In this episode, I sit down with one of my good friends, Ari Shafir, to talk about how he got into photography, his travels around the world, and the crazy things he's done to get to where he is now. It's a really fun episode, and I hope you enjoy it! If you haven't checked out Ari's podcast yet, you should definitely do so. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met and I'm sure you'll agree that he's a great friend and a great human being. I'm really looking forward to seeing him in person at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. I hope that you enjoy this episode and that it brings you some good laughs, because I know that it will bring you a lot of good laughs too. I can't wait to catch up with him at the Fringe in a few weeks, so keep your eyes open for that. I'll see you then! xoxo, Henry Rollins -Jon Sorrentino and Henry Rollins is a great guy. -Jon and Henry are good friends and I really enjoyed getting to know each other and talk about photography and traveling the world. I really hope you guys enjoy listening to this episode of his podcast, because it was a blast! Thank you so much for listening and supporting the cause! - Jon & Henry Rollins - thank you for supporting this podcast. I appreciate it greatly! -Jon & Henry - Jon and Henry - Thank you for your support and support the cause, we really appreciate it. - Henry Rollins, we love you, we appreciate you, thank you, much much, much, very much! - Thankyou, much love, much appreciate it, bye, bye! - Jon, bye. - Henry and Henry, bye Bye Bye, bye <3 - <3, bye - Jon xo - - EJ & EJ "Thank you, bye" - Henry & Ej, - P.S. "BONUS" - SONGS! - John xx - Tom and EJ. - Cheers, EJ and EjEJON & EK - BOBBY - MURPHY - JON AND EJON CHEERIE - CHEERS - KEVIN - R. MUNDORDS - PAUL MUNDS
00:00:31.000And I saw yours, and I think I did like the month after you, so I saw yours on the internet, and then I did one, and he's the host, and that's how I met him.
00:01:22.000Yeah, you're really doing it Like you pick a spot on a map and you just fucking go there.
00:01:27.000Yeah, you don't know anybody there No, you go by yourself and you just fucking hang out see what happens.
00:01:32.000Yeah Yeah, and that's usually, like, say I'll go to a place like Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for like five days or whatever.
00:01:39.000For two days, you get a tour guide, just so you can get the history, like this museum, not that one, this temple, not those two, just whatever.
00:01:48.000And what I always try and do in a place like that is get the tour guide and break them.
00:01:53.000And I'm like, okay, so tell me about the corruption in your government.
00:02:18.000And I'm going to be the translator because he and his guys are starting movements in this country to overthrow the government and he really wants to meet you.
00:04:11.000Travel experiences all over the world where I'm met by just amazing generosity and kindness and humility, and it informs kind of how I comport myself.
00:04:27.000Like, you give me six weeks off or I know I'm clear, I just whip out my high-res GIF file of the map of the world, and I pick one country and go, okay, then I'll just go east from there.
00:04:37.000Like China, Mongolia, Bhutan, Tibet, Vietnam, back to LA. And I'll just go do that.
00:04:43.000I want to get back to this, but what happened with your friend in California?
00:04:46.000Is this the same sort of a thing where you just wanted to check out a place?
00:05:08.000But, you know, it changes everything that you think about everything.
00:05:11.000I mean, I think everyone goes through trauma like that in their own way because it taps into everything you've ever done in your life beforehand.
00:05:49.000And people just, you know, walk up and, you know, smack you.
00:05:52.000I And I've never been to a country as free as America.
00:05:56.000I've been to countries that were way more hectic, like don't get caught outside at night, like, you know, downtown Nairobi or, you know, parts of Russia are kind of scary, just because they're living hard.
00:06:07.000But as far as a place where anything can happen, America is like easily the hairiest place I've ever been day to day.
00:06:31.000When I was young, I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. And I lived down the road from the National Geographic Museum with a big whale in the front.
00:06:57.000So we'd go hit the museums in Italy, go to the museums in France, go to see all the islands in Greece, go to England, see the National Museum, look at Shakespeare and Chaucer's handwriting.
00:07:07.000And so by the time I was a little kid, by 11 years old, like fifth grade or thereabouts, I'd been to Greece and Italy and England and different countries.
00:07:18.000Wanted more of that and when you grow up with National Geographic magazine you look at the pyramids you look at the sinks and you like I want to see that like that doesn't look real and Then eventually I did go to all those places You know I stood in front of the stinks more than once in the the Great Pyramid in Giza It's bigger than you think it's like you kind of just it hypnotizes you stare at it all day.
00:08:16.000A buddy of mine, this has been on the podcast, his name is John Anthony West, and he's created these incredible DVD series called Magical Egypt.
00:08:25.000He's an Egyptologist, like one of the most knowledgeable guys I've ever met in my life.
00:08:29.000I mean, you can spend your whole life just studying one dynasty.
00:08:49.000He's an older gentleman, and he's been...
00:08:51.000He's been trying to educate people on Egypt for a long time because he's a scholar when it comes to ancient Egypt, and he's one of those people that's actively trying to kind of rewrite the history of Egypt as far as how far back it goes.
00:09:07.000They've got some pretty rock-solid evidence to point to the idea that Egypt is a civilization that was probably very, very advanced many, many, many thousands of years ago, and then some sort of a natural cataclysmic disaster, probably asteroidal impacts or something like that,
00:09:23.000around 10,000 years ago, sort of reset society and civilization, and then they rebuilt from there with whatever was remained.
00:09:41.000There's parts of it that are still like a lake.
00:09:44.000And then when you see it, like in northern Uganda, South Sudan, like right when you cross the border, you go across this river, like, you know, Category 5, whitewater roaring.
