May 13, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:30:04
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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! | ||
| It was fun hanging out with you last night. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| You know, when you're in one of those rooms backstage, it's the same... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the same vibe, it's the same... | ||
|
unidentified
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Fun. | |
| Even if you don't know the actual people, it's a connection. | ||
| Yeah, in a good room, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we're all having fun. | ||
| Telling jokes. | ||
| The setup is so nice, too, because where the green room is, it's in between the two rooms. | ||
| So you can go to one room and watch, and then you can go to the other room, because we have the balcony set up. | ||
| I didn't notice that. | ||
| Yeah, it's very nice. | ||
| It's very, very convenient. | ||
| And that actually was the projector room. | ||
| For the theater. | ||
| So we converted the projector room for the theater into a green room. | ||
| It's a perfect position, because it's in between the two rooms. | ||
| So you got people going, leaving, going, and coming back from the set, and then you can see them doing it on the monitor? | ||
| You can see them on the monitor, or you could just step off into the balcony, because we have that comics balcony, so you could watch. | ||
| Like, if you're on stage, I could just sit up there and watch. | ||
| I don't have to go downstairs. | ||
| It's very nice. | ||
| It's a fun vibe, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's great for me to watch someone like you appreciate it, like go and check it out and go... | ||
| Yeah, it's like, you know, right from the beginning, the same, no matter where you go, I mean, if it's a good place, I would have stayed longer, but... | ||
| I didn't want to... | ||
| Is this going now? | ||
| Yeah, we're going. | ||
| I don't hear... | ||
| You don't hear yourself? | ||
| No, maybe because I'm not listening. | ||
| Is that good? | ||
| Do you hear it now? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not at all? | ||
| No. | ||
| Might have to bail on the headsets and go with real ones. | ||
| Oh, there it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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You got it? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Real ones. | ||
| I made these. | ||
| In your wood shop? | ||
| Metal shop. | ||
| When you started out, was it the Ding-Ho days? | ||
| Was that like the first place where you started? | ||
| What was it like? | ||
| What year did you start out first of all? | ||
| July 79. What was the scene like? | ||
| Well, it was the comedy connection. | ||
| The little one, downstairs? | ||
| No, it was on Warrington Street. | ||
| It was street level. | ||
| That was the first one. | ||
| Before Nick's? | ||
| Before Nick's. | ||
| So it was the same comedy, excuse me, the same one that was the Charles Playhouse, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got straight in, and it was right in there. | ||
| It was an amazing room. | ||
| Yeah, little, like... | ||
| 150 people probably? | ||
| I don't even think that many. | ||
| Maybe 100, maybe 90. That was the first. | ||
| Yeah, low. | ||
| That's where I... I went to see an open mic there, and then I thought... | ||
| What I was doing is I was, you know, into comedy from watching The Tonight Show. | ||
| That's when I really got, like, oh, these comedians, you know, Carl and Robert Klein, all these guys. | ||
| I had to watch The Tonight Show because my brother was older than me, and we had to watch what he wanted. | ||
| So, you know, I started watching, then I started to like it. | ||
| And then I heard that there was a club in town, and I thought... | ||
| I should go out, you know, I was 16 when I really was into it, but then when I was about 23, I heard of the club, and I thought, well, maybe I've got to go try it out. | ||
| I wouldn't have to move to Los Angeles or New York. | ||
| And my character then, I couldn't have... | ||
| 23, I'm not going to move to Los Angeles. | ||
| It was like a... | ||
| That was too much for me. | ||
| So I went to the Comedy Connection and I watched a show and then I learned that there was a... | ||
| the open mic nights was every Wednesday. | ||
| So then I thought I'm gonna go back in two weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you remember your first set? | |
| I don't remember. | ||
| I remember the first joke was, but I don't remember the rest of it was, I said I went into a bookstore and I started talking to this very French looking girl. | ||
| She was a bilingual illiterate. | ||
| She couldn't read in two different languages. | ||
| And then it... | ||
| And that's how you started? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had about three minutes. | ||
| So did you always write in that style? | ||
| Like the sort of non sequitur, absurdist... | ||
| No, see, I didn't even write anything until I went to the open, watched the show, and when I knew I was going back in two weeks, during that two weeks, I wrote things, but I had never written comedy at all. | ||
| Right, but when you first started writing comedy, it was always that style? | ||
| It was about 70% like that. | ||
| It was more like normal-ish. | ||
| I don't know why it came out like that. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| You know, I was influenced by Carl Talking about everyday little things. | ||
| And that's what I said, oh, I'm going to do that. | ||
| And then the structure of a joke was from listening to Woody Allen's stand-up albums. | ||
| But that's just how it came out with those two influences, plus my own mind. | ||
| Well, that's where it gets interesting, right? | ||
| Because in your own mind. | ||
| Because you have a totally different style than anybody else. | ||
| Well, really anybody else. | ||
| In the country, but in Boston at that time, there was a lot of guys like Lenny Clark and Steve Sweeney and Don Gavin. | ||
| There was all these very, very funny comics. | ||
| Great, great. | ||
| Every guy you mention is hilarious. | ||
| Top of the food chain. | ||
| I tell everybody to this day that those days in the 1980s when I lived in Boston, Those are some of the best comics that have ever lived. | ||
| Those guys were murderers. | ||
| I totally agree with you. | ||
| They were so good. | ||
| You would go there at any given night, and you'd watch Sweeney just destroy Nick's comedy stuff. | ||
| And he was so fucking good. | ||
| His timing was so good. | ||
| So much energy. | ||
| And there was so much stuff about Boston, and Boston people just fucking loved that shit. | ||
| Every one of those guys is different than the other guy. | ||
| Mike Donovan, Kenny Rogerson. | ||
| Kenny Rogerson, so prolific. | ||
| Mike Donovan, unbelievably hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, so many good guys. | ||
| Lenny. | ||
| Lenny Clark is so funny. | ||
| God damn, he's funny. | ||
| And just great guys, too. | ||
| It was a very unusual group of artists because they're these wild kind of partying guys, but they had real rigid rules about don't be a hack and don't be a thief and don't be a this and do good comedy. | ||
| And they all just wanted to kill. | ||
| And there was no real showbiz sort of like pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. | ||
| It was really just being a headliner, just killing. | ||
| That's all they did. | ||
| And there was no show business there. | ||
| There were no agents, no producers, no one to say, oh, you should do it. | ||
| Why are you doing it like that? | ||
| It was like being on an island. | ||
| That's how I've described it. | ||
| When we all started, like the club started in 79, so everyone started maybe one year before, one year. | ||
| Everyone just started it once, and we were all learning how to do it. | ||
| It was weird how it lined up. | ||
| It wasn't like that club was there for 10 years. | ||
| The club opens, and everyone you just said comes, and it just begins. | ||
| Like, where was it before? | ||
| It wasn't anywhere. | ||
| Like, Jay Leno was there before, but he would play the Playboy Club, and it wasn't actually a comedy club before this comedy connection. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| France Alameda did a great job of capturing it in that documentary when stand-up stood out. | ||
| Yeah, brilliant. | ||
| Great, great documentary. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But about what a strange scene it was. | ||
| And it was arguably the best scene in the country. | ||
| It might not have been the best scene in terms of, like, everybody getting to know those comedians worldwide... | ||
| But in terms of the quality of the comedy, it was as good as anywhere in the world. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It's one of those fluke things that just happens. | ||
| Probably like the music thing in the 60s in the village with the folk musicians and all that. | ||
| Or in London. | ||
| All of a sudden, these things come together and then just things happen. | ||
| I'm so grateful to have started there. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| When did you start? | ||
| I started in 88. 88? | ||
| I started after the wave. | ||
| So I started, you know, there was all the evening at the improvs then and stand-up specials on, like, MTV at the half-hour comedy hour. | ||
| So I started... | ||
| You know, like, George MacDonald was the host of Open Mic Nights. | ||
| I loved George. | ||
| Yeah, and you get to see Teddy Bergeron would stop in, who was just, to this day, one of the best comics I've ever seen. | ||
| Tremendous, tremendous. | ||
| So good. | ||
| So I started, um, when the wave of, like, television comedy was just starting to sort of subside, I kind of caught the last wave, you know, of that kind of, like, the comedy boom was starting to settle down. | ||
| You know, and there was a lot of mediocre comedy out there. | ||
| There was a lot of people that were doing what sounded like an impression of what a comedian should sound like. | ||
| You know, and they were working all over the place. | ||
| Now, were you living in Massachusetts? | ||
| Yeah, I was living in Newton. | ||
| And where did you get it in your head? | ||
| Why did it go into your head? | ||
| Like I told you, for me, it was watching The Tonight Show. | ||
| How did it... | ||
| The germ, Stuart. | ||
| Well, definitely watching stand-up on TV. I used to love watching Richard Jenny on The Tonight Show. | ||
| Oh, he was me. | ||
| So good. | ||
| He's incredible. | ||
| I was driving home one night fairly recently, a few years back, and you know how sometimes like a Bluetooth on your phone just randomly plays a song when you plug it in? | ||
| It just randomly played this Jenny bit. | ||
| And I was laughing so hard driving home. | ||
| And while I was driving, I downloaded the whole album. | ||
| And I just listened to the album coming home from Orange County. | ||
| And it was like... | ||
| I just forgot. | ||
| I kind of forgot how good he was. | ||
| I forgot how funny he was and all the tags and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. | ||
| He just never stopped. | ||
| He did several specials, stand-up specials. | ||
| I saw him live in California. | ||
| He's one of those guys where you laugh out loud. | ||
| You know, sometimes you can watch a guy and you can think, that's really funny, but you're not really laughing out loud. | ||
| It's not a judgment. | ||
| But then there's other guys where both lines up, you know, like Jenny and Kevin Meany. | ||
| He's just like, oh, my God. | ||
| But Jenny, I mean, so prolific. | ||
| He was so prolific. | ||
| Top guy. | ||
| He worked at Eastside Comedy Club in Long Island. | ||
| And I got there on Sunday, and the host and a couple other comics are sitting there. | ||
| They look depressed. | ||
| And I'm like, what's going on? | ||
| And they're like, Jenny did four different hours. | ||
| He did two different hours, two different shows Friday night. | ||
| He did one hour for the first show, totally different hour for the second show. | ||
| Then he does a totally different hour for the first show Saturday. | ||
| And another totally different hour for the second. | ||
| I never heard of such a thing. | ||
| They said he never repeated a joke. | ||
| He said he did four totally different hours and just murdered. | ||
| And they all wanted to kill themselves. | ||
| Yeah, I would too. | ||
| Kill myself, not them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy how good he was. | ||
| So I saw him and I saw Kenison. | ||
| I was actually introduced to Kenison by a girl I worked with. | ||
| It was a very funny story. | ||
| She had seen Kenison on HBO and then she went and acted out The bit about the homosexual necrophiliacs paying money to have sex with the freshest male corpse. | ||
| So this girl who's a friend of mine is lying on her stomach in the parking lot, acting it out. | ||
| She's going, oh, oh! | ||
| Life keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead! | ||
| It never ends! | ||
|
unidentified
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It never ends! | |
| So she's acting this out in the parking lot. | ||
| I'm laughing at her acting it out. | ||
| I couldn't even see the bit. | ||
| Yeah, this is your introduction to Sam Kinison. | ||
| That's my introduction to Sam Kinison. | ||
| It's my friend pretending she's getting fucked in the ass like she's dead. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That's touching. | ||
| It was touching. | ||
| I think about her all the time. | ||
| I really do think about her all the time because she was a girl I worked with at the Boston Athletic Club in South Boston. | ||
| I was a trainer there, and she was like this, she was very funny. | ||
|
unidentified
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She was like this big volleyball player girl. | |
| She was like a big athlete, strong girl. | ||
| So seeing her lying on the ground going, oh, oh, life keeps fucking the ass even after your dad. | ||
| It never ends. | ||
| Was there anyone walking by? | ||
| No, luckily, no. | ||
| She wouldn't give a fuck, though. | ||
| She could have been a cop. | ||
| She was very funny. | ||
| She was very funny. | ||
| There's a lot of people like that that you meet that are like, God, that guy could have been in a comic. | ||
| You know? | ||
| A few of those people. | ||
| So that girl introduced me to Kinnison, arguably. | ||
| I mean, believe it or not. | ||
| And then I just... | ||
| I saw Kinnison for the first time and I was like, oh, that's comedy too? | ||
| And that was like one of the first times that I thought I could do comedy. | ||
| I was like, maybe I got this wrong. | ||
| I thought comedy was like Jerry Seinfeld, Richard Pryor, polished, it's all done, and like, you can't do that. | ||
| You don't know what you're doing. | ||
| I see a little Kinnison in you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, definitely influence. | ||
| Like a sprinkle. | ||
| Kinnison, Hicks, Pryor, all of them. | ||
| Lenny Bruce. | ||
| So I saw an open mic night. | ||
| And once I saw an open mic night, that gave me the confidence. | ||
| Because I was like, oh, okay, everybody sucks in the beginning. | ||
| Because, you know, you see someone. | ||
| On my open mic night, the first time I went, when I did my show, afterwards, Teddy did a set. | ||
| So Teddy Bergeron went up and just showed everybody how it's done. | ||
| And for people who don't know, Teddy Bergeron, he was so smooth and so relaxed. | ||
| And he had this command of the audience and the stage with his presence and his performance. | ||
| I just been thinking, I can never do that. | ||
| How am I going to do that? | ||
| The guy's so advanced. | ||
| He's so good. | ||
| So that's how I got started. | ||
| And I got started by friends. | ||
| Friends talking me into doing it. | ||
| Oh, they said, why don't you try it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they pushed you, like, got you to go, like? | ||
| Yeah, it was my friend Steve, who I'm still one of my best friends to this day. | ||
| We were hanging out, and he was just like, I think you should be a comedian. | ||
| It was like when I was teaching martial arts, actually. | ||
| So I was like... | ||
| Making them laugh. | ||
| I'd make my friends laugh when we'd go fight in tournaments, and I'd make everybody laugh before we're about to spar, because it was like everybody was real nervous, you know? | ||
| So for me, it was a nice opportunity to get attention and to cut the tension, you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's how I got started. | ||
| But I think a lot of, you know, just because someone's funny hanging out doesn't mean they could do that. | ||
| I mean, you obviously have done it, but the big difference is, like, if you're in a bar with someone and the TV's on, there's a lot happening going by. | ||
| The waitress goes by, someone drops something, someone says something about that, something's on the TV, something goes by. | ||
| A truck goes by. | ||
| There's all these things. | ||
| But when you go on the stage, there's nothing happening. | ||
| So just because you can do that with your friends doesn't really mean then you could go do that. | ||
| Because when you walk out, there's nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It doesn't mean that you can do it, but if you can't do that with your friends... | ||
| Oh yeah, definitely. | ||
| If you don't have that, no. | ||
| You're either funny or you're not funny. | ||
| And if you can be funny with your friends, it's just a matter of like, how can I figure out how to be funny in front of everybody else? | ||
| Yeah, that's where it's tricky. | ||
| And to me, the most interesting thing about the art form is that no one can tell you how to do it. | ||
| You do it very different than I do it, and we both do it very different than Seinfeld does it, and Seinfeld does it different than Louie Anderson did it. | ||
| It's like everybody's got their own little weird way to do stand-up, and you kind of have to figure that out on your own. | ||
| It's like a fingerprint. | ||
| Everyone's mind is like a fingerprint. | ||
| You have your own fingerprint, and then you've got to figure it out. | ||
| And also, if you look at art forms that are very popular, like stand-up is obviously a very popular art form. | ||
| People love to go see it. | ||
| There's no real courses on how to do it. | ||
| There's no real structure. | ||
| Everything else, whether it's music, songwriting, literature, fiction, nonfiction, there's all teaching. | ||
| People teach people how to do it. | ||
| People who've done it already, they teach you how to set up your stories. | ||
| There's ways to learn almost every other art form. | ||
| But even acting. | ||
| They teach acting. | ||
| You can't really teach stand-up. | ||
| You gotta practice it in front of people. | ||
| You can kind of take classes. | ||
| The classes, the best thing the classes do is they get you on stage. | ||
| Yeah, I've always... | ||
| Years after I was doing it, I thought back that you are your own teacher and student at the same time. | ||
| You're standing on the stage. | ||
| You don't think of it like that because you're just trying to do it. | ||
| But in hindsight, and you can only learn from doing it over and over and over and over. | ||
| Your mind is soaking up like, oh, even mistakes at work. | ||
| Oh, oh, oh. | ||
| Like you soak everything. | ||
| You need every second that works. | ||
| Oh, that doesn't... | ||
| Oh, oh, oh. | ||
| And we tape them, audio tape them, the beginning sets. | ||
| Because it's happened so fast. | ||
| It's like a car accident. | ||
| The next thing you know, the thing is, oh, what? | ||
| And then you can, like, oh, because some of it went better than you thought. | ||
| Some of it didn't go as good. | ||
| Your writing process must be... | ||
| You have a very difficult style to write for, I would imagine. | ||
| Because your style is non sequiturs and a lot of it's very absurd. | ||
| Is it hard to... | ||
| When you write, do you sit in front of a computer? | ||
| Do you just come up with ideas as you're walking around? | ||
| What's your process? | ||
| In the beginning, I would sit down and look at the paper, like look for a word to jazz my mind or look for something. | ||
| And I would try to find jokes on purpose in the first six months. | ||
