Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Premium: Myq Caplan - From The Archives

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Premium: Myq Caplan - From The Archives · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode
• 0:03
  that you can hear in full by signing up
• 0:04
  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe.
• 0:08
  Enjoy the freebie.
• 0:10
  G'day, premium, primo, legends,
• 0:13
  and all other sundry, free riders and free loaders
• 0:16
  and hangers on who I also love very, very, very much.
• 0:20
  This is a treat from the Eric and I have to cheat.
• 0:23
  There's a lot of good stuff.
• 0:24
  I was going through some of the classic zips interviews
• 0:28
  that are stashed away on various hard drives,
• 0:30
  strewn about in boxes, and there are some gems,
• 0:33
  which it's so lovely to be able to share with you
• 0:35
  and to feel like we're actually getting an appreciation for
• 0:39
  after they've been merely collecting dust.
• 0:41
  Today, well, I favor it comics.
• 0:43
  In fact, one of the funniest people I know
• 0:47
  rendered all the more funny because he's so thoughtful
• 0:50
  about his craft and about the world
• 0:53
  and about what it means to be a conscious person
• 0:56
  alive on this ball of rock,
• 0:59
  circling a big flaming gas ball.
• 1:02
  He's a great guy.
• 1:04
  Mike Kaplan here, I pick his brain
• 1:08
  about his creative process, about what comedy is,
• 1:11
  about how he records sets.
• 1:14
  Like how does a professional stand up comedian
• 1:17
  really do their craft?
• 1:20
  And we wander off into our analyses of Jerry Seinfeld
• 1:25
  and Jay Leno and various different processes
• 1:28
  of people who we love, Louis CK, in spite of it all.
• 1:32
  And then expand into a conversation about life,
• 1:35
  about creativity, about procrastination,
• 1:38
  about how does he actually take those little nuggets
• 1:42
  of ideas that come to him and make something of them,
• 1:45
  turn them into a real, not just comedy set,
• 1:49
  but career, income, life.
• 1:53
  So I hope you enjoy this.
• 1:55
  If you have not yet subscribed and you're listening
• 1:57
  to the free version of this, I'm not going to bad you you.
• 1:59
  So find us it to say that very soon,
• 2:01
  probably the next episode, there will be a benefit,
• 2:04
  an additional benefit in addition
• 2:05
  to all of the existing benefits for every,
• 2:08
  all of the subscribers, including on the free tier.
• 2:10
  So you don't need to put in your credit card information yet.
• 2:13
  But if you haven't bothered to even enter your email address
• 2:17
  just to get on the mailing list,
• 2:19
  you may want to do that now, just saying.
• 2:23
  Either way, love having you.
• 2:25
  Hope you enjoyed this chat from the archives with Mike Kaplan.
• 2:29
  Welcome to We The People Life.
• 2:31
  This is a special version of We The People,
• 2:33
  where I sit down with creative individual
• 2:35
  and I talk to them about their creative process.
• 2:37
  And who knows what will happen?
• 2:39
  Mike Kaplan.
• 2:40
  I and you are the only people who could know what will happen.
• 2:44
  Now Mike is, I don't have anything in front of me
• 2:46
  to read out what he's been on,
• 2:48
  but you know him from Letterman.
• 2:49
  You know him from Conan.
• 2:50
  You know him from Craig Ferguson.
• 2:52
  But frankly, he should just leave that off the bio
• 2:54
  because nobody cares about Craig Ferguson anymore.
• 2:56
  I probably wrote it when that happened.
• 2:58
  I just, I mean, the moment in my bio rating.
• 3:00
  I'll tell you another thing that you'll find
• 3:02
  very interesting, dear listener, about Mike Kaplan or not,
• 3:05
  which is don't make the mistake
• 3:08
  that when you see on his bio,
• 3:10
  he's performed on the tonight show,
• 3:12
  that you assume that it was the tonight show with Jay Leno
• 3:17
  or the tonight show with Jimmy Fallon
• 3:18
  because it was the time to with Conan O'Brien.
• 3:20
  There you go.
• 3:21
  It was you were one of the four people
• 3:23
  who skirted through that, who threaded that needle.
• 3:25
  Limited window.
• 3:27
  I had the good fortune to be in the studio audience
• 3:30
  in that brief few months when he was helming the tonight show.
