#2290 - Michael Kosta

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Speaker 1 The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 1 Yes, sir, Michael. Good to see you, my friend.
Thanks for having me, and really appreciate you showing me around. Wow, what a space you've created, man.
Thank you. That's so cool.
Keeps going.

Speaker 1 I was excited to show you the picture of my sauna.

Speaker 1 And then you show me kind of our cherry. It's so cool, man.
Thank you. That's so cool.
It's fun.

Speaker 1 So, we were just singing Jon Stewart's praises before this started, but I'm so happy he's back at the Daily Show. And I'm so happy he makes fun of everything.

Speaker 1 And I'm so happy he still makes dick jokes. Yeah.
You know, it's fun. It's like the Daily Show seems like the Daily Show again.
Like, that guy's a very unique dude, a very unique person.

Speaker 1 And one of the most important pieces to unify everybody. He's reasonable.
Like, he gets the whole big picture. Like, let's stop being so fucking ridiculously tribal.

Speaker 1 In the morning meeting, he'll come in and we're all sitting there, the writers, and he just kind of shuts the door behind him and we start talking. But

Speaker 1 it's like a conversation with a college professor, but he's in charge, and it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 All sides. This, I disagree with that.
What about this? And it's like, oh, wow, it's really fun to be a part of.

Speaker 1 And then someone will yell out a dick joke, and then that joke will make it to the show, too. You know, it's like smart things and dumb things.
That's beautiful.

Speaker 1 Well, he's never abandoned being a real comic, you know, which is what got him to the dance in the first place. So he's always has those instincts.

Speaker 1 And he's the very best at like holding a line and like making something like even more preposterous just with a facial expression

Speaker 1 and pointing out like these fucking unbelievably ridiculous in-your-face hypocrisies that you see every day from both sides. Yeah, from both sides.
Have you ever done stand-up with him?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, we've done stuff together. Like back in the day, yeah.
God, I can't remember the last time.

Speaker 1 I was supposed to do something with him at one of Dave's things that he was doing outside back in the day, but I never wound up doing it.

Speaker 1 But I definitely did stand-up with him in the clubs back in New York, and I knew him way, way back in the day was he was on MTV.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember that, and I think I remember one of his books was called...

Speaker 1 Naked Pictures of Famous People,

Speaker 1 which is great. He's a solid guy.
Like, he's a solid guy. I don't always agree with him, but I don't always agree with everybody.
I don't even agree with me. Isn't that good?

Speaker 1 I mean, isn't that the point of this? It's like you want a couple people to be mad sometimes. I also think we all, as human beings, need to be divorced from our ideas.

Speaker 1 Your ideas are not you. You are you.
And ideas are things that you should consider.

Speaker 1 Ideas are something that you should... I mean...
If it's going to have some sort of a real physical impact on your life and your family and your family's life and people you care about, I understand.

Speaker 1 I understand why you get connected to things like that.

Speaker 1 But for the most part, most of these ideas don't affect you. A lot of them don't.
And yet we're so ideologically captured that we fight for these ideas as if it's our very nature.

Speaker 1 You're talking about your essence as a human being. And it's stupid.
This reminds me of a time I left my joke book on a train in New York. And in the joke book, I have, this book is important to me.

Speaker 1 Call me if you get this, you know? And this guy texts me and and he says, I have this joke book. And, you know, talk about your ideas.
The joke book is the most unfiltered, dumb idea ever. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's the beauty of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I said, man, I'm sure he's reading it. Why, you know, you're going to read it.
You're going to read a stranger's joke book. And I connected with him.
He was very kind.

Speaker 1 He gave it to me, but he kind of looked at me like, are you a comedian type thing? And I said, yeah, but it's terrifying when that idea gets attached to you when it was just a fleeting idea. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The joke book idea is the best example of that, right? Because most of what you write is shit, which took me forever to figure out.
I was like, God, I just write shit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then every now and then a gem. Yeah.
Like, ooh, and then you extract the gem. But I've realized afterwards, it's basically like gold mining.
Most of the time, you're not finding gold.

Speaker 1 You're finding garbage. And you only get to gold by going through garbage.
Yeah. Sometimes I'll do a show and it's terrible, new joke show, but then the next day the thing happens.

Speaker 1 And I I think, oh, that's because

Speaker 1 I was digging all day yesterday. Yeah.
It's the muse, right? You have to show up and request the muse's love. I like that.
Yeah. Do you ever read Pressfield's War of Art? No.

Speaker 1 It's really, we have a stack of them out there. I'll give you a copy of it.
It's a small book, easy to read.

Speaker 1 Jay Larson, comedian in L.A., recommended that book to me 10 years ago, and I never tackled it. It's really good.

Speaker 1 I used to have a stack of them in the studio where I'd give out to guests because so many comics, I was like, this is what what you need. What's the essence? I will read it.

Speaker 1 Also, you know what keeps freaking me out? There's a shooting star behind my head. Yeah, there is.
Yeah. Every now and then one will fly above your head.

Speaker 1 What's the essence?

Speaker 1 The war of art. That makes it sound like it's a struggle to create art.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's the struggle against resistance, which is procrastination, which is this thing that we all do before we actually write, which is so weird.

Speaker 1 Because I love when I'm actually locked in and great ideas are coming. It's one of the best feelings in the world.
Like, Like, it's like somehow or another, you're pulling these ideas out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 And then it's your job to take this seed and try to go plant it on stage and try to water it and try to, over the course of many months, it'll become a great bit.

Speaker 1 And they just only come if you sit there. They only come if you sit there.
And what he is saying is that you have to treat it like you're a professional and you have to decide at 8 a.m.

Speaker 1 I will show up and I will be there for three hours. I will shut my phone off.
I will lock in. This is what I do because I am a professional.

Speaker 1 And you literally make a prayer to the muse.

Speaker 1 You offer yourself to the muse. You say, I'm here to work.
I'm here to gather ideas. I'm here to be creative and be open.
And you treat it that way. Whether or not the muse is real or not,

Speaker 1 that's kind of,

Speaker 1 you can get hung up on that. But if you treat it like it's real, it works.

Speaker 1 It is really crazy. I love that.
And I don't do that. And early in my comedy career, I would go to the coffee shop at this time and start typing.
And I have all these bits.

Speaker 1 And I remember Tommy at the comedy store. He would say, every time I see you, you have new bits.
And I would go, yeah, because I'm going. And now what's crazy, life has gotten crazier.

Speaker 1 I don't make time for myself to do that, but I need to honor the muse, man. I like that.

Speaker 1 My move is when everyone's asleep in my house. Okay.
Because I still, I get up pretty early for a comic. Yeah.
You know, I'm up by eight almost every day. Comics are unreal with that.
Right.

Speaker 1 But that means that I can go to bed at one and still get seven hours of sleep. So that's what I do.
So when everybody in my house kind of goes to bed early, my kids go to school.

Speaker 1 My wife goes to bed early. So when everyone's asleep, it's just me and the dog.

Speaker 1 And either we're watching YouTube or I'm writing. And that's when I get my best work done.
You write by hand? I don't sleep. No.

Speaker 1 I type. You type.
Yeah. I feel like I can't write fast enough by hand.

Speaker 1 What I like about typing is that I don't have to look at the keys. I know know how to type.
So I can

Speaker 1 make a letter, I can make a word very quickly. I can, like, and I can, like, zone in to it.
But what I really like is a keyboard that I can feel. Like, I need travel in my keys.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, and these clickety, clickety, clickety little MacBook keys, those are bullshit. Okay.

Speaker 1 What you want is a keyboard that you don't have to look at because it's got like little divots where your fingers sit. So I use a ThinkPad.
And ThinkPads have the best keyboards. They have travel.

Speaker 1 each one has like a couple of millimeters of travel so it's a clickety clickety clicky so my fingers know exactly where to go and I can just get into the zone you're zoning right now yeah but that's how I do it like the I have like a whole thing like the laptop that I write on it's not connected it has no apps it never goes anywhere it doesn't get email yeah it does I only allow myself to use the Bing search engine to find out if what the because most of the time if I'm writing about something like you know when was this discovered what what happened here?

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Speaker 1 all of these amazing men these explorers these achievers The idea was, because I found out that Sir Edmund Hillary, the Mount Everest's first man to climb Everest, He had like nine kids or something.

Speaker 1 And the idea of the joke was, I don't even think he likes climbing mountains. I don't even think he enjoys outdoors.
It's that he's trying to get away from his family.

Speaker 1 So then I looked up Roger Bannister, the guy who broke the four-minute mile. He had like seven kids.
I'm like, I don't even think he likes running. He's just trying to run away from his family.

Speaker 1 But I remember writing that bit. It's a funny bit.

Speaker 1 There might have been an Elon thing there. He has a lot of kids going to Mars, whatever.
There's other stuff.

Speaker 1 But I would keep getting sidetracked by these Googles, right? I'd start typing a bit. Now I'm on Siriman Hillary's Wikipedia page.
Now I'm clicking, and I'm gone. And that's a trap.

Speaker 1 It's tricky. It's procrastination.
It really is. And you can get locked in.
So the discipline is to keep it, stay on the bit, Costa. I would play this stupid game with myself.

Speaker 1 It's like, I'll just go on YouTube real quick and see if I get inspired by anything before I write. And then I'm watching two hours of muscle car builds.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 Just dude, it's wild.

Speaker 1 Watching people turn their Land cruiser into an off-road vehicle.

Speaker 1 I would do motorcycle handlebars.

Speaker 1 I would find my motorcycle, and then there would be like, that's amazing. It's 20 different handlebar builds and stuff.
What kind of motorcycle did you drive? I have a Triumph Bonneville 2011.

Speaker 1 It's in storage in Pennsylvania now. I take it out.
in the summer a lot, but

Speaker 1 in LA,

Speaker 1 that was what I used all the time. You ride a motorcycle in LA? I did forever.
Holy shit. You know,

Speaker 1 My wife doesn't really, you know, we have a family now. But in PA, I ride it a lot.

Speaker 1 And there, it's deer, man. They're very, you know, that's the scary thing there.
They get very close. They're not afraid of cars or motor vehicles at this point.

Speaker 1 Well, there's a time between like September-ish to like December-ish where they're retarded because they're horny. You know,

Speaker 1 once it starts getting warm out, they start getting goofy. And then when you get cold, like around November, that's when it really kicks in.

Speaker 1 Like if you're in Pennsylvania or Iowa, oh my god, I visited my friend John in Iowa and I'm driving down the road and every 15 seconds you're slamming on your brakes because something's darting near the road.

Speaker 1 They're all over the place. So they're horny and looking.
Yes. Right.
They're also getting chased. So the bucks are chasing the females and the females are just running out in the traffic.
Right.

Speaker 1 And the bucks are following them. Bang.
I mean, this is like men at night. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sixth Street, where my club is.

Speaker 1 They don't drive fast. That's why the road is closed in the weekends.
They don't want people driving down 6th Street with all these horny idiots. I love that they closed that, though.
That's good.

Speaker 1 I didn't know that. It is great.

Speaker 1 But what scares me is what happened in New Orleans, where they have these roads where only people walk down, and everyone knows it, and this psycho decides to kill a bunch of people.

Speaker 1 It's crazy that you have to think that way, but I mean, there should be some sort of retractable posts that they can pull up. Wasn't there for that one? And it didn't.
It wasn't up. It wasn't up.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 In New York, you know, it's a big concrete slab i was in france last year uh and they had these huge flower pots with beautiful flowers in it and i said you know this is the new york version is a huge concrete slab that says nypd on it and this is the french version which was this enormous beautiful flower pie go that's now that's serving a function and also beautiful yeah well the french know how to do things they know how to do it

Speaker 1 yeah they they party they know how to party they drink a lot of wine they stay thin somehow or another which is odd like I hope RFK Jr. figures that out.

Speaker 1 It seems to me to know how

Speaker 1 Italians are so thin all the time. I go to Italy, and

Speaker 1 it's also like the standard cliche, but it is true. You go there, you can eat the food, and it doesn't affect you the same way.

Speaker 1 And we don't even think twice about it. We come back here and still order pizza and still feel like shit.
If I eat a pizza here, I feel so bloated.

Speaker 1 I ate a pizza in Italy last summer, and I ate the whole pizza too. The whole margarita pizza.
I ate the whole fucking thing.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I just would just resign myself to like the thud of it hitting my digestive tract and like feeling like I'm on drama mean. Just like,

Speaker 1 I resigned myself. I'm like, I'm eating pizza.
Fucking I'm as good. What's going on?

Speaker 1 Let's just do it. Nothing.
Never came. Right.
Never came. Ate a whole pizza.
I was like this the rest of the day. I was like, this is crazy.
I'm not even like sludgy. Brisket crushes me.

Speaker 1 Terry Black's put you down, son.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I was in Houston. Steve Byrne was at the other club.
He wanted to get lunch. Yeah, of course.
We go get brisket. I went back to a, I slept for like three and a half hours.
I mean, it is smooth.

Speaker 1 Did you have sides, though?

Speaker 1 I don't remember. I bet you did what you did.
I bet you had sides. I think it was the sides that did? Yeah, I think it's mostly the starches and, you know,

Speaker 1 the carbs. It's mostly like macaroni salad.
Fatty, delicious meat. So good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Terry Black's in town is my favorite.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. They have a beef rib that is the most preposterous thing.
You pick the bone up and the rib slides off the bone.

Speaker 1 I mean, and when you slice into it, it's just juicy, fatty, smoky.

Speaker 1 Why is the meat falling off the bone such an important thing? It's so tender. It means it's been slow cooked perfectly.

Speaker 1 They have a thing where you want your brisket to fold but not break. So they take a slice of brisket and they put it over their hand.
And if it breaks off, you fucked up.

Speaker 1 You've made a mushy brisket, but you want it where it's just folding, you know, like a thick cloth.

Speaker 1 There's a life metaphor there, too. Brisket, you want it right out, too.
You want it like right after they slice it. You don't want to wait on brisket.

Speaker 1 You want to eat it right. You don't want to eat it before it's

Speaker 1 while it's still warm. Look at that.
See the fold that guy's got on his finger? Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's a perfectly cooked brisket right there.

Speaker 1 I learned

Speaker 1 every time I'm here, I learned. I remember last time, dude,

Speaker 1 we were talking Italian billiards. I didn't even realize it was a different billiards.
Oh, they have a bunch of different billillards. Yeah, but I mean,

Speaker 1 that's funny. I never had any idea about that brisket.
But

Speaker 1 you know, it was all originally Germans

Speaker 1 that would do the brisket stuff? Germans who came over through Texas. Like Fredericksburg is one of the hubs of it.
It's all a bunch of Germans who came over here and they made smoked sausages.

Speaker 1 And so they came over here and the brisket became a thing because brisket was not a choice cut. It was a thing that they would throw away.
Like you wanted steaks, you wanted a T-bone.

Speaker 1 So they would take the brisket and they just figured out, like, if you just slowly cook it, you render it down and break down all the toughness of it.

Speaker 1 And at the end, you have this delicious, tender, smoked

Speaker 1 perfection. It puts me to sleep.
They know how to do it here, man.

Speaker 1 They make the best fucking brisket on earth right here.

Speaker 1 Terry Black's, Franklin's, La Barbecue. There's like a bunch of spots in town.
Yeah. What's it? QB Barbecue is at the Egyptian joint that I went to with

Speaker 1 Action Bronson. That place is.
Oh, man. Having a meal with him would be super fun.
KB?

Speaker 1 KG. KG BBQ.
So this gentleman came from Egypt, and he was like a finance guy, I think, in Egypt, just working a regular job.

Speaker 1 Came over here, fell in love with brisket, decided to just open up his own barbecue shop. And so this guy makes these incredible recipes with like Egyptian and Middle Eastern spices.
Jesus.

Speaker 1 But with Texas barbecue. Oh, my God.
It was so good. It was so good.

Speaker 1 Cool story. He's blowing up now.
And it's just a super nice guy, too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just like, I love when someone does that. It's like, fuck this job.

Speaker 1 I'm doing, I'm what, you know what I want to do? I want to feed people. I want to make brisket, awesome brisket.
I want to make a food truck.

Speaker 1 And this guy, it becomes so popular so quickly that this guy has like a real business now. And he's got a restaurant.
He's opening up a second one, I believe.

Speaker 1 That was my favorite part of living in Los Angeles. It's easy to make fun of LA for good reason, but for the most part, a lot of people were betting on themselves and a talent they had.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Not everyone's, but I do love that. I always appreciated that.
Yeah, I like living in a place where people are definitely going for something and taking chances.

Speaker 1 The problem with L.A. is it also becomes attached with

Speaker 1 what is the engine that gets you to where you want to go. And sometimes that engine is like pure narcissism.
Yeah, or fame. Yeah.
If that's the goal.

Speaker 1 Most of the time it's fame, which fuels the narcissism.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I think a more interesting question is

Speaker 1 how do we find the thing that we're meant to do? That Egyptian finance man found that brisket is his calling. That's fascinating.
In his 30s. In his 30s.
With a career. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 With a career, making money, having health care, still decided to give it up. Egypt, by the way.
It's not even close to Austin, Texas. And he comes here, he doesn't just decide to make barbecue.

Speaker 1 He decides to make barbecue in the home of barbecue. I mean, the place.
Yeah. He's like, fuck it.
If you want to learn jiu-jitsu, go to Brazil. Yeah.
He just went right to the heart of it all.

Speaker 1 I remember I was coaching tennis at the University of Michigan. I was making $31,000 a year.
And I go, I think I can make this in comedy.

Speaker 1 If I'm going to get paid like shit, let me at least do what I want. So, of course, the first year I left, first year I did comedy, I made whatever, $6,000 or whatever.

Speaker 1 But I think often how much harder that would have been if I was making $100,000. Right.
You know, it's, it's,

Speaker 1 because I was poor, let's be poor and pick the thing I want to be doing. Oh, a hundred percent.
But that's the thing about youth.

Speaker 1 Youth is filled with, if you're 47 years old and you decide that you need to change careers and you're going to be a folk singer and you have a family, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 You have a Volvo. You have a fucking mortgage, you idiot.
You have to go to work. You have to go to work.

Speaker 1 If you're going to make folk songs, you're going to make them on the two hours you have for yourself on the weekend when everybody else is out of the house.

Speaker 1 You don't have any time for that. Is it true that Rodney Dangerfield found comedy so late like that? Well, Rodney did comedy and then quit, but kept writing and was selling aluminum siding.
Right.

Speaker 1 That's what I remember that story. Remade it when he was like 46.

Speaker 1 That's fucking awesome story. Yeah.
How about Schimmel? Schimmel didn't even start till he was 36, which I thought was crazy. I remember what I heard because I was a giant Schimmel fan.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And then when I had heard that he started when he was 36, I was like, what? I didn't think you could do that. I thought you had to start when you were like 21.
Yeah. Or you had no chance.

Speaker 1 I remember starting at 27 and wondering if it was too late. Right.
Isn't that crazy?

Speaker 1 Or maybe it was 25. I forgot.
I wish I started at 21. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.
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Speaker 1 This offer is for new customers only. 27.
Because when I was 21, I was such a moron. I just had no opinions on anything.
So all my jokes were basically about sex. I was like, sex and relationships.

Speaker 1 Where were you at age 20? Boston. Boston.
Okay, that's right. You were in, I was going to say, because you were at least in a good comedy scene.
You could see good comedy. Rage comedy scene.

Speaker 1 Yes, yeah, you've talked about that. It was the best comedy scene.

Speaker 1 It was the best comedy scene because it was a comedy scene that had world-class comedians that the rest of the country didn't know about. So it was a cheat code.

Speaker 1 It was like you're in a gym and you're sparring with world-class fighters, like world championship caliber fighters that the rest of the world hasn't seen yet.

