The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2283

00:00:00.000 Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day what's happening man Good to see you.

00:00:14.000 Thank you for having me back.

00:00:15.000 My pleasure.

00:00:17.000 How many times a day do you get bombarded by the whole Bill Burr thing?

00:00:21.000 When it gets into the family and people I haven't talked to for 20 years.

00:00:27.000 Then do you have to break character and tell the truth?

00:00:29.000 No, you know, the thing is, this is what's crazy.

00:00:34.000 Okay.

00:00:35.000 You want the whole setup story?

00:00:37.000 Sure, sure, sure, sure.

00:00:38.000 So, where I take my podcast is in one of Howie Mandel's buildings, and he has another building in this area.

00:00:46.000 So, I was working on something and...

00:00:50.000 And I was supposed to go on Howie's show that day.

00:00:52.000 And they said, Howie will meet you out in the street or something for whatever reason.

00:00:55.000 So I go out in the street and the first thing Howie says to me when he sees me, he goes, here comes Bill Burr.

00:00:59.000 And I go, you too?

00:01:02.000 Like, do you know this story?

00:01:03.000 And he said, no, I don't know about it.

00:01:05.000 And I said, you know what?

00:01:07.000 Heck with it.

00:01:07.000 I'm just going to tell it on your show.

00:01:09.000 So don't ask me anymore.

00:01:10.000 And I want to show and I told this story about how 10 years ago my stepmother came to me and said, do you know who Bill Burr is?

00:01:15.000 I never heard of Bill.

00:01:16.000 Didn't know who he was because I don't really consume much.

00:01:19.000 You know, popular culture.

00:01:20.000 I had no idea he was a famous comedian.

00:01:21.000 He could have been the lawnmower guy.

00:01:23.000 Looked up Bill.

00:01:24.000 First thing I saw was like, oh my God, he looks just like Daddy.

00:01:26.000 When I was 18 years old at an IHOP on my 18th birthday, my father told me, you have a half-brother that I sired at the same time as you whose name is Bill.

00:01:37.000 So suddenly these facts come together and my mother telling me these stories.

00:01:41.000 I talked to my dad subsequently about it and he was very cagey about it.

00:01:44.000 And when I said, why won't you tell me?

00:01:47.000 Where this person is or who this person is, he said, I'm trying to protect you.

00:01:53.000 So when my stepmother had told me, it kind of made sense, like, well, if my half-brother is the super-famous comedian...

00:02:00.000 My dad, in a way, wouldn't want me to know because he wouldn't want me to feel like I was number two because Bill's so famous.

00:02:07.000 I know it sounds crazy, right?

00:02:08.000 You think that's why he's trying to protect you?

00:02:10.000 Well, I don't know.

00:02:11.000 So fast forward to how he's saying something on the street.

00:02:13.000 So I was like, you know what?

00:02:14.000 I'm just going to say something.

00:02:15.000 And I swear to God, hand on my heart, last time I was with you in California, I almost pulled you aside after we were on.

00:02:21.000 And I was going to tell you the story because I knew you knew Bill.

00:02:24.000 And I was going to back channel, see if there was anything to the story.

00:02:28.000 From Bill's side.

00:02:29.000 Wow.

00:02:29.000 So imagine, I think six or seven years since we talked on your show.

00:02:33.000 Yeah, I don't even know.

00:02:34.000 2018, somebody said to me today.

00:02:36.000 So anyway, sorry to talk over you.

00:02:38.000 But the point is, so here I am, fast forward, I'm just sick of seeing memes of my face with Bill's, so I just decide on the spur of the moment.

00:02:46.000 So Howie, of course, loves it.

00:02:48.000 But I said on Howie's show that first time, I don't think Bill's my half-brother.

00:02:52.000 I don't think there's anything there other than an uncanny resemblance.

00:02:58.000 Fast forward, the thing comes out, it gets a little bit of social media, and then it goes away.

00:03:02.000 And I think, good.

00:03:03.000 And Bill didn't say anything, so I figured Bill was kind of like, whatever.

00:03:06.000 It was a mild amusement.

00:03:08.000 You know, he could have made a joke out of the whole thing, and he didn't.

00:03:11.000 So then Howie calls me, and I'm in L.A. working recently, and Howie's like, we've come on the show, Bill's going to be on.

00:03:17.000 And I said, is Bill cool with it?

00:03:18.000 Oh yeah, no problem.

00:03:20.000 So then I go there, and it's like, it turns into this thing that you see happening on camera.

00:03:25.000 It's weirdness times, it's like a skit, but it's real.

00:03:30.000 And Bill's on me, then Bill's on Howie, and it gets just, okay.

00:03:33.000 So, I just told you basically everything I know, okay?

00:03:37.000 I have people I've known for 20, 30 years coming up to me going, what do you think?

00:03:42.000 And I said, I don't think we're...

00:03:44.000 I mean, yeah, there's a resemblance, but I don't think we're related.

00:03:48.000 Well, did you get a DNA test?

00:03:50.000 And I'm like, no, I don't.

00:03:53.000 There's nothing to get a DNA test for.

00:03:54.000 Well, I think he's your brother.

00:03:56.000 So people that know me and I'm telling him I don't think he's my brother, now they want a DNA test to prove it.

00:04:02.000 That's how much it's taken on a life of its own.

00:04:04.000 Do you think it's just because they want a DNA test because it's fun if he's your brother?

00:04:07.000 No, no.

00:04:08.000 They're convinced for real, for real.

00:04:09.000 Yes.

00:04:10.000 Really?

00:04:11.000 For real.

00:04:11.000 I swear to God.

00:04:13.000 I mean, people I'm close to, people that were at my wedding, I'm like, no, you need a DNA test.

00:04:18.000 Did Bill's dad know, well, did your dad know Bill's mom?

00:04:24.000 No, my father wouldn't talk to me about it at all.

00:04:27.000 Okay.

00:04:28.000 More context.

00:04:30.000 Okay.

00:04:31.000 My stepmother in that same time, 10 years ago, when she told me that she thought Bill Burr was my half-brother.

00:04:34.000 Jesus.

00:04:35.000 This guy don't know, right?

00:04:37.000 I mean, it just matches like, "Hey, do you know Joe Polanski?" Right.

00:04:41.000 And you look up and he's a famous comedian.

00:04:42.000 That's, you know what I mean?

00:04:43.000 Right, right, right.

00:04:44.000 So, in that same thing with my stepmother, she told me that she thought my father had sired 12 children.

00:04:51.000 Whoa.

00:04:52.000 You know, uh...

00:04:53.000 All over the place.

00:04:54.000 All over the place.

00:04:55.000 He was a traveling musician and a whore to his own admittance.

00:04:57.000 So it kind of makes sense.

00:04:59.000 He once told me he slept with 1,000 women.

00:05:01.000 So 12 out of 1,000, you know what I mean?

00:05:04.000 Normal odds.

00:05:05.000 Yeah, the math are actually pretty good.

00:05:07.000 Yeah.

00:05:08.000 And so when I went to my father and I told him what my stepmother had said, he got really cagey and wouldn't tell me anything.

00:05:15.000 He promised me that he would write down the names.

00:05:20.000 Oh, my God.

00:05:23.000 He's died and there's no paper.

00:05:25.000 Oh, my God.

00:05:26.000 So now I got people wanting DNA tests because they're convinced that Bill is my half-brother.

00:05:32.000 Is Bill willing to do a DNA test?

00:05:34.000 I think that's ridiculous.

00:05:35.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:05:36.000 It's like...

00:05:37.000 No, you have to do it.

00:05:37.000 No, no.

00:05:38.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:05:39.000 I mean, first of all, to Bill's credit, he's been...

00:05:43.000 Everything you saw on camera was, I think, his general irritation on the thing.

00:05:48.000 But he also kind of finds it funny because he's a comedian.

00:05:50.000 I thought it was a skit.

00:05:52.000 I thought you guys put together a skit.

00:05:54.000 I really did.

00:05:55.000 I thought you got, because I thought, you know, Bill does a lot of acting.

00:05:57.000 I thought you guys were just fucking around.

00:05:59.000 You like pro wrestling.

00:06:00.000 I thought you guys just decided to troll the world.

00:06:03.000 Let me put it to you this way.

00:06:05.000 Have you ever seen it?

00:06:07.000 Well, I'm assuming, but you tell me if I'm wrong.

00:06:09.000 Two guys get in the ring to roll around a bit.

00:06:12.000 Right?

00:06:13.000 Okay.

00:06:13.000 They're bros.

00:06:14.000 They're gonna roll around a bit.

00:06:15.000 Uh-huh.

00:06:15.000 Emotions kick in, and next thing you know, somebody's tapping somebody out.

00:06:19.000 Right.

00:06:19.000 Do you ever see that happen?

00:06:20.000 For sure.

00:06:20.000 Okay.

00:06:21.000 Yeah.

00:06:21.000 So, in the heat of that moment with Bill and Howie egging it on, you know, like, the emotionality of the thing came out because it's sort of a weird thing.

00:06:33.000 Like, we're suddenly in the middle of a situation.

00:06:35.000 It's like a meta situation.

00:06:37.000 Right.

00:06:37.000 So, yes, on some level we were playing along.

00:06:40.000 But then it starts to become like, wait, this is kind of weird, and then it starts to kick in, and then Billy Bush is in there, and it just took on a life of its own.

00:06:48.000 So what I'm saying is, there's enough there that people are all over me to come up with more answers, but you see what I'm saying?

00:06:56.000 I do see.

00:06:57.000 It's like it's spun out of control into its own thing.

00:06:59.000 Now it's a DNA test problem.

00:07:01.000 Oh, my God.

00:07:02.000 Which is a bit on its own.

00:07:03.000 We're going to do like a live stream?

00:07:04.000 We'll do it here.

00:07:05.000 Me, you, and Bill.

00:07:06.000 You know what I mean?

00:07:07.000 Well, people would trust you if the two of you got together and just both took a DNA test and found out you were brothers.

00:07:12.000 I don't think Bill's my half-brother, but he looks...

00:07:16.000 Well, listen, there's a simple way to find out.

00:07:18.000 I'll finance it.

00:07:19.000 How much is a DNA test?

00:07:20.000 How much does a DNA test cost to find out if someone's your sibling, Jamie?

00:07:25.000 Let's find out.

00:07:26.000 It can't be that much money.

00:07:27.000 It's 2025. I'll do it.

00:07:29.000 We'll get it sponsored.

00:07:30.000 Yes, maybe 23andMe, but didn't they sell out to somebody?

00:07:33.000 Somebody buy them.

00:07:34.000 200 bucks!

00:07:36.000 There you go.

00:07:37.000 I'll pay 200 bucks to find out.

00:07:38.000 Why wouldn't you want to know?

00:07:41.000 If I thought somebody was my half-brother, I'd be like, for real?

00:07:44.000 I don't think it's necessary.

00:07:45.000 If I found out Sebastian Maniscalco was my half-brother, I'd be like, I can kind of see that.

00:07:51.000 Maybe.

00:07:54.000 Again, all I know is I don't think, but when I look at him, he looks just like my father.

00:07:59.000 Right.

00:08:00.000 He doesn't look, we look similar-ish, but when I look at him, he's got the same thing as my dad had.

00:08:06.000 I don't know how to, you would know if somebody looked like your dad had, right?

00:08:08.000 Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:08:08.000 So that's where it's freaky for me.

00:08:10.000 Yeah.

00:08:10.000 And, you know, if you want to play the game one step further, you've got two world-class communicators.

00:08:17.000 People might argue against me calling myself a world-class communicator, but I've been doing it for over 30 years.

00:08:21.000 You're a world-class communicator.

00:08:22.000 God bless.

00:08:24.000 It's not too crazy that you'd have one guy go this way and one guy, you know what I mean?

00:08:28.000 Not at all.

00:08:29.000 No.

00:08:29.000 Especially when you consider how many different ways you've gone.

00:08:32.000 Like, not just smashing pumpkins, but pro wrestling.

00:08:35.000 And now I'm entering your game, which is podcasting.

00:08:38.000 This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp.

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00:10:05.000 So you're in all kinds of stuff.

00:10:06.000 And you easily could have been a comedian as well.

00:10:09.000 I don't think I'm that funny.

00:10:10.000 You're funny.

00:10:11.000 There's a lot of people that are professional comedians that aren't as funny as you.

00:10:15.000 I assume you know Carrot Top.

00:10:16.000 Sure, very well.

00:10:17.000 Okay, so Carrot Top and I become friends recently.

00:10:19.000 He's great.

00:10:20.000 Love him.

00:10:21.000 He's a total sweetheart.

00:10:22.000 Sweetheart of a guy.

00:10:24.000 Genuine.

00:10:24.000 Just a great guy to know.

00:10:26.000 Yeah.

00:10:27.000 But as you know, because you do this for a living, suddenly everybody wants to start pitching you bits.

00:10:33.000 So I made the mistake of pitching Carrot Top a bit.

00:10:37.000 I thought I had a good bit for him.

00:10:39.000 And he didn't respond, you know what I mean?

00:10:41.000 And then I texted him like an hour later and said, hey, did you just get that bid?

00:10:44.000 And he goes, yeah, that's why I didn't respond.

00:10:48.000 Yeah, people get tired of that.

00:10:50.000 Also, it's like most comics, they want it to be their idea.

00:10:53.000 Like, the whole idea.

00:10:54.000 What you're doing on stage is essentially, like, here's the words from my eyes.

00:10:58.000 Yeah, it's like somebody telling me how to write a song.

00:10:59.000 I get that.

00:11:00.000 Right.

00:11:00.000 It's one thing for another.

00:11:02.000 Like, comics, we give each other tags.

00:11:04.000 Like, if someone says something, I said, you know what else you can add to that?

00:11:07.000 Add this.

00:11:08.000 Oh, I see.

00:11:09.000 A buddy of mine was doing this bit on the guy who tried to shoot Trump, and we were bantering back and forth, and we came up with, like, the perfect line, like, oh!

00:11:18.000 There it is.

00:11:18.000 But it was already his premise and his bit.

00:11:21.000 Comics add to stuff for each other for fun.

00:11:24.000 It's like we just we sort of You toss the ball around in the green room and then someone will come up with a new line for you We'll do that but no one ever says hey, you should go on stage to talk about this Yeah, so that's I so I I've I've had a couple professional comedians care at top Preeminent among them.

00:11:43.000 Kind of let me know you're not that funny.

00:11:45.000 It's probably not that you're not that funny.

00:11:47.000 First of all, you sent a text.

00:11:49.000 Premises in text are terrible.

00:11:51.000 Oh, right.

00:11:51.000 Okay.

00:11:52.000 You really have to be...

00:11:53.000 Yeah, tone.

00:11:53.000 Tone is funny.

00:11:53.000 Yeah, it's everything.

00:11:54.000 And you really have to be there with the person.

00:11:57.000 And you really have to say it the way you thought it.

00:11:59.000 And then they get it.

00:12:01.000 Because text is just...

00:12:02.000 Unless it's just genius.

00:12:04.000 Unless it's just rock-solid structure.

00:12:06.000 Like, oh my god, this joke can't fail.

00:12:08.000 We do have a movie idea that we're working on.

00:12:10.000 Oh, yeah?

00:12:10.000 And it's a good one.

00:12:12.000 What is it?

00:12:12.000 I can't give it away.

00:12:13.000 I'll tell you privately, but it's a good one.

00:12:15.000 You and Carrot Top?

00:12:16.000 Yeah.

00:12:17.000 Oh, nice.

00:12:17.000 That he likes.

00:12:18.000 Okay.

00:12:19.000 He likes my movie idea.

00:12:20.000 Yeah.

00:12:21.000 I'm telling you, a lot of it is that comics don't like people coming to them with a premise.

00:12:26.000 They only want help from other comics, generally.

00:12:32.000 Okay, I get that.

00:12:32.000 Yeah.

00:12:33.000 It's just one of those things.

00:12:34.000 And even then, it's touchy.

00:12:36.000 Like, I would never help someone I don't know.

00:12:38.000 I would never go up to them, hey, you should say this.

00:12:40.000 Like, never, never, never, never, never.

00:12:42.000 It's got to be, like, your friend.

00:12:43.000 They know you love them.

00:12:45.000 You're fucking around.

00:12:46.000 You can talk.

00:12:46.000 You can say, did you ever try to say that?

00:12:48.000 You know what you left out?

00:12:49.000 Like, you forgot.

00:12:50.000 And they're like, oh, I forgot about that.

00:12:52.000 Yeah, that's a big part of the bit.

00:12:53.000 Yeah.

00:12:54.000 I never tried stand-up, so that's...

00:12:56.000 You could do it.

00:12:56.000 It seems terrifying to me, but...

00:12:58.000 So singing on stage.

00:12:59.000 You could do it.

00:13:01.000 It's a lot easier to scream with, you know, 50,000 watts behind your voice, you know, than tell a joke and bomb.

00:13:07.000 Is it though?

00:13:07.000 Because you could suck at that and then it's terrifying too.

00:13:10.000 Yeah.

00:13:11.000 I mean, it's all hard to do.

00:13:13.000 Anything at the highest level, it's hard to do.

00:13:15.000 That's true.

00:13:16.000 You're doing arena shows.

00:13:17.000 I've watched a lot of people perform in front of arenas singing.

00:13:20.000 It's hard.

00:13:21.000 That's a hard thing to do.

00:13:22.000 Most people freak the fuck out.

00:13:24.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:13:25.000 That part doesn't bother me, strangely.

00:13:27.000 Well, that's why you're good at it.

00:13:29.000 Right?

00:13:29.000 I feel like I kind of know what I'm doing up there for some reason.

00:13:33.000 Well, also I think it's like there's a build-up, right?

00:13:35.000 You start working in small clubs, you make your way to larger places, and then eventually you sell more and more records.

00:13:41.000 Like Smashing Pumpkins is like, they burst on the scene and sort of keep, you guys kept getting more and more popular, so you kind of got accustomed to it.

00:13:51.000 Yeah, you do normalize to the insanity of standing in front of 10,000 people.

00:13:55.000 Same as comedy.

00:13:56.000 You normalize.

00:13:56.000 What's the biggest show you've ever done?

00:13:59.000 Comedy?

00:14:00.000 25,000.

00:14:01.000 That's a lot of people.

00:14:02.000 Yeah, me and Chappelle, we sold out the Tacoma Dome.

00:14:05.000 And we were standing backstage.

00:14:07.000 I'll never forget it.

00:14:08.000 He looked at me right before he goes on stage.

00:14:10.000 He goes, not a lot of motherfuckers get to do this.

00:14:14.000 We were just laughing how much fun we were having.

00:14:18.000 25,000 people.

00:14:19.000 It was crazy.

00:14:20.000 In the round, too.

00:14:21.000 In the round.

00:14:22.000 It was very fun, though.

00:14:23.000 It was very fun.

00:14:24.000 I actually know Dave from way back in the day.

00:14:27.000 He's the best.

00:14:28.000 When he first burst on the scene, we used to hang out a little bit.

00:14:31.000 So I feel like it's cool that I knew him.

00:14:33.000 What year is this?

00:14:35.000 Remember he did a couple things on SNL really early on?

00:14:38.000 He was kind of around TV. The first year he was on television, I don't remember.

00:14:43.000 I'd see him in New York and he was hanging out with some other...

00:14:45.000 Maybe it was because he was hanging out with SNL people.

00:14:48.000 And I'd see him out in New York back, I guess, late 90s?

00:14:51.000 Yeah.

00:14:52.000 Early 2000s.

00:14:53.000 And so I knew him when...

00:14:54.000 I don't want to say he was a nobody, but I... He wasn't famous.

00:14:57.000 He wasn't a known...

00:14:58.000 I'd seen him on TV, but he wasn't like a household name like he is now.

00:15:01.000 Right, right, right.

00:15:03.000 So there was this one night where I was out.

00:15:05.000 I did a benefit for Roger Waters.

00:15:08.000 And military vets.

00:15:09.000 It was amazing in New York.

00:15:10.000 It was all these guys who were, like, single, double, and triple amputees playing Pink Floyd music.

00:15:14.000 And so I did this concert with Roger.

00:15:18.000 So afterwards, somebody came and said, oh, Chappelle's in this hotel, you know?

00:15:23.000 And I hadn't seen him for a few years.

00:15:24.000 And I said, well, I know him.

00:15:25.000 And you could see people think, like, you don't know him.

00:15:28.000 You know what I mean?

00:15:29.000 So when he came by, it's like, ah!

00:15:30.000 You know, it's like that moment, like, see, motherfuckers, I do know him.

00:15:33.000 So what a great guy, though.

00:15:35.000 Such a...

00:15:35.000 He's a genuine person.

00:15:36.000 Yeah.

00:15:37.000 He's another sweetheart.

00:15:38.000 Just a sweet, sweet guy.

00:15:40.000 Easy to hang out with.

00:15:41.000 Very fun.

00:15:42.000 Oh, yeah.

00:15:42.000 I mean, guys with that kind of mind, it blows my mind.

00:15:46.000 Because they just...

00:15:48.000 I mean, I could sit and listen to him for hours.

00:15:50.000 He's also kind of a legend for what he did.

00:15:53.000 Oh, walked away?

00:15:54.000 Left Comedy Central in the height of Chappelle's show, passed up on a $50 million deal, went to Africa, hung out there, and then came back and didn't do stand-up for 10 years.

00:16:05.000 I didn't know that he didn't do stand-up for 10 years.

00:16:08.000 He would do stand-up occasionally for free.

00:16:11.000 Okay.

00:16:11.000 So what he would do is he'd bring, like, a speaker to the park and, like, set up a mic in the park in Seattle and just start doing stand-up.

00:16:17.000 And everybody would be like, holy shit, it's Dave Chappelle.

00:16:18.000 Was he making any money?

00:16:19.000 Nope.

00:16:21.000 Just living off of his Chappelle's show money.

00:16:23.000 He had a ton of money.

00:16:24.000 I didn't know that part.

00:16:25.000 He made millions of dollars from the show, passed up on 50, but probably made...

00:16:28.000 I remember that.

00:16:29.000 And, you know...

00:16:30.000 I remember it became a big conspiracy thing.

00:16:32.000 Yes, it became a conspiracy why he left.

00:16:34.000 He was saying no to the Illuminati.

00:16:36.000 Right, right, right, right.

00:16:38.000 Those are always fun.

00:16:39.000 That's some Alex stuff, right?

00:16:40.000 You know what I mean?

00:16:41.000 You're like, what?

00:16:42.000 Are you sure that's what happened?

00:16:43.000 I kind of know what happened because the people that were running Comedy Central back then, I had dealt with.

00:16:50.000 It was nice folks, shouldn't have been running.

00:16:54.000 Comedy.

00:16:54.000 They shouldn't have been telling comedians what to do.

00:16:56.000 They were back to telling comedians what to do.

00:16:59.000 It was a situation where a bunch of non-creatives had gotten involved in the process.

00:17:04.000 I'm sure you're familiar with that.

00:17:05.000 This is so dear to my heart.

00:17:08.000 It's disgusting.

00:17:09.000 It's the worst aspect of show business.

00:17:11.000 You start dealing with money people and they start doing something that they're not supposed to be doing, which is like adding, changing, directing, moving, ideas, and then you're dealing with...

00:17:22.000 Literal morons that somehow or another got this job and they're telling you how to do what you're doing, which is what is the best sketch show in the world.

00:17:31.000 And still popular.

00:17:33.000 It's as good as any sketch show that's ever existed and they only did two seasons.

00:17:36.000 So he just decides...

00:17:39.000 I'm just going to be an artist.

00:17:41.000 I'm just going to hang out.

00:17:42.000 I'm not going to make any money.

00:17:43.000 He would show up at open mic nights for musicians, play folk songs.

00:17:49.000 And at the end of midnight, he would pull up and start talking.

00:17:52.000 And by 15 minutes into his set, everybody had told everybody that Dave Chappelle's there.

00:17:56.000 So then the place was packed.

00:17:57.000 And he did this for like 10 years, man.

00:17:59.000 I didn't know that part.

00:18:00.000 Yeah, he just fucked around.

00:18:01.000 He'd hear about him just showing up places and fucking around.

00:18:04.000 I love that.

00:18:05.000 And then somewhere, I think it was like 2000...

00:18:08.000 13, 14, starts doing stand-up again, and then boom.

00:18:13.000 Yeah, that's really how it all went down.

00:18:16.000 It's really a testament to the power of his talent because my wife, who's 32, she loves him.

00:18:23.000 And it's so cool because we went to see him, I think, at Radio City Music Hall.

00:18:28.000 And it's so cool because it's like, you know, I'm 57, she's 32. It's like that he can speak to both of us.

00:18:35.000 Right.

00:18:36.000 Yeah.

00:18:37.000 Right to the heart.

00:18:38.000 It's really a rare gift.

00:18:39.000 I mean, you know, you got a picture out there, Richard Pryor, who was, you know, from Illinois, like myself.

00:18:44.000 And my father loved Richard Pryor.

00:18:47.000 And so because of my father's love, Richard Pryor, I paid a lot of attention to Richard when I was a kid.

00:18:51.000 And he strikes me.

00:18:52.000 He's got that transcendent ability to somehow almost heal the country with his messaging.

00:18:58.000 Yes.

00:18:59.000 Murphy had that, too, in his own way.

00:19:01.000 But to me, Chappelle was more in the...

00:19:03.000 The prior mode of, like, somehow he can address issues that are uncomfortable.

00:19:08.000 Yeah.

00:19:08.000 And I know a lot of people have issues with what he says, but I ultimately see what he's trying to do is heal things.

00:19:15.000 Yeah.

00:19:16.000 Very much like prior.

00:19:18.000 Whereas Eddie Murphy was just really, really funny.

00:19:21.000 You know, just really, really funny.

00:19:23.000 And still to this day, I'm like, why doesn't that guy come back?

00:19:26.000 He did this one thing when he got the Mark Twain Award where he did this whole impression of Bill Cosby finding out they had to give away one of his awards because he was caught up in the scandal.

00:19:37.000 And so he's doing a Cosby impression.

00:19:38.000 And it's fucking genius.

00:19:39.000 It's dead on.

00:19:40.000 He's doing, like, brilliant stand-up.

00:19:42.000 And he hasn't touched stand-up in 25, 30 years.

00:19:45.000 I mean, you would think he would just do one victory lap tour.

00:19:48.000 If he wanted to, it would be sold out.

00:19:50.000 Talk about stadiums.

00:19:51.000 Oh, my God.

00:19:52.000 And I guarantee you, that guy would be the best.

00:19:55.000 He was so fucking talented, but just decided it was just too much.

00:19:59.000 I'd rather just do movies.

00:20:00.000 Yeah.

