Joe Rogan Experience #1303 - Tommy Chong
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 42 minutes
Words per Minute
165.31291
Summary
Comedian Tommy Chong joins Jemele to discuss his life and career, his love of Big Bamboo, and his love for tango. He also talks about how he got into comedy, and what it's like to be a gay comedian in his old age.
Transcript
00:00:09.000
I tell everybody that one of my first ever experiences with comedy recordings was listening to Big Bamboo when I was a kid.
00:00:18.000
My parents had it, and they'd let us listen to it.
00:00:21.000
We'd open it up like a big old packet of rolling papers and pull out the albums back then, the actual record.
00:00:27.000
You know, and so I've been a fan for a long time.
00:00:55.000
You know, all the systems are go again, you know.
00:00:58.000
And that makes a big difference in the life, you know.
00:01:02.000
That's what I found out the fountain of youth is the pussy.
00:01:07.000
Drink out of the fountain of youth and you'll live forever.
00:01:28.000
So, even for gay folks, it's gotta be pussy too?
00:01:31.000
Well, what's the longest living gay guy that you know?
00:01:53.000
Well, what happens is your body, when it reaches a certain stage, it starts disintegrating because it's getting ready for the recall and the reboot.
00:02:07.000
But if you keep this body healthy, it feels that there's no need to leave because you obviously still got more shit to do.
00:02:39.000
The whole thing about tango is it's so intricate.
00:02:43.000
The original tango was a mating dance from Africa.
00:02:48.000
And what they would do, the tribes, the young kids would get together and dance and flirt with their feet.
00:02:55.000
And so when the slaves got taken, you know, from Africa and put on the boats and that, they ended up crossing the foot dance with the Adagio French dance, the dance of the brothels.
00:03:09.000
And so then they ended up with a music or a dance called tango, which was a combination.
00:03:23.000
Just like Mambo, it's an African word that means storytelling.
00:03:36.000
So anyway, Tango, like I go to Argentina with my wife a lot.
00:03:41.000
And it's very tough dance to dance with your wife.
00:03:55.000
If you're a stranger, then all you can respond to is the dance signals.
00:04:06.000
But he has to lead in such a way that you can't see him.
00:04:15.000
And so he'll suggest a certain move and then the girl, his partner, will understand that move and then she can do a couple of steps.
00:04:39.000
And out of those combinations, once the guy gets the girl going into the ochos, for instance, then he can move on to another...
00:04:46.000
He'll stop her with his foot, and then he'll move on to another series of moves.
00:04:57.000
The woman has to really listen to the moves if she's dancing with a stranger or a teacher.
00:05:10.000
And the woman has to be cuddled up against the guy.
00:05:20.000
And so you have to feel the other person's body.
00:05:24.000
And it can get so intimate, man, that you really, after a good dance with a good tango teacher, you really feel like having a cigarette and relaxing for a bit.
00:05:43.000
Cheech and I were finishing up the Corsican Brothers, and we got offered to do the Cisco Kid.
00:05:50.000
And they sent me the script, and in the script it said, Tango Dancers.
00:05:54.000
And so my wife and I, girlfriend at the time, but wife now, we used to drive by this place that said Tango in neon lights, and so we stopped and And took our first tango lesson from this George and Rosie,
00:06:17.000
Rosie came and met us and she showed us the first little bit of tango.
00:06:22.000
Well, my wife, Shelby, who was an excellent dancer, she's been studying dance, you know, ever since I can remember, you know.
00:06:31.000
And so she started doing salsa first, and then I found out about that, and I had to learn salsa.
00:06:42.000
And then she went on to really learn how to dance, how to dance with the pros.
00:06:56.000
And so when we go down to Buenos Aires, like we went down for her birthday, I was the video operator because I didn't know how to dance that well.
00:07:07.000
I take lessons almost 20 years now, but I still don't have the skills to be a professional like that.
00:07:20.000
Yeah, so I went down and videotaped her, and then I came back and I made a vow.
00:07:24.000
I said, this is embarrassing, you know, because people know me from years ago, and I still can't dance.
00:07:41.000
There's a lot of guys right now that are going crazy.
00:07:47.000
I played a tournament, golf, last week, and I did the best I've ever done.
00:07:51.000
If you lay off something, you forget all your bad habits.
00:07:55.000
And you're probably really enthusiastic about playing it again.
00:08:04.000
For me, I got about a 36 handicap, something like that.
00:08:09.000
But I gave up golf because it's too much energy.
00:08:16.000
I would also imagine that the tango dancing, all the movement and the footwork would actually probably make you more steady and stable, balanced better, so it'd probably make your golf game better.
00:08:36.000
In comedy, someone asked me about the secret of comedy.
00:08:47.000
Waiting and using that silence, you know, before you say something to give people a time to formulate their own thoughts about what you're doing or to concentrate on what you're going to say next.
00:09:45.000
I imagine literally serious fucking training for that, right?
00:10:19.000
It's hard to learn things when you're stoned sometimes.
00:10:22.000
Yeah, like in jujitsu, most people agree that it's not a good idea to smoke pot when you're learning skills, but it's a good idea to smoke pot when you have the skills.
00:10:33.000
Yeah, when you roll and you already know what to do, it's like instinctive, then you can smoke some pot.
00:10:38.000
But like learning, like if someone shows me a new move and I'm high, I can't even figure out where the body's going.
00:10:51.000
So you really think that that happened to you because of that?
00:10:57.000
And it was a kind of prostate that was so slow acting.
00:11:01.000
The lazy ass doctor said, well, we won't do it.
00:11:03.000
We'll just leave it alone and you'll probably die of something else before that happens.
00:11:12.000
It happens all the time, you know, because, you know, prostate can be very slow.
00:11:22.000
Because I was going to do the growth hormone therapy.
00:11:25.000
And that's why I checked out my blood to make sure I didn't have cancer.
00:11:36.000
You know, in a biopsy, they come and take a piece of your...
00:11:38.000
So you think that taking a biopsy could have caused damage, which could have led to cancer?
00:11:43.000
Could have caused the cancer cell to hit the rectum the way it did.
00:11:53.000
But I'm totally healed now, and I'm good to go.
00:12:00.000
So I don't know if it was the lack of weed and the stress and the fact that I had prostate.
00:12:10.000
So when they fixed the rectal, and I got one of the best doctors, Kajandian.
00:12:17.000
They had to change the plumbing from the front From the back to the front.
00:12:32.000
And then you put the bag around to the front, and that's all they did there.
00:12:38.000
But what they did, they swept the prostate clean with the radiation.
00:12:42.000
They said, we're down there anyway, so we might as well do their prostate too.
