Actor and comedian David Cross joins Jemele to talk about the perils of being famous, and why he doesn t want to be famous anymore. Plus, how to deal with people wanting selfies in public, and what it's like to go to a Yankees game with Will Ferrell and be harassed by the owners of the stadium where he plays. Plus, why it sucks being famous and why you should just go back to being a normal guy in New York City. Get Off My Lawn is on all of the social medias, if you search for it, you'll find us. Subscribe to our new podcast, The Nod, wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The Cut, and The Other Place. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends, family, and fellow podcasters! Timestamps: 4:00 - Being famous sucks 5:30 - David Cross 6:40 - Being a celebrity 7:15 - What do you like about being famous? 8:20 - How do you deal with being famous 9:00 10:30 11:15 12:40 What does it suck? 13:00 | Being famous 14:30 | Being a normal person? 15:15 | What is it like to be a celebrity? 16:10 17: Is it a good thing 18:20 19:40 | What are you going to do with fame 21:20 | Is it better than being famous ? 22:10 | What s your favorite part of your favorite thing? 23: What is your favorite movie 25:00 / 26:00 // 27:00 Is it your favorite restaurant? 26:30 Is it the worst thing you like to do? 27:30 Do you have a favorite place to watch a movie or TV show? 30:00 Do you want to go out in public with someone else? 31: What do they like to drink in public? 32:00 Are you looking at you in a bar? 35:00 Can you like it? 36:00 Should you go to the Yankees game? 37:00 What s a good place to drink a lot of beer at night? 39:00 [ ]
Transcript
Transcripts from "Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:42.000You know, you were in a sort of gentrified neighborhood.
00:00:45.000So he was sort of like a little, a little GPS where you could tell how safe you were.
00:00:52.000If people, if you're with David Cross and people knew that he was from Scary Movie 2, you should probably get out of there before midnight.
00:01:00.000I remember when I first met him, I was kind of naive about celebrity, and I said to people, they would go, yo, David, you're my biggest, and I'd say, he's your biggest hero?
00:01:49.000And, you know, if they want selfies... This might sound annoying to you, because if you haven't been, you know, privy to it, it sounds like I'm bragging, and you go... I can't imagine you wanting to be famous, though.
00:02:17.000So I don't really think you want to be famous, do you?
00:02:20.000It's not like people come up to you and they go, hey, in episode 29 of Get Off My Lawn, you were talking to Cassandra Fairbanks, and she was talking about a secret service agent.
00:02:38.000People yelling from cars and they want a selfie, but their phones are never ready, so you stand there and they're like, oh, sorry, hold on, hold on.
00:02:45.000And they've got some Galaxy 500 piece of Google crap.
00:02:49.000And they're getting into pictures and... Ugh.
00:04:51.000You know, I can't... Towards the end of our relationship, he dumped me for being a Trump guy, basically, but he couldn't... Like, we couldn't go to a bar in L.A.
00:07:46.000It's not that my wife's dying to read celebrity mags, but I really think they're unethical.
00:07:52.000Like, I saw this picture, and it was Katie Holmes holding her daughter with Tom Cruise, and it said, uh, whatever her name is, Suri, uh, Suri, uh, struggling with the divorce of Tom and Katie.
00:08:08.000And I thought, no, she's struggling with the fact that you're running at this little child with a camera, and her mother is doing that, like, running from a fire hold, where the hand is below the butt, and the other hand is on the back,
00:08:22.000Like holding the child close to you, like the way you would hold a child if you were running down a mountain?
00:08:48.000And these people are disgusting human beings.
00:08:51.000Like, paying these thugs to attack someone on a motorcycle so you can get a frown emoji from Jennifer Aniston's husband is just depraved.
00:09:01.000So, um... The word on the street is that TMZ
00:09:08.000Call the cops on those guys because it's like within crime, you know, like the mob doesn't like certain mobsters to certain gangs to behave a certain way.
00:09:19.000Like I've heard that about the Westies in Hell's Kitchen.
00:09:23.000The Italian mob goes, we can't deal with these guys.
00:09:26.000I threatened his mother and he said, go ahead, fucking kill her.
