Comedian and writer Matt Lauer joins Jemele to discuss his new book, How to Fall in Love with a Comedian, and how to deal with the insecurities that come with being in love with someone you ve been with for a long time. They also talk about what it s like to be in a relationship with someone who s a narcissist, and why it s so hard to be a romantic partner when you re not drunk. Plus, they talk about how they met, how they first met, and how they started dating. And they discuss how they talk to each other in public, and the awkwardness that comes with it. And, of course, there s a little bit of awkwardness at the end of the episode, where they try to figure out if they should get a picture with the other person they re dating and if it s a good or bad thing. This episode was produced by Riley Bray and Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Music by Jeff Kaale. Artwork by Mark Phillips. We are a project of Native Creative Podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you re listening to this podcast, and tell us what you think about it in the comments section. We ll be looking out there! Thank you so much for all the love and support we can be heard on the next episode of Thank you! - The We'll be looking for more of your feedback. - Thank you for all your support and support us in the future episodes of Thank You! -- we really appreciate it. We really appreciate the love & support us. -- Thank you, Cheers! Cheers, Jen and Joe - P.S. Matt, Matt, Gorms, P. xoxo, Alex, R.A. XOXO, JUICY, EJ, JB, M.M. & K.B. & A.C. & J.J. ( ) (A. (M. (R.A) ) (S. (AJ) (C. (J. B. (P. M. )
00:01:27.000Like, I feel like so many other comedians that I admire and I at least have had some FaceTime with and you I only sort of started knowing in the last year.
00:01:34.000Yeah, well, we met Matt at the Laugh Factory.
00:02:57.000But when someone comes up to me at the airport and is like, hi, Whitney, I instantly, sometimes I have to say that I'm like, I just feel like I cannot give you what you need right now.
00:03:06.000What you need from me, I can't give you.
00:03:09.000I can take a picture with you, but I can't.
00:03:11.000Have a conversation with you about your life.
00:03:12.000There's no way you're going to walk away from this exchange feeling good about this.
00:04:39.000I promise you, I promise you, I will bet you, you have a lot more money than me, so maybe we shouldn't do this, I will bet you any amount of money that you'll watch it in two days.
00:07:51.000If I'm not getting attention, that must be something's wrong with me.
00:07:54.000So I need to work harder, be prettier, thinner, more successful, achieve more, you know, which I think is where a lot of my achievements are.
00:08:01.000And you did it to try to get your parents to pay attention to you?
00:08:05.000I think as a kid, that's when it started, is if I'm just perfect, I'll get this attention from these people who weren't capable of giving it to me.
00:08:11.000And then it sort of started manifesting in other ways as an adult.
00:08:18.000Yeah, I was definitely neglected as a child but I think that I sought it out from other people, not necessarily from my parents.
00:08:26.000Well, that's what I, you know, and similarly, which is I think why I had, and I'm in Al-Anon, so I'm in recovery for this, but people-pleasing.
00:08:35.000Al-Anon is like, if you had any kind of alcoholism in your home growing up, which is not necessarily like, I did have an alcoholic parent, and I have a drug addict sibling, but alcoholism, You know, for alcoholism to be present, alcohol doesn't necessarily need to be present,
00:08:51.000so it can still be signified by compulsive behavior, workaholism, a codependent relationship, an addictive relationship among your parents, gambling, sex, food, all that sort of stuff.
00:09:11.000Al-Anon is more for, like, if you're married to an alcoholic, if you have a kid who's an alcoholic, like, because addiction is a family disease, and it affects everybody.
00:11:38.000Because then they start resenting you for supporting them and sort of robbing them of their own dignity.
00:11:43.000And then if you have any kind of boundaries, they're all of a sudden like, oh, well, just because you give me money, you think you can talk to me that way?
00:11:50.000And it's like, well, no, I'm just like, have self-respect.
00:11:54.000It seems to me that the people that need money always need money.
00:11:58.000Like, when you give them money, it's not really helping them.
00:13:11.000And now I still have to work hard to sort of pay for all these other things, which I think maybe in some ways keeping me, you know, motivated because I'm never going to get ahead.
00:16:18.000I just feel like, as a woman, you're already, anything you do, people want to call you crazy.
00:16:24.000And even if you just talk sanely at a little too high of a decimal level, and people are so quick to call us crazy anyway that I don't want to actually be crazy.
00:26:31.000Here's the thing about this nebulous wealth that I have.
00:26:36.000Everyone thinks I have way more than I have, and it's been in the press that I have all this money, so I think guys that do have more money than me think I have more money than them, which I sort of...
00:27:05.000And if you date someone who likes weird shit, and then you go to someone else, and you're like, I know what girls like.
00:27:11.000I've had that recently, where I was in a relationship that was relatively sexually perverse, and then dated someone who was very not, and I was way overshot the mark.
00:31:06.000Yeah, I want someone who's more alpha than me.
