Tom Green and Joe Rogan recall his 2021 drunken van sleepout, shifting to Green’s off-grid life—solar-powered vans, third-degree burns from hot coals (3 surgeries, 6 months of recovery), and rural resilience. They debate Canada’s political polarization vs. U.S. algorithm-driven divisions, Rogan mocking Trudeau’s leadership while Green jokes about running for PM. Off-grid independence clashes with Rogan’s concerns over COVID-era censorship and future overreach, like solar flare emergencies. Green’s early internet talk show (2007) inspired Rogan’s podcasting, proving streaming tech’s power before social media dominance. Ultimately, their chaotic, self-reliant journeys—from comedy to survivalism—underscore how personal freedom thrives outside institutional control. [Automatically generated summary]
So, you know, I think maybe the last half hour of the show was such a blur.
I don't really quite remember getting the van, but I had a nice sleep in the parking lot.
It was amazing.
And then I kind of was a little nervous about like, geez, what?
That's a weird feeling when you said don't know what you said.
Yeah.
And I called my mom.
And everybody seemed, you know, like it was, people thought it was funny, but I mean, I think she was a little concerned about the drinking, the amount of drinking.
Just as a wake-up call, like you think you understand.
You see a jet, and I think of it almost like, well, obviously, like driving a race car is very difficult, right?
But driving a car fast is not that difficult.
You know, like if you have a good car, if you buy a new car today that handles really well, if there's no one around, you can go pretty fucking fast and it's really in control.
But those things are different, man.
It's like, there's a physical experience.
It's so fast.
There's so much power and force behind those things.
Yeah, helicopters are even more of a no-no for me.
Because they seem to go down a little too much.
I've been in a few.
I flew in a Blackhawk through Baghdad.
You did one of those USO tours, went did stand-up over there back in 2003.
How was that?
That was pretty, pretty wild experience.
It was right before, like it was probably fortunately for my nervous system right after the mission accomplished banner and right before shit hit the fan with the IEDs.
So I was kind of thinking, oh, it's okay, no big deal.
And we were over there in the green zone and we were flying around in the Blackhawk helicopter.
One night they said, you want to go out on a night patrol in like a tank?
And I was all set to go and then they had to cancel it because of some sort of attack.
And then we started hearing there's some stuff happening.
We were there for a few days only, but they started avoiding stuff on the road and the Humvees.
And then the second I got back to stateside, that's when it started to get real bad over there.
But I did a few of those.
I did Afghanistan as well and was on Chinook helicopters.
Well, yeah, I don't know about that, but I mean, first of all, you've always been very nice to, you know, give me a shout out about those early days of broadcasting in the living room, huh?
The first show was more, you know, me out in the street doing crazy stuff.
And then we did a talk show, which was a little bit more of a sort of a nightly show, a little bit more time to talk.
And I did love doing that when the show stopped.
It was right at the time of technology changing on the web.
And that was kind of always kind of how I was kind of looking at technology usually because when I was a kid, I was in a rap group and it was from technology, right?
I remember drum machines came out and we were listening to Public Enemy.
I'm going, what are these sounds?
How do you do that?
And then I would go work a summer job.
I'd buy a sampler and a Kai S900 sampler and an Atari computer.
And I'm making beats in my parents' basement in Ottawa, Canada.
Well, that was, you know, friends at school were listening to rap music.
So friends at school were like, hey, you got to check out Public Enemy.
You got to check out Boogie Down Productions.
I'm like, Boogie Down Productions.
Then you get someone to give you a cassette of like the criminal-minded Boogie Down Productions Bridges Over album.
And you're listening to it and they're rapping about Scott LaRock, their DJ, who'd been, you know, unfortunately, you know, passed away in bad circumstances.
He was shot and killed.
And then you're listening to this sort of, that was the internet to me.
You know, it was rap music and skateboarding.
Thrasher magazine was skateboarding.
You'd read stories about skateboarders in California in a magazine.
You'd listen to rap music and hear stories about people who were not in Ottawa, you know, doing cool shit.
And I was kind of wanting to get up on stage and perform.
I was kind of dabbling with stand-up at Yuck Yuck's in the comedy club in Ottawa.
I was doing stand-up, but I never really got to really, you know, a level where I was doing it every week.
I was going down every week for a couple of years.
And actually, the reason I stopped was because the rap group got kind of sort of a record deal, basically.
And I kind of went focused on that for a while and stopped doing stand-up.
But yeah, the club in Ottawa, Yuck Yucks in Ottawa, still there.
It's moved, but it's owned by Howard Wagman, who's Yuck Yucks is kind of like the improv of Canada.
It's chained all across the country.
Mark Breslin, I'm sure you know Mark, he started it.
And he's kind of like, it was wild because like, I don't know, it was something about the 80s, the 90s, before the internet, right?
You'd go down to a comedy club and you'd find out about stuff just through word of mouth, like the rap music and like comedy.
So I would go down to the comedy club and I remember Norm McDonald would come through and he was probably 25 years old, right?
And I'm 16 in the audience.
And then I got to become this huge fan of Norm.
And he was Norm.
But back then, there wasn't a lot of people doing stand-up like Norm.
Like there wasn't this sort of angle of sort of this absurdity to it, this sort of, it was more of a structured down-the-middle way of doing stand-up back then.
And so Norm was this sort of, you know, you know, it was a curveball.
This sort of curveball, and we just couldn't get enough of it.
So every time we were in town, we'd be down there.
But Howard Wagman told me this story about Norm.
And, you know, the first time he came down to do stand-up at Yuck Yuck's in Ottawa, and he got off stage and he was disappointed in how it went.
Norm was.
He said, I'm never doing this again.
He walked down the street.
Howard Wagman chased him down Spark Street in Ottawa and said, no, that was great.
You're coming back.
And he made him come back and the rest is history.
It's like if you concentrated on math, really got good at the basics of it, and then really started getting into more complex mathematics, it'd probably be very fun.
Probably be very exciting.
But the problem is, I never concentrated in high school at all.
I didn't pay attention to it.
So I'm so removed.
Like if people start talking about math, like complex shit.
Remember, you would, you would, if you want, if you're out and you're trying to meet somebody and they're going to meet you and then they don't show up and you want to figure out where they are, you'd go to a payphone, put a quarter in it, call your phone, and then put your code in and check your answering machine or your voicemail from like a from the mall.
No, I was thinking about how when I was a kid, we would be able to very easily manipulate the situation with my parents and say, okay, I'm going over to go drinking and skateboarding all night.
I don't have TikTok, but I use the Instagram reels.
I'm like, God damn it.
It's so nuts, like one after the other.
And it's so interesting watching this mad scramble of people trying to figure out a new way to get your attention.
Whether it's through like shooting a bow and arrow with your feet over your head at balloons.
You ever seen those gals that do that?
They stand on their hands and they have a bow in their feet and they have their legs all the way over the top of their head and they draw the bow back with their feet.
Yeah, there's some aspects of it that I think forced us to be just a little bit more creative and think out of the box because we were, or at least in a different way, because you'd go find some drum machine or you'd go down to the little comedy club in Ottawa and stand-up comedy wasn't a mainstream thing then.
It was pretty big, but not in Ottawa.
It was sort of almost like you felt like you were going somewhere that you weren't supposed to go.
Charlie is, I got Charlie right before I came here the last time.
She's named after the John Steinbeck novel, Travels with Charlie, because I was out in the van, and that book's about Steinbeck in the 60s, got a camper, made a camper van out of a pickup truck, and he drove across America, and he wrote a book about America and its differences.
It's called Travels with Charlie in Search of America.
And I got Charlie at a rescue called Thrive is the name of the rescue, which is actually run by Jimmy Durante's daughter in San Diego, the entertainer Jimmy Durante, who it's like a ranch in San Diego.
And they bring these dogs in from the Bahamas and Mexico called potcake dogs.
Charlie.
Anyways, we went out in the desert and everybody loves Charlie, like you said.
So the horse has, let me get this right, I've been, I've been trying to learn as much about it as possible because I'm riding this thing and I don't want to die because you can fall off it and it's not fun falling off.
I sometimes think about the close calls I've had with a couple of times with animals where I wasn't really giving them the not like just understanding the power they had.
Like I had a chimpanzee on a show I did once on my TV show back in the day.
And, you know, it was a trained chimpanzee, but massive.
And, you know, I remember after the show, I just said, hey, can I hang out with the chimpanzee?
So it came out and I was sitting out with him in the parking lot for about half an hour, just me and this chimpanzee right in front of me, looking right in my eyes.
