The Joe Rogan Experience - #1273 - Ron Funches

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

Ron Funches is a comedian, actor and writer. His new special "Giggle Fit" is available now to download via Comedy Central, Amazon, and iTunes.

That's what the last thing people want to see, you know, it's the thing of difference I'm learning between when I do comedy and acting is that like the last thing people really want to see from your own stage is you really get emotional. Yeah. You know, but when you act, you have to go to that right away. Big difference. We're live? Is it working? Just got it up, yeah. Oh my Jesus.

Right at the end of that. A candid moment. No, I think you're totally right. Ron Funches and I were talking about people getting mad First of all welcome to the show Thanks for having me We were talking about people getting emotional On stage if people get angry

On stage It shows the audience can feel it You can say the exact same words And with like a fake anger As we were saying like Brody was really good at Like he would fake be mad at you. Yeah. And it was.

Louis Black. Yes. Yeah. If you could see those exact same words, there's like a smile to it, right? You were saying that there's a nod or a hint, hint of a nod. Yeah. There's a little wink that lets you know that this isn't, this is a joke. I'm not really this mad about it.

And there's usually an absurdity about the thing they're mad at. Yes. You know? Yeah. We also see those sets sometimes when, like, someone's recently broken up with somebody or something. And then you get that real anger. And you could say something funny, but, like, it's too fresh. It's too real.

And people just don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear it. Yeah. It makes them feel uncomfortable. We were talking about how weird it is that you could actually have something that sounded so similar to that, but we could tell the difference. Like with the exact same words, with enthusiasm, just something's off about it. Something's off about it that you know it's funny versus something's off about it where you know that person's serious and a person like i was we were just saying try to explain that to someone who doesn't understand english or doesn't understand human communication they'd be like what

yeah how can you tell like how can you tell it's fake how can you tell it's fake anger yeah that's what makes i mean the language so fun yes that's not just about the words it's about the um intent behind the words yes and body language and posture is what makes comedy so deep you know i love about it oh for sure yeah i mean there what we're trying to do is convey intent we're trying to figure out a way to sneak ideas into your head where maybe you didn't see the punchline coming yeah it's a it's a very strange art form like one of the strangest ever so because it's a i've always said it's almost like a form of mass hypnosis do you feel that sometimes like in the middle of the set and you're in the groove yeah um a lot of ways um one of um Yeah, a lot of ways.

One of, this is going to get, I mean, you're a weird guy, so it doesn't matter. But it's going to get weird in multiple ways. But when I was first starting my acting class, I was talking about that with my acting coach. And I'd be like, there's a point, like, if my set's really going well, where I'm in the present moment of enjoying the set saying these words but at the same time i'm i'm in the future thinking about what's coming next i'm surveying everything that's going around me and i'm also still kind of like judging myself off of what just happened and so this thing happens where you're kind of like time traveling in a way where you don't exist in any one space of time you you just kind of like remove yourself from that and when your set's going really well that's the thing that my girlfriend and i've talked about is that you can hear these sets

and hear these jokes maybe you can see someone said multiple time but they're really good oftentimes you don't remember the joke like how many times people go back and quote a joke to you and they've got it half wrong right because they've heard you a thousand times but they don't remember the joke. Like how many times people go back and quote a joke to you and they've got it half wrong. Right. Because they've heard you a thousand times, but they got the joke half wrong because you've hypnotized them. They don't even remember it, you know? Oh, yeah.

Or some people remember shit you don't remember anymore. Yeah. That's a weird one. Yeah. I've had people come up to me and tell me a bit. I go, what bit is that? And they'll tell me the bit. I'm like, when is that from?

Like, 2014. I'm like, I don't even remember that. Yeah, just something you were trying out every now and then. Who knows? Yeah. That's what's fun now for me is I'm getting a little bit deeper. I'm coming up on 13 years. Now I'm getting to the point where I'm like, oh, this bit that I tried two or three years ago now works.

Yes, yes. And that's really fun. Yeah, I remember that time. You're essentially a PhD in comedy when you got 10 years in. Like if you do real 10 hard years of comedy. And then after that, it seems like some guys, I mean, it all depends on the artist, right? And after that, it seems like some guys, I mean, it all depends on the artist, right? But some guys have their best work like 15, 16 years in.

They're just starting to catch their groove and figure out what it is. Because it's only understood by the people who practice it. It's understood in a way by a lot of people who are comedy fans. But that's similar to me being a fan of music. I don't know about music but i know what i like i know when it sounds good yeah i literally don't understand any of it so i think there's those kinds of people too yeah i mean comedy is such a yeah i mean that's what gets great when your peers what's one thing i loved about doing my special, other than people seeing it and being able to, like,

I wanted to just make something and put something out. I'd always done small little things or guessed it on people's things. And I was like, oh, I've been doing comedy over 10 years, and I show a lot of potential. I want to present a meal. And when I put it out, and and and like people's reaction was great but in the but my peers is what really made me happy that when i would get texts from from like melanie or for some of the people being like you are or just be like this was your hour this is you presenting who you are completely right and and that um when people can see the stuff behind it when it's not just like

joke punchline joke punchline when people can see like oh you set this up you did this right your structure is right and then you just were yourself that's what really makes me happy in comedy yeah yeah you're a funny dude man i enjoy watching you i've watched you quite a few times at the comedy store now in the main room you're very very funny man it's cool to see a guy like you put something down that's representative of your real your real stand-up what you're capable of doing it's a nice group to be a part of man and you sound like you think about it a lot like i really appreciate that when people think about like what it is we're doing how do you do it? How do you do it? Do you write? Do you write on paper?

Do you write with a typewriter? Do you just have ideas and you just keep working on them? It's all a mix. I like to say I'm more of a fisher than a hunter. I'm not constantly like, oh, I need to write this down. Every day I have the structure. But I'm constantly like I try to make my house that we're constantly always joking around with each other there's notebooks everywhere there's like

little bowls of like with um post-it notes for me whenever i an idea comes i make sure i catch it and then i have to make sure that i work on it you know um that becomes the difference just constantly keeping myself in motion so that i don't't get stagnant and I don't just do the same 10, 15 over and over again. Because, you know, that's where I think, especially when I first moved out here, it was always about like, oh, I got to show these people that I'm good. So I got to do my best work, my best work. And I did that for about three months. And I was like, oh, I don't have anything in the kitchen. I don't have any backup, you know i haven't been building anything up and so i learned very

quickly i think the comedy story has been the best for me that just being like um having to like follow people who are completely not like me stylistically um having to follow people who i grew up watching you know i did a um night the other day where i had to follow it who I grew up watching. You know, I did a night the other day where I had to follow, it was Sebastian and then Ron White and then me. And then I was like, oh, there's no, I mean, I'm like, I'm confident in myself. Some people know me,

but when it comes to that, it's like I'm the bottom of the totem pole on those three. And I had to go out there and just show them that like, I'm capable. I'm not going to mess up the momentum here. I'm just as funny as these people. You just don't know me. You haven't met me yet.

That's the thing. I've been listening to a lot, like, these rappers all the time. But, like, this rapper 2 Chainz, where he said, like, I just had to wait for the fans and for the game to learn what I already knew. And that's where i'm starting to feel now a new confidence of like i know i'm good and i just have to wait for people to to catch up on my wave and i don't if they don't they don't if they do fine dude that's very jazz of you two chains was the guy who debated nancy grace about weed remember that yeah Weed. Mm-hmm. Remember that? Yeah. Weed is going to kill you. He outlasted her.

Yeah, that didn't work. I mean, it's hilarious now when you see how many states have legalized it. In full disclosure, Ron and I smoked marijuana with young Jamie before this podcast. Yes, we did. As I do so many others. Finally, the stigma stigma Slowly being removed Slowly? Dude I was a drug addict

In the 90s When I first started Smoking weed I guess it was Not even the 90s It was like Maybe 98 or 99 Somewhere around then

That's when I started Smoking weed And you were a drug addict You were a drug addict You were a marijuana user What's wrong with you man? Get your shit together I'm like man You guys don't get it and you were a drug addict. You were a drug addict. You're a marijuana user? What's wrong with you, man? Get your shit together.

I'm like, man, you guys don't get it. There's two chains. There he is, Nancy Grace. They put the stuff on the screen when it was going on. How many marijuanas does it take to overdose? Jamie, send me that. Send me that. That is a fucking amazing quote Did she really say that

No no no it was a twitter user It's like people were tweeting whatever hashtag pot to blame Oh my god Oh that twitter user Tyler 2015 Oh Tyler 2015 But is 2015 the day of the tweet No that's probably just in his account

It's a weird tweet though because there's a space in there. Yeah, I think 2015, well, whether... I don't know. I don't know. Whoever that is, congratulations. Made me laugh my ass off. That's funny. But yeah, that's why I love...

She was a ridiculous lady. She obviously wasn't that healthy. She wasn't a very fit know she wasn't uh like a very uh fit health conscious person she's worrying about weed she's a crazy person she was like paula dean but she couldn't cook food there's marijuana it's gonna kill you ron funchess people still like that there's a lot of people like that in the middle of the country in the middle of the country sometimes it's still like you know there's a lot of stigma depend racially you know depends they get the the soccer weed moms and everybody's like oh that's cool and then you still get that like i did a podcast the other day and

the first comments were like either you're yours two stones you're not doing i was like no i just did a bad job you know like i could have just done a bad job it didn't have anything to do with me being stoned yeah like they know that if you were sober the podcast would have been way better yeah if you were sober man you wouldn't have been so weird it's true it's all true i used to have to go to this place, the Englewood Wellness Center. It was kind of in a hood area. A little bit sketchy. And then while we were going there, within a year or two later, the guy who ran it got shot and robbed there. It was like, that's how dangerous weed was.

Because you had to do it all in cash. They wouldn't let banks use checks. They wouldn't accept checks and credit cards. So everything was weird. Even though it was medical and it was legal, you had to get it through nefarious ways. And then slowly but surely, the stigma started to erase. Yeah. Now you can just go to a store on Melrose.

Yes. Like adults. Like, how do you feel? You're a wise man. How do you feel? I shouldn't have qualified that. I felt like I'm do you feel you're a wise man how do you feel i shouldn't have qualified that i felt like i'm setting you up what do you think about making all drugs legal do you think that that would ever happen and given what we know about prohibition sounds like an interview

given what we know about prohibition like how bad it was for alcohol and how it popped up the organized crime and i mean it caused a lot of problems do you think it would be a wise thing to make all drugs legal that's a tough question for me that's um I think you have to start I guess that's really trying to give people a lot of credit about their intelligence and their decision making right and that's what you're trying to lead towards that the that the individual is very intelligent and they they're going to make their decision no matter what and that by putting these stigmas to it just like you know like you know prostitution things like that you're you're just adding extra jail time extra obstacles

extra um life-threatening situations and you're also penalizing people for their own life choices instead of propping up organized crime or as well as rather propping up organized crime but if you've seen the effects of drug addiction which i've had on occasion you it's hard to go like yeah this should be okay you know i 100 agree so it's it's not that clean no i don't and that's why yeah that would be my answers i don't think it's that clean i think that it is a case-by-case basis well do i think marijuana should be legal absolutely do i think that you should necessarily legalize heroin no i don't think so i don't think so either um but i think that i think there's a real problem with infantilizing adults. The real problem is, like, if you are 25 years old or older and you decide you want to try cocaine, why can they say you can't do that? Why?

Says who? Says who? Why, if you catch me with that that Can you put me in a jail? It grows from the ground It's a plant They take that plant They process it They turn it into cocaine

They still use it legally For lidocaine And medical grade cocaine They still use it For the flavor Of Coca-Cola They still use the leaves They still use the plant

Like who says I don't even do coke But who the fuck Do you think is making money selling coke because there's a lot of coke it's one thing that's completely 100% illegal yeah it's everywhere there's no other industry in miami and there's so much money there did you see cocaine cowboys no oh dude billy corbin the guy who directed it, was on the podcast yesterday. He's fantastic.

And he's got this new documentary called Screwball. It's about Alex Hernandez and steroids and baseball and all this crazy shit. Oh, right. Rodriguez. Who's Alex Hernandez? Is it a different one? A-Rod. How did I say Hernandez?

He's a guy. No, that's Aaron. That's the weed. I'm thinking of the guy from the New England Patriots. Goddamn weed. Fuck my head up. That is the guy from the Patriots. No, that's Aaron. That's the weed. I'm thinking of the guy from the New England Patriots. It's the goddamn weed. Fuck my head up. That is the guy from the Patriots. No, that's Aaron Hernandez.

Oh, okay. That's where I fucked it up. My apologies, Alex. Alex Rodriguez. And anyway, this guy made a documentary called Cocaine Cowboys. And it's all about how crazy during the big cocaine days Miami was. And how one year the entire graduating class of the Sheriff's Academy, the Police Academy, whatever it was,

they either were murdered or they were arrested for corruption. The whole, everyone, the entire class, like the entire graduating year, like it was wild west chaos. And there was all these pilots bringing in millions of dollars worth of coke. And they had bags of money buried in their backyard. It's fucking crazy. That's interesting.

