's what like I was so bad that I was like I understand why somebody would do that but I would never do that so I'm just now I'm really sad because I'm just gonna live in this Jesus so and I and I was like is this ever because once like three months and then I actually learned there was like a 90 day like you can be depressed for that and that was the first time it happened that bad but when I got out of it I was like fuck this dude I'm like every like I'm gonna life is too you know my mom had stage four cancer when I was younger too that's what actually Yanis said that that's what he thinks is from In 1997, | ||
| my mom got diagnosed with a rare stage 4 cancer, and she was on her way out, but the Dana-Farber Institute in Boston came up with a test drug, and she's alive today because of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| A hundred people took the test drug. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And it worked on 26, and she was one of them. | ||
| And then it whittled down to 10, and she was one of them. | ||
| And right now, she's still one of them. | ||
| The cancer's completely dormant and shrunken, and my mother would have been gone 20-something years. | ||
| But I got that news when I was a senior in high school. | ||
| I came home, there was ambulances, state troopers all in front of the fucking house. | ||
| It was like a movie. | ||
| You pulled up. | ||
| I was in fourth period gym and they said, Paul, we don't want to alarm you, but your mother's in some kind of situation. | ||
| You got to go home. | ||
| And I went home and I pulled up the street and I just saw state troopers and ambulances. | ||
| And my mother's best friend goes, she's all right. | ||
| And my mother was like pale white on a gurney. | ||
| And she didn't want me going in the ambulance with her, and I found out she got, like, blown all over the ambulance and shit. | ||
| So some people think that I thought that maybe when I thought something was wrong with me, that was it, and that's what triggered it. | ||
| It was a really hard thing and sometimes I still deal with it. | ||
| It's a good thing for you to talk about because there's a lot of people that don't understand what that's like and they don't understand how a person who is a successful comic, who's doing well, you have a family, you're loved, how could that be possible? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like the mind is a strange thing, man. | ||
| It's hard to understand. | ||
| There's people that are like super, super successful that are just a mess. | ||
| And it doesn't need to make sense. | ||
| The mind is just like other parts of your body. | ||
| You could get a pinched nerve and your arm doesn't work right anymore because there's something wrong with your body. | ||
| Well, there could be something wrong with your mind, too. | ||
| Your dopamine levels could be low. | ||
| Your serotonin levels could be low. | ||
| There could be something wrong, and then it just triggers it. | ||
| What people know about the mind is so fucking confusing. | ||
| I've had friends that got on SSRIs and antidepressants and shit, and it saved them. | ||
| It's one of the reasons I'm very hesitant to say that people should take medication, but I have friends that have taken medication and it changed their life. | ||
| It really did. | ||
| I have one buddy of mine that I used to do jujitsu with. | ||
| He was like fucking really depressed and he was an alcoholic and he was a mess and then he started taking medication and like some sort of SSRI and it got him out of the funk and then he started doing well in his life and then he started doing jujitsu and jujitsu sort of became his medication and he got really good at jujitsu. | ||
| And along the way, while he was getting really good at jujitsu, he slowly weaned his way off of the medication and then became functioning and normal. | ||
| So it did help him and save him. | ||
| He used it as like a cane to help him walk again, and then eventually got rid of the cane. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, I had to take something for the OCD because I would get stuck in the thought. | ||
| What kind of would they give you? | ||
| There was this drug called Luvox and I took a very low dose of it and it would take the edge off because I would get stuck in the thought where I'd be in a hotel and I would sit in a bed and I'd have a thought and I couldn't, I would fucking just be sitting there being like, well, why am I thinking this? | ||
| And the drug actually helped me to be like, dude, just fucking go, like, just move on. | ||
| So I've learned all that stuff and I have a really good understanding. | ||
| I had my first panic attack. | ||
| I didn't realize it, but, you know, my mother, I had my first panic attack in the third grade and I thought I was going to die. | ||
| In the third grade? | ||
| Yeah, I was sitting on the couch. | ||
| I remember, like, I remember it right now. | ||
| I remember the pattern on the fucking couch. | ||
| It was third grade and it was a panic that came over me. | ||
| I started looking around. | ||
| I was a little kid I didn't know. | ||
| And I called my mom. | ||
| I was crying. | ||
| I said, and I started to, and my mom got upset because she has anxiety. | ||
| So, yeah, and they said that that was because of what was going on as a kid. | ||
| Jesus, I'm not trying to bring this fucking thing, but you got me talking about it, and when I talked about it before, people called me up and said, Thank you. | ||
| You let me realize it's okay. | ||
| And that's the reason why I talk about it a lot is because when you get a message from somebody going, hey man, you helped me. | ||
| But yeah, man, I was in a really dark place and it was when I was doing well. | ||
| I remember right before, like a year before, I remember I was on the road with Burr. | ||
| And Burr goes, dude, you're getting ready for a special, man. | ||
| This material is coming together. | ||
| And like things were going good. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, man, it's just everything went, you know, and my wife was like, you got to go, you got to talk to somebody. | ||
| Something's going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Yeah, I try to deal with it. | ||
| I still deal with it sometimes, and then sometimes I'm just ahead of it for a while. | ||
| But what you said is running and doing things like that. | ||
| Cardio. | ||
| Cardio is big for it. | ||
| Cardio is a big one. | ||
| They found that cardio, well, any kind of rigorous exercise is just as effective as antidepressants, if not more effective on a lot of people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's something that happens to your body when your body's too sedentary. | ||
| I don't think it's normal and natural for people to not exert their body. | ||
| And I think when you don't do anything with your body, your body tends to malfunction. | ||
| It tends to have weird shit go wrong with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it could be the mind. | ||
| Because you think there's all sorts of endorphins that get released during exercise. | ||
| There's many times where I'm not feeling good, and then I work out, and then I feel so good. | ||
| I feel so happy. | ||
| And so nice, like that's one of the things that made me like so much nicer person is like sticking to a rigorous exercise routine because I you know I grew up My parents split up when I was five and there's domestic abuse in my house and I just always had this like tension about like violence and chaos and not being protected and stuff and And it makes you an angry person. | ||
| And the only thing that saved me was exertion. | ||
| Like when I would exert myself, when I would work out, like in martial arts in particular. | ||
| Afterwards, I was the nicest person in the world. | ||
| I was the nicest person in the world. | ||
| It was just like it made me... | ||
| My mom still talks about to this day. | ||
| She's like, there's two yous. | ||
| There's you before you started training, and then there's you afterwards. | ||
| You became a different person. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because when I was like 14, I was this fucking angry kid. | ||
| This angry, confused, insecure kid. | ||
| And then I started training. | ||
| Martial arts was the first thing that I ever did where I didn't feel like a loser. | ||
| Where I was like, oh, I can get good at things. | ||
| I'm really good at this. | ||
| I got praise for being good. | ||
| And I got praise for my instructor. | ||
| It became a big deal. | ||
| And then I realized, like, oh, I can't just sit around. | ||
| Like, half of the reason why I work out a lot is not just I like to look good and be, you know, healthy physically. | ||
| That's true, too. | ||
| But it's my mind. | ||
| I can't leave that motherfucker alone. | ||
| Like, that motherfucker needs to go for a run. | ||
| Like, he needs to do stuff. | ||
| I don't trust it. | ||
| I don't trust my mind. | ||
| My mind is primitive. | ||
| There's a lot of shit in there that just needs to get out. | ||
| But when I get it out, I get out in healthy, productive ways, and then my body stays healthy, my mind is clear, I can think things through better, but it makes me a nicer person. | ||
| That's the most important part of it. | ||
| It made me way nicer. | ||
| Yeah, so were you on edge to fight people before that? | ||
| Or were you like when you were angry and you felt like you said the word that hit me when you said you felt unprotected? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I felt unprotected too. | ||
| Yeah, when you broke up, your parents break up, and you're not around your dad, and no one's protecting you. | ||
| There's that feeling. | ||
| And, you know, they both are cool and realize that the way they were going at each other probably isn't, you know, they would wish they wouldn't have been like that. | ||
| But, you know, my mom said when I was really young, I would wake up like really upset thinking something was going to happen to her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and the protection thing is a big thing. | ||
| It's scary because you lose your dad, your dad's not with you anymore, and your mom's the only person there. | ||
| And then if your mom gets sick or something happens to your mom, like, oh, fuck. | ||
| My stepdad came in and he was a great dude, stuck with my mom. | ||
| Mine too. | ||
| That helped a lot too. | ||
| Having a stepdad there helps, man, for sure. | ||
| My stepdad is still with my mom. | ||
| And they've been together for fucking forever, since I was five. | ||
| They have a great relationship. | ||
| They do all kinds of stuff together. | ||
| They rarely even argue about things. | ||
| And they're in Jersey? | ||
| No, they're here now. | ||
| Oh, they're here? | ||
| They're here in Texas. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They're all coming. | ||
| You're getting everybody out. | ||
| That's got to be cool to have your mom out here. | ||
| It's cool, yeah. | ||
| But let's be honest. | ||
| It's cool that she doesn't have to worry about stuff. | ||
| But let's be honest, Joe. | ||
| The Italian bakeries out here can't be that good. | ||
| I don't eat bread. | ||
| You don't have to worry about the cannolis and shit? | ||
| No. | ||
| If they got rid of the butcher shops, I'd have a real problem. | ||
| But I eat a lot of meat that I hunt. | ||
| You hunt, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you hunt? | ||
| Mostly elk. | ||
| That's my favorite. | ||
| I never tasted elk. | ||
| I'll get you some. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, if you lived out here, I'd cook for you. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Next time you come here, we have a kitchen now in the gym. | ||
| We have a gym here, and we have a Traeger grill set up in the kitchen. | ||
| So the Traeger grill, they're fixing the vents for it now to make sure. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| Because it's a smoker, you know, so the smoke has to go through a vent through the ceiling and shit like that, but yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't eat bread. | ||
| So like the bakery thing is great, but I was in LA and there's this place in Venice called Felix. | ||
| It's my favorite restaurant in America. | ||
| It's fucking amazing. | ||
| And the head chef, this guy Evan Funk, who's been on my podcast before, he's amazing. | ||