It was playing with the buttons on my shirt.
And, you know, the trainer was 20 feet away.
And I just thought it was so the cutest thing.
And then, you know, a few years later read about the chimpanzee ripping that, you know, killing people and how violent they are.
And you go, man, that is, you know, I had a macaw at one point, which I actually had to get rid of.
You know, big red parrot, you know, a macaw.
And I got it when it was 13 months old.
And this was my biggest disappointment, I'd say, with a pet because I had gotten this macaw.
It's named Rex.
He was on the web show for a period of time.
I was after.
You were on that time.
And I really love this thing.
And I love animals, you know, and I was so fascinated by it because I was realizing, oh, this is a pet that I'm going to have for the rest of my life.
And I was all dedicated to this.
And I was really kind of somewhat moved by the fact that I was going to be having this beautiful macaw for the rest of my life.
And it would pick my teeth and it would stick its beak in my mouth and, you know, literally like just kind of put its plate and chew on my ear and all of this kind of stuff.
And then all of a sudden, when it got to be about 13 years old, it just became a real asshole.
Like it really, really changed.
It had been going from this little baby to I couldn't put my hand in the cage without it really biting hard and almost took my finger off.
I had to go in the cage to clean the cage and I couldn't pick it up anymore.
You got to put it up on her back, put a saddle pad on, then you've got to put the saddle on, and then she would move into me and kind of push me, you know.
And I didn't really know how to prevent that because she's 1,400 pounds.
So I'd have to kind of lead her around, try to get her back in position.
It became this weird sort of dance of me running around trying to get the saddle on.
I'd eventually get it on.
But what happens is she ends up losing all respect for me because I'm letting her sort of be the leader, right?
And so a mule really wants to want me to be the leader.
And it's hard for me to be the leader at first because I'm uncertain.
So they sense uncertainty.
So when I'm riding her, there's wolves at my place in the woods.
Oh, fun.
I got a story about that too.
And there's wolves there.
I was showing Jamie before the show.
There's a video of them on my trail cams.
But she sees them coming out of the woods at night.
She doesn't necessarily want to go into the woods.
She thinks it's unsafe.
It's not because obviously they're not going to attack her and me.
She's a giant mule.
But she thinks that.
So over time, she started to not want to go in that direction.
She stopped wanting to turn left.
And so what would happen is I would I started to realize she didn't want to go there.
So every time I wanted to go there, I would get nervous.
I would feel uncertain.
Oh, she's not going to want to go there.
She would sense that I was nervous and it would double down and then she wouldn't go in there.
So I had to kind of get into this real sort of sort of a psychological retraining, kind of a mule intervention from the people that raised her.
They drove her down and we spent about three days, okay, and they showed me how to saddle her up and they talked to me about it and I learned as much as one can learn in three days.
But this is kind of, they're telling me I'm doing quite well because I actually am able to handle this animal now, but it's been an interesting journey the last, you know, since June.
I got her in June.
Because, you know, at first, it's the very first sort of on-the-surface way that you ride a mule is you look where you want to go.
Lightly pull the rein.
If you want to go left, you pull the left lane rein lightly.
If that doesn't work, but you might not even have to pull the rein.
It really is, and you feel it, and it's such a really cool feeling when you really get into the pocket with it.
So then you pull lightly, then you do a little push with your foot.
And so that's all sort of very, you know, physical stuff.
And it worked fine for a while.
But then, you know, I didn't quite understand the overall psychological sort of hierarchy that gets created and a trust level that's created between the mule and myself.
The more I screwed up, geez, just even in the barnyard, the more I let her get in my space.
You don't ever want to let a mule get in your space, like gets in your space.
A very sort of easy way to control that is you can just put your hands up to her eyes like that.
It realizes how small I am, and it realizes I don't know what I'm doing.
and it loses all respect.
And so you start to kind of, so once you start to learn a little bit deeper about how to handle those just on the ground with her, then once you get up on her, she has a little bit more respect and is more apt to listen to you.
But it was really interesting because they came back.
They're really great.
They're trying to bring more mules into Canada because they love mules.
And they, you know, there is something very different and special about mules because of their intelligence.
So a horse doesn't necessarily sense that as easily as a mule, quite a bit less easily.
So that's why people say mules are stubborn because they're sensing all of these little nonverbal cues that a horse might just be apt to say, oh, he pulled on the rein, so I'm going to go that way.
He pushed his foot, so I'm going to go that way.
And that's why also mules are also extremely, they're used in war, and they're used in Grand Canyon trail riding and things like this, because if a horse is walking along the edge of a cliff and a snake jumps out, the horse might be apt to just jump the other way off the cliff, killing itself.
Whereas a mule will instantly identify, cliff that way, snake that way, danger both ways, mule will kill the snake.
But Koi wolf is kind of a misnomer, you know, because a coyote is a wolf.
Yeah.
The reason why the coyote spread so far across the country is because they have like a built-in mechanism to protect them from gray wolves because gray wolves would kill the coyotes.
Yeah, because I've been getting some information about this from a wolf researcher up who lives near me.
And he has sort of put out some trail cams, and we've actually laid out some fur traps that can get a little bit of their fur, and we're going to send it for a DNA sample to find out exactly the percentage of DNA that wolf to coyote that we have here.
Because, yeah, it's kind of, I don't know, you live out in the wilderness, you know, you find these kinds of things are, I find it quite interesting to just kind of really kind of dive into it deeply.
And I wish I had bear footage right now, but it's not online.
But this year I put out my trail cams and I got like, I'd say a little more than a half dozen distinct different bears on that exact trail, which is on my property right by my house.
But it's the same thing, you know, like half the country hates the party in power right now, just like as much as anybody, you know, and it's just a constant thing, and they want to get them out.
And so, you know, I just wanted to, you know, as a proud Canadian, I wanted to throw out the distinction that, you know, Canada's, you know, it's like here.
It's the same bullshit that's here.
Everybody's arguing about issues, important issues.
It's being reinforced, you know, through these algorithms.
People get mad about it, then they start arguing.
So, you know, like I sometimes kind of go, wouldn't it be interesting if Pierre Polyev won the next election, right?
Because then all of a sudden we'd have a conservative government up there.
And let's say Biden won down here.
You got Conservative government up there, and then Tucker Carlson might be going up to Canada talking about how great we are all of a sudden, you know?
I've had, you know, there's been my lifetime, Joe Clark was the first conservative prime minister.
Then there was Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper was pretty recent.
But anyways, I don't like talking politics, but I do, I did bring something about Canada that I loved.
I want to try not to talk politics too much because it's like it's gross.
Everybody gets all mad, you know?
Yep.
I don't fucking.
I kind of think like, wouldn't it be cool if the new thing became people start to realize that the division is almost worse than what we're arguing about?
And it's really kind of incredible to go see how they do it because they've built these, like, I can't describe it properly, but reverse osmosis machines where they have tubes coming with the sap from all the in the spring, the sap starts flowing, comes through these tubes from all through their woods on their property.
It runs out to their barn where they have these machines that do something called reverse osmosis.
I don't know what it is doing exactly, but they have to do it.
And then it goes into this giant vat with fires, with woodburn fires, and they boil the sap down until it becomes thicker and there's more sugar content.
So Fanny and Kia have come from a pasture that had 20 other animals in it to my place where they're just there by themselves with the whole field to themselves.
So Fanny was putting on some weight last summer.
I have to now kind of monitor how much she's out in the pasture.
I'm not sure if they, I don't know the answer to that.
But maybe they kind of somehow self-regulate when they're left to their own.
But, you know, you can feed them carrots.
And one thing, I haven't done this yet, but I understand that they really like, I was just told, because I'm actually thinking, what kind of variety can I give the ladies?
So they really like a frozen watermelon to be tossed into their house.
Although I admit that I am also actually, it's probably not really a warranted or fear, but I am nervous about these black bears, you know, on the process.
If you bring in, like, you know, you should really, that is one thing that is why they go in the tent slot.
They smell, you know, someone brought their sandwich in the tent or whatever.
That's true.
But, yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm right there with you.
There's something about it, though, that, well, you know, when you're out there in nature and you kind of, your sort of natural instincts kick in where you feel.
You feel it.
And the fact that there is something unpredictable and that you don't understand out there is kind of exciting.
You know, like the fact that there is, you know, I'm not really truly expecting to get attacked by a bear, but your senses are on alert.
You're listening into the woods.
You know they're there.
You know they know you're there and they've probably left.
But maybe this is the one time they're walking along with their cub and you get in the wrong position at the wrong time.