| And then after that, like I had this thing once, I was looking through the paper and it was an advertisement for electrolysis. | ||
| And I thought, what an interesting word. | ||
| Just the sound of the word, what it means, both things. | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| So I made a note of that. | ||
| And then, I don't know, my mind. | ||
| Because your subconscious is like a factory. | ||
| It's working when you don't even know that it is. | ||
| You're minding your own business. | ||
| You're in line doing something. | ||
| This just in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And what my mind did with that was I had this thing about living in an apartment building where they allowed pets and I had a pony. | ||
| I had a Shetland pony named Nicky. | ||
| And he was once involved in a bizarre electrolysis accident. | ||
| All the hair was removed except for the tail. | ||
| Now I rent him out to Hare Krishna family picnics. | ||
| And that whole thing came because I saw the word electrolysis. | ||
| So I would try to find things on purpose, but then after a while, I didn't, my mind was, I would just notice things, because I think comedy, all art is based on noticing what's around you. | ||
| And I would, my mind, like, I drew a lot. | ||
| I know that you used to draw, too. | ||
| I would draw realistically in high school and stuff, and like, if you were going to draw this cup and this There's the two shapes, and then you notice, if you're trying to draw it real, this shape, this shape, and then there's the shape that's in between. | ||
| That's also a shape, which helps you get it accurate. | ||
| So you don't really notice that shape unless you were trying to draw it. | ||
| So I think that that exercised my mind of noticing Then later on, doing the comedy, I was already noticing, I think was noticing just some people were very aware of what's around. | ||
| And you know, like in the tower at the airport where the radar goes like this, it goes like this. | ||
| And then there's the little beeps of the planes, like those are the planes. | ||
| So I think my mind got like... | ||
| Scanning like that, subconscious. | ||
| I don't walk down the street thinking I need another joke. | ||
| I'm going to go walk down that street. | ||
| I'm just going around my day just doing it. | ||
| But the thing is going... | ||
| And then it'll see a word. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Oh, oh, okay. | ||
| And then, oh, and then, like, write it down. | ||
| And I think of the show, the wording comes pretty fast, like, in a minute. | ||
| It's like, because in my mind, it can only be one way it can be written. | ||
| And then I just would write it down and then go on with what I was doing. | ||
| But the noticing never stops. | ||
| Don't you think what you do is you're reacting, right? | ||
| You're talking about the world, but you have to really see the world. | ||
| Yeah, you have to really see the world. | ||
| And I do a real similar thing, where if there's a certain subject that I'm working on, All throughout the day, I'm thinking about that subject. | ||
| If there's a new bit, it's just bouncing around in my head like, what is going on with that? | ||
| Why do we accept that? | ||
| Why is that so weird? | ||
| It's just always playing in the background. | ||
| My mind is trying to sort it out. | ||
| My mind is trying to figure out what my angle is. | ||
| And then sometimes I'll just take it on stage and just roll it out and go, let's see where this goes. | ||
| Without it all figured out. | ||
| Without it all figured out. | ||
| I'll just do it in between bits that are real. | ||
| So I'll do a bit that's good, like it's a solid bit, and then I'll work in that thing and I'll just go, let's see where this goes. | ||
| Under pressure, after a bit that kills, You get stuck in this spot. | ||
| There's something in there. | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| I have little destinations that I'd like to get to. | ||
| I'd like to talk about this part of it. | ||
| I'd like to talk about that part of it. | ||
| But let me just see. | ||
| I think because you're in front of the audience, everything's heightened. | ||
| So there's a pressure there. | ||
| So your mind is kicked into another intensity than if you were just at a red light. | ||
| So you're trying to survive, meaning get the You don't want a minute of nothing. | ||
| So your brain, like, you're turning up the knobs. | ||
| Like, we've got to figure this out. | ||
| Right, with all those eyes on you. | ||
| Like, there's something in there. | ||
| I know it's in there. | ||
| Let me fucking find it. | ||
| You know, but people kind of know the process now, so people enjoy seeing that. | ||
| I've talked to people, like guests that have come back, and they said, you know, that bit, I saw that bit six months ago, and now it's like totally different. | ||
| It's amazing, like you figured out this and that, and yeah, yeah, it's like a process. | ||
| So the fact that fans can come and check out the process, Yes. | ||
| Gross. | ||
| I'll stare at my notes when I get home. | ||
| I'm just trying to think, like, am I missing something? | ||
| There's another angle? | ||
| Is there another way I could... | ||
| How would another person approach this? | ||
| A person who didn't have this structure already set up for this bit. | ||
| Maybe someone will look at it differently. | ||
| Maybe the ending should be the beginning. | ||
| Maybe the beginning should be the ending. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| You triggered things. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| No, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Just, you can't see anything coming. | ||
| And the connections, it's like, it's all completely logical. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And it's so intense, too. | ||
| You have this intense presence, like a force. | ||
| It's like going on a mental ride, a mental rollercoaster. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really amazing, I think. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It just... | ||
| Oh, you had a thing. | ||
| Oh, when you were talking to those female comedians the other day. | ||
| Kim and Sarah? | ||
| Yeah, but no, it was in your act, I think. | ||
| It was about the guy... | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| The oil guy, the guys with the money in Texas and they started... | ||
| Oh, Bucky's. | ||
| Bucky's. | ||
| Bucky's is like the craziest gas station ever. | ||
| Is that a real place? | ||
| It's a real place? | ||
| You should go. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's not a chain, is it? | ||
| Oh, it's a chain. | ||
| And it's called Buc-ee's? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, B-U-C-C-E-E-S. Buc-ee's. | |
| That's Buc-ee's. | ||
| It's the biggest gas station you've ever seen. | ||
| It literally doesn't even make sense. | ||
| That's not even the biggest one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's only like even half of it. | |
| That's a small one. | ||
| That's a little Buc-ee's because that's the Buc-ee's car wash and then there's like this Buc-ee's gigantic store. | ||
| Is it only in Texas? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's definitely a big Texas thing. | ||
| It's like a Walmart, like a huge Walmart attached to a gas station. | ||
| They sell everything in there. | ||
| It's fucking nuts. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| Look at the size of it. | ||
| Look at the size of that place. | ||
| Looks like an airport with no planes. | ||
| Like the planes would be at, you know, the gates are gone. | ||
| Yeah, they're nuts. | ||
| And they're like that everywhere you go. | ||
| Everywhere you find a Buc-ee's, they're fucking gigantic. | ||
| A chain of buckies. | ||
| I thought for certain you would say, no, it's not a chain. | ||
| It doesn't sound like a chain. | ||
| It sounds like some guys at night going, let's call it buckies. | ||
| We can't do that. | ||
| Yeah, some guys have got high on cocaine and built the ultimate gas station. | ||
| It's the nuttiest place ever. | ||
| But it's a very Texas place. | ||
| Because Texas is a strange place. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, people here are very friendly. | ||
| They're very nice. | ||
| But they're also very tough. | ||
| And they're very progressive in Austin. | ||
| But not crazy like they are in California or they are in New York, where they're like cult members of this rabid liberal tribe. | ||
| So it's an interesting balance. | ||
| The people coming from the country and the people stopped on the East Coast and other people went the whole way. | ||
| And the other people said, oh, just stay here. | ||
| We're staying here. | ||
| We're going to stay here and fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that was the other thing in my act about Texas, and it's a true story. | ||
| It's a true fact. | ||
| There's more tigers in captivity in Texas. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| Tiger world. | ||
| Tiger world. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| A big oil guy, right? | ||
| He wanted more tigers than the other guy? | ||
| Yes, that's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's more tigers in people's yards in Texas than in the entire wild of the world. | ||
| More tigers in private collections in people's yards. | ||
| And it's true, and that's true. | ||
| Oh, it's 100% true. | ||
| I've been to some of these places. | ||
| I've been to some of these crazy ranches that they have. | ||
| Like, Texas wildlife laws are very different than anywhere else I've ever been to. | ||
| And the people who own the property own all the animals. | ||
| It's different than, like, wildlife in any other... | ||
| Like, say if you live in Montana, and you own a ranch in Montana... | ||
| You can get landowner tags for that ranch. | ||
| That means like, so you, say if you own like 6,000 acres in Montana, you and your friends and some family members, you could get license to hunt on that property. | ||
| But you're only allowed to hunt a certain amount of animals. | ||
| There's a certain season. | ||
| It's like very specific. | ||
| It starts at one time. | ||
| It ends at one time. | ||
| And, you know, you go to jail if you violate those things. | ||
| In Texas, as long as the animal's not from Texas, you own it. | ||
| So, like, zebras, lions, tigers, there's fucking stray kangaroos. | ||
| Like, kangaroos get out. | ||
| My wife saw a fucking zebra. | ||
| She was driving, and she's like, I saw a zebra. | ||
| There was a zebra on the side of the road. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Somebody had a zebra and it just got out. | |
| What if it's a zebra from Texas? | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I think it's probably born in Texas. | ||
| Not that zebra. | ||
| I mean in general. | ||
| You're saying you can own the land and then you own the animals if they're not from Texas. | ||
| As long as the animals are from another country. | ||
| Why though? | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It's not even just... | ||
| It's so crazy that it doesn't even make sense because they're not even exotic animals. | ||
| Like, for instance, elk. | ||
| Elk hunting in most of the country is a difficult tag to acquire. | ||
| It's a very prized hunt because it's delicious meat. | ||
| So it's very specific with the regulations. | ||
| In Texas, you can hunt elk 365 days a year, and you own the elk, because the elk were brought into Texas, even though they used to be in Texas. | ||
| So they were in Texas, and then in the 1800s, they wiped them out, and then when they reintroduced them, they said, well, you ain't from around here, so we own you. | ||
| That's a loophole. | ||
| It's a loophole. | ||
| A giant elk loophole in Texas. | ||
| You can do that with some animals. | ||
| You can't do it with eagles. | ||
| If you start hunting American eagles here in Texas, then people would crack down like, hey, enough. | ||
| Enough, Texas. | ||
| Settle down. | ||
| We own these fucking eagles. | ||
| We own these eagles. | ||
| There's no historical record of eagles in these here parts. | ||
| It's a weird place. | ||
| So because of that, there really is more tigers in people's yards. | ||
| That's just mind-boggling to me. | ||
| I wonder how the Tigers feel about that. | ||
| They must be like, this is wrong. | ||
| Unless there's some wild tycoon out there that's got a crazy setup where he lets a goat loose and the Tiger gets to chase the goat and eat it and kill it. | ||
| Just for the hell of it? | ||
| Well, because that's what tigers do. | ||
| Because otherwise you're going to... | ||
| Either it's that, or you kill the meat, and then you bring it to the tiger, which is not as fun for him. | ||
| Like, you'd really rather kill it themselves. | ||
| That's what they like to do. | ||
| But if you bring the animals here, then you can own them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, you could bring, like, I mean, how small can you go? | ||
| Can you go to crickets? | ||
| Can you bring crickets? | ||
| Bring worms in? | ||
| I think... | ||
| I own these worms because they're from Spain. | ||
| Yeah, you could. | ||
| Like that? | ||
| But I think that would be an invasive animal. | ||
| Like, you wouldn't be able to control it. | ||
| There is problems like bugs and things that come from other and even plants that come from other parts of the world that don't have natural predators and they just run over everybody else and take over an ecosystem. | ||
| Do you have any animals that you own that you've brought in from other countries? | ||
| Because I'm really here. | ||
| I'm representing the authorities. | ||
| No, I only have a golden retriever. | ||
| Is he from the United States? | ||
| He appears to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He appears to be. | |
| I cannot confirm nor deny, but I did get him in California when he was six weeks old, so I'm pretty sure he's from here. | ||
| But, you know, that's literally, like, the opposite of a tiger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Golden Retriever, they just, like, love sponges. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's very interesting, like, the laws here when it comes to wildlife. | ||
| Also, most of the land here is private, which is interesting, too. | ||
| Like, you know, California has a lot of public land, and there's public land that people go hiking on, hunting on, fishing on, and same thing with, like, New York State and a lot of states. | ||
| Not Texas. | ||
| Texas is very little public land, like a tiny swath of it where we can go hunting on. | ||
| So what brought you? | ||
| Why did you decide to move to Austin? | ||
| It was during the pandemic. | ||
| And everything in California was just really going sideways. | ||
| There was a lot of riots, there was a lot of smash and grabs, and there was a lot of really incompetent government. | ||
| Where they were telling people that you have to stay alive. | ||
| We couldn't even do outside shows. | ||
| You couldn't do outside shows. | ||
| They wouldn't let the comedy store do shows in the parking lot. | ||
| I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. | ||
| There's these incompetent bureaucrats who are telling people what to do over public health decisions. | ||
| They had massive control over your life all of a sudden. | ||
| The mayor never had any fucking control over who worked and who didn't work. | ||
| Now all of a sudden he does, and he's a moron? | ||
| I was like, I gotta get out of here. | ||
| Delight, Texas. | ||
| Well, I came to Texas with some friends, because we were all disgruntled with California. | ||
| And you've been to Texas before? | ||
| Oh yeah, many, many, many, many, many times. | ||
| So you've had a feeling for Texas. | ||
| I love it here. | ||
| We've always loved it here. | ||
| And really what I wanted to do, I wanted to move to Utah or Montana. | ||
| I wanted to move to somewhere where it was these beautiful mountains and woods. | ||
| I just wanted to... | ||
| I'm like, I travel so much, I want to go somewhere that's nice and peaceful. | ||
| Like, I don't want to be in cities anymore. | ||
| I was like, this city shit is bullshit. | ||
| It's just too much. | ||
| That's what I did. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we were talking about it last night. | ||
| I think you're on the right track. | ||
| It overloads your senses. | ||
| I don't think it's healthy for you. | ||
| So, there was that, and then... | ||
| It was also, this is a great town. | ||
| I mean, it's an amazing place. | ||
| There's only a million people there, and then a million on the outskirts. | ||
| So it's like really mild traffic, very friendly people, like great restaurants, a great artist community. | ||
| There's a lot of great musicians here. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I haven't even noticed in the airport. | ||
| I've never seen this. | ||
| There's singers in the airport, like at different gates. | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| That was wild. | ||
| And legit barbecue. | ||
| They got a salt lick at the airport. | ||
| They do? | ||
| Yeah, it's very good. | ||
| We were excited when salt lick was open. | ||
| Yeah, the food here is incredible. | ||
| But the big thing was freedom. | ||
| Freedom was number one. | ||
| Because when we came here, everybody was like, restaurants were open. | ||
| People would just walk around doing things. | ||
| We went out onto Lake Austin. | ||
| This friend of mine, she became a friend of mine. | ||
| She was a real estate agent. | ||
| And she took us on a tour on a boat. | ||
| And my young daughters were like, oh my god, we want to live here. | ||
| We want to live on the lake. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| And my wife was very hesitant at first, but she took to it like a duck to water when she moved here. | ||
| Why was she hesitant? | ||
| It's a big change. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| All of her friends are in L.A. You know, it's hard. | ||
| It's hard just packing up your shit. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Was there a second runner-up to move to? | ||
| Or was this just... | ||
| Yeah, there was... | ||
| I liked Park City, Utah. | ||
| Park City, Utah is real nice, real quiet. | ||
| But it's also, like, it's a resort town, mostly. | ||
| So, like, how many people even live there in the summertime? | ||
| It's like, maybe that'd be too weird. | ||
| But I really do love it up there. | ||
| It's so beautiful. | ||
| And again, I really love Montana, and I really love Colorado. | ||
| I just was like, LA is too much. | ||
| And the thing about the government, that was the big one for me. | ||
| It's like, you guys are morons. | ||
| You can't tell me what to do and what not to do, especially when it comes to health choices, and you're fat and disgusting, and you look like you don't take care of yourself at all, and you guys are giving out mandates on health. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I was like, this is just, I gotta get out of here. | ||
| And that's when I realized how valuable freedom is. | ||
| And to not be suppressed by these people that are supposedly acting in the guise of your best interest. | ||
| I get like that over parking tickets. | ||
| Seriously, parking tickets infuriate me. | ||
| For years. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| You decided you own this piece of the earth and you're gonna charge me? | ||
| Everything you just said I have boiled down to parking tickets. | ||
| That drives me crazy, and you know what drives me crazy? | ||
| Tolls. | ||
| When I go to New York, every time I go over those stupid fucking bridges, I get angry. | ||
| I'm like, you're making me pay again to drive over the bridge? | ||
| You paid for this bridge a thousand times over, you cunts. | ||
| Because, like, the whole idea in the beginning was, we gotta fund this bridge, so we need to charge people money to go across the bridge. | ||
| But then after a while, the funding's done, you paid for it, you fucks. | ||
| But now you're just addicted to charging people. | ||
| So you have this massive bottleneck where all these cars just stop dead, because everybody's gotta go to these stupid fucking booths. | ||
| And you're just raking in money and just staying incompetent, staying with your terrible money management so everybody's angry at you, and they still just keep paying it every day because there's no way around it. | ||
| You gotta go on the bridge, you gotta pay. | ||