00:09:58.000Faces to it now this this wanderlust that you have this like crazy touring thing where you just pick out a spot and go how long you been doing that?
00:10:05.000I Did conventional you know I used to do a lot of rock and roll and rock and roll will get you all over Europe Japan Australia New Zealand Places like that, but it won't get you to Egypt Morocco Tunisia Mongolia necessarily and so in the 90s,
00:10:22.000you know I'm like anyone else in this business you do every interview and And they say, you're pretty well-traveled.
00:10:27.000And I always have to say, well, caveat, I've never been to the African continent.
00:10:31.000And then one day I went, well, why not?
00:11:36.000I said, Sharon, I got this great idea.
00:11:39.000I fly out and hang out with Black Sabbath and bro down with a band and go to band practice and have a really good time and you put me on the guest list for the shows and I hang out for free and it's like the best time I've ever had knowing she'd hang up on me and she said let me call him and ask him if that's okay because I already knew Ozzy but I didn't know the rest of the guys and she called me later that day she said oh they think it's fine here's the address just let us know when to expect you so I booked it I booked it around my trip to Africa So I went USA,
00:12:08.000London, bus up to Wales where they were practicing.
00:12:11.000Taxi, no, no, Ozzy's assistant came and got me.
00:12:14.000So I hung out with Sabbath at band practice, me and the band in full band rehearsals, the best.
00:12:21.000Watched the shows, the two reunion shows at the soundboard.
00:12:25.000And then the next day I flew to Kenya.
00:12:27.000And so it was just a good, you know, that was a good chunk of travel.
00:12:30.000And I ended up in South Africa after all of that and said to myself, okay, I'm going to come to Africa once a year.
00:12:38.000And I just started picking out different chunks of it.
00:16:20.000And he was doing sword stuff for quite a long time, though.
00:16:23.000Yeah, he's always been involved in martial arts, and even the way he sort of approached hedonism, I always felt like it was sort of like an applied approach to hedonism.
00:16:32.000Like his rock star lifestyle thing, what he was doing, it's almost like, look, not a lot of people get a chance to do this, I'm gonna do it.
00:16:38.000Yeah, one time he, when we were working on his book, he said, you know, I go home to Pasadena now and then, where, you know, born and raised, and some of his high school buddies see me, like, well, Dave, you know, must be nice, you know, being David Lee Roth.
00:20:25.000But what I like with you, what you're saying is that you had already figured out all these other paths in life that you were enjoying, putting your creative energy in.
00:23:33.000I have those woozy afternoons where I take the seven-minute power naps in my chair at the office.
00:23:39.000But I just try and, you know, what I have found, if you want to not have to sleep eight hours a day, if you maintain a really good diet, you can shave about an hour of sleep off.
00:23:49.000You keep your proteins and your carbohydrates lean and stay away from food that's really fun to eat, you know, burgers, french fries, and all that, which is, I'd live on that if I could.
00:23:57.000But if you keep your diet really together and you keep your workouts up, I have found that you want to not get tired during the day.
00:24:06.000Work out at 5 in the morning and the rest of the day you're just kind of buzzing.
00:24:10.000You think you'd face plant onto your desk.
00:24:13.000Sometimes when I'm really humming, I'm up at 4.30 and I'm in the gym by 4.50, 5 p.m.
00:25:14.000It was great because it was- People put that in gyms all over the world.
00:25:17.000It was so, you nailed it because it was so honest and it was just so highlighted what is so beneficial about forcing yourself to do hard work and Yeah, and the fact that you are going, okay, I'd rather not,
00:25:58.000Two and a half hours on stage at night, no notes, talking at a high rate of speed.
00:26:02.000The only way I got through that was really good diet and three days on, one day off workouts.
00:26:09.000It was the workouts that alleviated the stress that made the sleep restorative, the muscle tissue absorbed into nutrients, etc., and made the shows good.
00:26:19.000And so, for me, the workouts, since I was about 15, that's been as much a part of my day as Anything.
00:26:26.000Just to, otherwise I get, you know, kind of mentally clogged.
00:28:05.000And so I was lifting a lot for a guy my size and my bone mass.
00:28:12.000And so at one point my back and shoulders started hurting and like a different kind of pain like you know that you shouldn't be doing this anymore And so the workouts I do now if I can't lift it ten times I just don't I just pull the weight down so I can so a lot of it's you know treadmill elliptical and stationary bike and a lot of pull-ups push-ups and Like you know a lot of compound lifts like you know bench press stuff like that but mainly a lot of pull-ups TRX,
00:28:41.000the straps, the guy who invented them gave them to me as a gift.
00:29:07.000Uh-uh, but I admire it because you see people who do yoga and they're so, not only are they flexible, but you can tell they're really grounded in themselves.
00:29:15.000Like they're really, they're coming on with an energy that I don't have.
00:30:57.000That's why I started working out when I was in high school, because I couldn't throw the ball straight, so the gym was always empty, so I just went in there.
00:31:18.000And I think as far as increasing your longevity of your body, the use of your body, it seems to me that what it does is kind of forge all the connections between your joints and your body and your core, and it just makes everything better.
00:31:31.000I don't have nearly as much back pain as I used to.
00:31:34.000I'm more flexible than I have been in years.
00:31:37.000I've been like a year and a half, maybe almost two years.
00:31:51.000But between that and all the other different kinds of workouts, what I like to do is I like to wake up and decide what I'm going to do when I wake up.
00:31:59.000And some days I'm like, I want to go kickbox.
00:32:05.000Like we were talking about before the podcast started, what I'm trying to do with my life at this point, I'm almost 50. I'm 49. I'll be 50 in August.
