March 16, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:02:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Cheers, sir. | ||
| Pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Yeah, and likewise, man. | ||
| I love your shit, dude. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Appreciate that. | ||
| You got a great voice and great songwriting. | ||
| I try my best. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| It's great shit. | ||
| Solid country. | ||
| Yeah, I try, man. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| A lot of... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess you always have doubts. | ||
| I mean, that comes with... | ||
| At least I do. | ||
| I'm constantly like, is this good enough? | ||
| Or is it country enough? | ||
| Or is it... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just always... | ||
| I'd be lying if I said I didn't have... | ||
| I think that's what makes you great. | ||
| I think you have to have those doubts. | ||
| I think every artist is always self-analyzing. | ||
| Always. | ||
| You have to be. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| My biggest fear is making the same record a hundred times. | ||
| Yeah, because we all know people who've done that before. | ||
| And when you're a fan of someone and they do that, that's one of the things I love about Sturgill, is like every album is a new artist. | ||
| It's like, who are you? | ||
| It's way different. | ||
| Yeah, everything's way different with him, man. | ||
| I remember Turtles All the Way Down coming out, and I was like, man, this is just such a departure from the last thing. | ||
| And that can be scary as an artist, too, because you're like, well, all my fans that I have... | ||
| We're the fan of this previous thing, right? | ||
| So here's the new thing, alienate. | ||
| Those people, it's just tough, man. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I think people have to do that, though. | ||
| That's what you feel. | ||
| I think they go along with you, especially today. | ||
| I think people are more willing than ever to let people take chances. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| And I mean, I think that comes with the artist now has the power in a lot of ways, right? | ||
| With the rise of the internet. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I think I was really kind of one of the first people who was able to bring something to, like when I got my first deal, it was like, well, I already had a built-in fan base. | ||
| And that wasn't really ever happening at that time. | ||
| Like as I was on this social media app called Vine, do you remember that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was like, I mean, I wasn't like, you know, mega big on there or anything, but I had enough, enough fans, I guess, where I was selling music that, and I didn't realize that that was weird. | ||
| So I got to Nashville and they're like, wait, you're selling how much? | ||
| And I'm like, oh, I thought that was, that's low, right? | ||
| And they're like, not really. | ||
| It's not really that low at all. | ||
| And I was like, oh, that's cool, you know? | ||
| So then you got some negotiating power, too. | ||
| Were you one of the first artists in the country scene that kind of made it off of social media? | ||
| Yeah, I would say me and Kane Brown probably were like the first two. | ||
| And we both got signed at Sony. | ||
| And I think that's the credit to, you know, I mean, Randy Goodman, who still runs Sony Nashville, has always been forward thinking in that. | ||
| Like at least before, in my opinion, all the other labels in Nashville were thinking about that stuff. | ||
| He was always thinking about what's the next thing or like how do we stay ahead of the trend or whatever. | ||
| And other labels weren't doing that at that time. | ||
| When you first started doing it on Vine, were you just doing it because it was just a thing that you could put your shit on? | ||
| You obviously didn't think that it would take off the way it did. | ||
| It just made sense, right? | ||
| It was like, okay, this is a tool. | ||
| And all I was doing on there was, I mean, the content on that app was six seconds long. | ||
| It was like TikTok, but six seconds. | ||
| And so it was like, you would have to pick out what's the most impactful section Of a George Strait song, or of a Waylon Jennings song, or anything I can sing, or of something that's on the radio, a Lee Bryce song, or whatever it was. | ||
| And go, what's the singingest-ass part of this song? | ||
| And I would get on there and just sing that six seconds on my guitar. | ||
| And then put it on there, and people were sharing and sharing. | ||
| And then when I put my own music out, I'm like... | ||
| Well, obviously I'm going to market to these people that are already like my voice and stuff. | ||
| And it just worked out. | ||
| It was never a master plan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I wasn't like... | ||
| I would love to say, man, I had this big scheme and I had it all planned out. | ||
| It just like... | ||
| It was these, like, logical steps that just made sense to me. | ||
| I think it's kind of better that it's not a master plan. | ||
| It just followed your instincts. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| I always tell... | ||
| I mean, there is so much luck involved. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| I mean, anybody that has success... | ||
| Obviously, you have to be able to sing. | ||
| And you have to have songs that people like, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Those things are, you know, that's a given. | ||
| But there's a lot of people that I know in town that I would argue are a lot more talented than me. | ||
| Singers, songwriters, that went for the artist thing and it was just, it wasn't the right time. | ||
| Or their music didn't connect at that time with whatever the mainstream kind of fan base was. | ||
| And now they're just songwriters instead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because now they might be 40-something. | ||
| And they're like, well, I'm not going to get a deal and go on a radio tour. | ||
| I've got three kids. | ||
| I'm going to make half a million dollars a year writing songs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, but that would suck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Listen to somebody else belting out your hits. | ||
| Yeah, but there's also a contingency of guys that... | ||
| I have some friends that... | ||
| Went the route, like, they had the deal, they had the songs, it wasn't the right time, but then the artist thing just wasn't for them either. | ||
| Like, going around and doing PR stuff, like, that gave them anxiety. | ||
| Having fans, that gave them anxiety. | ||
| And that's like, I think there's people that lean more into, they would rather just do the creative stuff. | ||
| And hope, okay, I hope I can write, I hope you dance for Leanne Womack instead of being Leanne Womack and singing, I hope you dance. | ||
| Yeah, well, that I get. | ||
| I mean, some people just, they don't have the personality for it. | ||
| They don't enjoy it. | ||
| They're more introspective. | ||
| They're more, you know, introverted. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| It's a weird world, right? | ||
| The world of taking your thoughts and putting them down and then sharing with people. | ||
| What is it like for you when you're at a red light and you hear some dude playing your music next to you? | ||
| Has that ever happened to you? | ||
| Yeah, it's even crazier. | ||
| The place it always gets me is when someone's listening to it on a boat. | ||
| To me, that's the ultimate test. | ||
| Of a song. | ||
| It's like, if somebody's listening to you on a boat, dude, they love you. | ||
|
unidentified
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They absolutely love your shit if they listen to you on a boat. | |
| That's so true. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, how many artists that you listen to in your car, you probably wouldn't listen to on a boat? | ||
| It's a different thing, right? | ||
| Like, to me, it's like, if it's summer, the weather's nice, the drinks are flowing, you know, and, dude, your song's on the boat, That's the soundtrack to like the best time that someone could possibly be having. | ||
| That's so true. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's so true. | ||
| You're the highlight of their weekend or their summer or whatever. | ||
| Like that song is like a huge part of their life if they're playing it on a boat. | ||
| I never thought of it like that. | ||
| But that's true. | ||
| Like, boat music? | ||
| Dude, it's a different breed, dude. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's the ultimate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's crazy, man. | ||
| Yeah, my 14-year-old, she loves Kanye West, and she likes to crank Kanye West on the boat, and I'm always like, okay. | ||
| You're like, all right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I hope nobody gets mad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like, forget about what he said. | ||
| These are bangers. | ||
| Is it, like, new Kanye, or is it old Kanye? | ||
| She likes all of it. | ||
| All of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I love the old stuff. | ||
| I can't say I'm jamming the Yee stuff. | ||
| I can't say I'm jamming. | ||
| To me, his choruses in the beginning were just... | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Incredible, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, incredible. | ||
| Yeah, I'm very curious to see what he comes up with now after all this cancellation shit. | ||
| It's crazy, man. | ||
| I bet he's gonna come up with some fucking bangers. | ||
| Is he, like, missing? | ||
| Or something? | ||
| Was that a thing? | ||
| There was some photos of him with some lady the other day. | ||
| He's out and about smiling. | ||
| So he's confirmed? | ||
| I mean, he's around. | ||
| I don't know what he's up to. | ||
| Because he lives in the middle of nowhere or something now, right? | ||
| He's got a place in Wyoming. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a ranch in Wyoming. | ||
| Man, that must be nice. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| That'd be cool. | ||
| I'd love to have one of those. | ||
| A ranch in Wyoming. | ||
| Everybody who saw Yellowstone was like, God damn it. | ||
| I want to live like that. | ||
| They're like, Montana's too expensive, so I'm going to Wyoming. | ||
| Yeah, Montana's overrun by yuppies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love Montana, though. | ||
| God, it's fucking beautiful. | ||
| Where Rinello lives? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I just went to Banff last week for the first time. | ||
| Have you ever been there? | ||
| No. | ||
| Dude, it's like even more Montana, Montana. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| How could it be? | ||
| It's hard to explain, man. | ||
| I mean, it's just so... | ||
| So, like, me and my wife flew into Calgary, because the closest you can get is Calgary. | ||
| Even flying private, the closest you can get is Calgary. | ||
| So it's Atlanta and another country? | ||
| No, they're both in Canada. | ||
| They're both in Canada. | ||
| So you go Calgary, and it's an hour and a half drive to Banff. | ||
| But it is, like, the sickest drive. | ||
| Like, 20 minutes out of Calgary, it turns into, like... | ||
| The most Rocky Mountain thing you've ever seen. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| I mean, it's out of control, man. | ||
| I mean, I had never seen anything like it. | ||
| We stayed in this hotel that was, like, built in 1889 up there. | ||
| I'm like, it's hard for me to get there now. | ||
| What was it like in 1889 to try to get there? | ||
| What's it made out? | ||
| Is it made out of logs? | ||
| It's stone. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm like, how do you even get the... | ||
| There's a railway that goes through there. | ||
| But I imagine, like... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's called the Fairmont. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Look at that fucking place. | ||
| Look at that view. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| It was wild, dude. | ||
| What a beautiful place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's from 1889. Yep. | ||
| 1889. How did they even get there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| We're talking pre-automobile. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I grew up in Asheville, and I always think about the Biltmore House. | ||
| Have you ever been to the Biltmore House? | ||
| I've been to Asheville. | ||
| I've never... | ||
| I don't know if I've seen the Biltmore House. | ||
| Pull up the Biltmore House. | ||
| This place is staggering, dude. | ||
| I mean, it is like... | ||
| You can't even... | ||
| So if you sit on... | ||
| It kind of sits on this hill, right? | ||
| So the Vanderbilts built it. | ||
| So it was the largest... | ||
| That's in Asheville? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Holy shit. | ||
| So if you stand on top of that building, they owned everything you can see from the top of that building, which is like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acres. | ||
| I mean, it is unbelievable. | ||
| It was the largest private residence in the United States for a long, long, long, long time. | ||
| They have the chess set in there that Napoleon's heart was put on after he died. | ||
| Just crazy. | ||
| They cut his heart off and put it on a chess set? | ||
| But that's the kind of stuff they have in that house, dude. | ||
| Is there still a bloodstain? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I can't attest to that. | ||
| I can't attest, but I used to go. | ||
| I mean, I've been in that place four or five times. | ||
| I mean, and it's just staggering. | ||
| Do you stay there? | ||
| Can you stay there? | ||
| No, you can't stay there. | ||
| It's tours. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| But they have a hotel on property, but it's not. | ||
| You don't stay in there. | ||
| They had a swimming pool, bowling alleys. | ||
| I mean, it was like decked out. | ||
| The biggest mansion you've ever seen, but it was built in. | ||
| I can't attest to the date that that one was built in, but 1800s, no doubt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| I wonder why they built such a big place in Asheville. | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| So they built a whole town around it, right? | ||
| It's called Biltmore Village. | ||
| And I actually sang in a choir at the All Souls Cathedral there in high school, which was built by the Vanderbilts as well. | ||
| And so it's like super old. | ||
| It's an Episcopalian church. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Look at that fucking place. | ||
| Dude, it's... | ||
| I mean, everything's marble, dude. | ||
| I mean, can you imagine living there in the 1800s? | ||
| What that was like? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Staggering. | ||
| Again, pre-automobile. | ||
| These people are riding horses to this house. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, they imported, and someone's definitely going to fact check me on this, but I believe they imported everything from overseas on this whole place. | ||
| The marble, the stone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Look at the ceiling in that place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 250 rooms, dude, in that place. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| What a fucking place. | ||
| Some people just have too much money. | ||
| That's too much money. | ||
| Yeah, if you're ever in Asheville, you've got to go tour that place, man. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| My bunny Duncan grew up in Asheville, and he lived there before he moved back here to Austin. | ||
| He grew up there, and they used to give the cows a special antifungal feed because they were growing mushrooms so much. | ||
| That all these kids are going out to the fields. | ||
| Sounds very Asheville. | ||
| And it's funny, growing up in Asheville, I heard about that. | ||
| I heard it would be like, oh, if you go under the cow patties, man, there's mushrooms under there. | ||
| And I always was like, man, that's a total lie. | ||
| But it's not. | ||
| No, apparently those spores are just in the hills. | ||
| He said, like, on any given day, you go out there and there's mushrooms everywhere. | ||
| That's wild, man. | ||
| Yeah, there were so many that, again, they were giving these cows some sort of feed to discourage the mushrooms from growing in their shit. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| Which seems like a crime against humanity. | ||
| Why the fuck would you do that? | ||
| Well, it's like, why mess with it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just let the kids pick them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let them do what they're going to do. | ||
| No one's dying from mushrooms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Let them do what they're going to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm in agreeance with that. | ||
| Also, it's awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, Asheville's a special place. | ||
| It's a very interesting place. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| Me and my parents moved there when I was eight from Charlotte. | ||
| I was born in Charlotte. | ||
| I moved there and we lived there. | ||
| I mean, I went to Appalachian State University, which is an hour and a half away from Asheville. | ||
| My parents actually just moved two months ago to Nashville because I just had my first son. | ||
| So they wanted to be close to the grandkid. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| They wanted to move, but they were really torn because they've loved that. | ||
| They've been in that same house since I was eight. | ||
| And so it was tough. | ||
| I mean, we still have the house at the moment and stuff. | ||
| We're trying to figure out if we want to keep it or sell it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard when you have roots in a place. | ||
| Yeah, my dad, you know, my dad's 69 and his two best friends live in Asheville and, you know, they drank beer every Friday and for 25 years, you know, and it's like he moved to Nashville and it's like he doesn't know anybody, you know, and it's like... | ||
| So I think he struggles with that a lot, which, you know, is tough for me, too, because I don't want him to, like, not be living his best life either. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like I love that he's close to, you know, my son and my son's close to his grandparents, but I also want them to, like, enjoy their life. | ||
| Enjoy their life, too, right? | ||
| Tells friends to move. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| That's what you gotta do. | ||
| Yeah, get them to move to Nashville. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| Yeah, you just gotta talk everybody into moving. | ||
| Get that mass exodus going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, Nashville's like, it's a hot market, too. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Well, it's like Austin in a lot of ways where the pandemic opened it up. | ||
| A lot of people were like, I'm getting the fuck out of wherever I am. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It sucks, and I'm going to go somewhere that's a little freer. | |
| Yeah, that's a little less stringent. | ||
| Nashville's a good place, man, but it is. | ||
| It's a great place. | ||
| It's changed a lot, even since I've been there. | ||
| I don't want to act like I've been there 30 years, because I'm probably considered a new Nashvillian myself. | ||
| How long? | ||
| So I moved there in 2014, so nine years. | ||
| So not that long. | ||
| Yeah, I think you need like 10 years. | ||
| Yeah, you need 10 years. | ||
| Before you can start talking shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Before you can be like, yes, it's changed, you know? | |
| Yeah, we ran into this guy the other day that was talking about Austin. | ||
| He's like, man, Austin's just not the same. | ||
| And Tony goes, how long you been here? | ||
| And the guy goes, five years. | ||
|
unidentified
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He goes, shut the fuck up. | |
| He goes, bitch, you just got here. | ||
| I'm that guy. | ||
| I'm that Nashville guy. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, it used to just be so different. | ||
| People love to say things like that, though. | ||
| They do. | ||
| It makes them feel like... | ||
| I feel like it's almost like if you're saying that, you're taking ownership that that's your home now. | ||
| Whether you've been there five years or 50 years, when you say things like that, it really shows that you feel some sort of ownership to that place. | ||
| And maybe that's the place that you want to be or you feel like is home. | ||
| So maybe it's a good thing, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it's a pride thing. | ||
| It's better than, like, shitting on it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like you just want it to stay good. | ||
| But, you know, things change and they evolve. | ||
| And it's not that it's not as good. | ||
| It's just different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I can imagine, you know, some of the guys that, you know, I love listening to that, you know, were in Nashville in the 60s and 70s. | ||
| Like, what would they think of it now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is the scene in Nashville, the music scene, is it Hollywoodized in any way? | ||
| Or is it still gritty? | ||
| There's like two sects of it, right? | ||
| There is still a very gritty scene, and there always has been, right? | ||
| So you've got Black Keys type kind of thing going on in East Nashville. | ||
| There's so many bands that have come out of East Nashville that are not part of the mainstream Nashville thing, and that community still really exists. | ||
| And a lot of, I think, artists, country artists that people love that would kind of, even two or three years ago, have been considered... | ||
| Americana? | ||
| I'm not even sure what that means, right? | ||
| To me, that's just country music. | ||
| There's all these people on the internet that are like, well, Luke Combs, he ain't a real country singer, you know what I mean? | ||
| Because he's not Sturgill Simpson or whatever it is, right? | ||
| There's always these people who are trying to discredit you. | ||
| But there's definitely these two different sects of mainstream and non-mainstream that exist in Nashville. | ||
| And there's people that are trying to chase kind of those things separately. | ||
| And sometimes when popularity on the not chasing that goes through the roof, then it kind of can transition into the major labels are like, well, maybe we should sniff around this guy. | ||
| I didn't move to Nashville to necessarily be like, I'm going to be a country artist. | ||
| I just wanted to do music for a living in any way. | ||
| I worked a bunch of jobs in high school and college and I went to college for five years, didn't graduate, which I'm sure my parents loved. | ||
| I was 21 hours away from getting my degree, and I was like, I'm going to do music. | ||
| And it was whatever that was. | ||
| Sweeping floors in a studio would have been great to me. | ||
| Because I would be around music, I'd be trying to write music, publishing. | ||
| I mean, realistically, I thought to myself, especially at the time I moved to town, it's like, dude, everybody that was doing music when I moved to town was hot, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Six, five, abs, dude. | |
| I mean, I didn't have a chance, bro. | ||
| You know, I didn't have a chance. | ||
| And so I'm going, well, cool, I'll just write songs for these handsome cats and, like, it'll be whatever, dude. | ||
| I'll be fine with me, you know? | ||
| But I just really, like, again, back to the luck thing, man. | ||
| Like, I stumbled into it at the right time. | ||
| I think Chris Stapleton singing Tennessee Whiskey with Justin Timberlake at the CMAs was an earth-shattering moment for country music. | ||
| And that opened the door up for guys like myself to pursue a career, like somebody who didn't look like every other guy in town. | ||
| And everyone knew about Chris Stapleton in town. | ||
| That guy was a legend in town. | ||
| Had been there for 12, 13, 14 something years at that time. | ||
| He had 250 cuts as a songwriter when that performance happened. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it was just no one gave him a chance because he was a husky guy with a beard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God damn that voice. | ||
| Oh man, he's unbelievable. | ||
| That national anthem at the Super Bowl, dude. | ||
| That was amazing. | ||
| It's that and Whitney Houston. | ||
| Two best national anthems ever, in my opinion. | ||
| At the Super Bowl, ever. | ||
| He's got some fucking bangers, that guy. | ||
| I was sitting in a box with Adele at the Super Bowl, and he sang that thing, and she was watching, and like two lines in, she just goes, holy shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, she just was losing her mind, dude. | ||
| See if he can play that. | ||
| Can you find that? | ||
| It was unbelievable, man. | ||
| Let's listen to it. | ||
| I mean, he's unbelievable. | ||
| He's a good dude, too. | ||
| I had him on a couple years back. | ||
| He's fun to hang with. | ||
| He's a very, very genuine person. | ||
| He's quiet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's always nice when you meet someone that you really admire and they're just cool as fuck. | ||
| Oh, is this it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
