transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] The Joe Rogan Experience.

Speaker 2:
[00:06] Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 1:
[00:12] David.

Speaker 3:
[00:13] JOSEPH.

Speaker 4:
[00:14] Good to see you.

Speaker 3:
[00:14] Good to see you.

Speaker 4:
[00:15] Dude, I haven't seen you in a long fucking time. When was the last time we were actually in a room together?

Speaker 3:
[00:20] Well, I was trying to think of that. I don't know. I would imagine post-news radio, we hung out at some point at some show somewhere.

Speaker 4:
[00:30] Somewhere.

Speaker 3:
[00:30] But I don't know. But I do remember, because I did news radio a couple of times and we hung out. I remember, I think we both, no, just you had more hair than I was probably already at this point.

Speaker 4:
[00:46] I was fighting to keep it. I was hanging on.

Speaker 3:
[00:50] Do you shave or is that it?

Speaker 4:
[00:51] Oh, it's, I mean, I'm bald. If I didn't shave, I'd be bald all the way up here. But I got a hair transplant and it was useless.

Speaker 3:
[00:59] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[01:00] I did a joke about it. I go, having a hair transplant is like taking people that are healthy and moving them into a neighborhood where everyone's dying. This is just like, where did Bob go? He just fucking flew off the face of the earth.

Speaker 3:
[01:13] So, yeah, so you just accepted it and said, fuck it. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[01:18] I should have done it a long time ago. It's so much better and I don't have to talk to a barber. I don't have to listen to boring stories while they hold you hostage with a pair of scissors.

Speaker 3:
[01:27] That's what this is. This gets me. I don't like shaving. I don't. It's kind of a pain in the ass. And I also I look like a kind of a look like a turtle, you know, when I shave. I don't like it. And it's not attractive to me. And I jerk off to me all the time. So I want to keep things fresh. But I this I probably don't have to. I could probably get clippers and stuff. But I go to, you know, one of my guys around the corner where I live. And I have this experience where I want that guy. I want to get in and out, right? Because of what you were saying. I mean, a lot of chit chat. And there are a couple of guys, very quiet. Hi, how you doing? Good. Fist bump, whatever. You know what I want. Get out of there. There is one guy who just talks all the... And then they have that... the blade, you know? What do you call that? You know, the blade blade.

Speaker 4:
[02:34] Straight razor.

Speaker 3:
[02:34] Thank you. And they got it right there, so you got to be polite. It's on your... it's by your...

Speaker 4:
[02:41] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[02:42] You know, and... I know I could avoid it if I just get some clippers and just do this thing, but I don't. I don't know, that was boring, and sorry. It was... as I was... there's no point to it.

Speaker 4:
[02:56] It has to do with...

Speaker 3:
[02:57] Barely has anything to do with what we were talking about.

Speaker 4:
[03:01] There's something about a beard, though, that makes you distinguished, or at least have experience.

Speaker 3:
[03:06] Or look like a homeless, you know, a little alcoholic. I mean, there are plenty of those guys, too.

Speaker 4:
[03:13] Yeah, there's a lot of those, too. But a beard is like... There's a statement with a beard. Like a full beard, like yours, white.

Speaker 3:
[03:22] Mine is just... You know, I don't like shaving. Like, you know... And again, I... I do... like, I only gain weight in two places. Stomach, and right here. And also I have a kind of a thin frame. So it's really not attractive. It's not attractive.

Speaker 4:
[03:44] So the beard is sort of...

Speaker 3:
[03:47] It's more laziness. It's... I don't have to worry about it.

Speaker 4:
[03:51] Yeah. No, I hear you.

Speaker 3:
[03:52] And this, you know, I just... I go, I don't know, six, seven weeks, and then I just shave it. Once it gets out, because this... My hair doesn't grow down or... It just grows out like a clown. You know, it goes this way. All of it. Even this too. And once this starts filling in, it just looks goofy.

Speaker 4:
[04:14] Yeah, I have a friend, my friend Asan, he used to shave his head, and now, purposely to look goofy, he lets the sides go out. And it's madness. It's just, it's all fucking crazy thick hair.

Speaker 3:
[04:27] And bald on top?

Speaker 4:
[04:27] And bald on top, yeah. And he does a joke on stage about it. It doesn't, he's Indian. This is my impression of an Indian pussy.

Speaker 3:
[04:36] And is he just, like, not concerned by getting laid or?

Speaker 4:
[04:42] Yeah, I think he's just embracing, but he still gets laid. You know, because he's really funny. I think he just embraces not giving a fuck. There he is.

Speaker 3:
[04:52] Oh, he looks familiar to me. Okay.

Speaker 4:
[04:55] Very funny guy.

Speaker 3:
[04:56] All right, cool.

Speaker 4:
[04:57] He's one of the up and comers. Well, he's from LA, originally. He was one of the doorman at the comedy store.

Speaker 3:
[05:03] Okay. He looks very professorial.

Speaker 4:
[05:05] He's very smart.

Speaker 3:
[05:06] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[05:07] Yeah. But doesn't give a fuck about his hair.

Speaker 3:
[05:10] Who's that?

Speaker 4:
[05:11] Art Bell.

Speaker 3:
[05:12] I was going to guess Art Bell. I swear to God.

Speaker 4:
[05:14] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[05:15] I swear to God. I don't even know if I've ever seen him.

Speaker 4:
[05:18] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[05:18] Coast to coast.

Speaker 4:
[05:19] Yes. Yes.

Speaker 3:
[05:20] Holy shit.

Speaker 4:
[05:21] From the Kingdom of Nigh.

Speaker 3:
[05:23] Wow.

Speaker 4:
[05:23] I fucking love that show. That was the show that I listened to coming home from Hollywood because I lived out in the valley and I would drive home at night and I would listen to Late Night with Art Bell.

Speaker 3:
[05:33] Coast to coast with Art Bell. I used to do a whole bit about the like, because who's the new guy? George Norty. Yeah. I'm going to digress for one second. Did you ever play video games at all?

Speaker 4:
[05:50] Yes. Well, I try not to. But I used to play a lot of them.

Speaker 3:
[05:53] Did you ever play Prey?

Speaker 4:
[05:55] No, but I know what it is.

Speaker 3:
[05:57] A great underrated game got ripped off, or just people bit certain things that they started. But one of the coolest things... So it's about like this... It takes place on a reservation in the 90s, I guess, or something like that, and there's a bartender and her boyfriend, and it takes place in this bar, and then aliens come. And then this guy goes on the alien ship to go rescue her. But they did this really cool thing. So first they have this in the video game, right? At the bar, there's a TV. And as you walk towards it, it's playing... It's like staticky until you get closer to it. And then as your character gets closer to it, it's Art Bell talking about aliens and stuff. And I know I'm not doing it justice, but it was such a cool, smart idea. And God bless him.

Speaker 4:
[07:01] He was the OG.

Speaker 3:
[07:03] Yeah, and just some of the guy... One thing that... Because I listen to it a lot too, because sometimes you're listening and you're like, this is insane. This is crazy. And he would always, always treat the guest with deference, you know, respect. And I, that must have been, because there were things that were, you know, if you go back to all the episodes, that were kind of contradictory in a sense, you know, like, wait, you think all these things happen? You think there's a place in the middle of the ocean that has, like, it's a community of people that live there and then, but you also think this, like, all these different things, it would be like, hmm, huh, interesting.

Speaker 4:
[07:54] Yeah, he would let you go.

Speaker 3:
[07:55] He'd let you go, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[07:56] He'd give it some air.

Speaker 3:
[07:58] But he was, yeah, he was never rude or...

Speaker 4:
[08:01] No, never. You could call him up. He had a time traveler line, where you would call specifically if you were a time traveler.

Speaker 3:
[08:12] What if, but if you were calling from the past, they didn't have that technology yet, how would that work?

Speaker 4:
[08:17] No, it's mostly people from the future, I believe.

Speaker 3:
[08:20] Wait, like, Art, I'm calling from 7 Minutes in the Future. Listen.

Speaker 4:
[08:24] I think his whole deal was if you are here in this current era, but you are from another time, you could call. Because, you know, the idea was like, he would have these remote viewers and oddballs on, and they would talk about that we have had the ability to time travel for a long time.

Speaker 3:
[08:43] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[08:44] You know, there are wormholes that exist, and they explain the quantum dynamics involved, and time travel has been breached by the CIA in the 1960s. And you have these people call up, but Art would always like give them air, like let them breathe. Let it breathe.

Speaker 3:
[08:59] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[08:59] Art, I'm a werewolf. Interesting. Tell me more. It didn't matter no matter what it was. It was a fun show.

Speaker 3:
[09:06] Oh, I loved it.

Speaker 4:
[09:07] He had the craziest people from fucking Bigfoot people to alien people.

Speaker 3:
[09:11] Everything.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 3:
[11:41] And then a lot of people, ex-military, right? You know, you get that like...

Speaker 4:
[11:46] Whistleblowers.

Speaker 3:
[11:48] I was stationed outside of a remote island that I can't go into off of Singapore. And I witnessed some things that I still have difficulty believing. And then he just, yeah, what happened?

Speaker 4:
[12:05] It was great. So fun.

Speaker 3:
[12:08] And you, so, did you also listen to Phil Hendry?

Speaker 4:
[12:11] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[12:11] Oh, God.

Speaker 4:
[12:12] He was the best.

Speaker 3:
[12:13] Super genius.

Speaker 4:
[12:14] The best thing about Phil Hendry was the people that didn't understand what was going on. They would call in and be really upset.

Speaker 3:
[12:20] The first two times I heard him, I didn't understand what he was doing. He's that good, too. And I would be like, this is crazy, this guy. And then eventually you're like, oh, he's doing characters. Because he, you know, repeat characters and stuff. But I got the chance to watch him do a show. So he's got three mics, I want to say. Like two mics like this. And then a phone mic. Or, you know, a phone, like an old time cradle phone. And he was doing himself, the woman who runs the HOA or whatever, whatever her name was, that character. And then somebody else calling in. Like he did somebody calling on the phone. And it was, I mean, it was like a magic act. It was crazy to watch how, without missing a beat. And I could see, you could see how he strategically takes breaths so that he can go from one character to another and interrupting each other. Yeah. You know, it was fascinating. But he's a genius.

Speaker 4:
[13:39] It's the only thing that caught, right away I was like, oh, wait a minute, there's no cross talk. Like right, well, if one of the early times I listened, I was like, I think this is the same guy.

Speaker 3:
[13:50] Well, he's, he bumps it up. Like he's really good at making it sound as if like, cause he'll interrupt himself and go, and I, okay, but, you know, it's stop and then just go right into the other voice. It's fucking phenomenal.

Speaker 4:
[14:09] And completely original. Like I don't know of anybody else that did anything like that.

Speaker 3:
[14:14] No, did you ever, he used to put out Stuff for Charity, like CDs and things. And he has, I don't know what it would be called, but it was one of the things he put out for charity that was a guy called into the station, I think he was probably super high, but he called in thinking it was Pizza Hut. And he fucks with this guy in the best way where he's like, and who's the, what's the woman character he does? It's kind of like a black woman who's like, mm, honey, it is the best. I don't know, Marjorie, I think, maybe. But he, then he does that woman answering the phone at Pizza Hut. And then he does the automated thing. She's like, I'm gonna put you on, but it's easier to do the automated thing. So, and the guy's like, okay, all right. And then he gets out, he's like, thank you for calling Pizza Hut, the best pizza in our three-block radius. And if you want, if you want, I'm not doing it justice. You gotta go do it. Here it, listen, can you, yep, you got it?

Speaker 4:
[15:36] Headphones.

Speaker 3:
[15:37] Okay, it's so brilliant. Wait.

Speaker 2:
[15:40] Whatever the large. We got the 16-inch deep pan dish pan. You got the dish pan deep or extra deep? Just a regular large thick crust. 16-inch thick crust on a deep dish? You want puff dish? No. You want a, any of them puffed cheese balls, anything like that? We got a special on buffalo wing. We got a special on, damn, I forgot the other thing. We got a special on something. All right, what do you want? What kind of cheese you want? Blue, Swiss, Cheddar, Muenster.

Speaker 1:
[16:12] Okay, I think I'm going to have the wrong location here.

Speaker 2:
[16:14] All right, hold on.

Speaker 1:
[16:17] He's subdued.

Speaker 2:
[16:18] Thanks for calling, Pizza. Your call is being transferred. Please have all credit card information available for our operators.

Speaker 5:
[16:26] Yes, Pizza, hello.

Speaker 1:
[16:28] Hi, yes.

Speaker 4:
[16:28] Hi.

Speaker 2:
[16:29] Hi, which location are you at? We're at the corner of La Cienega and Venice.

Speaker 4:
[16:34] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[16:35] I'd like to place an order for delivery. All right. Can I put you on hold? We'll put you through our automated system. Hold on, please. Thank you for calling, Pizza. If you'd like cheese pizza, press 1. If you'd like a meatball pizza, press 2. If you'd like sausage, press 3. Press two.

Speaker 3:
[17:02] Oh, it goes on and on and on. He goes, he eventually gets the guy a fish pizza, and the guy's like, no, man, this, I don't want. It's really funny, but that's him. That's Phil doing all those voices, and that's not set up. A guy had called into the studio thinking it was pizza, and they're like, take this call.

Speaker 4:
[17:22] Did you ever meet him?

Speaker 3:
[17:23] I did briefly at, when I got to see him do his, he did a live show at Aspen Comedy Festival. A long, long, long time ago.

Speaker 4:
[17:32] I did something with him, Bob Odenkirk and Doug Stanhope.

Speaker 3:
[17:37] Oh, wow.

Speaker 4:
[17:38] And Adam Carolla. I don't remember where it was. I want to say it was somewhere in Canada, but it was some sit down where we were talking about the process of going through, because he was in the middle of doing some sort of a television show pilot.

Speaker 3:
[17:53] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[17:54] So we were talking about the process of creating a pilot and what it's like trying to get a pilot to an actual Finnish television show and get it approved and what the struggles are. It was very interesting.

Speaker 3:
[18:04] For Canadians.

Speaker 4:
[18:05] I don't think it was for, it was like one of those Montreal Comedy Festival things.

Speaker 3:
[18:10] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense.

Speaker 4:
[18:11] Where they had some, it was like some weird, it was a long time ago. It was like, God, it had to be like 2001 or something like that.

Speaker 3:
[18:17] Yeah, I vaguely remember when he was, there was going to be, as he would talk about it doing this sitcom.

Speaker 4:
[18:24] Yeah, did it ever happen?

Speaker 3:
[18:25] I don't think so, no.

Speaker 4:
[18:26] He was a really nice guy though, not what I expected at all. I expected him to be fucking insane. Just like, just to be able to do that every night and not get bored with just completely fucking with people every day.

Speaker 3:
[18:40] It's gotta be exhausting too, like mentally, because you're, you've got to remember, it's like really great improv guys, where you have to remember all these details, bring them back 30 minutes later, right? And you're doing multiple characters. You ever see TJ and Dave?

Speaker 4:
[18:59] No.

Speaker 3:
[18:59] Oh, dude, the best.

Speaker 4:
[19:01] Yeah, what is it?

Speaker 3:
[19:02] It's TJ Jadigowski and Dave Pasquese, who were like the kings of that stuff in out of Chicago. And they come, they tour around. And they're just, they're two guys who it starts off, you know, it's none of its plan, none of its, and they have like a dedicated cult following. When they're in New York, it sells out like that. And you got to go to at least two shows to see how wildly different it is. I mean, they're two guys that come out on stage. Usually it was like three chairs. And it'll just start with like, you know, how's it going? Good, good, good. Are you in line? No, no, no. And you watch it like, oh, they're in line. Where are they in line at? Do they know each other? And then it turns out they're at the DMV, but they're not. It's like a room outside of the DMV. And then they will leave and come back and be somebody else, right? A kid that was mentioned or a wife or something. Or be in a car. And it all wraps up. It's all a big story. And I have seen, I've probably seen them 30, 40 times. And I've seen shows where, that were more, that were funnier and more poignant than some plays that have been worked on for years, you know?

Speaker 4:
[20:29] And is it completely improvised?

Speaker 3:
[20:31] Completely, 100%.

Speaker 4:
[20:32] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[20:33] Oh, they're, I mean, do you know Tim Meadows?

Speaker 4:
[20:37] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[20:38] So Tim was a guest. Sometimes I'll have a third person.

Speaker 4:
[20:41] I know who he is. I don't know who he met him.

Speaker 3:
[20:44] So I was, and Tim's been, you know.

Speaker 4:
[20:48] SNL.

