Donnell Rawlings joins Joe Rogan to dissect dietary quirks—Rogan’s meat digestion struggles at 58, nicotine’s cognitive boosts, and menthol marketing controversies—while exposing the sugar industry’s role in health disparities tied to $138M-per-liter soda like Pepsi. They pivot to Jeffrey Epstein’s lottery scams (e.g., $80M jackpot slashed to $30M) and the predatory nature of legalized gambling, framing it as a modern "house always wins" system. Rawlings critiques comedians’ shift toward negativity over craft, citing Kevin Hart’s grind in NYC, Dave Chappelle’s pandemic lockdown shows, and Bernie Mac’s legendary "I ain’t afraid" moment—success, he argues, stems from consistency, not viral stunts or industry lies. Ultimately, the episode underscores how true comedy thrives on authenticity, not attention-grabbing tactics or manufactured outrage. [Automatically generated summary]
If I eat a burger, it's different if I eat a steak.
Steak is a problem?
Yeah, I don't know if my digestive system, just like you two older, fucking bust this down.
I'm 58.
I'm 58 too.
I eat mostly meat.
I don't think it's age.
What is it then?
Well, what are you eating it with?
Tito's.
We're rolling.
Tito's.
Tito's vodka?
It can't be that, right?
No.
I'm eating a steak and I'm a little bit more.
I eat a steak and I will.
And I wash it down with Tito's and Tonic because it resembles H2O so much.
Sometimes I get thrown off until I do it.
What?
Yeah, I think I'm better at it.
Tito's and tonic resembles water.
The look of it.
The look of it.
It's clear.
That's all that matters to you?
Yeah.
I know at some point I need to change.
I need to change my life.
I'm at the age now that it's like I look at certain food and I'm like, oh my God, it looks good, but you know, you can't handle that.
I think this is when I really, really need to be in love because I need to be with somebody that understands when I go places and when I want to pig out, they got to be like, he can't eat that.
He's digging in.
He needs a handler.
He's going to be thrown up.
He's a female handler.
A female handler.
They call it geriatric.
This is what I hear.
This is what the streets are saying.
Most men get to an age, it's a geriatric shit, when you just smash all the women you want to do and everything.
Now you're going to have to worry about somebody helping you with your pill diet, helping you with your dietary needs and everything.
And they say that's a lot of times when men fall in love, when they need somebody to take them to the Golden Ears.
Or when you're about to be out of here, you need somebody to say, don't do that.
You got to mash this food up.
You got to chop it up.
But I'm having digestive issues sometimes.
With steak, huh?
It's red meat, I want to say.
And I'm a fan of it.
So if you eat like a bowl of pasta with the Tito's, no problem?
That's not a problem.
Interesting.
But it's definitely red meat.
You go to one of those doctors that checks people for allergies.
Voodoo doctor?
Yeah.
I don't want one of them selling it down.
I had to date an Asian.
I mean, I had to date a Haitian chick.
They intervoodoo really, really busy.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They stab you with pillows and shit.
You might have pain in your neck.
Is there any particular reason, Joe?
And I haven't been here in a while.
Is there any particular reason why I am doing your show during Black History Month?
No, you asked to come on.
But you reached out to me.
I reached out to you.
You should have reached out to me in July.
I would have said yes.
You got an open invitation.
You know that.
I haven't opened the invitation, but this is when, I don't know, I say, can I come to you?
You said, this is what you told me.
You said, I have a guest.
And then you called back.
I don't know if Jamie said, you know what month this is.
Right.
I don't know if he and you caught me.
I moved somebody.
I moved somebody for you because I knew you were coming here on a Monday.
I had someone booked.
Was it a Caucasian person?
I don't know.
I don't remember.
You know it was a white man or a black man.
No, you know what?
Did I get, did I book a bunch of people?
It might have been Michael Jarwhite because he's here tomorrow.
Yeah.
So it was probably Michael.
I just probably moved him a day.
But I appreciate you being accommodating because I felt like it was time for me to come back.
I haven't been here once.
You can come on anytime.
I really appreciate it.
I hold that to be true.
Come on.
I know that's true.
You know I love you.
Yeah.
I want some of that gum too, man.
I'm sorry.
The neurogum?
Do we have any, Jerry?
I have some, yeah.
Yeah, that stuff's the shoes.
I know.
Whenever you say something, it's the shit is the shit.
But what can I do about my, I can't do anything about my diet.
Sorry.
Whoops.
I hit the mic.
Yeah, you can.
You just, you know, you should go to a doctor and find out if there's like, there might be something particularly about you that red meat doesn't agree with you.
But it might just be what you're eating with the red meat more than the red meat itself.
You know, that's what I would imagine.
I would imagine it's not actually red meat.
I would imagine it's what you're eating with it.
Might be.
And I'm going to check into it.
Because as they say in the streets, I'm of that big age when you have to be considerate of a whole bunch of things.
So you should.
That's what I have to do.
I have to do that.
Do you exercise at all?
A little bit.
Usually doing sexual intercourse is when I get most of my cardio.
Get your push-ups in?
Yeah, and it's not as strong.
Damn, man.
You have to get...
I don't know if this applies to everybody.
You get to an age where you start looking at your history and you're like, damn, 2000, what's my best years?
Like, right now, I'll just give up.
You give up.
I don't put no pressure in it.
I give up.
I start asking, like, what's your shoe size is or whatever.
I'd rather go shopping than to really try to pound somebody out for three hours.
I'm at that age now where I have, I call it certain times.
Like, you're going to get a work good job.
I probably shouldn't be giving you that gum.
Gum is going to be a real problem on the microphone.
Is it people are going to get annoyed by you?
All right.
I don't know what to do.
Just chew it a little and spit it out.
Okay.
You'll get the effects of it pretty quickly anyway.
I'm at the age where my best work is like holidays.
Holidays.
Like, I'm an animal.
Why don't you hire a trainer?
You got some money.
And what are the trainers going to do to?
Get you in shape.
I think I need a therapist before I get a trainer.
I mean, you got to take one step at a time.
I got to get my mind right before I get my body right.
Wouldn't you agree?
No, getting your body right will help get your mind right.
I think that's some truth to that.
I think that you may be right about that.
Oh, 100%.
Getting your body right fixes your mind.
Without a doubt.
But I will say I'm at my best.
I'm at my peak when it's a holiday to celebrate.
Because you're rested.
I'm rested.
It's more incentive.
Like, if you want me to really smash good time, consider it like Valentine's Day, Christmas, Kwanzaa.
You can get seven good days.
But to expect me to be at my best on just a regular Tuesday or a Wednesday is not going to happen.
I need to do it.
Well, it's also drinking.
You like to drink.
The Menthol Effect00:06:28
Why would you say that?
I know why you would say that.
Come on, I've seen you.
All right.
I've been with you.
I drank with you.
Okay, then that's a good point.
All right.
There's cigarettes.
You was there.
You brought a pack with you.
Right?
There's that.
Those are not good.
There's a.
But you used to smoke.
I saw one of your podcasts.
I forget how you explain what made you not want to smoke anymore.
Well, cigarettes are a cognitive enhancer.
They are.
That's a fact.
Nicotine is a cognitive enhancer.
There's no doubt about it.
It's a fact.
And it does things to your mind.
It stimulates your mind in a way that very few other things do.
That's why a lot of intellectuals, a lot of professors use nicotine.
A lot of academics use nicotine.
A lot of people that rely on their brain use it.
A lot of writers use nicotine.
And there's different delivery methods that have different effects.
Unfortunately, smoking has a very potent, instantaneous effect.
And that's why people like it.
But it comes with a cost.
The physical health repercussions of cigarettes are well known.
It's not good.
And also, you're smoking Marlboros.
We had a doctor on the other side that thinks that regular cigarettes are not nearly like American spirits are not nearly as bad for you as cigarettes.
I understand that they have some type of American spirits.
I'm not even advocating for what you should and shouldn't smoke.
But they say that's supposed to be the most natural if there's such a thing.
It's just tobacco, I believe.
Is that a fact?
Nope.
No?
What's in there besides tobacco?
I don't know.
I've been trying to.
I don't know how this lawsuit ended up, but they got sued for the advertising of saying it's additive-free and all that.
Oh, did they?
Yeah.
What are the additives?
I've got that side item.
Well, let's look at it.
I've tried to look.
I mean, there's a big, here's like the website about the lawsuit.
What's the accusation?
That, oh, here you go.
It's on screen.
Oh, here we go.
Lawsuit questions natural claims.
Natural American Spirit cigarettes are made by Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company and parent company Reynolds America.
R.J. Reynolds, they fuck with you.
American Spirits has been sold in the U.S. since 1985.
Under the original name, Original American Spirit.
Organic.
Oh, you got us.
You fucks.
Unadulterated tobacco.
Sue claims such marketing language has endeared American Spirit cigarettes to a core group of smokers who believe that the natural tobacco in the cigarette makes them a healthier alternative.
Despite cigarette sales declining 17% between 2009 and 2014, American Spirit sales have increased 86% over the same period.
Huzzah.
A regulatory filing on the Reynolds American website states American Spirit is the leading super premium cigarette brand that is a top 10 best-selling cigarette brand, priced higher than most other competitive brands and is differentiated from key competitors through its use of all natural, additive-free tobacco, including styles made with organic tobacco.
But words like all natural and additive-free on American Spirits labeling, the suit says belies the fact that Santa Fe Reynolds adds ammonia to their cigarettes to maximize the amount of nicotine a smoker receives with the result that American Spirits contain significantly more free-based nicotine than other major cigarette brands.
So you're actually getting high off of cigarettes?
100%.
I get high off of them because I don't smoke them all the time.
So I only smoke, if I smoke a couple cigarettes a week, it's a lot.
And Newport's probably like 10 times worse than menthol cigarettes, probably 10 times worse for your body.
I was talking to Kat about that.
Yeah, I was asking him, like, why do you like menthols?
And he's like, he was speaking on behalf of the black community.
He said, we like things that are more potent.
I believe that that's possible, part of it, but I also believe that back in the day, and this supply, I don't know if I talk about this, it was certain brands that targeted certain communities just for the loyalty of it.
And I think Newport's was targeting, I don't know if it was a situation where Newport came out.
They were spending more ad money with advertising and everything.
I don't know if I shared this story with you, but Pepsi was a company that did that.
They targeted the black community.
So I think, even though I understand we said more potent, but I think it was something that was in our community, whether that was like cheaper prices or whatever.
And I think it's generation and generation, like you need to do this because black people did this because it was cheaper.
I think that that might be the case with Newport.
Probably both.
What is the menthol effect?
What is the difference?
And I think it's a small menthol.
I sound like Cat Williams in that case.
That's one of the reasons I had to downgrade.
Some people think that I started smoking marble lights because I started dating white women, which is more appealing.
Unless you date a white woman from the Midwest, then she probably smoking Newports and drinking Pepsis and Coca-Cola just like you.
But I think that's probably.
But I got so many bad habits that I need to change.
Here we go.
Our sponsor, our AI sponsor, Perplexity, says the menthol effect of cigarettes come from the chemical menthol itself, which is added as a flavoring and a sensory agent to the tobacco.
Menthol is naturally found in peppermint and other mint plants.
It can also be made synthetically in a lab.
Menthol activates cold-sensitive nerve receptors in the mouth, throat, and airways, creating a cooling sensation when you inhale smoke.
It's a mild anesthetic, numbing effect that reduces pain and irritation from hot, harsh cigarette smoke, making it feel smoother.
Menthol can suppress the cough reflex and dull early warnings or early warning signs of airway irritation, which make it easier to inhale more deeply and more often.
Menthol reduces the perceived harshness of nicotine and smoke.
The minty taste and smell plus the cooling feel act as a pleasant sensory cues that many smokers come to associate with satisfaction and craving.
Menthol can alter nicotine metabolism and the way nicotine acts on brain receptors, which may increase nicotine's reinforcing addictive effects.
In short, the menthol effect is not from nicotine, but from added menthol, which cools and numbs the airways, masks irritation, and can make cigarettes feel smoother and more addictive without making them any safer.
So menthol cigarettes appeal to black people because it's a cool cigarette.
It's cool.
That's what cooling makes so much sense by the brand cool cigarette because it makes shit.
Cool Cigarettes00:04:31
That makes sense.
That's why they called it cool, I bet.
Damn, what white people do to destroy my community, man?
Destroy everybody.
Yeah.
They don't give a fuck about anybody.
Cool ain't cool.
Half ain't wide.
Body ain't soul.
Mild ain't bold.
Cool ain't cool.
Newport is.
Oh, because that was like a take on cools because people used to smoke cools.
Do cools exist anymore?
In jail.
Only in jail?
I think that, I think, I don't know what the ratios, what cigarette gets you more money in a dice game, but whenever I hear people telling war stories, they like, man, I got a pack, I got a carton of cools for a bag of Doritos or something, but the value of a cool cigarette is higher in prison.
Isn't it crazy that they give you cigarettes in prison?
That's crazy.
It's like the only drug you can get in prison.
Yeah, and those.
You can't get alcohol, right?
Well, you can get hooch.
Well, you can't get alcohol, but they make their own type of stuff.
It's all under the table.
Yeah.
But I think in prison, the things that hold the most value, I think it's tang, right?
It's that artificial flavored drink you do.
I think that it's...
Astronaut shit.
Yeah.
Yep.
Cigarettes, Doritos.
I heard honey buns hold their value.
And I heard candy bar.
But candy bars, you got to be particular with that.
Because if you offer, this is what I hear.
If you offer a person a certain amount of candy bars, then what I understand is that you're inviting them to have sexual intercourse with you.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Candy bars.
Yeah, like you, I don't think.
You want some candy bars?
And that's like code.
Yeah, it's like Pizzagate with Pizza.
Mr. Goodbar for this Good Bar.
Oh, okay.
This is only, not that I've had those experiences, Joe, but this is the times that I frequent the streets, which aren't anymore, not too often.
These are the stories that they tell.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And these facts, you don't need them for anything but for barbershop talk, but these are the conversations that I have that I've heard people have.
It's interesting how different brands market to different people.
And I mean, how do they figure it out?
Like, what do they work?
Like, that's where it's evil, right?
Like, advertising itself, I don't have a problem with, but I did, there is something weird about deceptive advertising that's legal, you know?
Well, they do a history on what people like.
I was watching or reading a story about the people that started Forever 21.
I forget what the brand was.
It was some Koreans from South Korea, not to be confused with Kim Jong-un in those people.
But they were tailors of something.
They started a small boutique.
And what they would do is they would have these clothing pieces of clothes, and they would really pay particular attention to what colors people like, what was selling the most, whatever.
And that's what they buy.
And one of the things that made Forever 21 so popular because they had really inexpensive, the clothes weren't expensive, but they was turning them over so quick.
You know, so people do do case studies and see what people are attracted to.
I know with black people, you put lemon pepper on anything.
It's going to go out the roof.
You could do lemon pepper, chicken wings, lemon pepper, french fries, anything, lemon pepper.
They're going to go, I don't know who started the whole lemon pepper craze, but you lemon pepper, anything, black people are going to buy it.
That's interesting, like how white people are associated with very bland foods.
You know, macaroni, cheese, mashed potatoes, mayonnaise.
And you know why you're connected with that blandness?
Because the way you pronounced it.
Macaroni and cheese?
You'd never, ever say, if you tell somebody, if you say, and you would be able to be invited to the cookout, Joe, you know, people like you.
If you say, hey, guys, I'm coming to a cookout, right?
And I'm bringing macaroni and cheese, you're going to get uninvited to the cookout.
How should I say that?
Mac and cheese.
Mac and cheese.
Yeah, you can't say macaroni and cheese.
Nobody ever does that.
They would look at you as a spy.
You would get invited and invited.
I'm a different type of white person because I'm Italian, and we're associated with spicy food.
Very strong flavors.
Yeah, but...
It's a different...
Like, Italian people don't like bland food.
So you're not going to say spicy, very flavorful food.
Excess Sugar, Not Salt00:04:04
I'm bringing baked Ziti to the barbecue.
You'll be like, I'm bringing Ziti, right?
I would say baked Ziti.
Yeah, because there's different kinds of Ziti.
You know, the Ziti that you bake and then the Ziti that you just boil and put, you know, marinara sauce on.
I will say this.
As much as, you know, community make fun of white people and their lack of seasoning, that can save your life.
Lack of seasoning can save your life?
Yeah, so when you think about, you look at somebody, one of the most country home-cooked soul food spot, the one ingredient that's in everything that you taste right off the rip is salt.
How do you feel?
Salt's not bad for you at all.
It's all good.
Then why do we think salt is all bullshit?
If you're feeling a little off, it's okay.
It's February.
Everybody feels a little off in February.
It's darker.
It's colder.
You probably already gave up on some New Year's resolutions.
But you don't have to wait till spring to get yourself right again.
It all starts with making small changes to your routine.
And one of those is AG1.
It's not some big dramatic reset.
It's one small thing that you can do every morning to keep consistent when everything else is chaos.
One scoop, done.
AG1 can help support your energy, your gut health, and can support you through the darker evenings.
It gives that foundational support from morning to night.
And it all comes down to getting your daily nutrition.
There's more than 75 ingredients, including antioxidants, minerals, probiotics, and functional mushrooms to support your immune health and overall health.
And this is the time of year when it can really help.