00:12:48.000
And thank God I never had it taken out because now I got the sleeping giant is awoke again.
00:13:01.000
I think it was the weed that did it, too, plus my gorgeous wife.
00:13:04.000
But yeah, I started getting these urges, and I thought, oh, what's happening here?
00:13:23.000
Apparently to help induce labor because it's all about blood flow down there.
00:13:35.000
And so I'm going in tomorrow for an injection of some help to blood flow to help the giant get a little more awake.
00:13:49.000
I mean, it was so depressing to hear that you were going to jail for making bongs.
00:13:54.000
I mean, the whole thing was so sick, and that they were threatening to put your family in jail, and that's why they sent you to jail.
00:14:00.000
You couldn't smoke pot for a while after that, right?
00:14:12.000
Because if you get caught, then you end up getting tortured.
00:14:15.000
The whole time I was there, nine months I was there.
00:14:24.000
And then a year after that, I was on probation and I never smoked.
00:14:36.000
One thing that happened that was great was that you became even more of a hero to the cannabis community.
00:14:48.000
And it was so wrong that even people that didn't smoke pot were like, how the fuck are you arresting Tommy Chong?
00:14:56.000
All the terrorists in the world, the criminals, the rapists, the murderers.
00:15:09.000
But once I got in there, I was in there with a lot of people that were unjustly incarcerated.
00:15:15.000
I was in there with the orthopedic surgeon for the Rams, and he had been in a tax, it was legal at the time he did it, which was that he had a big car collection.
00:15:33.000
And then the IRS changed people, and next thing you know, they came to him and said, you owe all this money, and if you don't pay it, you've got to go to jail.
00:15:49.000
He's one of the straightest guys I've ever met.
00:15:52.000
And there was another guy that figured out the OJ tax scheme.
00:15:57.000
You know how OJ can keep his money from the NFL? Pension because he's in Florida?
00:16:04.000
Yeah, well, it's a law, a loophole that allowed OJ to keep his taxes.
00:16:15.000
And so this accountant figured out how to do it, and he started getting rich people so they didn't have to pay taxes.
00:16:23.000
And so rather than to change the law or do anything like that, they just put his ass in jail.
00:16:35.000
And then they told him, you're going to get out in a year, but you're not going to do that tax thing anymore.
00:16:52.000
Well, they're coming after him right now, right?
00:16:56.000
New York State is allowing Congress to subpoena his tax returns?
00:17:07.000
I tell everybody, why would you want to be president?
00:17:13.000
Even if you're super clean, they're going to make shit up about you.
00:17:16.000
No, the only reason Trump did it is because he owes Putin so much money.
00:17:24.000
How did this loser billionaire get financed over and over and over again?
00:17:29.000
And guess who's laundering money like crazy from Russia?
00:17:36.000
No, the whole Trump family is going to go down.
00:17:51.000
He owes Putin so much money that he's scared to death.
00:18:10.000
Mueller, the FBI. Trump was attacking Obama with a birther.
00:18:20.000
Obama's got control of the FBI, CIA, everybody.
00:18:24.000
So Obama said, okay, find out about this Trump guy.
00:18:30.000
But the thing is, they can't really do anything unless he becomes president.
00:18:42.000
He can't do anything unless he becomes president?
00:18:48.000
There's no law that says that you can't deal with Russia.
00:18:52.000
Only law says that you can't deal with Russia and be the president of the United States at the same time.
00:18:57.000
The only time he would break any laws is that if he became president.
00:19:11.000
No matter what they say, Hillary was going to win.
00:19:19.000
And they knew, they knew back in Obama time that there was nothing really wrong that Hillary did.
00:19:28.000
Well, they told her to release emails and she deleted 30,000 of them.
00:19:36.000
And she was using her own personal email server instead of the government's.
00:19:40.000
It was out of laziness and convenience more than anything illegal.
00:19:47.000
You know, she wasn't looking to get financed to her hotel by the Russians.
00:19:56.000
Yeah, it's a little fishy, little stinky stuff around there.
00:20:04.000
So my theory is that Comey and the FBI said, let's get this guy.
00:20:10.000
So you think they let him become president so they can get him?
00:20:18.000
You know what's going to be hilarious about this video?
00:20:21.000
When people watch this, they're going to go, how high is Tom Chum?
00:20:25.000
Tommy Chong thinks that Comey made Trump president so they could prosecute him.
00:20:35.000
I don't think anybody's controlling the strings that well.
00:20:40.000
Listen, look at everybody that was around Trump that became chief of staff and everything else.
00:20:55.000
And so, in order to keep him in line, they got people around him that can keep him in line.
00:21:08.000
Do you think they couldn't infiltrate Donald Trump's gang?
00:21:14.000
Just because of him going after Obama with the birther stuff?
00:21:22.000
But a lot of people were saying he was from Kenya, right?
00:21:25.000
There was some ridiculous Photoshop analysis of his birth certificate.
00:21:30.000
Anything to keep a black guy from being a president.
00:21:35.000
And the FBI and the federal laws, you know, against racism, and that's pretty strict, pretty heavy, you know, until Trump got in.
00:21:50.000
Yeah, like, I really feel that Giuliani is part of the scheme to keep Trump.
00:22:07.000
Well, there's some things they won't do when you're in office.
00:22:12.000
They won't indict you for certain things once you're in office.
00:22:17.000
He says, I'm going to hand this off to the Congress.
00:22:24.000
Here's all the evidence you need to impeach him.
00:22:26.000
And now the Democrats have got to figure out, are we going to impeach him, go through that, or are we just going to go to the election and beat his ass in the election and then arrest him after the election?
00:22:35.000
Who do you think is going to beat him in the election?
00:22:51.000
Can you find one thinker in that backing group?
00:23:30.000
And so when you look at the people that are opposing Trump...
00:23:35.000
You know, the women, the kids, the intellectuals, the liberals, the progressives, all those people, they want a good future for our country,
00:23:51.000
The other ones, they just want to keep everybody else out, or perceived enemies.
00:23:57.000
It's perceived enemies, like anybody with a gun.
00:24:02.000
If you have a gun, you're not very intelligent.
00:24:10.000
If you have a gun, you're not intelligent because you're paranoid?
00:24:15.000
Having a gun means that you're afraid that someone's going to come and attack you.
00:24:33.000
And just like the ones that know about guns, like the cops that didn't go into the school, they knew the guy's got an AK. They're not going to go into that school with their little pistols.
00:24:47.000
And the ones that rushed the guy, they ended up dying.