00:32:13.000Is to have as few obligations as possible and as much passion and interest as possible.
00:32:18.000And just sort of pursue the things that I'm really enjoying.
00:33:33.000And then months later, boom, there you are.
00:33:35.000Like, I was in Thailand making a documentary years ago.
00:33:38.000And I was reading in the Herald Tribune at breakfast one morning, I was in Chiang Mai, that the following year was going to be the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster in Bhopal, India, when Union Carbide India Limited, the methyl isocyanate tank exploded, killed a bunch of people.
00:34:22.000And so I went all the way to, like, here is where the guy was flicking the switch going, oh no, oh no, the gas scrubbers, the neutralizers aren't working.
00:34:33.000They're not going to shoot you, but they'll tell you, they'll kick you off.
00:34:35.000And so I just make these decisions, and then ultimately you're booking the tickets, you're booking the hotel, and then one day you are crawling through the weeds, avoiding security guys on their motor scooters with your camera, sneaking in and out of buildings getting your shots.
00:34:51.000I mean, I love to take these things from like sitting in a coffee place going, Oh!
00:34:56.000To, like, wow, here I am in Laos, in Zien Quang at the Plain of Jars.
00:35:01.000It's a place I've always wanted to go to.
00:36:06.000I was in Pyongyang and the areas around Pyongyang and then I went there via Beijing and then from there up to Mongolia, then over to Bhutan.
00:37:15.000And we're walking to the, whatever that room is, the room where the north and south meet, where they come in through the northern door and the southern door, it's that blue room.
00:37:28.000The DSJ, I'll come up with, the joint, the JSA, the Joint Security Area, something like that.
00:37:35.000I pulled one of the Australians to the side.
00:37:37.000I said, can you please call your friends off me?
00:37:41.000Because my tour spy is starting to ask me really weird questions about why people want their photo with me.
00:37:48.000And if I'm caught being in movies, writing books, rock and roll, I'm going downtown for a meeting that I might not get out of.
00:37:56.000And so he cooled out all his Australian friends.
00:37:59.000But then there's this one British guy who just kept getting in my face with the camera.
00:38:03.000Because you're all getting taken to the same places.
00:38:33.000The last day I was there, when they finally took me back to the airport in Beijing, I'm like, damn, man, am I really getting on this plane?
00:38:38.000And when the plane took off, man, I just like, okay, I did that.
00:38:41.000But why wouldn't you just say, I'm a musician?
00:39:13.000And same thing when I was in, I went to Tehran via Dubai, and the guy who met me at the airport, after the airport people got done grilling me, he said, look, I got your visa.
00:39:41.000And they get by with a website that gets visas done.
00:39:44.000So his cousin, her cousin, Anusha, the woman, her cousin calls her and says, your friend Henry's on TV. And Ahmed dropped his fork and said, we've got to go.
00:40:48.000Because anywhere else, you just go and show up.
00:40:50.000Now, do you go to all these places that you go to, do you pick places where there's high populations of people?
00:40:57.000Do you ever go to really nomadic places?
00:41:00.000I tend to choose places where there's...
00:41:03.000Just been in an election, or there's going to be an election, or there just was a war, where there's conflict, where you see signs of the wrath of globalization, the wrath of global climate change, places that are politically hot.
00:41:15.000All of these are of great interest to me.
00:41:17.000During the Bush administration, he said, don't go to this country, this country, this country.
00:42:00.000I was in Ecuador for a while on the Napo River, which is a tributary of the Amazon, and I went on a science boat.
00:42:07.000And I just sat with scientists, botanists, bird people, and learned about how the jungle interconnects and how this parasite kills that tree, which fertilizes that tree, and it's really integrated.
00:42:29.000But when I was in the interior, and it's all about hardwood and oil, and all those, you know, the Rouhani people, the interior tribes, are just getting discovered.
00:42:40.000And, you know, their land is getting cleared out.
00:42:43.000And the government's making a ton of money off cannibalizing their own land.
00:42:47.000And in November of 2015, I went to Antarctica.
00:42:53.000And that's the most substantive trip I've ever made.
00:42:57.000That was the most mind-blowing trip I've ever done.
00:43:00.000You go on Deception Island and you look down and there's bits of broken glass from the whale killers.
00:43:07.000They use that island to process and render whales.
00:43:10.000So it's like chips of whale bone and all the crappies people left.
00:43:26.000And they nearly hunted down the seals and whales, those particular species, to extinction.
00:43:31.000And so I got on a ship full of scientists, and you take lectures every day, and you walk around amongst the Gentoo and the Chinstrap and the Adelie penguins, and you learn a lot, and it's hard to take, because it's almost destructing in front of you.
00:44:47.000So there's like three days on either end where there's kind of nothing to do but take lectures in the lounge about history and all of that, which I did with my notepad out and questioned the lecturers afterwards and got a ton of information.
00:45:38.000But I learned a lot about MMA just because these people, these fighters become relevant to me because I'm saying their names over and over and I'm watching the footage.
00:45:58.000Be more aware of these fighters and all of this stuff.
00:46:01.000And then, you know, that's when I saw you.
00:46:03.000And I was thinking about you the other day, knowing I was going to meet you, thinking, like, here's this guy with this, you know, very interesting life, because I've seen the stand-up on TV. And there he is in the middle of the octagon with, like, you know, some guy who just got finished knocking the crap out of someone.
00:46:21.000That's a very eclectic life you've got.
00:46:25.000I'm sure you didn't grow up anything like the rest of your family and all the kids you went to high school with.