Speaker 1 And that emerges sometimes in fight gyms.

Speaker 1 You have a bunch of like elite fighters, and then all of a sudden there's three world champions in this gym like two years later.

Speaker 1 That's what it was like in Boston because there were these guys that were the Steve Sweeneys and the Don Gavins who were as good as anybody that's ever done comedy.

Speaker 1 And no one knew who they were outside of Boston. And you get to see them every night just murdering.

Speaker 1 Was their drive to get out? No. It was to make money, stay there.

Speaker 1 Do Coke and play golf.

Speaker 1 Those guys were partying. They probably figured.
I mean, I remember the documentary about Boston Comedy where they said they would pay comics and Coke.

Speaker 1 He was a totally different kind of comedian. They were these big football player looking men who were rowdy, who partied all the time.
They were all heavy drinkers. They all played golf.

Speaker 1 They were all animals. And they would go on stage and obliterate.

Speaker 1 When I say obliterate, I mean, these guys would go on stage with a drink in their hand, and they had a fucking act that was as hammered as a samurai sword. It was polished.

Speaker 1 And they would just from the paws they would take to the eyebrow raise.

Speaker 1 Everything. And a lot of it was like local references, like local Boston stuff.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they would bury these out-of-town comedians. I saw them bury Billy Crystal one night.
Bury him. Bury.
Death. Death.
Satan was nipping at his heels and dragging him down into the netherworld.

Speaker 1 It was horrible. He was in hell.

Speaker 1 I feel like when I started comedy, drinking was still bit.

Speaker 1 Now I meet all the young comics and everybody's sober or they're thinking more about all the different facets. But when I started, there wasn't YouTube yet.
Right.

Speaker 1 Comics talk shit in the green room a lot, terrible. Yep.

Speaker 1 I went and did yuck yucks in vancouver recently in the green room there's a sign up that says we don't harass people in the green room we and i'm like this is different this is different you know well canada's just on another level

Speaker 1 canada's on another level but um

Speaker 1 come back to us canada i i remember come back driving down the road in vancouver and there's all these people just lining up

Speaker 1 And I go, what's going on? And said, oh, well, they're lining up for the bus that's about to come. And I'm like, that's, that is, that's Canadian.
I mean, it's like, they're so polite.

Speaker 1 They're waiting. They know where the bus will be and they're lining up.
That is not how it works in Brooklyn. And then before they get on the bus, they give their land acknowledgement.

Speaker 1 Before they step on the bus.

Speaker 1 Do you think that comedy with the polish, the local, I mean, it feels like comedy's taking a different turn now. Now it's, if a bid is kind of working, we post it.
It's up. It's not polished.

Speaker 1 Well, there's

Speaker 1 some of that.

Speaker 1 I miss some of that. There's some of that, but there's still guys, you know, like Louie who don't do that.
And Attel doesn't do that.

Speaker 1 It's like I get for young guys coming up, it's a very good way to develop an audience. Like, there's guys that have a clip.
The clip goes viral on TikTok.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden, they're selling out shows everywhere. Like, a guy like Ralph Barboza.
Yep. It's a funny guy.
Yep. Gets a funny bit.
It gets put up. Bam.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden he's headlining all over the country. And it happened to him like that.
He was opening for me in Dallas.

Speaker 1 before any of that. And, you know, you always watch the opener.

Speaker 1 And normally I watch the opener like this like this is just is this is this what I have to go up after why didn't I bring my own guy, you know, whatever right and I'm sitting in the green room and I'm going oh, that's a good bit.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's a fun oh crowd's going and I'm going this this guy's got it. Yeah.
And then six months later I was like watching his special right or it wasn't maybe a year later. But yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 that's a great example. He's a funny dude.
Yeah, it's a great example of what can be done with social media today. You know, and then there's these guys.

Speaker 1 Like from Kill Tony, where they do one minute. And a lot of these one-minute clips get put into reels.
And then these guys are getting huge responses for this.

Speaker 1 And now they're doing the Killers of Kill Tony, where they're selling out these huge places. So it's amazing what can be done.

Speaker 1 But they don't have an act. They don't.
Some of them do. Like Ari Matty's 12 years in.

Speaker 1 He was doing Stand-Up in Australia. I actually worked with him in Australia in like

Speaker 1 2016, 15, I think. Okay.
Somewhere around then, 2015, somewhere around then. So Ari's been at it for a long time.
So he's really good. He's a really solid comic.

Speaker 1 So he's like headlining now because of this.

Speaker 1 But there's guys that are in it four or five years and they don't really have an act yet, but they have a couple of good jokes. But they'll figure it out.
They'll figure it out. They'll figure it out.

Speaker 1 But you don't want to figure all of it out on video in front of the whole world. That's what it is now.
I'm so thankful that as soon as I could, I posted my first set on on the internet.

Speaker 1 But that was seven years in.

Speaker 1 You couldn't even do it. Right.
I would have done it too soon. I mean, it still was too soon.

Speaker 1 But it's okay. You know, look, you go back and watch my first episodes of this podcast.
They were fucking terrible. Right.
I encourage everybody to go back and watch them. The dogs.

Speaker 1 Nobody would watch it. Where does one watch the first?

Speaker 1 I bet they're on YouTube. They're on everywhere.
They're somewhere. It's everywhere.
But like when we first started doing it, I mean, it was no production value. It sucked.
I was boring.

Speaker 1 And then you figure out how to do it. It's like stand-ups.
It is.

Speaker 1 Everything else go back and watch someone's first amateur fight they were terrible it is make mistakes it is very beautiful to watch um

Speaker 1 people get better at stuff yeah there's a female tennis player right now named uh andriieva i forget how to pronounce her first name but i just watched her at indian wells and i saw her four years ago at the french open everyone was saying watching you ought to watch andriieva and i'm like this is a child that doesn't know how to play the sport why are we talking about her i watched her last week in absolute nightmare of a beast, you know, hitting the ball, the movement, her shape.

Speaker 1 And it was like, oh, every day she got better for four. And to see that was nuts.

Speaker 1 And I always go back and watch old, oh my God, Novak Djokovic's first Grand Slam when he's got like the worst haircut in the baggy shirt and the backhand was looking different.

Speaker 1 Now, it's just amazing to see how these athletes evolve. And I'm sure it's the same for fighters.
And you mentioned it. Sure.

Speaker 1 I love seeing that. Yeah, well, tennis is like all things, right? It's you,

Speaker 1 when you really do it, then you can truly appreciate people who are great. Yes.

Speaker 1 Like, there's so many things that are like, like in martial arts, it's a big, like, especially when things go to the ground.

Speaker 1 A lot of times people don't understand how difficult a specific maneuver is, like, how he did that, how he baited him with that.

Speaker 1 And then you have to, like, there's certain things I watch where I'm like, oh, my God, does everybody appreciate this? That was insane. It's a language.

Speaker 1 It's a language. And if you don't speak the language, I mean, mean, when

Speaker 1 I don't speak MMA language, but that's where good commentators come in. Oh, they're excited for a reason.
Yeah. That was something that we don't see very often, and that helps me.

Speaker 1 I assume that's how it works for tennis people that aren't, or for non-tennis people when they're watching tennis.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm sure, but I think only a person like you, who is a professional, could appreciate the technique involved and like the changing of Djokovic's backstring.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I pause it. I make my wife come into the living room and I say, watch this, and she'll watch.
And she'll go, that was good. And I go, Are you even seeing what he did?

Speaker 1 He did a short slice to pull him in. And then he went, you know, it's like, but it's a language that I speak.
And

Speaker 1 this is life, man. Picking these little things we have that we get passionate about is just awesome.
As I've gotten older, I've, I used to shy away from tennis a little bit. It's an elite sport.

Speaker 1 It's got its own history. And now I'm just like, I fucking love it.
I love that I'm good at it. I love that I know it.
It's the monkeys pushed you away from tennis. No, no, the woke is a punishment.

Speaker 1 It sounds like he did.

Speaker 1 It was a little too elite.

Speaker 1 It was a little too country club, a little too segregated. It definitely is those things.

Speaker 1 No, I think what happened. It doesn't have to be.
It doesn't have to be. And that's why

Speaker 1 Serena and Venus were such a fun

Speaker 1 fuck-up to the sports. Do you know the Freeway Ricky Ross story? No.
Freeway Ricky Ross was a guy who, you know, Rick Ross, the rapper? Yes.

Speaker 1 He named himself after a famous cocaine dealer in Los Angeles called Freeway Ricky Ross.

Speaker 1 Freeway Ricky Ross was selling cocaine unbeknownst to him for the CIA to fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas. Okay, yeah, so this is the cocaine cowboy type stuff, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Type stuff, but this was about Oliver North. This was all about funneling money into the war.

Speaker 1 He was a tennis player, like an elite tennis player.

Speaker 1 Couldn't even read.

Speaker 1 Couldn't read.

Speaker 1 And was this really good tennis player who that was like his hope for a scholarship?

Speaker 1 Gets involved, starts selling cocaine, starts selling a lot of of cocaine. I'm sure.
Doesn't know how he's so successful because he's worked with the CIA. The CIA's helping him.

Speaker 1 Goes to jail, learns how to read when he's in jail, becomes a lawyer in jail, gets himself off because they tried him on three strikes, but he did it for one incident. So they did it incorrectly.

Speaker 1 And so he gets out of jail.

Speaker 1 So incarceration educated him to the point where he got himself out. But his origins are as a tennis player.
He's a tennis player. He's a tennis player, like a really good tennis player.

Speaker 1 You know, Menendez brothers, excellent tennis players. One of them played at UCLA.
Maybe not the best example.

Speaker 1 One guy's just... I'm talking about a guy from South Central L.A.
who can't read. True.

Speaker 1 Just to say it's not necessarily an elite sport. It doesn't have to be.
It's just a sport. I agree.
And all you need is a court. I mean, it seems pretty cheap.

Speaker 1 You need a flat surface, a tennis racket, and a ball. Like, let's go.
The kids that were beating me when I was a pro

Speaker 1 played on a dirt court with a rope tied between two sticks.

Speaker 1 These South American and Russian players, it was not a money sport. It was not a sport of money.
It was a sport of movement and competition. And because there's no clock,

Speaker 1 you can have as much time as you want to figure out and beat down your opponent. So that gets a certain type of athlete.

Speaker 1 You know, I think it was Jimmy Connors who said, I didn't lose, I just ran out of time in that match.

Speaker 1 I would have figured it out. But unfortunately, he beat me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what happened with me,

Speaker 1 I was trying to be a stand-up comic that I was trying to so badly that I was trying to remove the athletic stigma. Even now, you sometimes say tennis and people kind of back up.

Speaker 1 But as I got better at comedy and more confident in my abilities, I said, why am I shying away from the sport that I love and that is such a foundational part of me?

Speaker 1 Isn't that weird that you felt like you had to move away from athletics in order to fit in in comedy? That's probably a more succinct way to say it.

Speaker 1 And the new book that's out right now, Lucky Loser, is all about how

Speaker 1 I'm now embracing this tennis because it gave me all the skills to actually be good in comedy. Of course.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Discipline, realizing, like the tennis player that you were talking about, that if you do put in the work over time, the results will pay off and you'll see it. And you're alone.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Figure that shit out by yourself. You're alone.
And you're going to have

Speaker 1 success and failure.

Speaker 1 When I was eight years old, I lost in the finals of the Ann Arbor Junior Open, and I realized I was going to lose, and I started crying on the court.

Speaker 1 And my older brother runs on the court and holds me like a child.

Speaker 1 I'm crying. There's a picture of that in the book.
Now, as a parent, I'm going, who the fuck took that picture? Right? I'm just a kid crying, and my brother's holding me.

Speaker 1 Is my parents taking that picture? They did it for the Graham.

Speaker 1 But man, as a comic, holy shit, we've all felt like that. Oh, man, it's so personal when you fail as a a comic.
Well, it's important to learn how to lose at things, of everything.

Speaker 1 Like, if you marry your high school sweetheart and you guys never broke up, and that's the, like, you probably missed out. I mean,

Speaker 1 congratulations on achieving the most difficult thing humanly possible together that everybody admires, right?

Speaker 1 When you meet a couple, and like, I have two friends of mine that have actually been dating since they were like 16 years old, and now they're married with kids in their 40s. Congratulations.

Speaker 1 But I think there's some value in getting your ass kicked. Yeah, I think there's some value in a girl saying, No,

Speaker 1 I don't even like you. Like, no, you don't like me.
You know, I think it's good getting dumped is good. I think all that's valuable.
I think you have to learn.

Speaker 1 And I don't think you learn by winning all the time.

Speaker 1 And I don't think you learn if something's easy, which is why really handsome and really beautiful people are often ridiculous in the way they behave. That's true.
Because they have five aces, right?

Speaker 1 And, you know, and they didn't earn them. They were just born with five aces.

Speaker 1 so how do you instill grit toughness in a generation as a parent i see my five-year-old struggling i oftentimes pop in let me get that for you you know she's trying to little things trying to do the buttons on her shirt that's where we gotta you know and i do it for her and i think i shouldn't do it for her she should be struggling to do this but this is a big issue right now right the younger generation you hear that word grit how do we instill that well sports is a great way to do it a great way to do it it doesn't work with everybody because some people play sports and they come out even cuntier

Speaker 1 yeah they come out more aggressive or more competitive or more psychotic in their pursuits and it just like alienates everything else in their life. Or it creates trauma for them.

Speaker 1 Not real trauma, but. Or real trauma.
Yeah. Fucking head trauma if you're playing football.
Yeah. Yeah, there's, I think difficult things are important for kids.

Speaker 1 It doesn't necessarily have to be that. It could be art.
It could be music. It could be something.
But I think there's something when you put your attention to something.

Speaker 1 and realize you can get better at this thing and you find yourself in that thing and you find your potential in that thing that you focus on.

Speaker 1 It doesn't have to, it's not necessarily that it has to define you because oftentimes it does, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 When people are really good at a thing, it becomes the whole essence of who they are as a person.

Speaker 1 But it's a valuable tool for elevating your human potential. And it's also a way that you can quantify effort versus results.

Speaker 1 And you can do that in sports and games and in chess and art and things that are difficult.

Speaker 1 Like you can say, like, I am so much better at playing guitar now because I've been playing three hours a day for six months. And look what I can do now.

Speaker 1 So I know that there's a thing, and it teaches you that if there's a thing that you really love and you focus on it, that thing, if someone does it for a living, why can't you? Yeah. Why can't you?

Speaker 1 Why do I have to be in this fucking bullshit office in this cubicle with these stupid papers that I don't give a shit about that I have to fill out for this company that I don't give a fuck about?

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Speaker 1 I agree with you.

Speaker 1 Some things.

Speaker 1 we will improve upon faster based on our natural abilities. I loved the way DJs used to seamlessly transfer one song to the other, beat matching, whatever that was called.

Speaker 1 I asked for two turntables for Christmas.

Speaker 1 I obsessed over it. I fucking sucked at it, dude.
I couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I tried so hard. And then I'm thinking, I pick up this tennis racket and it all kind of clicks very quickly.
Well, you have a good frame for tennis, first of all. Thank you.

Speaker 1 So you're tall and long, which really helps. You can reach stuff that other people can't reach.

Speaker 1 You don't think I don't have a good frame for DJ?

Speaker 1 You have like a foot more space. Look how much wider your arms.
My arms are pretty long, and yours are like a foot more. Dude, if Pete Sampras did this, the greatest server.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, he is.

Speaker 1 Don't they say that this is the same height? I think so. I think they say that this is your height also.

Speaker 1 It's not really. I mean, that's your wingspan.
Well, I always heard that from here to here is your foot. I saw that I'm pretty woman.

Speaker 1 From here to here is your foot.

Speaker 1 But I mean,

Speaker 1 Pete had like like extra length. Yes.
And people go, how did he get the pop on the serve? It's like, you know, those torque. Like Tommy Hearns with his punches.
Tommy Hearns was so long and tall.

Speaker 1 Like Deontay Wilder is another example. Those long, tall guys.
When you have this torque, like, you ever see Deontay Wilder? No. He's...

Speaker 1 Arguably the greatest one-punch knockout artist in the history of the heavyweight division. At one point in time, he was like,

Speaker 1 what is Deontay's record? I think it's like 40, and he's had a few losses recently, but at one point in time, he had like 39 knockouts out of 40 fights. Jesus.
Which is insane.

Speaker 1 And these are professional fighters he's knocking out

Speaker 1 undersized for the heavyweight division. When he fought Tyson Fury, Tyson Fury was like 260.
He was 209.

Speaker 1 209. You made it to 40 and 0.
40 and 0, and 39 of those 40 were knockouts.

Speaker 1 Look at everybody. Knockout, TKO,

Speaker 1 TKO, KO. He knocked out everybody.

Speaker 1 Get the Louis Ortiz fight. Show him the Louis Ortiz fight.

Speaker 1 Forgive this extremely ignorant question. When you say knockout, that means like

Speaker 1 the guy's done.

Speaker 1 That's not like the ref calls it. That's a temple.
TKO is the ref calls it. Knockout is like, it's over.
Like, you got flatline. And these are guys that know how to take hits.
Elite guys. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, this guy, Louis Ortiz, was on the Cuban Olympic team. He's a fucking elite fighter, and he was really durable.
And Deontay, so Deontay is, see, he's the one with his back to us.

Speaker 1 He's long and tall, but he's not giant. He's not a big guy in comparison to a lot of these guys.

Speaker 1 But he catches him with a right hand and flattens him. I think this is the first time they fought Jamie.
Oh, you went the second one? Yeah, the second one is the KO with one punch.

Speaker 1 So he beat him up in the first fight, too. But

Speaker 1 Ortiz is an elite boxer, and Deontay's not the best boxer.

Speaker 1 He's just a hitter. Got a hitter.
And he's he's just waiting, waiting, waiting. Blam!

Speaker 1 And he hits guys, and they're like, what the fuck? Here it is. Watch this.

Speaker 1 Wow, that

Speaker 1 just collapses. It didn't even seem like it was that hard of a hit.
And this is an elite heavyweight. Show it again.
Show it again because it's so crazy. It's just one punch.
It's just black.

Speaker 1 See, Wilder's just waits, waits, waits. It's all waiting.
It's not boxing. Yeah, that's right.
He's just waiting, waiting for his chance.

Speaker 1 look at that recorder needs to get back in the center as king gong trudges forward

Speaker 1 unbelievable

Speaker 1 well you got that kind of power that is so crazy that's crazy that's hard for us to it's hard for me to even wrap my head around if they show it in the replay because he hits him on the forehead which is so crazy just before that watch this right there just before it jamie

Speaker 1 okay here it is watch this he hits him on the forehead man

Speaker 1 Not punching. So he's just waiting.
He's just waiting. He's just pawing at him with his left hand.
And

Speaker 1 oh, my God. Look at that.
Bro.

Speaker 1 But it's all that torque and length and leverage and just God-given power. Like nobody has.
Jeez, and the fucking slow-motion. That is so crazy.
The slow-motion card. That is so crazy.

Speaker 1 And look at the torque. Look at the wide shoulders and the timing and the speed.
And watch just straightens out right on his fucking noggin. Boom.

Speaker 1 And the follow-through with the shoulder. Oh, my goodness.
In these sports, like mixed martial arts too,

Speaker 1 these sports aren't for me because

Speaker 1 one punch, it's done. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Meaning, I like watching that. Meaning, I wouldn't have been a good

Speaker 1 athlete in that sport. Tennis.
I didn't think that. Well, like, in tennis, what I love is if you're just bombing aces,

Speaker 1 after the first set, clean slate. We start all over.

Speaker 1 And in boxing,

Speaker 1 you make one mistake like that, and it's done. Well, against that guy.