00:31:08.000You don't want, like, a male feminist who's, like, catering to you, who's, like, a beta, who wants to take care of the kids, who doesn't want to work, who wants to stay home.
00:32:34.000Because I don't want anyone to think I'm paying.
00:32:36.000Because I did date a guy that did not have money and I would wire him money.
00:32:41.000and so that he would pay him when we basically so that when we went out to dinner he'd pay so that people didn't think i was paying yeah that was a mistake i'm not gonna do that again that was like a week ago Hashtag Tony Hensler.
00:33:32.000I have not done stand-up since I shot my special.
00:33:35.000I tried to take, like, I try to take like three months off after every special because I feel like, number one, I don't like doing old material because I feel like I have, like I just feel like gross.
00:33:45.000And then number two, I feel like I start doing a bad impression of myself if I do it, if I don't take a break and rewire my brain and kind of reboot.
00:35:29.000People have flown in from other countries and driven to Bisbee, Arizona to come to Doug Stanhope's house, and they come into his living room and hang out with him.
00:35:37.000He's got a girlfriend, Bingo, who's legitimately out of her fucking mind crazy, like medicated, sees things that aren't there.
00:37:52.000I guess Super Bowl wasn't happening until February.
00:37:54.000It was a football party, a Monday night football party.
00:37:57.000Well, the only reason I know is because the guy that owns it was explaining to me that the knee surgeries made his knees better than they were before the injury.
00:38:08.000My knees are definitely better than they were before my surgery.
00:38:16.000Well, I have one they did the older way, which is a patella tendon graft, where they take a big slice out of your patella tendon, and then they open you up like a fish, and then they drill it into the knee, the tibia and the fibula.
00:38:29.000And that one's definitely stronger than a regular ACL. And then my other one I had replaced with a cadaver ACL, which is even stronger because they use an Achilles tendon, which is much larger.
00:39:22.000I was going to get shoulder surgery, because I had a labrum tear and a rotator cuff tear, and there's some, apparently I've dislocated my shoulder before in jujitsu.
00:41:47.000It's a shirt that, it's probably a compression shirt, but it has velcro on the top and the bottom and they adjust it so that it changes the way that you walk and stuff.
00:42:58.000Well this guy, this doctor, they are literally months away from releasing this new procedure that they have that reinvigorates collagen in your skin.
00:43:09.000Like changes your body's production of collagen.
00:43:12.000They have some sort of an injection and through that injection your body reproduces collagen like it did when you were 20. Wow!
00:43:19.000Yeah, people's face is just gonna go, like wrinkles are just gonna go away.
00:43:23.000They're like, this is a fucking complete total game changer.
00:43:28.000Well, they're setting up the infrastructure right now just to deal with the amount of patience, the overwhelming amount of patience they're gonna get as soon as this happens.
00:43:34.000It's gonna be like a trillion dollar business once it launches.
00:45:58.000I used to have, I get really bad migraines, and when we were trying to figure out what it was, like playing whack-a-mole with how to eliminate certain variables, they did cortisone in my sinuses, and that made me breathe so much better.
00:47:33.000And then I had to, because of, you know more about this than anyone, if I heard this thing, it affects the left, and then it affects my hips, because it's all connected.
00:47:42.000So I started sort of having to do my whole body, and that's when I got an S. Really?
00:48:45.000You know, that happened to my mastiff.
00:48:48.000Huge with dogs, especially purebred dogs.
00:48:50.000Yeah, my Mastiff, he was getting some limping issues, and it was when he was a puppy, and they were saying that he has too much protein in his food.
00:49:57.000I mean, I'm sure we'll look back in 20 years and there'll be so much new technology and we're like, I can't believe we lived in a day where we didn't have the stem cell injectors at our home or whatever.
00:50:57.000So when you're drinking milk, you're drinking milk with no enzymes in it because it's all boiled down so you can keep it on a shelf for a year.
00:51:03.000Yeah, even overcooking vegetables, you're not really getting the...
00:51:45.000And that almost sometimes the worst thing you can get at the grocery store is just an apple because of all the shit in it and chemicals on it and the dyes and whatever.
00:52:22.000Okay, drink it out of a flask like an adult.
00:52:25.000How would you feel if you went to a date with a guy and you went to a fancy restaurant and he pulled out, he had a bag with him, like a velvet bag.
00:55:27.000So the woman was talking about the word bossy, and about how women are told to not be bossy, like if a man does it, he's assertive, but if a woman does it, he's bossy.
00:55:37.000It was the first time that I ever heard that, that I thought, ooh, maybe there's something to that.
00:55:43.000No one's ever going to say, Joe Rogan's bossy.
00:56:06.000They can say to the guy, he's a dick, or he's overbearing, or whatever, but a woman becomes bossy.
00:56:12.000But then she was going on about, we should encourage men to not work, and take the role of child-rearing, and let the women work, and I was like, okay, this bitch is crazy.
00:56:25.000I think it was her own trip that she was trying to make it more normal for men to do that, to be the one who takes care of the children, and we should encourage this.