And so, you know, often when I go for a walk, I have bear spray on me.
I sometimes, you know, have a rifle on me.
I don't carry it with me every time I leave the house, but I've got a few rifles that I, you know, I might, I've not really been a hunter, you know, in my life, but I kind of so many people around me, you know, the country, Everybody hunts, and I think I'm going to maybe...
One of the exemptions is individuals train, compete, or coach in a handgun shooting discipline that is on the program of International Olympic Committee or the International Para-Olympic Committee.
Looks like someone's going to have to become a shooter.
First of all, the trucker rally was interesting because I'm from Ottawa.
So I grew up, you know, the Parliament Hill, I'm sure you saw it on the news, like the Parliament buildings is our, basically our Congress and our Senate combined, essentially, the House of Commons and the Senate.
You know, downtown Ottawa is like Washington, D.C., right?
That's our Washington, D.C. I grew up there.
I grew up skateboarding on the Parliament building's front steps.
I did a radio show.
This is something about the freedoms of Canada that I think is interesting, okay?
When I was a kid, I did a college radio show, and it was midnight till 2 in the morning.
And I would say during the show, okay, after the show, everybody show up on Parliament Hill, bring a soccer ball.
Let's go play soccer.
And then we'd show up there with pizzas and we'd play soccer on the front lawn of the Canadian government till 4 in the morning.
Every half hour, the bell would go, bring, bring.
The RCMP cops would come.
They'd shine their lights out on the field.
It was super positive, right?
I love Ottawa.
It's an amazing city.
And I understand that everybody has the right to express their dissent, right?
And I think Trudeau probably did overstep with some of his reaction to that, with some of the things he said specifically.
But there was also this element of Not only was the city shut down, there's people that live downtown.
So those horns were these air horns.
It was really kind of, there's babies sleeping.
It's like really like a neighborhood, right?
So it's kind of funny in a way the difference between Canadians and Americans sometimes.
You know, I. But what is sort of a comparable thing, I'd think, was, you know, what, you know, in the United States, they, on January, was it January 6th?
You know, they did more than freeze those people's bank accounts, right?
A lot of people broke glass, they smashed windows, they did a lot of shit.
It was also, it's not comparable because it seems like they were instigated in some way, at least partially, by people in the audience that wanted them to go in there.
Now, whether those people were federal agents or whether those people are Antifa, whether those people are Democratic operatives that want to turn this into chaos because it's a great way to attack Donald Trump.
Whatever it was, there definitely was people that were instigating people to get into the building.
There's video recordings of it.
There's also weird instances of cops opening gates, letting people in.
The fact that it was severely underpoliced.
When they had the George Floyd protest, the Black Lives Matter protest, they had way more cops there for that than they did for this crazy thing where the dude is denying the election and his rabid fans are going to show up.
And you're not prepared for this?
That seems, the whole thing seems like if I was going to make a playbook, if I was going to instigate a bunch of dumbasses to go do something really stupid because it'll make their leader look like a fascist and Hitler, that's how I would do it.
So you have that too.
It's not as simple as the trucker protest was a legitimate protest where a bunch of people were like, why are you telling me that I have to take this experimental medication or I can't work?
Like, where is the fucking information?
And now, over time, we've seen now that the, you know, the studies that they did do, they don't have to release them for like 75 years.
You know about all that?
Like all the paperwork involving the vaccines?
What is the exact ruling of like what information are they withholding for 75 years?
Let's be real clear on that.
But then it's also how many people we know that got injured by it.
You're smart to be reluctant to do something that's new, given the history and track record of pharmaceutical drugs in this country.
There's no drugs that have a gigantic effect on anything that don't have some people that have horrible adverse reactions to them.
Even normal shit.
Some people, people die from Tylenol all the time, man.
They overdose on it.
People die from all kinds of medication.
It turns out they have an allergy to.
It's like weird shit happens with people.
And people are right to be reluctant.
But you might be right and you might be wrong, but you're right to express that you don't think the government should be able to tell you what you can and can't do, specifically about putting something into your body or you can't work.
The FDA had previously said that it takes approximately eight minutes per page to process records for the FOIA request and that it could only review and release 500 pages a month, which is 6,000 pages a year.
At that rate, it would take 75 years to release all the data.
I guess the point I'm trying to make, which is outside of the weeds of it, is when I'm hanging out in Canada, half the people I talk to are so excited for me to come down here and they're all like, they're, you know, they were supportive of the truckers, right?
Like this was not like this was not some, it's not some fringe thing in Canada.
Maybe the people that actually got in their truck and drove there and camped out there.
Maybe that was a little bit more of a dedicated protester than the average citizen.
It's sort of like, this is, I was thinking the other day, I'm almost kind of wondering, this is obviously a stupid idea, but I'm wondering, like, maybe, wouldn't it almost be better if we just got rid of the elections and just let the conservatives run it for four years, and then just automatically the liberals run it four years.
I can pick a million holes in why that wouldn't work.
And just let it go back and forth.
And then people can just be like, okay, let's just all get along.
Let them have four years at running the country, do what they do, let the other side run for four years.
It's kind of a pendulum that goes back and forth anyways.
And then we can kind of get back to, you know, just all getting along.
And I got to the point where I started to kind of just try to disconnect from the conversation, which sounds, sometimes I feel bad about it because you want to have a social contribution.
What I was going to say, though, is that, you know, like the whole system is set up so that one person can't be in control for too long.
That's the whole idea about term limits.
You got four years and then you get elected again.
You get another four years and then you're fucking done.
I don't, I'm just saying this.
This is not something that I like fully support, but there's something to be said for someone staying in there for a long time and getting it right if they're good at it.
And often trying to undo everything that was done the four years before.
Yeah, well, so that's what term limits brought in.
But then on the flip side, you know, we don't have term limits in Canada and Trudeau's going to be there for, you know, if you're not a fan of Trudeau, you go, oh, I wish we had term limits, you know, because he's been there over eight years now, right?
I knew if we were going to talk about this, I wanted to kind of sort of make this point because I, again, I want Americans to understand what Canada is.
It's exactly like here.
It's the same people that the same type of people that like Biden are the people that like Trudeau.
Like the people in Canada that vote for Trudeau are the exact same people that they like Biden too.
There's nobody in Canada that likes Trudeau that also likes Trump.
There's also nobody in Canada that likes Pierre Polyev that likes Biden.
It's exactly the same.
It's the same division.
Even on social media, it's the same.
Like you go on social media, you go on TikTok, you got angry conservatives in Canada saying, fuck Trudeau, and we're turning into a communist country and all of this stuff, like completely, completely the exact same thing as here.
So it's just if I was, I'm not here to try to be a spokesperson for Canada or anything, but they would not want that.
I did a little research on this in case it came up.
They tried and they haven't put into effect that regulation of the Internet as far as regulating disinformation.
That has not been put into effect.
And Trudeau actually said he would not put that into effect.
It was a sort of a subset of it's sort of like you've got your extreme left wing here and then you have cooler heads and they did not actually put that into effect.
Like if you don't agree with it, then it's the same thing as, you know, fuck Joe Biden.
You know, it's the same thing.
Fuck Trudeau.
And so, you know, because it's interesting, like, I just really want Americans who are, you know, just not, who've never been to Canada to understand that.
Are you working for the Canadian Ministry of I would consider it some you know what I was thinking about?
Like in Canada, you don't have to be born in Canada to run for prime minister.
You could run for prime minister of Canada and come up and solve all this stuff.
I mean, you have to live up there, but it's a nice place.
Come on up to Canada.
You would win, too.
That's the thing that would be amazing.
You would win, and you could just-Imagine if I became Prime Minister of Canada.
He's what I don't like in leaders, this fake, bullshit, fucking nonsensical gaslighting.
I just, that shit drives me nuts.
It's so creepy.
And then using all the inclusive terms to make it seem like everybody else is a piece of shit and you're an amazing human being and you're on the right side of progressive movement.
It's all just a bullshit act to stay in power.
And when you see politicians do it, you know they just fucking wet their finger and try to figure out which way the wind's blowing and say those things and then act in the interests of whatever money got them into that position in the first place.
Whatever machine is behind them, whatever support they get.
That's all they're doing.
those types of politicians that's not the only kind you can have you know it's kind of like you can have real leaders They do exist.
It's such a huge sort of thing to wrap your head around.
It's capitalism.
It's money.
It controls everything.
