The Joe Rogan Experience - #1985 - Steven Wright

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

Steven Wright is an Academy Award-winning stand-up comic, actor, and now, author. Look for his first book, "Harold," on May 16.www.stevenwright.com

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! It was fun hanging out with you last night. Yeah, it was. You know, when you're in one of those rooms backstage, it's the same. Yeah.

It's the same vibe, it's the same. Yeah. It's the same vibe. It's the same fun. Even if you don't know the actual people, it's a connection. Yeah, and a good room. Yeah. Yeah, we're all having fun. Telling jokes. The setup is so nice, too too because where the green room is,

it's in between the two rooms. So you can go to one room and watch and then you can go to the other room because we have the balcony set up. I didn't notice that.

Yeah, it's very nice. It's very, very convenient. And that actually was the projector room for the theater. So we converted the projector room for the theater

into a green room. So it's perfect. It's a perfect position because it's in between the two rooms so you get people going yeah and then they can you can see them doing it on the monitor you can see I'm on the monitor or you could just step off into the balcony because we have that comics balcony so you could watch like if you're on stage I could just sit up there and watch enough to go downstairs. It's very nice.

It's a fun vibe, right? Absolutely. It's great for me to watch someone like you appreciate it. Like go and check it out and go, whoa. Yeah, it's like, you know, right from the beginning, the same, no matter where you go, I mean, if it's a good place, I have stayed longer but i didn't want to uh is this going yeah we're going i don't see her uh you don't hear yourself no maybe because i'm not turning because i'm not listening is that good do you hear it now no not at all no i Might have to bail on the headsets and go with real ones. Oh, there it is.

You got it? Okay. Real ones. I made these. In your wood shop? Metal shop. When you started out, was it the ding-ho days? Was that, like, the first place where you started? Like, what was it like? What year days was that like the first place where you start like what was it like what year did you start out first of all july 79 oh wow what was the scene like

well it was the comedy connection the little one downstairs no still no it was it was uh on warrenton street it was level. That was the first one. Before Nick's? Before Nick's. So it was the same comedy store, or excuse me, the same one that was the Charles Playhouse, right? Yeah. Yeah.

You got straight in. Yeah. And it was right in there. It was an amazing room. Yeah, little, little like 150 people probably i don't even think that many maybe 100 maybe 90 that was the first ceiling yeah yeah low that's where i i went to see an open mic there and then i thought i what i was doing is I was you know into

comedy from watching The Tonight Show that's when I really got like all these comedian you know Carl and Robert Klein all these guys I had to watch The Tonight Show because my brother was older than me and we had to watch what he wanted so I you know I started watching then I started to like it and then I heard that there was a club in town and I thought I should go out you know I was 16 when I really was into it but then when I was about 23 I heard of the club and I thought well maybe got to go try it out. I wouldn't have to move to Los Angeles or New York. And my character then, I couldn't have 23. I'm not going to move to Los Angeles.

It was like that was too much for me. So I went to the Comedy Connection and I watched a show and then I learned that there was a, the open mic nights was every Wednesday. So then I thought I'm going to go back in two weeks. Do you remember your first act? I don't remember. I remember the first joke was, but I don't remember the rest of it, was I said I went into a bookstore and I started talking to this very French-looking girl. She was a bilingual illiterate. She couldn't read in two different languages.

And that's how you started? Yeah. I had about three minutes. So did you always write in that style? Like the sort of non-sequitur, absurdist? No, see, I didn't even write anything until I went to the open, watched the show, and when I knew I was going back in two weeks,

during that two weeks, I wrote things, but I had never written comedy at all. Right, but when you first started writing comedy, it was always that style. It was about 70% like that. It was more like normal-ish. I don't know why it came out like that. I mean...

I was influenced by Carlin, talking about everyday little things. And that's what I said, oh, I'm going to do that. And then the structure of a joke was from listening to Woody Allen's stand-up albums. But that I had no, that's just how it came out with those two influences, plus my own mind. Well, that's where it gets interesting, right? Because in your own mind. Because you have a totally different style than anybody else in Boston. Well, really anybody else in the country.

But in Boston at that time, there was a lot of guys like Lenny Clark and Steve Sweeney and Don Gavin. There was all these very, very funny comics. Great. Great. Every guy you mentioned is hilarious. Top of the food chain. Yeah. I tell everybody to this day that those days when in the 1980s when I lived in Boston,

those are some of the best comics that have ever lived. Those guys were murderers. I totally agree with you. They were so good. You would go there at any given night and you'd watch Sweeney just destroy Nick's comedy stuff. And he was so fucking good. His timing was so good. So much energy.

And there was so much stuff about Boston. And Boston people just fucking love that shit. Every one of those guys is different than the other guy. Mike Donovan. Kenny Rogerson. Kenny Rogerson. the other guy. Mike Donovan, Kenny Rogerson. Kenny Rogerson, so prolific. Mike Donovan, unbelievably hilarious. Yeah, so many good guys.

Lenny. Lenny Clark is so funny. God damn, he's funny. Just great guys, too. It was a very unusual group of artists because they're these wild kind of partying guys but they had like real like rigid rules about don't be a hack and don't be a thief and don't be a this and you know and do good comedy and they all just wanted to kill and it was there was no real showbiz sort of like pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

It was really just being a headliner, just killing. That's all they did. And there was no show business there. There were no agents, no producers, no one to say, oh, you should do it. Why are you doing it like that? It was like being on an island. That's how I've described it. When we all started, like the club started in 79,

so everyone started maybe one year before one year. Everyone just started at once, and we were all learning how to do it. It was weird how it lined up. It wasn't like that club was there for 10 years. The club opens, and everyone you just said comes, and it just begins. Like, where was it before? It wasn't anywhere. Like, Jay Leno was there before, but he would play the Playboy Club,

and there wasn't actually a comedy club before this comedy connection. Yeah, it's – Fran Solomita did a great job of capturing it in that documentary when stand-up stood out brilliant great great documentary i agree but about what a strange scene it was and it was arguably the best scene in the country might not have been the best thing in terms of like everybody getting to know those comedians worldwide but in terms of like the quality of the comedy it was as good as anywhere in the world. I agree. It's one of those fluke things that just happens.

Yeah. Probably like the music thing in the 60s in the village with the folk musicians and all that, or in London. Yeah. It's just all of a sudden these things come together and then it's just things happen. Mm-hmm. I'm so grateful to have started there me too um you know i started i started in 88 i started after the wave so i started uh you

know there was all the evening at the improvs then and stand-up uh specials on like mtv at the half-hour comedy hour so i started uh you know like like George McDonald was the host of Open Mic Nights. Loved you. Yeah. And you get to see Teddy Bergeron would stop in. Who was just to this day one of the best comics I've ever seen. Tremendous. So good.

So I started when the wave of like television comedy was just starting to sort of subside I kind of caught the last wave you know of that kind of like the the comedy boom was starting to settle down you know and it was there was a lot of mediocre comedy out there there was a lot of people that were doing what sounded like like an impression of what a comedian should sound like. You know, and they were working all over the place. Now, were you living in Massachusetts? Yeah, I was living in Newton. And where did you get it?

Why did it go into your head? Like I told you, for me, it was watching The Tonight Show. How did the germ stir it? Well, definitely watching stand-up on TV. I used to love watching Richard Jenney on The Tonight Show. Oh, he was amazing. me so good he's incredible I was driving home one night fairly recently a few years back and you know how sometimes like a Bluetooth on your phone just randomly plays a song when you plug it in it just randomly

played this Jenny bit and I was laughing so hard driving home and I while I was driving, I downloaded the whole album. And I just listened to the album coming home from Orange County. And it was like, I just forgot. I kind of forgot how good he was. I forgot how funny he was and all the tags and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. He just never stopped. He did several stand-up special specials i saw him live in california he's one of those guys where you laugh out loud you know sometimes you can watch a guy

and you can think that's really funny but you're not really laughing out loud you're not right it's not a judgment but then there's other guys where both lines up yeah you know like like jenny and kevin meanie he's just like oh my god but jenny i mean so prolific he was so perfect top guy he worked at um uh east side comedy club in long island and i got there on sunday and the host and a couple other comics are sitting there they look depressed and i'm like what's going on and like jenny did four different hours he did two different hours two different shows friday night he did one hour for the first show totally different hour for the second show then he does a totally different hour for the first show saturday and another totally different hour i never heard of for the second i never heard of such a thing they said said never repeated a joke He said he did four totally different hours and just murdered and they all wanted to kill themselves. Yeah, I would too

Kill myself not Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. How good he was so I saw him and I Saw Kenison I was actually introduced to Kenison by a girl I worked with. It was a very funny story. She had seen Kennison on HBO, and then she went and acted out the bit about the homosexual necrophiliacs paying money to have sex with the freshest male corpse. So this girl who's a friend of mine is lying on her stomach in the parking lot, acting it out. She's going, oh, oh, life keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead. It never ends. It never ends. So she's acting this out in the parking going, oh, oh, life keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead. It never ends. It never ends.

So she's acting this out in the parking lot. I'm laughing at her acting it out. I couldn't even see the bit. Yeah, this is your introduction to Sam Kinison. That's my introduction

to Sam Kinison is my friend pretending she's getting fucked in the ass like she's dead. Oh my God. That's touching. It was touching. I think about her all the time. I. I think about her all the time.

I really do think about her all the time because she was a girl I worked with at the Boston Athletic Club in South Boston. I was a trainer there and she was like this, she was very funny. She was like this big volleyball player girl. She was like a big athlete, strong girl. So seeing her lying on the ground going, oh, oh. like, you're fucking the ass even after you're dead. It never ends. Was there anyone, like, walking by? No, luckily, no.

She wouldn't give a fuck, though. She could have been a comic. She was very funny. She was very funny. There's a lot of people like that that you meet that are like, God, that guy could have been a comic. You know? A few of those people. So that girl introduced me to kinnison arguably i mean uh believe it or not and then um i just i saw kinnison for the first time and i was like oh that's comedy too and that was like

one of the first times i thought i could do comedy i was like me maybe i'm like I got this wrong I thought it I thought comedy was like Jerry Seinfeld Richard Pryor polished it's all done and like you can't do that you don't know what you're doing then can I send in yeah oh definitely in sprinkle kinnison Hicks Pryor all of them Lenny Bruce but so I saw an open mic night. And once I saw an open mic night, that gave me the confidence. Because I was like, oh, okay, everybody sucks in the beginning. Because, you know, you see someone.

On my open mic night, the first time I went, when I did my show, afterwards Teddy did a set. So Teddy Bergeron went up and just showed everybody how it's done. And for people who don't know, Teddy Bergeron went up and just like showed everybody how it's done and for people who don't know teddy bergeron he was so smooth yes so relaxed and he had this command of the audience and the stage with this presence and his performance i just been thinking i can never do that how am i gonna do that the guy's so advanced he's good. So that's how I got started. And I got started by friends.

Friends talking me into doing it. Oh, they said, why don't you try it? Yeah. Like they pushed you, like, got you to go, like? Yeah, it was my friend Steve, who I'm still one of my best friends to this day. We were hanging out, and he was just like, I think you should be a comedian. It was like when I was teaching martial arts, actually. So it was like making them laugh.

I'd make my friends laugh when we'd go fight in tournaments, and I'd make everybody laugh before we were about to spar, because it was like everybody was real nervous. So for me it was a nice opportunity to get attention and to cut the tension. That's how it got started. Yeah know that's how it got started yeah that's how i got started but i think uh a lot of you know just because someone's funny hanging out doesn't mean they could do that i mean you obviously have done it but the big difference is like if you're in a bar with someone hanging the tv's on and there's a lot happening going by the waitress

goes by someone drops something someone says something about that something's on the tv something goes truck goes by there's all these things but when you go on the stage there's nothing happening so just because you can do that with your friends doesn't really mean then you could go do that because when you walk out there's nothing right it doesn't mean that you can do it but if you can't do that with your friends oh yeah you probably if you don't have that yeah no yeah you're either funny or you're not funny and if you can be funny with your friends it's just a matter of like how can i figure out how to be funny in front everybody else?

Yeah, that's where it's tricky and to me the most interesting thing about the art form is that no one can tell you how to do It you do it very different than I do it and we both do it very different than Seinfeld does it and Seinfeld does it different Louie Anderson did it it's like everybody's got their own little weird way To do stand-up and you kind of have to figure that out on your own. It's like a fingerprint. Everyone's mind is like a fingerprint. You have your own fingerprint, and then you've got to figure it out. And also, if you look at art forms that are very popular, like stand-up is obviously a very popular art form.

People love to go see it. There's no real courses on how to do it. There's no real courses on how to do it there's no real structure of like everything else whether it's music songwriting literature fiction non-fiction there's all teaching people teach people how to do it people who've done it already they teach you how to set up your your stories and how to you know there's ways to learn almost every other art form. But even acting. They teach acting.

You can't really teach stand-up. You got to practice it in front of people. You can kind of take classes. The classes, the best thing the classes do is they get you on stage. Yeah, I've always, years after I was doing it, I thought back that you are your own teacher and student at the same time.

You're standing on the stage. You don't think of it like that because you're just trying to do it. But in hindsight, and you can only learn from doing it over and over and over and over, and your mind is soaking up, like, even mistakes at work. Oh, oh, oh. Like, you soak, like, everything. You need every second that works. Oh, that doesn't. Oh, oh oh oh like it's so like everything you need every second that works and oh that doesn't oh oh oh all right and we tape them audio tape them the beginning sets because it's happened

so fast it's like a car accident the next thing you know the thing is oh what what and then you can like oh because some of it went better than you thought. Some of it didn't go as good. Your writing process must be, you have a very difficult style to write for, I would imagine. Because your style is, it's non sequiturs and a lot of it's very absurd. Is it hard to, when you write, do you sit in front of a computer? Do you just come up with ideas as you're walking around? Like, what's your process? In the beginning, I would sit down and look at the paper, like, look for a word to jazz my mind or look for something.

