The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2407 - Billy Bob Thornton

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:16.000 That's working so far.

00:00:17.000 Right?

00:00:18.000 I told my wife the other day, I said, if I live to 85, I'm going to go to Long John Silver's every day for lunch.

00:00:18.000 Right.

00:00:26.000 I'm just going to eat shit that like everything that I dream of right now that I can't eat.

00:00:31.000 I'm going to eat all of it.

00:00:32.000 I'm going to drink whiskey all day long and just eat everything I want.

00:00:36.000 Yeah, fuck it.

00:00:36.000 You're at the end of the ride.

00:00:38.000 Unless that's the problem is like on your deathbed, they come up with some new shit that fixes everything.

00:00:38.000 Yeah.

00:00:44.000 Oh, I know, right?

00:00:45.000 That'll be my luck.

00:00:46.000 New stem cell stuff that regenerates every cell in your body to a 25-year-old.

00:00:51.000 Like, oh.

00:00:52.000 Exactly.

00:00:53.000 I know.

00:00:54.000 That'd be a real problem.

00:00:55.000 Like a 70-year-old brain and a 25-year-old body.

00:00:57.000 Like, you have a lot of knowledge for a giant advantage.

00:01:01.000 Oh, yeah.

00:01:02.000 I fantasize about stuff like that.

00:01:05.000 I fantasize about being able to, like I imagine, you know, like my version of heaven, it would be like, if I could go back to when I'm 12 years old, live through junior high and high school again.

00:01:19.000 Oh, you'd be the king.

00:01:20.000 And have the knowledge I have now.

00:01:23.000 And just I would know exactly how to navigate everything.

00:01:27.000 Yeah.

00:01:28.000 You know what I mean?

00:01:28.000 Yeah.

00:01:30.000 But that's the fun of growing up and the not so fun of growing up.

00:01:35.000 Sure.

00:01:35.000 Because you don't know what the fuck is going on and you're so confused.

00:01:38.000 And then you get older and you go, man, if I could just go back, I'd fucking kill it.

00:01:43.000 I think about it all the time.

00:01:44.000 You know, your lovely co-mo-host, co-star rather, to me more, that movie that she did, The Substance is fucking crazy.

00:01:54.000 That's a great piece on this whole fear of aging thing.

00:02:00.000 That movie is wild.

00:02:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:02:03.000 It's so crazy.

00:02:04.000 But it's like, you know how many women would agree to that deal? 1.00

00:02:09.000 If it was a real, it was realistic enough where you're watching.

00:02:13.000 You're like, I know a lot of ladies who would agree to that. 1.00

00:02:17.000 I know a lot of ladies. 1.00

00:02:18.000 Have you seen that South Park episode where they it was about that type of thing, but it was about how they have all these apps that you can make yourself look better in?

00:02:32.000 You know what I mean?

00:02:33.000 It's like filters that make you look younger and all this kind of stuff.

00:02:38.000 And they had this episode about that where like all these girls who aren't like the hot girls, but their Instagram stuff, they are.

00:02:49.000 And they actually start to think.

00:02:52.000 And so all the guys start going for these girls, even though when they're in front of them, they're not like that.

00:02:57.000 But that's what they look like on there.

00:02:59.000 And yeah, it's pretty crazy.

00:03:02.000 It's probably accurate, too.

00:03:04.000 As long as a couple people start doing it, a couple of guys start going for those girls, then everybody else will as well.

00:03:10.000 Yeah.

00:03:11.000 Which is most of our world.

00:03:13.000 Yeah.

00:03:13.000 Most of our world is some fucking idiot decides bell bottoms look good.

00:03:19.000 And then we're all like, shit, I got to get bell bottoms.

00:03:22.000 I want to get laid.

00:03:23.000 I want to be cool.

00:03:25.000 I had bell bottoms when I was, you know, because I was playing in bands and stuff.

00:03:28.000 So whatever was trendy, you know, we wore that stuff.

00:03:31.000 I can remember those bell bottoms that were so big you couldn't see your shoes.

00:03:36.000 It just looked like a pair of jeans walking down the street.

00:03:42.000 It was so dumb looking.

00:03:45.000 It's a crazy thing that lasted for a little while.

00:03:48.000 Like regular jeans, somebody invented that shit in like the 1800s. 0.90

00:03:52.000 And everybody's like, yeah, you nailed it.

00:03:55.000 And it's like a Jeep.

00:03:56.000 A Jeep still looks like a Jeep.

00:03:57.000 They made a Jeep in like the 1950s.

00:04:00.000 They made a Jeep in 2026.

00:04:01.000 You could see the difference.

00:04:02.000 It's like it's a little bit more advanced, but that's a Jeep.

00:04:05.000 Jeans, they nailed it. 0.99

00:04:05.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:04:07.000 Bell bottoms are like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:10.000 What the fuck were we doing?

00:04:13.000 Oh, I mean, I had shirts with like bell sleeves with like pictures of sailboats and stuff on it.

00:04:21.000 It's like, are you kidding me?

00:04:22.000 I mean, you know, like lime green and orange and shit like that.

00:04:25.000 Remember the Elvis style collars?

00:04:27.000 Oh, for sure.

00:04:29.000 Like, what happened?

00:04:30.000 I know.

00:04:31.000 I have a theory because all that stuff happened after they passed the sweeping psychedelic Schedule I Act in 1970.

00:04:39.000 And I think they cut everybody off from mushrooms and acid and anything that makes you think.

00:04:47.000 And then they started giving them Coke and no one knew what to do.

00:04:50.000 And they were all just like, and it was disco, and the music kind of sucked and everybody got real weird.

00:04:56.000 Wow.

00:04:58.000 I think that's what happened.

00:04:59.000 Yeah, I don't doubt that at all.

00:05:01.000 That's when the clothes get really fucked up.

00:05:03.000 Yeah, it is.

00:05:04.000 It's the same exact time.

00:05:07.000 Because before, like, there was like a hippie style, you know, like Hendrix and a lot of Clapton, a lot of guys.

00:05:15.000 It was like a flowy hippie, but it looked good.

00:05:17.000 It was kind of cool.

00:05:18.000 But something happened in the 70s.

00:05:18.000 Sure.

00:05:20.000 We just lost all perspective.

00:05:22.000 Oh, I know.

00:05:23.000 I mean, when you look at some of the 70s, like especially like sort of late 70s, you know, the disco era and stuff like that.

00:05:30.000 And you look back at some of these TV shows they had and you see a lot of these bands and stuff on there.

00:05:36.000 And it's like, who thought that looked good?

00:05:38.000 I mean, who said this is the thing now?

00:05:42.000 It looked like shit.

00:05:43.000 I mean, horrible, horrible stuff.

00:05:46.000 Well, I talk about this all the time, but it's the cars too, man.

00:05:50.000 I love 1960s muscle cars, but I check out around 71, and I only allow a 71 Farracuda and a Challenger in that group.

00:06:00.000 Everything else after 71 is useless to me.

00:06:03.000 Except Corvette.

00:06:03.000 Oh, yeah.

00:06:04.000 Corvette still stayed cool looking.

00:06:06.000 They stayed cool looking deep into the 80s.

00:06:08.000 Yeah, that's true.

00:06:09.000 Yeah.

00:06:10.000 I'm a muscle car guy.

00:06:11.000 I've got a 67 Chevelle 396.

00:06:13.000 Oh, nice.

00:06:14.000 And muscle cars are my thing.

00:06:17.000 I have a 70.

00:06:18.000 Yeah.

00:06:18.000 Oh, do you really?

00:06:19.000 I would like to get a 64 GTO the first year they were made.

00:06:24.000 That's what I'm looking for.

00:06:25.000 But to get one that's perfect, they're pretty pricey.

00:06:28.000 They're very pricey.

00:06:30.000 And I grew up poor, so I don't like to buy stuff for myself.

00:06:32.000 I buy my kids' stuff all the time.

00:06:35.000 And I don't mind how much money I spend on my family.

00:06:39.000 But for me, I just, I don't spend money on myself.

00:06:42.000 Old habits die hard.

00:06:43.000 Yeah, they really do.

00:06:44.000 When I was a kid, my sister's boyfriend's brother, the older brother, was the cool guy in the neighborhood.

00:06:51.000 He had a 65 GTO convertible.

00:06:54.000 Oh, yeah.

00:06:54.000 And he would, I used to, I worked at a gas station, and he would drive by the gas station.

00:06:58.000 We'd all go like this.

00:06:59.000 Like, oh, yeah.

00:07:01.000 Can't believe he owns that.

00:07:03.000 That's really his car.

00:07:04.000 He was the coolest guy in the world.

00:07:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:07:07.000 We had those.

00:07:08.000 Terry Red.

00:07:09.000 Yeah.

00:07:11.000 There was a guy named Mike Page in our town.

00:07:13.000 He was older than my group.

00:07:17.000 When we were seniors, he was probably already 25, 26, something like that.

00:07:22.000 And you never really, because cruising was a thing, and you'd cruise through Sonic or whatever it was, and see who was there and all that crap.

00:07:29.000 And everybody parked on the bank parking lot and you'd drink beer and then the cops would come by and you'd hide all your shit.

00:07:37.000 And I mean, it was literally like the American graffiti days, you know.

00:07:43.000 And so this guy, Mike, he had a 65 candy apple red vet and he had a mustache.

00:07:51.000 Remember Chuck Negron, singer in the Three Dog Night, the one with the mustache?

00:07:55.000 Yeah.

00:07:56.000 looked like Chuck Negron.

00:07:57.000 So we would see him pass by and he was like Harrison Ford was in American Graffiti.

00:08:05.000 It's like you'd just see him in his car, you know.

00:08:09.000 And so he was, it was like seeing Elvis Presley go by.

00:08:14.000 And everybody go like, wow.

00:08:17.000 And that's actually how the boxmaster's name came about.

00:08:21.000 Really?

00:08:22.000 Yeah.

00:08:24.000 How?

00:08:25.000 Well, in the South, in those days, there was a, there are two stories how the boxmaster's name came about.

00:08:33.000 There's a there's the politically correct one and there's the one that's not.

00:08:39.000 And the one that's not is if somebody was a playboy type, you know, he was called a boxmaster.

00:08:48.000 And so and we had a guess that.

00:08:54.000 That's hilarious.

00:08:54.000 Yeah.

00:08:55.000 And then in the old days, people would say, oh, look, there goes the boxmaster when Mike would pass by because he just knew.

00:09:01.000 But you only saw him driving his Corvette up and down cruising.

00:09:04.000 You never saw him, you know, actually doing stuff, and he never got out and drank beer with us or anything.

00:09:09.000 He was just making an appearance.

00:09:11.000 Just letting everybody know.

00:09:11.000 Yeah.

00:09:12.000 Look at this.

00:09:14.000 Second generation Corvette.

00:09:15.000 Yeah.

00:09:16.000 65.

00:09:17.000 I have a 65 convertible.

00:09:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:09:19.000 Oh, yeah.

00:09:20.000 I love them.

00:09:21.000 Awesome cars.

00:09:22.000 I mean, yeah, muscle cars are the thing to me.

00:09:24.000 Do you remember there are two sort of car times that confused me?

00:09:35.000 I mean, first of all, how could a Mustang ever not be cool?

00:09:38.000 But remember in the late 70s, early 80s, it may as well have been a Ford Fiesta.

00:09:44.000 I mean, it was garbage.

00:09:45.000 What was that?

00:09:46.000 It was the gas guzzler crisis, the gas crisis. 0.92

00:09:49.000 That's what it was.

00:09:49.000 Oh, okay.

00:09:50.000 So they had to make all these cars gas efficient.

00:09:52.000 So they got rid of V8s. 0.97

00:09:54.000 They started having these very economical on gas V6s and like really shitty engines.

00:10:02.000 And they made the cars plastic and lighter and cheaper.

00:10:07.000 Yeah, they fucked everything up.

00:10:08.000 They fucked everything up.

00:10:11.000 Imagine working at Ford in 1969.

00:10:15.000 You got the Mach 1, which is like, you just look at that and you go, God, damn.

00:10:19.000 Every time you see to this day, I see one of those on, you go, God.

00:10:22.000 They just nailed it.

00:10:24.000 Like, you just stare at that car, just walk around it for hours just looking at it.

00:10:24.000 Yeah.

00:10:29.000 And then 10 years later, they got something that you would never want to own.

00:10:32.000 No, this is a hook of shit.

00:10:34.000 This is a fucking box.

00:10:35.000 This is a, it's like a, literally like a box that a washing machine comes in.

00:10:40.000 It's garbage.

00:10:41.000 People didn't even want to steal them.

00:10:42.000 Yeah.

00:10:43.000 Crazy.

00:10:44.000 Imagine being the CEO of that company and going, what did we do?

00:10:47.000 What the fuck happened?

00:10:48.000 We had it.

00:10:48.000 We had magic.

00:10:50.000 Like legit magic.

00:10:50.000 Right?

00:10:52.000 Remember the Toronado and the Riviera?

00:10:54.000 Oh, yeah.

00:10:55.000 Oh, my God.

00:10:56.000 I mean, you're talking about different looking.

00:10:58.000 Yeah.

00:10:59.000 But they were cool.

00:11:00.000 They're very cool.

00:11:01.000 Very cool, boy.

00:11:02.000 And weird and huge.

00:11:03.000 And huge.

00:11:04.000 Yeah.

00:11:05.000 And the opposite end of the spectrum was AMC.

00:11:09.000 What were they thinking?

00:11:11.000 That was a weird car to own.

00:11:11.000 They were weird.

00:11:13.000 Weird.

00:11:13.000 All of those.

00:11:14.000 They had one that looked kind of okay, but they had the Pacer and the other weird looking, the Gremlin.

00:11:25.000 The Gremlins, all those kind of things.

00:11:25.000 Yeah.

00:11:28.000 I mean, it's like, what in the hell is this?

00:11:30.000 It was a strange company.

00:11:32.000 It was almost like a fake company.

00:11:34.000 Yeah.

00:11:34.000 Like, it didn't make any sense.

00:11:35.000 It didn't make any sense at all.

00:11:36.000 It was like an Australian. 0.98

00:11:38.000 Remember, like Mad Max, he drove that Australian muscle car?

00:11:40.000 I remember watching, I'm going, what the fuck is that thing?

00:11:43.000 It was an Australian muscle car.

00:11:44.000 I don't know what it was.

00:11:45.000 Still to this day don't know what it was.

00:11:47.000 But that's like what those AMCs were.

00:11:50.000 Weird looking.

00:11:50.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:52.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:52.000 Just off.

00:11:53.000 Yeah.

00:11:54.000 Strange, strangely.

00:11:55.000 From a different timeline or something.

00:11:58.000 There was a movie called, it had Raquel Welch was in it, and Donald Pleasant, some of these people called Fantastic Voyage, where some politician or scientist or something, I guess it was an assassination attempt, but there was a brain thing.

00:11:58.000 Yeah.

00:12:19.000 So they shrink all these scientists down.

00:12:23.000 on a little glass thing, whatever those things are called for chemistry or whatever.

00:12:29.000 They shrink the cats down and their little submarine thing.

00:12:34.000 Oh, I remember that.

00:12:35.000 And they shoot them into the guy.

00:12:38.000 Yeah, that, that.

00:12:40.000 Well, see, that's a pacer.

00:12:42.000 You know, I just watch it.

00:12:44.000 I go, it's a damn pacer.

00:12:46.000 That's hilarious.

00:12:47.000 And so they go through the guy all through his veins and arteries and stuff and get to the place where they need to fix it and all this kind of stuff.

00:12:47.000 Yeah.

00:12:53.000 But antibodies kept attacking them and all this kind of stuff.

00:12:56.000 It was weird.

00:12:56.000 I saw it in the theater and I was pretty impressed, actually.

00:13:00.000 I remember that movie.

00:13:01.000 That's hilarious.

00:13:02.000 That's hilarious.

00:13:04.000 Shrinking people down.

00:13:08.000 What's wild is how many ideas were burned up in movies by the time like the 90s rolled around.

00:13:16.000 If you just stop and think about the fact that movies really were only like, well, movies, I think, are the absolute best mirror into the culture.

00:13:26.000 It's like a time machine.

00:13:28.000 Like you could read a history book and you can kind of get a rough understanding of how people behaved back then.

00:13:33.000 But you still think of them in a current context.

00:13:35.000 You think of them like today.

00:13:36.000 But you watch a film.

00:13:38.000 You watch a James Cagney film and you're like, whoa, man, this is a different world.

00:13:44.000 Nobody knew shit.

00:13:46.000 Nobody had any idea what was going on in the world.

00:13:49.000 You got all your news from the newspaper.

00:13:51.000 So these dudes who own the newspapers essentially control the narrative for the entire world.

00:13:55.000 Absolutely.

00:13:57.000 And people behave strange.

00:14:01.000 Open domestic violence.

00:14:03.000 Domestic violence is normal. 1.00

00:14:05.000 Shut up. 0.95

00:14:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:14:07.000 She would kiss them and like it was crazy.

00:14:09.000 Oh, right.

00:14:10.000 Nuts.

00:14:11.000 Well, my wife, who was raised in the Bay Area, you know, around San Francisco, Marin County there, when I first told her what my dad did to me, she was like, oh, my God, that's like—and honestly, that's what everybody's dad did.

00:14:27.000 It was like, you know, if he was working graveyard shift and you started making a bunch of damn noise at noon, you got your ass beat with a belt.

00:14:36.000 And she was just, she couldn't believe it.

00:14:38.000 I said, oh, no.

00:14:39.000 It was like every day almost, you know?

00:14:42.000 And, you know, not that it was good, but it was just part of our life.

00:14:48.000 We didn't know any better.

00:14:50.000 We really didn't.

00:14:50.000 No, no one knew any better and we're only figuring it out now.

00:14:54.000 Yeah.

00:14:55.000 It's like canceling people retroactively for stuff they did in the 80s.

00:14:58.000 Like, okay, that's a different world.

00:15:01.000 You weren't even alive then.

00:15:02.000 That's a different world.

00:15:05.000 When people came, like, you got to realize, like, your parents, like, think about it this way.

00:15:10.000 People were coming over on a boat from other countries with no knowledge of what was over here.

00:15:16.000 They just got told, oh, there's jobs in America, you know, and you got on a boat from fucking Europe.

00:15:23.000 Like, my grandparents came over here in the 1920s.

00:15:26.000 Like, they had no idea.

00:15:28.000 They come over here and there's a bunch of people that also did the same thing.

00:15:32.000 And they're basically just savages.

00:15:35.000 They're basically like one or two steps above like absolute savages.

00:15:40.000 You know, they're savages with metal. 0.87

00:15:42.000 You know, they've got metal and rubber.

00:15:44.000 Right.

00:15:45.000 And, you know, and they're raising kids.

00:15:46.000 And of course, they're going to raise kids in a rough way because the world is rough.

00:15:50.000 It's like everybody got beat up.

00:15:52.000 It was normal.

00:15:53.000 Like bullying was not, there was no anti-bullying campaigns.

00:15:57.000 God, no.

00:15:58.000 You just had to fight for yourself.

00:15:59.000 Like, that's just how it is.

00:16:01.000 This is life.

00:16:02.000 This prepares you for life.

00:16:03.000 It sucks, but this is life.

00:16:05.000 Absolutely.

00:16:06.000 We have guys in our town that you just stayed away from.

00:16:10.000 Yeah.

00:16:10.000 I mean, guys who were, you know, relatively the same age.

00:16:14.000 And I lucked out because I was a skinny, long-haired little hippie and playing in bands and stuff.

00:16:20.000 And for some reason, I always liked hanging out with the guys who are a few years older than me.

00:16:28.000 They had more fun than we did.

00:16:30.000 And so I remember the first time I ever, well, the first time I ever had a drink of beer, my uncle Don, he drank schlitz.

00:16:41.000 And this is back when you had to have a church key and you open both sides.

00:16:44.000 Wow.

00:16:45.000 And he would pour it in a, our glasses, you know, like I said, we were pretty poor.

00:16:49.000 We all lived at my grandmother's house.

00:16:50.000 And it was the jelly jars.

00:16:52.000 When you finished the jelly, that became the glasses we drank out of.

00:16:56.000 And he would have a jelly jar glass of beer and it just looked like apple juice to me.

00:17:02.000 And I would always ask him, you know, I'm six years old.

00:17:05.000 I'd say, hey, can I have some of that?

00:17:08.000 And he goes, you don't need any of this.

00:17:09.000 Well, finally, one day he goes, yeah, here, have a drink.

00:17:12.000 Tastes like apple juice.

00:17:13.000 And I'm like, oh, God, mighty.

00:17:16.000 But the first time I got drunk in my life was on Boone's Farm wine, Apple Wine.

00:17:25.000 And these two guys, Gary and Eddie were their names, and they were just trouble.

00:17:31.000 And Gary had a 64 GTO.

00:17:34.000 That's probably where I got that thing from.

00:17:36.000 But I mean, we rolled it one night.

00:17:40.000 I mean, we never even thought about a seatbelt.

00:17:40.000 No seatbelts.

00:17:43.000 And so they took me to the Dairy Queen and we were going to get a hamburger or whatever it was.

00:17:54.000 Well, they ended up hanging me out the window, just puking all over the Dairy Queen parking lot, you know, because I drank an entire bottle of this and never been drunk in my life.

00:18:02.000 I was 12, 13.

00:18:04.000 And so these guys, I just, I was fascinated by them.

00:18:09.000 They were all James Dean and Elvis Presley to me, right?

00:18:13.000 And there were a few guys in town that everybody knew not to mess with at all.

00:18:20.000 It's like they will literally pull your eyeballs out of the sockets.

00:18:25.000 They kind of considered me a mascot.

00:18:29.000 And they all protected me.

00:18:32.000 So the other guys who were, you know, pricks or whatever, you know, if one of them messed with me, there was a guy named Calvin, a guy named Billy Bob, actually, who was probably 10 years older than me, and a guy named Harry, and whose family came over from somewhere.

00:18:52.000 They were like, you know, from the Czech Republic or somewhere, but they'd grew up, they grew up here, you know, so they didn't sound like they were from someplace else.

00:19:02.000 Harry was about five, six and stocky, you know.

00:19:07.000 And there was this dude who was just mean to everybody.

00:19:13.000 Excuse me.

00:19:14.000 But somewhere in between our age, you know, when we were teenagers, 17, 18, and Harry and Billy Bob and Calvin and those guys, they were like 30.

00:19:30.000 And there are these other guys who were the mean guys in town who were in between those ages.

00:19:36.000 And they were the real problem because they were just assholes.

00:19:39.000 The other guys were cool as long as you didn't mess with them.

00:19:43.000 One night, this guy, Two of them were both named Steve, who are the real pricks.

00:19:52.000 And one of the Steves got me by my hair and drugged me around, beat me up a little bit, you know, and I was a fighter.

00:20:01.000 You know, I wasn't bad.

00:20:02.000 You know, I've fought a lot of guys.

00:20:05.000 I quit fighting in my early 20s, but back then, you know, it was just a way of life.

00:20:10.000 And this cat roughed me up, a lot bigger than me.

00:20:15.000 And Harry found out about it.

00:20:17.000 Well, we had a bonfire party out of the guy's trailer home that night.

00:20:22.000 And so this cat that had beat me up showed up and Harry had heard about it.

00:20:25.000 And Harry is, you know, I'm like Harry's little mascot guy, right?

00:20:30.000 So the guy gets out of his car and comes over there.

00:20:34.000 No, we got a big bonfire going on, right?

00:20:37.000 The guy comes over.

00:20:38.000 Harry didn't say a word to him.

00:20:40.000 He walked up to him.

00:20:41.000 This guy's like a foot taller than Harry.

00:20:44.000 Harry got him, reached up, got him by the hair, hit him one time, broke his jaw, and threw him in the bonfire.

00:20:52.000 Whoa.

00:20:52.000 And a bunch of people had to put him out.

00:20:54.000 I mean, this was just like a Friday night in Arkansas.

00:20:59.000 All right.

