Danny Mullen, known for blending chaotic humor with investigative stunts like the 2023 Border Patrol misdirection in Eagle Pass or WNBA arrests in fur coats, thrives on shallow expertise—mocking French figures (Napoleon, Descartes) as "poutine pigs"—while avoiding deep dives due to dwindling niche appeal. He dismisses YouTube censorship risks for big channels, citing Leo’s deleted account and Sargon of Akkad’s 2018 Patreon ban, preferring the platform’s direct control over content and revenue despite its demands. Mullen’s pranks—from fake FBI arrests to improvised stand-up with King Kroc at a sold-out San Diego show—rely on spontaneity, often targeting jaded California audiences or political extremes like MAGA rallies and flag-burning protests, while sidestepping global risks like Canada’s hate speech laws. His success hinges on viral adaptability, not mastery, proving that broad, shallow knowledge can outmaneuver depth in today’s content wars. [Automatically generated summary]
I almost forgot the name of my show because I almost said Danny Mullen.
He's our guest today.
How are you, Danny?
Thanks for joining me.
No problem.
I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me, Andrew.
This is just a monumental occasion.
You got a couple of big fans here, myself and an editor named Lincoln.
He considers himself part of the Danny Mullen.
I think it's Legion, if I'm correct.
Regime, excuse me, regime.
Whatever.
But shout out to Lincoln.
Thank you.
Oh, he's going to love that.
This isn't the like the first time I think some other people at Rebel News heard of Danny Mullen was when you had an excursion down by the border and ran into our fairly new reporter, Juan, who's been with us for a few months now, I think, doing the Spanish reporting and everything.
You want to tell everybody how that happened and what came about?
Really funny video.
We'll play it over top, but you want to tell us that story?
Yeah, absolutely.
So we went down to the Eagle Pass border section of Texas, which is one of the highest volume places as far as illegal immigration.
We went down there for the scheduled date of the termination of Title 42.
Title 42 was a Trump era piece of legislation that was basically the last line of defense keeping the borders from being totally overrun.
And the Biden administration was seeking to repeal it.
Now, to me, I heard about all this and I just thought, I have to see it for myself.
It sounds like awesome content.
And we just wanted to go down there and cover it.
And covering it, in my case, it's a little less professional than the squad of Rebel News as far as their definition of covering an event.
So we went down there with coyote costumes and an inflatable raft because we planned on crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico, actually.
I ended up getting tackled by Border Patrol.
It was a very immature display.
But at some point, we ran into Juan from Rebel News.
And he pointed out to us that there was this giant congregation of law enforcement, border patrol, and media.
And it was Juan who pointed out to us that, hey, I've been reporting on this sector of the border for months and months, and I've never seen it this heavily protected.
It's BS.
They're just putting on a show for the media.
And I don't like it because they're trying to give the citizens in America the idea that these borders are secure and they're actually not.
So that really fired me up.
I went right to City Hall where the governor of Texas was giving a speech in a coyote costume with my whole crew.
And we really made quite a spectacle out there.
And one of my favorite moments with the young Juan from Rebel News is when somebody, a police officer or a journalist, asked us who we were and who we were with.
I just, I shouted it out without thinking, we're with Rebel News, mother effer.
And you could see in the background, Juan going, no, they're not with us.
They're not with us.
Panic.
But he did the right thing.
But I think since that video came out, Rebel News was actually proud to have us claiming we were with them.
So Juan, if he could do it again, I think he would, the gesture would be more something like, yes, they're with us.
They're our newest correspondents.
He's new.
He might have been thrown off by telling him to chug the beer right away.
But he's a nice.
We did try to make him chug a beer.
Yeah, we tried to get him drunk.
We did.
He's more professional than I.
I probably would have just drank and said, who cares?
Danny, watching your, like, I knew who you were.
I saw you on Nelk Vids.
And then ever since this Juan stuff, it's just been non-stop binging your channel.
My girlfriend and I watched the one where you rated the women's march and pretended that I think it's your girlfriend, if I'm not wrong.
Yeah.
That you beat her up.
My girlfriend loved that.
She's like, this is something that you would make me do.
And it just really takes me back to my YouTube days, causing a muck in libraries and stuff and really bothering people around where I do.
And it just made me think of how did you get started doing this?
I don't know when your channel exactly started, but was it always just let's just go and do this excursion and we'll just make content out of it?
Because the content is really you and you have all the guys you're doing with.
And I want to ask you about Leo later, but the content is just you're going to go somewhere and you're going to make it a good video.
Is that how it always was?