00:09:29.000So I don't know how to deal with someone who doesn't want their mother to die.
00:09:52.000I kind of feel like that with the Proud Boys.
00:09:54.000I feel like I'm part of this group where we're ensconced in conflict against our will, and we have to say, don't do this, don't do that, but do punch back.
00:15:42.000I suspect that it's just politically correct claptrap and it was women saying, you know, I wrote an article and they didn't like it, and that was sexist.
00:16:34.000What exactly happened was, they're talking about a 2003, I don't know if you've seen this, but page six in the New York Post.
00:16:39.000I'm gonna have to open a Red Bull so I can stay focused.
00:16:43.000It's not a Budweiser at all, obviously.
00:16:48.000What happened in, uh, 2003, we launched this book, The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, and it was a compilation of all our craziest stuff over the past, uh, ten years.
00:17:04.000And in the interview, we talked about sex we had had when we were in our early 20s.
00:17:12.000By the way, if you were in your early 20s and you're in Montreal, which is basically France, which is basically sex-positive heaven, and you have anything going on, you're going to be attractive to women.
00:17:52.000And I wrote about it in the Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs from Rock and Roll in this interview section.
00:17:57.000So we're talking about sex we had in 1994.
00:18:00.000And I'm not sure how candid I can be here with this particular lady, but I think it's worth mentioning.
00:18:06.000Because you're 24, so I'm a young man, and when we would print the newspaper, it was done with a company called Quebecor, and this guy was a French-Canadian rep.
00:18:23.000Biggest wimps on earth, the French-Canadians.
00:18:26.000I mean, they call their mothers every day.
00:20:33.000And then Richard Sawinski found us and thought we were... He appreciates shame bravado when Shane said that Richard Sawinski was interested when Richard had never even heard of us.
00:20:43.000Anyway, this is all in my book, The Death of Cool.
00:20:45.000So, uh... We start fooling around with, uh, Amma.
00:21:55.000So in the Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, Shane called those encounters orgies, which whatever, you know, when you have a sales guy, you let him be hyperbolic.
00:22:07.000But that is somehow in modern media, and when I say modern media, I mean these past three days, become this like culture of sex and orgies.
00:22:17.000And then they're conflating that with allegations from 2015,
00:22:26.000And saying that the sort of template of sex that started back in 1994 has spread to today.
00:22:34.000Which, as I said to a New York Post reporter, is like saying Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys, during his Tibet stuff, is a sexist because during License to Ill, in 1985, did a giant inflatable penis on stage.
00:23:00.000So, maybe I should take a moment to sort of explain my old company, which I rarely talk about because I feel like it's talking about my ex-wife.
00:23:08.0001994, I started the company with Saroosh Alvi.
00:24:08.000And we were doing that, we were plugging along, and we had 16 pages.
00:24:12.000And I would send them to my friend Shane, childhood friend I knew since I was 12, who was teaching English in Budapest, I believe, at the time.
00:24:21.000And so him and his friends over there would make fun of us because the magazine sucked, and it kind of did suck, but whatever.
00:24:28.000How's your 16-page newsprint paper coming along?
00:24:32.000So he comes over, and I go, I want you to be head of sales.
00:26:45.000So we do that, and by the way, to these journalists that are trying to talk about these orgies and that chick from Malta as some sort of pattern, this is just still three dudes.
00:31:54.000Anyway, so that went on and then Richard Swinsky was, it turned out, had some nefarious business going on and there was bankruptcy going on and we were nothing.
00:32:06.000Overnight, we literally were, we came in and they shut the power off and they were removing the mirrors from the bathroom.
00:32:14.000So we moved to Triple Five Soul's storage space.
00:32:18.000In Williamsburg, which was a desolate wasteland at the time, 2001.
00:33:57.000That's the weird thing about these journalists.
00:33:59.000They go, I'm going to take your company now and just sort of backdate it such that there's a massive audience, you know, a massive staff working in 1994 in Montreal.
00:34:11.000Or they say, well, there was that pupus, that larvae of sexism and it slowly grew over the years.