| Put that stupid thing over your rearview mirror so it clocks you every time and dings your credit card. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| It's theft. | ||
| They're a bunch of creeps. | ||
| The whole idea behind it has already been passed. | ||
| Like, you're supposed to pay for the bridge. | ||
| You paid for the bridge. | ||
| Now you're just stealing. | ||
| Parking spots. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| I overreact to parking spots. | ||
| I don't think you overreacted. | ||
| I think we need to get violent. | ||
| Do you know Brian Holtzman? | ||
| Did you see Brian Holtzman last night? | ||
| Very, very funny guy. | ||
| And he just got here. | ||
| He was a really funny guy from L.A. But Brian used to be a meter maid. | ||
| That's what he used to do. | ||
| He was a comic, and he did parking enforcement. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were just talking about it last night that I ran into him one night. | ||
| He must have some stories. | ||
| Oh, he's got great stories. | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| You should see him. | ||
| He's very funny. | ||
| You would enjoy him. | ||
| He's so crazy. | ||
| He does the late night spots. | ||
| He likes to close off the show. | ||
| He was on stage last night till 1.45 in the morning. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He must have gone on after I was gone. | ||
| Yeah, he went on late. | ||
| He went on real late. | ||
| He likes to go on at the very end of the show. | ||
| He was on till 1.45? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kellen. | |
| Kellen. | ||
| He's so funny. | ||
| But it's like that Kinnison spot, you know, like at the store. | ||
| They used to have late night Kinnison spots. | ||
| And that's kind of what Holtzman does now. | ||
| Used to be back in L.A. It was Brody Stevens, too, before he died. | ||
| He did the same kind of thing. | ||
| He would do those late spots and it would be so much fun. | ||
| Did he ever tell you some conflicts he had when enforcing the parking thing? | ||
| No, I never talked to him about it. | ||
| I'm sure he had a few. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Those poor people, because they're getting the whole thing taken out. | ||
| They're just trying to do their job. | ||
| Yeah, they get attacked. | ||
| Parking meter people, they get attacked. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, it's another creepy way that the city makes money off you. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| You're dead right. | ||
| It's like, why are you charging money for this little spot? | ||
| And if it's like the meter is a dollar or whatever it is, but if I don't pay it, it's like 50 bucks? | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| You should charge me a dollar, you piece of shit. | ||
| It's like a dollar. | ||
| Is it a dollar? | ||
| Like, what's with the penalties? | ||
| What's with all these, like, crazy 50 times over penalties? | ||
| Like, you just get to say that you get to take my money? | ||
| If I'm gonna pay for the parking thing, and you know you're gonna make me pay because you give me a ticket, how about give me a ticket for what I should actually be paying? | ||
| That's what it should be. | ||
| Well, they're charging you on time and space. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| They're stealing money. | ||
| They're stealing money because it's never going to be worth $50. | ||
| Like, how's it worth $50 to just park in a spot? | ||
| But you can hit me with a $50 ticket if I don't pay? | ||
| Like, that's crazy. | ||
| Like, oh, it's a penalty. | ||
| Oh, all right. | ||
| Imagine that in the Wild West. | ||
| Imagine, like, 1860. That's how people got shot. | ||
| Your horse is in the wrong spot. | ||
| I wonder when they started doing that. | ||
| That's interesting to think about. | ||
| It had to have started. | ||
| It had to have started. | ||
| The first guy. | ||
| Imagine that meeting. | ||
| Let's find out. | ||
| When was the first parking meter? | ||
| I was thinking about when jaywalking started, it was like you could do it for a long time until there was too many cars. | ||
| And the cars were like, hey, hey, hey, get these people out of our way. | ||
| That makes sense because if you look at those old videos of New York City at the turn of the century when people were first having cars and they were cars mixed in with horses, everyone's just kind of always walking across the street. | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| I got a ticket once in jaywalking in Los Angeles in the 80's and it caused me, the penalty was I couldn't, it was with my car, even though I was walking, the penalty went to my car somehow. | ||
| Like even though the crime was walking across the street and then the ticket went on to my registration, which had nothing to do with what I had done. | ||
| Oklahoma City. | ||
| First parking meters in the United States went to Oklahoma City in 1935. The city grew rapidly in the early 20th century. | ||
| In 1913, the city had only 3,000 drivers, but as people traded in their horses and wagons and bought cars, the numbers grew. | ||
| By 1930, 5,000 cars were registered within the county. | ||
|
unidentified
|
500,000. | |
| Oh, 500,000. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| How did I miss that hundred? | ||
| Oklahomans who worked downtown arrived early and took the most convenient street parking for themselves, leaving their cars in one spot all day. | ||
| As a result, shoppers had difficulty finding places to park. | ||
| Like other towns addressing the problem, Oklahoma City tried to control this by marking tires with chalk. | ||
| Oh, that's gross. | ||
| Cars that were left in the same space for too long were ticketed, but that was time intensive and took policemen off their regular beats. | ||
| A better solution was needed, so they came up with the parking meter. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| I guess you gotta kinda do something, because people are gross, and they will just park their car and leave it there forever. | ||
| Oklahoma City, who would've... | ||
| You could've never known that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever fucked around with autonomous cars? | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| Do you ever drive a Tesla? | ||
| I wouldn't. | ||
| If it drives itself, you mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't do that. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, sit there and let it do it. | ||
| I mean, I might do it as a test, but I don't like the idea of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love to drive. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's one of my favorite things. | ||
| What do you drive? | ||
| I drive a Toyota Highlander. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| And I drive a 1986 Jeep CJ7. Nice. | ||
| I love going from point A to point B. There's something about moving. | ||
| That's good for you, at least for my mind, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like there's something unwinding just by moving forward. | ||
| I used to come up with a lot of my best ideas of driving and no radio on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You gotta shut it off sometimes because you always got radio or phone or something and sometimes you have to have nothing because nothing isn't really nothing. | ||
| You gotta like... | ||
| It took me years to realize that doing nothing was really good. | ||
| It was really doing something, because your mind thinks differently when something's not going in. | ||
| You can really think more. | ||
| For a long time I thought, well, I'm not doing anything, and I like it, and I think of things sometimes. | ||
| Part of me thought, because of society, it's like, well, what do you mean you're doing nothing? | ||
| It has a negative, you know what I mean? | ||
| It has a negative thing, and then it took me years to think that, no, this is really something. | ||
| And then I started looking up nothing. | ||
| It sounds like a George Carlin. | ||
| I started looking it up, and it showed the benefit of silence and just, you know. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you would drive with no radio, and you just, your mind? | ||
| Yeah, especially early in my beginning days of stand-up. | ||
| I drove a lot, because I delivered newspapers, so I drive in the mornings and deliver my newspapers. | ||
| And I do it with no radio on a lot of the time. | ||
| And some of the best ideas that I had came from just doing this manual labor, chucking these newspapers out the window and just driving around, and your mind is free to think about other stuff. | ||
| Instead of constantly having entertainment and bombarding it, I'd listen to Charles Laquadera, the morning radio, but if I just shut it off and listen to nothing, then I got some of my best ideas. | ||
| Plus you're doing this mundane thing with the paper, which is almost like the gears in your head, it's doing something, but that allows another part of your brain to go on its own, because you're distracting enough I don't know, it's fascinating how it works. | ||
| It's focused, but you're not, you're focused on this boring thing, then your mind is playing, because creativity to me is playing. | ||
| It's like a child with finger paints, you know, just like, it's always been a very playful thing to me. | ||
| I've never like thought, oh my god, I need more, I need five more minutes. | ||
| It's just like, Because creating is thinking. | ||
| You can't stop thinking. | ||
| If someone said to you, you can't think of any more comedy or you'll be arrested. | ||
| They wouldn't know if you didn't say it, but you can't stop, right? | ||
| It's like a machine going down a hill. | ||
| Well, it's how you look at things. | ||
| You're always going to look at something stupid and go, what is that? | ||
| How is that real? | ||
| Yeah, why is that like that? | ||
| How are we accepting that? | ||
| Because the world is, like, so chaos. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| And then people have come up... | ||
| Civilization, on one hand, it's good. | ||
| They have certain rules to guide it, but there's stuff spilling over the edges. | ||
| There's like tornadoes. | ||
| And the comedians are... | ||
| Pointing out, well, I know you're trying to get it so the world doesn't just blow up, but that rule is insane. | ||
| And then you can comment about the stuff that's spilling over. | ||
| Look what's spilling over. | ||
| Why didn't you do anything? | ||
| It's like, because we're just trying to go from point A to point B in the day and our entire lives and just get to the end. | ||
| And it's like a puzzle. | ||
| It's completely out of control. | ||
| You're just trying to survive. | ||
| It's interesting you're talking about your process, too, that you had this process in Boston. | ||
| And in Boston, out of all the places that I've ever lived, they appreciate hard work and work ethic more than any place I've ever lived. | ||
| And there's something about, like, they discourage lazy people. | ||
| They do not like lazy people. | ||
| Like, it is a thing growing up there where people work hard. | ||
| You gotta shovel your fucking driveway to go to work. | ||
| The shoveling the driveway thing is big, because there's so much goddamn snow. | ||
| Like, you have to get up in the morning. | ||
| You gotta do the work. | ||
| You gotta go to work. | ||
| So if you're some guy just sitting on the couch, I'm just waiting for ideas to come to me. | ||
| They'd be like, fuck you, Steven! | ||
| Go to work! | ||
| No, that wasn't growing up. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think growing up. | |
| He has a successful comic. | ||
| He doesn't even... | ||
| his wanders around the yard talking to himself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| Get a job. | ||
| Get a job. | ||
| What are you doing, Steven? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get a fucking job, you lazy slob. | |
| What are you doing? | ||
| Talking to yourself? | ||
| You're convincing yourself you're working hard? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| But that's another thing. | ||
| There is that. | ||
| There is that physical, physical, physical. | ||
| It took me years to realize that thinking is doing something too. | ||
| Because what you just described is... | ||
| So burned into you. | ||
| It's like, well, wait a minute. | ||
| I'm doing this. | ||
| It'd be one thing if you were not shoveling the driveway and not thinking of anything. | ||
| Because of that ethic that you described, thinking is not like... | ||
| I think it's almost abstract, even though it isn't. | ||
| You can't see someone thinking, but you can see the guy shoveling the driveway. | ||
| So that guy looks like he's doing something, and that guy doesn't look like he's doing anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that guy just wrote two pages of something. | |
| Just wandering around in his yard, staring at the trees. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Talking to himself. | ||
| I think it's only people who do creative stuff kind of appreciate that you really do have to have that time just thinking. | ||
| Because ideas, they just, they're out there, and if you don't go looking for them, they don't come into your head. | ||
| So if you spend time just too involved in stuff where you've got to be very aware and paying attention and doing this and doing that, like... | ||
| You don't have any boredom. | ||
| You don't have any, like, just flatness. | ||
| Yes, boredom has a negative thing where it's on a notion to it, too, because boredom, that's where the stuff comes. | ||
| Like, sometimes if I have to, everyone, everyone in there, every day, like, I have to go here, I've got to buy this, I've got to do this, I've got to call this guy, I've got to do this email, I've got to go, then I have to go there because the car needs this, and all of that, and then it's like, it's like, I can't wait to just sit there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Without doing these tasks. | ||
| Because if you're doing all these tasks, you can't think of anything other than the tasks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You're caught in a loop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And people, you know, I just like to think. | ||
| But you have to do that stuff. | ||
| If you didn't do anything, you just pile up and your house is on fire. | ||
| I'll put it out next week. | ||
| I gotta write a joke. | ||
| I'm thinking about walnuts right now. | ||
| A lot of guys, like writers, authors in particular, they like to write and then they go for walks. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so they have all the writing of the day done, like say if they commit to a certain amount of pages or a certain amount of letters that they write. | ||
| So they write all those words and then they go for a walk. | ||
| And then you think about what you wrote. | ||
| And then ideas will come to you as you're walking around just thinking about what you wrote. | ||
| Like a lot of guys, either they talk into their phone or they have like a little tape recorder and they just talk into it every now and again while they're walking. | ||
| Or even Einstein, when he couldn't figure something out, he'd play his violin, or he'd go for a walk. | ||
| Imagine seeing Einstein walk, what the hell, get back in the office! | ||
| And he figures out this giant thing, because he went for a walk. | ||
| He knew. | ||
| He knew. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just we have to separate the difference between lazy and a different effective strategy for engaging your mind. | ||
| Because we think of walking and just hanging out as being lazy. | ||
| But for a creative person, like... | ||
| One of the things that I think is really important for comics and I guess probably for anybody creative is to do things. | ||
| Like, you can't just do shows. | ||
| No, you have to have real experiences. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You have to go out and live life. | ||
| Go out and go visit museums. | ||
| Go travel places. | ||
| Go hang out with friends in other states. | ||
| Go do stuff. | ||
| You gotta do stuff. | ||
| Because if you don't do stuff, your field of references becomes very small. | ||
| Yes, you'd just be doing stuff about clubs and your house. | ||
| And air travel. | ||
| Yeah, air travel. | ||
| I have several museum jokes by accident. | ||
| LAUGHTER By accident. | ||
| Well, I mean, I went to the museum. | ||
| I didn't go to get some jokes. | ||
| I'd see the woman's name for the ladies. | ||
| Oh, that must be an exhibit. | ||
| Or where they have the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums. | ||
| A museum who had all the heads and arms. | ||
| That's because I went to a museum. | ||
| Or I exercise. | ||
| I'm a bike rider like an hour a day in the spring and summer on a stationary bike in the winter every day, 30 minutes. | ||
| I'm addicted to that. | ||
| And that's like a weird drug that makes you more relaxed and energetic at the same time. | ||
| And that affects your thinking, too, somehow. | ||
| It's like it's all... | ||
| I mean, I do it to feel good, but I like how it affects my mind also. | ||
| Then you add coffee, and then you're out of your mind. | ||
| I love cardio before shows. | ||
| Oh, you do? | ||
| Yeah, I do too. | ||
| If I could do like an hour of cardio before a show that night, I'm always so loose and relaxed. | ||
| Yeah, you're like, oh. | ||
| Yeah, like, hey, everything's fine. | ||
| Big smile on my face. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was out to dinner with my wife once, and I had just a giant smile on my face. | ||
| I was just like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| What's so funny? | ||
| I did cardio today. | ||
| I feel great. | ||
| It's just like it rings out all the tension in your body. | ||
| It just leaves you free. | ||
| I have to do it. | ||
| I love doing it. | ||
| Some people look at it like as a task. | ||
| I look forward to doing it. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| If you can look forward to it, it's way better. | ||
| Because when you think of it as a task, then you put off doing it. | ||
| And you procrastinate or you dread it. | ||
| Instead of just saying, this is what I love to do. | ||
| I'm going to go do this thing I love to do. | ||
| It's just hard for some people to think of exertion as being something they enjoy. | ||
| For most people, exertion is work. | ||
| And I'm tired of working. | ||
| I want to just relax. | ||
| You know, because mostly they're doing work they don't like to do, too. | ||
| So they have an association in their head. | ||
| But people who don't like exercising are people who don't exercise. | ||
| Because they see it as a, like, move those rocks. | ||
| But people who do it know how positive it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| Were you doing it when you first started? | ||
| No, I started doing it about in the early 90s. | ||
| I lived in Santa Monica. | ||
| And I had a bike just for no reason. | ||
| I had a bike. | ||
| You know the bike path along the ocean there? | ||
| So one day I went down. | ||
| I lived three blocks from there. | ||
| I went down and rode my bike on the bike path just to ride like a kid rides. | ||
| And I would do it a couple times a week. | ||
| And then one time I went down and I must have gone longer than before. | ||
| And I got that rush thing, that endorphin thing, because I must have spent more time on the bike. | ||
| And I thought, oh my God, this is what I've been hearing about my whole life. | ||
| I didn't go to get it. | ||
| I didn't do it. | ||
| I was like a kid riding a bike around the neighborhood. | ||
| But when I got that, I thought... | ||
| I want to get that again. | ||
| So then I went on purpose to get it again. | ||
| And now it's been like since 32 years. | ||
| It's like a drug, like a strike. | ||
| And it was all just from that couple first bike rides. | ||
| If you could get Runners High and put it in a tablet. | ||
| You know how many people would buy it? | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| You feel so good. | ||
| You feel so relaxed. | ||
| Just like, the world's fine. | ||
| The world's gonna be great. | ||
| The sun's out. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| Then I would be in the hotel and I would do 30 minutes before I would go on stage. | ||
| For years I did that because of the reason you said you walk out. | ||
