#2283 - Billy Corgan

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's happening, man? Good to see you.
Thank you for having me back. My pleasure.
How many times a day do you get bombarded by the whole Bill Burr thing? When it gets into the family and people I haven't talked to for 20 years. Then you have to

break character and tell the truth? No, you know, the thing is, this is what's crazy. Okay.

You want the whole setup story? Sure, sure, sure. So where I take my podcast is in one of Howie

Mandel's buildings, and he has another building in this area.

So I was working on something, and I was supposed to go on Howie's show that day.

And they said, Howie will meet you out in the street or something for whatever reason.

So I go out in the street, and the first thing Howie says to me when he sees me, he goes, here comes Bill Burr.

And I go, you too?

Like, do you know this story?

And he said, no, I don't know about it. And I said, you know what? Heck with it.
I'm just going to tell it on your show, so don't ask me anymore. And I went on the show, and I told this story about how 10 years ago my stepmother came to me and said, do you know who Bill Burr is? I never heard of Bill.
Didn't know who he was because I don't really consume much popular culture. I had no idea he was a famous comedian.
He could have been the lawnmower guy. Looked up Bill.
First thing I saw was like, oh, my God, he looks just like Daddy. When I was 18 years old at an IHOP on my 18th birthday, my father told me, you have a half-brother that I sired at the same time as you whose name is Bill.
So suddenly these facts come together. My mother telling me these stories.
I talked to my dad subsequently about it, and he was very cagey about it. And when I said, why won't you tell me where this person is or who this person is, he said, I'm trying to protect you.
So when my stepmother had told me, it kind of made sense, like, well, if my half-brother is this super famous comedian, my dad, in a way, wouldn't want me to know because he wouldn't want me to feel like I was number two because Bill's so famous. I know it sounds crazy, right? You think that's why he's trying to protect you? Well, I don't know.
So fast forward to how he's saying something on the street. So I was like, you know what? I'm just going to say something.
And I swear to God, hand in my heart, last time I was with you in California, I almost pulled you aside after we were on. And I was going to tell you the story because I knew you knew Bill.
And I i was going to back channel see if there was anything to the story from bill's side wow so imagine seven i think six or seven years since we talked on your show yeah i don't even know 2018 somebody said to me today but so anyway started talking but the point is is so here i am fast forward i'm just sick seeing memes of my face with bills and so I just decide on a spur of the moment, you know, so Howie, of course, loves it. But I said on Howie's show that first time, I don't think Bill's my half brother.
I don't think I don't think there's anything there other than like an uncanny resemblance. Fast forward.
The thing comes out, it gets a little bit of social media and then it goes away. And think, good.
And Bill didn't say anything, so I figured Bill was kind of like, whatever.

It was a mild amusement.

You know, he could have made a joke out of the whole thing, and he didn't.

So then Howie calls me, and I'm in L.A. working recently.

And Howie's like, we've come on the show.

Bill's going to be on.

And I said, is Bill cool with it?

Oh, yeah, no problem.

So then I go there, and it's like it turns into this thing that you see happening on camera.

It's weirdness times. It's like a skit, and it's like it turns into this thing that you see happening on camera.
It's weirdness times.

It's like a skit, but it's real.

And Bill's on me, then Bill's on Howie, and it gets just—okay.

So I just told you basically everything I know.

I have people I've known for 20, 30 years coming up to me going, what do you think?