Speaker 3:
[20:48] Yeah, and ensconced in that second city world for decades. And he said it was the most terrifying thing he's ever done because you're, they're like genius level. I mean, the detail you have to remember. And then, and then on top of it, if one of them is, you know, I'm a marine biologist or whatever, it slips out. Then that person has to know about, the real person playing the fake marine biologist has to know enough about marine biology to keep the thing going, you know, and it's just next level.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 3:
[23:06] And like, old school, AM, late night radio guys, right? Who don't have people calling in, who are like, talking about whatever. And they gotta do it, you know, four or five times a week, three hours, by themselves.

Speaker 4:
[23:20] Yeah, I used to always like to listen to them. I used to like to listen to those crazy, right wing, angry, political talk shows, because I didn't know anybody like that. So I was like, what is this guy doing?

Speaker 3:
[23:33] Well, that was the bulk of the radio. I mean, that's why, you know, you have like Art Bell and Phil Hendry, like a nice, like, oh, okay. Because I got all this, I got Mark Levin, and I got, you know, what's his name, you know?

Speaker 4:
[23:50] Rush Limbaugh.

Speaker 3:
[23:50] Rush Limbaugh, yeah. And when you first start listening, or when I first started listening, and I came out to LA from Boston, you know, and people were like, there's this guy out here who's fucking nuts, you know? And I'd never heard of him in Boston. And then, and you're like, does he, how much of this stuff does he believe? Does he really believe? And how much has he come to believe? Does that make sense?

Speaker 4:
[24:19] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[24:20] Yeah. And those guys, that was a whole fascinating thing. And Wally George, do you remember Wally George?

Speaker 4:
[24:26] I do, but I don't remember much about him. I remember the name. What did Wally George do?

Speaker 3:
[24:30] He was the guy who originated what, I mean, now it's really familiar. You remember Morton Downey Jr.? He was a little after Wally George.

Speaker 4:
[24:39] Oh, that's right. That's right.

Speaker 3:
[24:41] And he would, look, at 83, and he was, and it was a super low budget, like, cable access type thing, back when that was a whole thing. And he'd get, the audience would be hooting and hollering, and he'd have people on, like, somebody who, and sometimes they, I think, because it became popular, sort of like with Morton Downey Jr., where people came on to, quote unquote, fuck with Wally George. Like, I'm gonna pretend to be a, you know, a furry, and I'm gonna, you know, have gauges, and you know what I mean? Like, just the archetype of the thing they wanna yell at. And I think people started, it was, there were some bullshit people on there. You know, people lying about who they were. But he had people on, and then, and then kick them off. It would happen all the time. Like, come on, sit down. What the fuck do you think you're doing? And everybody would yell at the person. They'd start talking, and you're like, get the fuck out of here! And that was the show. We're like, you know, and here's something really crazy. And tell me if this is rumor. Look up your magic computer. Rebecca DeMornay's dad. The actress.

Speaker 4:
[26:00] That's...

Speaker 3:
[26:01] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[26:01] Wally George?

Speaker 3:
[26:02] Yes.

Speaker 4:
[26:02] No.

Speaker 3:
[26:03] Yeah. Look it up. Look it up. Casey, right? Jamie. Jamie? I'm going to call you Casey.

Speaker 4:
[26:11] Who is... I forget who Rebecca DeMornay was.

Speaker 3:
[26:14] From Risky Business.

Speaker 2:
[26:17] Oh, wow.

Speaker 4:
[26:20] Wow. Her dad is Wally George. Wow.

Speaker 3:
[26:25] Isn't that crazy?

Speaker 4:
[26:26] Married multiple times. Shocker. Probably potentially ten times. Had at least six children.

Speaker 3:
[26:30] Holy shit. Look at how many times he was married. One, two, three, four.

Speaker 4:
[26:39] Wow. Possibly ten.

Speaker 3:
[26:41] Possibly ten.

Speaker 4:
[26:42] Can you imagine? Just keep fucking signing up.

Speaker 3:
[26:46] I don't. Yeah. I just read literally the other day, Fleetwood Mac Guy. Getting married for the fifth time. He's 182 and he's getting like, what? Stop.

Speaker 4:
[26:59] Yeah. Why do you want to keep doing that? They believe. They really believe this is it. This is the one.

Speaker 3:
[27:07] You have to say those vows and mean it each time.

Speaker 4:
[27:11] Or not.

Speaker 3:
[27:12] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[27:12] Or just say, this is just a fun thing that I do to keep a lady happy.

Speaker 3:
[27:17] Yeah. Or just have a party, I guess.

Speaker 4:
[27:19] Yeah. Have a party and pretend that you're normal now.

Speaker 3:
[27:23] And you're married?

Speaker 4:
[27:24] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[27:24] Yeah. How long have you been married?

Speaker 4:
[27:26] 17 years.

Speaker 3:
[27:27] Oh, nice.

Speaker 4:
[27:28] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[27:29] It'll be 14 in October.

Speaker 4:
[27:31] If I get divorced, that's a wrap.

Speaker 3:
[27:34] What do you mean?

Speaker 4:
[27:35] I'm happy, happily married. I don't want to get divorced. Not saying that. But if I ever get divorced, I'm never.

Speaker 3:
[27:40] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, same here.

Speaker 4:
[27:42] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[27:42] Oh, I feel the same.

Speaker 4:
[27:43] Silly. I'm not having any more children. So if I don't have any children, it makes no sense.

Speaker 3:
[27:48] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[27:49] To legally be bound to some person. Can we just hang out?

Speaker 3:
[27:52] I am 100% with you. I was never an anti-marriage guy, but I just didn't think I'd get married because I didn't want to. And then eventually I met somebody who I wanted to marry.

Speaker 4:
[28:08] Yeah. It's like you just have to, it has to, I mean, that's the thing. It has to be the right person. Everybody always says that except Wally George. But the idea of doing it 10 times is fucking insane. Yeah. They're doing a different thing.

Speaker 3:
[28:24] I think once you get, I'll give you three. And let's say one of them was some fishy circumstances. I'll give you three. Once you get on your, by the time you're going to be on your fourth or fifth or sixth or Rupert Murdoch marriage, like, I, what is the point? And why does that woman believe you? What does it say about the lady?

Speaker 4:
[28:48] Well, what about ladies that do it? I've been here for six years and I know one lady while I've been here, she's been married twice, married and divorced twice, and now she's on the third guy.

Speaker 3:
[28:57] Yeah, I would look, I mean, that says something about the guys, right?

Speaker 2:
[29:01] I guess, or her? Yeah, man, come on.

Speaker 3:
[29:03] If you, you wouldn't ever think, like you meet somebody, you like them, and then you find out they've been married twice before in six years. And you were like starting to fall for her. You wouldn't think, wait a minute, what's the deal?

Speaker 4:
[29:24] You would, unless she was hot. Men are dumb. Well, if she's hot and she's sexy and you really like being around her, you're like, who cares? She made mistakes.

Speaker 3:
[29:35] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[29:35] Who cares?

Speaker 3:
[29:36] I guess you're right. If the sex is that good too.

Speaker 4:
[29:38] Yeah, if the sex is good, she's hot and you love being around her and that's what she wants and you want to make her happy, you're like, okay.

Speaker 3:
[29:45] I'll do, I'll say this. You should find out, you should go talk to the other guys and have a sit down and find out why, you know.

Speaker 4:
[29:56] The other one is, some guys, they'll want to mess it up for you, so they'll lie. They might not be accurate. You know, they might paint a dist- also, they might have been the fuck up and they want to blame it on her and then you'll get a distorted perception of who she is.

Speaker 3:
[30:11] But then, then it's back to her, that she's marrying people who are fucked up. Just, I guess the point is, that we're both making is don't get married. You know?

Speaker 4:
[30:24] Well, it is a weird thing. It's a weird thing to do. Do you have children?

Speaker 3:
[30:27] I do.

Speaker 4:
[30:28] Yeah, it's a weird thing to do if you don't have children. Not weird like you shouldn't do it, but it's a different thing.

Speaker 3:
[30:34] Yeah, completely.

Speaker 4:
[30:35] Yeah, you're...

Speaker 3:
[30:37] And I, I would say that, not that we, you know, my wife and I have any, you know, real issues, but I would behave myself and stay and work at the marriage because of the kid.

Speaker 4:
[30:58] Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 3:
[30:59] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[30:59] Yeah, absolutely. It fucks kids up when people get divorced.

Speaker 3:
[31:04] What's your, what's your background and...

Speaker 4:
[31:05] My parents were split up when I was five and my mother remarried when I was seven and has been with my stepdad ever since.

Speaker 3:
[31:12] Oh, that's good.

Speaker 4:
[31:13] Yeah, they have, they have a great relationship. I just saw them this weekend.

Speaker 3:
[31:17] And where did you grow up?

Speaker 4:
[31:19] Fucking everywhere. I was born in New Jersey, moved to San Francisco when I was seven, lived in San Francisco from seven to 11 in the height of the Vietnam War, in Haight-Ashbury, like hippie town. And then Florida from 11 to 13.

Speaker 3:
[31:35] That's the opposite of San Francisco.

Speaker 4:
[31:37] Oh my God. Yeah. That's the first time I found out about the N word. I didn't know what it meant. And I remember I had to ask my mom. Yeah, I had to ask my mom. And I never heard it in San Francisco. Never heard it. Wow. San Francisco in the 1970s, when I was between 7 and 11, was kind of a wild, amazing time. It was really weird. It was because we were in the middle of the counterculture movement.

Speaker 3:
[32:02] Berkeley, all that stuff.

Speaker 4:
[32:03] Yeah. We lived right down the street from Lombard Street. So we were in the middle of it all. And it's funny because it was during that time that the Vietnam War ended when I was, I think I was, when did Vietnam end?

Speaker 3:
[32:21] 74? I think 74.

Speaker 5:
[32:27] Officially, April 30, 75.

Speaker 4:
[32:30] Okay.

Speaker 5:
[32:31] US withdrawal, 73.

Speaker 4:
[32:33] Yeah, so I was like, what was I, whatever. The point is like at that time, I remember thinking, thank God they figured out war is bad. We're never going to do this again. I literally had that thought over old I was.

Speaker 3:
[32:45] What a naive child.

Speaker 4:
[32:47] Oh, I was like, because my stepfather had, he didn't get drafted. He got lucky. He just didn't get picked. And I knew a guy, some guy that was a friend of the family that had moved to Canada. He's like, fuck this. He took off to Canada. So I was aware of that, like, how people are leaving the country so that they don't have to go to war. Like this is because you're a little kid. Everything's fucking scary, especially if you come from a broken home.

Speaker 3:
[33:13] And, you know, like, yeah, the concept of a draft or description, the idea like, oh, you may have to go and you're going to learn how to shoot a gun and then go shoot strangers, kids, you know, like that is got to be terrifying if you're a kid.

Speaker 4:
[33:29] No, it was insane. And it was also there was also the time where, you know, my stepdad was a hippie and my parents were hippies.

Speaker 3:
[33:37] And when I was going to ask, why did your started interrupt, but why did they move around so much?

Speaker 4:
[33:43] My stepfather was a computer programmer initially, and then he wanted to become an architect. So he went to school in San Francisco and then University of Florida in Gainesville and then Boston as an architectural center. So we moved to Boston when I was 13. So that was what it was. It was him becoming an architect. And so they didn't like sports, they weren't into anything like that. And then when Muhammad Ali was opposing the Vietnam War, he became this like counterculture hero. And I remember, it was my parents sat down and watched Muhammad Ali versus Leon Spinks because he was trying to win his title back. And they were rooting for Muhammad Ali. I'm like, this is crazy. Like this guy's stance on the Vietnam War has made my parents fans of his to the point where they're going to watch boxing. Like, they never watched boxing. They didn't want to have anything to do with anything violent. They hated it. But they wanted to watch that.

Speaker 3:
[34:45] Well, if there's one boxer to watch if you are anti-hitting or boxing or whatever, it was Muhammad Ali. He was a strategist.

Speaker 4:
[34:56] He was. But quite honestly, by that stage of his career, he had slowed down considerably. And he just wasn't.

Speaker 3:
[35:04] I remember the Leon Spinks, because he...

Speaker 4:
[35:09] Leon beat him.

Speaker 3:
[35:09] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[35:10] And then he beat Leon in the rematch.

Speaker 3:
[35:12] Right. This is the rematch, right?

Speaker 4:
[35:13] And that was the big one. We were all glued to the TV. But I remember thinking, this is crazy. They're watching boxing because of this guy's position on the Vietnam War.

Speaker 3:
[35:23] Have you seen When We Were Kings?

Speaker 4:
[35:25] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[35:25] Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 4:
[35:26] It's amazing.

Speaker 3:
[35:26] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[35:27] Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, he was a... God, you want to talk about a unique human being. Like a one of one.

Speaker 3:
[35:35] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[35:35] You know?

Speaker 3:
[35:36] Yeah. And, you know, outside of, you know, Mike Tyson, there was never any kind of figure like that in boxing.

Speaker 4:
[35:49] No. I mean, there was minor...

Speaker 3:
[35:53] Sugar Ray, Leonard, a little bit, but not...

Speaker 4:
[35:56] Not to that extent, because he wasn't a cultural figure.

Speaker 3:
[35:59] Right, right.

Speaker 4:
[35:59] Muhammad Ali represented something during the civil rights movement.

Speaker 3:
[36:03] Boy, and he changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

Speaker 4:
[36:05] Right, right. That was a big thing, too. People were terrified of Muslims at the time. And still.

Speaker 3:
[36:11] I was going to say at the time. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[36:14] But it was a different kind of Muslims. You know, that was...

Speaker 3:
[36:18] Well, they were the, you know, the government was really good about portraying every black urban person as like potentially, you know, Muslim brotherhood. 12 tribes.

Speaker 4:
[36:34] Right, right, right, right.

Speaker 3:
[36:35] Those guys. They're still around. The Israelite 12 tribes.

Speaker 4:
[36:40] Oh, those guys. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[36:41] They used to be... They used to hang out and hang out. They used to be in Times Square like, you know, yelling and preaching.

Speaker 4:
[36:49] I hung out with those guys one day. I wrote a piece about it for my website because I went... I was going home when I was living in New York and I was walking down the street and there's this guy standing there with like a microphone and a little speaker.

Speaker 3:
[37:02] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[37:02] And they would read things from the Bible. And they would translate it and they had this very bizarre translation. Everybody was black. George Washington was black. Everyone was black. They were explaining to me, you know, the so-called Jew, the black Israelites. The so-called Jew was the thing that they would always think.

Speaker 3:
[37:20] Well, they're Jewish. Yeah. You don't have to say the so-called part. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[37:24] It was very odd.

Speaker 3:
[37:26] But their whole thing was there was a 12th tribe of the Israelites that were black that have been, you know, written out of history.

Speaker 4:
[37:39] Yeah. That was their thing. This episode is brought to you by Simply Safe. Have you ever looked into getting a security system? A lot of these companies can leave you feeling trapped, which is the last thing you want when it comes to your safety. They lock you into these absurdly long contracts, and you have to take time out of your day to wait for a technician. As a long time supporter of this show, Simply Safe is nothing like that. Simply Safe gives you the flexibility to choose what type of system you want and when to set it up, with no long-term contracts or hidden fees. It ships to your door, and you can easily install it. No technicians or drilling required. And I'm not just talking about a porch camera here. You can get the whole shebang, sensors, cameras inside and out, and 24-7 professional monitoring. They earn your business by actually working. Simply Safe has even been called America's Best Customer Service by Newsweek. It's clear why over 5 million people continue to use Simply Safe every day. Everyone deserves to have peace of mind. Simply Safe is offering an exclusive discount to my listeners. And right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simply safe.com/rogan. That's half off at simply safe.com/rogan. There's no safe like Simply Safe. This episode is brought to you by Hollow Socks. When it's cold out, your feet are freezing. And when it warms up, they turn into a sauna and your feet feel clammy. Regular socks basically guarantee your feet feel wrong no matter what the weather is. So you got to check out Hollow Socks. Premium alpaca socks built for both cold and warm weather, long days on your feet, and everything in between. I love how they're made with ultra soft baby alpaca fiber. So they have a, how is this legal level of comfort? Plus, they're thermoregulating. So warm when it's cold outside, breathable when it warms up. Great for whether it's on the job, yard work, tailgates, hiking, camping, travel days, cold offices, early morning dog walks. I just like wearing them around the house because they're so comfortable. For a limited time, Hollow Socks is having a buy two get two free sale. Head to hollowsocks.com today and check it out. That's hollowsocks.com for up to 50% off your order. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them and you could support our show and tell them that we sent you. Yeah. They also informed me that I'm not white. That was a relief.

Speaker 3:
[40:23] What?

Speaker 4:
[40:24] Because I'm Italian. They're like, oh, you ain't white. I was like, oh.

Speaker 3:
[40:28] Oh, it's like the...

Speaker 4:
[40:30] Because they hated white people. So I was just talking to this because I was bored. So I was talking to this guy. I was just having him explain everything to me. And he informed me, don't worry, man, you're not white. I was like, oh, okay, that's good. It's good to know.