To honor America with the performance of the National Anthem, eight-time Grammy Award winner Chris Staples. | |
| When Nick Sirianni cries in this thing, I felt like a bald eagle was going to fly over the stadium, dude. | ||
| It was the most American thing I've ever seen in my entire life. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, say and you say By the dawn's early light Oh, so proudly we hailed At the twilight's last gleaming Whose broad stripes and | |
| bright stars Oh, God, | ||
| He's unreal. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That got me, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| Woo! | ||
| Oh, say does that star spangled God | ||
| God dang, dude. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That was electric, dude. | ||
| I can't even explain to you what being there in person was like for that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was unbelievable, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| But I remember when Sirianni came on on the big jumbo screen in there with the tears coming down, I was like, this is like, this will never be a moment like this again. | ||
| Like, I'll never be present for a moment like that again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And, like, felt the gravity of it in the moment, too. | ||
| It wasn't just, like, when you saw it on TV, it was cool, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was like they were showing that same feed in the stadium, and it was that, like, even more... | ||
| I'd never been to the Super Bowl before, so it was like... | ||
| I was already soaking it in, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's already something about a big event like that, but to have him sing it like that... | ||
| Yeah, it was unreal, man. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| That guy's an incredible, generational talent. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| I mean, just no doubt about it. | ||
| Nah, he's incredible. | ||
| That's pretty fucking badass. | ||
| When did you first think that you wanted to do music? | ||
| It honestly wasn't until I was... | ||
| So I'm 33. It was when I was 22, probably. | ||
| It was when I was really like, I could do this. | ||
| And it was... | ||
| Did you enjoy it before? | ||
| You just, I guess, a hobby? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was beyond a hobby for me, but I didn't even realize that. | ||
| So in sixth grade, right? | ||
| So I'll paint the kind of how these things happen. | ||
| It's like in sixth grade, the first year of middle school, right? | ||
| What they did in my middle school was it was like these six-week grading periods. | ||
| And so in the first year of middle school, they made you take every elective. | ||
| So you would take gym class for six weeks and chorus for six weeks and band for six weeks. | ||
| Actually, I think you got to choose chorus or band, but you had to do one music. | ||
| And then you took art and you took home ec. | ||
| And so during that sixth grade year, you try out every elective they have in the school. | ||
| And then seventh grade, you pick what elective you want to take. | ||
| So you get one elective per semester. | ||
| So you could have two electives in your seventh grade year. | ||
| So there was an option for chorus that was a one semester of chorus. | ||
| Or you could try out for the advanced chorus, which would be both semesters. | ||
| So I liked chorus a lot. | ||
| And so I was like, well, I'll do the one semester chorus and then I'll do gym or whatever, you know? | ||
| Because, like, I like it, but I don't want to take it that serious, right? | ||
| So I do my first semester, I'm in chorus, and my teacher, Ms. Rayburn, she comes up to me, like, last week of school, and she's like, will you please change your elective and be in advanced chorus with me? | ||
| And I was like, yeah, I mean, if you really want me to. | ||
| Like, I liked it a lot. | ||
| And I was like, man, I wish I could do that in gym or whatever, you know. | ||
| And so I did. | ||
| I switched it. | ||
| And so from seventh grade until I graduated high school, I was in chorus class every day of school for six years, you know? | ||
| And then I got to high school. | ||
| I get to high school. | ||
| My chorus teacher, Miss Bryant, was like, I mean, she was like my mom at school. | ||
| She was like my school mom. | ||
| Me and her became super tight. | ||
| I mean, I was her teacher assistant my senior year. | ||
| I was in her class. | ||
| A fourth of my entire high school career was spent in her classroom. | ||
| And I was in every musical every year. | ||
| So after school for half the year, I was doing the musical. | ||
| And I just liked it. | ||
| And I didn't realize I was even any good until like ninth grade when Miss Bryant was like, hey, you're like... | ||
| You're, like, good. | ||
| You're really good. | ||
| And I was like, oh, cool. | ||
| That's nice, you know, because I like doing this. | ||
| That's fun. | ||
| And I remember I was transitioning to go to college, and she said, I asked her, I was like, hey, should I do music in college, you know? | ||
| And I remember her telling me, don't do music in college if you can see yourself doing anything else. | ||
| So if you can imagine yourself doing anything else other than music, you shouldn't pursue music in college. | ||
| So in my brain, I'm thinking, okay, well, I only thought the only option was to be a music teacher. | ||
| In my head, I'm going, well, that's the only option, is to be a music teacher. | ||
| And I don't want to be a music teacher, because I'm really bad. | ||
| Like, I can't read music. | ||
| Like, I can't do math. | ||
| Like, I have some sort of, like, I just can't learn it. | ||
| So you can't read music? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-mm. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| It's probably some sort of form of dyslexia, probably, to the truest extent. | ||
| Barely past math. | ||
| Have you tried to read music? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| Her husband was actually the band teacher. | ||
| He taught advanced placement music theory, which was a new class my senior year. | ||
| I took that class and got a D. Because it was like all these, the kids that were the best at band and the best at chorus were who was in that class. | ||
| There was only like eight students in the class. | ||
| And all it is was advanced, like here's the notes, here's this. | ||
| I tried out for Allstate Chorus three years in high school and didn't make it because you had to be able to read. | ||
| You had to do a sight singing audition, which is where they would hand you a piece of sheet music and you had to sing it just by reading the notes. | ||
| On there, right? | ||
| So it was a combination of what your voice sounded like and your ability to keep up with the Allstate choir teacher, whoever that was picked out to be. | ||
| And I never made it because I couldn't read the music. | ||
| I just couldn't do it. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Did you get coaching on it? | ||
| Did you get, like... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I try. | ||
| I mean, I busted to try to... | ||
| It's just something about it doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| Like, to my brain. | ||
| Like, I get it. | ||
| Like, if I sit there and, like... | ||
| Plink it out really really slow. | ||
| I mean I could figure it out, right? | ||
| But it just doesn't it's just such to me. | ||
| It's such an instinctual thing You know and so I was in an acapella group my freshman year college for a year I enjoyed that, but again, it was just like an after-school kind of activity thing with other people in college, you know? | ||
| Excuse to have people to drink with, really, you know, people with common ground or whatever. | ||
| And gave that up my beginning of my sophomore year, really. | ||
| And then didn't do music. | ||
| I played rugby. | ||
| I got into playing rugby in college. | ||
| I did that. | ||
| Loved that. | ||
| And I was just the guy that would like sing at parties or whatever. | ||
| Like my buddies that played rugby with knew I sang. | ||
| They'd be like, dude, sing for these chicks or whatever. | ||
| You know, it was kind of like, I was like party trick guy, you know? | ||
| And then after my junior year, I moved home to Asheville and I'd always moved home every summer up to that point. | ||
| And then my mom goes, because I was sulking because all my buddies that year, they all stayed in their college town for the summer. | ||
| I was the only guy that moved back. | ||
| So all my friends are gone. | ||
| They're in Raleigh. | ||
| They're in Charlotte. | ||
| They're in Chapel Hill. | ||
| They're in Boone. | ||
| They're in, you know, Collowee and all these different schools. | ||
| So I'm working at the same job I had when I was 16 at a go-kart place with a bunch of high school kids. | ||
| I'm 21 years old. | ||
| I got nobody to hang out with. | ||
| I'm living in my parents' house. | ||
| I'm not doing well in school. | ||
| I don't know what I want to do with my life at all. | ||
| And I'm sitting on the porch. | ||
| I remember sitting on my parents' carport, and it was like my mom come out, and she was like, what's wrong with you? | ||
| Like, what's... | ||
| I'm an only child, too, so... | ||
| She's like, what's going on? | ||
| And I was like, I don't know, Mom. | ||
| I don't have any friends here. | ||
| Like, I'm working at fucking go-karts, you know? | ||
| Like, what am I doing? | ||
| And she's like, well, you know, you know what, Luke? | ||
| Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, they didn't even learn to play guitar until they were 21 years old. | ||
| And I was 21, right? | ||
| And so my parents had bought me a guitar in seventh grade that I never played. | ||
| I did two guitar lessons and hated it because my parents wanted me to do it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like anything your parents want you to do, you don't want to do, really. | ||
| And so I went in the closet and I got this, oh, it was like an Ibanez, like $50 acoustic guitar, you know, just horrendous condition. | ||
| But I didn't know that. | ||
| Didn't know anything about guitar. | ||
| Didn't know what a good guitar was. | ||
| Didn't know nice guitars even existed. | ||
| So I taught myself all summer. | ||
| I just sat on the porch when I wasn't at work playing, playing, playing. | ||
| Because I knew I loved to sing. | ||
| And I was like, well, I'll just learn how to play and then I can sing at like parties for my buddies or whatever. | ||
| And Taught myself all year and then just kind of became obsessed with learning how to play. | ||
| By the time I was 22, I'm back in school. | ||
| I'm in Boone, hanging out with my buddies. | ||
| I'm starting to dabble around with writing my own songs because I was like, well, this would be cool. | ||
| I like this. | ||
| Then I wrote my first two or three songs. | ||
| I booked a gig down the street, just like at this bar my rugby team always hung out at. | ||
| Because I figured that guy would, you know, he was like the coke head, like wild card, like he'd give me a show or whatever, you know. | ||
| The guy was awesome, you know. | ||
| I was like, this guy will give me a show if I want to do a show. | ||
| So I borrowed my neighbor's guitar because mine wasn't even acoustic electric. | ||
| It was just a straight up acoustic. | ||
| I sat on a stool. | ||
| My other buddy let me borrow his PA speakers. | ||
| And 200 of my friends came out and paid a dollar to see me. | ||
| I made 200 bucks that night. | ||
| That was more than I made at both my jobs that week. | ||
| And I was hooked, man. | ||
| I was like, dude, this is awesome. | ||
| Like, I love doing this, first off. | ||
| I'm like, I love doing this anyways. | ||
| And I'm having a great time. | ||
| I'm like having drinks with my friends. | ||
| Everybody's psyched to see me here and stuff. | ||
| And I was like, it just made sense, man. | ||
| It wasn't one ounce of hard work in my mind after that point. | ||
| It was just always fun, man. | ||
| And I always loved it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it's like a door opened up, you walked through it, and your life changed forever. | ||
| It just made sense, dude. | ||
| Yeah, it was like a true, like, aha moment, right? | ||
| Like, you hear about those from people. | ||
| Oh, I think I'm gonna flip the top. | ||
| And you hear about those things, but it truly was that. | ||
| It was truly an aha moment, man. | ||
| And it was life-changing, man. | ||
| I don't know what I'd be doing if I hadn't done that. | ||
| That's so awesome. | ||
| I love those kind of stories. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I love those stories because it gives other people hope, too. | ||
| I guarantee you there's someone listening out there that's in that same state that you were in when you were 21. They're like, what the fuck am I doing? | ||
| And everybody has that feeling. | ||
| I feel like most people, right? | ||
| Like most people. | ||
| And you graduate college, I think about myself at, you know, if I graduated on time, 22, I didn't even graduate. | ||
| But if I would have graduated on time, I'd been 22 years old. | ||
| And at 22, it's like I just, by the hair of my chin, figured out what I was going to do. | ||
| And that's got to be kind of abnormal, right, even? | ||
| Like, you go to college and it's like, okay, I'm a business major. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then I get out and then I realize I hate business because I'm only 22 years old and I don't know anything, really. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All I know is, like, getting drunk and, like, smoking weed and stuff, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And hanging out and going to class. | ||
| Well, for most people, too, you're looking for something that you could do where you can survive. | ||
| You're just looking for a living. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And if you can find something that's not a living but is a passion... | ||
| Something that you really enjoy. | ||
| You're already way ahead of the game. | ||
| I always think to myself, man, don't make a living, make a life. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| And that's... | ||
| I wish I would have known that at the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you can't. | ||
| You can't know it. | ||
| You're too young. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people tell you those things and it doesn't... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just doesn't register. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's like when we were having this kid. | ||
| It's like people tell you, well, you're going to think this and this and this and I've heard it all. | ||
| And it's all true, Joe. | ||
| Every single bit of it is true. | ||
| But it's like you don't believe it until it happens, you know? | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| You have to experience it. | ||
| Yeah, when my friends who don't have kids ask me, I'm like, I can't even tell you. | ||
| There's nothing I can tell you. | ||
| It'll change everything about who you are. | ||
| It does, man. | ||
| It's definitely an earth-shattering thing. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| And there's never that right time, right? | ||
| There always could be an excuse to be like, well, we'll wait a couple years until we're this. | ||
| And then you get there and it's like, well, we need to get a bigger place. | ||
| And by that time you're 40 or something. | ||
| By that time it's hard to get pregnant. | ||
| Yeah, if you're set up in the bunker that you want to have with $10 million in the bank, you might be 50-something years old at that time. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, that's the theory behind population collapse. | ||
| Is that people start getting into their careers and women want to have children older and they want to have less children. | ||
| I didn't even realize that was a thing until Musk started talking about it. | ||
| Well, Japan is apparently in dire straits. | ||
| Because the way it works is you always have to look 18 to 20 years out from now. | ||
| And when people are looking at life now, you're like, oh, there's so many people. | ||
| There's no population collapse. | ||
| But when no one is having kids and you realize when these people die, that's it. | ||
| Yeah, because the mainstream belief is that the world's overpopulated, right? | ||
| Essentially. | ||
| That's what I always remembered hearing growing up is there was too many people. | ||
| Well, the real problem is not too many people. | ||
| The real problem is lack of economic opportunity and these places where people are starving and poor. | ||
| Those are the people that ironically are having the most children. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts, man. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| I remember thinking, like, my grandmother, you know, she's one of 12 or 14, right? | ||
| And then my other... | ||
| My dad's dad, he was one of... | ||
| I mean, ten. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And it's like, my dad's best friend, born in Ohio, he's one of a ton. | ||
| But it's like they all grew up on farms. | ||
| So it's like you're having, essentially the kids are had to like help with the farm, right? | ||
| Like that was the idea. | ||
| At that time for those people. | ||
| It's like, well, if I got more kids, I got more people to help. | ||
| Yeah, you're raising a staff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is wild. | ||
| And that's just not happening. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| Obviously, that's the reason no one should be having children to have people to work at their home. | ||
| But it was a necessity at that time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's always fascinating to me the roots of the kind of music that you enjoy, country music. | ||
| Because country is so ingrained in struggle and life and hardship and heartbreak. | ||
| That music resonates with people. | ||
| There's a thing about You know, that kind of life that comes through in that music that's so appealing to people. | ||
| Yeah, I remember, you know, I mean, I think back to, you know, my grandfather's favorite artist was Chet Atkins. | ||
| And when he passed away in 2015, the thing that he, you know, gave me was every Chet Atkins record ever on vinyl. | ||
| And I remember thinking, like, what a cool thing, right? | ||
| Like, he loved that guy so much. | ||
| I mean, one of the best guitar players ever, not to mention, but he loved that guy so much that he bought every... | ||
| And I'm talking, it's... | ||
| Those guys were putting fucking records out, dude, back then. | ||
| I mean, they might put out two albums a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| I mean, go look how many Merle Haggard records there are, or Waylon Jennings records. | ||
| There's a bunch, dude. | ||
| Willie Nelson records. | ||
| There's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
90? | |
| Willie Nelson Records? | ||
| It's really? | ||
| It's 60 or 90. Wow. | ||
| So either way, it's not a low number, right? | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Because those guys, they just lived in the studio, man. | ||
| And they wrote, and they cut their buddy's songs that they loved, and it was quick, because it was all one take. | ||
| We're going with the band, get a take, we like the take, done, print it. | ||
| Now it's go in, do the thing, record the songs, get every part right, comp the vocals, comp the guitar parts, comp the drums. | ||
| It could take days and days and weeks to get one song right now, because everything has to be perfect in everyone's mind. | ||
| And I think that's the uniqueness of Stapleton. | ||
| He goes in and cuts records with a band, and they cut it live to tape, and it's like... | ||
| That's why it's different. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting what resonates, too. | ||
| You know, I'm a big Colter Wall fan. | ||
| Sleeping on the Blacktop. | ||
| Oh my God, he's the shit. | ||
| I play that song, Kate McKinnon, and I tell people, this guy was 21 when he sang that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people are like, what the fuck? | ||
| He sounds like a cowboy from 1860. Like a dude who's been smoking four packs of camels a day. | ||
| Canadian guy, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you had him on? | ||
| No, man. | ||
| He doesn't do interviews. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he works on a ranch. | ||
| That's super cool. | ||
| Dude, that guy's so much cooler than me. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| That guy's so much cooler than me. | ||
| I've been trying to get him on for like a year and a half. | ||
| Two years. | ||
| He's like, he just doesn't do interviews. | ||
| He's just a musician. | ||
| He's just an artist. | ||
| He's pure in the strangest way. | ||
| I just love to hang with him. | ||
| I just want to meet him. | ||
| I just want to tell him, like, hey, man. | ||
| Even if you don't want to do an interview, let's just talk. | ||
| I just want to see what you're all about. | ||
| If he works on a ranch, dude, he hunts, right? | ||
| I guarantee you. | ||
| You would think so. | ||
| Maybe that's the pitch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's so many people from Canada that hunt, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a different world up there. | ||
| It really is, man. | ||
| It's wild up there. | ||
| It's a wild place up there. | ||
| How did you meet Rinella? | ||
| Okay, so I'm Rinella a stan, dude. | ||
| I'm a Rinella stan, meat eater. | ||
| I've been watching it for years, man. | ||
| And you probably feel the same way, man. | ||
| There's a lot of like machismo bravado stuff in like the hunting like industry. | ||
| Yeah, that really like turns me off to it because I feel like It's why so many people like have a disdain for hunting. | ||
| It's not necessarily Obviously, there's people that go you shouldn't kill animals. | ||
| You shouldn't do this shouldn't do that right? | ||
| There's always going to be those people but there's the people that go the type of people people that hunt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's almost a stereotype, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And I didn't get into hunting until I moved to Nashville. | ||
| I didn't grow up hunting. | ||
| My dad's from the Rust Belt in Ohio. | ||
| Like, steel mill. | ||
| You know, his dad was a truck driver. | ||
| Like, they didn't own land, you know, kind of thing. | ||
| So he didn't hunt. | ||
| That was just not a part of my upbringing, right? | ||
| I used... | ||
| Hunting and like inherently the guys I started writing songs with and the guys I connected with all love to hunt, right? | ||
| So started out as like, okay, well cool. | ||
| These guys will take me out. | ||
| That'll be super fun. | ||
| And as I fell in love with it as my curse because my career was taken off at the same time, right? | ||
| And so life became more and more and more hectic and it became this cathartic experience of like being able to process some of what was happening to me and And just enjoying that hunting was the opposite of everything else I was doing in my life. | ||
| It was like this pursuit of this thing that was so pure. | ||
| It's calm. | ||
| I'm in control of what's going on out here. | ||
| Obviously not the animal, but just being here and being present and not having my phone and not worrying about posting an Instagram or whatever it is. | ||
| And I fell in love with that rapidly. | ||
| And so as I begin to go, well, dude, I want to watch this on television. | ||
| You know, I want to see this. | ||
| So I start watching stuff, and I'm like, dude, some of these guys are brutal on here. | ||
| Like, it's just not for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, this hunting, like, oh, we're going, if it's brown, it's down and fucking kill it. | |
| You know, and it's like this whole thing about it to me was odd. | ||
| Yeah, posing. | ||
| Right, like it felt like this fake, it felt fake to me, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So then I turn on, I see this show Meat Eater on Outdoor Channel, and I'm watching it, and I see the intro where it's like, I'm Steven Rinella, and hunting's not just about the pursuit of an animal, and I was like, okay, that's different than all the other shows that I've seen. | ||
| So I watched it, and then there's this mega-intelligent cat on there. | ||
| And he's cooking, dude. | ||
| And he's like a wealth of knowledge, right? | ||
| And that's the thing that gets me. | ||
| My dad's a big thinker, you know? | ||
| And he's always been interested in just learning about new stuff. | ||
| He's always just... | ||
| Taking in information and learning things and so I think I kind of inherited that from him and so then I became kind of Obsessed with like this show this meteor show so I started watching an outdoor channel and then it comes on Netflix this new the new kind of version that comes on Netflix and I'm like Dude, this is like earth shattering for me. | ||
| This is like it's marrying the intelligence of what this is. | ||
| And it's exposing people to, in my opinion, what's the right side of hunting to be on. | ||
| The thing that I love about it so much. | ||
| So then my career is starting to go and go and go. | ||
| I saw you on there. | ||
| I was like, man, that's cool. | ||
| He's having guests on. | ||
| That's pretty sick. | ||
| And all his buddies were wicked smart and knew everything. | ||
| And they do all this to go to Alaska and all these incredible places, dude. | ||
| So I just had my PR team. | ||
| I was like, just reach out to this guy. | ||
| Like, please, how do I get on this show? | ||
| I want to be on this. | ||
| I want to meet this guy and be buddies with him and stuff. | ||
| And it took like two years to finally get like, okay, we got a time. | ||