I mean, I kind of feel just leaving Los Angeles, leaving Hollywood, right, kind of has sort of reset a little bit of my, you know, like, you know, you know this more than anybody else, of course, but, you know, because we even talked about this, whatever it was, 20 years ago on my podcast, about how, you know, you can democratize media with podcasting and get rid of all this money controlling everything, controlling.
And so it's sort of a, you know, a micro, micro sort of, or it's a similar thing to just politics in general.
You know, money comes in, controls everything.
It can be so frustrating, especially now when you can see that, you know, you don't necessarily have to play that game anymore.
Well, it's also the hive mind of Hollywood you're leaving.
There's a thing that happens in that town, in that area, where the people that think outside of the norm say it in like whispered hush tones.
There's a certain ideology that's attached to that city, and it's not logical.
It's a kooky, wacky, completely insulated left-wing view of the world, and they enforce it with an iron fist.
And if you're not on that team, you don't get booked for things.
You don't get picked for things.
If you're someone who has conservative leanings or you talk about, there's projects you're never going to get.
You're never going to be involved.
People will malign you and without knowing you at all, be openly prejudiced about you.
And so no one does it.
So everyone who goes over there who's just like desperately trying to make it, they're desperately trying to get in movies.
They're desperately trying to get a recording deal, whatever it is they're desperately trying to do.
The last thing they want to do is do something and talk about something that's going to politically get them at odds with the people that run the studios.
So no one does.
Everybody just follows the same sort of wacky ideology that these people take from the universities.
They go straight into working as a PA and straight into working for executives and producers.
And all of those people are indoctrinated.
They're all in this wild ass cult of weirdness.
And then you have people that move there to try to make it.
And these people are just always going on auditions.
So they're always like, please choose me, please choose me.
And no, they didn't choose me.
And so you're trying to be friends to the people who choose people.
You're trying to get them into parties, trying to introduce them to other people.
Yeah, it's like, you know, you start out as a stand-up comedian and you are trying to, you know, poke holes in the absurdity of the world and you're saying things that are not being said on stage.
And then, you know, as you all of a sudden get brought into, and I'm sort of saying every stand-up comedian, every outlier, every person that's doing something different, a punk rocker, a skateboarder, My goofy show was so out there when I was making it.
And I was making it, I was rebelling against, you know, in Canada in my little public access show.
I was kind of trying to rebel against what obviously seems like a formulaic, mainstream way of thinking to create art, right?
And then you move to Los Angeles because, well, the show got on MTV.
I end up moving to Los Angeles.
Now you're, I'm talking about myself now, all of a sudden being asked to go on, you know, the show, the Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, and you're on these shows.
And, you know, I was sort of a bit of a naive moron, basically, you know, like purposefully so.
I would go on these shows, trying to go nuts, right?
And try to do something crazy and just try to sort of almost disrupt the whole format of it, right?
In those first couple of years as a naive person who didn't understand how Hollywood worked.
And I was just, you know, I went on, I had a similar thing to our last appearance here on Jay Leno.
I went on Jay Leno when I had a film coming out.
I went on Jay Leno and I came up with this bit.
Let me roll the bar.
Remember, they had the bar cart, the J bar?
I'll roll it out on stage during the show, and then I'll do a shot of Jagger with Jay.
You know, Jay doesn't, this is a crazy story.
I probably told you this before, but I do a shot of Jagger with Jay, and Jay doesn't drink.
So he said, okay, well, I'll throw it over my shoulder, right?
So we go there, and I'm with my buddy who's, you know, you know, as a buddy who like pushes you further into the darkness, right?
Like, you know, like, you know, you got a bad idea, and he pushes you further and makes it even worse.
And, you know, in hindsight, I go, well, that was, you know, kind of the outrageous kind of young version of me that I was doing on the show that made perfect sense to do that for a gag.
But then, you know, the naive kid in me didn't understand.
Well, you know, a lot of people in Hollywood did not understand that and then got mad and the movie started.
Well, like the movie studio, I was on promoting a movie and they're like, oh, we don't want you to go on any more talk shows for the movie.
I'm like, what?
It was a joke.
I was obviously a joke.
And they're not interpreting it as a joke.
They're interpreting it as me being kind of out of control.
Yeah, exactly.
But it was a manufactured out of control.
I was out of control, but it was planned.
It was planned confusion, right?
But that kind of subtlety didn't really kind of pass the smell test.
So then you start to go, oh, geez, I better tone it down a little bit.
Better tone it down a little bit because this, and you sort of end up falling into that feeling where all of a sudden you're, like you said, going to an audition or driving out to a meeting and trying to be a person that might be not.
And then, you know, you end up living there for 20 years, end up living there for 20 years, and it becomes normal pretty quickly, right?
And then you sort of slowly forget, oh, you know, oh, this is just the way it works, I guess, now.
And then eventually, you know, one day you go, I'm getting out of here.
And I got to say, You know, when you moved here, it was a bit of a light bulb, I think, for me too.
It was inspiring for me because I sort of realized, oh, look at that.
Joe's leaving.
You know, because you were always at the comedy store, all the clubs.
It was a scene in L.A. and you're thinking, wow, like Joe's just going to go do it on his own and just turn his back on this whole infrastructure here.
And I was like, yeah, you can do that.
You don't have to be here.
And it was really inspiring.
And, you know, it inspired a lot of people.
And I can tell you, again, it's now living in the woods, not far from where I grew up.
We had a cottage when I was a kid, pretty close to where I grew up.
They've got these birds there called Whipper Wills, right?
Whipper will, whipper will.
They make this sound.
They're a really unique sounding bird, right?
Hank Williams sings about them.
And I grew up as a kid hearing those in the woods at night, you know, just at dusk, you hear them.
And now, like, when I'm going to bed, I hear those, and I'm like, oh, I feel like the sounds of my childhood are the smells of my childhood and even the things, you know, the mosquitoes, the horse flies, and you're like, even the largemouth bass in the lake and the, you know, the red-winged blackbirds and all those sounds and smells and everything.
And you feel like yourself again.
And it's like, and there was, there was, you know, for 20 years, I'd be like driving up Laurel Canyon, looking at palm trees.
And for 20 years, even after 20 years living in the same house, I never felt like I was actually at home.
I felt like I was off on some business trip trying to.
And I remember saying, you know, even just after living there 15, 20 years, like, what the hell am I doing at Los Angeles?
It's crazy.
This is a weird place.
You know, it's like a weird place.
And, you know, you feel almost like you have to be there.
Now everything's changed.
The internet, I think, and I think COVID did that for a lot of people too, because all of a sudden everybody's locked in their house and you're dealing with people in these Zoom calls and the internet's changed.
You don't have to be anywhere anymore.
We realize we can be wherever we want.
You know, you took your entire organization away and it's bigger than ever and light bulbs start going off and you're like, wow, you know what?
Well, when we were living in L.A., you're always thinking of yourself as someone who wants to work with the system.
You're always thinking of that.
Always.
I mean, I was on television shows.
I did all that stuff.
Did a couple of movies.
You're always working with the system.
So no matter what you do, you're working.
Even when you put out specials, you're putting out specials.
You're meeting with these people.
You're working with the system.
And you start to think that that's what you do.
That's the business that you're, but it's not.
What you do is what you do.
That's what you do.
What you do is what you do.
And you could do what you do wherever you want to do it.
Especially once you get good enough at it that you have an audience.
And you're supposed to take a chance.
You're not supposed to keep living your life by these bizarre tyrants and their rules and regulations about the way and the way they behave and the way they fucking the it's so ridiculous.
It's such a bizarre place to be.
And when you realize that you don't need that anymore, and comedians today realize they don't need that anymore.
All they need is a TikTok account or a YouTube account, an Instagram account, a Twitter account, and some good content.
And if you get on podcasts, people will check you out.
They'll try you out.
And there's a gigantic organic network of comedians.
We're all friends with each other and we all get on each other's podcasts and we all trust each other.
Like, if I tell you, this guy's really funny, go see him.
Like, I'm telling you the truth.
I would not ever lie.
And I wouldn't have them on if I didn't think they were funny, if I didn't like them.
If they weren't nice people, I'm not interested.
So there's this beautiful, organic thing.
And that's the real network now.
That's the real network.
It's an organic network.
There's no contracts.
Every comic that I know that has contracts with other comics, they start doing things together.
It always goes south.
I mean, maybe it can not go south once or twice.
I mean, maybe there's some great people that have figured out.
I mean, Thomas Guru seems like he's figured out how to do it with your mom's house, but that's like almost it.
Everybody else that I know that gets involved with deals and just fucking just help each other.