And I would try to find jokes on purpose in the first six months. And then after that, like I had this thing once, I was looking through the paper and it was an advertisement for electrolysis. And I thought, what an interesting word. Just the sound of the word, what it means, both things, what the hell? So I made a note of that. And then, I don't know, my mind, you know,

because your subconscious is like a factory. It's working when you don't even know that it is. You're minding your own business. You're in line doing something that's this just in. Yeah. And what my mind did with that was I came up, I had this thing about living in an apartment building where they allowed pets, and I had this thing about I'm living in an apartment building where they allowed

pets and I had a pony I had a Shetland pony named Nikki and he he was once involved in a bizarre electrolysis accident all the hair was removed except for the tail now I rent him out to Hare Krishna family picnics. And that whole thing came because I saw the word electrolysis. So I would try to find things on purpose, but then after a while, I didn't, my mind was, I would just notice things, because I think comedy, all art,

is based on noticing what's around you. And I would, my mind, like I drew a lot. I know that you used to draw too. I would draw realistically in high school and stuff. Like if you were going to draw this cup and the two shapes, and then you notice. If you're trying to draw it real, this shape, this shape, and then there's the shape that's in between.

That's also a shape, which helps you get it accurate. So you don't really notice that shape unless you were trying to jar it. So I think that exercised my mind of noticing. Then later on, doing the comedy, I was already noticing, what I think was noticing just some people people very aware of what's around. And you know like in the tower at the airport where the radar goes like this, it goes like this. And then there's the little beeps of the planes, like those are the planes. So I think my mind got like scanning like that, subconscious.

Like I'm not going out. I don't walk down the street thinking I need another joke. I'm going to go walk down that street. I'm just going around my day just doing it. But the thing is going. Right, you're just scanning. And then it'll see a word. It's like, oh, oh, maybe that, oh, okay.

And then, oh, and then like write it down. And I think of the joke, the wording comes pretty fast, like in a minute. Because in my mind, it can only be one way it can be written. And then I just would write it down and then go on with what I was doing. But the noticing never stops don't you think what you do is you're reacting right you're talking about the world but you have to really see the world yeah you have to really see the world and i i do a real similar thing where like if there's a certain subject that i'm working on like like all throughout the day i'm

thinking about that subject like if there's a new bit it's like it's just bouncing around in my head like what is going on with that why we accept that why is that so weird like what what you know and then it just it's just always playing in the background like my mind is trying to sort it out my mind's trying to figure out what my angle is, you know? And then sometimes I'll just take it on stage and just roll it out and go, let's see where this goes. Without it all figured out. Without it all figured out. I'll just do it in between bits that are real. So I'll do a bit that's good. Like it's a solid bit. And then I'll work in that thing and I'll just go, let's see where this goes. Under pressure, after after a bit that kills you get stuck in this

spot like there's something in there like what it where is it you know i have like little destinations that i'd like to get to i'd like to talk about this part of it i'd like to talk about that part of it but let me just see i think because you're in front of the audience everything's heightened so there's a pressure there so your mind is kicked into another intensity than if you were just you know at a red light so your mind is kicked into another intensity than if you were just you know at a red light so you're trying to survive meaning get the laugh you try you know what a minute of nothing so your brain like you turning up the knobs like we gotta figure it let's figure this out right all those

eyes on you look there's something in there I know it's in there let me fucking find it. You know, but people kind of know the process now, so people enjoy seeing that. Like, I've talked to people, like, guests that have come back, and they said, you know, that bit, I saw that bit six months ago, and now it's, like, totally different. It's amazing.

Like, you figured out this and that. Yeah, yeah, it's like a process. So the fact that fans can come and check out the process and they'll see a bit and then they'll come back and see you six months later is a totally different thing. So it's this living, breathing thing that you kind of take on stage to water. Where's this going? Gross. Yeah, and then I sit with it and I'll stare at my notes

when I get home I'm just trying to think am I missing something there's another angle how would another person approach this a person who didn't have this structure already set up for this bit maybe someone will look at it differently maybe the ending should be the beginning

maybe the beginning should be the ending you triggered things it was amazing. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Just, you can't see anything coming. And the connections, it's like... And it's all completely logical. Oh, yes. Oh. You know?

And it's so intense, too. You have this intense presence, like a force. It's like going on a mental ride, a mental roller coaster. You know? Yeah. Really amazing, I think. Thank you. It just...

Oh, you had a thing. Oh, when you were talking to those female comedians the other day uh no kim and sarah yeah but no it was in your act i think it was about the guy oh shit the oil guy the guys with the money in Texas, and they started Truck World. Buc-ee's. Buc-ee's is like the craziest gas station ever. Is that a real place? It's a real place. You should go.

It's amazing. It's not a chain, is it? Oh, it's a chain. And it's called Buc-ee's? Yeah, B-U-C-C-E-E-S. Buc-ee's. That's Buc-ee's. It's the biggest gas station you've ever seen.

It literally doesn't even make sense. That's not even the biggest one. Yeah, that's only like even half of it. That's a small one. That's a little Buc-ee's because that's the Buc-ee's car wash. And then there's like this Buc-ee's gigantic store. Is it only in Texas? I don't know.

I've never even heard of it. I don't know. It's definitely a big Texas thing. It's like a Walmart, like a huge Walmart attached to a gas station. They sell everything in there. It's fucking nuts. It's amazing. Look at that thing.

Look at the size of it. Look at the size of that place. It's like an airport with no planes. Like the planes would be at the gate. The gates are gone. Yeah, they're nuts. And they're like that everywhere you go. Everywhere you find a Buc-ee's, they're fucking gigantic.

A chain of Buc-ee's. One in Florida? Oh, there you go. I thought for certain you would say, no, it's not a chain. It doesn't sound like a chain. It sounds like some guys at night going, let's call it Buc-ee's. Yeah. We can't do that.

Yeah, some guys have got high on cocaine and built the ultimate gas station. It's the nuttiest place ever. But it's a very Texas place because Texas is a strange place. How so? Well, people here are very friendly. They're very nice, but they're also very tough. And they're very progressive in Austin, but not crazy like they are in California or they are in New York, where they're like cult members of this rabid liberal tribe.

So it's an interesting balance. The people coming from the country, people stopped on the East Coast, and other people went the whole way, and the other people said, oh, just stay here. We're staying here. We're going to stay here and fuck. Yeah. Well, that was the other thing in my act about Texas. And it's a true story.

It's a true fact. There's more tigers in captivity in Texas. That's what it was. Tiger world. Wild collection. Tiger world. Yeah, that's it. A big oil guy, right?

He wanted more tigers than the other guy? Yes, that's it. A big oil guy, right? He wanted more tigers than the other guy? Yes, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's more tigers in people's yards in Texas than in the entire wild of the world. More tigers in private collections. Yes. In people's yards.

And it's true. And that's true. Oh, it's 100% true. i've been to some of these places i've been to some of these crazy ranches that they have like texas wildlife laws are very different than anywhere else i've ever been to and the people who own the property own all the animals it's different than like wildlife in any like say if you let's say if you live in montana and you own a ranch in montana you can get landowner uh tags for that ranch that means like so you say if you own like 6 000 acres in montana you and your

friends and some family members you could get licensed to hunt on that property. But you're only allowed to hunt a certain amount of animals. There's a certain season. It's like very specific. It starts at one time. It ends at one time. And, you know, you go to jail if you violate those things. In Texas, as long as the animal's not from Texas, you own it.

So like zebras, lions, tigers, there's fucking stray kangaroos. Like kangaroos get out. My wife saw a fucking zebra. She was driving and she's like, I saw a zebra. There was a zebra on the side of the road. That's what he had a zebra and it just got out. What if it's a zebra from Texas? I don't think it is.

I think it's probably born in Texas. Not that zebra. I mean, in general. You're saying you can own the blue land and then you own the animals if they're not from another country. Why, though? Why? It doesn't make any sense. It's not even just.

It's so crazy. It's so crazy that it doesn't even make sense because they're not even exotic animals. Like, for instance, elk. Like, elk hunting in most of the country is like a very, it's a difficult tag to acquire. It's a very prized hunt because it's delicious meat. And, you know, so that's very specific with the regulations. In Texas, you can hunt elk 365 days a year. And you own hunt elk 365 days a year, and you own the elk because the elk were brought into Texas even though they used to be in Texas.

So they were in Texas, and then in the 1800s, they wiped them out. And then when they reintroduced them, they said, well, you ain't from around here. Oh, my God. So we own you. That's a loophole. It's a loophole. A giant elk loophole in Texas. Giant elk loophole.

You can do that with some animals you can't do with eagles you know like if you started hunting american eagles here in texas then people would crack down like hey enough enough texas settle down we own these fucking eagles historical record of eagles in these here parts it's a weird place so because of that there really is more tigers in people's yards that's just anywhere else to me like just something i wonder how the tigers feel about that they must be like this is wrong unless there's some wild tycoon out there that's got like a crazy setup where he lets a let's a goat loose and the tiger gets to chase the goat

and eat it and kill it. You know? Just for the hell of it? Well, because that's what tigers do. Yes. Because otherwise you're going to, either it's that or you kill the meat and then you bring it to the tiger, which is not as fun for him. And then you'd really rather kill it himself.

That's what they like to do. But if you bring the animals here, then you can own them. Yes. Like you could bring like, I mean, how small can you go? Can you go to crickets? Can you bring crickets? Bring worms in? I think.

I own these worms because they're from Spain. Yeah, you could. Like that. But I think that would be an invasive animal. Like you wouldn't be able to control it. There is problems like bugs and things that come from other, and even plants that come from other parts of the world that don't have natural predators, and they just run over everybody else and take over an ecosystem.

Do you have any animals that you own that you've brought in from other countries? No. Because I'm really here from the, I'm representing the authorities. No, I only have a golden retriever. Is he from the United States? He appears to be. He appears to be. He appears to be. Well,

I cannot confirm nor deny, but I did get him in California when he was six weeks old, so I'm pretty sure he's from here. But, you know, that's literally the opposite of a tiger. Golden retriever? They just love sponges. Yeah, but it's very interesting like the laws here when it comes to wildlife also most of the land here is private

which is interesting too like you know california has a lot of public land and there's public land that people go hiking on hunting on fishing on and same thing with, like, New York State and a lot of states. Not Texas. Texas is very little public land, like a tiny swath of it where you can go hunting on. So what brought you? Why did you decide to move to Austin? It was during the pandemic. And everything in California was just really going sideways.

There was a lot of riots. There was a lot of smash and grabs. And there was a lot of really incompetent government where they were telling people that you have to stay... We couldn't even do outside shows. You couldn't do outside shows. They wouldn't let the comedy store

do shows in the parking lot. This doesn't make any sense. These incompetent bureaucrats were telling people what to do over public health decisions. They had massive control over your life all of a sudden. The mayor never had any fucking control over who worked and who didn't work. Now all of a sudden he does, and he's a moron?

I was like, I've got to get out of here. But why Texas? Well, I came to Texas with some friends because we were all disgruntled with California. And you've been to Texas before? Oh, yeah. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. I've been coming here since then. I've been coming here for Texas.

I love it here. Oh, okay. I've always loved it here. All right. And really what I wanted to do, I wanted to move to like Utah or Montana. I wanted to move to somewhere where it was like these beautiful mountains and woods. I just wanted to, I'm like, I travel so much. I want to go somewhere that's nice and peaceful.

Like, I don't want to be in cities anymore. I was like, this city shit is bullshit. It's just too much. That's right. Yeah. I mean, we were talking about it last night. I think you're on the right track. It overloads your senses.

I don't think it's healthy for you. So there was that. And then it was also, this is a great town. I mean, it's an amazing place. There's only for you so there was that and then um it was also this is a great town i mean it's amazing place there's only a million people there and then a million on the outskirts so it's like really mild traffic very friendly people like great restaurants a great artist community there's a lot of great musicians here absolutely and you even noticed in the airport i've never seen this there's singers in the airport like at different gates yeah yeah that was wild and legit barbecue they got a salt lick at the airport they do yeah it's very good we get excited when salt lick was

open yeah the food here is incredible but so that was uh it was. But the big thing was freedom. Freedom was number one. Because when we came here, everybody was like, restaurants were open. People would just walk around doing things. We went out onto Lake Austin. This friend of mine, she became a friend of mine. She was a real estate agent. And she took us on a tour on a boat.

And my young daughters were like, oh, my God, we want to young daughters were like oh my god we want to live here they're like we want to live on the lake let's go and my wife was very hesitant at first but she took to it like a duck to water once she moved here why was she hesitant it was too different change yeah yeah all of our friends are in l.a you know it's hard it's hard just packing up your and absolutely was there a second runner-up to move to or was this just um yeah there was uh i liked uh park city utah park city utah is real nice real quiet but it's also like it's a resort town mostly so like how many people even live there in the summertime just like maybe that'd be too weird you know but i really do love it up there it's so beautiful

and and i again like i really loved love Montana and I really love Colorado. I just was like, L.A. is too much. And the thing about the government, that was the big one for me. It was like, you guys are morons. You can't tell me what to do and what not to do, especially when it comes to health choices and you're fat and disgusting and you look like you don't take care of yourself at all. You guys are giving out mandates on health the fuck out of here I was like this is just I gotta get out of here and I that's when

I realized like how valuable freedom is and to not be suppressed by these people that are supposedly acting in the guise of your best interest. I get like that over parking tickets. Seriously. Parking tickets infuriate me. For years. Yeah. It's how dare you? What do you mean?

You own, you decided you own this piece of the earth and you're going to charge me? Everything you just said I have boiled down to parking tickets. That drives me crazy, and you know what drives me crazy? Tolls. Oh, yeah. When I go to New York, every time I go over those stupid fucking bridges, I get angry. I'm like, you're making me pay again to drive over the bridge?