00:56:36.000I don't think you should encourage it one way or the other.
00:56:39.000I think there's going to be a bunch of people that like that.
00:57:36.000I instead have, you know, people, TED Talk people and, you know, Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Moran or anthropologists and neurologists come in and sort of explain what's happening because I think a lot of us sort of are pretending or are Misinformed thinking that we have choices in all of the decisions we make when so much of it is our primal reptilian brain just running the show and human nature taking over.
00:59:16.000Does it mean the female lion's doing the hunting?
00:59:19.000The male lion is pretty much the boss.
00:59:21.000They call the shots and are bigger, but they have to sleep most of the time to To preserve their energy and it's not economical for them to be up and running around.
00:59:30.000Bonobo apes, the women sort of call the shots in terms of who kills who and who's in charge and they're sort of like have the resources and stuff and because they're a gynocracy Is that what it's called?
00:59:41.000They use their vaginas to, you know, like if someone's pissed off, they fuck them.
01:00:04.000So we were talking about that and he sort of was making a strong argument that humans could have inherent matriarchal traits that we, you know, Oppress.
01:00:19.000Yeah, just in terms of like, you know, if, you know, what does power mean?
01:00:23.000And, you know, men are sort of designed to do the hunting and the killing and the protecting, and we're sort of designed to do all the organizing and all of the, like, bullshit work, but we're not sort of allowed to do that a lot in this society.
01:00:44.000I think that we're criticized a lot when we do what we do best at.
01:00:51.000We're called crazy and neurotic and obsessive and she's obsessed with getting married and nesting in the house and she wants to change the carpet.
01:00:58.000It's like that's what we're wired very well to do.
01:01:01.000Well, I think the reason why men will criticize that is because they don't understand those instincts.
01:01:05.000Like, my wife takes care of everything.
01:01:08.000She's the one who's responsible for all the...
01:01:10.000If you go to my house, you'd be like, oh, this isn't even your fucking house.
01:01:27.000And I think what I should mention is I think that women are shamed for that more than men shaming women.
01:01:31.000I think that there's this thing now where if you're, like, great at organizing the house and cooking and cleaning, like, you're not a feminist.
01:02:06.000It's like, wait a second, I thought the goal was that we were supposed to be superior, which means that we should equally be judged and criticized and all these other things.
01:02:13.000It can't be like, I'm going to speak out, but you're not allowed to attack me or question anything I say.
01:02:19.000If you question anything I say, it's like, no...
01:02:22.000So I think that is a very tricky place.
01:02:24.000And I'm working on this thing that's sort of about how our primal neurology, like what annoys you about your wife today, not you particularly, Joe, or what annoys you about your boyfriend today is what kept you alive 2,000 years ago.
01:02:38.000So essentially all the things that annoy your girl going through your cell phone today.
01:02:43.0002,000 years ago was her surveying land for tigers and threats.
01:02:47.000You know, today it just manifests in going through your cell phone.
01:03:03.000We're not just going to evolve overnight to catch up with cell phones and streetlights.
01:03:06.000Well, there's just so many classic stereotypes when it comes to gender roles.
01:03:12.000And one of my favorites is the feminist that's always concerned with rape and they constantly have all these rape tweets and rape awareness.
01:03:21.000And then you look at them and they're morbidly obese and they have pink hair.
01:03:25.000And you're like, well, what's going on here?
01:03:26.000Why is your entire existence, so much of your thoughts, whatever you're projecting online, so much of it is about gender.
01:03:52.000And it's so loaded, and it's the few radical ones give everyone a bad name.
01:03:59.000It's like, does every football player beat up his girlfriend?
01:04:02.000No, Ray Rice did, so now it's in the zeitgeist.
01:04:05.000Well, I had this woman, Christina Summers, on my podcast a couple weeks ago, and she calls herself the factual feminist, and she's an older woman who grew up as a feminist in a time where she believes that it had a different meaning, and it was a Yeah.
01:04:47.000So these are disingenuous comparisons, and these statistics are biased.
01:04:51.000Agreed, and I think that, you know, I talked to, Maureen Dowd wrote this article two weekends ago in the New York Times about less women in Hollywood and less women directors and all that kind of stuff.
01:05:00.000And I think that my sort of point, and she's a friend of mine and we're working on something together, but I think my point when people ask me about, like, what do you think about less women directors in Hollywood, I'm like, no one's talking about all the offers we get that we pass on.
01:05:23.000So it's like, I've been offered direct movies and I'm directing a movie next year, but I've said no because it's just not something that I really want to do.
01:07:27.000And a lot of men, they're not going to match that.
01:07:30.000You know, and sometimes when you see, like, when people, like, if they hate, like, if they hate on someone, like, there's a lot of people that hate on, like, Kevin Hart or someone like that.
01:08:08.000And I heard a quote a long time ago that stuck with me, which is that comparison is the worst form of violence against yourself.