It's great, man. It's great. It's a two-part series. There's two parts to it, too. Do you ever hear about the Black Mafia family? You ever watch any documentaries about them? No. That makes me always interested.

What did they do? They were a cocaine outlet in the early 2000s out of Atlanta. And they transit, at one point, they were running like most of the South, Southeast, headed by this dude named Big Meech. And then they decided like we should legalize and get into a rap. But they had never done anything like that before. And they were very blatant about it. So all of a sudden, these people who came out of nowhere were just all on, like, every magazine.

They had this thing where they're interviewing police officers. And they had this big billboard when you would land in Atlanta that would go, go that would just say bmf we own the world and they were just out there and they would throw these big parties with tigers and stuff and they only had one recording artist so it was just like they weren't good at pretending not to be drug dealers wow it's so it's very interesting to me well that whole um rap business man i mean if you just stop and think about rap music other than some country and i mean really like a small amount of country would talk about murdering men you know i shot a man in reno just to watch him die a few johnny cash maybe some Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, maybe some of those songs. But when you get to NWA, you have a totally different level of aggression.

When you get to Ice-T's body count, when he was doing that hard metal shit, he was doing Fuck the Police or I'm a Cop Killer. I mean, it's either NWA's Fuck the Police or Ice-T's I'm a Cop Killer. You hear those, like, you've never heard anything like that before. Yeah, and that was an interesting time because that's, I mean, talking about real anger we talked about before, this is coming from real places of people who

were dealing with, you know, Los Angeles at a horrible time and a lot of police corruption. And then what's crazy is then it goes the other way, right? They take that real anger that people connected to, and then they just started manufacturing it. And then rap becomes all these fake stories of like,

I murdered all these people. I have all this money. And then now it's just so far gone that it's hard to find that. I mean, now my favorite authentic rap is like people who are like oh you know i can't find my wi-fi password or are people just talking about raising their kids now i love that in rap because then i'm like oh you're for real yeah why not talk about anything you know today was a good day right i mean that was like one of the original ones, right? There used to be a song called All You Could Eat, which was just about going to a buffet.

But like, today was a good day. I mean, that is like a classic example of someone taking the art form and completely switching it up and slowing it down and make it casual and relaxed and celebratory. And that's from the same dude. The same dude from NWA. Yeah, smart man, smart man. He's a wizard of a writer too. His lyrics are fantastic. When there's lyrics, in my mind, when it comes to hip hop,

there's lyrics and then there's Nas. Nas does shit that you just go like that backwards song. Everything is so it's like a practiced orchestra, you know, as opposed to just being rhymes. Like sometimes he puts things together so interestingly. You know, he's got his own special sort of appreciation for things. Yeah, he's also a very smart man. He has to be. He invests in a lot of tech companies. He's big in investments.

He was young 20s when he wrote that. He was like 23 when that song came out. That's incredible. His dad was like a jazz musician. So I think he grew up around the culture of creating things and being an artist. He's got that feel to him. He's like a hybrid you know in terms of it he's like jazzy rap sort of you know what i mean like there's something to it's like almost like a classical trained musician slash rapper in terms of like how he constructs

things yeah like hamilton i didn't see hamilton did you see it no i but a lot of people once a lot anything where a lot of like that makes a lot of white people get into rap i go that's probably not for me oh i want no need rap about the presidents this one thing that like white guys have managed to infiltrate certain uh of rap, but such a small number of legitimately respected white rappers. What's the number? Eminem, of course.

Eminem. Yeah, for sure. Kid Rock, in a way, he's kind of a rapper. I wouldn't say he is a respected rapper. No. No. No. But he's fun.

Yeah. He's accepted. MC Search. Macklemore Yeah It's accepted MC Search Macklemore MC Search MC Search was great I used to love them I used to love Third Base

They were fun Everlast BC Boys Oh Everlast for sure But Everlast has changed And now He raps occasionally I would think he would

Call himself more of a musician Jump around But he still jump around He still jump around Well not only that the last shit that they put out was great too that stuff that he came in and and showed us and he did some stuff with be real and some other guys what did they call it what was his last project oh uh oh shit shout out to that project we'll find it jamie will find it he's a shit but like um

it he's a shit but like um war porn industries that's right war porn industries that's preposterous what a crazy name how high do you have to be to come up with that name action bronson oh yeah oh yeah albanian yeah oh action bronson yeah dude i've never seen a man smoke more weed in my life never seen it he just keeps going like he, we took a picture of the ashtray after it was over to show all the expired blunts. But it was like, this is, he's from that

Fuck That's Delicious show. You ever watch that? Oh, yeah. I'm a big action Paranthian friend. I love him. He's so interesting to me. Do you watch the cooking show?

Sometimes, yeah. It's interesting, right? Like, that guy was like a legit chef. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, man. And then, just that he's a great rapper, It's interesting right Like that guy was Like a legit chef Yeah Yeah And man And then

Just that he's A great rapper Great chef A great personality Super nice guy He's selling paintings now Good for him Yeah

Sell it for a billion dollars That's one billion dollars You fucks That's two billion That's a maze I had to work on that That's a rug with a lot of weed burns on it get that money action bronson get that money yeah man i'm all for people selling the most ridiculous shit i went to my agent's house once he had this dope place in aspen i mean this place was crazy like you know aspen houses like

near the ski lodges and shit and on the wall he had this painting and i said i go did this kid make this and they go no that's a you know some fucking obscure popular artist i go what is that and they're like this is a really expensive piece shut the fuck up you're messing with me they're like no it was like tissue paper there was like different colors it was stuck with glue and like a little piece of paper and some paint on it like get the fuck out of here with this like what are you doing with that can't count i mean was it pretty no no that's why i was stunned i thought it was his kid i thought his kid made it maybe i'm maybe i was dumb i definitely, but younger and dumber. Maybe I'd appreciate it now, but I don't think so. I appreciate all kinds of art. I appreciate distorted things, but I don't appreciate just a bunch of splat.

You know what I mean? It's got to have something to it. Yeah. Like Jackson Pollock stuff. That stuff weirds me out. It's like, why is it so expensive? I get it. I get it. I mean, it's crazy. It's like, why is it so expensive? I get it. I get it.

I mean, it's crazy. It's definitely crazy. But then you look at a classic, like look at some Frank Frazetta stuff. Do you know who that guy is? He was a fantasy painter from the 19th century. There's a poster of his or a print of one of his works out in the lobby, that Conan the Barbarian one with that monster.

He's got a sword. He was this guy that would do all the covers for Conan the Barbarian books. Just incredible artwork, like wild crazy fantasy shit. And this is your type of art? Oh, just I loved it when I was a kid man

when i was a kid you know when i was a young boy this seems like what you would like i loved it it was the best his books were incredible there's robert e howard was this really tortured guy who was um a guy who lived with his mom he had you know fairly poor health and he died suicide when he was like 36 years old but he wrote a bunch of these books about a guy that was nothing like him about a guy who was this just unstoppable force of nature from this he created this place called uh was sumerian no what do you call it what was his sumerian it was sumerian is that what it was where conan conan the samarian right c-i-m they create created a whole world and in this world it was like it was like very games

of throny in a lot of ways the original shit like no one to this day has really captured the books in a movie like arnold was fun as conan and then jason momoa was like a better fit physically he was like a perfect fit physically more He was like a perfect fit physically. More realistic as opposed to like being a bodybuilder. But nobody's ever captured like the feeling of the books. Because the books was just some wild shit. And it was all created by this one guy who was like super depressed. You just write these books about this guy who just fucked all these women

and killed everyone and just smashed his way through the world. Power fantasy. Like crazy shit, though. It was all him fighting dragons and monsters and demons coming for his soul. And he ran for 72 hours and fights them off with a sword. When you're 12 years old, like I was, and I got into this shit, you'd be like,

whoa, man, this is wild. Oh, I get that. That's like what ECW wrestling was for me, because there was like titties everywhere and violence and blood and nails. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, I watched one yesterday on Instagram. Somebody had a clip of a guy and a girl, and they're in the middle of the ring.

The guy's making out with the girl, and then he turns on there and body slams her down to the ground. And I was like, you could still do that? In pro wrestling, you could still fake violence against a chick? I didn't know you could do that. Oh, yeah. Intergender wrestling is still real big. They slam, they fake slam chicks?

Sure. That is crazy. I saw him do that. I was like, that could not have felt good. A lady stuck a blow pop up a dude's butt recently. Oh, no. Mm-hmm. He didn't want it.

What is this about? It's just his dick. When you carry around blow pop, I guess, you know. Wow. Jesus Christ. Just wrestling. Well, whatever you got to do to sell them tickets. What is this, Jamie?

Is this the blow pop thing? No way. Oh my God, he's really sticking it up his ass. Oh, they put it in his mouth. Oh my God. And then he sidekicks him in the face and the guy's got his pants down.

Wait a minute, that might be the greatest video I've ever seen in my life. Is that the same guy who did the, like, the hit the dick move? Oh shit, look at this. Look at? Oh, shit. Look at this. Look at this great white shark.

Look at this beached great white shark. That's crazy. Fuck, that's crazy. I can't show it. The shark was chasing a seagull. Oh, you can't show it. And accidentally ended up in the beach. Why don't these guys grab it and pull it back in the fucking water, man?

It can't bite you. Oh, my God. The guy's throwing water on it just grab it you just grab it they don't know oh how do they not know probably scared that's dead it's dead now they can only last outside oh it's still still breathing a little bit that is crazy that is an ancient fucking feeding machine look at the face on that thing, man. Just stop and think about what a motherfucking nightmare the ocean is. What a nightmare.

Things like that are just roaming around. And us assholes, we think we're being spiritual. Hey, man, I'm just going to get on my board. I'm just going to get on my board and be monster food. No, I put my foot in to back out. I'm such a pussy when it comes to the ocean. I was in Hawaii. We went snorkeling, diving the water, and you're staring down.

It was cool. We were by this reef. But all I was thinking is, I just need to see one of these motherfuckers, and I'm never getting in this water again. One of those motherfuckers. I kind of want to do that now. I was too heavy before I was past the weight limit that you could go do some diving. And I would always tell myself I didn't want to do it, but now I want to do it. Yeah.

You can tell yourself a lot of things, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mitch Heitberg used to have a joke about writing that when he gets a funny idea, he writes things down. Or if he's lazy, he convinces himself. Convincing myself is not that funny. How did you lose the weight? I really just changed my, I got a trainer.

That was a big part of it. I just changed my diet and started exercising a bunch. Went from a guy who didn't exercise at all and ate multiple Philly cheesesteaks a day to a guy who eats a bunch of boneless skinless chicken breasts and protein shakes and now i work out like six times a day wow yeah just seemed like i was gonna die if i didn't so what do you do for working out these days uh you know a lot of weight lifting a lot of um i don't see the data you know just a lot of back a little biceps you know one arm rows and whatnot just general weight lifting

so but you're you do it a lot yeah yeah yeah do you um do you find it has a uh an effect on your mood on how you feel oh absolutely how do you how much better do you feel and how much do you attribute it to the working out the losing losing weight, or both of them together? It's a combination, definitely. The diet and just feeling better nutrition-wise is very helpful. But, you know, just doing two shows a night now, you know, that used to be a thing for me. I used to be, like, really tired afterwards. And now, you know, that used to be a thing for me. I used to be, like, really tired afterwards. And now, you know, no problem.

I do a lot of voiceovers and other little things. And so, you know, I'm always bouncing around from going, like, doing shows on the weekend and coming home and then having to go do voiceover on Monday morning and taking care of my son and helping him with his homework and just being able to do that and not being like oh i'm just i gotta go pass out i'm tired you know that's really the the biggest deal being able to take on more so then i'm able to um make more money so i was uh carrying my daughter around on my shoulders the other day she likes to get carried around she's 63 pounds and uh while she's on my shoulders uh after you know 40 minutes or so of that like it's fucking rough. It starts really hurting your neck. You start getting really tired.

And I had to put her down. And I was thinking, how crazy is that? There's a lot of people that just carry that much extra around with them all the time. They're always carrying around an extra 60 pounds. And you don't think it's that much of a deal until you don't have it and then you walk with it yeah you know and you realize like and it's just like even if it's not that like when a kid's sitting on your neck it's not like the ideal place to carry all the weight they actually make a um a thing there's a company called the outdoorsman they make a thing called the atlas

pack it's like a backpack frame and but at the back of it is like one of those weight lifting posts so you could slide an olympic uh barbell or a olympic plate on and two plates you put as much as 90 pounds on it clamp this thing down and then it's sitting more on your hips it's way easier to carry but even that still it's it's fucking sucks man walking around with just 45 extra pounds on your back sucks. Yeah. Just being in my mid-30s and being like, oh, my knees are hurting. I never played football. I never did anything like that.