You paid for this bridge a thousand times over, you cunts. Because, like, the whole idea in the beginning was we got to fund this bridge, so we need to charge people money to go across the bridge But then after a while the funding's done you paid for it you fuck yes But now you're just addicted to charging people so you have this massive Bottleneck where all these cars just stop dead because everybody's got to go to these stupid fucking booths And you're just raking in money and just staying incompetent booths and you're just raking in money and just staying incompetent, staying with your terrible money management.

So everybody's angry at you and they still just keep paying it every day because there's no way around it. You got to go on the bridge. You got to pay where that fucking put that stupid thing over your rearview mirror. So it clocks you every time and dings your credit card. Fuck. It's theft. They're a bunch of creeps.

The whole idea behind it has already been passed. You were supposed to pay for the bridge. You paid for the bridge. Now you're just stealing. Parking spots. Fuck you. I overreact to parking spots. I don't think you overreact.

To the ticket. I think we need to get violent. Do you know Brian Holtzman? Did you see Brian Holtzman last night very very funny guy, and he just got here It was a really funny guy from LA but Brian used to be a meter maid That's what he's do is like he just he was a comic and he did parking enforcement really yeah We were just talking about it last night that I ran into him one night he was at the comedy oh he's got great stories he's funny you should see him he's very funny you would enjoy him he's so crazy he does the late night spots like he likes to close off the show so you know he was on stage last night till 1 45 in the morning wow yeah he must have

gone on after I was gone yeah he went on late he went on real late he likes to go on at the very end of the show he was on till 1 45. kellen kellen he's so funny but it's like that kinnison spot you know like at the store they used to have late night kinnison spots and that's kind of what holtzman does now he used to be back in l.a it was brodie stevens too before he died he did the's kind of what Holtzman does now. He used to be back in L.A. with Brody Stevens, too, before he died. He did the same kind of thing. He would do those late spots, and it would be so much fun. Did he ever tell you some conflicts he had when enforcing the parking thing?

No, I never talked to him about it. I mean. I'm sure he had a few. Absolutely. I'm sure he had a few. Those poor people, because they're getting the whole thing taken out on they're just trying to do their job yeah yeah they get attacked parking meter people they get attacked yeah it's just it's another

creepy way that the city makes money off you it really is you're dead right it's like why are you charging money for this little spot? And if it's like the meter is a dollar or whatever it is, but if I don't pay it, it's like 50 bucks Like yeah, that doesn't make any sense. You should charge me a dollar you piece of shit. It's like a dollar Is it a dollar there? Like what's with the penalties? What's all these like crazy? 50 times over penalties like you just get to say that you get to take my money Because if I'm going to pay for the parking thing

and you know you're going to make me pay because you give me a ticket, how about give me a ticket for what I should actually be paying? That's what it should be. Well, they're charging you

on time and space. Fuck off. They're stealing money. They're stealing money because it's never going to be worth $50. Like, how is it worth $50 to just park in a spot?

But you can hit me with a $50 ticket if I don't pay That's crazy. Like oh, it's a penalty Imagine that in the Wild West imagine like 1860. That's how people got shot Your horse is in the wrong spot Started doing that. That's interesting. I had to have started. It had to have started. The first guy. Imagine that meeting. Let's find out.

When was the first parking meter? I was thinking about, did you see, when jaywalking started, it was like you could do it for a long time until there was too many cars. And the cars were like, hey, hey, hey, get these people out of our way. That makes sense because if you look at those old videos of New York City at the turn of the century when people were first having cars and there were cars mixed in with horses, everyone's just kind of always walking across the street. Everywhere. I got a ticket once and jaywalking in Los Angeles in the 80s. And it cost me. The penalty was I couldn't.

It was with my car. Even though I was walking, the penalty went to my car somehow. with my car, even though I was walking, the penalty went to my car somehow. Like even though the crime, so it was walking across the street, and then the ticket went onto my registration, which had nothing to do with what I had done. Oklahoma City. First parking meters in the United States went to Oklahoma City in 1935. The city grew rapidly in the early 20th century.

In 1913, the city had only 3,000 drivers, but as people traded in their horses and wagons and bought cars, the numbers grew. By 1930, 5,000 cars were registered within the county. 500,000. Oh, 500,000. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God.

That's insane. How did I miss that 100? Oklahomans who worked downtown arrived early and took the most convenient street parking for themselves, leaving their cars in one spot all day. As a result, shoppers had difficulty finding places to park. Like other towns addressing the problem, Oklahoma City tried to control this by marking tires with chalk. That's gross. Cars that were left in the same space for too long were ticketed,

but that was time intensive and took policemen off their regular beats. A better solution was needed, so they came up with a parking meter. Interesting. Huh. I guess you gotta kinda do something, because people are gross, and they will just park their car and leave it there forever. Oklahoma City, who would have guessed? You could have never known that. Yeah.

Thank you, sir. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Yeah. It's, uh, have you ever fucked around with autonomous cars? I don't even know. You ever drive a Tesla? I wouldn't have. It drives itself, you mean? Yeah.

I wouldn't do that. No? No. You mean sit there and let it do, I mean, I might do it as a test, but I don't like the idea of it. Yeah. It's very creepy. I love to drive i love it i love i love i love it it's one of my favorite things what do you drive i drive a toyota highlander oh nice and i drive a 1986 jeep cj7 nice i love going from point a to point b there's

something about Moving that's good for you at least for my mind too. It's yeah, it's like there's something unwinding just by moving forward I Used to come up with a lot of my best ideas driving. Yeah radio on yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're gonna shut it off sometimes because yeah you're always good radio or phone or something. And sometimes you have to have nothing because nothing isn't really nothing. You've got to, like, it took me years to realize that doing nothing was really good. It was really doing something because your mind thinks differently when you're not going

when something's not going in yeah you really think more for sure for a long time i thought well i'm not doing anything and i and i like it and i think of things sometimes but part of me thought because of society it's like well what do you mean you're doing nothing it has a negative you know what i mean it has a negative thing and then it took me years to think that no this is really something and then i started looking up nothing it sounds like a george carlin i started looking it up and it showed the benefit of silence and just yeah yeah so you would drive with no radio and you just you mind yeah especially early in my my uh beginning days of stand-up i drove a lot because i delivered newspapers so i drive in the

mornings and deliver my newspapers um and i do it no radio on a lot of the time and some of the best ideas that i had came from just doing this manual labor, chucking these newspapers out the window and just driving around. And then your mind is free to think about other stuff. Instead of, like, constantly having entertainment and bombarding it. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'd listen to, like, Charles Laquadera, the morning radio. But if I just shut it off and listened to nothing, then I got some of my best ideas. Plus you're doing this mundane thing with the paper,

which is almost like the gears in your head, it's doing something, but that allows another part of your brain to go on its own, because you're distracting enough. I don't know, it's fascinating how it works. It's focused, but you're not. You're focused on this boring thing, then your mind is playing, because creativity to me is playing. It's like a child with finger paints, you know, just like,

it's always been a very playful thing to me. I've never, like, thought, oh, my God, I need more, I need five more minutes. It's just like, because creating is thinking. You can't stop thinking. If someone says to you, you can't think of any more comedy right now, you'll be arrested. You couldn't, they wouldn't know if you didn't say it,

but you can't stop, right? It's like a machine going down a hill. Well, it's how you look at things. You're always going to look at something stupid and go, what is that? How is that real? Yeah, why is that like that? How are we accepting that? Because the world is so chaos.

It's chaos. And then people have come up, civilization on one hand is good. They have certain rules to guide it. But this stuff spilling over the edges is like tornadoes. Yeah. And the comedians are pointing out, well, I know you're trying to get it so the world doesn't just blow up, but that rule is insane.

And then you can comment about the stuff that's spilling over. Look what's spilling over. Why didn't you do anything? It's like because we're just trying to go from point A to point B in the day and our entire lives and just get to the end. And it's like a puzzle that's completely out of control. You're just trying to survive. It's interesting you're talking about your process,, that, um, you had this process in Boston and in Boston at all the places that I've ever lived is the most, they, they appreciate

hard work and work ethic more than any place I've ever lived. And there's something about like, they discourage lazy people. They do not like lazy people. Like it is a, is a thing growing up there where people work hard You got a shovel your fucking driveway. No no You know the shoveling the driveway thing is big because there's so much goddamn snow Like you have to get up in the morning. You got to do the work. You got to go to work So if you're some guy just sitting on the couch, I'm just waiting for You Steven

Go to work. That wasn't growing up no no no I don't know he's as a successful comic the wiki doesn't even his wanders around you know You know? Get a job. Get a job. What are you doing, Steven? Get a fucking job, you lazy slob. What are you doing? Talking to yourself? You're convincing yourself you're working hard? Get the fuck out of here. But that's another thing.

There is that. There is that physical, physical, physical. It took me years to realize that thinking is doing something, too, because what you just described is so burned into you. It's like, well, wait a minute. I'm doing this. It's not. I mean, it would be one thing if you were not shoveling the driveway

and not thinking of anything. Right. I mean, because of that ethic that you described thinking is not like it's it's so it's thinking is almost abstract even though it isn't you can't see someone thinking me I can see the guy shovel in the driveway so that guy looks like he's doing something that guy doesn't look like he's doing anything but that guy just wrote two pages of something. Just wandering around in his yard, staring at the trees. Yeah. Talking to himself.

I think it's only people who do creative stuff kind of appreciate that you really do have to have that time just thinking. Because ideas, they're out there. And if you don't go looking for them, they don't come into your head. So if you spend time just too involved in stuff where you've got to be very aware and paying attention and doing this and doing that, like, you don't have any boredom. You don't have any, like, just flack. Yes, boredom has a negative thing where it's on its own to it, too, because boredom, that's where the stuff comes. Like, sometimes if I have to, everyone, everyone in there, every day,

like, I have to go here, I got to buy this do this i gotta call this guy i gotta do this email i gotta go then i have to go there because the car needs this guy's and all of that and then it's like it didn't it's like i can't wait to just to just sit there yeah without doing these tasks because if you're doing all these tasks, you can't think of anything other than the tasks. You're caught in a loop. And people, you know, I just like to think. But you have to do that stuff.

If you didn't do any of it, it would just pile up and your house is on fire. I'll put it out next week. I've got to write a joke. I'm thinking about walnuts right now a lot of guys uh like writers authors in particular they like to write and then they go for walks yeah yeah and so like they have all the the writing of the day done like say if they commit to a certain amount of pages or a certain amount of letters that they write so they write all those

words and then they go for a walk and And then you think about what you wrote, and then ideas will come to you as you're walking around just thinking about what you wrote. Like a lot of guys, either they talk into their phone or they have like a little tape recorder, and they just talk into it every now and again while they're walking. Or even Einstein, when he couldn't figure something out, he'd play his violin or he'd go for a walk yeah imagine

seeing Einstein walk what the hell get back in the office and that you know and he figures out this giant thing because he went for a walk he knew he knew yeah yeah it's just we have to separate the difference between lazy and a different effective strategy for engaging your mind because we think of walking and just hanging out as being lazy but for a creative person like one of the things that i think is really important for comics and i guess probably for anybody creative is to do things like you can't just do shows no you have to have real Yes. You have to go out and live life. Go out and go visit museums. Go travel places.

Go hang out with friends in other states. Go do stuff. You got to do stuff. Because if you don't do stuff, your field of references becomes very small. Yes, you would just be doing stuff about clubs and your house. And air travel. All your material. Yeah, air travel. I have several museum jokes by accident.

By accident, yeah. Well, I mean, I went to the museum. I didn't go to get some jokes. Right. I'd see the woman's name for the ladies. Oh, that must be an exhibit. Yeah. Or where they have the heads and arms from the statues

that are in all the other museums. A museum where they have all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums a Museum who had all the heads and arms that's because I went to a museum You know or like I exercise I'm a bike rider like an hour a day in the spring and summer and On a stationary bike in the winter every day 30 minutes I'm addicted to that and And that, like, it's a weird, that's like a weird drug that makes you more relaxed and energetic at the same time. And that affects your thinking, too, somehow. It's like it's all, I mean, I do it to feel good,

but I like how it affects my mind also. Then you add coffee, and then you're out of your mind. I love cardio before shows. Oh, you do? Yeah, I do too. If I could do like an hour of cardio before a show that night, I'm always so loose and relaxed. Yeah, you're like, oh. Yeah, like, hey, everything's fine.

Big smile on my face. Yeah. I was at the dinner with my wife once, and I had this giant smile on my face. I was just like, what the fuck are you doing? What's so funny? I'm like, I did cardio today. I feel great. It's just like it wrings out all the tension in your body.

It just leaves you free. I have to do it. I love doing it. Some people look at it like as a task. I look forward to doing it. That's good. If you as a task. I look forward to doing it. That's good. If you can look forward to it, it's way better. Because when you think of it as a task, then you put off doing it.

And you procrastinate or you dread it. Instead of just saying, this is what I love to do. I'm going to go do this thing I love to do. It's just hard for some people to think of exertion as being something they enjoy. For most people, exertion is work. And I'm tired of working. I want to just relax. You know, because it's mostly they're doing work they don't like to do, too.