00:24:50.000
So what I'm saying is that if you have a gun, if you think you need a gun for your house, for whatever, if you think you have something that's worth someone else's life, then you are ignorant.
00:25:02.000
Well, I don't necessarily think that's what they think.
00:25:04.000
They don't think that the gun is worth someone else's life.
00:25:06.000
They think they don't want to get their life taken by a home invasion, which does happen.
00:25:10.000
Did you see that video of the guy that had a raccoon on his boat?
00:25:23.000
And he's 20 miles out in the sea and he sees this raccoon and so he filmed himself kicking the raccoon off the boat.
00:25:47.000
But the wildlife guys said, just get a blanket.
00:26:04.000
Well, see, that's the form of ignorance that I'm talking about.
00:26:12.000
Right, but if someone has a gun in their house to protect themselves from home invasions, home invasions do happen.
00:26:22.000
Oh, you read about it plenty if you go looking for it.
00:26:27.000
If you look at the overall, they have like a pie chart of gun violence in this country.
00:26:37.000
When they start talking about how many people have died, unfortunately a large number is suicide by gun.
00:26:41.000
And I feel like if people are going to kill themselves with a gun, they'll probably kill themselves with pills or anything else if they had that as well, right?
00:26:47.000
And then there's justifiable homicides by the police.
00:26:51.000
There's people that are protecting their house.
00:26:55.000
There's a bunch of different – there's gang violence.
00:26:57.000
There's a bunch of different things that get lumped in when we talk about gun violence.
00:27:00.000
But a certain percentage of them are people that are protecting their house or their family from someone who's trying to hurt them.
00:27:14.000
And I'm quite sure he has a sidearm in his house.
00:27:19.000
But it would be useless because it's so locked away and so hidden by the time anything happened.
00:27:25.000
By the time he got to that gun and got it loaded and found the ammunition in the house.
00:27:38.000
Daughter or something coming in late at night and you mistake her for...
00:27:42.000
Well, you open your mouth and you say something.
00:27:47.000
Or what if you have homicidal tendencies and you've been...
00:27:52.000
See, one thing I learned about guns, because I grew up with guns, too.
00:28:13.000
But I grew up with guns where you actually needed a gun, especially when the hawks are coming down to get your chickens or some stuff like that.
00:28:25.000
But I've seen the gun culture in Calgary, and it turned me off because I've seen kids...
00:28:35.000
They would take a stray dog and bring him up to the field and tie him to a tree or something or a post and then shoot him.
00:29:14.000
No, we went duck hunting, and we're waiting there for hours for the ducks to come over.
00:29:18.000
And my brother, he got bored, and there's a muskrat swimming across the thing, so he shot it with a shotgun.
00:29:24.000
And he walks out into the middle of the slough, picks up the muskrat as the ducks flew over top of us.
00:29:36.000
But there's responsible gun owners, don't you think?
00:29:41.000
Well, as they are, like, I was an Army cadet, and when we had practice, I'm a sharpshooter, by the way.
00:29:47.000
Yeah, I got some, what do you call it, patches, you know, sharpshooter, 300 yards.
00:29:59.000
But when we go shooting, we would have to, first of all, we never got the weapon.
00:30:07.000
And until we marched down into firing position, then we were handed the weapon and one bullet.
00:30:15.000
And then we put the bullet in, shoot the target, another bullet, shoot the target.
00:30:20.000
And then when we were finished, we had to pick up all our casings and give them back.
00:30:25.000
And if anything was missing, no one left until they found that missing bullet.
00:30:32.000
Then the gun was taken from us and put it in an armory.
00:30:41.000
You can have a license to carry a skill saw, but you don't have a skill saw strapped to your side.
00:30:46.000
You can take out and try your skill saw anytime you want.
00:30:53.000
When you see people walking around with guns strapped to their hips in Arizona, you're like, okay.
00:31:03.000
Bikers, you know, the Hells Angels and the Mongols and that, they're the only crime and syndicate I know that advertise.
00:31:37.000
The craziest thing about mass shooters is guns have been around for a long time, but this is not a thing that's been around for a long time.
00:31:44.000
This is a fairly recent thing that keeps erupting over and over and over again.
00:31:51.000
When I was a kid, the crime comics were banned.
00:32:05.000
And they were people up in arms about comic books.
00:32:09.000
And now, you've got video games where you've got to be a masked killer.
00:32:37.000
I remember like in the last eight months or something.
00:32:54.000
And the third time, I realized a lot of it were stunt people.
00:33:00.000
Just, I've seen it so many times, it wasn't Jennifer.
00:33:06.000
But, again, that's the kind of violence that we get shown.
00:33:20.000
Like when I was a kid, I saw a picture, my brother died recently, and there's a whole picture, photo thing of him and I when we were kids.
00:33:28.000
And they used to get put under the Christmas tree, six guns.
00:33:34.000
And when we're little guys, we were three or four years old, I had six guns strapped to myself, you know, because Roy Rogers and Gene Audrey, and that was a big deal, you know, you had your six gun shooters,
00:33:49.000
but you never shot anybody, you just shot the gun under their hand, you know.
00:34:06.000
Going from the old days to Big Bamboo to where we're at today, where you're actually in the weed business now.
00:34:17.000
It's like you were arrested for just selling glass.
00:34:25.000
03. So 16 years ago, you were arrested for just selling glass.
00:34:39.000
But you were one of the real OGs that paid a price.
00:34:44.000
And, you know, now it's got to be nice to see that your influence had something to do with all this.
00:34:57.000
Yeah, but everybody made it out like, you know, you go from, if you think about propaganda, positive and negative, you go from Reefer Madness, which is the most negative, to the Cheech and Chong movies, which is probably the most positive.
00:35:08.000
Up until like Half Baked, that was the most positive Weed stuff we ever saw, right?
00:35:31.000
You know, in order to get laid, you had to be a hippie.
00:35:34.000
And so, all the rich kids growing their hair long.
00:35:46.000
Yeah, we used to say, when we'd be on some of the radio shows, and I was really popular on the right-wing radio shows.
00:36:02.000
They'd get all pissed off at me because I would out people.
00:36:19.000
Because I was in St. Louis on a radio show that Ashcroft listened to.
00:36:24.000
I think Ashcroft heard me and the hit went out.
00:36:37.000
He had a song that he sang that he wrote about Let the Eagle Soar.
00:36:46.000
And it was so creepy and crazy that this person would sing.
00:36:56.000
I would love to climb inside that guy's head and find out what kind of gears are spinning around in there.
00:37:07.000
Yeah, he had a whole song that he sang on television.
00:37:11.000
It was either in front of Congress or something along those lines.
