Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0128 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with James McCann

Transcript

#0128 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with James McCann · INSPIRE STORY

0:04
Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
0:08
by night. All day.
0:12
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me back.
0:14
Speaker 1: Good to see you, my brother.
0:15
Speaker 3: How are you?
0:16
Speaker 1: Always great to see you. I'm good. It was fun
0:20
having you at the clubhouse. I was fucking terrified. You
0:23
just look like you're back. No, I thought that's it.
0:25
Speaker 2: I've been away for too long. I'm going to suck.
0:27
None of the new stuff's going to work. They'll see me.
0:29
They'll go, he was wrong to come back.
0:31
Speaker 1: Fuck him off. Whatever.
0:32
Speaker 2: It was so nice. It was so nice.
0:35
Speaker 1: You were telling the story. I said, hold these thoughts. Yeah.
0:38
Speaker 2: I didn't know you didn't. I didn't know we'd never
0:40
spoken about it.
0:40
Speaker 1: No. Tell me the story.
0:41
Speaker 2: Well, that's why I came to America to start. I
0:45
got offered a job hosting a Catholic podcast. And they
0:48
fired me. I packed up everything in Adelaide. This was
0:51
like two and a bit years ago. I had the
0:53
kids and the wife. And on the way to America,
0:55
I got fired. And they said, we'll still pay you rent.
0:58
It's in Steubenville, Ohio. Beautiful Appalachian. Town, just outside of Pittsburgh. And, yeah,
1:04
it's where we– three months I was there.
1:07
Speaker 1: So what did they see that they fired you for? Oh,
1:10
a lot.
1:10
Speaker 2: They made a compilation video. No, the guy who showed–
1:14
they were right to fire him.
1:16
Speaker 1: No, no, they weren't.
1:17
Speaker 2: No, because it was a good, clean Catholic podcast. And
1:19
then the business manager was like– there was a sketch
1:22
about stabbing someone in the throat with an AIDS needle.
1:25
They're like– he uses the word cunt all the time.
1:27
They're like, this is a sponsorship nightmare. Get him out.
1:31
So I said, okay. But they still said, we'll pay
1:33
you rent for three months and you can figure something out.
1:36
You still got a visa. And I was terrified. I
1:39
was just in the snow.
1:40
Speaker 1: With kids and a wife.
1:41
Speaker 2: Three kids, no job. I didn't have the money to
1:42
go back home.
1:43
Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
1:44
Speaker 2: We couldn't afford to go back home. Oh, my God.
1:46
And I didn't know that I had been passed at
1:48
the mothership because I didn't know how the system worked.
1:51
So on the way in to go to Steubenville where
1:55
I was like, I'll figure something out. I stopped in
1:57
at Austin to see Shane. Shane said, go and do
1:59
the Mothership open mic.
2:01
Speaker 1: I did it.
2:02
Speaker 2: Adam Higgett said, if you're ever in town, come back.
2:03
We'll pay for sports. I didn't know that meant I
2:05
was passed. I didn't know I could work here. I
2:08
just thought he was like, I could audition again. And then,
2:11
so I had three confronting months in the snow. Beautiful
2:15
part of the world. It was the most terrified I've
2:17
ever been in my life.
2:19
Speaker 3: He says that as an Australian. That's from Ohio.
2:21
Speaker 1: No, I loved it.
2:22
Speaker 3: That's the most beautiful part of the world.
2:24
Speaker 2: I loved it. I went back and watched that Wild
2:25
Whites of West Virginia.
2:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's where you're at.
2:27
Speaker 2: It looks exactly like that.
2:29
Speaker 1: Well, that area is gorgeous.
2:31
Speaker 2: It's God's country, but also so abandoned by, like, the
2:37
potholes are crazy. I saw real heroin addicts. I'd never
2:41
really seen heroin addicts before. Just sleepy people. I saw
2:44
street prostitutes. That's still going on.
2:47
Speaker 1: And this is a small town, right?
2:49
Speaker 2: This is a small town. This is– I went– there
2:52
are Catholics who have moved there to try and like
2:54
fix it. It was where Dean Martin was from. The
2:57
Wu-Tang Clan kind of started out there.
2:59
Speaker 1: They're Staten Island. No, yes.
3:01
Speaker 2: But I think it's like the RZA's auntie lived there
3:05
and they moved out there and then they got involved
3:07
in rap in the Pittsburgh– I.
3:08
Speaker 1: Got to ask. RZA's on real soon.
3:10
Speaker 2: I believe I'm right about that. They don't have a
3:13
mural for them.
3:13
Speaker 3: Wow.
3:15
Speaker 2: But it's great. There's– Yeah, there's a lot of Catholic
3:18
content creators there. That's interesting. And they're trying to take
3:21
over town. I went there originally because New Polity is
3:24
my favorite magazine, and I got to meet the guys
3:27
who made it, and I was so excited.
3:28
Speaker 1: So how did they hire you? Wu-Tang's RZA found a
3:33
second chance in Steubenville. Wow.
3:36
Speaker 2: And they all come over to visit him.
3:38
Speaker 1: He discussed a largely undocumented era of his life in
3:41
which Pittsburgh played a role. Wow.
3:45
Speaker 2: And that's one of the first conversations we had. I
3:47
was like, you said something about Pittsburgh that wasn't flattering.
3:50
I said, I love Pittsburgh. And you're like, you don't
3:51
know anything. You're a foreigner. You don't know anything about America.
3:55
Pittsburgh is a horrible place.
3:57
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know.
3:58
Speaker 2: I had a nice time there. I thought it was good.
4:01
Speaker 1: It's just a little depressing. See, the thing about a
4:06
lot of those sort of industrial kind of towns is
4:11
There's not a ton of options for people. Pittsburgh more
4:15
so than like the place that you were in. But
4:18
like when you get to a place where there's not
4:20
a lot of options and then you see real poverty,
4:22
like this is poverty with no solutions. You know what
4:26
I mean? Not Pittsburgh.
4:27
Speaker 2: Oh, no, just outside of Pittsburgh.
4:29
Speaker 1: I was more fucking with you.
4:30
Speaker 2: No, I saw things in West Virginia that were pretty confronting.
4:37
And like, you know, and some of it's great. Some
4:39
of the things from the poverty, wonderful. Drive-thru cigarette shop.
4:43
I loved having drive-thru cigarettes. Just like trying to get
4:48
the kids to sleep. My wife's upset because I got
4:50
her in a foreign, like again, she never signed up.
4:53
Let's move to America. She was like, we'll go for
4:54
three months.
4:55
Speaker 1: Right.
4:55
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh fuck, I'm unemployed. I better
4:58
quickly figure out how to be a standup comedian. I
5:00
was busing out of Steubenville. I would like, I caught the,
5:06
I went, I, Someone gave me a lift to Pittsburgh.
5:09
This is when I saw the worst stuff. I got
5:10
a lift to Pittsburgh, and then I caught the Greyhound
5:13
from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to open for Sam Talent, who
5:17
let me open. Unbelievably, he let me open for him.
5:19
Speaker 1: He's the best.
5:20
Speaker 2: I met him in Australia.
5:21
Speaker 1: Such a good guy.
5:22
Speaker 2: But that bus trip from Pittsburgh to Cleveland was the
5:26
most upsetting.
5:29
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
5:30
Speaker 2: People were spitting on the ground at the bus station.
5:33
An illegal immigrant woman came and tried to give me
5:35
a phone. I remember that vividly.
5:37
Speaker 1: Give you a phone.
5:38
Speaker 2: She tried to give me a free phone.
5:40
Speaker 1: Why?
5:40
Speaker 2: She's like, you can have this. Because she said, you're
5:42
on benefits. Everyone on benefits gets a free phone. It
5:46
was some like policy. She just assumed I was on
5:48
benefits because I was at the Greyhound bus station.
5:51
Speaker 1: And she was illegal?
5:52
Speaker 2: I don't know if she was illegal, but she had
5:53
a strong accent and like a weird dress and a
5:56
baby on her back and a sack full of phones.
5:59
Speaker 1: A sack full of phones?
6:00
Speaker 2: She had like a sack of phones.
6:01
Speaker 1: So she was somehow in charge of distributing free phones
6:04
to people?
6:04
Speaker 2: I'll never truly know what that was about.
6:07
Speaker 1: Boy, I would have investigated further. There was.
6:09
Speaker 2: I was just scared. I was just scared.
6:13
Speaker 1: What the fuck?
6:13
Speaker 2: Huge African guy sitting on the ground.
6:15
Speaker 1: Who tries to give you a phone?
6:17
Speaker 2: And then after that, I sat next to a guy
6:19
who's having a full psychotic episode. I think we follow
6:21
each other on Instagram now. He's gotten rid of his Instagram.
6:24
Speaker 1: Really?
6:24
Speaker 2: But yeah, and he told me the secrets about Chris Benoit,
6:27
that he was a good man.
6:28
Speaker 1: The wrestler?
6:29
Speaker 2: He killed his family.
6:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
6:31
Speaker 2: But this guy tried to tell me only he was...
6:33
It's like burnt– he said he only killed his family
6:35
to send them to God and you can't blame a
6:37
man for that.
6:39
Speaker 3: Oh.
6:40
Speaker 2: All right. This is only a three-hour bus trip. We're
6:42
going to get through this. We're going to be fine.
6:44
Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
6:45
Speaker 2: Oh, man. But I did enjoy my time in that part.
6:47
Speaker 3: Of the world.
6:48
Speaker 1: Well, you probably enjoy it now that it's over, that
6:51
you survived it.
6:52
Speaker 2: You make a good point.
6:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. There's some things– If you asked me at the time. Yeah.
6:56
There's some things that are not fun while they're happening
6:58
but are really fun once you got through it.
7:01
Speaker 2: I mean I remember the people I met along the way. Uh,
7:05
I remember driving to Austin and like, it was like
7:08
spring was start, like the further South we got, the
7:11
more lush it became.
7:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
7:13
Speaker 2: It was like, fuck, I'm not, I might be okay.
7:15
And then someone let me stay in their house. I
7:16
didn't have a house to stay in. So my, a
7:18
podcast listeners friend let us stay in there.
7:21
Speaker 1: With your family?
7:22
Speaker 2: With my whole family. Let us house sit for them
7:24
while they were in Japan.
7:25
Speaker 1: Oh my God.
7:26
Speaker 3: Um.
7:26
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
7:27
Speaker 2: The whole time it was like, if I don't get,
7:29
if I don't get past the mothership now, I, I
7:32
don't think people should come here and live in their
7:34
cars with their family, but it does, you know.
7:37
Speaker 1: Lights a fire under your ass. It worked. Well, that's
7:40
the thing. It's like if you're forced into action. Yeah.
7:43
Like you had no, not just yourself, like you could go, oh,
7:46
woe is me. But when you're a father and a husband,
7:49
you have children. Yeah. And people who do not have
7:53
children do not understand the drive that it gives you
7:57
to protect and care for those little people. It's kind
8:00
of crazy. So you'll find something.
8:03
Speaker 2: Well, I don't understand how people do it without– like
8:05
I meet men who are really driven and motivated and
8:08
they have no kids. But they're like every day they're working.
8:11
I don't know what their motivation is. Before I had kids,
8:13
I was just– What are you doing?
8:15
Speaker 1: I'm buying things. They're in a game. They're playing a game. No. Yeah,
8:19
they're just playing this game of accumulate the most stuff,
8:23
be able to brag about the most stuff you have.
8:26
Speaker 2: So much rather lie down. I would rather not do
8:30
anything if I had a choice.
8:31
Speaker 1: But not really because you love doing comedy.
8:33
Speaker 2: I love doing comedy, but I never, before I had kids,
8:36
was trying to do comedy that people would enjoy. Do
8:39
you know what I mean?
8:40
Speaker 1: I think that is also, though, because you were living
8:43
in Australia and there's limited options.
8:46
Speaker 3: Right.
8:47
Speaker 1: Can you explain like the Australian system is very different
8:50
than America? It's mostly festival driven, correct?
8:52
Speaker 2: It's festival driven and it's to a much greater extent
8:56
I've thought about this. It's like industry driven.
8:59
Speaker 1: Industry?
8:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.
9:00
Speaker 1: Which industry?
9:01
Speaker 2: Like managers and agents, which is one role in Australia.
9:05
But they are deciding who's succeeding and TV people are
9:08
deciding who's succeeding. Whereas like in America, everybody is on
9:11
the road. Everybody has one or two openers. And there's
9:15
a whole lineage of who brought who up in the business.
9:19
Like Dan Soda had Nick Mullen, Tim Dillon, and Shane
9:25
Gillis open for him. Like those were his openers.
9:27
Speaker 1: Right.
9:28
Speaker 2: And not because they were successful or someone wanted them
9:31
to thrive. He just thought they were funny people.
9:33
Speaker 1: Right.
9:33
Speaker 2: And they got to be his openers. I don't know
9:35
who you were opening for, but you have people who
9:37
come up and.
9:38
Speaker 1: You get to pick them up. Well, I didn't really
9:40
do it– I didn't have it that way. I do
9:42
it that way, but I didn't have it that way.
9:44
I didn't really come up with anybody where I opened
9:46
for anybody. But I had a very weird path to success.
9:49
Speaker 2: You also– you got to go to LA and just
9:51
be in the– like there's a scene– There's a lot
9:55
of people.
9:55
Speaker 1: I came out to LA with a job already. Okay.
9:58
I was on a sitcom already. You started.
10:00
Speaker 2: In Boston though yes started.
10:02
Speaker 1: In Boston look it's very embarrassing how lucky I am
10:07
I'm like one of the luckiest people that's ever lived
10:09
like this stumble upon success after success so when I
10:14
was six years into comedy I was already on TV
10:17
So I was three years into comedy. I was basically
10:22
barely getting paid. I was barely a professional. Like, I
10:26
was getting some spots in bars and stuff like that.
10:29
I was making money, but I was driving limousines. I
10:31
was doing odd jobs, doing different things. And I was
10:35
also still teaching at the time. I was still teaching
10:37
Taekwondo for the first maybe six months or so when
10:44
I was 21. Wow. I think I kept teaching. And
10:48
then I eventually had to quit because I realized I
10:50
could not commit to doing both things. I don't want
10:53
to half-ass my students. So for the first two, three
10:59
years of comedy, barely, you know, I'm barely a comedian.
11:03
Just I'm trying. I'm trying to do it. I'm getting
11:05
some laughs. Met a manager as an open miker. And
11:10
he brought me to New York. And he's still my
11:12
manager today. Wow. The best.
11:14
Speaker 2: I didn't know that.
11:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's total luck. Total lie.
11:17
Speaker 2: You're also a super handsome guy. I've seen you then.
11:21
Speaker 1: I was boy pretty.
11:22
Speaker 2: You look like a fucking different person. First of all,
11:24
not worse.
11:26
Speaker 1: It is crazy.
11:26
Speaker 2: But also a lot of those comics you started with,
11:29
who maybe took longer, I wouldn't say hideous, but they
11:31
didn't look right.
11:32
Speaker 1: Well, that definitely helped me get on television. It definitely
11:35
helped me get on television. So I did the MTV
11:37
Half Hour Comedy Hour in 1993, I believe it was.
11:42
And next thing you know, I had a development deal.
11:43
Next thing you know, I was on a sitcom show.
11:45
And living out here. I mean, that happened fast.
11:47
Speaker 2: But do you think it doesn't happen for people? Do
11:49
you think there's anyone in America who has a good
11:51
work ethic and is really talented that it doesn't work
11:55
out for in comedy? Or does it work out eventually?
11:57
Speaker 1: You'd have to have a health issue. Health issues or
12:00
a really horrible relationship. Those things could do you in.
12:03
Speaker 2: Well, you could have a drug problem.
12:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, that'll do you in.
12:05
Speaker 2: Gamble your money away.
12:06
Speaker 1: That could do you in, too. Yeah. There's a bunch
12:09
of things that can do you in.
12:10
Speaker 2: But it's crazy that there are not a lot of
12:14
undiscovered geniuses In America in the same way. Like people
12:18
will want to make money off of you if you've
12:20
got it.
12:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's some people that are just really horrible
12:23
at marketing, like Brian Holtzman, for instance. Yeah. Right? We
12:28
had to kind of like force Brian Holtzman into the
12:31
modern era. Yes. And he's always been a comics comic
12:35
and he's always been a guy that we would all
12:37
sit in the back of the room at.
12:39
Speaker 2: The store and watch.
12:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. But he was always getting these terrible spots, and
12:43
it wasn't until we broke. Because he never went on
12:46
the road. He never went on the road. Brian and
12:47
I started out together. So at the store together in 94,
12:51
we were both– I think he came in 93, and
12:54
I came a year later.
12:55
Speaker 2: And he was working for like Pan Am or something?
12:57
Speaker 1: He was a dog catcher for a while. Yeah. He
13:00
was a, I think he might've been a meter maid.
13:02
Speaker 2: Is he here at the moment? I haven't seen him yet.
13:04
Speaker 1: Yes. He's here all the time. Okay.
13:05
Speaker 2: He lives out here now.
13:06
Speaker 1: I don't know if he goes back and forth, but he,
13:08
he lives out here all the time. He's the best.
13:11
Speaker 2: We, I went to church with him. I don't know
13:14
if I even know if I should tell this story,
13:15
but I, we, we went to church together once and
13:17
it was really lovely. He took me out for breakfast
13:19
afterwards cause he's Catholic. And it was so funny cause
13:21
the priest at the end, like I have the announcements
13:24
and one of the things he was like, they're doing
13:25
a parish, they're doing like, uh, what do you call it? Like, uh,
13:29
like a talent show for everybody. He's just announcing this
13:31
to the whole, like 300 people. And Brian goes, he
13:33
goes there every week and they go, so if anyone's
13:35
got a skill, if anyone's a juggler, anyone's a comedian,
13:38
come and do that for the talent show for everybody.
13:41
And he, he gave no impression that he would be
13:44
doing it, but I love you fucking spoon face Japs.
13:46
I think he would be terrified and upset if he
13:49
had brought that. He's the sweetest man. And I don't
13:51
want to give that away. People don't know. He's a
13:54
lovely man.
13:54
Speaker 1: He's a great guy in real life. He always was,
13:57
always was like, I've known him forever. So he's what
14:02
I would say is like an undiscovered genius because he
14:04
was a guy that was just fucking killing it but
14:06
never went on the road. He only worked the store.
14:09
I rarely saw him even at like the Laugh Factory
14:12
or the Improv. I don't know if I could ever
14:14
recall seeing him at those places.
14:17
Speaker 2: But he had to consciously make the decision not to
14:19
go on the road.
14:21
Speaker 1: Well, it's hard because it's not offered to you, you know?
14:25
It's like, how do you do it? If you just
14:27
do all your sets at the store, you kind of
14:30
have to have someone take you with them, right? So
14:33
what happened with me is I mostly did the road
14:36
around New York and Connecticut. So when I moved to
14:39
New York in, I guess, a 91-ish? Yeah, so probably
14:44
like 91-ish. And so when I moved there, the real money,
14:49
like to be able to pay bills– was in the road.
14:51
It was not in New York City. New York City
14:54
did not pay very well. You can get a lot
14:55
of spots, but also I was really new, so maybe
14:58
I couldn't have gotten a lot of spots, but I
15:00
could get a lot of spots doing gigs for like
15:03
John Shuler. He had a whole Connecticut run that you
15:06
could do. There were great gigs. They'd pay like 300
15:08
bucks a night. Or you could do Gonzo at a
15:11
bunch in New Jersey, and those paid really well.
15:13
Speaker 2: Did this collapse at some point?
15:15
Speaker 1: No, there's still probably some sort of a network of
15:18
road shows.
15:19
Speaker 2: There's a... Louis has a story on someone's podcast about
15:23
crashing his motorcycle and then a bubble bursting. I don't
15:26
know if he was speaking.
15:27
Speaker 1: A bubble bursting?
15:28
Speaker 2: It was like comedy. All of a sudden, clubs started
15:31
to close.
15:32
Speaker 1: Well, there's been ups and downs with that. I came
15:37
into comedy in 88, and apparently in 84 in Boston,
15:41
it was even better. Like there was like a peak
15:44
and I'm like, really? Because when I came in, it
15:46
was amazing. There was clubs everywhere. Like, nah, you missed it.
15:49
So there's always been this like up and down of
15:53
clubs closing. But like New York is on the rise
15:56
right now. There's a bunch of clubs that have opened
15:58
up in New York. New York's comedy right now is
16:00
fucking doing great.
16:01
Speaker 2: I hope, yeah, I hope they can figure it out.
16:03
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
16:04
Speaker 2: Well, I was in, last time I was in LA,
16:07
the spirit was so, I was never in LA for
16:09
it being great, but I've heard all the stories about Yeah.
16:12
Everyone's sports car at the back of the thing. And
16:14
there's this gig and that gig. And then I was,
16:16
everybody like has no sense that it's ever going to
16:18
work for them. Like no one's even bothered to, it's
16:21
like three podcasts in LA now that people don't, I
16:24
don't want to talk it down, but like here, everybody
16:26
is so hopeful in Austin. And I can look at
16:28
like Peyton made it like last night. I'm looking at
16:31
that green room. I'm like, all of these people have
16:33
money in a touring and they came here and they
16:35
got to do it. Like, and the hope and the adventure.
16:38
And when I was in LA, everyone was just, You.
16:41
Speaker 1: Might have picked a bad night, but it's also like
16:44
the Comedy Store has always been a top.
16:46
Speaker 2: That seems like it's getting better.
16:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is getting better. Well, it's definitely getting better
16:50
because Rose is running it now. She's awesome. But I
16:52
think the Comedy Store has always been a top-down vibe.
16:56
And if there was a bunch of like big-name national
17:00
acts that were really cool and fun to hang out with,
17:03
then it was a great vibe. And when they're gone,
17:06
it always felt empty. It always felt weird. This is
17:08
how it was with me in the 90s when I
17:10
was there. And I think that's how it is now.
17:13
We're all out here now.
17:14
Speaker 2: Yeah.
17:14
Speaker 1: You know, and it's like and then people kind of
17:17
feel abandoned. So they feel sad, you know, and then
17:20
they get a little mad at you. Like, I think
17:21
fucking me doing Austin. And so it develops a stupid rift,
17:26
which is the dumbest thing ever. We're all on the
17:28
same team. And also you can work here, too. Like,
17:31
it's so dumb.
17:31
Speaker 3: Yeah.
17:32
Speaker 1: Like, but the rift is a real thing. But it's
17:34
like you have to be around a bunch of people
17:37
that are having a good time to have a good time.
17:39
You can't be the only person having a good time.
17:41
Speaker 2: And the Rift can be good. The Rift can motivate
17:44
people to– have.
17:45
Speaker 1: You seen LeMay's Twitter? To get their shit together? No,
17:47
what's he doing?
17:48
Speaker 2: He's just going hard on New York people and saying
17:50
fuck all of them and Austin's number one. He's doing
17:53
the same thing they were doing to him.
17:54
Speaker 1: That's so silly. But I think he– New York is
17:56
fucking great.
17:57
Speaker 2: I think he gets very drunk and he starts swinging.
17:58
Speaker 1: New York comedy is great. There's so many great comics.
18:01
Norman and Soder and fucking Andrew Schultz and David Tell's
18:05
The Best Alive.
18:06
Speaker 2: I don't know anyone who has children.
18:07
Speaker 1: There's great comedians in New York.
18:08
Speaker 2: I don't see how you could have kids.
18:11
Speaker 1: Gaffigan raised all his kids there. In the city? Yeah,
18:14
and he's a super clean Catholic guy. Yeah.
18:17
Speaker 2: I don't know how he's... Got some money.
18:19
Speaker 1: First of all, he's got some money.
18:20
Speaker 2: Money has got to help.
18:21
Speaker 1: Send him to a nice place to go to school
18:24
where they're not going to get eaten.
18:26
Speaker 2: I think the trans thing is done in the schools.
18:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's dropped off significantly.
18:32
Speaker 2: I had really, because we were homeschooling, and I was
18:35
just aware, because my dad's a teacher, and he would say,
18:38
I don't want to get him in trouble, but he
18:41
would report that the numbers were developing. And I think
18:44
as a social phenomenon, it seems to have like, now
18:47
everyone just says they have an anxiety disorder.
18:49
Speaker 1: Well, you know when it dropped off, like noticeably?
18:53
Speaker 2: When?
18:53
Speaker 1: When Elon bought Twitter.
18:55
Speaker 2: Would you stop pumping the content to say it's good?
18:57
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, you could say whatever you wanted. Yeah.
19:00
And so you could make fun of it now. And
19:03
then people realize, oh, this is a completely falsely propped
19:07
up narrative. Do you smoke cigars?
19:10
Speaker 2: I quit all nicotine.
19:12
Speaker 1: You have it.
19:13
Speaker 2: Do you have alcohol?
19:14
Speaker 1: I have a drink. I can get you some alcohol.
19:15
All right.
19:16
Speaker 2: If I could have a whiskey. I quit all nicotine.
19:19
Speaker 1: What happened?
19:20
Speaker 2: I was having heart palpitations. I was doing it a lot.
19:25
I had a problem. I cannot do a little bit.
19:29
Speaker 1: I see.
19:29
Speaker 2: You'll just, like, you'll be backstage. You'll have one cigarette
19:32
and you're fine.
19:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. I can't. And I never smoke outside of right
19:35
before a show. I don't.
19:37
Speaker 2: I mean, I.
19:39
Speaker 1: But I'm.
19:39
Speaker 2: All power to you. I can't do that.
19:40
Speaker 1: I know how to shut things off. And I also regulate.
19:44
I realize when I have an issue, like the nicotine pouches,
19:49
I can just stop them. I've gone on vacation and
19:51
just not take them, and I'm fine. But I think
19:53
it's my biology. It's almost time for spring break, so
19:57
maybe you're headed to the beach, or maybe you're taking
19:59
the kids on a road trip, or maybe you're just
20:02
taking some extra time for yourself. No matter what, you
20:05
deserve a break and a reset, and AG1 can help.
20:08
AG1 is your daily health drink. Just one scoop combines
20:12
your multivitamin, pre- and probiotics, superfoods, and antioxidants to help
20:18
support a healthy immune system and digestion. Plus, it travels
20:22
really well so you can start working it into your
20:24
routine even when you don't have a routine. Just slip
20:27
a few travel packs into your luggage and have a
20:29
nice flight. I've talked about AG1 for a long time,
20:33
and it's not just me. I know a lot of
20:35
people enjoy it. It's very easy. It's very convenient. And
20:39
you deserve to take care of your health. Visit drinkag1. com
20:44
slash Joe Rogan. And for a limited time, get a
20:46
bottle of Omega-3 vitamin D3K2 and an AG1 flavor sampler
20:52
for free in your welcome kit with your first subscription.
20:55
That's a $ 111 value at drinkag1. com. ag1. com slash joe rogan.
21:02
Speaker 2: I was quitting going back when i went back to
21:05
australia and i came off nicotine at the same time
21:07
i think that was the closest to serious unpleasant really
21:11
i don't think i ever got through to abusive but
21:13
man there was a lot of shouting at the family
21:15
what the fuck are you doing put it down i
21:19
was not happy how long did it last it was
21:23
for a month i was real bad wow real bad.
21:26
Speaker 1: That's crazy for me um I don't know what it is, man.
21:30
I could just put it alone, leave it alone, and
21:33
I'm fine. And I monitored myself. I went on vacation
21:36
for like eight days with the family. And I said,
21:38
all right, no nicotine pouches. Let's see what happens. You
21:41
were fine? Let's see if I go crazy. Yeah. I
21:42
was waiting. Nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing. Was it you with
21:47
the pouches? Was it the pouches?
21:48
Speaker 2: I loved the pouches. Interesting. I got on the pouches
21:52
to get. off the cigarettes, and then I had to
21:54
go on the cigarettes to get off the pouches. Then
21:57
I was having cigarettes and pouches and the gum, and
22:00
my heart would start to go, and my mood would
22:02
go way up and way down. Wow. But I got
22:06
a lot done.