| He wants to do it. | ||
| And what was it like when you first met? | ||
| Well, I met him when he didn't have Meat Eater. | ||
| I met him when he was doing a show called The Wild Within. | ||
| There was a show that was on... | ||
| I forget what network it was on. | ||
| But it was a show where he was kind of recreating how... | ||
| The people that traveled across the West for the first time, the early settlers, how they hunted. | ||
| He shot a moose with a musket and turned its cape into a raft and was drifting with it. | ||
| And I was like, what an interesting guy. | ||
| The whole thing behind it, you could tell. | ||
| His integrity and his true appreciation for the outdoors and for wild animals and conservation. | ||
| It feels very pure. | ||
| And he's so well read. | ||
| I'm like, this is different than every other hunting show that I've ever seen. | ||
| The same thing to me. | ||
| And then I met, he didn't even know what a podcast was. | ||
| But to his defense, nobody did back then. | ||
| It was very early. | ||
| And I think I met him in 2011, and then he said he was doing a new show, and he asked me if I wanted to hunt. | ||
| And I said I've always wanted to hunt, and I never really knew how to get started. | ||
| It's intimidating, dude. | ||
| It's a hard thing to get into, man. | ||
| It's a big learning curve. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| And then to try to figure out what to do and how to do it, and there's so much to learn, and there's so much involved in it. | ||
| And so he took me and my friend Brian Cowan to Montana, and we went mule deer hunting. | ||
| And from then on, I've never stopped hunting. | ||
| That was 2012. I was hooked. | ||
| What was it like? | ||
| I'm curious to know what it was like. | ||
| So when you guys first meet, was he a little cold when you first met him? | ||
| A little standoffish. | ||
| Yeah, because he thinks everyone's a douchebag, because a lot of people are douchebags. | ||
| It was the same thing for me. | ||
| It was like we got there, we hunted in Wyoming. | ||
| You guys hunted pronghorn, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I had never done that. | ||
| That's a cool animal. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing, dude. | ||
| That's an ancient, ancient animal. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| That's one of the animals that survived the mass extinction of megafauna 12,000 years ago. | ||
| Yeah, it's because it doesn't have any known, really, relatives, right? | ||
| In the States. | ||
| It has speed that rivals, like, fucking cheetahs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they used to run from cheetahs. | ||
| That's the animal. | ||
| It's such a fucking ancient animal. | ||
| It's so cool looking, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's not a cervid. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's what I was so interested in. | ||
| Have you haunted these? | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| Dude, have you? | ||
| And Ronell told me this in the episode. | ||
| He was like, smell it. | ||
| It smells like Fritos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does. | |
| It smells like Fritos, man. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| And I didn't realize their hair was hollow. | ||
| So he's like, if you shoot one and it gets in the water, you're screwed, dude. | ||
| Because it weighs like three times as much. | ||
| Because its hair absorbs all the water. | ||
| So it just sinks. | ||
| So it's just like, well, if you've got to get it out and you've got to drag it, it weighs three times as much as it did before you shot it. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Because then the entire thing is just saturated with water. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Which I thought was crazy. | ||
| I wonder why. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's got to serve some sort of purpose, right? | ||
| Yeah, some ancient evolutionary purpose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I thought Steve was... | ||
| He was like, it was crazy. | ||
| It was like, we got there and we're all so hyped because I brought my buddy Stan and Reed who... | ||
| I credit mostly with me getting into hunting. | ||
| Two of my best buddies, I write songs with them. | ||
| Our kids hang out together. | ||
| We hang out together a ton. | ||
| They've been hunting their whole life. | ||
| I took them with me. | ||
| I said, hey, if I do this, I want to bring my buddies. | ||
| It's a great episode. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| I love that one. | ||
| But yeah, we were like, man, Steve, does he not like us, dude? | ||
| It was that first two hours where we were like... | ||
| You know, but then I realized more, I'm like, dude, you're around people you don't know with guns and stuff. | ||
| You know what he chilled out? | ||
| We went and shot that night. | ||
| Because we got those 6.5-300 Weatherby's that the meat-eater gun that they made with Weatherby. | ||
| And we went and shot that night and sighted them in. | ||
| And then he was like, alright, these guys know what they're doing. | ||
| And then he was immediately great. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| It was like he felt comfortable or like... | ||
| With us. | ||
| He knew we weren't bozos who were just out there and didn't know at all what we were doing. | ||
| We were going to in some way be dangerous to him or to his crew or whatever. | ||
| It was like immediately he was a completely different guy. | ||
| I didn't know anything. | ||
| I didn't own a rifle at the time. | ||
| I, you know, I didn't know anything. | ||
| I'd never shot an animal. | ||
| I'd been fishing. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Never been hunting at all. | ||
| And then next thing you know, we're in Montana and the Missouri breaks, you know, hiking up mountains looking for mule deer for days. | ||
| And it was... | ||
| It was fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's just, he's a serious dude, but he loves you. | ||
| He immediately contacted me after you did a show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and he's like, you should get that guy on. | ||
| Dude, he's, man, he's great. | ||
| And, I mean, he's just been so gracious to me. | ||
| And I was up in Montana. | ||
| We had a couple days off, and I had him up. | ||
| I was like, hey, I'm in town. | ||
| Like, what's something I can do? | ||
| And he's like, dude, he's like, bring you. | ||
| He's like, you can park your bus outside. | ||
| He's like, come on. | ||
| He's like, dude, he cooked dinner for me and my bus driver, my security guy. | ||
| Like, two guys he's never met. | ||
| Like, it's like his kids are running around, like, shooting us with Nerf guns and stuff. | ||
| Like... | ||
| And I was like, this guy's great, man. | ||
| It was just great, man. | ||
| I think he's the best spokesman for hunting. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Because he's the kind of guy that's so well-read and so articulate that he can have a conversation with someone who has a completely opposite opinion of what hunting is. | ||
| And at the end of it, they come away with just a much more comprehensive perspective of what it's about and what conservation's about and why he loves hunting. | ||
| This pursuit and why it resonates. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| He's wicked. | ||
| I love him, dude. | ||
| He's just... | ||
| He's an unbelievable guy. | ||
| Yeah, I've been hunting with him a bunch of times now, including off camera. | ||
| We went hunting recently in South Texas. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| He is, man. | ||
| He's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever rattled in bucks before? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I haven't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| We rattled in whitetails down in South Texas. | ||
| It's the most fun shed ever. | ||
| Because you basically set up, you have to have an arrow knocked, and you're fucking, you're released on the clip, because they come running in. | ||
| Right, you sprint. | ||
| Because it was in the middle of the rut, so you just clack and clack, you take the fake antlers and you rack them, and then these deer just come sprinting in, full clip, looking to fight and fuck. | ||
| Dude, I've tried it a million times, right? | ||
| It just has never worked. | ||
| You know, like Tennessee is... | ||
| Not exactly a hotbed for rattling and bucks. | ||
| I can't say it doesn't work for some of my buddies, but it's never worked for me. | ||
| It works amazing in South Texas. | ||
| He said it works there better than anywhere he's ever been. | ||
| No one knows why, but I think you just gotta catch it at the right time. | ||
| You gotta catch it right at the time when they're fucking and fighting. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a week or two week max where it really, really works. | ||
| And otherwise, they're like, why is that going on? | ||
| It's not supposed to be going on. | ||
| I'm not going out there. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| Deer are interesting, man. | ||
| They're interesting animals, man. | ||
| The more you watch them, nothing makes sense to me with it. | ||
| The more I watch them, you know? | ||
| The things that are supposed to happen often don't, I find. | ||
| You know, like you're thinking, this is gonna be, you know, I'm hunting the wind, I got the stand, I got the access, I got the wind, I got the spot, I got the stand. | ||
| I got the food plot. | ||
| You know, like in Tennessee, you can't hunt over bait, so it's like, you plant the food plot, you know, it's knee-high by July, and the corn, and it's like, you got it, everything's right. | ||
| And then it's like, it's rut. | ||
| And it's just nothing. | ||
| Sometimes you go out there and you're like, how is this possible? | ||
| Well, I have friends that are absolutely obsessed with whitetail. | ||
| Especially my friend John Dudley. | ||
| He has an enormous plot of land that he is dedicated just to bow hunting. | ||
| And that guy cultivates it all year round. | ||
| He works in the food plots. | ||
| He has stands set up specifically in areas so that he knows which way the wind is blowing. | ||
| He's gonna go to that stand. | ||
| He goes to the stand on an electric bike so he doesn't leave behind any trace of smell. | ||
| So his feet never touch the ground. | ||
| I do the same thing. | ||
| It sounds like it works for him. | ||
| It works for him. | ||
| Well, he's a master. | ||
| I mean, John's like one of the best archers and best archery coaches in the space. | ||
| He's an amazing guy, but man, that guy is obsessed. | ||
| And whitetail's the most hunted big game animal in North America. | ||
| I had a heartbreaker this year, man, a whitetail trip. | ||
| I went to Oklahoma for a week, and it was like, it was jam up, man. | ||
| It was like, there's gonna be deer, like... | ||
| You know, it just felt, everything's right, right? | ||
| We got this guy taking us out. | ||
| He was awesome, man. | ||
| He was stuff, like, killer guy, you know? | ||
| And it's like, we're going in. | ||
| Me and my buddies, we're going in. | ||
| So as I went with Dana Reed, same guys I did Meteor with, we went. | ||
| And we're like, dude, we're tagging out first night, dude. | ||
| They're sending us all these deer picks. | ||
| And we're like, man, this is going to be great. | ||
| So first night, don't really see anything, right? | ||
| It's like, oh, great. | ||
| So morning, dude, we'll be tagged out. | ||
| And it's for a reason. | ||
| So it's archery only. | ||
| Oklahoma's only got a two-week rifle season, I think. | ||
| We're doing archery. | ||
| Morning comes, nothing. | ||
| I'm like, man, like, not really seeing, like, a ton of deer and stuff. | ||
| And we're still like, we're good. | ||
| Tonight's the night. | ||
| You know, we got five days to be out there. | ||
| And we were thinking, we're going to be going home early, dude. | ||
| Like, we're going to be here the first night we're going to tag out and be, like, trying to spend two days just hanging out, you know, or something. | ||
| And so about the third day, we're like, well, let's all switch. | ||
| We'd all been in the same spots, you know, different stands, because they had a few different leases kind of around this area of Oklahoma, so we were all going to different spots. | ||
| And I'm like, well, let's all switch up, right? | ||
| So I get in this tree in the afternoon. | ||
| I'm sitting there. | ||
| My buddy Dan, he's like, he's probably 500 yards away from me in another tree. | ||
| And the grass is kind of like really soft rolling hills. | ||
| Like it looks flat almost if you're in the car and then you realize there's a little bit of elevation change going on. | ||
| So there's like this draw in between me and Dan. | ||
| I'm there and it's freezing, dude. | ||
| Wind's blowing 25 miles an hour. | ||
| I mean, just hammering. | ||
| But the wind's perfect for where I'm hunting at, right? | ||
| Because it's kind of like this grove of like cedars, you know, and that's where all the deer are because everything else is just ag fields around. | ||
| Sitting there. | ||
| I got these three does. | ||
| I watch them come, like, off this hill. | ||
| They come through the cedars, hop this fence. | ||
| Dude, they're 25 yards in me, like, right on me, dude, you know? | ||
| So I'm already, like, kind of standing up because I'm not, you know, we're not even hunting a doe at this point, you know? | ||
| And all of a sudden, man, behind this kind of berm over to my left, there's, like, a little pond. | ||
| Behind this berm walks out, dude. | ||
| I'm talking. | ||
| You're gonna think I'm lying. | ||
| 230 inch deer, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| No lie. | ||
| Everybody watching this is gonna be like, you're lying. | ||
| No, you didn't see a 230 inch deer. | ||
| 230 inch deer comes out. | ||
| He's at 60 yards broadside. | ||
| I've got my arrow, I'm on the D-loop, I'm up, but I'm not drawing on him, because he's broadside at 60, the winds go 25 miles an hour. | ||
| So it's like that arrow is going to go. | ||
| I'm not good enough to compensate for that kind of wind. | ||
| I've also got does at 25 yards underneath my feet, and I'm going, this buck's coming in, dude. | ||
| He's walking right into this thing. | ||
| There's no chance he doesn't walk in here. | ||
| There's does in here feeding underneath my feet, and he's looking right at them, broadside like this. | ||
| I'm hooked up, he kind of looks over, he's looking at the does, and then he looks back really quick. | ||
| And he takes off. | ||
| Like, dead sprint. | ||
| Just stays at 60 and goes all the way, watch him go all the way into the cedars. | ||
| Did the wind swirl? | ||
| No, the wind didn't swirl. | ||
| And I'm going, what is going on? | ||
| I called Dan. | ||
| I'm like shaking at this point. | ||
| I've got my bow back on the thing because the doe spooked out and they followed him. | ||
| When they saw, they looked back at him and when he took off, they took off. | ||
| I called Dan. | ||
| I was like, dude, I saw this once in 10 lifetime deer just come out and spooked at 60 yards. | ||
| Like, it can't be me. | ||
| If the wind's great, like nothing saw me, dude. | ||
| It wasn't me. | ||
| And then he's like, he's on the phone with me. | ||
| He goes, dude, there's coyotes running through the draw right now. | ||
| I can see them. | ||
| And I'm like, oh. | ||
| So I sat in that stand for the next three days, just every morning, three hours, night, three hours. | ||
| So last morning, I'm up there. | ||
| I look up back to where Dan was sitting at. | ||
| There's kind of another ag fence into a cut. | ||
| It's like a cut cotton field. | ||
| So it's not even like, even though it's cut, there's not even food in it, right? | ||
| There's not beans in it or corn in it. | ||
| It's a cut cotton field. | ||
| So really, in theory, nothing that these deer would be eating in this field, really. | ||
| So Dan's hunting somewhere else. | ||
| So I call our guy. | ||
| I see all these deer, and I'm glassing probably, like I said, 500-ish yards out. | ||
| I'm glassing, and I see all these does, all these does, and I see him, dude, just glassing. | ||
| I mean, you can see from 500 yards he's a giant without binoculars. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, just no doubt that this is the same deer. | ||
| And he's cruising. | ||
| And there's like, if you can imagine, there's this wheatgrass on the fence row right there that's grown up probably four foot, five foot maybe. | ||
| And there's a gap in it where there's a fence. | ||
| And probably six feet, there's another gap where there's a fence. | ||
| So it's all grass the whole way around, except for where those two fences are. | ||
| So I watch every doe pile past the first fence, past the second fence. | ||
| He's behind him. | ||
| He comes past the first fence, never goes past the second fence. | ||
| And I go, I call my guy. | ||
| I said, dude, come get me. | ||
| This deer's bedded in this little tiny spot. | ||
| I know exactly where he is. | ||
| And he goes, alright. | ||
| He said, we're going back tonight because this deer's not going to move. | ||
| He said, we're going to do spot and stalk up to this spot. | ||
| Because I know he's laying right there. | ||
| Stalk up. | ||
| Get probably 75 yards from that spot. | ||
| And we, pretty good feeling he's going to jump this fence and come right across this field to where we're at. | ||
| And we're just going to be right there. | ||
| You know, I'm sitting crisscross applesauce, like, ready. | ||
| He goes, if we got 15 minutes of light left, he's like, we're going to creep up there and see if we can spook him up kind of thing. | ||
| Dude, my heart is going a million miles an hour. | ||
| It probably is right now just from being fat. | ||
| But it was really going at that time, dude. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm one blood pressure point away from a stroke at this point, hiking up this thing. | ||
| We get up there and we're like... | ||
| Nothing's out there. | ||
| I'm like, how can he not be there? | ||
| So we're looking, we look down the fence and this property line right there is like, so it's like this fence, we have access to this fence here. | ||
| There's an adjacent fence right here that's not That they don't have access on. | ||
| So we hop. | ||
| Look. | ||
| He's 100 yards in the cut cotton field. | ||
| Just standing out in the cotton field. | ||
| This is our last night. | ||
| We're going to the plane after the hunt. | ||
| And it was over, man. | ||
| 230 inch deer. | ||
| I'll never see him again. | ||
| Never see anything like it. | ||
| Wow, this is not high-fence. | ||
| This is not a pin, pay-to-play, pick-your-deer thing. | ||
| I was excited to shoot a 145 on this trip. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The biggest trip I've ever killed is 155. You know, and so I'm like, I got pictures of him somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to see it. | ||
| He's nuts. | ||
| Let me see if I can find him on here. | ||
| It's fascinating how the appeal of those old, mature bucks, because you know they're so smart. | ||
| They don't get to be that big unless they make all the right moves for five or six years. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| They make it forever, dude. | ||
| And it's just, let me see if I can find this thing. | ||
| But that's how they get to be that big. | ||
| By just doing weird shit. | ||
| Just being smart. | ||
| Not being predictable. | ||
| Where's this guy at, man? | ||
| I got him in my text messages if I don't have him here. | ||
| Yeah, I got them in my text messages. | ||
| Dead air. | ||
| You ever watch Always Sunny? | ||
| I don't worry about dead air. | ||
| I remember the scene in Always Sunny where they're trying to do a podcast and nobody's saying anything and Danny DeVito just goes, dead air! | ||
| That always rings in my head when I'm doing an interview for some reason. | ||
| Okay, so I'm close here. | ||
| I don't think people are ever going to appreciate that don't hunt what it means to see an animal that's that unusual. | ||
| Holy fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Holy shit, dude. | ||
| That's not a joke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a gigantic deer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| This year? | ||
| So he's still alive, you think? | ||
| Do they have any trail cam photos of him? | ||
| Yeah, that's from a few weeks before we were out there. | ||
| This is where I was, right? | ||
| So this is my kind of spot here. | ||
| What time of year were you at? | ||
| We were there December, like second week of December. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You going back? | ||
| Oh, I'm going to have to. | ||
| They said, here's the thing with this deer, right? | ||
| Here's another angle of them. | ||
| They go, here's the thing with this deer. | ||
| They go, even if he loses 20 inches, he's a 210-inch deer, but there's a potential that he could be a 250-inch deer next year. | ||
| Right, if he's only five? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This deer breaks the county record by 60 inches, and it's a top 10 archery deer in the history of Oklahoma, if it goes down. | ||
| What's the number one? | ||
| Number one, I could look it up. | ||
| It's in the 240s range, like 245 range of all-time archery deer in the state of Oklahoma. | ||
| I didn't know Oklahoma had deer that were that big. | ||
| I don't think anybody does, so let's edit this part out. | ||
| Don't go to Oklahoma. | ||
| It stinks to hunt in northern Oklahoma. | ||
| It stinks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dudley has a spot in Oklahoma. | ||
| Dude, I didn't know about it until this year. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a lease in Oklahoma. | ||
| He's got some big fucking deer on that lease too. | ||
| We just had a friend that put us on to this guy and he was like, man, this guy's great and he knows his stuff and he's eager and He's excited to have you all down. | ||
| I was like, cool, man. | ||
| You've got to think, man. | ||
| I'm hunting Tennessee, dude. | ||
| A big deer in Tennessee is a 140-inch deer. | ||
| I killed a 155 in Mississippi and thought I killed a Tyrannosaurus Rex, dude. | ||
| When you're going out west and seeing these deer, it's unbelievable to a guy like myself to even see that. | ||
| Growing a 145 on my own place would be Deer of a lifetime for most guys in Southeast. | ||
| North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia. | ||
| That's the biggest deer you'll ever see. | ||
| Yeah, the obsession that people have with cultivating land developed specifically to encourage white-tailed deer to move there. | ||
| I mean, there's a whole industry behind it where people buy enormous plots of land and hire people to do land management just to set it up for deer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I can't say I don't do it myself. | ||
| It's like, it's just so intoxicating of like not. | ||
| And it's like, man, the high fence thing, it just doesn't do anything for me. | ||
| I've never done it. | ||
| I don't want to do it. | ||
| It just doesn't. | ||
| It's just not the same. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| It's just not even comparable. | ||
| It's like not knowing what's going to walk out is that almost the exciting part for me. | ||
| Yeah, it's the wildness, the fact that you're engaging with a wild animal. | ||
| Yeah, the people that, they feed them with feeders, and they have a high fence, and it's only 500 acres, you know, where they all are, they can't get out. | ||
| Right, so do you want to shoot Ricky, or Johnny, or Greg, or which one, and they just go, and they're like, that's Greg's whistle, he'll come out on that one, you know. | ||
| Well, they literally hear the feeders going off when they come in. | ||
| There's a lot of that in Texas. | ||
| Tennessee, you can feed them. | ||
| It's two weeks before season. | ||
| You have to have all feed. | ||
| You can't have a grain of corn on the ground that's not in a food plot. | ||
| You can hunt a food plot if you plant it and cultivate it and stuff. | ||
| And you can feed. | ||
| You can do protein corn stuff like Obviously, you can't do it during turkey season either, so you have to have it up for that as well. | ||
| But through the winter, you can supplement. | ||
| Well, not even winter, because that's season. | ||
| Our season ends like first week of January in Tennessee. | ||
| So after that, you could have stuff out. | ||
| So really, you're feeding through the spring and summer. | ||
| Have you ever done any out west hunting, like elk hunting? | ||
| No, I want to real bad, though. | ||
| Like, real bad. | ||
| If you think you get obsessed with whitetail. | ||
| I keep hearing about it. | ||
| Wait till you see a 400-inch bull raking its way through the trees. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Looking like a fucking dinosaur. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you hear him scream. | ||
| Hit the bugle. | ||
| I can't even imagine. | ||
| Your blood boils. | ||
| It's the wildest feeling. | ||
| We were talking before that Derek Wolf, who was in the fucking Super Bowl, and they asked him, What is better, sacking Tom Brady or shooting an elk? | ||
| And he's like, sacking Tom Brady's pretty fucking cool, but it's not even close. | ||
| It's not even close. | ||
| There's something about those animals, man. | ||
| What's a turkey hunting? | ||
| They call it poor man's elk hunting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because there's the call and response thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've shot a turkey. | ||
| It's not the same thing. | ||
| Turkeys are cool. | ||
| They're delicious. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| They are delicious. | ||
| It's not the same thing. | ||