Yeah, it I like to now think that we have enough of a team in place.
And I've done this long enough that when we go out to a place, it's not just, hey, let's be buffoons in public.
I try to have some sort of idea behind it.
Like the Title 42 video we did, it's called The U.S.-Mexico Border is a disaster.
It's one of my favorites.
It's us being super immature, sex jokes, really low-level humor.
But around it, we're doing some serious, sort of serious journalism.
The same with the WNBA game.
We're investigating a sporting event that most people have some ideas about and have heard of, but they don't know what it really looks like on the inside.
And that's where we come in.
We get courtside seats, show up in fur coats, and that night, as you know, we actually end up getting arrested.
But it started off a little I still, from time to time, will go back and private old videos of mine because at the very start, I was getting used to the grind of putting out a YouTube video every week, which is probably not a healthy work schedule to have.
And no other forms of media do people have to put out content every week of the year without break.
I mean, think about a sitcom or films where people have sketched they have breaks scheduled in and vacations.
We don't.
And I used to just be like, all right, I put out 42 pieces of content in a row.
I slept three hours last night.
I'm losing my mind.
Let's go into a Walmart and make loud noises until we get kicked out.
That's how it was a little bit in the beginning, and I'm not proud of that.
And I'm trying to move in the direction where, hey, now we're going to get kicked out by Border Patrol in a coyote costume while we're trying to make a young reporter shotgun a beer.
Well, whatever it is, Danny, it's working, let me tell you.
And I really like it, man.
I really envy you.
Now, I want to ask you about Leo.
I've got so many questions.
I want to ask you about Leo.
He is a homosexual.
Okay.
Yeah, he is.
He's come out of the closet.
I'm sorry.
It's early.
And I'm just like stupid stuff.
If there's a show on Rebel News to say that on it, I think it's this one.
So for a few videos, I'm watching it, and you keep saying he's from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.
I'm just like, oh, that's just a funny joke.
And I'm like, is he actually from The Bachelorette?
And I search it up, and he was.
And he was funny on that.
I saw the highlights of that.
How did you guys begin to cross paths?
Yeah, so him and I met in Los Angeles in a social media little sketch comedy event that was going on.
A buddy of ours who was directing a stupid Facebook sketch had us both on set and we met there.
And I saw the potential of Leo immediately just based on his look for all of these things we could do with a guy who looks like he should be on the cover of a romance novel.
But right after we did that shoot, though, he got cast on The Bachelorette.
Okay.
And I was bummed because I was like, oh, he's a reality television star now.
There's no way he's going to collaborate me with me, this guy who has, at the time, I don't know, 50,000 subscribers on YouTube.
But thank God that Leandro DiTavio was canceled for sending inappropriate texts to a woman in 2012.
They dug those up.
It destroyed his reputation in the reality television universe.
And he was mine again.
He was ready to come back to me because he would never get cast in another mainstream television show until the day he died.
Which is odd because there's so many reality shows where there's just like, what's that one where they go to the island and they're, is it still Temptation Island?
I'm not sure if it's still that.
They basically just cheat on their spouses the whole time.
But Leo sends some text and that's unacceptable for this genre now.
Yeah, isn't that strange?
The things that are okay and not okay.
Like, I recently got canceled.
It was about a year ago for saying insensitive comments about overweight people on a podcast.
I was ripping.
It was clearly a joke.
I said something about overweight women and how they should be treated.
It involved the samurai sword.
And it was clearly a joke.
I don't believe any of that, but it resulted in mass backlash.
The worst cancellation we've ever had.
But sort of like what you're alluding to, Andrew, is there are tiers of cancellation.
The worst you could get pegged with is racism.
After that, maybe sexual assault or sexual misconduct.
Fat is way down the list.
Fat shaming.
So the whole time, I couldn't even believe it.
Jokes and Cancellations00:04:23
I was like, oh, this is awesome.
I'm getting canceled for fat shaming.
That's the best kind of cancellation.
I love this.
And it really allowed me to lean into it.
When you referenced that, I looked it up and there is a change.org petition against you.
I don't think it's got any steam left behind it.
It faltered at like 50,000 or something, I want to say.
So everybody go and sign that.
Get it right on that.
Absolutely.
We'll put that on the screen.
A lot of the names were just not even clever joke names, too.
It was clearly my fans, I think, signed about 25% of those signatures with names like Harry Nutsack and Long Kock.
That was a lot of those names, I want to point out.
So they're not as close to their goal as it may seem.
It's inflated a little bit, we'll call it.