01:08:14.000And it's one that I know you're probably not a big quote, like inspirational quote person, but that's one that I stick to whenever I get stuck in the heat.
01:08:20.000She's got this and I don't and she did this and I didn't and I'm falling behind and all that sort of.
01:08:24.000That's a good way to look at it because instead you should look at it like fuel.
01:08:28.000That uncomfortable feeling that you get when you see someone kicking ass.
01:08:58.000I mean, it's tricky because I feel like when I hear the word ambitious, maybe it's to your point about the word bossy and the disruptive leadership thing, I feel like when we say a woman is ambitious, there's this weird stink on that word.
01:09:11.000It makes me recoil a tiny bit because it makes...
01:10:54.000But I think that, you know, for the first time, and I'm curious when you know you're good, because no comedian comes off stage and is like, Crust it!
01:11:56.000So it's so hard to like and also you're so close to it because you're chipping away at it and the only way to be good is to be like constantly introspective and constantly objective and constantly analytical and it's fucking brutal.
01:12:10.000I just know that if, I know that this last one I taped, on tape night, I still kind of giggled at some of the, I still cared, I still gave a shit about what I was talking about, I wasn't phoning it in, I wasn't wrote just saying something I had said 600 times,
01:12:26.000I still felt this sense of like, I'm saying something I care about, which to me is all I can ask for.
01:13:20.000What I do next depends on what you just did, and it does become a very hypnotic, symphonic thing.
01:13:26.000Well, that's why hecklers don't realize what a fucking disaster they are, like how they're fucking things up because you're fucking up the rhythm of the interaction.
01:13:35.000Like all of a sudden you have reared your ugly head and now everything has to focus on you and the whole trance has been transformed.
01:14:25.000I feel like there's shame, and maybe this is just like a high school attitude, but in comedy there's still that, you know, the person that gets an F is cool.
01:14:32.000Like the person who tries the least is the coolest.
01:14:34.000Oh wow, that's so weird that you think that way.
01:17:40.000And if I don't write them down, I'll forget them.
01:17:41.000And I just, I was always, you know, people always, not people always, but whenever people say I'm smart, I get so confused because I got smart because I was not smart enough.
01:17:52.000I was always in the kid in class asking a million questions and taking a million notes.
01:17:55.000Like, I worked so hard to overcompensate for the fact that I wasn't smart that that's how I... I think smart's a loaded word, too.
01:18:01.000It's a very vague, nebulous, it's a nothing word.
01:19:02.000Well, it's like when people, you know, and not to demystify sort of what we do or pull the current back too much, when people are like, you're so good with hecklers.
01:19:08.000It's like, well, there's no heckler I haven't encountered.
01:19:16.000And they think it's the first time I've ever heard it.
01:19:18.000And I'm like, okay, do you really want to do it?
01:19:20.000Comedian club comics, there's nothing we haven't encountered.
01:19:23.000Well, especially if you work the store, because there's no crowd control.
01:19:26.000Like, you know, like, I've had, there's like so many videos online of me dealing with hackers, and people are like, well, how do you get so good at that?
01:19:33.000And you can't even see them, because what people don't understand the comedy store is the way Mitzi lit it, is you, you're blinded by the light, and you, they're completely anonymous.
01:19:41.000You can't even go, hey, fucking V-neck, because you don't know what anyone's wearing, because you see a black mask.
01:19:45.000Well, there's also this thing that's going on in Hollywood that's very different than anywhere else, where there's a bunch of people that they're not fulfilled.
01:19:53.000Like, if you come to Pasadena and you do a set in Pasadena, like, a lot of those people are not actors.
01:20:51.000There's some hecklers that are good-natured, and sometimes you encounter people that are just trying to have fun, and those people aren't nearly as shitty as the ones you'll encounter that are just rude.
01:21:02.000I am so desperate, and I'm interested in your thought on this, I am so desperate to figure out how to be present, because I can't do it.
01:21:09.000It doesn't come natural to me to be present in the moment.
01:21:22.000I'm now doing this meditation practice that's based on John Bowlby's theory of attachment, which is to try to rewire your neural pathways in terms of how we attach to people.
01:21:32.000And when you grow up in a chaotic environment, your amygdala doesn't develop...
01:21:36.000The pathways to, I think, is it hippocampus?
01:21:42.000That calms your brain down because you're on such high alert as a kid.
01:21:46.000I developed an adrenaline addiction so early on that it's so hard for me to calm myself down, which is something I want to mention about smoking.
01:21:52.000A doctor told me that, not that I was going to, but was saying something about smoking is...
01:21:59.000The inhaling of smoking, because when you smoke, you take 10 deep breaths, let's say.
01:22:04.000If you take 10 deep breaths without a cigarette, that's going to calm you down.
01:22:07.000So sometimes the placebo of smoking is just the inhaling, which I thought was interesting.
01:24:50.000The most basic shit, I was like not, I used to look like, okay, so I'm looking at you now.