| Because for me, the stage is very intense for me. | ||
| I mean, I might look like I'm walking around and saying this stuff, but it's like a tightrope. | ||
| And then when you do the exercise, it's just different. | ||
| Then I switch to walks. | ||
| Now I go for a walk. | ||
| I'll be walking around out in the back of the theater going all around. | ||
| People might see me. | ||
| They're going into the show. | ||
| They must be so nervous. | ||
| I'm not nervous, though. | ||
| I'm trying to, like, oh, I'm trying to get that floaty thing. | ||
| And then you walk out, and it's like... | ||
| It's not as intense. | ||
| Do you think it's intense? | ||
| How do you feel about being out there? | ||
| It's intense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's intense. | ||
| It's dangerous, don't you think? | ||
| It certainly is. | ||
| People paid money. | ||
| They don't want you to suck. | ||
| To me, it's like you are running across a lake of thin ice, and it takes you 85 minutes to get to the other side. | ||
| You try not to you hear it cracking behind you And if you care about what you do, it's it's intense, you know, I'm glad Especially that live performance in front of many, many people that come to see you. | ||
| There's a lot going on there. | ||
| It's a very complicated issue. | ||
| And it's a lot of fun. | ||
| It's a lot of fucking fun. | ||
| I've done a lot of different things. | ||
| I love doing stand-up. | ||
| It's one of the most fun things I've ever done. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I love doing it in clubs. | ||
| You know, I do a lot of big shows, too. | ||
| But the fun I'm having at the club is the most fun. | ||
| We were all talking about it last night. | ||
| We're all sitting around after the show. | ||
| Because we've all done, like a lot of the guys that come with me on the road, we've done arenas, we've done big theaters, but there's nothing like clubs. | ||
| It's the most fun thing ever. | ||
| It's like everyone's just sharing a moment. | ||
| We're all just having a good time together. | ||
| I got all these things to talk about, I prepared, I've been doing a lot of sets, so it's gonna be smooth. | ||
| Have a cocktail, let's have a laugh. | ||
| And it's fun! | ||
| It's the most fun thing to do. | ||
| Out of all the shit I do, that's the one thing that I don't think I'd ever stop doing that. | ||
| Just too much fun. | ||
| The audience is a weird thing. | ||
| Weird and positive. | ||
| It's like they're your friends, but you don't really know their names. | ||
| You're hanging out with them. | ||
| You're hanging out with them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't know their names, but they know you. | ||
| And they know you inside and out. | ||
| Especially because of podcasts. | ||
| They really know you. | ||
| Like, they know you know you. | ||
| They listen to you talk for hours and hours and hours. | ||
| They know who you are. | ||
| You can't fake it, you know? | ||
| And so, they're excited about that, too. | ||
| It's a weird, like, extra connection that people have to comics now because of podcasts. | ||
| Yeah, but they're really thinking not on stage, because before it was just what the show would be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They also like the fact that sometimes, like, we'll bring up stuff in a podcast, and then I'll write it down, and then that'll become a bit. | ||
| Like, I'll have something pop into my head, and they'll go, ah, I remember when you first talked about that, and now it's, like, your closing bit, because you figured out how to turn it into this five-minute chunk, you know? | ||
| How long have you been doing the podcast? | ||
| 14 years? | ||
| Is it almost 14 years? | ||
| 13 and a half years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| That must be one of the first ones that you have here. | ||
| The first one was Adam Curry. | ||
| He was number one. | ||
| He's the podfather. | ||
| And then Corolla had one when he left radio. | ||
| And Marc Maron had one. | ||
| And there was a couple other that I had heard about. | ||
| But it was Kevin Smith. | ||
| Kevin Smith had one real early on. | ||
| But it was a fairly small amount of people. | ||
| And what drew you to it? | ||
| Just having fun. | ||
| What drew me to it was like I used to like to do radio. | ||
| I used to like to do like Opie and Anthony because it was a bunch of comics hanging around. | ||
| And you know it was like Jim Norton and Rich Voss. | ||
| We would just hang out and talk shit and just laugh. | ||
| And it was so much fun. | ||
| I would look forward to doing it every time I went to New York. | ||
| I couldn't wait to do the morning radio. | ||
| Because I get to hang with these comedians and just laugh. | ||
| Jim Norton's hilarious. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| But it was a camaraderie thing. | ||
| It was a fun thing. | ||
| We just would always leave there. | ||
| Ari Shaffir and I would do it together all the time. | ||
| And we would leave and we'd just be laughing. | ||
| It was just so much fun. | ||
| And then the idea came. | ||
| I'd seen Anthony Cumia from Opie& Anthony. | ||
| He had his own show that he was doing in his basement online. | ||
| And Tom Green had his own show online. | ||
| So I was watching a few other people do things. | ||
| And I was like, why don't I just try something? | ||
| Just have a webcam show. | ||
| Just do it for the fucking fun of it. | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| We started doing that. | ||
| You were doing it with your friend? | ||
| Yeah, my friend Brian. | ||
| And then I would bring in comedians like Tom Segura and Joey Diaz and Duncan Trussell and Ari Shafir. | ||
| And then it just became all of a sudden I have guests and all of a sudden I have scientists and all of a sudden I have authors and psychologists and physicians. | ||
| And it was weird. | ||
| It just like slowly became this thing that it is now. | ||
| You started in Los Angeles? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Started in my... | ||
| I just had a spare bedroom that I just like set up. | ||
| Like how did you... | ||
| I mean you had the comedians and stuff but then how did it go to like scientists? | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| I started, the podcast became fairly popular in podcasts. | ||
| I mean, by fairly popular, I mean, you know, thousands of downloads, nothing like it is now. | ||
| But it was enough so that I could convince people, hey, here's this episode. | ||
| Would you like to do my podcast? | ||
| Like, check it out. | ||
| This is what we do. | ||
| And they would do it, like, oh, you guys are silly. | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| You're sitting around smoking pot and talking shit about things? | ||
| Like, yeah. | ||
| Do you want to come? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And a lot of people said yes. | ||
| Like, Anthony Bourdain, he was an early one, he said yes. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Graham Hancock. | ||
| Graham Hancock was, like, the first real one. | ||
| Because Graham Hancock is a journalist and he specializes in ancient civilizations and the demise of ancient civilizations and that there's evidence that shows That there is likely some sort of a natural catastrophe that took place around 11,800 to 12,000 years ago that wiped out civilization. | ||
| And all the civilization that we think about, like Babylonia and Mesopotamia, those were probably reboots of an old civilization that was destroyed by asteroid impacts. | ||
| There's like all this physical evidence. | ||
| It's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. | ||
| There's core samples they do where they find iridium at around 11,800 years, which is very common in space, very rare on Earth, but there's a large layer of it. | ||
| And micro-diamonds which indicate impacts from the asteroids. | ||
| So we probably went through an asteroid shower, and it probably destroyed civilization somewhere around 11,800 years ago. | ||
| Ended the Ice Age. | ||
| So Graham Hancock, he has Ancient Catastrophe, which is on Netflix. | ||
| This whole series on that, where you can follow the evidence, the physical evidence and the archaeological evidence of these ancient civilizations and these ancient construction methods that to this day we still don't understand, like how they move these enormous stones, how they place them, how they even cut them. | ||
| We don't know what tools they were using. | ||
| We don't know anything. | ||
| How did you get him to come on? | ||
| I was a giant fan of his, and I would always sing his praises when I would do radio shows and stuff. | ||
| I'd tell people about this book he wrote called Fingerprints of the Gods. | ||
| An amazing book. | ||
| It just shows all this evidence of these ancient cultures that just don't exist anymore, including sunken cities off the coast of Japan. | ||
| There wasn't water there, or there was ground there at one point in time thousands and thousands of years ago, and they think that there was actually a city there, and now it's covered by the ocean. | ||
| There's a bunch of those that they find out there in the water. | ||
| There's a lot of indications that there was like really advanced civilization like 12,000, 20,000 years ago. | ||
| So that guy was like one of the first guests. | ||
| And you have Neil and DeGrasse. | ||
| Yeah, I've had him on multiple times. | ||
| Is he a nice guy? | ||
| He's a very nice guy. | ||
| Yeah, he's a very nice guy. | ||
| He's a sweetheart. | ||
| Because that stuff fascinates me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can only take so much. | ||
| I mean, I like to watch the shows, and then my mind, like, you know, my Burlington, Massachusetts mind. | ||
| Okay, okay, and then... | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No more room? | ||
| No, no, but I'll watch. | ||
| I'll hear the words. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll listen, but okay. | ||
| But I love it. | ||
| I love that stuff. | ||
| Well, we had Michio Kaku on the other day. | ||
| He's brilliant. | ||
| And he was talking about quantum computing. | ||
| He's really interested. | ||
| He wrote a book on quantum computing and what a game changer that's going to be when something can... | ||
| Compute not at a level of like ten times more than we could do now, but like millions and millions of times more. | ||
| And that it happens simultaneously in different universes. | ||
| And that they're calculating not just in this universe, but they're calculating simultaneously in multiple universes. | ||
| And he's telling me this, I'm like, what did you just say? | ||
| The fuck does that even mean? | ||
| I have to get going. | ||
| I'm like, what are you saying, Michio? | ||
| That guy is so goddamn smart. | ||
| Talking to him, you just realize what an ape you are? | ||
| He was building a particle collider in his garage when he was in high school. | ||
| With miles, and what did he say, like 20 miles of copper pipe? | ||
| Something crazy like that. | ||
| Is he from the United States? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What town was he building? | ||
| Where was he? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| I don't know why I want to... | ||
| Was it New York? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Genius. | ||
| Genius. | ||
| But that's like... | ||
| He was like that as a kid. | ||
| When I was 17, I was picking my nose. | ||
| I was an idiot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You were right. | |
| 22 miles of copper wire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It says... | |
| Why don't I pop this up? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think San Jose, California. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Because he said the heart of Silicon Valley, which is now... | ||
| Silicon Valley. | ||
| So just to be able to talk to a guy like that. | ||
| Yeah, a pleasure, a gift. | ||
| A pleasure. | ||
| Just to be in the same room with that guy. | ||
| I've had the most unexpected education talking to these people. | ||
| Yeah, amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's been, it's very, very, I feel super, super fortunate for that aspect of it because I've learned so much talking to so many different people. | ||
| And you get all these different perspectives, these heterodox perspectives and alternative perspectives and people that are like very rigid and their ideologies and then people that are like very open-minded and they're just like trying to find the truth. | ||
| And they're all like mixed in together in this world. | ||
| And if you can bring them together and have conversations with them, it expands your understanding of how the mind works so much. | ||
| Like I was only exposed to a certain kind of people before. | ||
| You know, I was exposed to us like comics. | ||
| And my martial arts friends. | ||
| And then, you know, other people that I knew from various walks of life, like whoever I ran into. | ||
| But I never got a chance to, like, how would you get a chance to sit down with a John Carmack? | ||
| And it's because you took that, let me say, webcam podcast. | ||
| Let me try this. | ||
| Let me try this. | ||
| Then you cut to Neil deGrasse, he's standing here, and the guy with the, what was the other guy? | ||
| Michio Kaku. | ||
| Yeah, you're saying, let me try this, and then, dang, it's like you have just people, the top people, you're sitting across from them. | ||
| That doesn't happen in real life. | ||
| It doesn't happen in real life. | ||
| And then Elon Musk was a big one. | ||
| That was a huge one. | ||
| You had him in here, too? | ||
| Yeah, I got him to smoke weed. | ||
| In here? | ||
| Yeah, because we were drinking. | ||
| It was like we were having a couple of whiskeys and I wanted to loosen him up because he's very intense. | ||
| I mean his brain is, like you can tell when you're talking to him, his brain is working on like five different things while he's talking. | ||
| It's like a different kind of thinking. | ||
| So we were drinking a little bit, loosening up, and then I sparked up a joint and it became a giant issue because he took a hit. | ||
| Oh, I remember that. | ||
| And the stock price of Tesla dropped like 6%. | ||
| It did? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It went back up. | ||
| I think it went past where it was the next day, but, you know, people panic on those things. | ||
| It went back up when he wasn't high anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And then, you know, there was also an issue with Top Secret Clearance. | ||
| Because even though it's legal in California, we was, where we were, it's not legal federally. | ||
| Yeah, it's so weird. | ||
| So here he's involved in this thing that's illegal, and he's also involved in NASA. He's also involved in top-secret rocket programs, you know, because he's got SpaceX. | ||
| And they're like, hey, motherfucker, what are you doing over there? | ||
| Did he smoke in his private life anyway? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I never asked him. | ||
| Did you say, hey... | ||
| Oh, I just sparked it up. | ||
| I know, but you don't know what his history was. | ||
| I didn't ask. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't ask. | ||
| But we do it all the time. | ||
| So if we're having a couple of drinks, and I spark up a blunt, I look at Jamie, and I hand it over to him, and I hand it to Elon, and he's like, hmm, okay. | ||
| So he takes his head of it. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| But it's like, how often do you get a chance to sit across from someone like that for three hours and just talk to them for three hours? | ||
| He scares the shit out of me. | ||
| He scares the shit out of me when he talks about AI. He's the one, like, out of all the people that have this, like, rosy view of AI, including Michio Kaku, who's brilliant, they have this rosy view of AI, artificial intelligence, and Elon does not. | ||
| He does not. | ||
| He's like, this is the biggest chance of being the demise of civilization, the demise of humans. | ||
| The biggest chance. | ||
| Yeah, because if you can't tell it apart, then you won't... | ||
| You won't know. | ||
| There's two things. | ||
| There's one, a bad state getting control of AI before a good state. | ||
| We try to think of ourselves as good guys. | ||
| Let's just for the sake of this argument say we're the good guys. | ||
| So if we're the good guys, we would like to get that AI before China does. | ||
| We'd like to get the AI before Russia does, before Iran does. | ||
| We don't want people that oppose us having the ultimate control over information and computing. | ||
| Because it'll probably be such a big game changer that there'll be no more encryption. | ||
| It'll burn through everything. | ||
| It'll be able to read passwords. | ||
| It'll be able to duplicate things. | ||
| You can do things with artificial intelligence that you can't even imagine could be possible. | ||
| And it's going to happen in our lifetime. | ||
| It's going to happen in 10 years, in 20 years. | ||
| It's going to be an unrecognizable world. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I like this, though. | ||
| It's pretty cool, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there a story behind this? | ||
| Oh, there's an artist. | ||
| His name's Jack of the Dust. | ||
| He makes a bunch of cool stuff. | ||
| They're ceramic. | ||
| Or what is it? | ||
| Resin? | ||
| They're resin sculptures. | ||
| I always love these Day of the Dead skulls. | ||
| They're pretty fucking cool. | ||
| He made me a few, and I said, I think they would all look cool here. | ||
| I just put them all on the table. | ||
| Is there a reason there's six? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Just a bunch of colors he has. | ||
| I just thought they're cool. | ||
| It is cool. | ||
| I like to have a bunch of shit laying around. | ||
| Yes, I see. | ||
| It makes it comfortable. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I love the photographs out there of the Indians out there. | ||
| Oh, that's Greg Overton. | ||
| Yeah, Greg Overton is this amazing artist. | ||
| And he's done a bunch of these incredible Native American art pieces. | ||
| And this area in particular was rich with Native American history because it was a very, very fertile area because of all the lakes and all the rivers and all the wildlife. | ||
| So there's arrowheads everywhere out here, all over the place. | ||
| I have a friend who has a ranch, and he's pulled thousands of arrowheads from his ranch. | ||
| They do these excavations where they know the areas where they hunted a lot. | ||
| Where there's a lot of wildlife and they dig into the ground and they sift through it. | ||
| And he finds these incredible points. | ||
| He's found Clovis points. | ||
| He's found Comanche arrowheads. | ||
| It's amazing, amazing stuff. | ||
| Yeah, tremendous. | ||
| Do you know that photographer? | ||
| Has he passed away or what? | ||
| The artist? | ||
| The guy that took the big pictures. | ||
| Oh, the photographs. | ||
| The photographs are of Quanah Parker. | ||
| Quanah Parker is the last Comanche chief. | ||
| So the Comanches were the people that were in control of the plains, in control of Texas, and they were the most fierce tribe, and they were the most difficult to get past. | ||
| And they were the reason why people couldn't settle this area. | ||
| It wasn't until the Texas Rangers figured out how to combat them on their own terms. | ||
| They cold-camped, they never used fires, they dressed like normal civilians, and they kind of lived like Indians. | ||
| And they ran around, and that's Quanah Parker. | ||
| So, Quanah Parker, his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was kidnapped by the Comanche when she was really young. | ||
| She was nine years old. | ||
| Her family was murdered in front of her, and they took her in, and she eventually became the wife of the chief, and they had a baby. | ||
| So, she was white, and she had a half Native American baby, who was Quanah Parker, who was the last Comanche chief. | ||
| And he was big for a Comanche and just like very, very fierce guy. | ||
| That photograph of her sucking, having her kid sucking on her nipple is a very famous photo because she would do that in front of people and they thought that was like so uncivilized. | ||
| Just to make them disturb them? | ||
| No, just that's how they did it. | ||