If you want to check it out, go to drinkag1.com slash Rogan, and you'll get three AG1 travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and other gifts free in your welcome kit with your first subscription.
That's drinkag1.com slash Rogan.
Salt is an essential mineral.
You need salt to survive.
Salt is not the problem.
They associate salt with high blood pressure, salt with this, salt.
It's not true.
It's bullshit.
What type of salt?
Is it a different song?
Is it like...
No, it's not.
Salt's not bad for you.
Well, first of all, there's iodized salt, which is actually good for you because it contains iodine.
They add iodine to it, which is good for you.
But salt is not a bad thing.
I mean, you shouldn't have too much salt.
Look, if you eat enough salt, you can't be the person to educate me with this.
So all of these years, it's a people getting their toes chopped off.
That's the table.
That's not why.
That's not why.
If you're getting diabetes, it's usually from sugar.
Okay.
You know, there's been a lot of misinformation that's spread because of actual scientists that were bribed by the sugar industry.
So the sugar industry, they paid a bunch of Harvard scientists.
It was Harvard, right?
I believe it was.
They didn't even give them a lot of money.
Was it the 1950s or 1960s, Jamie?
Do you remember?
So this has all been outed now.
But what they did was they tried to associate saturated fat and foods with saturated fat with being responsible for heart disease.
And they did that to try to get the blame off of sugar.
Because sugar is fucking terrible for you.
It's terrible in basically every way, especially added sugar.
So why are all of these diseases that we speak of are more happening in the black community than it's diet.
It's 100%.
It's sugar.
It's processed food.
It's diet.
It's sugar.
It's sugary drinks.
It's the amount of sugar, like if you say, if you drink like a one liter Pepsi, the amount of sugar that is, okay, let's find that out.
How much sugar is in a one-liter Pepsi?
You drink several of these a day.
One of them, I believe, is more sugar than you're ever supposed to have in a day.
Pepsi is the one, and that's why it was— Well, it could be Coca-Cola.
It could be Pepsi, Mountain Dew.
I don't know.
I think it's 100%.
Pick your poison.
I think it's 100% Pepsi.
Well, Pepsi is, I don't know, does Pepsi have more sugar than Coca-Cola?
Excess Sugar Debate00:04:19
I don't know.
You know, Coca-Cola is one of the only things that's still flavored with cocaine leaf.
Sugar content, 115, 123 grams in a one-liter bottle.
That's a crazy amount of sugar.
25 teaspoons, 35 sugar cubes.
God damn it.
That's 130%, 138% of the recommended daily value of sugar.
That's where people are getting type 2 diabetes.
They're getting it from excess sugar.
Specifically, excess sugar, like in a liquid form, your body does not know what the fuck to do with that because nowhere in nature do you get sugar in a liquid form like that.
Like even orange juice.
Like people think orange juice is good for you.
It's not.
Like drinking orange juice, yeah, you're going to get some vitamin D, but you're also going to, vitamin C, rather, but you're also going to get a gigantic dose of sugar that has no fiber in it.
But it's a different type of blood sugar and fruits and vegetables than what you get off the counter.
You get fructose rather than high fructose corn syrup.
You know, look, sugar from fruit is the best sugar for you because it's attached to fiber.
And that's a slow release sugar.
Like if you eat an apple, and apples aren't bad for you.
It's a natural way that your body consumes sugar.
Apples were bad for Adam.
I don't even know if it was an apple.
It was appropriate.
It was a fruit.
It was a fruit from the tree of knowledge.
The tree of knowledge.
It was an apple.
It was an apple.
But it wasn't an apple tree.
What specifically does the Bible refer to as the fruit?
Adam and Eve, Adam.
You know the truth?
Eve never talked to God.
Adam talked to God.
Adam told God not to eat the fruit.
There's nowhere in the Bible does it say that Adam went and told Eve.
This is why we should start not just shutting women down to listening to them.
It all started all the time.
Genesis does not specifically specify, rather, what kind of fruit Adam ate, only that it calls it fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Yeah, so it's not necessarily an apple.
We call it an apple.
The text never names the species, apple, fig, etc.
The Hebrew word is peri, a general term meaning fruit without a botanical detail.
Where the apple idea came from over time, Jewish and Christian interpreters proposed many candidates, including fig, grape, pomegranate, citron, and others.
Now, common idea is that an apple developed later in European tradition, helped by wordplay in Latin and Old French, where the words evil and apple or fruit sounded or were spelled similarly.
So it's not necessarily an apple.
I really don't know what to believe.
I feel like I get so much more information when I come here.
I don't know if people understand that.
Well, the crazy thing is that, I mean, I've found this out recently because I've actually been reading the Bible, that there's no reference whatsoever to Adam telling Eve, you're not supposed to eat the fruit from the plant with the knowledge of good and evil.
I never knew that.
Yeah.
I just knew it's just Adam.
It was a woman with an apple and his shit got fucked up after that.
What happened was God created Adam.
This is what Genesis says.
God created Adam and then told Adam, go and name all the animals.
And then when he was done with that, Adam made Eve.
But he never said, it never says in the Bible, Adam told Eve, do not eat the apple.
Who's given us this misinformation?
Well, the problem with the Bible is, first of all, that it was an oral tradition forever.
So it was an oral tradition for a long time before it was ever written down.
Then it was written down in a bunch of ancient languages.
It was written down in ancient Hebrew.
It was written down in Aramaic, Aramaic.
And then when you translate ancient Hebrew to first, they translated it to Latin, and then they translated it to Greek and all these other, maybe Greek first.
I forget which one was first.
But either way, the translations miss a lot of the language.
It's very complicated.
Ancient Hebrew is a very complicated language.
And numbers double as letters in ancient Hebrew.
So ancient Hebrew doesn't have numbers.
All their words have a numerical value to them.
What do you think makes people so connected to the Bible?
Suspicious Lottery Winnings00:16:09
Is it because of wanting to believe in something?
Definitely.
Definitely wanting to believe in something.
And then specifically, if you look at like the teachings of Jesus Christ, if you follow them, I think it'll lead to a better life.
I think it makes you a better person, makes you a better member of the community.
It reinforces community.
It's like a really good way to live your life.
So I think people that live that way, that actually live that way, they're better examples of human beings.
So that makes it reinforced.
But it's also people, there's a lot of other religions that people believe in that don't have those aspects to them.
People want to believe things.
People want to believe in things, even if you like, like Scientology.
People deeply believe in Scientology.
And we know it was written by a science fiction author who was a bad science fiction author.
L. Ron Hubbard wrote some terrible books.
Like that guy would just bang books out.
He never rewrote shit.
Everything was a first draft.
He wrote more fiction than any human being that's ever lived.
And he also wrote Scientology.
And people believe in it.
But I do believe people.
I think people, like you say, people want to, if your life is fucked up, whatever, they want to be able to say, okay, this is my Savior.
If I believe in this, it's going to get me on the right track.
100%.
And then with that, with these, like Druski just did a skit that went viral, right?
And it was like he was making fun of the mega churches and everything.
But these churches, like, they give these people something to believe in, make them feel better, and they charge people.
Do you think that there should be a separation?
If I inspire you, if my writings or my speeches inspire you to want to do something and change your life and be more financially secure, do you think these people are entitled to like, okay, almost like agencies, if I get you to work or get you there, should you hit me off?
Or the mega churches, is it so wrong for me just to pour all their money into them?
Or are they giving these people something to believe in?
If that's the case, do I supposed to get a piece of that?
I think they're preying on people's need to believe in things.
And I think they're very predatory.
And I think that's why they're flying private jets and driving Rolls-Royces and living in mega mansions on giant ranches.
And they're doing it all off of donations of people that are barely getting by.
That's a lot of it.
You know, I think it's a scam that's legal.
I think if we were a just and righteous society, it wouldn't be legal.
Right.
I mean, you're taking advantage of people when they need something to believe in and you're asking for all their money.
Like, I remember I was watching this guy on TV once, like, televangelists are the worst.
And this guy was saying that if you are broke, you should borrow money to donate it to the church and it will be paid back to you tenfold.
That God will pay you back tenfold.
And then he had all these examples of people that did it and they would call in and say, I was $1,000 in debt and this and that, but I borrowed $100 and I donated it to you.
And now all of a sudden I drive a Rolls-Royce and it's all horseshit.
But those are all desperate, desperate people.
Desperate people.
Those are the same people that I'm going to spend $30 on a lottery every day for like fucking 50 years and don't know how much that's another scam.
That's another scam.
Not only is that a scam, here's the scam about the lottery.
Not only does, like say if everyone pumps money into the lottery, say you buy $100 worth of tickets and Jamie buys $100 worth of tickets and I buy $100.
So there's $300 in the lottery.
There's not even $300 available to pay.
If you win.
And then if you win, you don't get all the money.
You get the money over a long period of time.
It's given options.
Right, right, right.
But if you take the second option, it's a significantly like here's a good example of it.
Speaking of the Epstein files.
What do you mean speaking of the company Zorro Trust?
I didn't like that transition.
You look me right in my eyes and say, speaking of the Epstein.
Well, Epstein, we were talking about it before the podcast.
No, Epstein came to see you.
No, Epstein did not fucking come to see you.
They came to see me.
They loved your show.
Yo.
He was the number one fan.
First of all, I never.
You don't know.
Look, they came to West Palm improv because you're a famous comedian and you were playing in the town where he lived.
So what are you saying?
Nothing.
But what I'm saying is that what I'm saying is Epstein won the lottery.
His company, Zorro Trust, won an $80 million lottery.
And then they took the payoff.
And the payoff was only $30 million.
What do you mean when you say win?
His company bought a ticket for the lottery.
Yes, Zorro Trust, which is his company.
They won the lottery, which is very suspicious.
Not only that, he won the lottery right after he was arrested and went to jail for fucking kids or having sex or whatever he was arrested for.
Sexual hand jobs, whatever it was.
So there's nothing wrong with that.
No, but when they're underage girls, probably not.
Oh, I didn't know that.
So then when he went and got the lottery money, the company took the payoff.
The payoff out of an $80 million payment, the $80 million jackpot, was only $30 million.
So if you want the money, you take $30.
So not only did they take $50 out of the 80, but then you think about how many people spent money buying lottery tickets is way more than $80 million.
So they make money off of that, and then they make money off of the fact that you want the payoff instead of the, you know, the overall.
So they never could, it doesn't matter what the jackpot becomes, they never can lose.
They can't lose.
They're stealing money from people that are desperate.
It's legalized gambling where the house always wins.
Like, let's find that out.
Like, let's say, let's find an average jackpot of mega bucks and find out how much money actually goes into it, how much money people spend versus how much money the payout is.
So, when this, all lottos are state-regulated, right?
Right?
I don't know.
I don't know who regulates.
Okay, so they get, say, they get $100 million from people trying to win $1 billion.
It's because the state regulates, do they have to pay taxes to the government for the money they know?
That's the state.
The government owns it.
So it's whatever the not only that, you pay taxes on it.
So if the winner pays taxes.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
So say if you take that $30 million payout, you don't even get $30 million.
Then you have to pay taxes on that $30 million.
So they get money from that too.
So they can't fucking lose.
But for a person that's never barely seen $1,000 anywhere, anything with millionaire, they're going to be excited about and take it before they get it.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And over time, most people are not going to win.
So most people are dumping money into it.
There was a story of a young lady.
I don't know exactly what it was.
I think she won some type of lottery where they gave her two options.
She would get, I think it was like a payout of like two or three million right up front, or they give her, I think it was like $20,000 every month for as long as she lived.
Yeah, that's how they do it.
And she did this.
Well, people think that it's kind of crazy, but if you consider the fact that she was probably 20, 21, her life expectancy probably, she was white, so she probably lived to 132.
You know what I'm saying?
She looked like, that was a smart thing.
A lot of people would not understand that.
That was a smart thing.
I don't think it's for the rest of your life.
I think it's until it reaches that number.
I don't think they're going to give you money for the rest of your life.
Well, maybe I was reading the headline.
It was a different kind of lottery that I'm not aware of.
Maybe I think it was something as long as she lives.
That sounds crazy.
Yeah.
All right, here it is.
Typical mega millions jackpot run.
Total ticket revenue is usually several times the advertised jackpot.
But there's no single fixed average because sales vary enormously with the jackpot size.
Still, you can get a good ballpark.
So around 50% of ticket revenue goes into the overall prize pool.
So the government makes 50% right off the bat.
So if it's $100 million payout, they already made $100 million.
So that's $200 million is what they made.
They throw in $100 million for everybody.
Of that prize pool, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters is allocated to the jackpot with the rest funding lower tier prizes.
So that means even if there's $200 million out of the $100 million, only two-thirds of it goes into the big jackpot.
And that means the jackpot is typically in the order of one-third of total ticket sales that run.
And then out of that one-third, so say if it's $100 million, or with the Epstein case, it was $80 million.
He took the payout, which was $30 million.
So they make $50 on top of that.
And then on top of that, you pay taxes on that 30.
It's a crazy situation.
What do they do with the money?
Whatever the fuck they want.
I think they probably.
I think in certain neighborhoods, I think they probably pump a certain amount of winning tickets into a neighborhood just to get you addicted to keep going in there and spend your money.
Well, it's supposed to be random.
You know, I don't know how much oversight.
Look, if a guy like Jeffrey Epstein can win, I don't know how much oversight is it.
I know back in Boston when I lived there, Whitey Bolger won.
See if this is true.
I think he won the lotto twice, which is crazy.
Whitey Bulger, who was that?
That's something that's not.
Whitey Bulger was a South Boston mob boss in the 1980s when I lived there, the 1980s and 90s.
A mob boss?
Yeah, he was a dangerous, dangerous guy.
He was the guy that that movie that Leonardo DiCaprio starred in with Jack Nicholson.
What was that movie, Jamie?
Remember that movie that was based on Whitey Bulger?
The Departed?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Departed, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
That was based on Whitey Bulger.
He was a gangster?
Oh, yeah.
Terrifying gangster.
Yeah.
What was his demise?
He was actually a fucking FBI informant.
Not only was he a gangster, he was working with the FBI and they were letting him get away with shit because he was throwing other people under the bus.
I think there's a different, I mean.
They wound up catching him in Santa Monica.
Well, I found that.
Hunting Whitey.
About that Whitey Bulger won the Mass Millions lottery about that time.
Yeah.
Yeah, he won the fucking lottery, man.
So this is what it says here.
What does it say?
I think it was more of a scheme than they actually won, but it's always taking money.
That's probably a way to launder money.
Yeah.
Oh, 100%.
It's a way to launder money.
So the way it would work was, like, say if you lived in the community and you won the lottery ticket, maybe they would give you money for your lottery ticket and then he would get it.
And that way, it would show that this is where he got his income from.
Like, these guys would all own businesses.
Right.
But the reason why they would own businesses is so they could show why they drive a Cadillac, why they have a mansion, why they have this, because they have legitimate businesses.
But really, these businesses were scams.
My father convinced my family that he was a real estate agent for years and come to find out he was a heroin kingpin in D.C. for years.
All we needed was an excuse.
He's selling real estate, all right?
That's hilarious.
So he ordered the real winner to sign the ticket over with Whitey and two associates paying $2.3 million in cash for 50% of the winnings.
Bulger himself paid Michael Linsky $700,000.
Although Linsky lost money in the deal, he really had no choice.
It came down to selling the ticket or risking his life.
Yeah, so that's how it usually works.
So he was a snitch.
Whitey was a snitch.
Yeah.
He was a snitch and he got caught in Santa Monica.
A snitch or a whistleblower.
There is a difference.
No, he was a snitch.
Whistleblowers are people that snitch on people in higher profile positions like corporate America.
But what I'm finding out.
No, he wasn't a whistleblower.
He was an actual snitch because he was turning other people in.
Dude, he was a kingpin.
Is this true?
And I don't want to make everything about race.
Is that phrase snitches, get snitches, more prevalent in the white community or the black community or it's across the board?
I think it's across the board, isn't it?
Like the black community is famous for keeping their mouth shut when someone gets shot or when someone does something, like when cops come and question.
I don't know that's the truth anymore because what I'm.
Not anymore.
But that was the thing with the mafia, too.
Yeah.
The mob would never rat out.
Guys would just go to jail.
I'm interested now because now I see, like, especially in my community, so many people like, rat, I got the paperwork and everything.
And now it feels like that model of being loyal is dead.
Like people now getting caught with shit.
And the minute they get caught, they snitch on everybody.
Right.
And there's no repercussions when they come home.
There's no repercussions.
I don't see that as much.
I see so many people that are like, they're saying whatever the fuck they want to do, whatever.
And they still out here just living their lives normal like nothing fucking happened.
Well, with the mob, it was always like if you ratted on the mob, you were a dead man.
You were a dead man.
Your family was probably dead.
They burned your house down.
And people kept their mouth shut because of that.
And so guys would go to jail all the time and never open their mouth and they would be rewarded when they would get out.
And they'd have a party for him, celebrate.
That's in good fellas.
You kept your mouth shut.
He never said nothing.
That was the whole thing.
But the whole thing, I used to live.
That changed, though, like with John Gotti.
Like the government.
No, Sammy the Bull.
Sammy the Bull.
And it wasn't just them.
Like, everyone was snitching on everybody.
It's like they got these guys.
And, you know, we had Donnie Brasco in the studio.
From that Bronx.
Johnny Depp movie.
It was called Donnie Brasco.