01:24:55.000I used to just look here for eye contact and someone, like I'm looking at the right side of your head.
01:25:00.000This guy who worked with Rob Anderson finally one day was like, do you know that you're looking at, like he was like self-conscious about like his hairline.
01:27:10.000It's all about how the human evolution of the brain was largely expedited once we started eating bone marrow because humans couldn't kill their own food in the beginning, so they would rely on eating the leftovers of wolves and lions and shit, and what was left over was always the bones and the shit that They didn't eat,
01:27:28.000so they started eating the marrow, and then their brains started growing exponentially, and then they were able to start developing tools and hunt their own food.
01:27:35.000Then they started eating meat again, because they hunted their own food, stopped eating the bones and what they thought was the leftover trash, and then sort of plateaued.
01:27:43.000It's so fascinating when you think about human beings, because what I've read is that human beings have been in this shape, as far as we know, for roughly 200 plus thousand years, but we've only been talking for 70. Wow.
01:27:57.000So, like, our ability to communicate was only established about 70,000 years ago.
01:28:04.000So for the first 130-plus thousand years, there was no talking.
01:28:39.000There's all these theories about maybe it was the consumption of more protein, but then the problem with that theory is, well, what about mountain lions?
01:28:47.000How come they don't have giant fucking brains?
01:28:48.000What about, you know, what about bears?
01:28:50.000Why don't they have the biggest brains?
01:28:52.000Then there's the other theories that we developed the throwing arm and that our throwing arm, the ability to throw at something and hit it, it led us to these problem-solving skills, all these different, because we figured out, oh, I can develop a tool now.
01:29:05.000I can develop a weapon, but that doesn't make any sense either.
01:29:08.000The most fascinating one is Terence McKenna's, because Terence McKenna's has a theory called the stoned ape theory, and his is based on psilocybin, and he believes that, and the crazy thing about this theory is it coincides with climate change.
01:29:22.000Because two million years ago, the rainforests, the climate had shifted, rainforests receded into grasslands, and he thinks that these primates came down from trees and started experimenting with different food sources.
01:29:34.000And one of the things, these undulate animals, cows and the like, they would shit, and then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow on cow patties.
01:29:40.000Well, they would flip over these cow patties looking for bugs and worms, because they were always underneath there to eat, but they also had these mushrooms that were growing on the cow patties, and a lot of them were psilocybin mushrooms.
01:29:51.000And that the psilocybin mushrooms, which were incredibly common in this area, when you eat them in low doses, they increase visual acuity.
01:30:00.000So that would make a better hunter and more likely to breed.
01:30:03.000And then in high doses, they have these transcendent psychedelic experiences, and they would allow them to think out of the box, be more creative, come up with the idea.
01:30:13.000Develop your right side of your brain, yeah.
01:30:15.000Also, psilocybin has been known to regenerate neurons.
01:30:18.000There's all these subjects they're doing right now about the properties of psilocybin.
01:32:25.000It's like a wellness place and they have a giant sensory deprivation tank where it's like two inches of water and you float in this black bowl.
01:32:35.000It should be a lot deeper than two inches.
01:36:28.000Because then I'm going, I'm being rejected on a minute-by-minute basis by someone who's choosing something else over me.
01:36:33.000So when you, the most tragic thing is when you see the new alcoholism, I think, is, is If kids with their parents, their parents are on their phone right next to them, completely checked out, but right next to them.
01:36:42.000So you're there, but you're not there.
01:37:13.000I hate to break it to you, but there'll be a lot of adversity, I would imagine, that you can't, you know, outside of your sanctuary of your home.
01:37:20.000But what I'm saying is they all came from fucked up houses.
01:37:23.000But this is all, but there's also no, you tell me, I feel like the last generation was just kind of a wash.
01:37:29.000Like, I don't know that many people who had, like, great childhoods just because, like, that generation of men, alcoholism was so rampant in the 50s.
01:37:36.000I mean, people don't think about the fact that, like, in the 20s, this country had to Outlawed drinking.
01:37:54.000What they did was they tried to control the population.
01:37:59.000And one of the ways they were going to control the population was outlawing drinking.
01:38:02.000They tried to put a shackle on people because they didn't want people going out in the streets and doing these things, but what they did is they empowered organized crime.
01:38:10.000And in doing that, what they did was they just made Al Capone rich, and they made all these people rich, and then, once they did that, then they tried to put a stop to other drugs so they can take these people that they used to enforce the alcohol laws, and they enforced other laws.
01:38:25.000Like, that's when marijuana became illegal.
01:38:27.000But all of it is just a control issue.
01:38:30.000In fact, the best way to keep people from drinking is to let people drink around them, see the disastrous effects, like, this is why you don't, like, you're in all these groups.
01:38:40.000You're in all these groups because you grew up with people that were fucked up.
01:38:43.000You know, I never touched coke, and one of the reasons why I never touched coke, because I grew up with cokeheads.