My knees shouldn't be hurting. Right. And just knowing. I think I had to just change my mindset about before when I was just doing stand-up to do it and didn't think I was going to be successful, it didn't matter. I was just like, I'm just living for today. Give me free pizza, give me whatever. And then it was like once things started changing a little bit, I was like, oh, things are happening,

and I still don't even really know what I'm doing. Let me, if I give myself a better chance and take care of my health, take care of my body, let me see how far I can push these gifts, push these skills, you know? And it became more about not wanting to waste opportunities. That's very cool. That's cool. I like that. So your love of stand-up made you sort of concentrate even more on your own body.

Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Like, not your love of yourself like not your love of yourself not your love of your body like of course like this is you have to go through no matter what you do in your life you're going through it with your body but it was your love of stand-up to me like god i gotta do something about this fucking body yeah that crazy yeah love of stand-up i love my son and love of fashion and i didn't you know when you get to certain size all your shirts got

dogs on them and you know i don't want that anymore yeah right yeah it gets like you get into that triple xl like i'm happy whenever anybody does anything that uh that benefits their health whether it's uh for whatever your motivation the end result is always good it's always good no matter what motivation is positive or negative if you want to prove somebody wrong you know or you just want to do just do better just have a better path you know so it's so it's so attainable for so many people so many people could at least be way healthier at least have way more energy at least like understand like not that feeling of just being like oh all day and every time i cheat like uh with burgers and fries and and and like milkshakes and shit like that if i really go off the deep end with my diet

i feel like dog shit i feel terrible it hits me i'm like oh and then you gotta realize hey man this is how a lot of people feel all the time yeah that's the big deal for me and the same thing just going off ate half a burger and and was feeling so sick and then i was like man i used to live like this every meal yeah and and my body you know is just a you know testament of what your body's capable to adapt to. But once you start going the other way and start really getting healthy and your body becomes more sensitive to it, you really are like, oh, I prefer not to cheat. You still got to have that balance. You got to have fun.

There's nothing wrong with an ice cream or something like that every now and again or some sort of a dessert. there's nothing wrong with an ice cream or something like that every now and again some sort of a dessert but really it's they they just think that your body has to be accustomed to getting what it needs that's what it is and for too many people they're running on a nutrition deficit so when your body's just not getting what it needs for long periods of time then you develop chronic inflammation and all sorts of other problems and this is what people are really suffering from you know you people are really suffering from. You know, they're suffering from a nutritional deficiency that's probably lasted for years. They probably never, you know, some people, they just, they go 10, 15, 20 years without even thinking about their diet, and they're just eating dog shit.

You're just eating stuff that doesn't have enough nutrients, and your body just starts to get weaker. There's no way around it and if you just just turn that start eating salads eating uh healthy fish and and and you know some healthy meat and just take some vitamins just take some vitamin supplements real simple you know it's not you just get yourself some multivitamins get yourself like a little thing of athletic greens or something like get get your fucking health online and once you do you'll be like oh i feel so much better i feel so this is all i had to do and i'm this person now yeah mentally so much better much clearer much happier much happier it's so hard though because we we

love mouth pleasure like you know but to the point where people are poisoning their bodies to get mouth pleasure yeah and it's just you know constantly pushed in your face everybody always knows we talk about all the time you know cheeseburgers 50 cents salad like five six dollars you know is you have to make that effort you have to be able to want to cook at home and it's not it's not made easy and and that's what i think um we become as a society less cool and less um appreciative of effort you know yeah but there's also there's something really annoying about people that want you to eat healthy yeah that too oh get off your high horse get the fuck out of here if you're sitting there and you're having a burger and fries and enjoying the shit out of it

and some asshole next to you has got kale with shaved pecans and talking shit about your diet while they're pouring fresh olive oil on top of their shitty salad, come on, man. Leave me alone. You know? Leave me alone while I enjoy something gross. Yeah, taste, I don't know. But I think as long as the majority of your diet is really healthy, then you can get in those fuck off days.

It doesn't matter. Your body will bounce back. Just don't put it in a deficit. That's the whole key. And that's where I've been coming from. That's the whole key. And that's where I've been coming from. And that's why I have to keep reminding myself because I get frustrated when I'm out at these parties or whatever.

And, you know, there's food everywhere, crafts everywhere. And I have to stay focused on this diet because I'm like, you know, I'm 36 now. And I want to make sure that I'm at my healthiest and I return this deficit when I i'm 40 you know because that when the natural aging process kicks in i don't want to be like kicking off still being you know 230 to 220 pounds i want to be like 200 and be able to coast and be a hot old man hot old man yes because it's also way easier competitions less true yeah um it's way easier to maintain. Competition's less. True. Yeah. It's way easier to maintain, too, than it is to, like, if you're in your 50s and then you start working out then. It's hard. It's really hard.

Like, it's hard for me when I get out of shape. Like, if I get hurt or something like that and I take a couple weeks off, you feel it. Like, whoa, it's way harder to bounce back. Way hard. Like, twice as hard as it was when I was younger. Like, you've got to be disciplined. You've horse yeah stay on the horse that's what i've been trying to do now is um i think you know when you're younger 20s teens or whatever you don't want to listen to anybody saying those things and now i'm like i i'm starting to listen when

someone i know one of my friends are 50 or older and they're like hey you need to do this now because one cheat meal for me is two weeks of work you know yeah um do you do anything like athletic that's fun like uh that's one way to get good workouts in like if you play a game you like like tennis tennis is very fast paced people like doing that gives them uh good card like calends in tennis boxing counts into boxing too like anything you don't even have to box a person i don't recommend you do but just hitting a bag it's like it's really satisfying too yeah i've been interested in getting into boxing i um i tried some pro wrestling for a little bit i went to a pro wrestling school no shit yeah what about uh have you ever thought about actual grappling like taking jujitsu or i thought about but it seemed like i would get hurt easily well you could but you're a smart guy

i think you'd figure it out pretty quickly it's it's it's a very unusual thing because um you think of people like if you thought of someone who does jujitsu you think like a like a jockish type person but the majority of them that are really good are really nerds that's i've met a couple people and they're all like um they're similar to me they're just kind of like the other side of me we're like oh you like comic books and video games too you just beat people up well they don't beat people up they strangle them but when i say nerd i mean i mean it with all due respect uh that they're you know because i'm a nerd in a lot of ways with some things but they they're um they're very like jujitsu geeks they're like people that

are obsessed with uh anything else whether it's music or uh video games or they become obsessed but they're doing it in this physical way that requires you to have a deep understanding of all the potential moves. It's very complicated in terms of like your ability to, when you're rolling with someone, like say if I roll with a guy and I know he's like a brown belt or a black belt or something like that, we're having an argument. It's like a conversation with techniques. And the more of a vocabulary you

have and the stronger your use of those words are particularly the basic words the better your chance of winning the argument that's what it's like almost like this really complicated debate with physical leverage does that translate to your comedy because i feel like that kind of reminds me of your style it um it definitely like it's like a lot of what I try to do is figure things out in a joke form. I try like, what? Why is that? What's that? So that's what I've been trying to do over the last few years, I think.

So in that sense, it is kind of similar. Because you're trying to figure something out. It's like a puzzle. I know there's some juice in this puzzle. Like, how do I turn this into a bit? Why do I think this is funny? Like, what do I think I can say out of this that's funny? And also, people go, oh, yeah.

Huh. And if I could do that. So in that sense, yeah. But it's also very humbling It's very humbling Because you're getting strangled You're losing power You also just know

My instructor is John Jock Machado He's this very famous Jiu-Jitsu black belt world champion Super nice guy One of the nicest guys on the planet But every time i grapple with him it's just like uh it's a matter of time before he catches me with something it's just it's not whether or not i'm ever going to catch him that's not going to happen because

it's just a total different world and a lot of that is his deep knowledge and understanding something and you being a smart guy i think you'd get into it especially because you love pro wrestling so it's like there's like you have a at least you have a mindset for watching guys do things to each other and manipulate each other which is half of what's exciting about pro wrestling right some guy pulling off some crazy move even if it's orchestrated it's still a crazy thing that these guys are pulling off on each other yeah I mean I like that more because then i'm like oh they're friends and they worked this out together my problem is i know they're getting hurt and then not even really fighting right i

mean they're it's they're hitting each other for sure they're doing things to each other and slamming each other it's all real but those guys get banged up and they do it way more so if you're watching a guy who's fighting in the ufc they have practices that they can control so if they know that they have a hurt uh you know back or a hurt foot you know they'll put shitting instant pads on they won't they won't kick they'll do things will they work around whatever injury they have whether when they're in the camp you can't do that when dudes are throwing you. You've got a bad back and some guy's fucking picking you up. Bang!

Well, they will. They'll adjust what moves they will do. But I do really like your point about at least they can take some time off. Yeah, they can definitely adjust. I'm sure. Yeah, they can definitely make an agreement with each other. Hey, don't slam me. My back is fucked.

But those guys get beat the fuck up. Talking to Dallas Page and Jake the Snake, two guys that I've had on the podcast, which were amazing. And especially Jake's story is fucking crazy, man. Yeah. When he tells you his story, and what a nice guy. Big, giant, nice man. Like, just genuinely friendly and happy that everything's going well for him now crazy but that's a rough business is my point like i'm way rather like real uh

grappling like i feel like real grappling for like if i was going to tell a person like what would be safer for your body i I think pro wrestling is harder. I think it's harder on you. I can see that. Dude, they get slammed. You watch some of that stuff. Knowing what you know now about brain damage and knowing what you know now about that it's not even concussions necessarily as much as it's subconcussive trauma that doesn't knock you unconscious but just rattles

your fucking head and the repeated impacts of those. Yeah. Those getting that all the time yeah all the time yeah no i go back and sometimes i watch some older wrestling and it really makes me cringe because you got a lot of guys taking all these chair shots straight to the face straight to the face yeah so ken shamrock take this one to the head that sounded like a gunshot. It was crazy. Yeah. Dude, what is it about people getting smacked in the head? Tom Segura has been sending me these Russian slap championships, his videos. Have you seen this shit?

Oh, my God. These guys stand in front of each other and smack each other in the face, full clip. But some of them are doing a terrible job. They're hitting with their fingers. Yeah, they're getting a lot of fingers. They're getting fingers. And then there's other guys that are basically doing like a ridge hand strike to your neck. They're clipping guys on the chin like this.

And they follow through. And it looks like a slap. But this is not a slap. This is like a karate chop they're they're like going like that to the head and then it turns i mean it's way harder and then some guys are they're doing like a boss root and palm strike they're hitting like this they're doing like a right hook to the head like that it's brutal guys are getting knocked unconscious i like to see it but just with like older black moms they used to be the dumbest thing ever it was called like x arm and they would tape these guys

arms together and let them have an mma fight what it was an mma fight slash arm wrestling competition and they were taped together. It sounds so stupid. You can't imagine that not only was it real, but that the guy who created it was one of the original creators of the UFC. Like, it's such a crazy idea. They just went for it, man. Look, they taped these people together. Their arms are taped together.

They can't even move away. And then when they say go, they start fighting. Come on. And they get an arm bars this guy fucks this guy's arm up dude he broke his arm on the table a hundred percent if that guy keeps pulling on that thing he gets his arm snapped yeah no i don't know if he actually broke it right there but if the way the leverage of that table look at that guy's getting kicked in the fucking head while he's tied to that guy's arm it's crazy pin his arm pin his arm or ko him to win what what what didn't work i mean it didn't last i can see why

just how crazy people can get i love it dude but that's real and how this is the other one chess boxing this is a legit one too i think they uh box first and then they play chess right i think i think it goes back and forth oh they keep going back and forth that's a good move but seriously if you get ko'd take the thing out of the ring what if you get ko'd do you win yeah if you win either one yeah like if you at chess, but you get flatlined in 30 seconds. That's also be really fun if there's people who are horrible at fighting, but really good at chess. Yeah, and they would just lay down. Like, you win.

You win this part. I'm just here for the chess. I know you guys suck at chess. Why do they have headphones on? Focus. You think so? Yeah. Really? While they're playing chess? chess oh like to drown out the crowd yeah oh because people probably say night two

it looks like the fight was first yeah they were sweating by the way night to rook two probably isn't even a real move i just said some numbers and some letters i don't understand anything when it comes to uh playing chess out loud i was friends with this guy that was in prison and in prison he learned how to play chess uh with his words you know with it just in his head and um he was at this place that we used to play pool at in white plains new york it's called executive billiards like a classic old school pool hall i think i think it's done now i think they they just closed it down or something like that maybe they're renovating or something but um this guy was playing with this kid who was like a world

champion chess player and this kid would come by and play pool this really young kid like like 15 16 years old and the two of them are sitting there playing chess with each other like just saying you know knight to queen two or you know whatever the fuck it means and the guy would go stand there go uh rook to six blah blah blah and they would go back and forth like this i'm i was like what are you like i'm imagining what they're seeing like what are they seeing in their head are they seeing like these things move around in three dimensions are they looking at it as a grid how are they keeping track of where their fucking pieces are it was humbling very humbling no that's a strategic mind that i do not have well it was

interesting to me too because as a very young man i think i was like 23 or 24 i i got to see how fucking smart this guy was yet he still wound up in prison so i was like okay like all right just because someone's a criminal doesn't mean they're stupid and just because someone's smart doesn't mean they won't go to jail absolutely those are two things i saw talking to that guy and uh he was in the middle of a game once and uh he was gambling with this guy and this is the guy from prison who's a super smart guy very sharp guy. And he was talking to the guy who was playing. He said, dude, my wife told me if I don't get home by 10, she wants a divorce.

