Comedian and comedian Joe Rogan returns to the Big Apple to talk about his night at Madison Square Garden. Joe also talks about his love of country music and how he got to meet his good friend, country singer-songwriter Ron White. Joe also gives his thoughts on the upcoming Country Music Country Music Awards and why he thinks there's no such thing as a "golden old man." And of course, there's a little bit about his new song, "Find whatever you can find" by Lady Antebellum, which you should definitely listen to if you haven't already done so! Enjoy the episode and tweet me if you do! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - The night that changed my life 4:30 - How to be yourself 6:15 - There are no rules for age 7:40 - You can do whatever you want 8:20 - There's no rules 9:00- You can express whatever you wanna express 10:00 11:30- You're too old to worry about that 12:20- You don't have to be too old 13:40- Ron White is a legend 14:30 15:15- You should never stop writing 16:00 Is there a rule for age? 17:40 18:00 -- You're a legend? 19:30 -- What are you working on it? 21:40 -- How old are you too old? 22:00-- you're not working the game? 23:30-- You're working too hard? 24:00? 26:00 You're better than you're old enough? 25:00 What's a good guy? 27:00 Do you need to be a good person? 29:00 Can you be yourself? 30:00 Are you old enough to be better than that's a ruleless? ? 32:00 Does it matter if you're a rule-less than you don't care about that? 35:00 How old is too old yet? 36:00 I'm not a rulebreaker? 37:00 No rules for you can be a rule breaker? 39:00 | No rules? 40:00 That's no rule for me? 41:00 This guy is a rule breaker?
00:00:52.000Like, everything associated with this club, everything associated with Tony, everything associated with Joe is fixing to fucking rocket ship.
00:01:01.000And it felt like, almost like, I'm getting goosebumps, Joe.
00:01:21.000So to see Tony at fucking Madison Square Garden, and then to see how y'all showed up for Tony at Madison Square Garden, every fucking comedian on earth came to see that dude to fucking kiss him on his fucking cheek.
00:02:30.000But watching Tony, I feel a kinship to Tony and Andrew Schultz in a certain way because I feel like we all kind of met each other right before it happened for all of us.
00:02:41.000Like I remember me and Schultz doing the opener up song at the five, four, you know, he was doing two nights at Zaney's, two shows, one show, you know, one show a night.
00:03:37.000But it's like that humility that he has, even though he's got great confidence in his ability, like Ron is a very humble guy, as successful as he is, but that humility that he is is also that constantly has him writing, constantly has him working.
00:03:52.000He's 40 years in the game, he never stops.
00:03:55.000And he's better now than he's ever been before.
00:03:58.000Now that he's sober, Like, he's a monster.
00:04:25.000Like, to me, Ron White has done more of that.
00:04:28.000I have more Ron White bits memorized than any other comedian.
00:04:32.000Just by default of how good he is at weaving these little quick two-minute stories of just complete white trashery and drunkery, which is just my fucking specialty.
00:05:51.000Once they have control of you like they had during the pandemic, wear a mask, gotta get a vaccine, can't go here, can't go there, no businesses, everything's shut down, all the restaurants go under, all the comedy clubs go under.
00:06:03.000When they were doing that, I was like, they're not gonna let this go.
00:07:23.000And when you came, that stale water stirred and it awakened everybody.
00:07:27.000Like, hold on, there's choices outside of the same routine that we've been, because, you know, I mean, I'm sure y'all's life was store, store, store, weekends out, store, store.
00:09:11.000I was like, it's the gym for the greatest comedians in the world, Tuesday through Thursday, and then the other greatest comedians in the world come and rent it from Friday to Sunday.
00:09:22.000It's like, no matter what day or show you want.
00:09:23.000And then you have Kill Tony, that's the anchor.
00:09:25.000Kill Tony is the anchor of comedy in the known universe.
00:09:29.000Really, that's a grandiose statement, I know.
00:09:31.000But what Kill Tony shows you is like every comic wants a reaction.
00:09:36.000And some comics, unfortunately, if you're in specific areas, like very liberal areas, like Silver Lake has a problem with this, like those kind of places, where everyone's like super woke and they want to let everyone else know that they're super woke.
00:09:49.000It's like a kind of thing you have to do.
00:09:58.000What Kill Tony makes you do is you have one fucking minute.
00:10:01.000You have one minute and there's obviously no rules.