01:38:47.000I had cokeheads that were friends of my, one of my good friend's cousin was a cokehead, and I saw it from a bunch of people, and then I had a buddy who died from heroin.
01:38:56.000I've never even thought about trying heroin.
01:38:59.000And also when you tell people they can't do something, they want to do it more.
01:39:02.000So like in Europe, you know, I mean, there's a lot of alcoholism, but it's not like as bad as it is here because it's like, yeah, go for it.
01:39:08.000They drink at 14 and they've got it out of their system and they have nothing to prove and there's not like, you know, all this taboo around it.
01:39:15.000I think it was more of a control issue than it was anything.
01:39:18.000And it all coincided with World War I. And I think, you know, there was a bunch of people that wanted everyone to get back to work and make America strong.
01:41:37.000I was like 17 at the time, but she was telling me that this guy hit her and I was like fuck and she's like, you know, what's fucked up is I like it and I was like, okay, well context easy You don't want him to like hit you because you you know the thing in the dishwasher You want the light slap in bed.
01:42:50.000In the beginning when I started at the Comedy Store, I think we told this story on his podcast, or he mentioned it, which is that in the beginning when I got hazed so hard, you were not there to protect me because you had made your mass exodus from the Comedy Store.
01:43:04.000It was like him and like David Taylor and all these guys used to just fucking kill me.
01:43:10.000I mean, they would just make my life miserable because I was like, showed up in my backpack and like, you know, hoodie.
01:43:16.000And I was like, she was like, I'm going to make it as a comedian.
01:43:19.000And they were like, we're going to crush your soul.
01:43:43.000I instantly, I couldn't find it, started hysterically crying and made Tommy turn on the house lights in the OR, which have you ever even seen lights on in the OR? Yes, it's weird.
01:45:50.000You sort of like have stuff you have to talk about, and instead of like boring your friends at dinner with it, or you have a podcast, you have other outlets, I wait till I'm like, this is a gross word, but like constipated with like...
01:46:54.000My new obsession is to do, and I did my last one in Irvine, my new obsession is to go all around the country to tour, and then when you shoot your special, sleep in your own bed.
01:47:15.000I want it to feel like a club, 500 seats, gorgeous, looks like a spaceship.
01:47:19.000You know, because when you shoot in, you know, I loved the one you did in Denver, and I've been obsessed with shooting a special at Comedy Works in Denver.
01:47:52.000It's a good thing to keep you comfortable.
01:47:53.000See, your last special, the Denver one, you talked about Denver and weed and that got into legalization of weed and all that kind of stuff.
01:47:59.000But it's like, for me, it's like, I don't think most people give a shit where you shoot it unless you make it a cornerstone of what you're doing.
01:48:06.000So it's like, I'm going to go all the way to Chicago to shoot it.
01:48:08.000No one cares that I've schlepped all the way to Chicago, you know?
01:49:52.000These stand-up specials are so fascinating to me because it's like we get so good at something that's incredibly hard that's very much thought of as one of the hardest things you can do.
01:50:00.000I mean, how many people can get up on a stage and make a crowd laugh for an hour?
01:52:22.000I do believe in kind of things that not always my ideas are the best ideas and maybe other people know more than I do, especially people who've been doing comedy for 30 years.
01:52:54.000And you've got muscle memory, and all of a sudden I'm fighting it, but anything that throws a curveball at me while I'm performing, I welcome because it keeps me present.
01:53:02.000Well, especially something that throws a curveball at you while you're doing a special.
01:54:01.000I mean, that's the benefit of HBO is they have a little more money, but that was helpful to me because the first show was just working out the kinks with the camera guys so that, you know, you do a great performance and, God forbid, they don't even catch it.
01:54:24.000And one of the reasons why it's kind of flat is he did one show in a theater in London, and it was for HBO. So it's like this one, ready, go.
01:54:37.000I think a lot of the reason people think multicams suck is that it's like filming a play.
01:54:41.000Being there, stand-up is meant to be live.
01:54:44.000If you're watching it on Netflix or if you're watching it on HBO, you're getting it in its second iteration.
01:54:49.000It's always going to lose 40% of the magic.
01:54:51.000I mean, you go see Joe Rogan at the fucking Comedy Works, you're dying at every joke, clapping, fucking slapping your knee, going crazy, and then you watch it, and you're laughing out loud, but it's just a different...
01:55:04.000You're not in the flesh in front of me.
01:55:06.000Yeah, you're not caught up in the trance.
01:57:15.000Like, a lot of women want to be assertive and powerful, and they just want to feel confident, and they look at you, you're on stage, you're talking about sex, and you're talking about all this crazy shit, and you're saying it in a funny way, and people are laughing, and you have your assertion, and the way you're enunciating is all this clear,
01:58:47.000I sometimes at night smoke weed and start plucking my eyebrows and then I wake up the next morning and they're just half the size and I'm just like, fuck!
02:00:15.000Well, you know, you would be a good striker.