That was what I really loved about hanging at the mothership the last two nights is the energy there is different.
Like for a com for the comedy club, just in the green room.
Like, I mean, you felt it.
You can tell that you've created an energy there that is supportive, right?
All the comics are just hanging out in the green room smoking cigarettes and everyone's talking and just, you know, it's super chill.
And I did sometimes find that it wasn't always like that when you're at a comedy club, and other comedians sometimes feel a little more competitive with each other and there's a little bit more of it.
And then we were just talking about writing and you said you're going to go home and actually, I don't know if you want people to know this is too far into the behind the curtain or whatever.
And that's, that I thought was a bit of a light bulb for me.
That's inspiring because, you know, I often find it's like, you know, when you write something down, or when you do the set and you maybe write it down after, and then you don't go get to writing it, and then you never remember what the rhythm was later.
I was talking to Louis C.K. I had a conversation with him about this and it was pretty interesting because I've kind of like to drink, but I kind of quit.
I really have cut back drinking in the last.
I quit drinking like three days ago.
No, but stand-up, you know, I wasn't doing stand-up when I was doing my TV show.
I'd done it when I was a kid.
I stopped.
I did my TV show.
I started again 13, 14 years ago.
Was drinking a lot.
Like I like to drink like everybody likes to drink.
And I go on the road and I started realizing, man, like even if I go drinking Friday night after the show, my Saturday night shows aren't as good as they could have been because I'm kind of like carrying a little bit of this alcohol around in me from the night before.
I quickly realized, you know, in the beginning, it was like, I'll have a beer on stage, right?
Then I go, oh, I better not have a beer on stage.
I'll wait till after the show to have a drink.
So then after the show Friday night, you know, on the road, it's fun.
You know, you're in Cleveland.
Let's go.
Let's party.
We're in Cleveland.
So, you know, you have a few too many drinks after the show Friday night.
And of course, I was, you know, younger, too, right?
I was in my 30s.
So you can handle it a little more too than when you're 52.
So, but then every year that went by, I was like, oh, those Saturday night shows are getting a little harder to get through, you know?
And it's just one too many Saturdays just lying in my hotel room just waiting for the show to start hungover, going, oh my God, and then going, and then dreading and being on stage.
So then I decided I was going to quit drinking when I'm doing stand-up.
So I'm not drinking this weekend until maybe Sunday night.
Well, the thing that I've been enjoying about kind of scheduling it where it's like I don't drink for a couple of days before, you know, a week, a weekend like this, I'm doing five shows, is like I find, and this is what I was talking about with Louie about where I had a, you know, we're not close friends, but I had an opportunity to have a conversation with him about this once, and it was pretty cool because the way his mind thinks is so, you know, analytical about this type of specific, everything comedy, right?
And I was telling him, I was saying, you know, I stopped drinking before I go on stage because, you know, I feel like there was this period where I didn't have a drink for a couple weeks.
And when I was doing crowd work, I was just coming up with stuff that I would never, you know, you know, you know, when you have a great set of crowd work and you get out, I came up with this intricate story that I told.
And it was clear my mind was operating in a different level than it would have been had I just had a few beers the night before even, right?
And then he said something I'd never really even occurred to me before, which is, you know, when you're working on a set, you know, if you have like a little bit of booze in your system, even from the night before, and you're up there working on a set, you don't remember the stuff that happened on stage as well either.
So then when you go home, you don't really even recall, you know, and that's the biggest, you know, the big part of repetition, getting up and doing these sets over and over again, and you remember everything and build on it and build on it.
And if you're not retaining that information, right?
So I'm really laying off the sauce.
And I was actually kind of, I was excited to hear that we were going to do this show on the day of my, I'm doing two shows tonight at the mothership with Fat Man.
And I was kind of excited because I knew I wasn't going to drink on this show.
The reason I told you about the reason why I wanted to come down here sooner and just kind of come check out and hang at the club.
I was super stoked that I'm actually getting to headline the club this weekend.
That was even more than I was expecting.
I just wanted to come down and see you and congratulate you and the club.
And the reason it's taken me so long is I had a fucked up thing that happened after I moved to the farm basically immediately after I moved to the farm and everything was going great.
I had a major injury that I told you about.
I didn't get into too much detail about it, but I had a major injury in Costa Rica.
I went down there for a vacation and there was this big bonfire on the beach and everyone was having fun.
I went to bed in the hotel.
I wake up.
I decide to go back to the bonfire a few hours later.
It's like two in the morning at this point.
The fire has gotten a lot smaller.
I pick up a piece of driftwood off this beach in this remote beach, right?
I go up to throw the driftwood on the fire.
And the reason the fire had gotten smaller is the people that had been at the fire put out the fire by burying it in sand.
And they buried this huge bonfire that was about the size of this room in sand.
And so now there was just a little fire with sand covering hot coals about four feet leading up to it.
And I'm walking up to the thing, you know, barefoot, in a bathing suit and a t-shirt with a piece of driftwood.
And my foot goes into the sand, into these hot coals.
Immediate realization.
I fall back.
If I'd fallen forward, I mean, my face would be burnt.
I ended up immediately realizing what had happened.
Third-degree burns on both feet, the top and bottom of my right foot, and strangely, the top of my left foot, not the bottom, thankfully.
And the nerves were completely burned off my feet.
So after the initial shock of it, I wasn't in pain, which was the weirdest thing.
And I looked down and there's a couple people came to my sort of assistance and were putting water on it, not feeling anything.
You know, I'll get graphic because it's crazy, but the skin is just falling off my feet.
And they took skin grafts like the size of a football off my right leg and stapled 60 staples to staple the skin into my foot.
And then I come up out of surgery and the doctor says to me, which I think he was trying to make me feel better, but he said, well, the good news is you'll probably be able to live a normal life.
He says to me, it's the first thing he says to me.
They told me you wouldn't be able to feel anything below my waist while I came out of it.
And then I'd spend two weeks in a hospital bed, and I was not able to get out of the hospital bed for two weeks.
This is debatably too much information, but it's interesting.
You get very constipated from all the medicine that's going into you, and you end up not being able to, you know, go to the bathroom for about a week, but then you ultimately have to go.
And you can't get out of bed because your foot has to remain elevated.
And it was just a really interesting moment of clarity for me where you realize you're humbled as a human being and you realize, oh, this is, I've lost all ability to look after myself.
And you just kind of end up having to just kind of go with it.
And it was, you know, to my honest with you, I still think about that sometimes.
It was a World War II doctor who invented the way of taking these skin grafts.
Actually, they did it for burn victims in the war, and they invented some really, I don't know the word for it, but some tool that actually takes a micro thin layer of skin.
It's almost like a paper, less than paper thin layers of skin.
They take them off of strips like this, and then they staple it in your foot to hold it on there.
And then that's left on there for about, I think it was just about two weeks, actually.
And then at the end of the two weeks in Costa Rica, I had to go under three general anesthetic surgeries in Costa Rica in a Central American hospital.
By myself, by the way.
My mom wanted to fly down.
My dad wanted to fly down.
I was like, you know what?
I'm just sitting here, like, you know, half out of it, you know, so just so I just spent two weeks in there.
And there was a second surgery where they go in and they checked it.
They had to go in and check it.
And so I had to go under general just to take the bandages off because it's painful.
And then the third general one was to go in and take the staples out.
And then Medevac back to Toronto to Sunnybrook Burn Center, Sunnybrook Hospital Burn Center, where I spent another 10 days.
And then for the next, essentially, six months, Joe, I would have to go to a doctor three times a week to have my bandages changed because it's like, you know, oozing.
And anyways, and then, you know, and then it was kind of like limping for the next year, and then now I'm kind of still a little wobbly, but it's pretty good.
I actually found some photos of this and pulled them up because I thought you might ask when I told you about this.
And you get this, you get this sense of almost like a sense of gratitude you get afterwards because you're like, I'm alive.
I'm here.
I still got my foot.
And it's so strange how that happens because it's happened to me twice now in my life because I had testicular cancer when I was on MTV and that's why I stopped the show and I'd go to the hospital.
They'd took my right testicle.
I still got the left one.
Everything's fine.
And you go, you go from, there's this moment where you're like, in both occasions, there's this moment where you're sort of traumatized by what's happening and angry about it.
And then it sort of almost instantly flips.
It must be some sort of human self-preservation kind of thing that's built into our way our minds work, where you're now grateful that it's not worse.
It's like after I had cancer, sometimes it comes into my mind like a little bit of a light bulb or a wave.