00:10:04.000By the time you get on stage, you've seen Cam go crazy, you've seen Hans Kim say some ridiculous shit, maybe you've seen William Montgomery or Brian Holtz, but you've seen maniacs on stage killing.
00:10:24.000No matter how you put it out, no matter what it is, what your style is, what you like to talk about, whether you're Nate Bargatze or whether you're Shane Gillis.
00:10:33.000There's just a different way to do it.
00:10:35.000Everybody's got their own way to do it.
00:10:37.000But it's just, just go try to find your way.
00:10:41.000Don't try to sneak in some fucking ideological bullshit just because you think people are going to agree with you and like you more and clap and cheat and you're going to say something profound.
00:12:30.000A bunch of music dudes every Monday that were like, religiously.
00:12:33.000It's something we have together, you know what I mean?
00:12:36.000It's something that the whole band can agree on.
00:12:38.000The other thing about Kill Tony was, in the beginning, Tony wasn't famous, no one was famous, and they were just going hard.
00:12:45.000And then, as everyone got famous, they kept going hard.
00:12:48.000Whereas it's very hard to just jump in and do something that wild now.
00:12:53.000And there was nothing like it during COVID. There was nothing like it.
00:12:56.000You had this live show every week in front of a live audience, and everybody else is locked down where you have to wear your fucking mask where you're walking your dog.
00:13:09.000Rejection of norm, you know, rejection of whatever people think the comedy industry is.
00:13:16.000Because people think the comedy industry is like some group of people with power that control and give people specials that don't deserve it.
00:13:52.000But you're talking about people that do more when they get there.
00:13:56.000And me and you were talking off-record, I mean off-record, off-microphone when we were walking in here about, you hang around nine long enough, you'll be the tenth.
00:25:32.000You found all the food you're going to find and you're going to get up in the morning and go right back at it all day long again and then eventually find your way back to the campfire.
00:25:40.000So the campfire was like the time where people would sit around and entertain each other.
00:26:31.000They had to figure that out trial and error.
00:26:33.000How many times they had to go through it and go back and go, listen, y'all, I've done this a few times and I'm pretty confident that there is this thing that grows in a pile of shit that makes me feel fucking like God.
00:27:21.000So this guy thinks that all of religion is stories about mushrooms.
00:27:25.000He thinks that the entire Christian religion was about psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
00:27:31.000He thinks that what they were doing was they would have these stories, especially when they're conquered by the Romans, they'd have these stories so they would hide the truth in stories.
00:27:49.000I can tell you this I mean, I'm a man of faith, but on brand with that is Jesus told stories and he taught in stories.
00:28:17.000You know, because if you have a story, in the story, Noah has an ark, and he brings the animals in the ark, and God tells him he's going to do this, and he's going to do that, and he does it, and then, you know, if you have a story, then that information keeps getting told essentially the same way over and over and over again.
00:28:33.000Like, we can read the Epic of Gilgamesh today.
00:28:36.000That's a 6,000-year-old story, something like that, 5,000.
00:28:47.000But if it was just people talking about what you should do or what happened and, you know, like, when it's history, man, we can't trust history from the 60s.
00:29:32.000You've got to sort through the rubble and figure out what the facts show.
00:29:37.000But if you have a story, even if it's like there's something hidden in that story, and he thinks that that's what the apple was in the Garden of Eden.
00:29:49.000The thing about stories, too, is they said, I've never been to the pyramids, but they said that All that stuff on the inside of it is just a story, right?
00:29:57.000The hieroglyphics, some of them, sure.
00:29:59.000Yeah, the hieroglyphics are like telling stories, or when they have the guys chasing these things with the spears, they're like trying to show a story.
00:30:40.000It was a life-changing experience every time.
00:30:41.000It's funny that people want to reject that.
00:30:44.000What's really important is to keep people from losing their mind and losing their ambition and becoming like the hippies were in the 1960s following Timothy Leary.
00:30:53.000That's what everybody's worried about.
00:30:55.000Everybody's worried about this collapse of society because people, they give up on capitalism, they tune in and drop out, you know, that whole thing.
00:32:37.000That's an organism from another planet.
00:32:39.000And the reason for this is that they know that spores can survive in the vacuum of space.
00:32:47.000And there's a thing called panspermia.
00:32:50.000What panspermia is, is the idea that like an asteroid slams into a planet And it takes amino acids and biological organisms that can survive in space and a bunch of different elements from that planet and then introduces those new elements to another planet by way of an asteroid.