I just love when you guys are teaming up and you're really, I think you guys lean into the pretending to be somebody harder than anyone I've ever seen.
And that's what makes it so funny when you guys pretend to be the single A baseball players, for example.
Yeah.
And I think, and you did that with a hockey team as well.
And it's just the small town people just, one, accept that you guys are probably from this team.
And two, you just go into like a restaurant and be like, we're from this team.
You can't even skate, by the way.
I don't want to point that out.
But they somehow are just like, yeah, he's from, I forget what they're called.
Stocked in Heat.
Stocked in Heat.
Yeah.
It used to be in Canada, that team.
That's why I remembered it.
But, oh man, it's good.
Yeah, they're assholes, by the way.
They tried to copyright strike that video, and we won through the YouTube system.
But yeah, the key to pretending you're somebody you're not, I think, again, it helps to have Leo around, who's just this giant, good-looking dude.
And people, they take a look at Leo and they're like, this guy is too big and too handsome to be fooling around on YouTube.
It must be legitimate, whatever he's telling us.
So in the cases you referenced, he must be a real minor league ball player or a real minor league hockey player.
And then me, I come in with the jargon.
It's all bullshit, but I can tell you what size skate blade I have.
I can tell you the proper defensive formation when we play the Monterey Bald Eagles in another minor league hockey.
I just, I have all those things at the tip of my tongue.
So after 30 seconds of interacting with us, they're like, all right, I guess these guys are real minor league athletes.
We'll give them a free Rappuccino in our Starbucks.
And then Leo always busts out the, I think, like a Cuban accent whenever you're in those situations, too.
He's got that down, yeah.
It's very good.
Another staple, I think, and I know that I'm just running through things here, but is your wrestling and jiu-jitsu.
It's always impressive to watch people challenge you.
It's one of my favorite parts of your videos.
And there was this one guy, I forget, it might have been at the marathon race where one guy seemed like he really thought he could beat you.
You do have jiu-jitsu training.
I can tell that.
I'm pretty sure.
Am I wrong?
Yeah, that'd be impressive if I didn't.
And I just somehow was able to lock people up in triangles.
Yeah, I do train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
I've been at Purple Mouth for way too long.
But yeah, I try to train three times a week down here in LA.
And where do you train?
I don't want to say that.
Okay.
I don't want some wacko showing up with a sign when I'm just trying to lay low in the middle of class.
That's fair.
I'm just a big MMA fan, so I was wondering from that regard.
How did you go ahead?
I was just going to say, it's a good gym.
I train with good guys, but it's a good bit, too.
Yeah.
When your fans really want to wrestle you, that's always a good time.
Another thing I wanted to ask you about is how you got involved with Nelk.
They sort of bring you in as, like you mentioned, the maximum level bullshitter, CIA guy, FBI guy, Sasquatch video, I think you were in.
How did you end up getting that gig, let's call it, or how did you just end up hooking up with them to do videos?
So they are very responsible for my early YouTube success.
They saw my videos when I was doing those things I referenced earlier, the immature, hey, I'm out of ideas.
Let's get herded out of a Walmart.
Jimmy And Adam's Crime Story00:15:16
Unfortunately, that's what I was doing.
They saw something there that they liked.
And they requested that I write them a couple of ideas.
So I sent them a list of four ideas, one of which was based on an SNL sketch to go be a pepper boy at a restaurant, like a super nervous pepper boy, and just pepper up people's dishes who don't require pepper on that dish, don't want pepper on that dish.
And then the other idea, I forget two of the ideas, but the other one I wrote them was actually a rehash of an old man show bit with Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel to show up at the airport dressed in pilot gear and then start getting visibly hammered at an airport bar.
Yeah.
So we did that bit, and I don't think I told them that I nicked that from the man show.
I just, I pretended it was an original idea.
But we did both of those sketches and the pepper boy went over okay.
The drunk pilots went over really, really well.
And that solidified my relationship to them.
And ever since, they've been calling in when they need, as you said, a master bullshitter.
And the last two occasions where my services were needed were, yeah, I was the FBI agent who rolled in on a Humvee to arrest some mark they found up in the upper Michigan Peninsula, who was a Bigfoot expert.
Yeah, they found just some wacko who was the world's foremost Bigfoot expert, whatever that means up there in that region.
And yeah, I came in.
You can watch the video.
That'll probably be better than me explaining it.
The newest milk bigfoot video, and then recently I was a wedding planner, right?
Right, wedding planner at a fake wedding where they were also pranking some poor guy, a versatile.
I remember all those.