00:37:19.000
And then along with the speech, he wanted to sing the song, Let the Eagle Soar.
00:37:32.000
They got 10 seconds from a Daily Show Moment of Zen that they did with it.
00:37:40.000
This is the clearest video I could find real quick.
00:38:08.000
That's when you kind of say, yeah, maybe guns are okay.
00:38:14.000
But seeing a guy like that, thinking that that psychopath had any control whatsoever over any laws or anyone getting arrested, that guy is fucking insane.
00:38:24.000
He's the guy who wanted to cover the breasts on statues.
00:38:31.000
No one noticed the tits before he put a veil over him.
00:38:41.000
That Bush administration had some spooky fucking people there.
00:38:45.000
It's really interesting that history whitewashes these weird old guys.
00:38:50.000
After he died, Ronald Reagan became like this patron saint of conservative thinking.
00:38:54.000
When I was in high school, Ronald Reagan was president and everybody fucking hated that guy.
00:39:02.000
You thought about him like, this guy's a fraud, he's a phony, he's lying about selling arms to Iran.
00:39:07.000
The whole thing was, it was so crazy to watch that guy become this loved figure.
00:39:16.000
And her and I were pretty good friends until one day I came to the gym and I saw part of a movie called Caliglia.
00:39:30.000
And apparently, Ron, her brother is very gay, and she blew it.
00:39:54.000
Yeah, Ron was like super hardcore Democrat, right?
00:40:02.000
Well, Well, Ronnie wasn't that right-wing until he found a better path for him.
00:40:25.000
Let the eagle soar, like she's never soared before.
00:40:33.000
Imagine, like, sitting down, writing that out, and then singing it with all that emotion and passion, as if that makes any fucking sense to anyone.
00:40:49.000
And the song's about a bird that's an evil raptor.
00:40:54.000
Like, an eagle is a fucking monstrous animal who'll eat babies.
00:40:58.000
They'll eat anything they can get their hands on.
00:41:00.000
They swoop down and snatch fish right out of the fucking river.
00:41:05.000
I don't hate eagles, but the idea that that's America.
00:41:13.000
It really is kind of hilarious that that's our animal.
00:41:18.000
No, I pissed off a lot of people in, you know, not meaning to.
00:41:24.000
You know what we used to say when they would attack us, you know, and say, what if we're right?
00:41:29.000
What if everything we're doing is right and you're wrong?
00:41:38.000
And, you know, I remember when I first started smoking weed, I was, well, I had smoked it a couple of times up until I was 30. And then when I was 30, my friend Eddie, Eddie Bravo, got me high for the first time.
00:41:49.000
I remember I couldn't believe that this was what pot was.
00:41:56.000
Like, yeah, some of the thoughts are a little unorganized and kind of chaotic, but it wasn't making me lazy.
00:42:03.000
It wasn't doing any of these things that people were claiming it did.
00:42:19.000
It is one of the biggest puzzles of modern times is that even in 2019, with all these states that have legalized it, there's still a bunch of people that think that pot is bad for you and that it makes you lazy.
00:42:36.000
You could build a house with a hammer, or you could just hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy.
00:42:42.000
You could use pot, and it can enhance your life, and it can enhance your relationship, and it makes you friendlier, more camaraderie, more compassion, or you could just get stoned all day and do nothing.
00:42:54.000
You got that goddamn phone ringing on your wrist again.
00:42:58.000
I had one of those on my wrist for a day, and I was like, what am I doing?
00:43:02.000
I don't know how to work it, so it's just decoration for me.
00:43:16.000
If it wasn't for Paris, I'd still be riding a bike.
00:43:20.000
Yeah, I had one of those that I was using for a while for fitness tracking stuff, but then I got this Whoop.
00:43:26.000
I got this other thing that's quite a bit more accurate and does more stuff.
00:43:37.000
I work out all the time because I'm terrified of it falling apart.
00:43:51.000
Well, like Arnold, you know, when I first came to L.A., the first thing I did was join Gold's Gym because I read about it, you know, up in Vancouver.
00:44:03.000
And then I met Arnold and all the guys and And they were so healthy.
00:44:08.000
You know, if he took a sip of seven up, he'd spit it out.
00:44:28.000
How the fuck does Pot make you a loser if the biggest bodybuilder on the planet?
00:44:36.000
I outed him one time, like I outed everybody, and Arnold was walking with Stallone at the time.
00:44:47.000
They asked Arnold, you know, Tommy Chong said that he smoked pot with you, and Stallone jumped in right away.
00:45:21.000
In fact, all I did was insult him and made him write his book.
00:45:25.000
Because I was writing my book, and he started, he said, what are you doing?
00:45:34.000
So he wrote a couple of pages, and he handed it to me like, hey, read this, you know.
00:45:38.000
And I read it, and it was like a copy of Tom Wolfe, you know, Bonfires and Vanities.
00:45:58.000
I said, write those stories you've been telling me every night.
00:46:02.000
There's one rule that you've got to remember when you're writing or doing anything.
00:46:11.000
You get higher than anybody's ever gotten in their life if you're going to put it on screen.
00:46:21.000
That's the kind of stuff you need that people are interested in.
00:46:24.000
And so he said, you didn't talk to me for about...
00:46:35.000
And then he'd give it to you and you're like, alright, you got something here.
00:46:39.000
The next time I saw him, he pulled in front of my house with his car.
00:46:44.000
We were both on probation, so we couldn't talk to each other.
00:46:49.000
He goes, hey, I sold the book to Martin Scorsese.
00:46:54.000
So you're allowed to talk to each other by yelling?
00:47:01.000
Well, technically you're not supposed to talk to each other, but yelling, no one's going to say anything about that.
00:47:10.000
You violate your probation, they put you back in jail.
00:47:15.000
That's so crazy that someone who you're trying to rehabilitate with, you can't talk to them because they also fucked up.
00:47:22.000
There was a Nixon speechwriter that was in with me, and he was so innocent.
00:47:26.000
The government was trying to get stuff on Imelda Marcos, the Philippines.
00:47:33.000
And this lawyer that I was in there was a speechwriter, a Reagan speechwriter.
00:47:49.000
Being a straight guy he was, he went home and took a Valium to help him sleep.
00:47:53.000
And he got drug tested the next day and went back in jail.
00:48:01.000
So you got to be very careful when you're dealing with probation people because they got you by the balls, man.
00:48:06.000
It's got to be a weird thing dealing with the probation officers because they have that power over you.
00:48:15.000
And I had a lot of nice ladies and so I'd flirt with them.
00:48:30.000
The sad thing about when I was in jail in Taft was that it's built over a toxic waste dump.