• 3:34
  Who'd you see?
• 3:35
  Do you remember?
• 3:35
  I don't.
• 3:36
  I was on with James Cameron was one of the guests
• 3:39
  and one to six.
• 3:40
  It was a fun panel.
• 3:42
  That sounds well, I don't really do panels.
• 3:45
  Are you thinking of the Jay Leno show?
• 3:47
  I don't think I am.
• 3:49
  I, but I mean, it was a fun roster of guests
• 3:52
  and a couch.
• 3:53
  That's 100% what I mean.
• 3:54
  I mean, you're from a different country,
• 3:56
  so maybe you don't understand when I say things wrong.
• 3:58
  Okay.
• 3:59
  No, I'd agree that the panel on the tonight show
• 4:02
  is regularly excellent.
• 4:04
  You may also know Mike Kaplan, dear listener,
• 4:06
  for today I'm just gonna call him dear listener.
• 4:08
  You may.
• 4:09
  Do you have a problem with that?
• 4:10
  They're dear.
• 4:11
  They are dear in their listeners at the moment.
• 4:12
  There's certainly not viewers.
• 4:13
  I mean, we don't have a webcam functionality.
• 4:15
  Unless they're, you know, NSA cameras in the building.
• 4:19
  Which is people's, what would that be?
• 4:20
  Wait, if they were just people looking at us
• 4:22
  as we're talking right now.
• 4:22
  I mean, there are, there's like another studio right
• 4:25
  to our.
• 4:26
  It's true, but then it's too pretty looking at us.
• 4:28
  No, no.
• 4:29
  What if we, we get them to,
• 4:31
  well, don't take your shirt off Mike Kaplan.
• 4:34
  I don't pull your balls out.
• 4:35
  That's a joke I already was naked.
• 4:39
  So last comic standing was another thing.
• 4:41
  Oh, yeah.
• 4:42
  And then America's got talent.
• 4:43
  Oh, sure.
• 4:44
  It was another thing.
• 4:45
  Yep.
• 4:46
  And you've also got a Netflix special.
• 4:47
  I do.
• 4:48
  I'm happy.
• 4:49
  I hope that I don't know how.
• 4:50
  And you've also got a podcast.
• 4:51
  There's just, I mean, if we go through everything,
• 4:52
  then we're not going to have any time to talk
• 4:53
  about creativity, Mike.
• 4:54
  Please, I mean, I've, those are all the places
• 4:57
  that I've been creative in the past.
• 4:58
  Those that, that is an exhaustive list.
• 5:00
  Yep.
• 5:01
  I've never done anything but those.
• 5:03
  And now we're just going to read the phone book
• 5:04
  because you've exhausted your creativity.
• 5:06
  And they say that somebody who is funny
• 5:09
  can read the phone book and be funny doing it.
• 5:13
  But that was also at a time when phone books were still
• 5:16
  a thing.
• 5:16
  And when they were hilarious, this guy
• 5:19
  could read code off the internet.
• 5:20
  1-0-0-1-0-1-1-0-1-0-1-0-1-0.
• 5:23
  It's a song I wrote.
• 5:24
  You've got me.
• 5:26
  You remember the yellow pages?
• 5:27
  Those were fun things when they existed.
• 5:29
  Sure.
• 5:29
  They weren't quite the phone book, but they
• 5:30
  had businesses that would pay to be in them.
• 5:32
  Oh, yeah.
• 5:33
  And I always got a kick because you'd
• 5:35
  look at the beginning and the first few businesses listed
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  would be ARVARC plumbing with eight A's.
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  And you'd be like, oh, that must be the most reliable plumbing
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  service because while they need to have eight A's in their name
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  to be at the front of the yellow pages.
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  Do you know it's funny?
• 5:50
  Another thing that I haven't been in yet,
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  but will, I mean, I have been in it,
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  but it hasn't come out yet.
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  Flanker.
• 5:56
  Do you know Henry Phillips, the comedian?
• 5:58
  Wonderful comedian from LA.
• 6:00
  He put out a movie.
• 6:02
  He created a movie, wrote a movie, and somebody else directed it.
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  And he was in it, and you know, a movie works.
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  It's a hilarious movie called Punching the Clown
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  that came out maybe six years ago, I want to say.
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  And he filmed a sequel to it.