Okay.
I'm not confused that with him.
What's his real Donny Brasco's real name?
Joe.
I'm not confused.
Bronx Tale.
That's not Bronx.
Joe Pistone.
Joe Pistone.
That's nothing to do with Bronx Tale, right?
No.
Different story.
That's a different story.
Yeah.
So Donnie Brasco was the guy who was an agent and he pretended to be a mob guy.
And he got in with the mob and was with them for like seven years, did all kinds of shit with the mob and then sold everybody out and they all went under.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm just so the culture, everything is, there used to be a phrase snitches get stitches.
Now, I don't know if this just everywhere, but everywhere I go, it's like the most interesting thing now that's selling on any platform, especially social media, is beef.
And I don't understand why people gravitate toward negativity more than anything.
That's normal.
Why?
But you know what?
It's interesting.
Your platform is not known for that.
No.
Your platform, but I go to these other platforms and I don't know.
I think these guys, people, they just sit back and it's like, okay, what can I say to make people upset, get them riled up, and then I take advantage of the engagement that they do.
They're in a different game than me.
All right.
Their game is trying to get engagement.
My game is talking to people that are.
But maybe that doesn't that become, I don't want to be triggered or anything, but doesn't that become destructive after a while?
100%.
And do you have you noticed, especially, I'll put it like this, especially with comedians with podcasts.
It used to be a time where, like you say, a person would go on a podcast because it was interesting.
They told funny stories or they was good at their craft or whatever.
But now it feels like all these platforms, and I don't know that's just in my community, when I say that, black people, it's like the only way I can find myself interesting if I talk shit about people.
And motherfuckers are going away from being funny when you get interviewed.
Like every fucking podcast I turn on now, it's somebody, I'm exposed this person.
I'm going to tell this about what you didn't know.
And the one thing they're not doing, especially as a stand-up comedian, motherfuckers don't give a fuck about being funny no more.
Podcasting's New Dynamic00:05:42
Are those days over?
No, no, no, no.
Those people that do that are almost always not very talented.
Almost always.
The only exception is that.
So who they're fooling?
The only exception to that is Kat.
And I think what Kat was doing was different because what Kat was doing was exposing what he thought was snakes and liars.
Okay.
It's a different thing.
Okay, okay.
Okay.
This is my question.
Okay.
Okay.
This is my question.
Okay.
This is my question.
Peter can take it.
Okay.
Okay.
I want to say this.
This is what I'm saying, Joe.
What are you saying?
Coming from this place, I'm like this.
No disrespect or whatever to Kat, but like who asked you?
Shannon Sharp did.
When he did that podcast.
Shannon Sharp might have asked one question.
But Shannon Sharp likes that.
Like that in his relationship.
He likes a lot of that.
His people, they find questions.
He's got a sheet of paper.
But Joe, what do you do with those joke?
What do you do with those truths?
What do you do with talking about I watched, this is a horrible impression.
I sat there in the parking lot and I watched people go up at the Diddy's house and they came down and they were standing up.
I'm trying to figure out what the fuck do you get out of that?
What is the result of that?
You expose these people to say what?
Hollywood is never going to fucking change.
You know what changes?
Like what you do.
I left fucking Hollywood.
Hollywood is not going to change.
And I'm not saying I went to a Diddy party.
First off, I was never invited.
There's a chance I would accept the invitation with rules, you know?
Right.
But what is the purpose of exposing something that you don't think most people are exposing.
What most people are doing with their being negative is they are jealous and they are below the person to talk shit about.
Like whenever I see someone that's talking about Kat was jealous about, you don't think you say that and you use Cat Williams as an example.
So when you said they're jealous.
So first of all, when Cat did it, it was very funny.
It was very funny.
Kat's a very funny guy.
Very funny.
And when he was doing it, I think he was also being very funny while he was doing it, which is different.
Well, you have to put an LOL on the end of it because people might not understand his humor.
Because this is a connection people have.
This is what they said.
The connection they have with Kat, it's like, this is what they say.
They ride with him.
They say, where is the lie?
Where is the lie and all this stuff?
But I'm just trying to understand what is the purpose of exposing all this stuff.
What do we do with this information?
What do we do with the information that Diddy liked to have fucking freak parties with baby all this?
What the fuck do we do with all this information?
Well, Diddy's in jail right now, so they did that with the information.
Well, Diddy's in jail for doing something that a lot of people— Let me tell you something, Joe.
Tell me something.
I was riding with Diddy for once.
I liked the music he did or anything.
I don't know Diddy like that.
But when I first read the definition of sex trafficking, right?
I'm sure you're a first person.
You're smart.
The definition of sex trafficking, to transport a woman across state lines with the intent to have sexual intercourse with her.
Right.
When I heard that.
When you're paying them, it's trafficking as.
No, that's not.
Actually, my.
This is my, Jamie, you can pull this up.
Wait a minute.
So if you are dating a girl and she lives in Minnesota and you live in California and you fly her to California and I'm thinking about I don't think that's true.
I don't think that's true at all.
I think that's just flying a girl in that you're having a relationship with the streets.
They call it fluid out.
Fluid out.
Yeah, but that's normal.
Everybody does that.
But that's the definition.
Commercial sex act.
Yeah, commercial.
Commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion.
Huh?
Well, coercion's crazy.
Because coercion is like, please, I'll buy you a bag.
That's sex trafficking.
So, like, if a girl, right, if you're, if you.
If there's a girl, she's like, what are you going to do for me?
Like, you know those shoes you want?
I got those shoes for you.
Let's go shopping.
Like, that's kind of sex trafficking if that's coercion for money.
Like, if a girl's thinking about coming out to visit you and then you go, listen, listen, listen.
What are you looking for?
What do you want to buy?
I got money.
Come on, let's go shopping.
That kind of would fall into that category.
But look, we're getting off topic.
Let's go back to the topic originally in hand.
The reason why these curvatures are negative.
I need to know.
No, no, no, no.
You're not going to get in trouble for sex trafficking.
Listen, that's all horseshit.
But the reason why these comedians are doing it is because they're never bigger than the comedians they're shitting on.
Never.
1,000%.
1,000%.
Because you know what it is, Joe?
And they're never good.
You know what it is too, Joe?
Is that deep down inside, they want to be that person?
100%.
Or they want to be in the position that person's in is a better way of putting it.
I'll use this.
I'll tell you this story.
I realize that, not to say names, but it's so many people that could be guilty of it.
And this is the thing that I hear that understands me, that disturbs me, is that, you know, a lot of these people that bitch the most, they, at some point in their career, they were favored by Hollywood.
Yes.
At some point in their career, they had these opportunities.
At some point in their career, guess what?
They had the agencies.
They had the agents.
And something happened in their career where they fell out of favor for whatever you want to call that it.
Whatever you want to call that.
For whatever, maybe something they did.
Favored But Now Criticizing00:04:24
Agency didn't like them too much.
And now everything that they wrote on, everything they wanted to do, now it's all that's fucked up.
And the only way you get this opportunity because it had to be sexual favors and all that type of shit.
And where did the fuck you draw the line?
But it's not even sexual.
I think they criticize the work of the other person.
That person ate shit.
That person scared.
Yo, there's.
Here's the thing.
There was.
Come on.
You get this all the time because you ride with Dave and Dave's number one.
Right.
So this is what I get.
You always get this label, even though you're a great comic, you get this label being a coattail rider.
Right.
And guess what?
Everybody don't.
This is what I try to explain to people, Joe.
Everybody does not have to be Batman.
I don't have a problem with being Robin.
You know why?
Because Robin got the same amount of screen time as Batman.
And the reason why I say, this is what I get, and I'm telling you this, Joe.
I don't know if this gum is kicking in.
This is what fucks me up, Joe.
This is what fucks me up.
And I'll tell you an example.
I'm going to give you an example.
Don't give me an example.
No, I'm going to tell you.
Oh, you're pulling out your phone.
I'm going to tell you why.
Because your fucking shirt is fucking triggering me, right?
Kill Tony?
I mean, the greatest comedy show of all time in the history of the known universe.
I know that, but there's a lot of lies involved.
Okay.
Listen.
This is what they say.
This is what they say.
Don't pay attention to me.
Listen.
Why are you doing that?
Yo, you told me.
What are you playing?
What things did the Kill Tony audience say about me?
Chappelle's butt plug is actually.
Oh, my God.
Yo, I got to deal with this shit.
What is so hard?
No.
Well, you got to stop paying attention to it.
It's so hard.
Do you know what would happen to me if I paid attention to all the haters that I have?
Yeah.
I would go crazy.
You would.
Do you think that you paid attention to those haters?
Now you're in a position where now you have so many reasons to say, fuck them.
Do you feel like you had that same belief when you was first starting this?
Did you engage them then?
Well, I engaged online with a lot of people in the early days because I didn't understand what you're doing is you're engaging with people that don't have happy lives.
Right.
And they're negative.
And there's some criticisms that are good for you because some criticisms make you evaluate what you're doing and say, okay, well, what I need to do is be undeniable so these critics mean nothing to me because you can't, I'm killing.
The audience loves me.
I'm selling out everywhere.
I'm doing great on stage.
You can't pay attention.
You know what?
I will say this.
I hear you, Joe.
I tried that with them motherfuckers on your shirt.
You had that show.
You had one bad show.
I never had.
You had a bad show.
You had a bad show.
Please don't do this to me.
You did.
You had that one bad show where you went back before.
You fucking have a fucking shit.
Did you walk off the show?
Get it, man.
Get the fuck down.
That's it.
I shit the fuck down.
I can walk off the show.
You want me to play it back?
Please don't do this.
You're a little drunk.
Please don't do it.
Who's the comic?
Who's the comic?
I don't know his name.
We don't need to bring him.
Whoever that dude is.
Yo, see, now you're doing this.
You know what you're doing.
You're being a provocatory on me.
You're provoking me because we broke this shit down.
And I don't want to keep going.
I wasn't thinking this when I was wearing this shirt.
I'll change the shirt.
No, it's okay.
Put something in the drawing shirt.
I'll wear a Benny the Jet shirt.
Let's break it down, Joe.
Oh, we don't have to.
If we have to, you started this shit.
All right.
Thank you.
I'm going to change my shirt right now.
It's like I didn't have a bad show.
You definitely didn't have a great show, right?
When you walk off, it's not good.
Jesus Christ, God talked.
I feel like Carrie.
They're all going to laugh at me.
They're going to laugh at me.
It wasn't this for the last fucking time, Joe.
For the last fucking time.
And this is what's so fucking evil about this situation that some people call it a bad show.
I never wanted to do the show.
But you came back on, you had a good show, right?
I want to go back.
Let's rewind.
All right?
And this is, you were part of it.
Hey, look, I changed my shirt.
No more triggers.
Shout out to Benny the Jet.
Okay, I feel a lot better now.
Last Time I Want To Talk About It00:03:18
Oh, boy.
I need another piece of gum.
I'm going to say this.
Say what it's worth.
First off, I did not want the first time I did it here in Austin.
Right?
I didn't want to do the show.
Okay.
And the reason why I didn't want to do the show, Joe, now you're not even paying attention to this.
Do you want a cigar?
Yeah, I'll take a cigar.
I didn't want to do the show, and I'll tell you why.
Because the streets say I'm sensitive.
You are a little sensitive.
Can I not have your opinion and just listen to me, please?
They know I'm sensitive.
It was during the pandemic, Joe.
You remember, people would still come to do your podcast because they know the benefits of it and you had your thing doing.
They would come to your podcast and then they would fucking leave because they didn't want to catch COVID and then they would leave Tony stranded and he had no good guests.
I was here, right?
This one, when I'm talking about the time when Tony had a black band.
He still has a black band.
All black.
There's a couple black people on there now.
Me into it.
I think it's mostly black.
Right?
Okay.
I want to tell a story.
This is the last time I want to talk about it.
Deep madness.
I mean, this is the last time, Joe.
I want to tell a story.
Drummer guitar player or not.
What's that?
Mike.
I mean, it's like Horms.
A lot of them are black.
Definitely.
Doesn't matter.
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Look at the old, when it was all not high production and all that type of shit.
Tony is like, it's hard for me to get a guess.
Would you stay?
And this is when you fucked me up the last time you wasn't playing fair.
Yes, you did.
I wasn't playing fair?
No, I'm telling you when you weren't playing fair.
When was I not playing fair?
Can I talk?
Please.
All I want to do.
I don't know if I got to raise my hand.
I just want to be able to speak.
It is my month.
It's my fucking month.
So Tony said, would you stay?
Come on.
I was like, you know.
And I stayed, right?
Okay.
And I stayed, and I stayed.
I was on his show for two and a half hours.
Redman's Comeback Challenge00:04:15
I told him, this is where it gets all crazy.
I told him I had something I was supposed to do later.
There was another black comic that was on his show.
He started roasting me.
I had no problem with that.
I had no problem with him roasting me, but I felt fucked up because it was only me, him.
And I was trying to give this guy some sound advice.
But the only way he thought he was going to get off, by fuck with me.
So I was like, yo, why you fuck with me?
We on this fucking same team.
What they did was, look at the fucking video.
Okay.
You see, I want you to slow it down.
Slow it down.
Slow the video down.
It's like a Zapruder film.
It's a background.
You got to left.
You're going to let me get my thought, Joe.
Sorry.
It's so easy for me to get distracted.
Just hang on.
So if you look at this video, you see him saying something to me.
And then when I leave, it's two different fucking comics on the fucking stage.
It's a dude that I was roasting.
And then they showed me the exit.
And then these kill Tony bitch ass motherfuckers.
And I'm telling you, I'll get past it.
They may, oh, Donnell walked off.
I didn't walk off.
I had some other shit to do.
And then the last episode, you and your boy, Tony, he caught here, and Tony doubled down on it.
And he said, no, that's not what happened.
Of course, them comic motherfuckers, the ones that be putting cringe on it, they rolled with it.
Okay.
Then I came back.
Came back.
He had an amazing show.
Tony said it was one of the best shows he's ever seen.
You know why it was amazing?
Because you were ready.
I'm amazing.
You are amazing, but also you wanted to get it back.
Right.
I didn't have, you know what?
This is what Redman said to me.
Red Band, Red Man.
Whatever the fuck his name is.
He changed too.
I'm going to tell you about him.
He was in the Wu-Tang.
And let me tell you.
I'm going to tell you the difference between him, and I'm going to tell you the similarities between him and Jamie a little later on, right?
Okay.
How they're divas now.
And I know you said.
Jamie?
My Jamie's a diva?
Yes, he has a false memory of someone already.
Just let him go.
Jamie was Jamie.
That's the last thing from a fucking hair joke.
I will defend Jamie to the bitter end.
Yo, maybe you don't know him.
I don't know Jamie.
Jamie?
Yo, let me tell you, this is Jamie.
I know Jamie better than his mom.
I know.
But this is the Jamie I saw.
Killed Tony after.
Sit down.
You're not on camera.
Okay, so it's also Saturday night.
Okay.
He had a leather jacket on.
Don't have a leather jacket.
Jamie had a leather jacket.
He didn't call it a leather jacket.
Whatever it was.
You own a leather jacket?
No, he didn't.
Wait, wait, wait.
Wait.
The collar was.
He's having a false memory.
Joe's collar was slipped up.
Like dice.
And then he had the shirt.
You might have had Timmy no brakes because he was.
He had to no brakes in the middle.
He had the shirt open to this button right here.
Oh, right.
Gold chains.
And he was sitting there.
I don't know what type of moose he was.
Jamie had gold chains, boots on his hair.
Ponytail was popping.
He had some type of moose or something, right?
And then he was just looking.
And I was like, what's up, Jamie?
He was like, he had his hands in his pocket.
It was giving, as they say, it was giving Fonzie attitude.
I knew.
I knew that it changed.
But this is what Redman, Red Man, whatever the man he was.
Red Band.
Red Man.
He said, after the show, he said, that must have been the most epic comeback and kill Tony history.
I was like, well, the second episode was.
You came back, fools.
You know what you're doing?
I don't know.
It was great.
I'm trying to use the term.
I don't think this past wrestler, but you fucking with my mentor.
No, I'm telling you, you're a great comic and you're funny as fuck and it was amazing.
That's what you said.
The second episode was great.
This is the point I'm making of what you're doing.
Right.
The first episode was great.
It was Dr. It was Dr. Williams.
He was doctor.
But then, here's the thing.
They said, Red Man, Red Band, he said, he said, that was the greatest comeback.
I was like, it wasn't a comeback.
You're editing what it was.
And this is what I did.
You're editing.
This is what I did.
And I'm not saying I think about the Kill Tony audience like that, but I thought about him.
This is what I said.
I was like, this is what I want.
Like you say, I'm a great comment.
I know what I do.
I say, you know what?
I don't want to give these motherfuckers an opportunity to be able to fuck with me.
Keep Kill Performer00:05:05
So I did, before I went that last, I said, okay, what did you do last time that you're going to do different for they want to say that?
I was like, the last one, you had some drinks.
Well, I wasn't able to do anything about that because I had some more drinks.
But I was like, I tried to address what their concerns were, right?
Which with them, it's not going to make a difference because I know that last episode, this is what I didn't understand about Kill Tony.
I didn't understand the formula.
I don't watch it like that.
First time I ever did it, I was interrupting the one minute part.
You know what I mean?
Oh, okay.
And Tony told me, the first time I did it, he said, D, only one rule.