| Not by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| But that's why they call it the poor man's elk hunting. | ||
| Well, it's just because you call them in. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| It's that interactive nature of it, I think, is what people get addicted to. | ||
| And that can be similar to the elk hunting experience, too. | ||
| Well, I think elk is just a majestic animal, too, when you see them. | ||
| Just the fucking antlers are insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're just massive. | ||
| And it's just so delicious, too. | ||
| The meat is so good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've had some buddies cook for me that have got one, and it's... | ||
| Yeah, I'd love to get one of my own, for sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It'd be real nice. | ||
| The problem with elk hunting is it's in the mountains. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And it's a lot of hoofing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh-huh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And not a lot of 300-pound guys elk hunting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| I can't imagine. | ||
|
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|
Not successfully. | |
| Unless they're 6'8 or something, dude. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like Derek. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not easy. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's the hardest in terms of just a physical workload. | ||
| It's also part of it, though, right? | ||
| It's part of how much work you put into it to get this thing out of it. | ||
| Well, when I became friends with Cam Haynes, that's why I was so baffled. | ||
| I was like, why is this guy running all the time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He tells me he runs all the time for hunting. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| How does that make any sense? | ||
| And then you go hunting for the first time in the mountains. | ||
| You're like, oh! | ||
| Oh, this is why this guy... | ||
| And I thought I was in pretty good shape. | ||
| I was like, oh my god, this is crazy. | ||
| It's like Steve, dude. | ||
| That guy can just go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he can just go. | ||
| He's a mountain go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's been doing that his whole life, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Puts in so many hours a year in the mountains. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That Buffalo book he wrote is unbelievable. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| Yeah, it's so good. | ||
| Yeah, he got the rights to that, luckily, and now re-released it with his audio. | ||
| Because when he first sold it, they had an actor read it. | ||
| You know, like some voiceover actor. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| Yeah, so he re-recorded it in his own voice, which is amazing. | ||
| Yeah, but that's a thing that happens with a lot of first-time authors. | ||
| Is they don't trust you to read it. | ||
| They want to get someone who's some sort of a professional. | ||
| He lost that argument and then as time went on and he became more prominent and famous, then he was able to acquire the rights through Meat Eater and then re-release it, which is excellent. | ||
| Yeah, that's awesome, man. | ||
| That guy... | ||
| I don't know if it was a book, that Close Encounters thing. | ||
| Have you listened to that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, that is chilling, man. | ||
| That guy that goes through the hypothermia thing, dude, is one of the most intense things I've ever listened to, man. | ||
| One of the most intense stories he's ever told me was when they were on a Fognac Island in Alaska. | ||
| Is this the grizzly bear? | ||
| The grizzly bear attack. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah, I was like on the edge of my seat, dude, when they were telling us that story. | ||
| 11-foot bear running through their camp. | ||
| Dude, I can't even imagine. | ||
| Because it had claimed their elk, and they didn't know yet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They shot it the day before. | ||
| They came back to pack it out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| And they're sitting there eating sandwiches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No one has a gun on them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this thing just comes running through the camp. | ||
| What did they say? | ||
| Giannis, like, hit it with a, like, walking stick or something. | ||
| Yeah, from, like, five feet away. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Like, he said he could, like, feel the jaws snapping as it ran past him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh. | |
| Yeah, that freaked me out. | ||
| Dirt myth was on its back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something happened, and he got knocked onto the back of this thing and rode it for like 10 yards. | ||
| Yeah, they ran intersecting paths. | ||
| As he was running away from the bear, the bear was running away from them, and the bear hit him or something, and he flipped on its back. | ||
| For like 10 yards, he said. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you imagine that memory? | ||
| No. | ||
| Of like, this bear is running and somehow or another you're on its back? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember him telling, like, they were telling us that part and he was, yeah, I hit this bear and, you know, everybody's kind of laughing and he's laughing and stuff. | ||
| And then, like, right when the story stops, he looks at me and goes, I think about it every day. | ||
|
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|
Of course. | |
| He went just immediately. | ||
| It was funny to tell it, and then he was like, it was also the most terrifying thing of all time. | ||
| You know, that guy, he also works for that show, Trafficked. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, Mariana Van Zeller took him in the jungles of Columbia, where they grow and manufacture cocaine. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, so he's filming there. | ||
|
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|
I've seen that show. | |
| Yeah, I've seen a bunch of episodes of that show. | ||
| That dude has been on some of the most insane adventures ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To go from riding a grizzly bear's back to packing out cocaine with mules, these drug mules that are taking it in backpacks through the jungle. | ||
| I can't... | ||
| Imagine how high intensity that moment was. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| To know that these people could just shoot you because they want to. | ||
| Or because they have to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, because someone comes along and catches them and they're interacting with reporters and they just say, you're going to kill these fucking people in front of us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus, dude. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| That's a whole other kind of stress, dude, that I don't... | ||
| Mariana is a gangster. | ||
| That lady's been doing that boots on the ground type dangerous journalism for fucking years. | ||
| I found out about her because of the documentary they did on Vanguard called the Oxycontin Express. | ||
| They detailed those pain clinics they had in Florida. | ||
| They would sell people Oxys and there was no database. | ||
| So you could go from one pain clinic to the next pain clinic and just stack up thousands of pills. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| And then they would just drive up the coast, drive up Florida rather, into the northern states and sell them. | ||
| And that was the OxyContin Express. | ||
| Dude, how do you get in? | ||
| Like, that's gotta be such a specific, like, sect of, like, humanity that wants to, like, get into that kind of journalism, right? | ||
| Yeah, you gotta be very, very, very brave. | ||
| Yeah, it's not, like, that's not, you're not reading the morning news, dude. | ||
|
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|
No. | |
| That's not scratching the itch for you. | ||
| No, she's trying to figure things out and then expose people to information that's otherwise unavailable. | ||
| You know, she found that there was LA cops that were selling drugs to the Mexican cartel, excuse me, they were selling guns to the Mexican cartels. | ||
| So they would confiscate guns from criminals and then they would fill up a trunk with AKs and ARs and pistols and then they would drive to Mexico because to get into Mexico is easy. | ||
| Coming to America is where it's difficult and they check you. | ||
| But get into Mexico, you just drive right through. | ||
| So they were driving right through with trunkfuls of confiscated weapons and they delivered them to the cartels. | ||
| Wow, dude. | ||
| It's just hard to believe that that kind of stuff happens. | ||
| It's happening right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, she said it happens all the time and that's the main way they acquire weapons. | ||
| That's wild, man. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Fucking cops. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The world's crazy, man. | ||
| It's a crazy place, dude. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's wild that we think about all the different things, the conflicts that are happening overseas, when one of the most wild conflicts is happening right south of our border, and you could literally walk over there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sure you heard about those folks that got killed, where these people went down there. | ||
| I think the story is one of the women went over there for plastic surgery. | ||
| I think she went over there. | ||
| They crossed the border. | ||
| I think she's getting a butt lift or something because it's like cheaper in Mexico. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they got mistaken for a rival cartel. | ||
| They got mistaken for some sort of rival drug dealers or something and they killed two of them. | ||
| And they kidnapped these Americans and killed two of them. | ||
| Jeez, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's a real recent story. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| How a trip to Mexico for cosmetic surgery turned deadly for U.S. Quartet. | ||
| Deaths of two of four Americans kidnapped at Matamoros place spotlight on cartels' impunity and on medical tourism. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That is wild, man. | ||
| Fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they came from Lake City, South Carolina to Matamoros to Malapas, just south of the U.S.-Mexico frontier. | ||
| They arrived in the border city on the 3rd of March, but never made it to the clinic. | ||
| Members of a violent drug cartel that controls the area mistook the group of Americans as rival traffickers, killed two of them, and kidnapped McGee and one of her friends. | ||
| McGee and Eric Williams were rescued within days, and the bodies of her cousin, Shahid Woodward, and friend Zindell Brown were later repatriated. | ||
| On Thursday, five men who allegedly carried out the attack were dumped on a Matamora street, along with a surreal letter of apology purportedly from the Gulf cartel. | ||
| We asked the public to become the letter said in Spanish. | ||
| We are committed that the mistakes caused by indiscipline won't be repeated and that those responsible pay no matter who they are. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| That's wild, dude. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| That's wild stuff, dude. | ||
| It's a sketchy place, man, and it's fueled by the fact that drugs are illegal. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| It's like our idea that we're gonna, you know, keep people safe by making drugs illegal is propping up an illegal enterprise worth Untold billions of dollars just south of us. | ||
| Massive amounts, dude. | ||
| Massive amounts of money. | ||
| Like, you can't even process how much money it is. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's also responsible for the fentanyl deaths of 100,000 people a year. | ||
| It's like, fucking A, man. | ||
| Crazy times, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It really is, man. | ||
| I've always wanted to go to Mexico to hunt because, you know, in Sonora. | ||
| Like Coos deer and stuff like that. | ||
| Yeah, Coos and a giant mule deer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They have giant mule deer south of the border. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, huge, huge. | ||
| Have you seen the mule deer in Mexico? | ||
| Just Google giant mule deer in Mexico. | ||
| Yeah, a buddy of mine just went over there and shot a fucking monster. | ||
| And he said, I don't know if I'm going back again. | ||
| He said, we had to meet members of the cartel, and we pulled up this place, and these dudes, look at the size of these mule deer. | ||
| Oh, goodness. | ||
| Yeah, look at these things. | ||
| And it's all in the desert of Mexico. | ||
| It's like one of the most known places for enormous mule deer in Sonora. | ||
| Which is interesting, right? | ||
| Because they have these tiny little coos deer. | ||
| And then they have these just... | ||
| Oh, look at that one. | ||
| Goodness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Click on that one, Jamie. | ||
| Yeah, that one right there. | ||
| Look at that fucker. | ||
| Good night, dude. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| That's hard to believe. | ||
| Monstrous, monstrous mule deer. | ||
| It's like semi-elk, dude. | ||
| You're like getting into elk territory with that. | ||
| And the territory is gorgeous and it's like the landscape is beautiful. | ||
| But you might pass some dudes that are parked in front of a G-Wagon with AKs hanging from their shoulders. | ||
| And you're like, oh my god. | ||
| And then they ask you questions and talk to you and you're like, oh fuck. | ||
| They just might kidnap you. | ||
| That'd be real scary. | ||
| I mean, most of the time they leave those people alone because there's a lot of revenue and tourism and they don't want to fuck that up and they also don't want to bring heat down on them, which is what happened when these Americans got kidnapped. | ||
| All of a sudden the world is aware and that can be very dangerous for them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think them dropping those five goss off on the street is probably going to squash it, you know, as weird as that is. | ||
| That's crazy, man. | ||
| That's crazy stuff, man. | ||
| It's just, like, again, it's just hard to believe that that stuff's going on. | ||
| Right now, right there. | ||
| And it's on the same landmass as America. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| The same, literally just further down south than Texas. | ||
| It's happening right there. | ||
| It's closer to where we're at right now than I was this morning. | ||
| From where we're at right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| It's like I live in Nashville, Tennessee, you know? | ||
| Just some invisible border that we created decided this is the line of lawlessness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's wild stuff, dude. | |
| It is wild. | ||
| I still would like to go down there. | ||
| I would like to know if there's a way to do it safely. | ||
| Beautiful country, though, man. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I've been down there a couple times. | ||
| It's gorgeous, man. | ||
| Well, Steve goes down there every year to hunt coos deer, and he says it's sketchy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's sketchy, but they do it at this ranch that has no electricity. | ||
| It's this gorgeous place, and they have this Mexican lady who cooks for them. | ||
| All, like, real traditional Mexican food. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He says it's insane. | ||
| I went down there a few years ago to... | ||
| I have a deal with Columbia Sportswear, and I went down there to shoot some content for them. | ||
| We were flying into Cabo, right? | ||
| And so the thing was that we're going to go down there and try to catch marlin. | ||
| It was going to be the idea, right? | ||
| And I'm like, well, this is a sick endorsement. | ||
| I'm getting paid to go fish for marlin in Mexico. | ||
| That's awesome, you know? | ||
| So I took a couple of my buddies down there with me, Jonathan and Dan and Ray, three of my dearest friends. | ||
| We go down, and all we had to do was wear our Columbia stuff, and they just took pictures of us hanging out, right? | ||
| So we get into Cabo. | ||
| None of us have ever been to Mexico before. | ||
| And, you know, you hear those kind of stories. | ||
| So you're like, man, it's like, are we going to be cool? | ||
| And they're like, yeah, well, you know, Cabo, like, it's like resort town. | ||
| You're good, whatever. | ||
| So we get down, get out of the plane. | ||
| There's a, you know, there's the guy with the van. | ||
| And it's like, God, like the name of like our party or whatever. | ||
| And it's like Columbia or something. | ||
| And some of the Columbia, like staff were coming down there with us to like the head of PFG and those kind of folks. | ||
| So we get in the van and we're like, oh, there's Cabo and stuff, and we're driving, and we get on the interstate, and I'm like... | ||
| Man, Cabo seems like it's behind us kind of right now, you know? | ||
| Seems like we're not going kind of towards it, you know? | ||
| And I was like, man, that's kind of odd. | ||
| Then we're driving for like an hour and a half. | ||
| And then it's like, dude, we are in like nowhere. | ||
| Like nowhere desert, dude. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Is this right, dude? | ||
| Like, are we... | ||
| Because all we got is the guy driving us, dude. | ||
| It's the guy driving us and, like, me and my buddies and my manager, Cappy. | ||
| And we're like, I think... | ||
| Because the Columbia people traveled separate from us, right? | ||
| So we're like, we're just hoping that this guy is, like, taking us to the right place. | ||
| And all of a sudden, like, we pull into this just, like, town along the coast. | ||
| And when I say town, there's not a McDonald's. | ||
| There's not even, like, a store. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's like a little, the roads are like sand roads, dude. | ||
| And when I say the houses are like, like you think of a beach house, right? | ||
| It's like there's the beach, there's the house, and there's like the dunes, and then like you walk through the dunes, and there's the beach. | ||
| These houses were on the beach, bro. | ||
| Like they were on the sand. | ||
| Like all the furniture in the house was poured concrete with cushions on it. | ||
| So if the hurricane were to come, you'd just put new cushions on it. | ||
| The house would still be there. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And we walk in, and it's like, sure as shit, the Columbia folks are there, and there's these two guys there, and they're whipping up. | ||
| They're making homemade tortilla chips. | ||
| They're cutting the tortillas and dropping them in the oil, chopping up, making homemade guac and stuff. | ||
| And I'm like, whoa, this is sick. | ||
| But where are we? | ||
| Where is this place? | ||
| So we do our thing that evening, get settled in. | ||
| We go out, fish. | ||
| I caught a 90-pound tuna or something the next day. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| I had so much fun. | ||
| So we get back that night, and when I say it's nighttime, I mean, it's desolate. | ||
| There's houses kind of along the beach. | ||
| But you can tell that not all of them are, like, occupied all the time, right? | ||
| And it's not like these houses you think of in the States. | ||
| Like, they're not these big, palatial, like, beach homes like we have. | ||
| They're kind of quaint, like, smaller homes. | ||
| And all of a sudden, we're sitting out there, like, we got a little fire going. | ||
| My buddy's picking the guitar or whatever. | ||
| I remember looking, you can just see, like, miles down the beach. | ||
| And I just see just this one headlight coming down the beach from, like, miles and miles down. | ||
| I'm like, shit, dude. | ||
| Like, we, like... | ||
| Because all the Columbia people, they were staying in, like, a resort, like, 30 minutes away. | ||
| So we're at the house alone in this town. | ||
| And this light just keeps coming and keeps coming. | ||
| And there's a beach little access road right beside our house where we're staying. | ||
| And this ATV comes in. | ||
| It's still, like, the lights. | ||
| And it pulls up and it stops right where we're at. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, shit, dude. | ||
| Like, are we about to, like, have to pay somebody, dude? | ||
| Like, what the hell's going on? | ||
| Turns off, gets off, and it's this older, like, white couple from Minnesota. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm like, okay, this is mega weird. | |
| They're like, what are you guys doing down here? | ||
| We're like, oh, we're down here writing songs, whatever. | ||
| It was really funny. | ||
| My buddy Dan, he goes, so we start talking to these people, and they're like, yeah, we're retired, and our kids are in college, and we come down here and live just for the summer or whatever, winter or whatever, and stay down here. | ||
| I was like, oh, that's cool. | ||
| You know, we don't have these people at all. | ||
| And my manager's asleep, so it's just me and Dan and Jonathan and Ray. | ||
| It's got to be until 11 o'clock at night. | ||
| And so he's talking to my buddy Dan starts talking to this guy. | ||
| And he's like, yeah. | ||
| He's like, I'd love to, you know, get some grass or whatever. | ||
| You know, this guy said something about grass, but he wasn't talking about weed. | ||
| And then my buddy Dan was like, yeah, I'd love to get some grass or whatever, you know. | ||
| And he's like, well, I got some back at the house. | ||
| Why don't y'all come over to the house? | ||
| And we were like, that seems kind of sketch, right? | ||
| And I'm like, damn, we're going, dude. | ||
| We're going. | ||
| And he was like, dude, this is a lot of pressure, dude. | ||
| He's like, Cappy's in there, dude? | ||
| Like, we're about to walk off in this fucking town, dude, in Mexico. | ||
| Like, sand streets, dude. | ||
| Like, I don't know where all of these people are at. | ||
| So we go down there. | ||
| We walk down the road. | ||
| We go in there, dude, and it's like just this kind of old, like, cool-ass biker guy and his wife, dude, and just rolls this one up, dude, and we rip with these folks, and we're walking with him and talking, and he's like, yeah, you guys like country music? | ||
| You know, my buddy Dan says that, and he's like, yeah, but I don't like any of them new guys. | ||
| You know, they're all sissies or whatever kind of thing, you know, and My buddy Dan's like, yeah, there's a couple guys that are pretty good, though, and stuff. | ||
| So we get in there, hang out with them, and we tell them we're riding ATVs the next day. | ||
| And they're like, well, we'll show you guys around. | ||
| We start ripping tequila shots. | ||
| It's just me and my buddy Dan and these 60-year-old folks hanging out. | ||
| And it comes to this point where my buddy Dan goes, he goes, dude, I've got to tell them, man. | ||
| And I was like, what do you mean? | ||
| He's like, tell them what? | ||
| What do you got to tell them? | ||
| He's like, I've got to tell them, dude, because I know their grandkids are probably like... | ||
| Like you, dude. | ||
| Like, their grandkids probably think you're cool, dude, and they're not going to know. | ||
| And he's like, imagine, he goes, dude, he's like, get it together. | ||
| Dude, we're like, we're zoinked, dude. | ||
| We're taking tequila shots like smoking J's with these old folks. | ||
| And he's like, dude, imagine if these people were in their 20s, and they were hanging out with George Strait, dude, and it was their grandparents hanging out with George Strait, and they didn't know that it was George Strait or whatever. | ||
| And I was like, dude, I'm not George Strait, though, dude. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| And he goes, man, this guy's name's Luke and everything. | ||
| And they're like, oh, cool, you know? | ||
| And we took a picture with him, and the guy rolled us a J for the next day. | ||
| And we take off out, and we're like, okay, mission, get back to this house, right? | ||
| We get out in the street. | ||
| There's no street lights, dude. | ||
| There's one light on this one house and it's just kind of illuminating this road, this like sand, clay kind of road in front of us. | ||
| And we walk out and I just hear this like cling, cling, cling. | ||
| It's like a bell. | ||
| And all of a sudden, dude, these two huge steers, dude, walk out. | ||
| Like bulls, dude. | ||
| Walk down this road. | ||
| And, like, I'm staring down the barrel, dude, of these two massive bulls, dude, on the beach in Mexico with Dan. | ||
| We're baked. | ||
| We've been hanging out with these old people, dude. | ||
| We're halfway lost trying to get back to this house. | ||
| And we're, like, hiding behind this dumpster. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Is this real? | ||
| Like, where are we, dude? | ||
| What is this place? | ||
| And we get back. | ||
| We get back to the house. | ||
| The bulls pass. | ||
| We make it back. | ||
| And it's got to be 2 or 3 in the morning at this point. | ||
| Get back. | ||
| And we open the slot. | ||
| We're trying to sneak in. | ||
| Everybody's in bed, dude. | ||
| And I'm like, I feel like I was sneaking out of my parents' house or something again. | ||
| But I was like 24 or 5 years old. | ||