So they have an association in their head. But people who don't like exercising are people who don't exercise. Because they see it as a like move those rocks right but people who do it know how positive it is yeah that's everything were you doing it when you first started no i started doing it about in the early 90s i lived in santa monica and i had a bike just for no reason i had a bike you know the bike path along the ocean there so one day i went down i lived three blocks from there i went down and rode my bike on the bike path just for just to ride like a kid rides and i would do it a couple times a week and then

one time i went down and i must have gone longer than before. And I got that rush thing, that endorphin thing, because I must have spent more time on the bike. And I thought, oh, my God, this is what I've been hearing about my whole life. I didn't go to get it. I didn't do it. I was like a kid riding a bike around the neighborhood. But when I got that, I thought, I want to get that again. So then I went on want to get that again so then I went on purpose to

get it again and then it's now it's been like since 32 years it's like a drug like a strike because it was all just from that couple first right bike rides if you could get runners high and put it in a tablet you feel so good you feel so relaxed just like it like the world's fine where it's gonna be great the Sun's out yay then I would do in a hotel and I would do 30 minutes before I would go on stage I for years I did that because of the reason you said you walk out because for me the stage is very intense for me I mean I might

look like I'm walking around saying this stuff but it's like a tightrope and then when you do the exercise it's different then I switch to walks now I go for a walk I'll be walking around out in the back

of the theater and going all around people might see me they're going into the show they must be so nervous i'm not nervous though i'm trying to like oh i'm trying to get that floaty thing yeah and you walk out and it's like it's not as intense do you think think it's intense? How do you feel about being out there? It's intense, yeah. Yeah, it's intense. It's dangerous, don't you think? It certainly is. People paid money.

They don't want you to suck. You know what I mean? To me, it's like you are running across a lake of thin ice, and it takes you 85 minutes to get to the other side. You hear it cracking behind you. That's a great way to describe it. You're trying to get to the other side you try not to you hear it cracking behind you trying to get oh and if you care about what you do it's it's intense you know especially that live performance in front of many many people that come to see you it's there's a lot going on there it's a very complicated issue and it's a

lot of fun it's a lot of fun I've's a lot of fucking fun. I've done a lot of different things. There's nothing, like, I love doing stand-up. It's one of the most fun things I've ever done. I agree. I love doing it in clubs. You know, I do a lot of big shows, too. But what I'm, the fun I'm having at the club, it's, like, the most fun. We were all talking about it last night.

We're all sitting around after the show. Because we've all done, like, a lot of the guys that come with me on the road we've done arenas we've done big theaters but there's nothing like clubs it's the most fun thing ever it's like everyone's just sharing a moment we're all just having a good time together i got all these things to talk about i prepared i've been doing a lot of sets, so it's going to be smooth. Have a cocktail. Let's have a laugh. And it's fun. It's the most fun thing to do. Out of all the shit I do, that's the one thing that I don't think I'd ever stop doing that.

It's just too much fun. Well, the audience is a weird thing. Weird and positive. It's like they're your friends, but you don't really know their names. You're hanging out with them. You're hanging out with them. Yeah. You don't know their names but they know you and they know you inside and out you know especially because of podcasts they really know you like they know you know you they listen to you talk for hours and hours and hours they know who you are you can't fake it you know and so they're excited about that too. It's a, it's a weird, like extra connection that people have to comics now because of podcasts.

Yeah. And what they're really thinking on, not on stage. Cause before it was just what the show would be. Yeah. They also liked the fact that sometimes like we'll bring up stuff in a podcast and then I'll write it down and then that'll become a bit like, I'll have something pop into my head.

Ah, I remember when you first talked about that and now it's like your closing bit because you figured out how to turn it into this five minute chunk, you know? How long have you been doing the podcast? 14 years, is it almost 14 years? 13 and a half. 13 and a half years.

Wow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Crazy. That must be one of the first ones that you have here. The first one was Adam Curry. He was number one. He's the podfather.

The podfather. And then Carolla had one when he left radio. And Mark Maron had one. And there was a couple other that I had heard about, but it was Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith had one real early on. But it was a fairly small amount of people. And what drew you to it?

Just having fun. What drew me to it was I used to like to do radio. I used to like to do radio I used to like to do like Opie and Anthony because it was a bunch of comics and you know it was like Jim Norton and Rich Voss we would just hang out and talk shit and just laugh and it was so much fun I would look forward to doing it every time I went

to New York I couldn't wait to do the morning radio because I get to hang with these comedians and just laugh it's the best I love it it's like it was a camaraderie thing. It was a fun thing. We just would always leave there. Like Ari Shaffir and I would do it together all the time.

And we would leave and we'd just be laughing like, it was just so much fun. And then the idea came. I'd seen Anthony Cumia from Opie and Anthony. He had his own show that he was doing in his basement online. And Tom Green had his own show online. So I was watching a few other people do things. And I was like, why don't I just try something?

Just have a webcam show. Just do it for the fucking fun of it. Let's see what happens. We started doing that. You were doing it with your friend? Yeah, my friend Brian. We started doing that. You were doing it with your friend?

Yeah, my friend Brian. And then I would bring in comedians like Tom Segura and Joey Diaz and Duncan Trussell and Ari Shafir. And then it just became all of a sudden I have guests and all of a sudden I have scientists and all of a sudden I have authors and psychologists and physicians. And it was weird. It just like slowly became this thing that it is now. It started in Los Angeles? Yeah. It started in my became this thing that it is now. It started in Los Angeles? Yeah. It started in my, I just had a spare bedroom that I just like set up. Like how did you, I mean, you had the comedians and stuff, but then how did it go to like scientists?

How did that happen? I started, the podcast became fairly popular in podcasts. I mean, by fairly popular, I mean, you know, thousands of downloads, nothing like it is now. But it was enough so that I could convince people, hey, here's this episode. Would you like to do my podcast? Like, check it out. This is what we do. And they would do like, oh, you guys are silly.

Like, what are you doing? You're sitting around smoking pot and talking shit about things? Like, yeah. Do you want to come? Yes. And a lot of people said yes. Like Anthony Bourdain, he was an early one. He said yes.

Oh, yeah. Graham Hancock. And Graham Hancock was like the first real one because Graham Hancock is a journalist and he specializes in ancient civilizations and the demise of ancient civilizations and that there's evidence that shows that there is likely some sort of a natural catastrophe that took place around 11,800 to 12,000 years ago that wiped out civilization. And all the civilization that we think about, like Babylonia and Mesopotamia, those were probably reboots of an old civilization that was destroyed by asteroid impacts. There's like all this physical evidence. It's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. There's core samples they do where they find iridium at around 11,800 years, which is like very common in space, very rare on Earth.

But there's a large layer of it and micro diamonds, which indicate impacts from the asteroids. So we probably went through an asteroid shower and it probably destroyed civilization somewhere around 11 800 years ago ended the ice age so graham hancock he has ancient catastrophe which is on netflix um this whole series on that where you can like follow evidence, the physical evidence and the archeological evidence of these ancient civilizations and these ancient construction methods

that to this day we still don't understand how they moved these enormous stones, how they placed them, how they even cut them. We don't know what tools they were using, we don't know anything. And how did you get him to come on? I was a giant fan of his, and I would always sing his praises

when I would do radio shows and stuff. I'd tell people about this book he wrote called Fingerprints of the Gods, an amazing book. Great title. It just shows all this evidence of these ancient cultures that just don't exist anymore, including sunken cities off the coast of Japan. There wasn't water there, or there was ground there at one point in time, thousands and thousands of years ago, and they think that there was actually a city there, and now it's covered by the ocean. There's a bunch of those that they find out there in the water.

There's a lot of indications that there was, like, really advanced civilization, like, 12,000, 20,000 years ago. So that guy was, like, one of the first guests. And you have Neil and DeGrasse. Yeah, I've met him on multiple shows. Is he a nice guy? He's a very nice guy. Yeah, he's a very nice guy yeah he's a very nice guy he's a sweetheart because that stuff fascinates me yeah i can only take so much i mean i like to watch the shows and then yeah my mind

like you know my berlington massachusetts mind okay okay and then all right no no no more room no no but i'll watch i'll hear the words yeah i'll listen but okay but i love it i love that stuff well we had michio kaku on the other day he's brilliant and he was talking about quantum computing he's really uh interested he wrote a book on quantum computing and what a game changer that's gonna be when something can compute not at a level of like ten times more than we could do now but like millions and millions of times more and that it happens simultaneously in different universes and that they're calculating not just in this universe but they're calculating simultaneously in multiple universes and

he's telling me this I'm like what did you just say the fuck does that even mean I have to get going that guy is so goddamn smart they're talking to him you just realize what an ape you are I was building a particle Collider in his garage when he was in high school With miles and Modi say like 20 miles of copper pipe Something crazy like that is he my eyes yeah, yeah, what town was he building this? I was you remember Was it New York Yeah, genius genius, but that's like I don't know why I want to... Was it New York? I don't know. Yeah. Genius. Genius.

But that's like... He was like that as a kid. When I was 17, I was picking my nose. I was an idiot. You were 22 miles to Copper Wire. It says... Why don't I pop this up? Okay. I think San Jose, California.

Oh, that's right. Right, that's right. Because he said the heart of Silicon Valley, which is now Silicon Valley. So just to be able to talk to a guy like that. Yeah, what a pleasure, a gift. A pleasure. Just to be in the same room with that guy. I've had the most unexpected education

talking to these people. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, it's been, it's very, very, I feel super, super fortunate for that aspect of it because I've learned so much talking to so many different people. And you get all these different perspectives, these heterodox perspectives and alternative perspectives and people that are like very rigid in their ideologies. And then people that are like very open minded and they're just like trying to find the truth.

And they're all like mixed in together in this world. And if you can bring them together and have conversations with them, it expands your understanding of how the mind works so much like I was only exposed to a certain kind of people before you know I was supposed exposed to us like comics and my martial arts friends and then you know other people that I knew from various walks of life like whoever I ran into but I never got a chance to like how would how would you get a chance to sit down with a John Carmack? And it's because you took that, let me see, webcam podcast. Let me try this. Yeah. Let me try this.

Then you cut to Neil deGrasse sitting here with the guy with the, what was the other guy? Michio Kaku. Yeah, you're saying, let me try this. And then, dang, it's like you have just people, the top people, you're sitting across from them. Yeah, that doesn't happen in real life It doesn't happen in real life. And then she and Elon Musk was a big one. That was a huge one Yeah, I mean here too I got him to smoke weed in here. Yeah, cuz we were drinking We were like we were having a couple of whiskeys and we're I wanted to loosen him up because he's very

Intense, I mean his brain is like you can tell when you're talking to him. His brain is working on, like, five different things while he's talking. It's like a different kind of thinking. So we were drinking a little bit, loosening up, and then I sparked up a joint, and it became a giant issue because he took a hit. Oh, I remember that. And the stock price of Tesla dropped like 6%. It did? Yes.

It went back up. I think it went past where it was the next day, but people panic on those things. It went back up when he wasn't high anymore. Exactly. They're like, it's okay. You can make decisions now. And then there was also an issue with top secret clearance. Because even though it's legal in California,

we was, where we were, it's not legal federally. Yeah, that's so weird. So here he's involved in this thing that's illegal, and he's also involved in NASA. He's also involved in top-secret rocket programs, you know, because he's got SpaceX. And they're like, hey, motherfucker,

what are you doing over there? Did he smoke in his private life anyway um you know what i never asked did you say hey oh i just sparked it up i know but you don't know what his history was i didn't ask yeah i didn't ask but we were we do it all the time so we're yeah if we're having a couple of drinks and I spark up a blunt I look at Jamie and I hand it over to him and I hand it to Elon and it's like he takes his head of it it was was funny but it's like how how often do you get a chance to sit across from someone like that for three hours you just talk to him for

three hours he scares the shit out of me he scares the shit out of me when he talks about AI he he's the one guy got all the people that have this like rosy view of AI including Michio Kaku who's brilliant they have this rosy view of AI artificial intelligence and and Nealon does not he does not he's like this is the biggest chance of being the demise of civilization the demise of humans the biggest chance of being the demise of civilization, the demise of humans, the biggest chance. Yeah, because if you can't tell it apart, then you won't know. There's two things.

There's one, a bad state getting control of AI before a good state. We try to think of ourselves as good guys. Let's just, for the sake of this argument, say we're the good guys. So if we're the good guys, we would like to get that AI before China does. We'd like to get the AI before Russia does, before Iran does. We don't want people that oppose us having the ultimate control over information and computing, because it'll probably be such a big game changer that there'll be no more encryption. It'll burn through everything. It'll be able to read passwords. It'll be able to duplicate things.

It'll be able to, you know, you can do things with artificial intelligence that you can't even imagine could be possible. And it's going to happen in our lifetime. It's going to happen in 10 years, in 20 years. It's going to be an unrecognizable world. I don't like it i like this though it's pretty cool right yeah is there a story behind oh it's just there's an artist his name is jack of the dust and he makes a bunch of cool stuff they're they're uh ceramic or what is it uh

resin they're resin sculptures i just i always love these day of the dead skulls are pretty cool they're just he uh made me a few I said, I think they would all look cool here. I just put them all on the table. Is there a reason there's six? Nope. Just a bunch of colors he has. I just thought they're cool. It is cool.

I like to have a bunch of shit laying around. Yes, I see. It makes it comfortable. You know? I love the photographs out there of the F the the Indians out there oh that's Greg Overton yeah Greg Overton is this amazing artist and he's done a bunch of these incredible Native American art pieces in this area in particular was rich with Native American history

because there's a very very fertile area because of all the lakes and all the rivers and all the wildlife. So there's arrowheads everywhere out here, all over the place. I have a friend who has a ranch, and he's pulled thousands of arrowheads from his ranch. They do these excavations where they know the areas where they hunted a lot you know where there's a lot of like wildlife and they they dig into the ground and they sift through it and he finds these incredible points he's found clovis points he's found like comanche arrowheads it's amazing amazing stuff tremendous do you know that photographer is he passed away or what the artist you know this guy took the big pictures of the photograph yeah the photographs are of Quanah Parker Quanah Parker is the last Comanche chief so the Comanches were the people that were in

control of the plains in control of Texas and they were the most fierce tribe and they were the most difficult to get past and they that they were the most fierce tribe, and they were the most difficult to get past. And they were the reason why people couldn't settle this area. It wasn't until the Texas Rangers figured out how to combat them on their own terms. They cold camped. They never used fires. They dressed like normal civilians, and they kind of lived like Indians. And they ran around, and that's Quanah Parker. So Quanah Parker, his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was kidnapped by the Comanche when she was really

young. She was nine years old. Her family was murdered in front of her and they took her in and she eventually became the wife of the chief and they had a baby so she was white and she had a half Native American baby who was Quanah Parker who was the last Comanche chief and he was a big for a Comanche and just like very very fierce guy that photograph of her sucking having her kid sucking on her nipple is a very famous photo because she would do that in front of people and they thought that was like so uncivilized they want to disturb them no just that's how they did it oh we're you know in the native american cultures in the comanche culture they would just

breastfeed so she would do that and they took a photo of her doing that because they thought it was like this is like the evidence that she's not oh i us. Oh, I see. Oh, I see, yeah. She's very primitive. She's like one of them. She was kidnapped when she was nine years old. I'm a fan of Red Cloud, the Lakota chief. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I read this book, In the Heart of Everything. Yes, I read that book.