Like I'll think to myself, you know, if I'm having a slightly bad day, you know what I mean?
And I'll be like, I don't, for whatever reason, it happens just sometimes when I'm out doing normal errands and I'm having a slightly bad day.
I'll go to the gas station, pumping gas or something.
And then I think to myself, oh man, at least I'm not in the hospital right now dealing with some crazy, you know, existential life and death thing, you know?
And so, yeah, maybe it is a learned thing because of what I've been through with that because the same thing happened after I burned my foot.
You know, as soon as it's sort of, as soon as I'm, you're quickly start of, you go from, I can't believe this has happened.
I'm angry.
I've just ruined my vacation.
I might lose my foot.
This is horrible to, okay, how are we going to get better?
How are we going to make sure that I do everything to change the bandages on time?
And your whole life changes, right?
I'm not thinking about all the things that I'm normally stressed about, whether it's work or relationships or whatever, things that are just normal, standard things that you're pissed off about.
And all of a sudden you're just not even thinking about that anymore.
I'm just thinking about making sure I don't get an infection on my foot and you're sort of treating it like a military operation, trying to save your foot or trying to make sure that you make the right choices in your cancer treatment.
And then when you come out of it, it is true, it's possibly a learned thing.
You come out of it and you realize, oh, all that shit that I'm normally worried about doesn't matter compared to what I just went through.
And then you can kind of maybe learn from that.
And then as time passes, you slip back into the same routine.
You start stressing out about the same things again.
But then every once in a while it pops into your head and go, well, at least I'm not dealing with the foot's healed and I'm outside right now and everything's good.
It's also people need to experience a certain amount of discomfort in order to appreciate not having that.
It's just the way we're wired for whatever reason.
I choose voluntary discomfort.
I do shit like cold plunges and saunas and hard workouts and I think it's a viable strategy.
I think it really works.
I think if you can force yourself to do difficult things like a difficult workout, a difficult yoga class, cold plunges, saunas, that kind of shit, your regular life will be less stressful.
Yeah.
You'll be able to deal with these were seemingly high stress situations.
They will seem less stressful because you're doing voluntary stress all the time.
And you prepare yourself for difficult things.
When you don't prepare yourself for difficult things, you can get caught up in just traffic being something that blows your mind.
I am going to do that because it's, I'm not sure how, I mean, I haven't done a cold plunge.
I can tell you that I do like the cold.
Like we sort of touched on that earlier.
Like when you just go outside into like sometimes it's Canadians complain about the cold who live in the city, but when you live in the country, it's different.
The city winter sucks because they put salt on the roads and you're basically running from your house to your car.
But in the country, when there's, you go outside and it's nature and you walk into the woods, there's no bugs, there's no mud, everything's frozen.
You can go places you can't go in the summer, in the winter.
You can walk across lakes.
You can walk like across huge lakes to islands that are over there with warm, you know, bath-in Canada goose jacket on.
It's sort of like, I kind of was thinking to myself, I was going to say, you know, it's sort of like a cold plunge, except it's just, you just go outside as a cold plunge sometimes.
It's like you do get a dopamine rush just from being outside.
So you can, like, I've actually noticed that in warmer climates, sometimes I'm a bit more lethargic, you know?
But when the winter comes, it's like, okay, go outside.
It's like, you know, you feel it, you feel that, you know, it's just.
They go, they wait too long, and it's a spring, and they drive their truck out on it, and it goes through the ice.
But if you're, you know, if you're properly advised by people that know what they're doing, don't you know, like the people, you know, that some of my friends out there do a lot of ice fishing.
You know, they tell you, okay.
The other thing you can do is, like when I was playing hockey on the lake this year, you just stay close to the shore.
So you go, okay, well, if I fall through, it's only two feet deep or three feet deep here.
So, you know, you won't actually be sucked away under the ice.
But walking across in the middle, you know, you have a little bit more dangerous out in the middle there.
There's another one of a guy who's trying to, they cut two holes and they try to swim from one to the other and the ice is clear and you see him under there and you see him get disoriented and then you see him trying to find his way back to the other hole.
And then he does eventually find his way, but there's this sort of moment of panic where his friends are up on top and they're banging on the ice and they're trying to say, no, no, this way, this way.
He goes up to about a scientist who goes up to study these wolves.
And, you know, it's just sort of man versus nature kind of story.
We ended up becoming a Disney movie.
But, you know, he ends up running out of food.
His food gets dropped off in the wrong place or something like that.
So he ends up sort of seeing the wolves eating mice.
So then he ends up, you know, the big scene, the big probably inspired some of my work later in life.
He starts eating mice off crackers and stuff like that.
And it was a big, oh, gross outside.
He needs the mice off the crackers.
But then he ends up falling through the ice at one point, walking across a lake.
And there's a scene like that.
And it's one of those, you know, back in the 80s pre-CGI movies where you're just sort of remembering, you had to come up with actual scenes where something relatable and shocking happens that you can actually really like grips you, you know?
Well, at one point in time, people did have to have become friends with wolves because that's where dogs came from.
So when wolves came around the campfires, there must have been some curious wolves and there must have been some generous hunters who threw him a bone or threw him some meat.
And that's how dogs got made.
The bitch-ass wolves.
They're like, oh, I'm just, I'm happy to be your friend.
And so she'll hear them from in the house at night.
I don't hear them.
But all of a sudden, this happens three times a week.
She starts running around the house, barking.
Barking, barking, barking.
And then we go out on the porch and you hear them howling in the distance.
And so they just, so this summer, and I know this happened to you.
I had chickens.
I got chickens.
I got chickens in June as well.
I had six chickens.
And eggs.
I'm getting eggs for my chickens.
And I'm eating a lot of eggs now, eating a lot of eggs.
And they free range, right?
So it's not fenced in, right?
But the woods are sort of, there's a pond and their woods are on the other side of the pond and it's kind of a pasture on one side.
So, you know, debatably the wolves and the coyotes don't come right up to near the barns where the chickens are, right?
So I've let them free range.
So in the morning, I get up and I let the chickens out and then they spend the day walking around on the lawn and the grass and in the sort of more closer to the house area.
And this was great.
All summer, it was great.
I named them.
It was Loretta, Patsy, Shania, Dolly, June, and Anne.
They're my girls, you know.
Give them all female country singers names.
And then I bonded with them in a way.
Like they're kind of sweet.
I actually would take, sometimes I'd bring one in the house and hang out with it and play piano with it.
And it was like, you know, it was, I mean, it's getting weird, but you could tell it was interested in the music.
Like there's an intelligence there that's, you know, I know chickens aren't known for being the most intelligent thing in the world, but you would see their wheels turning, listening to the music.
I kind of become attached to these chickens, you know.
And then, yeah, so I get a bit more comfortable with having them free-range.
They free-ranged all summer.
And they're great because they're eating all the bugs and they're getting all the, you know, insects and stuff on the property around the house.
And so I drive into town one day.
Okay.
So I'm gone for two hours.
Okay.
And I come back and I'm coming up the driveway and it's just feathers, feathers, feathers, feathers, feathers.
And there was one survivor, Loretta, survived.
She was sort of, funnily enough, there was one chicken that didn't hang out with other chickens all the time.
And this one, Loretta, I named her Loretta.
And she was probably just somewhere else.
But the five just got killed by the coyotes.
And I saw them on my security cameras.
Came right up to the house.
And so the thing is, is like you realize, and I realize this even more after talking to the wolf expert, they were watching the house from the woods.
And they saw me leave.
And they knew that there was nobody there.
And they chose their moment.
The wolves, I think it might have been coyotes that did the chickens.
They like waited.
They waited for me.
They knew my truck.
They knew there was nobody there.
And they said, you know, one good thing to do if you leave, you know, is to play talk radio.
You know, maybe they'll hear that.
But so they were watching and they came and they got five of them all at once.
And chickens were gone.
There was just feathers everywhere.
It almost looked like a bomb had hit the chicken.
It was like just a big circle of feathers and there's five circles of feathers.
And so then I have this one chicken left and this is actually kind of sad too.
It's funny, like I literally cried.
And then my, because I was like so upset.
And then my neighbors, you know, who are farmers, you know, or buddies of mine, you know, came over and they were like, oh, look at the chicken feathers everywhere.
And I saw, you know, like, you know, is this normal for me to be crying about this?
And I said, do farmers cry?
They go, not over their dead chickens, you know.
I'm like, I'm like a city guy here crying over my dead chickens.
But so then, yeah, so then I got two more chickens to keep Loretta company.
And this is kind of breaking news as of yesterday.