You mentioned the man show.
I'm glad, I think we're somewhat close to the same age, so I'm glad to get all these references.
But I saw Adam Carolla, I think, on Fox yesterday, and I'm just thinking, wow, him and Jimmy Kimmel really went separate ways.
I wonder if they just have this relationship where they don't talk to each other about anything related to politics, or even if they talk at all, because they don't badmouth each other, but they completely went in opposite directions.
Have you noticed that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I was just about to bring that up too.
Adam was one of my first comedy idols.
Him on Loveline, there's a channel called Loveline Clips, I think.
It used to be called Popular.
Now it's just Loveline Clips.
You can select any random Adam Carolla episode from 1997 to 2004, and he will make you laugh harder than most comedy specials on Netflix.
I mean, maybe you'll stumble across a Bill Burr or Louis Z.K. special that's better.
But Adam Carolla is almost as funny as those guys, totally unscripted.
And I loved him then, and it's made me so happy that he has basically been the same dude ever since.
I mean, he was anti-bullshit back in the day when he was on Loveline, over-taxation of people against crime, against people raising their kids like knuckleheads.
And today, that's become like, I mean, you're basically a Nazi if you say any of those things in public.
He hasn't backed down from that.
I still listen to his show every morning, The Adam Carolla Show, and it's great.
Jimmy Kimmel, on the other hand, just had Joe Biden on his program and was referring to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party as we and asking America why or asking aloud why people aren't with us and he didn't pondering why people can't understand why what Joe Biden is doing in the White House is really great right now.
Why can't people understand that?
So yeah, it's sad to see.
And I just, I think Adam's got to ask Jimmy, like, you're doing this is bullshit, right?
You're just doing this so you can stay on a prime time program so you can keep your advertisers and your guests.
You don't believe any of this, right?
Because I don't think there's any way that Jimmy Kimball can sincerely believe what he's saying night after night.
Well, you mentioned the part where they talk about like we, and I think it's very important for Hollywood and social media like Snapchat and Instagram to present it as if their point of view is the only one.
And anybody who differs from that even a little bit is like a really weird and strange and outlying person.
I think that's what a lot of it relies on, especially in the late night talk show world where they all pretty much say the exact same thing.
Everybody named Jimmy and James.
It's all Jimmy and James and Stephen Colbert.
Yes.
Yeah.
Hard segue, Danny, into how often you're asking people to show you their penis.
A lot.
Plans.
Speaking of not plans.
Can you tell your staff to turn their backs real quick?
And can you mind popping up and give me a look right now?
You mind giving me a look at yours right now speaking up.
Oh, no.
In person only.
Thank you.
I guess I have to talk about it if you don't want.
You know, that's that's that is a hard segue.
That was another thing.
Unfortunately, back in those days I referenced earlier when we didn't have much in the way of material.
We went down to San Diego with a character called Fan Jerry in my crew, and we filmed a video that was actually titled, Show Us Your Penis.
And we did a lot of asking people, as you can probably imagine, to show us their penis.
And unfortunately, that set it off.
And it creeps back into my videos from time to time like a cancer.
I just, I can't get rid of it.
Oh, man.
How much reliance is there on, you know, going in there?
I know you said that you're doing these planning, this planning now for the last while.
How much reliance is there on events happening?
Because I remember when I was doing these types of videos way back in the day now, let's say 2001.
No, I'm just kidding.
That you kind of have to try to find an event or find like a place to go to.
Is that why you find yourself traveling a lot more?
Or did you guys really just want to go and see more places?
Because a lot of the videos are like fattest city in America in Texas, worst city in California.
Did you kind of just want to get out there and see more of the country?
Or did you kind of follow where events and where things would lead you?
I think both.
I think I just scan the news, read the news.
Sometimes things jump out at me.
Events.
Oh, we could really go piss a lot of people off at this place.
But also, there really is something to be said for seeing the country and filming in locations other than Los Angeles.
LA is so saturated with dickhead YouTubers and people are so jaded that when you roll in with the camera, they already have a list of assumptions about you.
Want to be TikTok star, airhead, stupid, not funny.
Get away from me.
I don't want to talk.
But when you roll into a business in, say, Anchorage, Alaska, or Boise, Idaho with a camera, it's a novelty.
And everybody would love to speak with you.
This is their 15 minutes of fame.
So it is refreshing to travel and film.
It makes it a lot easier.
Not on the budget, but it does make it a lot easier to create content.
I keep asking people I talk to from California if they want to leave.