00:35:35.000If someone strayed from the path and got up to hanky-panky, that's none of my beeswax.
00:35:41.000And of course it's terrible if they did that.
00:35:44.000So, there was the bankruptcy, there was 2002, and then we started rebuilding the company, and I got to hand it to Shane and Saroosh, they busted their asses, and I didn't bust my ass at all.
00:35:57.000I liked that we were no longer owned by a billionaire, and I could go back to hanging out with weirdos and finding a guy who bought a dirty bomb in Paris, and I would just scour New York with my little notepad.
00:36:09.000And find someone who was like a black supremacist or a white supremacist or a lesbian supremacist and find all these weirdos.
00:36:23.000Those poor bastards had to deal with debt collectors and everything.
00:36:26.000And I think that's why they started to build their resentment towards me, because they thought, he gets to do the fun stuff, meet girls and shit, and we have to sit here dealing with debt collectors.
00:36:37.000But eventually, big investors started noticing that we had survived this, and they got interested again.
00:37:08.000And I would say when I left, like 2008 I left, but by 2007, there was an office again.
00:37:15.0002006, there was an office again with tons of people working there.
00:37:19.0002003 to 2006, it was a pretty small little community.
00:37:24.000And again, my business plan has always been, and would continue to be, ad sales go on this side of the room, editorial goes on this side of the room.
00:39:09.000If there is going to be a big expose on how my threesomes and various sexual escapades, and by the way, tons of drug use and heroin and all kinds of rude stuff, that was some sort of template that links to sexual assault allegations in 2016, 2017.
00:39:30.000That's just lazy journalism, is what it is.
00:39:51.000Do you really think a sexual encounter I had personally when I was 24 would affect a company I left 10 years ago and had sexual assault allegations this year?
00:41:38.000And I put some of it in the stock market, some of it in real estate, which then doubled.
00:41:45.000I'm sure a lot of people don't enjoy hearing that.
00:41:51.000And then I made a lot of money on my own.
00:41:53.000I mean, I started an ad agency with nothing and sold that for a boatload before it was shut down for my transphobic bullies.
00:42:02.000But I started a weird career after that, which was selling comedy pilots.
00:42:10.000So I'd go to L.A., and I'd go to Comedy Central and all these FX and stuff, and I'd just dazzle them in the pitch with an idea for a show.
00:42:21.000And I have all these PDFs of these pilots.
00:42:23.000I should probably send them to you, but there was like... One was three guys who are straight, but they learn to become hairdressers to get laid.
00:42:37.000I did one about a secretary, where a guy doesn't like the fact that he's called secretary, but he is the president's right-hand man, and he's a machismo dude who's known as a secretary.
00:42:53.000There was an aging hipster, which was basically my life, and this was a guy who had made tons of money selling a hipster company, and now he's still trying to get something else going, but all his friends are 22, and he's 40, and his wife's disgusted by it, and she's acquiesced beautifully into the upper middle class echelons of society, and he can't seem to let go of his hipster past.
00:43:17.000Okay, no Nobel Peace Prizes for creativity there, but you can imagine, knowing how incredibly funny I am, that the actual content was great.
00:43:29.000I actually wrote a great one with Jay Johnson from Mr. Show called The Two Bennies, and it was an update to the Benny Hill Show, but it was two Benny Hills.
00:43:42.000And it was just like a really exaggerated version of Benny Hill.
00:43:46.000So when a woman, like he did something rude to a woman like, oh, ha ha.
00:43:51.000And of course, this will be linked to the rapes advice.
00:43:55.000The woman wouldn't just like hit them with a purse the way they did Benny Hill.
00:43:59.000They'd beat him with the purse until his head was a pulp.
00:44:04.000Like he had that show, Monster Hunter, where this guy would, you know, beat the living crap out of monsters till they were just jam.
00:44:14.000He had a great James Bond parody that he did where James Bond would go to rescue someone and just destroy, you know, the whole village trying to save this woman.
00:44:23.000Anyway, it was that kind of thing meets Benny Hill.
00:44:28.000And that was a weird job I had for a while.