00:21:00.000 How's your schedule looking?

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00:22:32.000 Oh my God.

00:22:33.000 That's a rough part of the world, man, especially back then.

00:22:36.000 Yeah.

00:22:37.000 You know, Malcolm McDowell, he wrote a book about like where he was talking about why certain populations, like certain parts of the world, are rougher.

00:22:48.000 And he was talking about certain parts of America where they were settled initially by people that came from a herding community.

00:22:58.000 So they were like sheepherders in other countries. 0.63

00:23:01.000 And when they came over to America, when you have a flock of sheep, someone could steal all your food in the middle of the night.

00:23:08.000 They can just take all your sheep. 0.99

00:23:09.000 If you're growing corn, you know, it's hard to pick all that fucking corn.

00:23:14.000 You got to throw it in a truck, drag it out.

00:23:16.000 You could just steal someone's sheep.

00:23:18.000 So they're accustomed to extreme violence to protect their sheep.

00:23:22.000 And they're accustomed to acting fast and doing things quickly and violently.

00:23:28.000 And so that's how you got the Half Fields and the McCoy's. 0.99

00:23:31.000 That's what that shit's about.

00:23:32.000 People are like, why are those people such fucking psychos?

00:23:35.000 They came from a psycho community in Europe.

00:23:39.000 And then when they made it over to America, they just kept that tradition going.

00:23:42.000 Oh, for sure.

00:23:43.000 I mean, you know, people talk about, you know, the Irish and the Scots.

00:23:43.000 Yeah.

00:23:48.000 Did I say Michael McDowell?

00:23:49.000 Did I say Michael?

00:23:50.000 Malcolm McWellow.

00:23:50.000 Malcolm Gladwell.

00:23:51.000 That's what I meant.

00:23:52.000 Oh.

00:23:52.000 Malcolm Gladwell.

00:23:53.000 Sorry, Malcolm.

00:23:56.000 Malcolm Gladwell.

00:23:57.000 It's early.

00:23:58.000 Yeah, but that's, you know, we still, to this day, we talk about, oh, yeah, those Irish cats and the Scottish guys, the English guys, if you're in the, you know, like, say, South London or whatever, some rough guys over there.

00:24:10.000 Where do you think we came from?

00:24:11.000 Yeah.

00:24:12.000 I mean, you know, I did one of those tests about my genealogy and all that kind of stuff.

00:24:16.000 And, you know, you hear stuff from your family growing up that I grew up thinking I was part Italian and Native American and all these different things, right?

00:24:27.000 And then I do this thing.

00:24:28.000 It's like I'm a full-on English Scottish guy.

00:24:33.000 You know, it's Irish, English, Scottish, almost all of me.

00:24:36.000 Except for, as my daughter says, she goes, Daddy, why aren't we randomly Swiss?

00:24:40.000 I got a little bit of French Swiss.

00:24:43.000 You know, it's like 11%, something like that.

00:24:45.000 The rest of it's just that stuff.

00:24:47.000 So all those people come over here and North Carolina or Tennessee, Arkansas, all these places.

00:24:57.000 There are words that we use, which we call the hillbilly language, which actually wasn't considered a hillbilly language in England, but that language was left over.

00:25:11.000 Like we say, reckon you want to go do something?

00:25:14.000 Reckon over there, they still use it.

00:25:17.000 Yeah.

00:25:18.000 Aaron, meaning one.

00:25:21.000 It's like, if you said to me, hey, can I have a beer?

00:25:24.000 And I say, I ain't got Aaron.

00:25:27.000 You know, it's A-I-R-N. 1.00

00:25:29.000 I ain't got Aaron.

00:25:30.000 And all that stuff came from England and Ireland and Scotland.

00:25:34.000 Well, that's the idea of the southern accent, right?

00:25:36.000 The southern accent is an English accent.

00:25:38.000 It's just morphed in a new place.

00:25:41.000 Exactly.

00:25:41.000 Yeah.

00:25:42.000 Yeah.

00:25:43.000 And morphed particularly probably because of the climate.

00:25:47.000 Like the climate changed a lot.

00:25:49.000 And one of the weirder things about these stereotypes about the South is the hookworm thing.

00:25:55.000 Do you know that thing?

00:25:57.000 No, tell me about it.

00:25:58.000 This is crazy.

00:26:00.000 So for a long time, a giant percentage of people that lived in the South had hookworm.

00:26:08.000 And hookworm is a parasite that you get in your feet from walking around barefoot.

00:26:12.000 Okay.

00:26:13.000 And hookworm affects your cognitive function in a massive way.

00:26:17.000 It makes you slow and stupid.

00:26:19.000 And so this myth of the southern person being slow and lazy and stupid was all because they were infected with hookworm.

00:26:29.000 Wow.

00:26:30.000 Like a giant percentage of these people had hookworm.

00:26:34.000 Like throw that into our sponsor perplexity and tell me how much hookworm was in the south.

00:26:39.000 I'm going to cancel this.

00:26:40.000 I'm going to cancel my therapist.

00:26:41.000 The phrase hookworm, southern draw refers to historical connection between hookworm infections in the American South and certain stereotypes about southerners, including the way they spoke and behaved.

00:26:51.000 In the late 19th and early 20th century, hookworm infestations were rampant with estimates suggesting that up to 40% of the people in the region were infected.

00:27:01.000 So hookworm causes symptoms like severe fatigue, anemia, and mental fog, which led to slowness in speech and thought.

00:27:08.000 This contributed to the stereotype of southerners being lazy or slow-witted, often associated with the southern draw.

00:27:14.000 How did they fix that?

00:27:16.000 Like, what medication did they use to fix that?

00:27:20.000 Some sort of a dewormer?

00:27:25.000 Health campaigns?

00:27:27.000 How old were they?

00:27:31.000 I mean, I've heard of hookworm, but I had no idea that it had any association with us.

00:27:35.000 Yeah, I didn't either.

00:27:36.000 When I found that out, I was like, oh, that makes sense.

00:27:40.000 That makes sense.

00:27:42.000 Rockefeller Sanitation Commission surveyed infection rates 40%.

00:27:46.000 Mobile dispensaries traveled throughout the region, free deworming medications, and educating local doctors.

00:27:51.000 Okay, so they use some sort of an anti-parasitic.

00:27:54.000 All measures including latrines to improve sanitation, educating communities about the risk of soil contamination, and encouraging the routine of wearing shoes.

00:28:03.000 Isn't that nuts that shoes probably fixed it more than anything?

00:28:06.000 People wearing shoes.

00:28:07.000 Probably so.

00:28:08.000 Yeah.

00:28:09.000 So that's where it all came from.

00:28:11.000 That's the hookworm thing. 0.96

00:28:12.000 That's what?

00:28:13.000 Isn't that nuts?

00:28:14.000 It is nuts.

00:28:15.000 Because when I was a kid, I mean, to this day, when someone talks, like, if someone wants to make a stereotype about someone being stupid, they use a southern accent.

00:28:24.000 Yeah, it's true.

00:28:25.000 All the time.

00:28:26.000 I grew up with that.

00:28:27.000 I mean, there was a prejudice in Hollywood when I first got out there.

00:28:30.000 There still kind of is.

00:28:33.000 I can't, I mean, especially coming up now.

00:28:35.000 I mean, you know, once you reach a certain level, you know, you can walk into Universal Studios and say, I want to play Betty Davis.

00:28:45.000 And they're all, hey, that's a great idea.

00:28:46.000 But, you know, but when you're coming up, you know, I was, the first thing I ever auditioned for in L.A. was a student film.

00:28:57.000 It's like one of those USC student films.

00:29:00.000 And I go in there and the part was some guy that just got off the turnip truck from Alabama.

00:29:08.000 And I thought, well, I've probably got this.

00:29:11.000 And so, and I was broke and everything, and it wasn't going to pay anything, but I didn't care.

00:29:18.000 I was like, well, maybe I get my foot in the door because I didn't go to be an actor anyway.

00:29:22.000 I just thought, well, I'll try this stuff.

00:29:25.000 And I go in there, and I think the casting person and the director are both East Coast people, like New York or somewhere.

00:29:35.000 And I did my little audition, and they said, can you do it more southern?

00:29:43.000 And I'm like, are you shitting me?

00:29:45.000 It's like, you got to be shitting me.

00:29:48.000 I said, well, what you have to understand is I actually did just get off the turnip truck from back there, and this is how you talk.

00:29:56.000 And of course, my accent is not as thick as it was then, but they just said I wasn't southern enough.

00:30:02.000 And it was like, oh, I see what they're getting at.

00:30:05.000 Yeah.

00:30:06.000 So they wanted the foghorn, leg horn.

00:30:09.000 Yeah.

00:30:09.000 You know, now over here, what we have is, and I never heard anybody talk.

00:30:13.000 I never heard that.

00:30:13.000 I grew up down there.

00:30:15.000 And so that's what they would do.

00:30:17.000 There are a lot of performances over the years where people who are not from the South played the part that actually use that accent and they win Academy Awards and stuff.

00:30:27.000 And I'm like, wow.

00:30:29.000 So anyway, I didn't get this part.

00:30:30.000 And the guy who got the part literally sounded like Houston the Bronx.

00:30:35.000 But he was doing that thing.

00:30:37.000 I thought, wow, this is going to be tough out here.

00:30:40.000 But Southerners don't often get picked or even noticed for things like, let's say you're doing a gangster movie in the 30s in New York.

00:30:54.000 Even if you can do the accents, whatever.

00:30:59.000 But people from New York can get parts playing Southerners.

00:31:05.000 That still goes on.

00:31:06.000 That's so weird.

00:31:08.000 It's such a weird stereotype.

00:31:10.000 You know, it exists in music too, doesn't it?

00:31:12.000 For sure.

00:31:13.000 Like, Southern bands, until Skinner came along, Southern bands got no respect.

00:31:17.000 Absolutely.

00:31:18.000 Yeah.

00:31:18.000 Skinnyard fucked that up just because they were so good.

00:31:21.000 They were so good.

00:31:22.000 Everybody's like, all right, man.

00:31:23.000 You got to let it freebird is Freebird.

00:31:26.000 That guitar solo, you're like, it's ridiculous.

00:31:29.000 I've known those guys a long time, those guys in Skinner.

00:31:33.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:31:36.000 That whole, and also anybody that was from the South got lumped into the Southern rock thing.

00:31:44.000 You know, and they weren't all just people that sounded like Charlie Daniels.

00:31:44.000 Right.

00:31:50.000 I mean, there were very, very different types of bands.

00:31:52.000 The Allman Brothers combined jazz and blues and rock and pop and everything in their music.

00:32:00.000 They were literally masters, the Allman Brothers.

00:32:02.000 All the Brothers Live at the Fillmore East, probably the best live album ever made.

00:32:07.000 But they just say they're all southern rock bands.

00:32:09.000 It's like, man, it wasn't really like that.

00:32:13.000 Very different style.

00:32:14.000 The Allman Brothers were masters.

00:32:14.000 Very different styles.

00:32:16.000 They were.

00:32:17.000 Midnight Rider is still one of my all-time favorite songs.

00:32:19.000 Oh, it's awesome.

00:32:20.000 If I used to have to do radio when I lived in L.A., I have to do morning radio.

00:32:24.000 I'd smoke a joint before I left the house.

00:32:26.000 It was like 5.30 a.m. and I'd listen to Midnight Rider in the dark.

00:32:30.000 On the way there, like, oh.

00:32:30.000 Oh, yeah.

00:32:32.000 Oh, it's a brilliant song.

00:32:33.000 Oh, it's so good.

00:32:34.000 It just gets you in the mood.

00:32:36.000 And country guys, you know, back in those days when country was actual country music, they would hear some of these songs by those kind of guys like the Allman Brothers or Marshall Tucker, whoever it was, and cut them, you know, for country albums like Wayland Jennings did Midnight Rider.

00:32:53.000 Oh, he's a great conversion.

00:32:57.000 But yeah, it's kind of odd, you know, being raised in the area of the country that people look at as the armpit.

00:33:05.000 And then you have, you know, and like I said, once you overcome that within the business, and it's not like they like you any better.

00:33:13.000 You know, it's just that they can use you to make money with.

00:33:16.000 And once, you know, that happens, then, you know, you can go in and play Betty Davis.

00:33:20.000 That's the stereotype of the coastal cities, right?

00:33:25.000 It's the stereotype that comes out of New York and L.A., where it's like everything else is stupid.

00:33:29.000 Like you're in New York or you're in L.A. and all these retards in the middle. 1.00

00:33:33.000 That's the flyover states.

00:33:35.000 Literally would call it the flyover states.

00:33:37.000 And when you're in control of casting all the great films and all the great television shows and you decide what the great albums are, you dismiss like this people that are, it takes like a Stevie Ray Von, who was like an undeniable talent.

00:33:56.000 Yes.

00:33:56.000 Where they go, okay, I don't give a fuck where that guy's from.

00:34:00.000 Let that guy fucking play. 1.00

00:34:01.000 Oh, yeah.

00:34:01.000 Like that guy's got voodoo in his hands.

00:34:03.000 Like whatever he's doing, I don't care where he's from.

00:34:05.000 But other than that, they would look at these places like they were less than, you know, or that the people were not as bright.

00:34:14.000 And that stereotype still exists today.

00:34:18.000 I remember one of the good things about traveling and doing the road a lot as a stand-up is you get to perform all over the country and meet all these different people.

00:34:26.000 And you know, when I would talk to people about Texas in particular, I'd be like, dude, I fucking love it there.

00:34:31.000 They're the most fun people.

00:34:33.000 It's like, it's so fun.

00:34:34.000 And they're normal.

00:34:35.000 They're normal people.

00:34:36.000 They're not Hollywood people angling to try to get some sort of a social relationship with you so they can progress their career.

00:34:43.000 They're just cool people, just regular fucking people.

00:34:47.000 And the problem is that these people in these coastal cities are the ones who don't know that, and they're dictating the narrative for the entire country based on some very weird prejudices.

00:35:01.000 Very weird.

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00:36:22.000 Yeah, it's true.

00:36:23.000 I mean, it happens all the time.

00:36:26.000 And people ask me, there was a very famous singer, movie star person.

00:36:31.000 This is a long time ago.

00:36:34.000 It was when I first started getting invited to the parties, you know, and I didn't know anything about this stuff.

00:36:38.000 And I what year was this around?

00:36:41.000 Well, it was around the time of Slingblade.

00:36:43.000 You know, I mean, I was working and had done some stuff that had been noticed, like one false move, and, you know, done a few things.

00:36:49.000 But this was around that time.

00:36:53.000 And it wasn't even out yet, I don't think, but screenings had started happening, and there's a buzz about it, right?

00:36:59.000 So I get invited to a party, and it was out at David Foster's house, who was always real nice to me.

00:37:08.000 And at the time, he was married to Linda Thompson, who was a Memphis girl.

00:37:12.000 And she always made southern food. 0.99

00:37:15.000 And she kind of took a liking to me and said, hey, I want to invite you because, you know, you're from the South and we always have the Southern food at our parties and stuff.

00:37:23.000 So I go out there and there were a lot of big people there.

00:37:27.000 And I found myself outside having a smoke.

00:37:31.000 And I was standing there in a little group of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson.

00:37:37.000 And I think maybe Dan Aykroyd was there.

00:37:40.000 And I remember Lionel Ritchie was in there playing piano in the living room.

00:37:44.000 And I'm just like, wow, wait, this is crazy.

00:37:47.000 And but I felt it's like that poor kid from the South Syndrome. 0.72

00:37:52.000 Like, I don't really belong here.

00:37:54.000 So I was real shy and, you know, that kind of thing.

00:37:57.000 Well, this, I went into the kitchen to get another drink.

00:38:02.000 And this, like I said, I won't name her name, but a very famous singer and actress from, you know, back in the 60s and 70s.

00:38:12.000 And she very seriously said to me, she said, so this Slingblade, so sorry.

00:38:23.000 She goes, it's fascinating to me.

00:38:27.000 A lot of people who didn't know me before that thought that I was actually that guy.

00:38:32.000 It's like this mentally challenged guy made a movie and everything like that.

00:38:37.000 And they would meet me and they'd go, you're the guy in that.

00:38:40.000 Yeah.

00:38:41.000 So anyway.

00:38:42.000 But she said it was fascinating to me.

00:38:45.000 And she goes, and you came out here from, what is it, Alabama or something like that?

00:38:48.000 And I said, Arkansas.

00:38:49.000 And she goes, Arkansas.

00:38:52.000 And with a straight face, she said to me, What do you people do down there?

00:38:58.000 I was like, wow.

00:39:01.000 And I said, thinking she'd get the joke, I said, we mostly lay around on the porch with our hound dog and swat flies.

00:39:11.000 She goes, oh, interesting, interesting.

00:39:14.000 It's like, babe, I was fucking with you there.

00:39:20.000 But that was one of the moments where I realized that I really was an outsider out there.

00:39:28.000 And people ask me about my longevity in this business, and I always say it's because I stay out of it.

00:39:35.000 I tell people, do your acting on the red carpet, not in the movie.

00:39:39.000 They say, well, you're so natural in this stuff.

00:39:41.000 It's like, that's from ignorance.

00:39:43.000 I don't know anything about acting.

00:39:44.000 I didn't go to Shakespeare school and stuff.

00:39:47.000 I look at the thing.

00:39:48.000 I'm playing Tommy Norris and Landman, or I'm playing the guy in Goliath or Fargo or Slingblade or Monstrous Ball, whatever I was in.

00:39:55.000 I just go out there and do what it says, you know, and be myself in whatever role it is.

00:40:02.000 And because, you know, people want to think there's a trick to everything, that you can learn everything.

00:40:10.000 And it's kind of just not true.

00:40:13.000 I mean, I believe artists, whether they're musicians, novelists, actors, whatever they are, I truly believe that you're born with most of it.

00:40:23.000 I'm not saying that you can't learn and that you can't progress.

00:40:27.000 You can't get better.

00:40:29.000 I mean, just repetition makes you better.

00:40:32.000 I mean, you know, just the more you do something, the more comfortable you get with it.

00:40:36.000 But, you know, if you say, like, if you were to ask me, what is my process?

00:40:45.000 Hell, I wouldn't know what to tell you.

00:40:46.000 I don't know what my process is.

00:40:48.000 It's like my process started when I was born.

00:40:50.000 I've just, I use my life experience and I do this stuff.

00:40:54.000 I lived a very eclectic life and I just remember all this stuff.

00:41:00.000 I don't need to go in the hallway before a scene and think about when my dad ran over my cat or something.

00:41:06.000 Oh, right, right.

00:41:07.000 And, you know, start, you know, gobbling like a turkey and, you know, yelling and screaming and punching the wall and stuff like that and trying to get all this sense memory.

00:41:15.000 My sense memory is here on the edge of my skin every fucking minute.

00:41:22.000 And I mean, if you were raised where I was, it was like, you know, I don't forget any of that stuff.

00:41:27.000 And I've lived 50 different lives.

00:41:29.000 So plenty to draw on.

00:41:31.000 And I just believe that people want.

00:41:35.000 It sounds like you're smarter if you say, well, here's how I learn lines.

00:41:41.000 I take this and then I have this mathematical formula and I imagine these letters as numbers and stuff like that.

00:41:49.000 And it's like, because the press loves that because it's like, what a genius.

00:41:53.000 You know, they don't respect, hell, I don't know.

00:41:57.000 I just go out there and do it as much because people want to believe that anyone can do this if you get in the right school, if you get the right teaching from someone, if you go study Shakespeare or whatever it is.

00:42:15.000 And I just don't believe that's true.

00:42:17.000 I believe you either have it or you don't have it.

00:42:21.000 Like in music, you can learn to play guitar.

00:42:24.000 You can learn to play piano.

00:42:27.000 You can learn to play drums.

00:42:31.000 No, I'll take that back.

00:42:32.000 You can get better at playing drums, but if you're not born a drummer, you're not going to be able to do it.

00:42:37.000 My brother, God rest his soul, passed away at 30, Jimmy.

00:42:40.000 He was a brilliant musician, played every instrument in the world, except when he got on my drums, and he looked like he had some muscular disorder.

00:42:50.000 It was like, he was just like, he goes, how do you do this?

00:42:54.000 You use both legs and both arms.

00:42:57.000 That's crazy to me.

00:42:58.000 You play everything else.

00:42:59.000 Everything.

00:43:00.000 And he just couldn't play drums.

00:43:02.000 Drummers can get better and they get to be experts.

00:43:06.000 But the thing in music that you can't teach is feel.

00:43:11.000 You can't teach a vibe or a feel to people.

00:43:15.000 Eric Clapton could play a lick on a guitar, give it to another guy.

00:43:21.000 He plays the same exact lick.

00:43:23.000 It's going to sound different just because of their feel.

00:43:25.000 Yeah, this has like that Miles Davis quote about hitting notes so that everybody can hit the same notes, but it's the attitude of the motherfucker that's the important thing.

00:43:38.000 The attitude of the person singing the notes is everything.

00:43:41.000 That's most of it.

00:43:43.000 And you either have that or you do not.

00:43:45.000 No doubt about it.

00:43:47.000 And some of it's genetic and some of it's just learned experience in your environment and how you grew up.

00:43:52.000 But yeah, you don't got it.

00:43:53.000 You don't got it.

00:43:54.000 I mean, Levon Helm, who was a friend of mine, played drums with the band.

00:44:01.000 He and Richie Hayward, who was with Little Feet, Frank Beard and ZZ Top, especially on their earlier records.

00:44:11.000 And Charlie Watts and Ringo and those guys, they all had feel.

00:44:16.000 They had a thing.

00:44:18.000 And then there are these other drummers in these sort of, you know, I call them science bands, you know, where the drummer has like 75 drums.

00:44:28.000 And they can do shit that seems humanly impossible.

00:44:33.000 But what happens after the song's over?

00:44:36.000 It doesn't stick.

00:44:38.000 Right.

00:44:39.000 You know what I mean?

00:44:40.000 But Levon just playing on a little four-piece kit, just had that feel.

00:44:45.000 And he played the song.

00:44:48.000 So anytime musicians start thinking it's all about their thing.

00:44:53.000 Like if you're doing movies, the prop people think you need 11 watches on each arm.

00:44:57.000 It's like about your department, everything, five briefcases and watches everywhere and shit.

00:45:03.000 And it's like, no, I'll just take an old-time ex with a round face.

00:45:07.000 I'm good, you know.

00:45:09.000 But it's when musicians start thinking that they have to make their part cut through and be noticed, the best drummers, you don't really notice them.

00:45:25.000 You hear the song.

00:45:26.000 If you go in there and dig deep and listen to them, if you isolate them, you know, and just listen to that, you're like, oh, okay.

00:45:33.000 Yeah.

00:45:34.000 Listen to that cat.

00:45:35.000 But in a perfect world, all you hear is the singer singing and telling you what they're trying to say.

00:45:43.000 And the music is so good behind it that it's just part of it.

00:45:47.000 You don't really notice it.

00:45:47.000 Yeah.

00:45:48.000 Yeah.

00:45:48.000 You know what I mean?

00:45:49.000 Yeah, and you can't teach that.

00:45:52.000 It's the feel thing.

00:45:53.000 Yeah.

00:45:54.000 And you know it when you hear it.

00:45:56.000 When a song just, oh, yeah.

00:45:58.000 It just gets in there.

00:45:59.000 You're like, you guys nailed it.

00:46:01.000 Yeah.

00:46:01.000 You put it together, you fucking nailed it.

00:46:05.000 And the amazing thing about bands, and how long have the Boxmasters been around now?

00:46:11.000 20 years.

00:46:11.000 You've been around.

00:46:12.000 20 years.

00:46:13.000 The most amazing thing is that people get together and they stay friends for that long and with all the conflicts and all the ego and all the bullshit.

00:46:22.000 And you hang out.

00:46:25.000 That to me, when someone makes great music, the most impressive thing is not just that you make great music, but you make great music with people that all get along together with all these different creative minds and egos and weirdness.

00:46:38.000 Everybody's weird.