00:33:07.000And that's a real thing that we know for sure happens, right?
00:33:11.000And they know that that's how we get iridium.
00:33:13.000There's a lot of iridium on Earth, like in places where there's been an impact because it's really rare on Earth but really common in space.
00:33:22.000And apparently, I'm too stupid to understand this, but the way botanists describe it, and see if you can find any information on this, there's something very unusual about the compound psilocybin and psilocybin and cubensis mushrooms.
00:33:36.000They're very weird, and they're not really connected to a lot of the other fungus that's here in some strange way.
00:33:44.000The way they work is also very tied into human neurochemistry.
00:33:49.000It's really close to dimethyltryptamine, which is a part of human neurochemistry.
00:33:53.000And so, the craziest theory is that it's come from space.
00:33:56.000Living spores have been found and collected in every level of Earth's atmosphere.
00:34:00.000Mushroom spores are electron dense and can survive in the vacuum of space.
00:34:04.000Additionally, their outer layer is actually metallic and of a purple hue, which naturally allows the spore to deflect ultraviolet light.
00:34:12.000And as if all this wasn't unique enough, the outer shell of the spore is the hardest organic compound to exist in nature.
00:34:21.000So this is one of the weirder theories.
00:34:41.000His theory hypothesized that mushroom spores possess all the necessary requirements to travel on space currents.
00:34:46.000Furthermore, they could have settled in the brain matter of primitive hominoids and following the lines of modern-day hallucinogenic mushrooms directly contributed to our modern-day intelligence and self-awareness.
00:35:02.000Yeah, his theory is that's why I mean if you can see it there click on that back again you can see Where it was talking about his theory so his his theory is very very bizarre So he went on to theorize that mushrooms are the reason there's human life on Earth.
00:35:19.000So while it may seem like material from space, from a science fiction novel rather, there is no avoiding the fact that mushrooms possess many traits that are unique to their kingdom alone.
00:35:27.000Fungi build cell walls of, I don't know how to say that word, chitin?
00:35:42.000These cell walls contain similar chemicals found in butterfly and beetle wings as well as the plumage of some colorful birds such as peacocks, living spores.
00:35:51.000Okay, so we've read that, but there was something about his theory where he was explaining his theory of how it would have worked.
00:36:00.000Well, essentially his theory was that they experimented with mushrooms, and it made them better hunters, and it made them more creative, and it made them figure out language.
00:36:09.000And he thinks it's responsible for this weird mystery of the human brain size.
00:36:15.000It doubled over a period of two million years, and there's no real solid explanation.
00:42:16.000The time of this, I know I keep going back to the same point, but it's where my heart is right now, is watching me and a bunch of guys that were all at this kind of same thing at the same time three or four years ago, that you could feel the teapot bubbling.
00:42:29.000And all of us being like a little left of center.
00:43:15.000It's like gave me purpose and I've never felt more loved.
00:43:19.000I've never felt more warmed or welcomed.
00:43:21.000I spent so much time feeling the opposite of loved, you know?
00:43:25.000Even walking in here and playing with Carl, there was a time in my life where I would have walked in here and that dog would have let y'all know I was not a good person.
00:44:26.000They watched me get off lean They've watched me figure my life out slowly and they knew that the last mountain for me was food So we started putting a real structure around I hired a real nutritionist.
00:44:39.000He's out here with me now I mean like I'm only eating his food.
00:44:41.000I'm just like super with it We're getting anything that could you know out of the green room for just so I'm working out every day walking around the arenas and And one day they have a basketball court, because we're fucking playing in a...
00:44:52.000This is insane, by the way, that I'm playing fucking NBA arenas.
00:44:55.000And, like, I'm playing where the fucking Orlando...
00:46:19.000Especially like, because I don't get in my head about stuff, but just this week was the first time the label called and said, hey, we want to put this on your radar because it might make you want to promote the record.
00:47:26.000Like if you had like the little baby Snickers and a little thing or...
00:47:30.000The other day I was in my green room and somebody was in the green room and they picked up a piece of candy and said, you want one of these?
00:47:38.000Because we just got hit in a dab or something.
00:47:40.000I didn't even know the candy was in there, Jeff.
00:47:42.000Because normally they get the candy, they don't put shit like that in my room.
00:47:44.000And that was the first time I was like, oh, I'm on to something.
00:48:07.000I've had to make so many different small habit changes, but it's been the fucking...