He said, let them talk for a minute.
I said, Tony, why you have this me on this show?
You know I'm going to break the rules.
He knew that, right?
But then after I, I was like, I understood how important it was to let those comics get that minute.
Right.
So when I did it a second time with Rob Schneider, I didn't interrupt.
Sometimes my criticism could have been too hard.
I was trying to be more supportive than anything.
If you watched the last one I did, I had nothing bad to say about people in a harsh way.
Certain people I knew was up there just because it was gimmick.
And there were certain people I was like, oh man, they've really got talent.
Like this one lady, she was an older woman.
I think she's a regular there, right?
I don't know what she knows what she was.
But I told her, I said, you know, it's so awesome.
I said, when I watch you perform, I see passion.
I see somebody that's going into a different career later in life, which is the hardest thing to do.
I made those points.
And I wasn't trying to be an asshole.
And even I got caught up in one and they ran with this shit.
And it's a song that there was one of the acts by the name of Juanita.
Juanita is a gender.
What is it when you...
Transgender?
Yeah, you have a dick, but you're a girl still.
Yeah.
Yeah, transgender, right?
So she came up with this song and she did the song, We Will Praise You, Praise You.
And I had a couple drinks, right?
And I said, and I was thinking like...
Shit, you don't have to have bums on.
What?
What, Jamie?
I just started playing.
I'm sorry.
What's up?
Oh, you gearing up for that shit, huh?
You put your headphones on.
No, listen.
Put your headphones on.
Oh, God.
Okay, ho, ho. Go, ho, ho. Ho, ho, ho. Go.
Go ahead.
Wait a minute.
That's Juanita's version?
That's the rig.
Okay.
Okay.
Do you got Juanita's version?
Oh, I can find it.
So this is what happened, Joe.
So I had a couple two, two, three, four, five Tito's in.
And I'm only looking at the artist with my peripheral.
I'm not staring nobody down and like looking at them through the pupils or whatever.
So the performer, I'm going to say that because I don't want to get anybody upset.
The performer was like, here we go.
All of them talked to solo.
Okay.
Now look how I'm not paying attention.
Right?
You're looking right at her.
Shut the fuck up.
Okay.
Listen.
All right, we'll see.
So it was very strange when in 2008.
Okay.
Oh, they had to cut it out too, I think.
Probably the song.
That's the gayest thing I've ever done.
And I do anal.
Believe it or not.
Juanita.
Welcome back to the show.
Do y'all do a remix of that song for any black guy watching her right now?
Yeah.
We will, we will.
Fuck you.
Probably true.
Until you find out she has a dick, Donnell.
That is a true.
Keep it going.
Don't keep it going.
This is amazing.
That's how it happens, ladies and gentlemen.
They can't tell.
No, no, no.
Come back.
No.
The brothers.
The brothers can't tell.
Brothers can't, they will fuck you They never, the last place I was trying to be nice Donnell, the last fucking.
Keep it going.
Keep it going because it's hilarious.
Whereas white guys, no.
That's the first place the white guys look.
Charlemagne's going to find that clip.
We will, we will.
Fuck you.
You are fucked, Donnell.
Get word from the streets.
Get word from the street.
I'm sure this happened.
I don't want to get banned like Dave Sappelle, nigga.
Donnell, I'm sure this happened before in Korea.
I'm sure in Korea as an 18-year-old boy, this is a memory coming back to you.
Kid Rock's Dope Video00:15:51
Oh, my God.
That's usually how black guys react.
It's pretty.
Juanita, have you been with a black man before?
Keep it going.
Keep it going.
Getting your fire.
Okay.
Are you just saying that so that he doesn't find you and kill you?
No, it's raised right.
I'm just kidding.
I mean, what's the job?
Oh, shit.
Now I'm offended.
No, I've been with one.
He was half.
Okay.
He was half.
Half a black.
Okay.
My career's over, nigga!
Come on, that was funny.
No, wait a minute.
It was funny.
And I didn't take, the funny thing about it was, I did have a couple of drinks, right?
People like, how did you not know?
Like, I live in the Midwest.
And what I really thought, I know of women that look just like Juanita.
Sure.
That in the face, it's kind of like sketchy, like a dollar general one-to-two.
And I wasn't offended, but it just, it just caught me off guard.
But going back to what I was saying about the Kill Tony thing, and this is another thing.
People said, well, Donnell, you got upset because Rob Schneider was roasting or whatever.
First off, there was the first time Rob Schneider was on the show, right?
He didn't really know too much about the Kill Tony platform.
I knew a little more than he did.
And at the beginning, he was kind of cold, if you want to say.
Not cold, like not funny, but he just wasn't warmed up to the flow.
And then I started saying things.
I was alley-ooping him, right?
Basically, people say what they want.
I helped get him comfortable in the show, and then he started crushing, right?
He started crushing.
And then we did, anybody tell you that episode was amazing, right?
It was amazing.
But this is the thing, this is what that play, that platform is not a place for you to tell how you really feel about somebody, right?
And I owe Tony an apology, and I'll tell you why.
When Tony did the RN Republic National Convention, whatever, remember when he did the roasting?
Yes.
For that, it was a very, very testy time.
You know, politics, everybody says you shouldn't do this and everything.
I told him not to do it.
You told him not to do the show the Republican Party thing.
Here's the thing.
This is what, just for the people that's listening, this is what happened at the end of that Kill Tony with me and Rob Schneider.
All I wanted to do, I had the question on, where do you draw the line?
Do you draw a line of what people think, how you're supposed to respond to something, or do you loyal?
Are you loyal to somebody on how they treat you and how they are as a friend to you?
And Tony wanted me to do that show.
And anytime I've called Tony, he's pick up the phone.
Vice versa.
We've been in for each other.
My publicist, I don't know if this is a good idea right now, too, because what you think is a nice gesture you want to do the show, people are going to act like it's a political stand.
I didn't want that, right?
So I had to.
You can't listen to publicists.
This is what I learned now, Joe.
You know what I'm saying?
That was my inexperience, whatever.
And something I kept calling him.
I was like, what if I do this?
Because I wanted to be reconnected with him, whatever.
And I told Tony, he was hot in a good way, in a positive way.
I felt so bad.
I caught him.
I said, man, I really want to do the show, but I think people are going to take it the wrong way now, right?
And this with me, I felt bad about it.
I stood up at your condo.
I was on the balcony, bruh.
And I watched motherfuckers going to the show.
I felt bad about it.
I didn't do it.
And the only thing I wanted to do at the end of that Kill Tony episode was to apologize to him and say, you know, as a friend, I probably wasn't there.
And he understood, even though I was like, he's never going to let me do the show again.
He said, I'd love to have you there.
The only issue I had with Rob Schneider, in that moment, he didn't have the sense of me trying to say something serious, right?
And he was getting a laugh off this one joke, and it was at my expense.
You know, when I had this moment, I was talking about friendship and everything.
Rob kept on with this fucking corny joke, and I didn't want to flip out.
And then people took that as like, oh, yeah, Rob roasted him.
The fuck out of here.
I was trying to talk about, and I had this issue.
You might have the same issue.
Some people know people a certain way, you know them differently.
And I use an example, and I'm going to get shitted on for saying this or whatever.
Like, oh, how could you say that?
I, um, you got to stop worrying about what other people think.
I can't do it.
I can't do it.
You got to stop worrying about what other people think.
This is the conflict.
You know how you feel.
Just be yourself.
I'll just say this: Kid Rock.
Kid Rock, right?
You say that name for some people in certain places, oh, fuck him or whatever, right?
I met Kid Rock some years ago when we were doing the Cornfield shows in Yellow Springs.
And I tell people something, and we talked about this earlier.
Some people are provocateurs.
I really believe Kid Rock doesn't believe half the shit he says, but I think that he knows it's going to move the Dow is what's going to make him be in the headlines with people like, oh, shit.
He's going to stick to that.
Well, we did that show in Nashville.
Remember, we hung out with him, went to his house?
Yeah, exactly.
And with that, even when he came to Cornfield at that time, this was the point where he said some crazy shit out of his mouth.
Nobody wanted to be around him or anything, right?
They was like, oh, ba-ba-ba-ba.
Right.
Right.
You know, when I do, I do this thing called, I do river runs in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
And for some reason, I take people down the river and it's like a peace thing.
Like, you and nature.
Got a photo.
You're right outside the door.
I know.
I asked for that photo here, too.
You're right outside the river.
I love that.
So now, if you look at that photo, you'll see the energy.
That's the vibe I was on.
And nobody wanted to get close to Kid Rock or anything, right?
And I remember as a kid how the black community accepted him in school.
I'm thinking about that shit.
We're riding down the river.
Kid is over on one kayak.
I'm on the other side.
We're smoking and joint.
And he looked at me, and I know he was sincere when he said it.
He said, Man, it feels like I just had 13 hours of anger management, right?
And I was like, okay, I'm not trying to be a therapist or anything, but that felt good.
Then at the end, we stopped.
He's flipping burgers and shit.
We got to know each other.
Kept in touch with each other.
And he was doing a comedy festival in Nashville, right?
He appreciated me as a comedian.
He said, yo, D, I'm doing this.
I was like one of the first people he called, right?
He said, you want to do it?
I was like, why not?
Then I thought about it.
I was like, again, what you're saying, I was like, what people are going to think?
Seven comedians on the show.
I'm the only black guy.
I knew what I was walking into.
I knew it was going to be all MAGAs.
It was going to be a gay person.
It wasn't going to be a midget.
It wasn't going to be a lesbian.
It wasn't going to be anything but bona fide.
The real, real red, white, and blue flag motherfuckers.
But I said, Donnell, can you separate?
Can you go up here?
Can you perform and be entertaining?
Not shucking and jiving or none of that type of shit.
I went up there, last person, got a standing ovation, right?
At the end of the show, this is what people might not understand, and I'm not trying to defend him or anything.
At the end of the show, me and Kid Rock, in this case, I want to say Kid Rock wasn't backstage.
Bobby was, right?
And he said, man, he looked at me.
He said, man, I think we just brought this country back together.
Right?
And I said, well, don't separate it, motherfucker.
He said, okay, two weeks later, he do some other stupid shit.
When Trump got elected, I know people went to his page to see what his response was going to be.
Was he going to gloat?
We're like, fuck y'all, this is America.
He did this video, which I thought was so dope because it showed two sides of him.
It showed Kid Rock and it showed Bobby, right?
And then how they both responded to Donald Trump being elected.
The Kid Rock was the crotch-grabbing motherfucker.
Fuck you, right?
Then he came out.
You find this.
He came out as Bobby with shorts, just no American flags, baseball cap, fucking reading glasses, whatever.
And I thought it was dope.
The dialogue that he had with it, he played the victory.
He said, you know, you know, we did what he said, but this is not a time to gloat.
It's so much stuff that we need to do.
He said, all sides want to get to a certain place, but we have different ideas on how we're going to get there.
I thought that, for whatever people want to think, I thought that was showing another side.
And also, I told him, because I would talk to him off and on, I said, you know what song you should do?
You should do Nina Simone's song, Misunderstood.
Right?
Just sing that shit.
But I know he wouldn't never do that because the bass that really likes to support him might be like, oh, he's soft now.
The point I'm making, even though with Tony, with the situation, I consider Tony a good friend of mine for different reasons, right?
That's why I wanted to have that moment to say that.
But Rob Schneider, as much as they say I took away from moments on that show, he took away from that moment.
I wasn't trying to be a bitch.
I wasn't trying to be soft.
I wanted to say, I apologize because sometimes friendships got to be stronger than that.
And that's where I was with that.
And as much as I don't need the Kill Tony show, and this is what I always say about that show.
I said, there's not, that reminds me, Kill Tony reminds me of the Def Jam era, right?
And when I say that, there was a platform for undiscovered talent, people that you've never seen.
It's such a spectacle.
Like Def Jam, it was people that didn't have the skill set to fucking go headline, but they was being seen.
Same thing with Kill Tony.
You look at what's going on.
Is your phone on?
Is your phone on ding?
Shut up.
Shut up.
This is what I appreciate about this show.
For whoever likes it or whatever, it's a platform to get on.
I travel around the country.
It used to be, you remember back in the day, it was like, oh, I need to be on Letterman.
I need to be on Carson or whatever.
That is the, I got to get on Kill Tony.
100%.
And in some cases, it's some good and bad to that.
There's some people that was ready for it.
There's some people like, you know what?
You had two or three minutes worth of jokes.
You know what I'm saying?
You're not ready.
But it gave people some hope.
When I was standing at the hotel the other day, three people traveled across the country like with the hopes of that.
So I know how important that show is.
Is it the fan base?
I want them to be like, oh, I can't wait to see them.
But for me, I always, my whole career, Joe, I always wanted to be around the people, the places that they say the best comedians perform.
When I started, when I was in New York, I wanted to get past at the comedy cellar, not because I wanted to be a cellar dweller.
I didn't want to be the guy in the back fucking just every weekend, just sit back there telling War story.
I was like, if this is where the best comics perform, I want to be a part of that.
I want to be past that.
Because when I got past in the comedy cellar, it wasn't a lot of black comedians working in the cellar.
It was Greer Barnes.
It was Keith Robinson.
R.I.P., it was William Stevenson.
Patrice.
Patrice Dave Chappelle.
In fact, Barry Katz had a room, Boston Comedy Club, and it was Black Knight on Sundays, right?
Black comedians looked at me like they said, where are you going?
I was like, I got a spot at the cellar.
They're like, how the fuck did you get in the cellar?
The way I got into it was put the work in, I hung out, got a couple of recommendations, and when it's time for me to showcase, I did my thing.
But the minute I got past in the cellar, I didn't really care about working there all the time.
I just wanted to be validated as like, this is the spot.
Same thing.
I get it.
You know, same thing with the comedy store.
Same thing with what you're doing here.
It was that part of it.
I get it.
Greg Barnes, probably one of the most underappreciated talents in the country.
But you know what?
I've known that dude for 30 years.
He's a funny motherfucker, and he's been funny forever.
You know, it's so funny that you said underappreciated because, you know, when you know comedians that put the work in or whatever, it's a phrase that people use underrated, but you got to ask who rated it.
You didn't use those words.
You said underappreciated.
But he is.
I don't know.
Sometimes you got to ask yourself.
He's not underrated by comics.
He's underappreciated by audience members for whatever reason.
I think it's a social media thing.
I just think he doesn't have a big presence on social media for whatever reason.
He's a solid, solid fucking comic, though.
Always has been.
And a solid guy.
And a good dude.
But that's another thing.
This is the area that we're in right now.
And it's like, and you notice it's even more so now.
The most talented people aren't getting the shots if you don't know how to evolve.
Well, it's not even just that because like look at Dave Chappelle, not Dave Chappelle, excuse me, David Tell.
David Tell, I think, is one of the funniest dudes who's ever lived.
Ever.
Yeah.
Ever.
One of the best comics ever in the history of comedy.
And mostly does clubs and does like theaters and stuff like that.
He should be sold out arenas all across the country, but he does not promote himself.
He's not into social media.
But I don't even think a tale is other than specials.
I think a tale would be petrified.
Not that he couldn't do it.
Remember with the show he had, what was that?
The late night show.
That was before anybody was doing it.
Yeah.
The late night show, he go to bars and stuff like that.
Uh-huh.
Insomniac.
Yeah, Insomniac.
This is before everybody was doing it.
I don't think that some people, they like, I think he's always going to make millions of dollars touring or whatever.
But I think his comfort zone is like he's not a club act, but he's a club comic.
I think the best thing for him he ever wants to be is in front of 250 to 500 people.
Well, he's awesome than that, but he does, like, when Burt does arenas, he does arenas and he murders in arenas.
I think the real thing with him is that he's just focused on his craft only.
And the props that he gets from other comedians on podcasts and things along those lines is what really fuels his popularity.
And then when people go to see him, just word of mouth.
Do you think some people might be afraid of a certain level of fame that they don't want to have?
There is that.
Because I don't think he's that.
I just don't think he thinks about it.
I mean, he doesn't even have a phone.
Like, he carries a flip phone with him all the time.
He has an iPhone that he like stores away and sometimes he uses it.
But when you text him, he texts you on like, doot, Or you got to press forward.
You know what I'm saying?
You know what it is, right?
Well, he doesn't want to be distracted.
He's in the Epstein files.
Yo, he doesn't got to have him distracted.
You need to burn a phone.
If you're heavily in the Epstein files, no, I think.
He's only in the Epstein files because he was on a lineup that Epstein was going to go see at the cellar.
I think David Tale.
Louis J. Jones is on that too.
I like, I think David Tell is like, I think Dave Tell's ultimate happiness is being on stage.
Shut your fucking phone off, man.
Put that shit on silent.
Just put it on silent.
Do you know how to do that?
You don't know how to do that.
Disrespect me like that.
Put it on, do not disturb.
You know how to do it?
It's okay.
It's off.
It's off.
Okay, it keeps digging in your popular motherfucker.
I think some people, I think, my opinion, David Taylor, his comfort zone is fucking just being as incognito as he tries to be.
It's just like, oh, I came up with this.
I don't know anybody that turns over material.
It's certain comics.
You look at Joe and you're like, God damn, this motherfucker's constantly trying.
Yeah, always.
Like, when I work with Dave, he forced me to do that.
Deion Cole is another guy.
When I watch, Deion Cole does like at the Hollywood Improv, I think maybe three times a week.