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  And part of it is he's playing himself as a comedian,
• 6:19
  trying to garner more, you know, get more fans.
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  And so there's some internet I play.
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  I don't know what the word garner, yeah.
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  I don't know what fans means, but I was playing like,
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  sort of, you know, a douchey internet whiz
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  who was like trying to discuss with him like ways
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  to get his videos to be more viral.
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  And that was one of the things like we're like,
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  if in the movie, like one of the plot points is,
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  if you put A, if you started with A or a lot of A's,
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  then a lot more people will see it first
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  because it'll be up at the top.
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  And so the movie, the sequel to Punching the Clown
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  is called And Punching the Clown.
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  I like that.
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  And it's coming out at South by Southwest this 2016.
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  And then hopefully many other places.
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  This is the problem of my life, which isn't my name is Zips.
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  So always at the back.
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  Your successes are so much more valuable
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  because you had to wait for everyone else to get called
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  before you.
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  Thank you.
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  Other than you're a white man.
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  Exactly.
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  If it's all of, you know what it is mostly?
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  It's all these black people who are ahead of me in the pack
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  because B comes before Z.
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  Oh, yeah.
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  And that's how black people then Zips.
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  Then Zips.
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  Exactly.
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  I have to roll call black people here, but W for white people
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  also comes before Z everybody.
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  I mean, do you know what's first is though Australian?
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  That's true.
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  If we're going by broad categories of people,
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  which I don't think any of this is how it works.
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  But what about the category of big penis?
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  You know that category?
• 7:52
  Yeah.
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  Yeah, that's at the front of the line also.
• 7:55
  So sorry that you're, I mean, good congratulations
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  on your accomplishments.
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  When did you come to America?
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  I came to the United States of America.
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  Well, that came to visit occasionally.
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  How have you been living?
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  I've been living on and off for 11 years.
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  11 years ago was the first time I spent more than
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  a couple of weeks here when I spent three months here.
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  But then for the first probably five,
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  for the first sort of three or four years,
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  I oozed back and forth between New York City and Sydney.
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  And New York City.
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  New York City, I like that.
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  You should get a little teacher.
• 8:31
  Get a show.
• 8:32
  Get a show.
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  Do something.
• 8:34
  Oh, did you say T-shirt?
• 8:35
  I could get a T-shirt made.
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  I'm like TV show.
• 8:37
  No, I just think that T-shirt.
• 8:38
  Something starting with T and N-T-shirt?
• 8:41
  Yeah.
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  shirt or a V-show?
• 8:43
  Yeah, sure.
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  And then I was here properly from 2007 to 2008.
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  I like, I like properly as a,
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  like that's not a thing that we say here.
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  Yeah, some other people have said that.
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  I was here properly.
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  Like legally, legitimately.
• 8:59
  Yeah, legitimately.
• 9:00
  Yeah.
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  I was here in a more consistent,
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  it was more consistently.
• 9:05
  I completely understand what it means.
• 9:08
  But why are you gotten on your high horse about properly
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  when you people don't understand
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  the meaning of the word fancy?
• 9:12
  I'm not, I'm certainly not on any high horse here.
• 9:16
  Why is ketchup fancy?
• 9:18
  Oh, I mean, why is mayonnaise fancy?
• 9:21
  Maybe fancy in my language means like,
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  it's really putting on airs.
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  Like if the queen, the queen's throne is fancy.
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  And ketchup is not fancy.
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  What ketchup is trying to do is to do
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  what those art vark plumbers are trying to do.
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  Just, you know, do anything to stand out.
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  They're not saying that, you know,
• 9:38
  this is as fancy as a queen.
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  But they're like, if the queen used ketchup,
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  here's the ketchup.
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  Even in the category of things that could be fancy in my,
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  but people in my way, ketchup don't know that.
• 9:49
  But everyone uses ketchup.
• 9:50
  I guess well, then then the queen uses ketchup
• 9:54
  in which fancy guys.
• 9:55
  Like, I don't even know how,
• 9:56
  it's like saying like floral ketchup or something.
• 10:01
  Like they just aren't any flowers in ketchup.
• 10:03
  There's no fancy in this about ketchup.
• 10:05
  Even the fanciest ketchup in the world wouldn't be fancy.
• 10:07
  I thus far, I've been taking the side of the people
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  who named fancy ketchup just, you know,
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  I guess to try and get to the bottom of this,
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  like have a, you know, a spirited debate
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  as is the nature of how things work on your show.