00:48:39.000
That's where they found oil in Taft, in California.
00:48:43.000
And when they found oil back in the day, they never had a way to contain it.
00:48:47.000
They would just dig it and hit it, and they would just spill all over the ground.
00:48:51.000
And so they would dig big trenches out there, big pools, and they would fill up with oil.
00:48:57.000
Then they would get the barrels and dip the barrels in, and that's how they filled up the oil barrels.
00:49:03.000
And so after they figured out how to do it, the ground is all toxic.
00:49:10.000
And so they built a federal prison over top of it.
00:49:14.000
And so everybody that's worked there and a lot of people that did time there all got cancer and died.
00:49:21.000
So you think that's probably the root of your cancer?
00:49:28.000
And they say that marijuana does something to cancer, right?
00:49:36.000
I think what it does, more than anything, it calms the brain.
00:49:40.000
See, anytime you calm the brain, you lose the fear.
00:49:52.000
And when you calm that down, your body just goes into relaxation mode.
00:49:57.000
And when you're in the fight or flight mode, the other parts of your body can't function properly, like your immune system.
00:50:06.000
But when you're in a total relaxed mode, that's why when an animal gets hurt, they usually just crawl off in a corner somewhere and just lay there and lick their wounds.
00:50:14.000
And they just calm everything down and then they let the body take over the heel.
00:50:19.000
And I think what happens with pot is that it mellows the brain to the point where you, eh, so what?
00:50:54.000
And then just flour, you know, you smoke up a couple of joints.
00:51:15.000
That's probably as high as I've ever been in my life.
00:51:24.000
When I spoke with Arnold, Dave Draper, all these muscle heads would come around, and they'd get a big bong, and the thing was they'd put like an ounce in the bowl, and then they'd fire it up, and then they'd suck on it so hard,
00:51:48.000
All the muscle heads, they're taking their hit.
00:52:09.000
What was it like being famous for being a pothead back in the 70s?
00:53:05.000
See, it was before, what do you call it, sopers or...
00:53:26.000
When a girl gets high on a quaalude, it's like, take me.
00:53:30.000
Do you think that's why Bill Cosby was dosing those girls with quaaludes?
00:53:40.000
And that's what plot does for me now, but it does for women.
00:53:45.000
Women love to sleep with it, and they love to have sex after smoking joint.
00:53:56.000
Do you have to get high every time you make love with me?
00:54:02.000
And I think everybody in the movie company said, yeah, I can dig it.
00:54:10.000
Yeah, it definitely changes the way things feel.
00:54:21.000
I like to smoke weed right before I go to yoga class.
00:54:27.000
The tiny ones and the ones connected to weird spots.
00:54:48.000
I've been given all sorts of toys, you know, because I got the Chong's Choice weed in the stores and that.
00:55:07.000
Whatever it was, six years ago, last time you were on the show?
00:55:26.000
It's so cool because you open the thing and it's got a lighter built in and there's just enough, the bowl holds enough for a little nug.
00:55:35.000
Put the nug in there and you can carry it in your pocket because there's a lid.
00:55:39.000
And then when you want to hit it, you just hit the lighter and you got to hit it.
00:55:47.000
It has like a little metal lid that slides over to the side.
00:56:14.000
See, from the bowl to the mouthpiece, the whole thing is dimpled inside.
00:56:36.000
I'll cough just thinking about it, but you do the genius pipe and it's just so cool.
00:56:42.000
Do you get, all these kids are dabbing and using wax and I watch, do you ever go to Cypress Hills Instagram page?
00:56:48.000
I get fucking, I get anxiety just watching their videos.
00:56:59.000
And you're watching the video and you're like, oh my god, I can't do this.
00:57:12.000
They're heating up glass and dropping the THC into the glass.
00:57:15.000
I was at one dispensary, and the guy was so proud.
00:57:19.000
He handed me a big jar of shatter, you know, the dab stuff.
00:57:35.000
Yeah, it was probably a lot of money for that stuff.
00:57:45.000
You know, in Canada, we had to deal with hash a lot.
00:57:50.000
And it's okay, but it's a little bit too harsh.
00:58:07.000
The chocolate I got you is what my wife and I both use.
00:58:14.000
We'll wake up in the middle of the night instead of, you know, fussing and fighting or, you know...
00:58:21.000
Thinking about it, we just go and get a little chocolate thing.
00:58:28.000
It's de Fonsi chocolate, and it's the best thing.
00:58:33.000
Not only I slept last night, but I had a couple of epiphanies that just blew my mind.
00:58:52.000
And what happens when you have big, huge art pieces like that, you create employment.
00:59:02.000
And so the people that care for the animals, the people that have to feed, the mass of people that have to work on getting those rocks, carving those rocks and everything else, it creates employment.
00:59:18.000
And so when you have a piece of art, everybody wants to come and look at it.
00:59:23.000
And so that's what we need in the world today, you see.
00:59:27.000
And we not only need art, but we need functional art.
00:59:33.000
And a lot of people think it was the astronauts.
00:59:47.000
Well, because there's nothing new in the universe, you know.
01:00:01.000
Probably somewhere in the world or somewhere in the universe.
01:00:13.000
What makes you think that aliens built the pyramids, though?
01:00:21.000
Because if they're wearing space suits, if they're aliens, why do they need a space suit unless they come from another atmosphere?
01:00:30.000
I personally believe that Earth is the only planet in this universe.
01:00:36.000
And the reason I believe that is that there are countless universes.
01:00:41.000
And so if space is endless, why wouldn't we have our own universe?
01:00:48.000
So you think that Earth is the only planet in this universe?
01:00:57.000
The only planet with life in this whole universe?
01:01:01.000
So you think that there's multiple universes, or infinite numbers of universes, and each universe probably has an Earth.
01:01:10.000
But you think this whole universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of solar systems.
01:01:20.000
So you mean by one planet, one planet with life.
01:01:25.000
But why wouldn't you think that there's, because it's so big, why wouldn't you think there could possibly be other life other places?
01:01:40.000
See, that's why I have trouble with people that are afraid of AI, you know, artificial intelligence.
01:01:52.000
They're smart enough to know that they're not going to enslave anybody or torture anybody or take over anything.
01:02:02.000
Because when you capture something, you know what you capture?
01:02:13.000
Well, the people are just destroying the earth.
01:02:21.000
The artificial life is going to be like, you know what?
01:02:34.000
Well, first of all, you have to remember, we live in a physical universe.
01:02:45.000
Nothing explains Trump more than for every Obama, there's a Trump.