And 10 o'clock rolls around, and he yells out, I guess I'm getting a divorce. It was like two hours later, and he just racks the balls. He was there until like 2 o'clock in the morning. But it was hilarious. He said, like, as they started playing, my my wife says if I don't come home by 10 Those are weird times man growing up in Like a suburb of Boston, which was a really nice place

I grew up in this place called Newton like real quiet quaint little community To go from that took these seedy pool halls of New York was really weird for me. Very, very educational. I got to see all these street hustlers. I got to hang around with these guys, be friends with a lot of homeless guys. I had guys that were pool players that wound up staying on my couch. They had nowhere to go. A couple of them.

And one of them who became my best friend, this guy named Johnny. you know a couple of them and uh one of them who became my best friend this guy named johnny but it was like we'd i'd be in all these weird places gambling like these weird strange places with these guys who were like these semi-professional players playing for hundreds thousands of dollars and there'd be a big crowd of guys all gathered around it'd be one two in the morning and i'd be thinking these guys these are older than me men like they don't have families like what do they do like this is a whole separate culture you know and you're in the underworld oh it was in a lot of ways man a lot of ways it was very underworldy i was obsessed with it too man i just wanted to play pool all the time i wasn't very good um but the guys that was around were very good. I was around a lot of guys who were very, very good.

And you got to see the excitement of these. It wasn't just excitement that everybody was gathered around and that they were playing this game for a lot of money. It was also the excitement that we were bending the rules. We're all just a bunch of men hanging out at this smoky place at one o'clock in the morning on a wednesday and and everyone is in it together we're all just in some way deranged derelicts you know some weirdos from society that can figure their way to be able to be at this place at one o'clock in the morning on a wednesday like why the are you here man like don't you have responsibilities no one there had to be responsibilities everyone

there was some sort of either um a professional gambler or they had like some one of the guys was a fireman who they would they would put them on these 24-hour shifts and then they would have a couple days off and just come to pool hall and hang out watch guys gamble so i mean it sounds similar to stand-up oh yeah man lands and misfits well that's one of the reasons why I fit in there from stand-up you know like starting doing stand-up from 21 and then being around these pool hall guys when I was like 23 or 24 I was like oh you guys are like my fucked up friends that I like it's like too many people out there think that there's like only one way to live your life like there's a there's a bunch of ways to live life there's a lot yeah it's a whole lot of worlds and everybody

wants you to think that their way of living life is the way you should go about it it's real tricky because they all want like the sort of confirmation bias they want they want you to confirm they want it's more like a confirmation desire they want you to confirm that It's more like a confirmation desire. They want you to confirm that they're doing the right thing. If you listen to them, then you become happy. And they come up to you and they go, hey, man, I'm really, really excited that you told me how to do it this way. Because now I'm just living my life much better. Thank you very much.

People love to hear that. Like, yeah, I'm right then. I am living my life the right way. It's not the right way. No, so many paths. Yes. Be nice, be positive positive work hard and do do what you want i mean that's moving i would have never got here if i listen to people you know it's impossible they don't even know what they're saying people give you advice when they're absolutely not sure of what they're saying they just say track they practice on you they get sometimes people give you advice and it's real sometimes people have great advice sometimes people really mean advice and it's real. Sometimes people have great advice. Sometimes people really mean well. And sometimes people are just practicing.

Yeah. Well, in general, how can anyone give you advice that doesn't relate to something that happened to them? You know? Yeah. Like, they're only going by their life experience. So, that is one thing I learned from Chris Jericho, another wrestler, where he was just like like you don't listen to unsuccessful people because they don't know how to do it yeah why would they tell you of course they're going to tell you you can't do it because they couldn't do it a successful person will tell you you can do it

most people i know like if you tell someone that hey i want to go try comedy you know if you go if you have the balls to get up there and do it They're going to support you Yeah And there's plenty of those people out there On both sides There's plenty of people out there that will give you good advice And really care And want you to do well in your life And there's plenty of people that don't want to see anybody doing any better than them And they're not doing that well

There's a lot of that There's a lot of that That's a sickness that we got to forgive people for because i i had it when i was a young man for sure and i think many of us struggle with it it's one of the things that made me realize that i was looking at stand up the wrong way in terms of like other people's stand up i was looking at other people's stand up as like a comparison to mine in that uh i was judging like who's the best who's doing better who's this who's that and then i realized like that is so stupid like i should just be a fan of comedy and do comedy and so i shifted the way i thought about it so instead of like when i would see someone killing

i'd be like god i wish i thought of that bit or god he's doing so good shit now i have to follow him instead somewhere along the line i got to a place where you're like, this is great. This is funny. Like, I love the fact that this guy's funny. Now I can become a fan of comedy again. Yeah. Instead of like being wrapped up in my own creation of it and producing my own stuff. Yeah.

Well, I always, not that I've always, I'm on a similar journey. I was very competitive, not but maybe a year or two ago. And getting in a relationship that I'm in now has been very helpful because she maybe a year or two ago and getting in a relationship that i'm in now has been very helpful because she's a big fan of comedy and she always wants to watch comedy and so then i'm always like okay i have to just not be i just have to enjoy these people too because you're right they're they're great and and i had to learn like i don't want everybody to be doing the comedy that i'm doing or I'm not special. Yeah.

I want to see all these different types of styles. I think, I mean, the fact that me and you are in this room together and we both respect each other's comedy and our comedy's worlds apart and different, you know, just two completely different styles. But we both respect each other because we both know that we're authentic in what we do. You know, if I was to try to be like you that would make no sense and if i was trying to be like you people would go what's going on man what are you doing up there joe smoked too much you're a different dude you need to slow down man he's got a lot calmer you on like that what is that stuff kratom a lot of people on that kratom no i respect the fuck out of you man and i respect your process you know you're uh like we're talking about it as

a as an art form as this um structure based you know like you you structure things you know how to set things up it's so important and we don don't have anyone to tell us how to do it. We have to kind of like learn from each other and learn from the greats of the past that we can watch. But in a lot of ways, it's sort of an undocumented art form in terms of the creation of the art form. And part of the problem is that everybody has their own way of doing it. Like that's why I asked you, like, do you write down? Do you type? Do you just have – some of the best is that everybody has their own way of doing it. That's why I asked you, do you write down? Do you type? Do you just have some of the best just have ideas, and they don't write shit,

and then they go on stage a lot, and then they work those ideas out when they're on stage, and they work those ideas out in their head, and they keep everything in their head. There's a lot of guys who are really great who don't write. They just write in the moment. They write on stage, and they have ideas, and they flesh them out, and they continue to work on them, and they just stay active, and they never have to actually sit't write. They just write in the moment. They write on stage and they have ideas and they flesh them out and they continue to work on them and they just stay active. And they never have to actually sit and write. And they're some of the best. And then there's guys who write every day and they're some of the best.

You know, it's like, fuck, man. I don't think there's a right way to do it. I think you just have to care and you have to be trying to get better. Yes. 100%. 100%. 100%. It's got to be effort and not going back and like what I'm trying to do now is be a little bit more picky. Because I did my special and then I go write a joke. And I go, oh, you're basically doing an extension of what you've already written.

And don't do that. Let's try something new. Let's go with something else. If you don't have it, let's just go up there and relax a bit live life a little bit yeah because most of my material is personal anyway you know i don't really do a lot of topical so for me to generate material i usually have to be active in life and that things happen to me yes yes yeah i think um i think it's really important to be around a lot of other people that are doing it really well, too.

One of the things I really get out of L.A. is on any given night I can go to a store and watch someone murder all the time. Not one person, like six, seven, eight people killing in their own way. And you just get this extra juice out of that place, man. way and you just around that you just get this like extra juice out of that place man you know you get extra juice out of la out of the store a lot of times out of the improv it's like there's just there's so many of us here it's a crazy hive of comedians if you really stop and think about it yeah you know i mean jean diaz and burr and you know uh sagura's here you know you're here dalia i mean it's just fucking every week that place is ma maron's here it's like theo vaughn's here just it's chaos sebastian's here yeah like holy shit you might get drop in from chapelle all the time yeah all the time yeah

i mean it's one of the weirdest places ever in terms of a hive of comedy. We're so lucky to be in that hive, man, to be watching all this shit go down in 2019. This is an epic time for stand-up. Yeah, that's the thing. I don't like to bring it up all the time, but when something like Brody's passing happens, I have to go like, oh, oh yeah stopping and so in the rat race and so competitive all the time and worried about what you're making and realize that the true gift is the time that you get to spend with these truly unique minds you know the people who don't think

like me at all people who like you say you i see jokes every day where i go oh fuck like how like that was in the air for anyone yes yes yes that's the weirdest feeling right when you're like fuck how did i miss that god damn it tony hitchcliffe has a joke right now i don't want to give it away but uh it's it's one of those where he does it i go go, God, I missed that. So good. Santino's got this bit about candles that I'm like, fuck. Santino. I worked with him all weekend. I was in Austin with him.

He's great. I love him. I took George Perez, too. George Perez murdered in Austin. Wow. Yeah, I did Cap City Comedy Club. I wanted to go do the comedy club for a goof. I need to do more comedy clubs.

It's just such a different thing now. Such a rich comic. Do comedy club for a goof i need to uh do more comedy clubs uh it's just such a different thing such a rich comic do a club as a goof well it's like you make a decision whether you want to make a lot of money or have a lot of fun yeah true truly yeah yeah and um it's not that it's not a lot of money to work at a club it's great money it's not bad but it's um it's a different choice it's like the choice of money to work at a club. It's great money. It's not bad. But it's a different choice. It's like the choice of right now, for me, the choice is about just trying to make my shit make more sense. And more reps in front of different people and more feels, more different vibes. Every time you go on stage, you're in a different place. Audience is different. Introduce yourself to new people.

That's what I'm trying to do. I'm getting ready to go out on a tour. is different introduce yourself to new people that's what i'm trying to do i'm getting ready to go out on a tour and i specifically was asking my like my people were like i was like i want to go to huntsville alabama i want to go to like i want to go to these places that you don't expect to see me and i want to see a because i think it'd be cool to just bring in people who are like hey why are you here and i want to see um that's why i'm going to australia i just want to see make my comedy travel and i'll learn i'll learn how to i'm sure i'll go in there and i want to see um that's why i'm going to australia i just want to see make my comedy travel and i'll learn i'll learn how to i'm sure i'll go in there and i'll say something that's

too american and i'll be like oh okay right and it'll just then it'll inform my writing and i'll start writing more globally and you know and those are the type of things i'm looking for now they're they're fantastic australia's. They're like alternative Americans. I say that in a good way. And they're like a degree nicer than Canadians. It's like you get Canadians where I say there's 20% less douchebags in Canada than there is in the United States. You can always find bad people everywhere. But then you've got people from Australia. I think they take that another 10%.

It's like one of the nicest people ever. They're so nice. Oh, I can't wait. They're fucking great, man. Their shows over there are amazing. They know most of our shit. They understand most references and things that we'll talk about. But if you knew a few about them, it would probably help them relate to you.

It's a weird culture. It's a weird culture it's it's a place that i would totally live if i didn't live here if i didn't live in america or i didn't live in canada i don't want to go anywhere i'm not saying i want to leave america but i said if i did yeah but you travel and you like you you you find a place this is fun to visit and then you find those places like to me like italy is nice to visit but like i could never live here but then i go to amsterdam and i'm like, I could live here. This is like Portland.

This is great. Like Portland. Yeah, Portland sort of fashioned itself after that when it became legal to have weed there too, right? Mm-hmm. A lot of those places were comparing themselves to Amsterdam way back in the day. You know? It's funny. Amsterdam was a place where people would actually go there to get high.

It's like the very first high destination. Like people would gonna go to amsterdam get high i like going just for the vibe of like we were talking about earlier of um no stigma that there's no like someone if you know i drop something on the ground or whatever the people oh you stoner like there's nothing like that in amsterdam and i love that feeling it's a dumb thing here that's just a remnant of propaganda and dumb stoners that are that are real people you know i mean there's always that time where you're running into someone who's too high and you're like oh man you're just fucking up the whole stereotype man you're perpetrating sir yeah oh you get smoked a bowl now there's snot coming out of your nose.

There was certain people that just get too high. They just get too high. Can't handle it. They just get too weirded out by life. And you're like, bro, slow down. Well, right now you're okay. Right now everybody's okay. Yeah, the end is horrible for everyone and anyone.

