The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 527: Finding the Funny in Stuff with Jeff Foxworthy

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with comedian Jeff Foxworthy. Topics discussed: Foxworthy’s best work according to Steve, “The Incomplete Deer Hunter”; moo shu matzo balls; deer shot during Mardi Gras; a correction on Steve’s use of the word “crescendo”; eclipsing the apex of one’s splendor; when Foxworthy met Bruce Springstein; when the Beverly Hills Dodge dealership won’t actually sell you a truck; when deer needed to be brought into Georgia; the huge market for blue collar and redneck comedy; meeting your career and your wife five minutes apart; mountain lion sightings; how Jeff has sold more comedy records than anyone who’s ever lived; becoming a bowhunter; managing the farm for wildlife; arrowhead hunting meth heads; when Jeff found a 7,000-year-old pipe; when you’re old enough to derive happiness out of being involved in another person’s hunt; still not knowing exactly what folks are going to laugh at; and more. Outro song: "Raccoon Pecker" by Matt Baric Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

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Join me and the crew talking Clay Newcomb, Cal, Yanni, Spencer's going to be there. Phil the Engineer's going to be there. Meat Eater Live, head it back out. Now, when you get every ticket, okay, every ticket you buy, you get a signed copy of our new Meat Eater Outdoor Cookbook. This tour is celebrating the release of the book.

Buy a ticket, get a signed copy, Meat Eater Outdoor Cookbook, wild game recipes for the grill, smoker, camp stove, and campfire, which I'll point out is a $38 value. Here's where we're going to go. April 23rd, the Mesa Art Center in Mesa, Arizona. April 24th, the Balboa Theater in San Diego. April 25th, The Grove in Anaheim, California. April 27th, the Crest Theater in Sacramento.

April 29, the Union in Salt Lake City. April 30, the Egyptian in Boise. May 1, the Wilma Theater in Missoula. May 2, the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane, Washington. May 4, Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. And May 5, the last day of the tour, Pantages Theater in Tacoma, Washington. For tickets and more information,

visit the events page at themeateater.com. If we're not coming to your neck of the woods and you still want to get your hands on a signed copy of our new Meat Eater Outdoor Cookbook, go to signedoutdoorcookbook.com or check out Barnes & Noble online. Hope to see you at the show. Okay, everybody.

Joined today by Jeff Foxworthy, who I've wanted to have you on for forever. We talked about it years ago. But you don't, I had to come to you. Look, I have spent my entire life on the road. It's like, it was kind of a race between you and Rogan. I know, and you won't even travel to go on Joe's show. No, I won't travel.

Joe's like, come, I really want to talk to you. Come do the show. I want to talk about hunting. And I'm like, dude, I don't want to fly to Austin. All the way over to Austin. Well, but I've spent four decades on airplanes in hotel rooms. I got you. Yeah.

So it worked. You came to my farm. No, I didn't. I want to finish my intro. Then I want to get into what you were talking about. Hope it's good. Well, here's the problem. The problem is corinne

wrote the intro oh okay but uh on the subject of corinne our producer corinne as everyone knows is chinese and jewish and jeff's already got half act that's just such a weird combination i'm not going to tell anybody the jokes i don't want to ruin them. He's got half act. What was the last one? The only place that you could go to somebody's house and eat mushu matzo balls. There you go. You see where it's going. Comedian, actor, author, television host, and writer. The reason I was criticizing Corinne's introduction,

she said last night, do you think we should have an introduction for Jeff? I'm like, yeah, make one. But she only put, she put perhaps your greatest work last and you probably don't realize it was your greatest work which is the incomplete deer Hunter oh my God so I'd like to say Jeff Foxworthy is the creator of the incomplete deer Hunter and a comedian actor author television host and writer he's been nominated for a Grammy. Has a book of poems for kids. New York Times bestseller.

Is a member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour with Larry the Cable Guy, who I had no idea his name wasn't Larry. Did you not? No. You need to get out more. You've spent way too much time in the woods. You were talking today about how he's played golf for 30 years and never got any better.

One stroke better. Never. It's not stroke better. Never. It's not even humanly possible. Comedy specials on Netflix, The Good Old Days. And then, of course, what she has at the end, The Incomplete Deer Hunter. And just another thing of your many funny jokes, one of my favorites is in one of your records i can't remember which

one you're talking about the impulse to i thought of this being in here people's impulse to dress taxidermy up yeah well that's what you don't do and and you were commenting that sometimes people put so much stuff on their deer mounts that it looks like they got killed at mardi gras yeah oh yeah they have like beads around them and sunglasses and you know christmas time you put a little santa hat on them but they yeah a lot of them they stick a cigarette in their mouth and beads on them and dude i laughed so hard to shot him at mardi gras yeah uh man let me do here's the thing i didn't know like i got one thing i want to talk about all right because we do listener feedback okay which i'm cutting it all all right because i want to get

to your story that you're just talking about about how musicians got it made and comedians don't yeah but i want to tell you one thing because you might have made this mistake this is just one i i hate to exclude the audience so i want to do one listener feedback. We like to focus on criticisms. Okay. Excuse my pedantry. This is from a guy named Alex. What's a pedantry? Like teachy.

Okay. Preachy. Right? Pedantry. Anytime someone starts out a letter with excuse my pedantry, you know. You're in trouble. excuse my pedantry, you know you're in trouble. Excuse my pedantry. But I have noticed Steve committing a pet peeve of mine that seems common to most writer types.

And it pains me not to point it out. He has on multiple occasions, most recently in episode 514 use the phrase reached a crescendo to describe an apex or climax you following i'm look i'm so glad the criticism is against you i i just breathe a sigh of relief so good so be like around midnight yeah it reached a crescendo of noise yeah what should it be well however a crescendo is a rising action it means to increase volume crescendo from piano quiet to forte loud it's a musical term sure in this, the forte volume would be the peak of intensity. It's not the crescendo. Well, technically he's right.

Yeah. The inverse of crescendo would be to de-crescendo. My realm of expertise is only musical, but my understanding is that the same holds true of the word in non-musically related Italian as well. Italian, I appreciate that. I added that, yeah. Well, that's what I say about me aging,

is I have eclipsed the apex of my splendor. Got it. Which means, you know. You're on the decrescendo. Yeah, I'm on the decrescendo. Now, I want to get back to the thing you were talking about a minute ago and saying that you were telling me before Phil turned the machine on that musicians got it made.

Because a musician can have four hits. Yeah. And then spend the rest of his life. Playing those four songs. And people are going to come out. Yeah, you'd be 90 years old. They're going to come to hear those four songs. They might like your other stuff, but those four songs and people are going to come out yeah you'd be 90 years old they're going to come to hear those four songs they might like your other stuff but they're there for songs yeah a comedian it's the opposite is you know back in the day you did a record or you did a

cd uh and you record a special and people go oh that was funny what have you got that's new yeah so as a comic it would be like a musician going i'm never playing the hits again i'm gonna go write a new album and once i release that album i'll never play that again and that's what a comic does is which is one of the most agonized after 41 years of doing stand-up it's like i did that last special i'm like okay yeah starting over from scratch now i'm back to the club with 30 people in it note cards in my hand going is this funny is this funny is this funny and that's how a comic works their writer david remnick once observed he was profiling bruce springsteen but he observed that he was talking about the rolling stones how a band can eventually become its own cover band yeah you know but you're right you're a comic can't do that no springsteen people can't be like i just want to wait till

he does the one bit and then we'll go home yeah no they they don't want to get they've heard that no but i got to i got to meet uh bruce one time and my question for him was i said how as a 20 year old could you write lyrics like young girls sitting on the hood of a dodge drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain i said nobody 20 should be able to write that and he goes you know i just i wanted to be writing stuff i wasn't going to be embarrassed singing 30 years later i'm like mission accomplished that's a good that's a good approach yeah uh tell everybody where we're at right now we're at my farm uh about an hour south of atlanta uh this is if I'm not working, this is my sanctuary. This is my happy place.

