Comedian Tom Papa joins Jemele to discuss his new stand-up special, The Sultan of Sourdough, which premieres Friday on Epix. They also talk about his time in Cleveland, his love for the Cleveland sports teams, and how he got his start in comedy.
00:03:46.000There's a confidence that you have in delivering it that's different than you just pushing it out there.
00:03:50.000But you can't, the way that people digest everything now, you can't wait five years.
00:03:55.000Yeah, isn't that the issue, is that you have a bunch of Tom Papa fans, and they would like to come see you again, but they want to see new shit.
00:04:02.000You know, if you go to see the Rolling Stones, you want to hear Sympathy for the Devil, even though they wrote it in 1967, you know?
00:04:07.000I know, but, you know, I go back and forth on that, because...
00:04:11.000I'm sure you've had it, where you're in shows and you're at the end of your set or whatever and people start yelling out old bits that they want to see.
00:06:15.000Yeah, but those wormy type of fans, although they're not the happiest, nicest people in the world, they do keep you motivated and in check.
00:08:45.000But there is definitely that side that, you know, I came up during an era when you didn't just make an album because you could record it on your phone.
00:10:00.000He'd be at the Comedy Magic Club with his printed out sheets memorizing, like a play, like memorizing all this material to then take it out.
00:10:11.000You can put that together in a year, but it doesn't have the seasoning, the confidence, the ins and outs that if you just toured with that for three years...
00:10:23.000Tours is a big thing, too, man, because when I do a theater, if I do a theater on a weekend, like, say, if I do Friday night at a theater or Saturday night at a theater, there's a giant difference between doing that and doing, like, a weekend at the Comedy Works in Denver where you're doing four shows, two shows Friday,
00:10:48.000That first one, you're, yeah, okay, I'm doing it, you know, people are having a good time, but eh, Saturday, you're just, you're like, you could just kick back and just, there's this natural zone that you can be in that you don't have the, you just don't have the confidence.
00:11:04.000You know, you have to be out there all the time.
00:11:06.000And I think that's the hard part, you know, Jay, back to Jay doing The Tonight Show.
00:11:33.000But he would disagree, because he said that Letterman was doing a six-minute monologue, and people were turning off and going to the commercial and going to the next thing.
00:11:43.000So he said, if I could keep it, if I could do twice that, people aren't changing.
00:11:48.000And he beat Letterman all the time from that segment of the show.
00:11:53.000The ratings were strong enough and he held on to them, this is just his business mind working, that he hung on to them and kept them in there, and that's why he was number one all this time.
00:12:56.000And he was doing it while he was doing the show.
00:12:58.000I don't know how much he did before he did his show, but then once he did his show, I would go places and they said, yeah, we had Craig Ferguson last night.
00:14:44.000So I would like to see it, see what that's about.
00:14:46.000But I always find it interesting when people just, they get some sort of a mainstream gig like that and they do it for a while and they go, oh, I'm done.
00:17:50.000Imagine if you get the Tonight Show, your lifelong dream, and then the guy you took it from, they tell you, he's going to go on before you because your ratings are so-so.
00:17:59.000We're going to put him on at 10 o'clock.
00:18:32.000And then they put tremendous pressure on you, and then...
00:18:36.000Advertisers don't want to spend money because the ratings aren't high enough, so you're bleeding revenue, and you have all these producers, and everyone's sketchy, and everyone has their own idea of how to juice it up, and then they have meetings.
00:18:48.000And what's so strange to me in that scenario when it was all going down, when he had his thing in New York, it was locked in, he had his fans, it was solid.
00:18:56.000And doing the same thing in a bigger studio across the country, it was different.
00:19:51.000It was really gross for the audience, because right behind Andy Richter would be someone holding a cue card, and behind Conan would be someone holding a cue card.
00:20:00.000And it had, like, Conan, Andy, and then the- No.
00:21:13.000Here's the thing that sucks the most about those shows, is that you have these six, seven-minute segments where you just sit down and you just kind of force a bunch of subjects into these...
00:21:24.000He had Burr on the other day, and in one thing, there was this really awkward segue.
00:21:30.000What about the NFL? I know the NFL bothers you.
00:22:28.000How he took more than a decade off of show business, but the entire time he was writing jokes, but he was selling aluminum siding and shit.
00:22:36.000Yeah, didn't he keep the jokes in a briefcase or something?
00:22:38.000I don't know, but he just kept writing.
00:22:39.000So when he came back and started doing stand-up again, which I believe was in his 40s, Yeah, it was in his 40s.
00:25:15.000And then he was also getting drunk, you know.
00:25:18.000Before the second show and he did the second show and brought the t-shirt out at the end and there was like no response because he was so drunk he forgot to do the hacky bit to sell his t-shirt.
00:25:31.000I saw that and I was like, I don't care how much money is making him sell these shirts, I am not going down that road.