| And he's just a fantastic chef. | ||
| And he just started up this new place in LA called Mother Wolf. | ||
| You know, it's about Rome. | ||
| His food is all Rome-inspired and the mother wolf is like the origin story of Rome is something about... | ||
| Yeah, there's two brothers, Romulus and Remus, they were put in a basket and a wolf found them and raised them and that's where Rome comes from. | ||
| Yeah, so mother wolf. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Is the name of his restaurant. | ||
| But anyway, it was all pasta and pizza. | ||
| It was fucking phenomenal. | ||
| I ate it all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I ate it all. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll eat it on occasion. | ||
| But when I eat it, it's just for pleasure. | ||
| Yeah, that's the mother wolf. | ||
| Yeah, wild, man. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| They're sucking off the tit of a wolf. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| Jeez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a crazy origin story. | ||
| Do you like... | ||
| So being out here, like being in Austin, do you... | ||
| Did you do everything you could do out here, or you still got stuff to do out here in Austin? | ||
| Like what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Like, just with what is offered out here. | ||
| Like, what is offered out here other than... | ||
| I mean, the comedy scene's... | ||
| I know the comedy scene's incredible. | ||
| Comedy scene's awesome. | ||
| But you're out in the suburbs, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty close to here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, you are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| No, I mean, everything's close around here. | ||
| The thing is, there's no traffic. | ||
| What they call traffic is a fucking joke. | ||
| It took me five more minutes to get to work. | ||
| I listened to a whole extra song. | ||
| Like, it's the fuck out of here. | ||
| You don't know what traffic is. | ||
| But there's only a million people here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a million people here and then another million in the surrounding areas. | ||
| It's like, it's not that many people. | ||
| So, everyone is nicer. | ||
| Like, it's a nicer place to be. | ||
| I don't know... | ||
| I don't think I would have been the same person if I grew up here, because I think there's something about growing up on the East Coast, cold, hard winters, and people that are aggressive and fucking getting shit done, get the fuck out of here, and for comedy, growing up out there was phenomenal, because doing stand-up in Boston, those motherfuckers have zero attention span for bullshit. | ||
| Like, you better come with the fucking punchlines. | ||
| Like, if you see comics, like, from Boston, the guys who started out there, guys like Burr, Nick DiPaolo, and fucking, all those guys are killers. | ||
| They're just bang, bang, bang, punchline, punchline, punchline. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because, like, that's how you had to be back then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because those people, here people are a little kinder, a little nicer, you can probably get away with a little bit more. | ||
| You know, it's just, I think growing up in a place where the winters fucking suck is really good for your character. | ||
| You have to have that. | ||
| If you wake up every day 75 fucking California weather, you're weaker. | ||
| There's something to that. | ||
| 100% there is. | ||
| There's something about getting up and having somebody go, you better go shovel that foot of fucking snow and get out there and do all that shit outside. | ||
| That makes you a stronger person, for sure. | ||
| I love that shit. | ||
| Yeah, there's something to that. | ||
| But Texas is different. | ||
| It's like the people are very friendly here. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| They're very polite, even the way they drive. | ||
| There's a few assholes every now and then, but that's just a part of being a person. | ||
| But people let you in their lane, they wave to you. | ||
| I have a guy in my neighborhood, and this guy is this older guy who's always working on his garden. | ||
| And every time I drive by, this guy waves. | ||
| I don't know this dude, but every time he drives by, he puts his hand up, I put my hand up, I look forward. | ||
| When I'm driving, I go, there's that guy, we're gonna wave at each other. | ||
| I drive by, I give him that, he gives me that. | ||
| There's something about that, just with a neighbor you don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know that guy, but I love him. | |
| Yeah, I know I'm getting older too, not from physical shit, but from shit I say. | ||
| Little things I say, like I go to this cafe all the time, and I love talking to older people. | ||
| I love talking to 60, 70-year-old people that lived. | ||
| I just love it. | ||
| But I love the fun shit that they do. | ||
| So this guy, he always sees me. | ||
| He likes me. | ||
| Older Italian guy. | ||
| And he goes like this. | ||
| He goes, Hey Paul, how you doing? | ||
| And Joe, without even thinking, I just go, If I was doing any better, I'd be you! | ||
| And I pointed. | ||
| And I loved it, and I swear to God, he just goes, I like that. | ||
| I was like, oh, I'm in my 40s. | ||
| But I loved it. | ||
| I loved that because it was a quick thing. | ||
| It was like old man shit. | ||
| Old man shit. | ||
| Oh, dude, old man shit is the best. | ||
| I was playing golf with this guy, right? | ||
| I hit the ball. | ||
| It starts out low. | ||
| And then Jamie, you know those ones that like start gliding, but then all of a sudden, right? | ||
| And he just goes, old guy goes, oh, it's the mother-in-law shot. | ||
| Like, what do you mean? | ||
| He goes, yeah, the further away it gets, the better it looks. | ||
| And I just was like, what? | ||
| But it's like corny, dumb shit, but those old guys have a good time, man. | ||
| Well, there's a thing, a camaraderie of saying stupid shit to people, like with each other. | ||
| You know, he's saying things like that to each other. | ||
| It's like we're agreeing to be nice to each other. | ||
| It's almost not about the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Yes, like even when you talk sports. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, dude, you see who they drafted last night all the time? | ||
| We're just trying to talk. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But I love that because that's life. | ||
| That's living, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because that's a guy that's seen a lot more than I have, but in that moment we're kind of on the same thing. | ||
| I love that shit. | ||
| That's why people like to have shared hobbies. | ||
| They talk about their shared interests, the things they're really into. | ||
| And sports is a great one because there's so much going on. | ||
| There's always some activity happening, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Sports is an unbelievable thing to... | ||
| You know, that's actually how I met Burr because I'm a New York guy. | ||
| He was a Boston guy. | ||
| I opened for him. | ||
| And Bill is so funny that when we met... | ||
| I said to him, who he's a fan of, I go, dude, these 07 Patriots is the best offense I've ever seen. | ||
| I'm saying something nice about his team. | ||
| He called me and told me for 45 minutes why I was wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He goes, you know, this is their defense. | |
| I was agreeing with you. | ||
| But the thing about Bill, he's such a born contrarian. | ||
| I love bringing things up to him that I know he's going to disagree with. | ||
| I'll say things to him just to fuck with him. | ||
| Just to, like, get him wound up. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| I went into... | ||
| I did state college right after Joe Paterno's statue came down and shit. | ||
| And I was at state... | ||
| And they were like... | ||
| They literally said when we got there, like, there's no talking about him here. | ||
| So you get on stage, there's no talking. | ||
| Like, this was when, like, the town was devastated. | ||
| So I go into the hotel. | ||
| I'm on the phone with Bill. | ||
| And I go, what the fuck, man? | ||
| He goes, what? | ||
| And I go, it's the carpet here. | ||
| I was like, this is like 1990. The thing about me, Joe, is I just like a nice place to stay. | ||
| I'm a little bit like that. | ||
| I want slippers and a robe, even if I'm not going to use them. | ||
| I just want them there. | ||
| I want to know that they're there. | ||
| I like cucumber water downstairs. | ||
| I like that shit. | ||
| Just who I am. | ||
| Maybe from my dad, right? | ||
| But I don't go too much. | ||
| My dad had his initials engraved on his slippers and shit. | ||
| Nice! | ||
| TJV on the fucking... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like it! | |
| Yeah, his license was TJV. But I'm on the phone with Bill and I go, this fucking hotel's a shithole. | ||
| And I sit on the bed and he goes, Verzi, you're starting to make... | ||
| Go to another hotel. | ||
| He goes, go pay. | ||
| And I go, you know what? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I'm going to leave. | ||
| And then we argued why... | ||
| I said, Joe Montana, he said, this is years ago. | ||
| I said, Brady's better than Montana. | ||
| I agreed with, I said his guy is better than Montana. | ||
| We screamed at each other for three hours and it was too late for me to check in the other hotel. | ||
| So I had to stay in this shithole because he fucking had me on the phone arguing. | ||
| And I was arguing saying Brady because I said Brady was the best before he got the rings that he got. | ||
| But that's the funny thing about, you know, Bill is that he's, and he's so, such a nice kid, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's the best. | |
| He's the best and he's so nice, but he'll get into, we used to get into sports arguments that didn't make sense, but it was like camaraderie. | ||
| Yeah, there's something fun about that. | ||
| That's why they love those sports talk shows, where people get together and talk about sports. | ||
| They love it. | ||
| People love that. | ||
| MMA guys love it to death. | ||
| I mean, there's so many fucking MMA shows where guys just get together and talk about fights. | ||
| You know, I wasn't a UFC guy for years. | ||
| And then now, dude, the last four or five years, I have fight night at the house. | ||
| I can talk about it, you know, probably compared to you, I'm like a decent open mic level to talk about a UFC. But now I'm starting to like, you know who I like? | ||
| I love Bobby Knuckles. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and I thought that second fight he had with Adesanya was close. | ||
| It was very close. | ||
| I thought it was really close. | ||
| I love that kid. | ||
| I think there's something about him that's a real... | ||
| I don't know, it's like just watching him and his dad interact and there's just something about him. | ||
| And I love what he said. | ||
| He's like, man, I thought I did, you know, but I guess in that you got to beat the champ, you got to really beat him, right? | ||
| Well, you know... | ||
| That fight, I would have to go over and watch and score it, right? | ||
| You know, I'd have to go over and sit there and go over each individual round and score it, but I don't think you have to... | ||
| I mean, you have to win a fight, right? | ||
| I think when someone goes in there, yeah, you have to beat the champ to win the title, but if you win the fight, you win the fight. | ||
| So the problem with MMA, and I've said this ad nauseum, so I'll just quickly cover it, that scoring system sucks. | ||
| The scoring system sucks because it's a boxing system that they adopted. | ||
| They adopted a 10-point must system. | ||
| So a 10-point must system is like, say if you and Jamie box and you land more shots, you would win 10-9. | ||
| But if you dropped them, you'd win 10-8, right? | ||
| A 10-8 round is a round where someone gets dropped. | ||
| So it's pretty clear, you know, and there's subjective elements to it, and there's bad judging in boxing for sure. | ||
| But it's not a bad system for judging. | ||