He just has a Monday night and he just uses it as a workout, right?
Me, when I go into a spot, I'm trying to beat the fuck.
I'm trying to beat it up.
So sometimes I get distracted on what I'm really there for.
That's work out new material.
There's a different level where you just like, you know what?
I could deal with the silence.
I could deal with something not working.
And when I watch people like him, it's another comedian in L.A. by the name of Malik S that doesn't have all that notoriety like that.
But when I see him, I'm like, damn, every time I see this motherfucker, he's working on some new shit and has the same passion.
Kevin Hart's Grind00:12:18
Everybody doesn't have that.
That's why David Taylor will always give other comics something to like try to achieve because he's like, you ain't going to see him doing the same shit.
It's always a flip.
And that's what makes him who he is.
And that's why he gets so respected by so many people.
Well, he's only focused on his craft.
Whereas some people are really focused on social media and promotions.
And they have a guy that films him doing a bunch of wild things and edits with music.
I've never seen so many comedians have full-out production crews with them.
Right.
On an intro.
I know.
On stage.
They think that that's what they need.
You know, they think that's what they need to separate them.
And it does get them attention.
But what it takes away, it does draw some focus away from what you're trying to do, which is work on your shit and come up with new stuff.
Where Atel doesn't have any of that.
But with that said, it takes away, but then it also lets you know who the special people are.
Right now, fucking my goddamn guy that services my pool and shit say he's got a special coming out.
I don't know who doesn't have a special coming out.
And the thing about it is like, now, Joe, you know it.
Specials aren't, if you really look at it, specials aren't special anymore.
It's special.
It's a weird word, right?
Specials are a weird word.
I got a new special.
Like, no other art form calls it a special.
Like, if someone, like Taylor Swift, puts out a concert video, it's a video of her performance.
You know, a musician puts out a video.
It's that.
It's like for a comic, we got a weird word, special.
You know what special is now?
When you get excited about special, if you, people still do that, it's who's putting it out.
It's special people that do it.
It's special people that like Sebastian, he's doing it special.
You know what I'm saying?
Fucking Tom does a special.
It's special people where you know it's special.
And a lot of them now is just people that's doing 45 minutes worth of comedy.
No beginning, no middle, no end, no point of view.
You don't know anything about them.
It's just like the same way they do photo dumps.
It's just like joke dumps.
Right.
But I'll just say, and I'm not, you pay people to say Dave Chappelle's a butt player.
But one thing I could say, however, you look at Dave Chappelle's a what?
No, I'm Dave Chappelle's butt plug.
I'm going back to, that's what people, you know, they understand.
You got to stop listening to what other people say.
Joe, I'm segueing into a story.
Is it about Jamie wearing a Fonzie jacket?
Hey!
He's got him in all colors.
It's got him in all colors.
He's got a red, white, and blue one.
You know, and like people.
He took it off before the show.
People get so critical, but at a certain point, people evolve.
People that you know them a certain way, but then you're talking about a person who has a 35, 40-year career.
Like, people are like, well, this last special so-and-so did.
It wasn't that funny.
But how often, how long are you going to just be like rip roaring funny?
Some people have a position where when they talk, people listen.
And I look at, I use Dave as an example.
If you look at all his specials, 20 years from now, right?
You have a Netflix and Chill Day or whatever.
If you play all the special that Dave ever did, you would know exactly what was going on in the world at that time.
You know what I mean?
You know what's going on.
Some people put out singles.
They got one or two jokes.
Some people put out albums.
He's one of those people.
Sebastian is another one.
And you look at like, you see how his comedy evolved.
People get older.
They have different perspective on life.
And that's what you have to fucking accept him for.
But we don't do that.
And another thing, I don't know if this is prevalent in your community.
And when I say that, you community is a lot of people, but my community, man, it's just so much dumb beef.
And I've, it's only one white beef I've ever known about, and that's yours.
Mine?
Yes.
What do you mean?
The beef that you had with it.
I don't even know.
With Ben Sina?
Yeah, years ago.
Well, that was the same thing with Kat.
Like, some shit just has to be exposed.
That was a real problem, man.
You weren't around the store back then, but it was a real problem where he had that special or that show, rather, on Comedy Central after Dave left, which was basically doing his version of Dave's sketches.
And he was.
Do you think it was his version of Dave's sketches?
It was a lot of shit was.
Like the one when he dressed like the white guy and had white paint on his face and wore the white wig.
It was basically the same character that Dave was doing.
Yeah, but if you look at the history of sketch comedy, I don't think Dave was the first person to ever dressed himself up to look like right afterwards.
Right after the same slot.
Anything that came after Chappelle show, they would have compared.
Dave was saying it.
Yeah.
Dave never talked shit about nobody.
It was like, this motherfucker's doing my show.
Dave was saying it.
Dave doesn't talk shit about nobody.
Right.
It was, but that was only one of the problems.
The real problem was he would sit in the back room and watch open mic nights and take their shit.
Like they would flash the light when he was in the room so comics wouldn't do material.
They would start doing crowd work.
So why didn't he get exposed before that?
Why did it just come up?
Because nobody had the balls to do it.
And then he had to be.
Because he was famous at the time.
And he was doing.
And look, it cost me.
I got banned from the store.
I lost my agent.
And I was famous.
I was on Fear Factor.
I was rich.
I had a lot going for me where I could stick my neck out.
But you came back stronger.
I give another example, like the same situation with Dave in Comedy Central and shit.
As much as he went through that, he took a 12-year hiatus or whatever you wanted to do.
What Dave showed in that is that he's a real artist.
Dave just said, fuck it, I'm going to disappear for a while like a legend.
He just disappeared.
I remember when I was hearing stories about Dave doing shows where he would set up a speaker in Seattle in the park and just start doing stand-up.
And people are like, what the fuck?
And for no money, people would just show up and he would just do street performances.
But you know what was kind of where he got that from?
You've heard of a comedy.
I'm pretty sure of it.
Charlie Barnett.
100%.
Yeah, we played Charlie Barnett on the show.
I knew Charlie.
Charlie was like, if you ever thought you were funny or whatever, go.
This is what the art of only people I've ever known that got certain level of success with that, Charlie Barnett, Michael Collier, when he used to be in his beach.
Right.
But people don't understand how Charlie Barnett would like to go to a park, go to the center of Washington Square Park.
And get to gather around a bunch of people.
And you got it.
It's a certain technique.
Not only that, you got to hold their attention for one joke.
Right.
You got to get them involved, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
And you build this audience up, and then it's really for one joke.
A lot of people don't know that Charlie got Saturday Night Live, but he couldn't read.
Yeah, he couldn't.
And that's what opened up the door.
But he was so gangster, like when they wouldn't give him spots because, you know, he was probably a bit to deal with.
He would go to the Boston Comic Club and yell in there, Don't go in there.
I'm doing my show in five minutes.
The whole fucking club would come out.
That's how much power he had.
But then sometimes that we become victims of our own vices and everything and destroy us more than anything.
That's why when people talk shit about, like, they, oh, Kevin, Kevin Hart didn't get out the mud.
It's you got funny, but you know, funny isn't everything.
Okay, you're funny.
That's not, oh, so good that you got talent.
But more importantly, it's your work ethics.
And how do you take your guy-given talent and your passion and turn it into money?
You know, you're into music and everything.
You probably could name a million saxophonists or whatever that didn't get to do that you could be like, well, listen to this shit.
But for some reason, they didn't have the business part and all that together.
And I'm going back, I'm probably talking to Circle now, but this is what upsets me the most about my folks or whatever, these people that go on these platforms and talk shit about people.
There was a comedian that was talking shit about Martin Lawrence, right?
Well, I saw Martin Lawrence, and Martin Lawrence in the casino, he's really, it's not that funny.
I'm like this, motherfucker, he's Martin Lawrence.
Well, they didn't know him in the 90s.
No, no, this person, no, this person particularly, no.
If you just know Martin Lawrence, period, that's enough.
Richard Pride, before he passed away, when he was in the wheelchair, damn near rolled him out of the stage, sold out audiences.
I followed him for six weeks.
I followed him for six weeks at the comedy store when he was like that.
Certain people, Joe, I look at this business, are made people.
How dare you talk shit about this motherfucker?
That's a good way to put it.
He's a made man.
Another thing, Joe.
A legend.
You know, in this business, you can have a career, right?
But you have certain times where you just ruled.
You had three years.
Martin Lawrence, film star, movie star, comedy star.
He had one period of time for five or seven years when it was just Martin everywhere.
How dare you, as a person gets older, and whether he has a good, bad night or a bad night, how are you to judge?
And you ain't doing shit.
How are you to judge a motherfucker that when I was coming up, Joe, every fucking black comic in the business wanted an audition.
Everybody wanted to be hustle man.
Everybody wanted to just get two or three minutes on Martin's show because they knew that dude, that would do their career.
So you judge a motherfucker years down the road, right?
Where they basically, when Martin goes out, guess what?
Martin not doing no tours, saying I'm doing 45 minutes, whatever.
He's like, y'all want to see me?
Guess what?
Y'all going to see this young talent.
You're going to see this person.
I'm putting people on.
How dare you even have come out your fucking mouth and talk shit about this motherfucker?
How dare you talk shit about motherfuckers that talk shit about Kevin Hart?
How dare you talk shit about a motherfucker that was rocking with a dude, Nate Smith, R.I.P. passed away?
I remember when Kevin Hart was the one of the motherfuckers doing those comment cards.
All right, all right, I'm doing email lists.
One person, I remember when fucking Kevin Hart had fucking 20,000 people on Instagram.
No, on Twitter.
And at a radio, he was like, yo, radio says, yo, D, this is the problem.
I seen the hard work.
I see him not just come to fucking New York and do the black rooms.
I'm doing the black rooms.
I'm doing the white rooms.
I'm doing all of this shit.
How dare you?
I'll just say this, and I'll answer this.
It ain't no B for nothing.
Cat Williams said, this is what Cat Williams said about Kevin Hart.
I find it very strange that you just come from New York and then you have a TV show and a movie show.
And how does that happen?
You were in New York.
I'll tell you how it happens.
You're on the biggest showcase in comedy.
And you know what that is?
JFL.
Just for laughs.
Kevin Hart was a product of that.
Monique was a product of that.
Dave Chappelle was a product of that.
No, Kevin Hart wasn't pounding the streets in LA, but he happened to be on a showcase.
Back in the day, you do with JFL.
It was motherfuckers leaving there that probably had $500 in the bank, leaving with a quarter million dollar development deal just to do nothing.
That's the error it was.
So just because you weren't in LA doesn't mean you wasn't beating the pavement.
And I don't care.
In LA, you got LA and New York.
Nobody as a stand-up comic grinds as hard as a comic come from New York opposed to LA.
And the reason why, L.A. don't have that many stages.
LA don't have that many stages.
They used to tell you all the time, as a stand-up comic, if you're trying to be an actor, whatever, go to L.A. If you want to be a great stand-up comic, bang it out in New York.
And this was the rule back in the day, Joe.
Let Hollywood call you.
You just don't go to LA to sleep on somebody's couch.
Some people had that story, but it was like you grind.
And back then.
Everybody's got their own path, Darn.
You can do whatever the fuck you want.
That's just work on your act.
That's the point that I'm making.
Yeah, it's just everybody's got their own path.
The real problem in this conversation is what I said earlier.
It's worrying about what other people think.
The more you spend time worrying about what other people think, the less you're worrying about what you're doing.
Less you're thinking about what you're actually trying to achieve.
Worrying About Perception00:15:16
And I listen to what you're saying, and I don't listen to what you're saying.
And the reason why I say that, every time I go into this rabbit hole or whatever, it's the echo.
It's like a Rogan angel right here and is whispering, don't read the comments.
Yeah, but I'm right.
I still read them.
I know, you should.
But I'm stopping.
But this is another thing I didn't.
What I didn't know is that white comedians actually have beef with each other.
I did not know, or at least it's not, you don't hear about it.
It's rare.
It's more rare.
And the ones who have beef are usually failures.
They're usually people that aren't doing well.
I've got an example.
I'm exposing the industry right now.
I have an example.
It's so funny.
And this was interesting.
I was at the comedy store.
Oh, you told me this.
It's so fucking funny to me, son.
About two months ago, right?
I'm good friends with Bill Burr.
You know, we did, we had, I'm Rich Bitch Tour with Charlie Murphy, me, Bill Burr years ago.
And I know Mark Maron, right?
I don't know.
What I found out is I didn't know Mark Maron the way white people know Mark Marin, right?
So I know Mark Maron.
Like when I see Mark Maron, I was like, oh, that's the guy that had one of the greatest podcasts out.
That guy that was one of the alternative comedy favorites, Mark Maron's special.
So when I see Mark Maron, I have a certain level of respect.
Like, oh, that's the guy who did it, whatever.
So I was doing Annie Letterman's show for Annie Wood or whatever, right?
And I love that girl.
And I'm in the green room and I'm smoking and joining.
I forget who sponsored this weed, but it was incredible, right?
So I'm in there and I'm cracking jokes.
Bill is right there.
And then Mark is over by the side of the door.
And I'm cracking jokes with Bill and everything.
And I felt something did nobody was really laughing at my jokes, right?
That all of a sudden, a whole fucking argument popped off.
And it was like, it was white argument because it was so nice.
They were so gentleman to each other.
It was a whole bunch of, oh, yeah, but you'll never do my podcast.
It was like podcast beats.
I'm right in the middle.
I don't even know.
I didn't even know that they had beef like this, but they were so gentle about it.
But I tell you the difference between white beef and black beef.
I never felt that I was going to get shot.
Y'all, I felt so safe.
Y'all, if anything, I thought it'd be like lawsuits the next morning, defamation of character, slander, but I never knew that it was fucking Caucasian and on Caucasian beef like this.
And it was entertaining.
This is an example.
Mark Maron was doing really well at one point in time in his career, and now he's not.
So Mark Maron had the number one podcast, and after a while, his podcast wasn't even the top 200.
It dropped off.
Bill Burr, his career took off.
He's doing arenas.
He's killing it.
Mark's not.
And Mark finds reasons to criticize other people that are doing much better than him.
And he focuses on that because he thinks he should be getting more than he deserves.
But do you think that's going back to being a provocateur?
He knows if he talked his shit.
No, no, no.
I think it's going back to being bitter and jealous and thinking about other people instead of thinking about himself and why people don't want to go see him anymore.
He was upset when we left the comedy store because we took the crowds away.
And it's like, hey, you were on the fucking marquee too, man.
Right.
They're not coming to see you.
And the reason why they're not coming to see you is because you're not doing well.
And your podcast was in the top.
It was number one.
And when it was at number one, by the way, this is what I always say about Mark Maron.
He was great.
Mark Maron was fun to hang out with when he was killing it.
Right.
Because he was happy.
Because he was getting validation.
Because he had the number one podcast.
We were friends.
Like, I did his podcast.
He did mine.
We had a good time.
I'd hug him when I see him.
Like, we had gone back and forth many times and having beef with each other.
His problem, let me finish.
His problem was when everybody else started doing really good and he started dropping off.
Right.
That's what happened.
This is what I don't understand.
Why can't people understand that you have a moment?
Like I was talking about.
Because he's a fucking narcissist and he wants the moment to always be around him.
He wants it to always be about him.
And when other people are doing better than him, he wants to talk shit about them.
And that's where Bill had a problem with it.
You think being a narcissist in this field is a bad thing?
For some reason, I think that kind of fuels you to be the person that you are, to be determined to do and not give a fuck about what nobody thinks.
Well, having self-respect and having an ego where you care about what you put out, yes, that's a good thing.
But making it all about you and not being able to appreciate other people's work is crazy because other people doing well can be fuel for you to be inspired and do better yourself.
And that's a positive thing.
And if these people are your friends and you love them and you care about them, you should be happy that they're killing it.
And if you're not killing it anymore, you should try to figure out why.
Because it's not like the door's not open.
It's not like you're not getting on stage.
It's not like you're not putting out specials.
You should probably figure out why your podcast dropped from number one to not even in the top 200 anymore without anything happening.
You didn't get arrested.
There was no scandal.
There was nothing crazy.
You should try to figure that out.
And he doesn't do that because he's instead bitter.
Bitter and jealous.
He's always been like that.
There's a story about Jon Stewart.
And Andrew Schultz came on the podcast and told a story about Jon Stewart and Maron where Maron confronted Jon Stewart with Jon Stewart, got some television show.
He called him a fucking sellout.
He yelled at him all this different shit.
Jon Stewart left the show and they hired Maron to do the same show.
Yeah.
The same show that he was calling Jon Stewart for being a sellout.
So how did you go from that to, okay, for you to have one of the biggest podcasts, at some point in your career, you had to be likable or you think people just wanted to do this show?
There wasn't very many podcasts back then.
The thing that killed Marin's podcast, my personal opinion, no hate, is that he has this rant at the beginning of his podcast that's not entertaining.
I don't think it's good.
And the rant was long, and he would just ramble about himself, was very self-obsessed, and I just don't think it was good.
And I think that was part of the problem.
It's also the problem was how he interviewed people.
He had a very confrontational interview style, specifically with some comedians that he felt like were below him or that he could pick on.
You would think that that style would work in this day and age.
No, People don't want always to be uncomfortable.
They want to like you, man.
They want you to be a good person.
People want train wrecks.