It's just amazing. It's a great book. It's a great book. How he gathered all the Indians together to make it one big army. Yes. And fight the white guys. Mm-hmm. Just like.

Yeah. Because that's what it was supposed to be like. Not the wars, but when they had it. When they had this. Yeah. That's, you know, no parking meters. No parking meters. No malls.

That was the real version well that's the nostalgia that everybody loves so much about Native American culture the fact that they lived off the land in the land and they did it at the same time where Europe had already experienced the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and there was all this stuff and cities and all this culture all over the world that was like sophisticated and art and literature and they didn't even really have art the Comanches they did their art was their arrows their art was their their clothing their art was you know what what they did to live off the land

you know they just followed the buffalo and lived off of them that's all they ate they mostly just buffalo and then all that's happening in europe and then this is still here like stone age culture thousand years yeah amazing trains if you could go back in time and see what that must have been like my god how incredible to be like one of the lewis and clark people to take that trek across the country and just experience what it was like before the white man came and fucking put his greasy little palms over everything and built cities. It would have been too much for me. I would have cried to death.

Where is he? He fell out of the canoe. Hard life. Not good for comics. You know, the Lakotas had a comic they they had a a permanent like fiction really is part of it really i never knew that yeah it's called the heyoka the heyoka was the sacred clown wow the sacred clown the the job that they had in society was to mock things because anything that could be mocked must be bullshit like you would peel

away the layers of ego and distortion because if you can make fun of things so the the Heyoka was allowed to make a fun of everybody make fun of the chief make fun of the the women make fun of the Warriors he made fun of everybody I never heard of yeah it was a very important part of their culture did the other tribes have that I don don't know. What is it called again? Heyoka. Heyoka. Yeah. It was like he was like a kind of a medicine man. It was like there was a spiritual aspect to it. Heyoka. That'd be a good name for a child. Yeah. Heyoka. A little bit of cultural appropriation. He didn't get in trouble for that. Oh. Oh, the Indians. Oh, my God, the Indians.

I say the Indians in my show. I say the word Indian in my show. They say it. It's weird. It's one of those weird ones where, like, some people think Eskimo is a bad term, but some Eskimos prefer that term depending upon where they are in the country and where they are in the world. It's like a lot of native americans they actually want you to use the term indian american indian well then i say i wonder if in cleveland now

little boys are playing cowboys and guardians what are they playing now right you can't play cowboys and indians yeah guardians you know that's the name of the cleveland team You can't play Cowboys and Indians anymore. Guardians, you know, the name of the Cleveland team. Yeah, they changed it. But the Washington Redskins are still the Redskins, right? No? It's done?

The Commanders. The Commanders. Is anybody a Chief anymore? Chiefs are still there? And then the Seminoles in Florida State, they have a deal with the tribe to stay in the Seminoles. Well, the Seminole Nation is the only nation that was never conquered. They just fucking kept running shit in Florida.

That's why they have all the casinos down there and the hard rock. The Seminole Nation is huge in Florida. I did a book report on those Indians when I was in eighth grade. Oh, yeah? Because we went to Florida on vacation, and I saw the name all around. I don't remember anything about it, though, of course. Well, there's a great book about Cabeza de Vaca called A Land So Strange. Have you ever read that book?

No. It's a great book. It's about Cabeza de Vaca when they first came to America and how they made their way from Florida across the country and they're like, everybody died. There's like a couple guys left at the end of the journey but the stuff that they encountered the you know the way they had to try to get by and starving to death and you know facing hostile enemies and just crazy you being there then doing that thing

we're so lucky oh my god you just go Starbucks, get a cup of coffee. Go get a sandwich. Yes. You know, it's, like, so easy to get by now. These people, like, almost starved all the time. Even the rain would be different. I mean, experiencing the rain would be a big decision thing. Also, you didn't know when it was coming. You didn't know when it was going to end.

You had no idea a hurricane was on the way you had no idea it was just like but the weather guys the guy the weather guys though even now like i mean my brother is really into the weather and i mean i love snow i can't wait for it to snow i love snow in massachusetts but he told me about this guy, a weatherman in Brazil years ago, and he predicted these big, giant rains and stuff. Bad weather was supposed to come. And then all these tourists didn't come. And then the weather

didn't come, and they put him in jail. They put the weatherman in jail. That's crazy. I think that should happen. There's just a row of cells of weathermen from all over the United States. There's actually an even dumber one that's recent. And the dumber one was there was some geologists in Italy, I believe, and they failed to predict an earthquake.

So they were tried. And I want to say they were convicted and then they had a win on appeal. See if you can find that story. But it was insane for all the scientists that actually understand seismology and how those, you can't predict earthquakes. You just, you can't. And so these morons had decided, hey, it's this fucking guy. He should have told us. And so they tried these guys like they're criminals.

And it was real bad for science. It was real bad for seismology and the study of earthquakes because they had given, because of their own ignorance, they had decided these people could figure it out. So they're exonerated. Why Italian earthquake scientists were exonerated? Judge who overturned conviction. conviction yeah so there was a conviction say say experts use the best available science yeah you can't fucking

predict earthquakes jackasses six scientists convicted of manslaughter in 2012 so only 11 years ago for advice they gave ahead of the deadly Laquila earthquake were victims of uncertain and fallacious reasoning. To say the three judges who acquitted the experts and reduced the sentence of a seventh defendant last November in a 389-page document deposited in court on Friday since release to the public, a trio of magistrates attacked the convictions on multiple grounds and state that no blame can be laid on the scientists for the risk of analysis they carried out. Yeah, there's no way. Other scientists, however, accused the judges of failing to understand modern seismology. What does that mean?

Well, the judges definitely didn't understand it because they thought that these people could accurately predict when an earthquake is definitely going to come and that's just not available yet imagine telling the guy in the next cell while you're in why are you in here well italy's got goofy courts i had i did not know that oh real bad i had amanda knox in here well not that america doesn't i mean one of the things that i do yeah yeah she was great one of the things that I do on a regular basis is I have a very good friend Josh Dubin Who is a civil rights attorney? and one of the things he does he used to work for with the innocence project now he does stuff on his own and His like main goal in life is to find people that were wrongly convicted and get them out and he gets a lot of people

Out he's constantly doing it. It's like his main life's work. It's his main passion project. And so we highlight those cases every three months. He comes on and we sit down and we talk. And he talks about cases and he'll bring in people. He's brought in several guys who spent 15 years, 20 years in jail for something they didn't do. Wrongfully convicted.

You brought them in here? Yeah, yeah. well a couple different guys and it's amazing is Josh is I mean he's amazing. He's a fucking saint, but you get to realize our court system sucks dick, too But Italy's is even worse and Amanda Knox got fucking Railroad it like railroaded bad and there's a really good Netflix documentary that shows all the the stuff that happened I mean there was so much DNA evidence that connected to this one guy who murdered the girl He 100% did it like it handprints bloody hand really? Yeah, but this fucking this this prosecutor had it in his head from the beginning that she was it was it He had a stupid idea that it was definitely her

and he didn't want to look at any other evidence and he suppressed evidence he suppressed he didn't look at it he he knew that this other guy was probably guilty but he had already said she was so he wanted to convict her and he did it and he got her locked up and then she won on appeal and she finally got out after years in jail yes and, and then they tried her again. Well, she was in the United States Yes, and she was exonerated again But I mean this poor lady and she's so interesting. She's so fucking brilliant So smart and one of things that I said to her I said Do you think you would be the same person if you had not gone through this horrific experience?

I would never want you to go through this experience. But because you did, you're this amazing, fascinating person with this like very introspective, very open minded view of things. Like she's looking at things from all these different angles because her mind was tortured. What was her answer? She definitely would not have wanted to do that, but she definitely realizes she's a different person. Absolutely. She would have to be. An incredible person because of it.

Was the guy they got, was he one of the people there? Like, was he from the outside? Wasn't there, like, four people? The guy who they think did it was a guy who knew the woman and he had been with her and he was at that fucking place that night like he was there and he was also a criminal and he had been breaking into people's places and stuff like they knew that he had a history of doing some fucked up things with it they didn't

have a connection previous to this with murder and you know he said he didn't do it he said he got there and someone was already killing her and he ran away like a lot of like bullshit ridiculous stories and he's in there they got him in there no I don't think he convicted him of something else and I think he went to jail for a certain amount of time and then he got out I think I convicted for some other kind of crime wasn't it like a break-in and entering thing or something like that but for the the most of the evidence at least as it's presented in the netflix documentary and talking to her seems to point to this one guy that they're pretty sure did it it was a horrific murder too it

wasn't like it's not like a normal thing that women do it was it was like a male thing like a vicious knife murder you know what was she like was thing like a vicious knife murder, you know What was she like was she like was her vibe like? Like a person has been through hell. Yeah, and because that person been through hell like her mind is just Very unusual. I mean the the amount of time that she had to sit and deal with the fact that she was wrongfully convicted in front of the whole world. And then even when she got back home, how many people really knew the whole story and how many people thought she actually was a murderer? And somehow or another, she got away with it because

most people just read headlines. You just read the propaganda. You just read like, oh, Amanda Knox convicted of murder. Oh my God, she's a murderer. You know? And so this poor lady who was 20 years old at the time, She's a kid and she's just over there Studying abroad and the next thing you know, she's locked up in a jail for something She didn't do and it's in front of the whole fucking world and she thinks she's not getting out She thinks she's not getting out. Yeah, yeah And also then she gets to be embedded in prison with all these women who have had these horrific lives, horrific stories of abuse and this life of crime,

and their whole family's filled with crime and chaos. And you get to realize that these are just people, just people that just went down the wrong road, and all of it just didn't line up just a little tiny fork in the road yeah the wrong fork and it could happen to anybody wrong circumstances wrong time wrong place you're born in the wrong area wrong family wrong this wrong that wrong friends bad decision you get drunk you do this you do that next thing you you're in jail. That's a lot of us. There's so much randomness for the benefit of your life when you're born.

Oh, yeah. Where you're born, where you grow up, who your parents are. It's like rolling dice. And if you get a good situation, it's just like rolling so many sets of sevens for years in a row, sevens. And once you start doing well, it's easier to roll sevens, which is weird. You know, the rich get richer. The fortunate people become more fortunate. It's very, very, because like a lot of people want to believe in fate.

Fate's a beautiful thing to believe in, right? This is all meant to be. Kind of like takes away some pressure but boy like mathematically that doesn't seem likely it seems likely there's a lot of just like random chance like it's not fate that a baby dies of leukemia is that like someone there's a plan for the baby to die of leukemia that doesn't make any sense like when people want to say that like you manifest your own reality. Like do you though? Because babies get shot in drive-bys.

It does happen. Do you think they're manifesting that? No, that's random. That's like chaos. That happens too. Like there's probably a lot of factors that are all simultaneously working together. And the question is how much is fate a part of that? Is fate, is your mind a part of

that like how much of it do you actually manifest out of your own mind how much of your choices change reality itself there's just so many ways to like process what's happening because if it's all chaotic or maybe some of it isn't. There's just so many versions to look at it. Yeah. It can't be figured out, really. It's a mixture. I think it's a big mixture.

You try and figure out answers. Like we said before, it's so chaotic. But your brain is trying to have a right way. Yeah. And then there's choices you make, right? Like where you decide to move. Like I don't want to live here anymore. Yeah. I want to move to a right way. Yeah. And then there's choices you make, right? Like where you decide to move. Like I don't want to live here anymore. Yeah. I want to move to a different place.

Now all of a sudden you're in a new reality. You know? That's an interesting thing to do. So you were in Boston and then you lived in California. But now you're back to Boston. Yeah, in Carlisle, out in the woods, trees near Carl's Church. When did you go back? I went back about 22 years ago.

Wow. I lived in Burlington, then I went to Middlesex Community College in Bedford, then I went to Emerson College in Boston, then I started doing stand-up, and then I stayed, like, after I got out of college stayed like five years and then I Boston then I went to Hollywood for two years Emerson's like a performing arts college right yeah radio mass communication what did you go for I went for radio because I thought that I didn't really I wanted to be a comedian I had like my mind divided in half that was my goal but I proud of me thought that's not really gonna happen maybe

if it doesn't happen maybe i can be a guy on the radio maybe i can be funny on the radio and then somehow get from the radio onto the stage that how that would happen i didn't know but that's why i went to that school as like my backup plan i I loved that school because not really from what I learned about it because everyone there was slightly odd. Yeah. Like it had an automatic screening system that if you decided you wanted to go there, you weren't normal right there, you know? So then you get all these people who decide to go there yeah and they're all a little bit odd and then you started feeding off them so you even got more creative because everything you knew was creative yeah so what I got out

of the school was the people more than what I learned in the actual school some of my best friends is still from that time. And then I went on The Tonight Show. Then I went out to Hollywood for two years, then New York City for five years. I thought everyone, when I lived in New York, I thought everyone should have to live in New York for one year. Everyone in the United States. That's what I thought at the time because it was just, you know, you're like 30 years old. Oh, my God god then i went back to santa monica for 12 years and then i thought you know what i want to go back i want to go home

because the united states is like united states but it's like five countries, environment looking. There's New England, then there's Florida. Colorado was completely different. Nevada, here. You know, Utah, the Northwest, California. It's like seven different countries named one thing. But my gut was thought, I want to go back now. I want to go back to where the seasons are, where those buildings are. I was just drawn from my gut to go back now. I want to go back to where the seasons are, where those buildings are. I was just drawn from my gut to go back.