00:25:37.000That's a big thing though for road guys is merch.
00:26:40.000He records his set, and then he has a guy, his opener, when he's done, goodnight everybody, the opener comes up and does another ten minutes.
00:26:49.000While on this disc drive, they burn all of these little, what do they call them?
00:27:48.000If you're sensitive about your work and you get through the set and you put everything you had into it and you think they had a good time...
00:27:56.000Let's not judge each other for another time on the way out of the building.
00:28:03.000Let's not make it, oh, now he wants me to buy a shirt from him.
00:28:06.000Yeah, would it be nice to just say hi to people, too, and not have to take a photograph?
00:28:10.000I understand that people want to take photographs, and I'm happy to take them, but it's like that moment then becomes this pose instead of like, hey, what's up?
00:29:53.000But someone told me the history of deciding respect, that it was based on some movie that was famous at the time, like maybe even a mob movie.
00:33:02.000Those little jammed up original room at the Comedy Store rooms.
00:33:06.000People don't realize that energy is such a real, real thing.
00:33:11.000It is a real, given back and forth, you're riding this, it's not a mystical, it's a real, I'm getting from them, I'm giving it back, we're playing with this energy.
00:33:23.000That's why if you do an outdoor show, it sucks, because it's just poof!
00:33:27.000It's just evaporating, it's going up like smoke.
00:35:12.000Chris Rock had this bit about cops, and this guy just fucking interrupted, and then Chris was joking around with him at first, and then the guy interrupted again.
00:36:07.000Like, Chris Rock's premises are always, like, he's a master at taking a controversial premise, taking a controversial point of view, and then bringing it around when, at the end of it, you're just howling, laughing, because he's figured out a way to, like, he's right!
00:38:19.000Could you go live in, let's just pick New York, this is not a city question, but let's pick New York.
00:38:26.000Could you go live down by Washington Square Park in a studio apartment, have your act, have your fans, go do your thing, and kind of be okay with a low bank account?
00:38:35.000Or are you at an age now and you've had stability, do you feel like that would freak you out?
00:38:42.000Well, it would definitely freak you out if you all of a sudden...
00:38:46.000One of the things that I've sort of relied on is not needing anything.
00:39:18.000Look, if you have a car and you can get around, if you've got food on the table and your family's taken care of, everything else is kind of bullshit.
00:40:15.000If I lived in an apartment building, and Ari Shaffir lived next door, and Duncan lived down the hallway, and Joey was over the other side, I'd have a great time.
00:40:23.000If we all lived on the same floor or in the same building, I would have zero problem with that.
00:40:27.000If they knocked on the door, hey man, you got any weed?
00:40:43.000I bring it up because I was thinking about it, and it's like, if it all fell apart, you grab on...
00:40:50.000To your lifestyle and what you're doing so hard.
00:40:53.000But if it all, for whatever reason, washed away, and you could still go perform, and you still had your friends at this club you could go see, I could totally do it.
00:41:03.000I could totally go back to, I have clothes that fit in this big of a closet, and just keep doing what I'm doing, but in those circumstances, 100%.
00:41:15.000In some ways, I think you'd be lighter.
00:41:20.000A lot of people do believe that, and a lot of people do go towards that minimalism life where they give up everything.
00:41:26.000My friend Steve Maxwell, he's a world-renowned fitness trainer, strength and conditioning coach for a lot of pro athletes, a lot of fighters.
00:41:39.000He used to have a big house, and he had a gym in Philadelphia.
00:41:43.000He's one of the very first American Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts, and he had this gigantic gym where he's teaching, and he's an interesting guy.
00:41:53.000And then he just decided, he got divorced, and he decided, you know what?
00:42:41.000Last time I was in here, I had this back issue where it was like shooting pain down my arm.
00:42:46.000Yeah, you had a cervical issue, right?
00:42:48.000Yeah, and I was going to this really great Cairo guy, I was doing cupping, I was doing all of this kind of stuff, and it was just making it worse.
00:43:29.000It's just basically about that you're carrying...
00:43:31.000Your brain wants to go to work on something simple, like pain in your body, rather than deal with issues of stress and anxiety and anger that you carry all the time.
00:43:41.000And basically, just realizing that that's where the pain is coming from, you don't have to solve the anxiety or the pain or the anger.
00:43:54.000It just kind of alleviates that stress and then the physical manifestation of not having oxygen go into your muscles and stuff starts to slowly release.
00:44:37.000Don't live in this preventative way of, I can't move or I'm going to mess up my body.
00:44:42.000So what does he tell you about like physical issues?
00:44:45.000Like what if you have a herniated disc and it's pressing against your nerve and it's causing your hands to go numb and your arms atrophying?
00:45:14.000Because people, they don't strengthen their spine enough, they don't strengthen their core enough, and they wind up doing something, they yank it, and they hurt it, and then they try to work around it, and they wind up re-aggravating it, and then it gets worse and worse.