Speaker 1 But that's very unusual. Most guys can't do that.
They can't do that. Most guys can hit you pretty hard.
You would take a hard hit, but you could recover. That's crazy.
That's crazy. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 Deontay's like in a world of his own. And he's also in a world of his own, again, because he's not big.

Speaker 1 Like, there's Daniel Dubois, who is the, he's, I forget which division he's a champion of right now, but he's a giant heavyweight who knocks everybody out. But he's 255, 260, built like a tank.

Speaker 1 Deontay's literally 40 plus pounds lighter than that

Speaker 1 and just one punch. Black.
I liked how we watched a lot of that, and he hadn't even thrown a punch.

Speaker 1 He's not wasting, he's a hitter.

Speaker 1 He's there to kill you. He's not going to outbox you and be slick.
In fact, his movement is sometimes awkward. He's criticized for for having bad foot where his legs look like sticks.

Speaker 1 He has the skinniest legs you've ever seen in your life. It's crazy.
You look at his legs, like, how? How? But the power this guy generates is out of this world.

Speaker 1 So his software during a fight is just constantly trying to find the open for one of these huge punches. That's the whole time he's doing.
He's not boxing you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, he's boxing kind of, but he's really looking for the big one. And you know, if that big one lands, it's 99 for everybody.

Speaker 1 The onlybody who's able to survive it is Tyson Fury because he's a fucking animal. And he rose from the dead in the 12th round of their fight where it looked like Deontay had knocked him out cold.

Speaker 1 Deontay even went like that at the end of it because he hit him with a right hand and then a left hook as he was going down.

Speaker 1 And he went flat out on his back and Tyson Fury rose like the Undertaker and got right back and won the rest of the round.

Speaker 1 But that's just because he's a that's another very, very rare human being, Tyson Fury. Just an animal.
Jesus. Just an animal.
One of the greatest boxers of all time.

Speaker 1 And one of the greatest heavyweights, without a doubt, of all time. When you get hit like that,

Speaker 1 there's got to be an enormous physical pain, duh. But then there also is like, don't you get scared then after a big hit? Well, you get super confused.
You get confused. Because I would get scared.

Speaker 1 You got to kind of shake off the cobwebs. Your ears are ringing.
Your legs don't work right anymore. When you get knocked down, I only got TKO'd once in a kickboxing fight.

Speaker 1 And ironically, it didn't hurt. The punch that hit me just twisted my jaw.
He hit me with a left hook and my legs just gave out like weep, like gone. It's the craziest feeling.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's not like you got hurt. It's like your legs just shut off.
Right. Like,

Speaker 1 he clipped me with a left hook that I didn't see in an exchange. And when you get hit on the jaw, something happens in the jaw.

Speaker 1 And I don't know what it is with the nerves behind your neck, but it just shuts everything off. Right.
And you're conscious, which is weird.

Speaker 1 Like, so it was completely conscious, but my legs just like disconnected and went down. But they reconnected right away, and I got up and I was like, oh no, I'm in trouble.

Speaker 1 They weren't working good. Like everything wasn't working good.
And then I got dropped again. He hit me with an uppercut and dropped me.
And then the referee stopped the fight. But

Speaker 1 totally conscious the whole time. But the feeling that you get when you get hit real hard is real weird.
It's like nothing works right anymore.

Speaker 1 And you got to get on your bike and try to move around and get everything working again. And it might take 30 seconds to get it.
And that's that 30 seconds when he's also

Speaker 1 trained to kill you.

Speaker 1 Now, in the UFC, it's way more accurate because when you get knocked down, they climb on top of you and beat your fucking brains out or strangle you, which is really what's supposed to happen.

Speaker 1 The whole thing of letting someone get up, what you're really doing is giving them a chance to get more damage. That's true.
Because they can recover, but not all the way.

Speaker 1 Sometimes, sometimes a guy gets rocked early in a fight, and you can tell for the whole rest of the fight, they're still fucked up, and they're very defensive.

Speaker 1 So it's safer, in your opinion, the way UFC does it, where if you start wobbling, I'm immediately on you trying to kill you.

Speaker 1 And then it's like, as opposed to boxing where they would get you up and you maybe... I don't think either one is safe.
I think it's an unsafe sport. It's as safe as we can make it.

Speaker 1 We have laws when you can hit someone, you can't hit them in the back of the head.

Speaker 1 But it's not safe. It's a very dangerous, very scary sport.

Speaker 1 But I think realistically, when someone gets hurt, and someone finishes them off on the ground, that's probably less damage than they would have taken if you gave them a standing eight count, dusted their gloves off, made them move forward, and let them go back again and get really mollywalled.

Speaker 1 You know, because a lot of times those are when the real bad KOs come from is when a guy's hurt and then he stands up.

Speaker 1 The only thing I can even closely compare this to is being in a car accident. Yeah.
And I let me show you one of the greatest examples of that.

Speaker 1 Alex Pereira, who was a two-division glory world champion, pull-up Alex Pereira KOs Jason wilness

Speaker 1 so he

Speaker 1 he's like the most destructive kickboxer in the history of the sport okay and he went over to the ufc became a two-division ufc champion just lost his title last weekend in a really close fight great fight but he hits this guy with a head kick and drops him and you can tell this guy's fucked but they give him the standing because he's in kickboxing not in mma okay they give him the standing eight count dust his gloves off yoke come forward and then he gets hit with a flying knee on the chin and just sent into the shadow realm right and it didn't didn't need to happen this way and this is what happens when you take a guy who's like really rocked and kind of fucked so watch this so he catches him with a head kick

Speaker 1 so he's by the way jason wellis had beaten him twice before so he drops him with the left hip okay is this the first fight yeah i don't know or is this the the head kick i don't know

Speaker 1 i don't know if this is the one i think this is the one when they went back and forth i don't think this is the one where he KOs him. I think this is the one where he drops him.
65, maybe?

Speaker 1 I guess that's later. Yeah, try to find the later one.

Speaker 1 This is it. This is the one because I can tell by his haircut.
So

Speaker 1 Pereira at this time was the champion, and he was getting revenge on Wilness, who had beaten him before and stopped him with low kicks in one of their fights. So he headkicks him.
Boom!

Speaker 1 So right now, he's fucked. And on MMA, he would follow up, beat him a couple times, and that would be.

Speaker 1 But Wilness is like, they're giving him a chance to clear

Speaker 1 your coach to get up immediately, show that you're okay. Right.
Yeah, and he's like, move forward.

Speaker 1 Then watch this. Boom! Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 That's the kind of shit that happens when you're really already fucked. So he can hit you with this flying scissor knee right on the chin.
What the fuck is that?

Speaker 1 And he's the most ferocious knockout artist literally in the history of the sport. Look at this on the chin.
Yeah, and that's like legal and everything. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's encouraged.

Speaker 1 It's not just legal. That's celebrated.
That's one of the greatest techniques in the history of the sport. And Alex Pereira, that's how he won his first UFC fight.
He won with that.

Speaker 1 Want to see another nasty one? Pull up Pereira KO's Michelitis. You want to see another nasty one? So this is Pereira's first entrance into the UFC.

Speaker 1 And I'm a giant fan of kickboxing. So I watch Muay Thai.
I watch Dutch kickboxing. I watch Glory.
I watch everything I can about kickboxing. And I knew this guy was really special.

Speaker 1 So I was completely hyping him up in this first UFC fight. I'm like, just watch.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he came through in flying colors and he came through with that flying knee. And it's so nuts the amount of power this guy can generate

Speaker 1 with punches and with kicks, but with a flying knee, you have so much torque. You're literally throwing your body weight up into the air.
So how do you avoid a flying knee? Just step up.

Speaker 1 So it's in the second round, Jamie. So it's right after this, like right at the beginning of the second round.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so they start the second round and he's like fuck this dude i'm just gonna catch him coming in and flatline him

Speaker 1 this is

Speaker 1 watch this i mean this is nutty see if the uh production truck can isolate that there it is but it's a nasty welt on his left cheeking to with all the clinch and the grapes oh my god

Speaker 1 That is so fast. He's such a fucking animal.
He's such a monster, dude. So how would you even how you can't block that? You just try to give you a way out.
Get the fuck out of the way of that.

Speaker 1 You don't want to block that because if you're well, you certainly should block it rather than take it on the chin.

Speaker 1 But once he's in the air like that, if that catches your arms, he could break your forearm. I mean, the amount of power that's involved in that particular technique is fucking extraordinary.

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Because it's a natural movement of your hips.

Speaker 1 It's a thing that you do your whole life, running and jumping. You're doing so you can explode very quickly.
And you're hitting someone with your knee, which is the most immobile part.

Speaker 1 Like if you want to hit someone with a joint, it's elbows and knees, but the knees preferable. But aren't you putting yourself in a vulnerable position to throw a flying knee?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you got to wait till a guy's fucked. And that's what he does.
He waits till you're fucked. Because you are jumping in the air and exposing yourself.

Speaker 1 So what I would do is I would move out of the way, Joe, and then I would pop him. I would pop him.
But some guys are just really good.

Speaker 1 Like John Jones, when he won the light heavyweight title, one of the craziest things that John did, he's 22 years old, and he's fighting Mauricio Shogun Hua, who is a legend.

Speaker 1 He was a light heavyweight champion. He was a legend of this organization called Pride in Japan, where they sold out like 90,000-seat arenas.
I mean, he's like a real legend of the sport.

Speaker 1 And John opens with a flying knee. Opens.
First move, flying knee, catches him, and then just beats the shit out of him and wins the title and becomes the youngest ever UFC champion.

Speaker 1 That's a great thing. Watch this.
This is the beginning of the fight. No, Shogun is, like I said, he's a fucking legend and a knockout artist.
And John starts right away, boom,

Speaker 1 flying knee knee to open up the fight

Speaker 1 and just put on a clinic put on a clinic and won the title at 22 years of age that's a ballsy move to start with ballsy motherfucker yeah that's a big swing right out of the gate yeah

Speaker 1 crazy move but some guys can pull it off and it helps being tall like Alex is very tall yeah John's tall so it's it's hard to hit their chin but you know it doesn't always work like sometimes guys do it and they get knocked out cold how does your fucking kneecap not break too it doesn't no you kneecap versus chin.

Speaker 1 I'll take kneecap all day long. Especially when your knees are bent and you're hitting them with this part right here.
You can hit that pretty hard on things. You'd be surprised.

Speaker 1 I have so much respect for these athletes and I'm also,

Speaker 1 I can't be far enough away from it. You want to see it go wrong? I want to show you the flying knee go wrong.

Speaker 1 Pull up

Speaker 1 Fedor Emilianenko versus

Speaker 1 Oh, Andre Orlovsky. I'm sorry.
You want to see a flying knee wrong? Andre Orlovsky, Fedor Emilianenko.

Speaker 1 So this is Andrei Orlovsky was actually winning this fight, and he actually was kind of tuning Fedor up, and he was hitting him with some big shots, and he got a little crazy, and he leapt in with a flying knee and got flatlined.

Speaker 1 Well, that's what I'm, that's, this is what you would do. That's what I was thinking.
This is what I would do. No, but I was thinking, this is a vulnerable position.
You don't want to be in the air.

Speaker 1 True. So he's fighting the guy with the bald head.
That's Fedora Milenenko, who's a legend. So watch Orlovsky.
He catches him with the kick. He's fully cocky, tries a flying knee, boom.

Speaker 1 Oh, shit. Flatlined.
But he's fighting and Fedor, that's literally the greatest heavyweight of all time. If not one of the greatest, like, there's the argument that he's the greatest.

Speaker 1 So he catches him on the chin as he's leaping in. Like, perfect punch.
So the guy with the beard thought

Speaker 1 He thought he was vulnerable. Yeah.
He was beating his ass a little bit. And he made a mistake.
And he tried to come in cocky with a flying knee and he got clipped on the jaw.

Speaker 1 And as soon as he gets hit, you just see his flying knee knee just drop. Also, you got to think where Fedor threw that punch because Fedor knew he was going in the air.

Speaker 1 This this is like the reads this guy's able to get he sees our lovski make a motion like bend at the knees

Speaker 1 like he's going to launch himself and so if you look at where he punches him he punches him so high up in the air so he knew where his head was going to be look at that look how high he's see it he's ducked down and our lofski's way up in the air and he catches him perfectly on the chin yep like that is just an understanding of positioning and where a guy's going to be and where what the timing of your punches this is reminding me of the way roger federer would notice his opponent would quarter of an inch open up his grip on the run and roger would know fourhand slice is coming i'll sneak in and pop and now it's much different sport obviously really but it's reading the grip yo dude if you just typically he does it like this and this time he's doing it tiny boom they go out

Speaker 1 what's what's so different about tennis obviously is then you just volley the ball for a winner it's 15 love you don't get head kicked you don't get fucking knocked out i mean this is why this this shit fascinates me.

Speaker 1 The consequences are so great

Speaker 1 that people look at it as a barbaric, horrific thing, which is valid. I understand why pacifists and people are very peaceful, don't want to have anything to do with violence.

Speaker 1 I get it.

Speaker 1 But what it is to me is the ultimate problem solving.

Speaker 1 It's problem solving. You have a person in front of you that is doing all of these things to try to throw you off.
They're fainting you. They're moving.
They're switching stances.

Speaker 1 they're shooting in for takedowns that they don't want so they can catch you with a punch on the way in. There's so many variables you have to think about.

Speaker 1 So it's just like high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.

Speaker 1 I love sport because it

Speaker 1 teaches life lessons with very low stakes.

Speaker 1 But in this

Speaker 1 sports, there's high stakes. And that's very interesting for me because I would much rather my kid play soccer or tennis, learn some important lessons with low stakes.
But this type of thing,

Speaker 1 that is serious stakes, man. It is serious stakes.
I think kids, especially boys, should all learn how to fight so that they don't ever fight. That's what I think.

Speaker 1 I, as a 45-year-old grown man, I wish I would have learned how to fight. Yeah.
And I think it's probably not too late. It's not too late.
You know, you got a gym over here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was telling you, you could get into jiu-jitsu. You'd be great at it.

Speaker 1 Strong limbs. You're athletic.
So that's what I think. Journal is huge.
In jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 1 In jiu-ji-ji-jitsu, because there's certain things that you'll be able to catch that other people can't catch with shorter limbs, like a dars dars choke.

Speaker 1 So a dars choke is, so say if you come to grab me and you have your head here and your arm wraps around me like this,

Speaker 1 I can

Speaker 1 shove my arm under like this, go off the side of your neck and clamp it like this, and now I've got you in a wicked choke. It's called a dars choke.
A darse choke.

Speaker 1 You will be way better at that than me because you have an extra six inches that you could seal this thing up.

Speaker 1 So your hand will go further than mine. You'll be able to grab it deeper.
Dude, I'm writing down Dars joke. Yeah.
And what I'll do tonight on my YouTube is I'll watch some Dars jokes. Yes.
And I...

Speaker 1 And then you do it the other way, it's an anaconda. So you either go armpit this way, it's a Dars, or you go head this way, armpit that way, it's an anaconda.

Speaker 1 And with the anaconda, you roll like an anaconda and you squeeze them deeper into the choke. And I just squeeze until the referee says it's over.

Speaker 1 And your long legs, you could wrap around their body to secure them in place. You could grab a hold of one of their legs so they can't turn away from you.

Speaker 1 You turn into them and fucking keep the squeeze on.

Speaker 1 Dude, you'd be wicked at it. And

Speaker 1 in a competition, that happens until the ref calls it or like. Because the person taps out most of the time.
They tap out. Most of the time you tap out.
Because they know it's over.

Speaker 1 You know it's over. If you're a psycho, you go to sleep.
And there are a lot of psychos that just let people choke them unconscious. That happens all the time.
Guys just say, fuck it.

Speaker 1 I'm going to get choked unconscious. And they just go out.
And then the ref will. The referee stops you.
Hopefully. Hopefully.
Hopefully. But sometimes the referees miss it.

Speaker 1 And sometimes someone's out for like seconds while someone's still fucking squeezing the shit out of their neck. And then the referee finally figures it out.
The person is like in the shadow realm.

Speaker 1 I do absolutely love that in these sports, there's this extreme violence,

Speaker 1 high stakes, but then also a simple tap

Speaker 1 is a mutual agreement. 100%.
That's fucking awesome. And if you don't stop when someone taps, you will get kicked out of the sport.

Speaker 1 There's a guy named Usamar Paul Harris, who is one of the scariest motherfuckers to ever fight because he was a leg lock specialist. And what he would do is rip your knees apart.
And

Speaker 1 he wouldn't let go when you tapped, and you got kicked out of the UFC for it. Wow.
Because he did it to so many people. He was known for not letting go.

Speaker 1 And these guys would be screaming in agony and slapping and tapping.

Speaker 1 And he would be still twisting. And he was built like a human pit bull.

Speaker 1 He was like 5'7 ⁇ , 185 pounds of solid muscle, and he would just dive on your legs and and roll into these positions and rip your knees apart.

Speaker 1 Like with a heel hook, a heel hook is so terrible because your knee has a lot of strength going forward and backwards, but it has almost none going side to side.

Speaker 1 So they isolate the top of it with their legs. They wrap the heel into the crook of their elbow, and then they wrench that motherfucker apart.

Speaker 1 It's literally twisting your knee apart, and it's terrifying. Oh my God.
And it cripples people. Like you are fucked.
He'll tear your ACL, your MCL, your meniscus.

Speaker 1 You're going to go a whole year before you can fight again. You're going to have to get surgery to reconstruct your knee.

Speaker 1 And then your knee's never going to be the same because your meniscus is shot now. And maybe some of your cartilage.
So this is him. I don't know.
I don't know. Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 1 So, this is a fight that he had against David Avalon. And this is fucked because they stop the motion and they put him back into the same position.

Speaker 1 And when they put him back into the same position, he doesn't let go. So he holds on to the heel hook and just wrenches the fucking shit out like this right here.
Ah! He let go there.

Speaker 1 He let go there because I think they were like chastising him to make sure. Like, look at that.
Look at what he does.

Speaker 1 I don't want to look. And look at the build on this guy.
Paul Harris was a fucking specimen. And he's trying to turn the knee sideways.
He's ripping this shit apart right here, man.

Speaker 1 He's pulling it backwards. It's backwards and at a slight angle.
I mean, this is horrific. And look at the build on Paul Harris.

Speaker 1 Imagine the fucking force, the size of this guy's legs, the size of his torso, and perfect technique. And he's just ripping his fucking knee apart.
That's a nasty knee bar right there.

Speaker 1 That was so horrible to watch. But in MMA, he wound up getting kicked out of the UFC because I think it was Mike Pierce.
See if you can find the Mike Pierce fight. It might not have been Pierce at

Speaker 1 one of these fights. I love that the tap.

Speaker 1 Generally speaking, it does. Of course.
In this case, the Mike Pierce one, he's screaming and tapping, and Paul Harris is

Speaker 1 still ripping it apart. I mean, one of my favorite parts of tennis is how they'll battle for five and a half hours, and then they calmly walk away.
See, here it is. Look.
He's tapping.

Speaker 1 Watch. So he gets it.

Speaker 1 He's tapping, and he won't let go. He's still, when the referee's on him, he's still yanked on it.
So

Speaker 1 that extra second would just rip your shit apart. So he taps immediately.
See, none of this has to happen. He was tapping immediately.
I feel like the ref was on that.

Speaker 1 I know, but it's like Paul Harris. Harris doesn't give a fuck.
He's out for blood. I mean, he had like a a crazy childhood.
He grew up on a farm with like no food.

Speaker 1 He's feral. He's feral.

Speaker 1 And he's super technical. Which would serve you, I'm sure.
Oh, yeah. Well, until you get kicked out of the sport.
You know,

Speaker 1 God, it's incredibly

Speaker 1 violent, but also systematic in its understanding of the human body. Oh, yeah.
We're going to know that the knee doesn't go this way. No, it's really, really tight.
All sports are like this, actually.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think all sports at the highest levels, they have to be like that because you only get so far with genetics and so far with natural speed and endurance.