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  Lincoln Douglas.
• 10:22
  Absolutely.
• 10:23
  It's changes.
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  It's a fancy ketchup debates.
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  But yeah, I think your floral ketchup point is well taken.
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  I mean, it's like calling it ardent ketchup
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  or like important ketchup.
• 10:33
  Hey, exactly.
• 10:34
  That's right.
• 10:35
  Well, anybody out there, we have a lot more brands for you
• 10:38
  if you want or need.
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  There are so many things that there are so many places
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  we could go with ketchup, but that,
• 10:42
  but this has all,
• 10:44
  dear listener, been merely a prologue,
• 10:46
  a prologue of banter to get us warmed up and caffeinated.
• 10:49
  Oh, sure.
• 10:50
  Before the bulk of the conversation,
• 10:51
  and you can tell it's the bulk of the conversation
• 10:53
  because I'm putting my hands together,
• 10:55
  like with my fingers together in a, in a, in a prism almost.
• 10:58
  You can only assume that from the sound of voice
• 11:00
  because you can't hear or see
• 11:02
  because when no one's watching us,
• 11:04
  because they're listeners, not viewers.
• 11:06
  Here comes the bulk.
• 11:07
  Yeah.
• 11:08
  So what about creativity?
• 11:11
  And that's not a question.
• 11:14
  What about creativity?
• 11:16
  Great.
• 11:16
  OK.
• 11:17
  So what's the deal?
• 11:18
  What's the deal with creativity?
• 11:21
  What is the deal with creativity?
• 11:24
  No, how did you go into, how did you decide to go into a field
• 11:27
  which was so full of uncertainty?
• 11:29
  And we, most people don't succeed
• 11:32
  nor even manage to make a living.
• 11:35
  Great question.
• 11:37
  I mean, I think that life is full,
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  number one, life is full of uncertainty.
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  And the jobs that say my parents had,
• 11:45
  you know, my parents were teachers.
• 11:46
  That would, they grew up in a time.
• 11:48
  Temple jobs.
• 11:48
  Oh, yeah, yeah, selfish job.
• 11:50
  They just love teaching.
• 11:51
  They don't care about who they're teaching.
• 11:53
  I just, in it for themselves and the chicks and the dudes
• 11:57
  and the money and the non-binary people.
• 11:59
  But, you know, at least the lore,
• 12:02
  the American Dreamlike lore was that,
• 12:05
  oh, you go to school, go to college maybe, get a job,
• 12:10
  have that job forever, you know, pay a mortgage, own a house,
• 12:14
  have a family.
• 12:15
  And now, like, there are almost no jobs
• 12:17
  that you, like, if somebody gets out of school
• 12:20
  and is like, now I'm at this job
• 12:21
  and then they'll be at it for decades.
• 12:23
  Oddly enough, teacher.
• 12:24
  Oh, yeah.
• 12:25
  There's one of those.
• 12:26
  One of the only ones.
• 12:27
  Yeah.
• 12:28
  But almost every, like, when people are like,
• 12:29
  how do you think that involves the government and unions
• 12:32
  is probably OK, but very, very few things anymore.
• 12:34
  OK, in one way, yes.
• 12:37
  For sure.
• 12:37
  But yeah, so they,
• 12:38
  people, whenever people ask the question
• 12:40
  from outside of show business or art, artistry,
• 12:43
  as, oh, I wish I didn't say it.
• 12:46
  Outside of artistry, fancy artistry.
• 12:50
  Yeah, there's nothing fancy about stand-up comedy.
• 12:53
  But I did have a friend who used to have a show
• 12:54
  called The Fancy Show, where everybody dressed up.
• 12:57
  Who's show is that?
• 12:58
  Bethany Van Delft.
• 12:59
  And I think my friend, Aaron Schumann,
• 13:01
  was student.
• 13:02
  Oh, yeah.
• 13:03
  Not a real person.
• 13:04
  That's actually me in a dress.
• 13:05
  So when people ask from who are not, you know, comedians
• 13:11
  or musicians or people pursuing a career in the arts,
• 13:14
  when they're like, well, how do you deal with, like,
• 13:16
  not having, you know, a 401k or, like, a retirement plan
• 13:19
  or, you know, knowing where your money is
• 13:21
  going to be coming from in six months.