| Open the door. | ||
| My manager, unbeknownst to us, is sleeping on the couch outside. | ||
| And when we click the door open, he's like, oh, God! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's like, Like, we're freaked out. | |
| And I was like, dude, get up. | ||
| I was like, I know there's leftover shrimp in there, dude. | ||
| Make us a stir fry. | ||
| He was like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I was like, dude, we've been hanging out with these old people. | ||
| We almost got killed by these bulls. | ||
| And to his credit, dude, he got up and whipped us up like this breakfast stir fry at like three something in the morning, dude. | ||
| And like, that was my Mexico experience. | ||
| It was a great time. | ||
| That's a rural Mexico experience. | ||
| Yeah, it was awesome, dude. | ||
| You know who lives in Mexico? | ||
| Jesse Ventura. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, when he stopped being governor of Minnesota, he got a compound in Mexico. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, you know, he was doing that conspiracy theory show. | ||
| I'm gonna get some of this. | ||
| And I think he got balls deep into this idea that America is so profoundly corrupt and dangerous. | ||
| And, you know, he didn't want to have any part of it anymore. | ||
| He wanted to get the fuck out of America. | ||
| And he bought a compound in Mexico. | ||
| Dude, that's wild, man. | ||
| How old is he now? | ||
| He's got to be like... | ||
| He's pretty old. | ||
| Is he 80s? | ||
| Or 70s? | ||
| Late 70s? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| I had him on the podcast a few years back and, you know, he's got like a little bit of a shake to him now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He's got some health issues. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| How old is he now? | ||
| 71 years old. | ||
| 71. Minnesota. | ||
| Jesse Ventura from Minnesota. | ||
| So he was a wrestler. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wild, man. | ||
| Yeah, was a wrestler and then became the governor of Minnesota as an independent. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's rare. | ||
| That's like a rare thing to happen. | ||
| He was going to run for president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was a predator. | |
| Yeah, he was a predator. | ||
| Oh, a predator, right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'm about to be like a stogie, too. | ||
| Bunch of slack-drunk faggots right there. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| He was amazing. | ||
| Yeah, that was a great fucking movie, man. | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| Did you see the new one? | ||
| I haven't seen the new one. | ||
| The new one's awesome. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah, they did a new one about the Comanches. | ||
| Oh, that's pretty cool. | ||
| The new one is like a prequel. | ||
| Oh, it's like the Predators have been coming for a long time, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, that's cool. | ||
| When they come and they make war with the Comanche. | ||
| It's fucking awesome. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| You liked it? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Yeah, I'll have to check it out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love those movies. | |
| Anything involving aliens and Native Americans, I'm in. | ||
| Dude, I feel like those gung-ho, like, late 80s, like, early 90s action movies were, like, the sickest, dude. | ||
| I remember Commando. | ||
| I've seen that movie 8,000 times, dude. | ||
| Like, it's just, that was just a different level, dude. | ||
| Schwarzenegger was just killing it, dude. | ||
| Oh, he had so many of those movies, too. | ||
| So many of those gung-ho, kind of corny action movies. | ||
| But they were sick, though, dude. | ||
| They were sick, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They were. | |
| Like, I mean, how many guys, look at him, dude. | ||
| Look at this guy. | ||
| He was so jacked. | ||
| I'd like to look like 10% of that guy, dude. | ||
| Would be awesome, you know? | ||
| It's interesting seeing guys like that as they get older. | ||
| It's just like you realize, like, we don't have much time. | ||
| You really don't, because when I was in high school, this guy was a stud, and now he's this older dude. | ||
| Is this the trailer? | ||
| I love the chainmail vest the bad guy in this movie wears, dude. | ||
| All those movies back then, the Chuck Norris movies. | ||
| The rocket launcher, dude, was so hard, dude, when he pulled the rocket launcher out. | ||
| Commando. | ||
| Look at that guy, dude. | ||
| This guy. | ||
| He had the chainmail vest, dude. | ||
| Yeah, those movies were so good. | ||
| Kindergarten Cop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, this movie's legendary. | ||
| Me and my dad. | ||
| Is that Radon Chong? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Who was in that with him? | ||
| Alyssa Milano's in it. | ||
| His young daughter. | ||
| Yeah, it's Radon Chong. | ||
| That's Tommy Chong's daughter. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| How about another one? | ||
| Big Trouble in Little China, dude. | ||
| Oh, yeah, man. | ||
| Love that flick, dude. | ||
| That's a classic. | ||
| Me and my dad watch that all the time, dude. | ||
| That's a classic. | ||
| Yeah, that was a classic one, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny when you try to go back and watch those things now. | ||
| Is it a qualifier for being old that, like, everything, or feeling old where you're like... | ||
| Man, stuff was better back then. | ||
| That's just a qualifier, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody thinks that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I listen to my kids' music now. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck are you listening to? | ||
| This is nonsense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Essentially, my 12-year-old is really into old shit. | ||
| She's into Kiss and Nirvana and all kinds. | ||
| She plays me music, and I'm like, how the fuck do you know this? | ||
| She's into really... | ||
| My 14-year-old is into contemporary shit. | ||
| Whatever's popular now, she's into that. | ||
| She's into a lot of rap. | ||
| And my 12-year-old is into really cool, old music. | ||
| What are you into, music-wise? | ||
| Okay, you got five, dude. | ||
| Okay, you only listen to five artists forever. | ||
| So it's technically not a favorite five list. | ||
| Yeah, because I always take into account in this question the scope of the catalog, right? | ||
| So if I can really only listen to five artists forever, I don't want to listen to someone with two albums that I really like. | ||
| I've got to have somebody that's got enough of a catalog to keep me going through that. | ||
| Well, I'm a giant Hendrix fan, which is why I named the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| So Hendrix would have to be on the list. | ||
| Hendrix, to me, has always been a magical figure. | ||
| There's something about him that just embodied the spirit of the rebelliousness of the 1960s, this shift from the 50s to the 60s. | ||
| The ex-army guy. | ||
| He was like a microcosm. | ||
| He was like a synopsis of the whole era embodied in a human being. | ||
| Also, unparalleled genius on the guitar. | ||
| No one had ever seen anything like that before. | ||
| Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| Eric Clapton famously talked about the first time he saw Jimi Hendrix play and he just wanted to throw his guitar into the fire. | ||
| Like, what the fuck am I doing? | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| Yeah, Jesus Christ. | ||
| You know, I used to do news radio, the sitcom, with Phil Hartman. | ||
| And when Phil Hartman was young, he worked as like a roadie. | ||
| And, you know, he worked for, I think it was the Whiskey. | ||
| Pretty sure it was the whiskey. | ||
| And so he was there, I believe he was 18, when Hendrix was playing. | ||
| And his job was to make sure that the speakers didn't fall into the audience, like the way it was set up. | ||
| So he had to stand there, like right by the stage, while Hendrix was right there, playing in front of him. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| And he said it was the most fucking surreal experience of his life. | ||
| Just seeing Hendrix wail at the whiskey on sunset. | ||
| Just crushing it. | ||
| And he's a kid. | ||
| Just like standing there like just with his hands on his speaker making sure it doesn't fall over. | ||
| That's just it's just hard to even fathom that. | ||
| Hard to fathom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Hendrix? | ||
| Hendrix for sure. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| It's a tough question. | ||
| If you only have five, it's hard. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of classic rock. | ||
| I really love Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. | ||
| There's something about the music for me that is of that era, of the 1960s. | ||
| I'm obsessed with 1960s cars. | ||
| I have a bunch of 60s muscle cars. | ||
| They're my favorite. | ||
| Sometimes I go in my garage and I just stare at them. | ||
| I just sit there for like an hour and just stare at them. | ||
| And you're like, man, these are sick. | ||
| I just pull up a folding chair and just stare at the car. | ||
| There's just something about those things. | ||
| I mean, that's when I was born. | ||
| I was born in 67. And I feel like there's something about that, about going to high school, like when those cars had, you know, like you could kind of acquire those cars when you're 18. And it was, you know, because they weren't really that valuable back then, oddly enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They were just kind of like the cars people had. | ||
| Yeah, you could get like a 1968 Olds for like two grand, like a really mint one. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was just, there's something about that era that, to me, symbolizes the shift in American culture. | ||
| The American culture that shifted from the music and the culture of the 1950s to the 1960s. | ||
| The Vietnam War and just the change of the society. | ||
| The zeitgeist shifted and the drugs and the rebelliousness and the hippie movement and the anti-war movement and just the rock and roll was undeniable. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| The doors. | ||
| Yeah, it had that, it had balls behind it, man. | ||
| It was like, the music was made, you know, it wasn't this commercialized thing, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
At all. | |
| It wasn't like, no one was thinking about it in that sense at that time. | ||
| And maybe I'm insane for thinking that, but it just, it feels like that someone who wasn't even born then, who goes back and listens to that music, it has this like, Grit to it that just doesn't exist much. | ||
| Go from Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix. | ||
| Just do that. | ||
| That's not that much time. | ||
| You know, you're talking about the difference between 2013 and today. | ||
| The difference between 2013 music-wise and today is not that much of a difference. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's just music. | ||
| Country music it is. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| I mean, think about... | ||
| Hey, I gotta piss. | ||
| Let's come back and we'll talk about the difference. | ||
| I can imagine it gets wild. | ||
| Dude, I'll get twisted, dude, on it. | ||
| A little bit? | ||
| I get mega anxiety guy, dude. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here's my thing, man. | ||
| I used to love it, dude. | ||
| And when it's good, it can't be beat, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I feel like as I got... | ||
| So it starts out, right? | ||
| Like you're in college. | ||
| It's like, okay. | ||
| Ten out of ten times, I'm loving this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then the years kind of went on, and it was like, okay, like, one out of every ten times, it's not great for me. | ||
| And then, like, the years went on, and it was like three times out of ten. | ||
| And now it's kind of this point where it's like nine times out of ten, dude, I'm like, thinking I'm dying. | ||
| I'm having a panic attack, dude. | ||
| And it's like, I just, dude, it... | ||
| And I hate that because it is, in my opinion, one of the best things in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But for me, somehow my brain has changed where it doesn't. | ||
| Well, you have responsibilities now. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like, I guess I don't even think it's that. | ||
| It's almost like it's a chemical thing for me. | ||
| And like, I hate that so much because I did enjoy it so much. | ||
| And it was like, it was such a great thing for me. | ||
| Like, creatively or like... | ||
| Just to relax, dude, or have a great time with my buddies, dude, and it's like, I hate that I can't enjoy it anymore because I see other people enjoy it. | ||
| You just gotta power through. | ||
| I know, but it gets to this point where the good outweighs the bad, dude. | ||
| Even if I'm with the right people, though, it becomes this thing where it's like, I suffer from really bad, really, really, really bad OCD. Like, horrible. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| Okay, so it's like this weird, almost like not even like necessarily probably considered like a legit, I guess newer would be considered form. | ||
| And newer in medical terms because like the 80s is when like the first people were kind of exploring this type. | ||
| It would be called like purely obsessional OCD, which is like, okay, so you think when I say OCD, what do you think of? | ||
| Washing your hands too many times, touching things before you leave, like you have to touch things three times. | ||
| Or like straightening this. | ||
| Like Howard Stern style OCD. Right, like you're like everything's gonna be like this, or straight, or like everything's gonna be right, right? | ||
| So my thing is, pure OCD is right where there's these unanswered questions in your mind that can never be answered. | ||
| And the ritual is trying to find an answer. | ||
| Like, what kind of questions? | ||
| Okay, so it could be, like, let's say you are super religious, right? | ||
| And you love, like, at your core, like, your belief in God and Jesus, or any religion, really, is the centered part of your life, right? | ||
| So one theme of it can be you have a thought. | ||
| Everybody has crazy thoughts that slip through their head every day, and they come and go. | ||
| It's like somebody walking by you on the street, right? | ||
| They walk by and they go, oh, that was weird. | ||
| I just had a thought about jumping into traffic. | ||
| I don't want to. | ||
| And that thought doesn't even affect me in any way. | ||
| It just comes and goes. | ||
| It's like a weird thought that's a symptom of my brain. | ||
| People like me become obsessed with the meaning of those thoughts and why they entered our brain when really they don't mean anything. | ||
| So like someone that really loves God and that's a core part of their being is they would go, well, what if I hate God? | ||
| And that thought just, it's just a, it comes and it's gone as far as it can. | ||
| That thought in your brain triggers a flight or fight response. | ||
| So you get this mega adrenaline dump panic attack moment. | ||
| So then that gives it validity to your brain. | ||
| It says this is something we need to be concerned about. | ||
| So it starts sending that thought more and more and more. | ||
| And the obsession becomes, why did I have that thought? | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| Do I really hate this thing? | ||
| And it essentially attacks the things that are Essentially the antithesis of who you actually are, right? | ||
| So a lot of people have like violent obsessions. | ||
| Where they would have a thought of stabbing somebody. | ||
| They don't want to stab anybody. | ||
| Really, at the core of their being, they're probably the most gentle soul in the world, which is why the thought causes them anxiety. | ||
| And so then they become obsessed. | ||
| They get on their phone and they're like, why did I have this? | ||
| What are the symptoms of being a psychopath? | ||
| Or why am I like this? | ||
| Or why did I do this? | ||
| And so these themes, when you have them, they shift over time, but that period could be three, four, five, six months at a time. | ||
| And then you have another thought that's different, a different theme, and it just switches like that. | ||
| And then you think back on the other one and you're like, that was so dumb. | ||
| I can't believe I worried about that. | ||
| Now I'm worried about what if I'm schizophrenic and I don't know? | ||
| And you're obsessed with this thing. | ||
| And all my buddies know this about me, and I'm not afraid to talk about it or anything, but it's like... | ||
| People ask me sometimes, like my buddies would ask me, especially in high school is when it really kind of started for me. | ||
| And I think they would go, you know, try to explain it to me. | ||
| And the only way I could explain to you how truly bad it is, right, is if like if someone like murdered my whole family. | ||
| I would rather them be free and live with what I had than go to jail. | ||
| That's how bad it is. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And that's like, it's not an exaggeration in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| I wouldn't wish it on anybody in the entire world. | ||
| So it just comes in waves and you can't control it. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| I had a friend who was, he had that, and he would get these thoughts that he couldn't stop, and he didn't know why, and he would have panic attacks. | ||
| And he's a comic, and he was doing warm-up for the Cosby Show. | ||
| You know, warm-up is, you're kind of like telling kind of mild jokes, and you're explaining the scene, and you're just keeping everybody engaged, because the process of filming a television show is pretty, it's pretty arduous. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot going on, you know, and sometimes there's downtime. | ||
| And during that downtime, he would, you know, do kind of stand-up for the crowd and work. | ||
| And he gets this thought in his head that says, don't say the N-word. | ||
| That would be exactly the same thing. | ||
| That would be exactly the same. | ||
| He gets this thought and it's paralyzing. | ||
| He's terrified he's going to say it. | ||
| And he can't talk. | ||
| So his mouth is quivering. | ||
| He's trying to tell his jokes, but he's not thinking at all about what he's saying. | ||
| So now he's bombing. | ||
| So he's bombing. | ||
| And the entire time, his mind is screaming at him. | ||
| You're gonna say it. | ||
| You're gonna say it. | ||
| Don't say it. | ||
| Don't say it. | ||
| And he just has a fucking full-on panic attack while he's doing... | ||
| So that would be, that would be like a, I've never had that particular theme. | ||
| Like, there is a theme of that, like people who, like your brain's like, you're about to say this thing, don't say it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you're like, why would I think that? | ||
| I don't want to say that, or I don't think that way, or that's not who I am. | ||
| And like, that makes your brain send it more. | ||
| So it's like a broken circuit. | ||
| It's a broken circuit for sure. | ||
| And you, like, being afraid of it is what perpetuates it. | ||
| So, like, the only answer to it is living with the uncertainty. | ||
| Like, let's say I'm your friend in that moment. | ||
| The only way you can talk yourself out of it is you go, you know what? | ||
| I might say it. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| That's how you talk yourself out? | ||
| Like, I might jump in front of this truck? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I'd be like, you know what? | ||
| I could jump in front of that truck if I want to. | ||
| And that's how you get out of it? | ||
| And I'm okay with it. | ||
| I'm okay with that. | ||
| I'm not going to, but if I wanted to, I could, and I might, and that's okay. | ||
| But I can't even explain to people. | ||
| Because it's so weird to imagine... | ||
| If you had a thought of, I'm going to reach across this table and just deck you one, and I don't want to, and I'm afraid of that, but if I go, you know what? | ||
| I could, and I have to be okay with that. | ||
| It's almost like a paradox, right? | ||
| You're almost tricking the disorder. | ||
| Because then if you don't care about it anymore, then your brain stops sending the thoughts. | ||
| Because the thoughts are what's distressing. | ||
| The thoughts coming in continually are what stresses you out. | ||
| Because the more you have them, you're thinking, well, that must be who I am. | ||
| I must be this violent criminal, or I must be this, or I must be that, or whatever. | ||
| I must not love my wife. | ||
| It's all these things that can never be answered. | ||
| It's not like, what's two plus two? | ||
| Well, we all know that's four. | ||
| These are all questions that really, there is no answer to them at all. | ||
| And marijuana triggers those? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I just think that like, it can't be something that's like, no, and that's the thing is, I'm not afraid of those thoughts at all. | ||
| Like, they don't bother me at all. | ||
| Because you become comfortable with the idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it took me a decade to get... | ||
| Did you get counseling? | ||
| Did you talk to people? | ||
| A few times. | ||
| Not routinely, you know? | ||
| But I think counseling is almost paradoxical, right? | ||
| Because the more you focus on it... | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| So it can become a weird slope because reassurance seeking from other people. | ||
| Like if I told my best friend, dude, I just had this thought about shooting this guy. | ||
| Like, tell me I don't want to shoot this guy. | ||
| And then he goes, dude, you're not going to shoot that guy. | ||
| And I go, oh God, thank God. | ||
| Then you get addicted to the reassurance seeking, which then makes the thoughts come more and more and more and more because you're giving them attention. | ||
| You're giving them attention. | ||
| You're giving them attention. | ||
| And it's so strange, dude. | ||
| And it's like, I know, dude, that there's so many people that struggle with it and no one would ever know. | ||
| I could be having them right now and you'd have no clue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I could be totally checked out of this conversation and it's almost like you're living two lives at the same time. | ||
| It's freaky, dude. | ||
| And it's like, I wouldn't wish it on anybody, dude. | ||
| I wouldn't. | ||
| And it's terrible. | ||
| How often does it happen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| Now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Almost never. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But back then, I mean, I would attribute it to... | ||
| I mean, the majority, I would attribute it to, like, me failing out of college, probably. | ||
| Like, it's like, don't even... | ||
| Right, like, thinking you're gonna be a loser. | ||
| I don't even want... | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Like, you don't even want to go out of the house because you're on the bus to school and you're thinking about killing people and shit. | ||
| So that's why you dropped out of college. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it attributed to my horrible grades, without a doubt, because it was all... | ||
| I remember the new Scream movie had come out when I was 21. This is around the time I started playing guitar. | ||
| And my obsessions at that time were violent obsessions. | ||
| And the Scream commercial would come on to promote the movie, and I would turn it off, because I didn't even want to see anything. | ||
| I wouldn't even play violent video games. | ||
| What? | ||
| Which is the wrong way. | ||
| That's the wrong thing, because then avoidance and reassurance-seeking are what make the thoughts more prevalent. | ||
| It's such a paradoxical thing. | ||
| It's so strange, man. | ||
| Does anything help it, like if you go for Ike? | ||
| It would, yeah. | ||
| I mean, the more you can go out and not just... | ||
| The more you hide from it. | ||
| But do you get paralyzed by it? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Sometimes you feel like you can't go and do anything? | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| But then it's the thing is that you have to now. | ||
| If I were to have it now, you just have to continue on. | ||
| And I just know now that if I have it, it will end. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you ever got it when you're on stage? | |
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| And it's like, you feel so trapped, man. | ||
| You want to talk about feeling trapped. | ||
| I mean, you're in an arena with 20,000 people in there, and you're, like, having a full-blown, like... | ||
| And you're singing the song, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| And it's like nobody would even know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, but, like, that's... | ||
| Yeah, that's a lonely feeling, dude. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If anything, I know that there's kids that are at home dealing with this right now. | ||
| I didn't even know what it was until I was probably 19 or 20 years old. | ||
| And I'd had it since I was probably 12. And so you're just afraid, dude. | ||
| You just don't, you can't explain to your parents. | ||
| They don't know what to do. | ||
| They're like, I don't know what to do. | ||