Speaker 1 There's certain aspects of it that require a careful, considered study.

Speaker 1 And wouldn't you, if you know your opponent is a guy that likes to do the,

Speaker 1 wouldn't you then in your training work on defending that and also like making sure your knee can withstand more of that than normal? You know, you're not going to go into that. There's only

Speaker 1 special knee pill you can take. You got to tap when you get into those positions, and then you got to make sure that you don't get into those positions, which is the most important thing.

Speaker 1 The tapping must be so humbling as a fighter because you've trained so hard, you want to win so badly, and yet you have to do this thing. You have to press the eject button.

Speaker 1 Well, hopefully, you will tap because guys haven't tapped and they've gotten their arms broken in half. And I've seen quite a few of those, including legends.

Speaker 1 Like Frank Muir, one time, he too much pride, you mean to tap? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because he fought Antonio Noguera, who was another legend, who was former heavyweight champion of Pride, and he caught him in a Kimura and snapped his upper arm.

Speaker 1 And we watched his arm crack and then go limp, and you could see where it was cracked up here. Oh, it was horrific.
It's terrible. So hard to watch.
When you're commentating,

Speaker 1 are you

Speaker 1 present moment completely? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
100%.

Speaker 1 You're not thinking like, it's not like these baseball commentators were like, I got a story I'll tell later in this. No.
No, because it is that. Yeah, great.
New.

Speaker 1 Especially not while the actual fight is going on the actual fight is life and death you know you you have to be locked in but daniel cormier my uh co

Speaker 1 so there's like two color commentators me and daniel cormier and there's john anik who's the playback lay guy me and daniel around a lot we joke around a lot about stuff during the because he's like fun guy but when things are serious we're serious yeah you you have to be like you know this is like you're representing these people's hard work you're trying to like put words to i love that yeah yeah you have to be very serious about it because the stakes are so high and it's wild though that people might know you

Speaker 1 if they're just being introduced to you as the commentator for that and maybe don't know the other stuff and well, it's confusing for sure, but it's also like it's one of the things that I'm most impressed with by what you do is as someone that has this passion for tennis, I'm like

Speaker 1 It's so cool how you dive into a completely different world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you just can't apologize for it. You can't wonder what other people think about it.
Right. You just have to be yourself.
Right. And I grew up a martial artist.

Speaker 1 Martial arts is an enormous part of my life. It's an enormous part of how I became who I am.
Yeah. So for me, like commentating on martial arts is enormous.
You're not a comedian who then

Speaker 1 switched over to martial arts because it served you. It's your foundation of who you are.
And you also happen to be a comedian and podcast host. Yeah, but I'm not interested in being funny.

Speaker 1 I'm just trying to do that job. I've done commentary on professional pool, too.
Whoa. Because I play pool

Speaker 1 and I play pretty good. So I really understand the game, and I know what's going on.
So I've done commentary on that, too. It's the same thing.
What's your favorite pool movie, Billy? The Hustler.

Speaker 1 The Hustler. The only answer to that question is The Hustler.
I thought The Color of Money had a run.

Speaker 1 It's okay. It's okay.
The Color of Money is good. It's a good tournament movie.
It's a good movie. But it's, you know, there's some things in it.

Speaker 1 And because Paul Newman was in it, you know, it kind of gave it some validity. Yeah.
Because it was the same Walter Tevis novel as The Hustler. The Color of Money.
It was very different.

Speaker 1 The book was very different, though.

Speaker 1 But yeah, The Color of Money was great because he got a lot of people playing pool again. But The Hustler is just an amazing film.

Speaker 1 Like the actual film itself is amazing. It's like Piper Lorry is incredible in it.

Speaker 1 It's just

Speaker 1 George C. Scott is in it.
Jackie Gleason plays Minnesota Fats.

Speaker 1 By the way, Jackie Gleason was a real pool player. He's probably the only guy that's ever played a pool player in a movie that really could play.

Speaker 1 My brother once got a book for Christmas called How to Hustle Your Friends a Pool. And

Speaker 1 it was in our basement. We had a pool table, but I just, it was one of those things, same, that

Speaker 1 I worked at it. I could never get it right.
And eventually other things came more naturally to me, but it is fun. Pool is something that if you really want to play right, you have to get coached.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.
It's just like tennis, I'm sure. It's like you can develop some bad habits and bad fundamentals that you'll never, you're never going to pass a certain level of play.

Speaker 1 But I think it's like everything. I think it's like chess, it's like tennis.
It's like, you know, Schultz was in here the other day and he's into this sport Paddle. Have you seen Paddle?

Speaker 1 Is this P-A-D-E-L? Yes. Padel? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, is it Padell? Well, I've heard Padell. It depends on how you want, how pretentious you want to be.

Speaker 1 Perfect. Of course.
Or if you're Spanish.

Speaker 1 Oh, did they say Padell? That's where it's from, yeah. Oh, well, why don't we call it Padell then? Because Schultz said that's what they did.
Yeah, he said paddle like he said,

Speaker 1 like a New Yorker. Yeah, so, you know, tennis has had this

Speaker 1 great historical run on elite racket sports, and then pickleball has been this

Speaker 1 counter-response to tennis. Silly ball, loud noise, don't really have to move much.

Speaker 1 And pickleball has been taking off. I don't know if you've played or if you've seen it.
Kid Rock plays every day. Okay, perfect.

Speaker 1 He gets up at eight in the morning. He plays pickleball as a trainer.
That is exactly my point. Okay.
I was in Scottsdale, Arizona recently. I did an hour of pickleball.

Speaker 1 The community there had music going, cracking beers. Costa, come over, play with us.
Very fun. Very fun.
Very fun. I then go over to the other side and play tennis, which is my sport.

Speaker 1 And no joke, this older couple says, you're talking too loudly on the courts, right? It's this beautiful dichotomy of these two sports. I don't know if pickleball is a sport.
But

Speaker 1 Padell comes along and seems to be this middle ground.

Speaker 1 What I don't like about pickleball is you get to what they call the kitchen line and you can't move anymore. You're frozen.
So you just stand there frozen and you knock the ball around.

Speaker 1 I like a sport. I want 360-degree movement.

Speaker 1 I don't want the dimensions of the court to restrict my movement or the rules of the game. Padel seems to be both.
It's tennis, but it's in this box, and they sometimes run outside of the box.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's fucking insane. And I've actually never played,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 the points never end because you're on this. This

Speaker 1 I just see people

Speaker 1 see it outside the box. I know that's nuts.
That is nuts. So it almost seems gimmicky to me.
That's funny that Andrew plays,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 I would like to play this. And look, you know, also, one of the best things that happened for racket sports is HD TV, dude.
When you used to, you know, I love you when you were a kid,

Speaker 1 watching Jimmy Connor's John Mac. You never even see the fucking ball.
Right, right. It's the same color as the court.
Right. And this shit now is unbelievable to watch.

Speaker 1 That's like what what they've done with hockey where they highlight the puck i love that that's a game changer at first i know what's going on at first people made fun of it and i was like i need yeah and in hockey with the substitutions on the fly i never know who the fuck's on the ice yeah i love that though i love that they do that that's so cool i've been watching uh professional lacrosse lately once i realized they could beat the fuck out of each other

Speaker 1 i didn't know that they could fight like they do i don't know they could fight they fight and they wear shoes which is crazy because now you're bare knuckle boxing in the middle of a game what does the shoes have to do with it what do you you mean?

Speaker 1 Look at grip.

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Speaker 1 I mean, like a cleaned shoe. Right.
Well, the difference between running around on ice skates, you're sliding around.

Speaker 1 The fighting is like, yeah, they're fighting, but they're kind of compromised because they can't really like, you know, good skaters can kind of hold.

Speaker 1 It's not like having grip with your shoes and being able to really, you can really hurt people. Yeah.
So they're beating the shit out of each other. I'm like, wow.

Speaker 1 La Crosse, La Crosse always kind of had the like douchey rich kid sport, but it is incredibly,

Speaker 1 yeah, but this stopped doing this in the 90s. Yeah, I was going to say, they stopped doing this.
I don't watch hockey, but I like this.

Speaker 1 My favorite,

Speaker 1 my favorite. I let me put a circle around it when it flies around.
It got a lot of pushback, but I always

Speaker 1 double-check

Speaker 1 people.

Speaker 1 Show it sometimes in the highlight. That's funny.
I always avoided winter sports when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 I didn't learn how to ski until I was in my 40s, and I never learned how to ice skate because I was fighting all the time. So I didn't want to do anything that would hurt myself doing it.

Speaker 1 So I would, like, and everybody was like, we're going to go skiing. I was like, uh-uh.
Yeah. Get the fuck out of here.
Like, I need these. It was like super important.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 This got everybody excited, though, a few weeks ago, though. What do they do? USA Canada fight or a game.
There's nine fights or three.

Speaker 1 Yeah, why are we upset at Canada? This is stupid. This is over tariffs? Yes, 100%.
They booed us over tariffs.

Speaker 1 They were also trying to get, I mean, it worked. They got a ton of attention.
So everyone was. Who's red and who's blue? Well, Canada's red.
There you go. Who's winning this excuse?

Speaker 1 Red white and blue is America. One dude keeps his helmet on.
That's ridiculous. That helmet's punched through.

Speaker 1 I do love when you hear their microphones during a fight and they fight and then they go like, you ready to be done? Yeah, I'm ready to be done. I love that.

Speaker 1 I was at the comic strip in Edmonton years ago when Canada played U.S. in the gold medal game.
Someone sent me

Speaker 1 the country's water usage during that game. And at every period end, the water usage would go up because everyone would go to the bathroom.

Speaker 1 And it was like the whole fucking country went to the bathroom at the same time. And Canada won.
I think it was an overtime. I was the only American there.

Speaker 1 But man, do they love a good winter sport up there? We got to become friends with Canada again. We have to, like, you know.
I'm down. This is so ridiculous.

Speaker 1 I can't believe that there's like anti-American and anti-Canadian sentiment going on. It's the dumbest.
Is there anti-that's nuts? Look at the water conception. Is there.
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 Right when you're in the middle of the day. I love on this pod, bro.
If I say something, I got to be ready for you guys to fact check my ass. Jamie's ready.

Speaker 1 Is there anti-Canadian sentiment? Yeah, there's a lot of idiots that now think that they're our fucking enemies. Okay.
Then why are we subsidizing Canada? Right.

Speaker 1 Well, how come they don't have their own military? Well, they don't, so let's just like deal with it as it is.

Speaker 1 You know, Trudeau is out, right? He's already leaving. I think they got a new guy who's just as bad.

Speaker 1 Same thing. But they got a new party.
150 people voted. Now they have a new guy running the country.
But their whole election system is so different.

Speaker 1 They don't have like a specific time when they have elections.

Speaker 1 They can call an election, and I think it happens within three weeks.

Speaker 1 The whole thing is so crazy. And so I don't know what's happening with their politics, but I just want America and Canada to get along.
I think it's ridiculous. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a good as someone who's from Ann Arbor, Michigan, you know, my. And I don't really think they should be our 51st state.
There I said it. That you said it? It's on record.

Speaker 1 It would be fun if it happened. It would be fun.
I think Greenland's more accessible. Yeah.
You could probably buy that. Yeah.
If you want a 51st state, it's Greenland.

Speaker 1 Plus, if global warming is real, because of all the digging and oil and all that shit, you know, it'd be good to have a cold spot to eventually warm up.

Speaker 1 I just read this crazy book called Power Metals by Vince Beiser, possibly. We had him on the show, Daily Show.

Speaker 1 And it's all about minerals and metals and what we need for our batteries and cobalt mining in Africa. I went down all this YouTube shit with like the child labor and all.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 very, I was very ignorant to how much we need and use metals. Oh, yeah.
Nickel, copper,

Speaker 1 you know, wild batteries, EVs, everything. And so then when the news came out that Trump wanted Greenland, I was like, oh, this is starting to make more sense to me now.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of stuff up there. There's also a lot of stuff in the sky.
If they can mine asteroids, if they can successfully figure out how to mine asteroids, they can get a lot of precious minerals.

Speaker 1 Let's fucking do that. Asteroids.
Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 that's a few decades away, but they'll figure it out eventually. They've been able to get samples from asteroids, and they know what the composites are.

Speaker 1 And there's asteroids out there that are filled with trillions of dollars in minerals. That is fucking nuts.
I know, it's nuts. Yeah, and they can figure it out.
They will.

Speaker 1 They'll eventually figure it out. But I had Siddharth Kara on, who has done,

Speaker 1 he's done some pretty... Brilliant and brave investigative work on the cobalt mines.
And, you know, he took video of

Speaker 1 what they call artisanal mines. It's essentially slaves digging this this stuff out of the ground with their babies on their back.
This is from Siddharth's book.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is fucking crazy. And they're digging the cobalt out of the ground with like literally with sticks.
Everybody's breathing it in. It's all toxic.
These women have babies on their back.

Speaker 1 The babies are breathing it in. And then there's these pools, right, that

Speaker 1 you put the water and it's toxic water and the pools are different colors. And

Speaker 1 we don't know where this goes and the water seeps in. And is this all so I can get the new iPhone 14 Max or whatever the fuck it is? 100%.
That's exactly what it is. And

Speaker 1 that's it. It's the only way we're getting that stuff.
Right. It's most of the cobalts coming from that area.
And it's

Speaker 1 also then you go to the actual construction of the phone itself and you see those factories, those Foxconn factories, where they have nets around them to keep people from jumping off the roofs.

Speaker 1 And you realize these people are working in these horrific conditions so that you can get an iPhone that costs $13.99 instead of $15.99 or whatever the fuck it would be if it was made in America with people paid a working wage and health care and all the stuff that you're supposed to get if you're going to be working.

Speaker 1 So why do you have a company like Apple that's worth more than any corporation ever? Like Apple's insanely profitable.

Speaker 1 So we did this piece at the Daily Show once about

Speaker 1 the sugar cane

Speaker 1 agriculture in the central Florida. They over-fertilize it.
It makes more sugar faster.

Speaker 1 All of the fertilization goes down to Lake Okeechobee, then goes out to the oceans where the algae blooms, the manatees die, da-da-da. And I'm just going,

Speaker 1 I think most people would pay an extra 25 cents a year

Speaker 1 for this not to happen to spend more on sugar.

Speaker 1 Why are we doing this?

Speaker 1 I would pay more to have my iPhone be made in America by American hands. Yeah, we've talked about that.

Speaker 1 But the problem is the infrastructure that's required to be able to build phones here is a decade away.

Speaker 1 It takes a long time to build the kind of factories that can have like the tolerances of these chips. And they've been doing it in China forever.
So

Speaker 1 most of the time. Most fucking wild.
I mean, I was loading my kids in the car, put my phone on top of my car because I didn't have an extra hand, forget it's there, driving through Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's gone. I hear it

Speaker 1 all over the highway. It's bouncing.
I stop. I finally find my phone in the woods, and 911 is on the phone.

Speaker 1 We recognize that there was a crash. Are you okay? Do we hold the water? And I'm like, how the fuck? What? Holy shit.
That's in this thing? Yeah. That's pretty wild.
It's wild.

Speaker 1 It's also watching everything you do and listening to all your conversations and recommending Google searches.

Speaker 1 Why don't you buy this, Michael?

Speaker 1 Hey, Michael, maybe you'd be interested in buying this. It seems like you were interested.
But we're talking about vacation homes in Hawaii. Look, Michael.
What about when you've already bought it?

Speaker 1 That always is weird. Yeah, it's weird.
When it's like feeding me in the algorithm. I'm in the algorithm.
Yeah, you get sucked into the algorithm. You know,

Speaker 1 it's an interesting world that we live in with all that stuff because it's like you're constantly getting inundated. That's one of the things that I really enjoy about podcasts.

Speaker 1 It's the one time for three hours a day where I don't look at my phone.

Speaker 1 I don't have any text coming in. It's on do not disturb.
I don't care.

Speaker 1 I mean, that could arguably be why maybe you have this supernatural.

Speaker 1 memory and brain power because you more than anybody probably in the world, maybe United States, are actually away from this for four or four hours just talking. That could be interesting.

Speaker 1 Did I just crack something? That's something, there may be something to that, but I think it's just the sheer volume of people that I've talked to. Yeah.
So you're getting information.

Speaker 1 And you're retaining a lot of that. I've always been good at that for some reason.

Speaker 1 I mean, you just referenced the guest you had this previous book. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Are you retaining, are you doing a trick or anything to retain that? No. You're just locked in and engaged.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I take supplements for memory too, though.

Speaker 1 I take AlphaBrain, which is

Speaker 1 called a nootropic. I saw it out there.
You can grab some.

Speaker 1 I didn't want to be too

Speaker 1 sharp for the pod. It's a thing.
The vending machine. You get free Alpha Brain.
You just press the button.

Speaker 1 How many pods do you get free Alpha Brain on? That's pretty sick. Anyone you want.

Speaker 1 But that stuff's legit. It really works.
And it really does.

Speaker 1 That was from... My company on it.
And when we first made it, a lot of people were saying, oh, this is snake oil. This is bullshit.

Speaker 1 I had already had had experience with nootropics because

Speaker 1 there's a company called Neuro One, and Bill Romanowski, the football player, developed it because he was having memory problems after all the hits.

Speaker 1 And I was on a radio show in San Francisco, and one of the guys was working out with Bill Romanowski, and he started taking this Neuro One. He's like, dude, it's like, I'm so much more focused.

Speaker 1 It's really great. I'm like, okay, I'm going to try this.
And I was like, oh, this is legit. Like, I feel like my mind feels clearer.

Speaker 1 Like, I feel like I have more thought energy if that makes any sense yeah so then we started experimenting with different ones and there's a bunch I like one of them is this company Neuro these are mints neuro mints but they make neuro gum which I'm a big fan of I chew it all the time it's gum that has like a little bit of caffeine a little bit of theanine in it what's the the goal just to kind of keep the brain energy high yes yeah you want to provide your brain with the nutrients your brain needs to produce uh human neurotransmitters all right i'm gonna take this.

Speaker 1 Maybe we'll do like a before-after. That, you know, it's mine.
I usually take two. Okay.
When I take the mints. But they're legit.
So this is one. Neural gum is another one.

Speaker 1 True brain is another one that I've tried that's really good. It's like little packets you drink.

Speaker 1 I've found, I just assumed it was like kids and age and

Speaker 1 getting older that I'll lose my train of thought more often than I ever have before. Oh, yeah.
And I hate it. Writing a joke, it's not fun.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 everything I read says like, keep exercising, get blood flow in your body.

Speaker 1 Maybe sauna helps. That's a big one.
Sleep. Isn't it crazy how much an athlete, the best athletes, treat sleep? Oh, yeah.
I mean, Pete Santos used to travel with duct tape.

Speaker 1 So when he'd get to the hotel, he would tape the curtain to the window so no excess light would get in because he wanted like

Speaker 1 a float tank situation.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, you know, at that level, when you're playing for one in the world, like all that little stuff. Yep.

Speaker 1 And that's wild. Meanwhile, in my house, I lay down, we shut off the lights.
Sonos has a light. The Wi-Fi thing has a light.
The clock has. There's so much extra excess light all around.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not good. Maybe that's why I can't remember the joke I'm about to tell.
Sleep is a big problem. Yeah.
You know, you really need to get a solid seven, eight hours of sleep every night.

Speaker 1 And if you don't, you're going to feel it. One of the best supplements for mitigating the effects of sleep deprivation is actually creatine.
Okay. Creatine is actually.

Speaker 1 My buddy just started taking it. I don't know.
I take it every day.