00:47:25.000Anyway, so we did the ad agency for a while and we kept building up and Vans was really generous and we did some great videos with them.
00:47:35.000And I was also freelance writing at the time.
00:47:37.000I started, I was always writing for Tacky Meg, but then this dude at Thought Catalog, I think his name's Chris, maybe Rob, you know, a normal dude name.
00:47:46.000He goes, hey, I've been reading your stuff for a while.
00:48:16.000So I start saying things like, short hair is rape.
00:48:20.000Now, this is in a culture where they think everything is rape, so I say, if a lady has short hair, and you're doing her from behind, you look down and you see a woman's body with short hair, you see a 12 year old boy.
00:48:34.000So you switched you out with a 12-year-old boy.
00:49:53.000I beat polygraphs, and that's where I met my polygraph buddy, Doug.
00:50:01.000And so we shot all these episodes and we had a big staff, you know, they're all British, obviously Discover UK, and we had a staff of like 15 and everywhere we went, we'd have a staff of another 15 of locals.
00:50:13.000To be honest, it's hard to remember all the stuff I had going on then.
00:50:17.000As an entrepreneur in New York, you have 15 spinning plates at all time.
00:50:21.000So when one goes, you don't even notice it.
00:50:24.000Now in LA, they have one spinning plate,
00:50:28.000It falls, smashes, and they go, oh, that plate smashed.
00:50:32.000That plate, by the way, was spinning for three years, solo.
00:50:35.000And then they go, oh, my pilot didn't get picked up.
00:50:38.000All right, well, soon enough, I should get a plate back up and start spinning.
00:50:45.000Meanwhile, by the way, back in 08, I had started this website called Street Carnage.
00:50:50.000And I thought, me and Derek Beckles, my buddy,
00:51:27.000Now, of course, Derek and I eventually split because I'm a Nazi.
00:51:32.000So anyway, had all these things going on, but that... When I said transphobia is perfectly natural, and I said if your dad cut his dick off and stuff, you'd be freaked out.
00:52:09.000My ad agency had just been bought by Havas, which is a French ad agency.
00:52:15.000And, um, they, I think they were looking for a reason to kill us because, um, we were making just, like, good profits, 20% or something, and that's not good.
00:52:30.000When you buy an ad agency for several million dollars, you want them to make 20 million dollars.
00:52:37.000Everyone wants jackass or Blair Witch Project
00:52:40.000Where I think Jackass cost 5 million and it grossed something like 200 million, I'm not sure.
00:52:46.000But Blair Witch Project cost nothing to make and it made something like, I don't know, 20 million.
00:52:51.000I'm getting these numbers wrong, but it's shocking how much they spent and how much they made.
00:52:56.000And the funny thing about executives, also in book publishing by the way, they hear that and they go, I want that.
00:53:03.000But at the end of the day, most indie films lose money, most blockbusters sort of do okay, and, you know, books make twenty grand or something.
00:53:13.000Less than the Advance, is the truth of it.
00:53:16.000And then, you know, the Fifty Shades of Grey pays for everything else.
00:53:22.000Am I being interesting or am I sounding too negative here?
00:53:25.000So, uh, the ad agency was, Havas, was waiting for a chance to shut us down, and this trans thing was a perfect opportunity, so they shut us down.
00:53:34.000But here's what I'll never forget about all those things.
00:53:37.000Everything in my life was completely extinguished by the trans article.
00:58:07.000I went there after I lost money and figured out how to make money there.
00:58:13.000And what's ironic, by the way, Mr. Creative Pants, is you couldn't do the same.
00:58:18.000If I ostracized you, you Rastafarian, who clearly must hate gays because that's part of Rastafarian culture, if I painted you into a corner, you would have to blow your head off because you'd have no idea what to do because you're a loser.
00:58:33.000Yes, that was me leaving the podcast and getting into my own id for a moment.
00:58:41.000So yeah, so I did Kumia for a while, and I started getting so many followers, and I mean that in the best of ways, that I thought I could do this by myself.
00:58:49.000I could probably get 10,000 guys to spend $4 a month.
00:58:53.000And while this was going on, by the way, I said, let's start a men's club.