| For MMA, it's like, it's a very blunt instrument to cover something that's a very comprehensive sport. | ||
| There's so many elements to fighting. | ||
| I think fighting should be like the way MMA is. | ||
| When I say fighting, I mean MMA. It shouldn't be like a 10 system. | ||
| It should be like each thing that happens is worth a quality. | ||
| Like this is worth 20 points. | ||
| That's worth 30 points. | ||
| So rounds should be 115 to like 106. Yeah. | ||
| Because sometimes guys will win a 10-9 round, and who fucking knows who won? | ||
| It's so close. | ||
| And other times, a guy will dominate a round, and he'll win 10-9. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| Yeah, did you think that that fight was as close? | ||
| It's a very close fight. | ||
| Whitaker's a bad guy. | ||
| Bad motherfucker. | ||
| And he came back after getting knocked out in the second round of the first fight. | ||
| Almost got finished at the end of the first round, in the first fight. | ||
| Yes, I remember. | ||
| And then Adesanya stops him in the second round, and then comes back, has this fucking great run, beats a lot of quality guys, and then fights for the title a second time to try to win his title back, and it got down to the wire. | ||
| It was very close. | ||
| Yeah, it was a great fight to watch. | ||
| And the other best fight I've seen was that Ortega versus the recent Ortega. | ||
| Who did he fight where he just got bloodied up, but both of them were beating the shit out of each other. | ||
| They were the two team leaders on the, what is it, contender? | ||
| Who was Ortega's last fight? | ||
| I know who you're talking about. | ||
| I'm stuck. | ||
| Yeah, who the hell was it? | ||
| Volkanovski beat the shit out of him, though. | ||
| That wasn't it. | ||
| What was Sartega's last fight? | ||
| It was Volkanovski? | ||
|
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|
Yeah, he lost to Max, then he beat Chan Sung Young, and then lost to Volkanovski. | |
| That's right. | ||
| So it must have been the Volkanovski fight, but that was a fight where Volkanovski... | ||
| Oh, I know what you're talking about because he almost caught him a couple times in guillotines. | ||
| He caught him in a triangle and he caught him in a darts joke. | ||
| Yeah, I think he was getting beat real bad and then he started to... | ||
| He caught him in a guillotine, yeah. | ||
| He caught him in a mounted guillotine and almost had him. | ||
| And then he caught him in a triangle and almost had him. | ||
| Yeah, that's the fight. | ||
| That was a brutal, brutal fight. | ||
| And he was beat, I mean, but he was still going with his face battered like that and I was just like, dude... | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| So it looked like he almost lost like between the fourth and fifth rounds It looks like it was over like they're gonna stop the fight and then he came back in the fifth round and fought great It's like that guy's got incredible incredible heart that guy's heart was on and that's what I miss with boxing man boxing I used to love boxing and it's like you can't UFC is giving me something every two weeks I got every every week I watched I watched the ones at the apex I watched in Vegas and and boxing is like you gotta wait a fucking year for Well, for big fights, for big fights, you gotta wait. | ||
| But it's just, the UFC's just, the way they do it is just, they're way more organized, they're way more efficient, it's just a better system. | ||
| The way they put together fights, I mean, they're constantly showing you fights. | ||
| If you have ESPN +, I mean, it's fucking incredible. | ||
| There's always fights on. | ||
| We have fight night all the time. | ||
| We're off or whatever and just come to my house. | ||
| Neighbors come to our house. | ||
| Giannis lives six houses down from me on the same side of the street. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
|
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|
Oh, yeah. | |
| His dog and my dog are best friends for years. | ||
| We go in the backyard and we yell. | ||
| We see if we could hear each other. | ||
| Oh, that's funny. | ||
| We live in northern Westchester up in the woods. | ||
| Horse country, dude. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| Horse farms and all that shit. | ||
| A lot of deer out there, right? | ||
| You gotta be careful driving at night. | ||
| Two of them told him I got my car. | ||
| It had to be redone twice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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|
Damn. | |
| That's a sad thing, man. | ||
| This one was just waiting and they just dart out real quick. | ||
| It's kind of weird. | ||
| Yeah, it is weird. | ||
| They don't know what to do with headlights. | ||
| Yeah, because they break. | ||
| It's like they break for second, you know, like to steal second. | ||
| They just break one way and whichever way they go, you're going to get hit. | ||
| They don't know what it is. | ||
| They see a headlight. | ||
| They're not evolved for headlights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It freaks animals out. | ||
| It's like it makes them panic. | ||
| It's like the expression, deer in the headlights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you hit one out here ever? | ||
| No, I haven't hit one yet, luckily. | ||
| Knock on wood. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, no, it's dangerous up there. | ||
| You see all of them, but in all the years we've been up there, which is nine now, two bucks just saw. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| They know. | ||
| They're at night. | ||
| They know, man. | ||
| If you go out at night, I bet they're all over the place. | ||
| And when it's like a real quiet snowstorm. | ||
| And nothing's out. | ||
| I saw one just standing there. | ||
| Beautiful, man. | ||
| There was a big boy standing there, and he was in the middle of the street, quiet snow. | ||
| And I just watched him, man. | ||
| And I was like, oh, my God. | ||
| That's why I can't... | ||
| I got nothing against hunting, man. | ||
| But when I hear something like moaning and shit, when I was in eighth grade, I shot a fucking Blue Jay with a pellet gun at like 13. And the thing went down, and I stared at it. | ||
| I cried. | ||
| And I was like, fuck this thing. | ||
| I'm not built for this shit. | ||
| I'm not built for this shit, dude. | ||
| I can't do it, man. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I've killed a lot of deer. | ||
| I've killed this one, too. | ||
| I shot that one in Iowa. | ||
| Shout out to John Dudley. | ||
| In Iowa? | ||
| I shot that one at my friend John Dudley's ranch. | ||
| Yeah, Iowa's a great place for deer. | ||
| It's a crazy place for deer. | ||
| My friend John has a 600-acre property that's just set up for bow hunting. | ||
| My friend John is one of the best bow hunters in the world. | ||
| He's actually an archery coach. | ||
| He was a former archery competitor. | ||
| He's a guy who taught me how to shoot a bow. | ||
| Shit! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, he's got this great spot. | ||
| I've hunted deer on his place. | ||
| I've hunted deer a bunch of times. | ||
| I think deer are beautiful, and it's sort of a contradiction, but the thing is, like, you have to control their numbers. | ||
| There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. | ||
| So either you're gonna bring in mountain lions and wolves, or you're gonna hunt them. | ||
| Because if you don't, they're gonna get hit by cars, they're gonna be everywhere, and they're gonna get diseases, they're gonna spread diseases. | ||
| They're a prey animal, and they don't... | ||
| We've set up this fucked up environment. | ||
| Like, Iowa's a good example. | ||
| There's no wolves in Iowa, right? | ||
| So what do these animals do? | ||
| They just fucking breed. | ||
| And so if you don't hunt them, and they're delicious, and you have to hunt them. | ||
| They have to control their population. | ||
| And that money goes to wildlife resource protection. | ||
| It goes to habitat and conservation. | ||
| It's like there's a lot of value in the hunting them. | ||
| But I understand that people wouldn't want to watch them die and suffer, but that's why you get accurate. | ||
| You have to practice. | ||
| Do you use guns ever, or is it only bows? | ||
| I've used guns, yeah. | ||
| I shot a pig last year with a gun. | ||
| I shot a wild boar with a gun in California. | ||
| It's a lot more effective. | ||
| It's easier, but it's not as exciting. | ||
| It's not as difficult to do, because you could shoot a deer with a rifle from 200, 300 yards away. | ||
| Right. | ||
| With a bow, you don't have a chance. | ||
| You have to get- How close? | ||
| Well, you really want to be inside a 50. That's really what you want. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 50 yards is what you really want. | ||
| I mean, you could make a bomb. | ||
| You could shoot a deer at 75 yards. | ||
| An elk? | ||
| I'll shoot an elk at 75 yards. | ||
| I've shot elk at 75 yards with a bow. | ||
| But it's like, you can't, with a rifle, that's a chip shot. | ||
| Now, are you in a tree stand? | ||
| No. | ||
| With the bow? | ||
| With deer? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I shot that deer from a tree stand. | ||
| But that's at John's place. | ||
| Most of the time, like my friend John has it down. | ||
| I mean, he rides in on electric bikes so you don't leave scent on the ground. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Deer hunting in Iowa is like a religion, man. | ||
| They don't fuck around, because some of the biggest deer in the world live there. | ||
| People move to Iowa specifically so that they can hunt there. | ||
| Because Iowa has residence tags that you can get that are different. | ||
| If you're an outsider in Iowa and you want to draw a tag, it's very hard to get a deer tag. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| You've got to put in every year, but if you live there, you get an allotment. | ||
| It's easier, especially if you own property. | ||
| John owns property, so he has multiple deer at his place. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you said he's got 600 acres? | ||
| Yeah, he's got an incredible place. | ||
| And it's only bow and arrow. | ||
| It's the only way he hunts. | ||
| He doesn't let anybody use a rifle in his place. | ||
| Oh, but it's not illegal. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| It's all 100% legal. | ||
| Yeah, it's all legal. | ||
| He just wants it to be that way? | ||
| Yeah, no, he doesn't... | ||
| He's an archer. | ||
| He doesn't use... | ||
| I mean, he has a rifle, but he doesn't use it. | ||
| See, that's a motherfucker who could just go and survive. | ||
| Like, if he was, like, dropped in the middle of a forest somewhere and a bow, he's fucking living. | ||
| Oh, as long as he has enough arrows. | ||
| It's not easy to make an arrow. | ||
| The arrows that we use today, my arrows are all carbon fiber, and then there's brass weights in them, in the front to make a higher FOC, which is like you want a higher weight in the front of the arrow, and then you have a broadhead, and you have veins in the end, the feathers, but they're actually made out of plastic, and these veins are steering the broadhead, making sure it goes straight, making sure the arrow goes straight. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Yeah, there's a long, deep learning curve to archery. | ||
| And then bow hunting, it's like archery at the highest level because you're trying to sneak up on a target that has evolved for a million years to get away from mountain lions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Heavy duty stuff. | ||
| That is real heavy duty stuff. | ||
| And he's a sniper with it? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| We were in Hawaii. | ||
| This is how good this motherfucker is. | ||
| We were in Hawaii. | ||
| We're hunting Axis deer. | ||
| And Axis deer are the hardest deer to hunt because they evolved to get away from tigers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they are the fastest fucking things you've ever seen in your life. | ||
| And they're gone. | ||
| Like you can't believe how fast they move. | ||
| It's bizarre how fast they move. | ||
| So we're in a truck and we're headed towards this hunting spot. | ||