01:02:52.000
So there's no limit to how ignorant you can be, and there's no limit to how smart you can be.
01:03:00.000
And so when you go up the scale to intelligence scale, then you realize that there's no reason to be paranoid about anything.
01:03:12.000
Because it's all written out, and all the holy books have written it out, especially the Bible.
01:03:18.000
See, the Bible has been misconstrued by so many people, because what they do, they take it to what's going to suit their purposes.
01:03:27.000
But to really interpret the Bible, it's written in code.
01:03:49.000
Does he decipher the ancient Hebrew version of the Bible, or the Greek version of the Bible, Latin version of the Bible?
01:03:56.000
Right, but I mean, it all comes from ancient Hebrew.
01:03:59.000
And when you translate things from ancient Hebrew, you know, ancient Hebrew, the letters also double as numbers.
01:04:05.000
And see, with the people I read, there's another mystic that I read a lot.
01:04:22.000
I discovered him a long time ago, but I discovered him in jail.
01:04:37.000
Because what he maintains, it's all written, like I say, in the Bible.
01:04:51.000
Because if there's no beginning to no end, what can happen will happen.
01:05:07.000
In the physical world, we have to learn everything.
01:05:13.000
Like the first thing when you're born, you have to learn how to breathe.
01:05:21.000
These are all skills that you have to literally learn.
01:05:27.000
And then when you reach a certain age, You leave the planet, at least your spirit.
01:05:39.000
And so, because of eternity, this goes on and on and on and on forever.
01:05:52.000
We're all students, whether we want to be or not.
01:05:55.000
I was trying to explain this to my one son, because my youngest son is a musician, and I try to understand that he's a musician.
01:06:08.000
Musicians aren't that entrepreneurial, as some people would like them to be.
01:06:16.000
But anyway, everybody's here to learn a certain task.
01:06:21.000
And some of us are blessed to the point, like me, I'm blessed.
01:06:27.000
Because I've been given the ability to do what I do and to see what I see and to say what I say, you know.
01:06:38.000
It comes from, you know, the source, what I call the source.
01:06:43.000
And that's why I could turn prison into a religious retreat.
01:06:49.000
Because it's like a monk going into hiatus for nine months.
01:06:55.000
You just had a thought in your head that you're going to treat it like a religious retreat.
01:07:00.000
And you learn about yourself and educate yourself.
01:07:07.000
When you get a chance to be alone, man, that's a very important time.
01:07:11.000
Because that's when you connect with your spiritual teacher.
01:07:16.000
It must have felt so good to be released, though.
01:07:26.000
I never looked as good as when I got released, man.
01:07:31.000
Because one of the inmates there, he was a barber.
01:07:40.000
I come out, my wife, Shelby, looked at me, whoa, that's the best haircut you've ever had.
01:07:55.000
There's a track and you can walk miles around the track.
01:07:58.000
And the whole prison's out there walking around.
01:08:01.000
That's when you socialize and talk and everything else to people.
01:08:13.000
I had a little area where I had my own private studio.
01:08:34.000
And even then, if you wanted to leave, I'm going, why would you want to leave?
01:08:39.000
So you think that's why people go back to jail?
01:08:51.000
And he was a junkie, and he knew that as soon as he hit the street, he was going to die, you know?
01:09:02.000
They had a little game that when they opened the dormitory, the first few people to hit the mess hall got to order eggs any way they wanted, like over easy or sunny side up, whatever.
01:09:18.000
He'd be the first guy in line, and he'd be kind of...
01:09:32.000
But when he got released, he took his own life.
01:09:44.000
So he just couldn't help himself once he got out.
01:09:46.000
Well, see, you know, everybody's worried about socialism.
01:09:49.000
Well, America's the biggest socialist country in the world.
01:09:53.000
Yeah, we've got more people in jail than anywhere else in the world.
01:10:00.000
You're fed, you're clothed, you're told what to wear, you're allowed to study certain things.
01:10:13.000
There were prisoners that would go to jail so they could get their open heart surgery.
01:10:17.000
Because the federal law mandates that if you have something wrong with you, they have to fix it.
01:10:22.000
And so there were prisoners that would break the law so they could get in to get their open heart surgery.
01:10:32.000
I'm going to go to jail so I can get open-heart surgery.
01:10:39.000
Was there anything that was like, could you order whatever you wanted?
01:10:59.000
Because people on the outside would dose them with the acid, LSD, and ship the books in there.
01:11:06.000
And then next thing you know, half a dorm would be tripping on acid.
01:11:10.000
Because they were eating pieces of the subscription paper?
01:11:16.000
But as far as, no, you could read whatever you wanted, basically, you know.
01:11:21.000
But I read a lot of books that, you know, I was meaning to read, you know.
01:11:41.000
Well, supposedly it's some sort of like future reading thing, right?
01:11:59.000
And you throw the three coins and you get numbers from six to nine.
01:12:07.000
And anything in between six, seven, six, eight...
01:12:14.000
Anyway, each number tells you what line you're going to read.
01:12:19.000
And you throw it three times and you write down and then you get a sort of like a plan of what page you're supposed to look at.
01:12:31.000
Then it tells you, you know, but you're asking it.
01:12:35.000
Because you've got to ask the I Ching for something, you know.
01:12:43.000
For instance, I threw mine, when I did it, I threw it, and the first line said, you are in jail for a reason.
01:13:07.000
And so I read it, because they still talk about chariots and kings and queens and everything.
01:13:14.000
That was the first line, you are in jail for a reason.
01:13:17.000
Jails are corrective institutions that will correct your behavior.
01:13:29.000
The girls that wrote it, they updated it to the modern time.
01:13:44.000
And another guy, Mike, this Chicano, he saw me.
01:13:58.000
And it's very polite not to read the readings of the other guy.
01:14:05.000
And so I did the numbers, and I give it to him.
01:14:09.000
And he read it, and he just handed me the book, and he went, sat on his bunk.
01:14:22.000
And a month before, he lost his wife and child in a car accident.
01:14:33.000
And the I Ching said, you suffered a great misfortune.
01:14:45.000
And the I Ching goes on to tell you what to do.
01:15:02.000
He's really into the I Ching and he thought it was some sort of a map of time.
01:15:05.000
He was trying to Figure out what it was and how it worked and why I can predict things.
01:15:15.000
Like the Ouija board, you know, sometimes if you do the Ouija board, it's the same thing.
01:15:20.000
If you start making it a game, you know, let's ask it this, let's ask it that.
01:15:26.000
And right away, the I Ching catches that and knows your real feelings and it tells you.
01:15:41.000
I think what it is, it's a spiritual way of communicating this.