When you were in Santa Monica, were you here because you were doing Hollywood stuff? And that's why you felt like you needed to be here? Yeah, I was here. I was mainly going on the road. And I'd come back to L.A., but going on the road. And then I'd do some movies movies like some parts in movies some tv but i was mainly going doing what i'm doing and i thought well wait a minute you know i'm in this place that i really don't i didn't hate it but i didn't like it it's like you i saw it as like a

waiting room like you're waiting for something to happen, waiting for this other thing to happen. And then I thought, well, I'm going on the road mainly. The audience doesn't care if I came from LAX or Logan. They don't know. And I thought, well, I don't want to be here waiting for something else anymore. This is what I do, mainly what I do. So I'll just go home and I'll do it based out of there. And I'm happy that I did it. And during that time when I was gone, I started to really

like nature. I would go to Rhode Island in the summer and I really became more and more into nature. So when I went back to Massachusetts, I didn't want to live in a city anymore. So when I went back to Massachusetts, I didn't want to live in a city anymore. I lived in Boston, New York, Los Angeles. Now I wanted to be around the trees because my mind was just like, my being was like, I didn't want that madness anymore. Yeah. Just like, oh.

You know, and then I could go into the mad. I'd go to Boston or whatever. Then I'd go on the road into the madness. Then I'd come back and it's trees. Yeah, that's the way to do it. Isn't nature powerful? I mean, nature is incredible. It's medicine. It is.

I remember when you did it. I remember when you went back to Boston because it was a big deal. A lot of people were talking about it. They're like, Stephen, I went back to Boston. I was like, whoa. Because nobody moves back to Boston. Everybody goes from Boston, then they move to L.A. or they move to New York. But it was always this thing that you kind of had to to Boston. Everybody goes from Boston and they move to LA or they move to New York.

But it was always this thing that you kind of had to leave Boston because unfortunately, like what we talked about with those great comics that were around back then, they never became worldwide. They were just these huge talents that stayed in Boston. And it was a kind of a cautionary tale for a lot of us that were the next generation. Like, Hey, I think you got to get out. If you really want to do TV,

if you really want to do stuff, you got to get out. You got to do the road. You can't just do local jokes to local people. Like, even though it's amazing and so much fun, you really like, you should kind of selling yourself short if you don't get out there.

So we all, so when you went back i was jealous i was like really so i didn't even know people were aware that i was so free just went back i was like it's such a gangster move do you get to like at the top of your game killing it all over the world doing stand-up you're like yeah i live back in b. It was a gut feeling, you know? Your mind's only so much involved, but your gut makes a lot of decisions. Just like time is so precious, right? So here I am in a place that I don't really care for, Los Angeles, and meanwhile the time is going,

my life is going, and it's like, well, why not be in a place where i like where i am did you have friends back there in los angeles no boston yeah i had some friends there definitely i uh but i know most of my friends still live in los angeles but i have friends in new york and massachusetts and los angeles i have a few friends still back home in Boston it's very interesting it's good to keep touch with them it's good to go back I love going back it's one of my favorite how often do you go back well last time was there it was probably the most emotional set I did the TD garden and it

was like for me Wow going congratulations thank you so for me starting out there yeah doing open mics wow and then coming back and doing the garden and this fucking crazy sold-out show amazing it was very emotional it's like oh yeah that's something else it's pretty wild but you know how boston is it's like if they know you came from there, there's like there's a thing the way a town embraces you when you came from there. That's different than any other place. And Boston is a very proud city. Very proud city. Like they love people from Boston.

So it was like going back there it was like like look I did it you know like it worked out here I am I'm back you know it's like to start out at a place and also when you start out at a place you know you're always kind of like in the back of your mind you remember how bad you sucked he think you mad you remember what it was like in the back of your mind you remember how bad you sucked you know you mad you remember what it was like in the beginning and to be able to come back and sell out an arena it's just weird but you know Boston has got this like rich history of stand-up comedy that I think is unlike any other city in the country because I think it was the only city where you could have these top talents that never left.

And so you're dealing with this incredible high level of comedy, but it's all local. And it's just a bunch of killers. It was very, very unusual. I think to this day, there's no other place like it. Because everybody in New York was trying to get on TV and trying to do this now There was no real show business there the show business was When's your set you know yeah? Oh?

I got a eight o'clock at Nick's and you go down the Knicks and you see your friends and everyone's doing shows and There's shows down the street the connection and shows over there at Dick Doherty's comedy vault and it was like but there were comedians like Paul Poundstone and Dennis Leary and Kevin Meaney. But Boston, the people there, they loved the comedians. Like you were talking about Boston going back, Bill Burr. He was telling me before he did Fenway Park with Tony V, who was one of my favorite comedians.

Love Tony V. Tony V, one of the prolific. Bill Burr, just amazing. And he was telling me when he was walking around the city before that people knew he was going to do Fenway, and they were saying, hey, I hope it goes great. And he felt like they were rooting for him, which is a really cool thing.

It's a very cool thing. No one's more Boston than Bill Burr. He's like the most Boston comedian ever. He's mad at so much stuff. He's hilarious. He's so funny. He's amazing. And he's the best.

Yeah. There's so many guys like that. Pat Patrice when Patrice was in Boston and there's so many goddamn killers that area just produced it's also people don't have a lot of attentions band involved they don't have a lot of tolerance for stupid shit like come on get to the jokes yeah funny shit you know over the years people have asked me why so many comedians from there? What is it? I can't even answer you.

Because when you think of all the people, all we've been mentioning, this giant list of people from this one area, I do not know why. Well, I think it's what you were talking about, how the club was built, and then all of a sudden everybody came to the club. And because there was no real show business it was really just about doing those shows because it was kind of

isolated yeah like an island like yeah that's how I saw it like thinking back was like an island also it's like when you have guys like Barry Crimmins Oh Mary Kermans who was a he was kind of like the watchdog for everything he's this brilliant guy who had very high standards, was a real artist, and was very politically aware, very socially aware. And, you know, his comedy was fucking brilliant, but it was also very smart. Absolutely. And, like, kind of set the tone.

Absolutely. A lot of what he talked about, I didn't know what he was talking about. Right, he would talk about obscure political things. And then he opened the Ding Ho Comedy Club. So the connection started for about a year. And then Barry went and opened that in Inman Square. And that was a whole other thing than the connection. That was more like a clubhouse of insanity.

Yeah. And he was a great comedian, brilliant comedian, and he ran the place. So that was an odd thing. Yeah. Because he saw the whole thing through the mind of a comedian. He's one of my favorite people I love. I love him to death.

He was amazing. He was an amazing guy. And his influence, I think, was a huge part of that scene. Again, it was before my time, so I didn't get to experience the ding-ho, but I knew all those guys, and I talked to all of them, and they all talked about it. And everyone to a person was talking about Barry, that Barry was like, you know, you didn't want Barry on your bad side.

You didn't want Barry. He didn't like hearing you do something like not in a good, you know, like kind of hacky. And younger guy, I was really good friends with him, but years later I heard that younger guys were afraid of him. I was afraid of him. And then I thought, well, why? And then I thought, well, wait a minute, let me look at him as if I didn't know him.

Yes. One time he was being heckled at the ding-ho and he the lights on the state you know they were track lighting and he just turned the light around to the guy he started hammering him like now the light is on him that's hilarious that's hilarious yeah I was terrified of him you were yeah well he was smarter than everybody else Yeah, he's a great comic and he had super high standards, and I sucked Fuck

Please don't let this guy see my set And luckily I got very lucky. He didn't see my set until long later Headline I was already killing i was already good then he saw me and then he said he told me i was really funny i was like oh yes yes and then i became friends with him yeah so that's cool podcast oh really that's great he was and and then you know he's just he was a and then he did that documentary where he explained his abuse and like what happened to him when he was younger. What sort of shaped him as a person.

I knew him so well and I didn't even know a lot of that stuff. I don't think anyone knew. When he went to Congress and was arguing with them, that was incredible. We should explain what he did because in the early days of AOL chat rooms and things along those lines, people were openly trading in child pornography. And he found out about it and he exposed it. And he made it a big part of his life's work to shut that shit down. And this was the very, very very very early days of the internet yes

did you see you know that part of the movie where he's in the show him in there in Congress arguing with the guy and then the lawyer beside him for the other side says some lawyer thing and then Barry shreds him with reality yeah and the guy said another lawyer thing and then Barry shreds him with reality. And then the guy said another lawyer thing. And then Barry shreds him with the real point of the situation. And then the guy stopped talking. Yeah. Barry was the wrong guy. He was the wrong guy to argue with. The wrong guy to be on the wrong side of an argument.

Funny hanging out too. Just funny. Just like always hilarious. Brilliant. I think that's one of the reasons why the scene emerged I think it was because of Barry I think there's like a thing that happens in scenes we have this top-down force this one guy that's the gold standard and then you have this army of assassins that's around this guy the kenny rogersons yeah the john gavin brilliant killers killers just a sea of killers every tony v everywhere you go there's like so many comics that were just top notch man i wouldn't i went into nick's comedy stuff one night

one of the things that nicks used to do that was absolutely brutal and uh this was when i was a beginning comic they would take people like say if like uh you know billy crystal was in town billy crystal wanted to do stand-up billy crystal celebrated around the world he's billy crystal he's an amazing comedian everybody's gonna go see billy crystal let's go see billy crystal he's an amazing comedian. Everybody's going to go see Billy Crystal. Let's go see Billy Crystal. He's at the next comedy stop. It would be Billy Crystal. But before Billy Crystal would get on, it would be Kevin Knox, and then it would be Steve Sweeney, and Don Gavin, and Kenny Rogerson,

and Lenny Clark. By the time he got on, that audience was beat to shit. And these guys were fucking killing. They would all kill for like 15 every one of those guys yeah just roars people falling out of their tables like they couldn't believe how funny it was and then they would set these poor guys up and these guys were used to doing soft shows on the road they picked their opening act they have a you know a nice soft casino type show hey it's Mr. Saturday Night it's Billy Crystal just eating plates of shit

in front of Longshoremen at Dick's Comedy Stop at 9 o'clock on a Thursday it was brutal it was like that's how they did it whenever someone came into town they set them up did they do it on purpose? 100%

100,000% I didn't know that into town they set them up did they do it on purpose a hundred percent one hundred thousand percent and every i didn't know that every comedian that went up they no one did new stuff no one took a chance setting like a setup a setup burying that guy they were burying that guy they would do it to everybody did you see it oh it. Yeah. I watched a lot of guys eat dick. Yeah. I watched a lot of guys. Richard Belzer. I watched a lot of guys.

They just threw him to the wolves. But the only guy I saw come out of that like a rose was Dom Herrera. They did that to Dom Herrera. He was headlining. And they had like 15 killers on in front of him. Like everybody's murdering. And Dom Herrera just went up there like a fucking pro and rode the wave and went on stage and immediately was killing. And I was like, that's a fucking pro.

Look at him. Yeah. He's a New York hilarious. Oh, yeah. Philly. Started out in Philly. Oh, Philly. I only know him from New York. Yeah.

I became friends with him later in life, but i actually paid to see him before i was ever his friend so i remember seeing him at nick's comedy stop and bringing my girlfriend at the time because i was just starting to do stand-up and i was just i wanted to see all the good ones when they came into town and i got to see that see dom o'rei in his prime was amazing but it was like the only guy that i ever saw that ran that gauntlet and came out of it on the other end looking like a pro.

Did you tell him later when you became friends with him? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he knew it too. He did? He was aware that they knew

what they were doing? He's like, oh, that's what they did. They set you up. They just threw every fucking local killer. Whenever a big name guy was in town,

all those guys would be there to do sets. It was 100% on purpose that's kind of cruel actually it's fucking terrible Richard Lewis was another one he got it they gave it to him

I love him though it was a great comic his style of comic was his audience and you wanted his but if you have a bunch of other stuff on It's a great comic. It's just like his style of comic was his audience, and you wanted his bit. But if you have a bunch of other stuff on before that that's just murderous, that style is very hard to change gears and get into his.

Absolutely, because they're all like Indy 500 cars, different versions, just so intense, intense, intense. Yeah, yeah. Top quality. You can't get better than those guys. you can't get better than those guys. You can't get better than those guys. And really laugh out loud. I think ever, I think ever, of all my years of comedy,

I mean it's hard now, because you go back and watch it now, it's like, you gotta realize it's a totally different time in the world, it's not, it's not, it doesn't, it's not our culture, it's it's not it's not um it doesn't it's not our culture it's a different culture it's the culture of 1980s things were more risque they're more like when you said things that were more shocking and a lot of that stuff's already been said so many times now that if you go back and listen to it it's like some of it doesn't really hold up the same way but for the

time in those days those guys were the cream of the crop and if you had to follow them in boston like good luck because i don't think anybody ever killed hard i didn't i didn't those guys i didn't want to go on after them i did because i was proud of the lineup but i knew that the the sound from the audience of the laughs, I knew it was going to be more than me. But I just accepted it because it was like a wave. You know when a big wave hits? Yeah. All of those guys.

Yeah. Gavin Sweeney. Donovan. Did you feel any pressure to sort of ever to change your act in the beginning before you made it? Was it like were you just committed to that kind of style? I was, well, committed means a decision. There was no decision.