| And John goes, stop the truck! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop, stop, stop, stop! | |
| And he sees a bedded deer that's 60 yards away. | ||
| And I go, you gonna shoot it from the truck? | ||
| He goes, fuck yeah. | ||
| And so he leans his body out. | ||
| John's huge. | ||
| He's like six foot six. | ||
| He's a really tall guy, and he's got these long fucking giraffe arms. | ||
| He leans out of the truck with his bow and shoots a perfect 60-yard shot into the heart of this deer that's bedded 60 yards off the side of the road. | ||
| And you watch the arrow just right behind the shoulder, right into the heart. | ||
| The deer's dead almost instantly. | ||
| And that's his kill shot. | ||
| Oh yeah, perfect shot. | ||
| Perfect shot from a truck. | ||
| So when you're shooting, say if you're shooting something, if you're a target archer, you're in the Olympics or something like that, your stance is very important. | ||
| You have to stand with your toes, have to be in line with where the arrow's gonna be, you draw back, you anchor, everything has to be perfect, and then you release the arrow. | ||
| You want all your mechanics to line up. | ||
| This motherfucker's out a truck. | ||
| It's impossible to do that and still hits a perfect 60-yard shot. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was incredible. | |
| That's fucking wild, man. | ||
| That's how good he is. | ||
| But he's been doing it his whole life. | ||
| You know, he's a master. | ||
| And he taught you. | ||
| Yeah, he taught me. | ||
| And my friend Cam Haynes, he taught me too. | ||
| Both those guys taught me. | ||
| But there's a long learning curve to archery. | ||
| But for me, archery, even if I never hunt it again, I will never stop doing archery. | ||
| But just shooting targets is like, when you're thinking, when you've got that pin settled on that target, and you're trying to keep it steady, and you're just going through your shot process, and pulling through the shot, and the arrow breaks, and you watch that arrow right into the bullseye, it's one of the most satisfying feelings in life. | ||
| I have a hard time going back and getting it off right. | ||
| Just getting it fucking off. | ||
| I wouldn't leave the street. | ||
| It's just practice. | ||
| It's just practice. | ||
| It's like stand-up. | ||
| Think about the first time you ever did stand-up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're like, you know, you feel, you hear your own voice. | |
| You hear your own voice in the microphone. | ||
| It sounds goofy. | ||
| You hear a couple people laughing. | ||
| You're like, is that a sympathy laugh? | ||
| Is that a real laugh? | ||
| I know. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you remember the first joke you ever told? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha! | |
| Ha! | ||
| First joke I ever told. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was bad, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Of course it was bad. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I think the first time I did an open mic in Woodstock, New York. | ||
| I did an open mic in Woodstock, New York at a bar called Joyous Lake. | ||
| And it's such a famous place that like the Stones and all these bands would play there practicing to do Woodstock. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And they did a Tuesday night open mic, but it wasn't just comedy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| So a fucking poet could go up there, like people reading poems, and I went up there with three friends, nothing written. | ||
| So I thought that I could just... | ||
| My dream was to do... | ||
| I thought I could just go up and do... | ||
| So I was just saying... | ||
| I was like, what do you mean? | ||
| The cigarette pack says it may cause cancer. | ||
| It does cause... | ||
| I didn't have jokes. | ||
| I didn't have jokes, and I felt so bad. | ||
| So the next day I went to the booker. | ||
| I go, put me here next fucking Tuesday. | ||
| I said, put me here. | ||
| This is true. | ||
| Put me here next Tuesday. | ||
| And I wrote in my bedroom. | ||
| I wrote six, seven minutes. | ||
| And I brought a couple of friends up there with me. | ||
| And I did really good. | ||
| And one local came up to me afterwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He goes, way better than last week. | |
| I know you fucking dummy, it was my first time, but that was in Woodstock, New York. | ||
| Do you remember the first place you did? | ||
| Yeah, I did Stitch's open mic night in Boston. | ||
| And my first joke was, here's my impression of a hot girl getting pulled over by a cop. | ||
| Do you realize how fast you were going? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you like my tits? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| Here's a warning. | ||
| That was my first joke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was so terrible. | |
| And you're probably like, oh, it kind of connected with some people. | ||
| I was like, I got it. | ||
| Whatever it is, I got it. | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| 1988. August 27th, 1988. Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was in Boston. | ||
| In Boston? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So you never did stand-up in Newark? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I moved out of Newark when I was seven years old. | ||
| That's when I moved to California. | ||
| I lived in California until I was 11, Florida until I was 13, 11 to 13 in Florida, 13 to 24 in Boston, and then I moved to New York. | ||
| Yeah, do you remember the weirdest place you ever did stand-up? | ||
| Like the weirdest place? | ||
| Yeah, I did a Jack and Jill strip club in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. | ||
| And it was a Jack and Jill strip club is where a guy goes on and dances and then a girl goes on and dances. | ||
| And it's for couples. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, it didn't work out. | ||
| It was like a concept. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was the concept they were trying out in the 80s, I guess. | |
| It was terrible. | ||
| But it was also the kind of guy and girl that, first of all, there was no crowd there. | ||
| There was like maybe six people in the whole place. | ||
| And there's a guy named Brian Deary. | ||
| And Brian Deary was like a guy who would book road gigs. | ||
| He was the guy who started out doing comedy and then he became like a booker. | ||
| Real nice guy. | ||
| And he would always book me for these gigs. | ||
| And this was like a brand new gig that he had. | ||
| Like, you know, he would call up a place, hey, do you want to do a comedy night? | ||
| And they said, well, you know, we actually have a strip club and we want to get a host for a strip club. | ||
| So he says to me, do you want to host a strip club? | ||
| I'm like, well, how much money does it pay? | ||
| Yeah, I'll do it, sure. | ||
| It was like $150, right? | ||
| So I drive to Woonsocket, Rhode Island for $150 to MC. So I'm not just the comic. | ||
| I'm also bringing up the strippers. | ||
| So I would do a little comedy. | ||
| And when I say I bombed, it wasn't that I bombed. | ||
| Because I think when you bomb, there's some sound. | ||
| This was science. | ||
| I mean, I would tell my jokes to emptiness, and I don't even know if the people that were in the audience spoke English, because it's a very Portuguese community out there, so there's a lot of people who probably didn't even speak English. | ||
| This lady goes on. | ||
| The lady and the guy both looked like they were the poster people for bad parenting and alcohol abuse. | ||
| And this guy had... | ||
| I remember he had bad tattoos that he had covered up with bandanas. | ||
| So he put bandanas on his arm. | ||
| And you could see the shitty tattoo poking out under the bandana. | ||
| And the girl just looked sad. | ||
| I remember she had a snake on her butt. | ||
| A snake tattoo on the cheek of her butt. | ||
| It was a terrible snake like a five-year-old drew it. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| It's so funny because it was so awful that you remember all of that shit. | ||
| Do you remember the details? | ||
| I remember my first manager was Tony Camacho. | ||
| Oh yeah, I know Tony. | ||
| Is he still around? | ||
| I think he's like retired in Vegas or something. | ||
| But he goes, you want to do this restaurant in Staten Island for $150? | ||
| I was psyched. | ||
| It was a Friday. | ||
| I'm like, I'm working on a Friday. | ||
| I go there. | ||
| I shit you nacho. | ||
| The owner goes, look man, I didn't want to do this. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| He goes, we don't have a mic. | ||
| He goes, there's a radio shack down the block. | ||
| You guys want to buy a mic? | ||
| I'm not paying for it. | ||
| I mean, I just got there. | ||
| So he doesn't want to do it. | ||
| He goes, I thought we should just get local guys to bring their family and friends. | ||
| That's what I would have done. | ||
| But Tony brought you guys. | ||
| He goes, TV's on. | ||
| TV's are on, dude. | ||
| People are eating. | ||
| They didn't even know there was a show. | ||
| So it's like I was standing in the middle of a diner, like a restaurant. | ||
| I saw this one guy and his dad. | ||
| They were just trying to enjoy chicken parm and looking at the TV. And I'm like, yeah, so my grandmother! | ||
| And they were just like, dude, I guess we're doing this. | ||
| I mean, it was fucking brutal. | ||
| And another weird one I did, somebody gave me an address to do a show. | ||
| It was a private home. | ||
| And they were having a party and they were watching a football game. | ||
| And there was hors d'oeuvres and I was in somebody's home. | ||
| And she goes, we're ready for the show now. | ||
| And I go, and all these adults sat on the couch in Indian style in the living room. | ||
| And I just stood in front of a TV with an empty Corona bottle as a mic. | ||
| But you want to know what? | ||
| I fucking killed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I killed on that one. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know those gigs where you want to leave? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know who Don Gavin is? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Don Gavin's a fucking master. | ||
| He's a legend. | ||
| He's one of the most underrated comedians in all of history. | ||
| He's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's a joke about him where he showed up to a, I don't know who told me, somebody told me that he showed up to an outdoor event. | ||
| And he goes, yeah, I'm here to perform. | ||
| Where am I performing? | ||
| And the lady running it goes, you see that picnic table over there? | ||
| He goes, that's where you're going to be. | ||
| He goes, alright, cool, man. | ||
| I'm just going to go to my car and get my props. | ||
| And he left. | ||
| That sounds like Don Gavin. | ||
| He's like, alright, we'll get my props and left. | ||
| One of the things about Boston was there was a bunch of bookers, and they would book you in these little weird road gigs all around Boston. | ||
| And sometimes they would be like that Brian Deary gig where they would just try it the first time. | ||
| And I was nobody, so I got those gigs. | ||
| I got the gigs where they weren't proven gigs. | ||
| They would just send me out. | ||
| And so Mike Clark, who's a dear friend, who's Lenny Clark's brother, Mike Clark, who's the best. | ||
| He runs Giggles in Saugus, Massachusetts. | ||
| He managed guys and stuff. | ||
| He's fucking great. | ||
| And he had a gig at a fish restaurant. | ||
| It was a seafood restaurant down the Cape. | ||
| And so I drive all the way down there, do this gig. | ||
| It's just me. | ||
| It's a one-person show, right? | ||
| And I get there, and they explain to me that you're going to go on stage because this is a huge restaurant. | ||
| And there was a place where they had a waiting room where people were waiting to be seated. | ||
| I mean, it was like 150 people waiting to be seated, and the rest of the restaurant was huge. | ||
| So in this place, they had drinks, and they'd sit and wait for their table to be ready. | ||
| So I'd be on stage, and what I didn't realize until I was on stage was that the PA system, where they would announce whether or not your table was ready, was the same sound system as the comedy system. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So I'm in the middle of saying, so I say to my girlfriend, Johnson, party of four, your table is ready. | ||