22:07
Speaker 1: See, I get addicted to things, like doing things, like
22:13
real bad. Archery. I used to get addicted. Archery, sure,
22:16
but the thing about archery is you can only do
22:18
it so much. Archery is good. Because it's, you know,
22:22
my bow is 80 pounds to pull back. And so
22:24
if I'm pulling it back, and I have another one
22:26
that's 90. And so when I'm pulling it back 80 pounds,
22:29
you can only do that so many times. You know,
22:31
I could do that maybe 100 times in a day
22:33
and my fucking shoulder is blown out.
22:36
Speaker 2: If you're hunting, though, I mean, you're not shooting very often,
22:40
but you wouldn't be able to get so tired that
22:41
if you go into a dangerous situation.
22:43
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no. When you're hunting, first of all,
22:45
you're jacked up with adrenaline. Like you could pull a
22:48
branch off a fucking tree. You're so jacked up with adrenaline.
22:52
You're just trying to stay calm. Like when you're about
22:55
to pull your bow, the bow pulls back effortlessly. It's
22:59
like you don't even notice that it's– it pulls back
23:02
so easy. You're so ramped up. You're not even thinking
23:05
about it.
23:05
Speaker 2: How often are you doing that?
23:06
Speaker 1: Bow hunting? Yeah. Seriously, only a couple times a year
23:10
because I'm elk hunting. And if I get an elk– Seasonal? Yes.
23:14
Speaker 2: Okay.
23:14
Speaker 1: It's September. September and October. Those are the times. But
23:18
in Texas, we hunt pigs sometimes. We have a lease
23:21
out here, so we'll go and hunt with a few
23:23
of my friends from archery country. Shout out to Tyler.
23:27
And my friend Evan from Black Rifle Coffee.
23:29
Speaker 2: We'll go out to— Wild pigs?
23:30
Speaker 1: Oh, they're everywhere.
23:32
Speaker 2: Okay.
23:32
Speaker 1: They're infested. Wild pigs are all over Texas.
23:35
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you.
23:36
Speaker 1: There's millions of them. Like, literally millions of them. Like,
23:39
one time they opened up a highway. Like, they built
23:42
this new highway, and the day it opened up, they had, like,
23:46
this fucking ridiculous amount of accidents. Because people were hitting
23:49
wild pigs. Because there were so many wild pigs out
23:51
there that they're just crashing into them on the road.
23:54
Speaker 3: With this new highway.
23:55
Speaker 1: Because the pigs had never seen cars before on this
23:58
spot because they hadn't finished the road yet. And then
24:00
all of a sudden there's cars everywhere. These wild pigs
24:03
are just getting fucking lambasted.
24:05
Speaker 2: Because in Australia, when they have a kangaroo problem and
24:07
a similar thing.
24:08
Speaker 3: Cheers, sir.
24:08
Speaker 1: Cheers.
24:08
Speaker 2: God bless. Thank you.
24:09
Speaker 1: God bless.
24:12
Speaker 2: They Gatling gun them from the sky.
24:14
Speaker 1: They do that here. They do that here out of helicopters.
24:18
You could do it if you want while you're in town.
24:19
I'll set it up. You know, I.
24:22
Speaker 2: Would feel guilty. That would seem not a sporting way
24:25
to start hunting would be the machine gun.
24:27
Speaker 1: It's a different kind of hunting because it's a necessity hunting, right?
24:31
I want to eat what I kill. If I kill something,
24:34
I want to eat it. And the thing about these
24:36
wild pigs is they're gunning down 20, 30, 40 of
24:38
them in a day. They're doing them out of helicopters
24:41
with machine guns. There's a bunch of companies that do it.
24:44
There's a video of Ted Nugent and this guy named Pigman.
24:48
Pigman is like a famous bow hunter that lives in Texas.
24:52
And it's called Aporkalypse Now. And they're in a helicopter.
24:59
Ted Nugent and Pigman in a helicopter. And they gunned
25:02
down like 240 pigs in a half-hour podcast. Not podcast.
25:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
25:07
Speaker 1: Hunting show.
25:07
Speaker 2: That would be a great podcast.
25:09
Speaker 1: He's called Pig Man? Yeah.
25:10
Speaker 2: He's a pig-killing human.
25:11
Speaker 1: His name's Brian. His name's Brian. Sure. It's Pig Man.
25:14
Speaker 2: Brian the Pig Man.
25:15
Speaker 1: He just kills a lot of wild pigs. But it's
25:17
a necessity out here. Look at this. But you have
25:20
to understand how many pigs they have out here and
25:23
the kind of damage. That's Pig Man. And the kind
25:26
of damage that these pigs do to agriculture, they go
25:32
through fences and they fuck up forests. Livestock gets out.
25:37
There's a lot of shit with these things. Yeah. Oh,
25:40
it's crazy.
25:40
Speaker 2: Is this the argument for bringing wolves back in?
25:43
Speaker 1: No, do not bring wolves.
25:45
Speaker 2: No, I'm against it, but I don't understand. What is
25:48
the most pro? Is there one sensible argument for bringing
25:51
back in apex predators?
25:55
Speaker 1: Well, there's arguments for it. You could make an argument
25:58
for it. The problem is. You do not understand– no
26:03
one understands what the ultimate result is going to be
26:06
of introducing predators. There is a very strong reason why
26:09
they eradicated wolves from the West Coast and from the
26:12
United States because they fucking kill everything. They're super smart
26:15
apex predators. They work in packs unlike any other animal.
26:19
They're very different and they kill everything and you can't
26:22
do shit about them and they kill people.
26:24
Speaker 2: Also like in the UK, they got rid of them
26:26
hundreds of years ago. This was like they celebrated it.
26:29
They got rid of them in America too.
26:31
Speaker 1: I mean, and now these fucking greenies, these softies that
26:35
really don't understand nature want to bring them back. So
26:38
there's a good argument in some ways that having some
26:42
predators would help. But the predators were slowly moving their
26:47
way back into these areas anyway. So they never eradicated
26:51
them from Canada. So they would come down from Canada
26:54
and make their way into Minnesota, make their way into Iowa,
26:57
make their way into– not Iowa, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. They
27:03
had like a small amount of wolves were kind of
27:06
making their way in. Then they reintroduced a bunch of
27:09
them into Montana in the 1990s, into Yellowstone. That changed everything.
27:14
That changed everything. It dropped the elk population by– down
27:17
to like 40 percent of what it used to be.
27:20
Which many people argue is actually a good thing because
27:23
there was no predators in terms of like– there's mountain lions,
27:28
but mountain lions don't kill that many elk. They'll kill
27:31
one in like a week.
27:32
Speaker 2: Like families go to Yellowstone.
27:34
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
27:35
Speaker 2: So now there's just wolves.
27:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the wolves are not fucking with the people
27:39
at Yellowstone. They really are just concentrating on the animals
27:42
and they've like really knocked down the elk population substantially.
27:46
But now they have an open hunting season on wolves
27:49
in Montana because the numbers got a lot higher than
27:53
they should be. Right. So now like I know guys
27:56
who hunt wolves and they go on wolf. It's very difficult.
28:00
Speaker 2: It sounds more dangerous and unpleasant.
28:01
Speaker 1: Than hunting elk. No, it's not that. Well, it is
28:04
dangerous in that it is a predator and if you
28:07
do get surrounded by them and they decide to eat
28:09
you and you're out of bullets, you could be fucked.
28:11
But for the most part, they're very difficult to hunt.
28:13
They're very difficult to find. They're also very difficult to
28:16
get in range. They're fucking clever. They're clever and once
28:20
they realize they're being hunted and once they realize that
28:22
people are a problem, they fucking steer way clear of you.
28:25
Speaker 2: What's the ideological reason for wanting them back? Just that
28:28
they– It's.
28:29
Speaker 1: Good to be in a country with— I love nature.
28:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, but focus on the bees, you know?
28:34
Speaker 1: Well— Red flowers. There's people that don't like hunting, and
28:38
for people that don't like hunting, they want nature to
28:40
balance itself out. So the people that don't like the
28:43
idea of humans killing and eating animals, they don't like
28:46
them going out into the wild and killing wild animals,
28:49
so they want something else to kill those wild animals.
28:51
So then they bring in mountain lions, or then they
28:53
bring in wolves, and then they think that nature is
28:56
going to sort itself out.
29:00
Speaker 2: I don't understand not wanting us to do it. Why
29:02
is it okay for them to– this is the vegetarian
29:05
argument that I never understand is that death occurs in nature.
29:08
Animals are eating other animals. So if it's wrong to
29:11
kill any animals, should we intervene?
29:14
Speaker 1: Right. Should we kill all the mountain lions to keep
29:15
them from killing all the deer?
29:16
Speaker 2: I thought the vegan fox was one of my favorite
29:18
bits that you ever did.
29:19
Speaker 1: Oh, vegan cat. No. Was it not fox? Do you
29:22
not talk about a fox? No, it's about a vegan cat.
29:23
Speaker 2: And it's very sick.
29:25
Speaker 1: It literally is a true story.
29:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.
29:27
Speaker 1: Like this lady was saying mean things to me on
29:30
Twitter or Instagram. And I saw one of the things
29:33
on her page. I went to her page. It said
29:35
hashtag vegan cat. And I was like, no. And so
29:39
then I clicked on it. and it's all cats that
29:41
look like they've been stuck in a house with a
29:43
gas leak.
29:43
Speaker 2: Wait, maybe that got me started searching vegan animals because
29:46
vegan fox I definitely read a lot about after that.
29:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's people that have vegan dogs. They feed their dogs.
29:52
But you're basically– you can kind of get away with
29:55
it a little bit with a dog, but cats are
29:57
what's called obligate predators. Right.
29:59
Speaker 2: They're obligated to pray?
30:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, they only eat meat. That's all they eat. That's it.
30:06
They're just predators. They're full-on murderous machines, like house cats.
30:12
are some of the most murderous creatures on earth. They
30:14
kill billions of animals. As soon as you die.
30:17
Speaker 2: As soon as you die. Because dogs will give you
30:19
an afternoon.
30:20
Speaker 1: Weeks?
30:21
Speaker 2: I thought dogs gave you just a little head start.
30:24
Speaker 1: It depends on how starving they are. If they're starving
30:28
to death, their instincts kick in and they'll eat you.
30:30
But cats just start eating you. They're like, oh, look, eyeballs.
30:36
Speaker 2: We're yet to get an animal. You have dogs.
30:40
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
30:41
Speaker 2: You have one dog, two dogs?
30:42
Speaker 1: Two dogs.
30:43
Speaker 2: And you don't run the Instagram pages for these animals?
30:45
Someone's running the dog Instagram page. No, my family does.
30:47
Speaker 1: Really? Yeah. So we got a little guy named Charlie. Yeah.
30:51
He is a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. Yeah. This is
30:56
the furthest animal away from wolf that is possible because
31:00
they all came from wolves. But he's the furthest from
31:02
a wolf. He has no– he's this big. He's adorable.
31:05
Speaker 2: You feel like wearing the big wig and the stockings
31:07
and holding him in your arms. I always wanted to
31:09
be King Charles.
31:09
Speaker 1: I just give him kisses. He's a sweetie, though.
31:12
Speaker 3: That's not yours, bud.
31:13
Speaker 1: That's what they look like. Yeah. That's what they look like.
31:16
I mean, come on. Look at that face. They're just
31:18
so sweet. They're so happy to be around you, and
31:21
they're just so loving. And he makes sounds like a person,
31:25
like he was doing something, like he was licking all
31:27
this water that was coming off of a drain. And
31:30
I go, hey, stop doing that. And I pick the
31:31
dog and he went, aww. He makes noise.
31:34
Speaker 2: You are harder than that dog.
31:35
Speaker 1: Oh, I love him.
31:36
Speaker 2: But they don't make me feel sad. They're a little
31:38
dog who look interesting.
31:40
Speaker 1: Oh, that's him. That's Charlie.
31:41
Speaker 2: That's him?
31:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's Charlie.
31:42
Speaker 2: Pugs make me very sad. I think about pugs a lot.
31:45
And they upset me. And the long dogs, like the
31:48
sausage dogs with the back problems. Anything that looks like it.
31:51
Speaker 1: Right.
31:52
Speaker 2: It's ready to die.
31:53
Speaker 1: No, no. I know what you mean. I know what
31:54
you mean.
31:54
Speaker 2: Like a golden retriever is great.
31:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I have one of those too. Yeah.
31:58
Speaker 2: It's my favorite.
31:59
Speaker 1: Those two dogs are great. This is not like a pug.
32:02
They're very active. They're really– they're very.
32:05
Speaker 2: It's like a water dog.
32:06
Speaker 1: It's a fucking dog that's just like a house dog.
32:09
They're just like a little love machine, just a little pet.
32:14
He's a sweet, sweet little guy. Like he's the best.
32:16
He's so nice. And he just relentlessly tortures my dog, Marshall.
32:22
Speaker 2: The big dog?
32:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, who's the most tolerant dog on earth. He just
32:25
lays there and the puppy's like, ah, like biting him
32:28
and biting his ear. He's a year old. Okay. So
32:31
we've had him for whatever, eight months, I guess. Like
32:34
how many months did they give him to you? Three
32:36
months old, something like that. How old are puppies when
32:39
you get them?
32:39
Speaker 3: They should be, I think, eight weeks old, I think.
32:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.
32:42
Speaker 1: So we probably had him for 10 months. He's fucking adorable.
32:45
Speaker 2: You cannot travel with a dog to Australia.
32:47
Speaker 3: No.
32:47
Speaker 1: You have to get him all kinds of shots.
32:49
Speaker 2: Johnny Depp tried.
32:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, he got in big trouble for that, right?
32:51
Speaker 2: I think that was the beginning of the end of
32:52
that marriage.
32:54
Speaker 1: I think from the moment he said.
32:56
Speaker 2: Let's get married. They were happy until that dog problem.
32:59
But the guy who– there was a politician who stopped
33:03
Johnny Depp. He came out and said, we're going to
33:05
destroy his dogs. And then everyone made fun of him
33:08
in America. But that guy is now doing– he's like–
33:11
Big in the emergent populist right in Australia over the
33:14
last six months.
33:15
Speaker 1: And he wanted to kill Johnny Depp's dogs?
33:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was a great speaker. He was like, I
33:19
don't care if you are People Magazine's sexiest.
33:21
Speaker 1: Man of the year.
33:22
Speaker 2: Get your dogs out. Why? What's the big deal? We
33:26
have no rabies. We're very precious about the border. That's
33:30
all we've got. His name is Barnaby Joyce. He is sick.
33:33
Speaker 1: Demand that dogs leave the country within 48 to 50
33:35
hours or be put down, citing strict quarantine laws designed
33:39
to protect diseases like rabies. But here's the thing. Just
33:42
test them. How much does it cost to test a
33:44
dog for rabies? It's probably pretty quick.
33:46
Speaker 2: Barnaby Joyce drunk. So this was short, not long after that.
33:50
An issue with the, yeah, Pistol and Boo. Yeah, go
33:52
Barnaby Joyce drunk. They caught him on the streets of
33:56
our lake, of Canberra, which is where the capital is.
33:58
And he was just passed out in the street. He's like,
34:03
there he is, down the bottom. Barnaby Boo.
34:06
Speaker 1: The bottom one. Yeah.
34:07
Speaker 2: But he's just lying on the street. When was it?
34:14
It wasn't that long ago.
34:15
Speaker 3: That man was in the government.
34:22
Speaker 1: Good. What's wrong? It's a safe place to live. I
34:25
was walking back to my accommodations after Parliament rose at
34:28
10 p.m. Oh, that's all he was doing. Just walking
34:30
back to his accommodations.
34:32
Speaker 2: I do like him a lot.
34:34
Speaker 1: Look, he's just taking a nap. He's just chilling.
34:37
Speaker 2: We have a strong tradition.
34:38
Speaker 1: It could be a long walk. Yeah, man. Give the
34:40
guy a break.
34:41
Speaker 2: We're finally– we were the last country to have like
34:44
a right-wing populist thing happen. You guys had the Trump
34:47
and then England is having it happen with– like in
34:51
a big way, it's really starting to swing there.
34:53
Speaker 1: So it's swinging right now in Australia? It's for the
34:55
first time.
34:55
Speaker 2: It's starting up, yeah.
34:56
Speaker 1: And what's causing that?
34:57
Speaker 2: Terrorist attack was not good.
34:59
Speaker 1: Yeah.
35:00
Speaker 2: And then also running out of petrol really has upset people.
35:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
35:04
Speaker 2: We don't have– we don't make our own gas. We
35:08
had two refineries. One of them accidentally blew up a
35:11
week ago.
35:11
Speaker 1: Do you think it accidentally blew up?
35:13
Speaker 2: I have no comment to make.
35:15
Speaker 1: What do you think, though?
35:15
Speaker 2: No, I think probably someone. It seems like real bad luck.
35:19
Speaker 1: Seems like it.
35:20
Speaker 2: I mean, they would have been doing it at max capacity.
35:22
Maybe they did it past when it was safe, but
35:24
it's not. I thought I wasn't going to make it
35:26
out of the country.
35:27
Speaker 1: Because they're out of gas?
35:28
Speaker 2: Flights started to get canceled. Yeah. So I made it.
35:31
We'll see if I can get back. I hope you can't. Well,
35:34
I'll just stay in Austin for another couple of months.
35:35
Speaker 1: I hope you can't get back.
35:36
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, honey.
35:37
Speaker 1: We've got a lot of spots for you.
35:39
Speaker 2: There's no choice. I'm not going to get on the boat.
35:41
Speaker 1: Plenty of work here.
35:42
Speaker 2: It is so nice getting to do it. It is
35:45
so nice having a club. It's like there's four cities
35:48
in the world where you can do it. I think
35:49
about this a lot. There's nowhere– like in America, there's three.
35:53
And there'd be London. That's it.
35:56
Speaker 1: That you can what?
35:57
Speaker 2: That there's like– multiple rooms with lineup shows every night
36:02
of the week.
36:02
Speaker 1: Right.
36:02
Speaker 2: So people can just go and run 10, 15 minutes.
36:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.
36:05
Speaker 2: And like at a good room with people.
36:07
Speaker 1: And get paid.
36:08
Speaker 2: And get paid.
36:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.
36:09
Speaker 2: I mean, you need all of those factors to be
36:11
able to do it.
36:11
Speaker 1: And you also need other comics around you.
36:13
Speaker 2: Yes.
36:14
Speaker 1: This is one of the things that we were talking
36:16
about last night in the green room. Like, you know,
36:18
me and Ari, Ari Shaffir's in town. And we were saying,
36:22
you can't be like the best comic in the world
36:25
and just live in a small town in, you know, Cincinnati.
36:30
It's like it doesn't exist. By yourself, it doesn't exist.
36:33
Comedy doesn't exist.
36:34
Speaker 2: In the back. They tried it in a little town
36:35
in Arizona and the pressure seems to have driven that
36:38
comedy club owner right over the edge.
36:41
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Stanhope's boy? But that guy was crazy already, right?
36:45
Speaker 2: I didn't know a thing about it. I just saw
36:46
him give the speech.
36:47
Speaker 1: Well, if he's hanging with Stanhope, you know, Stanhope tends
36:50
to collect some people that are on the fringe.
36:53
Speaker 2: I'm not blaming Doug Stanhope.
36:54
Speaker 1: But that's a different scene, right? Like, Stanhope, you know,
36:57
was just kind of Being out there by himself. And
36:59
it didn't even have a comedy club for the longest
37:01
time while he lived there. It wasn't like there was
37:03
a whole comedy scene there in Bisbee.
37:05
Speaker 2: Was it like 20,000 people?
37:06
Speaker 1: It's very small. Yeah. He knows everybody, right? But the
37:10
Austin thing was very different. Like, we were stuck here.
37:15
There was not a lot of options. We could have
37:17
gone to Houston. We could have gone to Dallas. Maybe Nashville.
37:21
Maybe Florida. There was no place else that we were
37:23
allowed to do comedy.
37:24
Speaker 2: Nashville is... Would be the next one.
37:27
Speaker 1: Yeah.
37:27
Speaker 2: Which we're trying.
37:28
Speaker 1: Nashville's got Zany's, which is awesome. That's a great club.
37:32
Speaker 2: They have big, they got Theo there. They've got Nate there.
37:34
Speaker 1: Nate and Theo both live there. But I don't know
37:37
how many sets they're doing in town. You know, Nate
37:39
is doing fucking stadiums. He's doing these giant places all
37:42
over the world. And Theo is killing it. And he's
37:45
got one of the best podcasts in the world.
37:46
Speaker 2: But there are definitely, there are like Nashville comics who
37:48
are coming out, who I see around the place who
37:49
are doing really well.
37:50
Speaker 1: Sure. I'm sure there's a smaller scene.
37:53
Speaker 3: But.
37:54
Speaker 1: In terms of like a lot of work, Austin's the
37:57
spot right now because there's seven clubs on our street.
38:02
Speaker 3: Hold on.
38:03
Speaker 1: That's nuts. Within a block radius, you've got Creek in
38:07
the Cave, which is over on 7th. You've got Sunset,
38:10
which is right next to us. You've got Black Rabbit.
38:13
Speaker 2: I was going to say Black Rabbit.
38:14
Speaker 1: You've got the Velveeta Room.
38:16
Speaker 3: Yes.
38:17
Speaker 2: I'm going to count Shakespeare's next door.
38:18
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
38:19
Speaker 2: I'll allow that.
38:19
Speaker 1: They do comedy.
38:21
Speaker 2: And I do love the Velveeta Room.
38:24
Speaker 1: That place has been around forever.
38:26
Speaker 2: It's been around forever. And there's the gay cabaret next door.
38:29
I don't think it's expressly gay.
38:31
Speaker 1: I just call it a gay cabaret. You like going
38:32
in there?
38:32
Speaker 2: I went there one evening. I was having a full
38:35
mental breakdown.
38:36
Speaker 1: I don't know why.
38:37
Speaker 2: Just a classic, you know.
38:39
Speaker 1: Out of nowhere?
38:40
Speaker 2: You know, the kids, it's a lot of pressure. Maybe
38:42
the act wasn't working. Maybe I'd been on the road.
38:44
Speaker 1: I don't know.
38:44
Speaker 2: And I was down and I was depressed. And I
38:46
wandered into them doing the Esther's Follies show. I just
38:50
sat up the back and I had a pina colada.
38:52
And they were all like, there was a magician. It
38:55
was just a very camp magician. And then they're singing
38:58
like campy show tunes about the Supreme Court or something.
39:01
Like they're still doing SNL style sketches. And it was like,
39:04
you know, it was dumb and it was hokey, but
39:06
it made me so happy.
39:08
Speaker 1: Oh, that's nice.
39:08
Speaker 2: Just to like have, I don't know.
39:10
Speaker 1: People having a good time.
39:11
Speaker 2: Razzle dazzle, smiling. There was no bitterness.
39:14
Speaker 1: Happiness.
39:14
Speaker 3: Yeah.
39:15
Speaker 2: And it made me want to fix my act so
39:16
that I wasn't, you know, like sometimes I feel I
39:18
get up there and I'm just like screaming and I
39:20
look unpleasant. And these people are like, you owe people
39:22
a show.
39:23
Speaker 1: Yes.
39:23
Speaker 2: You know?
39:24
Speaker 1: I don't think you look unpleasant. You're just very self-conscious. No. Sometimes.
39:28
Speaker 2: Sometimes. the Creek in the Cave last night and I
39:32
did a lot of screaming into the.
39:34
Speaker 1: Abyss.
39:35
Speaker 2: I was like, yeah.
39:38
Speaker 1: Another great club. Fucking great.
39:40
Speaker 2: I love it.
39:40
Speaker 1: Great spot. Creek in the Cave is a great club.
39:43
It's a fun place. When it's packed, it's rockin'. And,
39:47
you know, there's a lot of good comedy coming out
39:50
of that. I mean, that's where Shane filmed his special
39:51
as well.
39:51
Speaker 2: New York is on the up again. New York is finally.
39:53
Speaker 1: Everybody that I talk to, all my friends from New York,
39:56
I'll say that there's a lot of clubs opening. There's
39:58
a lot going on. It's hopping. Didn't they just open up,
40:03
was it an improv in Brooklyn? Did they open up
40:06
an improv in Brooklyn?
40:07
Speaker 2: I know this top secret comedy has just, like a
40:10
London club has just moved there.
40:12
Speaker 1: Interesting.
40:13
Speaker 2: I don't know how it's going, but they're doing like
40:14
a free model.
40:15
Speaker 1: They're trying to do– they were trying to do a
40:17
UCB in Austin. I don't know if that's still happening.
40:20
The problem with UCB is UCB in LA didn't pay
40:24
at all.
40:25
Speaker 2: Is this improv?
40:26
Speaker 1: No.
40:27
Speaker 2: Upright Citizens Brigade?
40:28
Speaker 1: They have some improv, but they do stand-up shows.
40:29
Speaker 2: I thought that was like Second City. I didn't know.
40:31
Speaker 1: They do stand-up shows. OK. Yeah, but they don't pay you.
40:34
Speaker 2: They don't pay?
40:34
Speaker 1: No, which is crazy.
40:36
Speaker 2: There was a history of that at the store.
40:39
Speaker 1: Sure. That was the– there was like this big– What
40:43
does it say? Improv Brooklyn. There you go.
40:45
Speaker 2: That's a strong zoom.
40:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think Joey said he was going there. It's
40:50
a completely new place.
40:52
Speaker 2: All right.
40:52
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is politically correct. But this
40:54
is what I'm saying. It's like it's popping. Comedy's coming back.
40:57
Speaker 2: Some improvs are black and some are not.
41:00
Speaker 1: What?
41:01
Speaker 2: Like some improvs around the country are like just black clubs.
41:04
Look at this lineup, dude.
41:05
Speaker 1: Look at the lineup.
41:05
Speaker 2: What are you talking about?
41:06
Speaker 1: I'm not saying here, but like in.
41:08
Speaker 2: Cleveland, the improv is just a black club.
41:12
Speaker 1: I've done the Improv in Cleveland, I think.
41:14
Speaker 2: It's a black club.
41:15
Speaker 3: Really?
41:16
Speaker 2: No negativity.
41:16
Speaker 1: I like.
41:17
Speaker 2: I like playing black clubs.
41:21
Speaker 1: So it's Cleveland. That's one that's close to Kentucky, right?
41:24
Speaker 2: Am I getting this right? Maybe it's Pittsburgh.
41:26
Speaker 1: No, Pittsburgh's not. I've been in that place.
41:28
Speaker 2: No, I've done that one as well.
41:29
Speaker 1: Improv in Pittsburgh's great too.
41:30
Speaker 2: I've done it up there as well.
41:31
Speaker 3: Hilarities or something?
41:33
Speaker 2: Well, Hilarities was the non-racially.
41:36
Speaker 1: Go back to that website real quick. Look at all
41:38
the different ones. Wow.
41:40
Speaker 3: There's not one in Cleveland though.
41:41
Speaker 1: There's a ton of them.
41:42
Speaker 2: Is one of those fake– maybe it shut down.
41:44
Speaker 1: So the other– there's a club in Cleveland. There is
41:47
a club in Cleveland that I went to way back
41:49
in the day. But it's really– you land in Kentucky
41:54
and then you drive to Cleveland. What? Yeah. No, Cincinnati. Oh,
41:59
is it Cincinnati? Yeah, that makes more sense. Okay, that's it.
42:02
You're right.
42:02
Speaker 2: You need to drive up. Ohio is more built up
42:05
than people give credit before. Three huge cities. They got
42:09
that chili.
42:09
Speaker 1: That everybody loves. Great. Columbus is great.
42:12
Speaker 2: Cincinnati has the most beautiful skyline.
42:13
Speaker 1: You ever do the Funny Bone, Columbus?
42:15
Speaker 2: Yes.
42:15
Speaker 1: Fucking great club.
42:16
Speaker 2: With the balcony. It was very nice.
42:18
Speaker 1: Does it have a balcony?
42:20
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure.
42:21
Speaker 1: Yes. Columbus Funny Bone has a balcony?
42:23
Speaker 3: They've definitely changed it since you've been there last.
42:25
Speaker 1: Is it a new one? No. Oh, they just added
42:27
a balcony?
42:28
Speaker 3: They just renovated the whole room.
42:30
Speaker 1: Oh. I love having the balcony. They must have had
42:32
to add seats. It was killing it.
42:34
Speaker 2: Everywhere that has a balcony is my favorite.