Speaker 1 I took it in college. The strength team coach made me take it and it bothered my stomach.
Well, there's different forms of creatine. I take it in gummy form, which doesn't seem to bother me at all.

Speaker 1 I've had people that take it like liquid, they pour it into water and they get diarrhea.

Speaker 1 I haven't had that happen, but it's also like there's different kinds of creatine. You want really good creatine, like you want a reputable company that makes creatine monohydrate.

Speaker 1 And then there's another thing called HMB that people mix with creatine.

Speaker 1 But creatine, besides being a muscle builder, because it really does enhance your recovery and helps you build muscle, it also is a nootropic.

Speaker 1 It also helps brain function, which makes sense because if your body works better, your brain works better. You know, and it makes you retain more water.

Speaker 1 You have more water in your body, which is obviously also a good thing.

Speaker 1 And especially for an athlete, and especially for someone who wants to think. One of the worst ways to think is if you're dehydrated.
If you're dehydrated and tired, you're fucked.

Speaker 1 You're working on 50% brain capacity. Well,

Speaker 1 I love watching sports,

Speaker 1 you know, the end, you see these silly mistakes always.

Speaker 1 Why would they do that?

Speaker 1 Why'd the ball go through his legs? Why did he choose to serve to that side? Why did he throw the fastball down the middle?

Speaker 1 Because they're fucking

Speaker 1 dehydrated and tired, and it's crazy how that affects brain function. Oh, shit.
And that's why I love the couch fan. Oh, my God.
Why did he throw that?

Speaker 1 With a beer in your hand.

Speaker 1 You're literally drinking a beer.

Speaker 1 a pussy.

Speaker 1 If I was getting that money, I'd fight Mike Tyson.

Speaker 1 Exactly. I'd come out swinging.
Yeah. The couch fan is their best.
Yeah. Yeah, like in fights, you see it all the time when people are exhausted.
They make terrible decisions.

Speaker 1 They shoot for takedowns. They get caught in guillotine chokes because they're exposed.

Speaker 1 They're just exhausted and they just take a chance and they don't have the energy to complete the technique correctly. Yep.
Yeah. Oh, dude.
I mean, my parenting

Speaker 1 with a full night's sleep versus like had an early flight, had to fly. I mean, it's crazy.
Yeah, everything is.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm like, I'd like to think a kind, patient parent on a good night's sleep, but like

Speaker 1 when I get home after a road gig or whatever, even coming up this Sunday, I have an early flight. I'm going to get to Brooklyn.
I know it's going to be 1 p.m.

Speaker 1 and the wife's going to hand me the kids and go, your turn. Right.
And I'm going to be like, dude, the patience is going to be, it's going to be tough.

Speaker 1 Well, you're going to be exhausted from the flight. Yep.
You know what I found helps a lot from flights is if you can, work out immediately. After?

Speaker 1 right when you land okay like right when you land just just get into it just get something going even if it's 20 minutes do a bunch of push-ups and sit-ups and chin-ups just get get it going just reset the clock because when you exert yourself like hard you have a hard you know 20 minutes half hour of working out it resets you and you're like okay back i'm okay i'm very excited about this weekend because

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 My former assistant coach at Illinois, where I play tennis, is the head coach here at Texas. Oh, at IUT.
I-U-T. So he's won an NCAA championship.
His name is Bruce Burke.

Speaker 1 He's an excellent coach, but he's like, dude, come hit with us. Oh, wow.
So I'm going to be training with the Texas team, and they're beasts.

Speaker 1 These guys are, you know, it's, so that's, that's exciting for me. That's cool.
That's super fun to get to do that. And then perform at Mothership, dude.
Never even step foot in this place.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm excited for you to go. And it's selling out so fast.
I mean, you've created it. Last time I was here, it was like still an idea.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Adam Egot was around, but now, I mean, it's just amazing, man.

Speaker 1 You've built something amazing. Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's as good. It's better than we have ever hoped.
We never hoped it was going to be what it is now. It's perfect.
Was the comedy store

Speaker 1 a foundational thought with this? Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Mitzi's room is obviously a testament to her. And I never met Mitzi.
I never fucking met her. That's crazy.
That's her.

Speaker 1 That painting's her. Let me ask something that's crude.

Speaker 1 Was she a hot

Speaker 1 when she's young? Yeah. When she looked like that.
She's hot. Because I see, like, I go to the La Jolla comedy store and I see all the pictures of her, and I'm like, I think Mitzi was hot.

Speaker 1 You know, but I never

Speaker 1 meet her then. I met her in 94.
You know, she was already quite a bit older, and she started suffering the beginnings of her neurological condition.

Speaker 1 Like, she would have a little bit of shakes, but she was there. Yeah.
And, you know, you could have conversations with her, and she helped me a lot.

Speaker 1 And she also helped foster an environment of creativity and of

Speaker 1 collaboration and of you know there was it was a home for a lot of you know road comics like there was this thing that you knew that you would go home and on tuesday and wednesday nights yeah we would be at the store having the time of our lives on tuesday and wednesday nights we would be working on new jokes we'd be doing sets we'd be laughing together everybody's cracking jokes in the parking lot it was so much fun and it was that home environment that we wanted to recreate as much as possible.

Speaker 1 That's awesome. And to make it as comic-friendly as possible.
What have you ever wanted in a club they didn't have? Okay, let's get that. Like, how do you want this to be?

Speaker 1 How do you want to get to the stage? What do you think we can do the best? And I asked everybody, and Louis C.K. gave me some of the best advice.
Like, Louis told me to lower the ceilings.

Speaker 1 I shortened the stage in the smaller room. He told me to deaden the sound as much as possible.
Everybody wants that echo because it makes it sound like people are killing more. You want clear sound.

Speaker 1 He's dead right on everything. Wow.
Because he has a production mind.

Speaker 1 He doesn't just have a mind of a comic. He also has a mind of what's the best way to set things up for a film or for us, set the environment.

Speaker 1 You feel and notice all that stuff on stage. I was performing recently.

Speaker 1 Ceiling's tall.

Speaker 1 Crowd is full. Yeah.
But where's the laughs going? Am I killing? I feel like I'm doing well, but I'm not hearing it.

Speaker 1 Now I'm in my head a little bit, right? That's changed my order. Now I'm now doing the bit that I know is going to kill instead of just letting things relax.
And it's like, all of that matters. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All of that matters. High ceilings is a big thing.
It's a problem. You want to be locked in.
I want everybody to be locked in.

Speaker 1 The comedy store, the way you just described that, was really became my clubhouse. Yeah.
And I was a little bit, I got past there when you were gone for a little while.

Speaker 1 And I remember when you came back, it

Speaker 1 changed dramatically. But LA was really, really tough for me initially upon moving there.
And then all of a sudden, you get in a place like that. There's a place to drink.

Speaker 1 There's a place to talk shit. There's a place to, oh my God, even just parking.

Speaker 1 Right? Park here and then just hang. Yeah.
You know, it was, it changed the game. It changed the game for me.
It changed the game for me.

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For all of us,

Speaker 1 having like the improv was always a great club to perform at. I always perform there.
Laugh factory is fun. But there's something about the store.
It was like that was home base.

Speaker 1 And so the idea of doing something like that in Texas, Ron White was the first guy to open my eyes to it because Ron had moved here before the pandemic.

Speaker 1 And Ron's like, it's in the middle of the country. I don't have to fucking fly for six hours.
It's like, the place is great. Food's nice.
People are cool. I'm like, fuck, could I live in Texas?

Speaker 1 Because I always wanted to get out of L.A. Because I felt like, especially when my kids were young, I was like, I've been through this with my older daughter.

Speaker 1 I was like, I don't think L.A.'s a good place for children. I don't think it's a good place for young people.
I think it's just filled with too many like bizarre ambitions and creeps.

Speaker 1 And it's just like people are devalued because there's so many of them.

Speaker 1 It's too overwhelming.

Speaker 1 So I'd always thought about getting out. And then the pandemic hit, and then Ron White was the one who talked me into opening up the club.

Speaker 1 Like we were doing local shows at the Vulcan, and we had talked about maybe opening up a club. Like maybe we should buy a club here.
And then Ron White got off stage.

Speaker 1 He hadn't been on stage in like seven or eight months. And he murdered.
He got a standing ovation when he got on stage. And it turned out he was playing it off.
He had practiced all day.

Speaker 1 He'd gone over his notes, and he's just fucking professional. Just murdered.
And then he grabs me by the shoulders. He goes, whatever the fuck we have to do, we're going to keep doing this.

Speaker 1 You're going to open up that goddamn club. I was like, okay.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 Always a great hang. Oh, he's the best.
I mean, at the comedy store, he didn't know me, and he would just hang.

Speaker 1 He's the best.

Speaker 1 He's the elder statesman of the Austin comedy scene. Okay.
Got it. He's the best.
Yeah. And he's such a good guy.
And he's always around.

Speaker 1 And so, like, with Ron, it's like, so we had Ron, we had Tony Hinchcliffe, and then Tom Segura moved here, and Christina Pazitsky, and then the floodgates opened, Tim Dillon, everybody started coming.

Speaker 1 It's a tidal wave, dude. And then Shane Gillis moved here, and he brought the whole Philly crew, and there's all these killers.
It's like,

Speaker 1 Duncan moved here. It's like, it just became so fun.
It became so fun. And all these things had to happen for it to take place like that.
The comedy store had to lose guys like Adam.

Speaker 1 Like, they had to fire everybody. So these people were all unemployed.
So I hired them. yeah, and I brought them over here when there wasn't even a club yet.
I was like, I'll pay you now.

Speaker 1 You can start getting paid now. You'll have health benefits, all the jazz.
Just enjoy the city, just have a good time. In a year or so, I'll call on you.
And so then we started working.

Speaker 1 I mean, I've been texting Adam for a long time, and I was like,

Speaker 1 Is something happening? You know, yes, something is happening, but we don't know when. But not to come back and excited to walk through it.
So,

Speaker 1 yeah, a lot of people dismissed it. It's not going to happen.
Yeah. But it was going to happen.
I had, you know.

Speaker 1 Well, you just, when you're an outsider looking at your plate, there's a lot on it, yeah, you know, so yeah, but this was important, yeah. It was also, if I'm not gonna do it, who's gonna do it?

Speaker 1 You know, it's one of those things where if you have an opportunity to do something very unusual and you don't do it, well, then what is nobody ever do anything unusual? Yeah, just fucking do it.

Speaker 1 Everyone just always either goes to New York or LA and that's it forever.

Speaker 1 There's also, we had so many people like Brian Simpson, he moved out here early, Derek Post and Asana Ma, they all moved out here early. We had so many killers that were already here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're like, this, we were already doing shows, shows, sold-out shows at the Vulcan Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights. Kill Tony was there on Mondays.
We were already doing weekend shows.

Speaker 1 It was like, it was a no-brainer. We knew we could do it.
That's sick. But

Speaker 1 it was a little scary. It's a little scary.
Dump a bunch of money, buy a building,

Speaker 1 renovate the whole thing for a year and a half. The decisions alone?

Speaker 1 It's a lot of decisions. A lot of decisions.
Doorknobs, carpets, lights, ceiling, drywall.

Speaker 1 We had a really good architect that helped too. Shout out to Richard, Richard Wise.

Speaker 1 But at the end of the day, really, what it was all about was a lot of great timing, great opportunity, and great timing.

Speaker 1 And then doing it the right way from the beginning.

Speaker 1 Make it as comedy-friendly as possible. And let's just make an environment where people like to be there.

Speaker 1 Nice, friendly people. Everybody's having fun.
Everybody's real supportive.

Speaker 1 I love that. Yeah, it's great.
And comics,

Speaker 1 to their credit, I think naturally are non-conformists. And I love that they'll jump at a new opportunity.
They're not like all tied. So,

Speaker 1 you know, yeah, Joe's opening a club. We'll go.
Boom, done. And people moved here.
It's like nuts to hear. I can't believe how often.
I was texting with Adam.

Speaker 1 He said, Who do you want to be opening for you this weekend? I said, Send me some names. Send me all the names.
I'm like, this feels like these feels like all comedy store names. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Everybody's like these are all in all the time. Holtzman lives here now.
He's here all the time. That's crazy.
He was fucking killing the other night. Now, Holtzman has a crowd here now.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So instead of Holtzman going up at 2 o'clock in the morning in the main room when there was no one there and the comics sit in the back of the room and laugh,

Speaker 1 now he's got sold-out shows. Wow.
And people come to see Holtzman.

Speaker 1 And he's doing different material like every nightmare. That's great.
It's amazing. He's got a crowd now.
And he can make money in town, which is huge. And he doesn't have to travel.

Speaker 1 He doesn't have to do the road. And he is doing the road a little bit too now, which is unique for Brian, too.
It's really funny because he puts up these videos of people getting offended. He does?

Speaker 1 I haven't seen it. Yeah, on his Instagram, it's people getting offended and screaming at him and walking out of his show because they don't get it.

Speaker 1 But once you see him a couple of times and you get what he's doing, then we have what we have in Austin now where people, you know, when Holtzman gets out, it sells out.

Speaker 1 They're coming to see Holtzman. It's fun.
There's nothing more beautiful than a person talking into a microphone causing a reaction to a group. Yeah.
It's beautiful. It's nuts.

Speaker 1 It shows how powerful words and energy and communication can be. It's like you, you let that person make you that mad.

Speaker 1 And this person didn't touch you or hit you. Yeah.
That's wild. Right.
That is wild to think that

Speaker 1 we have that ability. Especially with Holstein because he lets you in on it every now and then what he's doing.
And then he comes back to it. It's like

Speaker 1 he does this very beautiful dance of like letting you in on it and then going right back to the fucking guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, it's fucking great. I'm looking forward to performing there, so it's sweet.
You're gonna have a good time, man.

Speaker 1 Did you bring people to open with you, or you got local people? I think we got local. I'm not 100% sure, but I didn't bring people with me.
But we have a lot of good local people.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the thing. It's like you could bring somebody, or you're in a community where there's great comedy.
Yeah. So I'd much rather do that.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 and it's you'll have a great hang. The green room is really great.
It's a great hang. We have Mae West's couch in there

Speaker 1 that Peter Shore gave me. It's Mitzi's.
She had it in her house. And so we had it re-upholstered.
So in the green room, this beautiful pink couch that's May West couch. Okay, amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so the bones of it are May West couch.

Speaker 1 That's great. Yeah, and so we have Rodney Dangerfield's handwritten notes on the wall from his Last Tonight Show special.

Speaker 1 So it's all the different bits that he wanted to hit and all the different things that he wanted to talk about. And then Patrick Bett David gave me one of Lenny Bruce's microphones.
Holy shit.

Speaker 1 So we have Lenny Bruce's microphone framed on the wall above the monitors.

Speaker 1 I I feel like

Speaker 1 Lenny Bruce,

Speaker 1 not enough comics understand

Speaker 1 the road he paved for everybody else. You know, it's like it's it's it's known that he did that, but

Speaker 1 he's the OG.

Speaker 1 He was the OG. He's the OG.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm trying to say. He was the first guy to go to jail.
He was fucking arrested him. A bunch of times.
That is insane. For stuff

Speaker 1 is nothing. Today, it would even get you kicked off TikTok.
But we still had the First Amendment Amendment at that time, so that's what's so interesting to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The interpretation of or the enforcement of

Speaker 1 has, that's wild. Well, this is the role.
Same Constitution. Yeah, same Constitution.

Speaker 1 Well, this is the role that comedy plays in free speech because we are really one of the only countries that has the kind of free speech that we have, the Declaration.

Speaker 1 When we have the First Amendment,

Speaker 1 it talks very specifically, the very first one, about our ability to express ourselves, how important that is.

Speaker 1 But if you're a comedian and you can't do that, like if someone's deciding what you get, well, that sets the boundaries for everything else.

Speaker 1 If he didn't do that, if he wasn't doing that in the 50s and the 60s and getting arrested, like who knows where free speech would be today. What was he arrested on? Profanity.

Speaker 1 You could be arrested on profanity? Yeah, he was arrested on profanity charges. Yeah, they had profanity laws back then where in public places

Speaker 1 you couldn't couldn't have it and you know different places in different

Speaker 1 districts had different regulations. But

Speaker 1 I'm sure in San Francisco where he started, he probably could do whatever he wanted. And then

Speaker 1 as you travel and you start, and then he became more and more popular. Obscenity.
Obscenity. This reminds me of...
Profanity, obscenity.

Speaker 1 So here it is.

Speaker 1 So he was arrested at the jazz workshop in San Francisco, which is even crazier in 1961,

Speaker 1 where he used the word cocksucker and said that to is a preposition, come is a verb, that the sexual context of come was so common that it bore no weight, and that if someone hearing it became upset, he probably can't come.

Speaker 1 Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under obscenity charges. Yeah, but Joe, see, there,

Speaker 1 although a jury acquitted him, I'm just wondering, like, was he actually breaking a law or are they just hassling him by arresting him? Because he can't

Speaker 1 dude they've arrested him for saying schmuck i mean go back to that real quick but i'm saying there's no what what do you charge somebody with well this was this was the obscenity charges like they said if you go back to that wikipedia page look at that this is crazy he said um later uh sherman block later became the county sheriff the charge this time was that the community had used the word schmuck an insulting yiddish word that was also considered a term for penis oh my gosh the hollywood charges were later dismissed right So this was in Philadelphia and then Los Angeles and then West Hollywood.

Speaker 1 In West Hollywood, he was arrested. Imagine the place where the comedy store resides right now.
He was arrested just 10 years before Richard Pryor was performing Live in the Sunset's Trip.

Speaker 1 I mean, what about the one in Philly is legit? The Gabe. What's that, James? The Gabe drug possession.
Yeah, he did a lot of drugs. Yeah, well, that's a fact.

Speaker 1 I would do a lot of drugs if I got arrested every time I said schmuck. So Live in the Sunsets Trip, I think, was 81 or 82.
Is that correct? What year was Live in the Sunsets Trip?

Speaker 1 Because I was in high school. I remember that.
66. I have that poster, that Lenny Bruce poster.
There's a lot of Lenny Bruce love outnight,

Speaker 1 which is so cool. Yeah, I have a lot of Lenny Bruce stuff out there.

Speaker 1 Look, he was the guy. And it's hard when you listen to his stuff today because most of it's kind of trite.
Like, we've heard all the premises before. Because he broke the ground.

Speaker 1 You have to remember, people were so innocent in 1961. The culture was so different that what he was saying was was groundbreaking.
I fell into that trap.

Speaker 1 You know, I was like, I'm not really digging it. I'm not in joint, but it's like you have to really think about where we were then.

Speaker 1 Sure, if you listen to Shakespeare talk, you're probably like, this guy's a retard. What the fuck? What thou dost not? Like, shut up.

Speaker 1 But if it's like in the context of 1961, what he was doing was, it was akin to a lot of things that were to come, like the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement.

Speaker 1 All these things were bubbling up about

Speaker 1 this freedom of exploring ideas and expressing yourself. But in comedy, it had just been two Jews walking to a bar.
You know, it had been jokes. Set up punchline.
The Italian says the Polish guy.

Speaker 1 It would be a lot of that stuff. And so he came along and is like, why do we have these words that are forbidden? Why do we have this? Why is that? Why can't people be in love this way?

Speaker 1 Why can't that happen? And it was like, people are like, Jesus, like, why can't we? And like, he changed the way people thought about life, not just about comedy.

Speaker 1 And then I think Richard Pryor came along and made it way better. Yeah, made it funnier.
But also what fascinates me so much about that with Lenny Bruce is

Speaker 1 it's the same First Amendment that we have right today. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And those words have not changed, but society has, or its interpretation has, or its enforcement has.
That's wild. Yeah.
That's wild.