00:45:26.000You're saying that a lot of times you'll have, like, your disc will be...
00:45:32.000Bulging a little bit or whatever these little imperfections are and we all have these imperfections in us.
00:45:38.000But when you are stressed and the muscles are tightening around you and becoming inflamed because you're carrying this stuff that you're not working through, everything's constricting around it so then it's going to aggravate that and that's going to become a bigger problem.
00:45:52.000I definitely think that's true in some cases.
00:45:57.000I had a conversation with a friend of mine about this.
00:47:59.000There's a weird way to bring this up, but how much of that, like having a wife and having kids, obviously there's going to be compromises and there's going to be stress that comes along with any sort of relationship, but do you feel like it was tipping more towards the negative than towards the positive?
00:50:57.000Every time the mail came for the first year that I owned a home, I thought it was going to be a notice saying, you've got to get out of there now.
00:51:13.000So that's what just brought me to the feeling of like, well, maybe just going back and living with my wife in that little studio apartment in New York again wouldn't be so bad.
00:51:46.000I mean, because it was a little self-aware moment because I do, like I said, I feel like I'm pretty carefree, but why the hell was my neck so...
00:51:57.000Well, I think that was something that resonated with Sarno's book, and I remember Howard Stern talking about it.
00:53:17.000I don't know what the real answer is, but in my head it's, the class is from 9 till 1030, and that's when I do my best writing, when the kids get out of the house and I can write in the morning.
00:54:01.000I think writing on stage, and I think there's a bunch of aspects that over the last few years, I like to think that I've kind of got my own way of doing it.
00:54:10.000Everybody's got a different way, obviously.
00:54:40.000Did you think of that or it just happened and you looked back like that was a good thing to do?
00:54:43.000I remember thinking somewhere along the line, God, I come up with a lot of great ideas for bits when I'm having fun with people.
00:54:49.000Like having fun with friends or even with people I don't even know.
00:54:54.000Occasionally you'll meet someone that's really cool and you enjoy talking to them and then you have these cool conversations.
00:54:59.000You see this perspective from a stranger that's interesting and they say something and then it fires something in your own brain.
00:55:06.000I think socializing is big and I think that's one of the reasons why really, really famous comedians hit a dead spot later in their career because their circle becomes very small because they only trust certain people and they kind of get anxiety about hanging out with regular folks and just going out there.
00:58:10.000This dude, he writes in the morning when he's supposed to be taking yoga, his neck's all fucked up and he doesn't know why, but he's a good guy and he's hilarious.
00:59:01.000I fucking, every time I'm on the road and I see someone weaving in and out of traffic, I see the light of their phone shining in their eyes and they're trying to text while they're driving.
00:59:55.000And then he doesn't call you or like you or there's a problem and you're waiting, you're checking your phone every two seconds to see the response.
01:01:05.000I didn't realize until this Pizzagate thing, which by the way, it's a very controversial what's fake and what's not fake about Pizzagate, because Pizzagate is connected to that John Podesta guy.
01:01:17.000Who is a very controversial character, who's still friends with that Dennis Hastert guy, who was the Speaker of the House, who's absolutely a pedophile.
01:01:28.000Absolutely a confirmed serial pedophile.
01:01:34.000So, the fact that that guy's friends with that.
01:01:36.000And then, also, Andrew Breitbart, apparently, in 2011, Made a tweet about Podesta being a guy who helps people who fuck kids.
01:01:50.000He made this crazy tweet about him in 2011, which five years later, after Breitbart is dead, it's very interesting to read that tweet and say, well, what did he know about Podesta before all this spirit cooking and all this craziness came out with the Hillary campaign?
01:02:44.000He had been fucking kids for years So anybody who doesn't think that it can reach you could be a pedophile and cover it up and reach high levels of government You are mistaken or it is possible Penn State football program exactly, but that guy obviously wasn't government But yeah,
01:03:01.000I mean he had a goddamn charity Yeah, a lot of people trust Sandusky would would work with young kids and take them on the road and fuck them and Ay yi yi.
01:03:28.000So some guy walked into that comet ping pong place...
01:03:33.000Yesterday with a loaded assault rifle and an AR and fucking shot around in the ground in the building, pointed a gun at the employee and demanded to know where the sex dungeons were.
01:04:13.000She said, you know, when we do papers at school...
01:04:17.000And my wife, who's in college now, when they do papers for school, they have to, because of the internet and because there's so much stuff, you have to provide the sources for where your information is coming from when you're writing these papers.
01:04:34.000You have to have a legitimate source attached to any of the facts that you're putting in there so that they know that you did the research and stuff.
01:04:42.000Point being, There will always be really legitimate news sources where you can cite that people agree that this is a place where it's been filtered.