I always say when I go through the gate, I'm no longer Jeff Foxworthy. I'm just Jeff. Cheapest labor on the farm. I will work all day long with a bag of jerky and three waters and get on a tractor and happy as a clam. You were telling me earlier how people are surprised. Some people were surprised that you wanted land and not like Jerry Seinfeld wanted cars. Well, you observed that a tractor costs more than a lot of his cars.

Yeah. Well, like when I did my sitcom, it was, we filmed right next to Seinfeld. And so Jerry and I had parking places next to each other. And he had like an aircraft hangar full of Porsches. So every day he'd come in with a different Porsche. I had a pickup truck. I literally went to Beverly Hills Dodge and I said, I want one of the new ram trucks and the guy goes to drive he goes we don't sell those here i had to go out somewhere so i would pull into with my pickup

truck in the spot and jerry would wheel in with his porsche and get out and go good morning loser and you know the dude in the pickup truck but yeah i didn't didn't. That wasn't my thing. I didn't care about car. I wasn't a car guy. I wanted a farm. I wanted land. And so that's where my car money. But I did tell Jerry, I said, you really need to come film an episode of comedians drinking coffee in tractors because some of my tractors cost more than your Porsches. Yeah, comedians getting beer in tractors.

Yeah, right. of my tractors cost more than your porsches yeah comedians getting beer and track yeah right i think he would love a tractor or a bulldozer and just feel the joy of pushing a tree over something you know how did uh you have a property because you like to hunt yeah and it's beautifully managed you manage as a wildlife yeah it's like you manage for wildlife deer in particular but you manage for wildlife well when you were growing up what was your what was your understanding of deer hunting spots like what kind of ground did you guys hunt as a kid well it's funny like growing up in georgia we didn't have deer when i was a kid we but you squirrel hunted you quail hunted you rabbit hunted and it was usually on some relative's farm. Everybody had small farms back then. So, and my dad didn't have a bird dog,

so he would buy me briar bridges and then go, hey, get down there and walk through there. And I was the dog. I flushed the bird dog. What did your dad do for a living? My dad grew up on a farm, but he worked at IBM. Oh, he did? Yeah.

He was a smart dude. But we'd go back to these little farms, and that's how I learned to hunt was like, I remember being four or five years old and going squirrel hunting and learning. You got to sit still. You can't talk. You can't move. And, uh, then it was quail hunting. Then it was dove hunting.

And then it became deer hunting. Uh, I, I hunted by the time I was a teenager in georgia i hunted two years before i saw a deer now that was dedication you hunted two years before you saw a deer yeah getting up every weekend going through the motions getting up saturday morning saturday evening sunday morning never saw a deer uh and it took me i think three years and i finally shot a little five point buck which i thought that's the one he showed me well no that was the second one that was the eight point buck which had a basket rack like this that i literally i i think i didn't clean it for three days i kept driving it through town because i was pretty sure it was the state record and I wanted everybody to say I saw it I saw it on the tailgate of his truck you know but you only know what you know I knew

nothing about deer hunting I would I would go like behind grocery stores and get pallets and go to construction sites and get two by fours and I would make my own stands and get like railroad spikes and go up a tree with two by fours and put a make my own stands i'd get like railroad spikes and go up a tree with two by fours and put a pallet up there never thought about the wind never thought about is there a food source or a bedding probably never thought about a safety it was no safety harness no but never thought about any of that stuff and climb up and you know after three years one of the steps would rot, and you'd drop. I mean, it's a wonder we're still here.

But I knew I loved it. I knew I loved being out in the woods by myself, which is kind of crazy because, like on my dad's farm, me and two friends would leave in the morning with a 22 and a 12 gauge shotgun and take off through the woods we had no cell phone nobody knew where we were we didn't know where we were you know we just go explore the woods and end up on a road and walk back home and it was just a totally different time i've told you a couple times today that I had no idea that here in Georgia, you guys deer numbers were so bad that they actually brought in deer. They had to restock.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of areas where it got bad, but I just was not aware that they had to do like a, that they had to do a white tail deer reintroduction in Georgia. Yeah. Yeah. It did it during the fifties. It's like I told you as a kid yeah never

saw a deer um and we're lucky here at the farm because most of the deer they brought into georgia they brought from texas in our particular area they came down from wisconsin so our deer were kind of bigger horned and bigger bodied and there's just a a real good portion of the state to hunt in when when you were little what kind of you you've done a lot of comedy about hunting and and sort of like parodies on hunting when you were little were you were you aware of any kind of like hunting videos and stuff like were you going out and buying vhs tapes the the instructional hunting content dude i had no idea so when i was a kid i would save my allowance and i would buy comedy records bill cosby philip wilson jerry clower you know and i'd memorize them and i'd

go to school and i could do the whole album and so you know i was the funny kid um but I never, you know, hunting was hunting. And I remember the first time I was probably 30 that I saw a real tree hunting video, a deer hunting video. And I'm like, oh my gosh, people, other people can experience deer hunting. Of course it was way bigger deer than I ever had seen, you know, but it kind of led to, and you mentioned this in the intro, part of hunting, there's that solitary part that's really good, but there's also that communal part that you get in a deer camp not when you're out actually hunting but in the camp where it's a very social thing and there's a lot of laughter going on and so i thought well if guys are watching videos of hunts why wouldn't they watch funny videos too

and so i came up with the incomplete deer hunter. Somebody asked me a while back, they said, who did you write those? I went, right? Yeah, no, we were, we were in the woods with deer suits. We had made going. What if we do this, this, and this, but I thought, and it was, it was a crazy idea. We sold millions of those. But it's like, maybe you didn't't write them but there's a lot of you know this is the thing i wanted to ask about anyways this is there there's like laughing at

your culture from the inside and laughing from the outside and this is something you know intimately well like yeah your whole expertise is laughing from the inside well i'll give you a great example like so you grew up in michigan right and so i was the kid when i started comedy i wore jeans i wore boots i drove a truck and i was i was just the outdoor kid but I'm the comedian now in the clubs. And I'm up in Michigan, and it was like November, and I'm like, man, I ought to be sitting in a tree in the morning. It's the middle of the road. I need to be in a tree. They were kidding me.

I was playing right outside Detroit, a little town called Livonia. Oh, yeah. And we were sitting around, and they were going, Foxworthy, you're nothing but an old redneck from Georgia. Well, the club that we were playing in was attached to a bowling alley that had valet parking. And I said, if you don't think you have rednecks in Michigan, go look out the window. People are valet parking at the bowling alley. And I went back to the hotel that night and I didn't think it was going to be a hook. I didn't think it was going to be a book or T-shirts.

I just thought, maybe this is funny material. And I wrote 10 ways how to tell how you might be a redneck. And I went back the next night and just tried them as stand-up. And not only were people laughing, they were pointing at each other. Well, every one of them was things my family had done you know if your front porch collapses and kills more than three dogs that was my uncle bob's house when you pulled up in the driveway the whole bottom of the house just erupted with dogs uh if you have a complete set of salad bowls and they all say cool whip on the side that's my sister it's nothing but butter tubs cool whip tubs and jelly glasses so i wasn't laughing at

somebody i'm laughing with you know yeah and that's kind of always been my comedy my my template is is i feel like if if i think something or my wife says something or my family does something i'm going to trust other people are thinking and saying and doing the same thing that that that the one that works is because there's an expertise of the subject matter you know and i'm like a laugh about your incomplete deer hunter thing um is when you guys have the deer suits on and the deer kind of like coaching all the other deer about coach buck and coach yeah like this year's game plan and there's like very sort of like specific references where the coach is telling the other deer he's like when all you does and little bucks come out in the field don't look

back when i come out in the field yeah don't tell them i'm coming yeah but that was all experience oh yeah that's what i'm saying it's like you're like you're watching it like no these dudes actually hunt because no one would ever like ever if an outsider was goofing on rednecks goofing on deer hunters they would never know that little bit of body language yeah where a hunter's like there's something in the woods still because those deer keep looking back in there. And that's what I tell young comics. I said, talk about what you know about. It's like when I wrote 10 redneck jokes, I thought, well, if I can write 10, can I write 50? And then I wrote 50, I might kind of write 100.