Because the people that are still there, I just had a friend of mine, Patriot Jay, who's a rapper, lawyer, writer, and everything.
He still lives out in California.
He doesn't plan on leaving.
He's a versatile guy.
Yeah, he is.
I know.
And he's only like 23 years.
He's a lawyer writer.
Yeah.
Wow.
He's like 23.
Dreadlocked.
Can you be a lawyer at 23?
Did this guy skip law school?
Maybe.
Maybe he's older than that.
But I think that's possibly five years in school.
How long does it take?
He might be like, I think Alexander Hamilton was self-studied.
I think he passed the bar after like six months.
So he was like later.
That happens.
You pay like a few grand.
You can do it.
But is there any desire to leave or do you just want to make California better?
Is there too much good content fodder out there?
Or how do you feel about that?
Yeah, I don't think, at least in my opinion, I don't think there would be a better state to film in.
The weather is something you have to consider because we film almost exclusively outdoors.
So a rainy day shuts us down.
That's important.
Absolutely.
The content is tremendous out here.
It is such a big state.
There are so many different worlds.
I mean, a lot of Star Wars, for instance, they turned the geography of California literally into different worlds.
I mean, Endor, the sand dunes, all of those locations they filmed at the original Star Wars is here.
And also politically, there are different worlds.
You can go to Bakersfield and find the biggest flag saluting MAGA man on the planet.
But then you go an hour and a half the other direction and people are lighting American flags on fire.
So we have that sort of diversity.
The crime's insane.
The underworld, the scum.
I love documenting that.
But it's also beautiful here.
I love LA.
I love the history of L.A.
The only real reason to move would be just cheaper real estate and not having to pay 13% income tax, which is a good reason.
But I mean, I mean, we toyed with the idea of moving to Las Vegas.
But what do you have in Las Vegas?
You have the strip and then you have strip malls.
And I just, I can't, people are going to get bored of me shoving a microphone in the face of a drunken tourist and then go like hanging out in front of a Chili's.
There's just, there's not enough content in these low-tax states.
So for now, remaining in Los Angeles is the plan.
Yeah, not to mention, if you get kicked out of one of those casinos, they're all going to ban you forever.
I feel like because they, I think they're all owned by three people.
Like three companies own all the casinos.
So yeah, that's true.
How, how hardcore are you going to go into a political scenario?
And what I mean by that is you went to Evergreen College.
I don't think you guys probably weren't in any physical danger at the time.
The people were wonderful there in that video.
Just the kid who lets you pop his pimple, that was in order to fight white supremacy, of course, because he was a whitehead.
But could we see Danny Mullen and Leo going to like Seattle during an Antifa riot or something like that?
Do you want to get that dangerous or is it best for you to not get into a place where you could actually get assaulted by a group of nerds?
Yeah, I would prefer to not get assaulted, but I'm willing to get assaulted.
Where it gets a little hairy is I don't want my cameraman or somebody else in my crew to get hurt because they aren't as in.
I mean, this is their job and it's my life.
So that's the difference.
So I'm willing to get hurt, but I don't want them to get hurt.
It's really the Antifa, the nerds, the liberals, they don't scare me.
In Los Angeles, it's just people who are on the fringe of homelessness, who can't really do the mental arithmetic.
If I kill this guy, I'm going to prison for the rest of my life.
Those are the scary people.
I mean, I was just reading an article in the LA Times the other day where a guy's down in Long Beach right now walking into 7-Elevens, holding up the register for $322, and then just smoking the clerk after he takes the money.
Just armed robbery, life in prison automatically.
He thinks it's worth it for a couple hundred dollars.
And that's what scares me.
People who are just so out of touch with reality that they will kill you over nothing.
And down here in Los Angeles, unfortunately, there are a lot of those people, and they scare me more than anything.
Have you ever done one in another country yet?
No, I'm not really too interested.
I mean, I used to think that we would be safe if we went to Canada, the UK, or Australia.
But as you know, I mean, Canada especially, free speech isn't really a thing, and their prime minister is a nutcase.
I don't really want to get, I don't want to get caught.
Like, I don't want to get arrested at a WNBA game or whatever their equivalent is.
Zero candidates in Canada.
I'm not sure what kind of like misogynist hate crime they would spin that up into being.
And I would be the next Britney Griner or whatever her name is, locked away for potentially 10 years for something that in America is nothing.
So I think you might, the worst thing that would happen, I think, is you'd get charged for hate speech and probably banned from the country.
I don't think you're doing jail time.
Canada doesn't like putting people in jail even for the worst of crimes.