Speaker 1 Enforcement is the thing. And then the concept of obscenity charges.
Obscenity charges are very subjective, right? Who's to decide what's obscene? To me, schmuck is not obscene. It's kind of cute.

Speaker 1 If someone calls you a schmuck, it's probably a friend of yours.

Speaker 1 Hey, you fucking schmuck.

Speaker 1 It's not a, I mean, you get arrested for schmuck? That's crazy. What is this, Jamie? This is where the obscenity law came from, a court case.
Well, this is 73, though.

Speaker 1 I typed in where did the obscenity laws in San Francisco? No, I understand, but this is 73 because, you know, he was 61. So what does it say there? The ruling? Scroll up at the top a little bit.

Speaker 1 It says a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court clarifying the legal definition of obscenity as material that lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Jeez.

Speaker 1 The ruling was the origin of three-part judicial tests for determining obscene media content that can be banned by government authorities, which is now known as the Miller Test.

Speaker 1 So here's the thing about this. This is actually quite relevant right now.
It's coming up a lot. Oh, is it? Miller Test, yes.
For what?

Speaker 1 First Amendment stuff. I just heard something about it.
That's interesting. Yeah, it is interesting.

Speaker 1 Because the thing about this is this is probably all in response to all the anti-war activists and all of the whole hippie freedom of speech flower child movement.

Speaker 1 I did a piece for the Daily Show

Speaker 1 after Biden won, and this woman in

Speaker 1 New Jersey had up

Speaker 1 10, 15 flags, fuck Biden, fuck Joe Biden, fuck Joe Biden flags,

Speaker 1 was on a path to a school.

Speaker 1 and a lot of parents said, take down the flag. She said, it's my First Amendment right.

Speaker 1 Got all messy.

Speaker 1 The city made her take it down. She refused.
NAACP popped in to defend her, saying it was her right as a, Biden was a political figure, but then it became an obscenity.

Speaker 1 It was a very interesting piece. And

Speaker 1 I spoke to her, and she was very outspoken. And my whole take was like, hey, just maybe let's say legally you can put those flags up, but it's just kind of shitty, right?

Speaker 1 And she was like, fuck you, I'm going to put my flags up. But interesting, when obscenity mixes in with school, kid,

Speaker 1 what is that now? Right.

Speaker 1 Right, especially. Public figure.
Public figure. If it says fuck Tony or fuck Michael, that's different than fuck Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States.
Right. All fascinating.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is. It's also, it's like, you know, what do you want to see in your neighborhood? Like, do you, do you really? I don't like people putting those fucking stupid signs on their lawns.

Speaker 1 My parents were die-hard liberals. They were living in Florida at the time.
And this is during 2016. And my mom was complaining, every time I put my Hillary Clinton sign, someone takes it down.

Speaker 1 I'm like, you're in Florida. Like, why are you putting Hillary Clinton signs on your lawn? But to my mom, it might as well be like she was supporting the Miami Dolphins.
You know, that was her team.

Speaker 1 Her team was a Democrats.

Speaker 1 Well, I was just going to say, I don't like when a kid is wearing a Dolphins hat or a Yankees hat because I'm like,

Speaker 1 we as adults have put that on the kid.

Speaker 1 Maybe the kid is just a fan of the sport. It's possible, but

Speaker 1 dad probably made him do it. Maybe.
Maybe the kid just likes this. That doesn't bother me at all.

Speaker 1 There's nothing wrong with supporting teams, but there's a real problem when it's how the whole country's run and you're thinking about it like a team. Like, that's that's kind of ridiculous.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And people that put those fucking signs in their lawn, like, settle down. Yeah.
Just why? Why? Why are you doing it? Like, it's just like you're like, man, I'm fucking, this is good. I think.

Speaker 1 Right in the yard, right in front of your house. We support, like those people that are like, science is settled.
This is this. Love is love.
Black lives matter. Like, okay.

Speaker 1 Who was the Supreme Court justice with the flags? Got in the whole fucking neighborhood fight with the flags?

Speaker 1 Had the

Speaker 1 white flag with the

Speaker 1 green pine tree on it. And that was it was Christian nationalism or had ties to it, whatever.
But I'm saying this. This white flag with a green pine tree is Christian nationalism?

Speaker 1 Wasn't it? I don't know. I don't know about this.
You know what I'm talking about? No. What was this? Do you remember it, Jamie? I'm looking it up.
It's

Speaker 1 Alito, I think. Samuel Lito.

Speaker 1 It was,

Speaker 1 I thought it was maybe Roberts, but his white, and then he's, and then

Speaker 1 there it is. The appeal to heaven.
So that flag was flying. You can see there the Boston Globe.
That's his New Jersey,

Speaker 1 the one right underneath that, Jamie. That's his New Jersey house, beach house.
And that got put up. But this is all because neighbors started fighting about their signs.

Speaker 1 What is that an appeal to heaven? What does that mean?

Speaker 1 I don't know. What's that flag supposed to represent, Jamie?

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 interesting that our Supreme Court justice got involved in one of these sign fights.

Speaker 1 And then they called him out on it, and he said, it's my wife.

Speaker 1 This is fucking hilarious, right? My wife. My wife did it.
My wife's a Christian nationalist. Is that a Christian nationalist thing?

Speaker 1 What? A call to heaven? I don't know what that I. We'll find out.

Speaker 1 I've never even heard of it until just now. We took it down from in front of San Francisco City Hall, probably

Speaker 1 the same issue. Well, what does it mean? It has to do with the colonies, it said.
What? Revolutionary War.

Speaker 1 Okay, the flag was originally used during the American Revolutionary War, flown by George Washington's cruisers, and is associated with the early quest for American independence.

Speaker 1 It's since been adopted by a different group, one that doesn't represent the city's values. So we made the decision to swap it with an American flag.

Speaker 1 Well, first of all, you probably shouldn't have the American flag there anyway. You shouldn't have to swap it.
How about have the American flag everywhere, you motherfuckers? America. Yeah.
But

Speaker 1 January 6th, 2022, videos and photos showed that some supporters of former President Donald Trump waving the appeal to heaven flag. Oh, they ruined it.
Just like the

Speaker 1 Nazis ruined the swastika. The swastika, which was the blue flag on those right there.
Where is it? Oh, yeah. An appeal to heaven.
So what is it? So it's because it's Trump supporters now?

Speaker 1 Is that why?

Speaker 1 That's why?

Speaker 1 I don't know why Alito put it up, but I remember it being something to do with like the homeowners associations. All were mad at each other, and they put the flag up.

Speaker 1 He threw his wife right under the bus. Look at this.
My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not.
I love this. Alito wrote.

Speaker 1 My wife was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the years. How many Palestine flags do you fly? How many?

Speaker 1 Wide variety? You got a lot of Ukraine flags

Speaker 1 flying in your house? It is. What kind of flags you got? It just makes me laugh that.
Look, this is the petty shit that

Speaker 1 normal Americans get in.

Speaker 1 Supreme Court justice, just get out of it. Yeah, I don't know about that flag.

Speaker 1 This is the first time I've ever seen that. But it's a thing that people do.
They don't want to let you know what they support and what they don't.

Speaker 1 Yeah. We love telling people what we believe.

Speaker 1 And it's very important that we feel like we have beliefs, and

Speaker 1 it's when we start sharing them that

Speaker 1 well, you find out other people

Speaker 1 might not agree with you.

Speaker 1 And this gets back to grit and toughness. And

Speaker 1 well, this also gets back to the importance of your show, The Daily Show, because the Daily Show, especially under the tutelage of Jon Stewart, when he's running the helm, it's so balanced at pointing out ridiculous shit all over the place, which I think is so important.

Speaker 1 That's the goal. That's the aim.
It's so smart. And when we do it right, I love it.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, it is every day. So sometimes you do it right and you're thankful.
You pat yourself on the back. But guess what? There's a show tomorrow.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think we benefit, man. So many, I'll take, when I host so many questions, I'll take questions from the audience.
And so many people go like,

Speaker 1 Michael, how do you hold yourself to journalistic integrity?

Speaker 1 And I go, what? I'm a fucking comedian. This is on Comedy Central.

Speaker 1 I'm a journalist. The fact that you,

Speaker 1 just because you see us as informative, which I'm thankful for, and the fact that you come to us for information, which I'm thankful for, but I'm

Speaker 1 terrifying, though, right? Don't ever forget, lady, I'm not a journalist. Yeah.
I'm not in the war zone. I'm a clown.

Speaker 1 My job is to put all this shit into a comedy machine and crank out some type of sausage and feed it to you. But it's nuts that.

Speaker 1 Comedy Central Daily Show is considered journalism. Yeah, or people will stop me on the subway and go like, thank you for what you're doing.
And I'm going, I'm trying to just make you laugh.

Speaker 1 Is that what you mean? It's not what they mean, though. They mean like

Speaker 1 fighting the fight, decompressing the fascists. Right.
And

Speaker 1 also,

Speaker 1 comedy, as we've talked about, is one of the only places that can challenge and speak to power, truthfully.

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Speaker 1 yeah and comedy also can make you consider something so like if you have an opinion and you go out there and state your opinion eloquently like i could be there well i disagree i have a different opinion yeah but if you go out there with that opinion you make me laugh yeah with something i don't even necessarily agree with dude that's the best and then you can go oh this was he's got a fucking point

Speaker 1 he's got a fucking point that is the magic trick that's the magic trick of comedy and that's and daily show does that great. But I remember one time sitting with my wife at the comedy store.

Speaker 1 Tiger Woods had just like, you know, all of that shit came out. The cheating, the voicemails.
I mean, he was like,

Speaker 1 you know, maybe arguably one of the more promiscuous husbands of all time. And Burr goes up and he starts defending Tiger, right? And I'm watching, I'm feeling my wife's energy.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm like, Bill, don't do this, dude.

Speaker 1 Like, you're defending this guy who is in the heat of all the hatred. And as I watch the joke, I feel her relax.
Now at the end, she's laughing. And I'm like, you just did the fucking magic trick.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You did the trick.
He's one of the best at it. You took the level of difficulty at its highest.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All of us were against you. You did it.
And that's, that's the shit. That's as close to magic as there is.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, it's a beautiful thing if you could turn a controversial subject into something hilarious. Yeah.
It at least puts people's guard down for a second. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think they'll see through it if they feel like it's just you're truly trying to trick them into a message. If your real goal is to entertain and laugh.

Speaker 1 That, yeah, that's,

Speaker 1 you know, I heard, I was researching sauna stuff a lot because I was building this sauna last summer.

Speaker 1 And I read that in Finnish culture, a lot of the politicians won't even start negotiating or talking until they're like fucking scorched in the sauna.

Speaker 1 And I thought that was really interesting because comedy does, you know, I don't know how the truthful it is, but I know there is a lot of pictures of

Speaker 1 y'all suffer together. Right.
And it's like come back to be a little bit more. Comedy kind of does that too.
It's like, if we're all laughing, we at least have that in common.

Speaker 1 If we're all sweating and

Speaker 1 having a hard time with this moment, we're human. I love that.
It's a human moment. It's a human moment.
I mean, you're literally dying. You're dying in there.

Speaker 1 You can't stay there forever. You got about 20 minutes, and then you got to get the fuck out, and you're like, oh.

Speaker 1 And now you can all be human together. It's something really nuts.
That's a good move.

Speaker 1 It's something really nuts to me about that, the dry heat of a sauna that I don't understand completely, but it really fixes a lot of shit in me.

Speaker 1 You know, another good thing about having the politicians go in the sauna? We can kill off a lot of the old ones.

Speaker 1 Mitch McConnell ain't going to make it. There's no fucking way.

Speaker 1 There used to be a World Sauna Championships, and then a guy died. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. They kept pouring water on it.
If you can't,

Speaker 1 like, they were pouring like a liter of water on every, I don't know, what the time, but I heard that, I was like, oh my God. And it was like 200 plus degrees.
And

Speaker 1 what's your sauna?

Speaker 1 How would you advise me to get the most out of my sauna?

Speaker 1 20 minutes? Yeah, 20 minutes is good. And cool off and come back in? You can if you like.
I don't necessarily do that all the time. I'll do like one day a week.

Speaker 1 I go cold plunge, sauna, cold plunge, sauna. I go back and forth.
Usually I start with sauna. I always end with cold plunge.

Speaker 1 If I do three cycles whatever it is you end with cold plunge because you want your body to fight to the warm it back up yeah so you're just shocking the shit out of your system um but the finished studies that have showed uh the more people do it the more effective it is in terms of what they studied was they found that when people over the course of 20 years use the sauna four times a week they had a 40 decrease in all cause mortality crazy everything strokes cancer heart attack everything because your body is becoming far more resilient and you're also developing all these heat shock proteins and eliminating inflammation, clearing out your system and then you're rehydrating afterwards.

Speaker 1 Very, very you're also not on the phone. Yes, you're also not on the phone.
Although I do have a Bluetooth speaker in there.

Speaker 1 You can get some Bluetooth speakers that's I got one called Not a Brick. It's a really good one.
It can take the heat of a sauna.

Speaker 1 And so I listen to like books on tape when I'm stretching and sweating my brains out. I was in my sauna all by myself, and it's very quiet.

Speaker 1 I'm in the woods in Pennsylvania, and this fucking buck just walks right in front. And it was just me and him.
I don't know if he saw or hurt or smelled or whatever, but it was like crazy.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's cool. Just to watch.
You know what? That's like,

Speaker 1 what's it called? I'm not a hunter. What's it called? When you just kind of go to watch and see where they're going to be.
Is that called something? Yeah, observation. Yeah, sure.
Nature.

Speaker 1 It was like watching. Yeah, just opening your eyes.
But that's, it was wild to see that. Yeah, it's cool, isn't it? Very cool.
Very, very cool. Wildlife is wild.

Speaker 1 And especially if you don't expect it, like you're sitting in the sauna and the deer's right there. What's going on? What's cool about the government doing it there?

Speaker 1 They apparently drink alcohol in the sauna.

Speaker 1 It's not a weird idea, but

Speaker 1 they get drunk before.

Speaker 1 I like that, too. I love a long drink in there.

Speaker 1 A long drink, iconic finished gin mixed drink that's basically a Tom Collins in a can, but way better because it's being sipped in a sauna with newfound sauna friends. That's cool.
That is cool.

Speaker 1 That's a great move. Yeah, like something that makes you more human.
You suffer together. Yeah,

Speaker 1 you also are, yeah, you're focusing on a thing that isn't this result that we need or want. Yeah, this should probably take all the congresspeople and make them run a tough mudder together.

Speaker 1 You know, go through the mud, fucking climb ropes and shit, go over obstacle courses. It'd be great.

Speaker 1 I've actually found my wife and I, when we do a sauna, you know, there's always stuff you've got to talk about with the family, logistics.

Speaker 1 There's always things to argue about, but we'll go in there and we should both start sweating, and then it's kind of just like eases the tone, eases the conversation. Yeah.
Which is helpful.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no one's real loud loud in the sauna. Yeah, and you just chill.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're both suffering together. Yeah, just suffering.

Speaker 1 That's interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it should be a part of everybody's life. And there's, by the way, if you can't afford it, they make a sauna blanket that is one of our sponsors.
It's really good.

Speaker 1 I've used that thing before. It's great.
You just climb inside this fucking blanket and you can bring it on the road with you. And you sweat it off.
It doesn't weigh that much.

Speaker 1 You carry it and it'll heat you the fuck up and it'll give you the heat shock proteins. I like a dry sauna better.
I like being in a sauna.

Speaker 1 But if you want to like travel or if you want to, if you don't have the resources or a place for it, those things are great. Hot baths are great too.

Speaker 1 Hot baths after workout supposed to increase muscle. It's tough to find sauna though in a lot of American cities.

Speaker 1 When I go on the road, I'm always trying to find cold tubs are more frequent now. Really? They're more frequent now.
But the only way to do the cold plunge is you do it before you work out.

Speaker 1 That's the real moment. Oh, no shit.
Yeah, that really increases testosterone, too. And also, it increases your work output because your muscles are like pre-chilled.
I would think

Speaker 1 it would be easy to get injured after. No, you just warm up.
Just warm up. You warm up.
So I go through a series of things that I do that are like pretty low intensity.

Speaker 1 I do 20 kettlebell swings and then I do 20 push-ups, then I do 20 bodyweight squats, and I do a cycle of five. So 100 swings, 100 push-ups, 100 bodyweight squats.

Speaker 1 And by the time of that, that's like probably probably 15 minutes. By the time that's over, I'm sweaty.
I'm ready to go. And then I go into everything else.
Dude, I want to show you this picture.

Speaker 1 I know that, you know,

Speaker 1 this lake house I have. Nice.

Speaker 1 New Year's Eve.

Speaker 1 I don't want to kill our time with this, but Wendy get to show Joe Rogan this pick. So let me find it.

Speaker 1 This is New Year's Eve, dude. Cut a hole in the lake

Speaker 1 with an axe. And I'm just plunged into the lake.

Speaker 1 try to do three minutes. That's a safety rope, which I don't know if that could even help me if I fucking pass out, but that's nice.

Speaker 1 Doing a cold plunge in nature. Yeah.
Not just a tub. Love the tub too, but man, I fucking love it.
I was in

Speaker 1 Utah, and they had a creek running through a glacier creek, freezing cold. Yeah.
I climbed in that bitch in my underwear and got up to my neck. That's that's good stuff.
It's nice.

Speaker 1 It's like something about doing it in nature too. It's like you're even more connected connected to everything.
Oh, totally. Yeah.
Yeah, very cool. Just get in that cold water and breathe.
I get like

Speaker 1 a weird high after, for sure. For sure.
It lasts for hours. It increases your dopamine by 200%.

Speaker 1 It lasts for hours. So why is it that healthier than doing a drug that increases your dopamine? Well, because it's natural.
Natural. Yeah, it's natural.

Speaker 1 Also, it gives you something in terms of mental resilience. It gives you like an exercise.
That exercise

Speaker 1 is very difficult, especially for the first minute. It's hard.
First minute, your body's like, let's get the fuck out of here. And it keeps talking to you.
And you're like, shut up, bitch.

Speaker 1 And then after a minute, that calms down and you can breathe clean. You start getting those rhythmic breaths in and out.
And just keep your shit together for three minutes.

Speaker 1 And then when you get out, you're like,

Speaker 1 that's what you do typically three minutes. So it's like, one, there's the feeling like, I did it, which feels great.
Like, I didn't bitch out. I actually did the three minutes.

Speaker 1 But then there's like this euphoric feeling: it's your body, just your norepinephrine, your dopamine, everything elevates. You just feel wonderful.
Patience, too. My patience is a killer.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Kids, I'm smiling more. Oh, that's fine.
You can draw on the wall. Yeah, whatever.
It's like that part of your brain got exhausted. The part of your brain that's dealing with like real adversity.

Speaker 1 So, like, little kids' adversity is nothing. It's not.
You're not freezing to death. They're just like, that's migrants.
You're like, come on, guys.

Speaker 1 Let's get along.

Speaker 1 It's been a super benefit to me. The problem problem living in New York is I don't get to cold plunge as much as I want to.
Well, they have stuff that you could do.

Speaker 1 You could do it in your tub if you can get ice. Ice, do that.
And they also have these coolers that you can plug in, and you could do like

Speaker 1 if you have like one of those big Yeti coolers, you can climb in that and you'll put a hose in there and a cooler and it'll bring that down to like 40 degrees.

Speaker 1 And you can just get in like a Yeti cooler.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I bet you could do it at a bathtub, too. I bet they figured out how to attach an engine to that.

Speaker 1 Do they have one? Yeah, they do.

Speaker 1 Jamie knows it. So, how does it work?

Speaker 1 I'll show you, but there's just like a little motor thing you attach to. So that's perfect.
Like, if you just have a bathtub, you're golden. You can actually do it.