And I got like 300 of them. I sent them to 14 different publishers and got rejected. Oh, you did? Yeah, rejected by the first 14. And I sent it to the 15 and he called me and he said, come in, let's talk. And he said, I think this is funny. He said, how does $1,500 sound?

Steve, I thought he was asking me for 1,500 bucks. And so I'm like, because I didn't have 1,500 bucks. And he goes, no, no, no, we'll pay you. I'm like, hell yeah, let's do it. And I remember asking him, I said, how many of these do you think we'll sell? How many books? And he said, oh, I bet we sell 5,000 of them. I think we sold 4 million of them.

Because. Who was the publisher? Longstreet Press. But a small publisher in Atlanta. But from doing comedy, I'd been to all 50 states. I didn't hang in L.A. and New York. I was going everywhere in between. And I knew L.A. and New York were the media centers,

but I also came to know the people living in the country. And from what I observed i'm like you know 30 minutes outside of any major city we're all the same and we may have a little different accent but we're all hunting and we're all fishing and we're all growing gardens and we're all you know got that my definition of redneck is glorious absence of sophistication you know that's all it is and i knew there was a market there which is why we did the blue collar comedy tour when they did the kings of comedy atlanta was one of the first stops and in the paper in an article about it it said that it was a show for the urban

hip audience and i thought i've been to every. There's a lot of people that aren't Irvin and they're not hip. And I called Bill Engvall and I said, we need to do a show for everybody that this doesn't apply to. And he laughed and said, what would you call it? And I'm like, hell, I don't know. Call it the blue collar, blue collar comedy tour. And we were going to do it for three weeks and we did it the first one for three years i mean it was just it just hit an herb yeah have you always planned or have you always when you're uh touring and doing all those shows and all that were you always trying to schedule around being able to hunt and fish and stuff well did you sometimes just have to eat it and be like i'm not gonna do anything

outdoors because i'm gonna like while the fire's burning hot i'm just gonna go and do my business well back in the club days because most clubs were like tuesday through sunday i had eight years in a row i did 500 shows a year at least and you're going well there's only 365 days but you're doing two shows on Friday night, three shows on Saturday night. If you were in a, you might be bouncing from club to club. And I would just keep note because I wanted, I wanted to be on Johnny Carson.

And I thought the only way I'm going to do this is kind of the Malcolm Gladwell theory. I've got to do it 10,000 times to become an expert at it. And, uh, and my goal was everybody said it takes you 10 years to be a good enough comedian to be on carson and i thought i'll do it in half i'm gonna work so by doubling your nights yeah yeah and uh it actually took me five years and two months but i did it and uh so then i didn't i didn't do anything but do comedy um but then once i started moving from clubs to like theaters and things like that when you say a club that's

100 people 200 people yeah 100 people 200 people um and when you say a theater it's a thousand three thousand yeah up to four,000 or 5,000. But the great thing about theaters, and that kind of happened because of the albums. People became aware of you, and then they would come. Well, theaters were more Friday and Saturday, which was great because it was about the time I had kids, so I could be home during the week, and I was just going on the weekend doing shows. Um, then I could start to, to get back into hunting and fishing. In fact, when I did, are you smarter than a fifth grader? I had it in my contract that I could film 11 months of the year, but I couldn't film the month of November. And I had an LA attorney come up to me and say,

why? I don't understand. Why can't you film in November? And I said, cause attorney come up to me and say, I don't understand. Why can't you film in November? And I said, because it's the rut. And he was like, the what? I'm like, dude, it's the rut. I'm not hunting. I mean, I'm not filming during the rut. I'm going to be home.

And so I may be the only idiot in LA that had that in there. Has that in there. Do you ever try to go hit? Do you ever try to go somewhere and be trying to get out in the morning with people you know and hit little things like hit the morning turkey hunt and then make it to a show it was just always hard because you couldn't travel with guns and you know and like back in the day you do a show on friday night well you walk off stage say you were in Michigan well you're the next night you may be in Kansas City so you're up at 5 a.m. to catch the first flight to fly to Kansas City which you get there at 10 or 11 well your day's kind of shot so it was just hard I know

that feeling you know you would do 500 shows a year yeah I'll do maybe six to eight yeah and uh so I have a level of expertise here but and i know that even then you're always like as you're planning it you're thinking about man i'm gonna hunt turkeys in every one of those locations yeah and you just never have the time to do it and yours were different like when i watch your shows like for me i told my wife i said you love to travel because when you get somewhere, you open your suitcase and you open it for a week. I said, I'm opening my suitcase every day and packing it back up because you're in a different city every night. But like with your shows, when you're going to these remote places, hell, you're going to sheep hunt.

You're gone two weeks. Oh, that kind of show. Yeah, I was referring to doing live shows, which was a very small handful of, oh, no. Your trips were long trips. Long trips, yeah. No, you really get like doing that kind of lifestyle, especially when we were making a lot of shows.

Man, you get like a really deep immersion into a lot of different spots, which is just completely like not at all similar to what you're talking about with like the turn and burn and kind of stuff yeah did you did you start to formulate an idea of like at what point in your life did you start thinking that at some point i'm going to slow down and enjoy myself more yeah and and what will that look like like when did you indulge yourself with that you know with that vision um because i look now i feel like you got i feel like i'm when i'm here i'm like man this guy's got it made i know but i'm like last weekend in the woods and last

weekend i was in michigan on friday night min Minnesota on Saturday night. So I still enjoy what I do, but I've slowed down. I mean, I probably do 40 or 50 concerts a year now as opposed to hundreds because I want to enjoy my grandkids. Yesterday I'm riding around on tractors and skid steers with my two and a half year old grandson. That's, that's my joy in life. That's why I always said I didn't want to live to work. I wanted to work to live.

Unfortunately, I was born with a work ethic. You know, I, uh, I don't want to sit around. You know, my mom's like, you need to slow down. I said, I just wasn't born with that brain. I can't just sit on the couch. I want to go do something. I want to go see something, learn something. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there. OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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onxmaps.com slash meet onxmaps.com slash meet welcome to the to the onx club y'all did your uh did your folks think you were crazy for what you wanted to do yeah well did they try to discourage you like he'll never do that you know well i blew up my folks divorced early so my dad had a really good job working at ibm but my granddad was a fireman when you say early how old are you like eight or nine yeah how well did you understand what was going on well back i was the only kid i knew that had divorced parents it was It was, you know, it sucked because, you know, I wanted my dad there. But I love my grandparents. My granddad, bless his heart, was a fireman.

So he worked one day and had two off and he was fishing the two he was off and he would take me. Got it. You know, great granddad, which was one of my goals in life. I'm like, I want to be a really good granddad. But everybody i knew they were blue collar they worked for a living so even though i was attracted to comedy it never occurred to me that that was a possibility yeah you probably hadn't met a comic no they were just on tv and um but i was the funny guy i i actually i worked in a grocery store and i worked at a hotel

and then i got a job i think my dad because i flunked out of college after three years um i think my dad thought i was going to end up being a ne'er-do-well so i think he got one of his friends to call and give me a job at ibm entry level uh i was working dispatch and then later on i was i carried a tool bag and fixed machines um but i was the funny guy at work i was the guy that was in the break room doing impersonations of the boss and then you would turn around the boss would be in the doorway i was that guy so i wasn't on the uh crescendo crescendo to be to the top. And a bunch of guys I worked with entered me in a comedy competition, not an amateur night, a competition for working comedians called the great Southeastern laugh off.