In fact, they did the thing that I think they did in California and New York where they let a lot of people out during COVID because the prisons were overcrowded, they said.
So there's that.
I don't think you run the risk of jail time in Canada, especially if you just tell them you identify as something or that you have a certain sexuality or gender.
And then I think they'd be confused enough to let you just leave.
But the problem would be getting in, frankly.
You don't have 19 vaccinations.
I don't know if you can get in right now is the problem.
That's recently announced was you can never be up to date in Canada.
So you're going to need it every nine months to be considered up to date, which is a great new law.
I fixed my like 90s hair that I got going here.
It looks great, actually.
Thank you, Danny.
I pride myself on the voluminousness of it.
And it's not cooperating.
I need a haircut.
I need to go to my barber.
Maybe should censor that so that he doesn't get hate mail.
Somebody coming after me, they'll be like, well, I can at least go after.
Maybe Daniel will hear about it.
But yeah, I need to also.
But I feel like a hair appointment, especially in LA, it's first of all, you know, you're not going to be able to get in for a week.
So that knowing that it's going to take a long time weirdly makes you procrastinate even more because you're like, ah, it's just like such delayed gratification.
Then I have to drive to the valley of Los Angeles.
It really is horrendous.
I moved up the street from my old house.
So I just recently moved like a mile, about a mile.
And I thought, that's great.
I'll go to the same grocery store.
I can work out in the same park.
My life won't even change.
But that mile added nearly 25 minutes to my commute.
Pit Vipers and Commutes00:03:27
Oh, God.
Because every day it's something.
A junkie plows into a fire hydrant and floods a city block.
Add 15 minutes onto your commute.
A high-speed chase ensued with the police.
And now there's a shootout at La Brea in La Cienega.
And you have to go 30 minutes out of your way.
So for me, getting a haircut, I mean, I might as well be crossing into Tijuana to get it done.
It's such an effort that's, yeah, I'm getting anxiety just thinking about it.
I need one as well, though.
See, it's here.
It's construction or car accident every single day.
If there wasn't any of that, my drive to work would be 30, 35 minutes, but every day it's an hour for some reason.
And it never gets done.
But isn't your haircut like part of who you are?
I want to say, like, isn't, aren't you recognizable partially because of your haircut?
Yeah, it's a pretty stupid bull cut right now.
And right after it gets cut, I get a wave of shit talk from the fans for like maybe three weeks until it grows out into a more natural state.
Then they're like, all right, we can stop making fun of his hair.
But yeah, I guess when you do what I do, you can't get the traditional like douchebag TikTok or perm cut or anything like that.
You can't be trying to look hot.
So that rules out a bunch of haircuts for me right there.
I do jujitsu, so I don't want the hair all down in my face.
So that rules out a longer haircut.
So I'm really left with just a handful of cuts.
And the bowl cut is somehow what I wound up with.
I'm not really sure.
Probably find a better alternative now that I talk about.
Well, I think, you know, society really came into play into your haircut.
Like, society caught up to your haircut.
Now we're seeing it a lot more.
I was at a tech conference a couple weeks ago.
And there's this guy with a big hockey mullet shaved side of his head, big permed mullet at the back, selling NFTs.
And I go up to him.
I'm like, this is going to be a Canadian bro.
And it turns out he was like a Peruvian guy.
He's like, yes, you like this hair?
It is called Di Molette.
And I was like, this is impressive.
And his comedy is called Ugly Bros.
Shout out Ugly Bros.
Don't get canceled on that.
Shout out.
Yeah, that was the problem with the mullet, too.
My hair used to be more mullet-y, but now Peruvian guys, it's such a big trend that they're rocking it.
And every date rapist frat douchebag that I see on the street, too, with a pair of pit vipers and a longboard, he's got the mullet now.
So I hadn't transitioned out of that.
That got too big.
Let me just scratch off wearing my pit vipers in my next video.
I got them because Filipino-American comedian I'm friends with with a mullet has been wearing them.
I'm like, I need my own pit vipers for.
Tell him he's got to be careful.
That's two strikes, the pit vipers and the mullets.
But hey, Leo wears pit vipers too.
So I'm not hating pit vipers.
You just, you can't, you could have like one thing that overlaps with the typical American date rapist frat boy.
You don't want like all of your accessories and looks matching them.
I'll have to get rid of the longboard.
No, I'm against you in the anti-longboard stance.
It is impressive, though.
You just randomly do these things in your videos.
Like you just randomly are able to kick flip.
And when I watched, you just grab this guy's guitar and start playing it.