• 13:22
  And then, you know, with the events of, like, 2008-ish,
• 13:27
  when markets crashed and, like, people who worked, like,
• 13:29
  like, markets crashed.
• 13:30
  I'm not going to call my broker.
• 13:32
  Call him a couple of years ago.
• 13:35
  Time travel broker, please.
• 13:37
  You know, when people who were working at Gigantic,
• 13:40
  you know, Wall Street companies are losing their,
• 13:42
  like, everybody's, you know, so many people losing jobs
• 13:44
  that were thought to be, you know, safe, that you'd be like,
• 13:48
  oh, you have this job, you're all set.
• 13:50
  The reason that you go into this job,
• 13:51
  you're like, you don't like this job.
• 13:52
  You've got a worker in Detroit, nothing can touch me.
• 13:55
  So, you know, that doesn't necessarily answer the question
• 13:58
  of why go, I mean, why go into comedy, then,
• 14:00
  because, well, if nothing is certain,
• 14:03
  then do the thing that you want to do.
• 14:05
  And maybe that thing, like, you know, like a, but, yes,
• 14:08
  I take your point, I mean, my dad is an actor in Australia
• 14:10
  and has been, you know, was an actor for more than 40 years
• 14:14
  without having to do anything else apart from act.
• 14:15
  But, of course, in a medium-sized market, like Australia,
• 14:19
  you were going from job to job to job to job the whole time.
• 14:23
  And he noted that, you know, he did electrical engineering
• 14:27
  at university and a lot of his friends who thought
• 14:29
  that he was crazy for going into acting
• 14:30
  because it was so risky,
• 14:31
  ended up getting retrenched when they were in their 40s
• 14:33
  during the, you know, the, I guess,
• 14:36
  the economic rationalization of the 1980s and 90s
• 14:39
  the Reagan Thatcher years, which were reflected also
• 14:42
  in countries in other countries like Australia.
• 14:44
  And he was sort of more resilient.
• 14:46
  It reminds me a bit of, I don't know if you know,
• 14:48
  Nicholas Tuller, who's this economist
• 14:50
  who wrote a book called The Black Swan.
• 14:52
  He, he basically, I saw the movie.
• 14:54
  A different thing, different thing, fair enough.
• 14:56
  He basically predicted the meltdown of 2008
• 14:58
  and his, his big life thesis is,
• 15:01
  he was recently written a book called anti-fragile,
• 15:03
  which is about exactly this,
• 15:04
  which is that the best way for you to be
• 15:06
  is not unfragile, but sort of anti-fragile.
• 15:12
  In other words, that's different from having security.
• 15:14
  It's actually the opposite of having security
• 15:16
  that the countries that work best,
• 15:17
  the economies that work best and the individuals
• 15:19
  who work best.
• 15:20
  Are ones who are used to having to be nimble,
• 15:23
  are used to having to adjust to change.
• 15:25
  And if you'd looked, for example, at Syria 10 years ago,
• 15:30
  you would have said that it was a very stable country
• 15:33
  in the way that we would look at Saudi Arabia
• 15:34
  and say it's very stable.
• 15:35
  It's got very strong institutions of power.
• 15:38
  But it's actually deeply vulnerable
• 15:40
  because it has no experience of change
• 15:42
  in the sense that a country that you might think of
• 15:44
  as being totally fucked up, like say Lebanon,
• 15:46
  which is always going through change or Italy,
• 15:48
  which has had more governments than years.
• 15:50
  There are practically since the Second World War.
• 15:53
  They're actually fine and always will be fine
• 15:55
  whatever the world throws at them
• 15:56
  because they have such an experience of being nimble.
• 15:59
  And in the same way, I sort of think that like being an actor
• 16:01
  or being a performer, like we are,
• 16:02
  gives you a good level of resilience
• 16:04
  which people who expect to have that stable job
• 16:07
  and then get thrown out on the road, yeah, don't have.
• 16:09
  Oh yeah, especially comedy in particular,
• 16:11
  because like if you're an actor, you know,
• 16:13
  I mean, you can be a working actor
• 16:15
  or you can be somebody who you could get a big break
• 16:18
  and you're in a movie and now you're a famous person
• 16:20
  and you don't have to go through all the steps
• 16:22
  of the various changes that can happen.