00:48:12.000I was just telling Bubba out there, and I was telling Bruce on the way in here, I feel this good just losing 100 pounds, Joe, and I'm still...
00:48:19.000I've never told my weight, but I'm going to tell it here because I want some accountability from people.
00:48:28.000Imagine, I'm walking around different, talking different, my shoulders are setting different, I'm fucking my wife different, I'm just kind of, you know, I'm moving different.
00:48:37.000Bro, you probably have crazy powerful legs.
00:51:44.000Yeah, if you just keep going, you know, it'll become normal for you to not eat candy, normal for you to eat healthy food, it'll be what you crave.
00:58:41.000I would just try to, you know the story, we've talked about it a lot, but it was a way to connect with her, even before music.
00:58:47.000And then when I found out music was her shit, I was like, oh, this is the double connection.
00:58:50.000Like, oh, this is, I'm doubling down on this.
00:58:53.000And I still to this day think I'm writing for my mama.
00:58:56.000Like, to this day, I'm still like, when I'm really finishing a song, I'm thinking to myself, I wonder what my mama would think about this, you know, in this really weird way.
00:59:26.000And if it's, it could be anything as much as it's just, you know, it just makes me happy or it could make people happy or it could make people move is enough of a reason.
00:59:34.000Out of these 100 plus songs that you've written recently, how many of them you think you'll ever record?
00:59:40.000I recorded probably 30 something of them.
01:00:11.000You know, it's not that I couldn't, you know...
01:00:16.000I don't know if this is a good comparison, but it'd be like, I could write a song about hating my wife, but I could never sing it because I don't really hate my wife.
01:00:25.000I could never sing it with conviction.
01:00:27.000Now, as a songwriter, do I have the skill set to write a song about hating my wife?
01:02:20.000Yeah, I'll watch it for bursts, but then my knowledge of orthopedic surgeries that these people are going to be receiving and injuries and concussions, they're just like, I got to stop watching this.
01:02:30.000I love watching stuff that doesn't seem real, though, right?
01:04:00.000And I feel like somewhere, it's kind of like everything goes in themes, and then country music went through, like, you know, the hunting and fishing era.
01:04:07.000But in the 70s, it was more of the storytelling era, like the poncho and lefty style stuff, you know what I mean?
01:04:13.000But to me, the 90s cowboy music was, like, still some of the best country music ever made.
01:04:19.000Bro, you know who's got the best rodeo song for my money?
01:04:44.000You want to talk about a real cowgirl?
01:04:46.000Reba McIntyre was like Oklahoma or somewhere, and she would sing the national anthem at all the local rodeos because they knew she was a local singer, but she was a real cowboy.
01:05:14.000How many people are like that out there?
01:05:16.000When you think about yourself becoming artist of the year at 39, how many people are like that out there that are just super talented, that just never get that crack?
01:06:07.000I went to the Juvenile yesterday in...
01:06:15.000Columbus, Ohio I went to go play cards with the kids in their units before my show I try to do stuff like that all the time and we were all talking about You know time energy stuff into this and songs and I talked about writing 170 songs last year And I was like do y'all know that there was so many moments in my life where I in hindsight I'm glad nobody sat me down really that I had to have looked fucking crazy You know,
01:06:41.000that kid asked me, he said, when did you feel like you made it?
01:06:44.000I was like, I think that's why God kept blessing me is that me and DJ Highlight, that's my DJ's from Columbus, Ohio, he was there with me.
01:06:49.000We did the one o'clock slot at Rock on the Range 12 years ago, right?
01:06:54.000The festival, you know Rock on the Range, Jamie.
01:06:56.000This is a big deal of where Jamie's from.
01:06:59.000We played the fifth stage of five stages.
01:07:02.000So we played the smallest stage there, 30 minutes after they opened the gates.
01:07:06.000Joe, we started drinking at 10 o'clock that morning because we were rock stars in our minds.
01:09:21.000People figure it out, but not everybody figures it out.
01:09:24.000That's why it's so exciting when you do.
01:09:26.000That's why it's so exciting when you make it, because you know it's not just that a bunch of lucky things had to happen to you, because they all do with all of us.
01:09:34.000There's a lot of good circumstances to happen your way just to keep you alive, right?
01:10:57.000It didn't make the album, but Bert one night said something.
01:10:59.000He was like, yeah, man, this is where dreams go to die.