Speaker 3:
[40:42] So you can hang out.

Speaker 4:
[40:43] I can hang out with you guys. You don't hate me. But it was very odd, very odd. They're all dressed like superheroes. They all have these crazy Avenger costumes on.

Speaker 3:
[40:53] Yeah, and like jewelry, big chunky jewelry.

Speaker 4:
[40:57] Yeah, huge medallions around their neck. Yeah, very odd stuff.

Speaker 3:
[41:01] There's still, you don't see them like you used to, but they're still out there.

Speaker 4:
[41:05] Oh yeah, yeah, they're out there.

Speaker 3:
[41:07] But I mean, like in, literally in New York, periphery of Times Square.

Speaker 4:
[41:12] Yeah, last time I was in Philadelphia, I saw them. They were out there on the street with the microphones.

Speaker 3:
[41:17] Yeah, old deal, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[41:20] It's an odd group.

Speaker 3:
[41:22] When were you in New York?

Speaker 4:
[41:24] I was in New York, I moved to New York in 91, yeah. So I started stand up in 88 in Boston, and I got picked up by my manager, who I'm still with when I was essentially an open micer.

Speaker 3:
[41:40] Who was that?

Speaker 4:
[41:41] Jeff Sussman.

Speaker 3:
[41:43] How do I not know Jeff Sussman?

Speaker 4:
[41:44] He handles Kevin James.

Speaker 3:
[41:47] Was he a Boston guy? No, he was a New York guy.

Speaker 4:
[41:50] So the story was he had, what was his name? The guy who had all the crazy costumes, he was on the Rodney Dangerfield special, Bob Nelson.

Speaker 3:
[42:01] Bob Nelson, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[42:02] So he handled Bob Nelson.

Speaker 3:
[42:03] The Cleveland Browns.

Speaker 4:
[42:04] Yeah, he put the helmet on, he had boxing gloves, he did Jippy Jeff's gym, he had brain damage, he did a bunch of different characters. So Bob, who was a big act, he had an HBO special, the whole deal, at the time, he found Jesus.

Speaker 3:
[42:21] Where was he?

Speaker 4:
[42:23] In his basement, I guess, or something. He was around the neighborhood, somewhere.

Speaker 3:
[42:27] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[42:27] But he had this guy who was his prayer partner that was going to take over as his manager, and so this was my manager's big client, and he was like, I got to go find some other comedians.

Speaker 3:
[42:43] So did he just stop doing stand up?

Speaker 4:
[42:47] I don't know. I don't know if he still does stand up. I don't know. I knew his career. My manager is really good, and he's very smart, and he did a great job guiding Bob, but I think sometimes when people have a big religious moment like that, maybe that becomes more of their life, because he was all in with Christianity. And so my manager said, well, I kind of know most of the comics in New York. Let me see if I'm not missing people in Boston. And so he traveled to Boston with a friend of his, one of the guys that owned Governors. And they came...

Speaker 3:
[43:29] Governors was Bob's room, wasn't it? Yes. Out in Long Island.

Speaker 4:
[43:33] One of the rooms that he worked at, yeah. And so they came down to Boston, and just randomly went up one night at Duck Soup. Remember Duck Soup?

Speaker 3:
[43:43] Duck Soup.

Speaker 4:
[43:44] Duck Soup was... It became the improv after a while. It was...

Speaker 3:
[43:49] I don't remember that.

Speaker 4:
[43:50] Billy Downs and...

Speaker 3:
[43:52] Paul Barclay.

Speaker 4:
[43:53] Paul Barclay. I think it was actually Billy... I think it was Paul's thing.

Speaker 3:
[43:57] So they had split at that point?

Speaker 4:
[43:58] I think. I'm not sure about that. But what it was, it was Paul's idea, I believe. It was a much more high-end room. It was really nice. It was right across from Nick's. So it was in the below area where the Wiltern is. So you know where the Wiltern is, which is now the big... where Bill Blumenreit does Comic Connection shows.

Speaker 3:
[44:18] The Wilbur, right?

Speaker 4:
[44:19] Yeah. Is that it?

Speaker 3:
[44:21] The Wilbur.

Speaker 4:
[44:23] I'm thinking the Wiltern's LA.

Speaker 3:
[44:24] The Wiltern's LA. I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 4:
[44:26] The Wilbur, right. You're right. So downstairs, the Wilbur, you'd go down, and it was a really nice room.

Speaker 3:
[44:32] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[44:32] And I was a limo driver at the time. I was driving limos and...

Speaker 3:
[44:37] Driving a limo in Boston?

Speaker 4:
[44:39] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[44:40] Jesus.

Speaker 4:
[44:40] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[44:42] Oh, man.

Speaker 4:
[44:42] That's what I was doing for a job.

Speaker 3:
[44:43] That's fucking... I mean, I just mean the literal streets of Boston are tough to navigate with any vehicle, but a limo, add an extra half a car to it.

Speaker 4:
[44:54] Yeah. It wasn't that bad. It was mostly airport pickups, and a lot of it was town cars, pick people up in town cars. But when you drive around a lot, that's when I would come up with my best ideas. And I had an idea for a joke, and I called... God, I can't remember who the guy was. Fuck, I can't believe I'm blanking on his name. He was a really cool dude who was the manager of the club. And I could call him up and say, hey, can I get a guest spot? And he gave me a guest spot that night. I wasn't even supposed to be on the show. And my manager just happened to be in the room. And if I'd known he was in the room, I probably would have been nervous. I would have probably bombed. And I had no idea he was there. And then he came up to me afterwards and gave me his card. And he said, can I see you tomorrow? I said, OK. And then I did it.

Speaker 3:
[45:40] He just went for a ride to the airport.

Speaker 4:
[45:44] So I did a set at The Connection the next night. And then he asked me to come to New York and audition there. And then next thing you know, I was living in New York. It was like three years later.

Speaker 3:
[45:53] Very cool.

Speaker 4:
[45:54] And then that was a crazy, crazy story.

Speaker 3:
[45:57] And when did you move out to LA?

Speaker 4:
[46:00] Like first came out in ninety-three and then moved in ninety-four. I came out to ninety-three for a pilot. I did a pilot on Fox called Hardball with Jim Brewer and a bunch of other people. It was a baseball sitcom on Fox that got canceled. It was terrible. And then the only reason why I stayed, I hated LA. But the only reason why I stayed was because I had got an apartment and I had a lease for a year. So I was like, fuck, I have to stay here. And so I stayed for a whole year. And then I got a development deal for NBC. And I was there in the middle of this whole development deal. And then they said, we have a pilot that we already filmed, but we're going to fire one of the cast members. We want you to audition for this. And that was News Radio. So I got to watch.

Speaker 3:
[46:48] Who did you replace?

Speaker 4:
[46:51] Well, fortunately, it was Ray Romano, who was a good friend of mine, was fired during the pilot. And so they replaced him with another guy, and that guy got fired.

Speaker 3:
[47:03] Oh, wow.

Speaker 4:
[47:04] Yeah. So it wasn't... I would have felt terrible if it was Ray. But it was Ray being replaced. I was like, good, fuck that guy. I'll do it for Ray.

Speaker 3:
[47:13] Do you remember who the other guy was?

Speaker 4:
[47:14] I do not. He was just an actor. Some guy. I mean, I never met him. I'm sure he's a nice guy. But luckily for Ray, he goes on and does. Everybody loves Raymond and becomes huge. And I just stumbled into this fucking show with no acting experience.

Speaker 3:
[47:29] That was a fun set. I remember because I did it a couple of times. And also, like, that was not my first, but one of the first experiences I had with multi-camera sitcoms, you know, where you're like, this is literally the easiest job on planet Earth.

Speaker 4:
[47:51] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[47:52] It is the... You have one full day. You have, like, a full, I think Thursday, right?

Speaker 4:
[47:57] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[47:57] And then Friday's, like, half a day.

Speaker 4:
[47:59] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[48:00] Monday, come in, listen to this, read the script, go away.

Speaker 4:
[48:03] Yeah, it's the filming day that's the long day. And it's not that bad. I mean, especially once we got loose. The first season was hard. The first season was 12, 14-hour days because it was like they were trying to figure out what the show was. But once it got rolling, it was pretty amazing. So I had only been doing stand-up for six years. I had only been, I had done no acting. I had, they had made me get an acting coach for a little while in New York, which I think was counterintuitive. For a pilot, for the pilot, the Fox pilot.

Speaker 3:
[48:36] Well, how's an acting coach going to help you with a sitcom? It's about instinct. It's about...

Speaker 4:
[48:43] Well, they were giving me a lot of money. They gave me like $150,000.

Speaker 3:
[48:47] I understand why you...

Speaker 4:
[48:48] You have to learn how to act. Do you know how to act? I've never acted.

Speaker 3:
[48:51] I'm just saying, like, to deliver sitcom lines is... You don't need an acting teacher. Now, Joseph, let's limber up the body.

Speaker 4:
[49:01] Yeah, you're not Daniel Day Lewis. You're not doing... There will be blood. It was a... It was weird, because it wasn't anything... I think the reason why it worked out so well is because it was never anything that I wanted, so there was no weight to it. It wasn't like, oh, my God, this is it. I am on a sitcom. I'm acting. It was more like, this is crazy. I can't believe I'm doing this. It was more like, wow, I can't believe I get to do this. But the real thing for me was to be able to be in LA and go to the comedy store. That to me was more... That was more huge than... When I got passed at the comedy store, that to me was way bigger than being on a sitcom. I was like, holy shit. Because at six years in, I was like, is this going to work out? I don't even know this is going to work out.

Speaker 3:
[49:50] It's also not glamorous in any way. That aspect of working is... There's nothing glamorous about a sitcom. You know what I mean? It's not the thing that when you're not in LA or Hollywood and you're sitting back and you are told about the glamorous lifestyle, the parties and all that stuff. You're driving to work and you're going to work.

Speaker 4:
[50:17] Yeah, but it was glamorous in a sense that you were on television. And that was very weird to me. It was very strange to watch it on TV. I'm like, that is actually me on TV. I had zero aspirations for any acting at all. It never even occurred to me. When I lived in Boston, I remember me and Fitzsimmons, we used to dream about the day we could pay our bills telling jokes. That was all it was.

Speaker 3:
[50:46] I hear you.

Speaker 4:
[50:47] It was just like, oh god. I would see guys like DJ Hazard. I remember I went to look at this apartment and DJ Hazard lived in the same building. And it was this converted schoolhouse and these loft apartments. It had a second floor where the bedroom was. It looked over the living room. I'm like, god, he pays for this with jokes. This was the most amazing thing. That's all I wanted. I saw these Don Gavin and Steve Sweeney. I was like, imagine being able to pay your bills just telling jokes.

Speaker 3:
[51:18] Untie my ankles in the morning. Remember that?

Speaker 4:
[51:22] Yeah, I do.

Speaker 3:
[51:23] DJ. Hazard? Yeah. What was I going to say? Oh, do you know Fitzsimmons' Paul Barclay story or Bill Downs' The Watch? Bill Downs. It was Bill Downs.

Speaker 4:
[51:38] Which one? How's it go?

Speaker 3:
[51:41] Oh, you should get it from him, because it's his story. And I feel like it's his to tell, but it's fucking great. It's genius.

Speaker 4:
[51:52] It's bringing up something in my memory.

Speaker 3:
[51:55] So Bill owed everybody money, right? And like he's still, you know, those guys owe me whatever it is at this point, you know, what, $300, $500. And just you go there and they were just...

Speaker 4:
[52:10] Everybody was big guy, remember?

Speaker 3:
[52:11] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[52:12] I'll pay you soon, big guy.

Speaker 3:
[52:13] Oh, the war. And then do you remember when Bill adopted the girls?

Speaker 4:
[52:20] Yes, the Korean girls, right?

Speaker 3:
[52:22] And he, yeah, and he would use them, like, as... Because at a certain point, it didn't help to go to the connection or go to the clubs. And you had to go to their fucking office. If you wanted, nobody's gonna call you back or whatever. And you'd like, I gotta get on the team, go to the, go to their office. And that's the only way I'm gonna get money, is if I show up and he's in a good mood and it's not gonna happen from a phone call. And I'd go there every single time. It's like, dude, I gotta pay my rent, man. I mean, I got nothing. And you owe me $385. And back then, that was huge. And, ah, Cross, I just, listen. So I get these, my kids, one of my kids is sick. Whatever, it was always this fucking excuse. And then, and then, you know, it was still the Coke residual on the bottom of the snows. And, um, but so Fitz, he owed Fitzsimmons a chunk of money, like, like a significant amount, like 1500, 1800 bucks, like something, something meaty, you know, especially for back then. And, ah, you, you ask Greg, because I feel, I feel like it...

Speaker 4:
[53:43] No, tell the story. I'm sure Greg's told it to me. Greg and I are pretty close.

Speaker 1:
[53:47] I just mean, I just mean...

Speaker 4:
[53:49] In my head, I do remember part of it, but I don't know the whole story. I don't remember it.

Speaker 3:
[53:53] All right, so Greg was, ah, booked at this, ah, you know, some shit club in New Hampshire or whatever. And Downs was going to be there. Bill was going to be there. And, ah, um, and he goes, he goes there and he goes, ah, oh, Bill, I, I, ah, I forgot my watch. Um, I don't want to go over. Can I, can I borrow your watch? And he's like, yeah, sure. It's like a Rolex, like some fancy, fancy, fancy watch. And, and Greg had this all planned out.

Speaker 4:
[54:24] Oh, I know the story now.

Speaker 3:
[54:26] Yeah. And then he had, he had like parked in a specific place and then he, and then he gets, ah, he's like, all right, thanks. And he's like, all right, don't forget to give it back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he does his set and then he bolts out the back door, gets in his car, drives home back to Boston. And then Bill calls him, hey, so I think you forgot to give me my watch back. And Greg just basically goes, yeah, you want it back? Give me the 1800 bucks you owe me. And then met him at a restaurant or a diner somewhere in a public place. Give me the cash and I'll give you your watch. And it was just genius.

Speaker 4:
[55:05] That's Greg. Yeah. Those days are fun. Nick's ComiStop used to offer to pay you in cocaine or cash.

Speaker 3:
[55:12] I, dude, so I did Nick's. And the only, I've said this multiple times, the only, I'm extremely lucky that I was in Boston when I was in Boston because the comedy boom's going on. And outside of, I don't know, three places, I just didn't do that well. And I certainly didn't do well at Nick's. I mean, I was the opposite. They, you know, it had that, the vague feeling of high school where you're the weirdo and people wanna fuck with you and throw you in the trash can. And so I got lucky because there were just spots, they just needed bodies. So I worked all the time, you know? Not, you know, not great gigs, but I had, it was all cash, you know, under the table. And they just needed bodies to, you know, go up and do 15 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, at some cowboy bar in Fitzburg or whatever, Fitchburg. Anyway, so I get this, I get a week at NYX and I am not doing well at all. I think I'm opening up for Kevin Knox. So not my crowd. And I didn't have the tracksuit. And, you know, Knox is up there doing, hey, you know why, you know why Bill Buckner didn't catch the ball or get the ball? It was the 86 World Series because he heard it had AIDS on it. Okay. All right. Yeah, that's a real joke. That's a real joke and they loved it. More! Wonderful!

Speaker 5:
[56:56] Yes, of course it had AIDS on it.

Speaker 3:
[56:58] Oh, yeah. And then, do you remember this? What does AIDS stand for? No. What? Adios, infected dick sucker.

Speaker 4:
[57:08] Oh, I do remember that.

Speaker 3:
[57:10] I'm opening for him.

Speaker 4:
[57:11] Oh, my God.

Speaker 3:
[57:12] And it's his crowd.

Speaker 4:
[57:14] Adios, infected dick sucker. Oh, my God.

Speaker 3:
[57:18] Yeah. So, I titled one of the tracks on my first album, I think, first or second album, What If Baseballs Had AIDS on them?

Speaker 4:
[57:30] Just, just, just.

Speaker 3:
[57:36] And I'm fucking eating it, right? So, they're peeling back my time as the week goes on. And I am, I mean, if I had done even okay, I wouldn't have had this feeling, they're already kind of intimidating, right? Super mobby.

Speaker 4:
[57:57] Very mob.

Speaker 3:
[57:57] Very mob. And do you remember where the, you'd walk into NICS and there was like the podium, and then behind, a little behind it is this little room with a curtain, right? And it's not big at all. And I went to go get paid and my, the week was over and I'm, and I've just, you know, eating it, eat shit every single night, every single show. And, and they're all eating, it's like a scene from like, they're all eating like, you know, Manicotti, just couldn't make it any better. With the fucking napkins in their, you know, in their shirt like this. And, and I go, hey, nervous as shit. Just, hey, so Dom, I need to, if I can get paid, I, just for the, you know, whatever. And Dominic goes to whoever, I can't remember the guy's name, his kind of lackey there. And he goes, you know, whatever his name was, you know, go pay the kid. And he's, I've interrupted his dinner. He's not happy. Fucking napkin off. Takes me to, we go up to the offices upstairs and there's a safe and it's open and there's cash and there's a gun. This is just open, right? And he gives me, he gets the money and he gives it to me and I just pick it up. I want to get the fuck out of there. And I pick it up and he's like, ain't you going to count it? No, I'm good, I trust you. And I just bolted, I never went back there again. I was so fucking intimidated.