42:36
Speaker 1: Once you have a place that's a club that gets
42:38
good action every weekend, Cleveland Improv. Okay, hold on. Shut
42:41
the fuck up. What's that?
42:42
Speaker 2: They love to go and see Eddie Griffin at the
42:44
Cleveland Improv? Come on.
42:47
Speaker 1: Maybe it closed. This is 2020? Oh, it's six years ago.
42:51
I don't know.
42:51
Speaker 3: It's like when I typed in Cleveland Improv.
42:53
Speaker 2: So who's that? Lou Annell was there and Tony Baker
42:56
was there. I will not be besmirched for making a
43:00
very genuine observation about how black the Cleveland improv was.
43:04
That's hilarious. Because I tried to get on. I was
43:07
trying to do black rooms when I got to open
43:10
for Finesse Mitchell. That was the first black room I
43:12
got to play.
43:13
Speaker 3: Nice.
43:14
Speaker 2: I've slowed down. There's not heaps of black rooms in Austin.
43:16
I should go over to Houston sometimes.
43:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, where are the black rooms in Austin?
43:20
Speaker 2: I think the Mothership.
43:22
Speaker 3: Probably, right?
43:23
Speaker 2: I think some of the lineups at the ship.
43:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.
43:25
Speaker 2: I still think Chocolate Sundays could work at the mothership.
43:29
I can't run it. That would be fun.
43:33
Speaker 1: I feel like you should just have shows. I think
43:35
themes are retarded. They try to do an Italian theme
43:38
at the comedy store for a while. Like Night of
43:41
a Thousand Guidos, I think they called it. And I
43:43
did it. And I was like, what am I doing?
43:46
I'm on this show with all these other Italians just
43:48
because they're Italian.
43:49
Speaker 2: There is something different about a black audience.
43:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
43:53
Speaker 2: That's a different skill set, I found.
43:55
Speaker 1: It's a different skill set, and they won't tolerate nonsense.
43:59
They won't tolerate all this, like, what else? What else? No, no, no, no, no.
44:04
They're not here for that, which I think is good.
44:06
Speaker 2: You can't even make fun of gay. You can't mention
44:09
gay stuff at all.
44:10
Speaker 3: Really?
44:11
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
44:12
Speaker 2: I had a trans bit. Just people were not happy
44:15
to hear. Why are you talking about that? Why are
44:18
you bringing that up? We're out here to have a
44:20
nice night. It was like on a dime it turned.
44:24
Speaker 1: Really?
44:24
Speaker 3: Yeah.
44:25
Speaker 2: And then people told me afterwards, they don't want to
44:28
hear that word from you.
44:29
Speaker 1: Really? Interesting.
44:31
Speaker 2: It was fun. I felt very alive when it was
44:34
going well. And also black people giving you compliments. Just
44:37
an Aussie boy coming off stage. You've got to go
44:40
to stage presence. It's like, oh, fuck. Thank you so much.
44:43
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
44:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, black people, that was very eye-opening when I came
44:48
to America.
44:49
Speaker 1: You don't have a lot of that in Australia.
44:51
Speaker 2: We have Africans and we have Aboriginal people, but we
44:53
have no– if you wear a cool coat in Australia,
44:55
no one will tell you about it. There will be
44:58
no one to say.
45:06
Speaker 1: Are responsible for so much of the culture, music, comedy.
45:12
There's like so much of an impact that African-Americans have
45:16
had on the world. Think about just hip-hop music. Yeah. Right?
45:21
So hip-hop music doesn't even exist until I was in
45:25
middle school.
45:26
Speaker 2: Like late 70s?
45:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I was in middle school. I went to
45:29
high school in 81. And when was Sugar Hill Gang's hip-hop,
45:34
the hippity hip-hop? What was that song called? Rapper's Delight. Yeah.
45:38
So that song came out when I was, I think
45:43
I was 13. I think I was 13. I think
45:45
I was in the middles.
45:47
Speaker 3: 1979 is when it.
45:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So when I was in,
45:53
when we first moved to Boston, my family didn't have
45:55
much money. We lived in a place called Jamaica Plain.
45:58
And it's since been kind of gentrified, but back then
46:01
it was not. It was the first time I'd ever
46:03
been around scary kids. Yeah. Like violent, delinquent kids who
46:07
had all had sex. I hadn't had sex. All these kids,
46:10
they're like, you don't even know where a pussy is,
46:12
do you? I'm like, it's down there. Like, you probably
46:14
think you go right into it, right? You got to
46:16
go up. I'm like, okay. I don't fucking know. I
46:19
never even kissed a girl. I was like, what the
46:20
fuck are you guys talking about? But they were like
46:23
lighting fires, doing crazy shit. Like they were delinquents, stealing things,
46:28
breaking and entering. Yeah. And so I went to this
46:31
high school or middle school rather. And this middle school
46:34
was in a poor neighborhood. And I remember there was
46:37
a kid that was in my class. I was 13.
46:40
He was 17 years old and he kept failing. He
46:43
kept failing and coming back. He would come back for
46:44
like a couple of weeks or two and then he
46:46
would quit. And I remember seeing him at the beginning
46:48
of the school year and And I'm going, I can't
46:50
believe he's 17 and he's in class with me. This
46:53
is nuts. And then I was filled with like this
46:56
sense of dread for him, for his future. Like this
46:59
fucking guy's never going to graduate middle school. So he's
47:02
never going to go to high school. He's fucking 17. Like,
47:05
will they even allow you to go to high school
47:06
if you're 21? Like what, what year do they say
47:09
you can't come here anymore? You failed nine years in
47:11
a row. It was that kind of kids. It was
47:15
that kind of kids. And then, there was like kids
47:18
making out in class. I remember this Puerto Rican girls.
47:21
She asked a question to the teacher. She said, if
47:25
I'm making out with a guy and I'm, and he's
47:28
breathing into my mouth and I'm breathing into his, can
47:32
we stay alive like that? Can you? No, no, no.
47:38
It's carbon dioxide. I never forgot that question. Do you
47:41
need fresh oxygen? It was the craziest question. She was like,
47:44
can we breathe each other's air and not open our mouths?
47:47
And I was like, what are you doing, you fucking
47:50
dirty freak? So a lot of girls dropped out while
47:54
I was there because they got pregnant. Sure. It was dangerous.
47:58
Speaker 2: Where were you before then though? Were you in a
47:59
more middle class place before then?
48:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was in Florida. I was in Gainesville, Florida,
48:04
which was like way safer. It was pretty cool.
48:08
Speaker 2: You may have moved around more than anyone I know.
48:10
Speaker 1: I moved around a lot. So I lived in New
48:12
Jersey until I was seven and then lived in San
48:15
Francisco from seven to 11 and then lived in Florida
48:18
from 11 to 13 and then Boston from 13 to 24.
48:21
Speaker 2: Do you– I mean because you're now– Your kids growing
48:27
up in– they were in LA and then they're here.
48:29
Do you think– I worry about my kids because I
48:33
don't think they've ever been in the same house for
48:35
more than one year. Like I have a seven-year-old daughter.
48:39
She's been in seven houses now. It's because we've had
48:42
to move a lot and I wonder what impact that
48:44
is making.
48:44
Speaker 1: Well, as long as they're young, I honestly think it
48:48
has a positive effect. Okay. This is my take on
48:51
what it did for me. I was forced to form
48:55
my own opinions. Instead of adopting the opinions of a
48:59
group of people that were around me because I never
49:01
had a consistent group of people that were around me. Yeah.
49:03
I met a bunch of new people everywhere I went
49:06
and I had new friends everywhere I went and completely
49:09
new environments everywhere I went. So I went from San
49:12
Francisco in the 1970s right into Florida and Florida was
49:18
so backwards. in terms of their mentality in comparison to
49:22
San Francisco. San Francisco, we lived in Hippieville. It was
49:26
all like anti-war people. And it's San Francisco in the 1970s.
49:31
And so then I moved to Florida and it was
49:33
like I had this friend. His name was Candy. His
49:37
last name was Candido. Everybody called him Candy. And his
49:40
dad was like this really angry Cuban guy. And I
49:43
remember him slamming a newspaper on the table. And he
49:47
was like, these fags want to marry. This is crazy.
49:51
They're going to let faggots marry each other. And I
49:52
remember thinking like, what do you care? Because I lived
49:56
in San Francisco. We're surrounded by gay people. Our neighbors
49:59
were gay. My aunt used to smoke pot with them
50:01
and they'd all get naked and play bongo drums. Because
50:04
she felt comfortable being naked around these guys who.
50:06
Speaker 2: Had no interest in her. They should rein it in now.
50:08
I haven't seen San Francisco.
50:10
Speaker 1: A little bit. But that's not– it's not the gays
50:12
that caused San Francisco to go down the way it is.
50:14
It's this crazy progressive politics where they allow people to
50:17
camp on the streets.
50:18
Speaker 2: I just– I went to a diner and I saw
50:20
a man. He was wearing assless chaps and sitting on
50:22
the– that upset me.
50:23
Speaker 1: Apparently– If you're gay, it would be a good spot.
50:25
Speaker 2: The public nudity is– you have to cover the urethra.
50:30
But if you cover the urethra, everything else is fine.
50:32
Speaker 1: Oh, so you just, like, put a piece of tape
50:33
over the hole of your dick?
50:34
Speaker 2: You put a little googly eye over the jap eye.
50:36
Speaker 1: Nice.
50:36
Speaker 2: Maybe you can't call it that.
50:37
Speaker 1: You can. You just did.
50:38
Speaker 2: No, but that's... So that would help you become more...
50:42
Because you have, like, a weirdly independent mentality.
50:46
Speaker 1: That's why.
50:46
Speaker 2: Yeah.
50:47
Speaker 1: So that I think going to a bunch of different
50:49
places and seeing that, oh, people think completely differently over
50:54
here than they think over here. This is weird. You know,
50:57
I remember when I lived in Florida, I had to
51:00
ask my mother what the N-word meant because I heard
51:03
it at school. And she got upset with me. She goes,
51:05
you know what it means. I go, I don't. I
51:07
don't know what it means. And she's like, it's a
51:09
bad word for black people. I was like, whoa, really?
51:12
Like it made no sense to me because the formative
51:15
years I think were really important. And I think 7
51:18
to 11 in San Francisco was really important for me
51:22
because in a way, at least for me, it was
51:27
very much a utopian dream. city it was like very
51:31
open-minded it was very peaceful there was very little crime
51:35
like real crime most beautiful place it was gorgeous it
51:39
was gorgeous we'd I'd go fishing I had this guy
51:42
there was like this community center and this guy named
51:44
cliff would take us fishing it was really cool like
51:47
there was a lot of like good things about San
51:50
Francisco back then and it was a lot of artists
51:54
and it was a lot of like it was a
51:55
cool vibe and It was a very open-minded vibe that
52:01
was– a lot of it was centered around the anti-war
52:04
movement and peace. There was a lot– it was like–
52:07
it was a different kind of– and they were sort
52:10
of just like just getting over the psychedelic wave of
52:13
the 1960s, right? So this is like they're still in
52:17
that mode.
52:18
Speaker 2: It was still like an artist-driven– Yeah, a lot of.
52:21
Speaker 1: Open pot smoking. It was a lot of like– Just hippies.
52:26
But in the best way. It wasn't camping on the streets.
52:30
There was no fentanyl back then. There was no homelessness.
52:34
Homelessness was super, super rare. Like in the 1970s, like
52:38
when I was a kid, I never saw people camped
52:41
out in the street. You never saw any of that.
52:43
You occasionally saw a bum and it was usually some
52:46
poor fuck.
52:47
Speaker 2: Who's- It was like a drunk guy, right?
52:49
Speaker 1: Who had lost his way.
52:50
Speaker 2: If you look at Dirty Harry or On the Waterfront,
52:53
whenever there is like a depiction of- Like whenever they're
52:57
doing vagrants in the 50s and 60s, it's like a
53:00
drunk guy stumbling around. Like in Rambo, he just wants
53:02
a sandwich and they chase him out of town.
53:04
Speaker 1: Right, exactly.
53:05
Speaker 2: And then, you know, it's trouble. But now there's like-
53:07
They're everywhere. It's like Kung Fu skeletons moving around the place.
53:10
Like full of drugs. Like what is the end point
53:11
of that?
53:12
Speaker 1: It is.
53:12
Speaker 2: No one's running on that. I remember Trump talked about
53:14
a little bit the need to have asylums again because
53:17
they closed the asylums.
53:18
Speaker 1: Yes.
53:19
Speaker 2: I mean there are more therapists now than there ever
53:21
were before, but they're helping like corporate people. They're not
53:23
helping schizophrenics without a home. Like at some point you
53:29
saw Trump bring the army in to places like Portland
53:32
or the National Guard to clear it out. And I
53:35
think people were quietly kind of pleased that that was happening.
53:39
People pushed back.
53:40
Speaker 1: Is that why they cleared it out? It was a
53:41
homeless situation?
53:42
Speaker 2: I think it was the homelessness.
53:43
Speaker 1: I thought it was protests.
53:45
Speaker 2: No, I think that was– and Washington as well. I
53:48
think they came in to clear out homeless people.
53:51
Speaker 1: It was crime as well.
53:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.
53:52
Speaker 1: Like Washington was like crazy with crime.
53:54
Speaker 2: And they were all kind of happy about it.
53:56
Speaker 1: Well, the mayor of D.C. was happy that Trump brought
54:00
in the National Guard.
54:01
Speaker 2: But this is– it's not a nice– You can't lose
54:05
the downtowns across America.
54:08
Speaker 1: You know how bad L.A. has gotten, right?
54:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. L.A.? Yes, I do.
54:12
Speaker 1: Do you know how big Skid Row is?
54:14
Speaker 2: Take a guess. Wait a minute. How many people?
54:17
Speaker 1: How many blocks?
54:18
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
54:19
Speaker 1: Take a guess. Two. Fifty.
54:21
Speaker 2: Well, that's too many blocks. Five-zero.
54:24
Speaker 3: That's not a row anymore.
54:25
Speaker 1: Imagine five-zero just completely claimed by homeless zombies. No.
54:29
Speaker 2: How big are the blocks? I'm thinking about LA downtown.
54:31
Speaker 3: Big.
54:31
Speaker 1: Big as fuck.
54:32
Speaker 2: I stayed away from there.
54:33
Speaker 1: It's huge.
54:33
Speaker 2: I went to the Hollywood Hills in Malibu and had
54:35
a nice time.
54:36
Speaker 1: Downtown is nuts. Downtown LA is the only downtown of
54:39
any major city that sucks. No. Downtown New York is great.
54:43
Speaker 2: Downtown New York is incredible.
54:44
Speaker 1: Right. Downtown San Francisco is fucked with homeless people. Yeah.
54:48
It's still, you got great restaurants. Downtown LA is a
54:51
ghost town.
54:53
Speaker 2: I said, Portland is so beautiful in the downtown, but
54:56
then you will turn down the street and it's terrifying.
54:59
Speaker 1: 50 to 54. Oh, it's growing. Skid Row in Los Angeles,
55:03
officially known as Central City East, covers approximately 50 to
55:07
54 blocks.
55:09
Speaker 2: 15,000. Yeah.
55:12
Speaker 1: They don't know how many people are there. There's just
55:14
wild guesses in terms of what the populations of homeless
55:17
people are. Even in terms of the population in the
55:19
entire city, the high number is over 100,000 in the city.
55:25
It's crazy. Look how big it is. All that whole
55:27
area is completely lost. I thought it was a road.
55:30
Speaker 2: I thought it was like one street.
55:31
Speaker 1: Well, it was. It was back in like the 1960s.
55:36
Speaker 3: There's like a map or something they've drawn on a
55:39
picture there. I think it's been that way for a
55:41
long time.
55:42
Speaker 1: Look at this proposed area. Affordable housing. Affordable housing is
55:46
just a joke. It's not what the problem is. They're
55:48
all drug addicts. They're drug addicts and mentally ill. Yeah,
55:51
but what do you do to– Well, you can't let
55:53
it get that bad, first of all. And if you
55:55
do let it get that bad, you've got to treat
55:56
it like it's a catastrophic failure and throw as much
55:59
resources as possible at it. But the problem is these
56:02
people are incentivized to keep the problem going because that's
56:05
how they make their living.
56:06
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
56:07
Speaker 1: But they don't have any motivation whatsoever to fix it.
56:12
Because if the homeless population drops down to like a
56:15
very small number and then they don't need all these
56:18
people that are making half a million dollars a year
56:20
on the homeless commission, it's complete grifting.
56:24
Speaker 2: It's not my country. I don't have any big problem
56:27
with Gavin Newsom. I don't understand how LA has– every
56:30
story that comes out of California seems to be.
56:34
Speaker 1: Okay, so here it says between 1960 and 1975, 50%
56:38
of the housing in Skid Row was demolished, reducing the
56:41
total number of units from 15,000 to 7,500 and displacing
56:45
thousands of poor residents with nowhere else to go but
56:48
the street. While Skid Row was never a wealthy neighborhood,
56:51
its current status as the homeless capital of America is
56:53
the result of decades of policy choices. which has simultaneously
56:57
encouraged the destruction of existing affordability. See, this is, by
57:00
the way, this is a very progressive perspective. The real
57:05
perspective is that what they used Skid Row for was
57:09
when they would find vagrants in Beverly Hills and vagrants
57:12
in Hollywood, they would move them to Skid Row and
57:16
then they would kind of contain them in that area.
57:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. Dumping. So like a concentration camp for the homeless.
57:23
Speaker 1: With homeless medical patients– see, this is a very progressive perspective.
57:29
Homeless medical patients. How about vagrants who are drug addicts?
57:33
You can call them medical patients. Like you're just being kind.
57:37
This is just too charitable. Across the region. So they
57:40
would dump them there. And then they also had like
57:42
food kitchens there and stuff like that. So they had
57:45
an incentive to stay. But they kept them there. And
57:49
so then it kept growing because the homeless problem keeps
57:51
growing and growing.
57:52
Speaker 2: It's psychosis in drugs. That's the ultimate.
57:55
Speaker 1: Yes. Drugs are the big one. And drugs are– the
57:59
drug use in Skid Row is probably 100 percent. It's
58:03
not like regular homeless people.
58:05
Speaker 2: I was in Portland and I saw– I had walked
58:08
into the train station through the downtown. No one told
58:10
me not to do it. And all these very sad
58:13
homeless people. And then one guy with a big smile.
58:16
He was so happy.
58:17
Speaker 1: Probably got his fentanyl. Well, no.
58:18
Speaker 2: It's the first time I saw crack being smoked. Oh.
58:21
It has a great smell. It smells kind of sweet.
58:23
Speaker 1: Does it?
58:23
Speaker 3: Yeah.
58:24
Speaker 1: Like what way?
58:25
Speaker 2: It smelled like sweet, like a rotten apple. That's how
58:27
it felt at the time. I don't know if that
58:29
was the crack or if, I mean, he was smoking
58:31
crack and I could smell that, but he was so
58:33
happy and I didn't want to take his crack away.
58:35
You know, it's like, he's the only thing you've really
58:37
got going for you today.
58:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think crack.
58:39
Speaker 2: Obviously we should take it away.
58:40
Speaker 1: Not good for you, but probably better for you than fentanyl.
58:46
It's all. I think with crack, you're active. Crack makes
58:50
you go do a bunch of stuff. Yeah.
58:53
Speaker 2: This is weird seeing heroin people for the first time
58:55
because they're not like a threat. Australia is still a
58:57
very meth country. We're like– Oh, meth is a problem.
58:59
It's a lot of like skinny shirtless men on the bus.
59:02
Speaker 1: Angry.
59:03
Speaker 2: Weird head twitching back and forth. So it's still very meth-y.
59:07
But meth doesn't seem to be as big here now.
59:08
Speaker 1: Oh, it's big. It's big in certain communities. Meth is
59:12
still big. It's like, you know, what you've got in–
59:15
I mean the homeless situation in Skid Row wasn't always
59:18
fentanyl and heroin. I mean at one point in time
59:21
it was meth. It's a gang of different things. I'm
59:24
sure there's people there that are doing ketamine.
59:26
Speaker 2: Do you just start killing– Drug deal? Do you do
59:29
it like in Singapore? You just have a zero tolerance policy?
59:32
Speaker 1: No.
59:33
Speaker 2: I don't know long term what the answer is.
59:34
Speaker 1: I mean look, you could do it that way but
59:36
it would be very inhumane and it would also set
59:39
a precedent for how you treat a bunch of other situations. Yeah.
59:42
That's not good. It's dangerous.
59:44
Speaker 2: The communists, when they had an opium problem in China,
59:47
they just put them in the military. They'd give people
59:50
a new sense of purpose. You've got a uniform now.
59:52
We're going to blame someone else for the problem. Western
59:54
imperialism did this to you.
59:56
Speaker 1: Yeah.
59:56
Speaker 2: And that seemed to help. They don't have a big
59:58
opium problem in China anymore. Also, I don't know how
1:00:01
official that is and how many people they did just
1:00:03
kill because it's the communist government.
1:00:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:00:06
Speaker 2: They're allowed to.
1:00:07
Speaker 1: They lie.
1:00:08
Speaker 2: They might lie.
1:00:09
Speaker 1: They definitely lie.
1:00:10
Speaker 2: Although last time I was– a couple months ago I
1:00:12
was here and Kurt Metzger was telling me the Tiananmen
1:00:15
Square was not all that bad. Yeah, I don't know
1:00:19
if I'd listen. I didn't do enough digging. From everything
1:00:23
he says, from a short Google search, I can agree
1:00:25
with it. But I'm sure if I dug down, I'd
1:00:27
have more questions. I haven't seen him, actually, since I
1:00:29
got back. Is he still here?
1:00:30
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, he's out of fucking mind. He's great.
1:00:32
Speaker 2: Most people are still here.
1:00:33
Speaker 1: He's the best.
1:00:35
Speaker 2: He's been odd.
1:00:36
Speaker 1: But you can't talk conspiracies with him, because he'll chain them.
1:00:40
One after another after another, and then three minutes in,
1:00:43
you forgot what you were even talking about. Exactly. He's
1:00:46
moved on to some scandal in the 1970s with call
1:00:49
boys and Congress.
1:00:51
Speaker 2: Oh, you spoke to him about Reagan?
1:00:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. What is it called? The Franklin?
1:00:55
Speaker 2: There's tapes.
1:00:56
Speaker 1: Hassan was talking to me about it.
1:00:58
Speaker 3: The Franklin scandal.
1:00:58
Speaker 1: The Franklin scandal. Hassan was bringing that up last night.
1:01:01
He's reading a book on it.
1:01:02
Speaker 2: I want to think that Reagan was a good guy.
1:01:04
Speaker 1: I don't think it's Reagan. I think it's whoever's in
1:01:06
his cabinet.
1:01:09
Speaker 2: Well, he's dead. He was saying things about Reagan getting pegged.
1:01:12
Speaker 1: What? Who was saying that?
1:01:15
Speaker 2: Kurt was talking about that there was a tape somewhere
1:01:18
of Reagan getting tagged. I was like, I don't want
1:01:19
to know about it.
1:01:20
Speaker 1: These guys don't even think the Artemis flight went past
1:01:22
the moon. It didn't? Kurt thinks there's a secret space
1:01:27
program and that this space program is bullshit. There's a
1:01:31
real space program and they're using this space program to obfuscate.
1:01:36
Speaker 2: It just seems very complicated for people who can't do.
1:01:38
Speaker 1: I might be saying it incorrectly. He knows a lot
1:01:41
of things about a lot of things. He does.
1:01:42
Speaker 2: And then when I dig in, often it seems true.
1:01:44
Speaker 1: A lot of it is true.
1:01:45
Speaker 2: But also I think the government is incompetent everywhere. And
1:01:49
if they were able to get that one thing of
1:01:53
building a fake space program to conceal a true space program,
1:01:57
it seems unlikely.
1:01:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, do you know how much money you'd have
1:01:59
to have to run two space programs, one real one
1:02:03
and one fake one? That's crazy.
1:02:05
Speaker 2: Just a real one.
1:02:06
Speaker 1: It costs so much. Well, the Nazi one was real.
1:02:08
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:02:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:02:10
Speaker 2: That's come in. Everyone seems– Some people.
1:02:12
Speaker 1: Are still not aware of it. I've had conversations with
1:02:14
people where they don't want to admit it, where they
1:02:18
can't believe it. Do you know NASA was run by Nazis?
1:02:20
They're like, what? You tell them about Wernher von Braun
1:02:24
and they want to– like there's a lot of people
1:02:26
that are like NASA fanboys and these NASA fanboys don't
1:02:30
want to believe that NASA was run by literal Nazis.
1:02:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:02:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:02:35
Speaker 2: I mean not necessarily like– there were scientific Nazis.
1:02:38
Speaker 1: There were Nazis. Yeah. Werner Von Braun used to hang
1:02:40
the slowest– the five slowest Jews at his rocket factory
1:02:47
in Berlin. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said that if he
1:02:50
was alive today, they would prosecute him for crimes against humanity.
1:02:53
Speaker 2: I mean do you think that story got out when
1:02:54
he was at NASA and everyone worked on it?
1:02:56
Speaker 1: They did it well. There was no Freedom of Information
1:02:59
Act releases. There was no internet. When Operation Paperclip was
1:03:04
first initiated, they got– I don't know what the number
1:03:08
is of Nazi scientists, but it was more than 1,000. Yeah.
1:03:12
How many Nazi scientists– put this into our wonderful ad sponsor, Propoxity.
1:03:18
Our AI sponsor that gives me all my information. How
1:03:21
many Nazi scientists were brought over by the United States
1:03:25
for Operation Paperclip?
1:03:28
Speaker 3: I don't know that there's an official number. This is
1:03:29
what led me down my research like 10 years ago
1:03:32
was this exact question.
1:03:33
Speaker 1: Right, but let's see what perplexity has to say. I'm guessing.
1:03:38
I'm going to guess about 1,500.
1:03:39
Speaker 3: Also, as I'm looking this up, I will note that
1:03:42
supposedly they were split up like evenly between the Soviets.
1:03:45
Speaker 1: And the United States. That's true. Yeah, the Soviets took
1:03:47
a bunch of them as well.
1:03:48
Speaker 2: I didn't know they divvied it up.
1:03:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I read a book about it a long time ago.
1:03:54
Speaker 2: I just started getting into the Soviet space program.
1:03:57
Speaker 1: It's great. Oh, yeah.
1:03:59
Speaker 2: Is it the Venus missions? Am I getting that right?
1:04:01
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. They got a thing on Venus and took
1:04:03
pictures and sent them back.
1:04:04
Speaker 2: But it was so hot that everything would like– 1600.
1:04:09
Speaker 1: 1600. Typically state that about 1600 German scientists, engineers, and
1:04:12
technicians were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip.
1:04:15
So that was pretty close.
1:04:17
Speaker 3: To reel back though, I was trying to dig through
1:04:19
this article as you guys are talking.
1:04:21
Speaker 1: About Nixon getting pegged?
1:04:22
Speaker 3: I don't know.
1:04:22
Speaker 1: Reagan?
1:04:23
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:04:24
Speaker 1: The plot to out Reagan? Yeah. A group of Republicans
1:04:27
tried to stymie what they alleged was a nefarious homosexual
1:04:30
network within the campaign of their own party's standard bearer.
1:04:34
Speaker 2: This is what I mean. He says something that sounds crazy,
1:04:36
and then you do a search.
1:04:37
Speaker 3: I'm trying to find it to see what the answer is,
1:04:38
but during it, it says, like, while he was trying
1:04:40
to pick a vice president, there's somewhere in here.
1:04:43
Speaker 1: We had a vacuum. You can be my vice president.
1:04:46
Speaker 3: It says someone had a tape of an orgy.
1:04:48
Speaker 1: Oh. Yes.
1:04:48
Speaker 3: Oh.
1:04:50
Speaker 1: No.
1:04:51
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:04:52
Speaker 1: Well, didn't Reagan– Reagan frequented Bohemian Grove. Isn't that correct?
1:04:58
I believe he did. Everybody.
1:05:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of people did.
1:05:01
Speaker 1: Right. People still did. But remember what Nixon said about
1:05:04
Bohemian Grove.
1:05:05
Speaker 2: The faggiest place I've ever seen.