These two new chickens came and they hung out with Loretta for the next since, I don't know, August.
And then, well, this is a downer, but yesterday I got a call and the two chickens killed the, killed Loretta, the one that was from the different flock, you know.
Here's an interesting thing about revenge because I've been thinking about revenge.
Well, I was thinking about revenge with the coyotes.
And so here's the thing that's a very sort of odd thing.
I love the coyotes.
I love the wolves.
I love them.
I love hearing them at night and I love seeing them.
And I photographed them.
I've had many moments where I've been engaged in a standoff with them.
I filmed it.
And so I kind of was really mad for a minute.
And then I thought, well, you know what?
I think I like the coyotes more than the chickens, to be honest with you.
So I'm just going to kind of figure out a way to kind of control the situation.
But also, watching your show with, I forget who it was, but it was an expert in this area and talking to people.
Apparently, like if you try to, again, this is all theory, but apparently if you try to completely control the population of coyotes, it just makes more coyotes.
But that was what I was talking about earlier, where they were persecuted by the gray wolves, because gray wolves and coyotes don't mix.
So when the gray wolves would kill the coyotes, the coyotes would expand their range, and then they would repopulate new areas where the gray wolves weren't.
And the way they would find out how many coyotes are around, they call out to each other.
It could happen, especially if there's some new COVID type thing happens.
And I have contrary experts on.
I have people on that are like Robert Malone, the guy that they maligned and said it was a conspiracy theorist and that he wasn't a qualified expert to talk about the subject, even though he's vaccine injured himself, even though he owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology.
I mean, he's a legitimate scientist that worked on that technology.
But the thing is, if they do, if they try to, and there's calls to do it right now in America.
There's also calls to do it from the World Health Organization to try to put a kibosh on any information that doesn't jive with what they're saying in the case of another situation, another pandemic.
I mean, Google released that thing where they were saying that they had some new regulations that would be put in place in cases of a special event or anything of extreme social or political, some thing where they're going to be able to stop, air quotes, misinformation.
That's fucking terrifying because oftentimes that information turns out to be correct.
I love your approach to it and your stand-up, your new stand-up.
It's hilarious.
I won't say it, obviously, but it's just hilarious because it's very self-reflective, too.
And I just thought it was just amazing because you're kind of, I won't say it.
I don't want to say it because obviously you got your show coming up.
But appreciate it.
But I thought it was even people that may think they disagree with you on some subjects probably are going to really find it quite pointed, the way you address the issue in your stand-up set.
Well, it's obviously something on everybody's mind.
It's just, we're in a weird pivotal moment where technology and our awareness of corruption is all meeting in this battleground in the middle of the fucking field, like brave heart.
That's what's scary.
What's scary is these two things are colliding, and I don't know which one's going to win.
Because we could turn into a dictatorship.
We could.
We could turn into something that's closer to a dictatorship and then something that's closer still and continue to go down that line, especially if there's some need to clamp down on society because something happened, whether it's a solar flare or whether it's a terrorist attack or whether it's just flat-out war.
That's all they would need.
All they would need is some reason why they need to completely clamp down on your ability to express yourself, platform's ability to distribute information that's contrary to what they're saying, any of those things.
Anything that they can do to stop that, to put a clamp down on people, like disrupting the narrative that they're trying to distribute.
we just hang outside for a couple months go to the dog park and see people there and stuff like that it was that you know that initial stage where because you know you weren't in LA So it was wild.
I could imagine if I had a girlfriend at the time, we'd just say, okay, we're going to isolate together.
Now you're just with your significant other.
Here I was, okay, I'm going to isolate.
And I don't have a significant other at the time.
So it was actually the first time where I've ever had this sort of self-imposed or whatever maybe was imposed on On us, you know, or I took, I took the, took it, I took it as an opportunity to be by myself and go out and make videos in the desert and go to these really crazy remote places.
And I would seek out places where there wasn't going to be other vans and other people.
But when you were out in the desert, a lot of times you'd go to somewhere and there'd be other people out in their vans and you'd hang out and have beers with people out in the desert and hang out and then you'd go think of a more remote place.
And I started discovering some amazing places like that, you know, the rabbit hole you go down when you, you know, COVID aside, isolation aside, just going out into the American Southwest in a camper van that's self-sufficient is pretty wild, the stuff that's out there.
I mean, I think I probably talked about Chaco Canyon the last time I was here because I think I'd just gone there in New Mexico, which is, you know, Pueblo Native American ruins of, it's essentially like a stone ruins of a city that was built in the year 875,
875, and it's like Machu Picchu level type city that they didn't even discover until the 1950s because it was buried and now they've, you know, you're, and you're, and it's in this beautiful, it's on the Navajo Nation Reserve, you know, on the on the Navajo land,
and you feel this sort of, I felt sort of somewhat shocked, I guess, that there's all this stuff out there that you don't really hear talked about constantly.
Like I hear about Machu Picchu, somebody brings that up once a week.
And you can go walking through there, and there's wood that they've used as beams that's still within the petrified wood or whatever.
It's within the stone.
And, you know, it's wood from the year 875 to 1100.
It went, like, the people left there in 1100 because of a drought.
Like, they were gone before Columbus, right?
See the wood there?
That's from between 875 and 1175 whenever that was particularly built.
So, and this area, they've done all these studies of this area, so they know like they found macaw feathers, speaking to my old pal Rex, they found macaw feathers there.
Now, macaws are from the furthest north is Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.
So they knew that people were coming from Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, up here to trade with them.
And they found, you know, evidence of all these different things that sort of indicated that people were coming from as far north as Canada, as far south as South America, to come to this area.
And that whole Chaco Canyon area, once you get in there, is like this, I don't know, not to get all like, you know, voodoo about it, but you know, when you talk, people talk about Sedona and there's the energy there, you feel this sort of, and it may be just because it's so beautiful and it's so quiet and it's this natural kind of amphitheater where it's silent and the wind is deadened and you're just all alone and you're walking through this structure.
I share the fascination that you have for the pyramids.
I want to go there someday.
I think it would be one of them.
If I could snap my fingers right now and just be somewhere, it would be the pyramids.
I'd like to go to the pyramid someday.
I've never been there.
So here's me walking through it with my camera.
And so you're walking through this by yourself.
And you're just going like, wow, like there was all this stuff going on here.
And apparently they've determined this was like a meeting place for people from all over North America that would kind of come here and share information.
They actually believe that there was sort of almost like a festival type atmosphere that would happen there where people come and trade and share information and all this stuff.
And the stories you pick up when you go to these places, because then you go down the rabbit hole, you start reading about it, and you go, wow, this is, I never knew about this.
No American had ever been there until the mid-1800s because it was Apache territory.
And if you went there, the Apache, you know, would kill you before 18, whatever it was.
I forget the date, but it was like the 1700s, early 1800s.
It's like there's a lot to do that is stuff that falls outside of anything that would fall under the category of what I would consider to be work, right?
But it is work, but it's different work.
It's like, oh, I've got to feed the chickens or we built a fence this year for the mule and the donkey.
So it's this patent rail fence that is made out of cedar that is literally these 100-year-old cedar rail fences that are on the property that have fallen down in the woods and have gone by the not used anymore.
And we went back with a fence builder.
And everybody out there is in the country.
He's a guy whose family is traditional fence builders, whose grandfather built these fences.
We went and salvaged all this wood and then built new fences out of them.
Oh, that's cool.
So you kind of, you know, it's nice to find something to do that is, A, you're outside, you're getting exercise.
And it's the first time, I said this earlier, I'm never going to leave this place.
Like, it's the first time I've ever lived somewhere where I know I'm never going to sell it and leave.
So every step of my life, like everyone, as you're growing up, you've got your first apartment.
How long am I going to be here until I move here?
How long am I going to be here?
So now I'm just kind of like, now I just, in my head, I have like, oh, I'd like to maybe build a log cabin someday on the back woods, you know?
So that's sort of one thing I'm kind of like kind of thinking about how I want to build a log cabin, like the way the, you know, the my the house itself that I'm in was built in 1857 and it's a log house.
unidentified
So you can see the do you have photos of the house?
There's there's yeah, there's on my YouTube channel there's a full tour of the house.
I haven't really, there's not a full tour, but I think if you can see some of the logs on the YouTube channel, I did a couple little sort of sample podcasts where you can see the wood in the background.
So, you know, you start to realize, you know, I'm doomsday prepping in the van, you know, like, oh, I could be self-sufficient in this van.
Well, I also, you know, and again, it's fun, but it's also kind of very functional.