00:58:59.000Just a place where guys can be guys, and guys can be alone, away from chicks, and just do normal stuff like the Shriners used to do.
00:59:06.000And I joined the Knights of Columbus, and I loved it.
00:59:11.000Uh, you know, I don't really belong with these guys in Hell's Kitchen.
00:59:15.000I couldn't have a more different background.
00:59:16.000I'm an English middle class kid who moved to Canada when I was five and made a bunch of money in New York.
00:59:25.000And now I am, you know, taking the train into Hell's Kitchen to talk to these blue collar dudes.
00:59:31.000About their lives and about growing up with the Westies in Hell's Kitchen.
01:01:16.000New guests no one's ever heard of and regular guests people have heard of and introduce new concepts and you know I just I don't sit on my ass and the story I'm trying to tell today on this podcast is not that I'm special though I am.
01:01:34.000The thing I'm trying to get across today is I know you're gonna be ostracized if you like Trump, if you're a right-winger, you're going to be banished if you like Bannon, but the beauty of this country is you just keep plugging away, and you will succeed.
01:01:56.000If you want to make children's wood puppets,
01:02:01.000Where they're marionettes, and you use fishing line for the wires, and there are little wood guys that dance around, and you practice and practice and practice.
01:02:11.000You can do a funny little dance with them.
01:02:13.000I guarantee you, you'll make 50 grand a year after three years.
01:02:18.000Now, I usually say two years, but I said three years because you chose such a stupid profession.
01:02:23.000Dancing puppets, what the hell's the matter with you?
01:03:24.000And the fact that their jaws dropped when I was that fake guy for those, you know, five seconds, shows that they don't really think that that's a guy either.
01:03:33.000They just like, like, we don't like you.
01:05:09.000And finished it, and then Proud Boys became this thing where it was like they must be racist or something if they don't agree with the left.
01:05:18.000I actually had Alan Foyer, a journalist at New York Times, he said, why don't you just lie there and take a beating?
01:06:40.000And there's been some serious downs over the years.
01:06:44.000Serious bankruptcy, serious borderline divorce, serious, you know, hemorrhaging cash, serious a year with zero money at all coming in, eating away at savings, losing savings, you know, having to move in with friends over the years, crash on couches.
01:07:06.000There's been all of that, but the beauty of the Western world is you keep plugging away at no matter what it is.
01:08:37.000They still, I mean Shark Tank is a popular show for a reason because as John Steinbeck said, the poor in America vote Republican because they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
01:08:52.000So I started this podcast to say that these journalists that are trying to imply that my rampant sexual encounters when I was a young man in 1984 are somehow linked to an inexorable culture of sexism in 2016 is retarded.
01:09:13.000Similarly, to say that Proud Boys, a men's club where we happen to defend our friends if our friends get attacked,
01:09:22.000is somehow a gateway drug to Nazism is also lazy journalism.
01:09:28.000And you might like lazy journalism because your editors comply and they go, good job.
01:09:34.000But young people don't appreciate that.
01:09:43.000And I'm actually never going to this site again or this show again.
01:09:48.000So, you may get in under the wire and pay your bills and temporarily appease your employers, but lying doesn't work in America, because America is ultimately a meritocracy.
01:10:04.000And you can be a pariah, you can go against the grain, you can be a witch during Salem, you can be a communist during McCarthyism, you can be a truth teller during political correctness.
01:10:15.000But eventually, if you bust your ass in the West, you will succeed.
01:10:22.000I know it's frustrating being ostracized.
01:10:25.000I've seen being a Trump supporter ruin marriages, get people fired, get bricks thrown through windows, believe it or not.
01:10:33.000That's probably a whole other podcast.
01:10:35.000But the big picture is the West is still the best.
01:10:39.000And this is still the only part of the world where you get rewarded for busting your ass.
01:10:47.000It's still the only place in the world where if you persevere, if you get up early, if you're not hungover, and if you GIVER from dawn till dusk, you'll get paid, you'll have two cars, you'll have a house you own, you'll have a happy wife, and you'll have a bunch of kids.