00:46:50.000And just, it would occupy all my thoughts, and I couldn't wait to do it 24 hours a day.
00:46:55.000And then, when I got out of high school, I took a year off before I went to college, and the only reason why I went to college was because I didn't want people thinking I was a loser.
00:47:04.000I was tired of telling people that I wasn't doing anything, so I went to college.
00:48:20.000Well I think there's a lot of people out there like that and for some Awful reason they never find whatever it is that can break them free.
00:48:28.000They never catch a ride on that river out Yeah, you know and I got lucky I found stand-up comedy and I had already I think a lot of it had come from martial arts too I'd fought a lot and then competed a lot in martial arts tournaments and I think that from that I realized that like these Unconventional paths they brought me something that I wasn't getting from regular life.
00:48:53.000It gave me this feeling that I wasn't a loser.
00:48:55.000It was the only thing that I'd ever done my whole life where I said, wow, maybe I'm not a loser.
00:48:59.000I kind of thought I was an outcast and a loser, and then all of a sudden I was successful at something, only because I was obsessed with it.
00:49:05.000But then I knew there was no way I was ever going to be able to hold a regular job, and then I got lucky when I was 21 and I found stand-up.
00:49:13.000And so from then on, I'd kind of like locked into this thing where I'm just going to do what I like and fuck what everybody says because everybody's giving me advice to do this and advice to do that and it never seems to be what I want to do.
00:49:25.000And their advice is coming from a different world.
00:49:27.000And they mean well, but they're coming from the whole other value system.
00:49:33.000And a whole other expectation of their own lives and what your life should be and all of that.
00:49:37.000And all of it is not poisoned, but it's just kind of anathema to every breath you're taking.
00:49:49.000So when you say, here's how I do it, they're like, you're crazy, man.
00:49:52.000And then you look at them in that job and you're like, you're the crazy one amongst us.
00:49:56.000Because I couldn't handle wearing that tie every day and taking it from that dude.
00:50:00.000Yeah, and some people, I guess, like the corporate world.
00:50:03.000I just, I got lucky and I found a bunch of shit that I like.
00:50:06.000And if you had said to me, you know, if you asked me if I was, you know, outside of my life, and if I didn't know that I existed, and you said, do you think it's possible to be a cage-fighting commentator slash stand-up comedian?
00:50:27.000If I'm going somewhere for the UFC, I always write UFC commentator.
00:50:32.000It's the easiest one to do because then they go, oh yeah, I know you, and then they let me in and it's easy, you know, if you're getting your passport stamped.
00:52:36.000There is a dance that when you discuss these things like you don't want to disparage anybody that it genuinely has Shown courage and grinding it out because for their family does take courage.
00:52:45.000I just don't have it I'm saying I consider them People in the real world and in my life.
00:52:52.000I don't think I really live in the real world that much I live in my self-invented Henry world right and I saw this video with Lady Gaga I don't know much about her music, but she did this long intro, the $80 million thing.
00:53:06.000And she said, she was like, reality, I hate reality.
00:53:52.000But if you had a friend that was doing that, but you know that friend really wanted to be a novelist, wouldn't you just fucking go, dude, please, just try it.
00:54:41.000But surely you must have had heroes that did it also before you, so you felt like there was a path.
00:54:47.000Well, definitely not like you did it, but a lot of rock stars, a lot of bands, a lot of musicians, a lot of artists, they pursued their goals, they went out and chased things, and you knew that it was a path.
00:55:54.000I never thought I'd ever be able to pay my rent.
00:55:57.000I just reconciled my life to a life of fighting, bad tasting food, and sleeping, you know, next to the drum roost snort all night in the back of the van hoping the bass, the bass player, the guitar player didn't drive us into a tree because we didn't have a driver.
00:57:18.000Yeah, but you've managed to transcend that, obviously.
00:57:21.000You've managed to find this very unique path in life where you're doing all these different things.
00:57:27.000You're no longer in a band anymore, and now you're this worldwide traveler slash performance artist where you're doing these spoken word things.
00:58:40.000And the next week I got up there and I read something that I had written and told a story about what had happened at band practice the day before when a white supremacist tried to run over our guitar player with his car.
01:00:08.000But it's more general admission theaters.
01:00:10.000But every once in a while, I'll do like the Melbourne Comedy Festival, the Sydney Comedy Festival, or like three nights of comedy, and I'm like doing an hour on one of those nights.
01:00:19.000I did a comedy club on this last tour.
01:00:21.000There was a night off or doing a thing at like the Laugh Bucket or one of those places.
01:00:26.000And, you know, the PA is like bolted into the wall.
01:01:16.000Either ultimately or eventually to be funny like almost anything then obviously some things are never going to be funny, but Most things are like I don't know which way your politics lean that much But you can look at the president administration go like ie we're all you know going down the drain or you can go man This is the lowest hanging fruit This dude has just jumped up on a table onto the silver platter with his ass in the air and an apple already in his mouth.
01:01:57.000But there's a lot of comedy, or at least humorous moments that inform what I do on stage, which allows me to go for a long time on stage, because if it had no humor in it, it would be stultifyingly boring, for me and for the audience.
01:02:09.000In a lot of ways, when an administration is really fucked up, Comics do take joy in it because they know, like during the Bush administration, there was eight years of gold.
01:02:37.000There's a proposal now to get rid of public lands and to make public lands private and start tapping into them and sucking out the resources and ruin all these places that people go and hunt and fish and hike.
01:02:51.000You know, I think it's a really beautiful thing, what they call the commons in this country, where you can go to the park.
01:02:57.000And I don't know if you ever spent time in parks.