01:04:56.000Well, not filtered, but it comes from a newsworthy source.
01:04:59.000You can't just spew stuff and just put, you know...
01:05:04.000Such and such website and have that pass in an academic setting.
01:05:20.000I think that legitimate studies and things that were done by legitimate researchers where they have peer-reviewed studies and everything's been vetted out, but news sources are so suspect now.
01:05:34.000What we saw from this past election, whether you support Trump or whether you support Hillary, support anybody, What I saw from this election is very little unbiased truth.
01:05:47.000What I saw was a lot of, whether it's pro-Hillary or anti-Hillary, pro-Trump or anti-Trump, I saw a lot of editorial Yeah.
01:06:16.000Point of view and perspective and thoughts on the burden that one carries by having a voice that it's imperative that they get out what they believe about certain candidates, especially with Trump.
01:06:28.000It could be slanted, but there still is did this thing happen or not happen?
01:07:06.000That was editorial influence on the fact of her being an old lady who fell down in 2012 and got brain damaged, cracked her head open, was literally, according to Bill Clinton, was convalescing for six months.
01:07:48.000This is not an unusual occurrence, I don't think.
01:07:52.000I think they did a real good job of covering it up, but there were so many media stories that were talking about the conspiracy theory of her being ill, or that there was so many people were latching on to her health, and obviously she showed in that debate that her health was fine.
01:10:17.000I think physical health is something that you should take into consideration when you have an unbelievably stressful job that looks like it drains you like a vampire sucking onto your neck.
01:10:26.000I couldn't believe both of them were still standing at the end.
01:11:40.000It's based on his past statements about marijuana not being for good people and also based on what he could potentially do as the Attorney General.
01:11:49.000However, Trump has said that he's going to leave it up to the states.
01:11:52.000I think that Trump is a populist, and I think that the last thing Trump wants is people, more people, especially the potheads, Rallying against him and saying this is preposterous.
01:12:03.000If you look at the actual fear that people have about marijuana versus the physical effects of marijuana versus the potential revenue gained by these states, look at what's happening in Colorado.
01:13:59.000It makes me feel super vulnerable, and it makes me feel really in tune with any weird distractions I might have in my psyche, any weird bumps in the night that are haunting the back of my brain.
01:14:12.000It just drags them out, like, get out here in the front!
01:14:15.000Pulls them in, put the spotlight on them, click!
01:15:23.000Like, anything that you're doing, you just try to do better.
01:15:26.000I don't always succeed, but there's a journey and a process along the way.
01:15:30.000And what I've found is the hard work is the best way for me to really judge my progress and all those things, because I'm forced to be alone with my thoughts and to be...
01:15:52.000When you sit alone with your thoughts and you think about everything you do and you can pick it apart and find problems with it, that's the hard work.
01:16:10.000You think, like, you've got the structure and you think you're being hard on yourself, and then you come in the back door and you're like, oh, maybe I'm a little hacky over here.
01:16:18.000Or you can take some of this and go through the fucking roof like an asteroid.
01:17:10.000It was funny coming out with my bag, like, filled with stuff, and not being afraid of the cops who just waved to me, but then the potheads who want it.
01:21:09.000And they asked him why he did it and what he said was he said essentially he started it out as like an exercise sort of to prove how gullible these alt-right folks could be and that some of them at least.
01:21:42.000No, you're going to just write fake stories now.
01:21:44.000So what you were saying earlier about us entering into an era where you can't really tell what's true or not true...
01:21:53.000That's why it's so imperative that someone like the Washington Post or like the New York Times cannot be biased in any way.
01:22:00.000You have to, as clearly as you can, emphasize the facts of every story.
01:22:06.000Even if you feel like you have an obligation to show how horrible a person President Trump is, just to let people know, this guy can't get in the office.
01:22:13.000As soon as you start doing that, you embolden the people who oppose you.
01:22:17.000It's very dangerous for ideas in general because it's so hard.
01:22:22.000I don't do it, but it's so hard for anybody to completely be unbiased and establish just the facts, even when they're disturbing and uncomfortable.
01:24:35.000That said, what if it was bullshit, and if it is bullshit, and this guy thought it was real, and he goes in and what if he shot somebody?
01:24:46.000At what point is there some sort of responsibility as a culture?
01:24:53.000If someone's inciting hate towards a very specific establishment that really hasn't done anything wrong, that's kind of a criminal act, right?
01:25:50.000A lot of scary, sketchy people that are in positions of power, and they have been forever, and they're starting to get exposed more than they ever have been before.
01:25:58.000So I don't know what the fuck the truth is.
01:26:35.000Well, it's what we were talking about earlier when we were saying about fake stories, that we're getting to this weird era where you can't tell whether or not a story is true or not.
01:26:58.000I think, now they're doing these things where they're able to transmit words from person to person through the internet, brain to brain.