00:20:01.000 Which is kind of crazy.

00:20:02.000 But Pryor never did, obviously.

00:20:04.000 Pryor kept doing...

00:20:05.000 Has anyone ever tried to pull you in the movie orbit?

00:20:08.000 Yeah.

00:20:09.000 Yeah, I'm not.

00:20:09.000 Like action hero?

00:20:11.000 Yeah, I'm not interested.

00:20:12.000 I'm not interested.

00:20:13.000 They only offer me parts like a serial killer, so I always turn it down.

00:20:17.000 Yeah, there's been a few tempting ones, but no, I don't have that kind of time.

00:20:22.000 And I also don't have the desire to do it.

00:20:24.000 It's not something I enjoyed.

00:20:26.000 Sitting on that set all day seems like a...

00:20:27.000 It's a lot of work.

00:20:29.000 It's hard.

00:20:30.000 And to be a real good actor, like a really good actor, you know, the rehearsing and the practicing and the going over the character, it's like, I couldn't do it because I don't have the time.

00:20:39.000 It would require everything I have.

00:20:41.000 Yeah.

00:20:41.000 If you really wanted to do it right, if I really wanted to do a role in a movie where I played somebody, I would have to fucking really spend time not doing anything but that, you know?

00:20:52.000 Yeah.

00:20:53.000 It's just not.

00:20:55.000 That's not my jam.

00:20:57.000 There's people out there that do it.

00:20:58.000 I'm glad they do it because I love movies.

00:20:59.000 Yeah.

00:21:00.000 But I don't want to do it.

00:21:01.000 Did you watch the Oscars?

00:21:03.000 I did not.

00:21:04.000 Me neither.

00:21:04.000 I never watch award shows.

00:21:05.000 I don't think you should give away awards for art.

00:21:08.000 I think it's silly.

00:21:09.000 I don't get it.

00:21:10.000 I think it's dumb.

00:21:11.000 I think it's all...

00:21:14.000 Really, who's making money is the people that are putting it on television.

00:21:17.000 I mean, that's really what it is.

00:21:18.000 It's just a big money grab.

00:21:20.000 They're all just selling advertising and everybody's wearing a tux and it's like...

00:21:23.000 Well, certainly the public's...

00:21:25.000 Growing disinterest in awards shows is some indication that people no longer believe in either the integrity of the process or maybe the intent of the process.

00:21:36.000 Right.

00:21:37.000 Well, the integrity of the process and the intent are both compromised, right?

00:21:40.000 Because there's people that...

00:21:42.000 Like, you could kind of guess just by the subject of some movies whether or not they're going to win an award.

00:21:47.000 Because, you know, people feel obligated to address this very important message.

00:21:51.000 The guy who won Best Picture, I was actually in talks with about five years ago.

00:21:57.000 Because he had made some really cool movies.

00:21:59.000 He made one on cell phones called, I think it was called Tangerine, about prostitutes working the streets in L.A. And he got to...

00:22:06.000 Street workers, I believe.

00:22:08.000 And then he cast them.

00:22:09.000 So it was a movie.

00:22:10.000 It wasn't a documentary.

00:22:11.000 It was a really beautiful movie.

00:22:12.000 And then he did that movie called The Florida Project, where he, at the end of the movie, they actually snuck into Disney World and shot stuff, and somehow Disney let it go.

00:22:21.000 Really?

00:22:22.000 Yeah.

00:22:23.000 But it was kind of about the social milieu around a place like Disney World, like what goes on outside the gates.

00:22:29.000 People living in motels and kind of perpetual tourist economy.

00:22:34.000 and kind of using the white whale of tourism to just get enough money because there's always some turnover you know whether it's running scams and stuff so he made a really beautiful movie about that as well so I was in talks with him for a while about doing something and then it just didn't go anywhere like what kind of scams I can't remember because it's been a few years since maybe it's just the idea that anywhere there's a tourist economy there's money to be made right you know there's the guy standing on the corner selling brochures or hustling you into a van to see where the stars live it was kind of about that

00:23:04.000 Right, right, right.

00:23:04.000 It was about a cast of characters living in the shadow of this idealistic place.

00:23:10.000 Right, just like those Hollywood tour people that you would get in L.A. Yeah.

00:23:13.000 Yeah.

00:23:15.000 Those were the weirdest fucking people.

00:23:17.000 Well, I always get offended when I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and they think I want to go on it.

00:23:21.000 You know what I mean?

00:23:22.000 It's like, I don't know what it is.

00:23:23.000 I feel like, I don't want to go on your tour.

00:23:25.000 You look like a guy who would get on a tour, just got off the boat.

00:23:29.000 Yeah.

00:23:30.000 Just came here from Nebraska.

00:23:32.000 Totally, yeah.

00:23:33.000 Like, gee, I wonder where the stars live, you know?

00:23:35.000 That's such a creepy thing to do.

00:23:37.000 Just drive around and point.

00:23:38.000 That's where Ben Affleck sleeps.

00:23:39.000 But they've been doing it since the 30s.

00:23:41.000 Yeah, forever.

00:23:42.000 Yeah.

00:23:42.000 I mean, I have some of the old brochures, you know, see where Greta Garba lives and all that stuff.

00:23:47.000 It's just always been weird.

00:23:49.000 Well, back then it was even weirder because those were the first stars.

00:23:53.000 Well, back then, I mean, they...

00:23:56.000 Went way out of their way to turn them into gods.

00:23:59.000 You know, they airbrushed the shit out of every photo and they cover up scandals.

00:24:03.000 There's that one famous scandal where one of the top male stars, maybe it was Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, ran somebody over in a car.

00:24:10.000 Really?

00:24:10.000 You know about that?

00:24:11.000 No.

00:24:11.000 You might want to look that one up.

00:24:12.000 I know the Fatty Arbuckle one.

00:24:14.000 No, it was a top A-level star.

00:24:17.000 I think he was drunk, ran over somebody in a car, and somebody from the studio went to jail for like seven years and took the rap so that the star could stay out.

00:24:25.000 And the studio paid the guy like a stipend to go to jail.

00:24:28.000 It's a very famous story.

00:24:30.000 So some guy did seven years or something.

00:24:33.000 That's crazy.

00:24:34.000 You know, there's a similar story about that in China with the bodies exhibit.

00:24:40.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:41.000 There was a woman who was married to a mayor of one of the cities in China.

00:24:47.000 And this woman who was married to this mayor, the mayor was having an affair with a TV newscaster, and he got the TV newscaster pregnant.

00:24:59.000 Apparently there was a confrontation between the woman and the wife, and the lady winds up missing.

00:25:06.000 She gets scrubbed from the internet.

00:25:08.000 I mean, she's scrubbed.

00:25:09.000 There's only like a photo of her on the internet.

00:25:12.000 And then all of a sudden, in the Body Works exhibit, there's an eight-month pregnant woman who they believe is this newscaster.

00:25:20.000 Here's the other part.

00:25:22.000 The woman who's the mayor's wife is also the manager of the local plastination factory where they take the bodies and they immerse them in these solvents and turn them into statues.

00:25:38.000 This woman was the manager of the place that produced the woman with the eight-month fetus in her body.

00:25:47.000 And you can still see it.

00:25:48.000 Like, it's on tour.

00:25:49.000 You can go see this lady who was most likely murdered.

00:25:53.000 So then she didn't just kill that lady.

00:25:56.000 She poisoned some British businessman.

00:25:59.000 So she poisons this guy and she has to go to trial.

00:26:03.000 Well, she doesn't go to trial.

00:26:06.000 Other woman goes to trial who doesn't look anything like her.

00:26:09.000 Raises her right hand, the whole thing, goes to jail.

00:26:11.000 So she probably paid some family off, some poor family.

00:26:16.000 I'll give you a million dollars.

00:26:17.000 Give up your daughter.

00:26:19.000 She goes to jail.

00:26:20.000 It's not a bad jail.

00:26:22.000 She's going to do yoga, play checkers.

00:26:24.000 Have you heard the ones where, like, because there's so much plastic surgery in Asia where guys are suing their wives because...

00:26:30.000 They marry some woman that they think is hot, and then the kid comes out, and the kid's not very good looking.

00:26:34.000 Jawline's totally different, different nose.

00:26:36.000 Yeah, there's a lot of plastic surgery over there.

00:26:38.000 In Korea, it's nuts.

00:26:39.000 They do their eyes in this strange hallway.

00:26:41.000 Somebody told me as much as 75% of the women in South Korea have surgery.

00:26:45.000 Is it really?

00:26:46.000 Somebody who's Korean told me that.

00:26:47.000 I don't know if that's true.

00:26:47.000 Google that, Jamie.

00:26:48.000 We need to find this out.

00:26:50.000 This is important information.

00:26:51.000 Because last time I was in Korea, I was like, wow, these women here are really hot.

00:26:54.000 Like this was like woman after woman after woman.

00:26:56.000 And somebody pulled me aside and said, bro, that's like, that's just all plastic surgery.

00:27:00.000 That's not real.

00:27:02.000 Wow.

00:27:04.000 As many as up to 50% or higher, maybe some people have said.

00:27:07.000 A lot of liars.

00:27:08.000 A lot of them ladies are lying about it.

00:27:10.000 Up to 50% or higher.

00:27:12.000 Well, higher could be like 75%.

00:27:14.000 I like this whole new business of...

00:27:17.000 Like plastic surgery tourism?

00:27:19.000 Where it's like cheaper to get on a plane and go somewhere?

00:27:21.000 Oh, like go to Turkey and get your hair transplanted?

00:27:22.000 Yeah, somebody was recently trying to talk me to go to South Korea to get some work done on my face.

00:27:27.000 It's like, so like, what?

00:27:29.000 I guess the idea would be you could go and recover over there.

00:27:31.000 Your neighbors don't have to see you with bandages over your head.

00:27:34.000 No, I think it's the idea.

00:27:35.000 It's cheaper.

00:27:36.000 Yeah, cheaper.

00:27:37.000 Cheaper and better because they can do stuff there that we can't do here yet.

00:27:40.000 Oh, really?

00:27:41.000 What can they do there?

00:27:43.000 Apparently they have some new thing that's unbelievable.

00:27:47.000 What is it?

00:27:48.000 Something, it's, they tried to explain it to me, it doesn't make any sense.

00:27:52.000 Some kind of new facelift that's not a facelift or something.

00:27:56.000 A facelift?

00:27:56.000 Like a non-invasive facelift.

00:27:58.000 Oh.

00:27:58.000 It's a relative of mine through marriage, a Chinese relative.

00:28:03.000 And he's in that business and knows the Koreans over there in LA and all this.

00:28:08.000 And he was saying, he was saying in five years this will be the number one thing, so you might as well get to Korea now.

00:28:15.000 It's the stuff I hear when I'm sitting around the hot pot dinner, you know?

00:28:18.000 Non-invasive face love.

00:28:20.000 Isn't that weird that, like, one of our biggest fears is that your face sags?

00:28:26.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:28:26.000 I mean, I don't know how I would feel if I wasn't in the entertainment business, right?

00:28:29.000 I mean, you're in a cosmetic business on some level, you know what I mean?

00:28:33.000 On some level, I guess.

00:28:34.000 I know it's not just your brand.

00:28:35.000 It kind of helps you a little being uglier.

00:28:37.000 Being ugly.

00:28:37.000 I never thought of you as ugly.

00:28:39.000 I'm not attracted to men per se, but I never thought you were unattractive.

00:28:43.000 Definitely less attractive than I used to be.

00:28:45.000 That's just time and booze and not so much sleep.

00:28:49.000 Success creates a glow around a man.

00:28:51.000 It does a little bit of a glow, right?

00:28:52.000 Yeah, it can.

00:28:53.000 A little bit of a swagger.

00:28:55.000 Well, just age beats us all.

00:28:57.000 You don't win.

00:28:58.000 Nobody wins.

00:28:59.000 Everybody looks worse at 80 than they do at 20. Yeah.

00:29:02.000 Just how it goes.

00:29:04.000 Yeah.

00:29:04.000 I'm 57, so you kind of look down.

00:29:06.000 I'm 57, too.

00:29:07.000 Oh, are you?

00:29:07.000 Yeah.

00:29:07.000 When's your birthday?

00:29:08.000 August.

00:29:08.000 Okay, I'm older than you.

00:29:09.000 I'm March.

00:29:10.000 Nice.

00:29:10.000 But, you know, you look down that road and you're like, like, am I going to be all right when I get to 80, you know?

00:29:18.000 Very few people are.

00:29:19.000 You know, there's a few people at 80, like, wow.

00:29:20.000 When you're calling UFC, like, nine...

00:29:23.000 72?

00:29:24.000 I don't know what the number would be.

00:29:26.000 I'm worried about Bruce Buffer.

00:29:27.000 Because Bruce Buffer, he puts out so much energy.

00:29:30.000 I was telling the guys the other day, one day he's just going to be in the middle screaming someone's name and he's just going to fucking check out.

00:29:37.000 Like right in the middle.

00:29:39.000 It's time!

00:29:41.000 Boom.

00:29:42.000 His eyes will roll back.

00:29:43.000 But for any performer, that's the way you go out.

00:29:45.000 You go out on your shield, right?

00:29:47.000 That would be amazing.

00:29:48.000 I don't want him to die.

00:29:49.000 I love him.

00:29:49.000 But if he did die that way, I'd be like, what a legend.

00:29:52.000 What a legend.

00:29:53.000 The Buffers, right?

00:29:55.000 Both of them.

00:29:55.000 Oh, yeah.

00:29:56.000 Isn't it crazy that they didn't know each other until they were like 30?

00:29:58.000 He didn't even know he had a brother?

00:30:00.000 UFC 313 is back in Vegas.

00:30:03.000 It won't be paradise for one of the light heavyweights in the main event.

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00:31:10.000 Please play responsibly.

00:31:10.000 I only have one Michael Buffer story if you want to hear it.

00:31:29.000 Sure.

00:31:30.000 So, I went to see Holyfield Lennox Lewis at Madison Square Garden.

00:31:35.000 Oh, wow.

00:31:36.000 And I was hanging out with all the cool people at the time.

00:31:38.000 So, I'm in the fourth row, and it was infamously a draw.

00:31:41.000 It was almost all English tourists that had come in for the fight.

00:31:45.000 They were booing the national anthem.

00:31:47.000 I mean, it was a pretty riotous atmosphere.

00:31:50.000 And, you know, I don't know anything about fights, but it was a pretty boring fight.

00:31:57.000 Lewis seemed to be a little bit more agile because of youth and all that.

00:32:01.000 Anyway, so right when I... You know, whatever they're doing, HBO, they're over there in the corner, they're doing their bit.

00:32:09.000 You know what I mean?

00:32:09.000 They're talking before they go to the scorecards.

00:32:11.000 And a guy leans forward, the ref, to tell someone in the second row, might have been Don King.

00:32:19.000 And I heard him go, it's a draw.

00:32:21.000 Right?

00:32:22.000 So I knew it was a draw like 60 seconds before they announced it.

00:32:27.000 And I was with a lot of well-known people.

00:32:31.000 And I said, run.

00:32:33.000 And they're like, what do you mean?

00:32:34.000 I said, we gotta run.

00:32:35.000 And I started grabbing people and we ran out of Madison Square Garden.

00:32:39.000 And we're almost totally out the building, you know, kind of where you get to the concourse part.

00:32:43.000 And you hear the decision and it's like...

00:32:45.000 And people start...

00:32:47.000 Like, here comes the riot vibe.

00:32:49.000 Really?

00:32:49.000 So somehow we ended up because it got so...

00:32:51.000 Was it because the decision was bad?

00:32:52.000 Well, the English people didn't like that it was a draw.

00:32:55.000 Oh.

00:32:56.000 Because Holyfield was on the older side.

00:32:58.000 Right.

00:32:59.000 I don't know.

00:32:59.000 It's not a well-renowned fight.

00:33:01.000 I can't remember it.

00:33:02.000 It was just a draw.

00:33:03.000 It was a stone-cold, boring fight, but because it was a draw and all these English people were mad and Don King was involved, so it was like all that typical brouhaha that was going on at boxing at the time.

00:33:12.000 Anyway, so because of suddenly the riotous or potentially riotous situation, the police started making people go different ways, like funneling traffic or something.

00:33:23.000 It was almost like they got code red or something because it suddenly got really weird.

00:33:27.000 So then we couldn't get out of the building.

00:33:29.000 So somebody was like, somebody recognized somebody in our party and said, follow me.

00:33:33.000 And so then next thing we know, we end up in the VIP backstage part where it's safe.

00:33:38.000 And there's Michael Buffer on a chair.

00:33:43.000 And he wasn't talking to me, but he's talking to somebody.

00:33:45.000 And all I heard was going, that's bullshit!

00:33:47.000 Like in that voice.

00:33:48.000 That's all I remember.

00:33:49.000 That's bullshit!

00:33:51.000 So was he talking about the decision?

00:33:53.000 He thought the decision was bullshit.

00:33:55.000 A lot of men's card was...

00:33:56.000 Heavy for Lewis.

00:33:57.000 Wow!

00:33:58.000 117-111.

00:34:00.000 Harold Letterman, who's always dead on the money.

00:34:02.000 Harold Letterman was always right.

00:34:03.000 Yeah, so they were saying, as it got called, this is a travesty.

00:34:06.000 Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not a fight aficionado, but I thought Lewis was slightly better.

00:34:13.000 Wow, I forgot about this fight.

00:34:15.000 I completely forgot about this fight.

00:34:18.000 There's so many fights from this era that were incredible.

00:34:21.000 That was an amazing era for heavyweights.

00:34:24.000 And this is when Don King was still running everything.

00:34:27.000 Did they have a rematch?

00:34:29.000 I honestly don't remember.

00:34:31.000 You don't think so?

00:34:35.000 That's bullshit.

00:34:36.000 With that great voice.

00:34:39.000 He's still trucking.

00:34:40.000 He's still trucking.

00:34:41.000 He still announces huge boxing fights.

00:34:46.000 You ever get that, like somebody wants you to do their bar mitzvah or anything?

00:34:50.000 You ever get those requests?

00:34:52.000 No.

00:34:52.000 I get those requests?

00:34:53.000 Will you come do my bar mitzvah?

00:34:55.000 Who won this one?

00:34:57.000 Is that the rematch?

00:34:58.000 Had to be Lewis, right?

00:34:59.000 I would imagine.

00:35:02.000 Well, similar Letterman card.

00:35:04.000 Similar card.

00:35:05.000 Let's see if they robbed him twice.

00:35:07.000 They gave it to him.

00:35:08.000 Yeah.

00:35:09.000 Well, they got their rematch.

00:35:12.000 No, you get this thing like, hey, will you come do my...

00:35:14.000 Right, right, right.

00:35:15.000 I wonder what Michael Buffer gets to show up somewhere.

00:35:17.000 You know what I mean?

00:35:18.000 Yeah, it's probably like Saudi Arabia.

00:35:19.000 They have him come over there and introduce someone's birthday.

00:35:22.000 Is it half a million?

00:35:24.000 Probably more.

00:35:26.000 Depends.

00:35:27.000 You know?

00:35:27.000 I mean, like...

00:35:28.000 You know, in my business, we could become privates.

00:35:31.000 Right.

00:35:32.000 I saw Stone Temple Pilots.

00:35:33.000 They played Dana White's 40th birthday party.

00:35:37.000 Yeah.

00:35:37.000 And there was no one in the room other than UFC employees, and they put on a show like it was a fucking sold-out arena.

00:35:46.000 I mean, full blast.

00:35:47.000 They didn't go through the motions at all.

00:35:49.000 It was a phenomenal show.

00:35:51.000 That means Dana paid them.

00:35:52.000 Yeah.

00:35:53.000 Great band.

00:35:54.000 I mean, totally.

00:35:54.000 I love those guys.

00:35:55.000 But they were so professional.

00:35:57.000 It was so impressive.

00:35:59.000 Because they were so powerful on stage, everybody just started paying attention.

00:36:04.000 Because it kind of broke out in the middle of this party.

00:36:06.000 It's a birthday party where we're all standing around tables, eating food, having fun.

00:36:10.000 I've done a few things and it's always a bit awkward.

00:36:13.000 Yeah.

00:36:13.000 Which is weird because they're all paid gigs.

00:36:15.000 Right.

00:36:16.000 But something about a paid, paid gig feels different.

00:36:19.000 Yeah, there's a lot of entitlement that's attached to, like, someone's paying you to come perform at their birthday party.

00:36:26.000 Well, and then you see the guy's wife going, who's this?

00:36:28.000 Right.

00:36:29.000 There's that, too.

00:36:29.000 The people that aren't fans are like, oh, no.

00:36:33.000 Yeah.

00:36:34.000 Yeah, those are weird gigs, because then you go, how much?

00:36:38.000 I could have one shitty night for a million dollars.

00:36:45.000 I mean, I'd like to tell you I haven't been there, but I've been there.

00:36:49.000 Ron White did one last year in Vegas, and he was talking about it.

00:36:52.000 He was like, I didn't want to do it.

00:36:54.000 I kept saying no, and they kept going higher and higher.

00:36:56.000 And eventually got to a point where I go, oh, fuck it, I'll do it.

00:37:00.000 And he goes, it wasn't worth it.

00:37:02.000 He goes, it was one of the worst fucking nights of my life.

00:37:05.000 He goes, all the time I'm doing it, I'm thinking, I shouldn't have fucking done this.

00:37:11.000 He said they didn't laugh, they barely paid attention.

00:37:13.000 It's like, why am I here?

00:37:15.000 But if, like, you're a giant fan, like, say, if you're a giant Ron White fan, and you hire Ron White, but your, like, office doesn't give a shit about comedy, and they just want to, like, have fun and drink and eat hot dogs.

00:37:26.000 Yeah, I went to a billionaire thing once where the guy had hired Diana Ross.

00:37:30.000 Whoa.

00:37:31.000 It had to at least be a million-dollar gig for her.

00:37:33.000 And maybe 700, 800 people.

00:37:37.000 Wow.

00:37:37.000 You know?

00:37:38.000 And you're like, wow.

00:37:39.000 I mean, basically a private concert with Diana Ross.

00:37:42.000 That's pretty dope.

00:37:44.000 If you were really into it and people paid attention, it'd probably be fun.

00:37:47.000 Small, intimate concert.

00:37:48.000 I've done them where they're fun.

00:37:49.000 Yeah?

00:37:49.000 Yeah.

00:37:50.000 What percentage?

00:37:52.000 Less than 50. We don't get asked, to be fair, or not fair, we don't get asked to do it a lot.

00:37:57.000 I don't think we're on most people's bingo's card for a private event.

00:38:01.000 Yeah.

00:38:02.000 I think my rep precedes me, you know.

00:38:04.000 It's like a Beyonce thing.

00:38:07.000 Although, I mean, have you ever heard some of the numbers that some of those pop people get coming out of Saudi Arabia?

00:38:12.000 Yeah.

00:38:13.000 14 mil and nobody calling us.

00:38:16.000 You know what I mean?

00:38:18.000 I'd take that phone call.

00:38:19.000 Well, that's one of those things.

00:38:20.000 Who was the richest man in India?

00:38:23.000 His son had a birthday and it was like the most extravagant birthday of all time.

00:38:27.000 They spent 50-50 mil on entertainment alone.

00:38:30.000 Something crazy like that.

00:38:33.000 God, that's so crazy.

00:38:35.000 That's so much money.

00:38:37.000 Yeah.

00:38:38.000 I mean, I wish there was a perfect formula for it, but there isn't.

00:38:43.000 Because that's what I mean.

00:38:43.000 I mean, every time we play, we basically get paid.

00:38:47.000 I think it was a wedding, not a birthday party, right?

00:38:48.000 It was a wedding.

00:38:50.000 And Lennox Lewis was there.

00:38:53.000 Yeah, Lennox Lewis was the announcer.

00:38:56.000 Yeah, it's just...

00:38:57.000 That's the weird world of...

00:39:01.000 Extravagant amounts of money, like unbelievable amounts of money, where you want to hire Kanye to come to your house.

00:39:06.000 The wedding was $100 million.

00:39:07.000 That's where Beyonce was.

00:39:08.000 They probably spent over $100 million for Anand's sister, Isha's wedding in 2018. The ceremony featured a performance by Beyonce.

00:39:15.000 I mean, if I'm Beyonce's manager, she's not going over there for less than 2025. Yeah, why not?

00:39:22.000 They have so much money.

00:39:23.000 They won't even notice it.

00:39:24.000 They'll make it back tomorrow in the stock market.

00:39:26.000 I don't know if I'm saying that.

00:39:28.000 Once you get to that goofy...

00:39:30.000 That was a hundred and how many million?

00:39:32.000 190?

00:39:33.000 How much did that cost?

00:39:34.000 No, I'm sorry.

00:39:36.000 Billion.

00:39:37.000 How much is he worth?

00:39:38.000 116 billion.

00:39:38.000 116. Yeah.

00:39:40.000 You're making $20 million every day, probably.

00:39:44.000 It's like rolling in constantly.

00:39:47.000 I mean, you just had a billionaire in here.

00:39:50.000 A couple days ago.

00:39:50.000 Yeah.

00:39:51.000 I mean, you've met your share of billionaires.

00:39:52.000 It's always an interesting thing how they spend or don't spend their money.

00:39:57.000 There's no consistent guide for billionaires.

00:40:00.000 No.

00:40:00.000 I like the Jeff Bezos way.

00:40:02.000 Wear tight shirts, get a yacht, have a hot girlfriend, let's fucking go.

00:40:06.000 That's what you're supposed to do when you've got $250 billion.

00:40:10.000 You're not supposed to be a fucking weirdo and wear a sweater and go visit Haiti.

00:40:14.000 No, you're supposed to be balling.

00:40:16.000 Go to the Mediterranean.

00:40:18.000 Popping corks with models.

00:40:20.000 Let's go!

00:40:22.000 Get a million dollar watch.

00:40:23.000 I'd like to have a billion dollars to make that decision.

00:40:26.000 Right.

00:40:27.000 I'm not there yet.

00:40:28.000 Well, the weirdest one is billionaires that compare themselves to super billionaires.

00:40:32.000 And they feel poor.

00:40:34.000 Like Brian Callen was telling me about his buddy who's worth, I think, $3 billion.

00:40:38.000 And he's like, I really need to fucking up my game.

00:40:41.000 Because he's friends with a guy who's worth $80 billion.

00:40:44.000 So he feels poor compared to his $80 billion friend.

00:40:50.000 Boy.

00:40:51.000 I like to be poor like that.

00:40:52.000 The forest for the trees.

00:40:56.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:40:57.000 Yeah.

00:40:58.000 Not this lifetime, I don't think.

00:41:00.000 It doesn't seem like fun.