01:02:59.000There's a decency that you'll often find where, like, the family picks up the garbage.
01:03:04.000And you'll even see the little kid picking up the cup.
01:03:53.000And I think there's a rectitude and a moral decency that we Americans skew towards when we're in these places that we're all somewhat responsible for.
01:04:04.000And to take that away, when everything becomes me, mine, I drew the line, you step over it, I kill you, all that stuff.
01:04:27.000I could put nine hotels, four casinos, and a theme park in there.
01:04:31.000Well, Teddy Roosevelt and a lot of the people that established the national park system in this country many, many years ago, they had an incredible vision.
01:04:39.000They realized that we have this amazing landscape, and they decided to preserve it and put it in the trust of the public, make it a public thing where anyone can go.
01:05:03.000You know, I'm not one who gets up every day with a hate list of people.
01:05:08.000And I don't think Donald Trump wakes up every day going, how can I screw a bunch of people?
01:05:12.000I really don't think that's on his menu.
01:05:14.000But I do think he's a businessman who's looking to make deals.
01:05:18.000The tell for me was when the president said, if Vladimir Putin agrees to help us in the fight against ISIS, I'll consider lifting those sanctions.
01:05:28.000It's not, you know, we'll make a deal.
01:06:47.000It was never not amazing to me to walk into the library and go, like, any damn book I want, I can walk into any section and no one's going, hey, kid, get out of here.
01:07:18.000So you better bring some humor and a little bit of like, hey, it's okay.
01:07:21.000And I see that in New Yorkers, this really great greatness.
01:07:27.000And when you make us cheap and petty and we turn into some Twilight Zone episode, that is what I fear in this country is us kind of cheating ourselves out of how great we are when you don't scare the crap out of us all the time.
01:07:41.000Yeah, well, I mean Trump is just such a polarizing figure.
01:07:44.000I hope that it unites us in a lot of ways so that we realize how good we have it and we realize what really is important and that having this guy who so many people are opposed to and having these policies that so many people are opposed to, even if you're not opposed to him.
01:08:00.000I know a lot of people that supported him that are now looking at some of these policies, particularly the public land policy, and they're kind of freaking out.
01:08:07.000I think a lot of that is going to unite folks, and it's going to make people understand what is important.
01:08:12.000Like that gigantic women's march the other day.
01:08:46.000I mean, and I think other presidents have rocked that responsibility far more gracefully.
01:08:52.000Even presidents I don't necessarily agree with, they really understood the awesome weight of that job, and they really kind of feared it and tried their best.
01:09:01.000Even presidents whose policies I disagree with, I think they really got the magnitude.
01:09:06.000When you think about your life, you know, you have this wanderlust and this passion for exploring new environments and learning about new cultures and, you know, and we're also talking about just the fucking great pull of death because it is there and it's always to be considered.
01:09:21.000When you're looking at a guy like that who's older than us, he's 70-something years old, right?
01:09:26.000And that fucking life is a meat grinder.
01:09:30.000That job is the greatest aging job we've ever seen.
01:09:50.000When you have $4 billion or whatever the fuck he has, when you have your name on all these buildings all over the world, like, what is the motivation to continue?
01:10:00.000I've always wondered with the Koch brothers, the two angriest men in America, and the tyranny of Obama, they'd always opine about, like, dude, you've got $34 billion.
01:10:09.000You can have me killed right now and all the pizza you want.
01:10:23.000I did a movie many years ago, one of the first ones I was ever in with a very big movie star, and someone told me how much he makes in a year.
01:12:13.000And I think if you're in that mode, you can greet the day better.
01:12:18.000But when you look at things like, well, I don't have as much as he has, or some guy made a nasty tweet about me, and I'm going to get on Twitter and answer back, oh no.
01:12:43.000And now that he's got it, when he did his acceptance speech, I was in Washington on the night of the election on stage at the Lincoln Theater.
01:12:49.000I watched the whole damn thing until five in the morning when he made his acceptance speech.
01:12:53.000And the look on his face, on Mr. Trump's face, was...
01:12:57.000Wow, I've just sawed off a big chunk of meat for myself.
01:13:59.000God bless the United States of America.
01:14:01.000They come down to the Situation Room and look at the high-resolution video footage of the girls' intestines sailing through the air for the drone strike that zigged when it should have zagged.
01:14:09.000They get bad news, and they make gut-wrenching decisions where they're like, yep, we're going in, and all those people are going to die.
01:14:17.000Every president makes those decisions, and it's a job you couldn't pay me enough.
01:16:24.000Well, I like the fact that he's talking about rebuilding the infrastructure and putting people to work in that regard and rebuilding American manufacturing.
01:16:32.000I hope that really does happen and people do get good jobs and the economy does rise up.
01:16:36.000What I worry about is all this corporate raider mentality backed by these people that think that he's somehow or another looking out for the little guy.
01:16:51.000Yeah, but to me, when someone says, oh, this new president, what he's doing is unprecedented.
01:16:57.000I'm like, no, America's a broken 45. We just keep repeating trickle-down economics with more parts or less parts per million, in that in the early days of slavery, To be well-landed gentry in America was great.
01:17:11.000You bought land, you bought the materials, and you built your plantation.
01:17:15.000You bought livestock, human and animal.
01:17:18.000When they bred, you kept the offspring.
01:17:20.000Human, offspring, chickens, all of it was yours.
01:18:10.000Virginia, that's the miscegenation laws, 1967. Obergefell v.
01:18:16.000Hodges, marriage equality, 2015. And these are speed bumps.