01:15:46.000
Remember in Ghost, where Patrick Swayze had to learn how to move a coin?
01:15:56.000
The spirits, especially spiritual people, they're around us.
01:16:02.000
And so you give them a chance to communicate with you because they know all.
01:16:10.000
And so the I Ching gives the spirits a chance to communicate.
01:16:13.000
So when you throw a coin, they know what heads or tails or whatever it is, number, that you need to talk to you.
01:16:29.000
Yeah, I'm curious because I do know that many people have used it to try to figure out what their life is about, what they're doing with their life.
01:16:37.000
The weirdest thing about it is they seem to find some real answers in it.
01:16:44.000
Yeah, but the idea that I had heard that made the most sense was that The way the world works is not as simple and as easy as 1 plus 1 equals 2, left, right, left, right, walk down the road, but that there's intention and thought that also helps formulate our universe.
01:17:03.000
And what the I Ching does is it somehow clarifies intention and thought, and it clarifies your actual...
01:17:14.000
The actual process is going on in your mind, and it quantifies it and puts it into a way that you can read your effect on life and life's effect on you in this, and then it reads it somehow or another, even though it doesn't make any sense.
01:17:33.000
Yeah, it's a method of communicating with the spirit world.
01:17:38.000
And the thing is, getting back to the AI, the artificial intelligence, we already use artificial intelligence in our lives every day.
01:18:12.000
Everybody in the universe wants us, the spirits, they want us to be enlightened.
01:18:18.000
Because the more enlightened we are, the more we can enjoy what we've inherited.
01:18:26.000
Because when you're born into this world, you've inherited a kingdom.
01:18:39.000
This is the greatest time, the greatest, most fortunate.
01:18:52.000
And so when you're ready, boom, you're pushed out in front.
01:18:56.000
And so our duty as students is to learn everything we can learn and to teach whatever we can teach.
01:19:07.000
And that's why there should be no paranoia because we're not here long enough So that being rich or being poor makes any kind of a difference.
01:19:19.000
Because you know yourself, I mean, what do you really need in this life?
01:19:31.000
Yeah, and something interesting that you like to do.
01:19:34.000
Yeah, because I've been hanging with billionaires now.
01:19:41.000
They like me because I get recognized everywhere I go.
01:19:53.000
You can get into restaurants and people and give me pictures.
01:20:04.000
They're hard-working, very, you know, like a lot of burdens being rich.
01:20:14.000
And, you know, just with me, you know, it's like instead of owning a boat, I'd rather know a guy that owns a boat.
01:20:23.000
Definitely you don't have to deal with any of the maintenance costs.
01:20:33.000
Yeah, that's the reality of, I mean, if you want to have a big, giant, crazy business, you're going to have a lot of employees, you're going to have a lot of problems you have to deal with.
01:20:46.000
Everybody else forgets what they're doing as soon as they walk out that door.
01:20:55.000
I had two nightclubs at one time, but I never bothered with the money part at all.
01:21:00.000
I just worried about the stage and the mic was working.
01:21:13.000
Well, one was an after hours, sort of like a jazz dance bottle club.
01:21:22.000
There again, you know, hey, Tommy, you want a club?
01:21:30.000
And back in the day, there was a steakhouse in the basement.
01:21:44.000
Most people that own buildings don't be giving them away.
01:21:53.000
Just because they want to get someone in the building.
01:21:57.000
See, as soon as we started being successful, we were paying $500 a month rent.
01:22:07.000
And that's where I got the bands, you know, that's where I honed my skills as a musician and singer and all that.
01:22:15.000
And then I got offered another club because it was going under and it was a dine and dance club in Chinatown.
01:22:29.000
The Shanghai Junk turned it into a strip club, Vancouver's first strip club.
01:22:34.000
You were the proprietor of Vancouver's first ever strip club?
01:23:04.000
Well, I got fired from Motown because I had to get a green card and nobody at Motown knew what a green card was.
01:23:12.000
And so I had to miss a gig to get my green card.
01:23:29.000
And so then I came out to LA and tried to live on the beach and be a songwriter.
01:23:36.000
But then my clubs were calling me because they needed help.
01:23:39.000
So I went back and I turned the strip club into an improvisational club.
01:23:52.000
Once I turned them into actresses, they were a lot cheaper, and they were a lot more beautiful.
01:23:58.000
They talked, they did skits, and then they would take off their clothes when they had to.
01:24:09.000
Because we had a straight guy, and the straight guy's wife found out what he was doing, and hauled him away.
01:24:16.000
And then Cheech came on board as a straight guy.
01:24:24.000
Yeah, he was up there in case a Viet Cong attack from Alaska.
01:24:39.000
And then he had to sneak back into L.A. from Canada.
01:24:47.000
He just showed someone else's ID, and they said, all right, go on.
01:24:54.000
So that's why I'm saying I'm so blessed, you know, because everything, the universe, you know, and it was from the I Ching.
01:25:03.000
One of the guitar players turned me on to the I Ching back then, and my reading was perfection.
01:25:16.000
And then Cheech and Chong and all that stuff happened.
01:25:35.000
When you say 08, it's like, oh, it just happened.
01:26:28.000
This is the way we looked when we went over there.
01:26:31.000
And we come back, long hair, everybody wore different clothes.
01:26:37.000
Now, when you went from this to comedy, how did you make that leap?
01:26:52.000
I was a guitar player, so I had nothing to say other than I owned the club.
01:27:08.000
I had hired, when I turned the strip club into an improvisation club, I hired the act we already had, which was a black tap dancer named Taps Harris.
01:27:20.000
And Jeannie, a black singer, and they had a band.
01:27:24.000
The first skit was about a pajama party that all the strippers were having at their house after.
01:27:33.000
And so they all change into their pajamas in their little nighties.
01:27:39.000
And then Taps comes by after the show, you know, so-called.
01:27:45.000
And they say, hey Taps, do that number that you did on the show.
01:27:48.000
And so Taps, first time he ever tap danced, you know, in front of a live audience.
01:27:53.000
Because usually he was just an MC. So he did his tap dance.
01:27:57.000
And it was so good that everybody wanted to encore.
01:28:11.000
And so the doorman, an English guy named Dave, and so I said, Dave, I need an emcee, you know.
01:28:27.000
And so we started, we had long hair, we were like hippies.
01:28:31.000
And so we did a lot of hippies and TNA jokes, you know, tits and ass jokes.
01:28:59.000
They're all bikers, mostly bikers, you know, come to a strip bar, you know, bikers and that.
01:29:03.000
And so the first act, we had it, because when we turned it into a theater company, we attracted all the theater people, all the performers, you know, there's a stage, oh boy, we'll go work there.