00:41:01.000 It seems like the amount of stress and energy that must be required to acquire that much fucking money.

00:41:11.000 Yeah, Jimmy Chamberlain of the Pumpkins, the drummer, is friends with Jimmy John, the sub kid.

00:41:17.000 Ah, okay.

00:41:18.000 So I know Jimmy John a little bit.

00:41:19.000 And we were at dinner one night in Nashville at a place he owns or with other people.

00:41:25.000 And one of my buddies started pitching him on some kind of money thing.

00:41:29.000 And I just saw his face change because everybody in the world wants to pitch.

00:41:32.000 We're back to pitching ideas, right?

00:41:34.000 Of course.

00:41:35.000 And Jimmy John knows this mutual friend.

00:41:38.000 So it's not as rude as it might sound coming out of my mouth.

00:41:42.000 But at some point he looks at me and goes, Tommy, you know how I got that money?

00:41:48.000 I made a lot of fucking sandwiches.

00:41:52.000 That was the way he shut him down.

00:41:56.000 I know what I had to go through to make that money.

00:42:00.000 You just see me as a walking ATM. Well, it just changes the dynamic of the friendship now, too.

00:42:07.000 Now he's not going to be able to trust your friend.

00:42:09.000 Nobody trusts Tommy.

00:42:12.000 Tommy's infamous, actually.

00:42:14.000 Infamous?

00:42:15.000 Infa-mess.

00:42:16.000 Infa-mess.

00:42:18.000 I've literally been walking down the street in foreign countries and strangers will come up to me and say, oh, you know Tommy?

00:42:23.000 He's just a legendary character in the entertainment business.

00:42:27.000 What was he trying to pitch Jimmy John on?

00:42:29.000 Some kind of investment scheme or something.

00:42:32.000 Because my friend Tommy collects billionaires.

00:42:36.000 Oh, boy.

00:42:37.000 I call it, he plays billionaire lotto.

00:42:40.000 He's hoping that when one of them knocks over, they'll leave him a taste.

00:42:46.000 How bizarre.

00:42:47.000 He's like a vampire familiar.

00:42:48.000 Well, what's interesting about Tommy is his uncle was the founder of Hard Rock Cafe.

00:42:54.000 So he grew up in a family with money.

00:42:57.000 So instead of somebody who we figure was poor and aspirational and want to hang out with billionaires, he actually came from money.

00:43:03.000 Right.

00:43:03.000 So he knows how to speak the language of wealthy people.

00:43:06.000 And so he's kind of generally welcome in those circles where I, you know, I grew up poor in the suburbs.

00:43:11.000 I don't know how to roll in that world.

00:43:12.000 And so, yeah.

00:43:14.000 But yeah, Tommy, I think he's probably up to about seven or eight billionaires that he counts as friends.

00:43:18.000 And what does he do for a living?

00:43:20.000 No one knows.

00:43:21.000 No one knows?

00:43:22.000 That's the legend of Tommy.

00:43:23.000 Really?

00:43:23.000 Yeah.

00:43:24.000 And in fact, I pitched Tommy once I'm making a documentary.

00:43:26.000 Called Who the Fuck is Tommy Lipnick?

00:43:29.000 That's his name, Tommy Lipnick.

00:43:31.000 And he doesn't like the idea.

00:43:33.000 Yeah, I wonder why.

00:43:34.000 He just outed him.

00:43:35.000 But, I mean, we don't have time for it, but I could make you a list of 50 people that are super famous, like Bono on down, who have pulled me aside and go...

00:43:44.000 What's the deal with Tommy?

00:43:48.000 And just the fact that we're talking about Tommy will really please Tommy, but he'll take umbrage.

00:43:53.000 In fact, I have to tell you a story about my father, too, but he'll take umbrage with the way I'm portraying him.

00:43:58.000 I'm sure he will.

00:43:59.000 The story I wanted to tell you about my father was when I was on your show, I told you a story about how I found a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun under my father's bed.

00:44:08.000 It was in a guitar case.

00:44:09.000 Well, my father heard the show about a month after.

00:44:13.000 I told the story on your show.

00:44:15.000 And so I get this text from my father's when he's still alive, obviously.

00:44:17.000 And he goes, yeah, I heard what you said on Joe's show.

00:44:21.000 And I'm like, you know, you're looking at your phone like here it comes, you know, because I thought he was going to be pissed at me.

00:44:25.000 He goes, there's one thing you left out of the story.

00:44:27.000 Waiting.

00:44:28.000 Text.

00:44:29.000 The shotgun wasn't loaded.

00:44:31.000 That's all he wanted me to know.

00:44:33.000 Like somehow it made it better.

00:44:35.000 How bizarre.

00:44:37.000 Your father sounds like a fucking character.

00:44:39.000 He was unbelievable.

00:44:41.000 Unbelievable.

00:44:41.000 What did he play?

00:44:44.000 Guitar.

00:44:45.000 Wow.

00:44:45.000 Great musician.

00:44:46.000 Really, truly great musician.

00:44:48.000 He's the classic guy that should have made it, it didn't.

00:44:51.000 So when I made it, it made the whole thing really weird.

00:44:55.000 Oh.

00:44:55.000 Because he looked at me and said, how did my schlubby kid make it?

00:45:00.000 And I didn't.

00:45:01.000 Wow.

00:45:02.000 He must have gotten lucky.

00:45:03.000 He must have done something.

00:45:05.000 Because if it didn't work for me, how could it work for him?

00:45:07.000 So that was a weird...

00:45:09.000 It's a weird thing.

00:45:10.000 But he was talented.

00:45:11.000 I mean, he really was talented.

00:45:12.000 That's great.

00:45:13.000 Did you feel resentment?

00:45:16.000 Did you get along with him after that?

00:45:18.000 My father had a lot of issues with drugs.

00:45:19.000 It was always kind of like it can be with addicts.

00:45:22.000 It was like depending on the day.

00:45:24.000 One day he would tell me I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him and I was the number one son and da-da-da.

00:45:29.000 And two weeks later he's telling me he wished I'd never been born and I should have been aborted.

00:45:33.000 So it was weird.

00:45:35.000 It was a weird thing.

00:45:36.000 So that's why that story is funny to me because He didn't mind that I told you about finding a sawed-off shotgun.

00:45:42.000 He minded that I implied it was dangerous when he made sure that it wasn't loaded so it was okay.

00:45:47.000 That's the way his brain worked.

00:45:49.000 Do you believe him that it wasn't loaded?

00:45:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:45:52.000 He should have been an arch-criminal or something, but he didn't have the nerve.

00:45:58.000 So he just became a guitarist?

00:46:00.000 No, he was a drug dealer, and he used to run drugs and guns for the mob.

00:46:06.000 Really?

00:46:10.000 Melrose Park is kind of an infamous city just outside the Chicago city limits where a lot of the mob wise guys lived.

00:46:16.000 And he was friends with the kid of a wise guy.

00:46:19.000 And the kid would dabble because he was protected because his father was a made man.

00:46:23.000 So we go over to that guy's house for hours and just hear these crazy stories about the mob.

00:46:28.000 And my dad would pick up something in a satchel and deliver it.

00:46:31.000 I was eight years old going through all this shit.

00:46:35.000 Wow!

00:46:36.000 What a crazy environment.

00:46:38.000 So you're eight years old.

00:46:39.000 He's running drugs and guns.

00:46:41.000 Oh, yeah.

00:46:43.000 Wow.

00:46:43.000 Did you see, like, a lot of shit?

00:46:45.000 I saw a lot of stuff, but it was like, you know, when adults are trying to hide stuff from you, but not really.

00:46:52.000 Uh-huh.

00:46:53.000 You know?

00:46:53.000 So, like, for example, they would stay in the basement all night and party, whoever he was with.

00:46:57.000 Musicians, whatever.

00:46:58.000 Right.

00:46:58.000 So I'd come down at night and it'd be Coke everywhere.

00:47:00.000 And rolled up 20s on Black Sabbath mirrors.

00:47:03.000 I was like 7, 10. Oh my God.

00:47:06.000 So I had a feeling, call it intuition, I had a feeling that he wanted me to clean up but not the mirrors.

00:47:14.000 And I was like, what's on the mirror that you left behind?

00:47:18.000 He was like, oh, that's, have a cold or something.

00:47:21.000 But yeah, it's good you didn't get rid of it.

00:47:24.000 And you're like, why do you need the rolled up 20?

00:47:26.000 Oh, it's just easier to...

00:47:28.000 So you knew it was bullshit, but you're 10. You don't know what Coke is.

00:47:33.000 You don't have any concept of what they're doing, but you know something's going on.

00:47:36.000 And this was constant.

00:47:37.000 Yeah, and my dad would do stuff like he'd take me to lunch with his mistresses and stuff and introduce them as his friends.

00:47:43.000 Wow.

00:47:43.000 So it was all kind of in plain sight weirdness.

00:47:47.000 But, you know, you'd be driving down the street and suddenly you were in a drug deal and it was...

00:47:51.000 Whoa!

00:47:52.000 He told me he was shot at...

00:47:55.000 Nine times and stabbed three times.

00:47:57.000 Holy shit.

00:48:00.000 Yeah.

00:48:01.000 You want to hear?

00:48:02.000 It was one of my favorite stories.

00:48:03.000 Yeah.

00:48:04.000 So the band had a van.

00:48:07.000 He had a van and we bought it off him.

00:48:09.000 It was our band van for a while.

00:48:11.000 And then after we didn't need it anymore because we got too big, he wanted to buy it back.

00:48:15.000 So we sold it to him.

00:48:16.000 So one day I went over to his house and, you know, this is the driver's thing.

00:48:21.000 Well, right behind the driver's, where the driver's head would be, but in the middle of the car was a bullet hole.

00:48:27.000 So I said, did somebody shoot at you?

00:48:30.000 He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:48:31.000 Well, what happened?

00:48:33.000 Exactly.

00:48:33.000 He's like, yeah, I was stopped over there on Narragansett and some guy came up and I thought he needed something like a dollar or something.

00:48:41.000 So I rolled down the window.

00:48:42.000 As soon as I did, he put a gun through the window at my head.

00:48:47.000 And then, you know, I hit the gas.

00:48:50.000 And sped off, and so he tried to shoot me, but then he missed, and the bullet went in behind my head, and I got away.

00:48:55.000 That's the story he told me at the time.

00:48:58.000 So years later, the story came back up somehow.

00:49:00.000 He goes, oh, that wasn't the real story.

00:49:02.000 Here's the real story.

00:49:04.000 So same setup.

00:49:05.000 He's sitting somewhere, but it was a drug deal.

00:49:07.000 He rolls down the window to make the drug deal.

00:49:10.000 Guy puts a gun at his head.

00:49:11.000 He does hit the gas.

00:49:13.000 The guy does try to shoot him.

00:49:16.000 Because my father's mad now, he spins the van around and he tries to run the guy over.

00:49:20.000 And the guy's trucking down the street.

00:49:22.000 And the guy ran into a gas station.

00:49:25.000 So my dad came barreling into the gas station at full speed in this van and he was going to run the guy over.

00:49:30.000 And he said he reached a point where the guy was going to...

00:49:33.000 If the guy stopped, he would run him over.

00:49:35.000 But the guy leapt a fence and the only way to kill the guy was to have to run the fence and ram into a house that was next to the gas station.

00:49:41.000 So he hit the brakes and didn't run the guy over.

00:49:44.000 So that was the real story.

00:49:46.000 So back to the kid thing.

00:49:48.000 Excuse me.

00:49:49.000 That's why it's so hard to pin this whole thing down, because there's so much smoke, you know?

00:49:55.000 Right.

00:49:56.000 Like, he did tell me there was another kid named Bill.

00:49:58.000 That's a real thing.

00:50:01.000 Wow.

00:50:01.000 And when he told me when I was 18, he lied and said he didn't know where the kid was.

00:50:05.000 Well, when my stepmother brought up the whole Bill Burr thing later, and I asked him, he admitted that he did know where the kid was, but he didn't want to tell me.

00:50:13.000 What did Bill think about this?

00:50:15.000 Like, the possibility that his mother had an affair with your dad?

00:50:18.000 I don't think Bill gives it any credence.

00:50:21.000 I mean, that's my sense of it.

00:50:22.000 Okay.

00:50:24.000 He just thinks it's bullshit.

00:50:25.000 I don't know.

00:50:26.000 Honestly, I don't know what Bill thinks, you know what I mean?

00:50:29.000 Because...

00:50:29.000 I can see how you would think it'd be possible, because your dad was insane.

00:50:32.000 Your dad sounds like a fucking maniac.

00:50:34.000 I mean, the only way...

00:50:36.000 A Scorsese movie maniac.

00:50:38.000 Well, put it this way.

00:50:39.000 If a person doesn't believe that somebody...

00:50:45.000 And I do know people who've had that.

00:50:47.000 They grew up with somebody.

00:50:47.000 In fact, it just happened in my family that a cousin of mine found out that her father was not her father, and she's in her 60s because of a DNA test.

00:50:55.000 Oh, my God.

00:50:56.000 So it is possible that people can find out later in life, oh, by the way, that guy that you thought was your dad, he ain't your dad.

00:51:03.000 Here's your real dad, right?

00:51:04.000 Right.

00:51:04.000 So it does happen.

00:51:05.000 But I don't get any sense from Bill that he believes that's possible.

00:51:09.000 Got it.

00:51:10.000 So the only way it would be possible if Bill grew up in some kind of weird lie.

00:51:15.000 You see what I'm saying?

00:51:16.000 Right.

00:51:16.000 And I don't believe that.

00:51:17.000 Right, right.

00:51:18.000 Well, I don't know how much he's talked about his family.

00:51:24.000 But that's...

00:51:25.000 I just can't imagine a kid coming downstairs and seeing Coco over the mirrors and Black Sabbath albums and people blacked out and empty booze everywhere.

00:51:36.000 Like, this is a normal thing at your house to have these wild parties.

00:51:40.000 Yeah.

00:51:40.000 And you're a little kid.

00:51:41.000 To be fair, I think a lot of people grew up in that atmosphere.

00:51:43.000 I think we just don't hear about it.

00:51:45.000 Yeah, but not a lot of people grew up with a dad that's running guns and drugs for the mob.

00:51:48.000 That's true.

00:51:49.000 That's true.

00:51:50.000 That is true.

00:51:51.000 That's so insane.

00:51:53.000 That's such a crazy way to grow up.

00:51:56.000 Like, we would have conversations.

00:51:57.000 Like, we would have conversations.

00:51:58.000 Because, you know, as you get older, you start to ask questions, right?

00:52:01.000 Yeah.

00:52:02.000 So I'd say, Dad, aren't you worried, like, if you get pulled over?

00:52:05.000 You know, because he would carry, like, a lot of fucking weed in the car, just for his own personal use.

00:52:10.000 He smoked constantly, like, my whole childhood.

00:52:12.000 Like, I mean, I just remember joint after joint all day.

00:52:15.000 At the dinner table, in the car, I'd contact high.

00:52:19.000 So finally, at some point, I said, Daddy, aren't you worried about if you get pulled over?

00:52:23.000 And he, like, popped the engine, you know, old cars, you know, when you pop the trunk.

00:52:29.000 What is it called?

00:52:30.000 The hood.

00:52:31.000 He had figured out some system where if you put weed in a thing full of whiskey, he said dogs couldn't pick up on the scent.

00:52:44.000 So there was like a compartment in the engine compartment, like a thing.

00:52:48.000 That was full of whiskey, and then he would put a waterproof baggie with the weed in the whiskey, and so if a dog came around the car, it would never smell it.

00:52:55.000 That's hilarious.

00:52:57.000 So it was like life lessons, you know, from Pop.

00:52:59.000 But dogs can only smell one thing.

00:53:01.000 They're only looking for one thing.

00:53:03.000 When you train a dog, you train a dog either for a bomb or you train them for heroin.

00:53:06.000 You don't train a dog for everything.

00:53:08.000 Like, what do you got?

00:53:09.000 Three barks for Coke.

00:53:11.000 The way they train dogs, it's one thing that they're trained to smell.

00:53:14.000 Oh, right.

00:53:14.000 They have one.

00:53:15.000 Yeah.

00:53:16.000 If they're looking for bombs, they're only looking for bombs.

00:53:18.000 They're not going to stop you for weed.

00:53:21.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:53:21.000 Which is like the dumbest thing to train a dog for, if you train a dog for weed.

00:53:25.000 Well, now, yeah.

00:53:26.000 Now, it's the dumbest.

00:53:27.000 But they still do.

00:53:28.000 Really?

00:53:28.000 They still have weed dogs.

00:53:29.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:30.000 If they smell weed, they'll call the weed dog.

00:53:33.000 Is weed legal in Texas?

00:53:35.000 It's not.

00:53:35.000 It's weird.

00:53:36.000 It's decriminalized.

00:53:37.000 There was actually a lawsuit that Ken Paxton tried to stop Dallas from decriminalizing weed and they just lost in court.

00:53:45.000 So Dallas now, marijuana is decriminalized for personal use.

00:53:50.000 It's stupid.

00:53:51.000 It should be the whole country.

00:53:52.000 It should be legal, just like whiskey is.

00:53:54.000 Don't do it if you don't want to do it.

00:53:56.000 But, you know, you should probably know what the effects are, and we should probably study what the actual correct dose is per person.

00:54:04.000 Like, we know what drinks.

00:54:05.000 Like, one drink is one drink, right?

00:54:07.000 You know what it is.

00:54:08.000 You go to the bar, you get a shot of tequila.

00:54:11.000 That's what it is.

00:54:12.000 It's one shot of tequila.

00:54:13.000 Everybody's pretty much, it's standard.

00:54:15.000 With weed, you don't know what, though.

00:54:16.000 Oh, I see, yeah.

00:54:17.000 You don't know what's the right amount.

00:54:19.000 Like, should I take two hits or three hits?

00:54:21.000 You can build up a tolerance, like your dad, you're smoking weed.

00:54:24.000 Like, if I smoked weed all day long, I'd be a fucking mess.

00:54:27.000 I'd be paranoid and freaked out.

00:54:29.000 I'd be like, everyone's out to get me.

00:54:30.000 But he was.

00:54:33.000 And he just kept doing it.

00:54:35.000 That's what's even crazier.

00:54:37.000 And weed back then was not weed today.

00:54:39.000 You probably could get some weed that's commensurate with weed today.

00:54:44.000 Acapulco gold or something wacky.

00:54:46.000 But generally...

00:54:47.000 They have all these crazy strains now, right?

00:54:49.000 Now they have scientists.

00:54:52.000 Botanists got involved in the game.

00:54:53.000 And they're making super weed.

00:54:56.000 I noticed one thing, because I was in LA for a couple months this winter.

00:54:59.000 And when they first, whatever, decriminalized in LA, it seemed like everywhere you went, everybody was smoking weed.

00:55:04.000 It became like a thing.

00:55:05.000 You couldn't go anywhere without smelling, you know.

00:55:08.000 The telltale smoke.

00:55:09.000 And now it seems to have calmed down.

00:55:11.000 And I think it's almost like, now it's like Holland back in the day, where it's so normal, it's no longer a thing to openly smoke weed.

00:55:19.000 So I think it's gone back to a, oh, it's not that big a deal, which I think is probably best.

00:55:23.000 Because there was a year there where you would go there and everybody was stoned.

00:55:27.000 You couldn't get service at a restaurant.

00:55:28.000 I mean, it was like people were staring off into space.

00:55:32.000 Edibles.

00:55:34.000 Yeah.

00:55:34.000 Well, for sure.

00:55:36.000 You're gonna have like a normalization period after a while where it's like weed's normal.

00:55:41.000 It's just like everyone's not drunk all the time even though you can get liquor everywhere.

00:55:45.000 You choose when to imbibe and when not to or not to at all.

00:55:49.000 You're supposed to have choices.

00:55:50.000 You're an adult.

00:55:51.000 You're an adult human being.

00:55:52.000 The analogy I always make is imagine if it was the three of us in a room, just us three, and we were the only people on Earth.

00:55:58.000 We lived on an island, and Jamie just decided he doesn't want us smoking weed.

00:56:02.000 And so Jamie passed a law, and he wants to lock us up if we smoke weed.

00:56:07.000 Oh, I see.

00:56:07.000 That's just as ridiculous as...

00:56:11.000 300 million people and one adult decides that the other 300 million people shouldn't be allowed to smoke weed.

00:56:18.000 Like, do it if you want to do it.

00:56:19.000 Don't do it if you don't want to do it.

00:56:20.000 But you can't.

00:56:21.000 Putting people in a fucking cage for doing something that they want to do that harms no one but you don't want them to do is fucking insane.

00:56:29.000 It's just insane.

00:56:31.000 I grew up, because of my father's life, I mean...

00:56:35.000 I don't know what age I became conscious of my father doing drugs constantly, but let's say I was five years old.

00:56:40.000 So that's 1972. So I've been in weed culture since 1972. Jesus.

00:56:45.000 So I always thought it was...

00:56:46.000 Vietnam War days.

00:56:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:48.000 And I met all those guys too, you know, these guys with PTSD and all that stuff.

00:56:52.000 Wow.

00:56:53.000 So I guess what I'm after is I never understood what the big deal was.

00:56:59.000 And the only thing that freaks me out are people that are really into weed.

00:57:03.000 Like, you know what I mean?

00:57:04.000 Like, the 420 credit?

00:57:05.000 Yeah.

00:57:06.000 Like, that's their identity?

00:57:07.000 That freaks me out.

00:57:08.000 Yeah.

00:57:08.000 It's a crutch for some.

00:57:10.000 It's a tool for others.

00:57:11.000 You know, it's a creativity tool for a lot of people.

00:57:14.000 You know, Carl Sagan was one of them.

00:57:17.000 Carl Sagan.

00:57:17.000 Carl Sagan was a stoner?

00:57:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:57:19.000 Huge stoner.

00:57:19.000 He's got one of the best quotes on states of consciousness that are available to people under cannabis that are not available any other time.

00:57:30.000 See if you can find that quote.

00:57:31.000 It's a brilliant quote.

00:57:32.000 Yeah, Carl Sagan, I mean, he kind of had to keep it under wraps a little bit because marijuana was really illegal back then.

00:57:40.000 But he still wanted to talk about it sometimes.

00:57:44.000 It depends on the person.

00:57:47.000 It's like everything else.

00:57:48.000 There's some people that should not drink.

00:57:50.000 They drink and then their eyes turn to shark eyes.

00:57:53.000 They're gone and they go away.

00:57:56.000 That's it.

00:58:01.000 That's not the quote.

00:58:09.000 That's a quote.

00:58:10.000 But the other one had to do with states of consciousness that you could achieve.

00:58:17.000 It's a very stoner-like thing to say.

00:58:23.000 Well, I'm sure he talked about it a bunch.

00:58:25.000 But either way, he was a regular cannabis user.

00:58:30.000 It's supposed to be like everything else.

00:58:33.000 You could have wine in your house.

00:58:34.000 It doesn't mean you're going to drink wine all day every day.

00:58:37.000 You should not be...

00:58:39.000 High all the time.

00:58:40.000 I just don't want the 420 people to hear me.

00:58:42.000 Well, it's like those people like the MAGA people or like the fucking Insane Clown Posse people.

00:58:49.000 It's just like it becomes their whole thing.

00:58:52.000 There's nothing wrong with going to an Insane Clown Posse show, but if you want to be a juggalo and that's your whole identity is being a juggalo.

00:58:58.000 A juggalo is a whole thing.

00:59:00.000 It's a whole thing.

00:59:01.000 Because of the NWA, we've done business with the juggalos.

00:59:04.000 They seem like fun guys.

00:59:06.000 They're great.

00:59:07.000 No problem with them.

00:59:08.000 You know, Violent J, as he's known, was in the NWA for a hot second.

00:59:12.000 Oh, really?

00:59:13.000 And he's kind of refired his promotion now, Juggalo.

00:59:16.000 I guess JCW? Juggalo Clown Promotions or something?

00:59:21.000 So a lot of my wrestlers wrestle for him, too.

00:59:23.000 Oh, okay.

00:59:24.000 I didn't even know he had a wrestling promotion.

00:59:26.000 They did back in the day.

00:59:27.000 They used to wrestle.

00:59:28.000 I know they wrestled for WCW and TNA. So they were wrestling at the highest level for a while when they were sort of in the 90s times.

00:59:37.000 When they're on MTV and all that stuff.

00:59:39.000 I just love that they have a carnival of outcasts.

00:59:45.000 All the outcasts have a home in the Juggalos.

00:59:48.000 They have these gatherings of the Juggalos.

00:59:52.000 They look like they're having the best fucking time.

00:59:54.000 They're all like-minded people, all partying together.

00:59:57.000 Yeah, but it's freaky when people admit secretly being Juggalos.

01:00:01.000 Have you ever had that experience?

01:00:04.000 They pull you aside.

01:00:06.000 A friend of mine, former porn star, Sasha Gray, sent me a picture of her at like 17 in the Juggalo makeup.

01:00:14.000 Oh, wow.

01:00:15.000 17. And you're like, this is so out there.

01:00:18.000 Juggalo makeup.

01:00:19.000 Do they do insane clown posse?

01:00:22.000 They do very specific makeup.

01:00:24.000 Are the Juggalos, do they have different makeup than the insane clown posse?

01:00:27.000 Or is it the same kind of makeup?

01:00:28.000 It seems to me there's a kind of a particular way they do the Juggalo.

01:00:33.000 Jamie, can you please Google Juggalo makeup?

01:00:35.000 Yeah, I think it's black and white.

01:00:36.000 I don't know if there's rules, but it's clown makeup.

01:00:39.000 What does it look like?

01:00:41.000 Like that guy right there.

01:00:42.000 Yes, but that's Violent J on the top there.

01:00:45.000 That's Violent J there.

01:00:46.000 But they'll do their makeup kind of like how J is.

01:00:49.000 Okay, so some of the people in the audience choose to make their face up.

01:00:53.000 I don't see anybody there with face makeup, though, in that picture.

01:00:56.000 It's hot.

01:00:56.000 It's the summer.

01:00:57.000 Oh, yeah, there you go.

01:00:59.000 Sweating.

01:00:59.000 When it washed off.

01:01:00.000 Sweating off your makeup.

01:01:01.000 See, like the girl there?

01:01:02.000 That split tongue, that dude, in the middle?

01:01:05.000 That's a fucking commitment.

01:01:06.000 That's a commitment to never having a real job.

01:01:09.000 Up top?

01:01:11.000 That's a lot.

01:01:13.000 You gotta really hate your parents to split your tongue like that.

01:01:18.000 How about the guys who split their cock?

01:01:19.000 Have you ever seen that?