They entered me in and I'm like, oh crap. I got to write material. So I wrote five minutes about my family. I went down, I won the contest the first time what was the material um it was why i lived in sarasota florida and i talked about it being it was god's waiting room because everybody there was like 90 years old then i did a bit about dad's dads when everybody else cuts their toenails, they put them in the trash. Dads leave theirs in the ashtray in the den for the whole family to come observe and admire. The crazy thing is my wife used to act and she had just done a TV show with a comedian

and she was there that night rooting for him in the competition. So I met my career and I met my wife five minutes apart. You stole his fan. Same night. Yeah. Were they romantically involved? No. No.

In fact, he and his wife are two of our best friends to this day. But what's the odds of finding your career and your wife five minutes apart, same night? I guess low. Yeah, low. But I knew it. and but i knew well hold on i take that back a little bit cause when i sold my first book i went i had never been to new york sold my first book went to have a meeting i sold to miramax probably heard of those fellers bob and harvey weinstein i have sold their company flew to new york to meet the people that bought my book and in that meeting met my wife

did you not from new york did you know when you met her did you did you because i know so i met my wife on a tuesday night we went out on a Saturday and an hour into the date. I went, oh crap, I'm going to marry this girl. Oh really? An hour into the first date. And she was the only one that was saying to me, you could do this. She said to me, she said, you are so creative. If you sit in a cubicle the rest of your life, you're going to have a miserable life.

You're going to explode. You need to do something creative. If you sit in a cubicle the rest of your life, you're going to have a miserable life. You're going to explode. You need to do something creative. Is your wife redneck? No, she's from New Orleans. Does that make you not a redneck? I don't understand. No, they've got a lot of them down there. But instead of...

Because in my mind, I don't think of that as incompatible. No, they're very compatible. Because she has family in other parts of Louisiana that will eat things the FBI can't identify. I mean, it's just. But I think she really thought she was going to pull me up to her level. And instead, I just. Drug her down. Drug her down to bed.

But she. It was like the first person that got me you know what i mean she was like and so i thought hell i could do this and uh so i quit my job i and i tell my kids i'm like at that point well i went i did amateur night for like six months and little gigs around town but i knew by then i loved it and uh what was the first money you were making at it i mean not like i mean all right what was the first like uh helpful usable amount of money so december the 4th 1984 i'm they had amateur night before the regular show stephen writes the headliner and he found me in the club. He had watched amateur night and he came up and he told me, he said,

you need to be doing this. You should be a comic. And with the, which kind of reinforced what my wife said. And so I went in the next day and I told my boss, I'm like, I'm quitting IBM. And, uh, my mother, when I told my mother, I like I'm quitting IBM and my mother when I told my mother I had quit well that's right you're supposed to be asking about your parents perception yeah I got there eventually my mom's first question was are you on the dope I'm not sure what the dope was are you on the dope we can get you help and I'm like can get you help. And I'm like, no.

I said, but I think I can do this. And I don't want to be sitting around when I'm 60 going, what if I tried that? And I tell my kids, I said, you need some hold your nose and jump moments in your life. And so my first real gig was New Year's Eve of 84 with Sinbad. And so I think I was making. That was what year? 84. So I think I was making like 32 grand a year at IBM and I had health and dental insurance.

My first year of comedy, 85, first full year, I did 406 shows and I made $8,300 for the year, which is like 20 bucks a show. So at that point, man, you've given like at that point at that volume, you've really given up a lot of normal life. Oh God. Yeah. Yeah. You're not doing anything when i would go out to do the week at the comedy club my wife would give me 30 bucks to live on for the week and that was gas money and food money and you were hoping the club gave you a free meal if a club served food a lot of times the comics could eat uh we used to roll pennies and when we had enough

we'd go to the movies that was our date really you lived like that oh yeah dude no money so broke i i left atlanta one time i had a gig at a comedy club that was in a holiday inn in sarasota florida i drove down there and when i got there the the guy said, did you say that? Where was the gig? Sarasota, Florida, but in a holiday, in a holiday, their little nightclub there. And, but the deal was they, they gave you a hotel room for the week while you did this. And when I got there, the guy said, dude, he said, last night was our last night. We're, we're not making money. We we closed and i'm like so you're out of business well i just driven nine hours yeah yeah i went in the lobby bathroom and peed and bought a coke and got back in the car so i've driven nine hours and now i'm turning around driving back home

but i haven't got paid i don't have a credit card. And I'm like, God, I hope I got enough money to get home for gas. And I stop in Macon, Georgia at about 3 in the morning, and I'm digging for change underneath the car seat. You know, oh, we got 40 cents. Let me put that in gas in the car. And I got to South Atlanta where I grew up, and the red light's on. I'm like, I'm not going to make it home. So I pull off the interstate into a gas station lights on I'm like I'm not gonna make it home so I pull off the

interstate into a gas station and I'm trying to figure I don't even have a quarter to call my wife and a guy I went to high school with pulled up to get gas and I went over to him and I said dude I'm so embarrassed but I left home this morning without my wallet I didn't want to tell him I was that broke I said can I borrow five bucks he's like yeah oh hell yeah so i got home years later he came to my concert and he goes i remember loading you and i said dude i was so broke i had no money to get home i said let me pay you back and he's like nope i want you to owe it to me because it's a much better story this way yeah and the sum it still hasn't yeah it still hasn't paid me because it's a much better story this way. Yeah, and the sumbitch still hasn't paid me back. Still hasn't paid me back.

That's incredible though that you went through all that. I mean, it's great that you did it. But looking back, it's it was good. It made Oh, I think it's hugely important, man. It made me better. I had a hunger to get better at it. You know, people say

that comics have like uh there's like a lot of them are chasing uh it's got to be fueled somewhere right yeah i always heard there's like a there's like some sort of demon that needs to be slay you know or else you're not funny you know i mean like like if everything's just gravy all time, you don't get a chance to be funny. Yeah. I always heard they're, they're laughing on the outside, crying on the inside, but I think it's like human beings. We're, we're all different. Um, I think I was probably affected by my dad leaving because I could make my dad laugh

when I saw him. Well, that was the approval. Got it. So it probably made me work at being funnier, but I was wired this way. I came from a funny family. I was wired creative. Part of the reason that I flunked out of college

was I was going to Georgia Tech, which was an engineering school, and that wasn't my strength. I remember taking an English class there and writing a story about deer hunting. Oh, you did? And the English teacher goes, have you ever thought about being a writer? Maybe you're not an engineer. Maybe you should be a writer. I remember being in high school, and I had no money to buy my girlfriend a birthday present. I saw there was a speech

contest at the Elks sludge that paid 50 bucks i wrote a speech went down there and won you know hey taking my girlfriend to red lobster baby here we go so uh so what happened with flunking out of college yeah i was at the wrong place i it it wasn't my gift you know and I didn't know what my gift was, but from where I stand now, like God made me this way. I see the funny in things. It doesn't mean that I don't get mad or I don't get sad, but I always look for the funny in it.

And I do believe it's a gift, and I think I'm a writer. And any great comic is a writer. You just have to have that brain. And you're a writer. We don't do it necessarily because it's fun. It ain't fun. No, I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy the act.

People have a hard time with that. Doing it is not like like doing it's not fun there's a writer ian frazier and he he said when when he was little he pictured being a writer he pictured writers sitting there and they're typing and they're kind of chuckling to themselves you know and then only later do you realize it it's just like it's just doing it is not enjoyable it's not only enjoyable the minute you stand up the minute you stand up finished product when you look back and you go yeah yeah now all right let me ask you a question because i actually asked bruce springsteen this like i have a pad next to my bed i've had it for

30 years with a pen on it and i can write in the dark but so because you always think you're going to remember it and you never do so i've learned like right like something about is your body's relaxing to go to sleep ideas start coming and i've learned to just write a sentence where i can remember it in the morning but i also have a pad next to on my bathroom counter i bet 60 of the things I think of are in the shower. Oh. And so I get out of the shower, and I actually ask Springsteen, I say, where do you write the most?