They want train wrecks for 15-second or 30-minute, 30-second Instagram clips.
They don't want train wrecks to be their primary thing that they're listening to when they're in traffic on the way to work.
But the people that host these podcasts now, like I think people go on these podcasts now and like this, this is going to be clickbait.
We're going to go viral.
Yeah, but they're not that talented.
That's why they're doing it is because that's their only method of getting attention.
If they were entertaining and interesting and fascinating, then their podcast would be about that.
You know what?
It's all in what you're trying to focus on.
What I try to focus on on my podcast is who do I want to talk to?
I never have someone on and go, oh, this would be great.
It'd be very controversial.
People will fucking hate them.
It'll be crazy.
They'll say wild shit.
I never do that.
My podcast is only about who do I want to talk to.
That's why I have a lot of people on that aren't even remotely famous because they're interesting.
I find them interesting.
I find with the book they wrote interesting, the documentary they made interesting.
I want to know something about them.
It stimulates my curiosity.
Do you think that there's going to be a shift?
Do you think that these salacious interviews, these interviews with Professor, you don't have to do that?
Don't think about it.
That's my key.
You know what's so funny?
I will say this.
You know what's funny about what you said?
That I was with Dave a while ago and he echoed the exact same thing.
And I was having this conversation with him.
He said, D, I don't even think about that shit.
Yeah, don't think about it.
There's other things to think about.
I've said this too many times.
If people have heard this before, I'm sorry.
Think of your focus and your attention like a number.
Think of you have like a hundred points in a day to spend on things.
If you spend 30 of those points thinking about haters or 30% of those thinking about bitter people, 30% thinking about other people that are doing better than you, that's 30% that you robbed from the 100% that you have to focus on your life.
I have things to do, man.
I have a family.
I have friends.
I have loved ones.
I have interests.
I have hobbies.
I have comedy and podcasts and the UFC and all these different things that I like to do.
And I think about those things.
I don't think about negative, stupid things with people that have bitter, angry minds that are concentrating on other people's success and trying to tear them down all the time because they're trying to tear them down all the time because they compare themselves to them and they don't like how they stack up.
They don't like the fact that that person's doing better.
They don't like the fact that that person's more successful.
So they try to take things either out of context or they try to misrepresent who that person is.
They try to change public perception of that person to try to drag that person down.
And it's transparent.
The reason why it doesn't work is because people inherently know what you're trying to do.
It might get people, oh, there's beef.
Oh, there's beef.
Those are simple-minded people that you're always going to attract, but you're not going to change people's opinions of things.
It's a trick.
It's a trap that you're playing on yourself.
It's a waste of your precious resources.
You only have so much time in the day.
My time I spend on things that I think are interesting or beneficial or things that excite my curiosity.
And I think that is the way I like to live my life.
Now, if you like to live your life, constantly engaged in beefs and being filled with anxiety and stress and you want to do that, okay.
But those are bitter fucking people.
I don't want to be a better person.
In another life, could you have been a therapist?
Well, I majored in psychology for the brief amount of time that I was in college.
That was what I was interested in.
But I was doing that because I was fighting at the time, and I was trying to figure out how to manage my mind.
So I was trying to figure out the inner workings of the human psyche.
Do you think, I know this is, I'm not, do you think your success made you a more calm person to not give a fuck?
Well, it certainly helps, right?
You don't have to give a fuck if you have enough money that you could just like disappear off into the sunset and never have to worry about money.
Because a lot of people are always worried about money.
And so you're always constantly in this state of anxiety trying to get more.
That helps.
But it's also, it's like, there's other things in life.
I concentrate on my loved ones.
I concentrate on my friends.
I concentrate on things I enjoy doing, on fun.
This life is short, man.
You and I are 58 years old.
We're more than halfway dead.
Why would you spend time concentrating on people you don't like?
Like, it's one thing if someone's wronging you.
It's one thing if you find out you have a business partner that's been stealing money or you have someone who's lying about.
Dane Cook.
No, I'm just saying.
I know.
His own brother still.
No doubt is like this yet.
What the fuck?
Yeah, it's very, very interesting.
And I'm at a place right now.
I was with John Hamm, right?
San Francisco.
And I had just did a show with Dave.
And it was interesting.
He said something to me.
He's in the back and he's with his wife and me kicking it.
He used to come out to summer camp and everything and hang out with us.
I don't want to say we like super friends, but we have mutual respect for each other.
And it was interesting because we're in the green room.
And this is after I just slayed this audience or whatever, right?
And I'm feeling good.
And he said, Don't, he said, what is it that you really want to do?
He said, what is it that you want?
I said, what kind of question?
He said, no, I mean, what is it?
Is it TV?
Is it TV show?
Is it movies?
I was like, John, I'm doing exactly what I want to do.
For me to be able to wake up, not have to work for anybody, call my own shots, make a fair wage, take care of my families, enjoy my friends and everything.
And it's me connecting with a God-given talent.
Anything else is a bonus.
I don't look at it like I need the private jet and everything.
Certain things you're like, you know, that would be nice.
But I just look at what this life has given me.
And I'm appreciative of that.
I know so many people that of my class, whatever, that aren't doing nearly as well as I am.
Or even the ones that are, that don't mean that they're happy.
You know what I'm saying?
So when he asked my question, I didn't think anything bad of it.
I was like, this, I don't get caught up on looking at somebody.
They got this, they got that.
I like this.
Am I happy?
Am I comfortable?
Do I get to do what I want?
So whether I tell people all this all the time, whether I get another film opportunity, whether I get another TV show or whatever, or any of that, I'm living what some people's dreams are.
Yes.
And it's not my dream.
It's my reality.
Yes.
And I also had to realize, this is so easy for us to do.
You can be so connected with somebody.
And even with my situation, with my connection with Dave and everything, I'm a huge fan of Dave.
He's given me great opportunities and everything.
But at some point in my life, I had to say, you can't be caught up in somebody else's dreams so much that you forget your realities.
And my reality is whether I'm alongside of him or what I'm doing, I got to continue to be Don Air Rollins.
I got to continue to support my family.
I got to continue to do things that I do.
And it's so easy.
It's so easy for me to get caught up like, I'm rolling with Dave.
We on the jets.
We doing this type of shit.
But then I'll lose focus on who I am.
And I realize for me, and my career continues to go when I know how to make that separation.
I do have a yeah, but the thing is, even when you're caught up with Dave, you still love him and you don't hate him at all.
You're not jealous of him.
Not at all.
You might get caught up in the wave because you're hanging out with one of the greatest comics that's ever lived, but it doesn't mean that it's a negative.
And you know another thing, let me add to that.
And I'm not blowing my own horn or whatever.
Like you said, one of the greatest comedians ever lived, right?
If a person had a conversation with Dave Chappelle, people could say whatever I'm worrying about, people think.
If you ask Dave who is in his top five comedians, my name's going to come up.
So as much as people, they always talk about, they always try to pin me like blah, blah, this and everything.
I respect the fact that he respects me.
I respect him.
When we work together, we push each other.
We make each other, whatever people want to say, we make each other better.
And what other people understand is that, like, he's like truly my friend.
You know what I mean?
It's not like I just work on a show, he's my friend.
And even when some of my fondest memories, especially when I come here, is when we was doing those fucking shows.
Yeah.
When we was doing shit nobody was doing.
When we were doing those lockdown shows, that was fun.
Yo, it was wild times.
It was, it was, it's all, it was already, we already have a community.
We all have mutual respect for each other.
But the thing that made that so special wasn't nobody doing this shit.
Right.
That's what made it even, and it really, one thing about the pandemic, it made you appreciate life a lot more than before the pandemic.
Yeah, it made you appreciate freedom.
Freedom.
Ability to do shows.
Remember, we did those shows outside and everybody was wearing a mask.
Pre-COVID Lockdown Shows00:05:59
It was so stupid.
And they all got tested too.
We got, they was, I was, I had so much fun during the pandemic.
I was almost embarrassed to show the pictures I wanted to show, like faceless shit.
Yo, we were taking pictures and people was like, this, look at him.
He could kill my grandmother.
I'm like, all right, first of all, you did it.
Dave did.
I was like, people were like this.
Oh, it must be nice to have rich friends that have testing machines.
I was like, you're absolutely right.
It is.
It's beautiful.
It is the most amazing shit ever.
Dave Chappelle raped my nose for two summers in a row when we were doing the shows in the cornfields and shit.
But this is what people don't understand.
He took the opportunity.
That village of Yellow Springs, he made it as safe as it could be.
Like any place we would go, hotel staff.
Everybody had an opportunity to get, everybody had an opportunity to get tested.
And I remember, this was very interesting.
When the bubble we did one, this was Bob Sagart, R.I.P., we were doing these shows.
And I think that before Bob passed away, when he came out to Yellow Springs and was hanging out with Dave and us and everything, it gave him some incentive to want to go back on the road to do it.
He just got really excited about doing it again.
We did like 55 shows.
The summer was over.
The run was clear.
We had no positives or anything.
Dave extended the show another week.
And that week was when the bubble popped, right?
And now everybody is like freaking out.
Like, oh my God, these same women that was, people was coming out there when they was getting flown out in jets.
They weren't getting traffic, but Dave created his environment.
He wanted his friends around.
We was going to restaurants.
We would have the whole spot.
We was just doing all this stuff.
Nobody was thinking about the possible consequences of that.
And I remember this one girl was like, oh my God, I don't even know why I'm here.
Then I looked at Dave.
I was like, yo, man, damn, we almost made it, man, through.
He was like, Donnell, it's going to be okay.
He said, you got to realize this is the reason why we test.
When we first got our first positive, had we not been testing, it could have been crazy.
And we got a first positive because dudes went to do somebody else's podcast and they didn't test.
Remember that?
I remember that.
I remember that because I remember that scene.
It was so funny.
Yeah, that was here.
Yeah.
And it was like, something was different because we had one positive.
And you remember that backstage used to be blacked out, right?
It started getting lower and lower.
It was basically like me, Syphe Sounds.
Somebody else was in the green room, right?
And then Big J came.
That's one of my friends, good friends, Big J came back.
He had this look on his face like it's over, right?
He came in there and I looked, I said, boss man, got it.
He's like, yep.
Right.
And another thing Dave could have did, this is where I respect his character.
He could have been, at that time, he could have just been in the mask, went on stage, went back out.
He canceled the show.
But the funniest shit, it's a whole at stubbs.
Room is sold out, right?
And then Cena comes back and Cena was like, I need you to go out there and tell people that the show is canceled, right?
I said, you don't need me to do that shit, nigga.
Because the minute, it's one thing, if I go out there, people can be like, show starting, right?
And as a comedian, I'm not going to not tell jokes.
And then I'm like, oh, yeah, Dave's not going to show up.
But that was the crazy thing about that, everybody.
At the Line Hotel, they was making jokes, Joe.
They call it Corona, COVID Row.
Because we had the whole floor locked down, right?
And everybody in our team got it.
But it felt like an old school chicken pock party.
You know what I'm saying?
We got it.
We got it.
When I tell you, man, what we did, everything was like, okay, make sure you had your voluminous on that type of shit.
But the beauty of it was, we was like, you know, people was testing out like eight or nine days, right?
So we thought we were going to leave.
After a while, we was like, I was like, wait a minute, the next run was going to be in 10 days.
And for some reason, everybody went back to being negative.
We closed and did more shows and we got the fuck up out of here.
But it was a beautiful time, man.
It was a beautiful time.
It was a fun time.
It was fun to be alive.
Yep.
It was a fun time.
But it was crazy.
And then we did that.
What that fucking joint we did?
It was in Tacoma.
The Superdome.
That was wild.
27,000.
25,000.
Whatever it was.
We broke the Tacoma Dome record.
I never been in a place where the laughter was so hard.
It felt like helicopters was on the show.
It was crazy.
This is what I respect about what you guys did.
You got people saying they're doing arenas and shit, but normally.
But that was pre-COVID, brother.
It was pre-COVID?
Yeah, that was pre-COVID.
But before everything popped off.
What I will say about a real arena show, you got the arena show where a quarter of the venue is being used for stage and everything, right?
So it ain't the true capacity.
Right.
But the shows you motherfuckers was doing, it was in the round.
Right.
Well, the wildest thing was walking through the crowd to get to the stage.
Man, crazy.
You've experienced this shit of that walk from the UFC shit.
Man, I'm so grateful for you guys' friendship and everything.
And for me, it was so special for me because I didn't sell a ticket.
Nobody else, no open to sell.
You and Dave sold those tickets, right?
But the best feeling for me, Joe, was when I go out and DJ Trauma be like, you seen him on HBO's The Wire.
You seen him on BMF, whatever.
But simple line.
But you fell in love with Ashley Chappelle's show, and them people fucking go crazy.
I don't give a fuck if you've ever been in the fist fight in your life when you come through them tunnels.
You doing this shit right here.
You feel like Tyson, like, just give me a robe.
Just give me a towel.
I'm about to go beat these motherfuckers up.
And every show we had, there was no room for being okay.
You had to be on your game every time.
Yeah.
It was good times.
It was a good time.
Zoom Into Clubhouse00:16:08
Well, that was when all that COVID shit went down with me, when CNN turned my face green.
That was because of a Nashville show that we were doing that we had to cancel.
Yeah, I didn't know.
That's what that was.
Yeah, we were supposed to do a show that weekend, and I got COVID the previous weekend.
And I was doing an arena with Tony in Florida.
And I got COVID in Florida, and then I made that video on like a Tuesday or a Wednesday.
It was like the third day after I got COVID and where I got over it.
And I was like, you know, I feel fine, but we have to cancel the shows this weekend.
And that's when all the shit went down because I took Iver Mac then.
That was those reasons.
I remember that.
Oh, he has the answer, everything.
Yo, if he don't have the answer, at least he's fucking trying to find it.
It's so interesting.
Whether or not I had the answer, the crazy thing is I was better.
I was already better.
And they turned my face green on CNN.
We got to see how crazy the media really is.
Like, they didn't want to hear nothing, but you have to take this vaccine.
And you have to do that.
And if you didn't take this vaccine, you're a part of the problem.
It's so that I just don't, as devastating as that time was, I'm just, how is it just like fucking over now?
Is it hurt immunity?
How is it just like it almost?
It's hurt immunity.
It's, yeah, it's also, you know, everybody who got it got it.
You got immunity because of it.
And then also whatever variants are still left, they're significantly diminished.
That's how viruses generally are.
It's like a cold strand now, right?
Yes.
Well, that's how viruses generally go.
They become more transmissible but less potent over time.
Yeah, and that's what happened.
I'm going to tell you, there was a time, though, man.
I even said, man, maybe it was just something about how people got along with each other.
I was like, we should do like once a year, just have a week of just lockdown.
Yo, just so you can get it.
Man, it makes you appreciate freedom.
That's for sure.
It made me appreciate nature, bro.
I bought a fucking house in Yellow Spring because I was like, you know what?
Trees, woods.
I don't know if the streets can handle this, but I became a bird watcher, bro.
I watch bird.
I watched birds.
You know what that does to my street credit?
What?
To know the difference between a cardinal and a blue jay?
Is that bad?
It's not the most.
Listen, that's a Blue Jay call.
It's like, I can't be in the street talking about.
It was good shit.
If you can't appreciate nature, that's whatever.
That's a bullshit narrative.
That's ridiculous.
Here's the thing.
I didn't crash out today.
Didn't crash out.
I know people think I'm a crash out king.
It's not that.
Sometimes I just need to.
You mean on this show today?
Yeah.
What did I?
No.
No, you didn't.
You definitely accused Jamie of wearing a leather jacket.
Jamie did have a leather jacket.
He had a leather jacket on, man.
And I think he brushed his eyebrows, too.
It was everything.
I was like, I'd never seen this sexy side of Jamie.
He had like a British accent.
He was like, I think he wants a book.
I was like, who is his eyebrows?
I was like, who the fuck is this person, man?
It was something different.
We definitely went through something that most people would never experience in their life.
Nope.
And most previous generations never experienced it.
Having a nationwide, worldwide pandemic that everybody freaked out and we didn't.
Not only did we didn't freak out, we did shows.
We had a good time.
We hung out together.
Those after parties when we go to the line, you had a DJ, we would laugh and laugh.
We would laugh till two, three o'clock in the morning.
You know, the girl I was dating.
It was so much fun.
Girl I was dating the time.
She couldn't believe that she was like, I would be like this.
So what do you do?
I was like, well, I was at the line kicking with Dave and Joe.
What are y'all doing?
Just talking and laughing to 3:30 in the morning.
They were like, get the fuck out of here.
You was fucking.
No, I wasn't.
We was just on some brotherhood shit.
It was just so much.
And we also realized how special it was that we could do this while the whole world was locked down.
Yep.
I'm telling you, I was embarrassed to show pictures.
My mother called me, you better be careful out there.
Like man, I'm getting tested.
We got tested more than probably anybody in the country and that's.
I got tested every day because I was doing podcasts.
Through the whole thing, I did your show doing that one time yeah, and then we didn't.
I sat down and before I got the results the last time I was here, you was like, did he get the test?
I'm like I'm like this, please don't come in here like, get this motherfucker out of here.
Well, we definitely had a couple people that tested positive.
We had to get them out and I tested positive once.
But the thing about it making those, taking those precautions, you could isolate it.
You knew where it came and you shut it down.
That's one thing.