01:01:20.000 Yes!

01:01:21.000 Who does that?

01:01:22.000 Do you remember the early days of the internet?

01:01:26.000 I don't know how much you were on the internet in the 90s, but there was a page called the Style Project.

01:01:32.000 Do you remember that?

01:01:33.000 Don't remember that.

01:01:34.000 It was all like some of the most fucked up thing.

01:01:37.000 Things that this dude could find on the internet and he had a whole website and you would you go to the style project you'd get like just insane fucked up stories about people and one of them was body modification extreme and I became friends with the guy who ran the site who's actually that arm wrestler Devin laureate I think that was his brother or someone he's related to Well,

01:02:06.000 Shannon Laureate, I became friends with him and he gave me access to his website and it was like a members-only access where you could like...

01:02:13.000 So you got the VIP tier of split cocks?

01:02:16.000 Oh my god, it wasn't just split cocks.

01:02:19.000 It was crazy stuff.

01:02:21.000 Like some people, they decided that they wanted to get their arm chopped off or their hand chopped off, so they devised a guillotine.

01:02:28.000 It was body modification extreme.

01:02:30.000 So it was all different people doing different things like putting horns in their head and splitting their cock.

01:02:39.000 And one of them was this horrible story about this guy whose boyfriend turned him into a eunuch, wanted him to cut his dick off for him and be a slave.

01:02:47.000 And like, oh my god.

01:02:49.000 It's like detailing how this guy cut his cock off.

01:02:53.000 Yeah.

01:02:56.000 Donnie Fargo, who was a famous wrestler, he was famous for him.

01:02:59.000 As a party trick, he would put a nail through his cock.

01:03:04.000 That's not nice.

01:03:09.000 I had David Blaine on, and he made me stick an ice pick through his arm.

01:03:14.000 Yeah, he's got this trick that he does.

01:03:15.000 It's not a trick, though.

01:03:16.000 I really stuck an ice pick through his arm.

01:03:19.000 It's like you can call it a trick, but a lot of things David does is just it freaks you out.

01:03:24.000 But, you know, you can survive an ice pick through your arm.

01:03:28.000 But I had to back it out because I hit a nerve, and he made me reinsert it, and so I reinserted it, and then the original one just started bleeding, and it got like a little bit of a hematoma, started swelling up.

01:03:40.000 We had to get the medics, and we had SEALs working for us, so they checked it out.

01:03:45.000 Because of all this body talk, my wife loves all sorts of weird body talk, and she wanted me to send you a message because she's...

01:03:53.000 We're literally about to have a baby, like, right now.

01:03:55.000 Oh, congratulations.

01:03:56.000 So we were somewhat concerned coming in because it was possible I may not be able to come because of her about to have this baby.

01:04:02.000 So when we were talking last night, I said, please don't have the baby today.

01:04:07.000 You know, I want to be on Joe's show.

01:04:09.000 And she said, you tell Joe that if I start to have the baby, I expect him to give you some of his NetJet points so you can get home.

01:04:15.000 It's a very rich person joke.

01:04:17.000 That's hilarious.

01:04:19.000 What does that have to do with body modification?

01:04:21.000 Nothing?

01:04:21.000 Because she loves talking about this type of shit.

01:04:23.000 Why does she like talking about that stuff?

01:04:24.000 I don't know.

01:04:24.000 In my family, we didn't talk about anything.

01:04:27.000 Sex, you know, was all just kind of implied.

01:04:30.000 Oh, I see.

01:04:31.000 You see what I'm saying?

01:04:32.000 I grew up in a family where nobody hugged, nobody kissed, everyone hated each other, and nobody talked about the secrets of life.

01:04:40.000 You know, good or bad.

01:04:42.000 It was all kind of in the shadows, you know what I mean?

01:04:44.000 And she grew up in a family where it's like, because she has...

01:04:47.000 Five brothers and a sister.

01:04:49.000 So they talk about everything, like, to the point where just, like, at dinner, like, you're talking about all this, like, weird body stuff.

01:04:55.000 I don't want to be graphic because it turns me off, you know, but they seem to think it's funny.

01:04:59.000 When did you learn to hug people and be, like, outwardly nice?

01:05:05.000 It's funny you ask me that.

01:05:06.000 I didn't grow up with my mother.

01:05:08.000 My mother went crazy when I was four and I never lived with her again.

01:05:12.000 We started to become close again when I was in my 20s.

01:05:14.000 And I remember this one time where I walked through her door.

01:05:18.000 And it was that thing where I wanted to hug her because I never really hugged her my whole life.

01:05:23.000 And I just made this decision at 24, like I was going to hug my mother and give her a kiss on the cheek.

01:05:28.000 And it was like, that was the opening of this other life where people hug and kiss each other.

01:05:33.000 You know what I mean?

01:05:34.000 I mean, obviously I had fool around with girls, but it was only within the context of being romantic.

01:05:40.000 I had no physical affection in my life outside of that.

01:05:44.000 Now my kids are all over me.

01:05:46.000 I've got nine and six-year-olds, so I'm used to kids like rugrats climbing all over you, but I didn't grow up in that at all.

01:05:53.000 The idea of affection was alien.

01:05:56.000 In fact, when I first started chasing girls at 17, 18, girls want to hold your hand or hug you in the car, and it was so freaky to me.

01:06:05.000 When did you relax?

01:06:07.000 I'm not sure I ever did.

01:06:10.000 Well, I gave you a hug when I saw you today.

01:06:11.000 It seemed pretty normal.

01:06:12.000 No, I'm actually a very naturally affectionate person, and it's nice to give you a hug, and it's nice to see you, and it's nice to love on people that you admire and are your friends, and that's the great stuff of life.

01:06:24.000 But I came very late to life.

01:06:25.000 You could even see I'm just uncomfortable.

01:06:30.000 I'm sure you know Howie Mandel.

01:06:31.000 You must.

01:06:32.000 I mean, Howie with his...

01:06:34.000 I made the mistake of hugging Howie once, and I mean, you know, I killed his cat, you know?

01:06:40.000 Yeah, it's like you executed him, like you tased him.

01:06:42.000 That poor bastard.

01:06:43.000 It used to be you could touch knuckles with him.

01:06:45.000 He'll touch knuckles.

01:06:46.000 He will.

01:06:48.000 Touching knuckles again.

01:06:49.000 I'm close enough to Howie to touch knuckles.

01:06:51.000 He stopped touching knuckles, and then he would do elbows.

01:06:55.000 He would touch elbows, and then he got to air elbows.

01:06:59.000 He would just kind of like do that and then put it down.

01:07:01.000 I am a lead singer, so I do some of these things.

01:07:03.000 But meanwhile, he's hanging out with us in the green room at the Comedy Mothership, and then he's going on stage, and there's a comic before him has the same microphone.

01:07:12.000 They're spitting into it.

01:07:13.000 He's holding on to it.

01:07:15.000 See, I think I'm secretly a germaphobe, but...

01:07:20.000 Really?

01:07:20.000 Secretly.

01:07:21.000 We just talked about it.

01:07:25.000 Can we cut this out?

01:07:27.000 Howie's like...

01:07:28.000 That's another level.

01:07:29.000 He talks about it, though.

01:07:30.000 He knows it's a problem.

01:07:31.000 He just can't overcome it for whatever reason.

01:07:33.000 And he manages to sort of have it and still work his way through life.

01:07:38.000 He was fun to hang out with.

01:07:39.000 It's not like he's freaking out about other stuff.

01:07:41.000 He was cool hanging out with, just talking.

01:07:44.000 I had him on my podcast, and we did talk about it.

01:07:46.000 It hasn't aired yet, but we talked about all his...

01:07:49.000 I guess phobias would be the word.

01:07:50.000 Yeah.

01:07:51.000 Conditions.

01:07:51.000 I mean, there's all these letters.

01:07:53.000 You know, ADHD, OCD, this and that.

01:07:57.000 But he's very open about it, to his credit.

01:07:59.000 Yeah.

01:07:59.000 No, he is.

01:08:00.000 Yeah, he talks about it, and it's, you know, it's been a battle for him.

01:08:03.000 But it's just, like, it's so odd because he's so personable.

01:08:06.000 Like, you expect that someone like that would be, like, a recluse, wouldn't like people, like, get away from me, everybody.

01:08:11.000 But he's not.

01:08:12.000 He's, like, super friendly.

01:08:14.000 Super friendly.

01:08:15.000 Except when he puts you in front of a professional comedian who's kind of irritated that you're there and claiming you're his half-brother.

01:08:20.000 Oh, yeah.

01:08:21.000 That was probably a bad pairing.

01:08:23.000 I feel like both of you are kind of a lot in a good way.

01:08:25.000 I would have one of you on by themselves.

01:08:27.000 I wouldn't want you and Burr together.

01:08:30.000 He's such an alpha.

01:08:31.000 I mean, he's just one of those guys.

01:08:33.000 He just can't help it.

01:08:34.000 Yeah, well, he has to make fun of everything, too.

01:08:36.000 Oh, yeah, that's a fucking great idea.

01:08:38.000 What about this?

01:08:40.000 He can't help himself.

01:08:41.000 Yeah, at one point he looked at me.

01:08:42.000 Actually, I was wearing this coat.

01:08:43.000 He goes, where'd you get that?

01:08:45.000 In like a Moroccan bazaar?

01:08:48.000 It's like a regular coat.

01:08:49.000 It's like, no, this is a very expensive coat.

01:08:50.000 It's like a normal coat.

01:08:51.000 I understand.

01:08:52.000 That seems normal.

01:08:53.000 I look at North Face or something.

01:08:55.000 But I'm asking you this in an empathetic way.

01:09:00.000 Because you're a professional comedian, so maybe it's different.

01:09:03.000 But when a professional comedian puts their death ray on you and wants to make fun of you, it's a very particular feeling.

01:09:09.000 It's like getting carved up by a chef.

01:09:12.000 Right.

01:09:12.000 You know what I mean?

01:09:13.000 Because they're so good at Zorro.

01:09:18.000 It's kind of cool.

01:09:19.000 It's like, wow, I'm being insulted by Bill Burr.

01:09:21.000 It's kind of an honor.

01:09:23.000 But at the same time, it's really fucked up because they know exactly where to poke you.

01:09:27.000 Also, you can't fire back.

01:09:29.000 You'll get killed.

01:09:31.000 Right?

01:09:32.000 If you fire back.

01:09:32.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:09:33.000 He's going to chew you apart.

01:09:35.000 What am I going to tell him?

01:09:36.000 Make a little joke?

01:09:38.000 Yeah, there's not much you can do other than laugh along with it.

01:09:41.000 Just have fun with it.

01:09:43.000 Just let him make fun of you.

01:09:45.000 Have fun.

01:09:46.000 That's all you can do.

01:09:47.000 But it feels like a death ray.

01:09:50.000 Yeah, especially a guy like Bill.

01:09:53.000 Who's like the meanest comedian you ever kind of locked horns on you?

01:09:58.000 The meanest at that kind of stuff, but he's one of my best friends, is Tony Hinchcliffe.

01:10:04.000 He's the best at it.

01:10:05.000 He's the fucking best.

01:10:06.000 I just found one the other day from quite a while ago.

01:10:12.000 I'm going to send you this.

01:10:13.000 Because this is like young, fresh-faced Tony Hinchcliffe.

01:10:16.000 It's fucking hilarious.

01:10:18.000 And this is just like off the cuff.

01:10:20.000 They bring in these dudes and he starts roasting them.

01:10:23.000 Just random dudes?

01:10:24.000 Yeah, these two guys.

01:10:26.000 And they team up and they start talking shit to him.

01:10:28.000 And he just eats them alive.

01:10:31.000 Put your headphones on.

01:10:32.000 This one's hilarious.

01:10:33.000 Alright, here we go.

01:10:34.000 He's the best roaster on planet Earth.

01:10:37.000 Nobody's better than Tony Hinchcliffe.

01:10:39.000 That's why Kill Tony's so funny.

01:10:41.000 Part of the reason is he's so fast.

01:10:44.000 Did you get it, Jamie?

01:10:47.000 Okay.

01:10:48.000 - Wrestler, what the you got on wrestler shoes for?

01:10:50.000 - You guys are mean. - Jimmy Neutron granddaddy right here.

01:10:54.000 - You guys look like a before and after for a product that doesn't work.

01:10:57.000 What does ADD stand for?

01:10:58.000 A dose of diabetes?

01:11:00.000 - Okay.

01:11:00.000 - I wasn't ready for any of this.

01:11:01.000 - Yeah.

01:11:02.000 - You guys are wearing sweatpants and sweat skin.

01:11:04.000 Have you guys just completely given up on pussy?

01:11:06.000 Is that it?

01:11:07.000 - All right, baby, Doughboy, not me.

01:11:10.000 I'm out here now.

01:11:11.000 - Doughboy?

01:11:11.000 Wait, what? - His name is Doughboy.

01:11:13.000 - Doughboy?

01:11:14.000 - Yeah.

01:11:15.000 I spell it D-O-B-O-Y.

01:11:16.000 - Yeah, I had a feeling you'd misspell it.

01:11:18.000 You guys are my favorites.

01:11:19.000 Two Chins and ASAP Rocky Road.

01:11:21.000 - Wow, wow. - Just off the cuff.

01:11:26.000 Out of nowhere.

01:11:27.000 And he does that all day long.

01:11:29.000 So he'll do that in the green room.

01:11:31.000 He just turns on people in the green room.

01:11:32.000 It's fucking amazing.

01:11:34.000 We have like...

01:11:35.000 When we do these shows, like Tuesday or Wednesday night or whenever we're there, where everyone's in the...

01:11:39.000 Tuesday and Wednesday nights are a really good night at the club because all the comics that are traveling on the road on the weekend, they come into the club to hang out during the weekday.

01:11:47.000 And so there'll be like eight or nine of us in the green room just talking shit about each other.

01:11:51.000 And Tony's just cutting up left and right, this one, that one.

01:11:55.000 It's so much fun.

01:11:57.000 He's the best at it, though.

01:11:58.000 You do not want to fuck with...

01:12:00.000 You don't want to go blow for blow with Tony Hinchcliffe.

01:12:02.000 I'm going to say right now, I don't think he's my brother.

01:12:04.000 He's definitely not your brother.

01:12:05.000 He doesn't look anything like you.

01:12:06.000 It's a completely different Gene line.

01:12:09.000 Now he'll make fun of me for saying I'm not his brother.

01:12:11.000 So did Bill know that you were going to be there with him?

01:12:13.000 Or was it just like how he just decided to put the two of you together?

01:12:16.000 I got the feeling that Bill wasn't really given the heads up.

01:12:21.000 Yeah, probably.

01:12:22.000 It was a little bit irritating to him.

01:12:24.000 Bill gets easily irritated.

01:12:26.000 But that's also why he's so funny.

01:12:28.000 He gets mad.

01:12:31.000 He gets mad at everything.

01:12:35.000 You know?

01:12:36.000 Yes, and my mind doesn't work like that, so it's hard.

01:12:39.000 Like, I would have a better time understanding like a rocket scientist than a professional comedian, I think.

01:12:45.000 Really?

01:12:45.000 Because the professional comedians I've known personally a little bit, like Bobcat Goldthwait and Carrot Top, their minds are so different than the average human mind.

01:12:55.000 I think the way they process information and they're looking for something that, you know, almost like a meme, like coalesces a whole set of ideas.

01:13:03.000 That's what makes it funny, right?

01:13:04.000 You can...

01:13:05.000 It works on all these different levels at one time.

01:13:07.000 The great comedians, like Dice to me is the greatest.

01:13:10.000 And Dice will tell a joke.

01:13:13.000 It works on like eight different levels.

01:13:15.000 You know, it's like high, low, middle.

01:13:18.000 Do you know what Dice's best stuff is?

01:13:21.000 People don't understand that Dice is literally one of the best live performance artists.

01:13:27.000 Just random.

01:13:29.000 Street artists.

01:13:30.000 Oh, I watch him.

01:13:31.000 You mean when he just goes up to people?

01:13:32.000 Yeah.

01:13:32.000 Oh, it's unbelievable.

01:13:33.000 And pretends that these people wanted a photo with him and they don't know who he is.

01:13:36.000 It's the face.

01:13:37.000 You want the face.

01:13:37.000 You want the picture.

01:13:39.000 And he just goes, he's fucking...

01:13:41.000 And it's so uncomfortable to watch.

01:13:43.000 You start pulling your fucking clothes off.

01:13:45.000 Like, no, don't do this.

01:13:47.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:13:49.000 He's the best at that.

01:13:50.000 And he does that for zero money.

01:13:53.000 He's only doing that for fun.

01:13:55.000 That's it.

01:13:56.000 He's just being an artist.

01:13:58.000 Like, there's no money in it at all, and he spends all this time wandering around the streets, going to bars and restaurants and just bothering people, wandering up to people on the street in New York City.

01:14:11.000 They're waiting for the light to turn green.

01:14:13.000 You want the picture?

01:14:15.000 I just love that he'll just double and triple and quadruple down on the bit.

01:14:20.000 Yeah.

01:14:21.000 Like, he just won't give it up.

01:14:22.000 He won't give it up.

01:14:23.000 Zamud is the same thing with Tony Clifton.

01:14:26.000 Yeah.

01:14:27.000 Just the discomfort of it all.

01:14:30.000 Yeah.

01:14:31.000 Well, Dice is the only guy ever, in the peak of his fame, to try to bomb on purpose and then release it as a two-CD set.

01:14:39.000 Is that the night comedy died?

01:14:40.000 Yeah.

01:14:41.000 That is so...

01:14:43.000 The Day the Laughter Died.

01:14:44.000 The Day the Laughter Died.

01:14:45.000 Rick Rubin produced it.

01:14:46.000 Rick, who's a fucking maniac, loved the idea.

01:14:49.000 He loved it.

01:14:50.000 He's like, what a great idea.

01:14:52.000 This is going to be amazing.

01:14:53.000 Dice is selling out Madison Square Garden more than anybody alive.

01:14:58.000 He's just selling out everything.

01:14:59.000 In the height of this, he decides to record on a night where no one knows he's going to be there and bomb.

01:15:05.000 No material.

01:15:06.000 There's talk off the top of his head.

01:15:08.000 Sometimes don't even try to be funny.

01:15:11.000 I've listened to it multiple times, and it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

01:15:15.000 It's performance art.

01:15:16.000 It's like him on the street going, you want the picture?

01:15:19.000 And look, if he couldn't kill regular way, I wouldn't respect it.

01:15:24.000 Because there's people that do comedy.

01:15:26.000 That pretend they're doing, like, anti-comedy because regular comedy is too easy.

01:15:30.000 The problem is they're not good at regular comedy.

01:15:32.000 If you're, like, hilarious at regular comedy and then you say, I'm going to freak these people out by hitting them with something.

01:15:39.000 He would do this thing at the comedy store where he would go on stage and see how long he could not talk.

01:15:46.000 Yeah.

01:15:46.000 I saw him do it once.

01:15:47.000 He'll go, like, five minutes.

01:15:49.000 Five minutes.

01:15:50.000 And no one knows what to do.

01:15:52.000 And people are, like, nervously laughing.

01:15:54.000 But he also could fucking kill.

01:15:57.000 Like, in the Rodney Dangerfield special.

01:15:58.000 You know, when he did Dice Rules.

01:16:00.000 Like, he could destroy an arena filled with people.

01:16:03.000 So, it was a choice to do this weird thing.

01:16:06.000 Who's your favorite all-time comedian?

01:16:07.000 I'm just curious.

01:16:09.000 God, I don't think I have an all-time favorite.

01:16:12.000 I think Pryor, probably, is the greatest of all time.

01:16:16.000 Not living.

01:16:17.000 With Chappelle being the greatest of living.

01:16:20.000 I think that you have to give credit to Lenny Bruce, though, because he really started the art form.

01:16:26.000 Because before Lenny Bruce, comedy was just a series of jokes.

01:16:30.000 It was just jokes.

01:16:31.000 And Lenny Bruce came along, and all of a sudden he had social commentary, cultural commentary that he turned into humor.

01:16:40.000 The way he described relationships, the way he described marriage, the way he described...

01:16:45.000 It was completely different.

01:16:47.000 It's like, what is this guy doing?

01:16:50.000 And then I think Pryor took that and made it funnier.

01:16:55.000 Pryor took that and that honesty.

01:16:57.000 I never connected that dot, but it makes sense when you say it.

01:17:00.000 Yeah, because he was just funnier.

01:17:02.000 Pryor was just better at it.

01:17:04.000 But the door was opened up by Lenny.

01:17:07.000 It didn't exist before Lenny.

01:17:09.000 So Lenny comes along in the 50s, and he's getting arrested all the time in the 60s.

01:17:14.000 He was getting arrested.

01:17:15.000 Remember that whole thing where he would just go on and read his court transcripts?

01:17:18.000 Yes, that was the end.

01:17:20.000 That must have been really out there.

01:17:21.000 I watched the videos of that.

01:17:23.000 I watched it.

01:17:23.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:17:25.000 I bought it.

01:17:25.000 I bought a VHS tape that was Lenny Bruce on stage.

01:17:30.000 I forget what place it was.

01:17:32.000 I think it was somewhere in San Francisco.

01:17:34.000 And he was just talking.

01:17:35.000 He was reading his court transcripts and talking about the case.

01:17:37.000 And some of the audiences go, we want Dirty Lenny.

01:17:40.000 And he's like, man, it's not about that, man.

01:17:43.000 You've got to understand what they're doing here, man.

01:17:46.000 And he would go back into the court case.

01:17:49.000 But it wasn't funny at all.

01:17:50.000 It was just him on stage for a while.

01:17:56.000 The thing about comedy is a lot of comedy, like even from the 80s, it doesn't hold up.

01:18:03.000 It doesn't mean that it wasn't funny at the time.

01:18:06.000 It just means the concepts and the culture has shifted.

01:18:11.000 So much and they've become so commonplace that it's not shocking or funny anymore.

01:18:15.000 But it was maybe in the 70s or maybe in the 80s.

01:18:18.000 And much more so with Lenny Bruce.

01:18:21.000 Because you go back and listen to his stuff and people are dying laughing.

01:18:24.000 And you don't even find it funny.

01:18:26.000 Like it doesn't even make you chocolate.

01:18:27.000 It's hard to laugh at Lenny Bruce's stuff.

01:18:31.000 It's because we can't put ourselves in the context of being alive watching this guy perform in 1962. Red Fox to me is still funny though.

01:18:39.000 Still funny.

01:18:40.000 Like his stuff holds.

01:18:41.000 Yes, his stuff holds.

01:18:42.000 Moms Maybelline?

01:18:43.000 Yep.

01:18:44.000 Some people still hold up.

01:18:46.000 You know, Robin Harris still holds up.

01:18:50.000 There's some old school comedians from the 70s and the 80s that are just still...

01:18:56.000 You could tell they were...

01:18:57.000 Eddie Murphy.

01:18:58.000 He was special.

01:18:59.000 He was a special talent.

01:19:02.000 That still holds up today.

01:19:03.000 But some of the stuff doesn't.

01:19:06.000 And then I think the next big shift, the big change was Kinnison.

01:19:10.000 Kinnison was a giant change in comedy.

01:19:11.000 Did you know Kinnison?

01:19:12.000 No.

01:19:13.000 I saw him live a few times.

01:19:14.000 I was going to say, I think age-wise it probably does.

01:19:16.000 Yeah.

01:19:17.000 No, I was about 21 when I saw him live.

01:19:20.000 I saw him live once when I was 19 when I was a security guard at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts.

01:19:28.000 So I got to see him live there.

01:19:30.000 And then I got to see him live at some...

01:19:33.000 I think it was like...

01:19:35.000 Some weird place in the middle of nowhere, and it was like half empty.

01:19:39.000 And this was like 88, 89. So by 89, he was kind of falling off.

01:19:46.000 Because he had just done so much drugs and partied so hard that he was fucking huge in like 86. And then by the time 88 came around, the material kind of dropped off.

01:19:58.000 And then by the time I saw him, it was like 89 or 90, it wasn't so good anymore.

01:20:03.000 And then he died in like...

01:20:05.000 Did he die in like 92?

01:20:07.000 I think he died in 92. Car crash, right?

01:20:09.000 Yeah, drunk driver.

01:20:11.000 Ironically, because he had jokes about drunk driving.

01:20:14.000 But he just...

01:20:16.000 I was always hoping he was going to come out with a new album and he would be back.

01:20:20.000 You know, he'd be back to the Kinnison of 86. But just the party and the coke and the women and the...

01:20:27.000 Fucking no time to write.

01:20:28.000 His brother wrote about it.

01:20:29.000 There's a great book called Brother Sam by his brother Bill.

01:20:33.000 Bill wrote about the childhood, about him getting hit by a car and becoming this maniac.

01:20:38.000 He's like the victim of a head injury.

01:20:40.000 Oh, okay.

01:20:41.000 And that's what turned him into that fucking maniac.

01:20:43.000 The childhood preaching.

01:20:44.000 Yes.

01:20:45.000 Childhood preaching, tent revival preaching.

01:20:47.000 And he brought that kind of energy to comedy.

01:20:50.000 He was a different thing.

01:20:51.000 I remember the first time I saw him, I'm like, oh, wow, that's comedy too?

01:20:54.000 This is crazy.

01:20:56.000 I remember thinking, well, this is a completely different thing.

01:21:00.000 I never thought this was stand-up comedy.

01:21:01.000 Yeah, he felt, it was like, to me at the time, he was the rock and roll equivalent of comedy or something.

01:21:07.000 Yes.

01:21:08.000 And didn't Guns N' Roses take him on tour or something?

01:21:11.000 There was some, I seem to remember, somebody took him on tour.

01:21:13.000 Something like that.

01:21:14.000 I think Bon Jovi, too.

01:21:15.000 I think he was hanging out with those guys, too.

01:21:17.000 He was just...

01:21:18.000 I think Bon Jovi was one of his...

01:21:20.000 Because he had a music video called Wild Thing.

01:21:23.000 Yeah, I remember he was singing.

01:21:24.000 Yeah.

01:21:25.000 He was kind of trying to be a rock star for a while.

01:21:28.000 But it's a quick fall from grace, man.

01:21:30.000 Because in 86, he's one of the best comics that's ever walked the face of the earth.

01:21:35.000 And by 89, he's like a caricature of the guy he was three years ago.

01:21:40.000 And I think it's just...

01:21:42.000 It's really hard to maintain, especially in the 80s when no one was famous.

01:21:48.000 How many famous comedians were there?

01:21:50.000 There were like five, ten at the most.

01:21:51.000 Now there's hundreds.

01:21:52.000 But back then, nobody was famous.

01:21:55.000 It was all about getting on Carson.