Oh, no, I write a lot of stuff in the shower, man. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. So there must be, when I'm driving in the shower and right before I'm going to bed is usually those times. There's a band I like a bit trampled by

turtles they have great name the the singers this guy Dave Simonette he's really good lyrically and the other night he left his he accidentally left his little notebook at my house it's sitting on my counter right now. And I keep wanting to look in that little notebook, but I can't bring myself to look in there. Because I feel like it'd be like a betrayal. Kind of is. But I'm real curious about it.

For a writer. I have cracked it. I look at it, and I think, man, I want to look in that notebook. Yeah. But then I feel like I'd be violating some kind of guest host bond, you know? If I found it on the street, sure, but he left it in my house. See, that's why I was real. So we don't crack it open.

We just look at it. I was interested in doing this with you because you're a weird combo in that you're very capable, but you're creative, which are not usually, like most really creatives I know can't tie their shoes, can't fill up their gas tank and that's kind of normal i had a dad that pounded all that into you yeah he didn't give a lick about the creative no mine didn't either but it was like he wrote something it was on a it was on graph paper yeah or on a two by four you know that's uh but i think you and i are have that in common is we're capable

but we're creative as well rogan's like this so it's a weird mix uh which because i'm kind of fascinated by the writer's side of you i saw where steve martin won a writing award and he said this means more to me than anything because writing's hard. Yeah. And I'm like, dude, I get it. You know, it's. Well, yeah. Cause you guys get like, like comics,

you get known for the performative part, but prior to the performative parts, the writing part. Do you know? But a writer just winds up, it's kind of the end of it. You're a writer. It's funny. Cause I'm kind of a physical comic and people will ask me, do you practice in

front of a mirror no i i never think about the performance do you ever have to watch yourself i hate to watch myself oh you don't know what you look like i cringe like when i used to do johnny carson and you'd film it like at four or five in the afternoon and you'd come home and and it would come on. I'd watch the whole show until I came on. Then I'd get up and leave the room. Because I hate the way I talk. I hate the way I look.

And my wife would be in the other room going, it's really good. Come watch it. And I'm like, no, I can't. You hate the way you look. What do you wish you looked like? I don't know. Something different. Springsteen?

Yeah. But with comedy, it was always the writing. And it's kind of like, I know when you do it well that the audience thinks, oh, he just walked out here and just thought of this. Oh, yeah. But Leno, I remember when i was still doing amateur nights leno was always so nice to young comics was he very patient and we're sitting at the waffle house and he said your goal should be to write one new minute a week now think about that your goal

should be to write one new minute a week it gives gives you a special every year. Well, it does. And in my mind, I'm thinking, are you out of your mind? I could write 20 or 30 minutes a week. No, he was right. If you can write one minute that a room full of strangers are going to laugh at every time you say it, over the course of a year, you've got a new album, you've got a new special, whatever it is. But that wasn't easy.

I mean, you had to be working to get 62 minutes a year, which was always so sad because you do a special and went, crap, all that work, now I've got to start all over. Walk me through the flow of an idea um if you don't practice front of a mirror so you get like an observation that like your wife's butt's cold when she climbs in bed yeah how'd her bucket cold yeah um you drive around in your tractor or whatever and you think about about that, and you think that's funny, you never go and, like, it just lives in your head. Then you try it out.

You never do, like, hey, film me talking about this. No, it starts with a thought. And then I'm like, if I thought of something, maybe I think this is funny. Like, you and I were having a conversation. I'd figure out a way to work it into the conversation. And if you laughed, I went, okay, that's a valid thought. Oh, so you try it out on your buddies without them knowing it.

Yeah. And then, so in the early days, I always envisioned it like clay. I would go out there and throw an idea out, say it's five sentences, and three of them worked. So I'd keep the three that worked, get rid of the two that didn't, and then the next night I'd try two or three more. And so it was like adding a little piece of clay every night. Patting it on there.

Over a course of a month, you've got a new 10-minute bit. Yeah. As I've gotten older, i kind of did the opposite is i would start with the big glob and just go out there and try it which i don't know why but everything that didn't work i'd cut it off and cut it off and just kept and so in the early days my bits were two and three minutes long now they tend to be 20 and 30 minutes long right really long pieces when you say a bit you mean like you'll do that you'll spend that time on a subject yeah like

having a kidney stone you know so like you're not going to get done with that in two minutes no well and and here's my thought if you go to all the trouble to set it up which is the part you're not getting a laugh once you get it set up why not go you got a harvest dig deep and get like jim gaffigan talking about bacon you know i'm a comic and i'm like how long can you talk about bacon for two or three minutes at minute 20 of gaffigan i've got my hands in my head going how can you talk about bacon for 20 minutes this is hilarious yeah that's a good observation you got to set you got to set the story up yeah but if you've got all that trouble and then you spin off jokes yeah yeah what uh when you were

not when you were because as you meet comics um are you guys always bound like do you feel that you're bound to other comics through the comedy or do you feel like the the sort of political and social differences do you i mean like do you run into do you when you're doing running another comics and like is it like you're sort of like the redneck guy from the south and so you're ostracized or is it just that comedy brings your whole circle of professional colleagues together? I mean, I think when you're starting out, it's so competitive and everybody's trying to get a hand on the ledge that you're really cut throat with each other. And the thing about the redneck jokes,

they were one-liners. And so we live in an age where nobody does one-liners, but they were easy to remember. They were easy to retell. You know what I mean? And so I could do them on the radio, and I could do 10 of them. So there's 10 laughs, and people could remember them. They could repeat them. But it was a way for people to remember my name.

But at the height of it, it was three minutes out of an hour and a half show. Yeah. And so for people that thought that was all I did, I'm like, no, you haven't watched me. Mostly what I do is material about my wife and my family and my kids. But it was a way for them to remember their name. I find the longer you do it, you realize it's a wonderful job, but it's hard. You don't last unless you work hard at it.

It's like, you know, I love to look for arrowheads. If I walk into a guy's house and he's got a display case full of unbroken arrowheads, I knew that took a long time. That took a long, long time to find that many unbroken arrowheads. Same way with a comic. And so you kind of have a respect for each other. I want to return this, but I want to tell you another metric you should consider. How many mountain lions have you seen?

That's a metric for time spent messing around outside. How many have you seen? Not many. I've spent a lot of time messing around outside. Yeah. I think I've seen six that weren't being chased by dogs. Well, that's pretty cool. Well, I got a buddy who spends a lot of time outside.

Last time I talked to him, he was on like 35 or something. Oh, my gosh. I didn't mean to interrupt your chance. I had stuck an elk with a bow one time and I was trailing him and Glenn, my farm manager, who you met, went back to get us some water and all. And so I just sat down and when he came back, he goes, dude, there's mountain lion tracks in your footprints. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, my dumb ass is sitting at the bottom of a tree with my bow. You know, it's a wonder I wasn't lunch.

Yeah. I don't want to break a chain of thought, but I was just thinking about your awareness of that collection and being like, that is a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot of work. Like you're dedicated. You're good at it. Well, yeah.

You know, out of everything I've done professionally, the thing that I'm proudest of is I've sold more comedy records than anybody that's ever lived. Is that right? Yep. Corinne should have put that in the damn bio. I know. Nice job, Corinne. So go eat some more Mooshu Matzo Balls.