00:46:40.000 Every fucking creative person I've ever met is out of their fucking mind.

00:46:43.000 And you get all together and then you show up at practice at the same time, and you rehearse together.

00:46:43.000 Oh, yeah.

00:46:48.000 You actually do it and you show up for gigs and you perform.

00:46:51.000 You hit your notes on stage.

00:46:53.000 You can all stay friends.

00:46:54.000 Like that's the most important thing and the most rare thing and the most impressive thing.

00:46:59.000 Absolutely.

00:47:00.000 And with our band in particular, I mean, before that, I'd played in a million bands and had a solo band that did four major label solo records.

00:47:08.000 And that's where I met some of the guys that were rolled over into the Boxmasters. 0.95

00:47:14.000 J.D. Andrew specifically, who's still, he and I are the longest running members.

00:47:20.000 We started the band together and he and I still run it.

00:47:23.000 And, You know, we're the opposite of what normally happens.

00:47:30.000 Normally, a band, when they're younger, they hit it for a while, three or four years, maybe have a couple of hits or at least some things that people know about.

00:47:41.000 And then as the years go on, you start to dwindle a bit, you know.

00:47:46.000 I mean, unless you're the Rolling Stones or the Who.

00:47:49.000 We just opened for the Who on our last tour, which is awesome.

00:47:52.000 Wow.

00:47:52.000 Yeah.

00:47:53.000 And so this band has started as, you know, it's like, you know, I got this crap about it's always an actor who wants to be a musician, just like this guy and that guy.

00:48:06.000 And it's like, no, no, I was a musician who came to LA to play music, accidentally became an actor.

00:48:11.000 Next thing you know, I made $381 on an episode of Matlock with five lines.

00:48:16.000 And I'm like, I'm broke.

00:48:17.000 I better do this.

00:48:19.000 That's how I became an actor.

00:48:20.000 That's crazy.

00:48:21.000 And so one way or the other, we started out fighting that stigma for, you know, 10, 12 years.

00:48:30.000 And then all of a sudden, it started to go away because we got more and more fans and became a big underground band.

00:48:35.000 And in the last five or six years, got really popular.

00:48:38.000 So here we are, old guys who are still making it, who are still on their way up at our age.

00:48:45.000 And so it kind of went the other way around with us.

00:48:49.000 And you're right.

00:48:51.000 I mean, to stick around that long, especially when it took us a while to get success, to make any money at it, and to get the fan base we have now.

00:49:02.000 Is there a weird thing, too, about people like critics or people that are paying attention to the music that don't just listen to the music and see you guys perform?

00:49:12.000 Instead, they think, oh, that's Billy Bob, the movie star who's trying to be a musician.

00:49:17.000 So there's this like stigma to it.

00:49:18.000 So instead of like looking at you and go, oh, it's a cool band.

00:49:21.000 Oh, I like them.

00:49:22.000 This is great.

00:49:23.000 They're like, oh, that's that fucking sling blade guy.

00:49:25.000 Right?

00:49:26.000 Yeah.

00:49:26.000 Billy Bob's trying to do something different.

00:49:28.000 He wants to be a rock star.

00:49:29.000 Yeah.

00:49:30.000 I mean, that's what we put up with for about half of our career with the Boxmasters. 1.00

00:49:30.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:49:35.000 Not as much anymore.

00:49:37.000 That kind of goes away.

00:49:39.000 It goes away with the public, with the audience.

00:49:42.000 With some of the critics, it's still there because they want to say that about you.

00:49:49.000 It has nothing to do with your music.

00:49:51.000 It has to do with, here's my angle for this article.

00:49:55.000 My angle in this.

00:49:55.000 Yes.

00:49:56.000 I mean, I did an article with a magazine one time that was kind of more of a men's magazine, you know.

00:50:02.000 Talked about music the whole time and talked about sex for about three minutes.

00:50:07.000 The whole article's about sex.

00:50:08.000 You know what I mean?

00:50:09.000 So, I mean, that's just what they do because that's their vibe, you know.

00:50:13.000 And so anyway, when they say this stuff, they're saying it because they want to dig at you.

00:50:24.000 Right.

00:50:25.000 And if musicians, you know, famous musicians are at one of our shows, unless it's, you know, ones who are friends of ours, if they want to come back and meet us after the show and say hello, they'll come back there and most people wouldn't take this as an insult, but it is.

00:50:42.000 They'll come back and they'll say, hey, it looks like you're really having fun up there.

00:50:47.000 Which means, oh, isn't it cute?

00:50:50.000 You got a little hobby and you're having fun up there and you get to be a rock star.

00:50:53.000 That's what they mean by it.

00:50:55.000 And I just kick them the fuck out of the dressing room. 0.99

00:50:58.000 I mean, I'm not joking.

00:51:00.000 There was a very famous guy who came back to see us in Dallas one time.

00:51:03.000 And he came back and he goes, you know, it's really nice you get to do this.

00:51:07.000 I said, get to do what?

00:51:09.000 And he said, you know, get to go out on the road and stuff and, you know, get this part out of you and get to have fun up there and stuff like that.

00:51:17.000 I said, well, you know, I have some songs about suicide.

00:51:19.000 I said, so you think that's fun?

00:51:21.000 I said, it's not fun.

00:51:23.000 I'm writing about shit for my soul that I grew up in.

00:51:26.000 I'm also writing things that are hopeful songs.

00:51:29.000 I'm writing a lot of stuff here.

00:51:31.000 We write original music and perform it, and people love this band.

00:51:35.000 I said, so don't ever fucking come near me again.

00:51:39.000 Don't ever come to one of our shows again if all you want to do is come back here because you're pissed that we just had a record on the radio.

00:51:48.000 Right, right.

00:51:49.000 You know what I mean?

00:51:50.000 And then you were in a band from 30 years ago, and now you're playing places that are smaller than where we are.

00:51:57.000 So don't come back there and start that shit with me.

00:51:59.000 And I actually, he said, oh, no, no, dude.

00:52:02.000 I'm just saying it really looked like I said, get the fuck out of here.

00:52:05.000 I don't care who you are.

00:52:05.000 Oh, wow.

00:52:07.000 And so I go.

00:52:07.000 Wow.

00:52:08.000 Well, you know when someone's digging at you.

00:52:10.000 Absolutely.

00:52:11.000 Yeah, you know when someone's saying, that was a great show.

00:52:13.000 It looks like you guys are having fun.

00:52:14.000 They're smiling and laughing.

00:52:16.000 I loved it.

00:52:16.000 That was fucking great.

00:52:17.000 I loved it.

00:52:18.000 And then you know, oh, it looks like you're having fun up there.

00:52:20.000 Yeah, right.

00:52:21.000 Oh, you're a cunt. 1.00

00:52:21.000 Oh. 1.00

00:52:23.000 Yeah, right.

00:52:23.000 Oh, okay.

00:52:24.000 Okay, cunt. 1.00

00:52:25.000 Yeah.

00:52:26.000 Some people just love to do that.

00:52:28.000 They just want to dismiss.

00:52:30.000 And fans think you're so dumb and you have no memory that some of the people who come to your shows to get stuff signed, which, you know, a lot of them, they're not even, well, they're selling them, you know, right.

00:52:44.000 And in certain cities, like in Kansas City, we're like the Beatles.

00:52:47.000 I mean, there are just certain cities where we sell out the second it goes unsale.

00:52:51.000 So you got good places and places that aren't as good, you know.

00:52:56.000 No rhyme or reason to it sometimes.

00:52:58.000 But there are people who come up to me that I've seen at shows before.

00:53:04.000 And I mean, if it's a guy that's just this average-looking guy, you may not remember them.

00:53:11.000 But if it's a guy who's 6'11 and has red hair with like this giant nose and two teeth, you remember that guy.

00:53:18.000 I saw this guy last year, you know.

00:53:21.000 And so I've actually had them come up to me and say, one of their favorite things to say is, oh, it's so funny.

00:53:28.000 We can't wait to come see your show tonight.

00:53:30.000 We didn't even know you had a band.

00:53:31.000 They love to say that.

00:53:32.000 It's like, well, you obviously didn't see every TV show we've done.

00:53:37.000 You didn't see, you know, me talking about it on the Today Show or whatever I'm on.

00:53:44.000 You know, this has been going on a long time.

00:53:47.000 Yeah, you knew that.

00:53:48.000 But they want to say that to you.

00:53:50.000 Right, to dismiss you.

00:53:51.000 And so I've actually had guys on this tour, a guy came up to me who's been to three of our shows.

00:53:57.000 I know he was there.

00:53:58.000 And he's always in the front.

00:54:00.000 On the third time, he comes up to me and he goes, Yeah, man, this is really, really cool and everything.

00:54:06.000 Will you sign these bunch of pictures from Bad Santa?

00:54:09.000 I didn't even know you had a band.

00:54:11.000 It's like, well, the first time you came, maybe you didn't.

00:54:15.000 But then the second time you came, I think you probably remembered.

00:54:18.000 And then last year when you were here, and now you're here today.

00:54:21.000 So I think you probably do by today that we have a band.

00:54:25.000 But people love, we're in a society now where nobody wants to, it's a get-me society.

00:54:36.000 They're going to get you.

00:54:37.000 Yeah.

00:54:38.000 And however they can get you, they want to get you.

00:54:41.000 And nobody likes to see people succeed.

00:54:44.000 Like when I was playing Carl and Slingblade, every critic in the world loved me.

00:54:52.000 And then all the other ones, a simple plan, I'm playing this poor pathetic wretch and all this kind of stuff.

00:54:58.000 The second I got to have a love scene with somebody and I was a leading man, all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, you're not one of us.

00:55:08.000 Where'd the hump on your back go and all that shit?

00:55:12.000 And it's like, you actually look better in this movie than you did now.

00:55:15.000 What did you have plastic surgery or whatever?

00:55:18.000 Right, right, right.

00:55:19.000 So once you start to succeed, that's when they start to want to say shit to you.

00:55:24.000 Yeah.

00:55:25.000 People love watching people fail at things.

00:55:28.000 Because it takes away the pressure that they have in their own life, their lack of success.

00:55:28.000 Yeah.

00:55:35.000 If they could watch a great man fall.

00:55:39.000 It's a funny thing is like the dismissal of your music.

00:55:45.000 They can't dismiss. you as an actor or your accomplishments.

00:55:49.000 So they try to dismiss you as like, oh, like this is a thing you're kind of doing.

00:55:54.000 You wish you were a rock star.

00:55:56.000 Right.

00:55:57.000 You can't possibly be also a musician.

00:56:00.000 You're just an artist and you do things that are cool that you enjoy doing.

00:56:03.000 No, that's not possible.

00:56:04.000 Why is this ugly fuck married to Angelina? 1.00

00:56:08.000 You know, that kind of stuff.

00:56:09.000 You know what I mean?

00:56:12.000 And, you know, not that I disagree, but it's normal.

00:56:17.000 I get it.

00:56:18.000 I would be thinking that way too if I was 16.

00:56:20.000 You know, if I was a kid, I'd be like, fuck that guy.

00:56:23.000 Yeah.

00:56:23.000 You know what I mean?

00:56:25.000 Yeah.

00:56:26.000 I remember when I first saw pictures of you with Angelina Jolie, I didn't think that, though.

00:56:30.000 I was like, fuck yeah, dude.

00:56:32.000 Like, we're supposed to root for each other.

00:56:34.000 Yes.

00:56:35.000 You can look at something and be like, oh, fuck that guy.

00:56:35.000 You know?

00:56:40.000 Why is that guy?

00:56:41.000 Or you could look at the same thing and go, fuck yeah.

00:56:45.000 Way to go, dude.

00:56:46.000 That's awesome.

00:56:46.000 Absolutely.

00:56:47.000 And then you feel good, and he feels good.

00:56:49.000 And everybody feels good.

00:56:51.000 And maybe you're inspired to do better for yourself.

00:56:54.000 Like, you know what?

00:56:55.000 I wish I was a little bit more like that guy.

00:56:57.000 I got to maybe discipline myself a little more, get my shit together, get something going.

00:57:02.000 You know, but instead of fucking, that guy sucks.

00:57:04.000 He's fucking overrated.

00:57:06.000 That guy fucking sucks.

00:57:07.000 He's a joke.

00:57:08.000 Oh, yeah.

00:57:09.000 Yeah.

00:57:10.000 Fucking Slingblade.

00:57:11.000 Oh, he played a retard. 1.00

00:57:12.000 You're all right.

00:57:13.000 Exactly.

00:57:14.000 The beautiful thing about Slingblade is you did that on your own.

00:57:17.000 Like you, you did that and you broke out.

00:57:21.000 Like you're like, look, nobody's giving me a chance.

00:57:23.000 I was going to do something.

00:57:25.000 And then everybody's like, oh, my God, we love you.

00:57:28.000 You did this on your own.

00:57:28.000 We love you.

00:57:30.000 Yeah.

00:57:31.000 But even then, you try to do something different.

00:57:36.000 You try to just be a normal human.

00:57:38.000 They're like, no, no, no, no.

00:57:40.000 You're going to be a retard. 1.00

00:57:41.000 You like you as a retard. 1.00

00:57:45.000 Absolutely.

00:57:46.000 You're getting a little too big.

00:57:48.000 I liked it when you were underground.

00:57:49.000 I liked it when nobody knew about you.

00:57:51.000 I bet the boxmasters get that too, right?

00:57:53.000 Like, I liked you in the beginning before you guys made it.

00:57:56.000 We have people who like the first two or three albums back when we first started, which were kind of experimental albums.

00:57:56.000 Yeah.

00:58:03.000 But yeah, that's a thing.

00:58:06.000 It just is.

00:58:07.000 It's a human thing.

00:58:08.000 Yeah.

00:58:09.000 And we do like more than ever to see people fail, I think.

00:58:12.000 I mean, there was a time when we rooted for people.

00:58:15.000 I think there's also too much exposure now.

00:58:19.000 I think, for instance, when we were growing up, especially in my era, if we were going to see Jimmy Stewart, we were only going to see him in the movie.

00:58:33.000 And it was on film and it had literally a film over it that made it look like you were watching something magical.

00:58:41.000 Now you've got digital where you can see every fucking mole on your face and shit, you know, and everything is a behind the scenes.

00:58:49.000 Oh, and the studio is doing this and now this group wants to come over and they're going to do a whole thing and they want to see you on the set.

00:58:58.000 But if I see Mel Gibson sitting in a director's chair dressed up like he was in Braveheart talking about the movie, it's like it takes away something from that.

00:59:09.000 It's like we've had too much of a peek behind the curtain, I believe.

00:59:13.000 And I think we're too exposed.

00:59:16.000 There's too much access to people.

00:59:18.000 When I was growing up in this business, I wouldn't have dared.

00:59:23.000 If I'd seen Bob Dylan or Jack Lemon or whoever it was on the sidewalk, I wouldn't walk up to him to say Jack Lemon, punch him in the shoulder and say, hey, dude, let's get a picture.

00:59:34.000 I mean, in a million years, I wouldn't have done that.

00:59:37.000 There's a respect.

00:59:38.000 These are my elders.

00:59:40.000 They're my heroes.

00:59:42.000 And I probably wouldn't have approached them at all.

00:59:44.000 But if I did, I would be, you know, very apologetic and say, I'm so sorry, but I'm such a huge fan of yours.

00:59:51.000 And you still get that every now and then from decent people.

00:59:53.000 But now, cats will come up to me literally and just, you know, just come up and like grab me by the arm and say, dude, let's get a picture.

01:00:02.000 The worst ones are, and this is usually guys, usually more guys than women. 1.00

01:00:06.000 They come up and they'll say, hey, man, you're supposed to be famous or some shit.

01:00:11.000 And my wife said, you know, you're like some famous dude.

01:00:15.000 So I don't really give a shit about that stuff, but can we get a picture?

01:00:17.000 And it's like, I put up with it for 30 years.

01:00:22.000 In the last couple of years, I started saying, how about when you do give a shit, come back and we'll get a picture?

01:00:29.000 You know, because, you know, after a while, you just can't take it.

01:00:33.000 And I'm kind of a codependent guy, so I'm nice to everybody I can be, you know.

01:00:38.000 And it's just every now and then you get a ringer and you get drunk people, men and women, who just come over.

01:00:47.000 They'll come to the bus and we're on tour and just start banging on the door and saying, hey, you know, come out here.

01:00:53.000 We got some whiskey.

01:00:54.000 Take a shot with us.

01:00:55.000 And you're just like, can you imagine doing that to Jimmy Stewart?

01:00:58.000 Right.

01:00:59.000 You know, first of all, back then, you would have just, that just thrown you in jail, you know.

01:01:04.000 But there's something about having heroes that are unattainable for you.

01:01:10.000 That way they can stay in that magic spot.

01:01:13.000 So I think we've lost magic and mystery and all these things.

01:01:16.000 Well, it certainly happens when you hear actors talk about politics.

01:01:19.000 When actors become activists, it's like, okay.

01:01:22.000 Yeah.

01:01:25.000 I donate to a lot of charities, mainly children's stuff, but nobody knows it.

01:01:30.000 I don't go to the award show and talk about it when I'm getting my award.

01:01:34.000 It's like Ricky Gervais said in that skit of his.

01:01:38.000 He said, look, come up here, accept your little award, and fuck off.

01:01:47.000 I think, first of all, unless you have really studied stuff and really know about a subject fully, who the hell would want to listen to an actor or a musician talk about politics?

01:02:00.000 You know what I mean?

01:02:01.000 It's like, are we supposed to follow this?

01:02:04.000 I mean, if we are, what if they lead you down the wrong road?

01:02:08.000 And, you know, and politically, I'm not a, I call myself a radical moderate.

01:02:14.000 I'm like very strong in my opinions.

01:02:18.000 But my opinions don't belong to any political party.

01:02:22.000 And, you know, I just look at what makes sense.

01:02:26.000 And I think we need a common sense party in this country.

01:02:28.000 That's actually what I think we need.

01:02:31.000 Just figure it out.

01:02:32.000 It's pretty easy to figure out what this is all about.

01:02:36.000 A non-ideologically captured party.

01:02:38.000 Yes.

01:02:39.000 That just is like, okay, what do we need to do here?

01:02:39.000 Yeah.

01:02:42.000 Instead of it's us versus them.

01:02:45.000 You know, like you're seeing this a lot right now because Mom Donnie won in New York City and people are screaming, we're winning now, we're winning.

01:02:54.000 Like, what is this we shit?

01:02:55.000 It's supposed to be, we are all Americans.

01:02:59.000 You are all New Yorkers.

01:03:01.000 You're all we.

01:03:02.000 You decided who's going to run your city.

01:03:04.000 Now we should all root for this guy to do a great job.

01:03:08.000 For sure.

01:03:08.000 And this idea that now, fuck all these other people that didn't vote for him.

01:03:14.000 It's not a gang war, okay?

01:03:16.000 It's an election to see who governs your city.

01:03:19.000 And once someone wins, everybody else should be like, okay, well, let's hope this guy's got some good fucking plans and it works out great for everybody.

01:03:27.000 And if you don't think like that, you're part of the problem.

01:03:31.000 I mean, people are pitted against each other so much these days that it's gotten kind of ridiculous.

01:03:31.000 Absolutely.

01:03:37.000 It is almost like gang warfare.

01:03:37.000 And you're right.

01:03:42.000 And here's the other thing.

01:03:43.000 It's like we could also say, let's all get along.

01:03:47.000 Well, that's never going to happen because not everybody's going to get along with everybody.

01:03:51.000 I mean, even on a personal basis.

01:03:51.000 Right.

01:03:53.000 I mean, you could pick any, you know, 20 people, put them in a room, and let's all hang out together for a week and all live in the same house.

01:04:02.000 You're not going to get along with everybody.

01:04:04.000 But at the end of the day, our basic principles as humans, those should all be the same with all those people.

01:04:12.000 Yes.

01:04:13.000 You know, which that, to me, that's getting along.

01:04:16.000 That's attainable.

01:04:17.000 It is attainable.

01:04:18.000 And I think that we, like, even somebody that maybe you don't agree with their principles, if it's just two of you sitting at a bus stop talking, it's hard to not, just on a one-on-one basis with people, it's hard to dislike someone that you're stuck with for a couple hours.

01:04:39.000 Right.

01:04:40.000 You start talking, then you find out, oh, well, this cat doesn't believe anything I believe.

01:04:40.000 You know what I mean?

01:04:45.000 But then all of a sudden you say something like, you know, remember when we used to drink Tang?

01:04:49.000 You know, and then the guy.

01:04:51.000 He's an astronaut.

01:04:54.000 And then the guy goes, yeah, we used to drink Tang.

01:04:56.000 The next thing you know, you're having a conversation because you grew up as just kids and humans, you know?

01:05:01.000 Right, right, right.

01:05:02.000 Yeah.

01:05:04.000 I think it's all because of social media is a big part of it.

01:05:07.000 Yes, I totally agree.

01:05:08.000 Because the division when I was a kid, you know, I remember like the Reagan days, like, there was a lot of people who didn't like Reagan, but it was never evil.

01:05:18.000 It was never like this vile hatred of someone that you see today for different political parties and different politicians and just the way we looked at one side of the country versus the other side of the country.

01:05:30.000 It wasn't divided like that.

01:05:32.000 Like, I always had relatives that were, some of them were conservative and some of them were liberal and real liberal.

01:05:38.000 And everybody is like, you disagreed, but they didn't fucking disavow each other because you voted for the wrong person.

01:05:45.000 Like, this is bizarre.

01:05:47.000 And I think that sort of insanity is just accentuated by these weird little echo chambers that people exist in that are also infiltrated by bots.

01:05:57.000 So they're not even real people, half of them.

01:06:00.000 So this one FBI analyst, he estimated that it might be as high as 80% of the people that are communicating online are bots on Twitter.

01:06:00.000 Right, right.

01:06:10.000 Right.

01:06:10.000 Which is fucking insane.

01:06:12.000 Well, yeah.

01:06:13.000 Because it's 80% of the people getting all these other people riled up aren't even people.

01:06:18.000 It's either AI chat bots that are run by China or Russia or even our own government.

01:06:23.000 And then there's actual farms of people that are being told to do these things.

01:06:28.000 Oh, for sure.

01:06:29.000 I mean, now people get jobs in the entertainment business because they're in charge of, I mean, at studios and things, you know, some 22-year-old who's in charge of seeing who has the most followers.

01:06:44.000 Yeah.

01:06:45.000 And they take someone and make them into a star because they got all these followers.

01:06:48.000 And it's like, but they can't do jack shit.

01:06:51.000 It's like, you know, the talent comes, the talent is created as opposed to someone who's talented and given the opportunity, you know.

01:07:00.000 And I think you're right.

01:07:02.000 I mean, social media has really, I mean, it sounds like the old guy chasing kids off their lawn, but it's just the truth.

01:07:10.000 I told my wife when the internet first became a thing, way back when it first started, I said, watch and see.

01:07:18.000 I said, this is going to ruin people's view of each other.

01:07:23.000 It's going to ruin our society.

01:07:25.000 I promise you.

01:07:26.000 You really thought that way back then?

01:07:27.000 Totally.

01:07:28.000 What made you feel that way?

01:07:28.000 Why?

01:07:30.000 Once you start opening it up to well, it's like, it's like, well, now everyone has an opportunity.

01:07:39.000 They look at that as equality, as an opportunity for everyone, that everyone can get on the internet, and now everyone can do something.

01:07:48.000 That's great for the people that actually had something to say or do.

01:07:53.000 But then you got another 80% who have an opportunity, and all of a sudden there's someone because they decided to take pictures of themselves in the bathroom or something, you know.

01:08:07.000 But I swear to God, I saw it all coming.

01:08:11.000 And it was, I mean, it gets out of control.

01:08:16.000 And then AI, for Christ's sakes, yeah, it's fun to watch me in Slingblade talking like Carl, but it's a little baby trying to order french fries.

01:08:27.000 You know, it's funny.

01:08:29.000 But if it's used for that or if there's some medical ways that they can use it, that's awesome.