01:11:02.000And he was talking about a bar he used to go to where everybody would talk about what they would do but never did, so he quit talking about what he was going to do.
01:11:08.000But what he don't know is I just quietly grabbed my phone and wrote, dreams die here.
01:11:42.000Like when you sit in front of the computer and an idea just comes to you and you start writing it down or when you wake up in the middle of the night, take a leak and you can't get this idea out of your head and you gotta grab a notebook.
01:12:40.000The problem was, me and D-Ray joke about it.
01:12:42.000It took us two hours to write the song that would have took us 20 minutes to write, because I was convinced, Somebody Save Me was supposed to be the chorus.
01:14:01.000Because the funny part about him was...
01:14:04.000He was struggling with whether or not he was going to keep the original chorus and do somebody save me at the end or do somebody save me as the chorus and put the original chorus at the end.
01:14:11.000And he ended up doing somebody save me in the original chorus at the end.
01:14:14.000So he fought the battle the opposite of the way I fought it.
01:14:18.000It's crazy, right, how art works that way?
01:15:09.000And it has been so—talking about muses—I wasn't sure if I was going to tell this story, but I will.
01:15:20.000As a part of my journey of my mental health and with things I struggle with, I will pop into when I'm home, NA or AA meetings, even though I still drink and smoke pot.
01:15:31.000I don't claim to be a part of the program because I have so much respect for those who are sober, like can really live the clean, sober life by the program.
01:15:38.000But it's helped me so much not to go back to some of my demons.
01:16:51.000And I went into the meeting and I left and I walked in the writer's room and they was like, you know, it's fun when we write together because everybody's got an idea.
01:16:58.000I said, boys, I don't know if this is the idea, but I want to tell you what just happened to me.
01:17:02.000I just seen one of the most beautiful acts of humanity I've ever seen.
01:17:08.000Because this guy's shaking, he's crying.
01:20:33.000I don't know what it was, but before they would play a song, it was like they would take, and I'm like this to this day, I would take great pride in being like, oh, I'm fixing to show you something.
01:22:50.000To me, this is some of the best, the whole song, but right here.
01:22:55.000I've been walking my mind to an easy time With my back turned towards the sun So simple for real.
01:23:03.000Lord knows when the cold wind blows It'll turn your head around There's hours of time on the telephone line To talk about things to come Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.
01:23:21.000Oh, now I've seen fire and I've seen rain.
01:23:27.000I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end.
01:26:29.000Ever since the singer released her accusatory track in 1972, The Identity of You has remained one of the greatest mysteries in music history.
01:26:36.000But she did date Warren Beatty, right?
01:27:43.000The idea was, and Neil Young was speaking a lot about what was happening down there in the South at the time, and Ronnie's position was just simply like, hey man, We stay the fuck out of your business.
01:30:59.000It's hard to say because of Hendrix and Steve Ray Vaughn and a bunch of other people, Eddie Van Halen, but that solo was the same every time they did it.
01:31:07.000Oh, the story about Sweet Home Alabama.
01:31:11.000They're sitting at a sound check and it's just Ronnie and Gary.
01:32:00.000When Gary's family gave me that guitar after he passed away, it still is up there with my top probably ten possessions that I've ever been gifted.
01:32:10.000I have it in my studio now, and I hung it in a case with the note that his family wrote me with the picture that we took the night he played the guitar.
01:32:50.000But over the years, they always found different ways to make them as they were improving them, but the sounds and textures were getting different.
01:32:58.000But I forgot exactly what he does, because he takes a pickup from another guitar and puts it in, too, I think, in most of his guitars.
01:33:04.000There's a lot of real guitarists that'll want to play this guitar, but they'll want to put this from this guitar on this guitar.
01:35:26.000So his younger brother took right over.
01:35:29.000And like I tell people, the average Lynyrd Skynyrd fan that's not like me and you, obsessed with him to a degree, they don't know anybody other than him to be their singer.
01:35:40.000Because he's been their singer four years longer than Ronnie was.
01:35:44.000That band has only been out for four years when Ronnie died.
01:37:41.000But when we're watching a blue-collar special as a family, and I know this wasn't the way to watch it in hindsight, we're all waiting on her.
01:38:49.000When you're in Nashville, too, I mean, think about how many different amazing artists there are that you go see live in Nashville just fucking around on a regular night.
01:39:35.000That's something else that comes with being on that stage a bunch.