| Where, you know, in the Native American cultures, in the Comanche culture, they would just breastfeed. | ||
| So she would do that and they took a photo of her doing that because they thought it was like, This is like the evidence that she's not one of them. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| She's very primitive. | ||
| She's like one of them. | ||
| She was kidnapped when she was nine years old. | ||
| I'm a fan of Red Cloud, the Lakota chief. | ||
| I read this book, In the Heart of Everything. | ||
| Yes, I read that book. | ||
| Just amazing. | ||
| It's a great book. | ||
| It's a great book. | ||
| How he gathered all the Indians together. | ||
| If I make it one big army, fight the white guys. | ||
| Just like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's what it was supposed to be like. | ||
| Not the wars, but when they had it. | ||
| When they had this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's... | ||
| No parking meters. | ||
| No parking meters. | ||
| No malls. | ||
| That was the real version. | ||
| Well that's the nostalgia that everybody loves so much about Native American culture, the fact that they lived off the land, in the land. | ||
| And they did it at the same time where Europe had already experienced the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and there was all this Stuff and cities and all this culture all over the world. | ||
| It was like sophisticated and art and literature. | ||
| They didn't even really have art, the Comanches. | ||
| Their art was their arrows. | ||
| Their art was their clothing. | ||
| Their art was, you know, what they did to live off the land. | ||
| You know, they just followed the buffalo and lived off of them. | ||
| That's all they ate. | ||
| They ate mostly just buffalo. | ||
| And then all that's happening in Europe, and this is still here, like... | ||
| Stone Age culture. | ||
| 10,000 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Amazing. | ||
| And they're making the trains. | ||
| If you could go back in time and see what that must have been like, my God. | ||
| How incredible. | ||
| To be like one of the Lewis and Clark people, to take that trek across the country, and just experience what it was like before the white man came and fucking put his greasy little palms over everything and built cities. | ||
| It would have been too much for me. | ||
| I would have cried to death. | ||
| Where is he? | ||
| He fell out of the canoe. | ||
| Hard life. | ||
| Not good for comics. | ||
| You know, the Lakotas had a comic. | ||
| They had a permanent, like, fiction. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I never knew that. | ||
| Yeah, it's called the Heoka. | ||
| The Heoka was the sacred clown. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The sacred clown, the job that they had in society was to mock things, because anything that could be mocked must be bullshit. | ||
| Like, you would peel away the layers of ego and distortion. | ||
| Because if you can make fun of things... | ||
| So the Heioka was allowed to make fun of everybody. | ||
| Make fun of the chief, make fun of the women, make fun of the warriors. | ||
| He made fun of everybody. | ||
| I never heard of this. | ||
| Yeah, it was a very important part of their culture. | ||
| Did the other tribes have that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What is it called again? | ||
| Heyoka. | ||
| Heyoka. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was like he was like a kind of a medicine man. | ||
| It was like there was a spiritual aspect to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Heyoka. | |
| That'd be a good name for a child. | ||
| Heyoka. | ||
| Heyoka. | ||
| A little bit of cultural appropriation. | ||
| You can get in trouble for that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Oh, the Indians. | ||
| Oh my god, the Indians. | ||
| I say the Indians in my show. | ||
| I say the word Indian in my show. | ||
| They say it. | ||
| It's one of those weird ones, where like some people think Eskimo is a bad term, but some Eskimos prefer that term, depending upon where they are in the country and where they are in the world. | ||
| It's like a lot of Native Americans, they actually want you to use the term Indian, American Indian. | ||
| Well, then I say, I wonder if in Cleveland now, little boys are playing Cowboys and Guardians. | ||
| What are they playing now, right? | ||
| You can't play Cowboys and Indians anymore. | ||
| Yeah, Guardians, you know, the name of the Cleveland team. | ||
| Yeah, they changed it. | ||
| But the Washington Redskins are still the Redskins, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No? | ||
| It's done? | ||
| The Commanders. | ||
| The Commanders. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Is anybody a Chief anymore? | ||
| Chiefs are still there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then the Seminoles in Florida State, like, they have a deal with the tribe to stay in the Seminoles. | ||
| Well, the Seminole Nation is the only nation that was never conquered. | ||
| They just fucking kept running shit in Florida. | ||
| You know, that's why they have all the casinos down there and the Hard Rock and the Seminole Nation is huge in Florida. | ||
| I did a book report on those Indians when I was in eighth grade. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| Because we went to Florida on vacation and I saw the name all around. | ||
| I don't remember anything about it though, of course. | ||
| Well, there's a great book about Cabeza de Vaca called The Land So Strange. | ||
| Have you ever read that book? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a great book. | ||
| It's about Cabeza de Vaca when they first came to America and how they made their way from Florida across the country and they're like, everybody died. | ||
| There's like a couple guys left at the end of the journey. | ||
| But the stuff that they encountered, the way they had to try to get by, and starving to death, and facing hostile enemies, and just crazy. | ||
| Crazy being there then, doing that then. | ||
| We're so lucky. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| So lucky you just go to Starbucks, get a cup of coffee. | ||
| Go get a sandwich. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so easy to get by now. | |
| These people almost starved all the time. | ||
| Even the rain would be different. | ||
| I mean, experiencing the rain would be a big decision thing. | ||
| Also, you didn't know when it was coming. | ||
| You didn't know when it was going to end. | ||
| You had no idea a hurricane was on the way. | ||
| You had no idea. | ||
| It's just like the fate of the gods. | ||
| But the weather guys, though, even now, like, I mean, my brother is really into the weather. | ||
| I mean, I love snow. | ||
| I can't wait for it to snow. | ||
| I love snow in Massachusetts. | ||
| But he told me about this weatherman in Brazil years ago. | ||
| And he predicted these big, giant rains and stuff. | ||
| Bad weather was supposed to come. | ||
| And then all these tourists didn't come. | ||
| And then the weather didn't come. | ||
| And they put them in jail. | ||
| They put the weatherman in jail. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I think that should happen. | ||
| Just a row of cells of weathermen from all over the United States. | ||
| There's actually an even dumber one that's recent. | ||
| And the dumber one was there was some geologists in Italy, I believe. | ||
| And they failed to predict an earthquake. | ||
| So they were tried. | ||
| And I want to say they were convicted and then they had a win on appeal. | ||
| See if you can find that story. | ||
| But it was insane for all the scientists that actually understand seismology and how those... | ||
| You can't predict earthquakes. | ||
| You just... | ||
| You can't. | ||
| And so these morons had decided, hey, it's this fucking guy. | ||
| He should have told us. | ||
| They tried these guys like they're criminals. | ||
| And it was real bad for science. | ||
| It was real bad for seismology and the study of earthquakes because they had given – because of their own ignorance, they had decided these people could figure it out. | ||
| So they're exonerated. | ||
| Why Italian earthquake scientists were exonerated? | ||
| Judge who overturned conviction – yeah, so there was a conviction – say experts use the best available science. | ||
| Yeah, you can't fucking predict earthquakes, jackasses. | ||
| Six scientists convicted of manslaughter in 2012, so only 11 years ago, for advice they gave ahead of the deadly L'Aquila earthquake were victims of uncertain and fallacious reasoning. | ||
| To say the three judges who acquitted the experts and reduced the sentence of a seventh defendant last November in a 389-page document deposited in court on Friday since released to the public, Yeah, there's no way. | ||
| Other scientists, however, accused the judges of failing to understand modern seismology. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well, the judges definitely didn't understand it because they thought that these people could accurately predict when an earthquake is definitely going to come. | ||
| That's just not available yet. | ||
| Imagine telling the guy in the next cell why you're in. | ||
| Why are you in here? | ||
| Well, Italy's got goofy courts. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| Oh, real bad. | ||
| I had Amanda Knox in here. | ||
| Well, not that America doesn't. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that I do... | ||
| You had her in here? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| She was great. | ||
| One of the things that I do on a regular basis is I have a very good friend, Josh Dubin, who is a civil rights attorney. | ||
| And one of the things he does, he used to work with the Innocence Project. | ||
| Now he does stuff on his own. | ||
| And his, like, main goal in life is to find people that were wrongly convicted and get them out. | ||
| And he gets a lot of people out. | ||
| He's constantly doing it. | ||
| It's like his main life's work. | ||
| It's his main passion project. | ||
| And so we have, we highlight those cases, like, every three months. | ||
| He comes on and we sit down and we talk. | ||
| And, you know, he talks about cases, and he'll bring in people. | ||
| He's brought in several guys who spent 15 years, 20 years in jail for something they didn't do. | ||
| Wrongfully convicted. | ||
| He brought them in here? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| A couple different guys. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| Josh is, I mean, he's amazing. | ||
| He's a fucking saint. | ||
| But you get to realize our court system sucks dick, too. | ||
| But Italy's is even worse. | ||
| And Amanda Knox got fucking railroaded. | ||
| Like, railroaded bad. | ||
| And there's a really good Netflix documentary that shows all the stuff that happened. | ||
| I mean, there was so much DNA evidence that connected to this one guy. | ||
| Who murdered the girl. | ||
| He 100% did it. | ||
| Like, they had handprints, bloody handprints. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But this fucking, this prosecutor had it in his head from the beginning that she was it. | ||
| She was it. | ||
| He had a stupid idea that it was definitely her, and he didn't want to look at any other evidence. | ||
| And he suppressed evidence. | ||
| He didn't look at it. | ||
| He knew that this other guy was probably guilty, but he had already said she was, so he wanted to convict her, and he did it. | ||
| And he got her locked up. | ||
| And then she won on appeal. | ||
| And she finally got out after years in jail. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then they tried her again. | ||
| While she was in the United States. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And she was exonerated again. | ||
| But, I mean, this poor lady. | ||
| And she's so interesting. | ||
| She's so fucking brilliant. | ||
| So smart. | ||
| And one of the things that I said to her, I said, do you think you would be the same person if you had not gone through this horrific experience? | ||
| I would never want you to go through this experience. | ||
| But because you did... | ||
| You're this amazing, fascinating person with this, like, very introspective, very open-minded view of things. | ||
| Like, she's looking at things from all these different angles because her mind was tortured. | ||
| What was her answer? | ||
| She definitely would not have wanted to do that, but she definitely realizes she's a different person. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| She would have to be. | ||
| An incredible person because of it. | ||
| Was the guy they got, was he one of the people there? | ||
| Like, was he from the outside? | ||
| Wasn't there like four people? | ||
| The guy who they think did it was a guy who knew the woman and he had been with her. | ||
| And he was at that fucking place that night. | ||
| Like, he was there. | ||
| And he was also a criminal. | ||
| He had been breaking into people's places and stuff. | ||
| They knew that he had a history of doing some fucked up things. | ||
| They didn't have a connection previous to this with murder. | ||
| And he said he didn't do it. | ||
| He said he got there and someone was already killing her and he ran away. | ||
| A lot of bullshit, ridiculous stories. | ||
| And he's in now? | ||
| They got him in now? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I think they convicted him of something else and I think he went to jail for a certain amount of time and then he got out. | ||
| I think I got convicted for some other kind of crime. | ||
| Wasn't it like a break in and entering thing or something like that? | ||
| But most of the evidence, at least as it's presented in the Netflix documentary and talking to her, seems to point to this one guy that they're pretty sure did it. | ||
| It was a horrific murder, too. | ||
| It's not like a normal thing that women do. | ||
| It was like a male thing, like a vicious knife murder. | ||
| What was she like? | ||
| What was her vibe like? | ||
| Like a person who's been through hell. | ||
| And because that person been through hell, like her mind is just very unusual. | ||
| I mean, the amount of time that she had to sit and deal with the fact that she was wrongfully convicted in front of the whole world. | ||
| And then even when she got back home, how many people really knew the whole story and how many people thought she actually was a murderer? | ||
| Somehow or another, she got away with it because most people just read headlines. | ||
| You just read the propaganda. | ||
| You just read like, "Oh, Amanda Knox convicted of murder. | ||
| Oh my God, she's a murderer?" And so this poor lady who was 20 years old at the time. | ||
| She's a kid and she's just over there studying abroad and the next thing you know she's locked up in a jail for something she didn't do and it's in front of the whole fucking world. | ||
| And she thinks she's not getting out. | ||
| She thinks she's not getting out. | ||
| Imagine that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also then she gets to be embedded in prison with all these women who have had these horrific lives. | ||
| Horrific stories of abuse and this life of crime and their whole families filled with crime and chaos and And you get to realize that these are just people just people that just like went down the wrong road And just all of it just didn't line up Just a little tiny fork in the road. | ||
| Yep the wrong fork and it could happen to anybody wrong circumstances wrong time wrong place you're born in the wrong area and Wrong family, wrong this, wrong that, wrong friends. | ||
| Bad decision. | ||
| You get drunk, you do this, you do that. | ||
| Next thing you know, you're in jail. | ||
| That's a lot of us. | ||
| There's so much randomness for the benefit of your life when you're born. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Where you're born, where you grow up, who your parents are. | ||
| It's like rolling dice. | ||
| And if you get a good situation, it's just like rolling so many sets of sevens for years in a row. | ||
| Sevens. | ||
| And once you start doing well, it's easier to roll sevens, which is weird. | ||
| The rich get richer. | ||
| The fortunate people become more fortunate. | ||
| A lot of people want to believe in fate. | ||
| Fate's a beautiful thing to believe in, right? | ||
| This is all meant to be. | ||
| It kind of takes away some pressure. | ||
| But boy, like, mathematically, that doesn't seem likely. | ||
| It seems likely there's a lot of just, like, random shits. | ||
| Shits. | ||
| Like, it's not fate that a baby dies of leukemia. | ||
| Is that, like, someone does a plan for the baby to die of leukemia? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Like, when people want to say that, like, you manifest your own reality. | ||
| Like, do you, though? | ||
| Because babies get shot in drive-bys. | ||
| It does happen. | ||
| Do you think they're manifesting that? | ||
| No, that's random. | ||
| That's, like, chaos. | ||
| That happens too. | ||
| Like there's probably a lot of factors that are all simultaneously working together. | ||
| And the question is, how much is fate a part of that? | ||
| Is fate, is your mind a part of that? | ||
| Like how much of it do you actually manifest out of your own mind? | ||
| How much of your choices change reality itself? | ||
| There's just so many ways to process what's happening, because if it's all chaotic or maybe some of it isn't, there's just so many versions to look at it. | ||
| It can't be figured out, really. | ||
| It's a mixture. | ||
| I think it's a big mixture. | ||
| You're trying to figure out answers. | ||
| Like I said before, it's so chaotic, but your brain is trying to have a right way. | ||
| And then there's choices you make, right? | ||
| Like where you decide to move. | ||
| Like I don't want to live here anymore. | ||
| I want to move to a different place. | ||
| Now all of a sudden you're in a new reality. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's an interesting thing to do. | ||
| So you were in Boston and then you lived in California, but now you're back to Boston. | ||
| Yeah, in Carlisle, out in the woods, trees near Carlisle. | ||
| When did you go back? | ||
| I went back about 22 years ago. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I lived in Burlington, then I went to Middlesex Community College in Bedford, then I went to Emerson College in Boston, then I started doing stand-up, and then I stayed, like, after I got out of... | ||
| I stayed like five years in Boston, then I went to Hollywood for two years. | ||
| Emerson's like a performing arts college, right? | ||
| Yeah, radio, mass communication. | ||
| What did you go for? | ||
| I went for radio because I thought that I didn't really... | ||
| I wanted to be a comedian. | ||
| I had like my mind divided in half. | ||
| That was my goal, but part of me thought that's not really gonna happen. | ||
| Maybe if it doesn't happen, maybe I can be a guy on the radio. | ||
| Maybe I can be funny on the radio. | ||
| And then somehow get from the radio onto the stage. | ||
| How that would happen, I didn't know. | ||
| But that's why I went to that school as like my backup plan. | ||
| I loved that school, because not really from what I learned about it, because everyone there was slightly awed. | ||
| It had an automatic screening system that if you decided you wanted to go there, you weren't normal right there. | ||
| So then you get all these people who decide to go there, and they're all a little bit odd, and then you started feeding off them. | ||
| So you even got more creative, because everyone you knew was creative. | ||
| So what I got out of the school was the people. | ||
| More than what I learned in the actual school. | ||
| Some of my best friends are still from that time. | ||
| And then I went on The Tonight Show. | ||
| Then I went out to Hollywood for two years. | ||
| Then New York City for five years. | ||
| I thought everyone... | ||
| When I lived in New York, I thought everyone should have to live in New York for one year. | ||
| Everyone in the United States. | ||
| That's what I thought at the time. | ||
| Because it was just... | ||
| You know, you're like 30 years old, and he's like, oh my god! | ||
| Then I went back to Santa Monica for 12 years. | ||
| And then I thought, you know what? | ||
| I want to go back. | ||
| I want to go home. | ||
| Because the United States is like the United States, but it's like five countries, environment-looking. | ||