| Johnson, party of four. | ||
| And I'm like, oh no. | ||
| So you'd be in the middle of a premise, and it would just completely cut off. | ||
| But fortunately, the people thought it was funny that that was happening. | ||
| Yeah, you could use it. | ||
| I was good enough at that point. | ||
| I'd been doing comedy for like two and a half, three years, and it was good enough that I could make light of it. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck have I signed up for? | ||
| And the people were howling. | ||
| They thought it was funny. | ||
| But it was like, I would try to get through the punchlines quick because I was worried that the fucking PA system would kick in. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| And then like one time the PA system kicked in. | ||
| I'm like, hold that thought. | ||
| And they were laughing. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And then it stopped. | ||
| But I told Mike, he's like, what the fuck? | ||
| But you had to, like you said, you were at the level where you were able to use it to your advantage. | ||
| Also, I was in a good mood. | ||
| Back then, it was like, you know, I wasn't that skilled. | ||
| So it's like, you know, you're clunky still. | ||
| And so you have to catch yourself on a good day. | ||
| You can handle almost anything. | ||
| But on a shit day, like if I had just gotten in a fight with my girlfriend or something like that, and then I got there and I was angry or depressed or whatever, then it's not good. | ||
| But that day I was smiling already when I got there, and then I was like, oh, it seems like a good crowd. | ||
| And I got on stage and people were pretty friendly. | ||
| It was like, I was having fun. | ||
| Yeah, I love that when that happens. | ||
| You kind of take a situation that's not great, but you're in the mood, so you're like, let's go have a good time with this. | ||
| Yeah, I had resigned myself to the fact that it was a hell gig, and also resigned myself to the fact that this was probably the last time they were ever going to have a gig there, because Mike's gigs were always good. | ||
| So he's like, eh, pal, I don't know about this one, you know, I just started out, you want to do it? | ||
| I'm like, I'll do it. | ||
| Like, I would do anything. | ||
| Like, I would call them up, what do you got for me? | ||
| That was the way it worked. | ||
| There was several booking agents that you could call up, and you'd say, what do you got for me? | ||
| And you'd break out a calendar and write some shit down on the calendar, and then they would give you directions over the phone. | ||
| And you would write it down on a legal pad. | ||
| Like I had a yellow legal pad. | ||
| This was before MapQuest. | ||
| Oh yeah, way before MapQuest. | ||
| Everything was written down. | ||
| I had a fucking map. | ||
| And everything was written down on a piece of paper. | ||
| And I remember I used to love that. | ||
| Because I used to feel almost like I was a hitman or something. | ||
| Like I got a job. | ||
| Like this is my job and this is where I'm going. | ||
| It was all written down. | ||
| And then I would take those pieces of paper. | ||
| I had like a folder of all the different places. | ||
| I had the directions already written out. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wish I still had that. | ||
| I wish I still had that. | ||
| Those are the things that mold us. | ||
| There's this country club in Westchester called Sleepy Hollow, and it's one of the nicest golf courses in America. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| You go there and you're like, this is fucking incredible. | ||
| You look at the greens and the fairway. | ||
| You think you could be in Scotland, right? | ||
| And they do something called... | ||
| It's in Sleepy Hollow, New York. | ||
| They do something called the Headless Horseman Award where all these dudes go out on the golf course. | ||
| They come back in. | ||
| They shower. | ||
| They smoke cigars. | ||
| They eat. | ||
| There's ice sculptures. | ||
| And it's this big outdoor event. | ||
| And they bring a comedian in to go and do it. | ||
| And they give him like a couple thousand dollars. | ||
| So a buddy goes, hey, I can't do it this year. | ||
| Do you want to do it? | ||
| He goes, it's all dudes. | ||
| It's all like, you know, one percenters. | ||
| They're all millionaire billionaires. | ||
| And he goes, you know, he goes, they kind of like when you just roast or whatever. | ||
| So the guy looks at my thing and he goes, do you think this would be something? | ||
| I say your stuff, you seem like a regular comic. | ||
| Like, are you sure you want to? | ||
| And I'm like, you know, I was young. | ||
| I was like, two grand. | ||
| I was like, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. | ||
| Fuck, two grand. | ||
| So he goes, bring a friend. | ||
| So I bring a buddy. | ||
| I bring a Jason Lund. | ||
| And I got him a thousand. | ||
| So he goes up and he's fucking murdering. | ||
| He's murdering. | ||
| He's about to... | ||
| I gotta close the thing. | ||
| It's all white chairs. | ||
| It's like a fucking movie. | ||
| It's all white chairs. | ||
| And I said, I said, are you gonna talk about race? | ||
| I was just like, I'm gonna talk about... | ||
| But he's going up there. | ||
| He's throwing everything he's got. | ||
| And they're going, one more joke! | ||
| Then he does another joke. | ||
| He's killing it. | ||
| One more joke! | ||
| I mean, they didn't want to... | ||
| I get on stage, and I remember they go, roast the guy. | ||
| They go, here's one thing. | ||
| His wife has got, like, big fake tits and all this and stuff. | ||
| So just her name is Lindsay, all this stuff, right? | ||
| So I go on stage. | ||
| They loved him. | ||
| I immediately said something about him. | ||
| I was like, if you knew it was his checking account, he wouldn't be fucking allowed. | ||
| And they didn't even like that I was joking about him because they loved him so much. | ||
| Dude, when I tell you this fucking plane, the nose went down. | ||
| Joe, when I tell you if it was a dream of the worst. | ||
| It was the opposite of the... | ||
| It was going into a mountain. | ||
| So I start... | ||
| I remember I was making fun of Chris Christie at the time. | ||
| And I'm shitting on Chris Christie. | ||
| My buddy said he was in the back while I'm shitting on Chris Christie. | ||
| They go, dude, they just threw him a $3,000 a plate dinner in South Carolina last week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So now I go, now I'm in panic. | ||
| You know when you're in panic mode? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're just, all the bullets, everything. | ||
| I'm pulling the gun out of my fucking, out of my ankle. | ||
| Everything I got, right? | ||
| So I go, alright, roast him, roast him. | ||
| And I remember wife's name. | ||
| So I go, hey man, so I go, this guy's got a lot of money. | ||
| He's got his, you know, hands on a lot of paper and plastic. | ||
| And by plastic, I mean his wife Lindsay's tits. | ||
| And everyone goes, whoa, whoa, whoa! | ||
| And I'm, and like the grandfather was there. | ||
| And I'm, and in my mind, I'm going, they told me, dude, everything I did. | ||
| Joe, everything I fucking did. | ||
| I go, who's the golfer that hits it in the woods and acts like... | ||
| I mean, I tried everything. | ||
| It was so fucking bad that one of the old men go, all right. | ||
| Like, alright. | ||
| And I'm going, no, no. | ||
| And I said goodnight. | ||
| Thank God I had the two grand in my back pocket. | ||
| I walked out the door, into the parking lot. | ||
| I texted Jason. | ||
| I go, dude, I'm in the car. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And we're just driving back in silence. | ||
| And out of nowhere, he just goes, Paul, you're a great comic. | ||
| I was fucking mortified, dude. | ||
| It was the worst. | ||
| How many years have you been doing it? | ||
| This was probably... | ||
| I've been doing it. | ||
| I was a pro, dude. | ||
| So did you go on stage nervous? | ||
| Were you nervous about following him because he was killing? | ||
| Yeah, he was killing. | ||
| They were going, one more joke, one more joke. | ||
| And he said some things I was going to maybe use. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| He did his thing. | ||
| And then I just got up there and everything went wrong. | ||
| And it was like if a movie, if a director was going, guys, this is going to be really bad for him. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| And that's one that, you know, you remember those, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean, that one stuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That one fucking stuck, man. | ||
| Those are good, though. | ||
| They're important for you because then you realize that that can happen. | ||
| You go, what did I do wrong? | ||
| Why was I boring? | ||
| Why was I unentertaining? | ||
| How did I fuck that up? | ||
| Isn't that horrible, though? | ||
| You just question, what could I have done? | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| It's like, what could I have done? | ||
| And I think sometimes, honestly, I think sometimes... | ||
| You know, sometimes there are things you could do, and other times it's just, sometimes I just, you know, what can you do? | ||
| With what you had at the moment, that's the problem. | ||
| Like, if you went up there now today, you could probably just go right into some material, nice to be here, thank you very much, and you'd be more smooth and composed, and they would just follow along with you and you'd probably get them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, those early days. | ||
| Or now today I could be like, today I could be like, and I mean I was still, I was actually pretty more advanced though. | ||
| I think what it was was, I think when I made the turn to roast and say that about his wife, and I don't know if her, I mean, that's what really turned. | ||
| And then I'm making fun of a guy that they're raising money for. | ||
| So it just was, you know, I mean, the only thing I didn't do was kick an old man. | ||
| That was really fucked up, man. | ||
| Well, you can't make fun of Chris Christie. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| I forgot what it was. | ||
| I just said something about his... | ||
| It was at the time where he was doing those baseball games with his... | ||
| His gunt? | ||
| Whatever it was. | ||
| It looked like he had four balls. | ||
| But I don't even know if it was even about his appearance. | ||
| I think it was just something about him balancing... | ||
| I forgot what the joke was, but I know that it was just... | ||
| Dude, that was one I'll never forget, man. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| But it's like it's an inexact science, and you have to learn it. | ||
| You have to learn what it is to be entertaining. | ||
| You have to learn what it is to be a good comic. | ||
| And then sometimes you just don't have the fucking material. | ||
| You have the desire, but your material's just not there yet. | ||
| Yeah, like for certain outdoor things, there are things that, you know, but I learned from it. | ||
| Like you said, if I did it now, it'd be different, because I learned. | ||
| But there's things that suck while they're happening that are awesome later. | ||
| Like this. | ||
| Like this story's great. | ||
| It sucked while it was happening, but you have this great story now forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when we're old and retired and not doing stand-up anymore, and people say, that's something that you'll tell your, hey, do you remember a bad night? | ||
| Yeah, that's a fucking night that I remember that was bad. | ||
| They're important for comics to hear, too, because a lot of comics have those and they think, oh my god, it's over. | ||
| I'm never going to make it. | ||
| I'm never going to get out of this. | ||
| This is me now. | ||
| I suck. | ||
| I need to get a job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you realize, like, listen, these are obstacles. | ||
| These obstacles are important. | ||
| They teach. | ||
| And some of my best sets that I've ever had and my best growing moments are after I bombed. | ||