01:08:34.000 But once you start taking jobs away from people, I mean, the workforce is going to be destroyed because of that stuff.

01:08:46.000 And that's, to me, not cool, unless you're going to find a way to take care of people because it's going to ruin the workforce.

01:08:53.000 I mean, pretty soon you won't need it.

01:08:55.000 For sure.

01:08:56.000 Yeah, and it's going to be interesting to see how we navigate that.

01:08:58.000 But I just, I'm shocked that you picked that out early on because I looked at it the other way.

01:09:03.000 I said, this is going to give people that were outside the system, sort of like you were when you created Slingblade.

01:09:08.000 This is going to give people an opportunity to show their talent that maybe would have never gotten an opportunity to be hired by somebody.

01:09:16.000 That they'll be able to create something completely on their own.

01:09:19.000 And I read all these blogs by people that were really interesting.

01:09:23.000 I was like, okay, I would have never read this guy's book if I just saw it in a bookstore.

01:09:27.000 I wouldn't buy it and pick it up.

01:09:29.000 But I'm reading this guy's, and he's got very interesting insights.

01:09:32.000 And he's just some guy who's a computer coder who lives in Missouri.

01:09:36.000 And somehow or another, he's just smart enough to figure out how to say things in a way that resonates with me.

01:09:43.000 And I would have never seen this guy's words before.

01:09:45.000 And I was like, oh, this is like good because it'll make it much more of a meritocracy.

01:09:50.000 It's like, if you have good stuff, if you have good things, good ideas, those ideas will get out.

01:09:55.000 Yeah, I agree with that still to this day.

01:09:59.000 That too.

01:10:00.000 That's true.

01:10:02.000 And in the beginning, I felt that too.

01:10:03.000 I felt this is great.

01:10:05.000 What I was afraid of was it becoming a runaway train.

01:10:09.000 Well, clearly you were right.

01:10:11.000 And so it was, I did love the opportunity to discover people I wouldn't have otherwise.

01:10:17.000 And I still feel that way.

01:10:18.000 I still discover people on the internet all the time that it's like, wow, I would have never known that.

01:10:23.000 So that does exist.

01:10:26.000 But out of those, you know, 20%, like I said, there's another 80%.

01:10:32.000 For instance, when I was coming up as an actor, we had like 30 critics to worry about.

01:10:38.000 It was Rex Reed and Siskel and Ebert and Jeffrey Lyons and all these people.

01:10:46.000 But you know, there was not a finite number, but semi-finite number of critics.

01:10:53.000 I mean, you had the local ones and all the states, and internationally.

01:10:59.000 But now some guy named Daryl who doesn't like you, you know, can just write a bunch of shit about you and people believe it.

01:11:10.000 Right, right.

01:11:11.000 You know, I've been on lists before.

01:11:12.000 I mean, you can ask people I work with on a set.

01:11:15.000 Like I said, I'm codependent.

01:11:18.000 I'm probably nicer to the crew even than I am, you know, the director and the producers and stuff.

01:11:23.000 I mean, not that I'm not nice to them too, but I love like the Landman crew, best crew I ever worked with.

01:11:31.000 And I go out of my way to make sure that they're okay every day.

01:11:36.000 And they'll tell you that.

01:11:38.000 I mean, I've always been, you know, a decent guy on set to people.

01:11:42.000 I've blown up maybe two or three times ever, and that was always when I was directing.

01:11:46.000 But somehow you look at something on the internet, you could be looking up, how do you make blueberry muffins?

01:11:55.000 And some fucking way, I'll eventually get to something that says what an asshole I am.

01:12:03.000 And when you see that thing pop up, it's like, oh, he eats blueberries every day.

01:12:07.000 And that was related to the blueberry muffin thing, in which I do eat blueberries every day.

01:12:12.000 And it's been said publicly.

01:12:14.000 But then the blueberries turns into, oh, and he's also weird because he's afraid of antiques.

01:12:19.000 And then it's this and that and the other.

01:12:21.000 Next thing you know, I'm on a list of the top 10 actors, and I've seen this a couple of times, who are the most difficult to work with on set.

01:12:30.000 And I'm like, how the hell did this even happen?

01:12:33.000 I mean, that's not true, but somehow somebody said something that then became widespread.

01:12:42.000 And then all of a sudden I end up one of these lists and the people I work with would say, God, it couldn't be further from the truth.

01:12:49.000 Once again, people love to find out that someone's secretly an asshole.

01:12:53.000 Yeah, right.

01:12:54.000 They want that.

01:12:54.000 Yeah.

01:12:55.000 They don't want like, oh, he's the sweetest guy.

01:12:57.000 They want, oh, he's a piece of shit behind the scenes, like the Ellen thing.

01:13:01.000 Like, you know, like Ellen was all like laughing and smiley.

01:13:04.000 And then when everybody found out she's actually kind of mean, they were like, oh, good.

01:13:09.000 Yeah, fuck her. 1.00

01:13:11.000 You know, it's like they wanted that to be true.

01:13:11.000 Right.

01:13:13.000 They were excited that it was true.

01:13:15.000 Absolutely.

01:13:16.000 Yeah.

01:13:16.000 People love to see that.

01:13:18.000 And, yeah, I mean, I don't know.

01:13:21.000 It's also rumors can just get, they just light fire.

01:13:25.000 Remember the Richard Gere gerbil rumor?

01:13:28.000 I grew up in Massachusetts, and my buddy grew up in L.A.

01:13:28.000 Oh, yeah.

01:13:32.000 And I was like, when did you hear that rumor?

01:13:34.000 And he was like, and it was the same time.

01:13:36.000 I'm like, so this fucking rumor burned across the entire country.

01:13:40.000 Probably no basis whatsoever in truth that Richard Gere had to go to the hospital, get a gerbil removed from his ass.

01:13:45.000 And everybody talked about it.

01:13:47.000 And poor Richard Gere is probably at home going, what the fuck?

01:13:50.000 Right.

01:13:50.000 How did that happen?

01:13:51.000 Yeah, it's like, I've never even been near a gerbil.

01:13:55.000 I mean, it's like, but every time everybody would see Richard Gere, you would go, oh, that's the guy with the gerbil up his ass.

01:14:02.000 And they're stamped that way forever.

01:14:05.000 Nobody ever forgets it.

01:14:06.000 And now with the internet, it doesn't go away.

01:14:09.000 No.

01:14:09.000 And if I want something taken down off the internet, I have to prove it's me, but the person who put it up there doesn't have to prove who they are.

01:14:20.000 Right.

01:14:21.000 Right.

01:14:21.000 You know what I mean?

01:14:22.000 Which seems kind of odd to me.

01:14:23.000 But, yeah, that whole thing with Richard Gere, they want it to be true so badly that everybody you talk to who's got the news, you know, who said, hey, guess what happened with Richard Gere?

01:14:39.000 You know, and then he went to so-and-so hospital and, you know, whatever it was.

01:14:44.000 And then you say, nah, come on.

01:14:46.000 I mean, seriously, really and truly.

01:14:48.000 And they go, no, no, no.

01:14:50.000 My neighbors, cousins, and nurse, you know how many fucking nurses were working there that night? 1.00

01:14:56.000 Thousands.

01:14:57.000 Thousands of nurses were on duty. 0.99

01:14:59.000 And I know somebody who knows one of them all across the country.

01:15:04.000 Well, they want it to be true.

01:15:06.000 They want it to be true because he's too handsome.

01:15:08.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:15:09.000 Too handsome, doing too well, too good of an actor.

01:15:13.000 You know, like, fuck that guy.

01:15:15.000 Oh, he like gerbils up his ass.

01:15:17.000 Makes sense.

01:15:18.000 Yeah.

01:15:19.000 And then the idea is that, like, you get so much pussy, just like you get bored. 0.98

01:15:22.000 Oh, you start sucking dicks, putting things up your ass, like, going to the hospital, the G.I. Joe stuffed up there.

01:15:28.000 Oh, yeah.

01:15:29.000 It's just some kind of a fucking rumor.

01:15:32.000 Yeah.

01:15:32.000 Always.

01:15:33.000 It's, you know, it's unfortunate.

01:15:36.000 It's unfortunate people think like that.

01:15:37.000 They want.

01:15:38.000 They want failure.

01:15:40.000 And the thing with me is I like people.

01:15:42.000 I really do.

01:15:43.000 And people tell me, I sign a lot of things and take a lot of pictures of people.

01:15:49.000 And my friends will say, I have friends who won't even look at them, you know, in the entertainment business.

01:15:54.000 They're just like, fuck these guys.

01:15:55.000 Just walk right by them.

01:15:57.000 And I'll go through these press lines.

01:15:59.000 I'll sign stuff all day.

01:16:00.000 And people ask me, they say, why do you do that?

01:16:02.000 I say, A, they put my kids through school.

01:16:05.000 That's why.

01:16:06.000 You know, I owe them, you know, some attention.

01:16:10.000 You know, and the other thing is, it's like, to them, it means something.

01:16:16.000 You know, 50 years from now, somebody's grandkid is going to have an autograph by somebody that means something to them.

01:16:25.000 I mean, it's different than the people selling them.

01:16:27.000 I'm talking about actual fans who want you to write it out to Uncle Albert or whoever it is.

01:16:31.000 Right, right, right.

01:16:33.000 And it means something to them.

01:16:35.000 And I love my fans.

01:16:37.000 I mean, I always have.

01:16:38.000 And I cherish them.

01:16:40.000 I feel blessed every day.

01:16:41.000 And I don't, it's, I mean, it's emotionally exhausting sometimes, you know, because, you know, everybody wants to talk to you for a half hour apiece and you can't do it.

01:16:55.000 But I try, anyway, to talk to them.

01:16:58.000 It's a weird position to be in.

01:17:00.000 It's a very weird position to be in where they know you and you don't know them.

01:17:00.000 It is.

01:17:04.000 And everywhere you go, that's the case.

01:17:05.000 You walk any restaurant you walk into, oh, Billy Bob's here.

01:17:08.000 It's like people want to say hi.

01:17:10.000 They want to come over to your table and shake your hand and talk to you.

01:17:13.000 I got a mouthful of food and it's like, well, you know, they always want to buy you stuff.

01:17:19.000 When I was broke, starving to death most of my life until the last 35 years, nobody ever bought me shit.

01:17:29.000 No.

01:17:30.000 You know, now everybody wants to buy me a drink.

01:17:32.000 And I'm like, well, no, let me buy you guys a drink.

01:17:35.000 It's like, I don't need you to buy me a drink.

01:17:37.000 But then I kind of figured out that what it really is, it's a connection.

01:17:41.000 It's not really about buying the drink.

01:17:44.000 It's more about friendship offering.

01:17:46.000 Exactly.

01:17:47.000 And that's why, you know, you take it.

01:17:50.000 Take the drink and you appreciate it.

01:17:54.000 And occasionally you meet really cool people that way.

01:17:56.000 Absolutely.

01:17:57.000 I meet cool people all the time.

01:17:59.000 All the time.

01:18:00.000 All the time.

01:18:00.000 Yeah.

01:18:01.000 Yeah.

01:18:02.000 The problem is it's just like social media comments.

01:18:05.000 Like if you read 10 great things about you, but then you read one, like that guy's a piece of shit.

01:18:09.000 He owns the crew.

01:18:10.000 Like, oh, fuck you, man.

01:18:12.000 And then that ruins your whole day.

01:18:13.000 Like, 10 people saying you're the nicest guy they've ever met.

01:18:17.000 He's so, so talented and so authentic.

01:18:17.000 We love him.

01:18:20.000 And then one fucking person, and that person gets stuck in your head. 0.85

01:18:23.000 That's the same with meeting people.

01:18:24.000 You know, you can meet 10 amazing people.

01:18:26.000 This is great.

01:18:27.000 And one guy is like, I don't give a shit, but my wife says you're somebody.

01:18:31.000 Ah, fuck you.

01:18:32.000 And that's what you think about the you're sitting in your hotel room smoking cigarettes, like, fuck that guy.

01:18:37.000 Right.

01:18:38.000 Oh, it's amazing how people can get under your skin.

01:18:41.000 That's why they do it.

01:18:41.000 It is.

01:18:42.000 Yeah.

01:18:43.000 Yeah.

01:18:44.000 That's why I always tell comedians, post and ghost.

01:18:47.000 Post something, then get the fuck out of there.

01:18:49.000 Don't read anything about yourself.

01:18:52.000 Don't read the good and don't read the bad.

01:18:54.000 Don't read any of it.

01:18:55.000 You don't want to know.

01:18:56.000 Let them yap. 0.99

01:18:56.000 Let them talk. 0.99

01:18:57.000 Who cares?

01:18:58.000 I quit reading it several years ago.

01:19:01.000 I don't do it anymore.

01:19:03.000 And I just don't even, I don't care about awards anymore.

01:19:08.000 Good for you.

01:19:09.000 I got plenty of them.

01:19:10.000 And because I kind of got in under the wire when awards were kind of real still, you know.

01:19:16.000 Right.

01:19:17.000 And I've won a couple recently.

01:19:19.000 But these days I just look at it as like, oh, okay, we're going to go over here and, you know, have some, you know, dry chicken breast and green beans.

01:19:30.000 You know, listen to them.

01:19:33.000 And we'll listen to people get up there and pontificate about how awesome they are.

01:19:37.000 And, you know, but see, those are the ones that get me.

01:19:41.000 It's like, how about if you're going to get one of these things and you truly are honored by it, well, you honor the people who gave it to you.

01:19:52.000 Just them.

01:19:52.000 Yeah.

01:19:54.000 And don't go up there and talk about saving, you know, the Badgers in Wisconsin or something.

01:19:59.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:20:01.000 It's like, you know, there's a time and place for that, I believe.

01:20:04.000 And, you know, you should just stick to what it is.

01:20:09.000 And people would argue and say, well, no, because I have a voice and because everybody knows me, this is a great platform for me to put this out there.

01:20:17.000 Well, how about this?

01:20:19.000 If you have a billion dollars and you want to save the Badgers, fucking save them.

01:20:27.000 I mean, you got plenty of money to save the Badgers.

01:20:30.000 Trust me.

01:20:31.000 That's barely going to cut into your budget.

01:20:33.000 Right, right.

01:20:34.000 You know what I mean?

01:20:35.000 If that's really your cause, talking about it is just going to annoy people.

01:20:39.000 Everybody knows what you're really doing.

01:20:40.000 You're saying how awesome you are because you care about that.

01:20:42.000 That's exactly right.

01:20:43.000 You're saying how special you are because you're really concerned about people in Sudan or whatever the fuck it is.

01:20:48.000 It's like a flag that you carry with you to let everybody know that you're an amazing person.

01:20:53.000 Yeah, if you're going to do it, just do it.

01:20:54.000 I've always felt like, I mean, it's easy to say someone's never won an award, but I always felt like awards for art are stupid.

01:21:02.000 Stupid.

01:21:02.000 Because I don't.

01:21:03.000 The concept is stupid.

01:21:05.000 If people enjoy it, that's the reward.

01:21:07.000 That's the award.

01:21:08.000 You got it.

01:21:09.000 You won.

01:21:10.000 People enjoyed it.

01:21:11.000 You did something.

01:21:12.000 They enjoyed it.

01:21:13.000 Congratulations.

01:21:13.000 Yes.

01:21:14.000 And everything else is just jerking off.

01:21:18.000 Well, they become shows.

01:21:19.000 Yeah.

01:21:20.000 Now it's just about the show.

01:21:22.000 And you may as well be watching, what's the one where all the pretty people live in an apartment together and that kind of stuff. 0.98

01:21:30.000 Right, right, right.

01:21:31.000 And like my buddy Rick Overton.

01:21:33.000 Overton.

01:21:33.000 You know Rick?

01:21:35.000 I know him very well.

01:21:35.000 I go way back with Rick, and Rick did a thing, a voiceover thing for an album of ours years ago.

01:21:41.000 And he said, he was talking about, he goes, when did a dude, a regular dude sitting in a hot tub with six models become fucking reality?

01:21:59.000 Big brother, right?

01:22:01.000 Yeah, but they're all shows now.

01:22:04.000 And if you also look you in the eye, the ones I don't dig are like if you didn't like, let's say you hated Landman and you tell me that.

01:22:15.000 You say, you know what, I don't get it.

01:22:17.000 I just don't get it.

01:22:18.000 I can accept that.

01:22:20.000 I go, okay, well, sorry, you don't dig it, Jump.

01:22:22.000 I mean, we're having a great time on it.

01:22:23.000 And, you know, a lot of people like it, but I respect that.

01:22:27.000 It's the ones who say, hey, I love your, you know, this is with journalists mostly.

01:22:32.000 They'll say, oh, it's the best show on TV.

01:22:35.000 Then you read their article in their paper or wherever it is, in Sweden or wherever the fuck it is, and they just rip you a new asshole. 0.70

01:22:44.000 And it's like, that's what I don't respect.

01:22:46.000 It's like, if you don't like it, tell me you don't like it right now.

01:22:49.000 Don't get me to say a bunch of shit about it.

01:22:51.000 Exactly.

01:22:52.000 And then take the piss out of it.

01:22:55.000 That's what's wrong.

01:22:56.000 And I'll tell you, here's one.

01:22:59.000 Screen actors guild.

01:23:01.000 I've been in the screen actors guild since the mid-80s.

01:23:05.000 I mean, a long time.

01:23:08.000 I've done so many Q ⁇ As for SAG audiences out of all this.

01:23:15.000 And these are your peers.

01:23:17.000 Now, maybe if there's an organization that gives out an award, maybe it's political, maybe I don't get it because they don't like me or whatever it is.

01:23:25.000 Okay, I get it.

01:23:27.000 All the actors at a SAG thing will come up to me or any other actor-based or entertainer-based award where it's actually your peers voting for you.

01:23:40.000 If you go to the cocktail party after the Q ⁇ A, they couldn't be further up your ass. 0.98

01:23:48.000 Then, guess how many SAG awards I have in all these years?

01:23:55.000 I think one.

01:23:57.000 And it was like a group, an ensemble deal.

01:24:01.000 And I think I've been nominated twice, maybe three times, in a 40-something year career in this.

01:24:09.000 They have given me the least notice.

01:24:12.000 My own cats who want to be in the movie with me.

01:24:16.000 Hey, see if you can get me in Landman.

01:24:18.000 You know, who you're voting for?

01:24:20.000 Adrian Brody, you know, whoever it is.

01:24:23.000 Whoever they voted for, it wasn't me.

01:24:25.000 Now, I don't give a shit.

01:24:27.000 I really don't care.

01:24:28.000 When I do these Q ⁇ As now, I do it because I like talking to actors and kind of giving them some information about what we do, hearing what their questions are, what they want to know about.

01:24:37.000 That's why I do it now.

01:24:38.000 Has nothing to do.

01:24:39.000 I actually have, I told an audience in Boston last year, I said, do me a favor, please don't vote for me.

01:24:47.000 I said, I'm not here to beg you for an award.

01:24:50.000 So if you don't want to vote for me, don't let me change your mind today because this is just, I'm just talking to you guys right now.

01:24:59.000 And I mean that.

01:25:00.000 You know, I'm not just talking about.

01:25:01.000 Well, that's a healthy perspective.

01:25:02.000 That's a good way to look at it.

01:25:03.000 Yeah, the award thing is a weird thing.

01:25:06.000 I think one of my favorite award show moments was Marlon Brando when he didn't want to accept his Academy Award.

01:25:13.000 So he brought up this Native American woman who talked about the plight of Native Americans in America.

01:25:17.000 And then it turned out that wasn't really a Native American woman. 0.99

01:25:20.000 She was a crazy person. 0.86

01:25:21.000 Right.

01:25:22.000 Your sister out in her.

01:25:23.000 She wasn't at all Native American.

01:25:25.000 She was just fucking nuts.

01:25:26.000 Oh, my God.

01:25:27.000 She came up with a completely fake name.

01:25:29.000 Oh, God.

01:25:30.000 She just went up there and just was a nut and just got all this attention.

01:25:35.000 And she tricked Marlon Brando and she tricked all those people.

01:25:38.000 And everybody's like, you're amazing.

01:25:39.000 She's amazing.

01:25:41.000 And to me, that's Hollywood.

01:25:43.000 That moment is what it's really about.

01:25:45.000 That and when they gave Will Smith a standing ovation after he smacked Chris Rock.

01:25:45.000 Oh, yeah.

01:25:50.000 Like, okay, this is you guys.

01:25:50.000 Yeah.

01:25:52.000 This is your, you're fucking insane.

01:25:54.000 You guys are nuts.

01:25:55.000 You have no idea which way is north.

01:25:58.000 Someone says it's that way.

01:25:59.000 You're like, it's that way.

01:26:00.000 Everybody runs in that direction.

01:26:02.000 People have been given awards that didn't actually win because they fucked something up, you know, and they can't go back and say, well, actually, you know, and, you know, it was on the show.

01:26:14.000 It's got a stick, you know, and that kind of thing.

01:26:17.000 But you reminded me of something that I thought was hilarious with the woman being a nut on this thing. 1.00

01:26:24.000 Remember when there was a cat who was, I think it's happened more than once now, but the original guy I saw, I think, I don't remember exactly.

01:26:33.000 It might have been somewhere in Africa, but some politician or somebody was giving a speech, and there was a cat acting like the sign language guy.

01:26:41.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:26:42.000 And he was doing stuff that looked like he was dancing like James Brown.

01:26:47.000 It was like it had nothing to do with sign language.

01:26:49.000 He would literally flip around and do things like this.

01:26:53.000 It's like, I don't know sign language.

01:26:55.000 I know that wasn't fucking sign language.

01:26:58.000 Well, sign language is also different everywhere you go.

01:27:01.000 There's American Sign Language.

01:27:02.000 There's English Sign Language.

01:27:04.000 It's a completely different language.

01:27:05.000 Which is really weird.

01:27:05.000 Yeah.

01:27:07.000 Yeah, it's very strange.

01:27:07.000 Yeah.

01:27:09.000 Yeah, my buddy Moshe Kasher, his parents were deaf, so he can sign, and he explained to me the whole thing and how unique it is.

01:27:17.000 And he can have full conversations with sign language, both alphabetically and with words.

01:27:17.000 Yeah.

01:27:23.000 He could do anything, but it's American sign language.

01:27:25.000 So if he went and tried to talk to someone in some other country, even if they speak English, they have a totally different kind of sign language.

01:27:32.000 So it's just like actual language, where if you and I go to China, we're not going to know what the fuck to say.

01:27:37.000 Exactly.

01:27:38.000 So in sign language, yeah.

01:27:39.000 And sign language is an important thing.

01:27:42.000 That's a good thing that's happened over the last couple of decades is they actually do when there's important information, they always have a signer there.

01:27:53.000 I think there's a lawsuit right now to make the Trump administration bring sign language people back to those White House press briefings.

01:28:02.000 Yeah, I read something.

01:28:02.000 Really?

01:28:03.000 See if you can find that.

01:28:04.000 I read something about that today.

01:28:05.000 I'm like, why would they take that out?

01:28:07.000 Why would you remove sign language thing?

01:28:09.000 Yeah.

01:28:10.000 I've had them on comedy shows sometimes.

01:28:12.000 Like if you perform at some theater and there's some sort of a mandatory requirement for a sign language person, and so there's someone that has to keep up with the jokes and explain sarcasm while you're in the middle.

01:28:25.000 Like it's very weird.

01:28:25.000 Wow.

01:28:26.000 That's very weird.

01:28:27.000 That's a hard job.

01:28:28.000 Well, I always fuck with the person too.

01:28:30.000 Because I was like, this is so crazy.

01:28:32.000 You have to try to decipher that.

01:28:35.000 Here it is.

01:28:36.000 Judge orders White House to use American Sign Language Interpreters at briefings.

01:28:40.000 So were there not ones ever before?

01:28:40.000 Yeah.

01:28:44.000 No, it says they stopped when they stopped during the Trump administration.

01:28:49.000 Oh, that's crazy.