01:27:07.000Like somehow or another, I can't, I'm not going to do a good job explaining it.
01:27:11.000But they've been able to essentially put a word in your head and then do it accurately from a long distance away through some sort of electrical impulse or something that they blast into your head.
01:27:22.000But right now it's like a word, a word.
01:27:27.000I think it's entirely possible within our lifetime that one day someone is gonna figure out how if you can do that if you could transmit something from brain to brain like that through the internet through some sort of an interface they're gonna figure out how to How to broadcast intention so instead of a language They're gonna figure out how to broadcast what the feeling is behind you thinking something.
01:27:53.000Like if I say, hey, Tom Papa has a comedy special on Epix this Friday night.
01:33:18.000He seems like one of those guys that just flies.
01:33:21.000I feel like he also, like, maybe, I think he's a little smarter than people give him credit for.
01:33:26.000And I think it's entirely possible that he might, in some sort of a weird, whether it's conscious or subconscious way, put himself in these horrible situations so he has funny shit to talk about.
01:34:57.000No, if I'm in trouble, the hardest part about being on the road is when do you eat?
01:35:02.000I really feel like the timing of when you eat and when you're going to perform and all that stuff.
01:35:06.000So if I get past the 4 o'clock, like if I eat late, early in the afternoon, and then I'm getting too close to the show, it's not enough for a meal, then I'll try and protein bar it to get me through the show.
01:35:18.000Something light that's, you know, I'm not going to be up there digesting.
01:35:22.000I remember Jim Carrey, there was in some interview...
01:35:26.000The guy who directed him in, like, Ace Ventura or something, they said, get all of his stuff before lunch, because once he eats, he's a different guy.
01:35:32.000Like, that hyper, hilarious Jim Carrey, you gotta get that in the morning, because once he starts eating, it's a different guy.
01:37:02.000And he changed his act right with Rodney.
01:37:04.000I think he was opening for Rodney and he was doing kind of straight stand-up and then said he wanted to go this new direction and start doing these characters and voices and impressions.
01:37:13.000And Rodney kind of encouraged him to go for it.
01:39:00.000Yeah, but I thought at the time that if I was moving toward enlightenment, like if I was meditating, the reason why I was meditating, like when I was competing, I would meditate because I would try to move towards a place of balance.
01:39:17.000But then as a comedian, I was like, you probably shouldn't be balanced.
01:39:21.000Because the funny shit comes from the people like Richard Pryor, who had all these problems and was kind of crazy.
01:42:36.000But then you get into it and you understand the physics behind these things, the cams and the fucking limbs that pull back on these compound bows and how it's all measured and weighed and balanced.
01:42:49.000And Hoyt has to come out with a brand new, better bow every year.
01:42:55.000These minor improvements of engineering, these things are getting faster and more powerful, and it's all about figuring out how to execute a shot correctly using your skeleton and holding everything perfect and not having any influence on the flight of the arrow.
01:43:19.000I think if there's nothing physically wrong with you, I think bow and arrow shooting, archery, is one of the more easy things on your body.
01:43:32.000Like in terms of like, you could be really good at it deep into your 40s or 50s.
01:43:37.000But what I love about, the reason I ask is the thing I love about this bread thing, what you're talking about with stand-up, it's kind of unknowable.
01:46:12.000If you want to get an elk or anything, it takes a lot of work.
01:46:15.000But I guess it takes a lot of work to learn how to bake bread, but it's a different kind of work.
01:46:20.000It's different, but there's all of this.
01:46:22.000I mean, there's a whole other level that I am not even close to of the pH balance, the humidity in the house, the temperature, all of this stuff.
01:46:44.000Literally, when I'm on the road, I'll go check out these bakeries and just go see what kind of bread they're making and see who's doing what in this town.
01:46:51.000And there's a place in Venice down by here.
01:52:54.000I mean, I think the problem, really, my just gut instinct is that when you're eating all this gluten with other stuff, there's so much other stuff added in there that's maybe interacting with the gluten that's giving you the problem.
01:55:52.000Boy, you know, you run into that thing where you say, well, if you want to have bread on the shelves in places where they're not growing any food, like, in order for it to be fresh enough for you to eat and not get sick, you gotta have some sort of preservatives in the bread.
01:56:08.000I just, like, would one, I would like to know, like, definitively, How much those preservatives have an effect on your health?
01:56:16.000Everybody assumes they're really bad for you, right?
01:56:19.000Don't you assume they're really bad for you?
01:56:29.000So if you have a loaf of bread and you put preservatives in it, it's stunting bacterial growth, which will eventually take over and your bread will get moldy, right?
01:56:40.000So you've got some sort of a poison on your bread that keeps it from being edible to bacteria.
01:56:45.000So instead of eating bread while it's fresh, when you're supposed to eat it, the only time you're supposed to eat it, you've got some chemicals pumped into it.