01:21:56.000 That was the thing, right?

01:21:57.000 It was about getting an HBO special.

01:21:59.000 That was the big thing.

01:22:01.000 Carson was big in the 80s, but for a guy like Kinison, even though he got on Letterman and he had one of the most brilliant sets ever, his Letterman set's fantastic.

01:22:10.000 We played it on the show once.

01:22:11.000 It's really good.

01:22:13.000 But I think with Kinison, it was really the HBO special.

01:22:15.000 It was Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedian special first, and people got to see him on that, and then he did his own Hour special.

01:22:22.000 You're right, because...

01:22:23.000 When Eddie Murphy did his HBO special, that was when he just like...

01:22:27.000 Delirious.

01:22:27.000 Maybe he had that leather suit.

01:22:29.000 Yep.

01:22:29.000 I remember high school, everybody was like, it was all...

01:22:32.000 Norton, I've been looking at you.

01:22:34.000 And I know you've been looking at me.

01:22:38.000 Yeah, he was...

01:22:39.000 Yeah, I mean, it's like there was only a few back then, though.

01:22:42.000 And then Dice came along.

01:22:44.000 And Dice had a completely different element to it because people wanted to repeat the lines.

01:22:48.000 What's in the bowl, bitch?

01:22:50.000 Oh!

01:22:51.000 The whole crowd would go crazy.

01:22:53.000 It was rock and roll.

01:22:55.000 They sang along.

01:22:58.000 Shot through the heart!

01:22:59.000 It was like rock and roll.

01:23:00.000 Everybody was singing along.

01:23:02.000 You give love a bad name.

01:23:05.000 The crowd wanted to say that, and the crowd wanted to say, little boy blue, oh, he needed the money!

01:23:13.000 I tried to talk my wife into seeing if we could hire Dice to do our wedding.

01:23:20.000 She wasn't having it.

01:23:22.000 Who knows what he would have done.

01:23:24.000 The vision I had, my wife wanted to do kind of an after party of the wedding.

01:23:28.000 We had it at my house, so the idea was, you know, when half the crowd bangs off because it's been a long day.

01:23:35.000 There'd still be a crowd that want to hang out and just party.

01:23:37.000 And then Dice shows up?

01:23:38.000 And then Dice shows up.

01:23:39.000 At 1am.

01:23:40.000 And then takes the...

01:23:41.000 Puts the death ray on me.

01:23:43.000 Right?

01:23:44.000 He just was not having it.

01:23:46.000 We used to call it...

01:23:47.000 We used to say Dice had two Dices, but my favorite Dice was Mean Dice.

01:23:51.000 Because Mean Dice would find a guy in the audience.

01:23:53.000 He knew who could take it, who couldn't, who's smiling and laughing along.

01:23:57.000 He'd be like, look at you.

01:23:58.000 And just start tearing this fucking poor fool apart.

01:24:04.000 Fun.

01:24:05.000 Back then, the beautiful thing was the comedy store had no audience.

01:24:09.000 So he could go on unannounced.

01:24:11.000 He would show up at midnight on a fucking Monday night or something like that and just torture people for fun.

01:24:17.000 Just for fun.

01:24:18.000 He was only fucking around.

01:24:20.000 I'm having Bill Burr PTSD because that feeling when they put the death ray on you.

01:24:25.000 It really bothered you?

01:24:26.000 No, it didn't bother me.

01:24:27.000 It's just...

01:24:28.000 It's uncomfortable.

01:24:29.000 Well, I'm not...

01:24:30.000 What do they always say?

01:24:31.000 Don't...

01:24:33.000 Don't bring a knife to a gunfight, right?

01:24:35.000 What am I going to say?

01:24:37.000 You know what I mean?

01:24:38.000 Why was he picking on you?

01:24:40.000 I think because he was uncomfortable about the whole setup.

01:24:42.000 Because at the end of the day, it's my fault.

01:24:44.000 I'm the one who said something in public.

01:24:46.000 Right.

01:24:47.000 So at the end of the day, I do bear the responsibility for initiating this insanity.

01:24:51.000 It's taken a life of its own.

01:24:53.000 Because, I mean, I walk through public now, and people are like, hey, it's Bill Burr's brother!

01:24:57.000 So he's got to be getting it the other way.

01:25:00.000 That's hilarious.

01:25:01.000 You're the brother of that weirdo from the pumpkins, you know?

01:25:06.000 Like, I don't know.

01:25:08.000 We were talking about the other night at the club in the green room, and we were convinced it was a bit that you guys were doing together.

01:25:13.000 We were convinced.

01:25:15.000 No one disagreed.

01:25:17.000 No one was like, yeah, I think it's real.

01:25:19.000 Most people were like, nah, I think they were fucking around.

01:25:21.000 It seemed like they made an agreement.

01:25:24.000 It's somewhere between...

01:25:25.000 A bit and reality.

01:25:27.000 And I think that's where it gets confusing.

01:25:29.000 That's why I would use the word meta.

01:25:31.000 There's this moment, if you watch it back, where Howie splits and just leaves me and Bill alone.

01:25:37.000 And Howie has a band that plays when he does a show.

01:25:42.000 So the gentleman who runs the band starts playing a really sad piano.

01:25:46.000 And Bill just starts riffing.

01:25:47.000 It's just me and him in this room alone.

01:25:49.000 I mean, I don't know Bill at all.

01:25:50.000 And he starts talking about our shared dad.

01:25:54.000 It gets really weird because on some level it's like, it's possible, right?

01:25:59.000 Right.

01:25:59.000 Even if it's 1%, it's not a zero.

01:26:01.000 Right.

01:26:02.000 So that's where it gets kind of, that's why I say meta, it's like you're looking down a hall of mirrors and you start almost playing with your mind.

01:26:09.000 You're thinking like, well, it could be possible.

01:26:13.000 It's also, the two of you guys doing this publicly is very pro wrestling, which is what you love.

01:26:20.000 There's something about...

01:26:22.000 I brought a wrestler with me today who runs the promotions for the NWA. But you know what I'm saying?

01:26:29.000 It's like there's something about it.

01:26:30.000 It's like, is this kayfabe?

01:26:32.000 Is this real?

01:26:33.000 Is this a shoot?

01:26:34.000 Or is this a work?

01:26:35.000 Like, what is this?

01:26:36.000 Well, Tommy...

01:26:36.000 You know Tommy Dreamer?

01:26:37.000 I know the name.

01:26:38.000 Tommy Dreamer, a famous ECW wrestler, went on to work for WWE and now works for TNA. Tommy's the classic salty veteran, you know, seen it all, done it all, you know, been split in half and the whole thing.

01:26:53.000 So there's nothing Tommy hasn't seen.

01:26:55.000 And, you know, Tommy will say something like, it's all a work.

01:26:59.000 It's all a work.

01:27:00.000 Like, basically, it's the cynical view that everything you see in the world is fake.

01:27:06.000 The president is fake.

01:27:08.000 The news is fake.

01:27:11.000 It's all a work.

01:27:12.000 So once you go there cynically, It's hard to back out of that.

01:27:16.000 Yeah.

01:27:17.000 The artist in me likes the discomfort.

01:27:21.000 Yes, that's what I'm getting at.

01:27:23.000 I really do like the discomfort.

01:27:25.000 I remember watching Andy Kaufman on Saturday Night Live circa 78 or whatever.

01:27:31.000 And it's that idea that you can create a vibration in the room between what's expected and where you're willing to go.

01:27:42.000 Yeah.

01:27:44.000 I have this one friend who was a performance artist, and she would do stuff like when she was in college, she would just walk in the cafeteria and take off all her clothes.

01:27:52.000 And she would stick a camera in the corner and just film people's reactions.

01:27:55.000 And it was interesting to watch because one guy would just keep eating his food and no salad.

01:28:00.000 Like, I'm just going to eat my salad and just pretend this isn't happening.

01:28:03.000 Like, every human being goes in a different direction with the weirdness.

01:28:06.000 Right.

01:28:07.000 So as an artist, you know, on a stage, you know, there is this kind of crazy power that you have because depending on what comes out of your mouth next or what you do can affect thousands of people.

01:28:20.000 And then obviously through a digital medium even more.

01:28:23.000 So there's something about flirting with the uncomfortable, but what makes it uncomfortable is it always has a foundation of truth.

01:28:33.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:28:35.000 Yes, I do know what you're saying.

01:28:37.000 Yeah.

01:28:37.000 If it didn't have a foundation of truth, it would just be silly.

01:28:39.000 Right, right, right.

01:28:40.000 The discomfort comes from like, oh, I recognize.

01:28:43.000 There's something you're doing that I recognize in myself, or I know somebody that's like this.

01:28:48.000 Yeah, well, it makes it much more interesting if there's a 1% chance that it's true.

01:28:51.000 If I just think you guys are running a sketch, it's kind of funny, but if it might be true, then it gets to that weird place, where it's like, this is uncomfortable.

01:28:59.000 Okay, so if I walked out of that room that day after meeting Bill for the first time, and it was a 1% chance...

01:29:05.000 Now that I walk through life, we're up into like the 10 percentile in the public's mind.

01:29:10.000 Yes.

01:29:10.000 10 percent of the public is convinced we're brothers.

01:29:13.000 Even if I sat there and told them, no, it's not true.

01:29:15.000 More now.

01:29:16.000 That's okay, but that's what I'm saying.

01:29:18.000 Now after this show.

01:29:19.000 But that's why it's like when you say it's a bit, yeah, it's a bit to the extent that you're playing with the idea.

01:29:25.000 Yes.

01:29:26.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:29:26.000 It would be like if I sat down and say, you know, I'm sure you remember the last time I was on your show, but you know, I met you when I was 12. And I told you this whole story about how I met you.

01:29:38.000 Like Carrot Top in his show tells this whole story about meeting Gallagher when he's a kid.

01:29:42.000 Have you ever heard that?

01:29:43.000 No.

01:29:43.000 Gallagher is Carrot Top's hero.

01:29:46.000 Sure.

01:29:46.000 And he even does a thing at the end of his show in tribute to Gallagher.

01:29:50.000 He kind of does a watermelon bit or something like that.

01:29:52.000 But he tells this thing in the show about how meeting Gallagher when he was like 14 years old.

01:29:56.000 And Gallagher actually gave him some advice that inspired him to be who he became.

01:30:04.000 I mean, for all I know, it's a bit.

01:30:05.000 Right, right, right.

01:30:06.000 But he says it with such earnestness, and it does have some...

01:30:09.000 It feels right, but for all I know, it's just another bit.

01:30:13.000 Everything's a work.

01:30:14.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:30:14.000 So if I came here, oh, Joe, I met you when I was 12. You were at an airport.

01:30:17.000 You were so nice.

01:30:18.000 You signed an autograph, you know.

01:30:20.000 There's a part of you that would be like, well, it's possible.

01:30:23.000 I mean, you know what I mean?

01:30:25.000 I got a pretty good memory.

01:30:27.000 I'd be like, what happened?

01:30:29.000 Where were we?

01:30:31.000 I never been there.

01:30:36.000 Sorry.

01:30:36.000 I have this plague that I can't get rid of.

01:30:38.000 But if you have that Tommy's perception that everything's at work, the whole world gets really weird.

01:30:45.000 Well, I think we're there.

01:30:47.000 Yeah.

01:30:49.000 We definitely are when it comes to politics and the news.

01:30:52.000 I think our whole culture has been turned into, like, where are we?

01:30:56.000 Right.

01:30:58.000 That's why I started calling it, like, five, seven years ago, a post-truth era.

01:31:02.000 Right.

01:31:03.000 I mean, we've all been in that situation where somebody in our inner circle will bring up something that we know from a factually presented basis isn't true.

01:31:14.000 I heard so-and-so did so-and-so, and you go, no, that's not true.

01:31:18.000 Let me show you the YouTube clip.

01:31:20.000 You know what I mean?

01:31:21.000 This didn't happen.

01:31:22.000 Or, no, so-and-so made a left, not a right.

01:31:26.000 But because of what they've heard, they believe it.

01:31:29.000 And you can literally show them something and say, no, no, look.

01:31:32.000 Well, that must be AI or edited.

01:31:35.000 It's like once somebody becomes convinced of this culture, it's really hard to unconvince them.

01:31:41.000 Right.

01:31:41.000 And so from a performing point of view and somebody who's now also in the podcasting sphere, it's like, is it better to play into what people want?

01:31:52.000 Like, I really appreciate it in Bruce Springsteen's Broadway special when in the first five minutes of the thing, he basically says, I'm not really Bruce Springsteen.

01:31:59.000 Have you ever seen it?

01:32:00.000 No.

01:32:01.000 It's really worth watching.

01:32:03.000 In the first five, it's when he did his long Broadway run.

01:32:06.000 You know about that?

01:32:07.000 He did this thing where it was like, he would talk and then play songs.

01:32:11.000 No, I didn't even know he did it.

01:32:12.000 Oh yeah, it was huge.

01:32:13.000 He went on this massive Broadway run.

01:32:15.000 Huh.

01:32:16.000 And HBO did it and put it on as a special.

01:32:20.000 But he literally, in the first five minutes of talking, and it's about 1,200 people a night, so it's a live audience, and he says in the first five minutes, by the way, I'm not Bruce Springsteen.

01:32:28.000 I mean, that's my name, but...

01:32:30.000 The Bruce Springsteen, you think, he's like, I don't know how to fix a car.

01:32:33.000 I've never been a factory in my life.

01:32:37.000 Serious.

01:32:38.000 Yeah.

01:32:39.000 Now, I knew that as a performer, I knew that what I was watching wasn't real, but people want him to play John Wayne so bad that he puts his finger in there and says, okay, you want me to be John Wayne?

01:32:50.000 I'll be John Wayne.

01:32:51.000 Right.

01:32:53.000 That's audience capture, right?

01:32:56.000 Yes, but now we're in the business of it.

01:32:59.000 I mean, there's obviously examples, historical antecedents over the last hundred years of media, where people would figure it out.

01:33:05.000 Right.

01:33:05.000 Charlie Chaplin or something, you know what I mean?

01:33:07.000 Like, they wanted him to be the tramp, so he became the tramp.

01:33:09.000 Right.

01:33:10.000 He wasn't that guy at all.

01:33:11.000 Right.

01:33:12.000 He fed into it and obviously connected to something real in him, but he wasn't really a tramp.

01:33:16.000 He was a complete rich Lothario.

01:33:19.000 Well, you really see it in The Dictator, that movie The Dictator?

01:33:21.000 Yeah.

01:33:22.000 Where he has that insane speech at the end.

01:33:24.000 Oh, yeah.

01:33:24.000 Uniting the world.

01:33:25.000 Yeah.

01:33:26.000 Well, he was...

01:33:26.000 Out and out, socialist, basically.

01:33:28.000 And a brilliant guy.

01:33:30.000 Oh, yeah.

01:33:30.000 Which is really crazy when you think about how silly his character was.

01:33:34.000 His character was this, like, bumbling, stumbling goof.

01:33:37.000 So that's what I'm saying.

01:33:38.000 What is more valuable?

01:33:39.000 What the public wants from you or what is true?

01:33:43.000 In the entertainment world, we're used to it, right?

01:33:46.000 Yeah.

01:33:46.000 Like, you could play Joe Rogan the comedian at the drop of a hat because you've done it.

01:33:51.000 And Joe Rogan, the UFC announcer, you know, just...

01:33:54.000 I'm not saying it's not who you are, but it's an extenuation.

01:33:57.000 We say in wrestling, you turn the volume up to 11. Right.

01:34:00.000 It's still Joe Rogan.

01:34:01.000 I don't see you as being disingenuous.

01:34:03.000 I can't even think of one time I've ever seen you in any media where I thought that he's not playing.

01:34:07.000 He's not Joe Rogan.

01:34:09.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:34:09.000 Right.

01:34:10.000 I've done it.

01:34:11.000 I've played other people.

01:34:13.000 What I'm trying to say is, now we're in this thing where everybody's doing it.

01:34:18.000 I mean, everybody.

01:34:20.000 We've all looked at some girl on the internet and said, that's not how she really looks.

01:34:24.000 You've got to go through the Instagram and, like, you find the real picture.

01:34:27.000 Like, everybody's kind of become comfortable with, like, a filter over everything.

01:34:31.000 So that's what I mean.

01:34:32.000 We're in a post-truth world where the impression is becoming more valuable than the reality.

01:34:36.000 That's really, I think, unprecedented.

01:34:40.000 Yeah, I think so, too.

01:34:41.000 But I also think that authenticity is more valuable now than ever before because it's hard to find.

01:34:46.000 Well, that would be my argument for why my band has risen back up.

01:34:49.000 Because we're one of the only bands left that sort of represents some...

01:34:54.000 Ideal that is long abandoned.

01:34:56.000 Right, right, right.

01:34:57.000 You're not a corporate creation.

01:34:59.000 No, we never were.

01:35:01.000 Right.

01:35:01.000 And there's so many of them now, you feel like, you know, like, you ever seen Kinnison's bit about the Monkees?

01:35:09.000 The band the Monkees?

01:35:10.000 Yeah.

01:35:11.000 Well, it's a bit about Manson.

01:35:13.000 It was, and then, you know...

01:35:16.000 He does this bit about the Monkees, about they weren't a real fucking band, because they were pieced together by a corporation.

01:35:23.000 The Monkees, which were great.

01:35:25.000 The Monkees are great.

01:35:26.000 I'm a believer.

01:35:27.000 They have some great songs.

01:35:28.000 But they were kind of one of the first corporate creations.

01:35:31.000 But I actually, on my podcast recently, interviewed Mickey Dolenz.

01:35:36.000 Oh, wow.

01:35:36.000 And we talk a lot about this very subject.

01:35:38.000 It hasn't aired yet.

01:35:41.000 He was less interested in the discussion than I was because my argument would be is that the monkeys are actually the template that came.

01:35:48.000 Our whole lives, the monkeys were dismissed as an anachronistic thing that went against the integrity of the Beatles.

01:35:53.000 Right.

01:35:54.000 But if you actually look now, Beatles versus monkeys, the monkeys are more accurate of what came than the Beatles.

01:36:00.000 In what way?

01:36:01.000 Because authenticity is less and less and less important.

01:36:04.000 Those who establish authenticity, and I would include myself amongst that, and I would include you in that, they're very valuable.

01:36:10.000 But you also know because of your public things that have gone on, you've had to stand there and take a lot of shit because just even speaking your own truth is inconvenient in a post-truth world.

01:36:21.000 Yeah.

01:36:22.000 Right?

01:36:22.000 So it's actually more politically expedient to create a character that can navigate this new world.

01:36:29.000 And by the way, change on a dime.

01:36:30.000 Right.

01:36:31.000 Does it make sense the way I'm positive?

01:36:33.000 Yeah, no, it does make sense.

01:36:34.000 So my argument would be from a rock and roll historical point of view is that the Monkees are actually more relevant now in a particular way.

01:36:41.000 The Beatles are the preeminent band.

01:36:43.000 That's not the argument I'm making.

01:36:44.000 I'm saying is the model of the Monkees, which was always held up for a form of mockery.

01:36:49.000 See, this is what you get when you make plastic music.

01:36:51.000 No, no.

01:36:51.000 We live in the age of plastic music now.

01:36:53.000 Right.

01:36:54.000 The Monkees are the grandfathers of this thing.

01:36:57.000 Right, it wouldn't even be shocking today if the corporation put together a band.

01:37:01.000 No one would dismiss the band because a bunch of people, they cast it together with a bunch of good musicians and created a band.

01:37:08.000 No, I mean, I... We used to want Aerosmith.

01:37:12.000 We used to want Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Young, coming up together, playing music.

01:37:16.000 That's what we used to want.

01:37:18.000 I used to want the Beatles.

01:37:19.000 They all got together, they formed a band, they played in Hamburg until they tightened it up.

01:37:23.000 I used to work with a musician, and I was in therapy at the time, and I was having a lot of problems with the musician.

01:37:29.000 And the musician was from a wealthy family, but he always, he didn't bathe, and he wore junky clothes.

01:37:34.000 He wanted people to believe he was somebody that he wasn't.

01:37:37.000 Right.

01:37:38.000 You know, I was actually from a poorish family.

01:37:40.000 He was from a rich family pretending to be poor.

01:37:43.000 Yeah.

01:37:44.000 And my therapist had the great line about him.

01:37:46.000 He said, he looks like a junkie, he smells like a junkie, but he doesn't have the guts to be a junkie.

01:37:52.000 So if you can, if in this culture you can pick up anything you want, Mm-hmm.

01:38:23.000 Yeah.

01:38:24.000 You know, I'm 57. I got two kids, another one on the way.

01:38:27.000 I work with animal charities, and I have a tea house and a wrestling company.

01:38:31.000 And I'm still fighting at 57 with people who want me to be this guy that they believe I am from 30 years ago.

01:38:38.000 Right.

01:38:38.000 And no amount of empirical evidence will change their minds.

01:38:41.000 Right.

01:38:42.000 They're upset with you because you're connected to something that's different than what they want you to be connected to.

01:38:46.000 Like, they don't care what you really are.

01:38:48.000 They don't want you to like pro wrestling.

01:38:54.000 Get sober, get straight, and go on another hellacious run.

01:38:58.000 Yeah, I suspect Sam was very mentally ill.

01:39:01.000 I never met him, but I think one of the reasons why he was self-medicating so hard was...

01:39:06.000 Probably that head injury that he got when he was a young kid probably really fucked him up because I know quite a few people with some pretty significant head injuries.

01:39:14.000 And they're wild and impulsive and aggressive and they do crazy things.

01:39:19.000 Like some of them, they just go off on benders, they disappear for days.

01:39:23.000 I think it's common with people with severe CTE. Because I'm on the board, I'm an honorary on the board of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, which I'm sure...

01:39:33.000 You know, has some tie to UFC, too, because, you know, Chris Nowinski, who runs it, is my friend.

01:39:40.000 One of the main things that happens with people who start to get CTE early in life is lack of impulse control.

01:39:47.000 So suddenly you have a 40-year-old retired professional athlete who's faster and stronger than 99% of the population who can't control his temper.

01:39:56.000 That's what makes that situation so frightening for the families, because they lose the ability to kind of...

01:40:02.000 Keep it all reined in.

01:40:04.000 Right, right.

01:40:04.000 That happens a lot with fighters, football players.

01:40:07.000 I'm sure it happens with pro wrestlers.

01:40:08.000 Probably happens with a lot of...

01:40:10.000 It's getting better, I think, with wrestling.

01:40:11.000 The awareness is helping.

01:40:13.000 In our organization, we forbid headshots.

01:40:17.000 That's good.

01:40:18.000 You know, the classic chair to the head.

01:40:19.000 There's none of that in my world.

01:40:21.000 Good.

01:40:21.000 You don't need it.

01:40:22.000 Well, for what?

01:40:23.000 Yeah, the pain of watching people deteriorate is so awful.

01:40:27.000 The pain in their eyes, where they just can't navigate life anymore, and every day they have a fucking headache, and they're just in hell, and they just want to kill themselves.

01:40:36.000 They just can't take it anymore.

01:40:37.000 And it gets to a certain point where it sort of accumulates over time, where it doesn't get better, it gets worse.

01:40:41.000 Well, I think also, and I'm not speaking from experiences, but I've heard the stories.

01:40:45.000 You take people who are held up as almost like masculine ideals.

01:40:50.000 That fall isn't just the fall physically, it's the fall of like...

01:40:54.000 I'm not the person, I'm not the hero that you've made me out to be anymore.

01:40:58.000 Right.

01:40:58.000 I'm broken.

01:40:59.000 Right.

01:41:00.000 And there's nothing I can do to put the pieces back together.

01:41:02.000 That's a very hard journey for championship fighters.

01:41:05.000 When they are the fucking man, they're on top of the world, and then they have to just integrate society and be one of us.

01:41:11.000 When they used to be the dominant, and then they go to the fights, they sit there with a paunch and a little bit of a belly, sit there and watch people doing what they used to do.

01:41:21.000 And they don't know how to make a living outside of fighting.

01:41:25.000 They don't know what to do.

01:41:26.000 Very few of them figure out how to transition into some other stage of life.

01:41:30.000 The thing about athletics is by the time you're 40, you're essentially done.

01:41:33.000 Unless you're a rare Tom Brady type character or Randy Couture who can compete into their 40s.

01:41:39.000 Bernard Hopkins, great example.

01:41:41.000 But at a certain point in time, it's over.

01:41:44.000 And you have to know when it's over.

01:41:45.000 And then what?

01:41:46.000 You put all your eggs in this one basket.

01:41:50.000 To be a championship fighter like a Lennox Lewis or a Vander Holyfield, you have to be all in.

01:41:55.000 You can't have a side gig in a blues band.

01:41:57.000 There's no room for you writing books.

01:42:00.000 There's no room for you fucking selling things on Etsy.

01:42:05.000 I know this is a leap of discussion, but that's one of the discussions that's going on internally in my band.

01:42:11.000 I'm 57 and One guy's 56 and one guy's, I think, 61. You know, it's like, at what point do you start to dial the thing down?

01:42:19.000 My brain is wired.

01:42:20.000 I'm going to go until I run into a brick wall.

01:42:22.000 Right.

01:42:23.000 And they're more like, well, things are pretty good.

01:42:26.000 You know what I mean?

01:42:26.000 Like, do we have to keep throwing ourselves into the maw of the public?

01:42:30.000 You know, and my argument is, like, it'd be like going into a UFC fight and not fighting to win.

01:42:37.000 Right, right, right.

01:42:38.000 Fighting not to lose.

01:42:39.000 Right.

01:42:39.000 That seems to me far more dangerous.

01:42:41.000 And that's kind of my argument is, like, In order to be in the arts, you've got to, it's a pell-mell, all in.

01:42:48.000 Yeah.

01:42:48.000 All in or all out.

01:42:49.000 That's the only gear I know.

01:42:50.000 Yeah.

01:42:51.000 There's a thing that happens to bands when they get to a point where they never make any new music, right?

01:42:56.000 And they just tour on the old music.

01:42:58.000 You're touching on the nerve of my life.

01:43:01.000 Yeah.

01:43:02.000 How do you navigate that?

01:43:04.000 I just keep working.

01:43:05.000 I refuse.

01:43:08.000 That's it.

01:43:10.000 In my case, Back to my daddy for a second.

01:43:13.000 I watched my dad play songs he didn't want to play.

01:43:16.000 I watched him doing drug deals rather than make money for music.

01:43:19.000 I watched him give up on his talent, his dream, all of it.

01:43:22.000 I watched it destroy my father.

01:43:24.000 And then, if you want to even go further in a kind of a mythical way, my success destroyed him again.