02:00:16.000Because it's one of the things that when you're teaching martial arts, one of the things that I would teach people back when I used to teach, is you've got to think about you're using your bones.
02:02:19.000It's like the straw that breaks the camel's back.
02:02:20.000And I had to drive to Vegas, and this was a long time ago, and I was in my car driving.
02:02:25.000I remember I couldn't turn around and look behind me, so when I had to look behind me, I'd literally have to turn my whole body like this to look behind me.
02:04:02.000And I also am like at this place, and I don't know where you are on this, I'm like on self-improvement overwhelm.
02:04:07.000So it's like, by the time I do all the things I need to do to improve myself, it's like 4.30.
02:04:13.000By the time you go to like therapy and work out and meditate and yoga, it's like I don't even have time to, it's a full-time job to try to take care of yourself.
02:04:21.000It's definitely a full-time job if you do it right, and that's why it's really hard for people that have full-time jobs to take care of themselves.
02:04:33.000If you're a full-time job and you have a family, and God forbid you're behind on your bills, so then you have to work overtime or pick up a second job, and fucking Christ.
02:05:09.000Um, she, um, her whole thing is that you, um, you're basically, your body's a blueprint to everything that ever happened to you.
02:05:14.000And as a kid, all the trauma and emotions that you repressed are like held in your muscles.
02:05:18.000And because of our bodies react faster than our brains, is that true to something?
02:05:23.000That if as a kid, if I was abused and I used to do this, I'm flinching for those of you listening, uh, as an adult, if I flinch at something, all of a sudden it's going to signal my hippocampus.
02:05:35.000The amygdala tells my hippocampus something bad is happening, even if it's not.
02:06:10.000I learned that crying is a weakness, and you're not allowed to cry, and if you do cry, you're going to attract attention of dangerous people who are just going to make things worse, so just pretend like everything's fine.
02:06:21.000Well, I think that whatever crying is, this overwhelming emotion, that is also like horsepower.
02:06:28.000That overwhelming emotion when it's manifested itself or when it's manifested in a positive way or when you turn it on and use it in some way.
02:06:47.000I mean, even though it makes you feel uncomfortable because you're insecure, because you have this self-judging thing, what that is is you got a lot of fucking horsepower.
02:07:39.000There's some people that are just more.
02:07:41.000And I wonder if you're, and I'm interested in your take on this, is that I wonder if, because I was very nervous when I decided, okay, I'm going to heal my, I'm going to fix all these invisible wounds, I'm going to fix all this brokenness, of like, will I still be funny?
02:08:01.000When I was in my early 20s, there was always the concept that I would always chase as a martial artist, chase this concept of enlightenment, this unachievable goal of being in complete, total control of your mind, being present at all times, and being just absent of weakness.
02:08:21.000You get to this point where you're operating in this pure zen state in competition.
02:08:25.000That's what I chased all throughout my youth and all through my teenage years up until I started doing comedy.
02:08:32.000And then when I started doing comedy, I was at this weird place where I was like, I shouldn't try to meditate and I shouldn't try to calm myself because I should be kind of fucked up because that's all the great ones, like whether it was Pryor or Kinison, they were all fucked up.
02:09:23.000It's 2015 now because all the people that are addicted to pills.
02:09:26.000Anthony Bourdain did a show recently about Massachusetts, and one of the things that they were talking about in the Massachusetts show of his show...
02:09:40.000He was talking about these people, they were interviewing, because Anthony had a serious heroin problem when he was younger, and he was talking about all these people that became addicted to heroin because they got on pills, and it was so easy to get, and then they were prescribing them like fucking crazy.
02:09:56.000When I got my nose fixed, my doctor prescribed me two different opioids.
02:11:33.000Horrible environments, violence and crime.
02:11:35.000Constantly in fight mode and flight mode.
02:11:37.000When you're around violence all the time, your body just becomes engineered to handle that from the womb.
02:11:44.000Yes, and I found that I, and this is sort of what half of what I'm in recovery for, is that I found that I felt very comfortable in dangerous situations and in completely benign situations felt fear.
02:11:55.000Do you think that's because in dangerous situations, it's like the circumstances are already laid out.
02:12:23.000Hyper-vigilant, you know, and because in my home growing up, silence meant it's the calm before the storm.
02:12:31.000If things were calm, it meant someone's about to come home drunk, shit's about to hit the fan, so it's very hard for me to relax, which is probably why yoga is hard for me, because it's like, when's the other shoe gonna drop?
02:12:44.000PTSD is a huge problem with soldiers, but I talked to a lot of guys that were Special Forces guys, like Special Ops, whether Rangers or Green Berets or Navy SEALs.
02:12:54.000They don't have nearly as much of a problem because they're the antagonists.
02:13:17.000I would also be fascinated in the Special Forces.
02:13:19.000A couple things that interest me about them is that, number one, the ones that have the most PTSD and depression when they come home are the ones that didn't kill anyone because they feel guilt and shame.