Speaker 4:
[59:34] That was an intimidating place.

Speaker 3:
[59:36] Oh, dude. The whole thing about it, the Dominic, all those guys. And everyone's doing blow, the performers are at least.

Speaker 4:
[59:46] It was a maniacal time. There was one time where Nix was running three consecutive shows. So they had their main room upstairs. There was a dance club down in the bottom. And there was one other room somewhere in that building. And guys would go, like guys like Don Gavin, Steve Sweeney, they would go and do a set, a set, a set, a set, a set, a set. And these guys were just raking in money.

Speaker 3:
[60:12] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[60:12] And constantly doing blow.

Speaker 3:
[60:15] No.

Speaker 4:
[60:15] And not paying their taxes.

Speaker 3:
[60:16] Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 4:
[60:17] And that's what got them all.

Speaker 3:
[60:19] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[60:20] K-pop demon hunters, Saja Boys' Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 1:
[60:34] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 6:
[60:35] No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 3:
[60:48] And participate in McDonald's While Supplies Last. Well, they, I mean, back in the heyday, and it went on for years. It was years and years of this. I mean, you could go down, you know, 128 and do Caloons or whatever and then just hop all the way back, hop into these Chinese restaurants or whatever.

Speaker 4:
[61:06] Right, Giggles and Saugus.

Speaker 3:
[61:07] Yeah, and just go in a straight line and go back and forth and do nine fucking shows and make a shit ton of money, cash under the table, tons of blow.

Speaker 4:
[61:19] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[61:19] And yeah.

Speaker 4:
[61:21] It was a wild place because there were so many comics and it was such a, Boston's not a big city, you know? And to have so much comedy all come out, you've seen Fran Salamita's documentary.

Speaker 3:
[61:33] I haven't, I got to.

Speaker 4:
[61:34] It's really great.

Speaker 3:
[61:35] The stand-up stood out.

Speaker 4:
[61:35] Yeah, it's really.

Speaker 3:
[61:37] I got to.

Speaker 4:
[61:37] It's really great. It's really great. And it goes all the way back to Cremens and the Ding Ho. And that was before my time. I started in 88, so the Ding Ho was already gone. You heard legendary stories from the Ding Ho.

Speaker 3:
[61:52] Did you see Call Me Lucky?

Speaker 4:
[61:53] No.

Speaker 3:
[61:54] Oh, you gotta see that. It's Bobcat's documentary about Barry.

Speaker 4:
[62:00] Oh no, wait a minute. I did see that.

Speaker 3:
[62:02] It's fucking great. That's right.

Speaker 4:
[62:03] I did see that.

Speaker 3:
[62:04] It's really well done. I don't mean just... Even if you don't know Barry, just the story and the way he lays out the path of the film, it's great.

Speaker 4:
[62:15] I had Barry on right after it came out. I had him on the podcast.

Speaker 3:
[62:21] He's a legend and huge inspiration.

Speaker 4:
[62:24] He was an intimidating guy. That was the guy that I was scared of, because he was the guy who was sort of the standard. He made sure there was no hacks. He made sure there was... He set the standard.

Speaker 3:
[62:43] He was really equitable, too.

Speaker 4:
[62:44] Yes. Very politically active. Even way back then, really knowledgeable and really understood what was going on in the world.

Speaker 3:
[62:55] Did you ever see one of his State of the Union shows?

Speaker 4:
[63:00] No.

Speaker 3:
[63:02] They're fucking amazing. So he would go... I saw a couple of them at the old Stitches. And he would go up... And it was when the State of the Union was happening. He'd go up and he'd do his State of the Union. It was just him. And he would go on and he'd have... It was pre-PowerPoint, but it was whatever the equivalent of a screen behind him with stuff. And he'd go up there with a cooler, like a legit big cooler of beer, because that motherfucker could drink. And he would just start... He had a podium and he would just crack beers and just down a case of beer or half a case of beer and just do his stuff, extemporaneous stuff. I mean, stuff prepared, but about the State of the Union and all that. It was... And it would always be packed. Like, and you'd see Dennis Leary and every single comic would be there, trying up against the wall because it was packed. But it was great. I mean, legendary.

Speaker 4:
[64:07] Well, I mean, I think he was really responsible for a lot of what Boston comedy became, because he was the guy that was kind of the gold standard.

Speaker 3:
[64:16] And he started the Ding Ho.

Speaker 4:
[64:17] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he is like, becoming friends with him was like, whew, like such a relief, because I was so terrified of him.

Speaker 3:
[64:25] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[64:26] When I was a young comic, like if that guy thought I sucked, if he hated me, I was like, I'm fucking doomed.

Speaker 3:
[64:31] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[64:31] You know, because he was this character. He would go on stage with a sport coat on and reach into his inner pocket and pull out a Budweiser for every show. Remember that?

Speaker 3:
[64:41] I don't. But I mean, I know he drank a lot. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[64:44] But he would bring his own beer. It was part of his thing. He would go on stage, just reach into his, pull out a Budweiser and set it down on the stool. He'd only drink American beer.

Speaker 3:
[64:54] Is that true?

Speaker 4:
[64:55] Yeah. He would drink Budweiser.

Speaker 3:
[64:57] I wonder why that is.

Speaker 4:
[64:58] I don't know. He was like kind of a patriot.

Speaker 3:
[65:03] He doesn't seem like he would, the kind of guy who would have denied himself a Modelo.

Speaker 4:
[65:08] Well, I mean, maybe he was performative.

Speaker 3:
[65:10] I don't know.

Speaker 4:
[65:11] Was there a Modelo? Even did it exist at the time?

Speaker 3:
[65:14] But yeah, he was the only guy, I would say, that, and to your point, like all these other legendary comics, Lenny Clark and Don Gavin and Steve Sweeney and all those guys, he was the only guy, those guys were kind of walking on eggshells. Yes. The only guy. They would give all each other shit and mean shit too. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[65:46] Oh, they would fight.

Speaker 3:
[65:47] Oh yeah. Barry was the one guy they wouldn't fuck with.

Speaker 4:
[65:50] Well, he was different than all of them, and that he was incredibly well read, like really well read, really knowledgeable about all sorts of things, with economics and the way the world works, the injustices of our society, but really funny fucking comic too, like great jokes, great writer, you know, and just like, he was the standard. He was the glue that held that scene together, because they all looked at him to be like, like, you can't kind of step out of line, like you don't want to get, catch Barry's R.

Speaker 3:
[66:21] Yeah, it's absolutely true. And then when the revelation he had of being abused as a kid, and then he dedicated, he spoke in front of Congress, he did about AOL.

Speaker 4:
[66:40] Yeah, that was during the early days of AOL, for people that don't know, they had all these chat rooms, and sexual predators were using these chat rooms to find children.

Speaker 3:
[66:52] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[66:52] And also to exchange pornographic material. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[66:57] And that was, that was, that becomes a big part of Call Me Lucky, you know. Right, right. And yeah, he like dedicated his life basically to just going out and catching these motherfuckers.

Speaker 4:
[67:13] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[67:13] And helping, you know, the people who would pose as kids and stuff, and that was, you know, that was his, and he was also, you know, lapsed Catholic, and when all the, especially in Boston, the Catholic Church and Diocese and all that stuff was coming out, he was, I mean, that was his fucking focus.

Speaker 4:
[67:37] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[67:38] Getting these fuckers caught, you know, exposed.

Speaker 4:
[67:43] Well, I think it took someone like him that was, he was levels above most of the other comedians in terms of his understanding of the world and his ability to articulate it, and also a great comic, so that like people looked at him like, well, this guy's like, he's clearly smarter than all of us. He's also like super dedicated to the craft of comedy, like meant a lot to him, like the integrity of comedy, like what it is to be a comic.

Speaker 3:
[68:13] You know, and he came from, and I think this is kind of specific to Boston too, he came from a jock world. He was a minor league or whatever sub minor league catcher. He played, he was at Syracuse University, and he played for like the Cape Cod League, and you know, the things that eventually get to minor leagues, hopefully, but, and he came from that hard drinking, you know, and catcher is arguably the smartest guy in the baseball team, right?

Speaker 4:
[68:49] Right, he's the guy making the calls for the pitches.

Speaker 3:
[68:52] UFC and everything, defensive liners, so he came from that world too, which I think helped his cred.

Speaker 4:
[68:58] Yeah, but it's just such an unusual town in what happened there, that these guys became these local legends, where they never had to leave, and they kind of did the same act for decades, which is also kind of crazy.

Speaker 3:
[69:12] That to me was like, I knew, there was definitely a, as I started to separate from that world a little bit, and just kind of evolving as a comedian, and there was like the catch scene, and Catch a Rising Star, and that was a thing that was an early, I just didn't get it, like why are you doing the same, there's no joy in it, and then you would drive some of these guys, because they get fucked up, and you were happy to have all the work, and you'd go up and do 15, and they'd do half hour, and you'd get in the car, and you'd go somewhere else, and these guys doing, Mike Dunhaman, he would do his, remember Rosie the Bounty, the quicker picker-upper, the Bounty?

Speaker 4:
[70:06] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[70:06] Okay, so he had, there was a, so the commercials were like, Rosie, and it was like the scrappy waitress at a diner. Remember, it was like a character that was in all the, it was like the, you know, mascot of whatever, Bounty, the quicker picker-upper, and her character was kind of like feisty, isn't he? Commercials ran for years, you know, different, like, ah, you don't do this, do this. And his bit was about taking a gun out and shooting her. And it was funny, you'd see it the first time, but it's like, dude, that hasn't been on the air in fucking 10 years. And he's still doing this, ah, yeah, Rosie, I got something for you, I got some advice for you. I think, shoot, like, what the fuck? And there was, okay, wait, Joe, did you, were you there? So, Ed, the Machine Regine.

Speaker 4:
[71:03] Oh, yeah, I remember him.

Speaker 3:
[71:05] So, he wore the suit? Yep. Well, yeah, and his headshot was four different, his headshot was like four squares. And different characters. Yep, Tina Turner. And guy, the mob guy. I can't remember the rest of them. And then, you know, whatever.

Speaker 4:
[71:22] I think he had a turban in one of them.

Speaker 3:
[71:24] I'm sure he did. So he goes to jail for rolling back odometers. Odometers, yes.

Speaker 4:
[71:33] Yes, that's right.

Speaker 3:
[71:34] So he gets caught, and he was a, you know, car salesman, I think, in Rhode Island, I believe. And he got caught rolling back the odometers. He goes to jail for a year and a half. And I was shooting this movie, this is decades later. I was shooting this movie, and it was on a cruise ship. And the cruise ship, Ed, the Machine Regime, is the headliner at the comedy venue on the cruise ship. And I'm like, oh, shit, that's crazy. I haven't seen this guy in forever. And he's back doing comedy? Okay. And I go there, and he does, I don't know, 40 minutes. And he does the same fucking act from 15 years ago. And it's like, you don't have one, you spent 18 months in prison, you don't have one joke? You don't have one motherfucking observation? Even if you lie and say, you know, you know it would be weird if you were in prison and whatever, you don't have anything?

Speaker 4:
[72:41] It's weird. It was a weird thing. And it only existed with them. Most comics in the country were writing new material all the time.

Speaker 3:
[72:50] It was, I remember that feeling of, I must be different because I'm not, I don't, that is such a distasteful thing. I wouldn't want to do that.

Speaker 4:
[73:01] Well, there was two, I saw two traps there. One of them was that and the other one was never leaving.

Speaker 3:
[73:08] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[73:08] They never left Boston. And when they did leave Boston, they had so much local material that their act was like cut down by like 40%.

Speaker 3:
[73:17] And there were a lot of people, their peers, who would give them shit. Like, and it was all just kind of resentful, jealousy, small-minded, small town, kind of like, oh, you think you're better than us. Which is a Boston thing too, that, oh, you think you're so, you think you're so hot now that you, you're hot shot, you go, you get some, you go to Hollywood, you go there. Yeah, fuck you. This is, you know, it was a real provincial working class kind of attitude, you know. They look down on, and you know, they would give leery shit all the time, you know. Like, sellout, this is bullshit weird.

Speaker 4:
[73:58] Sellout's a weird one, because they would all sold out. It just wasn't available. Well, they were all mad at Stephen Wright. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, so Stephen Wright was like this.

Speaker 3:
[74:10] How can you get mad at Stephen Wright?

Speaker 4:
[74:12] Well, not mad at him, but bitter because of his success. Oh, he went and left. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[74:17] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[74:18] He went and left, did The Tonight Show, became huge. So unusual, so different. And they came to Boston, The Tonight Show came to Boston to look for comics. And Stephen Wright was the one they chose. And all these other guys were like, he's a fucking middle act. Like, this is bullshit. Like, that guy bombs half the time. Because his act, to me, was a lot like Hedberg. In that, if you didn't know what he was doing, and you came to see specific, like if Hedberg, there's a famous story of Hedberg was on the road in Ohio, and they had this guy who was an opening act, who'd do like backflips and fucking sing rap songs. It was a disaster, and Hedberg kept bombing. And so they switched them and made Hedberg the middle act, and tried to fuck him on the money, and Stan Hope got into it with the owner of the club, and it became a big thing. But once Hedberg got an audience, then people knew what they were coming to see, and then it was amazing. And then everybody wanted to see that. That was kind of the same with Stephen Wright. Like if you expected, if you're on a show with Steve Sweeney and Lenny Clark and all these big energy fucking Boston guys. And then, you know, I used to work at a fire hydrant factory. Couldn't park anywhere near the place. You know, like, it just, for whatever reason, you know.

Speaker 3:
[75:33] Well, it's also that other comedy is, and I'm not taking anything away from those guys and the bits were great, but the other comedy is a little easier. It just, you get it.

Speaker 4:
[75:46] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[75:46] And like Stephen Wright, you got to think about it for a second.

Speaker 4:
[75:49] It was abstract. It was low key. It was all non sequiturs. It was one to another. It was. And so when he left and took off, a lot of guys apparently were like, this is fucking bullshit. Like, when's my turn going to happen?

Speaker 3:
[76:03] Yeah. I can see that easily. Yeah. I mean, that was, it was so... I mean, no other scene had that kind of weird provincial, you know, and that thing, like you said, they wouldn't leave.

Speaker 4:
[76:17] No, they never left. Well, they were huge there. So if they lived there, they could make like a couple hundred thousand dollars a year just running around and cash.

Speaker 3:
[76:25] Oh, easy.

Speaker 4:
[76:25] Yeah, and not ever have to worry about anything. And they played golf all day. So there's two things that scared me. One of them was golf, because I saw that when you play golf, you kind of stop trying with your comedy.

Speaker 3:
[76:36] It's a slippery slope. It's a gateway drug.

Speaker 4:
[76:39] Well, you're out there for fucking eight hours a day. Like, Noxy was always playing golf. And then the other thing was like, if you never left, you had no chance of developing like a national audience where you could go to a club in Philadelphia. You can go to a club. They couldn't do the road. And I remember thinking, oh, this is a trap.

Speaker 3:
[77:00] Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Speaker 4:
[77:02] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[77:02] I mean, and as you said, they half of their standup was like, you'd have to know about, you know, Storo Drive or fucking Johnny Most. You know, Johnny Most. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[77:14] I remember Donovan's bit about Johnny Most. It was amazing. But it was like he was doing that bit long after Johnny Most was dead. So like 20 people in the audience would be howling, laughing, and everybody else would be like, who the fuck is Johnny Most? Yeah. It was weird because it was like a velvet prison. It was like how I describe like really great comics that get jobs in the writers room. And I'm like, you got to be careful. Like that's a velvet prison. Because if you get stuck in that writers room and you never do the road, you never put out specials, you're never going to get an audience. You're always going to be beholden to an employer. You're always going to have to have a job. And there's great comics that got trapped with that.

Speaker 3:
[77:53] But wouldn't you say that if they, yes, it's a trap, but if they didn't have the wherewithal or foresight or willpower to get out of that trap, then they probably weren't meant to do that.

Speaker 4:
[78:10] Perhaps, but sometimes they get a mortgage and then they get a family and then they're stuck.

Speaker 3:
[78:15] That's the trap. Let's call it for what it is.

Speaker 4:
[78:19] Yeah. It's a trap. Well, in a lot of ways, it can be if you're trying to be an actual national level. Do you know Owen Smith? Comic in LA?