01:39:38.000The more you do it, the more circumstances you've been up against, nothing starts to scare you no more.
01:39:44.000Even if I walk out to a crowd, like if I'm opening for somebody still and I walk out and I'm like, I'm going to have to really work for this one, I'm not panicked.
01:41:18.000You know, I tell people all the time, you're not going to be a good performer until you've performed in a place where people looked at you like you were interrupting them.
01:41:34.000But those are the funnest, too, though.
01:41:36.000I got to open up for Morgan Wallen this year a few times, and it was really fun because in the last few years we've just been headlining.
01:41:42.000We haven't got to really, you know, go out and do something that was so much dramatically bigger than us that it made sense for us to do it.
01:41:48.000And I love Morgan, so I was like, I'm in.
01:41:50.000And we went out there, and it was cool because you feel it immediately.
01:41:54.000You're like, even with the hits I have, you know, there's 70,000 people here that bought a ticket to see Morgan Wallen for they knew my name was on the bill.
01:42:02.000You know, so there's a lot of people here that are with me, but I'm still having to tell you, I'm still up here like, oh, okay, tonight.
01:42:08.000You know, I see there's three scenarios in my business, and I don't know if this is probably different for y'all's, but in mine, my three scenarios are this.
01:42:16.000One is the you're welcome, we're here.
01:44:42.000You know, I see fighters that come out and they compete in the UFC and like their first fight they look fantastic and they're fast-tracked.
01:44:50.000And sometimes guys get broken because they meet top flight competition before they're really ready.
01:44:56.000They're really like an up-and-coming fighter honing their skills and they run into a wily veteran who's like a top 15 guy and they get fucked up and they're kind of never the same.
01:45:10.000If they have a guy who's like a Terence Crawford or someone who's a really good fighter, they'll match him up correctly until they can make the big money and until their skills are at a very, very high level.
01:45:20.000And then they start challenging for a world title.
01:45:47.000You know, and it's like the perfect example of this in the UFC to me is one guy could be Sugar Sean, who went on to be that guy, right, immediately.
01:45:57.000I know he just had his loss, but I mean, he still looks like Sugar to me.
01:47:10.000Yeah, there's a growing thing that's...
01:47:17.000Yeah, I guess it's different too, man.
01:47:19.000I'm thinking about that kid like Chase is that getting put into that national spotlight at the biggest fighting organization in the world at 19. You know what I mean?
01:47:27.000And you're like, Tavondre Sweat is the defensive end for the Tennessee Titans.
01:49:45.000That was when Nate Bargassi hosted Saturday Night Live, not this time, but last year, he did that skit joke about it coming from the UK, and he was like, and we will have a sport named football.
01:49:55.000And they were like, oh, where you'll kick a ball?
01:52:29.000So it's like, I have those, that to me is like those unreal moments when you watch a guy like Theo with his platform impersonating me to a T, and we're friends too, and it's just like...
01:53:44.000Before I got here last night, just the few people that knew I was coming, I'd already got texts from my friends down here, from Kerry to Bruce to people that, you know, just...
01:53:53.000Even my wife was like, you love it there.
01:53:56.000I was like, she loves Texas anyway, so she's all in.
01:54:15.000And I was like, I think if I came down there, we would get, you know, if I brought the culture, the way I approach songwriting in Nashville here, I think we could have a little paradigm shift down here, too.
01:54:34.000I've told you this before, drunk, and I meant it then and I mean it now.
01:54:38.000I'm going to come to you one day, and it's not going to surprise you, I hope, and I'm going to, with a concept about doing the mother, you're just giving me the right to call it the music mothership in Nashville.
01:56:14.000You knew that if the comedians were happy, they would show the fuck up.
01:56:17.000And that if you did everything you could to cater it to the comedians first, that they would come and bring their best and the best comedians would be there, which means that people were going to come see the best art, right?
01:56:26.000Same concept I'm going to try to do with music.
01:57:01.000Because then it goes from, like, not only will I sing you the hit I just wrote, how about I got a song Morgan Wallen's finna put out next month that nobody's heard.
01:58:01.000Like, all of a sudden, because of necessity, because you're forced into this situation where you're trying to, like, it's literally like you're calling on the muse on the stage.
01:58:10.000And, you know, a lot of times it's nothing.
01:58:11.000Like, seven out of ten times, you ain't got shit for that bit.
01:58:14.000But every now and then, you catch fire, and that becomes, like, a bit.