But right now you're okay. So if you can't be happy now when you're okay and you're worried about the times when you're not going to be okay that is madness all right so you got to pull yourself out of madness and be in the moment in the moment everything's fine but that's a tight wire walk when you're high as fuck right that's like a tight wire walk when you're sober yeah it is it is so do you see that they let that dude off the empire guy yeah i did see that let him slide i love it it makes it so exciting for me i've been i've been i literally went around class couple days told my girlfriend i go i go the craziest thing would be if they say he's not

guilty because then you have to go what happened what happened what happened did he bribe somebody or did some new evidence come forth that they had a bad investigation did the the two guys that were his witnesses did they get caught lying about something else you know the witnesses against them they might have caught them lying about something else and they don't know what to do and they have to abandon the case because then they obviously know that he's a lot these guys lied about something who the fuck knows man i don't understand that. I can make a guesstimate. They won't be educated.

But just knowing Chicago in general, I mean, my guess is maybe the way they were going off the investigation wasn't really above board. And if he's just like, I'm not guilty, and they have to actually go in and present this evidence, they don't have what they really need to have. I don't think anyone's going around like, okay, yeah, well, then those two Nigerian MAGA guys did attack him. Nigerian MAGA guys. It's so great. Well, then also they sealed the case.

So fun. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, if you wanted like good twist in the movie, this is a crazy scene in the movie where crazy music is playing, and you see Jussie Smollett come out in slow motion and put his sunglasses on and get into the limo. He's here. Not guilty.

And the music. And he comes out in slow motion and gets in the limo, and then dudes are wearing ski masks and people are pulling on it's like like one ongoing story in one of those tarantino movies where you got four stories like pulp fiction battling it out he's one of them where he gets not guilty and it becomes a big twist because you feel like you find out there's some behind the scenes shenanigans and shit that led to this yeah Yeah, because what happens? People are like, oh, he's never going to work again. But now, not guilty.

So does he get his own show? That's a good question. What happens? Well, the other thing is, for the longest time, Chicago has been thought to be a place that is like a, you know, like things can happen there. You can make shit happen. Right? Is that a fair way to say it? I love chicago i don't want to be disparaging but there's been some uh some cases of corruption oh yeah no i mean that's where i was raised it'll vary corrupt place most of our mayors and stuff go to jail so i don't think i'm being unfair. Yeah. There was a scene in a movie.

What was the scene in the movie? Where someone said, Chicago is the most corrupt big city. Illinois third most corrupt state in the country. Deep mafia ties. Yeah, that's crazy. Published February 15th. This is recent. Oh, my goodness.

Yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know about Chicagoago i'd be talking out of my ass you don't i know a little bit yeah tell me what it's like it's very cold it's very corrupt right then sometimes it's very hot right um is he is either usually too cold and shooty or very hot and shooty and then spring is delightful shooty that's the best verb ever shooty too shooty there's a little too shooty over there that's fucking hilarious shooty yeah it is uh it's way way way way way too shooty right and um do you think that people i this is my opinion i don't know if you agree i think that people, this is my opinion, I want to know if you agree. I think that people in colder areas like Detroit and Boston, Chicago, like there are different kind of people.

There are hardier people than people that grow up like in San Diego. No disrespect, San Diego. I'm sure a lot of you are hard as fuck. But there's like a difference between people that have to shovel snow and deal with that fucking winter and be holed up and really be fucking freezing. Like when you come in from outside, fuck fuck fuck and you you appreciate the warmth of a nice restaurant or something like that when you walk in from out of the cold yeah shoveling snow it's it's windy as hell and then you got like very aggressive homeless people there yeah so

you're gonna yeah you're gonna get tougher i had to unprogram that for myself when I moved from Chicago to Oregon. Because when I was a teen, it was always like, even my walking. My walking was too slow for Oregon because I would walk and I'd take a look back. Because that's how my mom taught me to walk. In Chicago, make sure nobody's sneaking up on you. And in Oregon, they didn't have that concern. Yeah. Fuck. That's a weird way for a kid to grow up too man it is always be worrying about danger one of the stranger things

about that is that it's very hard for people to get over that hump it's very hard for people to just calm down after they've been in a bad environment for a long time. You get wired a certain way. And even though you're in a new place now and everything's calm, you're still looking out. You're still thinking that shit could go sideways. You've seen people go sideways. Yeah. That's why it's hard to be in a relationship with me. There's something I miss about when it was snowing and you would go outside and it would be silent

you wouldn't hear anything it was one of some of my favorite times i live in boston or newton where i was i lived right across the street from the charles river and there was just like this big grassy area in front of my house and you just look at all the white it would just be all thick white snow and it muffled everything like it looks it was sound insulation for everything you didn't hear shit you know that feeling jamie you grew up in columbus you know when you get a like a big snowstorm it's quiet it's like it's just like sound deadening everywhere there's no hard edges anymore everything is covered with snow it's just quiet it feels good it would feel good you know it'd

feel like yeah this is nice as long as you have food as long as you know it's going to go away as long as the plows are still running as long as you have either firewood or backup generator or something sometimes that electricity cuts out yeah and then everyone gets scared noddles up together i remember that episode of i love lucy did you ever have that happen yeah no i did terrifying i did too everybody does if you live in a place where it snows at some point in time the power goes out i remember these guys in toronto were telling me their power went out for two weeks and it was fucking crazy cold like in the zeros and below zero and um they were doomed i mean there's ice

everywhere and ice had made the power lines fall down they had uh you know like frozen rain had come and covered everything with ice and things were breaking off and power was out and like blocks and blocks and blocks and all these people in fucking the dead of winter in a city were in danger day scary scary shit man because you don't even have any firewood you don't have a place to burn it you're in a goddamn apartment building what are you gonna do everybody's fucking freezing no one's gonna help you the phone doesn't work there's no fucking power this is stuff you think about a lot though right because you always talk about that like because we're so coddled with you know I think about the thin veneer of civilization.

That's what I think about. And what I think about it more than anything is from natural disasters. That's what I think about. I think about the potential for natural disasters. It can happen at any moment. And most people have no preparation for it whatsoever. They have no idea what they would do. It just seems that if you're paying attention to history at all you know that this happened it happens all the time it

almost just happened that one that you were uh you pulled up the other day that happened in december some asteroid that blew up in our atmosphere that had five times the power of uh hiroshima 10 times 10 times the power of hiroshima blows up in our atmosphere motherfucker man if that hits that hits chicago right in the face that can happen i mean it's happened all over the world before it's a there's a total possibility that we can get hit with a chunk of iron the size of a fucking ocean liner and just slams into a city and nukes that city. That shit happens. I think of that.

Does it bother you or does it make you more free? I would lie to you and say it makes me more free. I don't think that's true though. I think it definitely makes me sound paranoid but I've thought about that a lot. And it's just, I'm just being accurate.

But also, I'm pretty present. You can be both. Yes. I try to be pretty present. I try to be pretty here, you know, as much as I can. And so, if you're here, like, if you're present and you're aware of all these things, it's just a slippery or grip on present but you can still be present and aware like this ain't gonna last this whole thing ain't gonna last these people are building

buildings right next to the goddamn ocean the ocean's rising you know it's there's a real possibility that rocks are gonna slam into this motherfucker any day now or a hundred years from now or five years from now nobody knows but one day it's going to happen, and it's going to be boom, and the fucking earth is going to ring for a million years. That's what happens. Nice. I mean, I'm okay with that because it's out of my control in that regard. It's a good way to look at it. But it also seems like horseshit because this world seems very permanent.

This moment seems very permanent this moment seems very permanent life seems very real it's been real my whole life every day i get up life is real you know i don't but that's the thing you know this too shall pass right you know you gotta you always know nothing is is true i think that's one of the biggest life lessons i had by having a um not most stable childhood moving around a lot and bouncing around to different schools in different states where I was like I learned very quickly that things aren't permanent and I learned also that things are very relative to whatever area you are that's what really helped me I think helps my voice as a comedian now is that I've

learned very young that like what's cool is very relative to wherever you are. You know, the things that were cool in Chicago, people weren't on in Oregon and things that were cool in Oregon or like Greece, you know, that would have been beat up in Chicago. Yeah.

So I learned very quickly to just be like, Oh man, just enjoy what I do and just like what I'm about. And it's, um, it's really helped my life be more, more peaceful in way and that's why like you know my 36 year old man owns a shit ton of wrestling action figures yeah that's half of the life is trying to find the balance between being satisfied and being

motivated and being happy and just being again just being present you know just finding out what you actually enjoy just doing it just do that thing you know for you it's pro wrestling action figures it is and that's where it's where the battle because you think that thing would be like comedy but then you also learn that you can't you can overdose on that you can be over that. You can be over. Because that was the thing I learned when I started headlining. And then you hear these stories when I was younger, like when Greg Giraldo died or Patrice died.

And I just get to these parts where I'm like, man, that's like, and obviously all due respect to them, but I was like, I don't want to die on the road. That's not how I want to live my life. i don't want to be found in some hotel somewhere i want my family around me i want people who care about me and and that really made me be like okay i have to um think about more than just like each individual set i have to start thinking about what do i want to give back what do i what do i want to do bigger than that like do what do i want to do if i just want to do the road for fun if i just want to like if i want to move into something else when my son's 16 he's going to be going hopefully he'll be going to college soon and i want to be like i want to be able to spend more

time with him you know yeah your your life as a comic you know it oftentimes i find that guys go through these stages and then the first stage you kind of feel like an imposter feel like a fraud you know you feel like like i'm not really that good at this and then you you get to a stage where you feel like a professional when you feel like a professional then you start to take put more responsibility on you on your work. For me, I think that's right around when it happened with me. Somewhere around 10 years in, I decided, hey, I've got to treat this like I'm an actual professional and stop fucking off. I fucked off a lot.

I went through periods of years where I didn't write anything, where I was really lazy and I had the same sex. I was doing TV show shit, sitcom stuff, and I just wasn't working on the act at all. But it's just such a more energized time right now in comedy. You know, guys like Santino, like we were talking about all these guys that are coming up, having all this good comedy around you, it's almost like it raises everybody's vibration like the whole the whole community like it's the better everybody gets instead of how everybody used to

approach it where everybody was competing against each other and then you kind of like you have weird feelings when you're around each other now everything's like a different kind of vibe yeah it's a um it's a healthy competition and one thing i'm really liking is a change of the presentation of um people being more cognizant and of like i want to present like just dressing up more you know looking nicer not necessarily trying to like suit up or anything but i see more and more posters and more and more things where people are clearly putting work into their graphic design and their art are even um and i don't want to speak for for female comedians at all but like i'm just noticing a trend more where women are

being not because it used to be either like i am the hot girl or like i'm just a dude like you don't don't worry i might be hot but you wouldn't know because i'm wearing a hoodie you know and now there's just more of these women being like i'm just me and so i might be hot but that's not a part of this you know and i see that a lot now but they'll still go out there and they'll put out their posters where they're like in a bikini or whatever you know because it's like why wouldn't you right like just like when i go and i wear a suit you know right but i love seeing people more take charge of that and of what they're presenting and not just being because i mean that's how i use the dress all the time which is wearing a big purple hoodie or whatever you know but now i'm more like i want to look more like i guess like

a star well there's definitely something to that you I remember the Martin Lawrence days when he was on top and he'd wear those crazy outfits on stage or Eddie Murphy in Raw where he'd wear this crazy leather jumpsuit. He put a lot of effort into what he was going to wear. Delirious, that was another one. Like, Eddie Murphy had these crazy costumes that you could

only wear if you were doing stand-up in a lot of ways. I mean, it was the ultimate Eddie Murphy costume. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you were doing stand-up in a lot of ways i mean it was the ultimate eddie murphy costume you know i'm saying like if you really think about like him shirtless in a red jacket yeah like with kinnison what do you picture you picture the beret you picture the overcoat you picture the white sneakers like it was his crazy outfit he had like kind of a like you kind of expected that look from him but with eddie murphy's eddie murphy was like you know leather like colored

leather and you know it was very powerful it was very bold which was like his comedy you know it was like letting you know like this is a special night this is a night he doesn't dress like this every day yeah this is yeah he's on stage doing a show like that yeah yeah i like it when just people think about the full presentation i've been even doing that with like the playlist that the club plays before my show like i've been sure setting that up now because i want a vibe of mostly fish dude i gotta piss so bad so i want to keep going though i don't want to stop so uh i just did two podcasts in a row and i drank too much coffee so jamie why don't you guys talk about something you have in common?

All right. Okay. What do you guys have in common? Can I smoke some more pot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, for sure, bro. Here, have a freshie. Thank you.

Have an extra one for the road, too, sir. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. I'll be right back. Great folks. I just got to pee. Talk amongst yourselves. Okay.

Nice. Welcome to the Ron Funches experience. Ron, you have your own podcast, too, right? I do. It's called Getting Better with Ron Funchess experience. Ron, you have your own podcast too, right? I do. It's called Getting Better with Ron Funchess. I talk to people who I admire or people who I want to learn from, people who have accomplished things I want to accomplish or have gotten better in some form in their life,

and I ask them about it and about setting goals and stuff. Do you just set it up that way as a conversation, or do you put more thought into like i want to ask them these kind of questions and get these kinds of things um i mean there's just there's some set questions i usually just ask people about about their goals and i ask them about some advice to give me but other than that it's usually just some type of free form conversation it's just you know it's usually just some type of free-form conversation. It's just, you know, it's funny sometimes. But for the most part, it's just, like, the reason why I wanted to do it is because I was a big fan of, like, Patton Oswalt's website, The Spew,

and stuff like that when he had that. And I noticed, like, when I was on Twitter, there had been a shift from people who were, like, used to be very supportive of me especially when i was fatter and stuff and then it came this thing of like anytime i would try to post something positive people be like well why the fuck do you you fuck who cares you have money and you and you just you know and i just want to be like no i'm not on a different side of the fence because i did these things i'm i'm like over here being like anybody can fucking do it if my dumb ass did it.