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delirious yes yeah my first comedy record sold almost four million copies the second one did almost the same the the like physical copies yeah physical no kidding these are album but what that tells me is i'll tell you what it tells me. Somebody was a popular ass comedian. Well, it means you were working, you were writing. Yeah. You know, and I mean, I've written like 27 books and invented games. I've been very lucky to do a lot of things creatively, but, but out of everything that tells me you worked at it, you worked hard, which is, you know, it's, it's part of me with hunting. I want to do it.

I want to do things that aren't easy. Like when I was a kid, I just wanted to shoot a deer that had antlers. I just wanted to kill a deer. Any antler didn't matter. You know, that that's enough you know yeah yeah yeah and and and there's cycles hunters go through then you want to shoot a bigger one you want to shoot a bigger one and but you get to a point like because i was doing a lot of hunting shows i was doing hunting shows for real tree and uh bucks of tecumseh and i was getting to go places and hunt really cool things and shoot really big deer and I had a year where I shot a 13 point deer he's out there in the in the mainland out there

huge deer shot him with a gun and 350 yards and then I came back to my farm and my farm manager only bow hunted and I was starting to play around with it. That's your buddy here. Glenn. Glenn. And the next weekend I shot 138 inch deer, but he was Pope and young with a bow and arrow. And I sat up there and I just shook and I could remember being 15 years old. And the deer I shot at 350 yards had no idea that I was there. I didn't really have to be that stealth. I was a long way away. But the one I shot at 30 yards, that was close and personal.

And I remember, I called my wife. I never call my wife when she's cooking dinner back at home. And I'm like, oh my God, I just shot a buck with my bow. And I thought, this is what I want to feel like. This is what I want hunting to feel like. And so I'm like, I'm not doing with my bow. And I thought, this is what I want to feel like. This is what I want hunting to feel like. And so I'm like, I'm not doing a gun anymore. I'm going to hunt with a bow. I was horrible at it.

I mean, it took me two or three years to even get, I messed up. I kept drawing at the wrong time. You know, so you sat there for two hours waiting on a doe to come up and now you draw at the wrong time, spook her and she runs off. And you're like, okay, I got to wait till her head's behind a tree. But there was something about wanting to do it the hard way. Yep. And once I had started being pretty good at shooting deer with it, I'm like, I want to, I want to go hunt an elk. I want to, but not with a gun.

I want to. And then it was a moose. And then it was, I want to but not with a gun i want to and then it was a moose and then it was i want to hunt it like i'd always kind of been fascinated with bears but i had zero interest in nothing wrong with somebody doing this i didn't want to shoot one over a barrel of donuts i wanted to go find a bear and shoot him with my bow well i ended up doing that because and i don't know if you ever feel like this but but like I would watch videos of people hunting moose with a bow and I kept going, holy crap, that is so scary. I mean, like roll up in a ball going, oh my dude, they're so close. They're so big, so big.

There's part of me that goes, do you, do you have enough balls to do this? And I wanted to find out. I'm like, I wanted to push myself to go, do you have enough courage to go stand there with a stick and a string 15 yards from this 2,000-pound animal? And it's funny, like after doing it, because my wife's first question was, were you scared? Because I shoot this big bullet 15 yards. And I said, in and of the moment, no.

Did you guys call that bull in? Yeah. So he's. That's intimidating, man yeah i mean he's got his eyes rolled but well here was the worst part so we're going up we're in a john boat going up a river and i'm in the front of the boat looking for tracks or looking for sign and we'd been in the boat for four or five hours and then i finally saw tracks coming out and I hey he got tracked he went over and looked said it's a big bull beach the boat go up into some kind of vegetation it was about this high kind of little red berries in there

and as we're just kind of standing there listening for the bull i look down and at my feet there is a pile of poop with steam coming up off of it i mean steam is coming off and i look at the guide and i go moose and he goes grizzly and i'm like okay so there's grizzly with steam coming off of it, which means he ain't far away. And then, and then the, and now we're, now we've got a moose coming and I forget about the grizzly. But in the end, he's coming in to fight. He destroys a 10 foot tree. I mean, down to nothing. He wants to nothing.

He wants to fight. But he's kind of hanging up at like 15 yards because he can't see us. And in and of the moment, I was not scared. And I thought, oh, I'd be petrified. My only thought was, turn so I can get a stick in you. I need, I need a, an ethical, I mean, I need a shot. I need, and it was so hyper-focused on what do I have to do to get an arrow in this? And, and he finally turned to walk off and I look and there's a, there's a hole and I'm, so I go to full draw and I wait till he fills the hole and I shoot him.

He goes 30 yards and, and folds up. As soon as that happens. Now I've got the adrenaline and I'm doing the stanky leg and shaking and all, but in the moment I wasn't scared. And I didn't know that about myself. I got you. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. You didn't freeze up. You didn't know that about myself i got you and i'm like oh that's cool you didn't freeze up you didn't turn around and run away you held it together i didn't know that about myself

do you uh are you into bows do you just go to the bow shop and be like get me set up and i want to shoot now i'm i'm like a weird dude i'm like um so I was hunting with a Matthews for a while and I liked it. But then I got a PSE bow that just seemed to fit me. Like when I go into full draw, it wasn't jumping on me. I could hold it. I could draw it straight back. I've hunted with the same bow for eight years. You do?

Oh, yeah? Yeah. You got a new bow every year, guy. I'm not a junkie on anything. If I get a truck I like, I'm like, I don't need a new truck. Look at the watch I'm wearing. I mean, I've done okay in life. I'm wearing a $100 watch with a broken band, you know,

because it tells time well. I'm not a latest and greatest thing kind of guy yeah i just found a bow that i liked i'm like i like this one i'm gonna stick with this you mentioned uh you mentioned hunt arrowheads what was your introduction to that um i had found one or two i think as a kid but glenn my farm manager had looked for him his life. And I'd go to his house and look at his collection. I'm like, that's pretty cool. Well, and I think becoming a bow hunter, you start to go, damn, these people. Oh.

These people were pretty fascinating. So you were looking at it, too, from a hunting perspective. Yeah. I know a lot of guys that are into arrowheads that don't look at it from a hunting perspective, which always kind of surprised me. I'm fascinated by everything they do like they took rocks and they learned to make a knife they learned to make a projectile point they learned to make a a grinder a bowl and a grinder that let's mash up acorns or corn or whatever they were such capable people.

So when I look at artifacts, I'm thinking, A, if I pick it up and go, all right, I'm the first human being in 7,000 years to hold this. But mostly I think about there was some woman or some man sitting here making this, not thinking, oh, this is pretty or this is artistic. They're thinking i need to carve up that squirrel tonight for dinner they were making it to live and um i think that's what got me kind of fascinated with it and uh the first trip i ever went on glenn took me on a trip up to north carolina he had a buddy that was planting strawberries and yeah because you

guys will i will go everywhere yeah you'll travel you'll go like on a hunting trip but to go if you get an opportunity to go look so like I just did a thing for a wounded warriors out in Texas well I knew I was going to be out there and I called a friend that was close by go hey you got any buddies at Arrowhead Hunt oh yeah and he goes yeah I got a friend that loves it and I'm like find out if we can go with him. So I fly out there and do something good. Do the Wounded Warrior Show. They raised like a million bucks. It was cool.

But then the next morning, we're out looking for arrowheads. So try to combine them together now. And then you have a lot of stuff from this property you were showing me. Yeah, but we don't. I don't mean to criticize it, but you even said it too. It's like. It's ugly. It's ugly, but it's ugly because of uh they didn't have they didn't have rock to work they didn't have flint they they had quartz which is very hard to make thin and pretty

it was functional but they just don't make pretty arrowheads but like i made friends in arkansas that have beautiful flint i made friends in texas that have beautiful flint i made friends in arkansas that have beautiful flint i made friends in texas that have beautiful flint i have friends in kentucky so hell we'll get in the car and drive to kentucky if somebody says i've got a plowed field and it's rained oh yeah what were you mentioning you're going where someone was putting in strawberries yeah and so they had plowed this field and it was going to rain. And they were fixing to plant it. Yeah, they're fixing, but they hadn't planted it yet, but they plowed it. But when you plow it, it's kind of dusty and you can't really see anything.