| Like, I bombed, and then I had this, like, revelation, like, oh my god, I gotta get my shit together. | ||
| Like, either I'm slacking off, or I'm not focused enough, or whatever the fuck it is, I can't have that again. | ||
| And so, you know. | ||
| Yeah, and you remember, like, the first heckler that fucked with you. | ||
| The first heckler that scared you. | ||
| Because you're like, I've never had this interference, but then now the next time, you're like, oh, wait, now I know what to say to the next guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the next time somebody yells something. | ||
| But remember how scary that is? | ||
| Yeah, it's a brutal learning process. | ||
| Stand-up comedy is one of the most brutal learning processes. | ||
| I always say that bombing on stage is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. | ||
| But the difference is, there's probably somebody out there that wants to suck a thousand dicks in front of his mom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, look at this mom, you made me do this. | |
| 99! | ||
| You know, but there's no one out there that wants to bomb. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| But there are some comics that when it's going bad, they go, okay... | ||
| I remember one time I saw Jim Norton at the cellar, and he just goes, all right, you people need to be disciplined. | ||
| And he just went hard. | ||
| It was just like, if this is the road we're going. | ||
| I've done that sometimes. | ||
| If I'm at the stand or the cellar or something like that, and I just know the crowd is being like, you clearly know it's them. | ||
| I'm going to give them this one because they're going to hate this one too. | ||
| There's those shows. | ||
| Norton puts a lot of fucking material up online. | ||
| He's always putting up those little clips on Instagram and stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Seems like he's always at the cellar working. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Does he do the road? | ||
| Is he doing the road these days? | ||
| Yeah, I think he does. | ||
| Yeah, he does the road. | ||
| He's great, man. | ||
| He's a funny motherfucker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Such a unique little character. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's such an unusual human, you know? | ||
| How many people do you know like Jim Norton? | ||
| Dude, the Chip Chipperson shit is the funniest fucking... | ||
| The Chip Chipperson shit is just so unbelievably funny. | ||
| Yeah, it's such a weird thing he does. | ||
| He does that podcast with Chip, you know? | ||
| He puts the wig on, the glasses. | ||
| What about Doug Bell? | ||
| What's Doug Bell? | ||
| I don't know that one. | ||
| Doug Bell is a character about a comic in the 90s who thinks he's like a legend, but he's not. | ||
| And he's got like blonde hair. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And he'll talk low, and then he'll be like, and then he'll look at the producer, yeah, take that out because I don't need, you know, but like he's like nowhere. | ||
| Yeah, take that out. | ||
| Oh my God, it's so fucking funny, dude. | ||
| He's the guy I tried to talk into doing podcasts a long time ago, but he's got that relationship with Sirius, you know, because he was on Opie and Anthony, and then he went from Opie and Anthony to Jim and Sam, you know, it's like, they're great on that show, but it's just like, man, your shit should be everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I think it is... | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Oh, it's Doug Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Doug Bell. | |
| This is his character. | ||
| Let me see some of it. | ||
| That's a cameo, so it's going to be... | ||
| Let's see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, cameo world. | |
| It's Doug Bell. | ||
| Better known as Doug Ring My Bell. | ||
| Doug Bell... | ||
| This cameo thing is crazy. | ||
| You're off the scene for seven years and you come back and everything is just crazy. | ||
| But I'm the guy, I got a lot of really funny show business stories. | ||
| So if you got like a birthday, I'll give you like, I got a million hilarious stories like for an anniversary or like if you had a birthday or an anniversary or something. | ||
| I got stories of it. | ||
| I was on stage one night and I'm doing my show and I used to have this joke right at the end where I'd go like, no, don't ever get married! | ||
| And I'd ring the bell and Chris Rock comes in and he goes on and he goes, hey Bell! | ||
| And I look, what? | ||
| I'll be with you in a second. | ||
| I'm taping this. | ||
| It's for Cameo. | ||
| I need the money. | ||
| So, you know, like that. | ||
| I had so many. | ||
| So just, if you want a cameo, like a crazy story like that, whatever, just, you know, it's good to see you again. | ||
| I'm back, and I'm better than ever. | ||
| What the fuck is wrong with him? | ||
| There's real people like that out there. | ||
| Yeah, that's what's fucked. | ||
| He's tapping into those guys that we know that were kind of headliners in the 80s and then they vanished. | ||
| They'll stop by and try to do a guest set somewhere and no one wants them to go on. | ||
| Yeah, that's fear, man. | ||
| I just think about those guys that dedicated 30-something years. | ||
| Did they really, though? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| No, that's actually a good question. | ||
| Yeah, that's what really has happened. | ||
| How much effort did they actually put forth? | ||
| Yeah, because it's like, yeah, what did you do? | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| Did you do enough? | ||
| Because, yeah, like, I'm sure you're the same way. | ||
| I was just like, I was just never, like, I always just was like, had to work and had to get the goals in short term, long term, and whatever you fell short, you work harder to get. | ||
| But what's brilliant about that character is that guy who thinks everything he does is amazing and great in that he's a legend. | ||
| That is exactly what makes a guy like that. | ||
| That's what makes you never get past that, is that attitude that you are. | ||
| Mental traps. | ||
| People set themselves up. | ||
| They give themselves these little fucking safety nets where they're always going to be okay. | ||
| They never really put themselves out there. | ||
| Yeah, I remember one time I saw an older comedian go up to the young and go, what are you going to do tonight? | ||
| He said to the guy going, what are you going to do? | ||
| Like, what's your material? | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| And the guy was like, well, I was thinking about talking about this. | ||
| He goes, no, no, no. | ||
| And it's like, the guy was nowhere. | ||
| It's like, what the fuck are you listening to that guy for? | ||
| The guy was nowhere. | ||
| No, here's what you do. | ||
| And it was like, it was just, it was for him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was for him to, it was for him to feel like he was somebody that, you know, should be heard and should be like listened to and respected. | ||
| But, but he wasn't. | ||
| Yeah, like he's an expert. | ||
| Like he's an expert, but he wasn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, those are the type of people that start comedy classes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are the weirdest ones. | ||
| Like, I don't know any legit comic that teaches a comedy class. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure they're out there. | ||
| Maybe I don't know about them. | ||
| I'm not disparaging every... | ||
| I mean, because it's... | ||
| It's a weird art form in that no one teaches you how to do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, someone will teach you how to play guitar. | ||
| There's songwriting courses. | ||
| No one is going to teach you how to do stand-up. | ||
| You do stand-up different than Jamie would do stand-up, different than this guy and that guy. | ||
| Everybody does it differently. | ||
| But it should be something like, I don't think a class can, you know, and I'm not going to knock a guy making a living. | ||
| If a guy's making a living because he's got some people in there giving him money and he's going to try to help with stage press, whatever. | ||
| I don't believe in it. | ||
| I think you just got to go up there and you got to eat some shit and you got to go up there and kill and everything in between. | ||
| I think what it does do that's good is it gets people on stage. | ||
| If you sign up for a comedy class and they say, hey, you're going to get up at the end of this class and the whole class is going to do three minutes, at least they're getting you on stage and then maybe you go from that and do something else and you actually wind up becoming a comic. | ||
| There's people that have started out in comedy classes, and it was just like a little foot ladder. | ||
| Just like, get them over the top. | ||
| Yeah, just get them up there. | ||
| Yeah, just get them up there. | ||
| And then once you get the bug, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think one of the most valuable resources for stand-up is podcasts, where people talk about stand-up. | ||
| Like you, just doing that. | ||
| Like if a guy's an open-miker, and he hears this, and he's thinking about doing comedy, and he's like, oh, Paul Verge is funny, let me listen to this podcast. | ||
| And he hears your whole process and what you went through, there's value in that. | ||
| Like, that's where you learn about comedy other than actually doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can learn from people talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And also, like, people's process is different where when you get evolved enough, you know it's a joke before I wouldn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like the closer of my Netflix special, I was playing basketball with my son and it was the first time that he challenged his father, challenged me verbally and like chested up to me and fucking blushed and he looked at me and said let's fucking, you know, and when it happened, When it happened, I just was like, oh my god. | ||
| And then I got off and I remember going, oh my god. | ||
| That's a fucking, that's a bit. | ||
| So I called my friends and I go, dude, you gotta hear this. | ||
| And I told Giannis and I told Bill. | ||
| And Bill told me something. | ||
| He goes, Andy Kindler and Conan O'Brien heard it and they're laughing. | ||
| I'm going, I think it's a joke. | ||
| So I did it once at New York Comedy Club and I did it once at the cellar. | ||
| And somebody goes, close at the garden with it. | ||
| And I go, dude, I can't close up the garden. | ||
| There's 18,000 people. | ||
| They go, close up the garden with it. | ||
| So I said, this is what I'm going to do. | ||
| I'm going to do my set at the garden, and if it's going well, I'm going to do that joke. | ||
| I swear to God, Joe. | ||
| And I'm on stage, and I'm having the opposite of what I had at that country club. | ||
| Like, if I went to bed and dreamed, it was like, ah! | ||
| And they're there. | ||
| And I see all these people and it's amazing. | ||
| And I just look up and I see Patrick Ewing's thing in the Raptors. | ||
| And I go, fuck it, I'm a Knicks fan. | ||
| And I'm going, alright guys, I'm going to let you go with a story about basketball and my son. | ||
| And I did it. | ||
| And the place fucking erupted and it was the third time I ever did it. | ||
| And the coolest thing is Burr got on stage. | ||
| And he goes, how about Verzi killing with new shit? | ||
| He addressed it somehow, but it was the third time. | ||
| But I knew when my son did that. | ||
| I knew when my son did that, that it was something that could be special on stage. | ||
| It was one of those. | ||
| But where before you're doing it a while, you wouldn't know. | ||
| So that moment leaves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Right. | ||
| You gotta capture that moment. | ||
| You gotta capture that moment. | ||
| Oh my god, this is a story on stage that people are gonna be captivated by, but you wouldn't know it, you know, when you're a two, three year comic. | ||
| How do you, do you write, do you sit down and write? | ||
| No. | ||