01:28:51.000 Well, that's not smart.

01:28:54.000 I don't remember it much when I was growing up.

01:28:57.000 I don't remember it at all.

01:28:58.000 Yeah.

01:28:59.000 I don't remember it at all.

01:29:00.000 I knew it was a thing, but I never saw it at speeches or anything like that.

01:29:05.000 But yeah, it's important.

01:29:08.000 So can I ask you a comedy question or because it's always fascinated me.

01:29:13.000 I mean, people have said to me before, like, especially if I get on a roll and I've had a few beers, they say, you ought to do it, just, you know, just for one night, just do a stand-up in LA or New York or somewhere or Texas, wherever.

01:29:27.000 And I'm like, it's the scariest thing in the world to me.

01:29:32.000 Like, if you and I are just hanging out, you know, all of us, you know, having a beer, you know, maybe I can be kind of funny sometimes.

01:29:40.000 But to get on a stage, and here's the reason I'm afraid of it is because if you're doing a play, if you're doing, you know, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or whatever the hell it is, you don't really know the reaction from the audience.

01:29:57.000 I mean, it's like they either love the shit out of this or they don't get it or whatever, but you don't know in the moment.

01:30:04.000 If you're a stand-up comic, you have one reason to be up there, and that's to make them laugh.

01:30:10.000 So if you don't make them laugh pretty soon, you're fucked.

01:30:15.000 And I mean, I can't imagine bombing as a comic.

01:30:20.000 And I think about different people over the years that had a very different type of comedy, you know.

01:30:29.000 And like Stephen Wright, for instance, perfect.

01:30:33.000 Stephen Wright, who walks out there, doesn't say shit to the audience for a minute, takes a drink of water, and then he goes, So last night I accidentally put my car key into my door at my house and started my house up.

01:30:51.000 I drove it around the block.

01:30:53.000 Cop pulled me over and said, Where do you live?

01:30:55.000 I said, Right here.

01:30:58.000 Or he goes, he says, I bought some powdered water, only I don't know what to mix it with.

01:31:04.000 I mean, you know, that kind of stuff.

01:31:06.000 So, this is very sort of like, nobody ever did that before until he did that.

01:31:11.000 And I'm like, what was it like in the beginning for that guy where people just going, the fuck are you talking about?

01:31:17.000 Well, you know, it's interesting with him.

01:31:18.000 He existed in, there's a great documentary on comedy in Boston called When Stand-Up Stood Out.

01:31:25.000 This guy, Fran Salamito, who was a comic in Boston, created it.

01:31:28.000 And it's all about there's a very Boston was a very unique environment in stand-up where all these comedians were just doing stand-up for Boston audiences.

01:31:40.000 They just didn't travel.

01:31:42.000 They just stayed there.

01:31:43.000 And they were some of the best guys that have ever done stand-up ever.

01:31:47.000 But a lot of it was regional, and a lot of it didn't translate when they left Boston.

01:31:51.000 But they were so fucking good.

01:31:54.000 And there was just a giant group of them.

01:31:57.000 And some of them, like Lenny Clark, broke through and Jay Leno, of course, and Louis C.K. came out of there, Bill Burr.

01:32:03.000 A lot of guys broke through, right?

01:32:04.000 But there was a core group of guys that were a part of this.

01:32:09.000 There was a group that would perform at this Chinese restaurant that was also a comedy club called the Ding-Ho.

01:32:15.000 And the Ding-Ho, I started in 88, and it was already closed.

01:32:19.000 It had closed by, I think, 84, 85, or something like that.

01:32:22.000 The guy was a gambler, lost all the money, and lost his fucking Chinese restaurant, the place went under.

01:32:27.000 But the scene still stayed.

01:32:30.000 And everybody was just about the art.

01:32:34.000 There was no way to be famous.

01:32:35.000 It was impossible.

01:32:37.000 You were locally known, you know, so you could perform at a club and people go, oh, Steve Sweeney's going to be there.

01:32:42.000 We'll go see him.

01:32:43.000 But when Stephen Wright got on the tonight show, it fucked it up for everybody because everybody's like, why him?

01:32:52.000 Why not me?

01:32:53.000 And they got mad because Stephen Wright had this very bizarre, absurdist act that translated perfectly to like a seven-minute late night, you know, Johnny Carson set.

01:33:05.000 And he was the guy that broke out.

01:33:09.000 He was the guy that broke out.

01:33:11.000 We're all these fucking killers, man.

01:33:13.000 And this one guy who's just like weird and absurd with fucking crazy hair and all fucked up.

01:33:19.000 Strange.

01:33:20.000 I used to work at a fire hydrant factory.

01:33:23.000 You couldn't park anywhere near the place.

01:33:26.000 It was like those kind of jokes.

01:33:28.000 Right, exactly.

01:33:29.000 And he created like a lot of resentment where these guys were upset that this guy who didn't do as good as them on stage was on the tonight show.

01:33:40.000 What about me?

01:33:41.000 And it like changed the thing that they were doing.

01:33:44.000 Wow.

01:33:45.000 That's amazing.

01:33:46.000 Which like when Steve Martin first came out, I worked as a roadie, you know, for a lot of bands when I was a kid.

01:33:53.000 And so, you know, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, those guys, they created a thing we hadn't seen before, you know, from anybody.

01:34:03.000 I mean, Richard Pryor doing his as like stories.

01:34:07.000 They weren't jokes.

01:34:08.000 They were just, he would just start talking about these people he knew and then, you know, go through the stories.

01:34:12.000 And Carlin, you know, coming up with all the witty stuff.

01:34:16.000 You know, here's some partial baseball scores: one, three, seven, you know, like that.

01:34:23.000 And so I was privileged as a kid to watch new brands of humor come out on TV that we could see.

01:34:32.000 And I was roadieing a couple of shows for the nitty-gritty dirt band, who I still kind of keep in touch with.

01:34:40.000 And their opening act was Steve Martin because he plays banjo.

01:34:44.000 So he played banjo before the dirt band came out.

01:34:46.000 This is when I'm a teenager.

01:34:48.000 And he did the arrow through the head, the whole thing.

01:34:51.000 But he had kind of longer, curly hair, and he wore buckskin clothes and played a banjo.

01:34:57.000 And there was a front-of-house guy named Danny Smith who I worked for, you know, with this sound company.

01:35:03.000 And I was back there at the front of the house console with him, and I see this guy come out, and I lost my mind.

01:35:13.000 I was screaming, crying, laughing, you know, with some of the shit he did because he just came out and just said, I'm going to do the stupidest shit you've ever seen in your life, and people are going to laugh.

01:35:25.000 And it's like, you know, and what he would just do, the whole excuse me, or whatever, you know.

01:35:30.000 And so here's a guy coming out being over the top and putting arrows to his head and shit.

01:35:37.000 And people couldn't get enough of it.

01:35:39.000 And before he did that, nobody else had ever done that.

01:35:43.000 Right.

01:35:43.000 And all of a sudden, here you got a guy that, you know, is doing it.

01:35:47.000 And that became more the norm for a while.

01:35:50.000 You know, it's like it spawned a lot of other people.

01:35:54.000 You know, it's like when we did Bad Santa, there hadn't been anything like that.

01:35:59.000 And the next thing you know, after Bad Santa, there's bad moms, bad teachers, bad grandpas, bad next door neighbors, you know, bad guy who works at the dry cleaners, you know.

01:36:09.000 And so, and those will last for several years, you know, where you, where people are kind of getting that in their heads, and naturally they're influenced by it, and that brand lasts for a while.

01:36:21.000 Like Yellowstone.

01:36:22.000 There's probably like a lot of Yellowstone-type ideas that get pitched after that.

01:36:27.000 Absolutely.

01:36:28.000 Yeah.

01:36:29.000 Steve Martin got so big that he decided to quit.

01:36:33.000 So he was doing stand-up and he was like, I lost all touch with the audience because anything I said was funny.

01:36:39.000 I lost what's real and what's not real.

01:36:42.000 He was too big.

01:36:43.000 And so he decided to not do it anymore, which is insane.

01:36:47.000 Right.

01:36:47.000 Because if you really think about it, like this the thing that he loved and he was at the time like one of the only acts that was doing arenas.

01:36:55.000 I mean, he was probably one of the first comedians of all time to do these huge places.

01:37:00.000 And people would come to see him as this variety act.

01:37:03.000 It was part, you know, King Tut.

01:37:06.000 Yeah, the King Tut song.

01:37:07.000 Oh, for sure.

01:37:08.000 Let's get small.

01:37:10.000 It was just so unique.

01:37:12.000 And he just decided to step away from it and just do movies.

01:37:16.000 And it's so wild because when you mentioned that thing about the big arenas and stuff, another thing that's scary to me about comedy is like if you're not in a room where everybody gets every nuance, that would scare me.

01:37:31.000 I mean, to be, you know, of course, he was that big.

01:37:34.000 And it was a big thing where people could see the big movements and stuff.

01:37:37.000 But, you know, Lewis Black, right?

01:37:39.000 Sure.

01:37:40.000 Lewis Black was, we played, this is probably, you know, at least a decade ago, probably more.

01:37:46.000 And we played in Milwaukee at County Stadium.

01:37:52.000 And it was a biker rally deal we were playing at.

01:37:58.000 And we came on before Kid Rock.

01:38:01.000 So we play our set.

01:38:03.000 There are 250,000 people at this thing.

01:38:06.000 Wow.

01:38:06.000 And it was like, you know, half of Woodstock.

01:38:08.000 And so we went out there and had a great show.

01:38:13.000 We come off and everything.

01:38:14.000 Well, Lewis was there.

01:38:15.000 So aside from the main giant stage where the concerts are going on, they have one of those blow-up tents, the ones where the sound's never good in there.

01:38:27.000 And it looks like the Dallas Cowboys training facility tent or whatever it is like that.

01:38:33.000 So Lewis comes by the bus to say, hey, we talked for a few minutes.

01:38:37.000 And I knew him from the Sunset Marquee.

01:38:40.000 He would be in the bar there sometimes in L.A.

01:38:43.000 And so we're talking and I said, yeah, man, there's a huge crowd out there.

01:38:49.000 He goes, no, you guys are awesome.

01:38:50.000 He goes, you don't have anything to worry about out here.

01:38:53.000 They loved you.

01:38:53.000 He goes, try doing comedy in a blow-up tent with people in folding chairs.

01:38:57.000 He goes, that's not fun.

01:39:01.000 And especially with a guy like him, whose whole thing is about anger and all that kind of stuff.

01:39:06.000 And you've got people in their little folding chairs in the tent, you know, with probably some shitty microphone.

01:39:12.000 Yeah.

01:39:13.000 Those shows are always hell.

01:39:15.000 Those are like festival shows or shows where they have like a bunch of different things going on simultaneously.

01:39:20.000 There's a band over there and there's a comedy tent over here.

01:39:23.000 I've done a few of those.

01:39:24.000 It's horrible.

01:39:25.000 They're always hell.

01:39:26.000 They always do it.

01:39:26.000 Yeah.

01:39:27.000 There are different stages.

01:39:28.000 So you got like five bands and you can hear every one of them and you're trying to be funny.

01:39:34.000 Yeah, that's not a good environment for comedy.

01:39:37.000 I mean, I've done a lot of different kinds of comedy, like arenas, theaters, comedy clubs is really where it's supposed to.

01:39:46.000 Everybody agrees with that.

01:39:48.000 Because I think what comedy is, is you're performing, but you're also hypnotizing people.

01:39:55.000 What you're doing is you're getting them to think the way you think.

01:39:57.000 You're putting people into your mindset.

01:39:59.000 When I watch a comic that's really good, when they're on stage, I let them think for me.

01:40:02.000 I'm like, think for me.

01:40:03.000 Take me on a trip.

01:40:05.000 Take me on a trip to the way you think of things.

01:40:07.000 And you lock in with these.

01:40:09.000 And it's much easier to do that.

01:40:12.000 It feels like as an audience member, it's much easier to get locked in if there's only 100 other people in the room with you or 200 other people in the room.

01:40:20.000 But as soon as you get to like 16,000, it starts getting weird.

01:40:24.000 It's a different thing.

01:40:25.000 Now it's a show.

01:40:27.000 It's a big show.

01:40:28.000 You're not like really, the only exception is the round.

01:40:28.000 For sure.

01:40:33.000 The round is weird because the stage is like this little circle and everyone's around you and it's oddly intimate.

01:40:41.000 Even if there's like, even if I've done the round in Madison Square Garden, so there's like 16,000 people in there.

01:40:47.000 But because they're all looking at each other, everyone sees everybody's face.

01:40:52.000 It's intimate now.

01:40:53.000 Now it's not a separation between the crowd and the performer who's on the stage.

01:40:59.000 Now we're all in this together.

01:41:00.000 It's like a big hug.

01:41:01.000 It's very weird.

01:41:03.000 That's an interesting point.

01:41:04.000 We've played shows with the band like that in certain theaters where, of course, for a loud ass band like we are, sometimes we're a little big for the room.

01:41:15.000 But that's an interesting point, especially the thing about people being able to see each other because then you don't want to be the dick that everybody's going, I wish that guy would shut the fuck up.

01:41:25.000 You know what I mean?

01:41:26.000 It's like they're right there.

01:41:27.000 Because in a Coliseum, these cats in the back, just hooting and hollering and shit, not paying any attention.

01:41:34.000 It's a different thing.

01:41:35.000 Can I pee?

01:41:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:41:37.000 We'll pause right here.

01:41:38.000 We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.

01:41:41.000 I can throw this in a cup.

01:41:42.000 It doesn't matter.

01:41:43.000 Unless you want to.

01:41:45.000 Oh, I don't care.

01:41:45.000 No, it doesn't matter.

01:41:46.000 Yeah.

01:41:47.000 Bud Light's cool.

01:41:48.000 They sponsor the UFC.

01:41:52.000 And we're back.

01:41:53.000 Where were we?

01:41:53.000 What were we talking about?

01:41:55.000 When we were on comedy, and then I just talked about Lewis Black.

01:42:00.000 Yeah, we're talking about fear.

01:42:02.000 Yeah.

01:42:02.000 Fear of performing.

01:42:03.000 Yeah.

01:42:04.000 And hypnosis.

01:42:05.000 Yeah.

01:42:05.000 About how it's kind of like hypnosis.

01:42:08.000 So it's a weird art form.

01:42:09.000 But yeah, the bombing is horrible, but it's also the killing is the greatest feeling of all time.

01:42:14.000 So it's like the only way you get one is with the possibility of the other.

01:42:19.000 Right.

01:42:19.000 You know, the only reason why you're willing to go through the bombing is because you know how great it feels when you're not bombing.

01:42:24.000 Right.

01:42:25.000 You know, and killing is so great because you know that it doesn't have to work out.

01:42:31.000 It could be terrible.

01:42:33.000 Yeah.

01:42:34.000 But it's a weird art form, and it's a very new one.

01:42:39.000 That's the really, I think, in my opinion, real modern stand-up, you could trace back to one guy, and it's Lenny Bruce.

01:42:46.000 Yeah.

01:42:46.000 Without him, I don't think there is, I mean, it probably would have been invented eventually.

01:42:50.000 Right.

01:42:50.000 But he's the guy.

01:42:51.000 Like, that's true.

01:42:52.000 Like, we have one person and we have film of him.

01:42:56.000 It's not like the first guy to pick up a guitar.

01:42:58.000 Like, who's that guy?

01:42:59.000 Yeah.

01:42:59.000 Try finding him.

01:43:01.000 Like, who invented the fucking drums?

01:43:03.000 Like, good luck.

01:43:05.000 Because they didn't really, like you said, before him, that wasn't, I mean, he made comedy performers, stand-up comedians, like rock stars, you know.

01:43:16.000 And it was before that, I had all the controversy and all that kind of thing.

01:43:21.000 Because before then, it was like variety shows.

01:43:23.000 If you have Bob Hope and those guys, they're always on some TV show, and it was usually them and someone else.

01:43:29.000 Yes.

01:43:29.000 You know, and yeah.

01:43:32.000 Did you ever know Rodney Dangerfeld?

01:43:34.000 Yes.

01:43:35.000 I didn't know him well, but I did meet him.

01:43:37.000 And funny enough, I worked when I was 19, I worked as a security guard at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts.

01:43:45.000 It's like this amphitheater in Massachusetts.

01:43:49.000 And Rodney was performing there.

01:43:51.000 And it was at the stage of Rodney's life where he only wore a bathrobe on stage, buck naked with slippers and a bathrobe.

01:43:59.000 And I saw Rodney when I was working there.

01:44:02.000 I was like by the backstage area.

01:44:04.000 I saw Rodney walking in the hallway, pacing with his fucking bathrobe on.

01:44:09.000 I'm like, this is the greatest thing of all time.

01:44:11.000 This guy's just going to go out there in a bathrobe.

01:44:13.000 This was 1986.

01:44:17.000 Wow.

01:44:17.000 Yeah.

01:44:18.000 And so he went out there with his fucking bathrobe and just murdered.

01:44:22.000 Murder.

01:44:22.000 I mean, murder.

01:44:23.000 Oh, yeah.

01:44:24.000 To the point where people were falling out of their chairs, dying, laughing.

01:44:28.000 And I was like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life.

01:44:31.000 This guy's in a fucking bathroom.

01:44:32.000 You want to talk about not giving a fuck?

01:44:34.000 He really didn't give a fuck anymore.

01:44:37.000 And I wish I had known him where I could have asked him why the bathrobe.

01:44:41.000 Like, what was it about that?

01:44:43.000 But I've got to think that it was like the ultimate not caring, the ultimate relaxing.

01:44:49.000 When are you ever more relaxed than when you get out of the shower?

01:44:52.000 You just put on a fucking bathrobe, your dick swinging out there in the wind, and he just walked out in front of the whole crowd like that.

01:44:59.000 Yeah.

01:44:59.000 15,000 people watching Rodney in a bathrobe, just murder it.

01:45:04.000 Nick Nolte used to do that.

01:45:05.000 Did he, really?

01:45:06.000 Nolte would do press junkets and interviews with his pajamas on and a robe.

01:45:13.000 Wow.

01:45:13.000 He did it for years.

01:45:14.000 Yeah.

01:45:15.000 And Nolte just was like, man, I just want to be comfortable.

01:45:18.000 Nolte had one of the greatest sayings for when somebody would come up to him who was a fan or whatever, you know.

01:45:30.000 And he was just messing with him if it wasn't serious.

01:45:34.000 But somebody'd come and say, Mr. Nolte, I don't want to bother you.

01:45:38.000 And he'd go, too late.

01:45:42.000 I met Nick Nolte in the 90s because I was on a show called News Radio.

01:45:48.000 And one of the stars of the show was Vicki Lewis.

01:45:52.000 And Vicki Lewis was dating Nick Nulty at the time.

01:45:54.000 So he was always hanging around.

01:45:55.000 I knew Vicki.

01:45:56.000 And I got to know him.

01:45:58.000 He was a really fucking nice guy.

01:46:00.000 And then one time I'm in Fry's Electronics going to get a motherboard.

01:46:04.000 That was back in the days where I would make my own computers.

01:46:07.000 I would build my own computers and play video games on them.

01:46:10.000 So I'd get great motherboards and a really good video card and all that jazz.

01:46:14.000 And I see this dude with glasses on who's going over this box.

01:46:20.000 And I go, hey, man, what's up?

01:46:23.000 He goes, oh, hey, Joe.

01:46:24.000 And I was like, to me, it's the coolest thing in the world that Nick Nolte knew who I was.

01:46:29.000 Outside of the set.

01:46:30.000 Like outside of the set, it was normal.

01:46:32.000 Inside the set, rather.

01:46:33.000 He's there with Vicki.

01:46:33.000 It was normal.

01:46:34.000 He says to hi to everybody.

01:46:36.000 But to meet him in an electronic store, I was like, this is the craziest thing of all time.

01:46:41.000 I'm like 27 at the time.

01:46:43.000 I'm like, this is just so nuts.

01:46:45.000 I know Nick Nolte.

01:46:46.000 This is fucking insane.

01:46:47.000 That's amazing.

01:46:48.000 I knew Vicky, too.

01:46:50.000 Skinny little red-haired gal. 1.00

01:46:52.000 Crazy voice.

01:46:53.000 Oh, right.

01:46:54.000 Oh, my God.

01:46:55.000 Could she sing?

01:46:56.000 Oh, my God.

01:46:56.000 Yeah.

01:46:57.000 Powerful voice.

01:46:59.000 Yeah.

01:46:59.000 To like a talent, like wow.

01:47:03.000 That's that to me is one of the most impressive things when someone could just sing their fucking ass off.

01:47:09.000 Like, because I can't sing at all.

01:47:11.000 So, when I hear someone sing like that, I'm like, God, what can you do with your voice?

01:47:15.000 That is insane.

01:47:17.000 The beauty of a good song is like, man, it's one of the most misunderstood things that we love.

01:47:27.000 Because I think it's an art form that creates a response in people that's just like a drug.

01:47:35.000 Like, if there's a drug that you could take that made you feel like when Midnight Rider comes on the radio and it's just the right time to hear it, like maybe you just had a shot, you know, and your buddy tells you something, you're like, oh, yeah, man, that was fucking great.

01:47:52.000 And then all of a sudden, doodle doom doom doom.

01:47:56.000 It's just, it's like, oh, yeah.

01:47:56.000 You know what I mean?

01:47:59.000 And everybody's like, woo!

01:48:01.000 It's a drug.

01:48:02.000 It really is a drug.

01:48:03.000 And some songs are made for the car.

01:48:07.000 Yeah.

01:48:08.000 And then other songs are made for at home.

01:48:10.000 Yeah.

01:48:11.000 Just laying around, like especially back in my hippie days.

01:48:14.000 It's like you weren't going to listen to King Crimson or Pink Floyd in the car.

01:48:17.000 Right.

01:48:18.000 You'd run off the road.

01:48:20.000 But Midnight Rider is the car song.

01:48:25.000 That and Radar Love.

01:48:26.000 Radar Love.

01:48:26.000 Oh, yeah.

01:48:27.000 That's a moment.

01:48:28.000 I saw those cats live.

01:48:29.000 Really?

01:48:30.000 Golden Earring.

01:48:31.000 They opened for Frank Zappa and the Mother's Invention.

01:48:36.000 Oh, wow.

01:48:38.000 Wow.

01:48:39.000 A Dutch band.

01:48:41.000 Oh, wow.

01:48:42.000 That's wild.

01:48:44.000 That was a song I used to listen to when I go to visit my girlfriend.

01:48:46.000 She was in Western Massachusetts.

01:48:47.000 It was like an hour and a half drive.

01:48:49.000 I listened to Radar Love.

01:48:51.000 Oh, yeah.

01:48:52.000 Yeah.

01:48:53.000 Been driving all night, man.

01:48:54.000 Way on the wheel.

01:48:57.000 It's one of those songs that make you think you are the guy in the song.

01:49:00.000 Oh, yeah.

01:49:01.000 You're the star of the song.

01:49:03.000 There's songs like that, like Shooting Star by Bad Company.

01:49:03.000 Yeah.

01:49:08.000 You know, everybody wants to be that guy.

01:49:10.000 Everybody, you're like, yeah, that's me, man.

01:49:10.000 Yeah.

01:49:12.000 Oh, yeah.

01:49:13.000 I'm going to be a superstar.

01:49:14.000 Then I'm going to die young and everyone's going to miss me.

01:49:18.000 It was like in the John Lennon documentary where that cat, that homeless hippie cat, comes up to his door, you know, and he's kind of starving and stuff.

01:49:25.000 And he says, I don't know if you ever saw it, but he's obviously been living in the bushes, you know, and he thinks that one of Lennon's songs was about him.

01:49:37.000 I think he probably had a little schizophrenia or something, you know.

01:49:40.000 And he was, and Lennon answered the door, you know, and talking to him.

01:49:43.000 It's in the documentary.

01:49:45.000 And he says, well, when you were singing that, I mean, it's like, I felt that, you know, you're singing about me.