You know? So it just became more about to me like talent and success is more like this ocean that we can all drink from. And it's about like how did this person get to that ocean? I don't think there's people who are talented and untalented. Finding out their path sort of to where they are now even. And what keeps them motivated now you know yeah like once people have some success what what why what keeps you going you know there's a question i would like to know from joe you know well he just walked back in so maybe we can find out hit me with a question what keeps you motivated you're so successful you

got a lot of money you're doing okay everything you have seen you like you accomplish so many things so what what makes you go to the store on a on a tuesday night uh to work on stand-up um i don't look when you uh when you get successful at something the best thing that it does is alleviate stress but it doesn't change the motivation the motivation is always to create something that i like that i can be proud of that the people enjoy most importantly there's a bunch of people that watch my stand-up i gotta i gotta work at it i don't want to be an asshole i don't want to be that guy that you come to see my show and you go he didn't prepare he didn't care he didn't try you know you. I'm not going to be that. Look, we all have bad sets.

I'll have bad sets. I'll try my best, though. I fucking try my best, and I'm going to keep trying my best. Because I think if I don't, I leave doubt in my own head that shouldn't be there. If I do my best and it just doesn't work i have to figure out what was wrong but if i don't do my best it doesn't work you feel like shit yeah that's true but i think that um i still feel like shit even if it doesn't work and i did my best but you feel like a failure yeah yeah yeah i feel like a failure. Not as shitty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like a failure rather than a loser. Yeah. But I think when I was younger and doing comedy in my 20s,

it might have just been a Portland thing. There was always kind of this vibe of like, I didn't try my best. If I tried my best, I would have crushed it. But I didn't try my best, so I didn't really fail. Yeah. That's a trap that a lot of comics get into when they are in front of a small crowd you want more of that yeah i take a little more damn ron goes deep um and um one of the you have those moments when you're a young comic where someone says something to you and it really

gives you a nice boost like you feel great about it and uh one time uh i was at the store and it was maybe like 12 or 13 people in the audience the most was like you know no I'll keep going it was and Paul Mooney was in the back of there and these 12 or 13 people I'm just doing my act and Mooney starts laughing hard, like a supportive laugh, like he's with you. Ha, ha, ha. He's clapping. And then he came up to me after the show and he goes something to the extent of,

you're a real comic. That's what makes you a real comic. You do those real shows in front of all those people. You do a real show. You don't say, oh, there's only 10 people all there's only 15 you don't have asset you go out there and do your best yeah that's um man

there's always just so much to learn that's what i've been learning to um get out of like every set is the same and like this is my material and i've been at it for a little bit but knowing how to shift my energy for like that like you do want to be professional for that, those 10 people. But you're not going to do the same like yelling energy as if they were 100 people. You're going to be a little more intimate, you know. You're going to make it more of a conversation. And that's what I'm really learning to do now. Watching, I think for a lot of comedians, but that Gary Shandling documentary.

I still haven't seen it. You haven't seen it? Oh, man, I love it so much. But it really helped me about being mindful, about being in the moment. So I've been really, like, whenever I write a set list now, because I usually number it and it has, like, a couple words. The first, I would write, number one, bullshit for as long as possible. Because I don't, like, i don't like i don't

want to just get into it i want to you know unless it's like i got 10 minutes and i have things i want to do but for the most part i'm like let me get in the moment let me look people in the eyes and see if i see something not necessarily going in and just crowd work and rip on people but let me um let me just go in and talk about my day for a second and then maybe that will segue into my set and so it teaches me a new way to get into things a more conversational yeah again you're very jazz you got a lot of jazz in you ron that's cool that's a good way to do it because it always does feel abrupt when someone begins with a joke sometimes it works though like some people can do it some people they would go on stage and they just begins with a joke sometimes it works though like some people can do

it some people they would go on stage and they just hammer with a first joke and from there it's off to the races like they'll open up with a non-sequitur like out of nowhere and bang yeah jeff ross is really good at like just changing the tempo in the room right yes yes yes he's great at it on the off the cuff you know in the spur of the moment type shit because all those years of roasting and all those years of fucking with the crowd like and and that show they're doing him and attell are traveling and doing that bumping mic show where they just they just fuck around man i mean it's crazy they just get in front of those people that's what's so crazy about what that really opens your mind about again what this job can be where you could literally just travel with your friend and fuck around and sell out yeah it's amazing it's amazing

it's a crazy gig man it's a crazy gig when you started out in chicago what club were you at um i didn't start in chicago i was a i was a young man. I left when I was 13 because my mom was in like, she's in a little negative relationship. So I went to go live with my dad in Oregon. And he was also a negative thing. And then I started comedy in Portland, Oregon when I was 23 at Harvey's Comedy Club there. And then doing some shows in Salem at this Chinese food restaurant called Lucky Fortune. And then I just started some shows there and, you know, struggled for a long time. And then I think about five years in, I got asked to do Conan and then was New Face and then got divorced and then was like all right i

moved i moved to los angeles and um now just i have my son here and she's been me and him and now my girlfriend and my mom now lives with me from the last uh year but um yeah that's pretty much it that sounds cool do you know is there a scene in portland where you started when i started it was pretty much like there'd been um seattle has a scene yeah there's been a bit of a um like an og scene of like i'm not familiar with like dwight slade and susan rice um and then not really much There's just a lot based off of road gigs, triple runs, going to Idaho. That's right.

Everybody was talking about those triple runs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had something similar, which is not as exciting because you guys were going through the Wild West. I mean, you're going to Montana and Idaho. Oh, not me. Oh.

Not me. But the people that did it. The people who did it. I didn't seem lucky at the time, but it turned out in hindsight to be very lucky that the one time that that booker saw me, I just ate shit. Hardcore. And so they wanted nothing to do with me. And it turned out to be the best thing because then I was in this position where I was like,

oh, okay, well, I i'm not gonna get idaho shows so i don't have to pander to that type of audience and i'm just gonna be here and so i can right now it's really just like oh just write what you like and and that turned out to be the um the best thing for me dude you could perform in boise they would love you oh i i've ended up i've had yeah no i love boise. It's like Portland. It's a very unusual place. It's almost like I hate talking about it. I don't want to give out their spot.

No, they got a good little comedy scene building over there. Yeah, there's, well, I think because of the internet, there's a comedy scene almost in every city. People find a way to get together and do something. It seems like too much of an exciting option for people who are fuck-ups, and there's so many of us. There's so many of us. You know, in one way or another, there's so many, you know, one form of fuck-up or another. There's so many of us.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, I don't know if that's necessarily the truth or if the way that is set up for us to go, the structure that is natural just doesn't work as much anymore it made more sense in the past you know um and also it's been shown to not be sound because that's the thing that trips me out now it's like when i was a kid that was drilled in my head from my mom was get a good government job get a good government job and now that seems like the most unsteady job you could have you know that just cut your department yeah you never know yeah and so one thing i learned um the stand-up taught me quickly was that it's the same stress

you know but now i'm in charge the stress of paying my bills the stress of taking care of my son is the same whether i'm working for somebody else or i'm working for myself but at least when i'm working for myself i'm in charge right you know and as long as i have a product that i can put out if i'm if i don't have anything then i guess i gotta go work for somebody but if i had something i'd rather have that stress be put on me than have someone just show up one day and be like we're out of business find find someplace else to work oh yeah and you're 60 yeah yeah and they just cut your whole department well didn't i mean every fucking single politician gets in the office they want to cut certain uh departments right there's always someone that thinks something's being overfunded yeah yeah most of the time they're just talking about cutting um social security and food stamps and it's like that seems like the last thing we need right now yeah if you can make things

if it seems like if you could make things this is like one of a good time to be on your own because you could sell things on the internet you can sell things in a way that no one could ever sell before like you could set up like an online store you don't have to have a physical location and you could just you know if you make something if you're an artist if you're you make pottery or some shit you could sell things that you create online like it's pretty easy to do now like this is a place where people can actually like oh well if i just did this if i figured out a way to do that i'm working for myself where people can actually like oh well if i just did this if i figured out a way to do that i'm working for myself i can just do it whenever i want to sell things people like it they put it in their house and then a lot of people can go in that direction

it's not i mean there's people that just aren't creative and they're not interested in it but there's a lot of people who are and for those people who are just have a little bit of creativity that they maybe never really nurtured because they work too much. Find a way. Find a way. Find a way to get through with that. Yeah. I mean, plus, you know who you are, because if you if you're content and how your job is going anyway, you're fine.

You're not even thinking about that. But if you're upset and you're like, I hate this job, hate what's going on my life you know that that usually that might be the case and people love to say that's easy for you to say it's easy it's easy for you to say you guys are both already successful it's very hard to get started i get it i get it it is hard to get started 100 i get it but don't think like that just try to find a way through the more time you spend thinking on it that's's easy for you. It's hard for me. The more time you do that, the less time you're thinking of an actual solution. Yeah.

I see that all the time, especially even with my weight loss and stuff. People are like, oh, you could say that. You got a trainer. And it's just like I still had to be the guy that vomited. That's true. I still had to be the guy that worked myself so hard that i threw up and still went back you know it's like do you vomit on the ground or did you make it to a trash can i made the trash can not at wrestling at wrestling i is on the ground oh no

yeah it sucked because then they made me clean it up and i'm like part of the gig yeah it really was yeah you can't be puking. Yeah, man, if you're working out to the point of puking, that's intense. Well, you know, when my body was coming from other places, it's such an activity. Yeah. How long do you think it took you for you to adjust to a constant state of activity? Probably like six months. That's a great thing, though, that you had the discipline to do that.

That's a great thing. It really is. It's an underappreciated thing because I think it's easy for me to keep doing what i'm doing i always do it it's part of my natural way of doing it but to not exercise and then decide you're going to clean your diet up and you're going to start exercising and you're going to continually do it even though you're exhausted because your body's not really prepared for this so you must have had a long period of like uh for a couple weeks at least where you're like having your body try to respond to this where it didn't have to do this before and now you're making it stress out all the time and it's got to recover and then you stress it out and it's got to recover and then your body's like what the fuck

dude what is happening here is this our new life yeah yeah no that was pretty much that you can you nailed it how long did it take um to lose to get to where i am now to where you started feeling comfortable with like normal exercise on a regular basis or extraneous exercise strenuous exercise again i think it'd be about about about six months of where i um and then also just there were weight goals, you know. I was about 360 when we started. Wow. And then getting under 350 was just like a real difference. And then when I got under 300, that was a big deal.

And then when I got under 250, and then now, like now I'm about 220. And anytime I go over 225, I can feel it in my knees again. And because I had to take a little break for a few weeks. And that was really big on my mind because I was like, oh, I have to take a break for three weeks. Am I going to just blow up again? am I going to just blow up again? And going through that and seeing that I can keep my diet and keep my nutrition and that I got a little less defined, but I didn't blow up. And I was like, okay, that made me relax a little bit more.

And it's helped me as far as my comedy or dealing with executives and stuff where I am very much like, oh, that like i can i can figure things out i can do it i have the discipline if i really set my mind to something i can usually do it yeah that's a it's a giant accomplishment and people undermine it because um they feel like it doesn't mean as much because you let yourself get to that weight and i think it's a silly way of looking at it because i am a firm believer that many of us who are feeling really good about life and having a great time here are very very lucky in their circumstance very lucky in in the people you're around the positive influences in your life, the good things, very lucky.