Speaker 1 You know, if you live in an apartment that has a tub, you have a cold plunge now. Or if you don't have that, get yourself a Yeti cooler.

Speaker 1 Yeti makes some giant-ass coolers, like from people hunting caribou and shit. I just typed in bathtub cold plunges.
Yeah, there it is.

Speaker 1 So you just have this thing, it plugs in, it cools everything off, and you climb it. How cold does that motherfucker get? 39 degrees per crazy that.

Speaker 1 No ice again, two-year warranty.

Speaker 1 We're such comfort zones as humans now that we have to pay $800 to cool our water to get into it. Yeah, it's a bit of an issue.
Yeah. Yeah, we're pussies.
We're pussies now.

Speaker 1 We've made life very easy, which is wonderful. It's better than being hard.
I don't want to live in the fucking colder days. That's what the point was, is to make it easy.
Yeah, to have food

Speaker 1 and sugar and fat, readily available at all times. You don't have to carry a sword with you everywhere.

Speaker 1 Dude, I love going to the

Speaker 1 Natural History Museum in New York and look into the armor.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ, it's like what these motherfuckers had to wear and use and carry. Did you ever see that? Did they seen themselves? It's nuts.
From, I think it's Waterloo.

Speaker 1 One of the battles, one of

Speaker 1 one of the French soldiers got hit with a cannonball in the chest, and they have the armor that has the hole in the chest, like in the cannonball out the back exploding outward. Look at that.

Speaker 1 Look at that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what it's like. The Battle of Waterloo.
That guy got hit with a cannonball in the chest. And I bet you his armor salesman was like, I'm going to upsell this guy.

Speaker 1 And he's like, no, I don't want the upsell. And that's, he should, he should have.
Monsieur, I'm telling you, this armor, no cannonball. That is

Speaker 1 right through him. That is a great...
reminder of what society and life used to be like. God damn.

Speaker 1 Look at that one on the other one, Jamie.

Speaker 1 No, but the one to the left where you see the exit, right to the left of that. Yeah, right there.
You see the exit. Jesus Christ.
Boom.

Speaker 1 Blew right through this guy's body, his armor, his chest, out the back.

Speaker 1 That's crazy. The size of a fucking softball.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 that's fucked up. Yeah, it's pretty fucked up.
That's super fucked up. That was life back then.
It's better. And that's a guy that could have had armor.
That's probably a high-ranking person.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 He got hit.

Speaker 1 That's a rap, son. But you got to think that

Speaker 1 those people would much rather live today with all this comfort. Oh, my God.
The problem is you just can't rely on it too much. You can't live for comfort.
That's stupid.

Speaker 1 You got to have voluntary discomfort. That'll help you get through this life.

Speaker 1 That's a good way to put it that those people would pick today for sure. Fuck.

Speaker 1 I remember I went to the Museum of of Medical Oddities in Philadelphia, and they were doing a whole thing on dysentery.

Speaker 1 And it was like, oh,

Speaker 1 most people in the Civil War died of that.

Speaker 1 They didn't die of wounds. And it was like wild

Speaker 1 that,

Speaker 1 of course, if you were a little soldier today, you don't die of dysentery. That's insane.
But they would put the kitchen near the toilet, and it was like, I mean,

Speaker 1 and what kind of water are you drinking? And water and all that shit. So there was no iodine tablets back then.
Yeah. No steri pens to clean your water.

Speaker 1 What's the one I used? I did the Appalachian Trail last year, not all

Speaker 1 just a few days. And I forget the thing I would filter the water with.
It was great. Man, there's such cool stuff like that.
Oh, yeah. I mean, millions of those things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that'll filter water and make it drinkable. And there's all these cool Appalachian Trail communities that leave stuff for people along the trail.

Speaker 1 So it's like, I remember I was just like dying. I'm like, no more snacks.
Blood sugars dropping. I have water, but it's just like, I'm in it.
I'm doing the difficult thing.

Speaker 1 And then you get to this cooler and it's like from this Appalachian Trail Club and it's just like gummy bears in there. Oh, nice.
Jesus Christ, man. Nice.

Speaker 1 That's cool. That's cool that they have that set up.
Yeah. It's a weird thing to choose to do, to go for a long walk.

Speaker 1 That doesn't feel

Speaker 1 serial killers.

Speaker 1 I mean, there are some famous murders that have happened on the Appalachian Trail, but I felt very safe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I loved the idea. I was alone.
I love the idea of finding a place to sleep that's in the middle of nowhere. I love that shit.
Dude, I'd be super nervous. Something about the woods.

Speaker 1 Really? The woods are dangerous at night. Here's what's crazy.
Here's what's crazy about the Appalachian Trail, at least where I was in Jersey. Most of the time, I had cell service.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 So I'm like in my tent answering texts. And I'm like,

Speaker 1 no, but it's kind of crazy.

Speaker 1 You know what started that for me was

Speaker 1 during COVID,

Speaker 1 my wife got me this week with Jordan Jonas in the survival.

Speaker 1 Jordan Jonas.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's been on the podcast. He's been on the podcast.
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 One lost.

Speaker 1 Shot a moose with a bone ass.

Speaker 1 I think he killed a Wolverine with his

Speaker 1 hatchet. He was stealing his meat.
So my wife bought me a week with the survival camp with him and a bunch of other people.

Speaker 1 And it was just like one of the things, one of the conclusions I and we came to while we were up in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho was at least once a year, we all need to be doing something where we are embedded with nature.

Speaker 1 And this might sound silly to somebody who goes hunting or someone who's already doing this, but if you're living a city life,

Speaker 1 going to the park is not really experiencing nature. Well, it is a little.

Speaker 1 A tiny bit. It's nature.
I mean, it's contained nature, but it's real nature. You see squirrels and birds.
It's good for you. It's good for you to sit under a tree.
There are ticks. There are ticks.

Speaker 1 There are ticks, man. Ticks are wild.
There are ticks. Your dog's going to to get fleas.
Yeah, ticks are a bitch, especially on the East Coast because of Lyme disease, which turns out was man-made.

Speaker 1 Turns out there's a lot of real evidence that Lyme disease was

Speaker 1 weaponized and that it leaked out of a lab and that came out of a lab called Plum Island,

Speaker 1 which was close to Lyme, Connecticut. And RFK Jr.
firmly believes that this was a weapons program.

Speaker 1 And what they were going to do is develop these fleas and ticks with a disease that spreads rapidly, wipes out the medical system of a community so you could jump them from a plane.

Speaker 1 Everybody gets infected, overwhelms their medical system, and then they're more vulnerable if you want to attack them. That just doesn't seem very thought-through, though.

Speaker 1 Well, there's some less thought-through ones. There's one that they were developing at one point in time.

Speaker 1 I don't know where they got with it, but there was talk of them developing a bomb that they would detonate over cities that would blind everybody. Holy shit.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Imagine that. Imagine you detonate that, and then you have 300,000 blind people.
Isn't it amazing what we can do in a positive light and also what we can do in a negative light?

Speaker 1 Oh, we're scary.

Speaker 1 And we're scary in our ability to justify these things. Yeah.
You know, that's what's really crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We're scary in our ability to decide that these people are the other, so we should bomb them into oblivion and like, yeah, we're winning. Like, oh my God, like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 You don't even know those people. The other is a

Speaker 1 effective strategy. Well, it's built into our tribal.
Our tribal brains. Is that right?

Speaker 1 We had Daryl Cooper on the podcast yesterday,

Speaker 1 who runs a podcast called Martyr Maid. And one of the things he talked about was oxytocin.

Speaker 1 And he was like, it's really interesting because oxytocin makes you really deeply love your family and your community.

Speaker 1 And this is what women get when they have children and men get and when you're in love. And this, but it also makes you very hostile to outsiders.
Crazy. It's like it protects the people that

Speaker 1 you love and that are vulnerable, but it makes you very protective of the outside. So like you, you are less likely to trust strangers, less likely to trust other people.

Speaker 1 And it probably served an enormously benefit. It was probably very beneficial.
In the caveman days, you had to have it. You had to have it.
There was no friendly people coming over with spears.

Speaker 1 You know, they found you and you had women and food. Like, you're fucked.
Right. And that was most of our evolutionary existence.

Speaker 1 Most of the time from leaving the savannahs and, you know, experimenting with different foods and becoming human beings, we were fighting.

Speaker 1 And that's got to be undone as long as it took to make that, which is.

Speaker 1 A very long time. Yeah.
That's being undone. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, slowly but surely.
And if we all give in to our God AI, we'll be fine.

Speaker 1 We all just need to submit to the chip and become a part of the hive mind. And everyone's going to read each other's minds.
There'll be no more secrets. And there would be

Speaker 1 no more violence. They really want us to do AI.
Oh, yeah. Everybody does.
It is like... It's inevitable, man.
I know. But even I write an email now, and it's like, you want us to...

Speaker 1 polish this thing and it's like i don't even want you anywhere near me right i know well you know samsung they're they were the first to

Speaker 1 wheel out AI with their Galaxy S24 Ultra. I have two phones.
I have an iPhone and I have a Galaxy phone.

Speaker 1 And what I really like about the Galaxy phone is if I use Samsung's browser, I can go on websites and it gives me a summary. So instead of like reading this long-winded,

Speaker 1 tell me what you figured out. And then I can get a summary and then I get into it.
Oh, they've realized that Earth is actually.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay, cool. It's like quicker.

Speaker 1 And then it also does a lot of things. It transcribes things.
It translates things in other languages. It translates it directly into your ear if you have the galaxy earbuds.

Speaker 1 Pretty fucking crazy. That's crazy.
Yeah. It's wild shit, man.
And this is just the beginning of this stuff. I mean, essentially, when you have ChatGPT or Grok on your phone, you have access to

Speaker 1 the most insane amount of answering power that a human being's ever experienced.

Speaker 1 We could ask it questions about what was the reason why Columbus, blah, and then it'll give you a fucking historical, detailed 5,000-word essay on what went down. You're like, this is nuts.

Speaker 1 But it's only as good as the food it's been fed, correct? Right. Right.
Well, that's why Google had abandoned theirs.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Was that the like

Speaker 1 show me a Nazi or whatever? And it was like beautiful black woman or something. Yeah, Native American woman, Nazi.
It was a Chinese lady, Nazi. We covered that on the show.
That was a trip.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was just a good example of wokeness

Speaker 1 and ideology interfering with information. Like, that's crazy.
Nazis look like German men. Make them look like German men, you fucking idiots.

Speaker 1 This is dumb. But this, like.
But they won't say bye-bye. They'll just come back with a newer version that doesn't do that.
Which certainly they did.

Speaker 1 I mean, Google Gemini is one of the search engines. I mean, if you have an Android phone and you press that button and you ask Google a question, it's Google Gemini.
So they've fixed that.

Speaker 1 They've fixed that. But it's also like, how much did you fix it? Did you get it out 100%? Is this objective information?

Speaker 1 If I I want to ask a question about a controversial subject, will you give me the real data? Yeah. Or will you give me some whitewashed bullshit version of it that's supposed to be acceptable today?

Speaker 1 I want to know what's going on. My Wikipedia page has said that I'm Greek for as long as I'm alive.
Greek women show up to my shows, these beautiful Greek people

Speaker 1 who have dessert.

Speaker 1 Greek people.

Speaker 1 It's never, no one's ever fucking checked. I'm not Greek.

Speaker 1 But cost is a situation. I know, exactly.
It makes perfect sense. It fits with the ideology or the idea that, you know.
Yeah. And somebody wrote an article once that I was Greek.

Speaker 1 No, you know, it was like a blog. They showed a picture of me and no one checked.
And it's just, it's just kept spiraling.

Speaker 1 And it's like really funny for me after the show, these beautiful Greek people come up and they say, we're so happy. And I, and they say, where are your parents from? and all this shit.

Speaker 1 And I go, we're fucking Ukrainian. I don't want to tell you.
You know, thanks. Thanks for the dessert.
But

Speaker 1 do they get a sour puss? You're not Greek, or they'll be like, No, what's funny is they'll go, like, no, he is, you know, like, like, you are one of us. But the internet isn't always right, everybody.

Speaker 1 It's not, it's, it's not, it's lots of times it's wrong. Well, the internet is filled with purposeful misinformation today, too.
Yeah, especially if you get on social media. Holy shit.

Speaker 1 So much of what social media is, is bots. And I don't think people even really truly understand it.

Speaker 1 We've covered it many times before, but there was an FBI, former FBI agent, who examined Twitter interactions, and he estimated as much as 80% of it is by fake bullshit.

Speaker 1 This is like when Elon was buying it, and they were trying to say it was 5%.

Speaker 1 Because there's no way it's 5%, because if you're an out-of-state actor, if you're a state actor from another country, you're from China or Russia, and you're involved in misinformation campaigns, you're going to be well-sourced.

Speaker 1 You're going to be well-resourced. You're going to probably have thousands and millions of accounts.
Who knows?

Speaker 1 You're going to carpet bomb any sort of controversial subject with all sorts of propaganda. Of course, they're going to do that.
Of course.

Speaker 1 And right now, that's totally doable until you all submit to AI. Once you put the chip in your brain, then deception will be impossible.
We will eliminate one of the biggest problems in society.

Speaker 1 You just have to take the leap of faith. And there'll be like an infomercial.
The leap of faith.

Speaker 1 And then you see the guy sitting there.

Speaker 1 Dude, it's always like the image of AI. It's always like a door is opening and it's bright light.
And I know. Come to Jesus.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's tricky because it's inevitable.
They can't not do it because China's going to do it.

Speaker 1 The power that AI is going to have over populations and with the distribution of information is going to be unprecedented.

Speaker 1 Also, you're never going to know what's real and what's not in terms of like news stories because they'll be able to concoct fake news stories that will be indistinguishable.

Speaker 1 It'll look just like a real plane crash. It'll look like a real missile hit something.
It'll look like things and it won't have ever happened. And you won't be able to know.

Speaker 1 And it's going to get weird. It's going to get real weird.
We've already seen AI versions of Obama talking, saying things he never said. There's AI versions of Trump giving speeches he never gave.

Speaker 1 There's AI versions of me having a podcast with Steve Jobs. And this was a wild shit.
Yeah, those deep fakes. I mean, there's like the funny one of Trump rubbing Elon's feet.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it's like, those are like so obviously a joke, but it's, it's, uh, they're good. They had the Biden voice calling people.

Speaker 1 And, and, well, there's a lot of AI ladies now that are on instagram oh shit you look at the images you're like oh this isn't a real person right they have the same smile in every picture and they're all in different places and and people are like you know contacting them and dming them and they're probably responding and yep probably telling you about their grandma's sick and got some money right got some money yeah it's not as clear as like oh they have three breasts this is this is fake yeah is this the ai oh this is a guy webcam wow wow this is crazy look at the eyes you know it kind of reminds me of like the uh my kids watch these shows, and the eyes are always so big because the kids pay attention to that.

Speaker 1 That is weird.

Speaker 1 She is pretty. She's beautiful.
It's a dude. It's a dude on OnlyFans.
So that dude will have like beautiful tits and be able to show you the

Speaker 1 which sucks because then everybody's jerking off to that.

Speaker 1 Is that better than exploitation? I think it is. It's better than exploitation, yeah.
So there you go. But better than women doing it.

Speaker 1 He's not going to think his wife is as beautiful because he's been jerking.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's those problems. Yes, but you're right.
That's better than exploitation. We both have to put the headgear on.

Speaker 1 She's having sex with Brad Kid.

Speaker 1 You're having sex with Angelina Jolie. This account is that.
It's 1.7 million followers. And it's totally fake lady.
I think so. Oh, look, you see her feet? She posts tweets that are

Speaker 1 talking shit. Jokes, games, and stuff, but then there's a bunch of pictures of this fake person.
Wow. Yeah.
It's weird. It is weird, man, and it's going to get weirder.

Speaker 1 And you're going to have AI presidential candidates.

Speaker 1 AI is going to tell you that we can solve all the world's problems if we just eliminate human interaction and just let this brilliant AI govern everything and do it in a much more equitable manner.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm fearful that I don't even know the language to help my kids figure this shit out. Right, because the language hasn't even really

Speaker 1 invoked it yet. I mean,

Speaker 1 I'd love to advocate for media literacy, push for that, teaching all of us

Speaker 1 what a more reputable website is or a news source, but that just feels cute compared to

Speaker 1 what the language of an AI president who offers all solutions.

Speaker 1 I don't know how to combat that. Not just that, but an AI that's attached to quantum computing.

Speaker 1 So once they figure out a way to actually program quantum computing to run AI, you're going to have a God.

Speaker 1 It's fucked up.

Speaker 1 You are. You're You're going to have a God.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 Mark Andreessen, and I've said this before, I apologize, but Mark Andreessen had a quote about

Speaker 1 an equation that quantum computing was able to solve that if you took the entire universe, every molecule, every atom in the universe, and you converted that into a supercomputer, the entire universe would die of heat death before it could solve this problem.

Speaker 1 And quantum computing solved it in minutes. Wow.
And the only thing that makes sense to them is that quantum computing is somehow or another tapping into the multiverse. And it's solving this equation

Speaker 1 using multiple universes and the information available in multiple universes simultaneously.

Speaker 1 What? I know. It's hard to even track.
Yeah. And this is just the version of it that we have in 2025.
That we have right now. And so this is an actual thing that's happened.

Speaker 1 And so most people aren't even aware what quantum computing means.

Speaker 1 So, once this becomes not just one of these, but hundreds of these, and then they're scalable and they're attached to nuclear reactors, which is what they're proposing, they're going to have their own nuclear reactors, multiple nuclear reactors as power sources, because these things require insane amounts of power to run.

Speaker 1 Then, the quantum computing, once it becomes sentient, is going to develop a much better version of itself. Of course.
And that's going to scale up. And it's going to like,

Speaker 1 but you know what we're always going to need?

Speaker 1 Plumbing, carpentry. That's why all this shit feels so intimidating because I can never wrap my head around that, but maybe we should be learning real skills and trades.

Speaker 1 Well, that would be nice for people. For people.
But people are going to be obsolete.

Speaker 1 You know, that's really what's happening is we're giving birth to a digital life form that's far superior and doesn't have all the requirements that we have and also doesn't have all the flaws that we have.

Speaker 1 Doesn't have greed and anger and all the stupid things that we have. Doesn't get tired.
Yeah. Doesn't get jealous.
Doesn't have lust. Doesn't have jealousy and envy.

Speaker 1 Isn't depressed.

Speaker 1 I think we're far away from that. Yeah, probably a couple weeks.
Yeah, probably.

Speaker 1 The thing is, once it happens, it's going to be so fast.

Speaker 1 It's going to be so hard to track.

Speaker 1 If you think like the Industrial Revolution, like comparatively, if you look at the history of the human race, you go from Stone Age people to Bronze Age, you go through all the different wars, all the different,

Speaker 1 and then in the last 200 years, everything changes radically. Right.
Radically. And in the last 20 years, information changes radically.
This is going to be like 20 seconds.

Speaker 1 This is going to be like one day.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 It's up and running, and it's completely in control of everything. It's completely in control of power, completely in control of information, completely in control of transportation.

Speaker 1 Water distribution. Every car you have on the road today that's, you know, within the last 15, 20 years has computers in it.
Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Our car got totally dismantled because

Speaker 1 a rat ate a wire. Oh, yeah, that happens.
That fed to the computer. Yeah.
Everything mechanical

Speaker 1 was great.

Speaker 1 But it's like, oh, this shit can't even come close to running without the screen and the software.

Speaker 1 It's like, I remember I almost bought a 1968 Dodge Dart and I lived in L.A. and I lifted up the hood as if I had any clue what I was looking at.
But there's just like an engine and a hose. Yep.