01:49:52.000 And it's like, and Lennon just says, no, he goes, I only write songs about me.

01:49:58.000 He said, I don't know about your life.

01:50:00.000 He goes, all I write about is my experience with stuff.

01:50:03.000 So it's not about you.

01:50:04.000 But he said, are you hungry?

01:50:05.000 And the guy goes, yeah, next thing you know, he invites them in and they eat and stuff like that at his house.

01:50:11.000 But sometimes, you know, some art form can influence people so much that they identify with it so much that it becomes that to them.

01:50:22.000 Especially people who have some mental issues or something like that can really speak to them.

01:50:29.000 I mean, you know, sometimes in a negative way.

01:50:29.000 Yeah.

01:50:32.000 I mean, once again, John Lennon, that cat, you know, I mean, read Catch Her in the Rye.

01:50:39.000 Catch her in the Rye.

01:50:40.000 He thought he was that cat in there, you know.

01:50:43.000 Yeah.

01:50:44.000 Well, people are very malleable.

01:50:46.000 And some people, mentally ill people, extremely.

01:50:50.000 And something, one song, one book, one movie can, I mean, how many people went nuts after they watched Taxi Driver?

01:50:58.000 I'd like to know that.

01:50:58.000 Oh, yeah.

01:50:59.000 How many people thought they were Travis?

01:51:01.000 Yeah.

01:51:02.000 For sure.

01:51:04.000 That was a fucking intense performance.

01:51:07.000 De Niro in the early days, goddamn that guy.

01:51:11.000 Yeah, he was great.

01:51:13.000 Really great.

01:51:16.000 And it's funny how many comedies he does now playing a dad or a grandpa.

01:51:21.000 Angry Rock.

01:51:23.000 Yeah.

01:51:24.000 Meet the Falkers.

01:51:25.000 Yeah, that kind of stuff.

01:51:28.000 Yeah.

01:51:29.000 It's so funny.

01:51:31.000 You know, Duvall, my mentors, you know, were Duval and Bruce Dern.

01:51:39.000 Oh, wow.

01:51:40.000 And guys like that.

01:51:41.000 And the fact that not only did I get to meet them, but work with them several times a piece.

01:51:49.000 And once you know everybody, you start to sometimes you hate to hear yourself talk because I'll be talking to some younger actor, you know, like 25 or 30.

01:52:02.000 And they'll say, oh, yeah, I really love that movie So-and-so with Robert Duvall.

01:52:10.000 I go, yeah, well, he's my mentor.

01:52:12.000 He brought me up.

01:52:12.000 And it's like, and yeah, look at it.

01:52:15.000 I watched some of the old movies too.

01:52:17.000 You know, like, I always thought Lauren Bacall was so hot.

01:52:20.000 Yeah, I knew Lauren Bacall. 0.98

01:52:21.000 And it's like, then you start to sound like an asshole.

01:52:24.000 But it's just a fact.

01:52:25.000 You do know him.

01:52:28.000 It's a different reality, though, for you.

01:52:30.000 It is a different reality.

01:52:31.000 And you get used to it to the point where you just look at all of these legends who you know.

01:52:40.000 Yeah.

01:52:40.000 I mean, I knew Gregory Peck very well, Elizabeth Taylor, all of them, and Roddy McDowell.

01:52:48.000 And I got so used to it that I would forget most of the time, you know.

01:52:54.000 And then every now and then, you go, I'm talking to fucking Lauren Bacall. 0.99

01:53:00.000 Right.

01:53:01.000 Right, right.

01:53:02.000 That's Bogart's wife. 0.96

01:53:03.000 Yeah.

01:53:04.000 I mean, are you shitting me?

01:53:06.000 And so I still pinch myself sometimes.

01:53:10.000 I mean, I've been really blessed to have met a lot of great heroes of mine, you know, and become friends with them.

01:53:18.000 Right now, I'm working with Sam Elliott.

01:53:20.000 Sam and I have known each other since probably late 80s, somewhere in there.

01:53:25.000 Worked together twice before, but a couple of scenes at a time, Tombstone and then 1883.

01:53:32.000 But kept up with each other over the years.

01:53:35.000 And he has another guy who was more of a mentor from a distance.

01:53:38.000 I just always admired Sam.

01:53:39.000 And now I work with him every day.

01:53:41.000 That's wild.

01:53:42.000 And it's amazing.

01:53:43.000 It's got to be weird, right?

01:53:45.000 It's so wild that he's such a sweet man, such a great actor.

01:53:50.000 But when he and I do scenes together, it's literally like you and I talking right now.

01:53:56.000 Right.

01:53:57.000 It's that natural.

01:53:58.000 Just to we're we essentially talk to each other off, you know, when they cut, it's no different than the scene we just did.

01:54:09.000 You know what I mean?

01:54:10.000 Yeah.

01:54:10.000 Well, that's when he's been doing it so long.

01:54:12.000 He's so good.

01:54:13.000 It's just he's so relaxed that even though you know it's Sam Elliott, you believe he's whoever the fuck he's playing.

01:54:20.000 Because there's it's a there's a naturalness to it.

01:54:23.000 Like you were talking about with yourself.

01:54:24.000 There's a naturalness to it.

01:54:26.000 And that translates when people are watching a film or watching a television show with that, which television shows aren't even really television shows anymore.

01:54:36.000 Like, I don't think Landman's a television show.

01:54:38.000 It's a long movie.

01:54:39.000 It's a 10-hour movie.

01:54:40.000 Yeah.

01:54:41.000 It's like, what is, which is the beautiful thing about streaming.

01:54:45.000 That's really when you got shows like Ozark and Stranger Things.

01:54:50.000 It really started with the Sopranos, where you're doing, it's essentially like a really long film.

01:54:56.000 It's not, I mean, it's on television, but it's, what does that mean anymore?

01:55:00.000 Fucking everything's on television.

01:55:02.000 Most people watch movies on television.

01:55:03.000 Like, what does that mean anymore?

01:55:05.000 It's just a distribution device for whatever art you're doing.

01:55:09.000 Yeah.

01:55:10.000 And on those kind of shows, like, it's so important for you to buy it.

01:55:18.000 You know, you've got this character.

01:55:20.000 It's not just one guy in a film, like, oh, I'm not buying that guy.

01:55:24.000 Right.

01:55:25.000 It's something about he sounds like an actor.

01:55:27.000 Right.

01:55:27.000 You know, versus 9, 10, 11 episodes in, second season.

01:55:33.000 Like, I got to believe that guy.

01:55:37.000 Yeah.

01:55:37.000 I got to be.

01:55:38.000 Yeah.

01:55:39.000 And the naturalness is the thing.

01:55:41.000 You know, like there's a great scene in Landman where you're explaining, which I loved.

01:55:47.000 You're explaining windmills and what green energy and how much fucking horseshit this all is for you to feel good about yourself.

01:55:56.000 I fucking love that scene.

01:55:58.000 But I know you're Billy Bob Thornton, but in that scene, you're that fucking dude who works for an oil company who's like, shut the fuck up.

01:56:09.000 What are you talking?

01:56:10.000 Do you know who the fuck you're even talking about?

01:56:12.000 It's because of that naturalness that that works.

01:56:17.000 Yeah, it was that scene was, I mean, it became huge.

01:56:21.000 I mean, it was all over the internet.

01:56:23.000 That scene.

01:56:23.000 And I mean, when I run into an oil guy, wherever it is, I mean, you know, mainly Texas, but wherever I am, they always bring that scene up and thank me.

01:56:35.000 And, you know, thanks for showing people what this is.

01:56:39.000 And, you know, I do get questions, you know, obviously because of the nature of the show.

01:56:43.000 People try to politicize everything.

01:56:45.000 And the fact of the matter is, is that Taylor with that show is not taking a side.

01:56:53.000 He's just saying, here's a look behind the curtain at how this works.

01:56:57.000 Yeah.

01:56:59.000 And it's about how are the people who work in that industry, whether you're on the suit side or you're out there in the fields, and if you're the family of, like I have the family in the show, it's just, this is how it works, and this is how it affects the people who work in it.

01:57:20.000 This is how dangerous it is.

01:57:22.000 Here's how much of a gamble it is.

01:57:24.000 And here are all the other crazy people circling your world.

01:57:28.000 In my case, the family, you know.

01:57:30.000 And it's when I did that scene, I was committed to it, you know, because when I read it, and Taylor's very good about writing gigantic monologues for me.

01:57:44.000 And when something makes sense to you dialogue-wise, it's easy to do a long monologue.

01:57:54.000 If you don't know what it means, it's harder to learn the dialogue.

01:57:59.000 If you understand what the person has written, I'm not saying if you agree with it or disagree with it, but if you understand what they're saying, it's actually easier to do a monologue than it is to do a back-and-forth scene with people sometimes.

01:58:13.000 I bone more lines on a back and forth conversation than I do when I'm just sitting there telling somebody something.

01:58:19.000 Right.

01:58:19.000 Like Jerry Jones scene.

01:58:22.000 You know, Jerry was telling his life story.

01:58:24.000 Right.

01:58:24.000 I mean, it wasn't, Taylor wrote something there for him, you know, because he'd heard the story before from Jerry.

01:58:31.000 But if it had been written and Taylor said, you got to write, you know, you got to say these words, Jerry probably wouldn't have done it, been able to do it.

01:58:42.000 But the fact that Taylor said, just tell that story you told me.

01:58:45.000 Yeah.

01:58:46.000 It's his story.

01:58:47.000 Yeah.

01:58:47.000 It'd be like if I ask you, tell me your life story.

01:58:50.000 You can do that.

01:58:51.000 Right.

01:58:52.000 And if you get a person who's not an actor to be themselves, they're better than actors.

01:58:59.000 You know, I've always found that.

01:59:01.000 I've cast people in movies that have never been in one before.

01:59:04.000 I just don't tell them we're rolling.

01:59:07.000 And I really don't.

01:59:08.000 In Slingblade, the guy, Rick Dial, who played the guy that ran the Fix-It shop, the kind of big guy, I went to school with him since the third grade.

01:59:17.000 And I always thought, this guy could be an actor, you know.

01:59:19.000 And when we did the first scene with him there in his shop, when Jimmy Hampton brought me over there and said, this is Carl, he's going to work here, all that stuff, you know.

01:59:30.000 I just went to Rick and I said, dude, and Brent Briscoe, who played Scooter, the guy could never fix anything.

01:59:36.000 And I said, look, Rick, the camera crew, they don't have their shit together.

01:59:41.000 I said, they're going to have to get some marks and do a bunch of stuff.

01:59:44.000 So this is not on us.

01:59:46.000 So we're going to run this scene, but we're not really filming it.

01:59:48.000 Just say the dialogue.

01:59:50.000 If you fuck something up, don't worry about it.

01:59:52.000 He was letter perfect.

01:59:55.000 Once we started saying action and shit, then all of a sudden it got a little different.

02:00:01.000 Most stuff in Slingblade was the first take.

02:00:04.000 Wow.

02:00:05.000 Wow.

02:00:06.000 Because he's relaxed.

02:00:07.000 Yeah.

02:00:08.000 Yeah, the pressure of the moment.

02:00:09.000 Action.

02:00:10.000 Action is a crazy word.

02:00:11.000 I hate it.

02:00:12.000 I don't even, usually when I'm directing, I don't direct much anymore.

02:00:15.000 But when I do, I just kind of say, well, you know, you guys go whenever you're ready, you know.

02:00:27.000 But then you have ADs and PAs out there on their radios and shit, and they're all screaming shit.

02:00:32.000 And it's like, you know, don't disrupt the flow here.

02:00:34.000 Just let the cats do it, you know.

02:00:36.000 I mean, Clint Eastwood has been known to say, you know, jokingly, but instead of cut, sometimes an actor I know worked with Clint, and he said, when Clint was satisfied with the scene, he just goes, okay, that's enough of that shit.

02:00:53.000 Instead of cut.

02:00:55.000 What was the process of deciding to do Slingblade?

02:00:59.000 Like, how did, like, you know, you're obviously trying to find a vehicle for yourself, and they're not offering it to you, so you create it yourself.

02:01:09.000 But what was the process?

02:01:11.000 Like, how did you decide to do that guy?

02:01:13.000 Like, what was it?

02:01:16.000 It's a story that nobody believes.

02:01:18.000 I've told it a couple of times, and nobody believes it, and it's the absolute truth. 1.00

02:01:27.000 I was doing one scene.

02:01:30.000 I think there were two scenes, but it was one of them was cut out of the thing.

02:01:36.000 I think it was an HBO movie or something.

02:01:38.000 It starred Val Kilmer.

02:01:40.000 And I was playing a railroad conductor in the 1920s.

02:01:44.000 It was based on an old movie with Paul Muni called I'm a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, old movie from, I guess, the 30s.

02:01:55.000 And they remade it and called it The Man Who Broke a Thousand Chains.

02:01:59.000 I played a railroad conductor who had like a wool fucking thing on for the 20s, and they had the, you know, the whole 20s haircut with the sides pretty much shaved off, you know, and that kind of stuff.

02:02:13.000 And we're shooting in Riverside, California at this old railroad museum.

02:02:18.000 And an old director named Daniel Mann, who directed Tea House, the August Moon with Brando and some other movies, he'd come out of retirement to do this.

02:02:28.000 He was an old cat.

02:02:29.000 As a matter of fact, he was so old school that when I went to read for him, there was a casting director named Kathy Henderson who was always good to me.

02:02:37.000 So she'd always get me in to see the director.

02:02:39.000 And he was sitting there behind the desk.

02:02:41.000 He had a little gray goatee and glasses.

02:02:45.000 And I just talked to him for a few minutes, and then I read a couple of lines with him.

02:02:49.000 It's just me and him.

02:02:51.000 And he literally said, kid, I got a pot for you in this picture.

02:02:59.000 And it was like, what am I?

02:03:01.000 What is that, Louis Mayer?

02:03:02.000 Who the fuck was I just talking to, you know?

02:03:04.000 And so he put me in the thing.

02:03:07.000 And this was in the 80s.

02:03:09.000 And I'm burning up.

02:03:13.000 You know, Riverside, California, it's hotter than shit out there.

02:03:15.000 It was in the summer.

02:03:16.000 So I'm in a wool suit with a conductor hat on and just sweating my ass off.

02:03:23.000 And I go in, and this is in the days when I was still in a honey wagon. 0.58

02:03:27.000 So there's just a little tiny room, you know, a little bathroom and a little couch, just like that wide.

02:03:33.000 And at lunch, I went in and I put the air conditioner on.

02:03:37.000 I took that conductor hat off.

02:03:40.000 And I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, you sorry son of a bitch.

02:03:45.000 You're never going to make it doing any of this shit.

02:03:47.000 Music, movies, nothing.

02:03:49.000 You're just, you know, why are you out here, you know, to make, you know, $300 or $400 for a date?

02:03:55.000 And Val Kilmer's the big star and you're just some idiot with a couple of lines, you know.

02:04:01.000 And I literally made that face in the mirror at myself.

02:04:05.000 Wow.

02:04:06.000 Made the face and I started talking in that voice because I was so in a moment of self-loathing that I literally started going at myself in the mirror.

02:04:21.000 I did that monologue to the girl that's the college student who comes to interview me in the beginning of the movie.

02:04:28.000 It's like a nine-minute monologue.

02:04:30.000 I did that monologue in the mirror to myself right there and never wrote it down.

02:04:36.000 And I can remember it to this day.

02:04:39.000 Because I have all these weird afflictions.

02:04:41.000 You know, I have terrible anxiety and have obsessive-compulsive disorder really bad.

02:04:48.000 And I grew up dyslexic and, you know, kind of an edge of the spectrum kind of guy.

02:04:54.000 And I always had the ability to remember stuff.

02:04:57.000 I have a photographic memory.

02:04:59.000 I'm dumb as a bag of hair in every other aspect of life, but I have a photographic memory.

02:05:05.000 And even if it's not something I read on a page, it's up here.

02:05:12.000 And so I remembered that monologue.

02:05:15.000 And then I realized that I was talking about certain things that were actually in my life.

02:05:20.000 The idea of him living out back in this shed, just sleeping in a hole back there, and the family would bring him his food and stuff like he was a creature and stuff like that.

02:05:31.000 That was based on a guy in Alpine, Arkansas that lived there.

02:05:37.000 The story was that his mother was scared by a snake when she was pregnant.

02:05:42.000 You know, old, you know, southern lore shit.

02:05:47.000 Or the father was drunk when he was conceived.

02:05:50.000 But actually, he had polio and was what the real deal was.

02:05:57.000 He walked funny, he talked funny, and everything.

02:05:59.000 So Carl is largely based on a combination of this guy, Ed, in our town, and Frankenstein.

02:06:11.000 You know, Frankenstein and the kid and the, you know, the sort of not knowing any better, you know.

02:06:17.000 And, you know, it's like the, well, I was told by the parents in the Bible that says, you know, if you see some, you know, like sex is bad or whatever it was, he sees his mother with his cat, Jesse Dixon, and he kills her.

02:06:17.000 Yeah.

02:06:33.000 She told him to do that, you know.

02:06:35.000 So that's where it all came from.

02:06:37.000 And I started doing it as part of a one-man show in the theater back in the late 80s.

02:06:44.000 And From that one-man show, that whole character was born.

02:06:50.000 And then I wrote a short film, and we did that.

02:06:55.000 And that's why I got best adapted to screenplay, Oscar, was from that.

02:07:00.000 It wasn't, I mean, it was my original screenplay, but it was adapted from my own thing.

02:07:07.000 And so that's how that came out.

02:07:08.000 So when you went to do a one-man show, did you ever think do you want to make it into a film, or was it just like, I want to put this on its legs and just whatever this idea I have in my head, I want to make something out of it.

02:07:20.000 At that time, when I was doing it in the theater, I didn't think much beyond that.

02:07:28.000 A couple of years later, I started thinking about it.

02:07:31.000 And I thought, that's the story.

02:07:33.000 And I knew the story before I ever wrote it.

02:07:35.000 I wrote it in nine days.

02:07:37.000 And my oldest son, Willie, was actually on my lap most of the time while I was writing on paper because I don't know how to type.

02:07:45.000 And so I just wrote it on, you know, paper, like a tablet like that.

02:07:54.000 And eventually, you know, we made that little short.

02:07:59.000 And then these guys that made the short wanted to make it into a feature, but they had this whole other idea about it.

02:08:06.000 They wanted to show what happened when I was a kid and show me murdering a mother.

02:08:10.000 I said, yeah, that's the wrong thing to do.

02:08:11.000 So I made it myself.

02:08:13.000 And I directed a documentary on Widespread Panic, the band, out of Athens, Georgia, and Colonel Bruce Hampton.

02:08:21.000 But that's the only directing experience I'd had, and I didn't know shit about it.

02:08:27.000 But I knew the story, you know, and I got Barry Markowitz, my DP, and got some guys and asked John Ritter, who I was working with at the time, you want to play a gay guy from St. Louis who moves to a little town in Millsburg?

02:08:41.000 And he goes, yeah, I'll do it.

02:08:43.000 None of us thought this thing was going to do what it did.

02:08:46.000 I thought my mom and my brothers and people like that would see it.

02:08:49.000 And that was it.

02:08:50.000 And it became huge.

02:08:54.000 How weird was that?

02:08:55.000 Very weird.

02:08:57.000 Yeah.

02:08:57.000 Very weird.

02:08:58.000 I mean, when they say overnight success, that literally was the moment.

02:09:03.000 I mean, I had a name within the movie business from this movie called One False Move that we did in 90 or so, 89 or 90.

02:09:13.000 But so people were, I already had made deals to write screenplays for various studios and stuff.

02:09:20.000 And I was getting acting work here and there.

02:09:22.000 But when I did Slingblade, it literally, I woke up one morning and I was not only a millionaire, but hugely popular.

02:09:31.000 And it freaked me out.

02:09:34.000 I mean, I appreciated every moment of it.

02:09:37.000 But really, when you're going through those times, it's such a blur, you know, how quickly it happened and everything.

02:09:47.000 I mean, to this day, I think back on it, you know, I think, how the hell did this happen?

02:09:54.000 How the fuck did I get here?

02:09:56.000 And I don't think you could get that movie made now.

02:10:00.000 I think a lot of movies that I've done, you couldn't get them made now.

02:10:04.000 I don't think there's an audience that would either tolerate it or be interested in it, you know, because most of my writing is based on novelists and not screenwriters.

02:10:15.000 I've stayed out of Hollywood my whole career pretty much, you know, other than the high-profile relationships maybe.

02:10:22.000 You know, other than that, I haven't associated with Hollywood much.

02:10:27.000 And it was just thinking back and going, how did I become a movie star?

02:10:35.000 Shit.

02:10:37.000 I think you could do it today.

02:10:38.000 Because I don't think anybody had ever done it when you did it.

02:10:41.000 No, that's true.

02:10:43.000 You know what I mean?

02:10:44.000 That's true.

02:10:45.000 But I think because maybe well, see, Slingblade, first of all, it's not a comedy.

02:10:56.000 There's funny stuff in it.

02:10:59.000 But a lot of people come up to me and they say, man, that Carl, he's funnier and shit.

02:11:03.000 And it's like, well, if you think about what it's really about, it's not that funny.

02:11:08.000 But I just think because of the climate, you know, it's like, well, is he making fun of a mentally challenged guy, you know, bad Santa?

02:11:21.000 I mean, it's like you can't be that crass anymore or whatever.

02:11:25.000 I think you still can.

02:11:26.000 Yeah.

02:11:27.000 I mean, I think if you do, people will go to see it.

02:11:27.000 Yeah.

02:11:31.000 It's just, you'll get a lot more pushback now because people think that they can and that they can stop things and cancel you and all that jazz.

02:11:39.000 But the reality is, if it's entertaining, if it resonates with people, they want to see it.

02:11:43.000 It's just nobody wants to find it.

02:11:45.000 That's like comedies have died.

02:11:47.000 Like, when was the last time it was a really good comedy movie?

02:11:50.000 It's hard to make because of all this pushback, all these people that freak out about things.

02:11:56.000 And if you don't like it, don't go see it.

02:12:00.000 That's my opinion.

02:12:01.000 You don't like rap music?

02:12:02.000 You don't like people talking about that?

02:12:03.000 Don't listen to it.

02:12:04.000 You don't like this?

02:12:06.000 Don't go see it.

02:12:07.000 Absolutely.

02:12:08.000 That's exactly what I believe.

02:12:09.000 actually think that critics maybe should only do reviews on things they like I mean because right what good right What are you trying to do?

02:12:23.000 What are you trying to do with the terrible review?

02:12:26.000 So they claim that they're trying to protect the public from this atrocity.

02:12:34.000 And I don't understand why they think that they are the savior of everybody's 15 bucks or whatever.

02:12:42.000 That it's like, you know, I can't believe I, you know, saw this movie, like, wasted two hours of my life.

02:12:49.000 I'll never get back.

02:12:50.000 It's like, you know, when people storm out of a theater?

02:12:54.000 Yeah.

02:12:55.000 I stormed out of the theater, you know?

02:12:57.000 It's like, because of a fucking movie?

02:13:00.000 I mean, seriously?

02:13:01.000 I mean, just go in there.

02:13:03.000 And if you don't dig it, you don't dig it.

02:13:05.000 Don't worry about it.

02:13:06.000 Just tell the public, hey, you know, I'm nobody, but I saw this movie recently.

02:13:11.000 It's pretty fucking good.

02:13:12.000 You might want to go see it.

02:13:14.000 As opposed to this vile piece of shit, blah, blah, blah.

02:13:19.000 It's like to have that type of arrogance to think that you are informing them that they should stay away from something, like you know shit.

02:13:31.000 I don't get that part.

02:13:33.000 Well, because you're not gross.

02:13:36.000 It's a gross profession.

02:13:38.000 I mean, do you remember when Siskel and Ebert were like the re that if you didn't get two thumbs up, you were fucked.

02:13:44.000 Fucked.

02:13:45.000 Those two guys had so much goddamn power.