01:18:20.000If you're oppressive and you just want to pay this guy what you feel like giving him, minimum wage and all that stuff is your enemy, because you don't want these people being able to stand up.
01:18:32.000And I think when Mr. Trump said, make America great again, I hate to say, I think he was talking about 1861 and the years before, when I paid you what I wanted to.
01:19:04.000And I don't think he wakes up every day going like, I want to kill people.
01:19:07.000I want to murder Americans and have them have a crap life.
01:19:10.000I just think he thinks like, look, we'll own stuff and you'll be the beneficiary as it falls from my mouth and trickles down to you.
01:19:19.000You'll be happy that I have so much money because I'm a beneficent master.
01:19:24.000Now, you're a guy that's really seen probably more of the world than one-tenth of one percent of the population of America.
01:19:32.000I mean, you've been to so many different places.
01:19:34.000Now, do you think that because of that, you have a unique perspective on what is possible today?
01:19:40.000Because, like, in 2017, if you just live in America, this is the only thing you've known.
01:19:44.000You think of the world as sort of this sort of state that we exist in.
01:19:47.000But you having gone to North Korea, having gone to Mongolia, having gone to all these different places, we see oppressive regimes, you see very bizarre cultures where people are rigid in their ability to move around and rigid in their ability to behave and express themselves.
01:20:01.000And you see that it could have turned out like that here.
01:20:06.000We have this unique sort of experiment in self-government, and it's sort of hobbled along, and it's patched up with duct tape and Gorilla Glue, but it's here.
01:21:42.000But I went to go, because I buy all these records from Mali and bands, so I wanted to go see them do it in the desert.
01:21:47.000So I went in 2008 and 9 or 9 and 10, something like that.
01:21:51.000And I went over land through Dogon country one year, and then the next year I hooked back up with this guy, Mahmoud, and we took the Niger River on a boat.
01:23:00.000And I think to forget that aspect of us, since at least the Bush administration, where the polarization in this country has been so extreme, I think we have started to forget that we can be there for each other.
01:23:14.000And I'm not saying we all need to have a big group hug.
01:24:03.000Now, I think it's really important what you were talking about, about people on the internet and that sort of bizarre communication that we experience today.
01:24:14.000I mean, you were a grown man before the internet came around.
01:24:18.000Don't you think that this existence that we have right now, where we are sort of communicating without looking at each other, without being there in front of each other.
01:24:42.000It's a very strange time in that regard.
01:24:44.000Yeah, and it leads to a lot of pettiness and just really mean stuff where the issuer of that, whatever that mean email or whatever, I wonder if they look back at that a week later and you're like, man, who was I that afternoon?
01:25:25.000Well, what's interesting is when they get found out and someone exposes whoever wrote that and then they focus on them publicly and you see the scrutiny of thousands, if not millions of people come down on those folks and how they fucking panic.
01:25:50.000And so I come, and I'm sure you can identify with this, I come from the world of, if you say something, that guy comes around the corner and goes, like, what'd you say?
01:26:01.000And so I never say anything about anyone.
01:26:04.000Not expecting to turn the corner and be face-to-face with that person.
01:26:09.000And so if I ever talk about a politician or, you know, I had a lot of disagreements with Judge Scalia and people like that, and I'd write about it in the LA Weekly.
01:26:17.000I would have loved to have debated the 14th Amendment with Antonin Scalia who said it didn't have any of the traction that I think it does.
01:26:24.000And any politician I bucket on, including Trump, I do, which I have fun with.
01:32:13.000Want to live with these people, but as far as like seeing, you know, reading what they have to say, I'm curious in that way, in that I want to know what is on someone's mind I might not agree with all the time.
01:33:40.000But ultimately, I want to get up the road with them.
01:33:43.000In order to do that, I don't want to get beat up by some guy getting out of his pickup truck to drill some freedom into my forehead with his fists.
01:33:53.000Because, you know, I'm just not built for it.
01:35:00.000And I think that's what we don't do anymore.
01:35:03.000But when you log on to Patriot 185 and you give some liberal snowflake, whatever they call these people, some grief on the internet, you're only listening to yourself.
01:35:13.000You just like disagreeing with people and piling on.
01:35:22.000Well, I think what you're saying is beautiful because, I mean, it is a good idea to have an open mind and try to find out why these people think in a diametrically opposed way to the way you think.
01:36:04.000One of the first things that happens is these trumpets jump on board and they start attacking what you're saying and then tweeting like, I don't know if they've researched it or not, but it's just like immediate attitude that the people on the right seem to have.
01:36:21.000Where they immediately want to dismiss anything that diminishes industry, anything about climate change, anything that protects the environment, whether it's about this Dakota pipeline access thing that Trump is just getting involved with.
01:36:49.000There's not one that you can really enjoy.
01:36:50.000Every single one of them is doing some creepy shit.
01:36:53.000And that whole thing where they were cutting easements through private land, they were arresting people on their own fucking land, they were saying that they had the right to drill through their land, that was during the Obama administration.
01:37:04.000Started during his administration, supported by his administration, and they stopped it towards the end.
01:37:09.000But it's almost like I kind of know that they stopped it knowing that Trump was gonna start it right the fuck back up as soon as he got in office.
01:37:15.000I think the last few months of Obama, that's why he kicked the Russians out.
01:37:20.000Because, like, let Trump bring him back in.
01:37:29.000I think Obama had some fun on the way out, knowing that Trump is, you know, first week is going to turn it all around, and everyone gets to point the finger.
01:38:53.000We're going to, like, you know, Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, any LGBT activist group, we can get involved and start kind of neutralizing this and slowing it down.
01:40:16.000And so going forward in this country, when it gets better is when the electorate gets better.