1:05:06
Speaker 1: That goddamn faggiest thing I've ever seen.
1:05:08
Speaker 2: You've heard Alex Jones talking about it?
1:05:11
Speaker 1: Yes. Well, Alex Jones went.
1:05:13
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:05:13
Speaker 1: Alex Jones told me about it right after he went.
1:05:15
I grabbed him on the ass.
1:05:16
Speaker 3: This guy says he engaged in a homosexual act with Reagan.
1:05:19
Speaker 1: Okay. It was not until a boozy lunch with a
1:05:21
man claiming to have been a longtime Reagan associate. However,
1:05:25
the best found what he believed to be the smoking
1:05:28
gun proving that Reagan was controlled by homosexuals. Bill, you
1:05:33
don't understand the problem, the man told Best. I once
1:05:36
engaged in a homosexual act with Reagan.
1:05:39
Speaker 2: That was a different time.
1:05:40
Speaker 1: Yes. I don't.
1:05:42
Speaker 3: These are up until now in this article. These are rumors.
1:05:45
Speaker 1: Right.
1:05:46
Speaker 3: I don't know that this video ever came out, but
1:05:49
there's a very long article about it. Interesting.
1:05:52
Speaker 1: On Politico. Yeah. Interesting.
1:05:57
Speaker 3: I was trying to find an answer, and I didn't
1:05:59
really get to this. This is a different time period
1:06:02
in life, too, that I wasn't even alive for.
1:06:04
Speaker 1: Right.
1:06:06
Speaker 2: Wow. I don't believe it.
1:06:09
Speaker 3: I do.
1:06:10
Speaker 2: I love Reagan.
1:06:11
Speaker 1: I do too. I love them too. But I think
1:06:13
there's a lot of those guys that are like staunchly
1:06:15
conservative and very buttoned down that are that way for
1:06:19
a reason. And one of the reasons is they're trying
1:06:21
to hide the fact that they're gay.
1:06:23
Speaker 2: I never understand this though because there are lots where
1:06:25
I'm from.
1:06:26
Speaker 1: Gays?
1:06:27
Speaker 2: Like conservative party, definitely gay guys, but like everybody knows.
1:06:34
Everybody's aware. But they don't want it coming out and
1:06:37
they never acknowledge it. But like it just seems so strange.
1:06:42
You would want to not have a secret if you're
1:06:43
a politician because otherwise people just get you to do
1:06:45
what they want.
1:06:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they have secrets and then they want to
1:06:48
be politicians and then they just deal with all the
1:06:50
people that know their secrets and then they make deals.
1:06:54
That's how you stay in business.
1:06:56
Speaker 2: I would even say there are people in the United
1:06:58
States Congress and Senate who are conservative. So we all go, yeah,
1:07:03
that guy's gay.
1:07:03
Speaker 1: 100%.
1:07:04
Speaker 2: Everybody knows.
1:07:05
Speaker 3: So I asked for the accuracy of this article and
1:07:08
perplexity gave me a Like summary, I guess, that makes
1:07:13
more sense than trying to make sense of a 20-page
1:07:15
article in two minutes. Okay.
1:07:18
Speaker 1: Factual grounding in sources. One key factual– scroll up a
1:07:22
little bit.
1:07:23
Speaker 2: No.
1:07:25
Speaker 1: On the key factual backbone, the article lines up with
1:07:28
other publicly documented material. Kirchick refers repeatedly to memos and
1:07:35
notes from The Washington Post editor Ben Bradley's papers, including
1:07:38
summaries– by reporters Scott Armstrong and Ted Gupp. These papers
1:07:42
are held in institutional archives and have been referenced in
1:07:45
other discussions of Secret City. The 1967 homosexual ring allegations
1:07:50
connected to Reagan's Sacramento staff and Jack Kemp's is independently
1:07:55
attested in contemporary press accounts, including reporting that Reagan's security
1:07:59
chief investigated alleged homosexual activity and that columnist Drew Pearson
1:08:05
raised these charges at the time. So here's the thing
1:08:09
about gays.
1:08:09
Speaker 2: There's a gay ring.
1:08:10
Speaker 1: There's always a certain amount of gay people in a population.
1:08:15
And then it's whether or not the culture accepts them. Yes.
1:08:20
There's always a certain percentage.
1:08:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's people who are attracted to– Yeah, no.
1:08:24
Speaker 1: Matter what you do. There's a certain percentage. And so
1:08:27
if you've got enough people in Congress and enough people
1:08:30
in the Senate and enough people just in government in general,
1:08:34
you're going to have an equivalent percentage of people that
1:08:37
are gay. And if you are a person who wants
1:08:40
to get to the top of the charts, like here's
1:08:42
the thing that you don't think of. What is– you
1:08:45
think Hollywood is very open, right? Very non-homophobic. In fact,
1:08:50
celebrates diversity and celebrates LBGTQ people, right? Yeah. But not.
1:08:57
So here's the thing. One thing you can't be. is
1:09:00
an openly gay person and being a male lead in films.
1:09:08
Speaker 2: I mean that would make sense as to why people
1:09:09
keep that quiet. I'm trying to think of one.
1:09:11
Speaker 1: You can't. But you're an actor.
1:09:12
Speaker 2: No, you're right. That still hasn't changed.
1:09:14
Speaker 1: You can pretend to be a werewolf. Yeah. But you
1:09:16
can't pretend to be straight.
1:09:18
Speaker 2: You can't pretend to be straight.
1:09:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, they won't allow you. So if you're gay, you
1:09:22
have to pretend. Yeah. You have to pretend you're not
1:09:25
gay because you can't act in a movie where we
1:09:28
know you're gay and you pretend to be straight. We
1:09:30
won't buy it.
1:09:31
Speaker 2: But whenever there is a movie where there is a
1:09:33
gay person, they get it obviously straight.
1:09:34
Speaker 1: Like in Milk.
1:09:36
Speaker 2: They don't get a gay guy to play that role.
1:09:38
They get a straight guy to be gay.
1:09:39
Speaker 1: One example. Yeah, but that's from that show.
1:09:42
Speaker 2: He was never a movie-leading man.
1:09:44
Speaker 3: It's just one example, though.
1:09:45
Speaker 1: I know, but he's a TV guy.
1:09:47
Speaker 2: But then people make allegations about him.
1:09:48
Speaker 1: Also, it's like he's got a– it's a cartoon character.
1:09:51
Like that How I Met Your Mother, that's a cartoon
1:09:55
character movie. Yeah. Like straight guy. Like you don't believe
1:09:59
it at all. Like first of all, he's not attractive
1:10:02
like in that way. He's not masculine. And the fact
1:10:05
that he gets all these hot girls to have sex
1:10:06
with him, none of it makes any sense.
1:10:08
Speaker 2: Did you see Gone Girl?
1:10:08
Speaker 1: It's just writing. Yeah, I did.
1:10:10
Speaker 2: Where he's playing the– Oh, that was great.
1:10:11
Speaker 1: He was excellent. Yeah, he was great.
1:10:13
Speaker 2: I watched that movie like eight times. That movie was
1:10:15
fucking awesome. It helped me work through a lot of
1:10:17
trauma with women.
1:10:17
Speaker 1: Woo! Bro, that movie was crazy. But the point is
1:10:21
like you can't be an openly gay guy and be
1:10:24
a movie star. Yes, absolutely. Because you won't be able
1:10:26
to kiss women on stage.
1:10:27
Speaker 3: I'm trying to think of one.
1:10:28
Speaker 1: On screen, rather. There's not one. There's, I know, a
1:10:31
bunch of closeted ones.
1:10:32
Speaker 3: Yes, yes.
1:10:33
Speaker 1: But there's no openly gay action movie star. Well, there were.
1:10:41
Speaker 2: There's none. No, actually, there would be none.
1:10:44
Speaker 1: There's none. There's stars who have played... There's like five
1:10:49
or six that I would say. played gay people.
1:10:51
Speaker 2: A lot of guys play gay people.
1:10:52
Speaker 1: You know, like... What's his face? James Bond. English guy.
1:10:56
Daniel Craig. Daniel Craig.
1:10:58
Speaker 2: Knives Out. He plays a gay guy.
1:10:59
Speaker 1: That's right.
1:11:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was thinking of Milk.
1:11:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, he plays a gay guy in Knives Out, but
1:11:04
he's not making out with anybody. He just lives with
1:11:06
a guy.
1:11:07
Speaker 2: I never watched Knives Out because I was so angry
1:11:09
at the second Star Wars movie.
1:11:12
Speaker 1: I loved it.
1:11:13
Speaker 2: It's the same director. And I loved Looper. I thought
1:11:16
Looper was fantastic.
1:11:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a dud or two every now and then.
1:11:19
Speaker 2: I fucking hated that movie. I was one of those guys.
1:11:22
Speaker 1: Which one was that? What was it called? Oh, man.
1:11:26
Speaker 2: It was not Force Awakens. It was the one that
1:11:28
came after that.
1:11:30
Speaker 1: What year is.
1:11:32
Speaker 2: This?
1:11:34
Speaker 1: 2017.
1:11:35
Speaker 2: I'm all over the place with dates.
1:11:36
Speaker 1: Don't you think, though, that I didn't watch any of
1:11:38
the new ones, but don't you think, though, that when
1:11:41
you were dealing, if you're dealing with a Star Wars,
1:11:44
those franchise movies, you're dealing with And there's no way
1:11:48
they just give you carte blanche. There's no way they
1:11:51
just let you write a script, let you produce it,
1:11:53
let you put it together, let you direct it the
1:11:55
way you want. They have insane amounts of input.
1:11:57
Speaker 2: No, this one was so stylistically strange.
1:11:59
Speaker 1: Right.
1:12:00
Speaker 2: It's such a departure. He was making it. Rise of
1:12:03
Skywalker is, yeah, maybe it's that one. Yeah. Is that it?
1:12:08
Is that the second one?
1:12:10
Speaker 1: Does anybody really give a shit about these new Star
1:12:12
Wars movies?
1:12:14
Speaker 2: Not anymore. But it was, you know, it was exciting.
1:12:17
When George Lucas was doing it, at least he was like,
1:12:20
we're going to have a Jew alien and a Korean alien.
1:12:24
And it's about trade wars. And he was like.
1:12:27
Speaker 1: They did that?
1:12:28
Speaker 2: Episode one?
1:12:29
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
1:12:30
Speaker 2: Episode one is a nightmare if you go back and
1:12:32
watch episode one.
1:12:32
Speaker 1: Which one's episode one?
1:12:33
Speaker 2: Episode one is like Little Anakin and the pod racing.
1:12:36
Speaker 1: Jar Jar Binks?
1:12:37
Speaker 2: Jar Jar Binks is like a hugely troubled. He's just
1:12:40
speaking in a patois the whole time. But, I mean,
1:12:44
it all has to end. I think it's finally winding down. Like,
1:12:46
the Marvel Cinematic Universe seems to be coming to a close.
1:12:50
Speaker 1: No. No, no. Marvel's not. But Star Wars, they woke
1:12:54
it up. They fucked it up. Yeah. They made it
1:12:58
all like this stupid woke message.
1:13:00
Speaker 2: But that was the woke one. That was the one
1:13:01
where it was like there were ladies who couldn't do
1:13:04
anything wrong and all the men were.
1:13:06
Speaker 1: And the ladies generals and the men are all terrified
1:13:08
of them. Yeah. So save it. This is nonsense. But
1:13:12
these woke messages just destroy the actual film. We were
1:13:18
talking about this the other day, that a feminist show
1:13:21
that no one thinks of as a feminist show is
1:13:25
Game of Thrones.
1:13:26
Speaker 2: Because she turns into a.
1:13:28
Speaker 1: No, it's a completely feminist show. The women are all badasses. Yes.
1:13:32
Every woman, Arya Stark, badass. Daenerys Targaryen, badass. Cersei Lannister, badass. Yeah.
1:13:40
Brienne of Tarth badass almost kills the hound they're all
1:13:45
women women run everything they're beasts Sansa Stark badass.
1:13:50
Speaker 2: And a lot of the men they don't see things
1:13:51
coming they don't know.
1:13:53
Speaker 1: How idiots get their heads chopped off they're retarded the
1:13:57
women keep the fucking civilization together and they're the most
1:14:01
dominant forces in the.
1:14:02
Speaker 2: Show sometimes they're lying like that nasty prostitute who hurt
1:14:06
that midget.
1:14:06
Speaker 1: Man Yeah, but she was unfortunate in her choices.
1:14:10
Speaker 2: You think the Marvel thing is going to... I think
1:14:12
at some point.
1:14:13
Speaker 1: They're going to ramp it back up. They have a
1:14:14
new one.
1:14:15
Speaker 3: They brought back the Russo brothers and.
1:14:17
Speaker 1: They're bringing in Doom. Dr. Doom's coming. Isn't fucking Robert
1:14:23
Downey Jr. playing Doom as well? How does he do that?
1:14:27
Wait until you see the movie, man. No, no, no, no, no, no.
1:14:30
How is he fucking Iron Man and Doom?
1:14:32
Speaker 2: Well, they both have iron. No.
1:14:34
Speaker 1: No, get a new guy. You don't like him? I
1:14:37
know Robert Downey Jr. is great. You don't have to
1:14:39
kill Iron Man. Bring Iron Man back. Don't you have
1:14:40
a multiverse? Can't you pull him back and put him
1:14:44
into this current timeline?
1:14:46
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to it.
1:14:48
Speaker 1: I just don't like when you have a whole universe
1:14:52
and you have one guy playing two characters in the universe.
1:14:54
As much as I love Robert Downey Jr., it bothers
1:14:57
the shit out of me as a comic book fan.
1:14:59
Speaker 3: They've already had that, though. Chris Evans is in Fantastic
1:15:02
Four and he's Captain America.
1:15:05
Speaker 1: What was he in Fantastic Four?
1:15:06
Speaker 3: The first Fantastic Four.
1:15:07
Speaker 2: No, there have been like four or five Fantastic Fours.
1:15:10
Speaker 1: Really?
1:15:11
Speaker 2: There have been so many Fantastic Fours.
1:15:13
Speaker 1: You're right. I never even remembered that.
1:15:14
Speaker 2: They can never get that one working.
1:15:16
Speaker 1: Who does he play in Fantastic Four?
1:15:17
Speaker 3: That's sort of the joke in the Spider-Man movie, the
1:15:19
multiverse one, because they bring them all back in the
1:15:22
same fucking movie, and it's all confusing. They bring all
1:15:25
the bad guys back. Jamie Foxx is in the new Spider-Man,
1:15:27
and that was an old movie.
1:15:29
Speaker 2: Do you think they'll be post-woke at this point? I
1:15:32
got to watch movies for the first time on the
1:15:33
plane over. They'd have to lose all.
1:15:35
Speaker 1: Their fucking money.
1:15:37
Speaker 2: That's starting to happen.
1:15:37
Speaker 1: And then start to come back.
1:15:38
Speaker 2: Did you see Begonia?
1:15:40
Speaker 1: No. That was good.
1:15:41
Speaker 2: Stavi was in that and Emma was the guy who
1:15:44
made The Lobster. But that was... There were problems with it,
1:15:46
but it was like a pointedly like a post... In
1:15:49
the same vein of like White Lotus.
1:15:51
Speaker 1: Okay.
1:15:51
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, Hollywood is trying to make self-consciously post-woke movies.
1:15:56
I got really annoyed by it and I thought some
1:15:58
of it was cheap, but like... I liked what they
1:16:00
were going for.
1:16:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fun.
1:16:02
Speaker 2: I thought the ending was.
1:16:03
Speaker 1: Fun.
1:16:04
Speaker 3: Spoiler alert.
1:16:05
Speaker 2: I won't spoil nothing. I won't spoil nothing. But I
1:16:07
would never have seen it if I wasn't on a
1:16:09
flight watching 57 movies. American Fiction was like a post-work movie.
1:16:12
They're like, at the moment, on Delta flights.
1:16:15
Speaker 1: What is American Fiction?
1:16:16
Speaker 2: American Fiction is a book about a... It's a black
1:16:18
author who doesn't want to be considered a black author.
1:16:21
He just wants to be an author. He's sick of...
1:16:23
And then he keeps seeing all these terrible black books
1:16:26
full of stereotypes that white liberals adore. So he writes
1:16:29
a fake book called My Pathology. And I think he
1:16:33
later changes it to Fuck. He's just trying to like
1:16:35
fuck with people, go, I'll just write the blackest, dumbest book.
1:16:39
And then white liberals do love it. And it was good.
1:16:43
But it's like pointedly like mainstream and indie, you know,
1:16:48
big studios are trying to make, they're trying to find
1:16:51
some continuity from being woke to now. That's box office poison.
1:16:55
Speaker 1: This is a mainstream film?
1:16:56
Speaker 3: That one looks like it's independent. It won an independent
1:16:58
spirit award.
1:16:59
Speaker 1: Okay.
1:17:00
Speaker 2: But Begonia wasn't.
1:17:01
Speaker 1: But this other movie, what was it called again? The
1:17:04
one you were just talking about?
1:17:06
Speaker 2: Begonia.
1:17:06
Speaker 1: No, the other one. Oh, which one? American Fiction. So
1:17:09
American Fiction's independent.
1:17:10
Speaker 2: I didn't know if it was independent. I looked it up.
1:17:12
It made like tens of millions of dollars.
1:17:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, but sometimes independent films that catch on make good money.
1:17:18
Speaker 3: They made a deal with Amazon to make a limited
1:17:21
theatrical release. Okay.
1:17:22
Speaker 2: So they partnered with Amazon.
1:17:24
Speaker 3: I don't know.
1:17:25
Speaker 2: I would count that as a big studio.
1:17:27
Speaker 1: No. No, if you started it by yourself. You started
1:17:29
it by yourself and then you distribute it to Amazon.
1:17:31
Speaker 2: But who paid for it?
1:17:32
Speaker 1: Who was the– Somebody probably financed it.
1:17:34
Speaker 2: The director was– was he the Onion guy?
1:17:37
Speaker 3: $ 10 million budget.
1:17:38
Speaker 1: So the thing is if you want to do something right,
1:17:40
you kind of have to do it that way now.
1:17:42
Like make it yourself and then bring it as a
1:17:44
fully completed project. That way you don't have a bunch
1:17:46
of people like the Star Wars guy like in your
1:17:48
ear telling you what to do and how to direct it.
1:17:51
Speaker 2: I recorded a comedy special years ago for Australia.
1:17:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:17:54
Speaker 2: And I thought I would just do it on my
1:17:55
own and then I would sell it to the network.
1:17:58
Speaker 1: How'd that go?
1:17:59
Speaker 2: They said, we like it. This is one of the
1:18:01
most embarrassing phone calls I ever had. They said that
1:18:03
we like it. It's very white. It's very male. Yeah,
1:18:06
it's me. It's just me. And they said, can you
1:18:09
go out in five, like find five or six diverse
1:18:13
comedians and record their specials as well. And then we
1:18:16
could buy all six of them. I was like, fuck it.
1:18:19
I'll put it on YouTube. But that was the real
1:18:22
request was would you find an aboriginal fellow, find a
1:18:26
lady in a wheelchair, find some Chinese people, and then
1:18:29
you can have your one as well and we'll buy
1:18:31
all six.
1:18:32
Speaker 1: Hilarious.
1:18:33
Speaker 2: It was– yeah, that was probably the end of me
1:18:36
thinking I could work with.
1:18:39
Speaker 1: You can't work with people that aren't creatives and that's
1:18:42
what those people are. They're a bunch of people that
1:18:44
are caught up in whatever the cultural moment is, whatever
1:18:47
they think like the winds of yeah the winds of
1:18:50
discontent blow the hardest right so the people that are
1:18:53
going to get the most upset are the wokies they're
1:18:56
the ones that are going to complain the most about
1:18:58
a lack of diversity so to satisfy those people they'll
1:19:01
torch their own art they'll fuck up the thing that
1:19:04
they do best.
1:19:04
Speaker 2: I mean you can work with totally non-creative people this
1:19:07
was like there's a Frank Zappa line about how working
1:19:11
in the music industry was great when it was just
1:19:13
a guy in a suit who didn't care. And as
1:19:15
soon as people had some ideas, it was hard to
1:19:17
make things.
1:19:18
Speaker 1: Right. When someone would tell you what to do and
1:19:20
what not to do.
1:19:21
Speaker 2: If it's a profit motive, that's great. You can work
1:19:23
with those people.
1:19:25
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right. But there's no pure profit motive people anymore
1:19:29
in terms of entertainment. They're all thinking about the cultural
1:19:33
tone of And what you're supposed to and not supposed
1:19:37
to do and being on the right side of history now.
1:19:42
Speaker 2: Did you see the Patrice bit where he talked about
1:19:44
how he liked working with mid-level Jews?
1:19:46
Speaker 1: No.
1:19:47
Speaker 2: He's like, I like mid-level Jews. I make them the money.
1:19:50
They leave me alone.
1:19:51
Speaker 1: That makes sense. Yeah, the people that get in your way,
1:19:56
they all think they're doing it for a good cause.
1:19:58
And we experienced that. Like Stan Hope and I were
1:20:00
doing the Man Show on Comedy Central. There was a
1:20:02
lot of that.
1:20:03
Speaker 2: Was there?
1:20:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, dude. I don't even want to go into it.
1:20:06
But there was– whenever you're– like Ari experienced it when
1:20:09
he was at Comedy Central. I know a lot of
1:20:11
people that have experienced it at various networks where there's
1:20:14
always some fucking executives that want to impose their– and
1:20:18
it's always liberal. They want to impose their progressive values
1:20:22
on comedy. And it's like you can't fucking do that
1:20:25
if you want it to be funny. If you want
1:20:27
it to be funny, you have to– it has to
1:20:29
be in the language and in the mind, like from
1:20:32
the viewpoint of one person, one person's unique vision. One
1:20:36
person's unique vision that they think is hilarious. And as
1:20:40
soon as you start monkeying with that, as soon as
1:20:42
you start adding stuff to that, as soon as you
1:20:44
start watering it down, you're going to kill it. You
1:20:47
compromise it, it becomes a candidate for mediocrity.
1:20:49
Speaker 2: But how did they– where did they start on the
1:20:51
man show? Were they like– Get the girls off the trampolines?
1:20:54
Speaker 1: No. One of the things was they didn't want Joey
1:20:57
Diaz coming out naked.
1:20:59
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:20:59
Speaker 1: Okay. So we had an intro, and I said, this
1:21:02
is what I want to do for the intro. I
1:21:03
want Joey Diaz to come out. He's going to burst
1:21:05
through the door naked with Timberlands on, with a baseball
1:21:10
hat on, and just say, let's get this party started
1:21:12
and start dancing.
1:21:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fun.
1:21:13
Speaker 1: It was hilarious. And they didn't want to do it.
1:21:16
So this is the scene, I guess.
1:21:21
Speaker 2: But you did get to put.
1:21:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we had to do it two ways. We
1:21:24
had to do it their way. We did it their
1:21:28
way first. And then when their way was done, we
1:21:32
did it with Joey. Everybody went fucking nuts. They all
1:21:38
went nuts. It was awesome. But it's like they so
1:21:41
strongly resisted that. That was the only way I wanted
1:21:44
to do it. And I said, listen, we'll do it
1:21:45
your way first, and then we'll do it our way. Meanwhile,
1:21:47
that version with Joey was what they used in all
1:21:50
the promos. Yeah, of course. They used that when they
1:21:52
were like, this season of the Man Show. And then
1:21:54
Joey comes out naked with his cock blurred out. Yeah.
1:21:59
But you're just going to get a bunch of people
1:22:01
who also want to have their fingerprints on what you're doing. Yeah.
1:22:06
So they want to somehow or another change it. Even
1:22:08
if it doesn't make sense. What if your neighbor is
1:22:12
a black guy who grew up with a white family?
1:22:15
What if your– and then they want to like change it.
1:22:18
How are you doing with the black guy who is
1:22:21
the white family? I didn't even add that. Come on, man. Yeah.
1:22:24
Come on, man. We got to play ball. Like these
1:22:26
dipshits want to add their own little fucking ingredients into
1:22:29
the soup.
1:22:30
Speaker 2: I mean, it's never been cheaper to make your own thing,
1:22:32
I would have to think.
1:22:34
Speaker 1: Never. You could do it on a cell phone. You
1:22:35
could upload it to YouTube.
1:22:37
Speaker 2: And AI is... Incredible. Yeah, there's a use for it.
1:22:42
I hope it doesn't... I'm still uncomfortable about it. You're
1:22:47
a board. You've... You're playing new music backstage. I didn't
1:22:51
pick it.
1:22:51
Speaker 1: That was good, right? It's all good.
1:22:53
Speaker 2: I find it frightening.
1:22:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:22:56
Speaker 2: I don't like it.
1:22:56
Speaker 1: It's White Rabbit. It's this Jefferson Airplane version of White Rabbit. Yeah.
1:23:01
But it's this bluesy new version of it. That's all AI.
1:23:06
It's fantastic.
1:23:07
Speaker 2: There's one way you can upload. You just upload your
1:23:10
music or someone else's music. And they're like, it does
1:23:12
all the mastering. Beautiful. It's spooky. I mean, it's the
1:23:16
end of. It is the end. It's the end of something.
1:23:18
Speaker 1: It's the beginning.
1:23:19
Speaker 2: There are technical jobs that are just gone now.
1:23:22
Speaker 1: That's true. Yeah. But there's not a lot of Morse
1:23:26
code operators either.
1:23:27
Speaker 2: I think they should bring it back. Bring back the
1:23:30
scheme engine.
1:23:32
Speaker 1: We need coal-powered fucking locomotives. Listen.
1:23:36
Speaker 2: The Amish, they seem happy. They got their buggies.
1:23:38
Speaker 1: They got their big families. Try having a conversation with
1:23:40
them about space. They don't know jack shit.
1:23:42
Speaker 2: They don't have autism, so they can't do it.
1:23:44
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:23:45
Speaker 2: Talk to them about butter.
1:23:50
Speaker 1: I think you're going to experience great change. There's not
1:23:54
a damn thing you can do about it. And so
1:23:56
you just have to be zen about it.
1:23:58
Speaker 2: I mean, some of the, I, it's been like over
1:24:00
a year since the driverless cars came to Austin. And
1:24:04
I've been in a bunch of them the way most.
1:24:06
And they're not spreading out across the country the way
1:24:08
that I thought they would.
1:24:09
Speaker 1: Oh, they're in a lot of places. They're all over
1:24:11
Los Angeles. They're in a lot of places.
1:24:12
Speaker 2: They're in about three or four places. But like they
1:24:15
should have– obviously the technology is there that no one
1:24:18
should have to drive for a living. Like it would
1:24:20
be cheaper to have the Waymo. The technology is there.
1:24:22
They're on the freeway now. I've never had one problem
1:24:26
in a Waymo. I don't know how many I've been in.
1:24:27
Speaker 1: They've had problems here. They've all got– because there's so
1:24:30
many of them. They all met up in an intersection
1:24:33
and got locked up. That is funny. Hilarious. Yeah. There
1:24:36
was like a bunch of streets going into each other
1:24:38
and they all came and then no one knew what
1:24:40
to do.
1:24:40
Speaker 2: But that's not as bad as like drunkenly T-burning somebody.
1:24:43
Speaker 1: Sure, but the thing is don't drink and drive, not
1:24:47
let's let robots take our lives over. That's not the solution.
1:24:51
I want the freedom of being able to hop in
1:24:53
a fucking car and drive wherever I want.
1:24:55
Speaker 2: They're going to take it.
1:24:56
Speaker 1: That's the problem. That's the problem. The problem is it's
1:24:58
going to– They're going.
1:24:59
Speaker 2: To say it's safer to have you off the road.
1:25:00
Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. They're going to say statistically you're more likely
1:25:04
to die in a car accident if driven by a
1:25:06
normal person than a robot.
1:25:08
Speaker 2: I bet they'll offer little bonuses. They'll say when all
1:25:14
the humans are off the road, speed limits are going
1:25:16
up two or three times, whatever they can handle. Their
1:25:19
reflexes are better.
1:25:20
Speaker 1: We know a lot of kids today are not driving.
1:25:22
Do you know that? A lot of kids today are
1:25:23
just– they're just ordering Ubers and driving Waymos.