French References Tease00:03:57
Maybe you're not like amazing at everything, but you do.
That sounds like an insult now that I say it.
No, you're right.
You're right.
But you know how to do basically everything convincingly.
I think that's the point to be, if you want to be like Danny Mullen, be able to do things convincingly.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, an improv teacher of mine once said that when you're not doing improv or comedy, you should just learn about the world.
Go to a play, go to a symphony, go to a new restaurant, read a book about a subject you know nothing about.
Because all of that stuff will serve you in your comedy if you just have a little surface level knowledge about everything.
And that's what you're referring to.
I know a little bit about a lot, which is better than being a master at anything.
Well, it really hits home for me is your hatred of the French, being a French Canadian myself.
The constant wreck.
Is it constant?
I don't know.
It's constant, but there's been frequent times where you're saying, let's yell at these French people.
And you're just like, Napoleon sucked.
Maybe you've mentioned like Descartes or something.
You have a whole bunch of French references that I myself don't even know.
And you're able to fire them off like six in a row.
This person was the worst person of all time.
His influence means nothing to me.
And just the poor French, you know, but not actually.
Yeah, I think you're referring to the video cross-dressing in San Francisco where we're more than one, Danny.
I'm not lying.
I can't even remember the last time we disparaged the French, but I mean, I was going to lay into the French right here.
But that's the thing.
I told you, I have a shallow amount of knowledge about everything.
Well, I've exhausted my anti-French sentiment, so now I'm out of new things.
I need to pick up maybe some 1940s era newspapers.
I'm sure there's something maybe that I can find about the French there.
I'll just call my dad and be like, dad, give me a lot of things French people hate, at least in Canada.
He hates separatists, loves his poutine and his Pepsi.
Do you know what a Joe Louie is?
A Joe Louie?
Yeah, it's a pastry.
There's this big pastry factory in Quebec called Vachon.
And they create all these like, yeah, V-C-H-O-N.
They create all these pastries.
Basically, like Swiss rolls and like pies, like moon pies, essentially, but it's called a loon moon here.
So there's plenty of fodder that I can just message you if you're ever for some reason surrounded by Frenchmen from Quebec.
So poutine's great.
But what's the Louie?
What is that called again?
Joe Louie, but it's spelt J-O-S and then Louie with an S. Like, Joss Lewis would be a joke we would say when we were kids.
See, that's that's um, that's too deep because you can call somebody a Joe Louie eater and nobody will get it.
Like, the less they're Canadian they would.
So, again, we're getting down to like 3% of the audience.
Whereas Poutine is that's highbrow.
That's a highbrow insult if you call somebody like a poutine pig in their French.
What do you mean I'm a poutine pig?
But uh, but at least, like, at least Poutine is like one notch above Palm Fritz.
It's a little bit more of a highbrow reference than that, but we're not in the Joe Louie territory, which is just people are going to be scratching their heads.
This is the art of insulting the Frenchman.
Palm Fritz, Apple, apple fries.
See, apple fries, I don't know of crazy.
Well, that's what Palmer is.
That's what Palm Fritz means.
Oh, does it?
I thought it was just French fries.
Worries and Views00:05:35
No, that's no, we're gonna have to.
Next episode, Danny, is just all French stuff.
Yeah, I've been calling people apple fry eaters.
That's not even a thing.
That's just two words stuck together.
Very good.
We'll get a thumbnail with just like a floor-de-lis.
All right, I wanted to explore as you lean in intently and listen to my wise words.
Keep going.
More about this canceling stuff.
Do you ever worry about it?
Because this change.org thing, I think if the right people wanted to try to like, are you demonetized on YouTube?
No.
No, that's what I'm saying.
And let's not jinx ourselves here.
Maybe I shouldn't even say it, but should this be something that you're worried about?
Do you worry about it at all when you're making the content?
Because every time I put a YouTube video up and it gets demonetized right away, I pretty much always win the appeal, knock on wood.
So it's not something I really worried about, but I'm wondering with such a large channel of yours and how many views you get, you have to sort of worry about this sort of thing sometimes, or do you?
I think the bigger you are, the less you have to worry about it.
Because YouTube, they have done some shady stuff.
Like they got rid of Leo's channel, which was a smaller channel.
And you hear stories about them just throwing aside the three-strike system and axing channels that they don't like.
But they can only do that when those channels are small.
Because if my channel got booted off YouTube, it would be news.
Enough other creators in this niche would pick it up and complain about it.
And it would be bad press for YouTube.