• 16:25
  But as a comedian, there's maybe very few stories
• 16:28
  of people being amazing at the beginning
• 16:30
  and getting plucked from nothing
• 16:32
  and then thrust into greatness.
• 16:34
  Most of the great successful comedians
• 16:36
  are people who were horrible comedians
• 16:39
  or certainly not successful.
• 16:41
  Almost everybody was not successful
• 16:43
  for a good chunk of time
• 16:45
  before they became as successful as they are.
• 16:47
  Dan Cook.
• 16:48
  Oh, you're, I mean,
• 16:49
  well, he just knew how to work that in my space.
• 16:51
  But Dan Cook is a good example
• 16:53
  of what we're talking about.
• 16:54
  Oh, sure.
• 16:55
  Someone who has a certain appeal
• 16:57
  to a certain band of people
• 16:59
  who becomes incredibly famous quite quickly
• 17:01
  but then doesn't have the way with all to be able to actually
• 17:04
  go play the long game
• 17:05
  and quite quickly sort of deflites.
• 17:07
  I mean, but he also did put out a special last year.
• 17:10
  Oh, he's still working.
• 17:13
  He's still doing comedy.
• 17:14
  He's not the, once you're the biggest thing,
• 17:17
  then once you haven't heard of him for a while,
• 17:19
  you're like, did he, did he die?
• 17:21
  But he didn't, he, you know,
• 17:23
  just, he continues to be himself.
• 17:25
  And even if, you know, if he had millions of fans before,
• 17:28
  like you can survive with thousands of fans.
• 17:31
  Yeah.
• 17:32
  I mean, the, you know, the thousand true fan model
• 17:33
  is one that, you know, if not an exact scientific number,
• 17:37
  is like, if there's a certain number of people
• 17:38
  who will buy everything that you do forever,
• 17:40
  then you'll be fine.
• 17:41
  Is that a, is that a thing?
• 17:42
  Is it the thousand fan model?
• 17:43
  Yeah, thousand true fans, like thousand people
• 17:45
  who'll consume whatever it is you produce.
• 17:47
  Yeah, if you put out one album a year,
• 17:48
  if you have like a podcast that you have to pay
• 17:50
  for extra things or, you know, like whatever it is,
• 17:52
  they'll, whenever you come to their town,
• 17:54
  they'll come see you.
• 17:55
  Well, that's reassuring to me,
• 17:56
  because what I'm gonna do is start retroactively
• 17:59
  billing everybody who's been listening to this podcast.
• 18:01
  Go on to Patreon.
• 18:02
  Yeah.
• 18:03
  They're not gonna, they don't know it right now.
• 18:05
  Oh, yeah.
• 18:06
  In the future, once I go to a full fee model,
• 18:09
  then I'm gonna send everyone bills for this very episode.
• 18:12
  Oh, yeah.
• 18:13
  But it's gonna be very reasonably priced at 1999 per episode.
• 18:16
  It's fun.
• 18:17
  And then if you think about that, a thousand lists this,
• 18:20
  you know, for several shows a week sometimes.
• 18:23
  Oh, yeah.
• 18:23
  At 1999 a show, I'm gonna be raking in the cash.
• 18:26
  I mean, but like to, to now address a,
• 18:29
  a sincere version of it where if you're like,
• 18:31
  hey, would you give me a dollar to listen to a thing
• 18:34
  for an hour?
• 18:34
  And if you have a thousand people that will give you a dollar,
• 18:37
  then you make a thousand dollars.
• 18:39
  Yeah.
• 18:39
  By the way, don't worry people, this podcast will always be free.
• 18:42
  There will be additional, we will eventually go to some kind of,
• 18:45
  oh, he is an extra premium thing that maybe you can pay for or something.
• 18:47
  Oh, yeah.
• 18:48
  But I think that, yes, you're right.
• 18:49
  I'm never gonna go down, I don't have the profile for a start to go down the model
• 18:53
  of, for example, an Arty Lang who was recently on my show and who was talking
• 18:58
  about how his, his podcast, he has like only 7,000,
• 19:02
  he has less than fewer than 10,000 listeners,
• 19:04
  but they all pay five bucks a month to listen.
• 19:08
  That's almost a quarter of a million dollars a year.
• 19:11
  Oh, yeah.
• 19:12
  That's great.