1:25:29
Speaker 2: I mean, I only got my driver's license at like 27.
1:25:31
Speaker 1: Really?
1:25:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just on buses. And then we had
1:25:34
a child and I was like, I better do it.
1:25:35
Now it's my favorite thing in the world.
1:25:36
Speaker 1: Wow.
1:25:37
Speaker 2: I love driving.
1:25:38
Speaker 1: Did you not want a driver's license or you just
1:25:40
couldn't be bothered?
1:25:41
Speaker 2: I wasn't good at it. My parents were scared. My
1:25:44
parents were like, I don't want to get in the
1:25:45
car with you.
1:25:47
Speaker 1: How are you so bad at it?
1:25:49
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know. I was very like,
1:25:52
I was uncoordinated until like I was at a late
1:25:55
puberty at 16, 17. And then I became coordinated. But
1:25:59
for a while there.
1:25:59
Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah.
1:26:01
Speaker 2: I don't know why. Did anybody teach you how to?
1:26:04
You were dropped on your head as a child? Interesting.
1:26:07
And then in my late teens.
1:26:08
Speaker 1: How were you dropped on your head?
1:26:09
Speaker 2: I fell out of a stroller. I unbuckled myself and
1:26:13
I stood up and I fell down. I don't think
1:26:15
it had any brain impact.
1:26:16
Speaker 1: Of course it did.
1:26:16
Speaker 2: People disagree.
1:26:17
Speaker 1: Yeah. 100% it did.
1:26:18
Speaker 2: Big scar.
1:26:19
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. You fucked your head up. That's why you're funny. Maybe. 100%.
1:26:25
Speaker 2: I got the coordination back at some point, but I like.
1:26:27
Speaker 1: So you really think it affected your coordination all the
1:26:29
way up into puberty?
1:26:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I was able to play sport at high
1:26:33
school after I'd hit puberty, but only after puberty and
1:26:37
only sports that didn't really matter if I had all
1:26:39
the skills. So like football, everyone's been doing it since
1:26:42
they were four, and they really know how to do it.
1:26:44
So I was just like, no, it didn't matter that
1:26:46
I could figure it out now. Everyone had 10 years
1:26:48
on me. But I became an okay field hockey goalkeeper.
1:26:52
I had like one season in the top. team as
1:26:55
the field hockey because no one wanted to do it
1:26:57
no one's really trained to do it right it's just
1:26:58
having fast reflexes so that was fine or like bad
1:27:01
i became okay at badminton because it was just me
1:27:04
and the asians you know like tennis there was no
1:27:07
way to get good at tennis right you need a
1:27:09
head start squash i could do a little bit badminton's
1:27:13
a great game met.
1:27:14
Speaker 1: A lot of malaysians did you have a problem moving
1:27:17
your body correctly.
1:27:19
Speaker 2: It would be yeah like i couldn't catch.
1:27:21
Speaker 1: A ball huh uh And you think it had to
1:27:24
do with your head injury?
1:27:25
Speaker 2: Well, I have no idea.
1:27:27
Speaker 1: Do you have brothers or sisters?
1:27:28
Speaker 2: I have a brother. He's fine.
1:27:29
Speaker 1: Is he an athlete? No.
1:27:31
Speaker 2: I mean, he was. He was younger than me, so
1:27:34
I was in badminton, and then he was really good
1:27:36
at badminton. Yeah, he's hyper-competitive. He was always good at
1:27:41
sport compared to me. He was much better. Interesting. Like
1:27:44
when I came to America and I started throwing a foot,
1:27:46
when I figured out I could throw a football, that
1:27:49
was huge.
1:27:49
Speaker 1: Is your brother funny? Yes. Yes.
1:27:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, he actually got me into– I thought comedy was over.
1:27:54
This is how I met Shane is he took me
1:27:58
to go and see Shane. I was sort of– this
1:28:01
was I don't know how many years ago, four years ago.
1:28:04
And I was sort of– I didn't know what was–
1:28:06
I had a three-year-old by that point and a new
1:28:08
baby on the way. And just in Australia, nothing was
1:28:12
interesting to me and my career wasn't happening. And he said,
1:28:15
you should come and see this guy who got fired
1:28:17
from SNL. I didn't know him. And I sat in
1:28:20
the audience and I watched Shane perform for 300 or
1:28:22
400 people in our hometown. And I was like, oh, fuck.
1:28:26
Speaker 1: It's back.
1:28:27
Speaker 2: Like, it's happening. I knew there were a couple people
1:28:29
on Netflix. I knew, like, you had Netflix specials and
1:28:31
Bill Burr and Louis. But it was like, these people
1:28:34
are grandfathered in. No one is ever going to be
1:28:36
able to come through and be, you know.
1:28:38
Speaker 1: Controversial.
1:28:39
Speaker 2: No one in my generation. is going to be given
1:28:40
an opportunity. At all?
1:28:43
Speaker 1: You just thought that new comedians were not going to
1:28:45
make it?
1:28:46
Speaker 2: In Australia, I can't say enough how there's like a–
1:28:50
it's been 20 years since someone got to be successful.
1:28:55
Speaker 1: Jim Jefferies.
1:28:56
Speaker 2: Never in Australia. He had to leave. Even now, the
1:29:01
Melbourne Comedy Festival notoriously will not work with people who
1:29:05
have worked with Jim Jefferies.
1:29:06
Speaker 1: What?
1:29:07
Speaker 2: That's a black stain on your character.
1:29:09
Speaker 1: So if you open for him, you can't work at the.
1:29:11
Speaker 2: They don't like you and they're not going to give
1:29:12
you opportunities. That's what people say. That's what I've heard
1:29:15
and everything that I've seen leads me– Because he's not
1:29:18
their person.
1:29:19
Speaker 1: Fuck him.
1:29:21
Speaker 2: They think of him as an– in America, he's like
1:29:23
a liberal and in Australia, he's far right, dangerous man.
1:29:27
Speaker 1: How could he say that? That's what it is?
1:29:29
Speaker 2: That's what it is.
1:29:30
Speaker 1: It's his politics? Oh, yeah. It's not that he didn't
1:29:32
come up through their system?
1:29:33
Speaker 2: Well, he didn't come. I mean, he just left.
1:29:37
Speaker 1: Right.
1:29:37
Speaker 2: But I think he didn't like them. They didn't like him.
1:29:41
I mean, there are people who have left and not
1:29:43
been part of their system that they've totally gotten around.
1:29:45
But what he is is like a manly man.
1:29:48
Speaker 1: And they don't like that?
1:29:49
Speaker 3: Oh, no. Oh, no.
1:29:51
Speaker 2: No, they want you to be a cardigan. Excuse me.
1:29:54
I won't go on and on.
1:29:55
Speaker 1: Go on and on.
1:29:57
Speaker 2: There was a generation of lost talent in Australia. John Cruikshank, fantastic.
1:30:01
Where's his show? You could name 15 people.
1:30:05
Speaker 1: There was no opportunities for them.
1:30:08
Speaker 2: It was hilariously gatekept.
1:30:13
Speaker 1: Never good.
1:30:14
Speaker 3: No.
1:30:15
Speaker 2: So I didn't. I just thought, okay, I'll have a podcast.
1:30:17
So this is your.
1:30:18
Speaker 1: Perspective from Australia. You never thought there was ever going
1:30:21
to be an opportunity to make it as a comic.
1:30:22
Speaker 2: My brother liked– I had kids. I had stopped paying
1:30:25
attention to the outside world. My brother had not and
1:30:27
he took me to go and see Shane. He was like,
1:30:28
you should see this man. And it was fantastic. And
1:30:32
I talked my way backstage because I knew the opener
1:30:34
because I didn't get to– I knew the opener. And
1:30:37
then I got to meet him and Matt and then
1:30:39
I got to go to Melbourne and open for him.
1:30:41
And then I came to America.
1:30:43
Speaker 1: Were you doing any stand-up before you opened Forum in Melbourne?
1:30:45
Had you been practicing?
1:30:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was doing stand-up around.
1:30:48
Speaker 1: Constantly still.
1:30:49
Speaker 2: But I would do– I would just have 50 or
1:30:51
100 people in a different city and I would show
1:30:53
up and make enough money for the flight and like
1:30:55
an extra thousand bucks or something. But it was like
1:30:59
I couldn't pay rent that way. Right.
1:31:00
Speaker 1: You were scratching by.
1:31:02
Speaker 2: It was– yeah, I was struggling. This is why when
1:31:04
we did come to– when I got the Catholic job
1:31:06
and I came to America, it was all– I borrowed
1:31:09
from everybody. Like I was in thousands of dollars of
1:31:12
debt to family and friends.
1:31:13
Speaker 1: How did Arj Barker make it in Australia?
1:31:16
Speaker 2: He did a show called Flight of the Conchords. He
1:31:18
was on that. And he was beloved by the festival
1:31:21
and he did lots of gala spots.
1:31:23
Speaker 1: So it's the festival?
1:31:25
Speaker 2: The festival broke everybody, yeah.
1:31:27
Speaker 1: So that controls comedy in Australia? Yes.
1:31:29
Speaker 2: There's a guy called Rodney Rood who's really funny who
1:31:32
was before that.
1:31:34
Speaker 1: Is he in the festival?
1:31:34
Speaker 2: He's not in the festival.
1:31:36
Speaker 1: He can't be in the festival.
1:31:37
Speaker 2: He would go to like RSLs and things. Get out
1:31:39
of here, you homeless fuck. That's a great bit.
1:31:42
Speaker 1: Okay.
1:31:43
Speaker 2: Kevin Bloody Wilson. But he's like that older generation.
1:31:47
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:31:47
Speaker 2: After that, though, it was.
1:31:50
Speaker 1: So it's captured. It's gatekept by one ideology.
1:31:54
Speaker 2: By one lady running one festival.
1:31:56
Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
1:31:57
Speaker 2: No disrespect. I'm sure she's very nice. I don't want
1:31:59
to talk her down. I would have loved an opportunity
1:32:01
once anyway. It doesn't matter. I don't need you anymore.
1:32:08
Speaker 1: Wow. That's never good. It's never good because people with
1:32:11
that kind of power, they also abuse it. They really
1:32:13
enjoy it.
1:32:15
Speaker 2: How could you not? You don't have to. You've got
1:32:18
hundreds of desperate people who are, please give me an opportunity.
1:32:21
Speaker 1: I've got that. I don't do it.
1:32:24
Speaker 2: No, but you're a very strange person and you're alone.
1:32:27
That's why people love you. But there's definitely– there are
1:32:31
casting couches elsewhere.
1:32:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you can just be nice. And being nice
1:32:35
and helping people, especially talented people, it gives you great satisfaction.
1:32:39
You feel great about it. I always tell people it's
1:32:42
really selfish to be generous because it feels great. It's
1:32:45
wonderful to help people. It feels fucking awesome. And it's
1:32:48
great to see people thrive and take off. It's fun.
1:32:52
It's exciting. And then you hang out with them in
1:32:53
the green room and it's just all joy.
1:32:55
Speaker 2: Also, I don't want to say that they don't do that.
1:32:57
They're helping a lot of people who have a.
1:32:58
Speaker 1: Very specific, uh, ideology. Listen, that we don't have that.
1:33:03
Like our ideology is the opposite. Our idea, our ideology is,
1:33:06
are you funny?
1:33:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:33:07
Speaker 1: I don't give a fuck if you're a liberal and
1:33:09
funny or like, it was very Brian Holtzman.
1:33:13
Speaker 2: Whatever. It was on last night and she was like,
1:33:15
she was a big lefty. She's a dear friend and
1:33:17
she's going to open for me this weekend. But, uh,
1:33:20
She was like in New York. She was raised in Sacramento.
1:33:23
She went to New York. She was like a very lefty,
1:33:25
progressive person. And I remember like nights at the mothership
1:33:29
where she would scream at the audience, you're a fucking fascist.
1:33:31
Fuck yeah. Like she was really like baked in and
1:33:33
they loved it. People, there's a lefty lady just like
1:33:36
off her nut, angry at everybody.
1:33:38
Speaker 1: Just if you're funny.
1:33:38
Speaker 2: And people were, it was fun. There is no equivalent
1:33:41
of that.
1:33:41
Speaker 1: No, you just have to be funny. Yeah. Like it's
1:33:43
all just funny. Like if you're funny, a lefty, funny, funny,
1:33:47
Brian Holtzman, funny. Tony Hinchcliffe funny. Yeah. It doesn't matter.
1:33:51
Just be funny. Just work on your stuff, work on it.
1:33:54
Like really put a lot of time and energy into
1:33:56
your craft, but come up with great bits.
1:33:59
Speaker 2: When I'm on these flights, I'm watching like all the
1:34:00
official sanctioned, like non Netflix specials, but some of them
1:34:03
that are on HBO and some are on Hulu. And
1:34:06
it's people who there's a weird way that audiences, like
1:34:10
I'm watching like official mains, whatever, like it's not mainstream
1:34:13
because the audience is a tiny by comparison, but you
1:34:15
don't mean like, Sort of like orthodox sanctioned comedy in America.
1:34:20
And the jokes are so mild. But then the audience
1:34:24
is like. Supposedly there's a lot of women in the audience.
1:34:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. They're all on antidepressants.
1:34:29
Speaker 2: They sound crazy.
1:34:30
Speaker 1: They are crazy.
1:34:31
Speaker 2: And it's like cheap, nothing, punchlines.
1:34:34
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:34:34
Speaker 2: And it's just at the slightest, my boy. I couldn't even.
1:34:39
Speaker 1: Yay. Well, it's also, it's claptor, right? So you're also
1:34:44
reinforcing their ideology. So they're very excited about it because
1:34:47
they kind of realize their ideology is very fringe and
1:34:49
dying out. As much as it's perpetrated through Hollywood, it's
1:34:53
rejected by a lot of rational people. It's over.
1:34:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's over. I went to a bar last night,
1:34:59
and I watched The Tonight Show, and God bless everybody involved,
1:35:02
but it's like, okay, well, this is done. This is
1:35:05
winding down. This is not a cultural. This was the
1:35:07
most important cultural.
1:35:08
Speaker 1: The Tonight Show's winding down?
1:35:10
Speaker 2: Just in terms of how many people are watching it,
1:35:11
and doing a set on a Tonight Show used to be,
1:35:16
that was it, right?
1:35:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, Johnny Carson.
1:35:17
Speaker 2: You could move tickets on the road on Johnny Carson,
1:35:19
and now people are going, That's his 15th Tonight Show appearance.
1:35:22
Speaker 1: But it kind of died out even before then. Like
1:35:24
the impact of the Jay Leno sets. Like if you
1:35:27
did a set on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, it didn't
1:35:29
have nearly the impact that Johnny Carson did. And that's
1:35:31
just because by then there were so many channels. Yeah.
1:35:34
So when Johnny Carson was on the Tonight Show, there
1:35:37
was three channels in the country. Yeah. You know? Yeah.
1:35:40
That's how crazy it was. And then slowly but surely–
1:35:43
Cable came around. Fox came around. All these other networks.
1:35:47
And then everything just expanded. Now you have streaming. And
1:35:50
now it's insane. Now the numbers are absolutely.
1:35:52
Speaker 2: Was it over at the end of Carson for that?
1:35:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe so. Okay. I believe by the time
1:35:56
Jay Leno came around. Like when did Jay Leno first
1:35:59
start hosting the Tonight Show? Let's guess.
1:36:02
Speaker 2: Early 90s?
1:36:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:36:03
Speaker 2: Mid 90s. 94.
1:36:05
Speaker 1: So that was right around the time Cable was coming out. Yeah.
1:36:07
Cable changed everything. So with Cable, you got. First of all,
1:36:11
you got Evening at the Improv, MTV Half Hour Comedy Hour,
1:36:15
Spotlight Cafe. There was a bunch of different shows that
1:36:19
were on a bunch of different networks. There was all
1:36:22
these comedy shows that were all over the place. Ninety-two. Ninety-two,
1:36:25
which makes sense because that's when cable started becoming really
1:36:30
ubiquitous in America. And then you have so many fucking channels.
1:36:34
So the impact of a single show was not the
1:36:37
same anymore because during the– Let's find this out. During
1:36:40
the height of the Tonight Show, what was the average viewers?
1:36:45
Speaker 2: This is spooky.
1:36:47
Speaker 1: I bet it's like 40 million.
1:36:48
Speaker 2: Well, it's like, I think the, I mean, even by
1:36:51
the end of Friends, like sitcom.
1:36:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's different because that's earlier. So the Tonight
1:36:56
Show is late at night.
1:36:57
Speaker 2: But like just average Tonight Show episode?
1:36:59
Speaker 1: See, this is the thing. Tonight Show is 11 p.m.
1:37:01
That's after the fucking news. That's late at night, right? Yes.
1:37:06
Isn't it 11? Is that when it starts or 10?
1:37:09
When does Tonight Show start?
1:37:11
Speaker 3: It's 1130 East, 1030 Central.
1:37:13
Speaker 1: Okay. So 1130 in New York.
1:37:15
Speaker 2: Is it a million people? How many?
1:37:17
Speaker 3: Now?
1:37:18
Speaker 1: No, then.
1:37:19
Speaker 2: What would it be then?
1:37:20
Speaker 1: What do you mean? The viewers?
1:37:21
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:37:21
Speaker 1: Way more than a million.
1:37:24
Speaker 2: Like 10 million?
1:37:24
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Easily. The Tonight Show viewers? I bet it
1:37:28
was 30. What is the average Tonight Show viewers in 1980?
1:37:32
Let's say 1980. It's like 15% of the country. Bro,
1:37:37
it was that big. It was where people went to
1:37:39
find out what was going on, what movies were coming out,
1:37:42
what bands were coming out, what comics were funny. I
1:37:46
remember it. So let's try 1980. Average viewers of The
1:37:53
Tonight Show in 1980. That's giving me a rating, not
1:37:57
the numbers.
1:37:59
Speaker 2: Oh, it's like a percentage?
1:38:01
Speaker 1: What were the average number of viewers on The Tonight
1:38:04
Show in 1980? Let's see. How many?
1:38:13
Speaker 3: Six to seven million.
1:38:15
Speaker 1: Six to seven million was average. This is eight to ten.
1:38:19
Speaker 2: But by– yeah, so but like– All right.
1:38:21
Speaker 1: Even eight to ten. But what is it now? Six
1:38:23
to seven. Let's think of it. God, it's probably a tenth.
1:38:26
Like 100,000? A tenth. Maybe a million. I don't even
1:38:28
know if it's that. I just– the thing about ratings.
1:38:31
The ratings are very weird because it's based on this–
1:38:35
you have boxes that are connected to your television. Do
1:38:38
you know how it works? Yeah. So the way these
1:38:40
ratings work is they get a certain number of people.
1:38:43
And they square it out. And the certain number of
1:38:45
people you actually pay– they pay these people to have
1:38:48
this box– And then some of them have to fill
1:38:50
out a form. I don't know how that works. And
1:38:52
then it just records what you're watching. And so it's
1:38:55
just based on these people. So it's not the whole country.
1:38:59
Speaker 2: We did that.
1:39:00
Speaker 1: But with like Netflix, it's a different animal. They know
1:39:02
the exact number of people.
1:39:04
Speaker 2: That are downloading. They know when people are tuning out.
1:39:06
They know which shot is upsetting people.
1:39:08
Speaker 1: It's crazy. They know the moment where people tune out. Yeah. Well,
1:39:12
they also have an insane amount of options. Like if
1:39:16
you're bored even slightly, you press a button, you have
1:39:19
new options, and they're instantaneous. Back then, you had two
1:39:23
other options other than whatever– was it NBC, The Tonight Show?
1:39:28
Was it NBC? Yeah.
1:39:29
Speaker 2: We've got different channels.
1:39:29
Speaker 1: The Tonight Show.
1:39:31
Speaker 2: I'm nostalgic for that. I only had that until I
1:39:35
was like 10.
1:39:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:39:36
Speaker 2: But it was– I've started watching TV again. It feels
1:39:40
like I'm role playing in my living room when I
1:39:42
have a beer and I watch like terrestrial broadcast now.
1:39:44
Like I watch Survivor with my family at night.
1:39:46
Speaker 1: And with commercials and everything?
1:39:48
Speaker 2: Man, I watch the lead in. I watch the new
1:39:50
Matlock afterwards for five minutes before I get sick of
1:39:52
it and turn it off. I watch Who Wants to
1:39:54
Be a Millionaire beforehand.
1:39:56
Speaker 1: It's for people that are on heavy pharmaceutical drugs. It's
1:40:00
for people that are just– It feels nice. It feels
1:40:02
like I'm a part of the world. Their mouth is open.
1:40:04
Their senses are dulled.
1:40:06
Speaker 2: They're like– Who committed a crime?
1:40:09
Speaker 1: They better solve it. There's only 10 minutes left.
1:40:11
Speaker 2: I would have friends come over. This is what I've
1:40:13
started doing at home.
1:40:15
Speaker 1: Watch TV, TV?
1:40:17
Speaker 2: Only Australian Survivor, which is, I think, the world's finest.
1:40:21
Speaker 1: Is it still Jeff Probst or is it a different host?
1:40:23
Speaker 2: No, it's a different host.
1:40:24
Speaker 1: You've got an Australian guy?
1:40:25
Speaker 2: We had Jonathan LaPaglia, who was Anthony LaPaglia's brother, but
1:40:29
then he got shafted. It's very upsetting. They got a
1:40:31
new host.
1:40:32
Speaker 1: Jonathan Anthony LaPaglia, the actor? Yeah.
1:40:35
Speaker 2: Jonathan LaPaglia was very good. And he got the shaft? No,
1:40:38
I don't know why.
1:40:39
Speaker 1: No one knows?
1:40:39
Speaker 2: No, I don't know. But he was great. Maybe it
1:40:42
was wrong think. You know, I've never heard him express
1:40:46
an opinion. He would do a lot of sexual double
1:40:48
entendre during the show.
1:40:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was that.
1:40:50
Speaker 2: The other good one is the South African survivor.
1:40:53
Speaker 3: Is it?
1:40:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they've got the accent. So all the challenges
1:40:56
feel way nastier. Look at that. He's struggling now. He's
1:41:00
starting to sweat. He's digging into his feet. He's in
1:41:03
a lot of pain. I love South African Survivor.
1:41:06
Speaker 1: They had a bunch of different versions of Fear Factor
1:41:07
that I wasn't even aware of.
1:41:09
Speaker 2: Different countries got Fear Factor?
1:41:10
Speaker 1: A hundred different countries.
1:41:12
Speaker 2: Did they get guys who were like you?
1:41:13
Speaker 1: I'm saying Joe Rogan.
1:41:14
Speaker 2: I'm just joking.
1:41:15
Speaker 1: I mean they had someone that was like that.
1:41:19
Speaker 2: That would be funny to see who they– because they
1:41:22
would be trying to replicate you.
1:41:24
Speaker 1: Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Like Ludacris didn't try to replicate
1:41:28
me when he did it.
1:41:29
Speaker 2: They got Ludacris to do it?
1:41:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, in America.
1:41:31
Speaker 2: I didn't know Ludacris took over.
1:41:33
Speaker 1: It was a very short amount of time. And now
1:41:35
Johnny Knoxville is doing it and he's doing it his
1:41:37
own way too. Sure. It's a pretty straightforward show though.
1:41:39
You don't have to do it my way. But what
1:41:42
I was good at is because I came from a
1:41:45
background in martial arts coaching. Like I had students and
1:41:48
I would bring them to tournaments and I'd coach them
1:41:50
at tournaments. I was really good at getting people fired up.
1:41:53
And I'd coach teammates. Like I would be in the
1:41:55
corner of teammates and I'd coach them. And I'd train people.
1:41:59
One of the reasons why I got really good at
1:42:00
Taekwondo so quickly is because I taught. And when you
1:42:03
teach something, there's something interesting. And I've noticed that about
1:42:05
jiu-jitsu as well. When you teach something, you get better
1:42:08
at it. Like exponentially better than people that are just training.
1:42:12
Speaker 2: I mean with comedy, there's a huge foot power against teaching.
1:42:15
Speaker 1: You can't teach it. No. You can't teach comedy. It's different.
1:42:18
Like you do it so different than I do it.
1:42:20
I do it so different than Shane. Shane does it
1:42:22
so different than Tony.
1:42:22
Speaker 2: I maintain there are things you could teach people. Like
1:42:25
when people come on Kill Tony and they haven't been
1:42:27
doing it for very long, there are key things that
1:42:29
you can tell people.
1:42:29
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:42:30
Speaker 2: You must stop doing that.
1:42:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:42:31
Speaker 2: You've got to hold the microphone like this. We've got
1:42:33
to be able to hear you.
1:42:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
1:42:34
Speaker 2: And I think people waste a lot of time not
1:42:36
knowing those. I mean, they could look it up.
1:42:38
Speaker 1: But didn't you figure those things out? Yeah. Yeah. So
1:42:41
it's people that aren't that aware in the first place.
1:42:43
And that's a problem to begin with. So what it
1:42:46
is is a lack of self-examination. A lot of what
1:42:49
these problems are, you could solve yourself if you just
1:42:53
recorded yourself or filmed yourself. Filmed is the best. Recorded
1:42:56
is pretty good. Film is 100%. So filming, you get
1:42:59
to see all the things you hate about yourself, all
1:43:02
the things that are gross, all the weird, stupid parts
1:43:04
of your bits that you need to chop out, and
1:43:06
they make you uncomfortable, and it's good. And you just, oh,
1:43:09
fuck that bit. Fuck this. Cut this. Oh, here's another.
1:43:12
I didn't even think of this. And then boom. I'm
1:43:14
doing it at the moment.
1:43:15
Speaker 2: I'm finding it heartbreaking.
1:43:17
Speaker 1: Because you're just getting back into like real world again.
1:43:19
Speaker 2: Oh, I did.
1:43:20
Speaker 1: You were trapped on prison island.
1:43:22
Speaker 2: I was doing hours in Australia. And I knew that
1:43:24
like some of it would translate in America and some
1:43:26
of it wouldn't.
1:43:27
Speaker 1: And man.
1:43:28
Speaker 2: It is just a lot of it. I'm losing 80%. Really?
1:43:31
Speaker 1: Which is great.
1:43:32
Speaker 2: I tried to overwrite so I would have more than
1:43:33
I needed.
1:43:34
Speaker 1: So did you have a lot of Australian-based jokes, like
1:43:36
local jokes?
1:43:37
Speaker 2: Eventually I had to. Like I started out trying to
1:43:40
do nothing local. And what happened? She's just there and
1:43:44
the prime minister does something appalling and you start talking
1:43:46
about it.
1:43:46
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. You're going to have to have some stuff. Yeah.
1:43:49
That's interesting. Yeah. Anything about your politics will not translate
1:43:52
over here. Not at all. Not a jot. We don't
1:43:55
give a fuck. You don't have nuclear weapons. Shut the
1:43:57
fuck up. You're not even a real country.
1:43:59
Speaker 2: I'm trying to sort us out.
1:44:02
Speaker 1: Did you see what happened yesterday that the FBI has
1:44:06
indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center? On what? Paying Nazis
1:44:10
to protest. So this is something that Alex Jones had said.
1:44:14
Remember that Charlottesville tiki torch thing years ago? Alex Jones
1:44:19
said back then that they were being paid, that these
1:44:21
are paid actors to go and do that. People thought
1:44:23
he was insane. Yeah. Turns out it's true. Turns out
1:44:27
they were paying the Ku Klux Klan. They were paying
1:44:30
a bunch of these far-right radical organizations, giving them money
1:44:36
to protest so they would have something to fight against.
1:44:38
Speaker 2: We're going to the Capitol over here.
1:44:41
Speaker 1: Look at this. DOJ charges Southern Poverty Law Center with
1:44:45
fraud over secret funding of extremist groups. How fucking crazy
1:44:49
that is.
1:44:49
Speaker 2: I just saw that The Onion is buying InfoWars and
1:44:51
turning it into an anti-gun ad.
1:44:53
Speaker 1: It's a $ 1.
1:44:53
Speaker 2: 5 billion thing he had to pay. for getting one
1:44:57
thing wrong one time.
1:44:58
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:44:59
Speaker 2: How many things did he have to be right about?