02:13:47.000 And now we know they're both TWATs. 0.97

02:13:50.000 They both hated each other.

02:13:51.000 You ever see the videos of the two guys just bitching at each other?

02:13:55.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:13:55.000 Talking about, don't fuck this up.

02:13:57.000 Like, you fucked up the last one.

02:13:58.000 Oh, you just fucked that up.

02:14:00.000 And like, these are the guys?

02:14:02.000 You have the worst fucking personalities.

02:14:05.000 And you're telling everybody what's a good film, what's not a good film?

02:14:08.000 Fortunately, they liked me.

02:14:11.000 There's certain things that are undeniable.

02:14:13.000 But it's like that one of the things I think is great today is audience score.

02:14:18.000 Like audience score of a film versus critic score.

02:14:22.000 And they're oftentimes completely lopsided.

02:14:24.000 Yes.

02:14:25.000 Like I pay attention to the audience score.

02:14:27.000 Like do people like that movie?

02:14:28.000 If critics like the movie and people hate it, maybe they're not getting it.

02:14:33.000 Maybe it's just esoteric.

02:14:35.000 Maybe it's weird.

02:14:36.000 Maybe I'll really like it then.

02:14:38.000 But generally speaking, like the critic score is not as interesting to me as was the audience score.

02:14:44.000 Right.

02:14:44.000 That's who it's made for.

02:14:46.000 Absolutely.

02:14:46.000 And that's who I pay attention to.

02:14:49.000 Yeah.

02:14:50.000 I want the fans.

02:14:51.000 I want the audience, you know, because critics, like I said earlier, there are so many critics now that, I mean, critics to begin with are generally not.

02:15:03.000 No human is qualified to judge any piece of art.

02:15:07.000 I mean, to start with.

02:15:09.000 I mean, it's like if you don't like something or it doesn't strike you or you see some write really silly shit that's kind of not made well or whatever, that's fine.

02:15:20.000 But how can you have a profession where individuals can tell everybody in the world what they should think about something is a bizarre world to me.

02:15:31.000 And like you said earlier, like with awards, it's not like sports.

02:15:38.000 You know, how can you win an award that is an intangible thing?

02:15:45.000 Yeah.

02:15:45.000 I mean, if you run a 100-meter dash in the Olympics and you're the first son of a bitch that breaks the tape, you won.

02:15:55.000 Yeah.

02:15:55.000 How in the hell do you know if I won a movie versus that movie versus this movie?

02:16:03.000 Oh, yeah.

02:16:04.000 Yeah.

02:16:05.000 And God forbid you're in a year where there's some sort of socially conscious film that has to win.

02:16:14.000 Like if it doesn't win, then who are these monsters that are voting?

02:16:18.000 You didn't vote for the socially conscious film?

02:16:20.000 Like, how dare you?

02:16:21.000 And yeah, the socially conscious film and also the one with the music that tells you exactly what you're supposed to feel every moment.

02:16:28.000 Yes.

02:16:29.000 That's the weirdest thing that we've all accepted about films is that there's music in scenes.

02:16:34.000 That is a weird thing.

02:16:35.000 Yeah, it is.

02:16:36.000 It just happens and it's normal because we've been around it our entire time.

02:16:40.000 You know, Darth Vader comes out.

02:16:45.000 It's always like that.

02:16:47.000 It's like, here comes the shark.

02:16:49.000 We see the fucking shark, dude.

02:16:51.000 It's like the shark is about to eat Robert Shaw.

02:16:55.000 We're scared already.

02:16:56.000 There's something eerie about a film that doesn't have music now.

02:16:59.000 There it is.

02:17:00.000 This seems too real.

02:17:01.000 Yeah, right.

02:17:02.000 Yeah.

02:17:03.000 Like at least when there's music playing and psycho.

02:17:05.000 Yeah, damn.

02:17:07.000 You know, it makes it like a little more palatable.

02:17:11.000 Yeah.

02:17:12.000 The other issue with critics is that they don't want to be critics.

02:17:16.000 I don't think anybody wants to criticize other people's art.

02:17:18.000 They just don't have anything to contribute.

02:17:21.000 Like if they did, they would probably stop being critics and be novelists or be screenwriters or whatever it is.

02:17:28.000 So generally speaking, the people that gravitate towards that don't have something to contribute to art.

02:17:34.000 So they're just professional haters.

02:17:36.000 So most of that's why they love to write bad reviews.

02:17:40.000 And they write the most vicious, I'm going to destroy the way he portrayed that role.

02:17:49.000 They just try to find the most biting way to dismiss you and to shut you down.

02:17:55.000 But it's the individual, like the type of human that's doing that for a living.

02:18:01.000 It's not necessarily anybody you want to aspire to be.

02:18:04.000 Well, no.

02:18:05.000 And that's why, like you said, it's the audience.

02:18:08.000 Yes.

02:18:08.000 That's who you're doing this for.

02:18:10.000 You're not doing this for organizations or award shows or critics or whoever it is.

02:18:16.000 You're doing this for the audience.

02:18:18.000 Those are the people that go pay a ticket price or sign up for Paramount Plus or whatever it is, you know, to watch these things.

02:18:27.000 And that's who you want to please.

02:18:29.000 I mean, I don't particularly give a shit if the actor guys I've run across in my lifetime like my shit or not.

02:18:39.000 I mean, it's like, you know, I'm not really doing it for them unless you love movies, unless you love good work, you know, then, you know, those cats are, you know, viable.

02:18:50.000 But I just don't, I'm in a good place right now.

02:18:58.000 And so I think because, you know, my daughter Bella is going to Cal Poly up there and she's doing great.

02:19:05.000 She's 21 years old.

02:19:07.000 My sons both have jobs in their own places and are doing well.

02:19:11.000 I love my wife.

02:19:14.000 I'm doing a show I love with a crew and a bunch of cats and actors that I love.

02:19:21.000 I'm touring, you know, once or twice a year, making a couple of albums a year.

02:19:26.000 I just don't let that shit bother me anymore.

02:19:30.000 Good for you.

02:19:31.000 It's like, I don't, I honestly don't give a fuck.

02:19:33.000 And, you know, people say that sometimes as a reverse psychology kind of idea, you know, it's like, oh, I'm never going to win this.

02:19:41.000 And I tell my wife every time I'm going to win an award or lose one, win or lose, you know.

02:19:47.000 Right.

02:19:49.000 Because I know.

02:19:50.000 I've gotten used to it and I can follow the trend.

02:19:53.000 And I go, huh.

02:19:55.000 And she'll go, oh, my God, you're going to get the Golden Globe or the Academy Award or whatever it is.

02:19:59.000 And I go, no, no, no.

02:20:01.000 That guy right there is going to get it.

02:20:02.000 She goes, how do you know?

02:20:03.000 I said, trust me, watch and see.

02:20:06.000 I was nominated for a Golden Globe for the first season of Landman.

02:20:10.000 We went over there, and I knew instantly it wasn't going to happen because they had us, if you were in a stadium at a concert hall and your seat was, here's the stage.

02:20:22.000 Your seat's right here.

02:20:24.000 It's going to take you 30 fucking minutes to get to the stage.

02:20:29.000 We walked in there and saw our table.

02:20:31.000 I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ.

02:20:33.000 I said, we're sitting back here by like the staff.

02:20:36.000 I said, we're not, you know, the people bringing out the fucking food.

02:20:40.000 You know?

02:20:41.000 And I said, it's not going to happen.

02:20:43.000 And she said, who's going to win then?

02:20:45.000 And I'd been telling her this, and she didn't believe me.

02:20:47.000 She goes, you still believe that?

02:20:48.000 I goes, I said, the guy from Shogun.

02:20:50.000 I said, I promise you that guy wins.

02:20:54.000 I mouthed it to her as it was happening.

02:21:00.000 I couldn't pronounce his name, but I said, the Japanese guy from Shogun.

02:21:06.000 Literally said it when, you know, they have panels of each one of you when they announce it and shit.

02:21:10.000 Because they want to see the other guys.

02:21:12.000 You know what I want to see one day?

02:21:14.000 I want to see somebody.

02:21:16.000 Like, let's say the three of us are nominated for something and it shows you and it shows me and it shows you and you're trying to act nonchalant like you don't give a fuck.

02:21:25.000 One day I want to see somebody just go, fuck.

02:21:31.000 You know what I mean?

02:21:31.000 One of those things.

02:21:33.000 That would be awesome.

02:21:35.000 I've only been to the Emmys once and it was when Phil Hartman died and he was nominated.

02:21:40.000 So we all as a cast went and I'll never forget this because he didn't win.

02:21:46.000 And Dave Foley looks over at me and he goes, what the fuck does he have to do to win?

02:21:50.000 Right.

02:21:54.000 Exactly.

02:21:55.000 But it was so funny in the moment.

02:21:58.000 The guy had just gotten fucking beloved guy, got murdered, this big giant, horrible thing.

02:22:03.000 His wife kills herself afterwards.

02:22:05.000 And we're all sitting there and he just looks at me and goes, what the fuck does the guy have to do to win?

02:22:10.000 That's hilarious.

02:22:11.000 I'm out forever.

02:22:12.000 I don't want to come back.

02:22:13.000 Leave me alone.

02:22:15.000 Keep me out of this fucking chaos.

02:22:17.000 And the worst thing you could ever do is get sucked into it and then play to that and then do stuff specifically to try to win awards.

02:22:25.000 Like, ew.

02:22:28.000 Like, ew, what have you become?

02:22:30.000 Ew.

02:22:32.000 They got you.

02:22:33.000 Yeah.

02:22:33.000 They got you.

02:22:35.000 They can get any of us.

02:22:35.000 And they can get you.

02:22:36.000 Just like crack.

02:22:37.000 Crack can get anybody. 0.97

02:22:38.000 All you have to do is smoke it a few times.

02:22:40.000 Yeah.

02:22:41.000 It'll get you.

02:22:41.000 Oh, for sure.

02:22:42.000 And the thing, I think it's kind of crazy with you because you're one of the most legitimate overnight successes ever.

02:22:52.000 Like, a lot of people were overnight successes, but it was kind of like a slow drip, and then something kicked.

02:22:57.000 And oh, wow, now it's something big.

02:22:59.000 It's like, man, Slingblade came out, and all of a sudden you were all over the fucking news.

02:23:03.000 It was like everywhere.

02:23:05.000 It's like, and that's the wildest ride that anybody can be on because also, this is the ride before the internet, right?

02:23:14.000 So there were not nearly as many famous people.

02:23:17.000 This is the thing.

02:23:17.000 If you think about a movie star back then was so different than a famous person today.

02:23:25.000 Right.

02:23:25.000 Because there's TikTok celebrities and reality TV celebrities, and it's just, there's so many famous people.

02:23:34.000 It's like an unprecedented number of people clamoring for attention.

02:23:39.000 So to be a Billy Bob Thornton when Slingblade came out was a crazy spot in life because there's only like 20 of you motherfuckers out there.

02:23:49.000 There's like 20 famous actors, like maybe 50 that you could get people to name.

02:23:55.000 And you're one of the 50.

02:23:56.000 Like, holy back then, if you were number 18 on the top 20 list of actors, you're pretty far down the fucking road.

02:24:03.000 Right, yeah, right?

02:24:05.000 It's crazy, right?

02:24:06.000 If you think about it, oh, yeah.

02:24:09.000 Because being famous then was a very different thing than being famous now.

02:24:13.000 It was.

02:24:13.000 It was very famous.

02:24:14.000 I mean, now people are famous because they're socialites, they go to parties and stuff.

02:24:18.000 Or they're the Kardashians, famous for being famous, and no one can explain it.

02:24:23.000 Yeah, but it's like that bizarre world.

02:24:28.000 There's no class you can take to navigate that.

02:24:32.000 No one can help you.

02:24:34.000 No one can tell you what to do and what not to do.

02:24:37.000 First of all, it's a new thing, like literally new.

02:24:41.000 By the time Slingblade, what year was Slingblade?

02:24:44.000 Maybe 95 came out in 96.

02:24:48.000 So films are much less than 100 years old.

02:24:53.000 So films are really like real films where people know who the actor is.

02:24:59.000 Who's the first film?

02:25:01.000 Buster Keaton is silent.

02:25:03.000 And then you got Charlie Chaplin.

02:25:06.000 It's real fucking recent, man.

02:25:08.000 It's real recent in the zeitgeist of the world.

02:25:13.000 And then you're one of them.

02:25:15.000 And no one, what the fuck is this?

02:25:16.000 Yeah.

02:25:18.000 It's unbelievable.

02:25:19.000 I mean, when I would work on sets early on with people that I grew up watching, you know, and I'm just like, wow, you know, I'm standing next to Andy Griffith or whoever that was, Robert Redford, you know.

02:25:35.000 And now you start to realize that you're in a group and an age group of actors who are looked at by 20-year-olds or 30-year-olds like I looked at those guys because they say this stuff to me.

02:25:55.000 I've been watching you since I was a little kid, you know, and all this kind of stuff.

02:25:59.000 And it's an odd feeling.

02:26:04.000 The only thing is, and maybe I'm off base here, but I think because, and once again, social media has a lot to do with it, I believe.

02:26:14.000 I don't think that because of our lack of younger generations' lack of history, you know, their knowledge, how far history goes back to them.

02:26:29.000 I don't think 100 years from now, generations will look at us the way we looked at Humphrey Bogart and Frederick March and all these different people, Spencer Tracy, Betty Davis, whoever it was.

02:26:46.000 I don't think it's as important.

02:26:48.000 It goes back to the acts, too much access, too much exposure.

02:26:52.000 And I just don't believe that in the history books, 30 years from now, let's say, they'll look at me or Quaid or Costner or whoever it is as the Bogarts and the Tracy's that we revere only because society's changed so much.

02:27:17.000 But is that a bad thing?

02:27:18.000 Because they still, like, people love you, and they still love Costner, and they still love Quaid, and they still love all these people.

02:27:25.000 It's just you know them more that they're human beings now.

02:27:29.000 Right.

02:27:30.000 Yeah, I don't think that's a bad thing.

02:27:31.000 It's a different thing.

02:27:34.000 It's a very different thing.

02:27:35.000 I was a movie star back then, like Clint Eastwood in his prime.

02:27:38.000 You know, like, that's a different thing.

02:27:40.000 Like, you never saw that guy outside.

02:27:43.000 It wasn't like he was doing YouTube videos and sitting down talking to people.

02:27:49.000 Well, I think the difference is with Eastwood or any of those guys, Duvall.

02:27:53.000 But you'd be surprised how many people, if I named Robert Duvall or Gene Hackman, how many people I talked to who don't know who they are.

02:28:02.000 That's crazy.

02:28:03.000 I worked with a 35-year-old costumer, and I said, we were doing a photo shoot.

02:28:07.000 At the time, we had four guys who made the records who were in the band.

02:28:12.000 And I said, hey, there's four of us here doing the photo shoot.

02:28:17.000 Which one of us would be Ringo?

02:28:19.000 And this girl, she's 35 years old.

02:28:22.000 And this is not that long ago, 10, 12 years ago.

02:28:27.000 And I said, Ringo?

02:28:31.000 She goes, what's that?

02:28:32.000 I said, the Beatles.

02:28:33.000 She goes, oh, I've heard of the Beatles.

02:28:37.000 And I'm like, yeah.

02:28:40.000 Yeah, it's like hearing of George Washington.

02:28:43.000 But anyway, and I said, can you name any of the Beatles?

02:28:47.000 And she goes, no, but weren't they like some kind of, I said, they were a band who started every fucking thing we do nowadays.

02:28:56.000 And I couldn't believe it.

02:28:57.000 And she was like a hip girl with like orange hair and fucking nose rings and cheek rings and everything else. 1.00

02:29:04.000 But it just seems to me that people's history is, it's kind of, it's become different.

02:29:09.000 Like our history, when I was, you know, listening to, you know, whoever, Cream or Jimi Hendrix or Traffic or whatever, I still knew who Billie Holliday and Jimmy Rogers, the singing brakeman, were, you know.

02:29:23.000 Now, a lot of people think Ozzy Osbourne is just a guy on reality show.

02:29:27.000 It's like, no, he was in a band called Black Sabbath way back in the late 60s.

02:29:33.000 And I think history is important for us.

02:29:38.000 I think if you don't know where shit comes from, I think it's part of what you put into your art or your influences and also to see what they went through to get where they were.

02:29:53.000 I just think it's important.

02:29:54.000 I mean, with anybody, politicians.

02:29:56.000 How many people know that Benjamin Franklin, you know, Benjamin Franklin, oh, he's a guy who flew a kite and discovered how to make electricity come to some other place or whatever.

02:30:06.000 But, you know, they were fighting over states when there weren't that many states.

02:30:13.000 And it's like, well, wait a minute.

02:30:15.000 We're in New York.

02:30:16.000 We got way more people than you do in Virginia or whatever it was.

02:30:22.000 And so we get more representatives and senators that they do.

02:30:27.000 They only get one or whatever.

02:30:28.000 Well, Benjamin Franklin comes in, who's one of my heroes.

02:30:31.000 He made sense about shit.

02:30:33.000 He comes in and he says, tell you what, how about you have more state representatives than they do because you've got more people in your state, but how about in terms of the Senate, everybody gets two, and then you get more representatives.

02:30:48.000 And they're all like, okay.

02:30:51.000 You know, makes sense.

02:30:53.000 I mean, those are the kind of guys I like, you know?

02:30:56.000 Yeah.

02:30:56.000 Well, history is important, but I think one of the problems with people today is like there's so much information coming at you that everybody has TikTok brain.

02:31:05.000 And young people in particular.

02:31:07.000 Like it's very difficult for them to get a sense of history when they're being inundated by very short attention span content all day long.

02:31:15.000 They're just getting fed nonsense.

02:31:17.000 It's hard for them to actually read something or sit down and have the attention to get into something and really get fascinated by watch a good documentary on somebody or read a book on somebody.

02:31:30.000 They're just checking their phone all the time.

02:31:32.000 They're always checking their goddamn phone.

02:31:34.000 They're addicted to these fucking things.

02:31:37.000 And growing up that way, like you and I grew up without it.

02:31:42.000 So you get to see it and how it's affecting the way people view the world.

02:31:46.000 And it's not good.

02:31:47.000 It's not good.

02:31:49.000 It's certainly not good for creating future versions of Ringo Stars and John Lennon's because it's like, what do you have to say if you don't have any understanding of what's going on and what's ever gone on?

02:32:01.000 And it's addictive, like you said earlier, because, you know, I put these things down and yet I've got the fucking thing with me all the time.

02:32:10.000 You know, and if I get out in the middle of, you know, the desert in California someplace and know where the fuck I am, you know, I'm like trying to call home and shit, you know, whatever.

02:32:21.000 But I mean, I lived most of my life without that.

02:32:27.000 And having to see if you had any fucking change left because you had to call somebody at a payphone.

02:32:34.000 We had a thing in L.A. called the Thomas Guide.

02:32:37.000 I had that.

02:32:38.000 You had the Thomas Guide where you had to look up shit and had all of L.A. County, San Bernardino County.

02:32:43.000 All of it was in there.

02:32:44.000 It's a book.

02:32:45.000 Big old booking.

02:32:46.000 Big old book.

02:32:47.000 And you had to look on these maps, which are confusing and shit.

02:32:51.000 And if you took a GPS away now from people, nobody would ever get to work on time.

02:32:57.000 Nobody would find the fucking place they were supposed to have a meeting because you also can't stop at a gas station anymore.

02:33:04.000 I mean, you know, remember when you didn't know where the fuck you were and you would stop over at the gas station and you'd go, yeah, I'm trying to get to 1625 Wilson Street.

02:33:15.000 You know where that is?

02:33:16.000 It's supposed to be by like the sawmill.

02:33:19.000 Some guy would go, yeah, okay.

02:33:22.000 Yeah, what you going to want to do?

02:33:24.000 He would take pride in being able to give you directions.

02:33:27.000 Right, absolutely.

02:33:28.000 Yeah, it was a big thing.

02:33:29.000 Like a guy who could give you directions to place, that's a cool guy.

02:33:33.000 Yeah.

02:33:34.000 Absolutely.

02:33:35.000 I'm going to tell you how to get there.

02:33:36.000 This is what you get.

02:33:37.000 You get on the 405 and you get on exit 16.

02:33:40.000 Yeah, they knew that shit.

02:33:42.000 Yeah.

02:33:42.000 I mean, now, I mean, I know LA inside and out.

02:33:44.000 I could be a cab driver there, but or I should say Uber driver now, I guess.

02:33:50.000 I don't know cabs anymore.

02:33:51.000 But one way or the other, you know, if you're someplace else, I mean, you know, I use it too.

02:33:58.000 It's like, but if you took GPS away, it would run people bat shit crazy.

02:34:05.000 Yep.

02:34:05.000 Yeah.

02:34:06.000 And if you took away the ability to just press someone's name on your phone to call them, if you had to remember their number, we had to remember numbers.

02:34:16.000 I still remember numbers.

02:34:18.000 Well, you have a great memory.

02:34:19.000 From my hometown.

02:34:21.000 I mean, I still, to this day, I rarely, In other words, I can take my phone and I can type in the people that I call on a regular basis, I can type in their numbers.

02:34:34.000 I know their numbers.

02:34:35.000 But it is true that if like my wife, she'll say, well, I don't have so-and-so in my contacts or whatever, you know, and be somebody we know really well.

02:34:45.000 I'm like, learn the damn number.

02:34:47.000 I told our daughter, I said, look, when you're at college, you need to have my number in your head all the time and your mother's.

02:34:56.000 You know?

02:34:57.000 Yeah.

02:34:58.000 Know the numbers.

02:34:59.000 Especially if you get arrested.

02:35:01.000 You know, for sure.

02:35:03.000 You got one call.

02:35:04.000 Nobody knows how to do that anymore.

02:35:06.000 I know.

02:35:07.000 Who am I going to call for?

02:35:08.000 I have fucking no idea.

02:35:10.000 I know like three people's numbers.

02:35:13.000 Yeah, it's like being an overweight person that's addicted to food because you have to eat to stay alive.

02:35:21.000 So you're going to have to do some of the thing you're addicted to, no matter what.

02:35:25.000 It's not like gambling.

02:35:26.000 You're a gambling addict.

02:35:28.000 Stay out of the casino.

02:35:29.000 You're going to be okay.

02:35:30.000 You know what I mean?

02:35:31.000 But if you had to still go to the casino every day and gamble a little, but you were a gambling addict, that's a crazy fucking problem to have.

02:35:40.000 And that's a problem that every young person has with their phone.

02:35:42.000 They're all addicted to their phone.

02:35:44.000 They're completely addicted.

02:35:45.000 And, you know, all of us too.

02:35:47.000 I'm addicted to my phone.

02:35:48.000 And you're using it every day because you have to get places, you have to call people, you have to text, you have to check your email.

02:35:56.000 So it's always there.

02:35:58.000 And you just have to develop some sort of a relationship with it that's not crazy.

02:36:03.000 Yeah.

02:36:04.000 That's true.

02:36:05.000 And people, it goes from mild addiction to severe addiction to internet creating this environment where people actually kill themselves.

02:36:20.000 Yeah.

02:36:21.000 Yeah.

02:36:22.000 I mean, it's that big a spectrum, you know what I mean?

02:36:25.000 And, you know, people talk about getting canceled all the time on this stuff.

02:36:29.000 And it's like, how about if you don't give a shit? 0.56

02:36:33.000 You know, if you do, I'm not on social media.

02:36:36.000 I don't deal with it.

02:36:39.000 I mean, you know, the band has an Instagram, you know, but I don't run it.

02:36:45.000 You know, they put pictures of me taking the garbage out.

02:36:50.000 That's what people want to see.

02:36:51.000 They don't want to see your picture on stage.

02:36:53.000 You know, they want to see that you're just this regular dude with your ass crack showing, taking the garbage down the hill to the normal shit, eating chicken-fried steak.

02:37:01.000 They love that.

02:37:02.000 Yeah, normal shit.