It was like I told you, that's how I wrote it, and it came out like that. It meshed with how I speak. This is how I speak, and for some reason, accidentally, the abstract jokes went good with my voice, but the audience, they weren't thrown off from it. People ask me, well, it was different. Would the audience take a while to come around?

And they didn't because right from the first three minutes, they laughed at some of it and they didn't laugh at other things. So then I knew right then it wasn't how I was saying it or my voice or anything. They don't care about anything. I don't give a shit as long as it's funny. So they thought some of it was funny and some of it wasn't. And Mike McDonald helped me a lot because he saw me the first time and I was naively disappointed because I didn't laugh at everything, which is insane, but that was out of being naive. And he said, look, take that material. He never did it before.

Take that set and take out the stuff that didn't work and put other stuff in that works. I mean, to try out. And when I left, from him telling me that, I thought it was a success because they laughed at some of it. Here I am wanting to, I was 16, wanting to try it, and then they laughed at a minute and a half. Oh, my God, they laughed. So then he made me leave. When I left, I was like, oh, my God, oh my god oh my god i gotta keep changing and changing and changing but i didn't think of changing my style or anything because

like i was saying a fingerprint before it was just just how i just what it was it didn't even enter my mind to change it yeah some of it worked some of it didn't change it try more try more try more and i'm glad there wasn't any show business there because someone might have said you can't be mumbling over on the side get a sport jacket and talk loud you know you know what i mean there was no one watching from that angle right like a producer and all of those guys that we were just talking about none of them are like the next guy. Right.

It was like a factory that only made one car, and then they made a different car. It was like a Mustang, then this. There was no assembly line. Every one of those guys is completely unique. Every one. Yeah. One of the interesting things about the documentary when stand up stood out was that you were kind of the first guy that got discovered in Boston. And then you took off and then it became a different thing because then people realized that that was possible.

And so then there was in the documentary, at least there was this attitude where a lot of guys had like, hey, what about me? Like, where's my thing? How come it's not happening for me? You know, I'm a headliner. I'm a this, I'm a that. Like, why isn't this? And it became where a lot of guys were trying to make it now. Do you remember that time? I knew later when I heard about it after I had gone.

But I mean, we all wanted to go on the TV. Like, everyone wasn't doing it just to be doing it in Boston. I wanted to someday go on TV. I had no idea how I would get there. And then I got a lucky break because Peter LaSalle came to Boston, and he saw me in the club because there was an article about the Ding Ho, and a freelance writer wrote about it and went into the L.A. Times, this weird comedy club, Chinese restaurant.

And then he read it, and then he went back east looking at colleges for his kids were getting out of high school they did a summer trip to boston and new york to look at schools and he remembered the article and he called up the club i'm gonna go in and you know and then he saw me and then i went went on there so i got a very uh lucky lucky break but i know you're talking about, like, I mean, I was just insanely lucky. But that Franz movie, I mean, he never even made a movie before. Right. He never made a movie.

I know. And that was a very interesting thing because say we were all rowers. Like a row guy is not going to make a movie. But a comedian, a creative guy, he's going to make a movie, but a comedian, a creative guy, he's going to make a movie about the time. You don't have a movie of your time in high school or your best time in college. We have a document by one of our own guys of the time, and it's still, all of us, one of our favorite times in our whole lives.

So it's a precious gift that Fran made the movie to see, to see this thing. Yeah. And for us, for guys from Boston, it's so fascinating because it does really do a fantastic job of capturing how unusual that scene was. How strange it was and how it's really never happened again since. fantastic job of capturing how unusual that scene was, how strange it was, and how it's really never happened again since. Yeah, so there's two things happening. The scene is happening on its own,

and now there's a movie about the scene. Yeah. It's tremendous. It's tremendous. He did an amazing job. He's so smart, that guy. Yeah, it's a great piece of history. Like for comics too, like any comic from anywhere in the world, watch that documentary. It's a great insight into how something like that can happen.

And I think something like that can happen in a lot of places. It just doesn't. It takes a lot of things that have to go right to make something like that happen. Yeah, a lot of things line up, like go right to make something like that happen a lot of things line up just like like flukes lining up and i've people like that movie who weren't even in that time are not even from boston they like seeing that unique uh thing that evolved on its own. Yeah. No, it's very special. When you do stand-up now, are you doing, like, the local clubs in Boston to fuck around,

to work on new stuff, or do you just take new stuff right to the stage? How do you do it? I mix it in with my show. Like, I have, like, spots in my act where I know I'm gonna

put this stuff in. Put the new put the new stuff yeah just mix it in and most of it doesn't work I don't know about you for only for I don't know what your batting average is but only one in three or four jokes that I write gets a big enough laugh to stay in the act yeah so I try it three times if it gets nothing three times i know it's never getting anything but if it works once i don't even really count on it because it might have been a fluke you know what the audience how i said it the mood of the art but if it works three times then i can trust it but if they don't laugh at it three times then i get rid of it i don't even remember what it is i get rid of it but i don't think that i was wrong i still think it's funny if i wrote it down i think it's funny

otherwise i wouldn't write it down but they don't agree with me they're in charge they're the editors don't you the audience is editors they don't think they're the editors but they're going like this and they're in charge so i just throw everything out that they don't think they're the editors, but they're going like this. And they're in charge, so I just throw everything out that they don't like. I still cannot predict. I don't know about you. I cannot predict in all these years what they're going to laugh at. I cannot write something down and think this is going to be on a scale of 1 to 10. This is a 7.

Nothing. Nothing. 10 this is a 7 nothing 500 people silenced to create manufacturing silence for other countries I can't predict can you predict when you

do it no there's some setups become bigger than the bit itself yeah sometimes like it's a setup and the setup gets a huge laugh and then you're like what is going on here you didn't get to the point yeah I didn't even think that part was funny and then you know the that is one of the interesting things about stand-up is that the the audience is part of the editing process and that you really create comedy with other people you don't really do it in a vacuum

come up with the ideas in a vacuum but the way it becomes an actual bit that you could do multiple times, it has to sort of alive. It's alive. That's why I don't put jokes like on Twitter or something. To me, the joke is an alive thing. It should be said out loud and heard by people. See it just written. It doesn't do it for me. You had one of the most interesting uses of Twitter ever

because you started writing a book on Twitter. Yes. So each tweet you would write was a part of this book. Someone could literally go back to your original Twitter feed and start reading this book a little bit every day. Well, what happened was I wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine in like 1987. It was a fairy tale about how the beach was invented. It was very interesting, weird, and I would read it every five years. I would read it and think, oh, I should write another story sometime.

So then one of the last times I read it, I should write another story. And then right then Michael O'Brien got me this Twitter thing, you know? Oh, here, you should do something on here. So then I thought, all right, I'm just going to try to write another story. I'll just write it on here. So I wrote two sentences, then two sentences, then the next day, two sentences. Because it didn't, like I said, it didn't enter my mind to write jokes. I'll try to write something.

And then people were leaving. I did it for like four or five days, and people were leaving messages saying, someone has to tell him what this is for. This is really good for his jokes. This is perfect. And other people would be saying, he's writing a novel on Twitter. This is insane. So I did it on and off for a few weeks and then I stopped

writing it for a while and then I thought I should just keep writing this but not on Twitter and then that's how the book got going that's interesting that's what a great way to start a book yeah another fluke you know I read the thing in about the beach i think i should write something else i have no idea what it is i start writing about hair this kid in school and then oh oh this take it off there oh this should keep going it wasn't like oh i'll write a book it was this should keep going yeah because there's never really big plan big planning out at least in what i do and then i just started doing it and it went further and further and i really liked doing it

because like we were saying before the uh the jokes from noticing you know like the sweep of the radar arm you're walking down the street, you see something. But this, I actually, after I started doing it, I started to sit down on purpose, like for a couple of hours a day, focusing right on this kid in this class. And that was different than just random things coming into my mind. So I was focusing it, and I couldn't stop doing it. I mean, I would do it for a couple of hours a day,

but it just kept going and going, and I was creating this weird world. And I was fascinated with what was in my head because I was sitting there on purpose because it was like going into your own head with a flashlight you know in the caves when this stuff written on it was like i was going in my own head with a flashlight because i was determined to try to write for two hours and that determination made me go deep in like and there was all this shit in there that I had no idea if I hadn't focused. And then the stuff that I thought of that had nothing to do with the book,

just life things would come back to me and go, oh, this can go right in here. You know, for what I do, a couple-sentence joke, two sentences, and then have the audience laugh, hopefully. It's like a narrow window. Say, and then laugh. But I had stuff in my head that wasn't going to go through that window.

It wasn't going to be good for stand-up. I had other stuff. I mean, I'm not complaining about that's how the jokes are. That's just how it is. And then when I started writing this thing, I thought, oh, I know what I'm going to do. After he kept going, I thought I'm going to put a funnel on this kid's head, and I'm going to pour everything I think about being alive into his head. And it'll seem like he's thinking it.

I mean, he can't really be a 7 seven-year-old couldn't be thinking this. But so I got to express a lot of stuff in my mind that wouldn't ever be expressed in the way I do stand-up. So it was a very, like, I really liked doing it. I had fun doing it. It's awesome that you have that free, your process is so free. Like your process is just like go where the whim takes you and then just follow it and then just be open to it. I had no book deal.

I had no thing. I was just like when I said before creativity is like playing. It's like it's fun, like finger paints. said before creativity is like playing it's like it's fun like finger paints i was just having fun discovering what was coming out of me because i was sitting down trying to do it on purpose like it was a whole other thing and i it was playing it's like playing with thoughts it's like you're hanging out with yourself me and you talking right now but when you're alone joking it's like you're hanging out with yourself me and you talking right now but when you're alone joking it's like there's almost you're joking and you're reacting to what you joked about so there's even you know it's one thing but it's almost like there's plural it's like there's you

and your thoughts and you're reacting your thought and you can almost be a little bit different. So you, oh, oh, oh, I like what you just did there. Oh, that's nuts. You can't say, oh, what about this? You know, it's like, I guess I'm a major loner person, but I'm never lonely, very rarely. So it was like you're hanging out with yourself, you're your own buddy. Even in the book, it says that the kid was his own best friend.

I feel like that about me. I'm my own best friend. So writing it was like hanging out with myself, kidding around. Like if you would be not in a bar with your friends, but in the sense that you're just having fun. That's a great way to think about it. It's very light. Creating should be a fun thing, not like, oh, at least for me.

I've done it like that the whole time, but I didn't even decide to do it like that. It was just how it would be it's uh i don't know it's a playful thing the whole thing it's always interesting to me the different creative processes that everyone has their own yeah yeah definitely it's always interesting to hear how other people, your process is so different. And also one of the things that's different is like this, the thing that you're doing these shows

and you're just sandwiching these new bits in between your other bits. You're not really performing at clubs. You're not like dropping in and doing a lot of sets at like regular places. No, just in these theaters that I'm doing. Do you miss the club environment, though? No, I don't.

I would be in it like, I don't really. I got so used to where I am now that it's normal to me. It's like very, like, it's very comfortable to be at the stage and they're out there, you know. If I ever go in a club for some reason, it's almost jolting to me because they're right on you know if i ever go in a club for some reason it's almost jolting to me because they're they're right on you yeah you know it's like oh my god i'm in the cage i want to be outside the cage looking into the cage so this is just how i've been doing it for years right theaters yeah that is the difference between the big stage and the audiences below you. It's like a completely different experience.

Open mic really should be in a nice theater in front of a full audience. That should be the open mic. You think so? Well, just as an analogy. Because when you start, you're starting at 11 at night and there's 10 drunk guys. You should start out in a nice theater and work your way to 10 drunk guys after you've been doing it for four years. Right, so you know how to handle it. Yeah, so now you start in the most...

Anyway. Yeah, but that, I think, is where you really learn how to do it. Yes, that's the other side. I don't think you can really ad-lib that well in those big-ass stages. It's different. different like in an arena i've i'm always on script you know i don't really around there's that many people but with a club there's like so much room for around i'm always on i present what i've written i'm not making anything up there always it's like always i know exactly oh okay okay what do you do with

hecklers i uh i ignore them yeah because it's the hardest thing to do really like if i took a tennis ball right now and threw it right beside your head you you would jolt and the heckler is like he's he's trying to make you move i think it's the hardest thing to do is to have no reaction no reaction no reaction then you make the audience have a reaction because they're mad at their car but eventually he goes away if you don't acknowledge what do you do what do you do do you enjoy it i don't acknowledge. What do you do? What do you do? Do you enjoy it? I don't mind sometimes. It just depends on what they're doing. Yeah.

It's like if someone interrupts a bit when you're in the middle of it, that sucks. Because you're ruining it for everybody. Oh, yeah. You're ruining the timing. You're making it all about yourself. Yeah. And, you know, that's the thing you're going to run into. You ran into a lot in L.A.

L.A. more than anywhere I've ever been. Really? Where people just feel like they need to talk yeah well that's the thing i don't understand with community see being a comedian one of the good things i think well important things is to talk to the audience like you're really talking to one person they don't see themselves as a crowd they i'm just they're watching the guy so there's like one person times 400 but it's still one times 400 yeah and i mean if you're communicating well is they feel like they're really talking to you that's why sometimes they talk back but if they went to a play they

wouldn't say what the hell are you putting the glass on that table for imagine at a play yelling out? Shut the other door. Yeah Or yell at the movies Yeah, yeah It's one of those things where it seems like you're just talking and everybody can talk Everyone can talk so when someone's on stage just talking you're like i do that thing too yes well i'll say this to this guy yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna help out yeah something and they think they're helping yeah did you like that thing i said oh it's the worst just some people are just

not good at being audience members and so some people are just very self-centered they don't care if there's 500 other people in the room they want to yell they want to say something just ego and stupidity but it's also live it's part of the fun of live things that you do have to interact with all these strange people it's live there's no it's like action 80 minutes later cut there's no like, let me try that joke again. No. Do you ever do multiple shows in a night anymore? No, I haven't done that in years and years and years because it was just too many one-liner jokes. I wouldn't know if I already said it before.