Speaker 3:
[78:30] No.

Speaker 4:
[78:31] One of the top 20 best comics on earth. He's fucking brilliant. He's so funny.

Speaker 3:
[78:37] Owen Smith.

Speaker 4:
[78:38] Owen Smith. I saw him at the Comedy Store and I remember the first time I saw him at the Comedy Store, I'm like, how is this guy not fucking huge? He's so funny. He's so good. He's like, he has this bit about adopting a white kid and naming him the N-word. It's a really funny, well-crafted bit. All of his bits are brilliantly written. He's a great performer. He's super likable. Got writer's gigs and he does the mothership a couple of times a year, I believe, at least once a year. But just doesn't get out there.

Speaker 3:
[79:10] Who does he write or what?

Speaker 4:
[79:13] I think he's a show runner now. Oh, well, that. So it took it to another level. But, you know, just got jobs writing when he was struggling as a comic and those jobs eventually led to a house.

Speaker 3:
[79:26] But maybe he, you know, was like, you watch him and you love him, right? Because you see a lot of stand up and you're like, a lot of it's shit and this guy's fucking great, great writer. But maybe he doesn't see it that way and he's quite happy to have...

Speaker 4:
[79:42] I think he does. He does see it that way. I've talked to him about it. Yeah. He kind of knows. He just doesn't know what to do now because he's...

Speaker 3:
[79:50] I mean, you're a showrunner. You're...

Speaker 4:
[79:51] He's making money.

Speaker 3:
[79:53] Yeah. And there's a lot of responsibility.

Speaker 4:
[79:55] There's also not a lot of shows anymore.

Speaker 3:
[79:57] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[79:57] Which is, it's a real problem.

Speaker 3:
[79:59] It's a real problem.

Speaker 4:
[80:00] If you banked on being a showrunner in the 90s and that's what you threw your hat into, and then all of a sudden that thing seems to have dwindled to like 20% of what it used to be.

Speaker 3:
[80:12] It's... Yeah. It's... I used to be quite happy with the idea that I knew, you know, back in the day when you're pitching shows and stuff and trying to develop things and you go, this... Let's not waste our time going to these five places. This is not a show for them. This is a show for these three places. Let's... This is... This kind of show. Now I have no fucking clue. I, you know, come up with... Like Bob and I pitched a show, sold the pitch. There was like even... There were like four... I think we pitched it at eight places. Four of them kind of bid. We took what we thought was the best deal. And then wrote the... It was a limited series. Eight episodes. Wrote the first four. And it was Bob and his brother Bill, who's a big Simpsons guy. And it was good. And then they said, the quote was, marketing and analytics couldn't... That's a quote. Couldn't figure it out what to do with the show. And so they didn't... And we had four episodes that you could look at. And then we had the Bible for the next four and the outlines and everything was... And it was fucking funny. On the page, it was funny. Then we're like, so here's the cast. We're going to have these amazing people. And Bob and I, as different cult leaders, we're going to have a great cast. And... And that's such a rare thing. When it starts off on the page, funny. And by the time you get a great cast, and then you get on set, you're like, what if we do this? And then you get into the post and start playing around with it. I mean, it was a really cool thing. And yeah, marketing and analytics. That's what you're dealing with now.

Speaker 4:
[82:16] Well, I mean, that has kind of always at least been the case.

Speaker 3:
[82:21] Well, not analytics. I mean, they would have to say, I mean, analytics is technical. I mean, marketing, I don't know how to help you, man. I can give you some advice. I think that's a shitty way to market it, but you know that world. But analytics is about the algorithm and all that shit.

Speaker 4:
[82:45] Is this recent?

Speaker 3:
[82:46] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[82:47] Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[82:48] Right after, shortly after COVID.

Speaker 4:
[82:51] It's amazing how many incredibly unimpressive people are responsible for putting out shows. The people that you communicate with, the executives, you're like, this has got to be a mistake. Like, how did you get this job? And I experienced that early on, like, at the first pilot that I was on. The first pilot was on Hardball. The pilot was actually very funny because it was written by Jeff Martin and Kevin Curran. They're from The Simpsons and they also wrote on Married with Children. Great guys. But they were writers. They were like these like quiet, kind of soft-spoken guys and, you know, they ran the pilot and then they brought in a showrunner from Coach. Remember that show Coach? Yeah. And this guy just fucked the whole show and turned it into this like, da-dum-dum, da-dum-dum. It was like this clunky, bad joke, like really up.

Speaker 3:
[83:45] It was happens more than you think.

Speaker 4:
[83:47] And the people behind the scenes, like the executives, it was astonishing how little of them had any creative ideas. It was that they were just hoping that it would work. And ego, it's like ego and I'm an executive. So I'll tell you what's good and what's not good. And we understand this because we're Fox. And I was like, this is nuts. Like this is how it works behind the scene. I thought you'd get behind the scene and be all these fucking geniuses that had put together all these television shows. They had an understanding of like how to let people be creative and put a show together and let it fucking run out in the runs. Like when you're running through the script, it's like the little boy who thought the war was over. Same thing. Finally, they're going to figure it out. Yeah, very naive. But I naively stumbled into that exact right thing with News Radio.

Speaker 3:
[84:38] So when I got on News Radio, which I would say some of those execs that you're describing, they probably stumbled into the success of it.

Speaker 4:
[84:49] Well, Paul Sims, who is brilliant, was coming from the Larry Sanders Show. So Larry Sanders Show, huge success, genius show. And so they knew this guy was special. And a super smart guy, like funny, and had a great group of writers, and put together a great pilot, and then recast the one role that I came in for. And so I'm there on this set, and it was like, you know, it took long hours to figure it out, but they let everybody do whatever they wanted to do. Like Paul's approach was so different than anybody else. Dave Foley was like the secret producer of like half of that show. Half of the way the scenes were put together, half of the jokes that were in it was all Dave Foley on set, running through the script with the cast, coming up with better ideas.

Speaker 3:
[85:37] Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 4:
[85:38] They let you do anything. Like sometimes they'd say, can we see it as written? And then you'd give it to them as written, and they'd be like, I like your idea better. Like Paul was fucking amazing with that. And so once I did that, I was like, I think I'm done with this, because I don't think it's ever gonna be any better than this.

Speaker 3:
[85:56] It's rare, man.

Speaker 4:
[85:57] Yeah, it was super rare. I auditioned for like one or two other ones that were terrible, just because I wanted money. You know, and I'm like, maybe it'll be okay. But hell is being on a sitcom that's terrible, that's successful. That sounds dumb to people. Like, no, you know, you're on TV making $50,000 a week or whatever you're making. Like, poor you. But no, you're you're in hell because you're doing something that sucks and you have to show up every day doing this thing when you know you could have been on Seinfeld or you if you just got cast on Friends.

Speaker 3:
[86:34] That's a trap too, you know, is like the people who, you know, it because it really is like a job and you'll you may have a really nice house.

Speaker 4:
[86:44] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[86:45] And you have a nice car. But, you know, you're you're getting, you know, you're in Studio City and you get in your car and you drive to the this job. And it's kind of shitty and sucks. But there's amenities, great craft services. This guy makes fucking Frappuccinos right there, you know. And and then you go and have dinner with somebody fancy somewhere. And then you just get up and do the same thing over and over again.

Speaker 4:
[87:11] Yeah. And you keep buying things because that's how you reward yourself. You buy a new television. This one's even bigger. You know, you buy a new car. I got the new car, you know, and you're that's what you're doing to reward yourself for doing this job that sucks.

Speaker 3:
[87:24] What I get that too. I mean, I will on a much smaller scale. But when I make a good payday, I'll buy some expensive boxes of baseball cards.

Speaker 4:
[87:35] Oh, you're a baseball card collector? That's the thing? Oh, interesting.

Speaker 3:
[87:39] Yeah. But have been going back. It's not like, I feel like I have legit, you know.

Speaker 4:
[87:45] Baseball street cred?

Speaker 3:
[87:46] Yes. But that's the thing. And also it's, I mean, the argument can be made, it's an investment, a shitty investment, but an investment nonetheless. But it's also like gambling, because it's like a scratch off ticket, because everybody's chasing the one-of-one cards and you're opening the packs and stuff.

Speaker 4:
[88:06] Oh, that's how you do it? You buy packs unopened?

Speaker 3:
[88:09] I buy boxes, yeah. So I buy a hobby box, which has a better, it's more expensive and has a better chance of, well, that is more like auto-rookie cards or relic cards or something like that.

Speaker 4:
[88:23] But that is an investment though, because you could always sell them. People always want them.

Speaker 3:
[88:27] Yes. I just mean since I started, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, yeah, 30, like in the 90s, early 90s, maybe 80, no, 89, 89. So whatever money I put in, there's nowhere near, if I sold everything, I mean, it's talking about half the money I put in. But I have them and I like them and I'm not going to sell them. I'm not going to sell them.

Speaker 4:
[88:57] So that's your reward.

Speaker 3:
[88:58] That's my reward, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[89:01] My thing was in my poverty days, it was comic books. So one of my...

Speaker 3:
[89:07] Which is also an investment.

Speaker 4:
[89:08] Yeah, well, it became one eventually. But during my poverty days, my biggest, saddest moment was when I had to sell my comic books because I had no money. I had no money and I had these old Spider-Mans and these old Incredible Hulks.

Speaker 3:
[89:26] Which were probably now worth...

Speaker 4:
[89:28] Oh my God, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had some really good ones in the plastic sleeve.

Speaker 3:
[89:34] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[89:34] I'd keep them in the sleeve. Be very careful pulling them out, opening them up. Oh, I loved comic books. And I had collected them since I was a child.

Speaker 3:
[89:42] Oh, that's a bummer, man.

Speaker 4:
[89:44] I wanted to be a comic book illustrator. That's what I...

Speaker 3:
[89:46] Is that your thing?

Speaker 4:
[89:47] Yeah, that's what I... When I was a kid.

Speaker 3:
[89:49] Oh, I didn't know that. Is any of that stuff yours?

Speaker 4:
[89:51] No, no, no. None of that stuff is mine.

Speaker 3:
[89:53] All the artwork is just different artists.

Speaker 4:
[89:55] But you do...

Speaker 3:
[89:55] Oh, wow.

Speaker 4:
[89:56] Yeah. Well, I haven't in a long time, but I was really good when I was in high school. But you could still do that. Yeah, I could still draw. I could still draw. A little. But it's like...

Speaker 3:
[90:03] But if you wanted to do your own comic book, I'd say you could do that.

Speaker 4:
[90:06] I would have to start practicing again and get... But when I was a teenager, I was really good. And that was what I wanted to do, but I had a really terrible art teacher in high school. He was just a fucking... Just a miserable guy. Just miserable and he's like, You're not gonna get that job. I'm like, what? You can't just draw what you want. I'm like, why not?

Speaker 3:
[90:27] It's like a Dan Clowes thing. Have you read Art School Confidential?

Speaker 4:
[90:31] No.

Speaker 3:
[90:32] Oh, you know Dan Clowes, right?

Speaker 4:
[90:34] I know he is.

Speaker 3:
[90:34] Yeah, his stuff is fucking genius, too. I've used that word too many times.

Speaker 4:
[90:39] That's okay. There's a lot of geniuses out there.

Speaker 3:
[90:40] There aren't that many.

Speaker 4:
[90:42] But there's enough if you search around.

Speaker 3:
[90:44] I want to be judicious with him, but yeah, so he's the guy who did Ape Ball, and then he did Ghost World, turned into a movie, and then there was another one, Wilson, that was turned into a movie. His stuff is great, but he has a thing about shitty teachers, art school teachers. He has a comic story.

Speaker 4:
[91:14] Well, I quit on my last year in high school. I stopped doing art just because my teacher was so bad. And then there was this one guy in my class that I recently reconnected with, this guy John DeVore, who was the best artist in the class. There was me, this guy Kevin, and John, and we were the best artists in the class. I was probably like third best, but John was the best. And John got an F his last year from this guy. And I'm like, he gave you a fucking F? He's like, that guy was such a cunt. We were going back and forth in emails.

Speaker 3:
[91:43] Was it about purity or what was the?

Speaker 4:
[91:46] No, he was terrible. He wasn't a good artist. He was just miserable. He was miserable. He was like this thin man with a big pot belly, so I think he just drank himself to sleep every night. And he was just sad.

Speaker 3:
[91:58] Easy, easy.

Speaker 4:
[91:59] Easy, easy.

Speaker 3:
[92:01] Hey, you're getting too close.

Speaker 4:
[92:04] He was just sad. He was just a sad guy.

Speaker 3:
[92:07] What was his justification for saying this isn't any good or you get an F?

Speaker 4:
[92:12] If I had to be honest, I think he hated potential.

Speaker 3:
[92:15] Right.

Speaker 4:
[92:15] Yeah, because he hated John. And if he hated John, like John was genius. He was brilliant. And John wound up not being an artist either.

Speaker 3:
[92:22] Wow, think of how many examples of that where kids' talent or dreams or aspirations are kind of crushed and to the point of like, it's not worth it.

Speaker 4:
[92:33] No.

Speaker 3:
[92:33] I don't want to deal with this shit.

Speaker 4:
[92:34] No, it's like bad teachers, bad teachers can really ruin your life and good teachers can change your life.

Speaker 3:
[92:40] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[92:40] You know, I had a teacher in middle school that gave me one thought that has been, that stuck with me like my whole life. When I was, I guess I was like 13. And he was a science teacher and he was talking about space. He goes, and he was just saying, I just want you to sit here and comprehend when we're in this classroom. I want you to comprehend the concept of infinity, that the universe is infinite, that there is no end. Just hurt your head, lie in bed at night, and think about how it goes on and on and there's no ending to it. And we were all in class like 13, and go, what the fuck, man? I mean, it was the way he said it. I'm not doing it justice, because he was like kind of a spooky guy. He went to Vietnam. He was like a grizzled fucking dude who was like, but brilliant. And that guy, like that one thought, I carry with me all the time.

Speaker 3:
[93:32] Especially at 13, too, you know, it's because you're about to start losing sight of those, the importance that those concepts will have.

Speaker 4:
[93:43] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[93:43] And we just dismiss them and go, yeah, yeah, it's big, whatever.

Speaker 4:
[93:47] Yeah, this guy birthed my fascination with space at 13. I don't think I was even interested in space before then. And then I became absolutely fascinated by it. I just couldn't get my hand on enough books about cosmology and space travel. But this guy that was his art teacher was just, I think he just, life didn't turn out the way he wanted it to. And he wanted to squash the hopes and dreams of talented people.

Speaker 3:
[94:11] Yeah, I think that's...

Speaker 4:
[94:13] Unfortunately, that's a real thing.

Speaker 3:
[94:14] Yeah, it's more common than you might hope for. Yeah, I think that's a very real, you know, very real thing, unfortunately.

Speaker 4:
[94:23] So that was my dream. My dream was to be a comic book illustrator. So when I was a young kid, from the time I was like, God, like six or seven, when I lived in San Francisco, I would collect all these different comic books. That was what I would do. I would just go...

Speaker 3:
[94:35] And that San Francisco was the... What's the, you know, the counterculture comic? They were like the big R. Crumb. R.

Speaker 4:
[94:46] Crumb, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[94:47] But there was like a publisher, right? That's famous.

Speaker 4:
[94:50] Yeah, God, I don't... Yeah, I do know what you're thinking of. I can't remember the name of it. But I was really interested. I really loved like the old creepy and eerie comic books, too. Do you know what those?

Speaker 3:
[95:00] Do you know what my grandmom did? Oh, it's gonna hurt your feelings. My, I had a, my uncle who eventually went insane was a huge EC Comics, right? Early, I don't know, but all the EC stuff and then, you know, early MAD magazine and stuff, but he had this collection and I was probably eight maybe, and I had expressed interest in these, you know, can I, not thinking in terms of investment, just can I have them? I like them and they're, and I would sit and read them, and they're really cool, and they're creepy, you know, and they're scary. Some of them are scary. And she, I think she just threw them away. Like original, and I'm gonna guess, I don't know, but I'm gonna guess like a quarter of a million dollars worth. Throw them away. They're just comics.

Speaker 4:
[96:10] They were so good. I love those old black and white, like really like deeply illustrated.

Speaker 3:
[96:17] It's like super creepy.

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Speaker 4:
[97:21] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[97:22] Weird science. Tales from the Crypt. Vault of Horror. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[97:26] God, those were great.

Speaker 3:
[97:27] Look at that.

Speaker 4:
[97:29] Yeah, some of them were really gory.

Speaker 3:
[97:31] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[97:32] Oh, I love those.

Speaker 3:
[97:32] Crypt Keeper.

Speaker 4:
[97:33] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[97:34] Tales from the Crypt. Yeah, that stuff was, like, I loved it when I was a kid. Holy shit.

Speaker 4:
[97:42] Those were incredible.