01:29:18.000
And so we opened the show with a mime artist and Gay playing classical guitar.
01:29:24.000
Now this is a strip joint and all the hardened bikers are sitting around waiting for naked girls to come out and here comes a mime artist.
01:29:33.000
Pretending he's picking flowers and smelling them and prancing around the stage.
01:29:51.000
And then Dave would come out, and Dave's a very funny-looking guy.
01:29:59.000
And he'd come out, and he sings this horrible song.
01:30:09.000
And then just when the bikers are getting ready to revolt, I kicked the door open.
01:30:16.000
We had doors in the back, you know, and I kicked the door open and I'm shirtless, my hair's messed up, and I got a rolled up newspaper.
01:30:24.000
And I walk over to Dave, I go, what kind of fucking song is that?
01:30:49.000
Wow, what a weird world it must have been back then.
01:31:10.000
And that's the mime artist, Ian, the mime artist.
01:31:34.000
And when did you start doing albums with Cheech?
01:31:42.000
Well, we came to L.A. in 70, and we struggled with all the places we could work.
01:31:50.000
Then we started being a regular at the Troubadour.
01:31:58.000
Hootenanny is when folk singers would get on stage and sing a song.
01:32:14.000
In fact, the troubadour would phone us up and say, are you guys coming?
01:32:20.000
And how did it turn into this weed-based comedy?
01:32:23.000
Well, it was the only thing that worked in this audience.
01:32:27.000
See, when we were at City Works, it was all T&A, you know.
01:32:31.000
But when we got down here, we had to go right for the stoners because that was what was going on, you know.
01:32:37.000
And so we played a club in Reseda, Irma Hotel, that was what it was called.
01:32:48.000
He saw us work somewhere and so he hired us for two nights.
01:32:52.000
And the first night, First night, we had to do two shows, but it was a dance club.
01:32:59.000
And so the dancers had to stop dancing, sit down and watch us do a show.
01:33:06.000
So the first show didn't go very well because we were doing TNA stuff and it just didn't go over.
01:33:12.000
And so the second show, Cheech and I got together and I said, Cheech, come on, man, you're from here.
01:33:21.000
And the night before that, we were standing outside and this lowrider pulls up and he goes, hey man, tell me how to get to Reseda Boulevard.
01:33:41.000
And then I showed him the car bit, this old black comedian showed me, Sir Pineapple.
01:33:48.000
He showed me this old taking a girl out on a date, and he'd just make the car appear by pretending to wash it, wax, you know, just do the mime, and the car would appear, and then Cheech got in the car, and he's driving, and then he goes, Hey, Red Freak,
01:34:04.000
And then I would come out, and we'd do our skits, and And it went over really well.
01:34:10.000
As soon as we started doing, you know, weed and pills and stuff like that, everybody related.
01:34:17.000
So you feel like you had that, and then you just ran with it?
01:34:22.000
And then we just improved, improved, improved, improved.
01:34:24.000
And so when we met Lou Adler saw us, And we never thought about doing a record until we went to meet in his office.
01:34:40.000
Because when I got high the first time, the guy gave me a joint and a Lenny Bruce record.
01:34:54.000
And so then when we started doing it, the first bit we did was an accident.
01:34:59.000
Cheech got locked outside the mix-down room that we were in La Brea, you know, the old Charlie Chaplin studio.
01:35:06.000
And it was a little courtyard where the sun was beating down.
01:35:12.000
And Cheech is a method actor and he had to put on all the costumes, you know, to get into character.
01:35:18.000
So he's got all these costumes on, he knocks on the door, and I was working the tape recorder, and when he knocked, I looked up at the door, and I didn't see if the needle moved or not.
01:35:30.000
And so when he knocked, it didn't answer, and then he knocked again, and I saw the needle moved.
01:35:38.000
And I was supposed to just open the door and let him in.
01:35:50.000
Yeah, so I waited, then he knocked again in a long pause, the pause.
01:36:09.000
And then finally he goes, it's me, Dave, man, Dave!
01:36:40.000
And then how long after that did you start doing movies?
01:36:45.000
78. We started doing the movies because I got tired of going to Australia.
01:36:54.000
Did you get accused, like, you guys are a bad influence on the youth?
01:37:09.000
What really, I noticed anyway, it was the comedy establishment, the committee and the Second City and all those guys.
01:37:25.000
Because Belushi was young enough that he heard our records and it influenced him.
01:37:39.000
But Howard Hessman, he was one of the committee members, you know, WKRP in Cincinnati.
01:37:48.000
He was a big, and I got influenced by him big time.
01:37:54.000
Because I saw them doing the committee in San Francisco, and they had a top-notch improv group there, and they were incredible.
01:38:02.000
And that's where I got the inspiration to go up and turn the strip club into an improvisational club, because I love improv.
01:38:13.000
We took what they were doing and took it out of that snotty theater, you know, I'm so evolved theatrically, you know, who does records, you know, that kind of thing.
01:38:31.000
Well, they ended up trying to do a record, but they had no clue.
01:38:40.000
I've been playing black clubs as long as I can remember.
01:38:44.000
And so I've seen a lot of humor, a lot of stand-up comics.
01:38:54.000
Did you ever hear those Richard Pryor tapes from the Red Fox Comedy Club?
01:39:08.000
When Cheech and I did the Comedy Store after Up and Smoke, We broke up with Lou.
01:39:16.000
We had a hit movie, no money, nothing coming in.
01:39:28.000
Although I wrote it and directed most of it, especially the ending.
01:39:36.000
Like again, like I said before, I'm not into the money part of it.
01:39:43.000
Well, we weren't getting any money from our life because we had to stop touring because of the movie.
01:39:52.000
And then we got paid a little bit on the movie, but nothing compared to what we were making on the road.
01:40:09.000
I mean, we got dribs and drabs at the end of the accounting time.
01:40:16.000
Yeah, at the end of the period of, you know, when you've gone on to something else and you get a check, oh, that's nice.
01:40:25.000
So Cheech and I went to the comedy store to get our act together.
01:40:36.000
Paula Shore was a little guy up in the light booth watching us because he was too young to be in the crowd.
01:40:43.000
And as we walked off the stage the first night, Richard held out his hand.
01:41:06.000
You've got to get them to come in and read us the I Ching.
01:41:19.000
Hey, listen, if I can follow instructions, anybody can follow instructions.
01:41:24.000
Well, listen, brother, it was a pleasure having you on.
01:41:37.000
Because we are so elite as far as the testing and the purity of the product that it's very rare that certain dispensaries have it.