02:37:03.000 Yeah.

02:37:04.000 That's true.

02:37:05.000 Well, they want to know that you're fucking normal.

02:37:07.000 Like everybody.

02:37:08.000 Oh, I'm subnormal.

02:37:10.000 But there's also the problem where people are putting up stuff to make themselves look cool.

02:37:14.000 Like everybody's trying to look cool online.

02:37:17.000 Oh, yeah.

02:37:17.000 You know, it's just what a weird thing to try to do all the time.

02:37:21.000 And they got liquify.

02:37:23.000 That's one thing.

02:37:24.000 Where you can make yourself skinny?

02:37:26.000 Oh, boy, that's a problem.

02:37:28.000 Yeah.

02:37:28.000 That's a problem, too, with a lot of young ladies because they see that and then they think that that's attainable.

02:37:34.000 And then what's wrong with me?

02:37:34.000 Right.

02:37:36.000 I look normal.

02:37:37.000 And you realize, like, well, she looks normal too.

02:37:39.000 She's got some crazy fucking program turning her into this bizarre form of human that doesn't exist in the wild. 1.00

02:37:47.000 Absolutely.

02:37:48.000 Yeah.

02:37:49.000 Jonathan Haight wrote about that where you see as the in the beginning of social media, you see automatic, almost instantly rather, a giant amount of young ladies that experience self-harm, cutting, depression, suicidal ideation, actual suicide.

02:38:07.000 It all ramps up at the same time that social media does because you're comparing yourself to someone's life that's a very distorted version of reality.

02:38:15.000 Yeah.

02:38:16.000 Distorted, like rose-colored glasses, propaganda version of reality that this person wants you to know how cool they are.

02:38:24.000 Look at me, I'm with a girl in a bikini and I'm sitting on a Ferrari with a stack of hundreds.

02:38:29.000 Fuck you.

02:38:31.000 You're like, wow.

02:38:33.000 How am I not that guy?

02:38:34.000 I'm just a loser.

02:38:36.000 I should jump in front of a fucking train.

02:38:38.000 And there's a face.

02:38:39.000 You know, when you're feeding a baby, there's something, I guess it's from our, you know, it's in our DNA or something, but you feed a baby and you go.

02:38:49.000 You open your mouth.

02:38:50.000 And they say that that probably came from you're showing the baby what to do.

02:38:54.000 Right, right, right.

02:38:55.000 But it's, it's, you know, somebody yawns, you yawn, right?

02:38:59.000 And you feed the baby like this.

02:39:03.000 There's a thing with these selfies that people take on the internet that they can't not go.

02:39:16.000 Yeah.

02:39:17.000 You know, it's very bizarre.

02:39:19.000 I did a bit about that in my act, about imagine seeing a photo from like the early 1900s where girls like this. 0.98

02:39:28.000 Like, what is it?

02:39:28.000 She's a fucking time traveler.

02:39:30.000 This is so strange.

02:39:31.000 Like the invention of the selfie.

02:39:33.000 Exactly.

02:39:34.000 My daughters are on Snapchat and they snap each, they snap all their friends. 1.00

02:39:39.000 So this is how they communicate.

02:39:41.000 They rarely text.

02:39:42.000 They just make Snapchats and they just have like in front of the camera.

02:39:47.000 And then they take a picture and they're like, oh my God, so bored.

02:39:50.000 Right.

02:39:50.000 You know, whatever.

02:39:51.000 Whatever it is.

02:39:52.000 This is how they're communicating with each other through selfies.

02:39:55.000 It is.

02:39:55.000 Very weird.

02:39:57.000 Yeah, everything is in snippets.

02:40:00.000 And the fact that, you know, if you have a TV service that has, you know, 1,800 channels, and I find myself doing it.

02:40:12.000 I sit at home.

02:40:13.000 Yeah, I got it on the Cincinnati Pittsburgh game.

02:40:19.000 I watch a few minutes and it's like, okay, it's first down there on their 18.

02:40:26.000 Flip it over the Chargers game.

02:40:28.000 You know what I mean?

02:40:29.000 And just go back and forth.

02:40:31.000 And I grew up with three fucking channels.

02:40:35.000 And so you had to watch everything all the way through.

02:40:40.000 And I'm convinced that that's the reason that trivia is easier for people that grew up with very little because you remember every fucking bit of it.

02:40:53.000 Right.

02:40:54.000 Now you've only got like a few seconds on each thing.

02:40:59.000 And it's like, I mean, now it's like you're watching, even if it's your team, something else happens.

02:41:05.000 Did somebody text you to start doing that?

02:41:07.000 Next thing you know, like, you know, I'm a Colts fan, you know, doing this and everything.

02:41:11.000 Next thing you know, oh, the game was, oh, that's right.

02:41:14.000 They're only three and a half minutes left.

02:41:15.000 I didn't see the end of the game.

02:41:16.000 Yeah.

02:41:17.000 You know?

02:41:18.000 Or I changed it over to, you know, rawhide on the old guy channel or whatever for a few minutes.

02:41:27.000 I was thinking about that once about podcasts.

02:41:30.000 Podcasts are one of the only times where I'm never distracted by anything but the conversation.

02:41:36.000 And I think it's one of the reasons why I like it so much.

02:41:39.000 And the same thing is when I do commentary for the UFC, I'm talking about the fight.

02:41:44.000 So I can't be looking at my phone.

02:41:46.000 I'm not answering texts.

02:41:47.000 I'm not like checking emails.

02:41:49.000 I'm not looking at TikTok.

02:41:50.000 I'm just locked in on what is happening for six hours.

02:41:55.000 And so if you could find a thing where you can have a break, escape from the clutches of all the information that's in the rest of the world coming at you all, all the fucking bad news and all the guns and tits and everything that's coming at you from all over the world.

02:42:15.000 It's very beneficial.

02:42:17.000 It's a brain.

02:42:18.000 And I love the fact that your show has, you sit for a few hours.

02:42:23.000 Yeah.

02:42:24.000 When do you get a chance to do this?

02:42:26.000 I mean, and that's, you know, I came late to podcasts, but I remember doing, God, I can't remember who I did Norm McDonald's podcast.

02:42:39.000 And I did one other guy did his podcast.

02:42:43.000 And then those are the first ones I did.

02:42:45.000 Kevin Pollock.

02:42:47.000 I did Kevin's.

02:42:48.000 I didn't even know what it meant at the time.

02:42:52.000 And since then, you know, I've done a few, but I like them too.

02:42:56.000 It's literally like the only place you are where the interviewer doesn't check their fucking phone.

02:43:03.000 Yeah.

02:43:04.000 I mean, I do interviews with people who, while I'm answering what they just asked me, they text somebody back or look at it for a second.

02:43:15.000 And it's like, hang a second.

02:43:17.000 It's like, how important is this to you that it's more important to let Mitzi know that you'd rather have spaghetti than, you know, fucking hell.

02:43:26.000 Well, it's also you're completely breaking whatever bond that you have in the conversation.

02:43:31.000 It's not a, it's, it's two people exchanging information, talking to each other, and you have to look at each other in the eye.

02:43:38.000 You got to feel with this person.

02:43:40.000 It's a dance.

02:43:41.000 And if you stop in the middle of the dance.

02:43:44.000 Yeah.

02:43:44.000 Like if you were on a date with someone, you're telling them some crazy story and it's really important to you.

02:43:49.000 And they're just like, yeah, wow.

02:43:51.000 Amazing.

02:43:52.000 No, that's good for your ego.

02:43:54.000 This is over.

02:43:55.000 There's no sense in continuing any further with this relationship.

02:43:59.000 Right?

02:44:00.000 It's like, honey, were you serious when you said you loved me more than anyone else?

02:44:05.000 Hang a sec.

02:44:06.000 Hang a second.

02:44:06.000 Yeah.

02:44:07.000 Hold on.

02:44:08.000 Yeah, what were you saying?

02:44:09.000 Oh, yeah.

02:44:10.000 Oh, absolutely.

02:44:11.000 I love you more than anybody I ever loved.

02:44:13.000 I just barely love anybody.

02:44:14.000 Yeah, right.

02:44:15.000 And I'm kind of mildly interested in everybody.

02:44:18.000 And that's sort of what's happening.

02:44:21.000 We're mildly interested in everybody.

02:44:23.000 And we love almost nobody.

02:44:26.000 It's weird.

02:44:27.000 That is weird.

02:44:29.000 It's a weird time.

02:44:30.000 But the only way we're going to get through it that makes any sense is you got to say things like that.

02:44:37.000 We have to figure out how to navigate it.

02:44:38.000 It's new.

02:44:39.000 You know, just like I was saying that when you were a movie star the first time you became a movie star through Slingblade, that's a new experience, just period in human civilization.

02:44:52.000 Becoming a movie star is very recent.

02:44:55.000 It's hard.

02:44:55.000 And this thing of everything being online, this thing of everybody having access to all this fucking information coming at you, all this media, all these opinions and all this stuff to watch and car accidents and animal attacks.

02:45:14.000 This is new.

02:45:15.000 This is a completely, so almost like the shit that you had to go through when you became famous through Slingblade.

02:45:23.000 The whole world's got to go through this new type of thing with phones and with social media and with the internet in general.

02:45:30.000 And we're not ready for, we don't know what, we don't know how to do it yet.

02:45:34.000 And people are giving classes on how to manage it.

02:45:36.000 And there's apps that can limit your time on certain things.

02:45:39.000 You can cut yourself off.

02:45:42.000 We don't know what we're doing.

02:45:43.000 This is fucking new as shit.

02:45:45.000 And just like fame, a lot of people are going to get wrecked by it.

02:45:49.000 Yes.

02:45:51.000 Totally.

02:45:52.000 It's a completely alien way of being.

02:45:55.000 Like a person that becomes, especially, I'm friends with Ricky Schroeder.

02:46:00.000 I've known Ricky for like 25, 30 years.

02:46:03.000 And there is no way anybody becomes famous at like six and makes it out okay.

02:46:12.000 Right.

02:46:12.000 It's not possible.

02:46:13.000 Right.

02:46:14.000 Like the way I liken it to making cement, but you don't put enough water in.

02:46:21.000 So it's always going to be fucked.

02:46:23.000 Sure.

02:46:23.000 There's a part that's never a normal, you had a normal life and then, or semi-normal, whatever, whatever normal movie.

02:46:31.000 It wasn't normal, but I wasn't a movie star.

02:46:32.000 You weren't famous and then became famous.

02:46:35.000 But if you're famous from the time you're a fucking baby and your whole life, you're in the public eye growing up.

02:46:43.000 That's insane.

02:46:44.000 It is insane.

02:46:45.000 Whether it's Miley Cyrus or, you know, you look at poor Britney Spears losing her fucking marbles. 1.00

02:46:51.000 What do you expect?

02:46:52.000 Nobody gets through that.

02:46:54.000 Okay.

02:46:55.000 What happened to those?

02:46:55.000 Remember the kids that did that show?

02:46:57.000 Was it different strokes?

02:46:59.000 And like a couple of them.

02:47:01.000 Yep.

02:47:01.000 Like one girl, she robbed a liquor store or something and then became a dope hooker and then dies young.

02:47:12.000 And one of the guys on there also, I think he got on drugs and then eventually died.

02:47:18.000 Some of them kill themselves.

02:47:20.000 I'm really happy that my success in terms of being famous anyway came at a later age.

02:47:32.000 I actually really relish that, you know, that I did not become famous when I was 19 or 16 or whatever it was.

02:47:43.000 Because at that point, with my state of mind in those days and just doing everything I wanted, you know, I would have been dead by now.

02:47:55.000 Right.

02:47:55.000 There's no doubt about it.

02:47:57.000 I would have never made it to 30.

02:47:59.000 Yeah.

02:47:59.000 And if you did, you'd have so much regret.

02:48:02.000 Oh, yeah.

02:48:02.000 I do.

02:48:03.000 The fuck did I do?

02:48:05.000 Why did I do that?

02:48:06.000 Oh, yeah.

02:48:07.000 Because you lost your mind.

02:48:07.000 Yeah.

02:48:08.000 Because you're famous at eight years old.

02:48:10.000 Yeah.

02:48:11.000 Yeah.

02:48:11.000 If you've, you know, it's kind of an old guy thing to say, but, you know, everything I got, I earned it, and I'm glad I did.

02:48:21.000 You know, I'm glad I didn't have a hell of a lot of help along the way that I just persevered and did this stuff.

02:48:27.000 But I think that knowing what work is before you get famous really helps you out in your life.

02:48:35.000 I mean, you know, I worked at a sawmill, a machine shop.

02:48:38.000 I hauled heavy equipment, hauled hay when I was 13.

02:48:41.000 I did all that shit.

02:48:43.000 And I mean, stuff that looking back on it, it's like, I don't even know how I did it half the time.

02:48:49.000 I worked as a carpenter's helper.

02:48:51.000 And so if I hadn't done all that stuff, if all I had known was the entertainment business, I think that would drive any fucking body crazy.

02:49:06.000 You know, I don't think I would have made it through that.

02:49:09.000 If, you know, like looking at the real world out there from a place where you never experienced the real world.

02:49:17.000 Right.

02:49:18.000 Like you're talking about Ricky and all that stuff.

02:49:20.000 It's like, if your only experience has been people getting your fucking juice box for you, you know, or whatever it is, then, and you get used to that shit too.

02:49:32.000 I'm telling you, these days, my wife thinks I'm the most helpless son of a bitch in the world.

02:49:39.000 And in some ways, I am.

02:49:41.000 I mean, I get into an airport and I used to go to fucking airports before I was famous.

02:49:46.000 I knew where to go.

02:49:47.000 I knew where to put my shit.

02:49:50.000 Now I'll go in there and I look like I'm, it's like Logan's Run.

02:49:54.000 I get out and I'm like, where the fuck are we now?

02:49:57.000 And I'll ask, you know, my assistant or publicist or somebody, I'm like, well, can I take this bag on there?

02:50:06.000 Or is this one?

02:50:07.000 Where's the thing we go through?

02:50:08.000 Do I need to do this?

02:50:09.000 Do I need to do that?

02:50:11.000 And it's like, I know fucking well what I have to do.

02:50:14.000 But you're used to people doing things for you.

02:50:16.000 You get used to it.

02:50:17.000 Yeah.

02:50:18.000 I mean, you get used to somebody driving you someplace.

02:50:21.000 I'm a driver.

02:50:22.000 I grew up, I raced fucking cars.

02:50:24.000 I'm a muscle car guy.

02:50:26.000 Now we go someplace, I ask my wife to drive. 1.00

02:50:29.000 It's like, well, no, maybe it's because I'm old.

02:50:32.000 Maybe because when I walk up and downstairs now, it's a psychological thing.

02:50:37.000 Physically, I'm very fit.

02:50:39.000 I mean, I can do shit whatever I want to.

02:50:41.000 If I got to run and a singing or whatever, I'm fine.

02:50:45.000 Something psychological happens to you when you get like 68 or 69.

02:50:51.000 And Tom Mayhew, our tour manager for the band, he and I were talking about it.

02:50:56.000 We were talking about how now when we get in a shower, you know, like we're in a hotel and you get in a shower, you grab the fucking handicap rail and you go really slow.

02:51:07.000 I don't have to, but I do because something up here tells me, here's my age now.

02:51:14.000 If I fall, I'll be dead in six weeks because I'll break my hip and then I'll get pneumonia and I'm done.

02:51:21.000 And I'm like, I feel 19, but for some reason, going downstairs now, I don't just hop down the stairs anymore.

02:51:30.000 I take it one stair at a time.

02:51:32.000 You know, it's not real.

02:51:35.000 And it's not real that I don't know how to get around a fucking airport.

02:51:39.000 None of that shit's real.

02:51:41.000 And yet something happened to me where I think now I'm just this helpless fucking old man who, you know, is going to have to have my caretaker fucking get me to the gig.

02:51:54.000 And then I go on stage and I'm just like, you know, it's like, wait a fucking minute.

02:51:59.000 You know, walking up the steps to the stage, I'm just like, you know, and I get up there and fucking go out to the edge of the stage and slap hands and shit.

02:52:07.000 If I fell off that fucking thing, it'd kill me instantly, but I do it.

02:52:11.000 So none of that shit's real.

02:52:13.000 It's weird, right?

02:52:15.000 Well, it's weird when people defy it, right?

02:52:18.000 Like I saw the Rolling Stones when they came to Austin a couple years ago at Coda.

02:52:22.000 So it's like 100,000 people or something out there.

02:52:24.000 It was nuts.

02:52:25.000 And I swear to God, it was like an out-of-body experience because you can't believe you're actually seeing Mick Jagger.

02:52:30.000 You're like, that's him?

02:52:31.000 That's really him.

02:52:32.000 He's really up to.

02:52:33.000 But he's fucking 1,000 years old.

02:52:36.000 Yeah.

02:52:39.000 He's dancing and moving around.

02:52:40.000 He's got two fucking trailers, two trailers that he brings with him everywhere he goes.

02:52:45.000 It's just workout equipment.

02:52:47.000 Yeah.

02:52:47.000 That motherfucker gets after it every day, they say.

02:52:50.000 Absolutely.

02:52:50.000 He's like, this is the only way.

02:52:52.000 If you don't do that, it'll fall apart and then you got nothing.

02:52:55.000 For sure.

02:52:55.000 But he's out there like he's 30 years old.

02:52:58.000 Oh, yeah.

02:52:58.000 It's nuts.

02:53:00.000 It's really amazing to watch.

02:53:01.000 I mean, like I said, we just opened for the who. 0.55

02:53:04.000 Yeah, right.

02:53:05.000 And Roger and Pete are, you know, they're 80, 81, whatever.

02:53:09.000 Crazy.

02:53:10.000 You know, and they're the fucking who.

02:53:13.000 Still up there singing their ass off, playing their ass off, you know?

02:53:17.000 That's another new thing.

02:53:18.000 Like when we were kids, there was no old rock stars.

02:53:21.000 No.

02:53:23.000 They all died.

02:53:24.000 Most of them were dead by 29.

02:53:26.000 Right, 27.

02:53:27.000 27 was the year.

02:53:28.000 Jim Morrison, Jazz Joplin.

02:53:31.000 They all died at like 27.

02:53:33.000 Yeah.

02:53:35.000 Yeah.

02:53:36.000 Wow.

02:53:36.000 Kirk Cobain.

02:53:37.000 Oh, yeah.

02:53:38.000 Yeah.

02:53:38.000 They all died young.

02:53:39.000 So when we were kids, there was no touring bands that were like 70 years old out there on the road.

02:53:43.000 Fuck no.

02:53:44.000 Killing it.

02:53:45.000 And we're more popular than we've ever been.

02:53:48.000 And so it's all bullshit.

02:53:52.000 It's all in your head.

02:53:53.000 It's all in your head.

02:53:54.000 But, you know, and not only were there not rock stars when we were growing up that were even many over 40.

02:54:02.000 Right.

02:54:03.000 Aside from the ones who died, age has changed a little bit.

02:54:09.000 I mean, like, you know, if you look at my dad's high school yearbook, these motherfuckers look, when they were 17, they looked like they were 55.

02:54:19.000 You know what I mean?

02:54:20.000 Hard living.

02:54:20.000 Yeah.

02:54:22.000 And like a man in those days, my dad died at 44 years of age. 0.99

02:54:26.000 I thought he was an old man.

02:54:28.000 Wow.

02:54:28.000 You know?

02:54:29.000 And when I think of 44 now, it's like, are you shitting me?

02:54:33.000 That's like babies.

02:54:36.000 But 50 and 60 and 70 meant something different when I was growing up.

02:54:43.000 Now, 70 is kind of like, I mean, you know, a guy like Sam or Duval, they look at me and I'm still like a kid to them and shit, you know?

02:54:49.000 That's crazy.

02:54:50.000 And 70-year-olds, and I think it's a lot of it is, you know, I eat real healthy.

02:54:55.000 And I actually had a holistic doctor tell me that, because I'm allergic to a lot of shit.

02:55:02.000 It's not like I got something against eating cows.

02:55:04.000 I'd love to.

02:55:06.000 But I have type AB negative blood, means you don't have many digestive enzymes.

02:55:11.000 And so I just get fucking, you know, indigestion and get all fucked up and bloated.

02:55:16.000 I just grew up, because I ate everything growing up.

02:55:18.000 I mean, shit, in Arkansas and Texas.

02:55:20.000 And I just grew up thinking that when you eat, you feel like shit.

02:55:27.000 I just thought that's the way it was.

02:55:28.000 I thought, this thing's overrated.

02:55:31.000 Fuck.

02:55:31.000 I feel like hell, you know.

02:55:33.000 But now I eat really healthy and I eat fish and turkey and vegetables and fruit and beans and rice and stuff.

02:55:39.000 So it's a red meat issue with you?

02:55:41.000 I can't have beef or pork.

02:55:45.000 I can have turkey and fish.

02:55:47.000 They digest easier.

02:55:50.000 But I think people are, and especially if you're in the entertainment business, you kind of keep a younger mind and also eating healthy.

02:56:01.000 But this holistic doctor I was talking about, I was talking about the, and this is really unpopular to say, but not my words.

02:56:13.000 I was actually told this, and I was saying, look, you know, I don't smoke a pack of cigarettes a day.

02:56:18.000 I smoke probably three quarters of a pack, you know, unless, you know, we're on the road and I'm on the bus with the guys, you know, and I smoke like an old Buick sometimes.

02:56:26.000 But, you know, and I drink light beer.

02:56:30.000 I don't drink hard alcohol and stuff like this.

02:56:33.000 And this holistic doctor said, you know, stress is one of the worst things in the world for you.

02:56:39.000 If smoking a few cigarettes a day that don't have chemicals in them and you're drinking light beer, which like I said in Landman, you know, has less alcohol than fucking orange juice, you know, you have a few of those a day and have a few smokes.

02:56:56.000 And if that alleviates your stress, especially me being high anxiety, he says probably healthier for you to just keep doing that.

02:57:05.000 Yeah, they say that's one of the worst things ever.

02:57:08.000 Rising cortisol, stress, anxiety.

02:57:12.000 It wears on your nerves, your nervous system.

02:57:15.000 And then loneliness.

02:57:17.000 They say loneliness is worse than smoking for your overall health.

02:57:22.000 If you smoked a pack and a half a day, you'd be way better off just doing that than being lonely.

02:57:28.000 Look how many spouses die a few months after their husband or wife died. 1.00

02:57:35.000 My grandfather, that's what happened when his wife died.

02:57:37.000 When my grandmother died, he died like within a year.

02:57:40.000 He was gone.

02:57:41.000 He was fine before that.

02:57:42.000 He was actually her caretaker.

02:57:44.000 He was taking care of her.

02:57:45.000 And then when she's gone, he was dead in a year.

02:57:47.000 Yeah, happens all day.

02:57:48.000 Died of grief.

02:57:51.000 Yeah, that old saying, you can die for a broken heart.

02:57:53.000 I believe that.

02:57:54.000 That's real.

02:57:55.000 It's real.

02:57:55.000 It's sadness.

02:57:57.000 And also, it's like, why am I still here?

02:57:59.000 She's gone.

02:58:00.000 I'm 90.

02:58:01.000 Like, what is this?

02:58:02.000 What are we doing here?

02:58:03.000 Yeah.

02:58:04.000 You know, let's call it a quit.

02:58:08.000 Call it a show.

02:58:10.000 Listen, man, we just did three hours.

02:58:12.000 So I think that was a lot of fun.

02:58:14.000 I really appreciate you.

02:58:16.000 Thank you for doing that.

02:58:17.000 I hope I didn't fuck anything up.

02:58:18.000 No, it was great, man.

02:58:19.000 It was great.

02:58:20.000 It was awesome.

02:58:21.000 I love your show.

02:58:21.000 I love everything you've done, man.

02:58:23.000 So it was a pleasure.

02:58:24.000 Well, it's a pleasure to be here.

02:58:25.000 Thank you very much.

02:58:27.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 07, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2407 - Billy Bob Thornton

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