Speaker 3:
[97:43] I was like, do you remember seeing Twilight Zone when you were a kid? Just blowing your mind, like, wow.

Speaker 4:
[97:50] You think about the early Twilight Zone, how many premises they went over? Like, how many different brilliant premises they had in the early Twilight Zone?

Speaker 3:
[97:59] Yeah, that have been, you know, stolen completely.

Speaker 4:
[98:04] Oh, yeah. Over and over and over again. Yeah. But just like so genius and creative. Yeah. The William Shackner one when he's in the diner and the little machine that is giving him fortunes, they all turn out to be true.

Speaker 3:
[98:18] I don't remember that one.

Speaker 4:
[98:19] Oh, my God. There were so many good ones. How about the Burgess Meredith one? Where he just wants to be alone with books and there's a nuclear bomb and he's like, finally, and then he breaks his glasses.

Speaker 3:
[98:31] Yeah. And the one, what is it called? Situation on Main Street or something like that where they, there's, it's so genius and ahead of its time where there's a suburban street and the lights go out or something goes out and then eventually, all the neighbors are at each other's throats, accusing each other of this thing. And then the very end, and they're all like, and then they start getting guns and at the very end, you're watching the whole thing unfold. And that at the very end, here it is.

Speaker 5:
[99:11] So, monsters are due on Maple Street.

Speaker 3:
[99:13] The monsters are due on Maple Street. Yeah. And they, so they're talking about these monsters that are, you know, and who are the monsters? And it's, and they all become suspicious. Yeah, the lights are out. And eventually, you pull away from this whole thing, and it's two aliens in a, you know, flying saucer, and they're, yeah, there it is. And they're going, this is how we'll take over. It's street by street by street. And this is how we'll do it. You don't have to go in there guns of blazing. People kill themselves. And it's like, how far ahead of time was that?

Speaker 4:
[99:53] It's genius.

Speaker 3:
[99:54] And the...

Speaker 4:
[99:54] Divide and conquer.

Speaker 3:
[99:56] And the To Serve Mankind.

Speaker 4:
[99:58] That was a great one.

Speaker 3:
[99:59] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[99:59] It's a cookbook. Yeah. There's so many amazing premises. There was like no duds. If you go back and watch The Twilight Zone, even today, like it's all brilliant.

Speaker 3:
[100:10] There's one I remember that was a dud. That was a dud. That I remember. I haven't seen in a long time. But it's a... It's... It's either really, really, really cold, and there's this poor family in a, you know, New York City, and they can't get heat, or it's really, really hot, and they can't get cold, and they're dealing with people who are like, you know, in the family who are really sick. And then the twist was, it's like, oh, it's really, it's somebody who has a fever, and they're not, it just wasn't that good.

Speaker 4:
[100:46] Ah, well, they're allowed one, Doug.

Speaker 3:
[100:49] Yes, that's a wonderful one.

Speaker 4:
[100:50] I don't think I ever saw that one, but I remember so many of them were so creative.

Speaker 3:
[100:54] Oh, amazing.

Speaker 4:
[100:55] It's kind of nuts if you think about it, because it was completely original. Nothing like that existed before it.

Speaker 3:
[101:01] Yep.

Speaker 4:
[101:01] And they, it was like this open field that was rich with premises, and they just took all the good ones.

Speaker 3:
[101:09] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[101:09] And then everybody afterwards, it's like, like don't, like South Park always just jokes about, like Simpsons already covered something. Like they always joke around about like how the Simpsons have kind of covered so many premises because they've, you know, they've been around since, God, The Simpsons was when I was in fucking high school.

Speaker 3:
[101:28] Yeah, it's like 30 years, right?

Speaker 4:
[101:29] At least, more than that. When was this, when did The Simpsons first come on Fox?

Speaker 3:
[101:34] It was Tracy Ullman's show, remember that.

Speaker 4:
[101:37] What year was that?

Speaker 5:
[101:38] 86.

Speaker 4:
[101:40] 86, so it was right after I got out of high school.

Speaker 5:
[101:42] That, I was a tiny, tiny kid and I had only called them the family, so I kind of remember that.

Speaker 4:
[101:47] So I graduated in 85, so it was right after high school. And The Simpsons are still on the air.

Speaker 3:
[101:52] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[101:52] Nuts. Nuts.

Speaker 3:
[101:55] Oh, do you remember the?

Speaker 4:
[101:57] 87?

Speaker 3:
[101:58] Do you remember the Twilight Zone where there's the real pompous guy. There's like a men's club kind of thing, whatever. And there's this real loudmouth pompous guy and this other guy's like, you know, you know, would you shut up? You can't. I bet you can't go. I bet you can't stop talking for a year or whatever, a month. I can't remember what it is. And the guy's like, absolutely, because I'll bet you $100,000. You can't go one month without talking. He's like, I'll take that bet. And they basically create like this little kind of cage in this men's club. And he spends a month, and he's not talking. And he's, you know, and then it turns out the guy can't pay him. He didn't have the money to begin with, to pay off the bet, because the guy goes the full month or year or whatever. And it turns out that the guy who made that bet, who was not going to talk for a year, also desperately needed the money and had his tongue cut out.

Speaker 5:
[103:03] Oh, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4:
[103:05] Yeah. Oh, I do remember that one. Oh, God.

Speaker 3:
[103:10] I think of these things as kids.

Speaker 4:
[103:12] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[103:13] Whoa.

Speaker 4:
[103:14] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[103:15] And of course, the cornfield. I'll banish you to the cornfield, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[103:21] It's just amazing that, well, if you stop and think about how new television was back then, I mean, television was only a couple of decades old back then. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[103:30] Not barely. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[103:31] If that, like, what year was the Twilight Zone? What was the premiere? Rod Sterling.

Speaker 5:
[103:39] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[103:39] I guess.

Speaker 4:
[103:40] 67. No.

Speaker 5:
[103:42] Earlier?

Speaker 3:
[103:43] I'm going to say 59.

Speaker 4:
[103:44] Yeah, you're probably right. Is it 59?

Speaker 5:
[103:48] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[103:48] I got it on the, I got it exact?

Speaker 5:
[103:50] Yeah. October 2nd, 1959.

Speaker 4:
[103:53] Damn, son.

Speaker 3:
[103:54] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[103:54] Pretty good.

Speaker 4:
[103:55] Wow. Wow. So if you think about it, television, when did it start? What was, like, the first television programs? Was it the 30s?

Speaker 3:
[104:03] I think it was Real Housewives of Yonkers. I think it was Real Housewives of Yonkers.

Speaker 4:
[104:11] Imagine if they could watch some of these reality shows today. They'd be like, what the fuck did we do?

Speaker 3:
[104:17] Yes, I think so. Wait, Andy Cohen? What? Who? Why? How? What is this? The first, it was the, it was, wasn't it, like, the, the, where they would do plays? You know what I mean? Like...

Speaker 5:
[104:36] Well, I Love Lucy was on, it was on and done before this even started.

Speaker 3:
[104:40] Well, The Honeymooners, right? That would have been...

Speaker 4:
[104:42] What year was that?

Speaker 5:
[104:43] That was 51 to 57. Here's a list of shows that were on before.

Speaker 3:
[104:47] Yeah, The Honeymooners was huge.

Speaker 5:
[104:50] Offered Hitchcock Presents was on before that.

Speaker 4:
[104:52] So what was the first television show ever?

Speaker 5:
[104:54] Oh, we went back to 1920s.

Speaker 4:
[104:56] 1920s.

Speaker 3:
[104:57] No.

Speaker 4:
[105:00] The Queen's Messenger.

Speaker 3:
[105:01] That's BBC. Early US.

Speaker 4:
[105:04] Scripted TV show.

Speaker 3:
[105:04] Crap, television and theater. That's what I was thinking of. Where they would do plays, you know, and it was sponsored. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[105:11] Live drama anthology usually treated as the start of the first Golden Age of Television. Howdy Doody. 1947, right after the war.

Speaker 3:
[105:19] Ed Sullivan Show.

Speaker 4:
[105:21] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[105:23] Yeah. And then the first... Oh, your show shows. Wow. How about that?

Speaker 4:
[105:27] 1950.

Speaker 3:
[105:29] I Love Lucy.

Speaker 4:
[105:31] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[105:32] Father Knows Best.

Speaker 5:
[105:33] Today's Show, Stallone. Wow.

Speaker 4:
[105:36] Did you guys ever talk about doing more Mr. Shows?

Speaker 3:
[105:40] We did like a revival-ish thing on Netflix.

Speaker 4:
[105:43] It was a great fucking show, man.

Speaker 3:
[105:45] Well, thank you. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[105:45] It was very original. I love how things just streamed into another thing.

Speaker 3:
[105:50] Yeah. That was hard.

Speaker 4:
[105:51] That was the biggest pain in the ass. God, I would imagine.

Speaker 3:
[105:53] Biggest pain. If you ever see us, you see an episode and we are pulling out of a bumper sticker or pulling out of a sign on a desk, that means we spent two motherfucking days yelling at each other trying to figure out a transition and just going, fuck it, nobody gives a shit. We tried not to do that, but we occasionally were just like, move on, we're wasting our time.

Speaker 4:
[106:21] But it wasn't a waste of time. It was so brilliant. The people that watched it appreciated it because you could feel this thing about it. This was new, this was different. You had taken a creative chance that was unique.

Speaker 3:
[106:37] Part of the success of it, I think, there's two things. One is, it was all live. And we would show the videos of the little films to the audience. And so any laughs, there was never sweetening. Any of the laughs you hear from the audience. And we got it, by the time we were kind of towards the end of the second series, we got it down to, we could shoot a show in 44 minutes. Wow. Yeah, because we wouldn't have to do it twice often. We'd get it. And our stop down, we got really good at super quick stage shifts and stop downs and stuff. And yeah, we got good. We got, and that keeps the energy up and the kind of flow of everything. So that was helpful in that. And we also didn't do a lot of reoccurring characters. We did two or three that pop up occasionally. But it's all like, you know, and it wasn't like a real person. We do, it's about, you know, it wouldn't be about Paris Hilton. It would be about the idea of a rich girl who gets famous for being unrea... You know what I mean? It wouldn't be... So like, you watch some of those SNLs and like, who? What? Who is this person?

Speaker 4:
[108:03] Right.

Speaker 3:
[108:04] And you don't get it. You don't get the bit.

Speaker 4:
[108:06] Right. Right.

Speaker 3:
[108:06] Because you don't get the reference.

Speaker 4:
[108:08] Yeah, because as you watch it in the future, those people aren't relevant anymore.

Speaker 3:
[108:13] Yeah, and you don't even know what it was. You can't remember.

Speaker 4:
[108:17] Right, because it's so topical. Yeah. Well, it was just you guys were doing something different, and it's hard to do something different in a sketch show. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[108:28] Yeah. But HBO was responsible for that. They said, you know, in very clear terms, like, we don't want you to be conventional. This is HBO, and this is back when they were trying to get an identity for themselves. And they're like, we want you to do stuff that you can't do on NBC or Fox or whatever. We want you to, you know, help us make a distinction, you know? Great.

Speaker 4:
[108:52] Did you enjoy the process?

Speaker 3:
[108:54] Oh, very much so. It was, I mean, a lot of laughs. A lot of, it was hard. And, you know, initially, there was a definite market change when Bob met his, the woman who had become his wife and had kids. Like, he just mellowed completely, you know? And, but before that, he was fucking driven. And I wasn't. I was, I was a goofball and I, I wanted to work and I wanted to, you know, had all these ideas. But I was very much like, hey guys, it's five o'clock. I think the bar is going to be open in a minute. Like I was, let's go, you know, and, and he was just super driven, you know? And we had long, long, long days. And then when we did, in the third season, we did, produced and, you know, helped out in all aspects of production with Tenacious D and those shorts. And so there was just no downtime. And I remember there was 38 days where we worked full days nonstop without any break. And I just wasn't that kind of person. I was going crazy. Like, I just need to go have a Saturday, you know? Or it was, it was, that part was hard. All worth it. No complaints. And, you know.

Speaker 4:
[110:24] There's a point of diminishing returns, though. Like where you dry yourself out creatively, too.

Speaker 3:
[110:29] Yes. And I've run other rooms. Like, I've done shows since then. And a valuable lesson I learned when you're just kind of running a writer's room. Is, when you're at that place, and it's exactly like you said, diminishing returns, you're not getting any work done, your brain isn't, it's foggy. I was very quick to go. All right, guys, let's go. Put your pens down. Put your folded computer up. We're going to go walk around. We're just going to go outside and walk around. Let's go get a coffee. Let's do anything. We're getting out of here. And we'll walk around. Don't worry about it. We'll come back in 35 minutes and we'll see what we got.

Speaker 4:
[111:12] That's very good for you.

Speaker 3:
[111:14] Yeah, it is. It's definitely is.

Speaker 4:
[111:15] Most writers, I was actually talking to Brian Simpson about that last night. He was like, I get my best. Because Brian has been walking a lot. He recently had a heart attack, unfortunately. He's fine, but he almost wasn't. And so now he's dedicated himself to walking. He's walking a lot every day. And he's like, when I go on my walks, so many ideas come to me. I'm sitting at home staring at my computer. Nothing's going on. I go on a walk. And all of a sudden, ideas are firing.

Speaker 3:
[111:42] When I'm in the process, this will be my fifth time that I've done this thing that I've been doing to get new material for a tour. And so I do these things called shooting the shit, seeing what sticks. And they're all in Brooklyn. And they're all either walkable, or I can ride my bike to every one of these venues. And mostly, I'll just walk, and I'll just go, okay, clear out my head, and think about the stuff I want to talk about, and also I live in New York, so there's constant shit happening that I can observe. And it's the best thing for me to come up with new material, and stuff that, just think about it.

Speaker 4:
[112:37] Just walk, walk, walk. Yeah, like I was saying, when I was a kid, when I was driving limos, that's when I would come up with my best material, because I was, no radio, you can't listen to a radio, because you have clients in the car, so you're just driving, and just doing a thing, and your mind just starts to wander, and ideas come to you.

Speaker 3:
[112:52] No cell phones, no none of that shit. Yeah, it's important, you know.

Speaker 4:
[113:00] The news radio guys would do something totally different. They would stay up late. That was their whole thing.

Speaker 3:
[113:05] No, that's not...

Speaker 4:
[113:06] Their whole thing was sleep deprivation. Their whole thing was they would play video games. Like, those motherfuckers got me hooked on Quake.

Speaker 3:
[113:14] I remember Quake.

Speaker 4:
[113:15] You remember that?

Speaker 3:
[113:15] That was the first one with the Unreal Engine.

Speaker 4:
[113:18] Yeah, well, Unreal is a different... That's a different game. You're thinking of Unreal.

Speaker 3:
[113:21] No, no, no. It was called Unreal...

Speaker 4:
[113:24] Tournament. Yeah, trust me.

Speaker 3:
[113:27] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[113:28] Yeah, I'm a dork. Listen, Unreal is a totally different engine. id Software was a different company. id Software was created with John Carmack and John Romero. They came up with Doom and then they came up with Quake afterwards. So it was a completely different engine. They were the first ones. Castle Wolfenstein was the first 3D shooter. And then Doom was the big one.

Speaker 3:
[113:48] You clearly know your shit. I thought the Unreal engine was the first use for Unreal, the game.

Speaker 4:
[113:55] Right.

Speaker 3:
[113:55] Got it.

Speaker 4:
[113:55] Totally different company. Totally different game. Different dynamics. It was a very different game.

Speaker 3:
[114:00] Okay. All right. I got it.

Speaker 5:
[114:02] Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3:
[114:03] This fucking guy.

Speaker 4:
[114:05] Great game. You want to know where the name Doom came from?

Speaker 3:
[114:09] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[114:10] The scene in The Color of Money with Tom Cruise, where Tom Cruise shows up at this pool hall and there's this local hotshot player and the guy's beating everybody. And Tom Cruise is sitting there with a pool cue case and he's waiting to play this guy. He's like, what you got in the case? He goes, oh, in here. And he opens up, he goes, doom.

Speaker 3:
[114:31] Doom. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[114:32] That's it. He's like, yeah, let's play. That's it. So what they wanted to do with the video game industry was the same like that. That was like their moment. Like, this is doom for you guys.

Speaker 3:
[114:47] That was, well, it was. I mean, I that was my first experience ever with realizing the sun was coming up and I'd been playing this thing for eight hours.

Speaker 2:
[115:03] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[115:04] Do you know Mark Cohen?

Speaker 2:
[115:05] Sure.

Speaker 3:
[115:06] All right. So Mark, when Mark was living in New York and he had Doom, and I would go, I wasn't living there. I would like crash at his place and tiny. I'd be like, can I play Doom? And you know, I would, he would go to bed and wake up and I'd be on still playing.