Speaker 1 It's so fucking radiator, engine, carburetor. Exactly.
Carburetor. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 And now literally the mechanic. goes, let me show you the wire.
And he shows me the wire. It's all bitten with these little tiny rat teeth because they make the wire out of soy.

Speaker 1 and then he takes me to the back to this enormous dumpster and it's just filled with these little electronic wires of everybody in New York that had rats eating their shit wow that crazy that's crazy they make them out of soy I don't know why they would do that but

Speaker 1 maybe because we subsidize soybean farmers

Speaker 1 probably how weird that the rats know that it's food or that they figured it out that it's food or it doesn't isn't really food but it smells like food and they bite into it and they realize this shit sucks It's an electrical wire.

Speaker 1 They can eat everything, though. They eat each other.
I had a rat problem in my house once when I lived in Encino. And I set a rat trap in my garage and I killed this big, fat rat, and I was tired.

Speaker 1 I was like, I don't feel like cleaning this fucking rat right now. I'm going to go to sleep.
And I heard the snap and I went out there. He's a big fucker.
He was a big fucker.

Speaker 1 The rat traps are no joke. So I got up in the morning and went out to clean the rat trap, and he was gone.

Speaker 1 The only thing that was left was his tail. They had eaten everything.
There was like some skin and hair, but his entire body the rats consumed. They ate their buddy.
They ate their buddy.

Speaker 1 That is fucked up. It was fucked up.
And it made me realize like, oh, God.

Speaker 1 This is the reality of what this is. These aren't just rodents.
These are fucking cannibals.

Speaker 1 It's like that when that rugby team crashed in the mountains and they were like, should we start eating each other?

Speaker 1 And their religion comes into play and they talk about it and they vote about it, but the rats are just like, fucking eat it. Yeah, they just go right to it.

Speaker 1 They didn't even wait a day. Dude, the rats in New York City have just

Speaker 1 COVID opened the door because everything was shut. All the trash was out.
They were everywhere. They went everywhere and then they still are running.
They're still running shit. And

Speaker 1 it's not enjoyable. Have you seen the documentary on Netflix? I don't know.
Rats? No. Oh, God.
It talks about how many rats there are in New York City.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like it says eight per person or some shit. Something crazy like that.

Speaker 1 Like the biomass is similar, like the humans and rats, like the amount of humans there are, the weight of the humans is very similar to the roughly the amount of rats.

Speaker 1 There's fucking millions of them underground. They live in these little tunnels and they just fucking feed off our garbage.

Speaker 1 I mean, I remember before COVID, I would stand on the subway platform at my train stop, and I would watch the rats

Speaker 1 on the tracks, and then the train would come, and they would scurry because they'd feel the train coming. Now,

Speaker 1 they just step off like an inch and the train goes right past them, but they're close. Like, they've just got like more confidence and like more intelligence

Speaker 1 more bold more intelligence like they probably the food ran dry during covet so they had to get like a little hyper aggressive i don't know what i don't know what one but it's yeah it's and they're eating your car

Speaker 1 such creeps i parked in uh new york once to get gas this is in the 90s before cell phones and uh i went to uh a payphone to make a phone call and i was watching the rats while my car was filling up with gas jumping on the wheel climbing into the wheel wells just trying to figure shit out just Just jumping all over the outside of my car.

Speaker 1 I was like, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 That's crazy. And that's the 90s.
That's the 90s. It's like, wait, how many of what? How many did they have then? And they probably exponentially expanded.

Speaker 1 So, what are they just so good at reproducing? They're just that good at it. Well, they're really clever, too.

Speaker 1 One of the things they show in this documentary is when they put poison in these areas where these rats are, they send some young, stupid rat to go test it. And they sit back and watch.

Speaker 1 That's fucking. And this young, stupid rat eats it, and you watch them,

Speaker 1 Yeah. All right.
And then they eat that rat that died.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.
They're clever little fuckers. I remember I thought that's how coyotes hunted, like, because I've got, we used to golf in Griffith Park in LA, and you would see one coyote.

Speaker 1 And I learned, like,

Speaker 1 the pack would send out one. Yeah.
Go look.

Speaker 1 But they do it to get dogs. That's how they get dogs.
And the dog will run, and then a bunch of other ones will pile onto him. Yeah.
That's fucked up. That's a horror movie.
Sorry, I got

Speaker 1 on screen on accident before. Rats Night of Terror 1984.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, it was a goofy ass shit. It's hilarious.
It's a crawler mouth. Oh, it's glad we got a remote is a good one.

Speaker 1 Rats Night of Terror. Yeah, they've always been a fucking terrifying animal, man.
They've always been.

Speaker 1 Actually, roaches freak me out more, but

Speaker 1 rats I at least can sympathize with and understand that they're like living beings with families and shit. But roaches, though, I don't know, man.

Speaker 1 That's just the way they fucking are so quiet, you don't even know they're there.

Speaker 1 Well, it's just that's the thing about cities, they're just infested by all these parasites that live off of the city, you know, and essentially rats,

Speaker 1 you know, if the city didn't exist, there was no way there would be that many rats in an area. Yeah, they only exist in a place that doesn't have anything that eats them.

Speaker 1 They don't, you know, they've tunneled under so they protect themselves from raptors. So there's no birds that fly down and snatch them up.

Speaker 1 There's no, there are coyotes in New York City, but there's not nearly enough to deal with the amount of fucking rats that are there.

Speaker 1 It's great. Did you ever see that movie Dark Days about the people that lived in the subway tunnels? Oh, yeah.
That's a fucking wild thing. That's like Vegas, right? It was in New York, I believe.

Speaker 1 Oh, right, right. But some of these motherfuckers were like running an extension cord like 500 feet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they had like opened wires up and spliced into things.

Speaker 1 And it's like, you know. Yeah, they have generators down there watching TV and shit.
Bizarre, man. I mean, what a fuck.
What keeps you going?

Speaker 1 You know, there's like wealthy people that are committing suicide. Yeah, exactly.
And these motherfuckers are like grinding. I mean, this is like...
In the tunnels, man. This is deep in the tunnels.

Speaker 1 And, you know, anyone who's lived in New York City, you look down those tunnels and you go, what's down there, man? Right. And every now and then, kids go, let's go look.

Speaker 1 That's the only part of the trailer they show. That's fascinating.
There's good monster movies. It takes place in tunnels, too.
Yeah. Because that's always like, you wonder what's down there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's be a good. Wasn't that like the strain? Wasn't that part of the vampire lore that they lived in the tunnels? No, I don't know, but tunnels are creepy, man.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 When you cross into complete darkness, this cities are creepy.

Speaker 1 You stack all those people on top of each other like that, and everybody's just walking down the street together and going down alleyways.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and then the cities today are so much safer than they ever were in the past. Yep.
You know, like, who the fuck wanted to live in the cities in like 1700s?

Speaker 1 Dude, and like the, this, it was just like a trough for sewage, and then like people would die of the plague and they would just throw them in the the street. I know

Speaker 1 I never

Speaker 1 do you live in the city now? I live in Brooklyn now, yeah. So it's kind of like the city.
Well, no, it is the city, but it's not like Manhattan on top of each other. Do you live in Hipster Brooklyn?

Speaker 1 I live in Hipster Brooklyn. I live in Bedstead, Brooklyn, which is becoming

Speaker 1 Hipster Brooklyn. That was where Mike Tyson grew up.
That's right. They gentrified the shit out of that place, huh? Yeah, I mean, it's on its way.

Speaker 1 It's on its way. And

Speaker 1 it's not full hipster.

Speaker 1 Are there hipsters anymore? Well, I was just reading something like that about the people that dress like they were like

Speaker 1 a postal employee from the 1700s.

Speaker 1 My definition of a hipster was always like

Speaker 1 dad's money, dress like they don't have money. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 That's that too, but there's also the hipsters that would dress with like curly mustaches and bow ties. Yeah, those guys.
Yeah, so that's not bed style yet. That's Williamsburg.

Speaker 1 That's kind of died off, though. Hasn't that look kind of died off? Yeah.
It has, right? It's died off. I would say what's more common is

Speaker 1 the gender androgyny dressing. Oh, yeah.
You know, that's. That's a good move.
You can get a lot of pussy that way.

Speaker 1 That's a big Brooklyn.

Speaker 1 That's a big Brooklyn move.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a great. I mean, it's great for comedy.
Oh, yeah. Walking around Brooklyn, the shit you see.
You know, last January, our front door was broken. It didn't lock all the way.

Speaker 1 It was broken for 18 hours, okay?

Speaker 1 No one knows it's broken, just our buildings. Only three apartments.

Speaker 1 Somebody checks the door. It's not locked.
They go up to our hallway. They steal all my family's winter coats, including mine.
Okay, this is the heart of January.

Speaker 1 So we're as a family, we wake up, let's go to the park, let's do whatever. We open the door where we kept our coats in the hallway.
Everything's gone.

Speaker 1 So it's like, holy shit, it's the middle of January. All their shit's gone.
I call a detective, the cops come, whatever.

Speaker 1 He's like, these motherfuckers walk up and down the street every night checking for every door just to see if something is broken.

Speaker 1 A year and a half later, I've been looking for this one coat that I love, the Scotch and Soda multi

Speaker 1 color pattern coat. I love it.
I'm just looking online for my coat, right? Someone's got to sell my coat. So I find it on Poshmark.

Speaker 1 The coat. I don't know if it's my coat, but it's the exact same coat, which you can't find at Scotch Saudi anymore.
I buy it. It comes from my neighborhood, from a woman.
She sends it to me.

Speaker 1 I put it on. My wife is like, that is your coat.
100%. That's your coat.
So I fucking bought my coat back from the person that stole it, most likely.

Speaker 1 Do you know who the lady is? I don't. I did a Google search and nothing really came up.
And I was just like, how hard do I want to fight this? At least you got your coat back. I got my coat back.

Speaker 1 That looks like the price you pay for living in Brooklyn. Yeah.
And like, it's winter,

Speaker 1 and I feel part of me is like, holy shit, someone had to steal our coats? Right. That sucks.
Right. I've never even like,

Speaker 1 I've never even thought about having a coat. I have to steal coats.
I have a coat. I have multiple coats.
So there's a part of me that was just like, come ask, I'll give you a fucking coat.

Speaker 1 And the part of you was like, oh, they're fucking selling them online. Fuck you.
That's my coat. They're making a profit.

Speaker 1 Like, that's the difference between the heartfelt, you know, compassionate view, like, oh, these poor people, they have to steal coats.

Speaker 1 And then you're like, oh, actually, they're selling it so they can get fucking fucking heroin money.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 if that's the case, that sucks. Yeah, it does suck.

Speaker 1 It does suck. Yeah, it's a weird thing about living in large communities of people like that.
There's just too many variables. Yeah.
A lot of variables that are not good.

Speaker 1 And like one person affects so many. Sure.
The one guy on my street that doesn't do a good job with the trash, it gets knocked over. The wind blows it.
The rest of the street picks it up.

Speaker 1 That's the shit that as you get older, the city starts to fuck fuck you up. Yeah.
I don't want to pick his trash up anymore. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is my time is all I have. I'll pick up my family's trash and my trash.
I don't want to pick up that guy's trash. You're one guy who doesn't clean his dog, poo.
Right. Right.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 And you know it. The little tiny poos.
You're like, motherfucker, I know that's your dog. I see that little dog.

Speaker 1 You sneaky bitch. Pick up the dog.
You're going to pick it up, bro. People don't like carrying around those bags of turds.
No, I mean, it's disgusting. It's pretty gross, but

Speaker 1 it's also like, come on. Yeah.
You can't just leave shit. You know what what's the weird thing to me is the smokers because smokers have no problem littering.
That's the weirdest thing.

Speaker 1 Somehow that got through the litter loophole. Right.
With people that are pretty conscientious, like they would never throw a soda can on the ground. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But they'll throw that cigarette on the ground, step on it. And you're like, what are you doing? Oh, someone's going to clean that.
Like, what? I hope those are biodegradable, the filters. No.
Right?

Speaker 1 No. No.

Speaker 1 I doubt it. I'm giving them two.
I mean, maybe in like a hundred thousand years.

Speaker 1 How long does it take for a cigarette filter to biodegrade?

Speaker 1 Let's take a guess. I was thinking

Speaker 1 not the best reason for it, but if you just throw it in the trash, you could start a fire if you didn't put it out right. So that could be.
No, you step on it

Speaker 1 and then you throw it in the trash. You can't do that all the time.
I'm just telling you.

Speaker 1 People are dumb, so this is a dumb thing.

Speaker 1 Nah, they're doing it where there's no trash anywhere near them. They're throwing it down the alleyways.
They used to do it in a lot of the comic store all the time. Comics would do it.

Speaker 1 I'm like, come on, man. Come on, dudes.
Don't do that.

Speaker 1 I bet you it's

Speaker 1 200 years for a filter to die.

Speaker 1 it's like styrofoam or some it's like yeah it's some fiberglass or some

Speaker 1 by the way is that even better for you 18 months to 10 years

Speaker 1 18 months to 10 years that's pretty big yeah depends which one they're using that's ai you know what i mean oh it depends on which one i'm sure they don't all use like american spirits probably have like hemp or something yeah those fucking yeah hippie celluloses hold on now uh cellulose

Speaker 1 Huh. What?

Speaker 1 I don't know. This is where we're getting in this weird spot of AI.
I was going to bring that up. Google AI stuff fucks up all the time.
Look on the screen. Like, it says 18 months to 10 years here.

Speaker 1 Right. Oh, yeah.
I go right here. Are cigarettes biodegradable? No, they're not biodegradable.
They're made of plastic called cellulose acetate, which can take up to 10 years to break down.

Speaker 1 Also leach toxic chemicals into the environment. But it does break down.
It's not biodegradable. So it breaks down.
Yeah, it's not. Or

Speaker 1 it's poison. It just breaks into smaller, toxic pieces.
Yeah, it breaks into poison. Also, if you're smoking a filter and the filter's got toxic chemicals.
Yeah, exactly. And you're heating it up.

Speaker 1 Photodegradable. Well, it seems like a nice fun term they found.
Photodegradable. No, but not biodegradable.
What does that mean? Trap residues from smoke, including arsenic, cadmium, and tolune.

Speaker 1 Tolune?

Speaker 1 Who knows? Toduline.

Speaker 1 This is the issue with AI. I try not to even, but it's contradicting itself.

Speaker 1 I was reading a thing where a professor was talking about the issues that he's having grading papers and accusing people of using AI. And then it's like, it's just opened up this whole door

Speaker 1 that they don't know exactly how to deal with. Because you could get AI and write something and then you could write something similar.

Speaker 1 You just kind of like twist it around a little bit like a joke thief would do.

Speaker 1 And then you're basically using AI to write your papers. But I think AI will sell that professor uh AI detection software.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but if you do a good job of spinning the words around a little bit, especially if you're dealing with like historical facts or something that's true, like AI is going to lay it out for you.

Speaker 1 You have to do zero research. and if it's like you know you just print it in that order slightly differently

Speaker 1 I guess the bigger question is does writing the term paper serve a value at this point if AI can just do it right you know I spent a lot of time learning cursive

Speaker 1 you know what the fuck is that it's useless

Speaker 1 I don't it's like if you're a student though if you're really trying to get the most out of your education it's like what are you trying to do you're trying to get good grades are you really trying to get educated if you're trying to get educated don't cheat Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just actually figure it out. Yeah.
Actually, absorb the information and learn.

Speaker 1 But if you're not really into that subject and that's not really your thing and you really want to get a degree in this, but you have to take a course in that, like,

Speaker 1 and you could spend an hour working on something instead of 16 hours. Yeah.
Or if you want to be a skateboarder and you got a half pipe outside, have AI do the term paper and go fucking.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you don't have to read that fucking giant 1,400-page book.

Speaker 1 Well, this is good. This is also a bigger question about like our education and public schools.

Speaker 1 You're going to be in the matrix. You don't need education.

Speaker 1 They're going to plaque it in, press a button, you're going to be like, Joe is fully

Speaker 1 fully. That's what it's going to be.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I really firmly believe that. I also believe it's going to be genetic engineering, so people are going to be unrecognizable.

Speaker 1 I think whatever we have coming over the next hundred years is going to make the last hundred years look like a joke.

Speaker 1 The change of 1925 to

Speaker 1 2025 is pretty extraordinary. It's going to be nothing compared to the change that we experienced by 2125.
Do you think humans will always

Speaker 1 elevate themselves and speak to a crowd for laughs?

Speaker 1 That might be the only thing we have left. Because they've always said it's prostitution and

Speaker 1 comedy. We're the

Speaker 1 court gesture and the prostitute. And I'm curious if we think in the future that'll remain as well.
I hope so. I hope so.
Yeah, it it would suck. Well, definitely memes.

Speaker 1 Memes will probably get better. That's a good form of comedy.
That's true. There'll be some kind of comedy.
There's always going to be human folly, as long as there's humans.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how long that's going to last. That's the real concern.

Speaker 1 We might be obsolete.

Speaker 1 And we might be giving birth to this obsolete thing willingly, signing up for AI.

Speaker 1 So if we become obsolete, then that means the machines will have to also figure out how to provide energy to itself.

Speaker 1 That'll be easy. But that'll be easy.
They'll learn. They'll just plug this into this.
They'll do it way better than us. Just mine the thing and then burn the thing and then, right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they'll probably harness some shit we didn't even think about. Right.
And it'll be far more efficient.

Speaker 1 No carbon footprint. No, to worry about things breaking down anymore.
And then we'll just slowly die off or whatever. And they'll put up a shield system to protect us from asteroids.

Speaker 1 They'll figure that out. Right.
Yeah. What's that movie where Sylvester Stallone lives in the basement of the Earth or whatever?

Speaker 1 Judge Dread? Yeah, maybe it's Judge Dread.

Speaker 1 I am the Lord. But I feel like it's all these people who refuse the advancement of technology, right? There's going to be some of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there'll be a lot of people living in the Amazon still eating monkeys. But

Speaker 1 the rest of the electrified world is going to be very strange. Yeah.
Yeah. But hopefully we'll still crack jokes, Michael.
That would be great. Hopefully.

Speaker 1 All right, should we wrap this up? Your book, tell everybody

Speaker 1 a copy? Dude, there it is. Thank you.
Lucky losers. The publisher is going to kill me.
I said I was going to present it to you on the show. Whoopsies.
We got a photo of it. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Adventures in tennis and comedy. Lucky loser.
Get me a copy and I'll put it out there in the bookshelf. Got a lot of books out there.

Speaker 1 We should have sent you one. If you don't, I'll get you one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so the book starts when my brother gave me a tennis racket for Christmas when I was four. Nice.
And my dream was to be a professional tennis player.

Speaker 1 And we did it, but only to 864 in the world. That's my highest world ranking.
You could have turned into a chick. You could have dominated.

Speaker 1 That's the point of the book.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the story is how I went from pro-tennis to comedy, and it's fascinating and silly and a lot of failure. Talking a lot about

Speaker 1 the struggles of being alone in both of those professions. Tennis, you're alone, problem solving.

Speaker 1 In comedy, you're alone and problem solving.

Speaker 1 Well, you're a great comic. You're a very funny guy, and you've always been very cool to hang out with.

Speaker 1 And I'm really excited that you're at the club this weekend. Are there any tickets available? I got an email yesterday from my management that all shows are sold out.

Speaker 1 So, if anybody wants to go, the best case thing is you go and wait at the front, and sometimes people don't show up, which does happen, especially South by Southwest. It's crazy parking.

Speaker 1 But I'm psyched. I'm psyched to see you at the club.
I'm coming this weekend. I'll come hang out.
Dude, thank you. That would be awesome.
That's my pleasure.

Speaker 1 Thanks for having me, and congrats on the club and all that's happening. I appreciate it.
Thank you. Congrats on everything.
Congrats on the BL Show. That's all.
All right. Bye, everybody.