• 19:13
  Yeah, good work.
• 19:14
  Good for him.
• 19:15
  For Arty.
• 19:16
  It's almost a half million dollars.
• 19:17
  That's what I said.
• 19:18
  Is that what he said?
• 19:19
  I think I said that.
• 19:20
  I thought you said quarter.
• 19:21
  I might have gotten my quarters and halves mixed up.
• 19:22
  Yeah, in America.
• 19:23
  You're good at math in your head.
• 19:24
  A little bit.
• 19:25
  Also, why do you call it math instead of maths?
• 19:27
  We call it mathematics because it has an end on the end and it's on the end.
• 19:29
  So it's maths.
• 19:31
  That's a, that's a fine question.
• 19:32
  I, I think it's just because of language development.
• 19:35
  You are.
• 19:36
  You are the repository of all American information.
• 19:40
  I mean, this half out.
• 19:41
  I mean, I also did study language in graduate school.
• 19:44
  Why are you so bad at answering my questions about fancy?
• 19:47
  I think that I'm good at it.
• 19:51
  To answer your other question, it's from a,
• 19:54
  or the same question that I've already answered,
• 19:55
  but from another direction, like about my getting into comedy.
• 19:58
  It's interesting to me, like thinking about how my parents were both creative people.
• 20:02
  They were both musicians, but they both, you know, monetized it.
• 20:06
  They're both played in orchestras, played in marching bands and things,
• 20:08
  but their main jobs were the solid, you know, teaching job.
• 20:13
  They're like, oh, we teach, but teaching music, the arts,
• 20:16
  which also among teaching jobs isn't the most secure because it's often,
• 20:20
  you know, arts and music are the thing.
• 20:21
  The first things to get cut is like, we need our kids to know math.
• 20:23
  Yeah.
• 20:24
  Not musics.
• 20:25
  Thank you.
• 20:27
  Music's in ships.
• 20:28
  And so I remember, like, I was obviously,
• 20:32
  I was made to play the violin from a very young age.
• 20:34
  My mom wanted me to, you know, value music.
• 20:37
  And then when I was in high school, I, like,
• 20:40
  is when I started playing guitar and loving it.
• 20:41
  And I was like, oh, man, like if I could,
• 20:43
  and that's when I was the dream, the dream seed developed of, like,
• 20:47
  if I could do anything, which is like, what,
• 20:49
  when I was asking anybody, like, if you could do anything,
• 20:51
  what would you do if you were, if money was no object,
• 20:53
  if you could, you know, have whatever job and somebody's like,
• 20:55
  I will fund your job.
• 20:57
  And so I didn't think of it like that at the time,
• 20:59
  but I was like, oh, yeah, if I could, if I could do anything,
• 21:01
  like my, my reach, my stretch goal,
• 21:03
  would you just be to play music and have fans
• 21:06
  have people buy my album, get to tour?
• 21:08
  What, I didn't know what shape it, I didn't have a specific shape.
• 21:10
  I'm just like, I like playing songs.
• 21:12
  I like writing songs.
• 21:13
  Like, people, my friends like my songs.
• 21:15
  And like, why have you filed so dismaly
• 21:17
  in achieving that goal?
• 21:18
  Because I accidentally succeeded a comedy.
• 21:20
  But I was, I, in college, I was in a few singing groups.
• 21:25
  I was in a cappella group.
• 21:26
  I was in a choir.
• 21:27
  And then I left those things to focus
• 21:30
  when I turned 21 on pursuing the music career.
• 21:33
  I was like, I think the way that you do it is to do it.
• 21:37
  Like, there wasn't as much, you know,
• 21:38
  I think now there's so many podcasts and, you know,
• 21:41
  websites and things that can point you to like,
• 21:43
  oh, yeah, if you want to do this, do this.
• 21:45
  I mean, it's going to be hard.
• 21:46
  And, but I remember I was just like, well,
• 21:49
  while I'm in school, at least I can give it a shot.
• 21:51
  So my senior year of college, I just like looked up
• 21:53
  on the internet, pre-Google, whatever, you know,
• 21:55
  hot bot Yahoo search.
• 21:57
  I was just like looking for clubs in Boston.
• 22:00
  I had a friend who was, who played cello in a rock band
• 22:02
  and asked him where he played.
• 22:03
  And he like directed me to some places.