01:40:21.000It's what Jefferson taught you, a vigorous, educated electorate who votes and votes and votes to keep American government and democracy a transparent lens, as transparent as possible.
01:40:33.000And that's what you can do in this time like don't you're not gonna move to Canada like the Canadians are gonna have you but you can be your decency now means more it's a it it's a more into a Fruitful currency.
01:40:47.000It just means more now to help that guy out.
01:40:50.000It's it's a help your help basically I also feel like great things get done in times of conflict absolutely We have something to push back against people organized like that women's March, you know exactly I Where you go, wow, decency is under threat.
01:42:23.000Like you have to take 80 details of the last hour.
01:42:26.000You forget it the next day because you're tired.
01:42:28.000And so when I'm on stage, I have no notes and it's all in the front of my brain pan.
01:42:32.000So if I'm going to quote the Constitution or quote a president or years that the Supreme Court did whatever, I just have to put it.
01:42:40.000I memorize all of it and I just carry it around with me.
01:42:43.000And before I go on stage, to center myself, I quote Lincoln from his speech, the speech to the perpetuation of our governmental institutions, I think it's called.
01:42:54.000It's the speech to the Young Men's Lyceum.
01:43:44.000After a show 25 in 25 days, man, the only thing getting you through it is your love of being on stage, my love of the audience, and I love them.
01:44:15.000Sometimes I'll, at the beginning of a tour, just to kind of get back in that groove, I'll write a page of notes.
01:44:22.000I'll talk about this, into that, into that, and I look at it and I kind of walk it through in my mind.
01:44:27.000And like, okay, you basically memorize where all the furniture is in the living room so you can run through it with your eyes closed and not bump into anything.
01:44:33.000And so when I go on stage, one thing tends to go into the next.
01:44:39.000And I just, all of a sudden, I have a stopwatch.
01:44:41.000I bring it on stage and put it down for the audience's benefit, not mine.
01:44:45.000Because if I'm not careful, the shows will go well over two hours.
01:44:50.000And I look down like, oh no, these poor people.
01:45:48.000I'll have one or two big centerpiece stories.
01:45:51.000Like, on the last tour, many nights of the week, I talked about the time I had lunch with David Bowie, because he had passed away last year.
01:47:12.000And so I talked about the time I was on RuPaul's Drag Race as a judge, which was hilarious.
01:47:18.000But I talked about that story because I was just on his show, RuPaul Drives, where he puts a microphone on you and a GoPro camera, and he drives you around L.A. doing errands, and he interviews you, and he chops it up into content.
01:47:30.000And so I was able to tell my being a judge on RuPaul's Drag Race story because I could segue into...
01:47:37.000The day we ran errands, the normal places I go, because I live alone.
01:47:42.000I made this story about how I walked into all these places, and the only time I've ever come in with someone else is the one time I walked in with a six-and-a-half-foot-tall black guy.
01:47:53.000And everyone who knows me in all these stores goes like, oh, Henry's finally found someone.
01:47:58.000And it was a story about perception, because you'd see the looks on their faces like, oh, hey, Henry.
01:49:33.000Sometimes, like, in Australia, they have a rule where if, you know, four people in your band, your American band, then four Australians have to play, too.
01:52:31.000I'm hoping for some good location work this year.
01:52:34.000If they said, you want to go move to the Czech Republic for a year and a half and make two seasons of a TV show, I'd say yes before I asked what the part was.
01:53:49.000I don't get to tell people what to do.
01:53:51.000But for me, every day I'm not out in the world, I'm thinking I'm trying to dodge the ball instead of deflecting it or catching it or getting hit by it.
01:54:51.000But beyond that, I've got nothing going on this year.
01:54:54.000So I'm waiting for an audition or a meeting and someone gives me a gig.
01:54:58.000And if I don't get any of that, then I'm just going to pack my bags and find some jungle and some desert and go dig it.
01:55:04.000Now, when you're writing something about cannabis and you don't use it, I mean, you obviously had a long history with drugs before you got clean.
01:58:52.000Yeah, which is not easy that you write for a Rolling Stone of Australia once a month and then I write I try and write a thousand words a day for myself and I have right now Five different books in various states of completion and that's not some college guy saying my manuscript these are they're done and I'm by day I edit and I'm editing the next journal book,
01:59:13.000travel book, and then at night I'm writing another journal book and working on one of two different music books.
01:59:20.000I do a series of music books called Fanatic, where I, you know, rare records and labels like music geek stuff.
02:06:17.000Yeah, and I got kicked out of a few schools until they put me in a prep school where the advertising is like, oh, your kid has problems with studying?
02:06:29.000And the first few days of school, some kids spoke out of class, and I watched this one teacher pick this one kid up and just kind of toss him into a blackboard.
02:07:17.000Or do some people just have a different composition, a different passion inside of them, and they resist doing things they don't want to do, and they don't want to be a part of any structured school curriculum?
02:07:36.000You're not on anything and yet you have all this passion for life You have all this isn't that the same shit that you had when you were six?
02:07:42.000Yeah, it's just it was undisciplined and unfocused but that's not a disease, right?
02:08:19.000Like, on the outside, I'm like this pale, skinny...
02:08:23.000But inside, I'm like the last few minutes of Dave in 2001, where he's going through the space-time continuum, and everything is flying by.
02:08:32.000That was like 10th grade for me, where I just kind of held onto my desk and fairly flew through classes, like not being able to retain much, because I was just speeding my brains out.
02:08:45.000And then the pill would wear off around dinner, and all of a sudden you're like eating two meals.
02:08:49.000And the next morning you take the pill and you don't eat again.