I mean, a great example of this is when Sargon of Akkad got kicked off Patreon in 2018 or 19, and Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris left the platform.
A ton of people left the platform and it was a black eye that I think they've done everything in their power to recover from.
YouTube doesn't want that.
It doesn't want to censor people publicly and be branded as that platform.
So I feel actually pretty safe because of my size.
And also, especially more and more, I feel like I try to do comedy that's universally funny.
I want to do stuff that makes my parents laugh.
So it's a little bit offensive.
It's a little bit naughty, but it's really not violating community guidelines.
I mean, I'm sure YouTube, I mean, clearly they don't like me probably.
There are a lot of people in YouTube who don't like me taking my girlfriend with a prosthetic black eye to a woman's march.
Okay, they're probably offended by that.
But it's really, I'm sure, not their top priority for removing from the platform.
What else do you want to do?
Do you want to, are you happy with staying on YouTube?
And I don't mean that insultingly.
Do you want to do something?
Would you ever do a Danny Mullen show?
Have you been offered by like MTV or something?
Is there anything like that?
No official offers.
I just realized, though, that my business email that's on my YouTube channel is like an email I hadn't checked in like three years.
So if MTV has emailed me, I haven't seen it.
But I'm not really interested in any of that.
I like the immediacy of we make something, we put it up on YouTube, it gets views instantly.
I don't really like the idea of going radio silent for eight months, working on a TV show for Netflix or Hulu.
It goes up.
It gets the same amount or less views than I get on YouTube.
And then it's gone.
And then nobody can find it or access it again because the rights get lost or sold.
And yeah, five years down the line, you're like, nobody even knows where it is anymore.
Right now, my content is all batched together.
I own it all.
It comes out when I want it to come out.
I'm happy with what I get paid.
I see people on YouTube who make much, much more money than I do.
So I know there's plenty of room for growth.
I'm happy on YouTube.
And the Danny and Leo podcast, I think it's called.
When did you start that?
Was there a particular reason, or did you guys just say that you wanted to just do a podcast like the rest of us?
Yeah, it's the Leo and Danny show.
And we started it on my couch, actually.
One hungover morning on my couch in 2019.
And yeah, that's just for us to have a podcast because you have to have a podcast, right?
Not much more to it.
Well, before we go, I'd be remiss to not shout out Ryan Long.
How did you guys meet?
One of the nicest guys in what I'll call it this space, this sphere.
How did you guys get to know each other?
Yeah, I believe we just exchanged a couple of direct messages.
I called him a piece of shit.
He called me a cocksucker.
No, that's not true.
Exchange text messages sounds like it's hostile or direct messages.
But no, we just said, hi, I like your stuff.
The feeling's mutual.
I went on his show, his podcast, actually, remotely, like I'm doing right now.
And then we first met up and filmed here in LA in November.
And shout out to Ryan in the video we did that we've spoken of a couple of times now, where I took my girlfriend, my battered girlfriend, to a woman's march.
The second half of that video, we went down to a Ryan Long comedy show in San Diego.
King Kroc's First Five Minutes00:01:42
And he gave our beloved crew member, King Kroc, his first five minutes of stand-up ever.
My buddy King Kroc gets up on stage at Ryan Long's sold-out comedy show with no material and somehow miraculously kills.
And he gave King Kroc the confidence he needed to continue his comedy career now.
So shout out to Ryan Long.
Isn't King Kroc a Donkey Kong reference?
No, that's King K rule.
My apologies.
Yeah, you're right.
That's the crocodile guy.
Yeah, that came up the other day.
Well, Danny, I really appreciate you coming on.
I had a lot of fun talking to you.
I'm down to, if you ever come to Can, I'm down to come out and support your hate speech here.
Hopefully I can come down there sometime.
Anything else you want to mention to our Canadian audience?
Anything else you want to mention at all?
No, just thanks for having me, man.
I like Rebel News.
You guys were super awesome.
All of your reporters down there in Eagle Pass.
Love what you guys are doing.
Keep it up.
And thanks for having me, man.
No problem.
You become a special correspondent whenever you want, okay?
Danny Mullen live from the border tearing down that wall jumping the border anything all right hell yeah sent inside where they get to the stalling house side where they get to the walking no side for the people that's off and rustling my boy you know that I'm talking aye rustling my boy you know that I'm talking aye look rustling my boy you know that I'm sent inside I don't trust a single soul inside need to euthanize sit on their ass while they loot the guys With their suits and ties,
we rip them off with the strength of gods.
If I see Nancy Pelosi or Kevin McCarthy, we fighting like Budokai.