Because shit can be really not good. And when things are really not good and people go down a spiral, whether it's with booze and cigarettes and heroin, or whether it's with food, or whether it's with alcohol, or whether it's whatever, pills, you can go down a spiral. It's who out of the person that is in the bottom of the spiral, who can pull themselves out? Could you, if you had to start from there, instead of starting from a place of success, and this is why I think people get cocky,

you wake up every morning like, oh, I guess everything's okay. You know, my life's not in the share. Instead, think of what it would be like if you woke up and you were 380 pounds. And this is your new life. Your new life is you got to get down from 380 pounds to about 220 pounds. You got to figure out how to do that. And you've got to figure out how to not lapse when you're aching with hunger. You got to figure out how your body has no fucking energy. It doesn't know how to recover. It never gets pushed. And you have to push it through that and you have to do that to the tune of 160 pounds it's a lot of fucking weight man that's a lot of fucking weight most people are not going to be

able to do that it's a lot of weight to lose how long did that take you um about about two and a half years that's a no matter what that's an accomplishment man you know and it's something that i think that when people hear that that you did that people realize like i can do that too i can do that that can be done yeah that's been one of the best things about it and what actually keeps me on it is when i get people reaching out to me like when i post pictures from the past or and now and they're like man like you know in some ways it used to piss me off because people be like oh if you can do it then i can definitely do it but now it's like it's very motivating yeah it's you're setting an example you know you um you you do something and then people because you're in the public eye and you do this thing

they see you do it they watch it happen you know i mean it's one of the cooler things about it like you go in real time you could see you two years ago. He could see you now. I mean, it's crazy. You went, whoop. I mean, you really did it. You know, and when people see that, it's not like a – you heard that a guy lost 400 pounds. You're like, wow, that's amazing. But if you see a guy and you watch him on a regular basis and he's 400 pounds,

and then all of a sudden he loses all that weight, you're like, what? Look at him. Watch him do it. You see him do do it something about people needing to see shit like we need to see someone else do it and then we go i can do that you know yeah like did you would you ever even imagine if you didn't know that people ran marathons or ultra marathons would you ever even imagine that you would want to just run a hundred miles no you'd be like what the fuck are you talking about no one's doing that but then you hear about it and you see it and you go oh i still don't want to do it you still don't want to do it but it changes your idea of what

people do yeah yeah of what's capable right so when a guy like you loses all that weight it changes people's idea of what if they maybe identify with you it changes their idea about what they're capable of they change their their opinion of themselves based on you pulling your life together in an awesome way publicly nice thank you dude that's dope that's that has a powerful impact on people you know there's got to be a lot of dudes out there and gals that are trying to figure the fuck out of the hole they dug themselves in you know they're like how did i get out of this like how do i jesus christ i hate being tired all the time no that's one of my um that's one of the things i love when i talk about a lot of my podcasts is and i try because people don't know me you know and like i'm on twitter if i'm like if i try to

give advice or things or i'm not even really advised just trying to be positive people go like you were talking about like what do you know what do you care you were on a tv show and i have to go like you don't know my history you don't know where i came from you don't know my history. You don't know where I came from. You don't know that I'm a single dad of a kid with a disability. I take care of him myself. I was poor as crap. I had three weeks of a community college education. And once I was like, oh, I got to pull my life together for this son who's different from other people. And I don't know if he's ever going to be able to live on his own or have his own job or i have to prepare for not i have to

prepare if if he does if he needs help i have to prepare for all these things and it really motivated me and it pushed me forward and i like to um now for some reason i i don't know if it's like survivor's remorse or whatever I'm always like man I feel like so many people can do that you know

not necessarily comedy or whatever but I always feel like people have their own gifts they have their own talents and sometimes we're not told that we're not pushed

in those directions or sometimes we go through traumas or things in our lives that dim our light, you know? And I like to be like, anybody can do it because I'm a testament to that because I should not be here. Well, you should because you chose the right path. This is what's really critical about this kind of when we talk about people's future or what they can and can't do,

one of the beautiful things about stand-up is that it's a meritocracy. You're really funny. People love you. We just want to know, are you funny? Hey, is that guy funny? He's funny?

Come on in. Is she funny? She's funny. Okay, come on in. That's it. And I don't know of that many other jobs where it's that clear. there's a lot of jobs we gotta do a lot of ass kissing you gotta suck that corporate dick you gotta be in the office

with satan going what the fuck am i doing with my life i don't want to be here you know i'm writing down goals i just want to do coke i want to get a ferrari fuck this job you know that's what a lot of it is man there's a lot of like weird, man. There's a lot of weird angst. And then you get stuck in this fucking corporate ladder. You get muted. You get toned down. There's no deviation from the standard office worker path. You're in this weird groove. Whereas as a stand-up, all you got to do is make the people laugh.

All you got to do is find this shit that's funny, work on it, make the people laugh. Get out there. Get out there. Boom, boom, boom. Holy shit, you got to go see Ron F shit that's funny work on it make the people laugh get out there get out there boom boom boom holy shit you gotta go see ron punches oh shit people start talking people start telling other friends the next thing you go there's agents there's managers you keep going you keep going you keep getting better oh my god you're on tv look at you keep going keep going keep going if you just keep going and working at it like nobody tells us what to do it's fucking beautiful but not everybody can get that gig so then there's other gigs like what gig do you take well you can't it seems like you should take the gig where you make a lot of money but that's not the move it's not the move unless you can you can be sure that you

can quit that gig in a short period of time because nobody ever does yeah right trap jobs who always would put them and they had a lot of them where i grew up with this is this bank call center where i was working um because it was the only place this tiny town not many jobs like unless you were if you didn't have a college education you were working at a subway you were gonna sam goody or you were working at this bank and you were making like 20 bucks an hour you're making like double what you're making at this Subway. But there's no skills that transfer. So if you want to leave this job, you're going back to Subway. You know?

So a lot of people end up trapped there. And I knew right away. I was like, I got to get out. I can't. I mean, hey, I'm not a bank guy. So, you know. That's a trap. That is a trap, man.

I remember when I was a kid, I was at this uh place called newport creamery it was an ice cream store like they sold ice cream and hamburgers and shit like that and there was a bank that was like right next door and i would always go in the bank with my newport creamery check and i'd deposit it i'd say hi this lady and then one day i heard uh she had the baby in the toilet and then left it in a garbage bin and no one even knew she was pregnant and it was one of those like what like we had just a window into madness like right next door to where we were working we be like what that lady that we always said hi to and the lady got pregnant didn't tell anybody and gave birth in the bathroom at work and put the baby in a dumpster dude i wish you hadn't led but this was a bank story this was a bank story and it was just a person person working she could have been in a cupcake shop it was just this was a person this is a person who was mad they were a crazy

person right you have to be you would have to be a crazy person where no one knows you're pregnant and then you give birth in a bathroom and the baby winds up in a dumpster it's like that is that's the most insane shit i've ever heard in my life yeah and that was like right next door to the ice cream place and we were all like whoa it's like the fabric the fabric of reality had rippled we realized like someone can be that crazy in your town in your fucking town right there i like that your town oh man you sound like you got a nice town though it was a nice town well i mean it was uh very idyllic yeah it sounds pretty sheltered up until yeah people putting babies and things well just it was it wasn't a big place you know and um when something would go wrong it would be odd you know like you knew the person you know how i know it's sheltered is because you worked at a place called creamery newport creamery yeah yes it wasn't even just ice cream super shelter

yeah that was a sheltered ass place that's beautiful i want to do that i want to make that a reality for my my son it was a nice place to grow up um and i had lived in jamaica plain before that which was much a much worse neighborhood. It was sketchy. We lived there for about a year. And then my parents were like, we've got to get the fuck out of here. People breaking into cars while you're sleeping and home break-ins. And it was just a lot of crime.

Especially in 1978 or whatever the fuck it was. I guess it was like 1980. So then we moved to uh newton which is nice are your parents still around yeah yeah they're still together my step my stepdad and my mom are still together they've been together since i was a little kid they're a nice couple have a good time together yeah i uh you know do you ever wonder what you're gonna be like when you're like a-year-old man? Yeah. What do you think?

I'm going to be cool as fuck. Because, I mean, I don't give a fuck mostly now. And I imagine later even less. Just saying all types of stuff. I see it in my mom. You know, my mom. Especially it's fun because I can take her to like random events that i go to and she just i try to be cool you know because i'm working and she has none of that

because she doesn't care like my mom sexually harassed justin timberlake once it was great she just went right up to security was about to take her out it's hilarious it was so she just doesn't care have you ever had her guest on your podcast yeah yeah she was the second guest or the first guest second episode yeah that's amazing yeah my mom's yeah i learned a lot from my mom she's super dope and now she's um smoking a lot of pot and just she lived out oh she lives with you now yeah she lives in the pool house and she just hangs out did you get depressed in in portland with the weather did it freak you out yeah you get seasonal depression there easily yeah people say it's real they say even if you take vitamin d and sit in a tanning bed yeah i mean they'll sell you those lights and all those things that shit doesn't do it though does it no not when

you're dealing with three months of straight gray, you know? It's the rain. Not just gray, but the rain. I think it's a bow because there's this lack of color palette in your life. Yes. You don't get the vibrance. Yeah. Yeah. When the ocean looks like a dull gray. Yeah.

Even the ocean looks tired. Like, whoa. Right? As opposed to, like, if you go to Mexico. Like, I went to Cancun way back in the day and the first thing i noticed like how the fuck is the ocean that color like look how pretty it is yeah it's like a bluish green it's gorgeous yeah have you ever been to the french riviera no oh my god one time went And yeah, same thing. They have pebble beaches instead of sand, which is horrible.

But the water is so beautiful. It's crazy. Yeah, I grew up in that town, which was next to the Charles River. And that Charles River went all the way through Boston. And the Charles River was like disgusting, man like you'd see condoms floating in it and you'd see I saw one pipe and these bubbles were coming up to the surface I was like what the fuck is that and then I saw a condom bubble up and I went oh my god it's a sewer pipe and I realized someone was just flushing their shit and piss right into the goddamn river I was like how did this happen and i was you know 14 and i'm like

what the fuck is this like how the how am i finding this like you don't have anybody like checking to see if the shit pipe is pumping right into the goddamn river like oh my god it was crazy so it wasn't clean by any stretch of the imagination so to see that kind of uh clean pure like ocean water where like you ever uh you ever heard of bone fishing do you know what that is it's a type of fishing that people do it's i think they mostly just catch and release them i don't think they even keep most of them but they go to florida and i think the bahamas i want to say the bahamas and uh they're on these like special boats that are like these boats you can stand on and they're fly fishing for this fish that looks like it belongs in the stone age this weird cool looking

fish called the bonefish see if you could pull a picture of it I don't know why we're talking about this that's how high I am yeah that's what what they look like. Oh, that's cool. Is that a bonefish? It looks more like a barracuda. That's a bonefish. See, that's a bonefish. That other one was a barracuda. I think they just had a bad photo. You see the difference?

It's a crazy-looking fish, man. And see that water behind them? It's hard to tell from this image, but what we're looking at is really shallow water. At the most, it's like three feet deep, right? And they're just casting out, and they see these fish coming towards them and they catch it it's supposed to be like super super exciting you do a lot of fishing i don't do a lot of fishing but i love fishing it's fun but this is fun like i i would assume i haven't done this kind of fishing bone fishing but that's what people people love like seeing a fish coming and going and biting your lure. It's very exciting.

Yeah, it sounds exciting. But look how clear that goddamn water is. It's beautiful. There's no condoms. There's no condoms. Just bonefish. I was watching a video today of a guy jumping with scuba gear on into the garbage patch. It's the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

I knew that it was supposed to be horrific. You know, I knew that it was supposed to be horrific, but when you see it in a video, you watch it and you just go, what the fuck is this? This guy put scuba gear on it, jumped into this. I mean, it was plastic. You couldn't see anything but plastic. Everywhere you looked, to the left and the right, it was all plastic.

Like, this is huge. Like, several states large. Yeah, this shit. This is what humans are doing to the ocean. This is, this is, you see them jump in and it's almost, did they show them jumping or is this a different video? This is a different video.

Probably a different video, but yeah. This is a different video because the other one, the guy starts out on the boat and dives in and what he dives into is just like plastic soup. It's fucking disgusting, man.

It's crazy. Yeah, like this. So there's this guy that we had on the podcast. His name is Boyan Slot. And he created a device that he's using to try to pull the plastic out of the ocean. And they'll maybe convert that plastic into you know things that we can use and um they're i don't think it worked on the first attempt but they're they're relaunching it right didn't they had to do something to fix things they're you

know still in like sort of the prototype stage but it's going to have these machines or this giant nets that move around through the ocean and catch all this plastic. Oh, it just skims it? Yeah, it just scoops it. But how does it stop it from getting fish? That's a very good question. I don't think there's any fish living in there. I bet a lot of fish have eaten that stuff, though.

Guaranteed. There's probably a lot of fish with plastic in their stomachs. Oh, 100%. Yeah, man. That's gross. I mean, what kind of shit gets in their system? And then when you eat that fish, what kind of shit are you getting in your system? How many people are testing their fish?