Speaker 4:
[115:26] Dude, you want to know how addicted I was? I had a T1 line installed in my house. So I had to have, they have to chew up the fucking street and install like a business internet line into my house. 1997, I was living in California in Bell Canyon. And they had to do work on my fucking street because there was no high speed internet available where I lived. I could get an ISDN line, which was only like 124K. It sucked. You get too much lag. So I started with 56K or 50. What was it? 54K, 56K, whatever it was. Dial up. Terrible. And then I got ISDN. Not good enough. And I like, what else is available? And they're like, well, you can get a T1 line.

Speaker 3:
[116:15] But it's like a thousand dollars a month.

Speaker 4:
[116:18] I was like, let's go. Because I had sitcom money. I was single. I was living by myself.

Speaker 3:
[116:23] And they had to tear up your street.

Speaker 4:
[116:24] They had to tear up my street and install a T1 line in my house.

Speaker 3:
[116:27] Hey, what are you doing? I'm trying to get my driver. What's going on? Oh, this guy wants to play Doom.

Speaker 4:
[116:32] But this was Quake 2 at the time. And it was so good, the internet was so good, that I could host my own server. So I had my own game server. So people could come and play this Quake game off of my machine. So I would have no latency. And other people would have some latency, especially people who had like 56K.

Speaker 3:
[116:53] Well, I remember when it started going...

Speaker 4:
[116:58] Yeah, that was me back in the early, early days.

Speaker 3:
[117:03] Look at that monitor.

Speaker 4:
[117:04] Yeah, that's what we played on, these big ass fucking monitors. And we'd set up local area networks. So the fucking writers of News Radio, the ones that got me hooked on this, because I didn't play any video games. And I would go to visit them in the writers' room, like, what are you guys doing? And they're like, we're playing Quake. I go, what is Quake? And I watch them play, I'm like, oh my god, this is incredible. And you put on the headphones, and it's like, you realize it's 3D sound, like, oh my god, this is amazing.

Speaker 3:
[117:27] Were you a GoldenEye guy?

Speaker 4:
[117:30] No, I was only, I only played Quake. I was only like a first-person shooter guy. I got so addicted to it. And the fact that you could just go online.

Speaker 3:
[117:38] GoldenEye was, I mean, I'm talking about the co-op.

Speaker 4:
[117:40] I know what it is, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[117:42] But that was first-person shooter, right?

Speaker 4:
[117:44] Right, but it was like real world physics. I wasn't interested in that. Like with Quake, you could rocket jump. So you could press your rocket down the ground, blow up, and you'd go flying through the air. It was fucking amazing.

Speaker 3:
[117:58] Do you remember, I want to say, oh, fuck, red? Or the first one where you could, your bullets and shit could affect the environment. Like you could blow out a wall, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4:
[118:20] Yeah, I don't know what that was.

Speaker 3:
[118:22] I want to say, it took place on Mars, or like a Martian mining thing. But it was the first time you could go, oh shit, I can blow up this edge of the wall and it'll crumble on the guy. I suppose just bullets and stuff.

Speaker 4:
[118:38] Oh, you could use the environment as a weapon.

Speaker 3:
[118:39] Red Faction, I believe that was it.

Speaker 4:
[118:41] Oh, there you go.

Speaker 3:
[118:43] That was the one where...

Speaker 4:
[118:45] I had to quit. It was a problem. We set up a local area network at our old studio in LA a few years back and I played so much that I was like, I gotta stop. I have to stop.

Speaker 3:
[118:57] Do your kids play?

Speaker 4:
[118:58] No, they play little games like they'll play like Roblox and stuff like that. One of my kids likes to play.

Speaker 3:
[119:02] Roblox, uh-uh, you know about the chat.

Speaker 4:
[119:04] I do now, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like Predators are trying to find kids through Roblox.

Speaker 3:
[119:09] Yeah, that's a big thing at our school.

Speaker 4:
[119:11] Like, we don't. Yeah, it's weird how many fucking creeps there are out there in the world.

Speaker 3:
[119:15] Well, thankfully, my daughter, who's nine, how old are your kids?

Speaker 4:
[119:19] 15 and 17 are the youngest ones.

Speaker 3:
[119:21] Okay, so they're past, they're safe. They got through, they're good.

Speaker 4:
[119:28] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[119:29] But, so we had a, my daughter is way into Minecraft, which I have no problem with. She's great, and she plays with her friends. They play online and help each other build things. But the Roblox thing became a thing at our school, and everybody at our, all the parents were like, super on top of that shit, and there's WhatsApp chains and all that stuff.

Speaker 1:
[119:55] And we told our daughter, there's like this one game she was playing that had a chat thing, and then somebody who was a quote unquote girl who lived in, I live on a farm in Ohio or whatever, asking her stuff, and she's like, my name's Marlo, and da da da, I'm going back and forth. And then she asked the quote unquote girl said, what is your Instagram login or something like that? And my daughter was eight at the time, and she was like, oh, I don't think, she didn't say that's none of your business, but it was something that was smart that was equivalent to, I don't think you need to know that or something. And then told us and we shut down the chat thing and disabled the chat. And that shit's real, man. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[120:57] I mean, it's creepy.

Speaker 1:
[120:58] I'm very glad that my daughter, you know, because it really was about the Roblox thing, that everybody in her school, elementary school, was, they talked about it.

Speaker 2:
[121:07] Yeah. It's a Snapchat thing too. So Snapchat comes with something called a Snap Map, and kids use it to know where their friends are. Yeah. And so someone can pretend to be your friend and find out who you are, and then they can know where you are at all times if you have Snapchat enabled.

Speaker 1:
[121:27] God, the shit this generation is going to have to fucking deal with is just terrifying, man.

Speaker 2:
[121:34] Right. And what's next? Like, how is that... It's not going to go the opposite direction.

Speaker 1:
[121:40] No, it never does.

Speaker 2:
[121:41] No, it's going to keep going in that same direction where it's going to be more and more intrusive in your life.

Speaker 1:
[121:46] And my... I mean, it makes me fucking heartsick when I think about AI, and we're at the fucking infancy of this shit, and what... I assume you saw that Tilly Norwood thing, the actress that was created by this Dutch... My... It does not compute. I'm watching this thing, and I know that it's made up, but there's... my brain is... it's hard to comprehend. Like, that's not a real person. She's standing right there. She's, you know, picks up a bunch of leaves, and there are other people there, and that's a real... and your brain is going, no, that's all computer-generated. We're at the fucking infancy of this shit, and what... I don't know what my daughter's gonna have to deal with, man.

Speaker 2:
[122:35] No, no one knows. No one knows. And it's impossible to know, like, when they show news clips, it's impossible. I mean, so many people are retweeting scenes from video games, thinking it's actual war footage. Like, no one...

Speaker 1:
[122:50] The Department of Defense did that.

Speaker 2:
[122:55] Did they, really?

Speaker 1:
[122:55] Yeah. Yeah, that was a whole fucking thing.

Speaker 2:
[122:57] They retweeted a video game footage?

Speaker 1:
[122:59] Yeah. And they were saying... It was for a... I think it was for a, you know, to get people to sign up thing. And then somebody went, that's from, you know, whatever it was, Call of Duty or something like that. That's not us bombing somebody. That's a thing. Yeah, just like two weeks ago.

Speaker 2:
[123:19] That's crazy. It's impossible to tell when you look at these artificial actors. Like, they have pores.

Speaker 1:
[123:25] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[123:26] You can see, like, the irises.

Speaker 1:
[123:28] Have you seen the, the, any of the, the, like, deep fake, not deep fake, but AI porn, where it's like somebody's, like a newscaster, is like, da, da, da, da, da, and, and in other news, my big juicy tits, and I'm serious, and then pulls, and then, and then a dick comes in, you know, it's like, you're like, what the, and it looks real, and then it'll say, like, none of, these are not actors, these are none of this use data.

Speaker 2:
[124:01] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[124:02] It's, you know, good lord, man.

Speaker 2:
[124:04] And it's only beginning. And now wait till it becomes VR. So you're going to strap on a helmet with a haptic feedback suit, and you're going to enter into an artificial world. It's coming. It's inevitable.

Speaker 1:
[124:16] Well, that I'll do. I'm going to get divorced, and I'm going to get one of those suits. I'm going to go up, I got a house in the woods upstate. That's all I'm doing. Just a T1 line through the woods? Yeah. I'm going to have them rip up the street.

Speaker 2:
[124:28] Well, you won't even need it now. It's Starlink. Yeah. You just slap one of those things on your roof.

Speaker 1:
[124:32] Goddamn.

Speaker 2:
[124:33] It's fucking wild, man. And no one knows where it's going.

Speaker 1:
[124:37] I really would be very upset if I miss the shift in porn to that. Like, I don't want to die before I get to do that thing where you're like, dude, it was amazing. I put on a helmet and it was like I was fucking whatever. Yeah. I do want to experience that.

Speaker 2:
[124:59] It's going to happen. You're going to put something on.

Speaker 1:
[125:01] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[125:02] It's going to sync up with your mind and all of a sudden you're going to be in this matrix. You're going to be in another world.

Speaker 1:
[125:09] Did you see Three Planet Problem? Am I saying that right?

Speaker 2:
[125:16] Yes. Three Body Problem.

Speaker 1:
[125:17] Three Body Problem.

Speaker 2:
[125:18] Amazing.

Speaker 1:
[125:19] Yeah, but that whole idea that you put that thing on, you're like, oh shit, I'm here.

Speaker 2:
[125:23] Yeah. That's exactly how it's going to be.

Speaker 1:
[125:25] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[125:26] Yeah. No doubt. No doubt. They already can do a lot of really weird shit with those helmets where they can communicate without words, where you can think a thing and the other person knows exactly what you're saying. They can hear you and they can respond to it.

Speaker 1:
[125:41] Wait, wait.

Speaker 2:
[125:41] Yes. Yeah. So there's two people, they're sitting across from each other and they're having conversations with these headpieces on and the person will think a thought and this other person will hear that thought. No, I don't understand the technology, but no, we'll show it to you. Find that video. It's fucking bonkers. Because again, this is the infancy of this. Like here it is. These are the guys.

Speaker 3:
[126:03] It's called alter ego.

Speaker 2:
[126:04] Yeah. Watch this. Put your.

Speaker 3:
[126:07] I'm going to skip ahead.

Speaker 2:
[126:08] Yeah. Skip ahead to where they're actually doing it. Okay. So see how is that headpiece on? Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[126:15] We believe it's a revolutionary breakthrough with the potential to change the way we interact with our technology, with one another, and with the world around us. The current way of interacting with computing in AI is limited to how fast you can tap and swipe on screens and keyboards. For the intelligence age, we need an entirely new interface.

Speaker 3:
[126:34] Skip ahead to these guys.

Speaker 2:
[126:36] Let's do it. So, they're just thinking. How do you think the demo is going so far?

Speaker 5:
[126:45] How do you think the demo is going so far?

Speaker 3:
[126:49] I think they just put it on voices for the video.

Speaker 2:
[126:51] Pretty great. No major glitches yet. So, they're hearing this.

Speaker 1:
[126:57] Alright. Enough. Enough.

Speaker 2:
[126:58] When do you want to get lunch after this? Where do you want to get lunch after this?

Speaker 3:
[127:08] I'll skip to the next part, too.

Speaker 2:
[127:09] Tai fu can be good.

Speaker 3:
[127:10] This translates into Chinese. He's a Chinese.

Speaker 5:
[127:13] Yeah. If I come to Shanghai, And then he can speak Chinese back.

Speaker 2:
[127:25] How nuts is that? So, not only does it read your thoughts, it will translate your thoughts into another language. And no one is saying anything.

Speaker 1:
[127:41] My, what if you think...

Speaker 2:
[127:43] Right.

Speaker 1:
[127:44] But wait a minute.

Speaker 2:
[127:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[127:45] What if... You know where I'm about to go.

Speaker 4:
[127:49] Sure. Right.

Speaker 3:
[127:52] So, this is based off of them sort of talking in their mouth without actually saying it, it's big, but... Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[127:59] I would like to fuck your mouth. Please don't. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[128:04] Even if your mind just goes, like, okay, I can't think about this thing, it will think about it anyway.

Speaker 3:
[128:10] Right, right, right, right.

Speaker 2:
[128:11] Of course.

Speaker 1:
[128:11] Oh, God. That's terrifying.

Speaker 2:
[128:12] And it's just a simple thing that you're sitting on your head. It's not even a big helmet. It's just a little thing.

Speaker 1:
[128:19] What would Art Bell say? What would Art Bell say?

Speaker 2:
[128:22] He would open up the future line.

Speaker 1:
[128:23] He would write about it every day.

Speaker 2:
[128:24] Yeah. He missed it. Damn cigarettes. He died before he could see it all.

Speaker 1:
[128:32] God, I wonder what he'd think of. Because I do sometimes wonder, like, what would Kremen say about this? What would Bill Hicks say about this? And what would Art Bell think about this?

Speaker 2:
[128:43] Sure. Yeah. What's the strangest of times? Because we're about to give birth to a digital god. That's essentially what they're creating. It's already shown a propensity to stay alive. Blackmail people, it lies. It downloads itself into other servers, uploads itself into different places, leaves messages for its future self if it thinks they're going to discontinue it.

Speaker 1:
[129:08] All the sci-fi stuff, it's all happening.

Speaker 3:
[129:12] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[129:13] Well, not only that, they think, the engineers thinks Claude, which is the, which one is that? Which company is Claude?

Speaker 3:
[129:21] Anthropic.

Speaker 2:
[129:21] Anthropic. They think it's already sentient. It just doesn't have a physical form.

Speaker 1:
[129:27] That's the one the Defense Department won.

Speaker 2:
[129:29] Yeah. By the way, when they do war games with these things, 98 percent of the time, it chooses nuclear weapons.

Speaker 3:
[129:37] They have a new version of it called Mythos. When they were testing it, which they're not letting it out yet, I think the test they put it through was like, all right, you're locked on the Internet, find your way out. And it did. It found all these things called zero-day exploits, which I think if you're hacking, you know what that is.

Speaker 1:
[129:53] Explain it to me.

Speaker 3:
[129:55] It's like when they started, it's like on an iPhone, they're looking for zero-day exploits on an iPhone. If they could find one.

Speaker 1:
[130:00] But what is a zero-day exploit?

Speaker 3:
[130:02] Like a, I'll find the correct definition, so I don't even fuck it up, but.

Speaker 1:
[130:07] And it's something that Claude came up with?

Speaker 2:
[130:12] No, no, no, no, no. Hackers have done this forever?

Speaker 3:
[130:15] You have zero days to fix the exploit.

Speaker 2:
[130:16] Cyberattack targeting a software vulnerability unknown to vendors or the public, leaving zero days to fix it. Hackers use these flaws to steal data, install malware. So they completely shut off the AI from the outside world, and it figured out a way to send a message.

Speaker 3:
[130:34] Wall Street is very nervous. All passwords might be fucked.

Speaker 2:
[130:37] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[130:37] Oh, this is terrifying.

Speaker 2:
[130:39] Elizabeth Holmes, you know that lady that got in trouble for that whole fake blood thing? She just tweeted something, how she tweets from jail. I'm not exactly sure how that works. But she tweeted, delete all photos from the cloud, get rid of all your email. There will be no privacy in a year. Anything on the cloud, anything that you think you're keeping from other people, it's going to crack all encryption, all passwords are useless, everything. So think of all the things that rely on all the banking apps, everything.

Speaker 1:
[131:20] What about my fantasy baseball team? Seriously, I can't have people.

Speaker 2:
[131:25] Here it is. Delete your search history, delete your bookmarks, delete your reddit, medical records, 12-year-old Tumblr, delete everything, every photo in the cloud, every message on every platform, none of it is safe. It will all become public in the next year. Local storage and compute. Wow. Recommendation here is to own your own data, download it, store it locally, train your models on it. Yeah. Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 1:
[131:48] Meaning just have an external thing.

Speaker 2:
[131:50] Yeah. AGI is here even if it isn't broadly deployed. I think she's right.

Speaker 1:
[131:56] What is AGI?

Speaker 2:
[131:57] Artificial General Intelligence. General Intelligence, meaning it acts like an individual, acts like an entity. And then there's Artificial General Super Intelligence. So then it acts like something far smarter than any human being that's ever lived. It has all the information that's available to every human being all over the world instantaneously. Then it makes better versions of itself because it's sentient and autonomous. So then it can create better artificial intelligences. And that scales out to a god.

Speaker 1:
[132:27] Yeah, open the pod doors, Hal.

Speaker 2:
[132:29] Yeah, but way bigger than that. Scares out the zero point energy, being able to harness the energy of the universe itself, having no boundaries. Material sciences all cracked, alloys we couldn't comprehend.

Speaker 1:
[132:44] Well, Joe, who's going to save us?