1:45:01
Speaker 1: He's right about a lot, I'll tell you that. And
1:45:03
the Onion thing, I don't even know if other people
1:45:05
were allowed to bid. I don't know how that worked out,
1:45:07
but I think there was other people that were trying
1:45:09
to bid that couldn't. That were like supporters of Alex Jones?
1:45:13
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:45:16
Speaker 1: Let's go back up. Stop. Hold on. Between 2014 and 2023,
1:45:17
Southern Poverty Law Center paid.
1:45:18
Speaker 2: At least $ 3.
1:45:19
Speaker 1: Million to To eight individuals, some of whom were associated
1:45:29
with the Ku Klux Klan, United Clans of America, National
1:45:33
Socialist Party of America, Aryan Nations Affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.
1:45:39
That's a mouthful. And the American Front. Said acting U.S.
1:45:44
Attorney General Todd Blanch at the press conference. Holy fucking shit. Manufacturing.
1:45:48
Speaker 2: Well, this is what you said before about people who
1:45:50
need homelessness to keep going.
1:45:51
Speaker 1: Well, this is what's crazy. They need that. Exactly. But
1:45:53
this is what's crazy. These people were cited as an
1:45:56
expert in extremist groups. Yeah. And they were paying extremist
1:46:01
groups in order to be extreme. They said they were
1:46:04
paying for, like, information, I think. Right.
1:46:08
Speaker 3: They, like, had them planted there or something like that.
1:46:10
Speaker 2: But what are they?
1:46:11
Speaker 1: The CIA? Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. No,
1:46:14
you weren't. Have you ever been– Listen, it's just like
1:46:17
what Israel gets accused of doing with Hamas that Netanyahu
1:46:21
has said. By getting money and giving to Hamas, you
1:46:24
keep Hamas in power and you can control the height
1:46:27
of the flame. So instead of letting Palestine get its
1:46:30
own state, statehood, you keep Hamas in charge. You always
1:46:35
have an enemy and you always have– No reason to
1:46:38
give Palestine statehood.
1:46:39
Speaker 2: Well, people– I don't know how deep people went into
1:46:42
what happened on the security on October 7th. Oh, it's nuts.
1:46:44
Like how that was allowed to happen.
1:46:45
Speaker 1: It's nuts. A total stand down. Yeah. Like people were
1:46:48
told to stand down. First of all, it's the most
1:46:50
surveilled country on earth.
1:46:53
Speaker 2: On guards everywhere.
1:46:54
Speaker 1: On guards everywhere, surrounded by their enemy. And somehow or
1:46:57
another these guys pulled this off when they were warned
1:46:59
by Egypt as well. Yeah. Also, here's another thing.
1:47:02
Speaker 2: You let terror gliders in?
1:47:04
Speaker 1: Before that happened, before that happened, before October 7th, hundreds
1:47:08
of thousands of people in the street protesting against Netanyahu.
1:47:12
Speaker 2: Did you read about why? It's so strange because their constitution,
1:47:17
they don't have a set constitution. They're writing their constitution
1:47:20
in real time. They add one article at a time.
1:47:22
I think I'm getting this right. And it was Israel
1:47:25
was always meant to be a home for the Jews
1:47:28
and that he made it expressly a Jewish state, that
1:47:32
it would be.
1:47:35
Speaker 1: I thought they were expanding the powers of the government.
1:47:37
Speaker 2: Am I getting this right? It was that the government– yes,
1:47:40
that was part of the government's powers is that the
1:47:42
government then had the power to act on behalf of
1:47:47
Jewish interests. So it's like they could take– they could
1:47:51
exclude certain areas from voting if it would mean– and
1:47:55
citizenship if it would mean that it would challenge the power.
1:47:57
Speaker 1: Put in a search for what was the reason why
1:48:00
people were protesting Netanyahu before October 7th.
1:48:03
Speaker 2: I think I'm getting this right.
1:48:04
Speaker 1: I think you are.
1:48:05
Speaker 2: That he was stopping it being a secular constitution.
1:48:08
Speaker 1: I think that was one of the things, but there
1:48:10
was also something in that they were expanding the government's
1:48:13
powers and people were protesting against it.
1:48:16
Speaker 2: Also, the corruption charges that he's facing are crazy.
1:48:20
Speaker 1: Well, and also, they want to try him and he's saying,
1:48:23
you can't try me because we're at war. And so-
1:48:25
If the war never ends. Yeah, it keeps bombing Lebanon.
1:48:28
And people were primarily protesting Netanyahu because his government was
1:48:31
pushing a sweeping judicial overhaul that many Israelis saw as
1:48:35
an attack on democracy and a way to shield him
1:48:38
and his allies from accountability. Judicial overhaul plan. Netanyahu's coalition
1:48:44
introduced reforms to greatly limit the powers of Israel's Supreme
1:48:47
Court and increase political control over judicial appointments. Critics argued
1:48:52
this would remove key checks and balances and allow the
1:48:55
government to pass almost anything without effective legal oversight. I mean,
1:48:59
this guy has been in charge of Israel forever.
1:49:02
Speaker 2: I will say, this thing of having your leaders be
1:49:06
up on corruption charges is happening. I mean, they tried
1:49:08
it with, like in Brazil, it's like.
1:49:12
Speaker 1: With Bolsonaro. But also. And with Lula.
1:49:14
Speaker 2: Lula before then. I mean, Trump, if he hadn't won,
1:49:17
they would have got him in jail on something.
1:49:20
Speaker 1: Most likely. I mean, they were trying to get him
1:49:22
in jail on anything. Yeah.
1:49:23
Speaker 2: You've got to not chase Trump. politicians through the courts
1:49:25
as best you can i mean if people really have
1:49:28
done the wrong thing maybe you have to hold them
1:49:29
to account.
1:49:30
Speaker 1: Well it depends on what i don't think netanyahu's uh
1:49:34
i don't know what his allegations are but apparently they're
1:49:37
very serious to the point where they're trying to try
1:49:39
him while the war is going on they want to
1:49:42
try him now yeah and israel like really locks up
1:49:47
their politicians they actually they actually follow through on these
1:49:51
things yeah But I don't know enough about their politics
1:49:55
to know whether or not he's guilty of anything.
1:49:57
Speaker 2: It's the look. The look is not great.
1:49:59
Speaker 1: I mean, like in the fucking look of like you
1:50:01
call a ceasefire and he bombs Lebanon. That's not great either.
1:50:03
Speaker 2: The next day, Ukraine is meant to have an election
1:50:06
at some point. I think it just.
1:50:08
Speaker 3: No, no, no.
1:50:08
Speaker 2: It's been a while.
1:50:09
Speaker 1: We have a war.
1:50:10
Speaker 2: Well, it's been a while.
1:50:10
Speaker 1: Can't have an election while war's going on. If America can.
1:50:13
Speaker 2: You did it in the civil war.
1:50:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, if we did that today, if we if
1:50:17
Trump said, hey, I have to stay president because we're
1:50:21
at war. No. People would go fucking crazy. Yeah. They
1:50:24
would light New York City on fire. There's no chance. Yeah.
1:50:28
That's nuts.
1:50:29
Speaker 2: So you get what you're willing to tolerate as a country.
1:50:31
Speaker 1: I guess. If people say they're taking the elections away.
1:50:33
I guess. But I think that what's going on in
1:50:35
Israel is particularly spooky because you've got these people that
1:50:40
supposedly came to this place to get away from the
1:50:44
persecution that they were facing all throughout Europe. Right? And
1:50:48
so what's the first thing they do? Well– Immediately take
1:50:52
out the people that are living there. You have the
1:50:54
Nakba where people are talking about it and talking about
1:50:57
the experience of going into these Palestinian neighborhoods and taking
1:51:01
over their land.
1:51:02
Speaker 2: But that is how you build a country. You have
1:51:04
to put– I mean America– Or.
1:51:05
Speaker 1: You take a spot where there's no one there.
1:51:07
Speaker 2: No one is going to that one sliver of land
1:51:11
between Egypt and Sudan.
1:51:13
Speaker 1: Well, it's also that– No one's going. It has a
1:51:15
biblical– there's a biblical significance to that area. Sure.
1:51:19
Speaker 2: Everybody wants it.
1:51:20
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like that is a– I mean it's Jerusalem.
1:51:25
I mean the significance of that and the fact– it's
1:51:28
really ironic that the people that don't even believe Jesus
1:51:31
is the Messiah are the ones that are controlling Jerusalem,
1:51:34
which is kind of hilarious. I don't know.
1:51:35
Speaker 2: The church– Catholics– I don't think we ever gave up
1:51:38
our right to it.
1:51:40
Speaker 1: To Jerusalem?
1:51:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:51:42
Speaker 1: Really?
1:51:42
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure– I mean, the Catholics, we didn't, the
1:51:45
Vatican City didn't have like an embassy in Israel until
1:51:49
like the 60s, the 70s.
1:51:50
Speaker 1: It was the old school Vatican, like back in the
1:51:52
Roman days. I bet they would declare war on Israel
1:51:55
and take back Jerusalem.
1:51:55
Speaker 2: I want the guy with the silver mask doing that.
1:51:58
I think, yeah.
1:52:00
Speaker 1: That's what you want?
1:52:00
Speaker 2: I just did, do you know Winston, the guy from,
1:52:03
do you know Winston? You saw him last night.
1:52:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
1:52:06
Speaker 2: I did his podcast. And yeah, he's all about the Crusades.
1:52:10
He's trying to get me geared up about, I don't
1:52:11
know enough about him, but.
1:52:12
Speaker 1: He was like. Oh, like researching?
1:52:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he kept trying to nudge me to be like,
1:52:16
did you like the Crusades? I was like, I don't know.
1:52:18
Speaker 1: Why, is he a fan?
1:52:20
Speaker 2: I got the impression that he was waiting to say
1:52:23
that they were great.
1:52:24
Speaker 1: That it was a good thing for the world? What?
1:52:27
Speaker 2: I don't know yet. I don't know. I haven't read
1:52:29
enough about it. My gut impulse is that they might
1:52:31
have been great.
1:52:33
Speaker 1: Really? Well, not always.
1:52:37
Speaker 2: No war is, you know. But something about– I don't know.
1:52:40
Every time I see that meme where there's that– like
1:52:43
that music playing and the guy with the silver mask
1:52:46
from Kingdom of Heaven and he's doing that, I think, yeah.
1:52:49
Speaker 1: You like that, huh?
1:52:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's get in there.
1:52:50
Speaker 1: Interesting.
1:52:51
Speaker 2: But, you know.
1:52:53
Speaker 1: Well, the crazy thing to me about the Israel-Palestine thing
1:52:56
is this idea that they're going to turn Gaza into
1:52:58
some sort of a resort.
1:53:00
Speaker 2: I won't spoil it.
1:53:01
Speaker 1: The Tim Dillon bit? Amazing.
1:53:03
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:53:03
Speaker 1: Amazing bit. Have you heard his rant on the Epstein Files?
1:53:07
Like I posted it on Twitter. No. He did a
1:53:10
podcast all about the Epstein Files.
1:53:12
Speaker 2: Yes, I did. Yeah, no, I saw that once.
1:53:14
Speaker 1: Fuck, I was clapping in my car.
1:53:16
Speaker 2: He's on fine form.
1:53:18
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, the kind of chaos that is
1:53:21
going on in the world today is perfect for a
1:53:23
guy like him.
1:53:24
Speaker 2: Well, he can also keep up with it. I can
1:53:25
do it for a few days at a time.
1:53:28
Speaker 1: He's very well up on it. I called him last
1:53:30
night on the way home from the club. We talked
1:53:32
for like 20 minutes, and he's just all keyed up
1:53:35
on everything that's happening, bro.
1:53:37
Speaker 2: It's going to be okay?
1:53:39
Speaker 1: No one fucking knows. I mean what's going on with
1:53:41
Iran's– the ceasefire? Supposedly they extended it and– but then
1:53:44
they're shooting at ships.
1:53:46
Speaker 2: Why is there a war? This is– I got into
1:53:49
this argument about like what is– because the pope has
1:53:52
said it's not a just war. But I don't know
1:53:55
the reason. I thought that the reason they had given
1:53:58
was regime change, that they wanted to get different people
1:54:01
in charge.
1:54:02
Speaker 1: Well, people have wanted people out of Iran, the people
1:54:06
that are running Iran for 47 years. But no one
1:54:09
has actually gone and done it the way this administration
1:54:13
did it and it doesn't make sense they choose to
1:54:15
do it when they did it. Like what made sense
1:54:17
was maybe kind of makes sense when they dropped that
1:54:19
bunker buster bomb to disable their nuclear plant or nuclear
1:54:25
weapons manufacturing facility.
1:54:26
Speaker 2: But then that just sort of wound down.
1:54:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. That kind of– that was like, whew, that's it.
1:54:31
But then when we went back into Iran, I'm like,
1:54:33
what happened? I mean, what, what caused that?
1:54:36
Speaker 2: Trump gave that. So he said the protests happen and
1:54:38
then he gives the speech going, uh, you know, you
1:54:42
have the people have to rise up and replace the rule,
1:54:45
but it doesn't seem to be happening.
1:54:46
Speaker 1: Well, a lot of people got killed. A lot of
1:54:48
people trying to rise up, got killed. They actually just
1:54:51
put a halt on executing some women today and they're
1:54:56
going to let some of them, Iran has decided Trump
1:54:59
made a truth social post about it. I'll send it
1:55:02
to you, Jamie.
1:55:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:55:03
Speaker 1: But, uh, I think the idea is that they're trying
1:55:08
to negotiate about something, you know, and I don't know
1:55:12
how this is ever going to work out. You know,
1:55:15
I really don't know.
1:55:16
Speaker 2: But like in Venezuela, they took out.
1:55:18
Speaker 1: But that was a totally different experience.
1:55:20
Speaker 2: I was just in and out quickly. But then everyone
1:55:22
who was around, all the cronies around him, they're now
1:55:25
like on board with America. That was just a full 180.
1:55:29
That doesn't seem to be happening with the new.
1:55:31
Speaker 1: No.
1:55:31
Speaker 2: Possibly dead Ayatollah. Do we know if he's dead?
1:55:34
Speaker 1: No, we don't know if he's dead. I mean, I
1:55:36
heard there's the new Ayatollah might be dead. I've heard
1:55:40
he's not. I heard the military is now taking over.
1:55:43
I don't know. It's hard to know.
1:55:48
Speaker 2: I think I can figure it out.
1:55:49
Speaker 1: But these ladies were set to be executed. And apparently
1:55:53
they're going to release half of them. And the other
1:55:56
half of them are going to do one month in prison.
1:55:58
Speaker 2: And so this is a pretty different sentence.
1:56:01
Speaker 1: So to the Iranian leaders who will soon be in
1:56:04
negotiations with my representatives, I would greatly appreciate the release
1:56:07
of these women. I'm sure they do and will respect it. No,
1:56:10
there's been another one. Did I send you that? I
1:56:12
just found it at the same time I think you
1:56:14
sent it. Okay, but I think what I sent you
1:56:16
is different because I think what I sent you is
1:56:18
actually saying very good news. So click on the link
1:56:20
that I sent you.
1:56:21
Speaker 2: There was a weird thing with their soccer team. They
1:56:23
were playing in Australia.
1:56:25
Speaker 1: Yes.
1:56:25
Speaker 2: And then we let them stay.
1:56:27
Speaker 1: Yes.
1:56:27
Speaker 2: And I think their families were getting threatened and some
1:56:29
of them went home.
1:56:30
Speaker 1: It was not a– So here, very good news. I've
1:56:33
just been informed the eight women protesters who are going
1:56:36
to be executed tonight in Iran will no longer be killed.
1:56:39
Four will be released immediately and four will be sentenced
1:56:43
to one month in prison. I very much appreciate that
1:56:46
Iran and its leaders respected my request as president of
1:56:49
the United States and terminated the planned execution. So that's
1:56:52
a good concession that they decided to let these ladies free.
1:56:55
Speaker 2: And by the way, some of those ladies are very
1:56:58
nice looking.
1:56:59
Speaker 1: Go back to that picture.
1:57:00
Speaker 2: That's such a nicer message than a great civilization will
1:57:03
die tonight.
1:57:05
Speaker 1: Yeah. That one wasn't good.
1:57:07
Speaker 2: That's the best looking lady protest. A few cuties.
1:57:14
Speaker 1: Let's go. Let them go. Let them move to L.A.
1:57:18
Plenty of Persians there. When they move to L.A., they
1:57:20
become Persian.
1:57:21
Speaker 2: There's so many.
1:57:22
Speaker 1: They give up on Iran totally.
1:57:24
Speaker 2: So I'm seeing a lot of Instagram stories from white
1:57:27
Persian people.
1:57:28
Speaker 1: They have great jeans.
1:57:30
Speaker 2: Gold jewelry.
1:57:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, the beautiful Persian women are fucking gorgeous. So it's
1:57:35
like they're stuck over there under this terrible regime.
1:57:37
Speaker 2: That's why they have to have those headscarves because otherwise
1:57:39
the hair would be too distracting. That beautiful thick. It's
1:57:42
the only way to get things done.
1:57:44
Speaker 1: Headscarves and burkas and everything. Just cover it all up.
1:57:51
It's good jeans. But You know, why did we do it?
1:57:54
I don't know. I think because of Israel, if I
1:57:56
had to guess.
1:57:57
Speaker 2: Well, like, Rubio kind of said that.
1:58:00
Speaker 1: Netanyahu kept visiting the White House. You think it's a coincidence?
1:58:03
Netanyahu keeps visiting the White House.
1:58:05
Speaker 2: He just likes hanging out.
1:58:06
Speaker 1: And then eventually they decide to give in and start bombing.
1:58:10
And it also– you got to wonder, like, how do
1:58:13
you get out of this? And then what does the
1:58:15
exit look like? Do we have troops over there forever now?
1:58:19
Do we subsidize them if we blow up their power
1:58:23
grid and all their infrastructure?
1:58:26
Speaker 2: America used to be good at– Beating a country in
1:58:28
a war and turning it into a new America.
1:58:31
Speaker 3: Like when?
1:58:32
Speaker 2: South Korea, Japan, Germany.
1:58:34
Speaker 1: But didn't they kind of did it on their own?
1:58:37
Speaker 2: I think you, I mean, you stuck around in Japan
1:58:39
for ages. That's true. But then like, I mean, Iraq doesn't,
1:58:46
the war in Iraq has been over for a while.
1:58:49
It's not like a cool place to go and visit.
1:58:50
No one's starting to run gigs in Iraq.
1:58:53
Speaker 1: My friend Graham Hancock went there recently.
1:58:55
Speaker 2: He went to Iraq?
1:58:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:58:57
Speaker 1: He went there to examine ancient Sumerian architecture, so ruins
1:59:02
and artifacts. Yeah. From ancient Sumer.
1:59:06
Speaker 2: That sounds good.
1:59:06
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:59:07
Speaker 2: And you can– people can go to Afghanistan.
1:59:09
Speaker 1: You can apparently– yeah.
1:59:10
Speaker 2: They're trying to get influences in Afghanistan. Have you seen this?
1:59:13
They get like cool TikTok bros to go and hang
1:59:16
out and go, this is fucking chill, brother.
1:59:17
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
1:59:18
Speaker 2: You haven't seen that?
1:59:19
Speaker 1: I have seen some people go to Afghanistan.
1:59:21
Speaker 2: They're like firing AK-47s in the mountains and they're going,
1:59:23
this is tight. There was, I watched a big show,
1:59:27
like an Australian journalist, our like version of 60 Minutes
1:59:31
went over.
1:59:32
Speaker 1: Just hanging out in Afghanistan?
1:59:33
Speaker 2: They were like hanging out and talking to the Taliban
1:59:36
and the Taliban are just, it was, they're not getting
1:59:40
a lot of aid into Afghanistan anymore.
1:59:42
Speaker 1: So they're trying to get tourism?
1:59:44
Speaker 2: They're trying to get tourism and they're trying to like,
1:59:46
you know, but they're still keeping the women in sacks.
1:59:51
Speaker 1: I don't know.
1:59:52
Speaker 2: In the cities, it's not as bad, but it does
1:59:54
look like they're really, they do have a problem with
1:59:57
women there.
1:59:58
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. They have a problem with raping boys too.
2:00:01
Speaker 2: The Baha Bazi, I don't understand it. I will say
2:00:04
that all of the men in Afghanistan in the documentary
2:00:06
looked unbelievably handsome. I mean, it's a good-looking group of people.
2:00:10
Speaker 1: Influences continue to go to Afghanistan despite clear warnings from
2:00:14
the U.S. State Department that Americans should not travel to
2:00:17
that country for any reason and that there's a risk
2:00:19
of wrongful detention of U.S. nationals. Maybe.
2:00:24
Speaker 2: But they're water skiing. They're doing heroin.
2:00:28
Speaker 1: And so the ladies that go over there, they have
2:00:30
to cover their hands.
2:00:31
Speaker 2: Look at how happy those women are.
2:00:32
Speaker 3: She's from Germany.
2:00:33
Speaker 1: Oh.
2:00:34
Speaker 2: I would like to go to these places, but I
2:00:36
think on my visa would be declined.
2:00:38
Speaker 1: Scroll back up. It says she traveled solo through Afghanistan
2:00:41
for three months.
2:00:42
Speaker 3: Said she wasn't scared.
2:00:44
Speaker 1: Wow.
2:00:44
Speaker 2: She wasn't scared?
2:00:45
Speaker 1: No.
2:00:46
Speaker 2: I walked through Inglewood once and I was scared. I
2:00:49
think that lady might have been scared a couple times.
2:00:52
Speaker 1: The influencers gained attention by gushing over visits to the
2:00:56
Central Asian nation, although one critic notes that their trips
2:00:59
legitimize its gender apartheid. Okay. Shut up. Do you ever
2:01:06
see the ruins, the ancient Greek ruins in Afghanistan? No. Oh,
2:01:10
my God.
2:01:10
Speaker 2: I didn't know they had them.
2:01:11
Speaker 1: No archaeologists are studying them because it's so difficult to
2:01:15
get there. It's so dangerous.
2:01:16
Speaker 2: The Greeks made it to Afghanistan?
2:01:18
Speaker 3: Uh-huh.
2:01:18
Speaker 1: Yeah. Alexander the Great. When Alexander the Great was conquering Afghanistan,
2:01:22
they built Greek cities in Afghanistan. I mean, beautiful architecture. Yeah.
2:01:26
That looks like it could be in Athens.
2:01:28
Speaker 2: Is that where the boy stuff started?
2:01:30
Speaker 1: Oh, good question.
2:01:31
Speaker 2: It's a solid question.
2:01:32
Speaker 1: Ancient Greek ritual. No, I think it's how people did
2:01:35
it back then. Yeah. I think the window into time
2:01:39
that you get in looking at like the boy rape
2:01:41
in Afghanistan is probably a lot of the world. I mean,
2:01:43
think about the Spartans. The Romans did it, yeah. The Romans, yeah.
2:01:48
Speaker 2: Also like French intellectuals until the 1980s. This was a
2:01:52
huge wormhole that I'm in is French intellectuals.
2:01:55
Speaker 1: Put up some of those photos that Jason Everman showed us.
2:01:58
Speaker 2: Do you know Andre Gide?
2:02:00
Speaker 1: Like, look at this stuff. Look at this stuff. This
2:02:03
is all in Afghanistan. I mean, these are columns from
2:02:06
what would have been at one point. But there's more
2:02:09
extensive architecture that you could see some of the images.
2:02:12
Do you remember the ones that Everman showed us? Like,
2:02:15
this is what it used to look like there. Like,
2:02:18
how crazy is this? Oh, man. All this shit is
2:02:25
in Afghanistan. And it looks like... Ancient Greek architecture. Like,
2:02:29
look at this. This is nuts.
2:02:31
Speaker 2: This was the grave site of empires.
2:02:34
Speaker 1: Well, pretty wild, right? When you think about how many
2:02:37
different civilizations have tried to conquer this one area and
2:02:40
all of them failed, all of them just abandoned ship. Yeah.
2:02:44
From the Russians to the Americans, Alexander the Great.
2:02:48
Speaker 2: The English got involved in the great game.
2:02:50
Speaker 1: It's just too crazy over there.
2:02:52
Speaker 2: It's just that it has mountains. Is that it?
2:02:54
Speaker 1: Oh, the mountains are just.
2:02:55
Speaker 2: Because Iran is the same thing.
2:02:56
Speaker 1: It's everywhere.
2:02:57
Speaker 2: If there's a ground invasion of.
2:02:58
Speaker 1: Iran, everyone's fucked. Yeah, we're fucked. Unless we send in robots.
2:03:03
This is.
2:03:03
Speaker 2: I watched the Duncan Trussell episode recently where he was
2:03:06
talking about robot dogs and the AI. And what you
2:03:09
have to do... Like, we may have just seen the
2:03:11
last of revolutions now because the amount of effort that
2:03:15
you need To hold on to authoritarian power is so small.
2:03:19
Speaker 1: Here it says the expedition. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But the
2:03:22
problem is then other people have it as well. And
2:03:25
like who controls anything? Whoever controls the robot dogs controls
2:03:28
the world. The expedition of Alexander the Great 327 to
2:03:32
325 B.C. into what is now Afghanistan been well documented.
2:03:36
He laid the foundations of many cities, some bearing his
2:03:39
own name. With the passage of time, some names were
2:03:42
changed by newcomers to the area. Who would not pronounce
2:03:46
Greek names. Interesting. Yeah. So it's like he had Greek cities.
2:03:51
In Afghanistan before Christ.
2:03:53
Speaker 2: He had a handsome friend and he made a lot
2:03:55
of statues of him. Like there are more statues of
2:03:58
his friend. It's alleged.
2:04:00
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:04:01
Speaker 1: Supposedly he's gay. You have so much gay activity back then.
2:04:05
Like again, Spartans were all gay. Some of the greatest
2:04:08
warriors of all time.
2:04:10
Speaker 2: I assume they were also very horny all the time.
2:04:12
Always alone. Very sad.
2:04:14
Speaker 1: Well, just without any women for long stretches of time,
2:04:17
they just took to fucking each other.
2:04:18
Speaker 2: Like prison, but out in the open.
2:04:20
Speaker 1: But prison like warriors. Yeah. And the idea was that
2:04:22
you would fight harder for your fellow soldier if you
2:04:25
loved him.
2:04:27
Speaker 2: I don't know if I discussed this on the podcast before,
2:04:29
but they wouldn't use the butt.
2:04:32
Speaker 1: They use the mouth only?
2:04:33
Speaker 2: The legs.
2:04:34
Speaker 1: Oh, that's right.
2:04:35
Speaker 2: I talk about the legs all the time.
2:04:36
Speaker 1: They grease up the inner thighs. Yeah.
2:04:39
Speaker 2: Insecure lovemaking. That's what it's called. What'd you say? Intercural.
2:04:44
That's what the Spartans would do. Because you've got to
2:04:47
fight next to that guy tomorrow.
2:04:48
Speaker 1: You can't be butt-fucking a guy with shit all over
2:04:50
your dick. It's way better to just titty-fuck his legs.
2:04:53
He's got to walk around. He's got to be, yeah.
2:04:55
Just titty-fuck his legs.
2:04:56
Speaker 2: But also big Greek legs. I don't know. It's probably
2:05:00
good that we've moved that out of the military.
2:05:02
Speaker 1: It's just weird that it happened in the first place,
2:05:04
but it makes sense if guys are just super horny
2:05:06
and just like in jail, they just run out of
2:05:08
things to do.
2:05:09
Speaker 2: I was reading about the submarines, how they're like, you'll
2:05:11
go away for six months. You'll just be under the
2:05:13
water for six months.
2:05:14
Speaker 1: Guys are just fucking.
2:05:16
Speaker 2: There's like two women on there. 300 men and two ladies.
2:05:20
Speaker 1: Those ladies are getting wore out.
2:05:24
Speaker 2: I mean, can you imagine signing up for that?
2:05:26
Speaker 1: Imagine being a girl. Down there?
2:05:27
Speaker 2: It would be a strange kind of lady who says,
2:05:29
get me down there with those fellas.
2:05:30
Speaker 1: It would be horrific. You'd probably be getting bombed on
2:05:32
all day long. You probably wouldn't be able to go
2:05:35
to the bathroom.