01:58:17.000Oh, have you ever had one birthed into a bit?
01:59:53.000Yeah, it was fun, man, because I got to watch the same set, but you fuck around a little more and kind of get lost in it sometimes, just having fun with it.
02:00:00.000You know, like you could tell you were like, you did the first one like, this is what I know I got, and the second one you had a couple cocktails, like, I'm going to riff on this point a little bit, just fuck off.
02:00:08.000Sometimes when you do that you have the best part of the joke.
02:00:10.000And that's when you'll find probably the shit that closes it out.
02:00:13.000There's sometimes like taglines just come to you in the moment and you're like wow I never even thought of that one before.
02:00:19.000Do you get straight off stage and write them down?
02:00:27.000I sit down from the laptop and just actually sit down and put them out.
02:00:30.000Does it help you to see your ideas like that?
02:00:32.000It helps me to expand on them because it takes longer to type a thought than it does to think it.
02:00:38.000So if I'm thinking of a coffee cup, I'm thinking of it instantly, but it takes a couple of seconds for me to write it.
02:00:44.000And that gives me chances to explore left, right, down, up, all these different ways you can go with an idea.
02:00:51.000And then I'll usually try to write it out like an essay form.
02:00:55.000So if I have an idea and it's funny and it does really well in the bottom of the barrel or a riff out of nowhere, Then I take that idea and I just write out like an essay.
02:01:05.000I just try to think about all the different angles of this idea and then I'll extract like little pieces of it and try these little pieces on stage.
02:01:54.000She's already so much better than I was at 16. But she would come to me a couple years ago and she'd be like, hey, I want to put some of this stuff out.
02:03:26.000And then they hear people talk about, like, the love of writing songs that you have, the passion you have for creating a thing, how you piece it, how you jump up and write down the premise.
02:03:51.000My daddy, I sat down with him at a bar called the Tin Roof on the Mummery Street one night, Joe, and I looked my dad in the eye and I said, I'm done.
02:04:49.000And he said, Jason, if you're working as hard as you really, as I know you are, if you're really writing every day, if you're doing shows every week, and I was opening up 50 bucks a night.
02:04:58.000I mean, you know, my story is that old school, get in the van and go do a thousand shows for fucking gas money.
02:06:35.000If you can't allow it to be the muse for it.
02:06:37.000For me, it was a little different because it became the muse.
02:06:40.000The chaos that was happening around me just became—I had a moment where—and this is such a cool epiphany I had, Joe.
02:06:47.000For the longest time, I thought I was special because I was from Antioch, Tennessee, and I grew up in a certain kind of way around certain kind of people, and that I was special because that was—I hung on to that like, I'm different.
02:07:00.000And then I realized what was happening was I was just like everybody else.
02:07:05.000That's what the superpower really was, is that every fucking neighborhood in America is like Antioch almost.
02:07:46.000You want to pretend that you have some special quality and ability that other people don't possess, so that's why you can get to this bizarre position that everybody wants, where everybody in our business wants to be successful and famous.
02:08:32.000And then when I started being like, you know what?
02:08:34.000No, I'm just going to write about my neighbor who's struggling with drug addiction.
02:08:38.000I'm just going to write a song about my baby mother because I'm infuriated that she left our daughter high and dry like this because of drugs.
02:09:08.000He's walking and for those who haven't, it's about an old boxer who in the depression had kind of Was on a losing streak, kind of long in the tooth.
02:09:51.000I was like, I'm the fucking Cinderella Man.
02:09:53.000That's why this worked for me at 40. You know what I mean?
02:09:55.000But I ended up calling it Beautifully Broken because as I started really writing, because that was my idea going into the project, I'm going to write the Cinderella Man story.
02:10:07.000And all I could think about was other people.
02:10:10.000Every time I'd pick up a pen, I would think about this young lady at a show who told me that Save Me helped her because she was raped by her uncle.
02:12:38.000I think that's one of the things that people really dislike about stars, like famous people, like people that you think of as stars, that they somehow or another think they're better than everybody else.
02:12:47.000That's the thing that people dislike the most.
02:12:50.000Like, oh, they think they're better than us.
02:15:01.000That's work in relationships, though, man.
02:15:03.000Just think about the arc that you've gone through from being a kid, getting arrested as a kid, spending all that time in juvenile and jail, and then getting free, and then figuring out that you're talented, and then pursuing this crazy, impossible dream,