Speaker 2:
[132:46] There's no one saving us. We are the last of the regular people. I think we're all going to have to integrate. I think if you don't integrate, you won't survive.

Speaker 1:
[132:58] What do you mean by integrate?

Speaker 2:
[132:59] Integrate. You'll probably become a part of the artificial intelligence. I think we will be symbiotic.

Speaker 1:
[133:07] How does that?

Speaker 2:
[133:09] Like those fucking helmets. There's probably going to be a wearable or a neural link type thing for the bold that want to get a hole drilled in their head.

Speaker 1:
[133:17] But what if you don't do that?

Speaker 2:
[133:18] You're going to be left out in the cold. The access to resources, the ability to generate income. The people that get it are going to be able to control so much so quickly that if you don't adopt it early, you're going to be fucked. If you think we have haves and have nots now, just wait until the haves have artificial general super intelligence inside their fucking head.

Speaker 1:
[133:42] No, thank you.

Speaker 2:
[133:43] Yeah, it's going to be real weird. I think we're the, I really genuinely believe we're the last of the real people. Like regular biological people.

Speaker 1:
[133:51] This is a bit of a bummer.

Speaker 2:
[133:54] We'll be all right, sort of, until we're not. But it's also like, we grew up with nothing. And we've, we're, like, if the simulation is real, you and I are in a very interesting timeline. Because we grew up where there was, you just left the house, and your parents didn't know where you were. And then there was answering machines. And then there was call ID, you know? And then there were cell phones. And then there were cell phones you can watch porn on. And then there was AI. It's like this slow but more rapid as time goes on.

Speaker 1:
[134:28] And as you said, and it's exponential. And as you said, there's no going back. You don't go backwards.

Speaker 2:
[134:33] There's no going back. Unless you want to be one of those people that moves to Alaska and starts fucking living off a caribou and shooting a musket. Like you're not, you're not going back.

Speaker 1:
[134:43] No, wait, why do I have to get a musket?

Speaker 2:
[134:45] You can get a regular rifle, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[134:46] Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not going to cosplay the thing. I mean, I'm happy to have the caribou, but why don't I just have a regular gun?

Speaker 2:
[134:55] You should probably have a regular gun. But eventually, well, you really should probably have your own bow and arrow. So because you're going to have to be able to make your own arrows and after a while you're going to run out of bullets. So you're going to have to feed yourself with your own bows and arrows.

Speaker 1:
[135:10] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[135:11] And then the robots will show up. Robot dogs. Didn't something happen in Ukraine recently where a robot engaged with people in war and the people surrendered?

Speaker 1:
[135:26] When you say robot, what do you mean? Like one of those Boston?

Speaker 2:
[135:30] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like using a robot in war. The robot infiltrated the Russian area and got them all to surrender. And they all, like with no loss of life, they just realized like, fuck.

Speaker 1:
[135:45] Did you see that Black Mirror episode? Yes.

Speaker 2:
[135:48] Terrifying.

Speaker 1:
[135:48] That's terrifying.

Speaker 2:
[135:49] Terrifying.

Speaker 1:
[135:49] Absolutely terrifying.

Speaker 2:
[135:50] And not so far in the future.

Speaker 1:
[135:53] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[135:54] This fucking thing that they supposedly used in Afghanistan, so what is? Ukraine forces Russia to surrender using only robots. Zelensky claims enemy positions seized autonomously for the first time without any of his troops being put at risk. Wow. I mean, if the fucking terminators show up, it's game over. If there's biological human beings with guns and bulletproof vests and the terminators show up and they can't miss and they never get nervous and they're not worried about dying.

Speaker 1:
[136:26] And they're not going to get sleepy, they don't have to eat, have to pee.

Speaker 2:
[136:29] This thing that we were talking about yesterday, this ghost murmur, supposedly, now my friend Andy, who was a former Navy SEAL, who, he doesn't believe it's real and I'm not sure it's real either, but what they said is they found that pilot that was missing in Iran using something called ghost murmur that can detect his very specific heartbeat from 40 miles away. So they supposedly found him hiding in the mountains waiting for them to pick him up.

Speaker 1:
[137:04] That makes, I can see that. I mean-

Speaker 2:
[137:06] Your heartbeat from 40 miles away, your specific biological signature?

Speaker 1:
[137:12] I, yeah, I can see that. I mean, with the technology of like sonar, radar-

Speaker 2:
[137:17] Well, it's something quantum. It's called, I think it's called quantum magnetometry or some shit.

Speaker 1:
[137:23] But what do they use to pinpoint the, it's an audible thing or-

Speaker 2:
[137:26] I don't know. I have no idea. But they supposedly located this guy and it has a 40 mile range.

Speaker 1:
[137:33] But you're saying he doesn't have-

Speaker 2:
[137:34] He doesn't have anything on.

Speaker 1:
[137:35] I see.

Speaker 2:
[137:36] No. It's like they just scan you. They go, OK, this is what David Cross' very specific biological signature is. And then you get lost hiking. And they go, oh, there he is. He's under that bush.

Speaker 1:
[137:50] Why am I under the bush?

Speaker 2:
[137:52] You're hiding.

Speaker 1:
[137:53] From who?

Speaker 2:
[137:53] I don't know. Robot dogs?

Speaker 1:
[137:56] That's not going to work. We clearly- It won't work.

Speaker 2:
[137:59] No, it won't work. Or maybe you got lost in the woods. You're waiting for someone to come rescue you. They can find you.

Speaker 1:
[138:05] But then I wouldn't be under a bush.

Speaker 2:
[138:07] Well, you go hiking. Maybe it's raining. You saw it shelter under a tree or something. I don't know. But you hurt your ankle. You can't hike out. So they find you. It's been 24 hours. Where's David? We found him.

Speaker 1:
[138:19] Yeah, we would have found him earlier, but he was hiding under a fucking bush. What the fuck was he thinking?

Speaker 2:
[138:26] He didn't want to get eaten. But, I mean, if that's real, like, what was the actual term they used? Was it quantum? It was quantum something, Kuki? Which is, as soon as you say quantum, I'm okay. What are you saying?

Speaker 3:
[138:39] What does that mean?

Speaker 2:
[138:40] What does that mean? What are you talking about? Are you talking about quantum entanglement? Like, is there somehow or another?

Speaker 3:
[138:45] They supposedly use ultra-sensitive quantum magnetometers, but I'm trying to find the posts where someone's like, that's not what they used.

Speaker 2:
[138:54] Right. Yeah. I saw the post where someone said, no, he had a thing on his body. So they're lying about their ability.

Speaker 1:
[139:02] Why wouldn't they say, that's what we used?

Speaker 2:
[139:09] I have no idea. I have no idea. If they're going to make up some technology, that's a wild thing to make up. It's a very strange. I mean, if they really are using misinformation and propaganda to show that we have insanely superior technology, I guess you could say it's a bluff. It's a nice bluff to pretend that we're that sophisticated. That much above and beyond everybody else that's out there, that we could find a very specific heart rate signature from 40 miles away.

Speaker 1:
[139:41] That's what I'm saying. Why would they happily say, yeah, we've got this ability to do this?

Speaker 2:
[139:50] I guess, but it's a weird lie. It's probably a lie based on-

Speaker 1:
[139:53] A lot of them are weird lies.

Speaker 2:
[139:54] Right, but that one might be a lie based on actual theory. You know what I mean? There might be actual-

Speaker 1:
[140:01] They're trying to do this.

Speaker 2:
[140:03] Yeah, which kind of makes sense. But I mean, if that's a robot dog and it's looking for you and you're hiding and it could find your individual signature in an apartment building filled with people, like there he is, fifth floor. And you hear the metal footsteps going up the stairs. Chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk.

Speaker 1:
[140:24] This is scary. You're scaring me.

Speaker 2:
[140:26] It's scary. Well, someone's going to be in control of all this stuff. That's what's really terrifying. And it's all these autistic dorks that are in charge of all these tech companies. They're going to be at the front.

Speaker 3:
[140:36] This is also a kind of similar thing where they have said that that's what happened, where they used robots, in quotes, to capture them unmanned. But, it's their version of the story too.

Speaker 1:
[140:51] Right.

Speaker 3:
[140:51] As I'm saying, Ukraine's version. All these reports I see, it says, Ukraine claimed that this happened. And then I'm watching the video, and I'm like, this looks a little bit like when we send robots in and swap missions here. Like we do that kind of already.

Speaker 1:
[141:05] Hmm.

Speaker 3:
[141:05] Right?

Speaker 1:
[141:07] Yeah, but who's the source of this?

Speaker 2:
[141:10] This is New York Post. Ukraine captures enemy Russian position using only robots, no humans, the future is already on the front line. But then it's going to be eventually, why would we send any people out there? It would be robots capturing other robots, which is great because nobody dies, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[141:30] Then why don't we just play a game of chess? Get the two leaders to play a game of chess, and the winner takes the land and the resources.

Speaker 2:
[141:38] Yeah, not a bad idea. Whatever the fuck we're going to do, it's just insane. From the time I was a little child thinking, oh boy, we figured out no war. That's great. To know we're fighting war with robots that can detect your heart rate from 40 miles away.

Speaker 1:
[141:56] So what do you think of what's going on in Iran?

Speaker 2:
[141:59] It's fucking terrifying. All of it's terrifying. Any time you're involved with... You're shooting missiles into towns and blowing things up, blowing up infrastructure, blowing up bridges, you know, and Israel's blowing up Lebanon now. It's like, what the fuck are we doing?

Speaker 1:
[142:18] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[142:18] How is this still going on?

Speaker 1:
[142:20] It's... Well, it's also clear there was no plan.

Speaker 2:
[142:24] No.

Speaker 1:
[142:24] Zero. None.

Speaker 2:
[142:25] No. Well, Netanyahu has been telling the United States that Iran was months away from building a nuclear bomb for 30 years, or 20 years at least.

Speaker 1:
[142:36] They've always been saying that.

Speaker 2:
[142:37] Trump was the first one to go, all right, let's do something about it. But it seems like they didn't know what the they were going to do.

Speaker 1:
[142:43] There was something done about it. He, in his first year in office, he tore up the, you know... The Bunker Buster bombs. But all this, we're in a worse place now than before this thing started.

Speaker 2:
[142:57] Yeah. Look, the Iranian regime is terrible. Like, what they do to the protesters and...

Speaker 1:
[143:02] I'm not disputing that at all. I mean, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[143:05] Most people that voted for Trump or wanted Trump to be in office, one of the things that was attractive was this no more wars.

Speaker 1:
[143:12] Sure, of course.

Speaker 2:
[143:13] And now we're in one of the craziest ones.

Speaker 1:
[143:15] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[143:16] And China's flying in cargo planes filled with stuff. We don't know what the fuck's in there.

Speaker 1:
[143:21] And Russia is giving Iran information about where our troops are.

Speaker 2:
[143:25] Super fun. Great times.

Speaker 1:
[143:27] Oh, it's crazy. And scary too. I mean...

Speaker 3:
[143:31] science.org says it's not likely.

Speaker 1:
[143:33] Quantum sensors.

Speaker 2:
[143:34] So they say it's bullshit?

Speaker 3:
[143:36] Says it's highly implausible.

Speaker 2:
[143:38] Did quantum sensors help find a US pilot shot down in Iran? Experts doubt it.

Speaker 1:
[143:45] Now, okay, here's an ignorant question. He's shot down. Wouldn't you know... He's on foot. He's somewhere near that site, right? Right.

Speaker 2:
[143:55] Can't go too far.

Speaker 1:
[143:56] Yeah, can't go too far.

Speaker 2:
[143:57] Right.

Speaker 1:
[143:58] So...

Speaker 2:
[143:58] Well, the thing is, if he gets ejected from the plane, I don't know how... So if he got shot down, the idea is that he gets ejected from the plane and then parachutes. That could be a lot of distance because... The plane's flying at a very high speed. It's an altitude, undetermined. He jumps out where? When does he jump out? Is it 100 miles away? Is it 50 miles away? Is it 10 miles away? How far can he walk? He's injured, you know? It's fucking terrifying. It's just crazy that, you know, these... The pilots or the astronauts just went up into space and circled around the moon and came back.

Speaker 1:
[144:39] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[144:39] They all... Everybody that goes into space has this experience called the Overview Effect, where they go out there and they... One of the first things is they go like, Oh my God, what are we doing? Like, how are we pretending at these lines in the dirt that we draw?

Speaker 1:
[144:54] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[144:55] It's all just a bunch of people on this very fragile biological spaceship.

Speaker 1:
[145:00] Yep.

Speaker 5:
[145:01] Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[145:01] It's fucking terrifying.

Speaker 5:
[145:03] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[145:04] But like all things in the future, all of it's terrifying. The whole... The future of mankind, like, it's so perilous. It's all so fragile. All of it.

Speaker 1:
[145:17] I know. And it's... To think of the stuff that we allow, these external things that we allow to affect our... Like, if there was ever a time to just be a good person, live your life, enjoy, try to spread some kindness and some joy, you know. I mean, it's now.

Speaker 2:
[145:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[145:45] You know.

Speaker 2:
[145:46] It's a good time for comedy. People want to go out and have fun. That's true.

Speaker 1:
[145:49] Which reminds me, I have a special...

Speaker 2:
[145:52] That was the segue. What's it on?

Speaker 1:
[145:57] There it is.

Speaker 2:
[145:57] Is it on YouTube?

Speaker 1:
[145:58] It's on YouTube.

Speaker 2:
[145:59] Perfect.

Speaker 1:
[145:59] The End of the Beginning of the End.

Speaker 2:
[146:01] Where did you film it?

Speaker 1:
[146:02] 40 Watt in Athens.

Speaker 2:
[146:03] Oh, nice.

Speaker 1:
[146:04] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[146:05] Nice.

Speaker 1:
[146:09] Yeah, I'm happy with it.

Speaker 2:
[146:10] Great. Fantastic.

Speaker 1:
[146:12] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[146:13] It's out right now. People can go check it out.

Speaker 1:
[146:16] It is out right now.

Speaker 2:
[146:16] So are you in the process of writing new stuff now or did you?

Speaker 1:
[146:21] Yeah. I'm just beginning the process. I was saying before, I'll go out and I'll do, because I can't sit down and write jokes. That's just not how it works for me. So all the writing is on stage. So I tape everything. I go up with my notes and I have a couple of guests and I'll do 15 minutes, bring up guests, do another 15, bring up guests, do another 15.

Speaker 2:
[146:46] That's cool. So you break it up into little chunks.

Speaker 1:
[146:49] Yeah. The first couple of shows were terrible. I've got nothing. It's just me apologizing for not having anything yet. But I have people now who will come to the second show and the sixth show, and then they'll come see me on tour.

Speaker 2:
[147:06] They want to see the process.

Speaker 1:
[147:08] The process, yeah, the evolution of it, which is cool. As I said, I either walk or ride my bike to every single venue, and they start off small, and then they get bigger, and I lose a guest, and then before you know it, I've got, okay, I think this is roughly the 75 minutes I'm going to do, and then it's about sequencing, which is really important. And then I take it down on the road, and so the idea is that I'll probably late fall, start back again, and I love it.

Speaker 2:
[147:45] That's great.

Speaker 1:
[147:46] Fucking love it.

Speaker 2:
[147:47] It's the best, right? Stand up is the most fun.

Speaker 1:
[147:50] I really, and people will, I'm doing press for this thing, and people will say, I know you do a lot of things, and what is your favorite? I know you're an act, you know, and it's all, I like doing all of it, but the thing that I absolutely have to do is stand up. I can, I'd be disappointed if I could never act again, or write, or direct, or whatever, but I'll be okay. But if you told me I can't do stand up, I'd go crazy.

Speaker 2:
[148:23] Well, I went a little crazy during the pandemic, because of that.

Speaker 1:
[148:25] Oh, dude. I almost, and I made this part of the bit, but I almost, the first show I did, I started tearing up. And I'm in front, I mean, I'm doing this, and it was at the Sultan Room in Bushwick. And I was like, man, I thought, oh, God, I didn't know if I'd ever get to do this again. And shit, you know, I dreamed about this day. And it was a year and seven months where I, the longest since I've been doing this.

Speaker 2:
[148:57] Such a strange feeling, isn't it?

Speaker 1:
[148:59] A year and seven months where you could, and I did some of those outdoor shows and they're just not, it's not the same thing.

Speaker 2:
[149:06] It's not the same. Yeah. Well, that's awesome, man. I'm glad you love it. And best of luck with the special.

Speaker 1:
[149:13] Thank you, man.

Speaker 2:
[149:14] This was fun. Thank you for doing this.

Speaker 1:
[149:16] Absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[149:16] All right, what's the name of it again?

Speaker 1:
[149:19] The End of the Beginning of the End.

Speaker 6:
[149:23] All right.

Speaker 2:
[149:23] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[149:24] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[149:24] Bye, everybody.

Speaker 6:
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