So you need it to rain a time or two. But the guy said, he said, y'all better be up here in the morning or the meth heads will kill it. Cause the meth heads will go out there and look for airheads and sell them god that's my kind of meth head man yeah i never heard of that before dude you can go up there it can rain that night and you can be there at sunrise and the field is covered in footprints and you're like how is this humanly possible how do you do this um and so the first place i ever went with him i'd walk 30 feet from the truck and i saw some thought it was a piece off a tractor like a spark plug picked it up i'm looking around they had broken pottery and things and as i'm doing it i'm like i don't feel like plastic and it's a pipe you know yeah so far i know it's because you you were when you're doing

that like how when you're looking on the ground, you'll sometimes hold something in your hand and just kind of worry it in your hand. Yeah. I worry it. That's great because I'm always got something in my hand. Whatever the most interesting thing. Yeah.

Oh, that's a cool rock. You walk around with it in your hand. Twirl it in your thumb. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I'm like, crap, that's not a tractor part. That's a pipe. It was a stone pipe.

And I go over to Glenn, who's been looking for 30 years, and I go, dude, look what I found. He was so pissed. He turned around and walked straight away from me, didn't talk to me the rest of the day. But then I was hooked. If you ever do go do Rogan's show, you should bring that pipe and let him pull a rip.

Let him pull a rip off that pipe, man. He'd probably get a real kick out of that. Yeah, Native American. Yeah, why not, right? He'd probably love to put that pipe to use. So how much time you spend hunting now? Like you get some time out now, right? Yeah, I get some time out.

You know, I'm kind of weird. Like I just had a friend that went to Africa. Have you done that? Because I've been to Africa, but not to hunt. I've been to Africa like six times. I'd like to do it, but I'm kind of weird. Like he wanted to go hunt a leopard. I have no desire.

I don't want to shoot something i'm not gonna eat and and there's nothing wrong with that i'm just this is me this is what you like this is the way i'm weird there's some guys that have foot fetishes yeah right and i'm and i look at them and go have you seen boobs because they're they're not bad either you know but uh i mean but to each his well here's the thing about the foot finish too what he views as lingerie i call a flip-flop right i mean but so when i say that i'm not being critical of somebody that wants to hunt a leopard that's just the way i'm wired yeah um is if i shoot something i want to eat it so oh but i would like to go

i'd like to go to africa and in bow hunt and i and we and i still hunt with a gun like i just go you do yeah well i thought maybe you gave it all up for your bow. Big game I hunt with a bow. Oh, I see. But like I just got turned on to duck hunting. I had my neck fused 10 years ago, and the doctor said two things. Don't look up and don't shoot a shotgun. That rules out duck hunting. Well, apparently not because I tried it and I liked it.

And now I'm like, I'll deal with the pain because this is a lot of fun. Well, what's in your head? Is there like a – how do you tell when you've scratched the itch for a year, right? Like for me, I like to hunt turkeys a lot. So late May, whatever, I'll be in my head. i don't think of how many turkeys i got i don't think of how many days i hunted turkeys i think of like well how many successful hunts was i in on yeah meaning my kid got one my buddy got one like that you don't have to shoot yeah i could shoot none of them wouldn't matter and if i finished the spring and i was like man i was in on six turkey kills that's pretty good then i'll be like oh that's

pretty good spring yeah you know um when the big game season ends when it's all said and done i'll kind of look at was there one particular did i get some particular animal that i was real excited about and do i have a whole mountain of stuff stored up in freezers yeah and if it's check i'm good you know how do you how do you know how do you know that your hunting life is well i think we go through stages as a hunter first it's i want to shoot a deer now i want to shoot a deer with horns now i want to shoot a deer. Now I want to shoot a deer with horns. Now I want to shoot a deer with bigger horns. Now I want to shoot a really big deer. And so I've been through all those stages.

Now I'm like you, if I can take a kid who's never done it and introduce it to them, that's every bit as rewarding as shooting a deer like that. I think that's the thing I loved about bow hunting. Uh, it, and kind of that conversion on big game stuff was I'd shot a lot of big deer with it. Shot.

There's your, might be a redneck word. Shot. Shot. I'd shot in a lot of, yeah, the guy that didn't like, uh,

crescendo. He's got a real problem. He's got real problems with shot. Um, he's not even nowhere to start when he writes that letter but but like when you were gun hunting and you'd go hey there's a dude there's oh crap it's a doe when you're bow hunting you're like oh hell here comes a doe you know everything's in play everything is in play and and i like that about it because it's hard man it's hard to get a stick i mean you got to let them get and and a friend of mine who loves big bucks he said well what do you do if you're bow hunting and the buck comes out

at 100 yards across the field and And I said, he wins today. But now I know a way where he likes to cross, and I'm going to move my stand closer. But he wins today. And you're excited about having a grandkid. Oh, yeah. Oh, the greatest joy of my life. Honest to God.

You get to the point where you think you've kind of got life figured out. I had no idea I was going to love a grandkid this much. I got a buddy that's got a new grandkid. He told me he likes that grandkid better than he ever liked any of his kids. Oh, I tell my kids. I hold my grandson and I go, I love you and I would lay down my life for you. I would die for you, but I do not love you as much as I love him. I don't love my wife as much as I love him. He is my favorite human being of all time. Well, and I had all girls, and I love being girls.

I love being a girl dad. What was that track record? Everybody in my family had girls. We had 11 girls in a row. He's the first boy in 58 years. You have you, two siblings, and you guys spun off 11 women. Yeah, yeah. And no, no boys. So he's the first boy.

And like yesterday morning, he comes out in his pajamas. He's pulling on his green rubber boots. He's got his thumb in his mouth. He goes, Jax, let's go ride a tractor. And I'm like, hell yeah, let's go ride a tractor. I let him drive the truck. I let him sit in my lap and drive. He's two and a tractor i let him drive the truck i let him sit my life laughing drive he's two and a half that's fine yeah but god he's i i ever whatever bad i ever did he makes up for

uh i've got a great life you know sure is i've i've made a fabulous living doing something i would have done for free because I love what I do I love I love that comedy it's it's it's very rewarding there's you're making people laugh um it's it's like the release valve that keeps people's boiler from exploding you're um but it's not easy I love the fact that you never get, you never get it figured out. After 40 years, you would think I would know what people are going to laugh at and what

they're not going to. I still don't know. She's like, it's like the, the woman you can't figure out, but that's what keeps her interesting is I can't figure out. Cause after 40 years, I can go up there and go,

Hey, is this funny? And it's crickets. you're like wow really it's not funny uh so I have that as a career I have a farm which I love man I don't need I don't need shiny cars I don't need I love this I, I love this. I love, I love being able to grow my own food. I love being able to hunt my own food. I love being able to share a sunrise, you know, with friends of mine. And I've never spent one day in the woods where I went, crap, that wasn't worth it.

Mm-hmm. Because you always see something see a hawk catch a squirrel or you know like today you and i stop and there's two otters chasing fish highlight of my day man yeah and you're like crap that was cool yeah there's always something like that so i've got a farm i've got a great job i've got a wife that i adore been married for 40 years got grandkids i got kids i adore i'm like i don't know what i did but thank you i've got a great life well thank you for coming on the show man i do thank i do i do i'm i'm fascinated by you i i like what you do and i like that you humanize hunters.