If you're not doing that, it's all over the place.
Just think about it.
If if, imagine if, Jamie would have got covered, then we would have never seen his sexy side now.
Jamie got covet.
He got covet before anybody.
He got covered really early on, when there was no vaccine, no treatment no, nothing.
He had to take a whole week off.
Um, maybe that's why he has the attitude that he has.
Yo y'all getting all this podcast.
You, you had covet that week, right?
Yeah yeah, he missed the Kanye Podcast.
Yeah, but I i'm sorry Jamie, if you thought I said anything that was kind of disrespectful to your character.
Well, it was just totally false.
No, it wasn't.
I'm telling you that ponytail I don't know what the fuck he did about it like a Steven Sagal ponytail yeah, and not only that, but he put his hair back like this, almost like the, like a ditty party.
That's how they start ditty parties, oiled up.
Yeah, I don't know.
Say that because I was never mind.
I never went to a ditty party.
I have a photo, but I never went to a ditty party.
Yeah, it's like I think people are going to be wiser if something like that happens again.
100 yeah, 100.
There's a lot of people that think they engineered that whole thing.
They wanted it to happen because it's the largest transfer of upward transfer of wealth in human history.
So many small companies went down.
Look at big businesses got made more money.
Look what it did to ZOOM yep, ZOOM.
I remember ZOOM because um, I was, I.
I had a show in Naples, Whatever.
I met this doctor that he wanted me to be on his podcast and I was like, how are we gonna do?
He said we can do it by zoom.
This is when it was only like for like, business people.
It was really like the nerdy thing.
Yeah, that's what it used to be.
Yeah, it used to be, but the pandemic it blew it up.
It was like, now, zoom is like that's the best way.
You don't want to talk to somebody on the phone.
They call you oh, i'm on a zoom right now.
It is so like in everybody's household and that just blew up.
So many businesses did the same thing.
Is anybody using that anymore?
Zoom yeah, they use it for an excuse not to talk to somebody.
Yeah, do they do zoom podcasts anymore?
Do people do zoom podcasts?
I never hear that term.
It used to be things like, oh, we're going to do it on zoom.
I don't hear that anymore.
A few other platforms exist.
Now I don't even think people discuss it, but yeah, they had one.
One was at Clubhouse, Whatever all of these things.
Oh yeah, Clubhouse was popular.
Clubhouse is a big one.
That was a big one where people were essentially doing podcasts like anybody could just like just talk, chime in and talk.
Shit was getting like a million followers in three days and shit like yeah, oh yeah, there was a lot of that and a lot of people thought that that was going to keep going, like clubhouse is going to be the new thing.
I'm like this is just bad podcasting And it's what.
There was.
Only so many things.
That battle, the diversus battles that they do now.
And when they have like, it's mostly, it's been hip-hop and R ⁇ B.
I think it was, who was it?
It was Swiss Beats and Timblin, I think.
They started this thing during the pandemic.
It was versus, right?
Where you have an artist versus another artist in like a competitive type of situation.
They didn't win anything, but it was just entertaining for everybody.
And that went from like, it was so low level.
Like people was in front of their computers.
It was freezing up and everything, but it was what everybody was doing.
Now that's like one of the biggest things now.
They did one at Madison Square Gardens.
Like it's a big thing now.
It's just like a competition.
Like you got, I think it had cash money and no limit records, but it's very, I don't see no white versus, but it's a popular thing.
And it started because of the pandemic.
Well, so many businesses started during the pandemic because a lot of people got laid off.
So they started their own business.
A lot of online businesses started.
A lot of people quit their jobs because they realized, look, they could just take this shit away from me at any minute.
Why am I doing something that I hate when I thought there was security in it?
There's no security in it.
I'm going to start my own business.
Also, even like you, you're an example of what happens when you finally realize that you don't need Hollywood the way it used to be.
No.
Well, we figured that out a long time ago.
We figured that out when the podcast started kicking off in like the early 2010s.
I realized that.
I was like, this is, I don't need TV shows anymore.
We figured that out in like 2013, 2014.
And Hollywood is not like, it used to be.
I'm a very old school guy, but I remember when I first started, you couldn't make it in this business.
You had to be in New York or L.A. Yep.
There was no producers going to, they wasn't going to Toledo, Ohio.
There was no way.
This was big.
Well, there's no comedy communities outside of New York and L.A.
No, not at all.
Not a real community.
There might have been like a good club that had some, like Denver always had like good opening acts, good comedy.
But it wasn't like a real hub like Austin is now.
And that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for the pandemic.
People wouldn't have moved.
They wouldn't have moved.
No.
And you brought a whole community here.
As much as this place was always big for music or whatever, but I mean, there's no way anybody cannot agree with what you did and what you made it appealing to a lot of people is that you could go somewhere else, get a better quality of life.
Yeah.
And everything.
Lower cost of living, better quality of life, no traffic, nicer people, and no Hollywood bullshit.
The problem with the LA is always going to be poisoned by the idea of going there to become famous.
That whole idea was permeated in the culture of LA and that fame was like the number one commodity.
But back then it was, that was the case.
It was the case.
But the problem is that's bad for art.
It's bad for your ability to produce shit.
I mean, you got great comics that came out of LA, but that was in spite of what L.A. had to offer.
It wasn't because of.
Whereas Austin, like the main reason people come here, first of all, is Kill Tony.
Because like you said, Kill Tony is one of the rare places where you can be a comic that's been doing comedy three, four years.
Even just start now, but you got some talent.
You can have a fucking career.
Like a real career and it'll launch.
Look, you got Cam Patterson who's on SNL right now.
You got all these people like William Montgomery, David Lucas.
They're killing it on the road, selling out everywhere they go.
Ari Maddie, this guy, I mean, they have a real career in the world.
But you know, another thing that they don't understand is like, this is what I say, and I use you as an example.
Whenever you hear about somebody saying that they want to do a podcast, the first thing is certain names like, I want to be Joe Rogan.
And I said this before.
Nobody wanted to be Joe Rogan fucking 25 years ago.
They didn't want to put the work in.
They want to see the accolades, the fortune you've built.
They see that part, but nobody sees the hard work.
Even with Kill Tony, the fact that during the pandemic, when he could have let the whole platform just fall apart, like we don't know when we're going to do it, he dug deeper and figured out a way, I'm just going to continue to do it.
Nobody ever respects the journey.
Right.
And if you think about it, Joe, and you probably the same way.
Most successful people, and I know some very, very wealthy people, right?
And when they talk about their career, whatever, they hardly ever talk about the yacht.
They ever talk about the fucking mansion they got in Paris.
You know, they talk about it was just me and my wife and we drove a Toyota, you know, a Toyota Corolla.
And we was like, we was down to our last 10 bucks and she did this.
That's the most interesting part of the story for most successful people.
And people don't understand that.
Right.
They only think about where you got to.
Right.
I want to get to there too.
They want to skip everything.
I hear people right now.
I want to be like, stand up.
I'm like, all right.
Well, no, when I was doing HBO's The Wire, right?
This guy I knew, I grew up with, he was like, this motherfucker said, yo, D, what's the number to the wire?
I want to call him.
I want to be on the wire.
Like, there's a wire.
Hey, is this David Simon?
Yeah.
I could be Omar.
And guess what?
If I knew the number to the wire, I wouldn't give it to you.
I'm going to give it to you.
I'm not giving it to you.
I want you to get that busy signal.
That's what it's.
Nobody ever wants to respect the grind.
And they all, everybody wants the rewards of the grind.
Plus.
Everybody.
It's just people that are missing it.
They're not getting what it's all about.
What it's all about.
Like, Kill Tony's a great example of that.
I was there in the early days of Kill Tony.
When Tony started out in 2013, there was no one in the crowd.
There was no one there.
It was a small show.
You'd have a few comedians.
I was doing it back before I was back at the comedy store, but I was still banned.
So I was doing it from the ice house.
And he didn't do it thinking it was going to be the number one show in the world and he was going to be on Netflix.
And he did it because it was fun to do.
And he loved it.
And he wanted to do a great job.
And he wanted to make it better every week.
And he kept doing it and kept getting better at it.
It's the same thing with this podcast.
This podcast didn't make money for years.
Didn't make any money for years.
It cost money.
But the most successful people are the ones, like even with when I first started doing comedy, right?
I never, you have some comedians that go out there like, I want to do comedy.
I want to get the money.
I want to get pussy off of it, right?
When I first started, I never, the only thing I wanted to do, Joe, I wanted to be good.
I was like this, if I'm good, all those other things that are rewards of that, that would happen.
But I had to be good first.
And here's the thing that I think, especially when you have these like social media comedians or whatever, the thing that the interesting thing about it, it's kind of hard to tell somebody to work on their craft when they're getting all the perks of what the craft can present them at an early, early stage.
It's hard to tell somebody that's only been doing it for two years, that's making $50,000 or $100,000 a month off of monetizing something.
They're like, this, you need to get better.
Hello?
They don't have to.
Like, do whatever the fuck you want to do.
If you just want to do that, do that.
And also, some of them are going to figure it out anyway.
Some of them are going to figure out, I'm not getting better.
I'll get better.
I'm going to work harder at it.
There's going to be people that don't figure things out no matter what you do in this life.
There's going to be a bunch of people that have a distorted perception of what success is all about and what you really want.
It's always going to be that.
What do you, what do you, what is, this is an interesting question.
What is your definition of success?
Happiness.
Happiness and doing something that you enjoy doing.
It's something that's challenging.
So, what is the definition of happiness?
Friendship, love, doing something I enjoy doing, doing it well, doing it better all the time, getting better at it.
You know, I mean, and struggle.
You're always going to have some kind of a struggle.
And that struggle, hopefully, is you trying to be better at the thing that you're doing.
You?
What gives you this? Is an interesting question.
What gives you the incentive to always continue to want to perform?
What gives you an incentive to always want to do Joe Rogan and Friends when you could just sit back and fucking just.
Because it's fun.
It's fun.
Jeff's Dark Circuit00:10:57
It's first of all, the green room on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the mothership.
It's one of the funniest times I've ever had in my fucking life.
It's so fun.
We have so much fun there.
There's Ron White there and Shane Gillis and Tony.
And it's fun.
It's, I mean, it's community.
Sounds like you're trying to give me the chance to.
We enjoy our times.
Would you want to come on?
I got to come to a Tuesday.
What are you doing tomorrow?
Come on, Daniel.
What do you got going on tomorrow?
Where are you headed back to Ohio?
No, I'm going to LA.
Do you have a show?
I got a son.
Okay.
Well, that's different.
That's more important.
But I can just give him some Roblox money.
I'll give you some Roblox money.
He'll be cool.
Let me see.
I might, because, cam, I didn't, I wish I would have even thought about it before.
But I might, I might, because I haven't had that experience.
Oh, come down then if you can.
If your son's cool with it, do it.
If not, there's always another look at another.
And this is another thing about me being an older dad.
Like, my son is really the age.
He could be my grandson.
I don't have time to do all those instill vials and morals and shit.
I'm like, this, will candy shut this motherfucker up?
Yo, I'm like, yo, let's go to McDonald's or whatever.
But yeah, I'm going to see.
I would definitely consider that.
Consider it.
Yeah.
But that's what I like.
I mean, I'm just enjoying my life and I like to do things that I find that are interesting and challenging.
And I like to have conversations with interesting people.
And I like the fact that people enjoy it still.
You know, when I first met you, you know, and I already knew that you had the ultimate platform, right?
And I never, this is me.
And I don't know if this is what happened, but I was like, I never want to be like, hey, Joe Rogan, I'm Donnell Robinson, so-and-so.
And the only respect I ever wanted to get from my peers and people that were doing it was like from the stage.
You know, I always like, I was like, if we ever make the connection, I wanted to be off of, yo, this motherfucker is funny first, not just like, hey, you know, I rock with Dave and everything.
I think that that was what happened.
I used to spend time in it, and I never, never did, even to this day.
I don't, you know, I just look at like the resp, I just want people, you can respect me as a man and respect my character, whatever.
But at the end of the day, what I love to do the most is stand up.
I want you to be like, yo, this motherfucker puts the work in, and then we can build everything off of that.
That's what respect I wanted.
I want the respect from what I put in, the work I put in.
And people can acknowledge that, and that's what builds my relationship with you.
It's built my relationships with all of these, all these guys.
All of these people that I fuck with now, it ain't because other than anything other than like, yo, he's a dope comic, and then you can find out that I'm a good dude.
Yeah.
It's that.
And then after that, it's got to be like, are you cool?
Right.
Is he fun to hang out with?
Right.
Yeah.
Barry Ketch said that one time.
He said that in one of his podcasts.
It's one of the things that separate like who goes on the road or so-and-so is if you're a good hang.
Yeah.
And I'm like, oh my God, that's everything.
I don't know how many people quote Barry Ketch, but I want to share this story.
You might be the only one.
You said, probably the only one.
But you said something earlier about undeniable, right?
Yeah.
I remember when I first moved from DC and I moved up to New York, I was doing the Chitlin Circuit, the Black Circuit.
I was popular in the black community, whatever.
I was like, I don't think this is going to be enough.
I want to do the mainstream stuff.
I want to do these other things, right?
And Barry Katz, Dave used to host this comedy night at this place called El Flamingos in DC, in New York.
And Barry Katz saw me there one day.
He was like, I don't think I've ever seen a comedian that go in front of an audience that was ready to rip someone's head off, and you could hear silence.
You know, that's the control I had with the audience.
So we built sort of a respect for each other.
And I remember one time I was at the comedy cellar and he was there.
And I knew that he was back then, whatever you want to say about him, nobody had a roster bigger than Barry Katz.
Back then, in like 97 or whatever, he had everybody.
The list goes on and on.
So I knew he was a fan of mine.
And I said, Barry, man, I'm trying to work these clubs, these mainstream clubs, but I'm having a hard time getting in past these clubs.
I was like, could you make a phone call or whatever for me?
And he looked at me.
He said, Donnell, he said, this is what you do.
I'll probably do the worst.
Everybody does it better, better Barry Katz.
You got to do Barry like this.
Yeah.
Okay, I'll try to get it.
He was like, that's just what you do.
And slowing down.
He said, Donnell, just rip.
Right?
He said, Yeah, be undeniable.
That's what he said.
He said, just be, he said, I'm not talking.
And I tell, this is advice I give people.
They say, well, I need social.
I was like, I'm not talking about have one good set and you have four bad sets.
I'm talking about the consistency where every time somebody sees you going that stage, you blowing the roof off.
And once you do that, managers are going to come to you.
They're going to hear about it.
That's one of the things that a lot of people try to skip.
They're like, oh, how was your set?
It was okay, but I can't talk to you.
Unless you just straight destroying shit everywhere, then you got other shit to work on.
Yeah.
And there's also a lot of people that are very delusional about how well they're doing because they want so much.
They want it all to be about them.
So they think they should have already had this.
They should have already had that.
Why don't I have a sitcom?
Why don't I have a this?
Why don't I have a that?
And I always said this is another thing, even with these lineups, you do these shows, whatever.
Always say that you have time to have a defining moment.
If you're in the room, right, and for some reason, the room is on fire, the club is on fire, everybody is ripping.
You probably won't stand out as much as that night when everybody was bombing.
You've seen rooms where everybody comes back and say that crowd was weird, but then you got one motherfucker back there like this.
I don't give a fuck what y'all doing.
Right.
I'm going to elevate this.
Those are the times when you got to fucking stand up.
Yeah, well, we used to see that all the time at the store, like late night at the store in particular, where like, you know, because the way the store works, the show starts at 8 p.m. and it goes on till 2 a.m.
And there's a lot of people that get there at 8 p.m. that are like, you know, tourists that are in town.
And they sit there for the whole fucking show.
They came to see the comedy store.
Yeah.
So by the time 12:30 rolls around, fuck, they've seen everything.
And so you get this lull period.
And then someone will go up and just tear that fucking place apart with 50 people.
When I used to, I was so naive when I first started that we used to have open mics, right?
And the open mic list would be like 25 people, right?
And they fucking, the guy that was running, they hated me so much because I used to talk shit in the audience and everything.
And they would keep bumping me down, right?
And my dumb ass never got mad, right?
I was like, this, yeah, they want me to headline.
25 comedians.
I took that.
I was like, I didn't think about audience fatigue or anything.
Oh, boy.
I just was like, yeah.
And it would be, but I'm telling you, I think that was one of the things that made me strong because I was like, I'm going to do what the next person.
There's one story.
This is one of, if you ask Dave Chappelle one of the dopest sets he's ever seen.
I just happened to be a part of that.
It was at the Hollywood Bowl years ago, about three years ago, right?
You know, Jeff.
Is that when he got attacked?
No, no, that wasn't that.
It was like the year before.
You know, Jeff Wills Live Nation, right?
Sure.
So we're doing.
Shout out to Jeff.
Shout out to Jeff.
We're doing a show.
You know, Hollywood Bowls, 18,000 people, right?
So show starts at 7 o'clock, right?
Jeff comes up to me.
He was like, Donnie, I got some good news and bad news.
He said, what?
He said, we're going to start on time.
It's only, but, 700 people out there, right?
Now, you imagine what 700 people look like in front of 18,000 place, right?
He said, there's only 700 people out there.
He said, well, I can let you start now or we can wait 10 minutes.
I was like, Jeff, it's not like 17,000 people are going to show up in 10 minutes.