| Like, it's just, I can't imagine some kid at home going through this right now, going through that right now. | ||
| And like, it's just so sad, dude, to me to know that there's people that deal with it. | ||
| And it's kind of obscure, right? | ||
| So it's not depression. | ||
| It's not like the hyped up, like, oh, I have depression or anxiety or whatever. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| I always wonder with people that have things like that that are also great artists, I always wonder if there's something that contributes to the depth of your art. | ||
| I think it's creativity, right? | ||
| So creativity can be a really great thing and a really bad thing. | ||
| In my opinion, because I think the creative side of my brain that can create a song and a story from nothing, right? | ||
| Like I could write a song about this, you know, bronze skull you have here if I really had to. | ||
| And I could create a story that was at least mildly compelling about it. | ||
| But I can also do that with the thought of stabbing somebody that I don't want to have. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And my brain just runs with it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the same sort of thing. | |
| It's the same circuit, right? | ||
| Like, my brain runs with that creativeness, and that can be a really detrimental thing to your mental health, too. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Did they ever try to give you medication for this? | ||
| In high school, yeah. | ||
| What did they give you? | ||
| It would probably be now, like... | ||
| I guess like maybe Zoloft, maybe? | ||
| I'm not sure what the generic of that would be. | ||
| So it's an SSRI. Yeah, it's an SSRI of some sort. | ||
| And that, it just didn't hit it for me, you know? | ||
| And that probably does work for a lot of people. | ||
| It just never hit it for me. | ||
| Did it stop the thoughts? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's the thing I don't know. | ||
| Like, I wasn't on it long enough. | ||
| You know, I was on it for a month, and really, in terms of SSRIs, that's not even long enough for them to take effect, right? | ||
| Like, really, you have to take them for, what, two or three months, I think, for them to be fully going, right? | ||
| So there is some sort of, like, serotonin, dopamine imbalance thing going on associated with it. | ||
| And I just choose to not go that route, but I think if that route works for people, then they should do that. | ||
| But that just wasn't something that I was interested in because I feel like it would have numbed like... | ||
| The creative aspect. | ||
| The positive. | ||
| Yeah, or like anything that was left of like my positive life at that point. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard people talk about Zoloft specifically in that regard, where it just like it numbs them or nothing bothers them, but nothing excites them either. | ||
| They're just flat. | ||
| It's just kind of, yeah, I wouldn't want to do that. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| And I think in some ways, I mean, it's probably something nuts to say this, but I think in some ways my brain is kind of like that anyways now. | ||
| And I think that may be an effect of the disorder that I've had. | ||
| Like, nothing really gets me through the roof excited. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Or down and through the roofs, like, in the dumps either. | ||
| So you've, like, managed your mind to keep it in, like, a certain frequency. | ||
| I think. | ||
| And I feel like it's a subconscious, like, almost defense mechanism of, like, having gone through, like, just these different things of that. | ||
| And that's bothered me a lot over the course of my career, too, because I... Sometimes I feel really guilty about not feeling the way I feel like I should feel about certain things. | ||
| Like in what way? | ||
| Like if I win a big award or if I get a number one song or... | ||
| Like those things are incredible and that's what I want to be doing. | ||
| Like that's why I started doing this. | ||
| But like I don't get that serotonin like dopamine hit off those things. | ||
| Like I feel like... | ||
| Do you get that? | ||
| I watch my colleagues do and I wonder... | ||
| When I watch it, like, I watch someone win an award, like, Male Vocalist of the Year or at the CMAs or whatever, and go up and accept the award, and they're, like, almost in tears. | ||
| Like, I don't feel that way. | ||
| And that makes me feel really, like, guilty and, like, that something's, like, wrong with me. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Does that make sense, what I'm saying? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, I think you watch movies your whole life, and you feel like this is the way that people are supposed to feel about things. | ||
| I appreciate the scope of what's going on and what it means to me and my team. | ||
| I'm so insanely proud of all those accomplishments. | ||
| Insanely. | ||
| This is why I do this. | ||
| To have achieved all of these great things. | ||
| But in that moment, it's not this overflow of joy and tears. | ||
| There's a few times in my life I felt that. | ||
| It's when I got married to my wife. | ||
| So when my son was born... | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it, dude. | |
| Like, and that's... | ||
| And I feel like I miss out on a lot because of this disorder, because of the way my brain works or the way that it's defended itself or something. | ||
| And there's probably a bunch of science that says I'm dumb or that I'm just like an emotionless weirdo. | ||
| I feel like I've been robbed of that, of all these things. | ||
| And maybe they all just seem trivial because of all the shit that I dealt with for so long with it, like the battles that have fallen inside my own head. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's hard to really explain. | ||
| It's hard to explain because the only way I would know is if I could somehow or another be in your brain. | ||
| I'm trying to imagine that. | ||
| I can imagine it, but I can't imagine living with it like you've lived with it and the steps you've taken to sort of get your mind into this place. | ||
| Yeah, like I just... | ||
| It's like I'm so thankful, dude, to just not be living in that mindset. | ||
| Do you have those positive thoughts when you create a new song? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but it's... | ||
| Hell, I love writing songs, man. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But maybe... | ||
| I mean, I don't get those feelings either for big things. | ||
| It's very odd. | ||
| Okay, that makes me feel better, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, like, it's very odd. | ||
| Does it ever bother you in the sense of, like, do you watch people go up, like... | ||
| Let's say there's... | ||
| I'm not super familiar with the comedic world. | ||
| Is there an award? | ||
| No. | ||
| It doesn't seem like it. | ||
| No, we don't want those awards. | ||
| But let's say there was, right? | ||
| Let's do the next reality over, right? | ||
| Let's say there's the... | ||
| The Oscars for comedy. | ||
| Comedy Oscars, right? | ||
| And you go up and it's like, funniest son of a bitch in the world award. | ||
| And that's the biggest thing in comedy, dude. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| All your heroes won it. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't be excited about that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But imagine being in the crowd. | ||
| Let's say you won it. | ||
| Let's say you won it, right? | ||
| And let's say you won it last year. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're like, man, it just didn't feel like it was supposed to. | ||
| And you're like, I love that I won that because I worked really hard and that's something I want to achieve. | ||
| In your brain, you know that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And you appreciate the shit of it. | ||
| You have it in your house. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| You're really proud of it. | ||
| And the next year, somebody else wins it, and they get up, dude, and they're pouring the tears, dude, and they're, like, having this big, like, emotional outburst about winning this thing and how much it means to them. | ||
| And then you're going, why didn't I do that? | ||
| Why didn't I feel that, like, rush, like, was I robbed of that rush of emotion? | ||
| Like, I often wonder that about myself. | ||
| Like, when I see my colleagues win things that I've even won, And they can barely even talk to get through the tears. | ||
| And I'm up there like, hey man, this is so great. | ||
| I love my wife and my team and everything's great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Does that just mean I'm a different guy? | ||
| Yeah, you're just a different guy. | ||
| But that's the things I wonder, dude, about that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I don't get excited about things like that. | ||
| I don't get excited about winning things. | ||
| I don't get excited about... | ||
| That kind of stuff, like a great show, like even like a sellout Madison Square Garden, standing ovation, I'm like, that's great. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I don't think about it like these emotional big moments. | ||
| My focus is always on the thing I'm doing. | ||
| And that's what's important. | ||
| It's supposed to work. | ||
| You worked hard to make it work. | ||
| Then you did it, good. | ||
| Get back to work. | ||
| That's my mind. | ||
| My mind is like, don't get all fucking excited about the fact that this was great. | ||
| Don't get stupid. | ||
| Go right back to work. | ||
| So my mind is always, no matter what happens, whatever accomplishments, my mind is always focused only on the work. | ||
| We're very similar then, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I think it's a creative thing. | ||
| I think so too. | ||
| Because what I get excited about, like I have this new bit that I wrote yesterday and I did it last night and it killed me. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, I got something. | ||
| I got something. | ||
| I got like a seed. | ||
| So for me, like, bits are seeds. | ||
| And those seeds are like a divine gift of the universe. | ||
| Like, whatever it is that creates creativity. | ||
| Whatever it is that creates an idea that enters into your mind and now you can give life to. | ||
| And then you become obsessed with it. | ||
| That's what I get excited about. | ||
| I get excited about these moments. | ||
| And I get excited about when they work. | ||
| But it's never excited for me. | ||
| It's never, I'm never like, I'm the man, I did it. | ||
| Never. | ||
| I feel that. | ||
| I never feel that. | ||
| And I feel like that, because that's wasted energy. | ||
| And I feel like that kind of celebrating is like, come on man, you know what the fuck you're doing. | ||
| You've been doing this forever. | ||
| This is what you do. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great show. | ||
| That's fun. | ||
| It's nice to have a great show, but that's not what's important. | ||
| What's important is the thing. | ||
| This fucking untold how many people, million people that are into what you're doing. | ||
| Like, what you got to do is get back to work. | ||
| Like, I have a massive responsibility to continue to create and to do the best I can, whether it's with podcasting, Or whether it's with doing stand-up or whether it's doing UFC commentary. | ||
| I have like this massive responsibility to just do the best I can. | ||
| So that's all I think about is like the thing that I can control. | ||
| You become obsessed with the result as in the sense of like... | ||
| The process and the result. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I'm the same way, dude. | ||
| Like I just... | ||
| Okay, so let me ask you this. | ||
| I'm interested. | ||
| So you're obsessed with the result, right? | ||
| So you go up, you do your bit last night, and it fucking crushes, dude. | ||
| It slams. | ||
| You love it, right? | ||
| Everybody loves it. | ||
| And you're like, I got something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So after that ends, and you're sitting in the green room, or you finally get home and you're by yourself... | ||
| What is the thing that keeps you shoving the needle in your arm, dude? | ||
| Is it the reaction and knowing that I've done it? | ||
| I did it again. | ||
| I did the joke. | ||
| I got the joke that's... | ||
| The joke. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's almost not me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's the thing. | ||
| It's like I know that I'm the person who's in front of the keyboard who came up with these ideas and who write it down wrote it on my phone and I'm the dude who's pacing around the green room trying to figure out which way to set it up and Should I chop this part out or let me just get the bullet points and then just talk to these people and tell them what I think about this thing and the comedy is gonna come out of that. | ||
| Yeah, and It's just that. | ||
| It's never like me. | ||
| It's always focused on the thing. | ||
| But it's the fact that it resonates with someone else on such a grand scale. | ||
| Well, if it resonates with me, it'll resonate with someone else. | ||
| That's what I've found. | ||
| As long as I'm honest about my approach and as long as I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| If I think it's funny and I start thinking Like, about what's funny about it, then the thing is just figuring out a way to get that into people's minds the smoothest, cleanest, funniest, sneakiest way. | ||
| You know and it's a process so the process is what's very exciting because the beginning is Usually a little clunky because you're not exactly sure how you're gonna say it and maybe I said it right last night But I forgot how to say it right tonight and I fucked it up and then I have to live with that and then the next day I have to start all over again and then I go over the notes and I go over the fucking recordings and But it's always the thing. | ||
| It's never like, look what I did. | ||
| I fucking did it. | ||
| I'm crying. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| I get zero of that. | ||
| Even when I film specials, even if I film a Netflix special and it fucking kills, I'm like, okay, we did it. | ||
| And then when I put it out, I stay offline. | ||
| I don't read reviews. | ||
| I'm like, I just got to keep moving. | ||
| Keep concentrating on this thing that I'm doing. | ||
| Yeah, that makes me feel great because I feel... | ||
| I feel that same way, man. | ||
| But there's nothing wrong with freaking out, too. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with going up there and crying, and this is an amazing moment for you, and you've worked so hard for that. | ||
| I just think every individual creative person has a unique way of addressing ideas and the thing that you're in love with. | ||
| And with you, the thing you're in love with is music. | ||
| And you address that music, and clearly it's working. | ||
| Your process creates amazing songs. | ||
| So there's something about this way you think Where you don't get excited about things that keeps you in that moment. | ||
| And I think you're thinking about it as a negative, but I think it's a superpower. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| And I think it's one of the reasons why your songs are so good. | ||
| I think it's a part of your mind. | ||
| And it's just like you have this unique gift of your mind. | ||
| It's a unique mind. | ||
| There's no one else like you. | ||
| You are you. | ||
| And that's what's coming out. | ||
| And that's why the award shows are bullshit. | ||
| All these people clapping on cue and like, why would I get excited about it? | ||
| It's the same thing that's already happened. | ||
| The music is affected when people are listening to one of your songs in their car and they start crying. | ||
| That's what's up. | ||
| That's the award, right? | ||
| That's the fucking award, man. | ||
| And you're not going to be there for that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No doubt. | |
| You're not even going to be there for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The beauty of it is when you are there for that is at a show, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like if you get that one person out of 60,000 or whatever now that we're doing these stadiums, it's like that makes it to the front row. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they want to hear this one song because it means so much to them. | ||
| And you play it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you see them, dude, I've had many, many, many nights where it's like, I have one song in particular that's called Even Though I'm Leaving, and it's a song that essentially starts out with a dad talking to his son, saying like, oh man, you're scared of the, I know there's not any monsters under the bed kind of thing. | ||
| Like, I'm just down the hall, you know, even though I'm leaving, I'm not going nowhere, right? | ||
| And the next verse is, then it's the son, and he's going off to war, right? | ||
| And the hook changes to, you know, even though you're leaving, I'm not going nowhere. | ||
| You know, I'll be here when you get back, kind of thing. | ||
| And then the last verse is the dad passing away. | ||
| And it's like, hey man, like, even though I'm leaving, I'm not going anywhere, you know? | ||
| And like, There's been many nights where, like, you see that person that's connected with that, like, that's lost their dad, right? | ||
| And they're there, and they're right in your face, man. | ||
| And they're just like, there's three or four people on them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And they're just weeping, dude. | ||
| Uncontrollably. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| It's powerful, dude. | ||
| I mean, that stuff is like... | ||
| I mean, that's powerful stuff, man. | ||
| And that's the reason you do it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's why you do it. | ||
| That's why you don't get excited about awards, man. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with you. | ||
| Because there's nothing that's like... | ||
| There's nothing that speaks to... | ||
| To me, that does. | ||
| That's also why it's so good, man. | ||
| That's why it's so good. | ||
| The reason why you have this thought process behind it is the end result. | ||
| Yeah, it's just you want to make people feel something, dude. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You want to make them feel this, whether it's a cathartic thing or it's like... | ||
| Even songs that maybe are mega sad, it's like... | ||
| There's something cathartic about, like, basking in sadness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, too, sometimes. | ||
| Something very attractive to people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, people, it's like, sometimes you hear, like, well, you know, pull yourself out of it kind of thing. | ||
| But, like, I think that's an important part of some sort of process of life is if you get your heart broken or a loved one passes away. | ||
| Like, that inherent sadness is, like, part of the process, right? | ||
| And it's like, that's such a powerful... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, human emotion to me. | |
| To everyone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, to all the people who feel. | ||
| Yeah, that's why people love those sad songs. | ||
| I mean, it's not that they want to be sad. | ||
| They don't want to listen to some, oh, I'm too happy today, let me listen to Luke Combs and start crying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's like, they want to hear this, put this song on, it's almost like, Reaffirming this feeling. | ||
| It just resonates with human emotion and feeling and thought and the appreciation of people when they are there. | ||
| That's part of the sorrow, is the backside of it, is the appreciation of the people that are in your life that you love. | ||
| It's like you don't feel one without the other. | ||
| It's like the two of them, they go hand in hand. | ||
| They're the yin and the yang of the world. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with your thought process in regards to that at all. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| I don't think you're robbing yourself of anything. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I think you're getting the juice out of the right spots. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That makes me feel good, man, because I worry about that. | ||
| I think about that a lot, and that's not something I've brought up to a lot of folks, really, almost ever. | ||
| But I often, I wonder that a lot. | ||
| You know, I spend a lot of time worrying about that. | ||
| The more crazy things happen to me, the more they're like steady, like a normal thing. | ||
| It's a base level. | ||
| Yeah, it's like everything stays normal. | ||
| But it's not that, then it's like, I worry, it's just like, well, it's not, I don't want this to be expected either. | ||
| It's not expected. | ||
| It's just you're like, you're comfortable with it, right? | ||
| You're just like, alright, this is what I'm doing. | ||
| Like, this is the kind of level of stuff I'm doing. | ||
| Like, talking about planning a stadium tour is like a normal thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's normal. | ||
| But it is normal. | ||
| It's normal for you. | ||
| What's normal for you is like mind-blowing for 21-year-old Luke to imagine that one day you'd be that guy. | ||
| Yeah, no doubt. | ||
| Doing a fucking stadium tour. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's crazy, man. | ||
| It's like not even like... | ||
| It just doesn't even seem like possible to do. | ||
| Right, because it's not normally. | ||
| That's why it's so crazy to you, but you have the right approach. | ||
| Because if you were like, yeah, I'm the fucking man. | ||
| I'm out here doing a fucking stadium tour. | ||
| I'm the fucking man. | ||
| That's the opposite of your creative process. | ||
| That's the opposite of the frequency that your mind is on when it's making these things that resonate with people's real feelings. | ||
| I just try to stay so rooted in, like, humility. | ||
| Like, that's been such a huge part of, like, I think, like, how me and my whole team have, like, gotten where we are is, like... | ||
| I just want people to know how grateful I am for all of it. | ||
| I am 1% of the puzzle, dude. | ||
| I'm the guy that gets to sit in here and talk with you. | ||
| But the 99% of everything else that's going on is like work that's done by someone else other than me, dude. | ||
| And I feel like that whole part of the process is like lost in like the idea of like celebrity, right? | ||
| It's like me and you are just, we're one guy. | ||
| But maybe we're a bigger cog in the wheel, right? | ||
| But you take that one cog out, Or any cog out, and it doesn't work. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's like there's a team, and I'm sure you have a team of folks that propel your success because there's not enough time in 10 lives to do all the things that's necessary for your stuff to go on or my stuff to go on. | ||
| Like, there's so many folks involved in that, you know? | ||
| I'm just—I'm really grateful for, like, having an, like, awesome group of people to, like, work with that, like, don't just tell me yes to everything and, like, that are willing to challenge me on things and, like, say, hey, man, is this the right decision? | ||
| Or I don't love this song or, like— Why would we do this thing? | ||
| Why don't we think about this? | ||
| I've always tried to keep it this open thing of me and people that work with me can talk about things and have discussions that a lot of people, I think, Sometimes lose that. | ||
| They become so shielded in the idea of celebrity, which is like they got a security guy, so nobody on their team, like they might not even know this guy that works for them at all. | ||
| They don't even know that guy's name and he's worked for him for five or six years at all. | ||
| Doesn't even know him, you know? | ||
| And like to me, it's like I can't say we're all best friends, dude. | ||
| We're not all coming over to my house and having... | ||
| I'm friendly with everybody that's out on the road with me. | ||
| I want people to know that I'm approachable. | ||
| We can talk about something. | ||
| I think that's so crucially important to the overall success of the thing. | ||
| Because if I show up at a venue... | ||
| The only impression that 99% of the people working in that venue will get of me is someone that works for me. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So if everyone on my team is rude, then what are they going to think about me? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| They're going to go, well, this guy must be a jerk, dude. | ||
| But this attitude that you have, though, is why people love you. | ||
| I mean, it's why it resonates. | ||
| To keep from being captured by celebrity and stardom. | ||
| Because a lot of people do because it's a shield. | ||
| You put that shield up to shield you from the thoughts of uncertainty and insecurity and whether or not you're worthy and whether or not you can keep doing it. | ||
| With a lot of people, it's like you start doing it, but can I keep doing it? | ||
| Do I still have it? | ||
| Are my new songs any good? | ||
| Are my new jokes any good? | ||
| It's the same kind of thing. | ||
| You're just thinking about it the right way, but it's not something that anybody could teach you because nobody gets to be famous. | ||
| Small, tiny sliver of the population. | ||
| And then to be famous for doing something that resonates with people and, like, they worship you. | ||
| They fucking listen to your song a hundred times in a row. | ||