You know, it's like I was doing something in L.A. and they were, you know, you guys just shoot everything you see. I said, are you kidding me? I said, during the course of a deer season, I will see 400 deer. I might shoot four does and a buck. I said, and you tell me you love them you don't love them more than i do because i'm out on a bulldozer creating habitat for them i'm out burning yeah to to give them more native food i'm out don't tell me you love them more than i know you could say to them said uh if you don't think i love deer i'd like to take you for a little drive

yeah but what i want is as many as my land can hold with them being healthy i want it right there to the top but it's it's not an infinite number of deer so and i've seen chronic wasting disease i've seen it's when nature takes care of it it's ugly much more humane and i don't and i'm not shooting them it's not the killing it's every one of them somebody eats it's it's a food source you know so and if you don't like it that's okay i don't have to like everything you do but i like the fact that you show that, you know, Oh, thank you. It just,

you, you don't have to like it, but I do. And it's legal and it's, it's good. It's fascinating. It's the biggest classroom in the world is the outdoors. Yup.

Well, man, thanks for, um, thanks for being a hunter. Thanks for making everybody laugh and making everyone laugh without capitalizing on hate and discord, but just laughing at yourselves, man. Laughing at ourselves. And I think we've kind where I have to be wrong. And we need to give up our need to be right because what you find as you age is things that you argued vehemently for as you were 20.

Now I find myself argued vehemently against. I'm like, you learn. And, you know, we're all wrong about something. The truth is we're all wrong about a lot of things. But we have to engage in those conversations. So like with you, I want to know what you know that i don't know those are the conversations i like to have uh i think a way to describe aging one way to describe aging would be it's a process by which you become less and less interested in your own

opinion agreed yeah i i i told my kids i said i miss my 30 year old body but i wouldn't trade my 60 year old mind and soul to get it back because you realize so many things you wanted to fight about when you're young you get old nothing and it ain't worth it it'll it'll sort itself out half the things you worry about more than half 90 Half the things you worry about, more than half, 90% of the things you worry about, they never happen. And so you kind of, there is a wisdom that comes, and that wisdom comes with everything's not a confrontation. You and I, here's the thing. I think politically you can have two people on total opposite ends of the spectrum but if you

sat them down and you said what do you want out of life what do you what do you care about what do you love we would agree on 85 of the same things we all want to be able to take care of our family we want to be able to take care of our family. We want to be able to take care of our kids. We want them to live in a safe place. We want to have food in our stomach. 15% would be different. What we should celebrate is the 85% that we're alike. You and I grew up in different parts of the country, different ways.

But as we sit here and talk, we realize realize oh steve and i are a lot alike on this and the parts that are different that's what makes you steve and what makes me jeff but what we want to do it right now is we want to fight and scream and yell at each other about the 15 instead of going crap it's%. You and I want the same thing. Why don't we baste in that? We can talk about the other. But how boring would it be if we all wanted and thought alike? Crap, that would be. That's one of the things I love about nature is,

and if you don't have faith, I don't care. I do. But I sit there and go, and if you don't have faith, I don't care. I do. But I sit there and go, God's infinitely creative. Like there's thousands of different kinds of trees. If you ask me to come up with trees after four, I'm like, I'm out of ideas. You're like, I'm going to do a little one, a medium, and a medium. Yeah. I'm done. I'm done. Or, you know, types of things in the ocean. Man, there's a fish. You know, and you go, crap, how many different kinds of fish are there?

Well, for people that love the outdoors, it's always, that's what I mean. It's kind of a, it's a classroom. You're like, all of this works together. You know, as the squirrel's sitting there chewing on the pine cone, some of those kernels are going down and into the soil and becoming pine trees. Well, there's, you know, within a square foot of dirt, there's 40,000 organisms living in that. And they all do something.

These leaves above it that are decaying or feeding something, that feed something else, and it's all tied together, and it's way more together and it's way more brilliant and smarter than i have the comp the the ability to understand so i'm just going to sit here and soak it all in and go wow isn't that cool it's a great place to do that and experience that and the thing that you were getting at a minute ago about the 85-15%. 85% of stuff brings us together. 15% is different. There's been this idea I've been toying around in my head about,

and I've talked about this a number of times, is I compare sometimes my lived experience, right? Like what happens to me going about my day? Going to a gas station down the road from here or whatever. What me going about my day, going to a gas station down the road from here, whatever, what happens going about my day. And then me reading about what my American life is supposed to be like. Yeah.

And in reading about what my American life is supposed to be like, it's supposed to be defined by polarization, political violence, right? Yeah. Whatever. All of this economic strain social economic upheaval you know and then i go okay i got it that's what life's like but why is that not line up at all with what you're experienced with what happens when i'm like talking to my neighbors who i don't

know the first thing about where they're at politically. Or why does that not happen when I go into a gas station? Why are people cool? When I get into an Uber, why am I able to, you know what I mean? Like, how am I supposed to be having this, but instead I'm having this? Well, and which ones of those things, which of those do you believe? Which is the truth? I'm leaning toward thinking that the lived one is the truth.

It is the truth. You follow me? I've got to the point i say when i walk on stage i and i do as i'm standing on the sides of the stage i remind myself that everybody that i'm going to look at is going through some kind of a struggle now it might be a physical struggle it might be emotional it might be financial but they're going through something and that's why really my whole life i'm like just have grace with people because you don't know their backstory you don't know what they're going through so have a little grace with them uh and i think that's that's the cool thing about laughter is you know we're all in a struggle that's why i love what i do is i can go visit kids in the hospital and they might have my book or they might have my game or they might have my dvd and they didn't

know i was coming so there's something that i've created that has given them an escape from the struggle that they're going through. And I went, oh, that's kind of a cool benefit to this. But, yeah, we don't give each other much grace. You know, you don't know. Like I worked at a totally under the radar, didn't want anybody to know, but get up every week, and I worked down at a homeless shelter in downtown Atlanta for 12 years. Get up on Tuesday morning at 5 o'clock and go down there and work. And my opinion of homeless used to be like, oh, you're too lazy to work.

Well, most of them were in some kind of addiction, but if you learn their story if you come to to learn their story something bad happened they were molested they were abused they were and so the addiction wasn't really the problem that that was the symptom that was i gotta numb this painful feeling and then you start having grace with them going, crap, dude, I would have numbed too. We need to get back as a society to start doing that with each other.

Having some grace. So quit yelling. life's too short crack some jokes instead yeah fry up some venison fry up some venison crack some jokes if you don't want to eat the venison fine hand it to me i'll eat it well man i want to thank you again for coming on the show i really appreciate appreciate it. Well, I. And thanks for the tour of the place. Yeah. I've always been such an admirer of what you do. Oh, thank you, man. So it's, I'm honored that you would be here, that you would take the time to be here.

Oh, no. Once I realized you weren't going to come to me, I decided to come to you, so. Yeah, so suck it, Rogan. Not really. I love what he does, too. All right. Thanks a lot, man. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, for sure. Come back and hunt and fish. I will. I'll bring my kids. Yeah. Please bring your kids. All right. That'd be the number one reason.

You guys could stay here and break everything in here. Great. It's worth the support. Thank you. Raccoon pecker. Old man in the mountains keeps his hat together. Raccoon pecker Use those toothache, it'll last forever Raccoon pecker

Best toothpick in town Well, you see now, I was driving down the road, and I stumbled upon this here raccoon there, and I ran him over, hit him with my car, looked at this old son of a gun, and seen that he has a pecker. Not just any kind of pecker.

A raccoon pecker put him in your hat it holds it together raccoon pecker something in my tooth raccoon pecker leave it on a tree it predicts the weather rain falling off you know it's rain if it's dry as a bone it's it's it's dry stiff as hell it's all ice cold old lady gonna give you the bone because it's a raccoon pecker

i put it in my hat to keep my hat together painted in my tooth gonna pick it on oh raccoon pecker there ain't no doubt hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada you might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that

because of raffle and sweepstakes law but hear this on axe hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer.

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