• 22:05
  And I was, it was very naive.
• 22:07
  I was just like, can I do music at your place?
• 22:10
  And they're like, what's your draw?
• 22:11
  How many people like do a fan?
• 22:13
  And I was like, I'd never do.
• 22:14
  And one of the places that I found was a comedy club
• 22:19
  called the comedy studio, which is in,
• 22:22
  right across from Harvard and Cambridge.
• 22:24
  And it's like a place where when I started going
• 22:26
  to shows there.
• 22:27
  Is that where you went to college?
• 22:28
  Is that where you just dropping a night's bomb?
• 22:29
  No, I went to Brandeis, which was outside of Boston
• 22:33
  a little bit, like 20 minutes.
• 22:34
  And then I went to Boston University for grad school.
• 22:38
  And, but it was near Harvard.
• 22:40
  Harvard at Jason's also near MIT.
• 22:43
  A lot of schools, do you know, a quarter of the population
• 22:45
  of Boston, I believe, is college students.
• 22:47
  Wow.
• 22:48
  So it's a lot.
• 22:49
  Oh, yeah.
• 22:50
  So go in the summer.
• 22:51
  It's a real empty.
• 22:53
  But there is some summer school.
• 22:54
  So I went to this, the comedy club was like, sure,
• 22:58
  you can come here and perform for seven minutes.
• 23:02
  If that's, you know, that was, sure.
• 23:03
  Like they didn't have an open mic,
• 23:04
  but they were just sort of a newer club at the time.
• 23:06
  And they were like, yeah, if you want to come on, like,
• 23:07
  Thursday or a Sunday, like, you know,
• 23:09
  and we'll see how you do.
• 23:11
  And of like two, three and a half minute songs,
• 23:14
  and we'll be done with you.
• 23:14
  Legitimately, I was like, oh, but at these music
• 23:16
  open mics are things like I would get, like, you know,
• 23:18
  sometimes 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, like,
• 23:21
  you get longer sets as a musician.
• 23:22
  So when I talk to Rick Jenkins, the proprietor,
• 23:25
  and guy who ran, that has run the comedy studio
• 23:29
  for the past 20 years,
• 23:31
  when we talk about like, when I first came to him
• 23:34
  about how like, clueless I was about the way
• 23:35
  that, you know, comedy worked, I was like,
• 23:37
  ooh, five, seven minutes, I guess I can play
• 23:39
  two, three minute songs.
• 23:41
  And I mean, I did.
• 23:42
  And some of my songs were like, not formatted for comedy.
• 23:44
  Some of them were funny, but like, they had like,
• 23:46
  choruses that repeated, which isn't like the ideal
• 23:48
  for comedy, but it was still like,
• 23:50
  unless you add them, Sandly,
• 23:51
  he has lots of songs which come back to the same
• 23:53
  glorious joke, no rules.
• 23:55
  Yeah, everybody can do it, ever they want.
• 23:57
  Just guidelines that I follow.
• 23:58
  I'm not gonna tell anyone else too.
• 23:59
  Mm-hmm.
• 24:00
  But I was like, oh, when people, when I say the same thing
• 24:02
  again, people aren't surprised the second time.
• 24:04
  Also, I'll say a different thing,
• 24:06
  or just stop the song after the first chorus.
• 24:08
  Uh, and I just, I learned in between the songs,
• 24:12
  I would talk and it was, and people would laugh at the things
• 24:15
  I said that weren't necessarily planned.
• 24:17
  But I was like, oh, that's, that's fun.
• 24:18
  So I sort of started thinking about like, writing,
• 24:21
  you know, just silly, oh my god,
• 24:22
  what if I said this for the first time?
• 24:24
  Yeah.
• 24:25
  Yeah.
• 24:26
  Yeah.
• 24:27
  Yeah.
• 24:28
  Yeah.
• 24:29
  Yeah.
• 24:30
  Yeah.
• 24:31
  Yeah.
• 24:32
  Yeah.
• 24:33
  Yeah.
• 24:34
  Yeah.
• 24:35
  Yeah.
• 24:36
  Yeah.
• 24:37
  Yeah.
• 24:38
  Yeah.
• 24:39
  Yeah.
• 24:40
  Yeah.
• 24:41
  Yeah.
• 24:42
  Yeah.
• 24:43
  Yeah.
• 24:44
  Yeah.