01:43:34.000 So, if you've watched that, well, then I was lucky enough to have kids late in life.

01:43:41.000 My first kid came when I was 48, and we're about to have one again, 57. Once my kid came, I was like, this kid is not going to look at me how I looked at my father.

01:43:52.000 Like, shoulda, woulda, coulda.

01:43:54.000 Yeah.

01:43:54.000 So I had to get myself up off the couch and, like, get serious again.

01:43:58.000 And again, that's that mentality, that killer mentality.

01:44:00.000 Like, I can still go.

01:44:01.000 I'm going to go.

01:44:02.000 So until somebody stops me, I'm going to go.

01:44:05.000 Well, that's what got you to the dance, right?

01:44:08.000 Well, even doing the podcast.

01:44:09.000 It looks easy to just sit and talk, but it requires prep and mental focus.

01:44:15.000 And it's a lot harder than I would have thought.

01:44:19.000 And I got money.

01:44:22.000 I mean, I could sit home.

01:44:23.000 I like being in the game.

01:44:24.000 I like the hustle.

01:44:25.000 I like having to learn things.

01:44:27.000 I like having to...

01:44:27.000 What do you enjoy about podcasting and why did you decide to get into it?

01:44:31.000 A quick story was, I did a podcast based on an album that we put out that was 33 songs.

01:44:36.000 And I did it for iHeartRadio, and they were fine and everything.

01:44:39.000 But when it all finished, I started to kind of enjoy it a bit.

01:44:43.000 And I poked around, as you do, to see if anybody was interested.

01:44:45.000 And it was like crickets.

01:44:47.000 Nobody gave a shit about me being a podcaster, like, at all.

01:44:51.000 And if any kind of response came back, it'd be like, well, if you want to tell stories about the 90s and get other 90s artists on to talk about the 90s, we'd be cool with that.

01:44:59.000 But other than that, we have no use for you.

01:45:01.000 So I just thought, okay, not for me.

01:45:03.000 Not meant to be.

01:45:04.000 And then I did Club Random with Bill Maher.

01:45:07.000 And as soon as I was done with the episode and shaking everybody's hands, they said, Bill's starting a podcast network.

01:45:12.000 Would you be interested in doing this?

01:45:14.000 And I said, only if I could do whatever I want to do.

01:45:17.000 And they said, tell us what it is.

01:45:19.000 And I pitched them the idea that is the show called Magnificent Others Now.

01:45:22.000 I said, I want to talk to whoever I want to talk to about whatever I want to talk about.

01:45:25.000 But here's the reason, and the reason to the heart of your question is I feel there's a lot of people in this culture that don't get celebrated in the way that I would celebrate them because we've become so skewed with influencers and people who are famous that don't do shit.

01:45:40.000 Yeah.

01:45:41.000 And I think there's a lot of value in American culture that can be celebrated.

01:45:45.000 So you're talking about, like, say, a retired fighter or something.

01:45:49.000 There's a lot we can learn from a retired fighter.

01:45:51.000 Yeah.

01:45:52.000 You know, you have a Shogun armor out here, you know what I mean?

01:45:54.000 To me, a retired fighter is like, you think I don't want to sit down with a retired Shogun?

01:45:58.000 Right.

01:45:59.000 And ask them about what it's like to be in there alone?

01:46:02.000 Right.

01:46:05.000 Recently interviewed Steve Vai, a great guitar player.

01:46:09.000 And I, for some reason, I had this idea of, you know, like the classic Sergio Leone, two guys at the end of the street with the gun.

01:46:16.000 Yeah.

01:46:17.000 So I said to Steve Vai, who do you fear at the end of, like, who's the faster gun?

01:46:22.000 You know what I mean?

01:46:23.000 That's his.

01:46:24.000 Right.

01:46:24.000 Not, I'm projecting, but I'm saying, we all have that moment, like, who do we not want to be in the octagon with?

01:46:30.000 Is it Eddie Van Halen?

01:46:31.000 Who was it?

01:46:31.000 For me?

01:46:32.000 Yeah.

01:46:33.000 Or for him?

01:46:33.000 For Steve Vai.

01:46:34.000 He didn't want to say.

01:46:35.000 Really?

01:46:36.000 Well, I think he's a top guy.

01:46:38.000 Right, right, right.

01:46:39.000 Why would you want to create heat where there's no need to create heat?

01:46:42.000 I mean, he's at an elite level.

01:46:44.000 Right.

01:46:44.000 I'll tell you what, I wouldn't want to be at the end of the street with him, Steve Vai at the other end of the street.

01:46:48.000 Yeah.

01:46:48.000 Or Yngwie.

01:46:49.000 Yeah, right, right, right.

01:46:49.000 Those guys are like insane.

01:46:51.000 Shredders.

01:46:52.000 I mean, yeah.

01:46:52.000 Yeah.

01:46:53.000 I mean, I'm an amateur, you know, compared to those guys, so I wouldn't want the whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.

01:46:56.000 There's something about that kind of shredding, too, that's just like so stunning.

01:47:02.000 Freakish.

01:47:02.000 Yeah.

01:47:04.000 I mean, do you still train MMA? I still do martial arts.

01:47:08.000 Okay.

01:47:09.000 I don't spar, though.

01:47:10.000 I don't get hit in the head anymore.

01:47:11.000 But there's got to be those times where you see a fighter that just, they just get it.

01:47:16.000 Yeah.

01:47:16.000 And it looks easy for them, and you're like, how is that?

01:47:18.000 Autism.

01:47:19.000 Okay, God bless, but I'm saying that's the way it is for me with other musicians sometimes.

01:47:23.000 Right.

01:47:23.000 I look at a guy like Steve Veyer and Eddie Van Halen, Ring Van, like, how do you do that?

01:47:28.000 Right.

01:47:28.000 Like what it must have been like when Hendrix burst onto the scene.

01:47:31.000 My dad had a story, actually.

01:47:33.000 He was playing a club in Wisconsin.

01:47:36.000 He never heard of Jimi Hendrix.

01:47:38.000 And Jimi Hendrix was playing the night before they were playing the same club.

01:47:42.000 So one of his boys said, why don't we go up, watch this new guy, Jimi Hendrix.

01:47:45.000 We'll hang out.

01:47:46.000 We'll play the gig the next night.

01:47:47.000 We'll drive back to Chicago.

01:47:48.000 So imagine my dad's in a club in Wisconsin with like a thousand people in 1966 or 67 and out walks Jimi Hendrix.

01:47:57.000 My dad said...

01:47:58.000 He'd never even heard his music, so it split his mind.

01:48:02.000 And he said it was so shocking the way he played and how masterful he was at it.

01:48:06.000 He said when he got on stage the next night, he felt like he couldn't play the guitar at all.

01:48:10.000 Wow.

01:48:11.000 It was like an alien instrument.

01:48:14.000 And Clapton talks about it.

01:48:15.000 Yeah.

01:48:16.000 Like, Jimi Hendrix blew Clapton's mind.

01:48:19.000 Yeah.

01:48:20.000 Roy Albert Hall, whatever it was, it was like, oh my God, what the hell is happening?

01:48:24.000 Yeah.

01:48:24.000 I think it was Bag of Nails or something.

01:48:25.000 He was like, what am I doing?

01:48:27.000 And this is when people were spray painting on the walls in London, Clapton is God.

01:48:32.000 And here comes, here shows up this guy who was on the Chitlin circuit is what they used to call playing for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers.

01:48:38.000 And he was just in the backup band.

01:48:40.000 Yeah.

01:48:41.000 And he shows up in England.

01:48:43.000 Chaz Chandler, the bassist from The Animals, goes, this guy could be a star.

01:48:46.000 Gets him a record deal.

01:48:47.000 He shows up in England.

01:48:48.000 And next thing you know, he's like, Hey Joe is a number one hit and he's on TV. And it's like, I mean, imagine that.

01:48:54.000 Wow.

01:48:55.000 So, yeah, there are those people that's like, it's so shocking.

01:48:58.000 Van Halen was the same way.

01:48:59.000 I got to interview him once and sit in his studio for four hours.

01:49:02.000 He would just play the guitar and you'd just be like, I don't understand how this is possible.

01:49:05.000 You're doing inhuman things and I know how to do what you do.

01:49:09.000 Yeah.

01:49:09.000 And I can't even come close to doing what you're doing.

01:49:13.000 Shocking.

01:49:14.000 It's always interesting, too, that people have a specific sound.

01:49:18.000 Like, you can hear them, and you know who's playing the guitar.

01:49:22.000 Like, Stevie Ray Vaughan had a sound.

01:49:24.000 Like, you can hear him.

01:49:25.000 Like, when he was doing Voodoo Child, you're like, oh, that's the Stevie version.

01:49:28.000 Like, he played music.

01:49:30.000 Do you play guitar at all?

01:49:31.000 No.

01:49:32.000 So the one thing I'll tell you, guitar player, to non-guitar players, the thing you learned about the great guitar players, it's...

01:49:39.000 All in their hands.

01:49:40.000 Everybody focuses on what amp, what guitar, the gear.

01:49:46.000 Somehow it's the way they hit the strings.

01:49:48.000 I couldn't even explain it to you.

01:49:50.000 They just have a different feel?

01:49:50.000 We call it attack.

01:49:51.000 I have no idea.

01:49:52.000 Steve Ray Vaughan, for example, he played his strings purposely high.

01:49:57.000 He made it harder to play the guitar.

01:49:59.000 Really?

01:50:00.000 And still played at that level.

01:50:01.000 Now, there's a belief with certain guitar players that the higher you put the strings, the more you have to dig out the notes, and so it becomes more emotive.

01:50:08.000 So imagine he's doing it at that level.

01:50:11.000 He's making it harder to do what he's doing, and he's doing it at that level.

01:50:14.000 Wow.

01:50:15.000 Unbelievable.

01:50:16.000 Incredible talent.

01:50:17.000 I mean, shocking.

01:50:18.000 Again, shocking.

01:50:19.000 It's like, where does that come from?

01:50:21.000 Just has it.

01:50:23.000 We have a photo of him in the tunnel leading up to the stage in my comedy club, of him on stage at that club.

01:50:32.000 In 1980...

01:50:34.000 Oh, at the same place?

01:50:35.000 Yeah.

01:50:35.000 I think it's 88 or 86?

01:50:38.000 Somewhere in the 80s.

01:50:39.000 Maybe it's 83. Sometime in the 80s.

01:50:43.000 And it's like Steve Ray Vaughn on stage at that club.

01:50:47.000 And it's wild.

01:50:48.000 It's just wild to think that he was in this room.

01:50:52.000 You know, because Austin is where he's from.

01:50:53.000 And think about this, because he talked about it.

01:50:55.000 There was a point in his life where he was dropping rocks of Coke.

01:50:57.000 I think in whiskey and drinking it.

01:50:59.000 And rotting his stomach out.

01:51:02.000 And he got sober, like, in the last year or so of his life, and he played even better.

01:51:06.000 Right.

01:51:07.000 If you listen to the recordings that he made live, particularly in the last year or so of his life, he's playing even better.

01:51:13.000 So that's what I say about Sam Kinison.

01:51:14.000 Imagine if he was able to make that left.

01:51:18.000 Like I said, though, I think Sam was dealing with something.

01:51:21.000 I think his demons were internal.

01:51:25.000 The Steve Ray Vaughn thing, what's fascinating to me...

01:51:31.000 Well, first of all, he's the only guy that can play Voodoo Child other than Hendrix.

01:51:35.000 Like, if you're, like, some upstart and you want to release Voodoo Child today, like, Jesus Christ, like, what are you doing?

01:51:42.000 You're trading on hallowed ground, you know?

01:51:46.000 Like, maybe you can do All Along the Watchtower, because that was actually a Dylan song, right?

01:51:52.000 Maybe.

01:51:52.000 But you know why he, you know, this is my opinion, but you know why he plays Voodoo Child so well?

01:51:57.000 Why?

01:51:58.000 Because he had studied the same guys that Hendrix had studied.

01:52:01.000 So he's not imitating Hendrix.

01:52:03.000 He's coming from the same wellspring of information.

01:52:06.000 Like who were the guys?

01:52:06.000 Albert King.

01:52:07.000 Oh.

01:52:08.000 B.B. King, Albert King.

01:52:11.000 You know, it's Muddy Waters.

01:52:14.000 It's understanding the way those guys played.

01:52:16.000 So he's not imitating Jimi Hendrix.

01:52:18.000 He's playing from the same spot.

01:52:20.000 Have you ever heard of Johnny Thunder?

01:52:23.000 You mean talking about from the New York Dolls?

01:52:26.000 No.

01:52:27.000 Johnny Thunder was an artist in the 1960s.

01:52:31.000 And he put out a song called I'm Alive.

01:52:34.000 And I think it was 1969. And it was also covered by another band.

01:52:39.000 But his version is fucking insane.

01:52:42.000 It's so good, you can't believe he didn't make it.

01:52:46.000 Can I play it for you?

01:52:47.000 Please, yeah.

01:52:48.000 Right, that's right.

01:52:49.000 His version is the cover.

01:52:50.000 What was the other version of it?

01:52:53.000 Tommy James and the Shondells.

01:52:56.000 Their version, eh.

01:52:58.000 But Johnny Thunder, put the headphone on.

01:53:00.000 It's in another new commercial I've heard recently.

01:53:03.000 Yeah, well we started talking about it like a year or so ago.

01:53:06.000 My friend Brian Simpson played it for me.

01:53:10.000 And he goes, you're gonna fucking love this.

01:53:13.000 And he goes, this is a one-hit wonder from 1969. Woo!

01:53:19.000 Never heard of him.

01:53:20.000 I usually know all this stuff.

01:53:22.000 Fucking fantastic, right?

01:53:23.000 Yeah.

01:53:24.000 I don't even know where he's from.

01:53:25.000 I can't even identify where he's from by the...

01:53:27.000 The fucking song is fantastic.

01:53:29.000 It's so good.

01:53:30.000 It just...

01:53:31.000 It stuns you because you hear something like that and you go, how did he not make it?

01:53:36.000 What hope is there?

01:53:37.000 Imagine if you were around in 1969 and you see that guy up at the Whiskey A Go-Go.

01:53:42.000 He gets on stage and plays that song and you're like, holy shit!

01:53:46.000 But to be fair, I saw those people in the 80s and I saw those people in the 90s and I couldn't imagine that they weren't going to make it and they didn't.

01:53:54.000 Yeah!

01:53:54.000 Isn't that weird?

01:53:56.000 And that was part of the vibe that my father put on me which was like, Well, how the hell did you get out?

01:54:01.000 Right, of course.

01:54:02.000 Well, the fucking resentment must have been astounding.

01:54:05.000 You know, when you're, you know, trying and kind of half-assing it and your son comes along and all of a sudden he's doing arenas, you're like, what the fuck?

01:54:13.000 This interview from Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan literally almost has what you guys just quoted, like, never heard of it?

01:54:20.000 I can't believe it.

01:54:21.000 Right.

01:54:22.000 We talked about this.

01:54:23.000 Yeah.

01:54:24.000 What year was this?

01:54:25.000 1969. Yeah.

01:54:27.000 Isn't that crazy?

01:54:28.000 That's right.

01:54:29.000 We talked about this.

01:54:30.000 Bob Dylan.

01:54:31.000 So he discovered it and was asking Jan Wenner if he'd heard of it.

01:54:34.000 That's so crazy that even Bob Dylan couldn't make it huge.

01:54:38.000 So 1968. Okay.

01:54:40.000 Yeah, Bob Dylan heard it on the radio.

01:54:42.000 Wow.

01:54:44.000 And then disappeared.

01:54:46.000 That's fucking incredible, man.

01:54:49.000 Incredible.

01:54:50.000 Because you feel like a guy who makes a song that's that good, oh my god, all you need is good songwriters, and that guy's going to be huge.

01:54:57.000 There's a fucking billion dollars in there waiting for you.

01:55:00.000 Dig it out.

01:55:01.000 But that's kind of what I was saying before, is like, it's a curious thing why certain people make it and certain people don't.

01:55:08.000 My father, before he passed away, he told me, you had the one thing that I didn't have, which was the ambition.

01:55:15.000 Like, he wanted it.

01:55:16.000 He said, I didn't really want it.

01:55:17.000 I just wanted it to come to me.

01:55:21.000 Well, also, I think if you're involved in a life of crime like that, a lot of cocaine, first of all, there's a lot of bad karma that you have.

01:55:29.000 But also, it's like you're too distracted.

01:55:32.000 You're too in that life.

01:55:34.000 You're never going to really be able to go all in on music as an artist.

01:55:38.000 So you're never going to really be able to reach your full potential, right?

01:55:42.000 Yeah, that's what he was saying.

01:55:44.000 He was admitting to me that he had made some sort of internal decision.

01:55:48.000 that he didn't want to do whatever he had to do to do it.

01:55:51.000 He made certain excuses involving the mob.

01:55:53.000 He did say that back then, and it is a known thing in Chicago, that in order to be successful in Chicago, you had to basically sign contracts with the mob.

01:56:01.000 Right.

01:56:01.000 There's always been rumors about the band Chicago that there were mob ties with their world.

01:56:08.000 I'm sure there was a lot of that going on.

01:56:11.000 Wasn't that the whole Hendricks thing?

01:56:13.000 You ever know that conspiracy?

01:56:15.000 Well, yeah, I've read about that.

01:56:17.000 That gets into other types of complications, and I don't have an opinion on it.

01:56:24.000 It's like saying there's no way to separate the two things at the time.

01:56:29.000 Anybody back then, any clubs at the time, particularly in Chicago, they were all mob-connected.

01:56:36.000 And Los Angeles as well.

01:56:39.000 A comedian or, you know what I mean?

01:56:41.000 An emcee or whatever you were doing.

01:56:43.000 Like, here's Lola the dancer, you know?

01:56:44.000 You were connected.

01:56:45.000 There was a white guy standing there and everybody knew who they were because that's how they did their business.

01:56:50.000 Because if you didn't like what Johnny Rocco was doing, you were going to get in trouble and you didn't want to get in trouble.

01:56:55.000 And I went to school with a bunch of the mob wise guys' kids and grandkids.

01:57:01.000 I worked at a mob club in Connecticut.

01:57:03.000 I did stand-up.

01:57:05.000 And another one in Long Island, where the guys were connected by the mob.

01:57:09.000 And in Boston as well.

01:57:11.000 In Boston, Nick's Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or money.

01:57:15.000 We played a club on Long Island once where the crowd was moshing.

01:57:20.000 And in the middle of the four-song, the guy on the side of the stage that worked for me was waving, like, stop playing in the middle of the song.

01:57:28.000 And I said, I fucking stopped playing.

01:57:30.000 Got a thousand people out in front of me.

01:57:32.000 And he kind of did one of these, and there were two wise guys standing there with suits on.

01:57:38.000 Kind of like, you're going to get in trouble with these guys if you don't stop.

01:57:40.000 And I said, I don't give a fuck, and I kept going.

01:57:43.000 So they waited one more song, and then they came out between songs on stage with their backs to the audience, and they pulled their coats open and showed me a gun and said, you better calm the fuck down.

01:57:51.000 Whoa.

01:57:52.000 Because of the washing?

01:57:54.000 Yeah.

01:57:55.000 Because we used to call them brass and fern bars, you know, like the brass bar and the ferns.

01:58:01.000 Right, right, right.

01:58:02.000 You know that bar, right?

01:58:03.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:58:03.000 We've all been there.

01:58:04.000 And we were playing one of those places for some reason.

01:58:06.000 And the crowd was going apeshit.

01:58:08.000 They were bouncing off the wall.

01:58:09.000 So they were blaming us for the reaction of the crowd.

01:58:11.000 So they wanted us to bring the crowd down.

01:58:13.000 But how do you bring the crowd down?

01:58:16.000 So they literally showed me a gun and said, you better calm the fuck down.

01:58:20.000 So what did you do?

01:58:21.000 I just kept going.

01:58:22.000 Were they going to kill me on stage?

01:58:25.000 Jesus Christ.

01:58:25.000 What happened when you got off stage?

01:58:27.000 They weren't gone.

01:58:28.000 Really?

01:58:29.000 I mean, there might have been a problem if somebody had done some real damage or something, but there was no problem.

01:58:35.000 But they definitely threatened me on stage.

01:58:37.000 How did they not know about moshes?

01:58:39.000 This is me at like 180 pounds and long hair and bad attitude.

01:58:44.000 That's hilarious.

01:58:44.000 No, I don't think they'd ever seen anything like moshing.

01:58:47.000 You know, this is like 92. This is a very new phenomenon to the outside world.

01:58:52.000 But moshing was going on before that, right?

01:58:53.000 Oh, yeah, but it's only in the underground clubs, is what I'm saying.

01:58:56.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:58:57.000 You're in a wise guy's club on Long Island with brass rails and ferns.

01:59:02.000 I dated a girl in the 80s who went to see the Cramps and came home with a concussion.

01:59:09.000 Yeah.

01:59:11.000 From the mosh pit.

01:59:12.000 Remember Poison Ivy?

01:59:13.000 She was the guitar player for the Cramps.

01:59:15.000 Oh, right.

01:59:16.000 So great.

01:59:18.000 Yeah.

01:59:19.000 Bad music for bad people.

01:59:20.000 Did you ever kind of encounter the alternative scene when you were a kid?

01:59:23.000 Not really.

01:59:24.000 No.

01:59:25.000 Not for you, the freaks?

01:59:28.000 I didn't go to very many...

01:59:30.000 I mean, I went to a few concerts when I was a kid, but not...

01:59:33.000 I went to Jay Giles' band.

01:59:36.000 I saw George Thorogood.

01:59:38.000 Not exactly the alternative there.

01:59:39.000 Yeah, no.

01:59:40.000 I never really saw...

01:59:42.000 A lot.

01:59:42.000 And then once I started really getting into comedy, I didn't really go to see anybody perform.

01:59:47.000 I was mostly just performing myself, so I never got to see anybody.

01:59:50.000 And I didn't really become friends with band people until I moved to Hollywood.

01:59:55.000 And then in the late 90s and 2000s, I met a bunch of band people.

02:00:01.000 And it was always weird.

02:00:03.000 Hanging out with them was always odd.

02:00:05.000 It was like, oh, that's that guy from that band.

02:00:08.000 Yeah.

02:00:09.000 It's a lot of...

02:00:11.000 Like, what do you call it?

02:00:13.000 When the brains don't connect?

02:00:16.000 The brain hemispheres?

02:00:17.000 Bipolar.

02:00:18.000 A lot of bipolarity in musicians.

02:00:21.000 Particularly high levels?

02:00:23.000 My theory is the reason they become musicians is they overdevelop one side of their brain.

02:00:29.000 Oh.

02:00:30.000 You know, you probably get on somebody who knows what they're talking about.

02:00:33.000 But the idea is that if people's, their brain hemispheres, and that's why a lot of musicians do coke, is it helps the polarities work.

02:00:41.000 It helps the brain communicate left to right.

02:00:44.000 Really?

02:00:44.000 Oh yeah.

02:00:46.000 It's a known thing that coke really helps that if you have that bipolarity.

02:00:50.000 Huh.

02:00:51.000 Is that a medication for people that are bipolar?

02:00:54.000 Do they give them Adderall or anything like that?

02:00:56.000 I don't know.

02:00:57.000 I mean, I've worked with people who are bipolar and they've talked about their medications and stuff, you know?

02:01:02.000 Huh.

02:01:04.000 And it's still kind of an inexact science, bipolarity.

02:01:06.000 It's crazy to think that Coke helps fix some things.

02:01:09.000 I think it helps.

02:01:11.000 What I've heard is it helps the brain communications.

02:01:13.000 Anybody I've known that's bipolar as a musician that did Coke told me they felt normal.

02:01:19.000 It's the first time in their life they felt normal, that their brain worked normally.

02:01:22.000 What a terrible thing.

02:01:23.000 Yeah, it doesn't work.

02:01:24.000 Imagine if that's the thing that keeps you together, it's cocaine.

02:01:28.000 I wonder if what coca leaves would do.

02:01:31.000 Because there's a lot of people like the high-altitude herding populations and, you know, like people in Peru, they chew coca leaves just for energy.

02:01:39.000 And apparently it's a very different thing, like the chewing of the coca leaves.

02:01:44.000 Or you can get tea, coca tea.

02:01:45.000 Yeah?

02:01:46.000 I was just in South America.

02:01:47.000 I've had that.

02:01:48.000 Mate de coca?

02:01:48.000 Yeah.

02:01:49.000 Yeah, I've had that.

02:01:50.000 It's got to get a little bit of a clarity.

02:01:52.000 But the chewing of the leaves is like, it's so normal for them.

02:01:57.000 And it's illegal over here.

02:01:59.000 Yeah.

02:01:59.000 But back to the theory, the idea is if you have one side of your brain overdevelop, it makes you good at something that you wouldn't necessarily be good at.

02:02:07.000 And then bad at life.

02:02:09.000 Yeah, probably.

02:02:10.000 Right.

02:02:11.000 So you need a handler like Elvis.

02:02:12.000 So if you're meeting a successful musician, they're the graduating class of the bipolarity.

02:02:18.000 Oh, okay.

02:02:20.000 That makes sense.

02:02:20.000 So there's some functional level of acumen.

02:02:22.000 That makes sense.

02:02:23.000 That makes sense.

02:02:24.000 That's why through the years as I've heard people give rumor to any number of famous rock stars, it's like I recognize all the behaviors.

02:02:31.000 Most people treat it like, oh, can you believe so-and-so did this and made this erratic decision?

02:02:35.000 It's like, no, that's a musician.

02:02:37.000 That's how most of their brains work.

02:02:39.000 I don't know what it is and maybe there's a comedic parallel.

02:02:44.000 It just strikes me that the reason there's such consistent bad behavior with musicians is because their brains don't work right.

02:02:50.000 And I'm sure somebody's going to get mad at me for saying that, but I mean it's a compliment.

02:02:54.000 It makes them good at something that they maybe wouldn't necessarily be good at.

02:02:57.000 And maybe, I don't know, I've never been tested.

02:02:59.000 I don't think I'm bipolar.

02:03:00.000 Yeah, I probably, I would imagine a lot of motivational speakers would not be awesome band members.

02:03:07.000 You know what I mean?

02:03:08.000 Like people who are completely dialed in with their life.

02:03:12.000 Tony Robbins, my new bass player.

02:03:13.000 They get up in the morning and they do their exercise and yoga and they eat well.

02:03:17.000 They stare at the sun as it rises and they get...

02:03:19.000 Their fucking whole life dialed in.

02:03:21.000 They probably wouldn't be the best band members.

02:03:24.000 Especially like a lead singer.

02:03:25.000 There's no good band members.