You know? I mean, how many people are, before they eat a salmon, they're like, hold on. Let me check for mercury. Let me see how much arsenic's in this. It's kind of heavy metal. What's that stuff, BPBs, that they're worried about that come from? What is the stuff they're worried about that comes from bottles

plastic yeah BPAs or something like that I wish I knew what that meant I guess they did a video of their first results from November I don't know what he's saying oh so this is their first actual pulling of the garbage

you know listen man even if it takes 10 years if they could figure out a way their first actual pulling of the garbage. You know, listen, man, even if it takes 10 years, if they could figure out a way to get rid of all that plastic and we could figure out a way to not put that plastic in the ocean, we could maybe, what I really worry about almost as much as this, maybe even more, is overfishing. When you realize how many different ships are out there using giant nets and just scooping everything they catch inside that net and then just serving it to us and we're like you want to get sushi yeah sushi sounds good you know we're like so close sushi sounds good

it's ocean genocide i mean it's fucking chaotic man they don't have real i mean they don't have real control it's international waters people are just cutting nets and dropping them to the bottom of the ocean and they're catching things all the time there's nets all over the place out there people just release their nets they just litter

you've been very conscious about what you eat and sustainability a lot lately right? well I think sustainability yeah I do think about that a lot um i don't know if i'm that conscious of it i'm definitely guilty of not being sometimes i mean i'm extremely unconscious about it i wish i was more conscious about because i'm putting my face it makes me all sad yeah i'm more conscious about what i eat than i am uh sustainability in terms of like what the quality of what i eat i'm more conscious about that

i should be more conscious about sustainability but sometimes it feels like um what is this what are you showing me here is that a crocodile god damn it no what is this a big big catch with an exclamation mark is the name of this video it's got 40 million views on youtube it's a net that's full of stuff oh they caught a net oh this is oh a net this is a fishing boat yeah oh jesus yeah look at that look how it works they just scoop up every fucking thing that's in that ocean it's really amazing that they i mean what a horrific place to be if you're a fish imagine a fish we're like super smart and this is their demise i mean this is an insane net filled with living creatures that we're gonna eat not bro it's just tilapia relax god you're getting so dramatic look at that

that's a crazy bundle of these ocean creatures and how often does this happen a day is it all day i bet it is i bet this is all day i bet this is all day for years and years and years and years and i don't think they take time off i think they keep going and if they're not there someone else is there too i think this has happened as long as they can make money uh selling fish and we're willing to buy fish it's kind of insane you think people ever feel bad about it any of those people feel bad maybe it's possible they're not monsters right if they're they might develop uh well that guy just stepped right on a fish though yeah they get desensitized i'm sure man he doesn't seem like he cared at all well this is

crazy i mean this is not a person supposed to be able to catch a fish or two fish or three fish and then you eat it. Like, this is chaos, man. This is some crazy thing where you have to make Filet-O-Fish sandwiches because there's, you know, 320 million people and 100 million of them want junk food anytime they want it. I mean, I don't know if that went to Filet-O-Fish or if that's expensive fish. I really have no idea. I'm just talking shit. Don't listen to me but and i also eat fish so i'm a hypocrite yeah but it is kind of crazy when you watch this video and i'm not a you know i uh i'm not opposed to you eating fish but i'm just saying the reality of what this is is it's crazy this is a crazy scene and to not deny it's a crazy scene, I'm still going to eat fish.

You know, I feel awful about this. It does slightly make me want sushi. Looking at this, when I was a server, like a big question people would always ask, is it farm-raised or is it wild-caught? And like, if this is wild-caught versus farm-raised, I don't know why it would make a giant difference.

It just seems like it's bad either way. Yeah, it's hell no matter what for these organisms. But they're delicious and they're really good for you. But how are they going to ensure that there's going to be some left? That's what's crazy. Like the human governments need to get together and go, hey, we can't kill the whole ocean because that is possible if you keep going at the pace that it's going now if you really stop and think about what the ocean must have been like when you hear about those uh japanese tuna fishermen like did you see jiro

dreams of sushi remember when those gentlemen were at the fish market and they were talking about what it used to be like used to be tuna everywhere so much tuna and now it's like a small amount and you gotta check to see if it's good. They're watching it happen in real time. If you go from that point where that guy was talking about to today and then go 50 years from now at the same pace, it's like... Yeah, no, you got to be...

But it seems like that it wouldn't be that hard to be more conscious about it. Well, at the very least, they have to take into consideration the fact that they need to maybe develop some sort of an international program to breed these things. Yeah. They've done that with yellowtail. They have these ocean sort of almost like a corralled in area. And they're out in the ocean, but they're only in this one in area and they're out in the ocean but they're only in this one trapped area and they're feeding them you know and occasionally they get out like they get

those yellow tails in hawaii there was a storm the storm wrecked their little enclosure and they got out now they're everywhere so all these uh hamachi grade like sushi grade yellow tails are swimming around all over the place outside of hawaii's one of my favorites. And they're breeding. They're getting bigger. Yeah, it's crazy. It's interesting. But I was thinking when they were telling me that, well, so if that's what they did, like maybe they should do that and just keep releasing them.

Maybe it should be a program that all the people who buy sushi fund into that just takes a little piece of the sushi money and uses it to develop these programs to make sure that these fucking fish keep breeding so you can have more sushi. I think people will pay extra for that. They should, right? Then they would feel good. Yeah, they feel a little better. They feel a little better than me.

You helping out? Yeah. That's what I think we can leave this next generation. They have a real good possibility of making things work out better. I really think that. I think it's totally possible. They have a real good possibility of making things work out better. I really think that. I think it's totally possible. I think it's possible that the world is just going to keep getting better and better,

and there's going to be terrible things, but it's going to keep getting better and better, and then we'll be able to come to some kind of time in our future where it seems like things have improved. I agree with you. I think we're headed towards an age of a new golden era, a new enlightenment. And I think a lot of times these things that we think are negative are kind of indicators of that. Because a lot of these negative things we talk about were happening either way. But now we're more aware of them. And people fight them. And people are more upset about them.

And they're more public because of things like social media. And I think that's a positive, not a negative, that people aren't able to pull the wool's yourself or Joey Diaz or Ari Shafir or Marc Maron or whoever these people are that have these podcasts so many people have this ability to communicate so many people have this ability to you know you show the life you let you show your world in like a different way and everybody gets to compare all these different ways that people are communicating and we kind of like come to maybe a better understanding of why we think the way we think in which i think especially one of the reasons why i'm so hell-bent on having people

be reasonable and try to talk to each other so i think that everybody could learn something from each other in this world. Whether you're left or right or in the center or religious or atheist or whatever, there's too much conflict that's unnecessary. There's too much of what people are or aren't that has nothing to do with you. And you should be able to talk about politics

or even religion and be completely calm about it and not be angry and not get emotional and childlike. But we're programmed to think you're supposed to. We're programmed to think that every fucking conversation about something you disagree with is supposed to be this angry battle of a one-upsmanship and i don't think it has to be i don't think it does no i mean um there's certain issues that like where like, oh, I don't want to argue over my civil rights or things like that. I don't want to be like, oh, okay, well, you don't think I'm a full person? Okay, let's have a point-counterpoint. There's issues like that.

But I think now so many things get wrapped up in politics that people do forget to be civilized and do forget that we've always disagreed and we've always had different sides and that's what's made us a country you know it's the fact that we we're supposed to take the like you said the mix of those conversations and that's the way that we kind of head in you know that's the way we find out who we really are as opposed to who our side is painting the other side as. And I feel like what I meant by people being able to get along is you can have opposing thoughts and still be a nice person. If you're a really super conservative person, sometimes I want to know why. I don't want to oppose you as much as i want to know

why i want to know what you're thinking like what what is what's pushing you in this direction what what makes you think this as opposed to if you are a really progressive person what makes you think this like what's going on like that that conversation can be had in a way more peaceful way or maybe we could all examine why we think about things a certain way and i've been thinking about a lot when it comes to religions lately this we're so fucking tense about religions so fucking tense lately and if it's not for like kids getting abused or wars getting started over it the vast majority of it is just a guideline for people to live their life and if you take that away from

them or tell them that that's bad for them or tell them they can't live that way then then you've created this conflict that's really not your business right in a lot of ways yeah i didn't think like that before i used to think before that like that's not what i believe so you know these people there must be something wrong with the way they're thinking well that's a lot of times that's what um certain organized religions painted as right like yeah if you aren't believe if you don't believe not even you can have same branch of like christianity or whatever but like oh if you're not protestant or you're not this then you're not following it completely or and to me it was always so many of these rules end up just being like hey be a nice person yeah don't don't be a jerk don't murder people that you know and they're those are kind

of constant through all those things where you're like that's something i can take from you but to judge someone else's life based off of their their sexual orientation or something of anything that that to me never jives you know right so i'm always like i'm open to whatever you want whatever makes you not be a fucking jerk i'm for yeah no i'm i'm with you 100 i remember the first time i found out there was other religions like i when i was raised a catholic when i was a little kid and i found out there was other things other than being a catholic and i was like what are you talking about it's like there's other things because uh my uncle was converting to judaism and so i was like what does that mean he's gonna become jewish like what does that mean like what are you talking

about i was like you know five or something like that i was like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute you could shit there's different ones like that. I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You could, there's different ones? Like, what do they think? Like, who's right? I remember being like six years old going, shit, there's more than one story that you have to follow? And we're not sure who's right? And my uncle is going to switch over to the other story? Now he believes a different story.

I can't believe this. He's got an adjusted story. And, you know, you fall into this pattern. Now you're in this story's pattern. Like, wow, you know, we lost him to the Marvel're in this this story's pattern like wow you know we lost him to the marvel universe he's dc comics for so long he was all about batman and superman and now he's like fuck them i'm with the avengers right crazy that's a fun way to look at it it's an interesting way of looking at it without being disrespectful to either side it's like wow okay you know i don't

know who's right we know who makes better movies yes yeah the jews do an excellent job making movies it's amazing how much they've been involved in show business you know when i'm watching that marvelous mrs mazel it makes you realize like oh yeah lenny bruce was jewish this guy was jewish that guy was jewish there were so many jewish guys in the early days of stand-up yeah we got a little mafia you know the same time there was a lot of jewish boxers back then too it's a thing that people probably don't know it was they were underclass in a lot of ways or you know um and like that's like now it's russians like you get a lot of russian boxers now badass motherfucking russians dude hard men hard men because they're coming over here from a hard place and they're fucking people up you know and it's like one day it'll be someone else

it's it's interesting how it goes in these waves you know yeah for whatever country is not doing well yeah and um it's interesting when you see the waves of stand-ups come out of these countries too you know like like there's different styles of stand-up now in different parts of the world you know like stand-up is really a global thing now like legitimate like english guys have their own style yeah you know there's a lot of those guys like i've never been to edinburgh but um r shafir goes all the time he's like dude like, dude, they'll do these hours on just a subject. Yeah, it's all these themes. Yeah, exactly. It's a different vibe, different style.

A lot less rowdy, a lot less boisterous, just people listening. They're great at listening. We did Sweden, and we played Stockholm, me and Tony Hinchcliffe. And Tony was like, like dude it's just like they didn't like me i go no they're just polite i go in between the jokes they're just quiet they're listening you're not used to that and he's like okay okay okay and he went out the second one he's like you're right you're right they're just so nice yeah i thought something was wrong but it's all put in for your timing because it makes you have to have more material because you're used to like waiting for a few seconds.

Yes. And being like, yeah, I am great. Well, it's also, you know, that's, it's not, I don't think it's a that common art form over there. I don't think they have a long history of having stand up in Sweden. Do they? Not that I'm aware of. I mean, maybe they do and we don't know, but for whatever it is, it's diminutive in comparison to any of the places that we know of

that have scenes, whether it's New York scene, you know, LA has a scene, San Francisco. There's like some big scenes here where you know funny guys and girls who've come out of these scenes. You don't hear like a lot of guys

from Sweden, do you? No. Yeah, but they're starting to get more of them. They're starting to get more of them. Everybody all around the world is starting to get more comedy. It's an interesting time in that way. It's very similar to jiu-jitsu. You know, jiu-jitsu at one point in time, there was only a few places you could get it outside of Brazil.

It was hard to find someone who was really good at teaching it. Now it's everywhere. Now it's in New Zealand and Australia. It's in Africa. It's everywhere. There's jiu-jitsu in Canada and fucking the puerto rico's jiu-jitsu everywhere all over the world cuba everyone has jiu-jitsu you know it's just spread i found out it was awesome that could be the same with stand-up then it informs back into the practice right because everybody's doing new

styles 100 and everyone is like there's a really accelerated uh learning growth from the time where it starts getting put on the internet which is like around like 95 96 and the internet kind of becomes alive from that point on people comparing jujitsu techniques and watching matches and and then you know new gyms opening up all around america in particular it's like the level of the sport went through the roof. It's crazy. Yeah, I think that's very similar to comedy because I think a lot of my personal growth I was able to do because I was able to watch so much comedy. And also I was able to get on the internet and read about a lot of comedy.

And Twitter and YouTube or twitter was just starting and youtube was going and i watch a lot watching the videos with you and mencia those things you know and a lot of that stuff um informed my comedy at an early early age about like making a style or just how i wanted to write for myself because when you're especially when you're first starting a lot of what will work when you're first starting will set you up for failure later. As far as like pandering to people and writing for these rowdy rooms or bar rooms, you know. And those things don't work when you go to travel. And so if I didn't have like the internet or all these things to watch to go like,

oh, don't worry about this time don't worry about this local scene as much because you don't want to be a local act you know and that was that was very helpful for me and that's it yeah no for me too man i know exactly what you're saying yeah well listen man let's wrap this bitch up um thank you for doing this tell people where can they see your special oh they can get it it's called giggle fit it's available on itunes comedy central on demand amazon your xbox your playstation anywhere really beautiful just find it and your twitter handle is at ron funches and i have my podcast getting better instagram instagram ron funch ladies and gentlemen ron funches thank you sir appreciate you man Funches. I have my podcast getting better. Instagram is Instagram Ron Funch. Ladies and gentlemen,

Ron Funches. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you, man. That was fun. Appreciate you, Joe. Bye. Bye.