| Never. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I don't know how guys are like, I open a notebook, you know, on Thursday for, I can't do that, dude. | ||
| I can't fucking. | ||
| Plus, I wouldn't know where to, you know, I just want to go and, you know, if my wife and I get into something or something like that happens, then I'm like, oh, that's something, you know. | ||
| So have you ever tried to write things? | ||
| I mean, no, not really. | ||
| The only time I've actually sat and wrote was when someone was like, hey, can you submit some roast jokes? | ||
| Or hey, can you send me some monologue jokes? | ||
| That's when I would have to do it. | ||
| But I'm not geared like that. | ||
| Maybe it means I'm not disciplined enough. | ||
| But comedy doesn't come to me like that. | ||
| Comedy comes to me in the shower. | ||
| Comedy comes to me when I'm laying in bed and I'm thinking about what happened during my day. | ||
| That's when it hits me, and I'm like, oh, let me try that. | ||
| Do you write your stuff down when that happens, or do you just keep it in your head? | ||
| If I write it down, it's just the... | ||
| Premise? | ||
| Kind of like the premise in one or two texts. | ||
| Outline. | ||
| Then I'll go on stage. | ||
| If I go at the stand or the cellar, I'll just kind of fuck with it a little bit. | ||
| Do you record your sets? | ||
| Yes, now I do. | ||
| Do you record them on your phone? | ||
| I record them on my phone, but it's hard to listen back to all of them. | ||
| Yeah, but at least you have them. | ||
| Right, like if a moment happens, then I'm like, oh fuck, I got it. | ||
| What's the worst is when you don't. | ||
| When a moment happens and you don't. | ||
| Oh, it's the worst. | ||
| Oh my god, when you did something at a club and you guys taped that, we're like, dude, we only taped the first set. | ||
| And you're like, no, dude, I said. | ||
| And then you started, do you remember what I said? | ||
| I know, that's the worst. | ||
| I'm like, what part? | ||
| Towards the end. | ||
| And they say something else. | ||
| You're like, no, no, no, not that one. | ||
| It's something else. | ||
| Like, fuck. | ||
| And then you'd be driving home. | ||
| Fuck, what was it? | ||
| Well, you have amazing act-outs. | ||
| So it's like, what if you did an act-out, an impromptu? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And all of a sudden, you don't have even the audio of it. | ||
| So now you've got to go like, did I? And then it's almost like maybe recreating that's not going to be what it was in the moment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, because you just went into something and you just had this like amazing, amazing thing. | ||
| You know, I did if two fat Italians landed on the moon and I do them like on the thing and I had it and I was like, wait, what did I say? | ||
| Because I didn't know and I had it and I'm like, okay, now maybe I can do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Yeah, I think recording is great because you just never know. | ||
| You know, there's a guy named Mike Donovan who's a really hilarious comic in LA, excuse me, in Boston. | ||
| And he used to bring, this was back when people had tape recorders. | ||
| He'd bring an actual tape recorder on stage with him. | ||
| And he said, you should tape all your sets because you never know when you might just deviate. | ||
| Just have an idea that comes out because there's a mindset that you have while you're doing stand-up that is very different. | ||
| It's very different than any other mindset because you know that people are paying attention. | ||
| It's like what we're talking about with ranting on a podcast. | ||
| You know people are listening. | ||
| So there's a mindset that's a very different... | ||
| It's like if no one's listening, you're not going to get that mindset. | ||
| And sometimes the only way to get that is just put yourself out there on stage and these ideas will come up. | ||
| But you don't remember them. | ||
| That's what's fucked. | ||
| Even if it's really funny, you would say, well, I'm going to remember that. | ||
| But you're not going to. | ||
| No, you're not going to remember. | ||
| No, because you're in the... | ||
| You're in a trance. | ||
| I'm a very defiant, competitive person. | ||
| Very. | ||
| So, for me, if I'm the type that's like, I'm either going to find it or I'm going to get back on stage to get another moment like that. | ||
| I have that. | ||
| Very, very much so. | ||
| I don't like anybody getting the best of me where I can't retaliate. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I... No, I'm sorry. | ||
| Were you going to say something? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| I got... | ||
| You remember that movie, Uncut Gems? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Great movie. | ||
| Fucking wild movie. | ||
| I'm in there with my brother. | ||
| These kids in their early 30s, late 20s were kicking my seat. | ||
| Dude, I fucking... | ||
| And they just kept doing it. | ||
| And I was trying to let it go. | ||
| I was just trying to let it go, right? | ||
| And... | ||
| So, the movie's ruined. | ||
| And I did one of these. | ||
| You know, like when somebody does it, you kind of do one of these? | ||
| But they're just like, and I could tell, and I hear them giggling and stuff. | ||
| So we leave the movie, and I see them laughing, looking at me. | ||
| And this is just my personality in life. | ||
| And I see my brother. | ||
| I give my brother a hug. | ||
| I say, I love you, man. | ||
| I'll see you later. | ||
| And these dudes get in a truck, and I start following them, because I had to get it out. | ||
| I had to get it out, dude. | ||
| So I'm following these fucking guys the wrong direction from my house on a highway. | ||
| And I'm going, what am I doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's four of them. | |
| What the fuck am I doing? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And they turned into this, like, alley. | ||
| And I turned into the alley. | ||
| And there was a Taco Bell. | ||
| And they just got on the drive-thru line. | ||
| And now I'm behind them. | ||
| And I'm on a drive-thru line at Taco Bell. | ||
| And I'm going, I'm going to fuck in. | ||
| I got to do something. | ||
| But I'm going, there's four of them. | ||
| What the fuck am I doing here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| So I go, I gotta scare them. | ||
| I gotta do something. | ||
| So they get their food and they park. | ||
| And I said something to the lady. | ||
| I go, did they say anything about me? | ||
| And I ended up ordering a taco and a soda because I was there. | ||
| I had to, right? | ||
| And I just sat there. | ||
| I just fucking sat there while they ate and I ate. | ||
| And the whole time, I'm going, I have to fucking... | ||
| Let them know that they ruined my movie. | ||
| I need to scare them. | ||
| I need to do something to fucking scare them. | ||
| But there was four of them. | ||
| It made no sense. | ||
| But then they did get scared, and they circled around, and they went in the line again. | ||
| And then I kind of started to go in the line, and I looked at them, and they were petrified. | ||
| And then I realized, I said, Paul, you have two children at home, and a wife, and you're 40-something years old, and I followed them 35 minutes. | ||
| I followed him 35 fucking minutes, dude. | ||
| And as I'm driving, I'm going, what is fucking wrong with you? | ||
| But I had to at least... | ||
| Something. | ||
| Does that make any... | ||
| Something. | ||
| I know what I did was stupid and doesn't... | ||
| But something. | ||
| I needed to do something. | ||
| And I tried to figure it out. | ||
| I talked to people about it. | ||
| And it was like, no, my wife's like, that's who I am. | ||
| So if I'm doing something on stage bombing or if I do something where somebody gets the best, I get to find... | ||
| I got to come back and do something. | ||
| And I don't know why that story reminded me of it, but that's how I am. | ||
| I don't like when somebody gets the best of me, or a set gets the best of me, or a crowd gets the best of me. | ||
| I get it, but don't do that. | ||
| No, dude, people were like, like, people said to me, like, dude, you followed, like, 28-year-olds for a long time and then bought a fucking taco and just sat there. | ||
| Like, it's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But, yeah, my wife wasn't, yeah. | ||
| I know that feeling, though. | ||
| The feeling of being fucked with at a movie theater is a very unusual feeling. | ||
| Someone's kicking your chair or talking shit or they're behind you. | ||
| Just being fucked with any time, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, being fucked with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When somebody's intentionally fucking with you and they don't know you, I don't know why I did that, but I had to do it. | ||
| I had to do that. | ||
| I wanted some way for them to know that what they did was they can't just get away with it. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Don't do that again. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's a good way to die. | ||
| And there was four of them. | ||
| I could have got hurt. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you could have got killed. | ||
| Yeah, when people don't know what your intentions are and you're following them around, that's a recipe for disaster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't do that, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I know. | |
| It's a stupid... | ||
| It's a weird way to end a podcast. | ||
| It's a stupid... | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| As soon as you were saying, as soon as we were talking about that, like, you know, getting the best of something or, you know, doing a set and not getting it right and wanting to get right back on stage and you don't write it down and you want to get right back and do it. | ||
| I just thought of that. | ||
| I just thought of that. | ||
| Don't ever do that again. | ||
| That guy was kicking my seat and he was laughing and it ruined my movie. | ||
| It ruined the movie and it was a great performance by Adam Sandler. | ||
| Yeah, it sucks, too, because if you watch it again, it's not going to be the same. | ||
| That's the problem with fucking movie theaters, man. | ||
| That's why I love watching movies at home. | ||
| It's so much better. | ||
| I love when they started, during COVID, they started streaming movies right away, like on HBO Max and on iTunes. | ||
| You can get it right away. | ||
| While I was out in the movie, I'm like, thank you. | ||
| This is what I've been asking for forever. | ||
| It's just too risky. | ||
| I mean, it's only happened to me a few times where people were talking in movie theater, you had to tell them to shut the fuck up, but it's enough that it's just so frustrating. | ||
| Some people will talk full blast. | ||
| Some people do that at a comedy club. | ||
| Some guy last night at the Vulcan, the front row, just talking full volume. | ||
| It's like, Jesus, some people just suck. | ||
| Yeah, but you know what bothers me? | ||
| You know what I should have done? | ||
| I should have. | ||
| I should have just turned around and I should have said dude stop kicking my fucking seat but he was doing it in this like really passive aggressive way where like after I did that it was like lower and like but yeah movie theaters anytime they always sit near you and I don't like being around people dude that's why my house is far away I don't like being around people dude I want to be away in the woods man. | ||
| I'm a country kid now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now you are? | ||
| I'm a country kid now. | ||
| I want fucking horses. | ||
| I told my wife, I want a fucking horse. | ||
| I want to be away from people, man. | ||
| I want to be in the woods. | ||
| I want to do comedy. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I drive to New York City. | ||
| New York City sucks now, man. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| Well, I got to be honest, man. | ||
| The homeless thing in Austin's not great. | ||
| I mean, I saw a guy try to kill himself and jump in front of a truck the last time I did the Vulcan. | ||
| He was asking for money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How long ago was this? | |
| Four people said no. | ||
| And he goes, fuck this! | ||