| I mean, that's a thing that no one is going to be able to explain to you. | ||
| Because you could talk to a psychologist about it and they're dealing with, you know, theory. | ||
| They've never experienced that. | ||
| They don't know what it's like to stand on stage in front of 60,000 people. | ||
| And only you do. | ||
| Very few people do. | ||
| And it's up to you because you are the guy that's holding the microphone and playing the music. | ||
| You are the guy that has to navigate that road. | ||
| And you're doing it, I think, the right way. | ||
| The way you're handling it with humility and the way you're handling it with genuine appreciation and just being a real person. | ||
| You can keep that going. | ||
| Guys have kept that going. | ||
| And that's actually something that's rewarded in country music, which I think is great. | ||
| Because in some styles of music, it's rewarded that you become untouchable. | ||
| You become this unapproachable, untouchable, don't make eye contact. | ||
| He's a genius. | ||
| He's going to walk into the room and everybody get out of the way. | ||
| And if he picks up the guitar, everybody stop talking. | ||
| That kind of psycho thinking, that can pollute your mind. | ||
| And people get very captured by that. | ||
| And we've seen it many many many many times with rock stars with movie stars It's just the the thing that you have given into is so overwhelmingly odd and So few people experience and it just does not resonate with any normal human emotions It's so strange that everybody knows who you are and you don't know who they are and you just this is the life you live but it's up to you and Because you're the rare traveler that's gone down that road that far, | ||
| the rare one. | ||
| It's up to you to navigate that road. | ||
| And if you can do it, a young artist can also see you do it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And they can go, oh, look how fucking Sturgill Simpson's so cool. | ||
| He's fucking huge. | ||
| Like, how do I stay cool? | ||
| That's what I aspire to. | ||
| I don't aspire to being a diva and have everybody throw rose petals at my feet. | ||
| I aspire to be that cool motherfucker that can hang out with the sound guy, For sure, dude. | ||
| Cracking jokes with the bus driver. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| Someone who's just a normal person who just, by some strange circumstance, the rarest of rare moments in life, you wind up being that person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just think about, it's like, I can't tell you how many beers I shotgunned in college, and now I can shotgun a beer and 50,000 or 60,000 people are stoked about it. | ||
| I'm like, that's awesome, dude. | ||
| That's pretty awesome. | ||
| I did seven or eight of these a night for years, dude. | ||
| You know, years. | ||
| I might do one. | ||
| You went to the bathroom when I was talking about it. | ||
| That's what got me thinking about shotguns. | ||
| Yeah, shotguns. | ||
| I might do one. | ||
| Go ahead, bro. | ||
| We got the freedom funnels here. | ||
| I might just do one straight out of the can. | ||
| You need a knife? | ||
| Old school? | ||
| Yeah, I'll start it, though. | ||
| Oh, you with teeth? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I always start it that way, right? | ||
| I feel like that's for good effect, you know? | ||
| That was a two-holer on that one. | ||
| I got two teeth through that bad boy. | ||
| Old school. | ||
| Yeah, it's an art form, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's not a speed. | ||
| This is not a speed thing, right? | ||
| It is with the funnel, the freedom funnel. | ||
| It goes right to your brain. | ||
| Do you think you could freedom funnel faster than I could shock on one? | ||
| I wouldn't bet a lot of money on that. | ||
| I mean, it's possible, I think. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| There's only one way to find out, sir. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| America! | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Coming to save the motherfucking day, yeah! | |
| That should be our national anthem. | ||
| You gotta close it, because you opened it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Why, is that the rule? | ||
| Yeah, that's like a... | ||
| When someone closes it, or opens it, they have to close it? | ||
| Oh yeah, dude, that's a big rule. | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ready? | |
| Three, two, one. | ||
| The motherfucking day! | ||
| Yeah, you beat me by a solid three seconds. | ||
| Impressively fast. | ||
| You beat me by a Tesla zero to 60. Oh my goodness. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| I don't even know how you did that. | ||
| It's like college. | ||
| It feels like college. | ||
| You just opened it up and it went down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So years of... | ||
| What is the deal with closing a knife? | ||
| How come you have to... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just always heard that. | ||
| Like if you open it, you got to be the person that closes it. | ||
| It's like bad luck, right? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I've always heard that at least. | ||
| There's a problem with those bad luck things. | ||
| They get in your head and then you think that's the truth. | ||
| It's like the guys that do, like, flip the cigarette around. | ||
| Like, when they open a pack of cigarettes, they flip the first one they touch upside down. | ||
| You heard of that? | ||
| To keep from getting cancer? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's called a lucky. | |
| I don't know why. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you flip it upside down, and then that's the last one you smoke out of the pack. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know that. | ||
| It's another weird superstition thing. | ||
| I'm sure there's a bunch of those. | ||
| There's a bunch of those. | ||
| I'm sure there's a rabbit hole of those things that people could go down. | ||
| Yeah, those things are fucking weird. | ||
| The things that people just decide. | ||
| And then they have to do it. | ||
| And you get obsessed with it. | ||
| You have to wear your lucky watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what has the most of that to do is baseball, dude. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It has the most superstition stuff in it. | ||
| Like crusty socks, dude. | ||
| Grody stuff, dude. | ||
| You know what I was excited to ask you about when I got in here is I'm a huge UFC guy. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| And I just... | ||
| I don't even know if I have, like, what questions I would even have. | ||
| I could do three hours just on that. | ||
| Like, I've just been such a fan of it for so long. | ||
| Like, back to high school, you know? | ||
| Like, I probably got into it, like... | ||
| Obviously, I'm not OOG, dude. | ||
| I'm not Gracie UFC 1 guy. | ||
| I was too young when that was going on. | ||
| But I was like Chuck Tito. | ||
| That was when I started. | ||
| I'm hooked. | ||
| Chuck was the guy for me that got me hooked. | ||
| I'm like, this guy... | ||
| Is the guy. | ||
| Well, he was the guy that launched the UFC, really, because for him as the biggest star, for him, because he was such a destroyer, he'd just like seek and destroy style. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He was so exciting. | ||
| Every one of his fights was a fucking chaotic experience. | ||
| It was, man. | ||
| And just, like, the him and Randy trilogy, dude, the him and Tito thing, it was like, those were the... | ||
| And I remember watching, like, Stephen Bonner, Forrest Griffin, like, that was just a war bloodbath, like, and I just became, like, obsessed. | ||
| I was, like, obsessed with it, dude. | ||
| Like, it's so... | ||
| It's just so primal, dude, that I couldn't love it anymore, man. | ||
| Been to a live event? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| Oh, you gotta go. | ||
| I want to so bad. | ||
| Tell me when. | ||
| Tell me where you want to go. | ||
| We'll hook it up. | ||
| So bad, dude. | ||
| Okay, so here's me out. | ||
| What's the next title fight that you think I should see in person? | ||
| Well, I would say this weekend, but it's in London. | ||
| Leon Edwards versus Kamaru Usman, the rematch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That fight was crazy, dude. | |
| One minute to go. | ||
| Leon launches the greatest head kick of all time. | ||
| Dude, the way he fainted that punch, dude, to get him to duck into it. | ||
| Dude, I remember screaming. | ||
| I was at... | ||
| Look at this fight card, too. | ||
| Justin Gaethje versus Rafael Fazeev. | ||
| Rafael Fazeev is a fucking assassin. | ||
| That is going to be a wild fight. | ||
| That is going to be a wild fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh man, I'm just eat up, dude. | |
| That fight, Leon Edwards and Kamaru Usman, though, that's for legacy. | ||
| I mean, Usman is, in my mind, up until that fight, he's the greatest welterweight of all time. | ||
| And Leon Edwards lands that one head kick. | ||
| You're going over GSP. Yeah. | ||
| I think if they fought... | ||
| That crushes me. | ||
| I just think the level of competition he faced is higher. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, but it's just because GSP was so good, he raised the bar. | ||
| He raised it to the level it's at now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I think if you look at GSP's victories, he beat some very good guys. | ||
| But I think the guys Kamaru Usman beat Colby Covington, Jorge Miles Vidal, Tyron Woodley, I think they're better. | ||
| You think Masvidal's GSP level? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think if Masvidal was around during that time, he would be dangerous for everybody. | ||
| I think he's on another level. | ||
| But I think everyone's on another level now. | ||
| I think, like, the Masvidal that knocked out Ben Askren, that was one of the craftiest fucking moves everyone's ever done. | ||
| For sure, man. | ||
| He ran out, he went sideways, and then ran straight at him, and Askren's instincts kicked in, and he kneed him into the dark lands. | ||
| Just one shot, boom, into the shadow realm. | ||
| I mean, Masvidal, I mean, he knocked out Eve Edwards with a fucking head kick back in the day. | ||
| He's a killer, dude, no doubt. | ||
| He's a fucking assassin. | ||
| He's a killer, dude, no doubt. | ||
| He's an assassin. | ||
| He had bare-knuckle fights in the Kimbo Slice days. | ||
| The Kimbo Slice era, dude. | ||
| The YouTube video area. | ||
|
unidentified
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Masvidal's a gangster. | |
| Masvidal's a gangster. | ||
| And he lost to Colby Covington, but I feel like Colby Covington, if it wasn't for Kamaru Usman, would be the welterweight champion of the world. | ||
| I think Colby's that fucking good. | ||
| He's like, just Usman was so... | ||
| Up into that Leon Edwards head kick... | ||
| So good. | ||
| Dude, it was like, and I can agree with you, watching those later. | ||
| So the last fight GSP lost, right? | ||
| That's Sarah, right? | ||
| So he lost Sarah and then avenges the Sarah. | ||
| He should have lost to Johnny Hendricks in a lot of people's eyes. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, before he retired. | ||
| A lot of people thought that was not a just decision. | ||
| I'd have to go back and re-watch it to see if I agree. | ||
| But, you know, it was like the amount of fights that he had, the stress... | ||
| Now, don't get me wrong. | ||
| He's absolutely one of the all-time greats. | ||
| One of the all-time greats. | ||
| I'm not looking at it like saying he wasn't as good as Kamaru Usman. | ||
| I'm saying what he did... | ||
| Was not as impressive as what Usman did. | ||
| With the competition. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you look at the fact that he got armbarred by Matt Hughes when Matt was in his prime. | ||
| He got knocked out by Matt Serra. | ||
| Matt Serra was a murderous puncher. | ||
| He took that guy for granted. | ||
| Matt fucking caught him. | ||
| Matt could do that to anybody. | ||
| Eventually, they had a rematch and he beat Matt up in front of The fans in Canada, and it was an insane event. | ||
| He's an all-time great, and I love him to death, but I feel like if I look at the level of competition he faced and the level of competition Kamaru faced and what Kamaru did to those people, you gotta understand, Kamaru, when he was coming up, no one would speak his name. | ||
| He was the boogeyman. | ||
| Right, because nobody wanted to fight him. | ||
| Nobody wanted to fight him when he was coming up. | ||
| Everybody would say, you know, gimme this guy, gimme that guy. | ||
| Right, and they wouldn't say anything about him. | ||
| Nobody was saying Kamaru Usman, because he was smashing people. | ||
| And he was doing it with destroyed knees. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That guy's mind is so strong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| His fucking knees are so bad, he goes downstairs backwards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let me ask you something that has been intriguing to me, and this is a fan who... | ||
| I would say I'm above casual fan, but below expert knowledge fan. | ||
| So I'm not a guy that watches... | ||
| I'm a guy that buys every pay-per-view. | ||
| I watch a lot of the in-between deals because I enjoy it, right? | ||
| But I'm not a guy who's like, oh, dude, the way he got into that Darce is like, I can do some of that stuff, but I'm not expert level. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I'm interested to hear your take, and this is as a fan who doesn't know these guys at all and has nothing against them. | ||
| But I remember, and I think in my mind is undeniably the GOAT, as again, just above casual fan, Jon Jones. | ||
| Jon Jones is the GOAT. He's the GOAT. Now, it's undeniable. | ||
| It's undeniable. | ||
| There was all this debate until he submitted Cyril gone and became the heavyweight champion. | ||
| No one can fuck with that. | ||
| Smashed him, bro. | ||
| Smashed him. | ||
| And Cyril looked kind of unbeatable up until the Francis fight. | ||
| Well, the Francis fight exposed one aspect of his game that you're never going to beat John in, and that's the wrestling. | ||
| And then everybody said, well, he didn't know that Francis was going to wrestle him, given. | ||
| Francis is not the caliber of wrestler, or even in the realm of Jon Jones. | ||
| Jon Jones has been wrestling since he was 12 years old. | ||
| He took down Daniel Cormier, who's an Olympic-level wrestler. | ||
| There is not a guy in the world that can say that... | ||
| You could start wrestling at 29 years old. | ||
| I mean, you'd have to be the freakiest of freak athletes to be able to compete with that guy to start wrestling when Cyril Gaunt started wrestling. | ||
| The gap is just too wide to cross. | ||
| So I think what I was thinking is, and when I bring up Jon Jones, is I remember the first Jon Jones fight I watched was when he got DQ'd against Matt Hamill from the 12-6 elbows, right? | ||
| That was my first experience with him. | ||
| The next thing I feel like I remember, and I may have seen some of his fights in between then, but is when he beat up this guy that was trying to rob this lady the night of a fight. | ||
| That was the day he fought for the title. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The day he fought for the title, he chased down a guy who robbed someone and tackled him and held him until the cops came. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, when he fought Shogun, he became the youngest ever UFC champion. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, here's what I'm getting at. | ||
| And this is going to be just kind of... | ||
| I'm interested in your take on this because I watched it happen with Jon Jones, and I feel like I watched it happen with Kamaru as well, where it was like... | ||
| Jon and Kamaru, as they came up, right, it's like Jon does this thing where he stops this robber and he wins the belt. | ||
| He beats Shogun, who is this kind of like, you know, him and Lyoto were these kind of like, unfigureoutable guys, to me as a fan at that time, right? | ||
| Like, guys like, how do you beat Lyoto Machida? | ||
| You can't figure, because you can't even touch the guy, right, at that time. | ||
| And they were, like, inherently these, like, good guys that everybody was rooting for. | ||
| And then both of them became these, like, epically long-range champions that then became sort of like villains. | ||
| Kamara was never a villain. | ||
| I feel like he is. | ||
| Really? | ||
| To me as a fan, again, who doesn't know anything, and maybe it comes back to maybe the celebrity ego thing, like to the camera as a fan. | ||
| Again, I've never met the guy. | ||
| He's probably great. | ||
| But just as a cash watcher, I went from going, I'm rooting for this guy, to then it'd be like the way he talks about himself, and I feel like Jon Jones was the same way to me, is they became this really... | ||
| And then Jon got in all this kind of turmoil-y stuff, like... | ||
| Well, I don't think you can compare the two. | ||
| And here's two reasons why. | ||
| One, have you ever seen Kamaru on my podcast? | ||
| He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth, friendly, smiley, fun guys. | ||
| What you're seeing is... | ||
| Kamaru, the destroyer. | ||
| The dog, dude. | ||
| The dog is ready to go to war. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| And that's what I was trying to ask. | ||
| He's signaling to all the other people, I'm going to smash you. | ||
| That's what he's signaling. | ||
| And that's what I think I was asking, is like, is that all just perceived by me? | ||
| Or is that... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's part of the fun of being a fan. | ||
| You know, deciding what you like and what you don't like and personalities that you root for and personalities you root against. | ||
| And sometimes you root against a guy and he wins you over because he's so goddamn good. | ||
| You're like, I wanted that motherfucker to lose, but he's the fucking greatest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| John is very different than Camaro. | ||
| John is what I would describe... | ||
| There's human beings that have different temperament and different minds and different mentality and a ruthless competitive drive that's almost terrifying to the ordinary person. | ||
| That's Jon Jones. | ||
| Jon Jones is a bad guy who's trying to be a good guy. | ||
| But that guy, if we were living a thousand years ago, he would be on a horse with the biggest battle axe, wading in the back, hacking heads off, and everybody would be running. | ||
| And those people have always existed. | ||
| These dominators have always existed. | ||
| But John is like a genuinely sensitive, intelligent guy who's trying to do the right thing. | ||
| But he's a fucking conqueror. | ||
| He's a fucking conqueror. | ||
| That's the thing that's inside of him that leads him to be the GOAT. And without that, you don't get there. | ||
| You don't get a Mike Tyson without that. | ||
| You don't get a Muhammad Ali without that. | ||
| You don't get a Marvin Hagler without that. | ||
| You don't get that. | ||
| There's a thing inside some people that is a driving force that allows them to overcome the greatest around them. | ||
| It's a Michael Jordan. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| There's a thing, man. | ||
| Tom Brady. | ||
| And those motherfuckers are hated. | ||
| They're always hated. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Because you have to hate them because you can't beat them. | ||
| It's the 260-inch deer, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because me and my buddies were talking. | ||
| They're like, man, that's not the deer of a lifetime. | ||
| That's the deer of 10 lifetimes. | ||
| Yes, most people never see that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's even more than that because you can just accidentally stumble across the deer of a lifetime. | ||
| You can't accidentally beat Jon Jones. | ||
| There's a thing about... | ||
| So he's goad over Khabib? | ||
| He's goad over everybody now. | ||
| Khabib's too? | ||
| Yeah, Khabib is in the conversation, but Mighty Mouse is in that conversation too. | ||
| Mighty Mouse to me, if you want to look at like a technical expression of the greatness of martial arts, he's as good as anybody's ever done it. | ||
| When Mighty Mouse was the flyweight champion. | ||
| And the only problem is, besides Cejudo and a couple other guys like Benavidez, he was not dealing with guys that were of the caliber of the guys that Jon Jones was facing. | ||
| Jon Jones was facing Gustafson. | ||
| Glover Teixeira. | ||
| He was facing Daniel Cormier. | ||
| He was facing the elite of the elite and he never fucking lost even when he was doing coke and he wasn't even training. | ||
| That's how goddamn good Jon Jones is. | ||
| And when Jon Jones talks about fights though, when I had him on the podcast, one of the things that he talked about Some people don't really watch tape or they only watch a little bit. | ||
| They let their coaches do the work. | ||
| Jon Jones studies everyone. | ||
| He studies their tendencies. | ||
| He gets in his mind how when you throw that left kick, you make this little step with your right foot. | ||
| You might do this thing when you shoot for a takedown where you keep your head on one side every time. | ||
| You might do this thing where when someone throws a right hand, you always lean to the left. | ||
| John Jones picked up that tendency, and that's how he knocked out Daniel Cormier. | ||
| He knew Daniel Cormier has a tendency to duck towards his right side because he goes for that single on the left leg, and John caught him with the perfect head kick. | ||
| But it wasn't by an accident. | ||
| He fucking, he set that up. | ||
| He set it up just like Leon Edwards set up that head kick on Kamaru. | ||
| There's a beauty of that that's just, man, in the middle of chaos and anxiety and fear and the fucking fog of war, you figure out a way to connect with this thing that you saw in tape and in training and in preparation. | ||
| So it's with John, it's not an accident that he's the GOAT. Even with his lack of training, even with his, even with the, it's just like he's so fucking talented that he almost needs another John Jones to make him compete the way he would, the way, make him train the way a lot of these other guys do. | ||
| Like he's so good, he can beat those guys without being challenged by someone like him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because John Jones has never faced a John Jones. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| He's that fucking talented. | ||
| And so to be a GOAT, you need all of those things. | ||
| It's like sometimes a talent is so great that even the fact that they don't work as hard, they're still better than everybody. | ||
| That's John. | ||
| That's why John's so good. | ||
| And he's still in his prime. | ||
| The way he fought... | ||
| Three years out, and he fights a heavyweight who's a 240-pound ripped heavyweight. | ||
| He's never fought a guy who can move like that and strike like that at heavyweight, and he just shut all that shit down. | ||
| Dude, that video of him training a couple weeks ago where he throws his training part. | ||
| Yeah, Walt Harris. | ||
| I was like, oh, Lord. | ||
| I was like, he is going to demolish this guy, dude. | ||
| Yeah, I was up until the day of the fight, I was like, I don't know. | ||
| I was with Cam Haynes and my buddy Tommy Jr., and we were talking about it. | ||
| I was like, I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, he had a hard time with Dominic Reyes, and Dominic Reyes is not nearly the striker that Cyril Ghosn is. | ||
| And then the day of the fight, I don't know what it is, man. | ||
| I think John's gonna run right through this dude. | ||
| I just, the day of the fight, I just had this feeling. | ||
| I just have a feeling that John is just going to express his greatness tonight. | ||
| Like, all those years out, all the doubts, all the chaos, all the personal problems, and the drugs, and the partying, and all the mess. | ||
| I think this is going to bring out the very best in John. | ||
| Because I think guys like him, I think one of the things that was happening with the Dominic Reyes fight and the first Alexander Gustafson fight, I think he was so dominant that he was playing with his food. | ||
| I don't think he was fully engaged in the fear of facing these men. | ||
| It's like a cat. | ||
| I don't think they presented the challenge that he requires to reach the level that we know he's capable of reaching, but I think Cyril Gunn did provide that challenge. | ||
| And I think he knew that going up to heavyweight and winning the title and just winning it easily the way he did... | ||
| All debates are off. | ||
| Do you think he goes back down to light and tries to win that? | ||
| No, he stays in heavy. | ||
| He would win it. | ||
| Right, for sure. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| Let me tell you something, man. | ||
| Jamal Hill is no fucking joke. | ||
| Jamal Hill, the way he pieced up Glover Teixeira, I was like, oh my god. | ||
| The way he grappled with him. | ||
| Jamal Hill might be the fucking man at light heavyweight. | ||
| And if John went down, that might be a wild-ass fight. | ||
| That might be a wild fight. | ||
| But I think John is done with starving himself and depleting his body to make 205. And now that he's the heavyweight champion, I think he beats all the best heavyweights that are available. | ||
| And then he goes down in history as number one. | ||
| And good luck catching up. | ||
| Who's he fighting next? | ||
| Stipe? | ||
| Stipe. | ||
| July. | ||
| You should go. | ||
| Yeah, I love Stipe too, man. | ||