01:57:48.000I mean, how much is left, how much of the preservative is in the bread while your body's trying to break it down, where this gut flora is used to digesting organic material, now it's dealing with sodium, laurel, iconofucking, clastic, supercalifragilistice.
01:58:02.000And it's probably taking out some of the stuff that you need to fight off other stuff in your gut.
01:58:07.000That's why antibiotics are so bad for you.
01:58:09.000Not because they don't cure diseases, they definitely do, but because they also wreck your whole biome.
01:58:15.000Like, you have to take a bunch of probiotics and...
01:58:18.000To try and get your system back to operating.
01:58:20.000People have sometimes problems for quite a long time after operations because of the probiotics.
01:58:26.000The probiotics, which are important to keep you from getting infections, but they're not without a price.
01:58:31.000Like, your body pays a price for that.
01:58:33.000I mean, look, there's been times when you walk in and you're like, you had a bread, like an Italian bread that you bought just from the supermarket, and you're like, three days later, you're like, oh, this is probably, no, soft, I could eat that.
01:59:48.000And then you would do that with all your foods.
01:59:51.000Then you'd go to the fruit guy and get that.
01:59:53.000Then you'd get your meat from that guy.
01:59:54.000And it wasn't all meant to last forever.
01:59:59.000Yeah, you know, I think, when I think about the time, like we were talking about how hard it is to eat when you're on the road, and like, you know, when you're pressed for time, if you're running between obligations, you have all these different things you're doing.
02:00:50.000So while I got in, fed the starter to get the bread going, and now when I go home, and then I made it into dough this morning, it's rising now, I'll go back and bake this bread, and then they'll have bread for the week until I come back on Friday.
02:01:25.000What I was gonna get at, though, is that when you're on the road, and you're on the hustle, and you're doing so many different things, you don't have a chance to eat well, and you definitely don't have the chance to have a loaf of bread, and take some slices out of it, and then get another loaf in a couple of days.
02:02:16.000I mean, look, if I was the Tom Papa that started stand-up for the first week, and you showed me where I'm at now, I would think, oh, pure bliss.
02:06:44.000Yeah, well, it's the angle that he went on it.
02:06:47.000Look, if these guys got in a legitimate traffic altercation, and that legitimate traffic altercation was because one guy hit his blinker too late or cut in front of somebody or something like that, if you're a fucking human being with any decency...
02:07:28.000When people are being bombarded, when white guys in Ohio who are going out trying to work as a construction worker and that guy's got three kids and he was told White men are over.
02:08:10.000I'm saying it's a big thing, and that people, that guy who's being told that the jobs aren't for you, it's for these other people, that's what's coming.
02:08:19.000But you're sitting there with your wife and two kids, and you're like, alright, look, I get it.
02:08:23.000White guys had a good run, you're saying.
02:08:26.000But I got Christmas to pay for, and I got a good run.
02:08:30.000I think that's such an extreme perspective on it that white people are done.
02:08:34.000I think the big perspective, the much broader perspective on people that are trying to encourage diversity is that they feel like people have been discriminated against in the past.
02:08:51.000But you're going to have the extreme that go, white people suck, white people stand down, white people should shut the fuck up and let us talk now.
02:08:58.000But that's always going to be the case.
02:09:00.000You're always going to have fluctuations inside of a good idea.
02:10:28.000Or that means we're trying to call attention to one very specific race only.
02:10:34.000And even though I completely understand why they're doing it, I don't think there's anything wrong with Black Lives Matter.
02:10:39.000I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of it.
02:10:41.000But I think, I didn't have this reaction to it, but I know that some people probably did.
02:10:45.000They immediately go, yeah, what about what people?
02:10:48.000That's a fucking knee-jerker, and that might not have had to happen.
02:10:54.000I think sometimes ideas, the way they're displayed, sometimes people, they do it because it feels like the right thing to do at the time, or the right way to say it at the time.
02:11:04.000Anytime you're inviting any sort of anger or dispute, it feels like you want to do that to push back, but that shit is going to come back this way.
02:11:15.000But I think that a lot of what we see from this reaction to anything that's aggressively progressive is people, when they feel like they're pushed, they're like, you have to listen to the way we see the world.
02:11:32.000And then they want to go, the fuck I do.
02:11:34.000They want to push back and almost ramp up, double down on the racism, double down on their In trying to correct wrongs, it could come off as being aggressive and bullying to those people.
02:12:12.000When you look at the world today, we're all just human beings, but there's people that are living in parts of the world that must behave a way different way than we are allowed to behave, because they're entrapped in a religious ideology that dominates their community.
02:12:36.000It could be growing up a Mormon in Utah in a crazy fucking house filled with nutty Mormons.
02:12:41.000You know, there's a million different possibilities.
02:12:45.000The roll of the dice that you ended up there.