02:03:27.000 That's the problem.

02:03:28.000 How do you keep it together for all these years?

02:03:32.000 What's the key to a harmonious...

02:03:34.000 That's the thing.

02:03:35.000 We broke up in 2000, and then the drummer and I brought the band back in 2007, and it only lasted two years.

02:03:41.000 And then I soldiered on...

02:03:42.000 Alone is the only original member from 2009 to 2015 and then the drummer came back and then the guitar player who I didn't talk to for 16, 17 years came back in 2018. So we've been an intact three-quarter unit since 2018. How come you guys didn't talk for so long?

02:03:58.000 It's just real heat.

02:04:00.000 It was real heat.

02:04:00.000 Yeah?

02:04:01.000 That sucks.

02:04:02.000 No, it's all resolved now.

02:04:04.000 I mean, it's all good.

02:04:06.000 I mean, I think if you don't talk to somebody for 16, 17 years, there's a beef there that, you know what I mean?

02:04:10.000 It lasts.

02:04:11.000 A real one.

02:04:12.000 But it's interesting to me how people can manage.

02:04:18.000 It's always, like as comics, we always look at band members going, imagine if all of your fucking success depended on this guy showing up, that guy showing up, this guy's girlfriend not getting in the way, this guy's fucking uncle not trying to manage you guys.

02:04:31.000 Like you have all these fucking people.

02:04:34.000 And you're trying to put together songs.

02:04:36.000 And you're trying to like, come on, we've got a tour.

02:04:38.000 I don't want a tour.

02:04:39.000 My mom needs me to help her with the fucking business.

02:04:41.000 What are you talking about, man?

02:04:42.000 We're in a band.

02:04:43.000 We have a record deal.

02:04:45.000 I'm nodding my head because this is my life experience for 35 years.

02:04:49.000 As comics, we always talk about it.

02:04:50.000 Thank God we're like a one-man show.

02:04:52.000 Thank God.

02:04:53.000 All we need is other comics to work with us.

02:04:55.000 The problem with the band is the band members have no idea why it works.

02:05:02.000 We're clueless as to the mystery of why people are attracted to us as a unit.

02:05:06.000 We can certainly conceptualize.

02:05:09.000 Like, I write good songs and I play good guitar.

02:05:12.000 But there's something about bands that creates a kind of a magical...

02:05:15.000 P. Townsend referred to it as a gang.

02:05:18.000 A gang that you want to be in.

02:05:20.000 That's what makes bands attractive to people.

02:05:22.000 That was his opinion.

02:05:23.000 I don't disagree.

02:05:25.000 There's something that goes on in those relationships that's kinetic enough that it sustains past whether or not you have a good song or two.

02:05:34.000 Yeah, it's all the pieces make the puzzle together.

02:05:39.000 It's not one piece as an individual.

02:05:41.000 It's all of them together.

02:05:44.000 Make Led Zeppelin.

02:05:45.000 Yes.

02:05:45.000 All together.

02:05:46.000 So if you're lucky, and in this new world, you know, you got the Stones playing into their 80s.

02:05:50.000 Yeah.

02:05:51.000 So the economy of music has changed where it's like you're in an elongated state of success.

02:05:55.000 It's just totally unprecedented, by the way.

02:05:58.000 There's no...

02:05:59.000 What's going on with rock bands in their 50s and beyond is there's no prior parallel in 100 plus years of recorded music.

02:06:07.000 There's not even one instance you can point to and say it worked that way then.

02:06:10.000 So we're all in uncharted territory.

02:06:13.000 And there's nobody that can even really advise you.

02:06:15.000 There's always the material thing of like, well, you're going to make a lot of money and, you know, you got this IP and the band.

02:06:21.000 But it's like the actual sort of the nuts and bolts of how to hang together.

02:06:24.000 So for us, it's been really, I call it the family of the band.

02:06:28.000 There's some sort of pride that's emerged with like, we've all survived.

02:06:32.000 Our relationships are intact enough for us to get on a stage and somehow it benefits our families individually.

02:06:38.000 So it has allowed us a sort of pride.

02:06:40.000 You know, because it's less about our relationship and more about our relationship with our families, that's allowed us to have a sweetness between the three of us that we didn't have when we were young.

02:06:49.000 Oh, that's cool.

02:06:51.000 Well, also, probably just growing up and being more mature and appreciative.

02:06:56.000 You're really going out on a limb there with the growing up shit.

02:06:59.000 A little bit of gratitude.

02:07:01.000 Perpetual adolescence over here.

02:07:03.000 Well, that is part of the fun, though.

02:07:06.000 You don't actually have to really grow up.

02:07:07.000 You know, it's funny.

02:07:08.000 Even when I say something like this, there's already some guy getting ready to go on Reddit.

02:07:12.000 But there is a day you wake up and you look in the mirror like, I'm a rock star.

02:07:15.000 This is fucking cool.

02:07:16.000 Yeah.

02:07:16.000 And there's another day that you wake up and go, you know, I don't have to get off this rock star train if I don't want to.

02:07:21.000 Well, look at the Stones.

02:07:22.000 I saw the Stones at CODA, the Circuit of the Americas here in Austin a couple years ago.

02:07:26.000 It was fucking insane.

02:07:28.000 It's insane.

02:07:29.000 It's almost like having an out-of-body experience because you can't believe you're really seeing Mick Jagger.

02:07:34.000 Like when he's out there dancing, I swear to God, I felt like I was on a drug.

02:07:37.000 I was like, my friend Bobby and I were hanging.

02:07:39.000 He owns that place, Circuit of the Americas.

02:07:42.000 And I was standing next to him like, I can't believe they're really here.

02:07:47.000 Like, there's certain people that you just get weirded out by being, like Bill Murray was here the other day.

02:07:52.000 And I even told him, I'm like, I'm weirded out.

02:07:55.000 I'm weirded out that you're here.

02:07:56.000 Like, it's just, there's a lot of people that I don't freak, I mean, I've met a lot of people.

02:08:01.000 I don't freak out about too many of them, but Bill Murray I freaked out about.

02:08:05.000 But seeing Mick Jagger, I didn't even get to meet him, but seeing him on the stage, I was like, that is nuts!

02:08:11.000 That's really Mick Jagger!

02:08:13.000 Yeah, well, the mythical part...

02:08:16.000 See, in his case, the mythical part of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is integrated.

02:08:22.000 They become the Avatar.

02:08:24.000 They're the living example of where it actually works.

02:08:26.000 My argument is against those people where it doesn't work.

02:08:30.000 You know, Larry465 on the internet, who thinks he's lord of like, you know, D&D or something.

02:08:36.000 I mean, that's where I get kind of like, what is that?

02:08:39.000 I get the other thing.

02:08:41.000 You know, because, you know, whether it's...

02:08:44.000 What do you mean by Larry Ford?

02:08:45.000 I'm joking about the guy on the internet whose entire status is based on being in a subculture and achieving some status within the subculture which doesn't really apply into the outside world.

02:08:56.000 Oh, like a Reddit forum or something?

02:08:57.000 Yeah, whatever.

02:08:58.000 Mick Jagger walks into a stadium full of people.

02:09:00.000 They're there to see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.

02:09:04.000 Right.

02:09:04.000 Even though they're 80, and you, who's been around everybody, goes, holy shit, there it is.

02:09:09.000 Yeah, just the fact that he was alive.

02:09:12.000 Okay, but it's the myth made real.

02:09:14.000 Yes.

02:09:14.000 Have you ever watched those YouTube videos like, what was Caesar really like?

02:09:18.000 You know what I mean?

02:09:18.000 Right, right, right.

02:09:18.000 That type of stuff.

02:09:20.000 Like, what was it like to live in those times?

02:09:22.000 Because there's the myth and then there's the reality.

02:09:24.000 Right.

02:09:24.000 And then sometimes if you learn about the reality, you're like, wow, that guy was really a badass or she was really a badass because...

02:09:31.000 The thing is real.

02:09:32.000 The mythology is real.

02:09:34.000 It has truth or resonance in it.

02:09:37.000 It's all this other culture that's risen up where we're supposed to pay tribute, and that goes back to the podcast.

02:09:42.000 It's like we're paying tribute to people who haven't done shit.

02:09:44.000 Right.

02:09:45.000 I want to pay tribute to people who have actually done something.

02:09:48.000 Yes.

02:09:49.000 Well, that's what you like about doing your podcast, then.

02:09:51.000 You just like finding people that resonate with you, that really strike a chord.

02:09:56.000 The other day, I interviewed Susan Olson, who was Cindy Brady.

02:09:59.000 Okay.

02:10:00.000 The Brady Bunch.

02:10:00.000 Oh, wow.

02:10:01.000 Okay.

02:10:01.000 The Brady Bunch is, you know, as far as the original show, I think it's been over for 50 years.

02:10:06.000 Right?

02:10:07.000 I think so.

02:10:07.000 Right?

02:10:08.000 Yeah.

02:10:09.000 Okay.

02:10:10.000 Every interview you look up on YouTube on Susan Olsen, it's like, it's just getting her to regurgitate the same stories.

02:10:17.000 And she did the Brady Bunch when she was like 7 to 12 years old or something.

02:10:21.000 Wow.

02:10:22.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:10:23.000 Yeah.

02:10:23.000 You're Gilligan for life.

02:10:25.000 Okay.

02:10:26.000 My thing is...

02:10:27.000 No, you're not Gilligan for life.

02:10:29.000 And we had a great chat because I think there's a lot to learn from somebody who went through a zeitgeist moment at such a young age.

02:10:37.000 How do you navigate past that?

02:10:39.000 What do you do with yourself?

02:10:41.000 How do you pick yourself up off the ground?

02:10:43.000 How do you deal with typecasting?

02:10:44.000 How do you navigate the fact that as you walk through the airport, you're not Susan Olsen, you're Cindy Brady?

02:10:49.000 Do people still recognize her?

02:10:50.000 Oh, yeah.

02:10:51.000 Wow.

02:10:52.000 Yeah, well, there's Barbara Eden, I Dream of Jeannie.

02:10:55.000 That was another one.

02:10:56.000 Yeah.

02:10:56.000 People get locked into who they are.

02:10:57.000 Al Bundy.

02:10:59.000 I'm still the rat in the cage guy.

02:11:01.000 I deal with that, too, you know?

02:11:03.000 Yeah, but it's such a good jam.

02:11:05.000 It's such a good jam.

02:11:07.000 That's a fucking great song.

02:11:09.000 Thank you.

02:11:10.000 That's on the Green Room playlist.

02:11:12.000 That fucking song rules, dude.

02:11:14.000 That was a good one.

02:11:14.000 Oh, my God.

02:11:15.000 All-time classic.

02:11:16.000 I didn't get it at the time.

02:11:17.000 I actually had to be talked into it.

02:11:19.000 Really?

02:11:19.000 Yeah.

02:11:20.000 We were putting out our double album, and it was this big pressure moment, 95. And I wanted a different song to be the first song.

02:11:26.000 And the guy from the record company called, who's now passed away.

02:11:28.000 His name was Phil Cordero.

02:11:29.000 Lovely guy.

02:11:30.000 And he literally did the thing on the phone.

02:11:32.000 Kid, it's a smash.

02:11:33.000 You gotta trust me.

02:11:35.000 And I trusted him.

02:11:36.000 Wow.

02:11:37.000 I thought he was crazy.

02:11:38.000 Didn't you think that that's sometimes because you're too close to your own creation?

02:11:42.000 Yeah.

02:11:43.000 Like, you're never gonna get to see how your songs impacted other people, the way it impacted them.

02:11:48.000 You're not gonna feel that the way they feel it.

02:11:51.000 Like, hearing that song for the first time, complete it.

02:11:53.000 They've never seen you rehearse it.

02:11:55.000 They don't know how you wrote it.

02:11:56.000 They don't know how you guys practiced it, how you fucked around with the lyrics.

02:12:00.000 You did it different way.

02:12:00.000 They just get the first, they get the full version of it done.

02:12:04.000 They're like, holy shit!

02:12:05.000 And it's kind of awful that you don't get to experience that.

02:12:09.000 Like, you created it.

02:12:10.000 Yeah, the only time I've been able to experience...

02:12:12.000 That is when I was really high.

02:12:15.000 Oh, wow.

02:12:16.000 Like getting so high that I could hear it as if it was somebody else singing.

02:12:22.000 What really tripped me out about doing a lot of drugs back in the day was I would hear messages in my music that I didn't even know I was putting in there.

02:12:30.000 And at some point I became conscious of my unconscious ability to put messages inside.

02:12:35.000 Sorry, you look at me like I'm crazy.

02:12:37.000 No, no, no.

02:12:37.000 It's fascinating.

02:12:38.000 So imagine, I'll try to reset up the scenario.

02:12:40.000 Okay.

02:12:41.000 You write a song, you think it's about something.

02:12:44.000 You're sure of it.

02:12:45.000 In fact, you would tell people, sorry, this horrible plague I got.

02:12:49.000 No worries.

02:12:51.000 You're convinced that the song that you've written is about your ex-girlfriend.

02:12:56.000 And then when you're super high, you listen and you can hear yourself actually singing about something else.

02:13:03.000 So now you have a conscious understanding of something your unconscious isn't planted in the art.

02:13:09.000 And once I became conscious of the process, I became more aware of how to consciously plant messages in my music.

02:13:17.000 Does that make sense?

02:13:18.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:13:19.000 You just operate on layers.

02:13:21.000 You put stuff in there.

02:13:23.000 Yes, but I didn't know that I was doing it until I did a lot of drugs.

02:13:26.000 That there was this other voice at work, this subliminal voice.

02:13:30.000 Can you give me an example?

02:13:35.000 The conscious mind wants to believe the song's about your ex-girlfriend, but what it's really about is about being abandoned by your mother.

02:13:42.000 If you came up to me and said, what's that song about?

02:13:45.000 And I trust you, and I go, oh, it's just about my ex.

02:13:47.000 I believed it.

02:13:48.000 I would believe it.

02:13:50.000 Like, 100%.

02:13:51.000 And then I listen to it high on drugs, and I'm like, oh my god, I'm singing about my mother, and I'm weeping.

02:13:56.000 And I had no conscious mind when I wrote the song that was about my mother.

02:14:00.000 Wow.

02:14:00.000 And then once I have that kind of agape moment of like, holy shit, then I go back and listen to music sober and I can totally hear it.

02:14:08.000 And then where it gets really weird is people would come up to me and say, that song, that reminded me of my relationship with my mother.

02:14:17.000 Thank you.

02:14:18.000 People would come up and respond to me on the unconscious recognition, not what I thought I wrote the song about.

02:14:24.000 That blew my mind.

02:14:25.000 That there was this other person in their layer at work.

02:14:30.000 And I gained a lot more respect for, I guess you would call it the shamanic aspects of art.

02:14:37.000 I don't know if you've ever read Castanedus, but do you ever read Castanedus?

02:14:41.000 Maybe I did in high school, I think.

02:14:43.000 It was kind of a thing for our generation.

02:14:45.000 Everybody kind of read Castanedus.

02:14:46.000 And it's still to this day debated about whether Castanedus...

02:14:50.000 It was a real thing.

02:14:51.000 It was a documentary.

02:14:52.000 It was true stories or made up.

02:14:54.000 Did Don Juan, the shaman, was he a real person?

02:14:56.000 Is there really a Don Juan?

02:14:58.000 There's a lot of debate.

02:14:59.000 I think there's even been New York Times articles written about it.

02:15:01.000 Right.

02:15:02.000 About whether Castaneda's whole thing is a fraud and all this stuff.

02:15:05.000 And I think Castaneda's may even still be alive.

02:15:08.000 Really?

02:15:08.000 That might be one to look up sometime.

02:15:11.000 Anyway, I gained a lot more respect that artists have the ability to communicate at subconscious levels that they're not even aware of.

02:15:20.000 I don't know if that resonates the way I'm explaining it, but it moved something to me and allowed me to be a better artist.

02:15:28.000 That's fascinating.

02:15:29.000 And also, you can never guess what kind of an impact, especially if you're too close to it, what kind of an impact your work is going to have on someone who's seeing it for the first time.

02:15:40.000 And if there's multiple layers that you're operating on that you're not even totally aware of, and then you put out this thing that has this very complex, layered message in it, and it just makes people go, oh my god.

02:15:54.000 That's one of the ultimate expressions of art, right?

02:16:00.000 Music does something very strange that no other art form does.

02:16:04.000 It operates like a drug.

02:16:07.000 Like, music gives you more energy when you're on the treadmill.

02:16:10.000 Like, if a great song comes on, you're working out, you're like, fuck yeah!

02:16:13.000 Like, you feel it, you know?

02:16:15.000 Yeah.

02:16:15.000 There's riffs.

02:16:16.000 There's guitar riffs that, I swear to God, make you stronger.

02:16:19.000 Like, Tool Prison Sex.

02:16:23.000 That song makes you just fucking rawr!

02:16:28.000 You know, there's like something to it.

02:16:30.000 It gives you energy.

02:16:31.000 It's like a drug.

02:16:33.000 It's an audio drug.

02:16:34.000 It fires up your synapses in this very strange way.

02:16:39.000 The best explanation I ever heard that resonated with me was, you know, the entire universe is constructed on waves.

02:16:47.000 Light, everything has to do with waves.

02:16:50.000 So music is the closest thing to the foundational aspects of the universe.

02:16:55.000 That's okay.

02:16:56.000 I know what you're saying.

02:16:57.000 Yeah, well, that makes sense.

02:16:59.000 Because it penetrates the cellular.

02:17:02.000 Right.

02:17:03.000 Well, people that go on these shamanic journeys, the ayahuasca journeys, they play these songs that accompany the ayahuasca journey.

02:17:13.000 They're called Icaros.

02:17:14.000 Are they traditional?

02:17:17.000 Ayahuasca songs?

02:17:18.000 Yes.

02:17:19.000 And they have like this weird beat to them.

02:17:22.000 When you listen to them by themselves, you're like, I don't get it.

02:17:25.000 But if you listen to them under the influence, the psychedelic experience dances to those songs.

02:17:33.000 And it gets guided by those songs.

02:17:34.000 And it's really wild.

02:17:36.000 Like really wild.

02:17:38.000 And then you go, oh, this is like a technology to interface with the psychedelic experience.

02:17:44.000 Okay, but you're hitting on exactly what I'm saying.

02:17:47.000 I think artists, and I'll exclude myself from the discussion so I don't make somebody mad, artists have a way of knowing how to do that without anybody teaching them.

02:17:56.000 Right.

02:17:57.000 They just know what music, beats, chords, melodies, lyrics to use to penetrate.

02:18:03.000 And the successful artists, think of it, they do it at scale.

02:18:07.000 Yeah.

02:18:07.000 Well, there's this thing that happens when someone's really in it, where you feel it from them while they're performing.

02:18:15.000 And you just get drawn into it like, wow.

02:18:20.000 I remember the first time I saw Mr. Jones in me.

02:18:23.000 The first time I saw Counting Crows play that song.

02:18:27.000 The way he was dancing around in the living room.

02:18:29.000 I'm like, that guy is so free.

02:18:31.000 I want to be free like that.

02:18:33.000 I really remember thinking that because it was so real.

02:18:36.000 He was so in the moment while he was singing that song.

02:18:40.000 And I had Adam in here and I asked him about it.

02:18:42.000 I'm like, what is that?

02:18:43.000 Like, you are fucking locked in, man.

02:18:45.000 Like, I remember being a kid.

02:18:47.000 I was probably like 23 or something like that when that song came out.

02:18:51.000 And I was in my apartment in New York watching it going, fuck.

02:18:54.000 Watching it on MTV going, this guy's just so loose, man.

02:18:59.000 He's so free.

02:19:00.000 And I remember thinking, I want to be able to perform like that.

02:19:03.000 Whatever I do, I want to feel like, what's that zone that he's in?

02:19:07.000 Well, part of that is...

02:19:09.000 You know, a lot of shamanic work involves the breath.

02:19:12.000 So think a singer is rhythmically breathing and rhythmically chanting.

02:19:18.000 So that's one thing that most people would not pick up on.

02:19:21.000 There's a ton of expiration of breath.

02:19:24.000 You know, like what's the Wim Hof?

02:19:27.000 I do that for two hours.

02:19:30.000 I mean, I'm totally asphyxiated the entire time.

02:19:33.000 Right.

02:19:34.000 It's not natural to scream your head off for two hours.

02:19:37.000 It just isn't.

02:19:38.000 Do you have to get in shape to do it?

02:19:39.000 Do you have to get your legs in shape?

02:19:40.000 I do.

02:19:41.000 I do, to a certain extent, yeah.

02:19:42.000 Do you build up to a concert performance?

02:19:44.000 You have to, to a certain extent.

02:19:46.000 Yeah?

02:19:46.000 I don't know how to explain it.

02:19:51.000 I'm off cycle right now, so if you came to see me play an hour and a half show tomorrow, I could do it, but I probably couldn't talk the next day.

02:19:57.000 But if I do a week of rehearsals and prep up, then I can...

02:20:01.000 So it's like a muscle.

02:20:03.000 Something, yeah.

02:20:04.000 I don't understand it.

02:20:07.000 It's almost like a trained fury.

02:20:09.000 Like you learn to not go too far.

02:20:13.000 People say you blow your voice out.

02:20:15.000 You have to really know where the line is.

02:20:17.000 By the way, when you're dealing with a ton of adrenaline, like the thing with fighters comes to mind, like they'll come in, they'll gas in a minute because they're so jacked.

02:20:27.000 Sometimes you see a guy get in the rain and they're just like...

02:20:30.000 Yeah.

02:20:31.000 And they gas in a minute.

02:20:32.000 I know how to see that because of watching wrestlers gas.

02:20:36.000 You learn the body language of somebody getting gassed.

02:20:39.000 They kind of start to lose their posture and get a little goosey, right?

02:20:42.000 They get loose.

02:20:43.000 Okay, same thing for a singer.

02:20:45.000 I mean, you can gas in the first three minutes and you're dead.

02:20:48.000 Oh, no.

02:20:49.000 What are you going to do?

02:20:50.000 Yeah.

02:20:50.000 So you have to almost like have a controlled fury.

02:20:53.000 Like imagine screaming at the top of your lungs, but not totally at the top of your lungs.

02:20:58.000 Right.

02:20:59.000 87%.

02:21:00.000 Like, there's the magical line.

02:21:01.000 Well, that's like fighting.

02:21:03.000 It's the same kind of thing.

02:21:04.000 You don't go 100%.

02:21:05.000 Or the zen of that.

02:21:06.000 Yeah.

02:21:06.000 Some of the best fighters, they'll punch like 50%, 60%.

02:21:09.000 And that way they can put volume on you.

02:21:12.000 So I can't imagine being in there and somebody's on the other side wanting to kill you and being able to be like, I'm just going to work my way through these.

02:21:20.000 Well, you have to have serious experience to be able to manage the storm that way.

02:21:24.000 Did you ever have to take vocal lessons to learn how to not blow your throat out?

02:21:28.000 I did, yeah.

02:21:29.000 I work with a lady.

02:21:30.000 It's a funny story.

02:21:31.000 I work with a lady at one point.

02:21:32.000 They hooked me up with somebody from the opera.

02:21:34.000 Oh, perfect.

02:21:35.000 And she came to my house.

02:21:36.000 Well, no, it's actually, she was great.

02:21:38.000 But she came to my house and she said, oh, you sing totally wrong.

02:21:42.000 But here's how to sing right and you won't blow your voice out.

02:21:45.000 And it was all about the right posture and all this stuff.

02:21:48.000 And the first time I tried to do it, a concert with 4,000 kids going nuts.

02:21:52.000 I tried to do what she taught me and it didn't work because I was in the deep end of the pool and I ended up having to go back to all my old bad habits.

02:21:59.000 So eventually I found a woman who was used to working with rock singers and she explained to me a bunch of theories about...

02:22:04.000 I think, per memory, I think she said the human body has 11 folds of tissue in the throat.

02:22:10.000 And if rock singers don't warm up all that tissue, that's how they damage their singing.

02:22:15.000 And she'd also worked with Steven Tyler.

02:22:17.000 And she said the thing about rock singers is you...

02:22:20.000 You guys sing wrong because that's the way you want to sound.

02:22:24.000 It's part of your gimmick.

02:22:28.000 I'm sure Steven Tyler and myself, we could sing like choir boys if we wanted to, but that's not what attracts people to us.

02:22:34.000 It's the razor's edge in the voice or something.

02:22:36.000 So you have to learn how to warm up to sing like an idiot, basically.

02:22:41.000 And that's the sound that people are attracted to with rock singers.

02:22:44.000 And even the gentleman you played before, I mean, he's totally abusing his voice.

02:22:48.000 That is not proper singing.

02:22:49.000 Right, right, right, right, right.

02:22:51.000 And there's physical techniques to create that sound.

02:22:55.000 Like there's Axl Rose, for example, like, you know.

02:23:00.000 He sings a very particular way, the way he uses his throat in a particular way that makes it, you would say, that's the Axel sound or whatever.

02:23:08.000 It's not natural, but it's awesome when he does it.

02:23:11.000 It's kind of the thing.

02:23:12.000 Yeah, that has got to be really hard to maintain.

02:23:15.000 I saw them play in Athens, Greece.

02:23:18.000 And they did a three-hour show, like, two years ago.

02:23:22.000 Yeah.

02:23:23.000 At, like, how old is he?

02:23:24.000 60?

02:23:24.000 60-something?

02:23:25.000 I think Axel's about seven years older than me, so.

02:23:27.000 Yeah, because I remember Welcome to the Jungle was huge when I was in high school.

02:23:32.000 Or just out of high school.

02:23:33.000 Yeah, 89. Yeah.

02:23:35.000 88?

02:23:35.000 89?

02:23:36.000 Was it?

02:23:37.000 Okay, so I graduated in 85. So it was like a couple years after high school.

02:23:41.000 Welcome to the Jungle.

02:23:41.000 I was like, oh my god.

02:23:43.000 I remember watching the music video.

02:23:46.000 Remember when he had that teased up hair back then?

02:23:49.000 Yeah, the big hair, yeah.

02:23:49.000 He had the huge hair.

02:23:51.000 That was the poison hair era.

02:23:53.000 Yeah.

02:23:54.000 Yeah, so singing like that, it's wrong, but that's what makes it right.

02:24:00.000 Right.

02:24:00.000 But you can't say what's wrong or what's right.

02:24:02.000 It's just like what's sustainable.

02:24:03.000 Trust me, no one can tell you.

02:24:05.000 You're surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of opinions.

02:24:08.000 I was told when I was very young, that voice you sing with will never sell records, ever.

02:24:14.000 And most people that don't like my music will often cite my voice as the reason they don't like my music.