| Can you make it? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Where's it at? | ||
| Vegas? | ||
| That's Vegas. | ||
| That's the international fight weekend. | ||
| That's the headline fight. | ||
| As long as someone doesn't get injured, they make the deal. | ||
| T-Mobile Arena. | ||
| Let's fucking go. | ||
| July 8th. | ||
| Now, is this TBD versus TBD? They haven't decided yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They just haven't announced it yet. | |
| But it's online, isn't it? | ||
| I saw it on a bunch of web, but I just read some sketchy websites. | ||
| All speculative. | ||
| I would imagine that if I was the UFC, that is the biggest fight you could make. | ||
| There's three events that are the biggest fights the UFC can make. | ||
| Madison Square Garden. | ||
| That's the biggest fight the UFC can make. | ||
| And then there's International Fight Weekend. | ||
| Those are the biggest fights the UFC can make. | ||
| And then there's the December one right before New Year's. | ||
| That's generally the three biggest cards the UFC can make. | ||
| Like multiple championship fights. | ||
| So if John and Stipe, I mean that qualifies as... | ||
| You know Stipe, if you look at his record, you look at what he was able to do, he's the most successful heavyweight of all time. | ||
| He defended the title more than anybody. | ||
| He's the first guy to beat Francis. | ||
| You know, Stipe, he's the fucking man, and he's a legit, bonafide heavyweight, never been a light heavyweight ever. | ||
| I think Stipe and John is an amazing... | ||
| It's, you know, Stipe's... | ||
| It's towards the end for Stipe, but he's still a great fighter. | ||
| And he's still... | ||
| And he's also had a lot of time off since the Francis loss, which is great. | ||
| Rest up, heel up. | ||
| And he put on a lot of weight, too. | ||
| He put on a lot of mass. | ||
| He's like 250 now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he felt like he was too small. | ||
| For the Ngannou rematch. | ||
| He thought he needed cardio because he beat him with cardio in the first fight. | ||
| He beat him with his durability because he got caught with some big shots and then took him down and then outworked him. | ||
| Francis went all out to try to knock Stipe out and when he couldn't, Stipe dominated him. | ||
| It was one of the best victories of Stipe's illustrious career. | ||
| But I think that Going into the second fight, he had that sort of same approach, but this time he reached a patient Francis. | ||
| This time Francis was, like, just looking to just nuke him. | ||
| And he wasn't just running at him, he was using technique, and he was just far more evolved as a fighter than he was the first time they fought. | ||
| And Francis just fucking annihilated him. | ||
| And, you know, but the thing is, like, Stipe came into that fight light. | ||
| And I think he was in, like, the 230s, if I remember correctly. | ||
| Maybe 240 at the most. | ||
| And he decided, you know what, I gotta bulk up. | ||
| I gotta get bigger. | ||
| And he got bigger for this Jon Jones fight. | ||
| But I think he was trying to fight anybody. | ||
| He was trying to fight Francis again. | ||
| He was trying to fight Cyril. | ||
| He'll fight anybody. | ||
| And for whatever reason, they weren't able to make the right fight for Stipe. | ||
| But I think overall for his own health and to rebound from that knockout loss, this is good. | ||
| Because you don't want a guy getting KO'd in his late 30s and then fighting again three months later. | ||
| Especially a heavyweight that got KO'd by Francis in a brutal way. | ||
| So I think it's good that he's had this time off. | ||
| And I'm excited about the fight. | ||
| He's like Chandler McGregor. | ||
| Ooh, that's chaos. | ||
| If that happens, the thing is, like, Conor hasn't even gotten into the USADA testing pool. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, Conor broke his leg. | ||
| Here's what John said a couple days ago. | ||
| More than likely felt like that was kind of sprung on me. | ||
| Need to talk with my team at UFC and come up with a plan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Asked about fighting. | |
| International Fight Week. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's... | ||
| Listen, this is called negotiations. | ||
| Maybe I'll fight. | ||
| Maybe I won't. | ||
| And people have to like me. | ||
| Dana also said that he thinks John might retire after that fight. | ||
| After the Steve Bay fight? | ||
| He may. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, not there. | |
| He may. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I lost it. | |
| I mean, he's gonna make a fucking boatload of money for that fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wouldn't be shocked. | |
| Wouldn't be shocked, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like Chandler. | ||
| Chandler McGregor would be electric to see. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| If it happens. | ||
| I love that Chandler's just all or nothing, man. | ||
| I love that about him. | ||
| Chandler's a fucking animal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's an animal. | ||
| And he's a very good wrestler. | ||
| He could fight in a very different way if he chose to. | ||
| But he fights for fans. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like his last two fights, man, he... | ||
| The problem is, if you fight in that style, though, if you fight in that style against Conor, you're coming straight forward towards Conor, that is Conor's wheelhouse. | ||
| Conor's one of the greatest counter-strikers that's ever fought in the UFC. If you look at his fight with Eddie Alvarez, you look at his knockout victory over Jose Aldo, if you come at Conor and you give him a chance to time you, especially in the early rounds, he is fucking lethal. | ||
| He's so explosive and fast. | ||
| You know, I mean, who knows? | ||
| The thing is, like, the USADA testing pool, I don't want to harp on this too much, but this is a giant issue for multiple reasons. | ||
| Here's one. | ||
| Let's just speculate. | ||
| Let's speculate he got out of the USADA testing pool. | ||
| This is what I would imagine if I was a pro athlete at Conor's level and I broke my leg. | ||
| You need help, okay? | ||
| You're not just going to heal off that eating mangoes and fucking eating clean. | ||
| You need some help. | ||
| I would say I would want that person to take something. | ||
| You would have to consult with an expert sports medicine doctor who would tell you, you want peptides, you want growth hormone, you want this, you want that. | ||
| You want all these things you can't take when you're in USADA. You want testosterone, you want all these things. | ||
| And you look at Connor after that leg break, he got fucking jacked. | ||
| Ripped. | ||
| Just gigantic. | ||
| Like 200 plus pounds it looks like. | ||
| Just huge fucking shoulders. | ||
| That's generally not the result of natural hormones. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's generally the result of exogenous hormone use. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| A lot of people are speculating, not just me. | ||
| And then when you look at the USADA testing pool and the fact that he's not in it, that also comes in. | ||
| So, now here's the thing. | ||
| You're in your 30s, you're 35 or whatever Connor is, 34, and you've disrupted your hormones with exogenous hormones. | ||
| Now your body has to get back to developing its own hormones. | ||
| And generally speaking, when people take steroids, and I'm not saying you took steroids, but generally speaking, if someone takes steroids, Say if you take steroids for six months, you need a year to bounce back to normal hormone levels after that. | ||
| Especially if you're doing it naturally. | ||
| There's things you can take like HCG and clomiphene and all these different things that restart your body's production of testosterone. | ||
| But you have to make sure that that's all done before you enter into the USADA testing pool. | ||
| Then you have to be in the USADA testing pool for six full months before you're allowed to compete. | ||
| So this is where it stands. | ||
| So until he enters into that, we don't know when this fight is going to happen from now. | ||
| If he says it now, tonight I'm going to enter the USADA testing pool. | ||
| Minimum six months. | ||
| So, I would imagine, there's no accusations, but if someone was doing something, they would have a team of people that are testing them. | ||
| And they continue to test them and make sure you're not going to test positive. | ||
| Because if you test positive and you sought a testing pool, you're out for two fucking years, kid. | ||
| You know, there's guys who make their UFC debuts and they piss hot and they're gone. | ||
| They get booted out of the UFC and you're banned for two years and it's terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| And again, no speculation, but this is just being a logical, rational person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's crazy, man. | ||
| This is stuff that the casual fan just doesn't think about. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, you just want the fight to happen. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Well, the fight will be awesome if it happens. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And when it happens. | ||
| I'm assuming it's gonna happen. | ||
| But, you know, I'm also hoping that Conor's leg's okay. | ||
| You know, a leg break of that magnitude, like Chris Weidman, he broke his leg in a similar way. | ||
| And he just recently competed in Polaris, which is a grappling competition. | ||
| And, you know, he was so emotional after it was over because he's like, this is the hardest two years of my life. | ||
| So for two years, he's been recovering from this shin break. | ||
| Oh, that was brutal. | ||
| Oh, it's so brutal, man. | ||
| Some guys never bounce back. | ||
| They're never the same. | ||
| Anderson was never the same after his leg break. | ||
| Tyron Spong was never the same after his leg break. | ||
| Those kind of leg breaks. | ||
| They're traumatic, dude. | ||
| That's traumatic stuff. | ||
| Scary. | ||
| I've seen three of them in real life. | ||
| It's fucking rough, man. | ||
| Stuff gives me the willies, man. | ||
| It's the worst break. | ||
| Like an arm break doesn't bother me nearly as much. | ||
| There's something about that shin break. | ||
| And you see that foot dangling and just going the wrong way. | ||
| Yeah, it's not pretty. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| Yeah, and it's kind of a career ender for a lot of folks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we don't know if it's a career ender for Conor, you know? | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| In retrospect, I wish he'd never taken that fight with Poirier, because it seems like he had a hairline fracture already going into that fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's how it broke. | ||
| It was like he already had a fucked up leg. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he just didn't want to back out of the fight, which he probably should have now. | ||
| Yeah, that was tough to watch, too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That was real tough to watch, you know? | ||
| Because you don't want it to end that way either, right? | ||
| Like, you want it to be... | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, I don't think Poirier probably wants it to end that way either, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| He wants it to be... | ||
| No, he wanted to beat his ass. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, this is a gigantic fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The rematch, you know, the rubber match between those two, that was a gigantic fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Conor was wild back in the day, man. | ||
| He still is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, who knows? | ||
| I mean, he might come back. | ||
| He might be the first guy to come back from that leg break and be able to compete at the highest level. | ||
| He might come back and nuke Chandler and, you know, or Chandler might get him. | ||
| And, you know, like, Chandler's a fucking dog, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a dangerous guy to be locked in there with. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That fight with Justin Gaethje, like, Jesus Louisa. | ||
| I mean, those dudes went at it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he does that with everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| He's just, like, down to go to war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He ain't afraid of it. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's a fun guy to watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of fun guys to watch. | ||
| It's the greatest sport in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's nothing like it. | ||
| It's so much fun, man. | ||
| It is really so much fun, dude. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Have you ever done any training yourself? | ||
| You've done anything? | ||
| No. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Do you exercise at all? | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| No, I've not done any training. | ||
| Depends what you mean by exercise, I guess. | ||
| Do you do anything like for your health, like exercise for your health? | ||
| I spend a lot of time outside. | ||
| I mean, you know, I can't say I'm a gym rat, obviously. | ||
| But it's interesting, man. | ||
| I've always struggled. | ||
| I've been this big... | ||
| Forever, as weird as that sounds, right? | ||
| So it's like proportionately to my, you know, until I stopped growing height-wise, you know, like once I got to where I'm at now, I was kind of like this size. | ||
| Well, I think the real benefits of exercise is not just with the way you look and your body size. | ||
| I think it's your brain. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Especially when we're talking about all these issues about the mind and the creative mind playing tricks on you. | ||
| For me, forcing myself to exercise every day is one of the main reasons why I stay sane through all the chaos that my life goes through. | ||
| And I think that's the real benefit that a lot of people do. | ||
| It's almost like the The benefit that you get physically is—that's great, but that's almost like a side effect of the benefit that you get for the mind. | ||
| For me, that's how I approach it. | ||
| Yeah, the crazy thing I think that I struggle with the most with it is—you know, it does bother me, right? | ||
| Like, being bigger, that bothers me, right? | ||
| The thing that also bothers me about it is like, okay, I literally went to the doctor last week, right? | ||
| To get the whole bus down. | ||
| Like, I get physical every year, right? | ||
| Blood work, dude. | ||
| Panels, counts, everything. | ||
| And it's just all clean, dude. | ||
| And that's like... | ||
| It's strange to me, dude, because I feel like... | ||
| I shouldn't be this big, right? | ||
| And it feels... | ||
| And that's really upsetting to me. | ||
| Like, I don't eat a tremendous amount of unhealthy food. | ||
| Like, I'm not stagnant. | ||
| I mean, I go out and do... | ||
| I mean, I was doing... | ||
| You know, hour 45, two-hour sets, three, sometimes four nights a week for years at this size, and it's never bothered me. | ||
| But it bothers me, right? | ||
| It does, though. | ||
| It bothers me in the sense of, like, because I don't feel like I should be the size that I am, right? | ||
| And I'm sure everyone's going to jump on me when they watch this and be like, whoa, you need to do this, you need to do that, right? | ||
| And... | ||
| I've just, it's a code that I've never been able to crack, right? | ||
| With diet, with exercise. | ||
| I've had a trainer out on tour, and it's like, I can lose 10, 15, 20 pounds, and then it just, it stops, right? | ||
| And maybe that's me, dude, right? | ||
| Because ultimately, I think the thing that's so frustrating to me is like, is it ultimately it is me, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There is nobody else to blame, right? | ||
| Like, there's not... | ||
| I know whatever I'm doing at that time is not enough. | ||
| Well, you have to look at it like this. | ||
| It's a process and you have to look at where you are in that process. | ||
| Now you can be someone like Jamie who's thin and healthy and fit and his process that he decides he wants to improve his fitness is a different process than yours. | ||
| And this process is scientific. | ||
| You can look at it in terms of calories in, calories out, expenditure, diet. | ||
| And mitigation things and all the different things you could do for recovery, like sauna and ice bath and all those different things. | ||
| All those factors play a part in this process. | ||
| And this process is long. | ||
| You have to realize that you've been in the process of becoming who you are now your whole life. | ||
| For 33 years, no doubt. | ||
| So the process of going... | ||
| Getting out of it is... | ||
| But you have to be, it's a path. | ||
| It's a long grind. | ||
| It's not like I take someone on tour and I lose 20 pounds and then it stops. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no. | ||
| You've just started your first steps. | ||
| You're not climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro yet. | ||
| There's a long process. | ||
| And people get very discouraged in the fact that they don't see tangible, obvious, physical results. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| They would like to work out a few times really hard and then to have a six-pack and look great. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| That's what everybody wants. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| But the thing is a process. | ||
| But it's just like your music. | ||
| It's just like anything else. | ||
| The more time you put into it, the more effort you put into it, the better the results are. | ||
| And you can get people that are like my friend Ethan Supli, who was like fucking enormous at one time. | ||
| Oh, remember the Titans? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He was like massive, dude. | ||
| He was so big. | ||
| And now that dude is fucking uber healthy. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Works out every day. | ||
| He's super happy and fit. | ||
| And he went through multiple times where he gained the weight back and blew out his stitches from having his fucking skin removed. | ||
| He fucked himself up and had to get it done again. | ||
| And he still kept going. | ||
| He got back on the horse and he kept going. | ||
| But it's not a thing that happens quick. | ||
| It's not a thing that happens easy. | ||
| It's not a thing that's just gonna happen on its own. | ||
| It's like, oh, how'd you build that house? | ||
| Oh, I just fucking did it on its own. | ||
| No, every fucking nail has to be hammered in. | ||
| Every piece of floorboard has to be cut perfectly. | ||
| Every 2x4 has to be... | ||
| It all has to be done. | ||
| And it's a long process. | ||
| Yeah, it's tough. | ||
| And I would say, you know, now... | ||
| I'm in the middle of that, right? | ||
| Like, I'm in the middle of that process of, like, I have wrestled with it for a long time, right? | ||
| And I'm ready to, like, move on with, like, the next part of my life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Beautiful. | |
| Which is, like... | ||
| Then just commit to it. | ||
| And the fact that you're committing to it right now on the air is great. | ||
| And then also just start writing shit down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Writing down what you're supposed to do. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing I need. | ||
| Having our son and everything, I think, is huge. | ||
| It's given me such a perspective shift. | ||
| I'm just, I'm slowly but surely, you know, it's every day, it really is like it's making this choice instead of that choice, right? | ||
| And it's like, that's so hard, right? | ||
| And it is, and that's not an excuse at all, you know, because... | ||
| I will get there. | ||
| I'm a firm believer in that. | ||
| Listen, man, I can find somebody to help you. | ||
| I would love that. | ||
| Yeah, I could find you a rock-solid trainer that's in Nashville. | ||
| I have a great trainer. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I have a great trainer, and I feel like... | ||
| Yeah, I just got to commit to it, man. | ||
| And it's like, I have a guy that's great in our schedules. | ||
| He's got a son now. | ||
| He was the guy that came out with us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I love him, dude. | ||
| And that was the most progress I ever made. | ||
| And me and him get along so well. | ||
| Get back on the horse, Luke. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| No, I want to, man. | ||
| Let's fucking go. | ||
| So then just do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| It's done. | ||
| Done. | ||
| Done. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| I'll commit to it. | ||
| That'll help the mind, man. | ||
| That's the thing that helps my mind more than anything. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| I was talking to my business manager, who's a dear friend of mine now. | ||
| Myself and my manager are all really, really tight. | ||
| It's kind of an abnormal relationship in the sense of he's not just my business manager. | ||
| He's friends with my parents. | ||
| He's a part of our lives now. | ||
| We talk about these things. | ||
| I remember telling him, sitting out one night, having a whiskey, and I was like, Chris, man, look, I know I've accomplished so much doing music, and we're about to go on the stadium tour. | ||
| This was just a few months ago, I think maybe December. | ||
| Or January and I was like listen man like I've accomplished all these things and like I've won Entertainer of the Year twice now and and I've got you know 15 number one songs and all these insane accolades that I could have never imagined and like in some ways Because I love music and because I feel like I've been blessed with the voice I have and the talent I have, | ||
| the voice and the talent I have, to me, doesn't feel earned. | ||
| Does that make sense to you? | ||
| There is a lot of work to hone the craft, but nobody that's tall is inherently talented for being tall. | ||
| And just because you're tall doesn't... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You need to earn it. | |
| Right. | ||
| You don't feel like you're... | ||
| You're not a great basketball player because you're tall. | ||
| You earn that. | ||
| But sometimes the precursor to being great at basketball is being tall. | ||
| So you do have to. | ||
| Not always, but for the most part. | ||
| Statistically speaking, that's a precursor of being great at basketball. | ||
| Having a great voice... | ||
| Statistically is a precursor for being a great musician. | ||
| Not always, but for the most part, statistically speaking. | ||
| And so, I don't want to come across as contrived or anything when I say this, but like, I feel like sometimes that I haven't done anything that's like hard to do. | ||
| But that's also a part of your humility. | ||
| That's part of what keeps you focused on your task. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like that you're not, you know, you're not like congratulating yourself. | ||
| But like my, but like I think... | ||
| My physical fitness and my appearance and my size has always been something that I've struggled with from the time I was a child and like it's this mountain that I've always been standing at the bottom of trying to run up and inherently slipping down every time, right? | ||
| And it's this thing that like I feel like if I don't overcome it in my lifetime It will be my biggest regret. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| Like, it is a burden that weighs so heavily on me. | ||
| And many guys, and silently. | ||
| Many women, silently. | ||
| And not because I care of what other people think about me, about the way I look, about my size, or any of that. | ||
| It's because I feel like it means about me as a man. | ||
| Because there's this thing that I want to accomplish. | ||
| That is solely up to me. | ||
| Nobody else can do it for me. | ||
| Nobody did this to me, but me. | ||
| I want so badly to conquer that. | ||
| And I will. | ||
| And I'm excited for that day to come. | ||
| Because I know that will mean so much to me. | ||
| I want it to mean something to my children. | ||
| I want to be running around the yard with my children. | ||
| I want to take my son on an elk hunt when he's 16 years old and hike up a mountain when I'm in my late 40s. | ||
| I want to do that with him. | ||
| And I know right now I can't do that with him. | ||
| And that bugs the shit out of me. | ||
| This is all doable, Luke. | ||
| It's all doable. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| This is not like trying to get tall. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| This is something that all you have to do is just stay on the path. | ||
| And I think there is beauty in that, that it is something that can be accomplished. | ||
| Yes, and that's why it's so exciting when people do it. | ||
| When someone like Ethan pulls it off, it's a fucking beautiful gift to everybody else. | ||
| This is a surmountable obstacle. | ||
| This is something that can be accomplished. | ||
| It's not easy, but it can be done. | ||
| It can be done, for sure. | ||
| Not impossible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| We ended it with this. | ||
| Luke, you're a bad motherfucker. | ||
| I appreciate you very much. | ||
| Appreciate you having me. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
| Let's do it again. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |
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