| And he started screaming out words and he tried jumping in front of a truck. | ||
| And that's happening in a lot of cities, but New York too. | ||
| New York is shitty now. | ||
| Austin's cleaned up the homeless a lot. | ||
| They used to have tents everywhere. | ||
| They're all gone now. | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
| Yeah, they don't allow it anymore. | ||
| They passed an ordinance. | ||
| Well, this was probably like six months ago, so maybe that's it. | ||
| But no, I do my sets in the city. | ||
| I get to feel New York City. | ||
| And I feel that feeling. | ||
| And then I drive up and I got... | ||
| I got woods. | ||
| I got deer. | ||
| It's a good contrast. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And I have a lot of land. | ||
| I have a nice plot of land. | ||
| And I'm 800 feet elevated, so the sun sets behind the mountains. | ||
| And my wife has this beautiful garden. | ||
| We got a fire pit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| And life gets quiet. | ||
| And that's the way that it should be, man. | ||
| You can't live. | ||
| A human being is not supposed to have a fucking... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Eight-foot backyard where you can lean over and touch your neighbor's house. | ||
| Some people love it though. | ||
| Ari loves it. | ||
| Ari loves it. | ||
| My friend Jeff loves it too. | ||
| Yeah, but Ari came to my backyard and fucking we drank a bottle till 7 o'clock in the morning at the fire pit. | ||
| He looked up and he goes, oh my god, I could do mushrooms here forever. | ||
| All the comics that get high and do that, they came to my house, they were just like, dude, we gotta go to Verzi's fire pit and do mushrooms and stare at the stars. | ||
| I'm like, oh, you could just hang out. | ||
| Well, Ari's a big mushroom fan. | ||
| He does that mushroom fest, shroom fest thing every summer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't fuck with psychedelic shit. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Because it'll put me in a place... | ||
| Yeah, if you already get panic attacks and get weird, marijuana, probably not good for you either. | ||
| No, edible, sometimes an edible relax me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| And I'll be cool with that because I almost look at it like a Xanax. | ||
| Low volume? | ||
| You know, yeah, dude, give me a Xanax and three vodkas, I'm fucking, that's what I like. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But doesn't Xanax, isn't that addictive? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How often do you take Xanax? | ||
| No, not a lot at all. | ||
| What's not a lot at all? | ||
| No, no, I haven't taken Xanax in years. | ||
| I haven't taken Xanax in years, but I like a mellow, calming. | ||
| But when I start thinking about why I exist, I'll start crying. | ||
| We were talking at the beginning of the podcast about why aliens... | ||
| I had a panic attack thinking that we were in a ball in space. | ||
| The other day I was driving and I realized that we were on a ball that's moving in infinite space. | ||
| And I freaked out because as a kid, growing up, you think we're here. | ||
| Like you think we're down, right? | ||
| Like we're flat on the floor and everything is up there. | ||
| And I just like shit like that. | ||
| So me getting super high. | ||
| Dude, I took an edible. | ||
| My brother-in-law gave me a macadamia and chocolate bar and he goes, Paul, this is the highest potent shit ever. | ||
| You can only have one square in it. | ||
| Only have one square in it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So I bit it and it was delicious. | ||
| And 45 minutes go by and nothing really. | ||
| So I took another one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude, I told my wife to take me to the hospital. | |
| I fucking hallucinated. | ||
| I hallucinated and here's the fucked up thing. | ||
| I slept in my son's bedroom and I woke up. | ||
| I couldn't remember that I had to piss. | ||
| I couldn't even hold a thought. | ||
| And he's got Darth Vader, Star Wars all around. | ||
| He got a fucking goldfish this big. | ||
| The water was going in it. | ||
| And then I thought I heard two elderly, like Latino men whispering, conspiring against me outside. | ||
| I thought I heard like the water sound into the fish tank was turning into... | ||
| I called my... | ||
| She goes, you just got to sleep this off, dude. | ||
| And I said, I'm not doing it. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| I can't fuck with it. | ||
| I don't know how you guys, I don't know how you guys do it. | ||
| How do you guys do much? | ||
| The mental discipline to understand, like I would think I'm never coming out of it. | ||
| I would think I'm gonna lose my fucking mind. | ||
| I would have a full-fledged panic attack. | ||
| I don't know how you guys... | ||
| I don't think it's for everybody. | ||
| No, it's definitely not for me. | ||
| But if you only took that little bit of pot, maybe you've been alright. | ||
| Every story that's bad about Edible starts with, I don't feel shit. | ||
| And then you take a second one. | ||
| This ain't shit, right? | ||
| But I think what gets people is the 45-minute kick-in. | ||
| Because almost an hour goes by and you're watching a movie, you don't feel any different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you don't realize it's just starting to make its way into your bloodstream. | ||
| And then it knocks your balls off, dude. | ||
| And it fucks you up. | ||
| And some people embrace it. | ||
| Yeah, I like it. | ||
| You like it, huh? | ||
| I like being paranoid. | ||
| You do? | ||
| Yeah, I like it. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I think it's good for you. | ||
| But let me ask you a question. | ||
| Being paranoid, are you afraid? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I like it. | ||
| I think it's good sometimes to have that vulnerable feeling. | ||
| It puts things into perspective. | ||
| Because you are vulnerable. | ||
| Life is crazy. | ||
| We are in space. | ||
| So many things don't make sense. | ||
| And then sometimes I think that's good for you. | ||
| Like, I don't like confidence-inspiring drugs. | ||
| Like, I would not be a good person on amphetamines and stuff like that, the ones that make you think like you're the king of the world. | ||
| I don't think those are my thing. | ||
| My thing is just, I like to freak out a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, that's why. | ||
| I think we should all be a little paranoid. | ||
| Like, life is very unpredictable and wild, and it doesn't really make sense. | ||
| And you could just decide that it makes sense because it's always been this way. | ||
| And you could settle into what it is and think that it's- Wow. | ||
| The structure to it, and, oh, I get up in the morning, I have my cup of coffee. | ||
| Like, no, there's no structure. | ||
| This is wild. | ||
| This life is madness, and it's random, and it's chaotic, and it's not going to last. | ||
| Yeah, well, I don't like thinking like that. | ||
| I like thinking like that. | ||
| You like thinking like that? | ||
| I like it. | ||
| It's good for me. | ||
| It makes me appreciate the things that are here. | ||
| And when I come out of it, I always feel like I'm learning something about myself. | ||
| Are you spiritual? | ||
| Do you believe in God or do you believe in something? | ||
| That's a weird question, right? | ||
| The problem with spiritual, it's tied down to too many people that are annoying. | ||
| That word has been attached to guys who wear wooden beads and talk nonsense because they're trying to get laid. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The cult leaders and shit. | ||
| Spiritual. | ||
| They're just talking... | ||
| I'm spiritual. | ||
| I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. | ||
| I think it's very possible there's something greater than us that's running this whole thing. | ||
| I think in some sort of a weird way. | ||
| I think it's just what we think of as us, as just being a human being, the energy that it is of being a human being is a very complex energy. | ||
| And what it means to be alive is very strange. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| And you're a part of some massive process. | ||
| Massive process of billions of other similar organisms who all have their own hopes and dreams and ideas and desires and they're all moving towards a certain direction and all of it is moving together. | ||
| You just can't see it because you're in the middle of it. | ||
| But as a super organism, as one gigantic race of beings, we're all moving in a general direction. | ||
| And that's what I like about getting high, is that I can put things into perspective and it humbles me. | ||
| Ah, yeah. | ||
| I believe in something, and I believe in putting things out into the universe that come back. | ||
| And I've had, you know, not to turn this into that, but I've had things answered that I've asked. | ||
| So you think God's looking out for you? | ||
| I think something is. | ||
| I think something is, man. | ||
| And a lot of things that I've put out there and I've asked for and I believe in and I've gotten senses and feelings and, you know, whatever it is, whatever people want to say and people, oh, whatever, you know, this and that. | ||
| But, yeah, I do. | ||
| I think if you think that way, it can benefit you. | ||
| It may be true. | ||
| It may be true that something's looking out for you. | ||
| But I do believe that if you think that way, it can benefit you. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that there's, you know, there's some, a lot of the things that Jim Carrey said when he was like, you know, when you put things out there or you kind of talk it into existence and say something, you know, I don't know if it's some force, but there's some power to that. | ||
| Maybe even if it's something that motivates you to get there. | ||
| Or even if it's something that comes in subconsciously to you in order to get that end result and get that final goal. | ||
| But when you say that, I said some of the shit that I was going to do. | ||
| And that's when some people are like, oh yeah, but I said it. | ||
| And I meant it. | ||
| And I was a guy that was looked over and I was like, no, no, it's coming. | ||
| And it's never going to not be that way because that's what I do and who I am. | ||
| But when I say something, I feel something and I ask for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright. | |
| I believe you. | ||
| Paul Verzi, don't follow anybody home anymore. | ||
| I know, man. | ||
| You're a cool motherfucker. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| Thank you very much for being here, man. | ||
| Dude, I appreciate you for having me. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, man. | |
| My pleasure. | ||
| Tell everybody your special, where they get it, what it's called. | ||
| Guys, my special right now is streaming on Netflix. | ||
| It's called Nocturnal Admissions. | ||
| And I thank everybody for the kind reviews of Verzi Effect Podcast. | ||
| I co-host the Anything Better Podcast with Bill Burr. | ||
| I will be at San Diego American Comedy Company. | ||
| I love that club. | ||
| That's a great club. | ||
| I'll be there tomorrow through Saturday, and I got... | ||
| Look at that smiling fuck. | ||
| How much makeup did they put on you? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| A lot, yeah. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| What have you done with Paul Verzi? | ||
| Yeah, I will be also in Rosemont. | ||
| Zany's? | ||
| You been to that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The Chicago one. | ||
| The one outside of Chicago. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Just outside? | ||
| Yes, just outside. | ||
| That's a great club. | ||
| I'll be there the 22nd, 23rd. | ||
| I'm also going to Michigan in the middle of July. | ||
| Go to paulverzi.com for all my dates. | ||
| Dude, I really appreciate you having me on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My pleasure, brother. | |
| It was great to talk to you. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| We'll do it again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. | |
| Paul Verzi, everybody. | ||
| Good night. |
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