One time I was doing that, and I strutted into this joke. I was doing that, and I strutted into this joke. I was saying, and when I got right that far in, I realized I had already said it 20 minutes earlier, and then I said, just checking. And they die laughing. So then I put that in on purpose. Every night I would start the joke. One of the jokes is if I didn't know I said it.

And you can feel him getting uncomfortable just checking. But that's an example of how mistakes, don't you soak up mistakes? Sure. Like accidents. Like your brain is like a computer. Oh, that worked. Oh, that worked. I need that half a second.

I need that. Oh, yes, yes, yes. That's the thing that you said it's like it's really is like a live it's a living art form it's and you're feeding it when you go to work yeah and sometimes like something will go bad and that bad thing is the best thing that ever happened that bit they're like oh this is the way to handle it this is where you talk about it and you don't know unless you do it in front of people over and over and over and over and over and the audience is different they're like one being i find that they're like they have the personality of one person like they have their

own energy their own mood almost their own and you can sense what they are in about a minute almost their own and you can sense what they are in about a minute yeah no okay this is what this is gonna be like how do you get opening acts like who do you who do you choose to take with you on the road I had them for a long time but then the show I do like an 85 minute show and I thought I don't I'm not gonna bring a guy now anymore because the audience would be too tired by the time I got to my 80th minute. Like if you had a guy sitting there for 15 minutes, then the first guy comes on for like 12 minutes,

then there's another break. So all that energy is now going to be felt when I get to 70 minutes. So I thought I want them to be tired. So you go on by yourself? Yeah, do you take people? Yeah, you start the show off and then you walk out there. Yeah, yeah, for years.

Yeah, that's a way to do it. I mean, it's a fun way to do it wild going on by yourself like the audience only has so much like a movie you can only pay attention for so long i think yeah and listening think you know it's tiring to follow someone they're a little whatever they're saying. Anyway, that's what I learned to do it that way. I do have guys go on with me, and one of the things I do in town when I do local shows is I have a lot of people go on in front of me. Really?

Yeah, because it's like running with weights on. By the time I get up, everyone's tired, so I have to be really focused. Oh, you do that on purpose? Yeah. So they're tired be like really focused. Oh you do that on purpose. Yeah, cuz so it's they're tired exactly Yeah, and I'll you know, I do like the Joe Rogan and Friends show I like five killers on in front of me Sometimes six so the shows an hour and a half old before I even get on stage. No way. Yeah

Yeah You can feel it, too. Yeah, that's crazy. You feel it. You feel it. And it's like, Jesus Christ. And you do that to make yourself better. Yeah, yeah.

Put yourself in a state where you have to be on point. You have to be very, very energetic. Man, an hour and a half before you hit. Sometimes more. One time I did a show with all those guys. It, an hour and a half before you hit. Sometimes more. One time I did a show with all those guys. It was two hours old before I got on stage. Are you kidding me? No.

No. But it does help. It does help because it really makes you tighten your act up. And then when you're on and someone's only on in front of you for like 20 minutes and you're just getting the crowd warmed up, oh, my God. It's like so easy. So different. But if you could take the lessons that you learn from doing the crowd like the late night spot like when all these people around before you and the show's really old you could take those

that that energy and bring it to a fresh audience it's like it really is like running with weights on yeah yes you're training extra yeah it's also, I think that I like a show where people get to see a lot of different stuff. One of the things that I'm trying to do with this comedy club is I want a lot of different styles, a lot of different people. I want people to see it. This guy does it different than she does. She does it different than he does. And everybody's doing their own. It's part of the thing is to showcase the art form the club is really amazing it was really fantastic two rooms designed

specifically like you said comedy louis ck who i think is brilliant giving you some points on how to yeah lay it out amazing brilliant man just and amazing advice. He was just brilliant, man. And everyone was in a good mood there. It's like, you know, it's like that's your own island. You have your own island of that fertile thing you get there happening. Yeah, we're creating a magnet for comedy. Yes. Yeah.

That's the idea. Congratulations on Yeah. That's the idea. Congratulations on that. That's just tremendous. It's very exciting. It's almost, it feels surreal when you're in a place. Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah, it's like, wow, is this real? Really, do it? Because everything is perfect. Everything's perfect. The lighting's perfect. The sound's perfect. The rooms are perfect.

The monitors in the green room are perfect. The green room hangout area is perfect. Yeah. We did it all the right way. And it's green room hangout area was perfect. Yeah. We did it all the right way. It's fun to be able to do something like that. It's very exciting.

And now because of that and because of the pandemic and all the different things that happened where things just kind of fell into place, we have this spot and then there's like world-class comedians here. Roseanne lives here. Ron White lives here. Tim Dillon, Tony Hinchcliffe, and fucking Tom Segura,

Christina Pazitsky. They all live in the area. They all live here. I didn't know that. Yeah. Like 13 or 14 world-class comedians live here. Incredible. And they're all dropping in.

All dropping in. Just popping in, having fun anytime when people are in town for the weekend. They'll come in early, do my show, do Sunday night shows, hang out, do the little boy shows, the little tiny room, have fun. It's an amazing environment. And every week it seems like we have some new crazy guest pops in.

It's very exciting. It's like an art school. Not school, but it's like a creative building. Yeah, and that's the purpose of it, right? The whole purpose of it for all of us to help us develop comedy, to write your shit, and then also to have a place where people can come and have a good time. That's the beautiful thing. Like watching people leave when the show is over and they have these giant smiles on their face and they're leaving.

God damn, that's the best feeling in the world. It's the best feeling in the world. You made people feel good. They came, they got babysitters, they did all the stuff, they got to the club and then just fucking laughing and having fun. It's the best. I love it to death. You should feel good about creating that place for all those people.

I do. Well, I did it for me, too. It's a little selfish. Yeah, but both, you know? Yeah, both, for sure. It's definitely not set up just for me. It's set up for everybody. It's our club.

And I could tell seeing you last night that you loved being in here. You loved the whole, you know, me and my friend Dean, we have this term called the treehouse. Treehouse is our term meaning when something is done, created just for fun. Just like when you were a kid and you're 12 and you're building something and oh, oh, oh, oh. Has no like outside. And that's what you have. You have like a giant treehouse for all this funness.

Yeah. It's fun. And it's also a great place to talk shop yeah like guys get off stage and like do you see my new thing i'm doing this new thing and then we'll all talk about it like how did you set it up and like oh oh what do you still do in that part no i dropped that part and now i got this part like oh that's way better oh my god and when you see people do stuff like that and create right in front of you and you watch the sets you watch their bits grow it's all just like it's so much fuel there's so much fucking gasoline in the air so many matches like wow no it's fun it's very exciting i love it

i'm so happy we could do it and this is the perfect place to do it too because there wasn't really a scene here and now there is so that's exciting so the town loves it and the people love that they could just go down there anytime they want to whenever they can get tickets at least and go see some shows the town the city is very into it i imagine the city embraced it like really early on they were very excited that we moved here because california sucked like This was part of it. They were like, yeah, California fucking sucks, right? Like, yeah, it sucks. I'm glad I'm here.

And so it was part of the fun of it. And also, when has that ever happened before where just a bunch of world-class comedians just moved somewhere and set up shop? There's been scenes before, but the scenes kind of already existed. Yes. This is a different thing. Like landing on another planet.

Yeah, it's like Boston in the 70s. It really is. In a lot of ways where it didn't exist before. Yes. But people moved here, so it's even more extreme. It wasn't just like Boston was pulling from funny guys that were in the area. Now that there's a club, they can go on stage. This was different because this is like everyone said,

hey, let's move there you know and they moved here before i even had a club that was it was crazy because the club i had another place that i bought and that deal fell apart because the the place was kind of a mess and the whole story was a mess but that club that setback because i bought this one place then i had to get out of the deal and then buy a new place that was like a whole year plus of wasted time and that was uh when everybody was moving here too and so then we were just doing local clubs like little rock and roll clubs like this place the vulcan gas company which is basically like an edm club and we were doing sets there and then the creek in the

cave opened and so that was nice it's a nice little club and we do sets there so we we did clubs in town but i didn't have the place yet people are still moving here just to do those shows because of the scene yeah just because they were creating yeah because it was already there was already saguro was already moving here timro was already moving here, Tim Dillon already moved here, Hinchcliffe had moved here. There was already these comics that were coming, and we were all talking about it. And so then people would come to Austin, they would do my podcast,

and they would do these shows with us. They'd be like, God damn, you guys are having so much fun. I want to move here. I'm like, fucking move here. Come on, come move here. Excellent. Plenty of spots to go on stage. There's a lot of clubs in the town

like the music scene in los angeles in the 60s all the people music from all over the canada the united states that whole thing yeah yeah yeah so that's what's exciting about it to me that it worked out you know that's it's actually happening and it's new I mean it's really only been two months old wow yeah the club's I was just thinking that think of the history that's gonna happen yeah the stories that are gonna come out it's exciting yeah it's exciting and it's also exciting for the development of comedy because we're really dedicated to that we have two nights of open mic nights. All of our door staff, the door staff all auditions.

They're all comics. They audition to get those jobs with their stand-up, and then they have spots that they can go up throughout the week. They're getting a lot of spots. These guys are going on stage constantly, and they're seeing each other get better so it's a kind of a competitive environment too you're seeing like oh this guy's fucking talented like this one girl is rising up and this one guy's got to figure it out and like you're watching even over the course of

just the last two months these people learn and grow and this is like this pressure cooker thing going on there too because you know shane gillis will stop by dave attell stopped by rich voss dave chappelle and andrew schultz it's like it's crazy in there it's like every night there's some more wild going on and so there's this real excitement of a of a new thing like people realize it's very special yeah this energy that's down there that's amazing that it's just only two months old. For some reason, I thought it was longer than that. It just seems like it's been there. When you're in it, it feels like it's been around forever.

It feels like The Shining, like the fucking Overlook Hotel, like it's always been there. It really does. Because that building is a 1927 building, and that building has had Stevie Ray Vaughn on stage in the 1980s and there was all the like there's if you look in the green room all those posters that are around the top of the walls those are all concert posters from people that performed at the ritz wow so it's like the misfits the butthole surfers black flag like all these different bands that performed there we have all their so there's like the memories of all of those things that happened in that place and

they're kind of burned into the framework of the building you feel it in there i know that sounds like woo woo bullshit but when you're in that building there's a an added element in the ingredients of whatever the fuck that building has. I agree because there can't be that much intensity, creativity in that one building

without it seeping into the walls. Yeah. I think. I think. Into the atmosphere. I think there's something to that.

I always felt that about the Comedy Store. I always felt that about like Dangerfields in New York City. There's like clubs you go into and you just go, whoa, this place is alive. Like this place, like I feel this place.

Like, whew. You know, and that, I felt that the moment I went into the Alamo. It was almost like it was asking me to do it. Like when I was walking around when it was the Alamo Drafthouse, when it was the Ritz Theater, you know, around when it was the Alamo Drafthouse, when it was the Ritz Theater, you know, they had leased it to the Alamo Drafthouse for a long, but then the Alamo Drafthouse there went under during the pandemic. So when I was walking around, it was just this empty theater, but it was almost like it was telling me to do this.

It's like, you're walking around like, this is what you can do. You can raise the floor up and you can lower the ceiling. Fix that stage, put a different stage up. You're like, yeah, okay. And I'm walking around. It's like, come on, we're going to take care of you. You take care of us. We'll take care of you. It feels like the building is happy that we're there. I know it sounds crazy.

But that's literally what it feels like when I pull in. The building's like, thanks for coming back. Because all of a sudden, it's alive. Yeah, you feel it. And it's like, thanks for coming back. Because all of a sudden it's alive. Yeah, you feel it. And it's alive with happiness and fun.

Yes. You can't ignore your feelings. Yeah. Your feelings are real. I mean, maybe I'm making it all up. Maybe it's all in my head. Maybe it's convenient.

No, but it doesn't matter. It's the same. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it's the same feeling. You know, I have to... Pee? Guess what I have to do.

You gotta pee? No. You gotta leave? No, that's it. I have to pee. At know i have to guess what i have to do you gotta pee no you gotta leave no that's it i have to pee we can wrap it up you want to wrap it up yeah i think so it was fun thank you very much i really appreciate it thank you for having me so much my pleasure i truly enjoy there's your book it's harold um did you do an audio version of it? Yes, yes. Nice. Yeah. And so that's available to, pre-order the book today. When is it available? May 16th.

Okay, so real close, real close. And will the audio be available May 16th as well? Yes. Nice. And you did the audio? Yes. Perfect. That was something else.

That would be awesome. You can't have anybody else do that. Thank you. My pleasure, brother. I really appreciate it. It was fun hanging out with you last night. Absolutely. That would be awesome. You can't have anybody else do that. Thank you. My pleasure, brother. I really appreciate it. It was fun hanging out with you last night. Absolutely. Fun doing this today.

Next time I go there, I'm going to hang out longer because, you know, I was trying to save my stories. I know. You didn't want to talk last night. I only have three stories. No, listen. We could talk forever, man. Yes, yes. I knew that yesterday.

I was like, don't worry about it. Let's have fun. Yeah, yeah. It was great. No knew that yesterday. I was like, don't worry about it. Let's have fun. Yeah, yeah. It was great. No, it was great. It's been an amazing experience. Thank you very much. My pleasure.

Listen, man, I've always been a Giant fan, so it's great to become friends with you and get to know you. Appreciate you. I think you're an amazing comedian. I said in the beginning. Thank you. Unbelievable. Thank you.

I absolutely feel the same way about you. Thank you so much. Bye, everybody.