02:12:46.000But apparently people are just super flexible.
02:12:50.000Our behavior is really malleable and we're adaptable and we can fit into whether it's a horrible ideology like what happened What happened in World War II? What happened with the Nazis?
02:13:05.000They fell into a horrible way of living life.
02:13:12.000It's going on right now in North Korea.
02:13:14.000It's always a possibility for people to fit into these little, weird, little packages.
02:13:19.000So if you see someone that has a weird package of existence that you don't jive with, You gotta look at it like, what would you do if you were them?
02:13:29.000Like, if you had lived their life and now you're looking at this from their perspective.
02:13:33.000Don't look at it from your perspective.
02:13:35.000Try, if you can, to imagine what it would be like to look at it from theirs.
02:17:22.000And just heard what this guy was saying about women and just heard what he was saying about handicaps or whatever.
02:17:31.000Well, that handicap thing, did you know that that's...
02:17:35.000I'm not giving him an excuse, but I don't think he knew that that guy was handicapped.
02:17:39.000I think he was trying to mock someone who was dumb, and it turned out that the person he was mocking was handicapped, and that's what everybody read with him.
02:17:47.000I don't believe he had any knowledge of that beforehand.
02:17:50.000I'll give you that, but even if he didn't know it, to make that gesture and act like that guy is just dumb, like as a guy running for president, it was a bully.
02:17:59.000It was a bully-ish move, whether the guy's handicapped or not.
02:18:50.000Have you ever seen, like, the ice core samples of, like, what the Earth used to be like just a few, you know, a few 10,000, 20,000 years ago?
02:21:51.000It was all about husbands and wives, and you would show a real husband and wife, and then you'd talk about them, and you'd try and decide who's right in the argument, the husband or the wife.
02:21:59.000And all of his jokes were about the women's breasts.
02:22:03.000All of his jokes were about, well, she's got these big things, so she'll be okay.
02:22:08.000And then he would turn to me and give me a wink.
02:22:10.000Like, not for the camera, not for anything, just me on the side.
02:22:14.000He would just kind of wink at me like, we're doing great here, right?
02:22:16.000I felt like, I mean, this was way before I knew anything about him running or anything.
02:22:20.000I was just like, ooh, this guy's kind of skeeving me out.
02:22:23.000I felt like I was date-raped on my own show.
02:22:27.000But he walked in during that show just like, we're going to do great ratings tonight.
02:25:11.000Especially if you get inside and then all of a sudden you get in a fight in jail, which happens all the time, and someone dies and you wind up getting charged with murder.
02:25:17.000I mean, that kind of stuff happens to people over a nonsense, Bullshit arrest.
02:25:22.000Aren't most people in jail because of drug-related...
02:27:05.000One thing that should be taken into consideration, though, is that he's a businessman.
02:27:08.000And one of the things about things like legalizing marijuana or going against legalized marijuana, it doesn't make sense from a business standpoint, because there's too many of us that smoke it.
02:28:13.000I had a little bit in my act that's based on a true poll, where 46% of the people believed in the creationist account of the Earth, and that the Earth was less than 10,000 years old.
02:29:30.000Yes, but you say you make those decisions as a businessman, but...
02:29:35.000The other people that are fighting against that are all the pharmaceutical companies, and they have a lot more money than these kids smoking pot.
02:37:22.000You know, like if you're Ford and the Chevy guys are just getting a little too fucking cocky and there was some dude like Henry Ford type character over at Chevy.
02:37:31.000Like some magnanimous, gigantic, larger-than-life figure and you start writing some fake shit about him pawning money off the government and eating pizza at this place where they have pedophilia artwork.
02:37:40.000In the old days they called it yellow journalism.
02:37:43.000The Hearst newspapers, they'd plant fake stories in the papers, and people would think that they were true, and you'd try and take down titans of business that you were competing against and all the rest of it.
02:39:14.000He's written books on growing marijuana.
02:39:16.000He was one of the first guys to ever get arrested for growing medical marijuana.
02:39:21.000And then when he went to court, he found out he was not even allowed to use the term medical.
02:39:26.000So you're not allowed to say it because they don't believe in it federally.
02:39:29.000So even though it was legal in California, what they did was they prosecuted him with federal laws, which don't allow for even the phrase medical marijuana.
02:39:38.000He wasn't even allowed, because it was a federal trial, he wasn't even allowed to mention that it was legal in California.
02:39:44.000So the people who were in the jury, they get this totally skewed perspective of what happened.
02:40:07.000And what happened was, when they came out with a decorticator, William Randolph Hearst owned paper mills, and he also owned these forests of trees that they would convert into paper.
02:40:16.000He made his own newspaper and printed on that paper.
02:40:20.000And then Popular Science magazine had a cover that said hemp, the new billion dollar crop.
02:40:26.000And it was all about the invention of the decorticator and how now they'd be able to effectively process this hemp.