| There's New England, then there's Florida. | ||
| Colorado was completely different. | ||
| Nevada, here. | ||
| Utah, the Northwest, California. | ||
| It's like seven different countries named one thing. | ||
| But my gut was thought, I want to go back. | ||
| I want to go back to where the seasons are, where those buildings are. | ||
| I was just drawn from my gut to go back. | ||
| When you were in Santa Monica, were you here because you were doing Hollywood stuff, and that's why you felt like you needed to be here? | ||
| Yeah, I was here, like, doing... | ||
| I was mainly going on the road, and I'd come back to L.A., but going on the road, man. | ||
| And then I'd do some movies, like, some parts in movies, some TV. But I was mainly going, doing what I'm doing. | ||
| And I thought, well, wait a minute. | ||
| You know, I'm in this place that I really don't... | ||
| I didn't hate it, but I didn't like it. | ||
| It's like I saw it as like a waiting room. | ||
| Like you're waiting for something to happen. | ||
| Waiting for this other thing to happen. | ||
| And then I thought, well, I'm going on the road mainly. | ||
| The audience doesn't care if I came from LAX or Logan. | ||
| They don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I thought, well, I don't want to be here waiting for something else anymore. | ||
| This is what I do, mainly what I do. | ||
| So I'll just go home and I'll do it based out of there. | ||
| And I'm happy that I did it. | ||
| During that time, when I was gone, I started to really like nature. | ||
| I would go to Rhode Island in the summer, and I really became more and more into nature. | ||
| So when I went back to Massachusetts, I didn't want to live in a city anymore. | ||
| I lived in Boston, New York, Los Angeles. | ||
| Now I wanted to be around the trees, because my mind was just like, my being was like, I didn't want that madness anymore. | ||
| It's just like, oh... | ||
| You know, then I can go into the madness. | ||
| I go to Boston or whatever. | ||
| Then I go on the road into the madness. | ||
| Then I come back and it's trees. | ||
| Yeah, that's the way to do it. | ||
| Isn't nature powerful? | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| Nature is incredible. | ||
| It's medicine. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I remember when you did it. | ||
| I remember when you went back to Boston because it was a big deal. | ||
| A lot of people were talking about it. | ||
| They're like, Stephen Wright, I've been back to Boston. | ||
| I was like, whoa. | ||
| Because nobody moves back to Boston. | ||
| Everybody goes from Boston and they move to L.A. or they move to New York. | ||
| But it was always this thing that you kind of had to leave Boston. | ||
| Because, unfortunately, like what we talked about with those great comics, That were around back then. | ||
| They never became worldwide. | ||
| They were just these huge talents that stayed in Boston. | ||
| And it was kind of a cautionary tale for a lot of us that were the next generation. | ||
| Like, hey, I think you've got to get out. | ||
| If you really want to do TV, if you really want to do stuff, you've got to get out. | ||
| You've got to do the road. | ||
| You can't just do local jokes to local people, even though it's amazing and so much fun. | ||
| You really, like, you're kind of selling yourself short if you don't get out there. | ||
| So when you went back, I was jealous. | ||
| I was like, look at him. | ||
| So free. | ||
| I didn't even know people were weirder than I was there. | ||
| I was like, so free. | ||
| Just went back. | ||
| I was like, it's such a gangster move. | ||
| You get to, like, at the top of your game, killing it all over the world, doing stand-up. | ||
| You're like, eh. | ||
| I live back in Boston. | ||
| It was a gut feeling, you know? | ||
| Your mind's only so much involved, but your gut makes a lot of decisions. | ||
| Just like time is so precious, right? | ||
| So here I am in a place that I don't really care for, Los Angeles, and meanwhile the time is going, my life is going, and it's like, well, why not be in a place where I like where I am? | ||
| Did you have friends back there? | ||
| In Los Angeles? | ||
| No, Boston. | ||
| Yeah, I had some friends there, definitely. | ||
| But I know most of my friends still live in Los Angeles, but I have friends in New York and Massachusetts and Los Angeles. | ||
| I have a few friends still back home in Boston. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| It's good to keep in touch with them. | ||
| It's good to go back. | ||
| I love going back. | ||
| It's one of my favorite places. | ||
| How often do you go back? | ||
| Well, last time I was there, it was probably the most emotional set ever. | ||
| I did the TD Garden, and it was like for me... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So for me, starting out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Doing open mics. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then coming back and doing the garden and this fucking crazy sold-out show. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| It was very emotional. | ||
| It was like, oh my god. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's something else. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| But you know how Boston is? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| If they know you came from there, there's like... | ||
| There's a thing the way a town embraces you when you came from there. | ||
| That's different than any other place. | ||
| And Boston is a... | ||
| It's a very proud city. | ||
| Very proud city. | ||
| Like, they love people from Boston. | ||
| So it was like, going back there was like, Like, look, I did it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, it worked out. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| I'm back. | ||
| You know, it's like, to start out at a place, and also when you start out at a place, you know, you're always kind of like, in the back of your mind, you remember how bad you sucked. | ||
| You know, you remember what it was like in the beginning. | ||
| And to be able to come back and sell out an arena is just weird. | ||
| But, you know, Boston has got this rich history of stand-up comedy that I think is unlike any other city in the country. | ||
| Because I think it was the only city where you could have these top talents that never left. | ||
| And so you're dealing with this incredible high level of comedy. | ||
| But it's all local. | ||
| And it's just a bunch of killers. | ||
| It was very, very unusual. | ||
| I think to this day, there's no other place like it. | ||
| Because everybody in New York was trying to get on TV and trying to do this and that. | ||
| There was no real show business there. | ||
| The show business was, when's your set? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I got an 8 o'clock at Nick's. | ||
| And you go down to Nick's and you see your friends and everyone's doing shows. | ||
| And there's shows down the street, The Connection, and shows over there at Dick Daugherty's Comedy Vault. | ||
| And it was like... | ||
| But there were comedians like Paula Poundstone and Dennis Leary and Kevin Meany. | ||
| But Boston, the people there, they loved the comedians. | ||
| You're talking about Boston going back, Bill Burr. | ||
| He was telling me before he did Fenway Park with Tony V, who was one of my favorite comedians. | ||
| Love Tony V. Tony V, one of that prolific... | ||
| Bill Burr, just amazing. | ||
| And he was telling me when he was walking around the city before that people knew he was going to do Fenway and they were saying, hey, I hope it goes great. | ||
| He felt like they were rooting for him, which is a really cool thing. | ||
| It's a very cool thing. | ||
| No one's more Boston than Bill Burr. | ||
| He's like the most Boston comedian ever. | ||
| He's mad at so much stuff. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| He's so funny. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| And he's the best. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's so many guys like that. | ||
| Patrice, when Patrice was in Boston. | ||
| And there's so many goddamn killers. | ||
| That area just produced... | ||
| It's also, people don't have a lot of attention span. | ||
| They don't have a lot of tolerance for stupid shit. | ||
| Like, come on. | ||
| Get to the jokes. | ||
| Let's hear some funny shit. | ||
| You know, over the years, people have asked me, why so many comedians from there? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I cannot even answer you. | ||
| Because when you think of all the people, all we've been mentioning, this giant list of people from this one area, I do not know why. | ||
| Well, I think it's what you were talking about, how the club was built, and then all of a sudden everybody came to the club. | ||
| And because there was no real show business, it was really just about doing those shows. | ||
| Because it was kind of isolated. | ||
| Yeah, like an island. | ||
| That's how I saw it. | ||
| Thinking back, it was like an island. | ||
| Also, it's like, when you have guys like Barry Crimmins... | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| He was kind of like the watchdog for everything. | ||
| He was this brilliant guy who had very high standards, was a real artist, and was very politically aware, very socially aware. | ||
| Comedy was fucking brilliant, but it was also very smart. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Kind of set the tone. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| A lot of what he talked about, I didn't know what he was talking about. | ||
| Right, he would talk about obscure political things. | ||
| And then he opened the Ding Ho comedy. | ||
| So the connection started for about a year. | ||
| And then Barry went and opened that in Inman Square. | ||
| And that was a whole other thing than the connection. | ||
| That was more like a... | ||
| Clubhouse of insanity. | ||
| And he was a great comedian, brilliant comedian, and he ran the place. | ||
| So that was an odd thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he saw the whole thing through the mind of a comedian. | ||
| He's one of my favorite people I love. | ||
| I love him to die. | ||
| He was amazing. | ||
| He was an amazing guy. | ||
| And his influence, I think, was a huge part of that scene. | ||
| Again, it was before my time, so I didn't get to experience it. | ||
| The ding-ho, but I knew all those guys, and I talked to all of them, and they all talked about it. | ||
| And everyone to a person was talking about Barry. | ||
| Barry was like, you know, you didn't want Barry on your bad side. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You didn't like hearing you do something, like, not a good, you know, like, kind of hacky. | ||
| Derivative. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And younger guy, I was really good friends with him, but I heard years later, I heard that younger guys were afraid of him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was afraid of him. | |
| And then I thought, well, why? | ||
| And then I thought, well, wait a minute, let me look at him as if I didn't know him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One time he was being heckled at the dingo and the lights on the stage, you know, they were track lighting and he just turned the light around to the guy in the audience and he started hammering him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, now the light is on him. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, I was terrified of him. | ||
| You were? | ||
| Yeah, well, he was smarter than everybody else, he was a great comic, and he had super high standards, and I sucked. | ||
| So I was like, fuck, please don't let this guy see my set. | ||
| Luckily, I got very lucky. | ||
| He didn't see my set until long later. | ||
| It was already a headline. | ||
| I was already killing. | ||
| I was already good. | ||
| Then he saw me. | ||
| And then he told me I was really funny. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| And then I became friends with him. | ||
| I had him on the podcast. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And then, you know, he just... | ||
| And then he did that documentary where he explained his abuse and what happened to him when he was younger and what sort of shaped him as a person. | ||
| I knew him so well and I didn't even know a lot of that stuff. | ||
| I don't think anyone knew. | ||
| When he went to Congress and was arguing with them, that was incredible. | ||
| We should explain what he did because in the early days of AOL chat rooms and things along those lines, People were openly trading in child pornography and he found out about it and he exposed it. | ||
| He made it a big part of his life's work to shut that shit down. | ||
| And this was the very, very, very early days of the internet. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You remember that part of the movie where they show him in there in Congress arguing with the guy, and then the lawyer beside him for the other side says some lawyer thing, and then Barry shreds him with reality, and then the guy said another lawyer thing, and then Barry shreds him with the real point of the situation, and then the guy stopped talking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Barry was the wrong guy. | ||
| He was the wrong guy to argue with. | ||
| Wrong guy to be on the wrong side of an argument. | ||
| Funny hanging out too. | ||
| Just funny. | ||
| Just like... | ||
| Always hilarious. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| I think... | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why the scene emerged. | ||
| I think it was because of Barry. | ||
| I think there's like a thing that happens in scenes where you have this top-down force. | ||
| This one guy that's the gold standard. | ||
| And then you have this... | ||
| Army of assassins that's around this guy. | ||
| The Kenny Rogersons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The John Gavins. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| Killers. | ||
| Killers. | ||
| Just a sea of killers. | ||
| Tony V. Everywhere you would go, there's like so many comics that were just top-notch, man. | ||
| I went into Nick's Comedy Stuff one night. | ||
| One of the things that Nick's used to do that was absolutely brutal, and this was when I was a beginning comic, they would take people, like say if like... | ||
| You know, Billy Crystal was in town. | ||
| Billy Crystal wanted to do stand-up. | ||
| Billy Crystal celebrated around the world. | ||
| He's Billy Crystal. | ||
| He's an amazing comedian. | ||
| Everybody's gonna go see Billy Crystal. | ||
| Let's go see Billy Crystal. | ||
| He's at the next Comedy Stop. | ||
| It would be Billy Crystal. | ||
| But before Billy Crystal would get on, it would be Kevin Knox, and then it would be Steve Sweeney, and Don Gavin, and Kenny Rogerson, and Lenny Clark. | ||
| By the time he got on, that audience was beat to shit. | ||
| And these guys were fucking killing. | ||
| They would all kill for like 15 minutes. | ||
| Every one of those guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kill! | |
| Just roars! | ||
| People falling out of their tables. | ||
| They couldn't believe how funny it was. | ||
| And then they would set these poor guys up. | ||
| And these guys were used to doing soft shows on the road. | ||
| They picked their opening act. | ||
| They have a nice soft casino type show. | ||
| Hey, it's Mr. Saturday Night. | ||
| It's Billy Crystal. | ||
| Just eating plates of shit in front of Longshoremen at Dick's Comedy Stop at 9 o'clock on a Thursday. | ||
| It was brutal. | ||
| That's how they did it. | ||
| Whenever someone came into town, they set them up. | ||
| Did they do it on purpose? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 100,000%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't know that. | |
| And every comedian that went up, no one did new stuff. | ||
| No one took a chance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They were burying that guy. | |
| They were burying that guy. | ||
| They would do it to everybody. | ||
| Did you see it? | ||
| Oh, I watched it. | ||
| Yeah, I watched a lot of guys eat dick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I watched a lot of guys. | ||
| Richard Belzer. | ||
| I watched a lot of guys. | ||
| They just threw him to the wolves. | ||
| But the only guy I saw come out of that like arose was Dom Herrera. | ||
| They did that to Dom Herrera. | ||
| He was headlining, and they had like 15 killers on in front of them. | ||
| Like, everybody's murdering. | ||
| And Dom Herrera just went up there like a fucking pro and rode the wave and went on stage and immediately was killing. | ||
| And I was like, that's a fucking pro. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Yeah, he's in New York. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Philly. | ||
| Started out in Philly. | ||
| Oh, Philly. | ||
| I only know him from New York. | ||
| Yeah, I became friends with him later in life, but I actually paid to see him before I was ever his friend. | ||
| So I remember seeing him at Nick's Comedy Stop and bringing my girlfriend at the time. | ||
| Because I was just starting to do stand-up, and I wanted to see all the good ones when they came into town. | ||
| And I got to see that. | ||
| See Dom Herrera in his prime. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| But it was like the only guy that I ever saw that ran that gauntlet and came out of it on the other end looking like a pro. | ||
| Did you tell him later when you became friends with him? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he knew it too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did? | |
| He knew what they were doing? | ||
| He was like, oh, that's what they did. | ||
| They set you up. | ||
| They just threw every fucking local killer. | ||
| Whenever a big-name guy was in town, all those guys would be there to do sets. | ||
| It was 100% on purpose. | ||
| That's kind of cruel actually. | ||
| It's fucking terrible. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| Richard Lewis was another one. | ||
| He got it. | ||
| They gave it to him. | ||
| I love him though. | ||
| Yeah, it was a great comic. | ||
| It's just like his style of comic was his audience and you wanted his bit. | ||
| But if you have a bunch of other stuff on before that, that's just murderous. | ||
| That style is very hard to change gears and get into his. | ||
| Absolutely, because they're all like Indy 500 cars, different versions, just like, and so intense, intense, intense. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Top quality. | ||
| You can't get better than those guys. | ||
| You can't get better than those guys. | ||
| And really laugh out loud. | ||
| I think ever. | ||
| I think ever. | ||
| Of all my years of comedy. | ||
| I mean, it's hard now because you go back and watch it now. | ||
| It's like you got to realize it's a totally different time in the world. | ||
| It's not our culture. | ||
| It's a different culture. | ||
| It's the culture of 1980s. | ||
| Things were more risque. | ||
| They're more like when you said things, they were more shocking. | ||
| And a lot of that stuff's already been said so many times now that if you go back and listen to it, it's like some of it doesn't really hold up the same way. | ||
| But for the time, in those days, those guys were the cream of the crop. | ||
| And if you had to follow them in Boston, like, good fucking luck. | ||
| Because I don't think anybody ever killed Harden. | ||
| I didn't, I didn't, those guys, I didn't want to go on after them. | ||
| I did, because I was proud of the lineup. | ||
| But I knew that the sound from the audience of the laughs, I knew they were going to, it was going to be more than me. | ||
| But I just accepted it. | ||
| Because it was like wave, you know, when a big wave hits, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| Yeah, all of those guys. | ||
| Gavin Sweeney, Donovan. | ||
| Did you feel any pressure to sort of ever change your act in the beginning before you made it? | ||
| Were you just committed to that kind of style? | ||
| Well, committed means a decision. | ||
| There was no decision. | ||
| Like I told you, that's how I wrote it, and it came out like that. | ||
| It meshed with how I speak. | ||
| This is how I speak. | ||
| And for some reason, accidentally, the abstract jokes went good with my voice. | ||
| But the audience, they weren't thrown off from it. | ||