02:13:34.000I dated a guy who was really into SEALs and made a movie about Navy SEALs and stuff.
02:13:39.000And then, so they probably, because they're, again, like the perpetrators, like you said, And I would imagine, I'm curious if it's chicken or an egg, the guys that end up being Navy SEALs, if they're, I don't want to say sociopathic, that's being extreme, but like if they became SEALs because they have less,
02:14:51.000You've been around more athletes than I have, but what I... Having dated a couple athletes, there's this disconnect, this lack of empathy and, dare I say, narcissism that I don't know must work for them.
02:15:04.000In order to become an elite athlete, I would imagine you have to have a healthy level of narcissism and ego.
02:15:09.000I think there's probably something in that.
02:15:11.000I think ego and athletes, it's so hand-in-hand, especially with pro athletes.
02:15:18.000It's so hand-in-hand that you've got to think, man, there's got to be some sort of a connection there.
02:15:22.000You have to be delusional on some level, don't you?
02:15:30.000The best fighters almost have sort of a zen ability to block all that bullshit out.
02:15:36.000They have a belief in themselves, But they have a zen ability to block all that shit out, and that's why they're some of the most friendly people.
02:15:42.000Some of the best fighters are some of the nicest people.
02:15:45.000Anderson Silva is one of the fucking nicest guys you'll ever meet.
02:16:27.000At all because negativity breeds negativity and paranoia and he doesn't even want to strengthen the part of your brain that even goes there.
02:16:32.000You know what fucks with a lot of fighters?
02:16:48.000Most of them against, because they're dealing with their own fears constantly, so they don't want more.
02:16:52.000Like, what you are and who you are is in some ways defined by what you believe.
02:16:59.000And if you are insecure and then that insecurity gets reinforced by other people calling you a loser, you know, that guy fucking chokes, I'm a choker, shit!
02:17:07.000You know, and then you get in there and you're like, fuck, am I a choker?
02:17:09.000And that's in your head, yeah, and it's strength in a neural pathway.
02:18:49.000I go places, and sometimes I go places, like I'll be in my car, I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna fucking drive somewhere I've never been before, and just get out of my car.
02:21:24.000There's not that much of a difference in the effect.
02:21:27.000There's differences, but both of them have very similar creative enhancing effects, at least to me.
02:21:34.000I'm convinced that everybody has a different reaction to it, because I've explained my reaction to marijuana to other people, and they're like, what?
02:23:02.000It was a whole staff I was working with, so it was like 30 people texting me, you're not going home with John Mayer, we're not going to let you go home.
02:24:14.000Sometimes I'm about to go in the tank, like sometimes I'll get high, and I'm thinking I'm going to go in the isolation tank, and then I decide to just start writing, and I can't stop.
02:24:44.000You're chipping away at the rock and occasionally you find gold in there.
02:24:48.000And then something I think Johnny Carson said is that B jokes that we would never do on stage that we write that are like B jokes that don't deserve to be on stage said extemporaneously are A jokes.
02:24:59.000So you just have this arsenal now of if there's a heckler, like some joke that I wrote that never would make it to stage, if I just do it, quote, seemingly off the cuff, it's all of a sudden an A-joke.
02:25:14.000And then sometimes jokes are like seeds and they give birth to a new idea.
02:25:18.000Like maybe it'll be just a tagline or a new branch that you follow and that new branch will be better than the original premise in the first place.
02:26:43.000But yeah, I feel I don't like that there's a lot of these new sexual things that make me feel bad.
02:26:48.000And guys watch so much porn and become so desensitized that all of a sudden if I can't squirt water across the room, I'm not good at fucking.
02:27:38.000And so, no, I think that a lot of guys, I'm obviously generalizing, but a lot of guys in Hollywood just sort of like dated, married Asian women.
02:31:07.000So if you have some sort of thing and you're eating as a child to deal with trauma and something bad's happening and then you're releasing dopamine in your brain and it's associating with something negative.
02:33:24.000Well, in a way, but you're enabling more productivity because you're sort of farming out all these tasks.
02:33:34.000But I feel like, for me personally, I value alone time and I value thinking.
02:33:40.000And the only way to do that is to not have obligations.
02:33:45.000You have to have less people that you have to communicate with.
02:33:48.000It's just more people you have to call back.
02:33:49.000But I think for me, I'm so easily distracted and my perfectionism begets procrastination, which begets paralysis.
02:34:00.000So if I'm going to go to the grocery store, it's going to take me three hours.
02:34:04.000If I'm going, and this, and what about this, and this has gluten, and blah, blah, blah.
02:34:08.000If someone else goes, it takes an hour.
02:34:10.000If I go, it's like, and then I'm in this, and then I'm getting a lavender oil, and then this fucking salt, Himalayan salt, fucking light.
02:34:16.000See, I put on the headphones, I listen to a podcast, I put my phone in my pocket, I push the cart around, I smile at people, I throw the vegetables in my cart.