02:40:32.000Because they used hemp forever because they didn't have a cotton gin.
02:40:37.000Then when they came out with the cotton gin, a lot of people shifted over to cotton, especially at the end of slavery, because it wasn't really financially sound until they spent all that time processing all that fiber to get cannabis.
02:40:53.000When you could just get it out of cotton, it would be way easier now with this cotton gin.
02:40:59.000So that changed the game, and then the decorticator changed the game again.
02:41:03.000And that's when William Randolph first came in.
02:41:05.000And they started writing all these stories about, well, telling people to write stories, I'm sure.
02:41:09.000Telling people to write stories about this new drug called marijuana.
02:41:12.000It's forcing blacks and Mexicans to have sex with white women and rape white women.
02:41:17.000And marijuana wasn't even a name for cannabis.
02:43:08.000So I guess the issue would be you would have somebody that was pretending they weren't growing the psychoactive stuff and that they were only growing...
02:43:16.000But they were also selling it as a drug.
02:43:18.000And then you would have an issue there legally.
02:43:21.000You know, when you find out, like, Hearst putting out those stories, you know, to get his way, and then, you know, Big Tobacco was putting...
02:43:28.000All these documentaries come out, like, 30 years later of all these stories.
02:44:13.000If you have a lot of people that have a lot of money.
02:44:15.000That's why if someone becomes president and then wins the president-elect like Trump and then tweets something that's not true about him losing the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally, when you say stuff like that,
02:44:31.000That's why people get scared and nervous, because there's a long history of people who have what you're going to have.
02:44:37.000Donald Trump is going to have ultimate power.
02:44:40.000He's going to have that position, the position of ultimate power.
02:44:43.000But with that comes just a massive, massive responsibility.
02:44:47.000So for him to continue to do stuff like that, which is like a strategic fib, he's got to kind of let all that go.
02:44:54.000Just like he said he was going to let all of his businesses go, he's going to let his family run his businesses, he's going to completely step away.
02:47:24.000Unless there's something Taiwan's doing where we're not supposed to talk to them, like North Korea, like if all of a sudden he started chatting with North Korea and started selling taco bowls over there.
02:47:37.000This is from the Washington Post about the call.
02:47:39.000It says, the message, as John Bolton correctly puts it, was that the President of the United States will talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it's in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.
02:48:42.000But here, the thing with the phone call is we don't know, did he just pick it up and not, is he, was he totally unaware of our relationship with them?
02:48:50.000It said he was brief before that phone call.
02:48:52.000They said, hey bro, I heard you were talking to Mike, man.
02:50:28.000So what this did was elevate the brand of Pride and make Pride even bigger in the United States like they had in Italy.
02:50:35.000Silva come over and he faced off with Chuck Liddell and Chuck Liddell went over there to fight people and they had all this negotiating stuff going on for a long time.
02:50:43.000And then finally the UFC comes in and buys them out.
02:50:45.000This big historic thing, take photos, shaking hands.
02:51:08.000And as far as like, they were going to like run that business over there where they got over there and they're like, oh my God, we can't run this.
02:51:14.000Like you can't run it without the Yakuza, the people that were all like, you have to have the like the consent of the Japanese mom to run the country, the company over there.
02:51:33.000But they went over there, they bought this, they got this library, and then while they had these UFC employees, the employees all started a new business called Dream.
02:51:42.000And they just fucking started up with a whole new thing.
02:52:00.000You know, maybe we are all unknowable to each other, and this is part of why Brexit went down, this is part of why Trump won, this is why Italy, their prime minister's now leaving.
02:52:12.000Everyone's being told we've got to deal with the whole world, globalization, we've got to deal with everybody, and everyone's starting to say, you know, it's not really helping us.
02:52:29.000Everybody is starting to kind of retreat.
02:52:31.000Maybe globalization as an idea on the paper seems like it'll work, but practically, it's not taking hold.
02:52:39.000We're all going to communicate through Tesla hive mind, because in the future, everyone's going to have to have an electric car, and Tesla's going to be the first to figure out that the best way to pilot your car is actually with a headset.
02:52:49.000So you're going to put on a headset, very light, and those electrodes, they'll all be Bluetooth to your car, and that thing will operate by your mind.
02:52:58.000For you to do that is you've got to be on Google Hive Minds Network.
02:53:03.000So then you download the thoughts or you project the thoughts through the headgear as pure intention.
02:53:10.000So everybody knows where everybody's going as they're driving because you can see pure intention from a mile away.
02:53:15.000And that becomes the universal language of human beings when they realize the flaws of English and Spanish and Chinese and Dutch and Japanese and Korean and no one can understand what the fuck they were talking about.
02:53:25.000But through Google Hive Mind, this headset connected to the Tesla as it drives around.
02:53:30.000Is this in the next update, or is this a ways away?