I said, give me the mic now.
Big ass stage.
I jump off the stage, right?
Dave and all these people in the green room.
I jump off the stage.
I go into the audience.
I'm literally going to each person in the theater.
And I'll get you a picture.
You can answer this.
I'm going to each person.
Why didn't they wait for the people to show up and sit down?
That's what I wanted to say, but they were just like, the show has to continue.
I don't allow that.
I never allow that.
I'll tell you nothing.
You've tried to do that before with me.
And they say, we're going to have to pay more money if the show goes over.
I go, then the show goes over and we pay more money.
Get the fuck out of here.
But for me, it was a moment because any other comedian, not any other, most people are like this.
Oh, it wasn't nobody out there.
So many excuses.
I jumped off stage.
I was like, no, I can't be up here.
Look like I'm about to be auctioned off.
I go in the audience.
I'm going to each joint, right?
And I'm fucking killing 700 people in front of 18,000 people.
That's a great way to start a show.
But listen, and I'm like this.
And here's the fucked up thing about this.
Nobody's going to know about it because your fucking phones are locked up, right?
Yo, it was a moment.
Dave, Dave, everybody for the green room came out, right?
And Dave told me to this day, he said, if I was doing a class on stand-up comedy, he said, I would use this as an example of like owning up to it.
And it was so crazy, man.
It was like, and it was just, it was crazy.
I remember another time I was working with, I think I was working with you.
It was me, you, and Dave.
And I think it was a time we was doing an outdoor theater.
And it was supposed to be a break.
It was supposed to be me.
It was supposed to be, I think, you, Tony, or whatever, or something.
Then it was a break.
And then it was going to be me and Dave.
But it was still daytime, right?
Where was this?
I can't remember the place.
It was still, Jeff, he came up to me.
He was like, I was like, I already know.
I'm going to have to go on there.
And I literally had to perform until it started getting dark.
Oh, I remember this.
And I was saying to myself, I was like, ain't no way.
I was like, this, ain't no way they give a Rogan.
And it wasn't a shitty audience.
People just hadn't come yet.
I was like, I knew I was going to even suggest.
I was like, nah, we had these two halves, right?
And it was, and that was another example of, okay, you got to do what you got to do.
And I had to go up there.
It wasn't the spot that I expected or whatever, but I was like, this, you know, for the sake of the show.
And I'm always like, what do we need to do to support this?
And we had to bring it down.
We had to buy some more time.
And then by the time you got on stage, everybody was seated.
It was dark.
It was dark.
That was outside of San Francisco.
Voss's Late Night Performance00:16:04
I can't remember exactly.
That was California.
That was California.
That shit was fun.
But I tell people all the time, and I do slight mentor.
I was like, man, it's certain times where you got to do what the next person is not going to do.
You can't bitch about shit.
And at the end of the day, you got to be a fucker.
I know when I used to do these shows with Dave, I used to fucking get the shittiest time.
Like, oh, we're at 30% capacity.
I'm like, man, half of these motherfuckers are not even going to see me.
But I looked at it like this.
Well, the people that's going to see me, they're going to remember it, you know?
And you just got to keep on going.
That's a good attitude.
Yep.
Yeah.
That's healthy.
See, I feel like this.
Very productive.
This conversation is going to bode well with my mental health.
Yeah, I think so too.
Everything except the lies you told about Jamie.
You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to start taking fucking videos.
I wish I would have had it.
Yeah, I wish he did too.
And the thing about it.
You would see, like, oh man, he didn't even have a leather jacket on.
And he wasn't even talking to me.
He was talking to me like, what is it?
I walked up.
He didn't even know who I was at first.
Guess why?
Why didn't I know?
I never know that.
I was like, who is this fake ass Jamie ass motherfucker?
It's like, it was almost like, remember when Family Battles, Urkel and then Stefan?
It was two characters.
They had the geeky Urkel and then his alter ego, whatever.
He was just this cool ass.
He was the same person.
What is happening to that dude?
Urkel.
Yeah.
Oh, he's been around.
What's that?
Some weed.
Is he?
He was.
And his weed is really good.
He's got a weed, Urkel Purple.
It's the best.
He got this joint hero, and it's like some type of Italian noodle, the spiral noodle.
He used that as a filter.
But also, I spent a lot of time with him because he would come out to the cornfields, whatever.
So I've been seeing him.
He's got a talk show.
Didn't he get jacked?
Isn't he like, is that him?
Julie White?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I heard Urkel got in great shape.
Yeah, but he's a good guy, man.
But he's another one of those celebrities I know that want to do comedy but don't have the heart to do it.
Always, I was like, he said, no, no, no, don't do that.
But he's a great guy.
It's hard to start out already famous.
That's one of the things that I really respected about Charlie.
Charlie was already famous when he was starting.
Do you know who started Charlie?
Who?
Me.
Did you?
And this is how it happened.
When we were doing the Chappelle show, it's safe to say, like, nobody was really making money.
You know, in the contract, when you, in your contract, if your show just blows up, you got to stick to whatever you was getting for the contract.
So we weren't making a lot of money doing the show.
But I was like, we're too popular right now.
And at that time, it was me and Charlie.
It was Dave, me, and Charlie, like the biggest names on the show.
So this was Mike Berkowitz, who's head of Willem and Morris right now, right?
He was a young agent at the time, right?
He was coming up.
And I was like, I told Jason, my manager at the time, Jason Steinberg, I said, man, we got to do a tour or something.
I was like, yo, everybody's talking about I'm rich, bitch.
I was like, let's do I'm rich, bitch, tour, right?
He was like, it's a good idea.
I said, me and Charlie can do it.
At the time, that was only a two-man show.
Charlie didn't have no time or anything.
And I was like, you know what?
I want to do it.
Because it was my idea.
I said, I want to do me, Charlie.
I said, we need another comedian.
At the time, Bill Burr was not making a lot of money doing stand-up.
And I'm not disrespecting him, but everybody knew he was going to blow.
But that was early on in the career.
And all Bill had to do was have a situation like he had in Philly.
Everybody knew he was going to blow.
So I said, why don't we do a tour?
Me, Charlie, and Bill Bird.
That shit would be hot.
Charlie had never did stand-up.
And he used to always crack jokes and shit.
I was like, yeah, you talk a lot of shit.
But once that microphone, your ass, you a bitch-ass motherfucker.
So Charlie was a guy like, don't threaten him with anything, right?
So this is when they had the Laugh Factory in New York, a Times Square, right?
One of my friends was doing the show there.
I was like, Charlie, yo, if we're going to do this tour, you got to at least have 10 minutes.
He could have, at that time, Charlie was so hot.
People would have just yelled out, Charlie Bervey, for five minutes.
He was the MC.
We just needed his face to be there.
And this was, it would be Charlie, Charlie, Bill Burr, and myself.
And Charlie had no jokes, right?
And like you said, I was like, maybe, I don't know if you guys understand how it is to be selling out as an open micer.
Crazy.
And he had to get his voice.
And I know, and I was like, why did he never do this?
Part of it was because he probably never wanted to be compared to his brother.
Right.
He never wanted to be able to, that's his brother.
And he had his own style or whatever.
So we did this fucking tour for like a year.
And then I saw him start to grow.
Sometimes he took some hits, but he became Charlie Murphy.
He became like, I'm not my brother.
I'm a storyteller.
He stuck to that shit.
And one of the things that I would say that I really appreciate about what the Chappelle show gave to Charlie Murphy, when Charlie Murphy passed away, Joe, nobody said Eddie Murphy's brother died.
They said Charlie Murphy passed away.
So that show didn't do it.
And when I tell you, one of the most stand-up, original guys, all of those stories, like, was it true?
It was, he told, that was just part of the story.
Me, Dave, me, Charlie, and Bill built a relationship.
We did something that was spectacular then.
But Bill Bird used to fuck with us.
And I'm going to tell you one of the things he would do.
We would be on the road, and all we used to do was argue and fight and just fuck with each other one time.
And Bill Bird, he did some fucking.
I don't want to call this racist or whatever.
But whatever.
It was very Bostonian.
Okay.
But what he did, I didn't know two years later.
Bill Bird, when we meet up, he would buy a fucking like 12-piece of Popeye's chicken, right?
And he knew me and Charlie would devour that chicken and we would be in a sleep coma, right?
The next 15 minutes.
And it was almost like he gave us sleeping pills and shit.
He would get his chicken, we'd be knocked out, and then he'd just go and just laugh at us and shit.
But that time, that was such a great time because you saw people's careers being bored.
Like Bill was already on a trajectory to be great.
You know what I'm saying?
But at that time, and this is when I say the stories that you remember, I'm pretty sure Bill still remembers.
Like, this was the first time that he was making like regular good money every week.
You know how it is for be a fucking headliner that's doing $800 a weekend.
Or they give you a deal $2,000 and then you get a $500 bonus when you sell or give away 300 tickets.
And you're not working every weekend.
And you're not working every weekend.
And then you got club owners like your bonus is supposed to be at 300.
And they'd be like, couldn't give you that bonus.
You were at 298.
You know, I'd be like, motherfucker, I couldn't do it.
And they lied too.
They lied to it.
They lie about how many tickets you sold.
They lied to it.
And then they wondered why when guys become big and everything, they don't want to come back.
Because I remember that.
Oh, I remember that.
There's a couple club owners that they can go eat shit.
And I tell people all the time, when everybody talks about this, I was like, yo, try this.
Try doing a fucking tour for a year and a half.
And every night you had to come behind Bill Burr.
I had no days off.
And I knew when I had a day off, I wasn't hitting on all cylinders.
Because that's when they used to have comment cards, right?
The comment cards, like, I don't know why the white boy didn't go last.
But that always, that's that always kept me in shape.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like this, you don't got no time to play around because Bill, and because Bill was one of those comics, Bill was like, Bill would come, Bill did the mainstream shit, and he was one of the only white dudes who would do the fucking most grimiest spots ever.
And I'm pretty sure he's always going to be a great comic, but I think that that helped build his character.
I think that was probably what made him be in a position where he goes to Philly, like, yo, fuck y'all.
I just did Dondell's fucking hood club in Brooklyn.
If I can handle that, I can handle it.
Well, that rant in Philly was because he was doing the Opie and Anthony tour.
So when Opie and Anthony, their crowd were brutal.
Their crowds were fucking brutal.
They was killed Tony's before T.L. Tony's.
Way worse.
Yeah.
Way worse.
That they had sort of fed into that crowd.
They fostered that crowd.
They called them the pests.
But then, even going back to what I was saying, in this career, sometimes you have situations that have a defining moment.
And that was one of those things.
I'm pretty sure everybody went on before Bill was throwing a towel and he was like, fuck that.
But what happened was Dom Area went on.
And, you know, Domerrera is a legend.
How's he doing, man?
He's hurting.
Yeah, he's hurting.
He's got whatever that neurological condition is.
It's not good.
I mean, I want to speak out of turn about his health, but it's not good.
But Dom, they booed Dom.
They were just rough.
They wanted you to fail.
And Bill went up and go, fuck you.
You know, and he just went into this crazy shit.
You know who else had a moment like that?
Who?
Bernie Mac.
Did he?
Oh, on Def Jam.
Yeah.
I ain't afraid of you, motherfuckers.
You know how that was born?
Why?
First off, Martin Lawrence was the host.
And that night, everybody was taking licks, right?
And there was another, it was a comic from D.C. named Butch Burns, right?
He was very popular in D.C. Butch Burns went on stage and bombed so bad.
Motherfuckers throwing shit.
There was nothing that Martin could do.
You know how sometimes you try and you're like, just you're on your own.
It's like, whoop-de-doo, right?
So Butch Burns had bombed.
The room was going crazy.
Martin could do anything.
Next on deck was fucking Bernie Mac.
Bernie Mac saw Butch Burns on the way out and he told him, he was like, listen, man, hold your head up, man.
He said, the sun might not shine on your day, but you'll have another opportunity to shine.
And the reason, he didn't plan on, I ain't scared of you, motherfuckers.
And then Bernie had a situation to go through because Bernie was on Def Jam before.
He dressed in a suit and everything.
He was looking like a Chicago player, but he didn't think that he connected with a young audience like that.
So you even watched the way he was dressed from the previous show to the next one.
Yeah.
The next one, he had more of a hip outfit, had graffiti on the jeans.
He was dressed up for that part of it.
No idea.
I ain't scared of you, motherfuckers.
He did have the energy that he was going to do, the connection he was going to have with the DJ, right?
But what made it so explosive is that he said, fuck y'all.
He said he did his joke.
That's why you hear like, why was he saying I ain't scared of you, motherfuckers?
Right.
It was because of the other shit.
He said, I ain't scared of you, motherfuckers.
Get it.
Boom, boom, boom.
But he said, what did he say?
And it was such the most simple stock jokes.
But the rhythm.
He was so powerful.
So powerful.
So powerful.
The rhythm that he had and the fact that you knew that something was special would happen.
That's why that fucking audience looked, was so fucking charged up because he said, fuck y'all.
I saw Bernie live once at the comedy connection in Fannie Hall in Boston.
I remember that club.
He was on fire.
I saw him.
So powerful.
First time I saw him at Comedy Connection at Greenbelt, I used to do this club and it was a couple of people that came through and I was like, these motherfuckers are the next level.
It was him.
Another person that was like that was George Wallace.
Oh, yeah.
You know another person that was like that?
Rich Voss.
Oh, yeah.
Yo, George Wallace, first off, I knew George Wallace was on the next level.
I've never seen nobody go to the comedy club and the deal he had was 100% of the door.
Everything.
You just get your drinks, your chicken wings, 100% door.
They had to give it to him.
Wow.
And George Wallace, he was old.
George Wallace always been an older dude, right?
Somebody said, you know, his thing is your mama jokes, right?
Somebody had did a mama joke and motherfucker George Wallace ripped off about 30 mama jokes.
I felt so bad for him.
And then Rich Voss fucking, Rich Voss fucked me up because I'd never seen a white comedian perform at this club.
It was a black club.
Rich Voss came in here.
He had a ponytail similar to Jamie's, right?
He had Jerry Curls.
No, Rich Voss had a ponytail.
It's the same one that Jamie was wearing when I, right?
It was Rich Voss's, right?
And I saw Rich Voss go up there and destroy this crowd.
I was like, this white dude don't know what's going on.
And he fucking killed that shit.
You know, we talk about joke stealing, right?
I've never, I stole one joke in my life, and I apologize to Rich Voss.
I was doing the show, and none of my jokes worked.
I tried, yo, I tried everything.
I tried everything.
And I said to myself, what joke have you heard?
I didn't mean to steal, right?
I borrowed it, okay?
I said, what one joke you know that fucking will kill this audience?
And Rich Voss used to have this joke.
He said, you know what they say?
Once you go black, you never go back.
He said, yeah, because your father won't let you back in the house, right?
I stole that joke.
I got him laughing.
I got him back on track.
And then I had to call Voss.
I said, man, I'm so sorry.
I said, it's going to get back to you, but I stole the joke.
He was like, no, no problem with it.
Well, at least you admitted it.
Yeah, I did.
All right.
I think we accomplished a lot.
This was therapy for me.
I think it was good for you.
Stay out of the comments.
I'm going to stay out of the comments.
Remember that podcast we did with Rizza?
No, don't do that.
They still talk shit to me.
Yo, I grabbed you at the end of the podcast.
I said, that was great.
Don't read the comments.
Exactly.
That was a long time ago.
I've been giving you that advice for a long time.
You did tell me, don't.
But the part of that story people don't know is that I did my podcast early.
I hadn't seen my son in like two and a half weeks.
I was on the road.
And I came straight there, straight to the podcast to do it, right?
And then I was like, you was like, yo, you want to hang out?
This is what people don't know.
This is the side you don't tell them.
You invited me.
You invited me.
I did invite you.
You did invite you.
I thought it would be fun.
You said the Rizza's going to come, right?
Well, we were having a good time.
We did a podcast together.
We were hanging out.
And I said, are you going anywhere?
I'm doing a podcast with Rizza next.
You want to hop on?
I thought it would be fun.
I thought it would be fun.
It was.
It was fun.
I would like to tell my side of the story.
We already did.
We've talked this.
We've done this many times.
Okay, every other podcast we do.
You tell your side of the story.
I'm never going to say this again, Joe.
I was going to leave.
And I was like, I was like, man, fuck Wu-Tang, man.
I'm going to see my son.
Right?
And I'm leaving out.
And as soon as I get ready to get my car, DeRizza comes out, and this motherfucker said, what's up, Ashy Larry?
And I said, fuck my son.
I'm fucking with the Wu-Tang, right?
And I didn't, but it was a good time.
It was fun.
But what people don't understand is, before we did that, Rizza said, yo, yo, bun, bun, bung, I got this idea, right?
I said, well, he said, I'm going to do these jokes.
They're going to be, he was trying to pitch jokes like he was on the jokes.
And I was like, please don't do that.
I was like, please don't do that.
And we sat down and of course it went, I had a good time.
But people was like, you just ruined it.
You ruined it.
You just ruined it.
But shout out to you.
It was fun.
It was a good time.
It was fun.
And thanks for, whenever I call you, let me, I can't even tell people anything other than, yes, I'm on tour.
Go to DonAirRollins.com, get tour dates.
All right.
And here's my shit.
A joke could be too soon, but it never could be too soon for a funny observation.
And that's what you're going to get when you come to my show.