| People ask me, well, you know, it was different. | ||
| Would the audience take a while to come around? | ||
| And they didn't, because right from the first three minutes, they laughed at some of it, and they didn't laugh at other things. | ||
| So then I knew right then it wasn't how I was saying it or my voice or anything. | ||
| They don't care about anything. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| As long as it's funny. | ||
| So they thought some of it was funny, and some of it wasn't. | ||
| And Mike McDonald helped me a lot, because he saw me the first time, and I was naively disappointed, because I didn't laugh at everything, which is insane, but that was out of being naive. | ||
| And he said, Take that material. | ||
| He never did it before. | ||
| Take that set and take out the stuff that didn't work and put other stuff in that works. | ||
| I mean, to try out. | ||
| And when I left, from him telling me that, I thought it was a success because they laughed at some of it. | ||
| Here I am wanting to, I was 16, wanting to try it and then I, they left it a minute and a half, I, oh my god, they left it. | ||
| So then he made me leave, when I left I was like, oh my god, oh my god, I gotta keep changing and changing and changing. | ||
| But I didn't think of changing my style or anything because, like I was saying, fingerprint before. | ||
| It was just what it was. | ||
| It didn't even enter my mind to change it. | ||
| Some of it worked, some of it didn't. | ||
| Change it, try more, try more, try more. | ||
| And I'm glad there wasn't any show business there because someone might have said, you can't be mumbling over on the side. | ||
| Get a sport jacket and talk loud. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There was no one watching from that angle, I mean. | ||
| And all of those guys that we were just talking about, none of them are like the next guy. | ||
| It was like a factory that only made one car, and then they made a different car. | ||
| It was like a Mustang, then this. | ||
| There was no assembly line. | ||
| Every one of those guys is completely unique. | ||
| Every one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the interesting things about the documentary, When Stand Up Stood Out, was that you were kind of the first guy that got discovered in Boston. | ||
| And then you took off. | ||
| And then it became a different thing. | ||
| Because then people realized that that was possible. | ||
| And so then, in the documentary at least, there was this attitude where a lot of guys had like, hey, what about me? | ||
| Like, where's my thing? | ||
| How come it's not happening for me? | ||
| You know, I'm a headliner. | ||
| I'm a this, I'm a that. | ||
| Like, why isn't this? | ||
| And it became where a lot of guys were trying to make it now. | ||
| Do you remember that time? | ||
| I knew later when I heard about it after I had gone. | ||
| But we all wanted to go on the TV. Everyone wasn't doing it just to be doing it in Boston. | ||
| I wanted to someday go on TV. I had no idea how I would get there. | ||
| And then I got a lucky break because Peter LaSalle came to Boston and he saw me in the club. | ||
| Because there was an article about the Ding Ho, and a freelance writer wrote about it and went into the LA Times, this weird comedy club, Chinese restaurant. | ||
| And then he read it, and then he went back east looking at colleges for his kids were getting out of high school. | ||
| They did a summer trip. | ||
| To Boston and New York to look at schools. | ||
| And he remembered the article and he called up the club. | ||
| I'm going to go in. | ||
| And then he saw me and then I went on there. | ||
| So I got a very lucky break. | ||
| But I know you're talking about, like, I mean, I was just insanely lucky. | ||
| But that Fran's movie, I mean, he never even made a movie before. | ||
| He never made a movie. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And that was a very interesting thing because say we were all rowers. | ||
| Like a row guy is not going to make a movie. | ||
| But a comedian, a creative guy, he's going to make a movie about the time. | ||
| You don't have a movie of your time in high school or your best time in college. | ||
| We have a document by one of our own guys of the time. | ||
| And it's still, all of us, one of our favorite times in our whole lives. | ||
| So it's a precious gift that Fran made the movie to see, to see this thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And for us, for guys from Boston, it's so fascinating because it does really do a fantastic job of capturing how unusual that scene was, how strange it was, and how it's really never happened again since. | ||
| Yeah, so there's two things happening. | ||
| The scene is happening on its own, and now there's a movie about the scene. | ||
| It's tremendous. | ||
| It's tremendous. | ||
| He did an amazing job. | ||
| He's so smart, that guy. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great piece of history. | ||
| For comics, too, like any comic from anywhere in the world, watch that documentary. | ||
| It's a great insight into how something like that can happen. | ||
| And I think something like that can happen in a lot of places. | ||
| It just doesn't. | ||
| It takes a lot of things that have to go right to make something like that happen. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of things line up, just like flukes lining up. | ||
| And people like that movie who weren't even in that time, are not even from Boston. | ||
| They like seeing that unique thing that evolved on its own. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's very special. | ||
| When you do stand-up now, are you doing, like, the local clubs in Boston to fuck around to work on new stuff, or do you just take new stuff right to the stage? | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| I mix it in with my show. | ||
| Like, I have, like, spots in my act where I know I'm gonna put this stuff in. | ||
| Put the new stuff in? | ||
| Yeah, just mix it in. | ||
| And most of it doesn't work. | ||
| I don't know about you. | ||
| For only... | ||
| I don't know what your batting average is, but only one in three or four jokes that I write gets a big enough laugh to stay in the act. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I try it three times. | ||
| If it gets nothing three times, I know it's never getting anything. | ||
| But if it works once, I don't even really count on it because it might have been a fluke, you know, the audience, how I said it, the mood of the audience. | ||
| But if it works three times, then I can trust it. | ||
| But if they don't laugh at it three times, then I get rid of it. | ||
| I don't even remember what it is. | ||
| I get rid of it. | ||
| But I don't think that I was wrong. | ||
| I still think it's funny. | ||
| If I wrote it down, I think it's funny. | ||
| Otherwise, I wouldn't write it down. | ||
| But they don't agree with me. | ||
| They're in charge. | ||
| They're the editors. | ||
| The audience is editors. | ||
| They don't think they're the editors, but they're going like this. | ||
| And they're in charge. | ||
| So I just throw everything out that they don't like. | ||
| I still cannot predict. | ||
| I don't know about you. | ||
| I cannot predict in all these years what they're going to laugh at. | ||
| I cannot write something down and think, this is going to be on a scale of 1 to 10. This is a 7. Nothing. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| 500 people of silence to create, manufacturing silence for other countries. | ||
| I can't predict. | ||
| Can you predict when you do it? | ||
| No, there's some setups become bigger than the bit itself. | ||
| Sometimes, like, it's a setup, and the setup gets a huge laugh. | ||
| And then you're like, what is going on here? | ||
| Why is that funny? | ||
| You didn't get to the point yet. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't even think that part was funny. | ||
| And then, you know, that is one of the interesting things about stand-up, is that the audience is part of the editing process. | ||
| And that you really create comedy with other people. | ||
| You don't really do it in a vacuum. | ||
| You come up with the ideas in a vacuum, but the way it becomes an actual bit that you could do multiple times, it has to sort of alive. | ||
| It's alive. | ||
| That's why I don't put jokes like on Twitter or something. | ||
| To me, the joke is an alive thing. | ||
| It should be said out loud and heard by people. | ||
| See it just written. | ||
| It doesn't do it. | ||
| You had one of the most interesting uses of Twitter ever, because you started writing a book on Twitter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So each tweet you would write was a part of this book. | ||
| Someone could literally go back to your original Twitter feed and start reading this book. | ||
| A little bit every day. | ||
| Well, what happened was I wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine in like 1987. It was a fairy tale about how the beach was invented. | ||
| It was very interesting, weird. | ||
| And I would read it every five years. | ||
| I would read it and think, oh, I should write another story sometime. | ||
| So then one of the last times I read it, I should write another story. | ||
| And then right then, Michael O'Brien got me this Twitter thing, you know? | ||
| Oh, here, you should do something on here. | ||
| So then I thought, all right, I'm just going to try to write another story. | ||
| I'll just write it on here. | ||
| So I wrote two sentences, then two sentences, then the next day two sentences. | ||
| Because it didn't, like I said, it didn't enter my mind to write jokes. | ||
| I'll try to write something. | ||
| I did it for like four or five days and people were leaving messages saying, someone has to tell him what this is for. | ||
| This is really good for his jokes. | ||
| This is perfect. | ||
| And other people would be saying, he's writing a novel on Twitter. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| So I did it on and off for a few weeks and then I stopped writing it for a while and then I thought, I should just keep writing this but not on Twitter. | ||
| And then that's how the book got going. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| What a great way to start a book. | ||
| Yeah, another fluke. | ||
| You know, I read the thing about the beach. | ||
| I think I should write something else. | ||
| I have no idea what it is. | ||
| I start writing about this kid in school. | ||
| And then, oh, oh, this, take it off the air. | ||
| Oh, this should keep going. | ||
| It wasn't like, oh, I'll write a book. | ||
| It was, this should keep going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's never really big planning out, at least in what I do. | ||
| And then I just started doing it, and it went further and further. | ||
| I really liked doing it because, like we were saying before, the jokes from noticing, you know, like the sweep of the radar. | ||
| You're walking down the street, you see something. | ||
| But with this, I actually, after I started doing it, I started to sit down on purpose, like for a couple of hours a day, focusing right on this kid in this class. | ||
| And that was different than just random things coming into my mind. | ||
| So I was focusing it, and I couldn't stop doing it. | ||
| I mean, I would do it for a couple of hours a day, but it just... | ||
| It kept going and going and I was creating this weird world. | ||
| And I was fascinated what was in my head because I was sitting there on purpose. | ||
| Because it was like going into your own head with a flashlight. | ||
| You know in the caves when there's stuff written on? | ||
| It was like I was going in my own head with a flashlight because I was determined to try to write for two hours. | ||
| And that determination made me go deep in like... | ||
| And there was all this shit in there that I had no idea if I hadn't focused. | ||
| And then the stuff that I thought of that had nothing to do with the book, just life things, would come back to me and go, oh, this can go right in here. | ||
| You know, for what I do, a couple sentence joke, two sentences, and then have the audience laugh, hopefully. | ||
| It's like a narrow window. | ||
| Say, and then laugh. | ||
| But I had stuff in my head that wasn't going to go through that window. | ||
| It wasn't going to be good for stand-up. | ||
| I had other stuff. | ||
| I mean, I'm not complaining about that's how the jokes are. | ||
| That's just how it is. | ||
| And then when I started writing this thing, I thought, oh, I know what I'm going to do. | ||
| After it kept going, I thought, I'm going to put a funnel on this kid's head, and I'm going to pour everything I think about being alive into his head. | ||
| And it'll seem like he's thinking it. | ||
| I mean, he can't really be, a 70-year-old couldn't be thinking this. | ||
| So I got to express a lot of stuff in my mind that wouldn't ever be expressed in the way I do stand-up. | ||
| I really liked doing it. | ||
| I had fun doing it. | ||
| It's awesome that you have that free, your process is so free. | ||
| Like your process is just like go where the whim takes you and then just follow it and then just be open to it. | ||
| Yeah, I had no book deal. | ||
| I had no thing. | ||
| I was just like when I said before creativity is like playing. | ||
| It's like it's fun like finger paints. | ||
| I was just having fun discovering what was coming out of me because I was sitting down trying to do it on purpose. | ||
| It was a whole other thing. | ||
| It was playing. | ||
| It's like playing with thoughts. | ||
| It's like you're hanging out with yourself. | ||
| Me and you are talking right now, but when you're alone joking, it's like There's almost, you're joking and you're reacting to what you joked about. | ||
| So there's, you know, it's one thing, but it's almost like there's plural. | ||
| It's like there's you and your thoughts. | ||
| And you're reacting, your thought and you can almost be a little bit different. | ||
| So you, oh, oh, I like what you just said there. | ||
| Oh, that's nuts. | ||
| You can't say. | ||
| Oh, what about this? | ||
| You know, it's like I guess I'm a major loner person, but I'm never lonely, very rarely. | ||
| So it was like you're hanging out with yourself. | ||
| You're your own buddy. | ||
| Even in the book it says that the kid was his own best friend. | ||
| I feel like that about me. | ||
| I'm my own best friend. | ||
| So writing it was like hanging out with myself. | ||
| Like if you would be not in a bar with your friends, but in the sense that you're just having fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a great way to think about it. | ||
| It's not a big... | ||
| It's very light. | ||
| Creating should be a fun thing, not like, oh, at least for me. | ||
| I've done it like that the whole time, but I didn't even decide to do it like that. | ||
| It was just how it would be. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a playful thing, the whole thing. | ||
| It's always interesting to me the different creative processes. | ||
| That everyone has their own different way to do it. | ||
| It's always interesting to hear how other people... | ||
| Your process is so different. | ||
| And also one of the things that's different is the thing that you're doing these shows and you're just sandwiching these new bits in between your other bits. | ||
| You're not really performing at clubs. | ||
| You're not dropping in and doing a lot of sets at regular places. | ||
| No, just in these theaters that I'm doing. | ||
| Do you miss the club environment though? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I would be in it like... | ||
| I don't really. | ||
| I got so used to where I am now that it's normal to me. | ||
| It's very comfortable to be with the stage and they're out there. | ||
| If I ever go in a club for some reason, it's almost jolting to me because they're right on you. | ||
| It's like, oh my god, I'm in the cage. | ||
| I want to be outside the cage, looking into the cage. | ||
| So this is just how I've been doing it for years. | ||
| Right, theaters. | ||
| Yeah, that is the difference between the big stage and the audiences below you. | ||
| It's like a completely different kind of experience. | ||
| Open mic really should be in a nice theater in front of a full audience. | ||
| That should be the open mic. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Just as an analogy. | ||
| Because when you start, you're starting at 11 at night and there's 10 drunk guys, you should start out in a nice theater and work your way to 10 drunk guys after you've been doing it for four years. | ||
| Right, so you know how to handle it. | ||
| Yeah, so now you start in the most... | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Yeah, but that, I think, is where you really learn how to do it. | ||
| Yes, that's the other side. | ||
| I don't think you can really ad-lib that well in those big-ass stages. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| In an arena, I'm always on script. | ||
| I don't really fuck around. | ||
| There's that many people. | ||
| But with a club, there's so much room for fucking around. | ||
| I'm always on. | ||
| I present what I've written. | ||
| I'm not making anything up there. | ||
| Always? | ||
| It's like always. | ||
| I know exactly. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| What do you do with hecklers? | ||
| I ignore them. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Because it's the hardest thing to do really. | ||
| Like if I took a tennis ball right now and threw it right beside your head, you would jolt. | ||
| And the heckler is like, he's trying to make you move. | ||
| I think it's the hardest thing to do is to have no reaction, no reaction, no reaction. | ||
| Then you make the audience have a reaction because they're mad at their car. | ||
| But eventually he goes away if you don't acknowledge it. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Do you enjoy it? | ||
| I don't mind sometimes. | ||
| It depends on what they're doing. | ||
| It's like if someone interrupts a bit when you're in the middle of it, that sucks. | ||
| Because you're ruining it for everybody. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You're ruining the timing. | ||
| You're making it all about yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, that's the thing you're going to run into. | ||
| You ran into a lot in L.A. L.A. more than anywhere I've ever been. | ||
| Where people just feel like they need to talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the thing that I don't understand with comedians. | ||
| See, being a comedian, one of the good things I think, or important things, is to talk to the audience like you're really talking to one person. | ||
| They don't see themselves as a crowd. | ||
| I'm just, they're watching the guy. | ||
| So there's like... | ||
| One person times 400, but it's still one times 400. Yeah. | ||
| And if you're communicating well, they feel like they're really talking to you. | ||
| That's why sometimes they talk back. | ||
| But if they went to a play, they wouldn't say, what the hell are you putting the glass on that table for? | ||
| Imagine at a play yelling out, shut the other door! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't happen. | ||
| Or yell at the movies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's one of those things where it seems like you're just talking. | ||
| And everybody can talk. | ||
| Everyone can talk. | ||
| So when someone's on stage just talking, you're like, I do that thing too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I'll say this to this guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to help out. | ||
| And they think they're helping you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you like that thing I said? | ||
| It's the worst. | ||
| Some people are just not good at being audience members. | ||
| Some people are just very self-centered. | ||
| They don't care if there's 500 other people in the room. | ||
| They want to yell. | ||
| They want to say something. | ||
| Just ego and stupidity. | ||
| But it's also live. | ||
| It's part of the fun of live things, that you do have to interact with all these strange people. | ||
| It's live. | ||
| There's no... | ||
| It's like action, 80 minutes later, cut. | ||
| There's no like... | ||
| Let me try that joke again. | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you ever do multiple shows in a night anymore? | ||