02:24:20.000 But that's why my voice is the reason that people who do like my music...

02:24:24.000 Like my music.

02:24:25.000 Right.

02:24:25.000 It's a weird...

02:24:26.000 It's like a...

02:24:27.000 Like, what do you do with that?

02:24:29.000 Well, you can't do it for other people.

02:24:31.000 No, no, but I'm saying I sing the way I sing, and it's like, don't sing that way.

02:24:35.000 Well, I don't...

02:24:37.000 That's the whole idea of, like, you can't do it for other people.

02:24:40.000 You can't do it for them.

02:24:41.000 You can't do it the way they want it to.

02:24:43.000 No, there's going to be people who like it the way you like it.

02:24:46.000 Yeah.

02:24:46.000 You just have to find out what that thing is, and you have to...

02:24:51.000 Whatever your internal compass is that guides you towards this particular style, this particular way of expressing yourself, it has to be authentic.

02:24:59.000 Well, singing against a wall of guitars is a particular skill set.

02:25:04.000 It's like singing against three airline jets at the same time.

02:25:08.000 Right, right, right.

02:25:08.000 We have three guitars in our band playing at the same time.

02:25:11.000 So my voice has to cut like a razor through that wall of noise.

02:25:21.000 Some voices are so fucking compelling.

02:25:24.000 Like you listen to them, like Amy Winehouse, perfect example.

02:25:26.000 You hear her sing once and you're just like, whoa.

02:25:30.000 There's something about it.

02:25:32.000 Okay, so back to my argument about the unconscious thing.

02:25:34.000 Certain voices convey an unconscious information.

02:25:38.000 Yeah.

02:25:39.000 Tonally it registers in the public as a certain authority or wisdom or sorrow.

02:25:45.000 Yeah.

02:25:46.000 Like some voices just have so much sorrow in them.

02:25:49.000 Yeah.

02:25:50.000 Like for our generation, when Kurt would sing, and I saw Kurt many times live, it sounded like, it was like the literal howl of our generation.

02:25:59.000 It had this great connectivity to what we were experiencing as latchkey kids.

02:26:05.000 Yes.

02:26:06.000 I don't want to say tantrum-ish, but it had a certain kind of...

02:26:10.000 Anger.

02:26:11.000 Anger, but it was the anger of disaffection.

02:26:13.000 It wasn't the anger of a hardcore band like, you know, screw capitalism.

02:26:18.000 Right, right, right, right.

02:26:20.000 It had a sorrow somehow in it.

02:26:22.000 Yeah.

02:26:24.000 Yeah.

02:26:26.000 Authenticity.

02:26:27.000 Like, Kurt was the master of authenticity.

02:26:29.000 He changed, he killed hair bands.

02:26:32.000 He really did.

02:26:34.000 He killed hair bands.

02:26:35.000 I remember when I was a kid, Nevermind came out, and I was with a couple of friends of mine, and this guy goes, have you seen this?

02:26:43.000 And he shows me this fucking cassette with a baby on the cover.

02:26:46.000 I go, what is it?

02:26:47.000 He's like, this is Nirvana.

02:26:49.000 And he plays to me Nirvana for the first time over his house.

02:26:52.000 I was like, holy shit.

02:26:54.000 Like, this is crazy.

02:26:56.000 Yeah.

02:26:57.000 For our generation, it was the...

02:27:00.000 The door getting kicked open.

02:27:01.000 Yes.

02:27:02.000 Everything after just got easier.

02:27:03.000 But that's the thing.

02:27:04.000 These unique artists that come along and transform the medium.

02:27:08.000 You know, like I said, Lenny Bruce, Pryor, Lynn Kinison.

02:27:11.000 There's a few examples of that in music where someone comes along like Hendrix or Kurt or even Elvis.

02:27:18.000 Someone comes along and everybody's like, what the fuck is going on?

02:27:21.000 The Beatles.

02:27:21.000 What is happening?

02:27:23.000 This is crazy.

02:27:24.000 What strikes me, and this is a business point, but that's where all the money is.

02:27:29.000 And yet the music business is not to nurture those talents.

02:27:33.000 In fact, the music business works against those talents.

02:27:36.000 It's almost like they blow up their business model so it becomes inconvenient.

02:27:40.000 Well, what do you think the music business nurtures?

02:27:43.000 Control.

02:27:44.000 They want control.

02:27:47.000 The biggest problem I've seen in the music business is they don't understand why...

02:27:52.000 Musicians can't be as supple in the business part of the equation as a guy who makes cookies or something.

02:27:58.000 This is what it costs.

02:28:00.000 Here's your quality control.

02:28:02.000 The public wants more chocolate chips.

02:28:04.000 Can't you just put more chocolate chips in there?

02:28:06.000 And none of that is what attracts the public to great artists.

02:28:11.000 It's completely counterintuitive.

02:28:14.000 So they sit there and you just end up as a name on a piece of paper or an inconvenient problem.

02:28:21.000 I've said this a few times publicly, but it bears repeating here, is I've been in meetings where they're complaining to me about me.

02:28:31.000 Like, how so?

02:28:32.000 Like, what do they say?

02:28:33.000 That basically the person that I am in the world is inconvenient to their business.

02:28:37.000 The things I'm saying, the things I'm doing, the music I'm making is inconvenient to the business.

02:28:41.000 And could I temper those things more in the direction that they want?

02:28:45.000 Like, what particularly were they talking about?

02:28:47.000 You name it.

02:28:48.000 Like, give me one example.

02:28:51.000 It could be anything from, you know, you're too negative, to your songs are too weird, to your voice is too weird, to your guitars are too loud.

02:28:59.000 They just want to sell more albums.

02:29:01.000 Yes.

02:29:01.000 So to them, it's an intellectual thing.

02:29:03.000 Oh, wow.

02:29:04.000 You'd be like, Joe, if you could just make more jokes about the economy, you'd sell two stadiums, not just one.

02:29:12.000 This is what happened with Dave Chappelle while he left the Chappelle show.

02:29:14.000 Same exact kind of thing.

02:29:17.000 You know, a different version of it.

02:29:20.000 Yeah, so it's this weird thing where you're sitting there and then you're like, and what I always try to tell them is, I didn't get here with that type of thinking.

02:29:30.000 And I do think, and I don't want to name names, but you can, I would say this to your great audience, you can pretty much tell who got to the dance on their own, and somewhere along the way between the second and the fourth album decided that the compromise had a bigger yield.

02:29:48.000 And off goes the organic switch, and on goes the, oh, you want me to be the next-door neighbor.

02:29:55.000 Or, you know...

02:29:57.000 Romantic movie ballads.

02:29:59.000 Whatever.

02:30:00.000 Yeah.

02:30:01.000 Aerosmith went through that for a while.

02:30:02.000 But to their credit, and I didn't understand at the time, it was a brilliant move, because they'd gone about as far as they could go in the one thing, and they're super influential, including on alternative music.

02:30:14.000 And it ended up being a really smart...

02:30:16.000 Watershed moment for them to do what they did.

02:30:18.000 At the time, they were doing SNL skits.

02:30:20.000 You remember Adam Sandler used to come out, and he would do, like, I think it was Adam Sandler, where he'd do, like, the seven Aerosmith ballads in a row.

02:30:26.000 And it was like, I'm crying, I'm really crying.

02:30:30.000 You know, they would just play, and he'd just sing all those songs, like Steven Tyler.

02:30:34.000 But I think looking back...

02:30:36.000 It was really smart what they did.

02:30:38.000 Well, also, maybe they're allowed to do whatever they want to do.

02:30:42.000 Like, artists changed their whole thing.

02:30:44.000 Like, they went from Mama Kin to, you know, some of those ballads.

02:30:49.000 As far as I know, and your her astute assistant over there would probably check, but I think Aerosmith is the biggest selling American rock band of all time.

02:30:59.000 Whoa.

02:31:00.000 So...

02:31:01.000 If you're Aerosmith, did they make a wrong turn?

02:31:03.000 My argument would be no.

02:31:04.000 No, it's not a wrong turn.

02:31:06.000 I mean, obviously, you're allowed to change what you're interested in, too.

02:31:11.000 There's a lot of bands that sort of reinvent themselves with almost every album.

02:31:16.000 Like my friend Sturgill Simpson.

02:31:18.000 He sort of reinvents himself with every album.

02:31:21.000 Every album's different.

02:31:22.000 He just gets bored with stuff.

02:31:24.000 Aerosmith, the best-selling American hard rock band of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide, including over 85 million records in the United States.

02:31:36.000 So, yeah.

02:31:38.000 That's pretty good.

02:31:39.000 Yeah.

02:31:39.000 So that's what I'm saying is only the bands can really know what the right direction to go in is because at some point, you know...

02:31:46.000 What seems so obvious to the audience or some guy in an office isn't necessarily what drives the band forward.

02:31:52.000 Well, then there's weird cases like David Lee Roth leaves Van Halen, Sammy Hagar takes over, and it becomes bigger in a totally different way.

02:32:03.000 But if you talk to the average Van Halen fan, they want to hear the David Lee Roth Van Halen.

02:32:08.000 Well, especially if you grew up with that.

02:32:10.000 The thing is, what you started out with is always what you want to see.

02:32:13.000 Right, but I'm saying there's no obvious argument of which is superior, you know what I'm saying?

02:32:18.000 One sold more records, one is sort of held more in people's hearts because of a particular generational thing, which would be our generation.

02:32:25.000 But some people love the Sammy Hagar version better.

02:32:29.000 You know, it's okay.

02:32:30.000 You're allowed to.

02:32:31.000 Like, Taylor Swift sells a lot of fucking tickets.

02:32:34.000 Like, it doesn't, if you're not into it, there's nothing, it doesn't mean it's wrong.

02:32:38.000 I mean, everybody has a weird four to...

02:32:41.000 The way they interface with the world and some things get in there and really lock on you and like, wow, this is amazing.

02:32:48.000 And you could take the same concert and another person that you like goes to it and they say, this sucks.

02:32:55.000 And you're like, this is fucking amazing.

02:32:57.000 How can you say this sucks?

02:32:59.000 Well, I think you're about to see that Nickelback and Creed are about to go on a huge run of business.

02:33:04.000 Really?

02:33:04.000 Oh, yeah.

02:33:05.000 Oh, yeah.

02:33:07.000 Nickelback took a lot of shit.

02:33:08.000 That's kind of my point.

02:33:11.000 They've survived it, and now here comes the inevitable moment of like, oh yeah, it was really good, and they wrote a lot of great songs.

02:33:19.000 They had some fucking great songs.

02:33:20.000 That Rockstar song, that's a great song.

02:33:23.000 But it was one of those weird things where they had become like a punchline.

02:33:27.000 And for whatever reason, everybody thought that it was okay to shit on Nickelback, and comics would shit on him.

02:33:33.000 It was like a thing that people would mock, the success of Nickelback.

02:33:37.000 Meanwhile, they're selling out arenas every fucking night of the week.

02:33:41.000 So, yeah, I think history has a way of sorting out the bodies, is the way I look at it.

02:33:46.000 Yeah.

02:33:46.000 That's kind of how I feel.

02:33:47.000 I mean, this is selfish for me to say this, but it's kind of how I feel about my musical life.

02:33:50.000 I think time will tell my story much better than I did.

02:33:55.000 Well, you seem at peace with that.

02:33:57.000 I am.

02:33:57.000 It doesn't seem to bother you at all.

02:33:59.000 I made my peace with it.

02:34:00.000 I mean, it bothered me when it bothered me.

02:34:02.000 Because it felt unfair or, yeah, it felt like I was being sort of made to pay for the sins of the people who are no longer here.

02:34:09.000 Because particularly in Gen X, we've had so many great talents die.

02:34:14.000 Oh, so you felt like you weren't getting the credit you deserve because you survived?

02:34:19.000 There was part of that.

02:34:21.000 That's the, let's call it the simpler version, the more complicated version is generations move with a collective energy.

02:34:31.000 By the mid-2000s, the collective energy of Generation X had mostly dissipated in the musical thing.

02:34:38.000 There were bands out playing, but a lot of the lead singers had died.

02:34:41.000 So it's hard to sort of stand and carry a flag for something that people feel very sentimental about if there isn't an army around you carrying the same flag.

02:34:51.000 So people start to put on you a set of cultural and generational expectations that you don't want.

02:34:59.000 You become the emblem of, like, the living version of what doesn't work.

02:35:04.000 But the other guys or girls aren't there to grow old with you and receive the same discernment or criticism.

02:35:14.000 Oh, wow.

02:35:16.000 Like, one time a guy tried to goad me into an argument of comparing myself to one of the top people, musical people in my generation.

02:35:23.000 I don't want to say who, but...

02:35:24.000 You'll understand the flow on this.

02:35:26.000 And they said, can you compare, you know, who do you think's better?

02:35:30.000 So it was like a real cheese setup.

02:35:32.000 And I said, well, I think they were more talented.

02:35:37.000 But I said, I feel I'm in the conversation.

02:35:40.000 And they said, why are you in the conversation?

02:35:42.000 I said, because I'm alive.

02:35:46.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:35:47.000 Yeah.

02:35:47.000 I'm here.

02:35:49.000 Well, it's also like you can't deny that Smashing Pumpkins didn't have some fucking bangers.

02:35:54.000 Like, anybody who denies that...

02:35:56.000 Well, Joe, that's a whole other episode, because the band is probably one of the most misunderstood...

02:36:02.000 I mean, we're probably one of the most misunderstood bands in the history of rock and roll.

02:36:07.000 I mean, that sounds like a wrestling statement, but it's fairly accurate.

02:36:12.000 What do you think that's from?

02:36:14.000 I think it has a lot to do with the issues of Gen X. And it has a lot to do with a relationship that I set into motion with the media when I was a very young person playing kind of a funny game.

02:36:25.000 Like doing my own version of Andy Kaufman or Bob Zamuda.

02:36:29.000 You understand?

02:36:31.000 Because I thought it was all shitty.

02:36:33.000 So I was just like, I'm just going to play with this like a toy because I think it's kind of funny.

02:36:37.000 I didn't realize that the coming culture was going to kind of almost be attracted to people who are willing to immolate themselves.

02:36:44.000 On the public stage.

02:36:45.000 Does that make sense?

02:36:46.000 Yeah.

02:36:47.000 Most people who are attracted to fame, they want to run towards the shiny part of it.

02:36:52.000 Right.

02:36:52.000 I was attracted to the non-shiny part, which is, okay, I'll light myself on fire and let's see what happens.

02:36:57.000 Or I'll light you on fire and let's see what happens.

02:37:00.000 So it kind of worked in the 90s when everybody was rolling and moving along.

02:37:04.000 Well, here comes Napster, the music business Craters.

02:37:08.000 Then a bunch of people die.

02:37:10.000 And there you are standing, you know, now at 40 years old, you're supposed to carry some flag for a generation that doesn't even know who it is anymore.

02:37:20.000 How do you navigate that?

02:37:21.000 Like, did that trouble you at the time?

02:37:24.000 Was it difficult to work as an artist?

02:37:27.000 Yeah, it's very difficult.

02:37:28.000 The simple version is, and I had some of the top, top people in the music business sit me down, one-on-one in a room, and say, just give them what they want.

02:37:36.000 Jesus.

02:37:38.000 Your life will be a lot better.

02:37:39.000 You'll make a lot more money.

02:37:40.000 And you could put your head on your pillow at night and not have to think about all these things.

02:37:44.000 And my response every time was, I don't give a fuck.

02:37:48.000 And I used to quote Popeye, I am what I am.

02:37:53.000 I'm here.

02:37:54.000 I'm here because I'm a freak.

02:37:57.000 Okay?

02:37:58.000 And I ain't changing for anything.

02:38:00.000 Good for you.

02:38:01.000 And part of that goes back to my daddy.

02:38:04.000 Okay?

02:38:04.000 I watched a man literally broken.

02:38:06.000 Buy the business.

02:38:08.000 So I'm the last person that's going to fucking bow down for that shit.

02:38:12.000 Fuck off.

02:38:13.000 Well, the beautiful thing is, too, you always had an audience.

02:38:15.000 So you didn't have to.

02:38:17.000 Well, there is that.

02:38:18.000 But at the end of the day, how can I explain it?

02:38:22.000 Everybody in the music business will tell you your value is exponentially related to your success.

02:38:28.000 So your biggest song is here and your next biggest song is here and there's like a pyramid.

02:38:32.000 And as you go down, you lose value.

02:38:35.000 Your aging becomes part of that loss of value.

02:38:37.000 How do you maintain value?

02:38:38.000 Relevancy.

02:38:39.000 You no longer have the record business that used to exist.

02:38:42.000 You no longer have the structure.

02:38:43.000 I mean, the music business is basically a touring business first now.

02:38:46.000 And everything else is in support of the touring business.

02:38:48.000 We're lucky in that we continue to be a very large touring band.

02:38:52.000 So you're told over and over again, almost in a propagandistic way, that your value is related to what's on a piece of paper.

02:39:00.000 And then somehow I woke up in the middle of it and I thought, no, no, that's actually not my value.

02:39:05.000 And so the minute I started saying, no, I know what my real value is.

02:39:08.000 It's that I'm an independent artist who, like a voice in the wilderness, represents something.

02:39:13.000 And I know it's not for everybody.

02:39:14.000 Trust me, I've been getting that message since I was a little kid, including from my own family.

02:39:19.000 But I know what I represent represents something that's valuable.

02:39:23.000 I can't quite put my finger on it, but I see the consistency of the, let's call it the communication between myself and somebody who's interested in what I do.

02:39:31.000 And once I started doubling and tripling down on the value, my business started going back up.

02:39:36.000 Wow.

02:39:37.000 The way I would say it in a crass way is I reasserted my brand.

02:39:41.000 Not the brand I was being handed in 40 plus brand.

02:39:46.000 You know, you're an oldies band.

02:39:47.000 You're an oldies artist.

02:39:48.000 You play these songs.

02:39:50.000 Well, you just kept and reinforced your true voice.

02:39:55.000 Yeah.

02:39:55.000 But I had to live it.

02:39:57.000 Which brought you to the dance in the first place.

02:39:59.000 It seems silly, but that's what I had to figure out.

02:40:01.000 I had to figure that out on my own, because there was nobody telling me that.

02:40:04.000 I mean, you've got to understand, and you're a man of the world, so you know what I'm saying.

02:40:09.000 When you're in a room with somebody who runs the fucking world, in my case, runs the music business.

02:40:15.000 Yeah.

02:40:15.000 The guy who can get shit done, the guy who can get you cancelled, the guy who can fucking make stuff happen.

02:40:20.000 Yeah.

02:40:21.000 And that guy tells you, here's your value.

02:40:23.000 It's awfully hard to go back to Chicago, Illinois, and convince yourself that he's wrong.

02:40:27.000 Right.

02:40:29.000 Right.

02:40:29.000 There's nobody, and who do you talk to about it?

02:40:31.000 Especially if fame is fleeting, it comes and goes, album sales come and go, and there's a new big thing right now, there's the new thing, and you're not the new thing anymore.

02:40:41.000 There's always the new thing.

02:40:42.000 Yeah, and then someone's coming along, listen.

02:40:44.000 You've got to listen to us.

02:40:46.000 We know how you can be back on top.

02:40:48.000 I don't read comments, but I have a social media person who occasionally relays what she sees.

02:40:52.000 Oh, boy.

02:40:53.000 Well, we kind of keep it on the positive.

02:40:55.000 But my favorite comment of the last few years was she started poking around with young fans, 16, 18-year-olds, who were suddenly seeming to come out of the woodwork and liking the band and me.

02:41:06.000 Almost like a cuddly bear or something.

02:41:08.000 They suddenly were attracted to me in a way that the 16 and 18-year-olds of the previous generation weren't.

02:41:14.000 So I asked her, I said, why don't you poke around with these people and ask them what's interesting?

02:41:18.000 And my favorite comment, and it became kind of common amongst the feedback that she got, was, I like him because other people told me not to like him.

02:41:29.000 But what that says to me, anybody can interpret it the way they want, but what it said to me is, we need people in the zeitgeist of the culture who don't represent the collective yes.

02:41:41.000 There's always room for somebody on the corner saying no.

02:41:44.000 And that goes back to Lenny Bruce.

02:41:47.000 As crazy as all that was, you still need that guy going, no, no, no, no, no.

02:41:52.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:41:53.000 And you can call them whatever, disruptors or whatever.

02:41:56.000 Authentic voices.

02:41:57.000 That sounds nicer than disruptor.

02:41:59.000 I like disruptor because that's...

02:42:01.000 That's what I do.

02:42:02.000 Well, it does disrupt.

02:42:03.000 But it disrupts because it's an authentic voice.

02:42:06.000 Because it bucks the idea of creating some manufactured thing for the market.

02:42:14.000 I've told many people in the music business, I know that you don't want me in this business, but I'm here.

02:42:20.000 And I've made a lot of money.

02:42:21.000 And I've made a lot of people a lot of money.

02:42:23.000 Like, what's the problem?

02:42:24.000 Oh, so you made great songs.

02:42:26.000 But most people are in the business for the music.

02:42:29.000 But the idea that somebody wouldn't want you in the business when you've been very successful in the business is just insane.

02:42:36.000 It doesn't even make any sense.

02:42:39.000 It doesn't make sense to me.

02:42:40.000 Well, that's the weird thing that you guys have to deal with.

02:42:43.000 You deal with like this whole layer of non-artistic people that have influence over art.

02:42:49.000 Having heard you many times do commentary for UFC, what I love about you as a commentator is you take me into the passion of the moment, the feeling of like two warriors are going to enter this thing and only one can emerge.

02:43:06.000 There's a feeling there that's like, and I've been to some of the events, it's like, it has that, like, it's sort of a life-affirming, like, here we are, you know, and you know because you're behind the scenes.

02:43:15.000 The training that went in, the injuries the guy had overcome, or the girl, or whatever, or the crazy girlfriend, and they got, you know, the training camp and all of it, and there it is, the clash.

02:43:24.000 It's no different for the musician.

02:43:26.000 It's like, you know?

02:43:28.000 I sit in a room for a year and make songs with only three, four people hearing them.

02:43:33.000 And I have to believe that I'm going to walk into my version of that octagon, and what I'm going to offer is not going to get me killed.

02:43:39.000 What is it like when you release an album?

02:43:41.000 What is that feeling like?

02:43:42.000 I just want to curl up in a ball and just die.

02:43:46.000 Because here it comes.

02:43:48.000 Here it comes.

02:43:49.000 And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.

02:43:50.000 But I've had more negative experiences than positive ones.

02:43:54.000 But positive from the fans.

02:43:57.000 Is it non-fans that are the problem?

02:44:01.000 It's like the people on the outside peering in?

02:44:04.000 20 years ago, I would have given you a different answer.

02:44:05.000 Now, nobody's the problem.

02:44:07.000 Ultimately, the game is you versus yourself.

02:44:11.000 I don't know if there's any commonality in the fighting world or the comedic world, but it's you versus yourself.

02:44:16.000 It's not the audience's fault.

02:44:18.000 It's not the guy at the radio station or the girl at the arena.

02:44:23.000 It's nothing to do with them.

02:44:25.000 Because the one thing you do know is if you find that value that makes a wheel turn, that prints cash, they don't care who you are.

02:44:35.000 They'll push you right back under the spotlight.

02:44:39.000 So once you can figure that game out, that's the game.

02:44:42.000 The game is you versus you.

02:44:43.000 It's not you versus them.

02:44:45.000 In fact, that's the suckers game.

02:44:49.000 So it's you just trying to create the best version of what you have inside your head.

02:44:54.000 Let's do a simple math.

02:44:56.000 And anybody who wants to have a problem with it, I don't care.

02:45:01.000 My band, in over 30 years, has been in the top 0.1 percentile of touring artists in the world.

02:45:14.000 Period.

02:45:15.000 You would think that if you were in that business and you were at that elite level, you would think the whole business would rally around you and try to get you to do more and make more.

02:45:26.000 Not even close to that.

02:45:29.000 There is no system by which you get that kind of support.

02:45:32.000 You are completely on your own.

02:45:35.000 But is that universal with successful artists?

02:45:38.000 I think so.

02:45:39.000 I hear different stories about the top pop artists, but I think that's because they're making so much money.

02:45:43.000 They're like a multinational corporation.

02:45:45.000 Most bands, their experiences are similar to ours.

02:45:49.000 You're kind of on your own, you have your team of people, and then you walk into the arena with what you got, what you think is going to work.

02:45:56.000 But I hear about the modern pop stars, I mean, I hear stuff that sounds like they're running a Fortune 500 company, because they are literally printing cash.

02:46:05.000 Also, the percentage that the actual artists get versus what they should be getting.

02:46:10.000 It hurts.

02:46:11.000 It's crazy.

02:46:12.000 It hurts.

02:46:13.000 It's crazy because they do everything.

02:46:16.000 They create the music, they perform the music, and yet they're not making the money.

02:46:22.000 People are coming to see them perform the music, yet they're not making the money.

02:46:26.000 There's some bizarre vampires that have attached themselves to the veins.

02:46:31.000 That's changing.

02:46:32.000 I think in the next 20 years you're going to see a very different music business.

02:46:37.000 In what way?

02:46:38.000 Peer-to-peer.

02:46:42.000 Right.

02:46:42.000 And then also, the fact that you could release things, like Oliver Anthony.

02:46:47.000 He put out that Rich Men, North of Richmond, and then it's fucking gigantic.

02:46:51.000 100 million views on YouTube.

02:46:54.000 It's crazy.

02:46:55.000 But 20 years ago, your success and who you work with would have been unthinkable.

02:47:01.000 Right.

02:47:02.000 And you're an independent voice.

02:47:03.000 You've built it.

02:47:04.000 I mean, it's yours.

02:47:06.000 Right?

02:47:06.000 So that's what I'm saying.

02:47:07.000 That's coming from music.

02:47:09.000 This is coming for music.

02:47:11.000 Well, that's good.

02:47:13.000 Yes, I think ultimately will benefit the fans of the artists and they'll get more of what they want and less of what they don't want.

02:47:20.000 Hear, hear.

02:47:21.000 All right.

02:47:22.000 Let's wrap it up.

02:47:23.000 Thank you, sir.

02:47:24.000 Appreciate you very much.

02:47:25.000 Always fun to talk to you.

02:47:26.000 Thank you, Jim.

02:47:26.000 Tell everybody what your podcast call, where they can get it.

02:47:30.000 The Magnificent Others.

02:47:31.000 You can get it on YouTube.

02:47:36.000 Thanks, sir.

02:47:36.000 Appreciate it.

02:47:37.000 Thanks so much.

02:47:37.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 04, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2283 - Billy Corgan

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