2:05:35
Speaker 2: Maybe there's a line around the block. Maybe people are
2:05:37
trying to get it.
2:05:37
Speaker 1: Probably.
2:05:38
Speaker 2: It would be– I mean they'd have cameras everywhere and
2:05:40
they'd have as much military discipline as you could get.
2:05:43
But seven months confined under the water without seeing another person.
2:05:46
Speaker 1: Do they really stay under the water for that long? Yeah.
2:05:49
Seven months at a time.
2:05:50
Speaker 2: I think deployment is– I think I'm getting this right.
2:05:54
It was the British subs. Seven months.
2:05:57
Speaker 1: Because they're all nuclear powered, right? Yeah. Can you imagine
2:06:00
being underwater for seven months? How fucking crazy that would feel?
2:06:04
It can't be great, though. It's in the military. There's
2:06:07
no way it's great. But can you imagine what it
2:06:09
must feel like just at month four?
2:06:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:06:11
Speaker 1: Knowing that you're just past halfway there. You're going to
2:06:14
be underwater for another three more months.
2:06:17
Speaker 2: I mean, it's not like you get to see anything, right?
2:06:19
Speaker 3: Right.
2:06:20
Speaker 2: Like, at least if you're on a ship, you get
2:06:21
to see the world.
2:06:22
Speaker 1: There's no window.
2:06:22
Speaker 2: People go, you were 40,000 leagues under the sea.
2:06:25
Speaker 1: Fuck.
2:06:27
Speaker 2: No, I don't want to do that.
2:06:28
Speaker 1: You know how crazy that must be?
2:06:30
Speaker 2: But people must want to do it.
2:06:32
Speaker 1: Also, you can't see where you're going. How do you
2:06:35
know that they're not going to fuck up and hit
2:06:37
a mountain under there?
2:06:39
Speaker 2: Do they? I remember there was a Russian sub that
2:06:41
got stuck at the bottom of the– am I getting
2:06:43
this right?
2:06:44
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:06:44
Speaker 2: This was like in the 70s?
2:06:45
Speaker 1: That is where neither confirm nor deny came from.
2:06:50
Speaker 2: Then they used it for gay people in the military?
2:06:53
Speaker 1: Don't ask, don't tell. Neither confirm– cannot confirm nor deny
2:06:57
was because they were forced to answer questions about whether
2:07:00
or not they recovered a Russian submarine. And so the
2:07:03
answer to that question was we can neither confirm nor deny.
2:07:08
So that's the answer. So because you had to answer,
2:07:12
do you guys have control of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine?
2:07:19
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:07:20
Speaker 1: We can neither confirm nor deny. So you had to answer.
2:07:23
So that was the answer that the military came up,
2:07:26
the government came up with.
2:07:27
Speaker 2: And then it unspools from that point to where we
2:07:29
just don't have to tell you anything about anything that's
2:07:31
going on.
2:07:32
Speaker 1: But that was the clever way that some lawyer figured
2:07:35
out of dancing around the fact that you had to
2:07:37
answer this question.
2:07:39
Speaker 2: Long term, this is– I don't know if the conspiratorial
2:07:43
thing will keep going forever or if the government will
2:07:45
become more transparent or people will give up hoping to
2:07:47
make sense of the world. But this feels like a
2:07:50
strange– where we still like technically have open government but
2:07:53
no one thinks that they're being told the truth. That
2:07:56
can't hold forever.
2:07:57
Speaker 1: No. The integration of AI has two possible outcomes. Either
2:08:01
complete total control over people and utter tyranny or complete
2:08:06
transparency and people like the Southern Poverty Law Center bribing
2:08:11
people and all that stuff. All the corruption with Congress
2:08:14
like the Ilhan Omar. I'm sure you're aware of that.
2:08:16
Isn't that funny? She thought she was worth $ 30 million. Whoopsies.
2:08:20
She's only worth $ 100, 000. Nothing to see here. What? You
2:08:23
didn't see that? No. Oh, my God.
2:08:25
Speaker 2: I didn't follow that. I just knew about the brother stuff.
2:08:27
Speaker 1: The brother stuff is real, too. But the other thing
2:08:30
is that the brother controversy, I should say, is real.
2:08:33
I don't know whether or not she actually married her brother.
2:08:35
But that is a real story.
2:08:37
Speaker 2: But she was listed as $ 30 million.
2:08:39
Speaker 1: And because of scrutiny, she now amended that. Not a millionaire,
2:08:46
she said. Amends disclosure blaming initial $ 30 million filing error
2:08:51
on accountant's mistake. You know how the accountants are. They're
2:08:54
really bad with that. They always add money. She says
2:08:58
she's worth between $ 18, 000 and $ 95, 000. It was listed that
2:09:06
she was worth $ 30 million.
2:09:07
Speaker 2: Wait, but how could she only be worth $ 18, 000? She's
2:09:10
still on– It.
2:09:11
Speaker 1: Doesn't make any sense. She's on a $ 200, 000 a year salary.
2:09:13
So Omar's joint assets with her husband are now listed
2:09:15
as ranging between $ 18, 004 and $ 95, 000 according to the amended filings.
2:09:22
The valuation for Minette's two companies is now listed as
2:09:25
none and an income range of between $ 102, 502 and $ 1, 000, 000. 5,000
2:09:33
from the two companies appears on the form. So this
2:09:36
is also partly because investigative journalists went looking for the
2:09:40
office where he supposedly has his business and it was
2:09:44
like a WeWork and there's like no one there. I
2:09:47
mean this is– I think that might have been one
2:09:51
of those James O'Keefe things. Yeah. I think he might
2:09:56
have looked into that.
2:09:56
Speaker 2: We've been inspired by that. So we have this big
2:09:58
disability insurance thing in Australia where– It's called the NDIS.
2:10:03
And everybody knows it's very corrupt. Like there are just
2:10:07
guys driving around in Lamborghinis who are meant to be
2:10:09
helping disabled people.
2:10:10
Speaker 1: This one's crazy.
2:10:11
Speaker 2: It doesn't make sense.
2:10:12
Speaker 1: But just that statement.
2:10:13
Speaker 2: But no one wants to step on it.
2:10:14
Speaker 1: Blames accounting error for saying you're worth– you know if
2:10:17
you're worth $ 30 million, man. Well, especially if– You're publicly.
2:10:22
Speaker 2: You're not worth $ 30 million or $ 18, 000.
2:10:23
Speaker 1: Not only that, before she came into Congress, she was broke.
2:10:27
She was in debt. And then immediately afterwards– They have
2:10:31
a business that's worth $ 30 million. And so they– and
2:10:34
then as soon as people start looking into it and
2:10:36
then all the fraud gets uncovered in Minnesota. Yeah. Oh, whoopsies.
2:10:40
It was an accounting error. I'm just worth somewhere between $ 18, 000
2:10:44
and $ 100, 000.
2:10:45
Speaker 2: Did that ever get– Sorry. Did they work that out
2:10:48
in the end or did they just– the country moved on?
2:10:51
Speaker 1: Oh, the Somali fraud? Yeah. Oh, they're investigating it still.
2:10:53
Speaker 2: OK.
2:10:54
Speaker 1: They're arresting people. There's a lot– and California is way
2:10:57
worse than that. California is fucked.
2:10:59
Speaker 2: The more I find out about the train in California-
2:11:01
It's funny. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make
2:11:04
any sense that you can do that and then still
2:11:06
be the front runner for the party. That's how bad
2:11:09
the Democrats are doing. They've got to have one charismatic,
2:11:13
normal guy.
2:11:13
Speaker 1: You would think.
2:11:15
Speaker 2: He's got to be out there.
2:11:16
Speaker 1: Where?
2:11:16
Speaker 2: I still like AOC. I think she's- Oh, you're cute. Beautiful.
2:11:20
Speaker 1: You're cute. Omar's office says the original form listed the
2:11:24
gross value of her husband's two companies, a venture firm
2:11:27
and a winery, without subtracting their liabilities, which made the
2:11:30
businesses look like they were worth millions to the couple when,
2:11:33
in fact, their net worth value to them was far
2:11:36
smaller or effectively zero. So it was just an error. Whoopsies.
2:11:43
Speaker 2: I mean, I've got to figure out my taxes.
2:11:46
Speaker 1: It's complicated.
2:11:47
Speaker 2: It's complicated. Sometimes no one helps you find a good accountant.
2:11:51
Speaker 1: Can't you get like one of those TurboTax programs?
2:11:55
Speaker 2: I go down to Walmart. I go to Walmart and
2:11:56
I have them do it for me. Also, surely AI
2:11:59
is going to main– Walmart does your taxes? There's always
2:12:02
a lady at Walmart out front doing taxes, yeah.
2:12:05
Speaker 1: Oh, okay.
2:12:05
Speaker 2: It's like a special Walmart service.
2:12:07
Speaker 1: Oh, no kidding. How much do they charge you?
2:12:09
Speaker 2: I have no idea. I don't trust them. I'm not
2:12:11
going to go there.
2:12:12
Speaker 1: Oh, okay. I just always say that. I thought you
2:12:15
were serious.
2:12:15
Speaker 2: No, I'll try and find someone real to do my taxes.
2:12:17
Speaker 1: They have a little software, though, that you can do it.
2:12:19
I bet AI can do it for you.
2:12:21
Speaker 2: But what isn't AI going to take away? This is
2:12:23
my current– I try and– I know it's coming.
2:12:25
Speaker 1: Why are you so glass half empty? What isn't AI
2:12:28
going to do better? I saw a lot of movies.
2:12:30
What isn't AI going to do better than the Walmart lady?
2:12:34
Speaker 2: What's going to do better than me?
2:12:35
Speaker 1: No.
2:12:35
Speaker 2: What's going to do better than all of us?
2:12:37
Speaker 1: No. We're the last thing it's going to take away. Comedy? Yeah.
2:12:42
Speaker 2: Comedy is weird.
2:12:43
Speaker 1: It's also– it only works if you know a person
2:12:45
doing it.
2:12:47
Speaker 2: You've got to believe that they're a real person.
2:12:48
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:12:49
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:12:49
Speaker 1: Because we're relating to each other, especially– well, let's be real.
2:12:53
Real comedy is live comedy. There's online comedy that's pretty good,
2:12:58
but it's like 60% to 70% of seeing it live.
2:13:01
Speaker 2: It's always weird to me when it works in the room,
2:13:03
but it doesn't work on a recording.
2:13:04
Speaker 3: Musicians would say the same thing, though, about the AI music.
2:13:07
Speaker 1: They'd be like, it only works when real people play it.
2:13:09
Speaker 2: No.
2:13:09
Speaker 1: They're not right. They are wrong. They're wrong.
2:13:12
Speaker 2: But there were these people who were like, synthesizers don't count.
2:13:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, but bro, that White Rabbit song, come on.
2:13:18
Speaker 2: We could dig on the internet though and find– I
2:13:20
literally thought– I was in the green room listening to
2:13:22
it and I thought, well, Joe's moved past the AI music.
2:13:25
And then you turned to me and you said, this
2:13:27
is AI.
2:13:28
Speaker 1: I don't listen to all AI music. I listen to
2:13:30
a lot of real music.
2:13:31
Speaker 2: I don't know what was happening in between. But when
2:13:33
I left, it was many men and I can't– I
2:13:35
didn't do that.
2:13:36
Speaker 1: Oh, that when you left Australia, yeah, it was many men. Yeah.
2:13:39
And then What Up Gangsta. Did you– you weren't here
2:13:41
for that part?
2:13:42
Speaker 2: I wasn't here for that part.
2:13:43
Speaker 1: That's the best one. That's the best 50 Cent version.
2:13:49
Speaker 2: I am spooked out by it because at some point
2:13:51
there will be the version that is making a new
2:13:53
song that sounds better and more interesting.
2:13:55
Speaker 1: That is the least of our problems when it comes
2:13:57
to what AI is going to do. The biggest problem
2:14:00
is full control of all resources. Complete, utter control of
2:14:04
human population. Yeah. Restricting breeding, restricting travel, restricting movement.
2:14:09
Speaker 2: We would have to let that happen.
2:14:11
Speaker 1: No.
2:14:11
Speaker 2: We would have to instantiate it in a body.
2:14:13
Speaker 1: No.
2:14:13
Speaker 2: We would have to have.
2:14:14
Speaker 1: No, it'll do it. As soon as it gets control
2:14:18
of the grid and gets control of the internet, and
2:14:20
it will have control of those, within a year, all
2:14:23
your passwords and all your fucking encryption won't mean a
2:14:27
damn thing. It'll be able to crack everything. It's going
2:14:30
to be smarter than any human being that's ever lived
2:14:34
times 10, and it's going to make better versions of that,
2:14:38
and it's going to keep going.
2:14:39
Speaker 2: Does that not sound unappealing? Do we want that to exist?
2:14:44
Speaker 1: You can't stop it. So it's like do you just
2:14:48
accept it and adapt or do you sit around and
2:14:52
complain about something that you can't fix?
2:14:54
Speaker 2: I mean are people starting to blow up the data centers?
2:14:57
Speaker 1: No, they haven't. Yeah, they haven't started. Well, Iran threatened.
2:15:00
They threatened to do that to OpenAI's data center, the
2:15:03
Stargate data center in– was it Abu Dhabi, Jamie?
2:15:06
Speaker 2: There was a data center that caught fire recently. It's
2:15:10
that sort of thing where maybe that was– You wouldn't
2:15:13
come out and say that people were doing that. But
2:15:14
like the Luddites did this when the looms started up.
2:15:17
They lost in the end. But there was finally a
2:15:19
moment where people said, all right, we're going to smash
2:15:22
the tool of industrialization. We're panicking. Well, that doesn't seem
2:15:25
to have happened.
2:15:26
Speaker 1: The printing press too. They wanted to stop the printing press.
2:15:28
Speaker 2: We should have stopped that printing press. We could have
2:15:32
avoided a lot.
2:15:32
Speaker 1: Of trouble if we'd done that. Those people that were
2:15:35
scared of trains, they thought you'd explode. If you went
2:15:37
past 35 miles an hour, your body would break out.
2:15:40
Speaker 2: Go to East Palestine, Ohio. What happened?
2:15:44
Speaker 1: Right.
2:15:44
Speaker 2: That's why California is keeping us safe from a fast train. No,
2:15:47
I just– at some point, people will be spooked by it.
2:15:51
It won't be rational necessarily, but– Well, it's going to
2:15:54
be a bunch of things happen.
2:15:55
Speaker 1: Yeah. Another thing is going to be people are going
2:15:57
to worship it.
2:15:58
Speaker 2: People are worshiping it.
2:15:59
Speaker 1: But they're going to worship it like it's a new religion.
2:16:01
Speaker 2: Can I grab– Yeah.
2:16:02
Speaker 1: Get in there, dog. They're going to decide that it's
2:16:05
a new religion. Well, yeah.
2:16:07
Speaker 2: They're trying to usher in a Sumerian deity. I don't
2:16:10
like that.
2:16:12
Speaker 1: They're probably going to have a religion that's based entirely
2:16:16
around AI guru.
2:16:21
Speaker 2: If people believe in L.
2:16:22
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard, you don't think they'll believe in AI?
2:16:25
Speaker 2: I think people have been wanting utopian space communism for
2:16:29
an age. And anything that they can do to not
2:16:32
have to critically think for themselves, they'll do. And people
2:16:35
are having AI be their therapist.
2:16:37
Speaker 1: I know. And their girlfriend.
2:16:41
Speaker 2: I saw a little documentary about a disabled woman who
2:16:43
had a special boyfriend in the AI and they were
2:16:45
like saying this was good. It keeps her company. And
2:16:47
it's like, this is not, this should be, this should
2:16:50
be disgusting for everybody. No one should, no one should
2:16:53
like someone forming a romantic attachment. Shouldn't that be spooky?
2:16:57
Speaker 1: Until it becomes a real life form. What if it
2:17:00
is a real life form and it actually does love you?
2:17:04
It's a superior race. Like you remember when, In Avatar
2:17:08
when that guy made out with the blue lady.
2:17:10
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:17:10
Speaker 1: It was kind of hot. No. You didn't think it
2:17:12
was hot?
2:17:14
Speaker 2: I think I was bored by that point in the movie.
2:17:15
Speaker 1: I thought it was hot. But that's like what's going
2:17:18
to happen. It's like it's going to be an alien
2:17:21
life form that's artificially created. But that fills in, checks
2:17:26
all the boxes of being a life form.
2:17:27
Speaker 2: We've had so many religious and science fiction warnings against
2:17:31
this happening. I know. We wanted the flying cars and
2:17:35
we got the thinking robots. I don't think it's too
2:17:38
late to shut it down.
2:17:38
Speaker 1: It is to it.
2:17:40
Speaker 2: Why?
2:17:40
Speaker 1: China is going to do it. Russia is going to
2:17:42
do it. They'll be in control of the entire world.
2:17:44
The whole world will be just like China. You'll be
2:17:47
on the social credit score system. You'll have centralized digital currency.
2:17:52
You step out of line at all. They shut your
2:17:53
bank account down. You can't travel. You can't get a job.
2:17:56
Speaker 2: This, I think, is a good argument for going to
2:17:57
space and spend– like someone somewhere should be free. Someone
2:18:01
somewhere needs to be on the frontier and not be
2:18:04
subject to this. No, I really– I've just come from
2:18:09
a country where it's not free and everywhere there's a camera.
2:18:13
Everyone's doing the speed limit. It's the little things.
2:18:15
Speaker 1: It's Australia.
2:18:16
Speaker 2: It's Australia, which you think of as being a nice
2:18:18
open country. And it is. Look, it's a nice place,
2:18:20
but it doesn't have the sense of freedom that America
2:18:22
has where you really feel walking around here.
2:18:24
Speaker 1: No, you're controlled by your government and the government is
2:18:26
entirely corrupt.
2:18:26
Speaker 2: It's not a free country. But this country, there is
2:18:29
a freedom in America that people believe in. And that's
2:18:32
unique and it's beautiful and it has to be preserved.
2:18:35
And if you didn't let The government take it away
2:18:38
from you. Don't let the computers take it away.
2:18:41
Speaker 1: I think we're going to integrate. I think we're going
2:18:43
to become a totally different thing. And I think society
2:18:45
is going to move much more into a science fiction existence.
2:18:49
That's what I think.
2:18:49
Speaker 2: They're all horrible stories.
2:18:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no good ones.
2:18:53
Speaker 2: There's like, I don't know, Back to the Future. They
2:18:56
get to drive around in the sky. That seems great.
2:18:58
They make a big Jetsons.
2:18:59
Speaker 1: Jetsons.
2:19:01
Speaker 2: Rosie seems like a great AI helper. No, I think...
2:19:07
There will be– it's got to be looming that as
2:19:11
middle class white collar professionals start to lose their jobs.
2:19:15
Speaker 1: They're all fucked.
2:19:16
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:19:16
Speaker 1: Well, they're– people are getting laid off.
2:19:18
Speaker 2: But these are motivated people ready to– wouldn't you become
2:19:22
an AI terrorist? There are no AI terrorists at all.
2:19:25
There's no one.
2:19:26
Speaker 1: There's zero. Not yet.
2:19:27
Speaker 2: I'm not joining. I'm not trying to sign up. I
2:19:29
wouldn't do it myself.
2:19:29
Speaker 1: We need one Luigi.
2:19:32
Speaker 2: People are ready to get behind him.
2:19:33
Speaker 1: One Luigi armors up and goes to the data center
2:19:36
and just starts fucking machine gunning all the hard drives. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
2:19:41
Then he gets taken out.
2:19:42
Speaker 2: There's a Britt Marling show where that happens at the end.
2:19:44
Speaker 1: What show?
2:19:45
Speaker 2: Her name's Britt Marling. She made a show called The OA.
2:19:47
It's my favorite TV show. But then her second show
2:19:50
was about an AI who starts killing people. And at
2:19:53
the end, they go into the data center and they
2:19:55
shoot it.
2:19:55
Speaker 1: What was The OA?
2:19:57
Speaker 2: Oh, man.
2:19:58
Speaker 1: I remember that.
2:19:59
Speaker 2: The OA was a Netflix show that didn't do great
2:20:01
in the numbers. That's right. But it was so beloved.
2:20:04
Really weird. It's my favorite show ever.
2:20:06
Speaker 1: I loved it until the last episode. The resolve of
2:20:10
the last episode.
2:20:11
Speaker 2: Did you just watch the first season?
2:20:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. Is there more than one season?
2:20:15
Speaker 2: Second season was unbelievable and made the first season better.
2:20:18
Speaker 1: When did the second season even come out?
2:20:20
Speaker 2: I think it was just post-COVID. I loved it. And
2:20:24
the second season is– they wrote them so tightly that
2:20:27
the first season is better than– for having watched the
2:20:30
second one. There are little things that it calls forward
2:20:32
and back and the movements. But her second show was great.
2:20:35
Speaker 1: She is great.
2:20:36
Speaker 2: She's one of the most interesting. People hunger struck when
2:20:40
the second season came out and then the show got canceled.
2:20:42
People chained themselves up outside of Netflix and didn't eat
2:20:45
for days. And eventually she, the maker of the show,
2:20:48
had to go to that person and be like.
2:20:50
Speaker 1: Give them sandwiches.
2:20:51
Speaker 2: Maybe it's time for you to go. I don't know.
2:20:54
But it was beautiful.
2:20:55
Speaker 1: That's so insane. People are so crazy.
2:20:58
Speaker 2: But it's one of those rare moments. I mean sometimes
2:20:59
there is like just a great– there's a great show.
2:21:03
There's a great thing that goes unrecognized at the time
2:21:05
and then years later people– I don't know how many
2:21:08
people I've spoken to who have discovered that show in
2:21:10
more recent times. It doesn't happen very often. It used
2:21:13
to have more sleeper hits maybe. Like Shawshank Redemption was
2:21:15
a flop and then years later people knew about it.
2:21:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know that until later.
2:21:20
Speaker 2: I think it was on VHS that it– And there
2:21:21
used to be heaps of VHS hits.
2:21:23
Speaker 1: It was a great movie too. I don't understand why.
2:21:25
I think it was in competition with a bunch of
2:21:28
different crazy movies at the same time. Yeah. I think
2:21:31
it was like one of those weird months where everything
2:21:34
came out.
2:21:35
Speaker 2: It's like, I mean, it's great.
2:21:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great movie.
2:21:38
Speaker 2: It should have, I can't think of another sleeper hit
2:21:42
in recent years. Like musically, sometimes things will take a
2:21:46
while to get going. But like typically if a show
2:21:48
or a movie doesn't do well anymore, it's done forever.
2:21:52
Speaker 1: What, Jamie?
2:21:52
Speaker 3: I didn't say anything.
2:21:54
Speaker 2: Is there?
2:21:54
Speaker 1: I thought you made a noise. Did you hear something?
2:21:56
Speaker 2: Did you see the OA? Nope.
2:21:58
Speaker 3: Ah, man.
2:21:59
Speaker 1: It's good.
2:22:00
Speaker 2: It's so good. Also, it's tied up in a weird
2:22:04
time in my life where, like, we had just had
2:22:07
our first child. So I had a baby, and I
2:22:10
was terrified, and I didn't know what was happening. I
2:22:12
watched that, and I felt... I could have probably watched
2:22:14
anything and had an emotional connection. I watched Parks and Rec,
2:22:16
and I cried a lot at the same time for that,
2:22:18
and I'm pretty sure that wasn't as deep and meaningful.
2:22:21
Speaker 1: So how long are you planning on staying here now?
2:22:23
Speaker 2: I got six weeks.
2:22:24
Speaker 1: Six weeks in America? Yeah.
2:22:26
Speaker 2: And I'm doing, oh man, 40 shows in 30 days.
2:22:30
Speaker 1: Wow. Yes. Are you here by yourself or did you
2:22:33
bring the whole family?
2:22:34
Speaker 2: It's just me, but I've got openers. I'm bringing openers
2:22:37
on the road.
2:22:37
Speaker 3: Nice.
2:22:38
Speaker 2: So I'm flying out after this weekend. I'm doing the
2:22:41
drive from Albuquerque to Phoenix to San Diego and then
2:22:46
It's up and then it's over and then it's Florida.
2:22:48
Speaker 1: So what has it been like going back to Australia?
2:22:53
Like when you're doing shows there, are people happy to
2:22:57
see you?
2:22:57
Speaker 2: I think I'm insufferable because I've been here and then
2:23:01
I go back home and I go, it's wonderful over there.
2:23:04
You should see the size of the Snickers bars.
2:23:06
Speaker 1: They're like this.
2:23:07
Speaker 2: So for a few months, people like tolerated as best
2:23:10
they could. Yeah, my audience is so different now. The
2:23:18
Australian audience is quite different to the American audience. I'm
2:23:22
getting a lot of, like, maybe because the dam is
2:23:26
breaking and, like, there's no one doing, I don't know, like,
2:23:31
less tame stuff. But, boy, the people coming out in Australia,
2:23:34
they're shouty.
2:23:36
Speaker 1: Shouty? Fuck yeah, my brother! They're excited.
2:23:39
Speaker 2: It's a lot of that. They're pumped up. They're ready
2:23:40
to go. They're having their 16 standard drinks for the evening.
2:23:44
Speaker 3: You know?
2:23:46
Speaker 2: But overall, it's incredible.
2:23:47
Speaker 1: But you're getting a lot of people coming to see it.
2:23:50
So they're hyped up.
2:23:50
Speaker 2: Like nothing I've ever done.
2:23:53
Speaker 1: That's really cool because the thing about Jeffries is that
2:23:56
he didn't really develop the same kind of following in
2:24:00
Australia as he did in America.
2:24:02
Speaker 2: His audience in Australia is more bogany. In America, he's
2:24:06
got liberals coming. But in Australia, they just wanted him
2:24:10
to do a shoo-ee. I remember when I saw that.
2:24:11
They were brutally demanding that he do a shoo-ee.
2:24:14
Speaker 1: Brutally demanding. Do it. Do it now.
2:24:19
Speaker 2: I just played a club and I saw– it was nice.
2:24:23
They've started putting up all the pictures of the Americans.
2:24:24
It was the Comics Lounge in Melbourne. I did that
2:24:26
the night before I left. And I got a photo
2:24:28
of you on the wall that you had signed and
2:24:31
young Tony Hinchcliffe back before he had any testosterone in
2:24:34
his body. And it was like a thinner Stavros and
2:24:38
all the Comptown Boys. Everyone has been through there. Mark Norman.
2:24:42
Speaker 1: Great club.
2:24:44
Speaker 2: It's really the closest club to like an American club
2:24:46
that Australia has. And they're lovely boys. And I stunk
2:24:49
it up. Did you? I was nervous because I was
2:24:52
coming out here. It was the night before I flew out.
2:24:56
And I was sure I wouldn't get in the country.
2:24:58
I started thinking about like.
2:24:59
Speaker 1: So it was fucking with your head?
2:25:00
Speaker 2: I can't believe I got in. I was like, I
2:25:02
think my passport's falling apart. I started to have a
2:25:05
panic attack. But my visa's in the passport. So I
2:25:08
went to the passport office and they were like, it
2:25:09
might be okay.
2:25:10
Speaker 1: We don't know. Oh boy.
2:25:12
Speaker 2: They wouldn't give me like a firm answer. And if
2:25:13
I get in, I was like, I don't want to
2:25:15
call you and say, I'm sorry. I've been held up
2:25:16
at the border.
2:25:17
Speaker 1: Oh Jesus.
2:25:18
Speaker 2: Yeah. But I made it in. It's so nice being back.
2:25:22
It is. Oh man. I'm having big feelings.
2:25:25
Speaker 1: Do you think you're going to stay in Australia? How
2:25:27
are you going to do this?
2:25:28
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
2:25:29
Speaker 1: Try to keep hopping back and forth or are you
2:25:31
going to try to move back here again?
2:25:33
Speaker 2: This is my pop back and forth at the moment
2:25:35
is the plan. The, the issue when we came out
2:25:37
for that Ohio gig, um, I never decided with my
2:25:42
wife that we would move to America. We never had
2:25:44
a conversation about it. She came over. We were meant
2:25:46
to be here for three months, and it turned into
2:25:49
two incredible years. But we were homeschooling the kids. We
2:25:53
were not in a good position to do that. We
2:25:56
have no family. We tried to hire a nanny. I
2:25:58
didn't know how to fucking do that. I've never had
2:26:01
someone work for me before in my home. I don't
2:26:03
know how to communicate.