02:13:00.000I'd wake up in the morning, go to the pet shop, work all day there, run home, shower, change my clothes, do the night shift at the movie theater, take the bus out to the surf shop in the suburbs and I'd repair skateboards and whatever on Sundays.
02:13:13.000So I always had pocket money because I liked working a cash register on my keychain in school.
02:13:22.000Bosses trusted me because I'd never steal.
02:13:24.000So I would work like 20 hours a week and go to school in high school.
02:13:32.000And part of that was informed by the weightlifting, and I like getting out of the house and being responsible.
02:13:38.000But in school, it didn't mean much to me.
02:13:40.000But showing up on time at the pet shop and cleaning out 20 cat pans, man, that was like I had to be there at 8 o'clock, not 8.01, man, because we got things to do.
02:17:10.000And I never get to that point where I've been to enough places, or I've written enough books, or I've done enough radio shows, or I've bought enough records.
02:19:04.000Keep all of that going and the phone is ringing because I work in different media all the time and so Heidi's always juggling eight chainsaws and so I'm around people who can allow me just to really run at it and go as fast and as hard as I want to.
02:19:21.000I call it living at the speed of life.
02:19:23.000You just kind of go You let your imagination and your resolve dictate everything.
02:19:31.000And to be able to do that and still keep the lights on, I'm just a lucky bastard.
02:19:36.000And so I try and be really cool about it.
02:19:39.000Well, this humility is very contagious too.
02:20:35.000They had something that the world says wow about.
02:20:38.000But they also at the same time know that they're not going to take the same caning that a lot of really good people who don't deserve it are going to take.
02:20:53.000And so I'm not looking to escape any beatings, but to have an idea and get to do it and turn it into something that kind of pays me.
02:21:03.000Like I can go into the world, have these crazy things happen, come back with photographs and a story, take it on stage and I can tour on that and people show up.
02:21:12.000Damn, man, I should just be saying thank you every other breath.
02:22:30.000I was really broke-ass in a band for many years, and all the money I made, it came with a lot of sweat and a lot of pain, and I must respect it.
02:22:42.000And I'm not saying to put yourself in business class as being disrespectful to money.
02:22:48.000What I'm saying is I can't justify it.
02:22:50.000I simply cannot go, that was worth it.
02:23:25.000It's a good system, but the one thing I miss when I'm on the road is my music, just easy access to analog.
02:23:33.000And so when I'm off the road, I have a file on my computer called I Heard That, and I write down every record I listen to in the order I listen to it, the exact pressing.
02:23:42.000Like last night I listened to a David Bowie single, Golden Years with Can You Hear Me, but it was the pressing from El Salvador, and I had to write that down.
02:25:31.000Yeah, I'm taking notes on things and I'm working writing in my journal and Just writing and listening.
02:25:38.000I got a cup of coffee and Cold cup of coffee.
02:25:43.000Yeah, it's from I made it the night before actually and And so I'm drinking the lower the second half of this cold stale coffee and Jesus Christ, man.
02:26:01.000Like this weekend, a band called Sleep is opening for the Melvins and they're playing two nights at the Fonda, so I'm going to both nights.
02:28:21.000Well, you get involved in relationships, you get a girlfriend or something like that, and they realize, like, what...
02:28:29.000What I'm getting involved with and I realize I can't hack it.
02:28:32.000Because here's the awful thing about being an adult in a relationship, seeking to be an adult in a relationship, I have found.
02:28:40.000When I was young and I was a boy and I was dating girls, It's boys and girls and she's an idiot, you're an idiot, you do dumb things and everyone cheats and whatever.
02:28:48.000Then you hit a certain part of your life where she's a woman and you're a man and you have adult expectations.
02:28:54.000And you can't be running around being an idiot with someone who kind of wants you to be at the table because they are sincerely giving time of their adult life to this thing that you were doing together.
02:29:07.000And when you come in still thinking you're in ninth grade and she's coming in like...
02:29:13.000This is part of what my life is, is being with you.
02:29:17.000I have never been able to answer that in a mature enough way to where I would have been able to maintain it.
02:29:26.000Because, like, say, next weekend, if I had a girlfriend, she might say, it's Friday, what are we doing?
02:29:33.000I'm like, oh, watching me write for four hours?
02:29:36.000laughter And so that's not the way to be.
02:31:01.000She's imagining holding your hand, coming to your spoken word shows, going to dinner with you, talking about your day, and you're in front of your fucking crazy speakers and you're writing.
02:31:25.000Okay, well Ian McKay, he's my best friend and we grew up together doing music and everything and we talk almost every Sunday and so we've been best friends since the Carter administration.
02:32:58.000If I could just say thank you, goodnight, walk out of the building into a moving vehicle and be 10 blocks down the road before they get up out of their seats, that would be fine.
02:33:07.000I don't know what else there is to do except hit it and then quit it.
02:33:13.000And so it makes some interactions a little uncomfortable.
02:34:24.000And so instead of, like, hey, we're all going to go down to the park, come with us, like, well, how about I just make you a really good book?
02:36:18.000You do that, and then you take time off, right?
02:36:20.000You do like a long stretch, and then you take time away from the tour.
02:36:24.000Yeah, and the only reason is if I had my way, I'd be on the road every year, and I'd have hours of new material, and no one would ever get tired of me coming to their city once a year.
02:36:32.000And I used to tour like that for years.
02:37:37.000He gave people a time to forget how long you talk for.
02:37:44.000And so it's sad to think that I have to wait until 2020. But I can do a little weekend here, a weekend there, but I can't go do the lap I just did next year.