Like, I have unlimited fuel, okay, because there's wood falling in the forest forever.
And every summer you can go out and I've got a wood splitter, right?
Like a, it's a, you know, gas-powered wood splitter.
And you, you know, you chainsaw up the logs, you drop them in, the wood splitter splits them, and it's sort of an efficient way of getting firewood, basically.
So they'll never run out of wood out there.
The house has actually got propane sort of a furnace as well.
So it runs on propane and the propane truck comes every, you know, there's no natural gas or anything running into the house to heat it.
So you have a propane truck comes every couple of months and fills up this propane tank in the winter.
But, you know, if, oh, shit, you know, shit hits the fan and the propane truck doesn't show up, you know, I can still heat the house fully with wood.
There's a solar system that was there actually that, but it doesn't actually connect it to the house, but it's connected to the grid, and it's actually selling energy back to the power company.
So I work with these guys who've been really cool, battle-borne batteries, they're called, and they make these batteries, lithium batteries, right?
They make them for boats.
They make them for now off-grid houses.
And so I have like a couple of bunkies, you know, like the one I built and one that we kind of set up.
It's like a prefabricated building that we put back in the woods with a wood stove in it.
And, you know, this trailer that I have solar panels on that butterfly out that I can take anywhere on the property, which has these battle-borne batteries in it.
It's constantly charging.
So I do have some solar.
And the barn as well.
So the barn I have, and these guys helped me set this up.
It's really cool.
I mean, I jokingly say the podcast that I'm going to do in the barn is going to be, I'm sure it isn't, but I'm saying it's the first solar-powered barn cast.
Okay, maybe.
Maybe.
I don't know if there's one.
But it's like, because the barn has no power running to it.
It's off-grid.
But we have, you know, it's, you know, 200 yards from the house.
But we've, up in the loft, got this battery, lithium battery array, solar panels that charge the batteries.
And then up in there, I can run all my cameras, lights, everything.
Yeah, it might be 10 years or something like that.
I'm not sure.
But it's the, that's the, the lithium batteries is kind of newer tech.
Like it's like, it's, that was the thing that kind of, you know, when I've, when COVID happened, I want, I want to get a van and go in the desert.
So then I figured out who was making these vans.
And then I found out about the battery systems.
And I was like, oh, you just have a regular plug in the van.
You can plug in your camera and charge your camera batteries.
You can run your laptop.
You can charge your phone indefinitely.
And, you know, spending so many years of my life running around making goofy videos.
When we were doing the Tom Green show and stuff, you'd go on the road and then you have to go back to the hotel at night to charge your camera batteries.
The idea that you can go into the middle of the desert and just film indefinitely and charge your camera batteries because the sun is recharging these batteries.
Constantly, it was dope.
I built a recording studio in the van.
I was making music and beats out there and just kind of getting into it.
Pretty much, you know, I was, I mean, it's, you know, it's funny.
After I came on the show last time and we talked about this, like there's a general perception in the world all of a sudden that I was living in my van, okay, which I wasn't actually living in.
And it was funny how, I mean, again, the power of social media and the size of your audience, you know, it permeated out there pretty big that like pretty much everybody I meet thinks I'm living in a van down by the river now.
Yeah, I think it forces people to confront the idea that what happened to the Native Americans in this country, too, and in North America and Canada, you know, like we weren't that nice to them, were we?
I feel like, and maybe it's my mind just thinking about the history of it, but there's, you know, people talk about energy, and I was like, is it, I used to hear people say when they go to Sedona, the energy there is amazing.
And I'm like, what are you talking about, the energy, right?
But then when you go to these places, is it because you're just alone and you're relaxed and you're thinking about it so much, but it's like you touch this and you go, well, you think somebody actually like carved this.
Somebody made this and then they survived with this, right?
They napped that thing and made it sharp and they did all these crazy techniques that they had learned how to make these fucking things and then they hunted with it.
And these people lived here forever until these Europeans just came in like a wave of locusts.
I had a few moments of, I don't know if they were wacky people, but your mind starts telling you that you got to be careful.
You know, like there was a moment, you know, there was a moment out in the desert where I was all alone out there in a truck.
This was on the Mexican border, actually.
And trucks coming from Mexico towards me.
And there's, you know, there's signs out in the desert when you get to this.
This was actually in the Arizona-Mexico border.
It's this place called the Cabiza Prieta Wilderness Area, which is a decommissioned section of the former Barry F. Goldwater Air Force Base test range where they would test bombs in World War II, right?
And it's like really beautiful, like the cactuses and the-You want a cigar?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
I bet you that's a good one, too.
I'm sure you wouldn't be smoking some Swiffer Sweets or something like that.
But they were sitting like this, and they were sitting like this, and their rifles were standing.
They were holding the rifles like that.
So I kind of assumed that they were going around looking for a deer or something like that.
But it was, you know, when you're all alone out there and you see a truck coming towards you and there's no one around, no one's going to hear anything, you know, you get a little nervous.
So I did get in the van and I locked the door and I'm in the van.
I'm looking out of the van and they pulled up by the van and they're looking at my van and I see the guns in the van and I'm like, okay, that's a lot of fun.
But there's this sort of, you know, five minutes of watching the truck get closer.
And so you go to the Cabiza Prieta wilderness area, and it's along the Arizona-Mexico border, and you know what the border's like.
So, you know, there's a lot of, you know, human trafficking and drug smuggling going on there, and as well as immigration going on there, and people coming across the border illegally and all this stuff.
And so there was actually a sign when you drive in there that says danger, human smuggling, drug smuggling, do not travel alone.
Okay, so I still go because I'm with Charlie, right?
And so, yeah, danger, human smuggling, drug smuggling.
Do not travel alone, right?
So I, of course, stupidly go out there and I'm camping out there for a week.
But then you haven't seen anybody for five days, you know, and you're out there making videos and making, you know, ambient music, you know, drinking beer.
I have a fridge in there.
I had a nice fridge in the van, too.
So I got beer.
I got, you know, some whiskey.
I'm just having a good time out there, you know, making music by myself.
And streaming on, like, some, not always, but sometimes you'd have like internet, you know?
So you'd stream, you know, and that was sort of a connection with the world, you know, streaming live from the middle of fucking nowhere.
The world's so crazy now.
And making beats in the middle of nowhere.
But yeah, so that was, you know, this moment where you're going like, oh, maybe I shouldn't be here by myself.
And that was actually when I, that was actually what, that moment was actually what kind of, I actually tell the story when I do stand-ups, so I'm trying not to make it a bit here because sometimes, you know, I don't want to do my bit, but like I do kind of incorporate it into my stand-up sometimes because I tell stories about this stuff.
But I ended up, it was what sort of spawned, I mean, I went back to L.A. and I bought a gun the next day.
I'd never owned a, I didn't hadn't owned a gun since I was 21 years old.
I had a 22 when I was like 24 years old.
I had 22.
I hadn't owned a gun the whole time I was in L.A. I was going out in the desert by myself, feeling vulnerable by myself out there.
So I went back to Burbank, went down to Guns Plus, and picked up a 357 Magnum and Benelli Montefeltro silver shotgun and got my hunting license and went quail hunting.
And I also thought, honestly, though, I actually have another answer to you because I was going to lots of places with bears.
And so I figured it would be good protection for bears, too, because I was going up into places in New Mexico where there's bears and I go hiking by myself.
And you don't want to lug a shotgun around with you all the time.
So, you know, I'd sometimes bring that in Arizona and stuff.
That's smart.
But also, I mean, it's honestly just kind of, I don't know, it's just a beautiful gun.
Well, I just think it's the coolest thing that you shout that out and say that to me because I appreciate it because it's like, it was when you came to do the show, I was stoked that you were coming to do the show.
I'm doing my little web show and you came up and did the show.
Yeah, go check out my YouTube channel, YouTube slash Tom.
I'm going to put a lot of stuff up on there now, which is kind of a little, and then Tom Green on Instagram, Tom Green Live on Twitter, and X. And y'all, that's all the spots, TikTok.
And I'm shooting a special, actually.
I'm shooting a special for Amazon Prime stand-up special.
Well, I'm going to do, I'm going to shoot it in Ottawa, but I'm also doing a tour in April.
So I'm going through, I'm going to be in Cleveland, I'm going to be in Lexington, Kentucky, Louisville, Detroit, all over Michigan, you know, Helium and Philly and a lot of the spots.
So you can go check out my tour and I'm going to film the whole tour too and I'm going to kind of cut it together into a bunch of stand-up montage.