| No, I haven't done that in years and years and years. | ||
| Because it was just too many one-liner jokes. | ||
| I wouldn't know if I already said it before. | ||
| One time I was doing that and I strutted into this joke. | ||
| I was saying... | ||
| When I got right that far in, I realized I had already said it 20 minutes earlier, and then I said, just checking. | ||
| And they die often. | ||
| So then I put that in on purpose. | ||
| Every night I would start the joke. | ||
| One of the jokes is if I didn't know I said it. | ||
| And you can feel them getting uncomfortable. | ||
| Just checking. | ||
| But that's an example of how mistakes. | ||
| Don't you soak up mistakes? | ||
| Like accidents? | ||
| It's like your brain is like a computer. | ||
| Oh, that worked. | ||
| Oh, that worked. | ||
| I need that half a second. | ||
| I need that. | ||
| Oh, yes, yes, yes. | ||
| That's the thing that you said. | ||
| It really is like a live. | ||
| It's a living art form. | ||
| And you're feeding it when you go to work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And sometimes, like, something will go bad, and that bad thing is the best thing that ever happened to that bit. | ||
| They're like, oh, this is the way to handle it. | ||
| This is the way to talk about it. | ||
| And you don't know unless you do it in front of people over and over and over and over again. | ||
| Yes, over and over. | ||
| And the audience is different. | ||
| They're like one being. | ||
| I find that they have the personality of one person. | ||
| They have their own energy, their own mood almost, their own... | ||
| And you can sense what they are in about a minute. | ||
| You can know, okay, this is what this is going to be like. | ||
| How do you get opening acts? | ||
| Who do you choose to take with you on the road? | ||
| I had them for a long time, but then the show, I do like an 85-minute show, and I thought, I'm not going to bring a guy now anymore, because the audience would be too tired by the time I got to my 80 minutes. | ||
| Like, if you had a guy sitting there for 15 minutes, then the first guy comes on for like 12 minutes, then there's another break. | ||
| So all that energy is now gonna be felt when I get to 70 minutes. | ||
| So I thought, I want all. | ||
| I don't want them to be tired. | ||
| So you go on by yourself? | ||
| Yeah, would you take people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You start the show off, and then you walk out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's the way to do it. | |
| Fun way to do it. | ||
| Wild, going on by yourself. | ||
| The audience only has so much, like a movie. | ||
| You can only pay attention for so long, I think. | ||
| And listening, you know, it's tiring to follow someone, their little, whatever they're saying. | ||
| Anyway, that's what I learned. | ||
| To do it that way. | ||
| I do have guys go on with me, and one of the things I do in town when I do local shows is I have a lot of people go on in front of me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because it's like running with weights on. | ||
| By the time I get up, everyone's tired, so I have to be really focused. | ||
| Oh, you do that on purpose? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they're tired? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, and I'll, you know, I do like the Joe Rogan and Friends show. | ||
| I'll have like five killers on in front of me. | ||
| Sometimes six. | ||
| So the show's an hour and a half old before I even get on stage. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can feel it, too. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| You feel the audience like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And you do that to make yourself better. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Put yourself in a state where you have to be on point. | ||
| You have to be very energetic. | ||
| Man, an hour and a half before you hit. | ||
| Sometimes more. | ||
| One time I did a show with all those guys that was two hours old before I got on stage. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| But it does help. | ||
| It does help because it really makes you tighten your act up. | ||
| And then when you're on... | ||
| And someone's only on in front of you for like 20 minutes and just getting the crowd warmed up. | ||
| Oh my god, it's like so easy. | ||
| So different. | ||
| But if you could take the lessons that you learn from doing the crowd, like the late night spot, like when all these people are on before you and the show's really old, you could take that energy and bring it to a fresh audience. | ||
| It really is like running with weights on. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| You're training extra. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's also, too, I think that I like a show where people get to see a lot of different stuff. | ||
| One of the things that I'm trying to do with this comedy club is I want a lot of different styles, a lot of different people. | ||
| I want people to see it. | ||
| This guy does it different than she does. | ||
| She does it different than he does. | ||
| Everybody's doing their own... | ||
| It's part of the thing, is to showcase the art form. | ||
| The club is really amazing. | ||
| It was really fantastic. | ||
| Two rooms designed specifically, like you said, comedy. | ||
| Louis C.K., who I think is brilliant, giving you some points on how to lay it out. | ||
| Yeah, give me amazing advice. | ||
| He's just brilliant, man. | ||
| And everyone was in a good mood there. | ||
| It's like, you know, it's like... | ||
| That's your own island. | ||
| You have your own island of that fertile thing you get there happening. | ||
| Yeah, we're creating a magnet for comedy. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| Congratulations on that. | ||
| That's just tremendous. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| It's almost, it feels surreal when you're in a place. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, wow, is this real? | ||
| Really do it? | ||
| Because everything is perfect. | ||
| Everything's perfect. | ||
| The lighting's perfect. | ||
| The sound's perfect. | ||
| The rooms are perfect. | ||
| The monitors in the green room are perfect. | ||
| The green room area is perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We did it all the right way. | ||
| It's fun to be able to do something like that. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| And now, because of that and because of the pandemic and all the different things that happened where things just kind of fell into place, we have this spot and then there's like world-class comedians here. | ||
| Roseanne lives here. | ||
| Ron White lives here. | ||
| Tim Dilland. | ||
| Tony Hinchcliffe and fucking Tom Segura, Christina Pazitsky, Duncan Trussell. | ||
| They all live in the area here? | ||
| They all live here. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like 13 or 14 world-class comedians live here. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| And they're all dropping in. | ||
| All dropping in. | ||
| Just popping in and having fun any time when people are in town for the weekend. | ||
| They'll come in early, do my show, do Sunday night shows, hang out, do the little boy shows, the little tiny room, have fun. | ||
| It's an amazing environment, you know? | ||
| And every week it seems like we have, you know, some new crazy guest pops in. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| It's like an art school, not school, but it's like a creative building. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the purpose of it, right? | ||
| The whole purpose of it for all of us to help us develop comedy, to write your shit, and then to also to have a place where people can come and have a good time. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing. | ||
| Like watching people leave and the show is over and they have these giant smiles on their face and they're leaving. | ||
| God damn, it's the best feeling in the world. | ||
| It's the best feeling in the world. | ||
| You made people feel good. | ||
| They came, they got babysitters, they did all the stuff, they got to the club, and then just fucking laughing and having fun. | ||
| It's the best. | ||
| I love it to death. | ||
| You should feel good about creating that place for all those people. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Well, I did it for me, too. | ||
| It's a little selfish. | ||
| Yeah, but both, you know? | ||
| Yeah, both, for sure. | ||
| It's definitely not set up just for me. | ||
| It's set up for everybody. | ||
| It's our club. | ||
| And I could tell seeing you last night that you loved being in here. | ||
| You loved the whole club. | ||
| You know, me and my friend Dean, we have this term called a treehouse. | ||
| Treehouse is our term meaning when something is done, created just for fun, just like when you were a kid and you were 12 and you're building something and oh, oh, oh, oh, has no, like, outside. | ||
| And that's what you have. | ||
| You have like a giant treehouse for all this funness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| And it's also a great place to talk shop. | ||
| Like guys get off stage and like, do you see my new thing? | ||
| I'm doing this new thing. | ||
| And then we'll all talk about it. | ||
| Like, how did you set it up? | ||
| And like, oh, oh, what do you still do in that part? | ||
| No, I dropped that part. | ||
| And now I got this part. | ||
| Like, oh, that's way better. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And when you see people do stuff like that and create right in front of you and you watch the sets and you watch their bits grow, it's all just like, it's so much fuel. | ||
| There's so much fucking gasoline in the air. | ||
| So many matches. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, whoa! | |
| It's fun. | ||
| It's very exciting. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I'm so happy we could do it. | ||
| And this is the perfect place to do it, too. | ||
| Because there wasn't really a scene here, and now there is. | ||
| So that's exciting. | ||
| So the town loves it. | ||
| And the people love that they can just go down there anytime they want to, whenever they can get tickets at least, and go see some shows. | ||
| The city's very into it, I imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The city embraced it, like, really early on. | ||
| They were very excited that we moved here because California sucked. | ||
| Like, this was part of it. | ||
| They were like, yeah, California fucking sucks, right? | ||
| Like, yeah, it sucks. | ||
| I'm glad I'm here. | ||
| And so it was part of the fun of it. | ||
| And also, like, when has that ever happened before? | ||
| Where just a bunch of world-class comedians just moved somewhere and set up shop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, never. | |
| There's been scenes before, but the scenes kind of already existed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And this is a different thing. | ||
| Not like landing on another planet. | ||
| Yeah, it's like Boston in the 70s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It really is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In a lot of ways where it didn't exist before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But people moved here. | ||
| So it's even more extreme. | ||
| It wasn't just like Boston was pulling from funny guys that were in the area. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Now that there's a club, they can go on stage. | ||
| This was different because this is like everyone said, hey, let's move there. | ||
| And they moved here before I even had a club. | ||
| That was crazy. | ||
| Because the club, I had another place that I had bought. | ||
| And that deal fell apart because the place was kind of a mess and the whole story was a mess. | ||
| But that club, that setback, because I had bought this one place, then I had to get out of the deal, and then buy a new place, that was like a whole year plus of wasted time. | ||
| And that was when everybody was moving here, too. | ||
| And so then we were just doing local clubs, like little rock and roll clubs. | ||
| It plays the Vulcan Gas Company, which is basically like an EDM club. | ||
| And we were doing sets there. | ||
| And then the Creek in the Cave opened. | ||
| And so that was nice. | ||
| It's a nice little club. | ||
| And we do sets there. | ||
| So we did clubs in town. | ||
| But I didn't have the place yet. | ||
| People were still moving here just to do those shows. | ||
| Because of the scene that you were creating? | ||
| Yeah, because it was already, there was already, Seguro was already moving here. | ||
| Tim Dillon already moved here. | ||
| Hinchcliffe had moved here. | ||
| There was already these comics that were coming, and we were all talking about it. | ||
| And so then people would come to Austin, they would do my podcast, and they would do these shows with us. | ||
| They'd be like, God damn, you guys are having so much fun. | ||
| I want to move here. | ||
| I'm like, fucking move here. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Come move here. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Plenty of spots to go on stage. | ||
| There's a lot of clubs in the town. | ||
| Like the music scene in Los Angeles in the 60s. | ||
| All the people, music from all over Canada, the United States, that whole thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's what's exciting about it to me, that it worked out. | ||
| You know, that it's actually happening. | ||
| And it's new. | ||
| I mean, it's really only been two months old. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I was just thinking of that. | ||
| Think of the history that's gonna happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at the stories that are gonna come out of this. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| Yeah, it's exciting. | ||
| And it's also exciting for the development of comedy because we're really dedicated to that. | ||
| We have two nights of open mic nights. | ||
| All of our door staff The door staff all auditions. | ||
| They're all comics. | ||
| They audition to get those jobs with their stand-up. | ||
| And then they have spots that they can go up throughout the week. | ||
| Like, they're getting a lot of spots. | ||
| Like, these guys are going on stage constantly. | ||
| And they're seeing each other get better, so it's kind of a competitive environment, too. | ||
| You're seeing, like, oh, this guy's fucking talented. | ||
| Like, this one girl is rising up, and this one guy's got to figure it out. | ||
| And, like... | ||
| You're watching, even over the course of just the last two months, these people learn and grow. | ||
| And this is like this pressure cooker thing going on there, too. | ||
| Because, you know, Shane Gillis will stop by, Dave Attell will stop by, Rich Voss, Dave Chappelle, and Andrew Schultz. | ||
| It's like it's crazy in there. | ||
| It's like every night there's some more wild shit going on. | ||
| And so there's this real excitement of a new thing. | ||
| Like, people realize it's very special. | ||
| Yeah, this energy that's down there. | ||
| That's amazing that it's just only two months old. | ||
| For some reason, I thought it was longer than that. | ||
| It just seems like it's been there. | ||
| When you're in it, it feels like it's been around forever. | ||
| It feels like The Shining, like the fucking Overlook Hotel, like it's always been there. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| Because that building is a 1927 building. | ||
| And that building has had Stevie Ray Vaughan on stage in the 1980s. | ||
| If you look in the green room, all those posters that are around the top of the walls, those are all concert posters from people that performed at the Ritz. | ||
| So it's like the Misfits, the Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, all these different bands that performed there. | ||
| So there's the memories of all of those things. | ||
| That happened in that place and they're kind of burned into the framework of the building. | ||
| You feel it in there. | ||
| I know it sounds like woo-woo bullshit, but when you're in that building, there's an added element. | ||
| In the ingredients of whatever the fuck that building is. | ||
| I agree, because there can't be that much intensity, creativity in that one building without it seeping into the walls. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think. | ||
| Into the atmosphere. | ||
| I think there's something to that. | ||
| I always felt that about the Comedy Store. | ||
| I always felt that about, like, Dangerfields in New York City. | ||
| There's, like, clubs you go into and you just go, whoa, this place is alive. | ||
| Like, this place, like, I feel this place. | ||
| Like, oof. | ||
| I felt that the moment I went into the Alamo, it was almost like it was asking me to do it. | ||
| Like when I was walking around when it was the Alamo Drafthouse, the Ritz Theater, they had leased it to the Alamo Drafthouse, but then the Alamo Drafthouse there went under during the pandemic. | ||
| So when I was walking around, it was just this empty theater. | ||
| But it was almost like it was telling me to do this. | ||
| It's like you're walking around like, this is what you can do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can raise the floor up and you can lower the ceiling. | |
| Fix that stage, put a different stage up. | ||
| You're like, yeah, okay. | ||
| And I'm walking around. | ||
| It's like, come on, we're going to take care of you. | ||
| You take care of us. | ||
| We'll take care of you. | ||
| It feels like the building is happy that we're there. | ||
| I know it sounds crazy, but that's literally what it feels like when I pull in. | ||
| The building's like, thanks for coming. | ||
| Because all of a sudden it's alive. | ||
| Yeah, you feel it. | ||
| And it's alive with happiness and fun. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You can't ignore your feelings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your feelings are real. | ||
| I mean, maybe I'm making it all up. | ||
| Maybe it's all in my head. | ||
| Maybe it's convenient. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, but it doesn't matter. | |
| It's the same. | ||
| But it doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Yeah, it's the same feeling. | ||
| You know, I have to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pee? | |
| Guess what I have to do. | ||
| You gotta pee? | ||
| No. | ||
| You gotta leave? | ||
| No, that's it. | ||
| I have to pee. | ||
| At least I was... | ||
| We can wrap it up. | ||
| You wanna wrap it up? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you for having me so much. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| I truly enjoyed it. | ||
| There's your book. | ||
| It's Harold. | ||
| Did you do an audio version of it? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's available too. | ||
| Pre-order the book today. | ||
| When is it available? | ||
| May 16th. | ||
| Okay, so real close. | ||
| Real close. | ||
| And will the audio be available May 16th as well? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| And you did the audio? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| That was something else. | ||
| That would be awesome. | ||
| You can't have anybody else do that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure, brother. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| It was fun hanging out with you last night. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Fun doing this today. | ||
| Next time I go there, I'm going to hang out longer because, you know, I was trying to save my stories. | ||
| I know you didn't want to talk last night. | ||
| I only have three stories. | ||
| We could talk forever, man. | ||
| I knew that yesterday. | ||
| I was like, don't worry about it. | ||
| Let's have fun. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It's been an amazing experience. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Listen, man, I've always been a giant fan, so it's great to become friends with you and get to know you. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| I think you're an amazing comedian. | ||
| I said in the beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I absolutely feel the same way, buddy. | ||
| Thank you so much. |
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