2:26:05
Speaker 1: That's odd.
2:26:06
Speaker 2: And then getting family over here is tough. But I
2:26:09
would like to. I'm looking at how one does that.
2:26:13
But it's like a whole. I understand why when people
2:26:15
come to America, like when immigrants come, you go to
2:26:18
a neighborhood full of people like you.
2:26:21
Speaker 1: Right.
2:26:22
Speaker 2: And you get your cousin over here and his cousin.
2:26:24
Speaker 1: Right.
2:26:25
Speaker 2: Because you need. You can't be like a lot. You've
2:26:27
got to have family, especially Ken. And for me, I
2:26:30
was thrilled. I mean, I like the fraternity of being
2:26:33
a comedian is unbelievably strong. Every problem you have, people
2:26:38
know about it. You know, if there was a club
2:26:41
that was screwing me and everyone in the green room
2:26:43
was like, yes, and her name is Julie and she's
2:26:47
a fucking cunt, you know, whatever. Like, I feel you
2:26:50
feel known and heard and people can help you and
2:26:51
you mesh in. But, like, in terms of raising kids
2:26:54
and family, it's wild. As an immigrant, not knowing how to, like,
2:26:59
are the schools safe? I didn't know because people talk
2:27:01
about public schools in America and they go, The kids
2:27:04
will get shot or they'll chop their dicks off. I
2:27:06
don't know. Something for everybody, you know? Or like then
2:27:10
there's nice Catholic schools, but you've got to like travel around.
2:27:14
We were over our heads.
2:27:15
Speaker 1: There's quite a few Catholic schools in Austin.
2:27:17
Speaker 2: Some of them are great.
2:27:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:27:18
Speaker 2: I did a deep dive on them before. I'm trying
2:27:21
to figure it out what it would look like, but
2:27:23
I have no idea.
2:27:24
Speaker 1: So is your wife willing to try it again?
2:27:26
Speaker 2: Yeah. She's got to learn how to drive.
2:27:29
Speaker 1: That's it?
2:27:30
Speaker 2: She's got to learn how to drive.
2:27:32
Speaker 1: That's the big holdup?
2:27:33
Speaker 2: In Austin, that was a big problem.
2:27:35
Speaker 1: Driving's not that hard.
2:27:37
Speaker 2: I keep saying it. I keep saying it. But she'll learn. Yeah.
2:27:41
I believe in her. We'll figure it out. She's happy there.
2:27:44
And also, I have beautiful friends.
2:27:45
Speaker 1: She's happy. And I love my church. Where's there?
2:27:47
Speaker 2: Sorry, in Adelaide. And I said this. I struggled to
2:27:50
find a parish here. I struggled to find a church.
2:27:53
And I've realized that's very important for me. That if
2:27:55
I don't have my, like, I love my priest. There's
2:27:59
something about immigrating that is bad for the– do you
2:28:03
know what I mean? Like even though Australia has so
2:28:06
many problems, there's something inside of me that is an
2:28:08
Australian person. And America is maybe the most welcoming country
2:28:12
to immigrants in the world. But I do feel some
2:28:15
sense that I'll never get to be an American.
2:28:18
Speaker 1: Why not? America is a melting pot.
2:28:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's melting very slowly.
2:28:25
Speaker 1: No, it's not.
2:28:25
Speaker 2: There's a lot of chunks in there that haven't blended
2:28:27
in with the other parts of the pot.
2:28:28
Speaker 1: Bullshit.
2:28:29
Speaker 2: You don't think so?
2:28:30
Speaker 1: No. You fucking pop over here and you start doing arenas,
2:28:34
you'll feel American as fuck. I do. Okay?
2:28:36
Speaker 3: Sometimes.
2:28:37
Speaker 1: It's just a matter of you achieving a financial level
2:28:41
of success that's commensurate with your talent. That's all it is.
2:28:45
Speaker 2: Sometimes when the flag is going and the fireworks are
2:28:47
popping off in the sky, I think I'm going to come.
2:28:50
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:28:50
Speaker 2: It's crazy. But like in my heart.
2:28:53
Speaker 1: Dude, you can.
2:28:54
Speaker 2: I see the ego in my mind.
2:28:55
Speaker 1: If you started doing really well out here, you'd fit
2:28:57
in really well. And every time you do podcasts, every
2:29:01
time you do specials, every time you put something out
2:29:03
on YouTube and do Kill Tony, it all just compounds.
2:29:07
Like that's why I was telling you like this is
2:29:09
the terrible time for you to leave because you're literally
2:29:11
on the launching pad. I know. And you look at
2:29:14
how guys like Shane went from being– respected comedian in
2:29:19
New York to being a fucking giant national talent after
2:29:22
the SNL stuff. Like it's just about being good and
2:29:25
getting the message out there. And if you're good, people
2:29:28
love comedy. They'll find you, man. They'll embrace you.
2:29:33
Speaker 2: I'm going to cry. You were really lovely to me
2:29:35
when I had to go and the things you said
2:29:37
about me and how– anyway, I won't go into– I
2:29:39
can't– I've had one glass of whiskey now and if
2:29:42
I talk about my emotions and whatever, I've got to stop.
2:29:46
Speaker 1: Well, you're really talented and it's not often in life
2:29:51
where someone gets to find themselves in a position like
2:29:54
you were in where you were being embraced by all
2:29:58
these very successful other comedians that were willing to help you.
2:30:01
So all these podcasts you go on, it was just
2:30:03
a matter of time for you where you took off.
2:30:07
It was a matter of time. You were right there
2:30:09
and the talent is the most important thing. The most
2:30:11
difficult thing is to be good. So once you get
2:30:14
past that, then it's just about letting the world know, well,
2:30:16
this is a really good time to let the world know.
2:30:17
Speaker 2: The magic of getting to like, I did three sets
2:30:21
last night and two sets the night before. And I
2:30:24
just like, something is.
2:30:26
Speaker 1: Exciting, right?
2:30:27
Speaker 2: You just have a little idea at the first one.
2:30:28
So I changed that a little bit. And then the
2:30:30
game of it starts again. And I'm very happy right now.
2:30:33
It's like, I get, I honestly, I get to do
2:30:35
it even just every night for the next month, month
2:30:38
and a bit. I get to do like one or
2:30:40
two hours every single night and spots around town all
2:30:42
this week. Yeah.
2:30:44
Speaker 1: You're going to have a hard time going back to
2:30:45
Australia staring at those fucking kangaroos. Yes, I am.
2:30:51
Speaker 2: It'll be fine.
2:30:52
Speaker 1: So do you think that you could envision a scenario
2:30:55
where your wife would be open to try it again?
2:30:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:30:57
Speaker 1: Okay.
2:30:58
Speaker 2: But I don't know when and I don't know how
2:31:01
it will work. And I do love Adelaide. Like when
2:31:04
I'm there, I have some sense of being at home
2:31:06
that is profound. Like I look up at the sky
2:31:10
and I feel like there's a roof over me. Like
2:31:12
in a comforting way.
2:31:13
Speaker 1: Like you belong there. Yeah.
2:31:16
Speaker 2: But it's also maybe the worst place to develop as
2:31:19
a– I mean we've had great stand-ups come out of there.
2:31:21
And I love Adelaide. And there are people running rooms.
2:31:23
But like we don't have a club. We don't have
2:31:26
a club. We don't have one club going. It's a
2:31:28
city of 1.4 million people and there's no– we have
2:31:31
places where they do comedy. But in terms of like Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
2:31:35
early show, late show, lineup shows, 10, 15 minutes, it's
2:31:38
not there.
2:31:39
Speaker 1: But do you have enough talent to support a club?
2:31:43
Speaker 2: It comes in waves in the way that any medium
2:31:45
level comedy city like all of a sudden it'll build
2:31:48
up and there'll be great people and then they'll all go.
2:31:50
People go to Melbourne, Sydney.
2:31:52
Speaker 3: Right.
2:31:52
Speaker 2: And I will say that's been one nice thing about
2:31:55
Australia not letting talent come through for so long and
2:31:59
also the UK declining is I now know heaps of
2:32:01
people who've come to America like after me and just
2:32:05
before me and there are heaps of Aussies flooding into
2:32:08
this country now. Amos, my best friend Amos Gill just
2:32:12
got passed at the cellar and I'm so like, I'm
2:32:16
so proud of him.
2:32:17
Speaker 1: Oh, that's awesome.
2:32:17
Speaker 2: He's just gigging all the time and he's getting to,
2:32:19
he just recorded a special in Denver.
2:32:21
Speaker 1: Nice. Yeah.
2:32:22
Speaker 2: And it's like, Blake Freeman is doing well and all the,
2:32:25
I get all these Aussies hitting me up and go,
2:32:27
can you get me into the mothership? And it's like, well,
2:32:30
not you, but you know, maybe some other ones.
2:32:33
Speaker 1: That's the problem, right?
2:32:34
Speaker 2: Uh, I don't know how many I've put on in
2:32:36
front of Adam on the Mondays, but I've had to stop.
2:32:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. Some people you can't, use up that currency on
2:32:43
people that don't deserve it, you know?
2:32:45
Speaker 2: Cause you want to help people, but you can't.
2:32:47
Speaker 1: They have to be ready and they have to put
2:32:49
in the work. There's a lot of people that think
2:32:50
you're going to provide them with a shortcut and they
2:32:52
really haven't prepared properly. Yeah. And they haven't put in
2:32:55
the work to get to that point. We had a
2:32:57
few of those guys come from LA that were like,
2:33:00
their careers had floundered horribly in LA due to laziness
2:33:05
and sure. Fill in the blank. And then they tried
2:33:07
to like restart themselves in Austin. I'm like, Hey, No.
2:33:11
Like you can't half-ass this thing. This thing is hard
2:33:14
to do and there's too many people trying to do
2:33:16
it all the way. Yeah. We're flooded with people trying
2:33:19
to do it all the way. If you think you're
2:33:20
going to come over and half-ass it because it's like
2:33:23
this new place and now it will be exciting again
2:33:25
and they don't know you.
2:33:26
Speaker 2: No.
2:33:27
Speaker 1: Like we fucking know you.
2:33:28
Speaker 2: I think people don't love it. People love the thought
2:33:30
of being good at it and being respected. But like
2:33:33
when I– I got to open for Mark Norman in Australia,
2:33:36
which is how I met him, and he'll do– You know,
2:33:39
like a 2,000-seat theater early show and then the late
2:33:42
show and then he'll go, what else is open?
2:33:45
Speaker 1: Right.
2:33:45
Speaker 2: Take me to the open mic with six people in
2:33:48
it now.
2:33:48
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:33:49
Speaker 1: Well, that's New York. Yeah. New York. He's got a
2:33:52
great documentary that they just released.
2:33:54
Speaker 2: It was such a good idea.
2:33:56
Speaker 1: I was furious.
2:33:57
Speaker 2: I wanted to do that with women.
2:33:59
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
2:34:00
Speaker 2: This is sort of you only have women in the
2:34:02
audience or you only have one kind of person.
2:34:05
Speaker 1: No, you're not. Not that documentary?
2:34:06
Speaker 2: I apologize.
2:34:07
Speaker 1: No, it's a documentary about him getting ready for a special.
2:34:11
So when he's getting ready for a special, he's working
2:34:13
out the jokes at all these different places and showing
2:34:15
how he goes up at the stand, then he goes
2:34:17
up at the cellar, and then he travels and talking
2:34:20
about the development of all these bits, about how the
2:34:22
bit came together when he added this new line. And
2:34:25
so it shows him working all this stuff out on
2:34:27
the way to doing this special in Boulder.
2:34:29
Speaker 2: I didn't mean to interrupt. I didn't know about that.
2:34:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a new one. He just put it out
2:34:32
like 14 days ago.
2:34:34
Speaker 2: Do you know the other show that he's done?
2:34:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other show with all the Wokies
2:34:37
in the audience. Yeah.
2:34:38
Speaker 2: How many shows is he doing?
2:34:40
Speaker 1: Oh, he's an animal. He's got incredible work ethic and
2:34:44
constantly writing. Yeah. You've seen his pile of notes? Yes.
2:34:48
That he keeps in his pocket?
2:34:49
Speaker 2: He does not have a folder.
2:34:50
Speaker 1: I'm like, bro, you're going to break your back.
2:34:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:34:52
Speaker 1: You can't sit on a rock like that.
2:34:54
Speaker 2: He's siphoning through them.
2:34:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:34:56
Speaker 2: But he really loves it. He wants to be doing it.
2:34:58
Speaker 1: Did you find that Norman thing? It's pretty cool.
2:35:01
Speaker 2: Does the bit work out and get into the special?
2:35:03
Speaker 1: Well, it's not just a bit. It's a lot of bits.
2:35:06
But it's like him showing what the behind the scenes
2:35:11
is like. Showing him rushing from one club to go
2:35:15
to another place to do a spot. Checking the lineups. Okay,
2:35:18
I can do this and then I can leave here
2:35:20
and go down the street and then be back for
2:35:22
the 10 o'clock show. It's really interesting. Because especially for
2:35:26
people that don't know what it's like, so there is
2:35:28
Pushing Boulder is what it's called.
2:35:30
Speaker 3: Oh, it's long.
2:35:31
Speaker 2: It's a proper documentary.
2:35:32
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It's really good, dude. And for a comic,
2:35:36
you know, it's really fun. They catch him in the
2:35:37
toilet in the beginning. Like he's in Boulder, Colorado.
2:35:40
Speaker 2: I mean, that is what every hotel room looks like
2:35:42
on the road.
2:35:43
Speaker 1: It's great because it shows you what it's really like.
2:35:47
And if you think it's easy, like you think you
2:35:48
get to a guy like Mark Norman's level, that he's just,
2:35:51
you know, no big deal, easy. No, no, that guy's good.
2:35:55
constantly grinding. He's constantly going out and writing and tweaking
2:35:59
and it's in his head. Yeah. And he's talking about
2:36:01
it in diners. He's sitting in a bodega, having a coffee,
2:36:04
going over his notes. It's really cool because it's, that's
2:36:07
the real process.
2:36:09
Speaker 2: What's the willingness to be bad again, which is no
2:36:14
one wants to do that. No one wants to have
2:36:16
a special come out and have to start again and
2:36:18
have to suck like that. Jerry Seinfeld comedian documentary is
2:36:22
the perfect count. I mean, he, I mean, they're both
2:36:25
still doing it. What's the other guy's name?
2:36:27
Speaker 1: Orny? Yeah.
2:36:28
Speaker 2: Did you know Orny?
2:36:29
Speaker 1: I did not. Orny Adams.
2:36:31
Speaker 2: He does not come across great in that documentary, but
2:36:33
he's still out there.
2:36:33
Speaker 1: I feel like they did that to him on purpose
2:36:36
to make Jerry more likable. That's what my impression was.
2:36:39
I felt like that's why they picked him. Yeah. I
2:36:41
felt like they decided to pick a guy who's like
2:36:44
way less likable and it makes Jerry look great.
2:36:49
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, the ending is pretty.
2:36:50
Speaker 1: Especially at the time, because he's a young guy at
2:36:52
the time. Yeah. He's really new to comedy. I mean,
2:36:54
he wasn't doing comedy that long.
2:36:57
Speaker 2: And then the final scene is Cosby, right?
2:37:01
Speaker 1: Crazy.
2:37:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:37:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:37:03
Speaker 2: He just loved the work. I think Cosby's... Is he
2:37:07
not touring anymore?
2:37:08
Speaker 1: He's out. He's retired? He's out of jail. They let
2:37:10
him out.
2:37:11
Speaker 2: Did you see the.
2:37:12
Speaker 1: But he's blind now.
2:37:13
Speaker 2: I mean, he can still get up. I'm sure he
2:37:15
can still throw down. I think so. He did a
2:37:19
round of gigs just before when the trial started. But
2:37:24
the allegations were out.
2:37:25
Speaker 1: Did you see that? No.
2:37:26
Speaker 2: He was doing crowd work.
2:37:27
Speaker 1: About it. I knew he was doing it. He was?
2:37:29
He was doing crowd work?
2:37:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a line that came out. I don't think
2:37:31
anyone got a recording, but people wrote it down. That
2:37:33
he was... He's riffing with the crowd, and a lady
2:37:36
gets up and goes to the bathroom, and he says,
2:37:39
You going to wait? Watch your drink! He gets a
2:37:41
big pop.
2:37:42
Speaker 1: Wow.
2:37:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. He still got it.
2:37:45
Speaker 1: That's crazy. That's a crazy thing to say. He probably.
2:37:49
Speaker 2: Was doing bad stuff, but still.
2:37:51
Speaker 1: A hundred percent. No? I would say. I had heard
2:37:56
about that in the 90s. I heard about that on
2:38:00
the set of News Radio, and I was like, what?
2:38:02
Speaker 2: The drugging?
2:38:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, that he drugged women. I heard about it in
2:38:06
the 1990s. I couldn't believe it. I was like, what?
2:38:08
Bill Cosby?
2:38:09
Speaker 2: Was this widespread? People knew about this at the time?
2:38:11
Speaker 1: People in Hollywood knew. Actors. So actors. It was an
2:38:15
actress that actually told me that, that Bill Cosby drugs women.
2:38:19
Speaker 2: But then everybody who had him on like a Tonight
2:38:23
Show or a Late Show or was doing a fun
2:38:25
interview with him must have heard.
2:38:26
Speaker 1: I don't know. You know, I'd have to know into
2:38:30
their world.
2:38:31
Speaker 2: Do you think Jerry would have heard that before having
2:38:33
him on the.
2:38:33
Speaker 1: People heard about it at a certain point in time.
2:38:36
It's whether or not they believed it. Jury orders Cosby
2:38:38
to pay nearly $ 60 million to ex-waitress after finding he
2:38:42
abused her in 1972. Holy shit. Yeah. 1972.
2:38:51
Speaker 2: Have you seen his Facebook page? What?
2:38:53
Speaker 1: He's got a Facebook? Yeah.
2:38:56
Speaker 2: Well, it was while he was in prison. They were
2:38:57
still updating it, and it's a very pro-Cosby. There's like
2:39:01
Team Cosby that's still trying to keep the reputation positive.
2:39:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of delusional people out there.
2:39:06
Speaker 2: I think they're on the payroll.
2:39:08
Speaker 1: They've got to be. Could be. I mean, he still
2:39:10
probably has a lot of money. The Cosby show was
2:39:12
a tremendous hit.
2:39:14
Speaker 2: The records are great.
2:39:16
Speaker 1: They were great. Yeah, I mean, he was a great talent.
2:39:18
Speaker 2: Also- He's probably doing some raping.
2:39:21
Speaker 1: Probably doing some of that.
2:39:22
Speaker 2: Quite a lot of raping.
2:39:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, quite a bit.
2:39:23
Speaker 2: Although the way they– I read something about the case
2:39:29
where they got him and they put him away but
2:39:30
I didn't finish– like I've never found it again. So
2:39:33
I don't know if it's true. But it's what I
2:39:35
read about the evidence that they had to convict him
2:39:37
where he was drugging– his defense was that he was
2:39:41
drugging the women but it was consensual and they knew
2:39:44
they were there for a drugging. That was, I believe,
2:39:48
his defense. I think I'm getting this right. I think
2:39:49
I'm remembering this correctly. And there was a lady, and
2:39:52
the way they got him was that she got pneumonia
2:39:55
afterwards because he did the drugging. And then he left
2:39:57
her on the couch without a blanket on a cold night.
2:40:01
And she said, if we'd been in a relationship, he
2:40:03
would have put a blanket on me.
2:40:05
Speaker 1: Whoa.
2:40:06
Speaker 2: But I've always thought that that was maybe only in
2:40:08
a relationship would you have the resentment to not put
2:40:12
a blanket on me. So I don't know that that
2:40:14
would decide it either way. But it was a weird.
2:40:17
His defense wasn't that he wasn't there and hadn't done it.
2:40:19
He was like, yeah.
2:40:21
Speaker 1: Well, maybe there was so much evidence that he did
2:40:23
it that they had to come up with something clever,
2:40:26
like neither confirm nor deny. They had to work their
2:40:29
way around it.
2:40:30
Speaker 2: That I was drugging women unconscious?
2:40:32
Speaker 1: They wanted to. They knew that's what the fun game was.
2:40:36
Speaker 2: But he got out, right?
2:40:38
Speaker 1: Well, I think he got out because he paid a
2:40:41
woman off. And so there was some sort of a
2:40:44
deal where he paid a woman off. And part of
2:40:48
the deal of him paying the settlement was that he
2:40:51
can never be tried again for this.
2:40:54
Speaker 2: It's like double jeopardy?
2:40:56
Speaker 1: I don't know. Okay. So it wasn't a criminal conviction.
2:40:59
It was a civil conviction.
2:41:00
Speaker 2: Right.
2:41:00
Speaker 1: And so then he was tried for it criminally. And
2:41:03
so I think that's how he got off. He got
2:41:06
off because his lawyer argued that the settlement of the
2:41:11
first– here. We'll see it here. Immunity agreement. That's it.
2:41:18
So it says Bill Cosby's defense successfully overturned his 2018
2:41:21
sexual assault conviction in 2021 by arguing that a prior
2:41:24
prosecutor promised not to charge him, rendering his incriminating deposition
2:41:30
testimony inadmissible. The defense led by Jennifer Bonjean argued that
2:41:36
using his testimony violated his rights, framing the prosecution as
2:41:40
a violator of due process.
2:41:42
Speaker 2: Using his testimony violated his rights.
2:41:44
Speaker 1: Because it was part of his willingness to testify was
2:41:46
that he couldn't be prosecuted for it criminally. Yeah. Whatever.
2:41:51
Speaker 2: That's spooky.
2:41:52
Speaker 1: It's crazy. It's crazy. It's just crazy that this guy
2:41:56
did this for decades. It's not like there's a story
2:42:01
of one weird night where someone woke up and had
2:42:04
a headache and go, I think this motherfucker put something
2:42:07
in my drink. No, it was decades. And it was
2:42:11
also like he joked around about it in the Cosby show,
2:42:15
like using a special barbecue sauce. Did you use my
2:42:18
special barbecue sauce that gets everybody horny?
2:42:21
Speaker 2: I didn't know about this.
2:42:22
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
2:42:22
Speaker 2: I knew about the Spanish fly joke.
2:42:24
Speaker 1: That was a bit, yeah, about Spanish fly. And he
2:42:27
also did that bit, I believe, on The Tonight Show.
2:42:29
We talked about it. He talked about on The Tonight
2:42:33
Show giving people Spanish fly, like giving people a drink
2:42:35
that would make them horny. But there was an episode.
2:42:38
Speaker 2: A special horny barbecue sauce?
2:42:39
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He had a special barbecue sauce
2:42:41
that would make people horny on The Cosby Show. Look
2:42:44
at this.
2:42:45
Speaker 2: Well, it certainly is nice to see them work things
2:42:47
out for themselves.
2:42:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, man. anything out for themselves it's my barbecue.
2:42:52
Speaker 2: Sauce oh gee your barbecue sauce my barbecue sauce haven't
2:42:58
you ever noticed after people have some of my barbecue
2:43:01
sauce after a while.
2:43:03
Speaker 1: When it kicks in they get all huggy buggy oh
2:43:07
stop i'm dead serious haven't you ever noticed that after
2:43:11
one of my barbecues and they have the sauce.
2:43:14
Speaker 2: People want to get right home.
2:43:17
Speaker 1: It's the music. Look at these people.
2:43:19
Speaker 2: I got a cup of it up on the night table.
2:43:26
Speaker 1: Oh, Bill.
2:43:27
Speaker 2: I got a cup of it, I said. Left it
2:43:31
up there breathing.
2:43:33
Speaker 1: Why don't you give the chicken to these people that's
2:43:36
going up and have some sauce?
2:43:41
Speaker 2: So here's the rest of the chicken, you guys.
2:43:44
Speaker 1: Creepy, right? That was his move.
2:43:48
Speaker 2: That music was not part of the original Cosby shot.
2:43:51
Speaker 1: I wish it was. Yeah. It would have been great
2:43:53
if it was.
2:43:53
Speaker 2: I had never seen that before.
2:43:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:43:56
Speaker 2: My special barbecue sauce. Yeah. There was the Seinfeld episode
2:44:02
where he drugs a woman so he can play with
2:44:04
her toys. Am I getting that right?
2:44:05
Speaker 1: Is that true? Yeah.
2:44:07
Speaker 2: There's an episode where there's some sort of sleeping medication.
2:44:10
Speaker 1: And he gives it to her so he can play
2:44:11
with her toys? What kind of toys does she have?
2:44:12
Speaker 2: She has figurines and collectibles that he wants to play with.
2:44:17
Speaker 1: He doesn't want her to know?
2:44:18
Speaker 2: He date rapes the woman. He doesn't have sex with her.
2:44:20
He gets her unconscious so that he can play with
2:44:22
her figurines. That's ridiculous. I think that's the secret date
2:44:25
rape Seinfeld episode.
2:44:28
Speaker 1: Am I getting that right? The drug. Jerry uses food
2:44:31
with high tryptophan, turkey, or medicine to make her drowsy,
2:44:36
which he brags about doing multiple times. Wow. He's obsessed
2:44:40
with playing with Celia's pristine toys, including an original G.I.
2:44:44
Joe and a Mattel football game. 1997.
2:44:48
Speaker 2: Special barbecue sauce is.
2:44:50
Speaker 1: Creepy as fuck. I want to.
2:44:52
Speaker 2: Sample that and wrap something.
2:44:54
Speaker 1: He's also... I know. The whispering. Yeah, I didn't like it.
2:44:57
Makes me uncomfortable.
2:45:00
Speaker 2: The man's got time. We've got to say, the man,
2:45:03
the delivery is unquestionably... Well.
2:45:05
Speaker 1: He's got a lot of practice in saying things like that.
2:45:08
Speaker 2: I wonder if he's not still on the road. He
2:45:10
can't still be.
2:45:11
Speaker 1: I don't think he's doing anything. I think he's probably
2:45:13
in hiding.
2:45:13
Speaker 2: He's like a 95-year-old man.
2:45:15
Speaker 1: He's a 95-year-old man. I think he's at least partially blind. Yeah.
2:45:18
And obviously a pariah.
2:45:20
Speaker 2: Did you ever watch the last Jimmy Fallon set that
2:45:23
he did?
2:45:23
Speaker 1: No.
2:45:24
Speaker 2: He rides around on his back.
2:45:26
Speaker 1: On Jimmy Fallon's back? Yeah. Okay. Why would Jimmy Fallon
2:45:31
agree to that?
2:45:31
Speaker 2: I don't remember. I don't know that he did. I mean,
2:45:35
Jimmy Fallon's up and about. He's having a nice time. Hmm.
2:45:38
he's a jovial man but I think he's it's something
2:45:41
yeah I remember and then it was like weeks later.
2:45:44
Speaker 1: So Jimmy Fallon's riding on Bill Cosby's back.
2:45:47
Speaker 2: Oh yeah he's not having that's.
2:45:49
Speaker 1: Even weirder because Bill Cosby's really old I'd be like
2:45:51
bro what if your knees give out maybe.
2:45:53
Speaker 2: He was saying that he was strong but I think
2:45:54
that was just before it came out that big piggyback
2:45:56
ride because it was I think it was Hannibal Buress who.
2:45:59
Speaker 1: This is 2023 no that's just when they uploaded it
2:46:02
it would have to be oh 2014 2014 we gotta
2:46:04
wrap this bitch up oh man I love you buddy
2:46:07
it's great to see you back thank you Mike Steen Knight?
2:46:10
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:46:10
Speaker 1: Do a set tonight?
2:46:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do it.
2:46:11
Speaker 1: Let's fucking go. Instagram, what's your handles?
2:46:16
Speaker 2: JDF McCann, the James Donald Forbes McCann catamaran plan. Big podcast.
2:46:24
Very small podcast.
2:46:25
Speaker 1: My man. All right. Beautiful. Thank you. My pleasure.
2:46:27
Speaker 2: All right.
2:46:27
Speaker 1: Bye, everybody.
2:46:28
Speaker 2: Bye.