And I said, I don't think we're related. I mean, yeah, there's a resemblance but I don't think we're related.
Well, did you get a DNA test? And I'm like, no, I don't. There's nothing to get a DNA test for.
Well, I think he's your brother. So people that know me and I'm telling him I don't think he's my brother, now they want a DNA test to prove it.
That's how much it's taken on a life of its own. Do you think it's just because they want a DNA test because it's fun if he's your brother no no they're convinced for real for yes really for real I swear to God I mean people I'm close to people that were at my wedding I'm like they like no you need a DNA test did Bill's dad know well did your dad no Bill's mom no my father wouldn't talk to me about it at all.
Okay, some more context. Okay.
My stepmother in that same time, 10 years ago, when she told me that she thought Bill Burr was my half-brother. Jesus.
This guy I don't know, right? I mean, it just matters if I, hey, do you know Joe Polanski? Right. And you look up and it's a famous comedian.
That's, you know what I mean? Right, right, right. So in that same thing with my stepmother, she told me that she thought my father had sired 12 children.
Whoa. All over the place.
All over the place. He was a traveling musician and a whore to his own admittance.
So it kind of makes sense. He once told me he slept with 1,000 women.
So 12 out of 1,000, you know what I mean mean it's normal odds yeah the math are actually pretty good yeah um and so um when i went to my father and i told him what my stepmother had said he got really cagey he wouldn't tell me anything he promised me that he would write down the names of the of the illegitimate children on a piece of paper so i could find them after he died oh my god he died he's died and there's no paper oh my god so now I got people wanting DNA tests because they're convinced that Bill is my half-brother is Bill willing to do a DNA test I think that's ridiculous you know what I'm saying it's like no you have to do it no no I mean first of all to Bill's credit he's been you could everything you saw on camera, I think, his general irritation on the thing. But he also kind of finds it funny because he's a comedian.
I thought it was a skit. I thought you guys put together a skit.
I really did. I thought you got, because I thought, you know, Bill does a lot of acting.
I thought you guys were just fucking around. You like pro wrestling.
I thought you guys just decided to troll the world. Let me put it to you this way.
Have seen it and i well i'm assuming but you tell me if i'm wrong two guys get in the ring to roll around a bit right okay they're bros they're gonna roll around a bit uh-huh emotions kick in and next thing you know somebody's tapping somebody out right do you ever see that happen for sure okay yeah so in the in the heat of that moment with bill and howie egging it on you know like the emotionality of the thing came out because it's a sort of an it's it's sort of a weird thing we're like we're suddenly in the middle of a situation it's like a meta situation right so yes on some level we were playing along but then it starts to become like wait this is kind of weird and then it starts to kick in and then bill Bush is in there and it just, it took on a life of its own. So what I'm saying is, there's enough there that people are all over me to come up with more answers.
But you see what I'm saying? It's like it's spun out of control into its own thing. Now it's a DNA test problem, which is a bit on its own.
We're going to do like a live stream. We'll do it here, me, you, and Bill.
You know what I mean? Well, people would trust you if the two of you got together and just both took a DNA test and found out you were brothers. I don't think Bill's my half-brother, but he looks— Well, listen, there's a simple way to find out.
I'll finance it. How much is a DNA test? How much does a DNA test cost to find out if someone's your sibling, Jamie? Let's find out.
It can't be that much money. It's 2025.
I'll do it. We'll get it sponsored.
Yes, maybe 23andMe, but didn't they sell out to somebody? Somebody buy them? 200 bucks? There you go. I'll pay 200 bucks to find out.
Why wouldn't you want to know? If I thought somebody was my half-brother, I'd be like, for real? I don't think it's necessary. If I found out Sebastian Maniscalco was my half-brother, I'd be like, I could kind of see that.
Maybe. Again, all I know is I don't think, but when I look at him, he looks just like my father.
Right. He doesn't look, we look similar-ish, but when I look at him, he's got the same thing as my dad had.

I don't know how to, you would know if somebody looked like your dad, right?

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's where it's freaky for me.

Yeah.

And, you know, if you want to play the game one step further, you've got two world-class communicators.

People might argue against me calling myself a world-class communicator, but I've been doing it for over 30 years.

You're a world-class communicator.

God bless.

So it's not too crazy that you'd have one guy go this way and one guy, you know what I mean? Not at all. No.
Especially when you consider how many different ways you've gone. Like not just smashing pumpkins, but pro wrestling.
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So you're in all kinds of stuff. and yeah easily could have been a comedian as well I don't think I'm that funny but you're funny there's a lot of people that are professional comedians that aren't as funny as you I assume you know carrot top sure very well okay so carrot top and I become friends recently he's great love him this guy.
And really masterful. Genuine.
Just a great guy to know.

Yeah.

But as you know, because you do this for a living, suddenly everybody wants to start pitching you bits.

So I made the mistake of pitching Carrot Top a bit.

I thought I had a good bit for him.

And he didn't respond.

You know what I mean?

And then I texted him like an hour later.

I said, hey, did you get that bit?

He said, yeah, that's why I didn't respond. Yeah, people get tired of that.
Also, it's like most comics, they want it to be their idea. Like the whole idea.
What you're doing on stage is essentially like here's the words of my eyes. Yeah, it's like somebody telling me how to write a song.
I get that. Right.
It's one thing for another. Like comics, we give each other tags.
Like if someone says something, I said, you know what else you can add to that add this oh i see we're a buddy of mine was doing this bit on the uh the guy who tried to shoot trump and we were bantering back and forth and we came up with like the perfect line like oh there it is but it was already his premise and his bit comics add to stuff for each other for fun it's like we just we sort of you're tossing the ball around in the green room and then someone will come up with a new line for you we'll do that but no one ever says hey you should go on stage to talk about this yeah so that's I so I I've I've had a couple professional comedians carrot top preeminent preeminent among them kind of let me know you're not that funny. It's probably not that you're not that funny.
First of all, you sent a text. Premises in text are terrible.
Oh, right. Okay.
You really have to be... Yeah, tone.
Tone is... Yeah, it's everything.
And you really have to be there with the person and you really have to like say it the way you thought it and then they get it. Because text is just...
Unless it's just genius, unless it's just like rock solid structure, like, oh structure like oh my god this joke can't fail well we do have a movie idea that we're working on oh yeah and it's a good one what is it i can't give it away i'll tell you privately but okay it's a good one you and caratop yeah oh nice that he likes okay he likes my my movie idea yeah i'm telling you a lot of it is that comics don't like people coming to them with a premise. They only want help from other comics, generally.
Okay, I get that. Yeah.
It's just one of those things. And even then, it's touchy.
I would never help someone I don't know. I would never go up to them, hey, you should say this.
Never, never, never, never, never. It's got to be like your friend.
They know you love them.

You're fucking around.

You can talk.

You can say, did you ever try to say that?

You know what you left out?

Like you forgot.

And they're like, oh, I forgot about that.

Yeah, that's a big part of the bit.

Yeah.

I never tried stand-up.

You could do it.

It seems terrifying to me.

So is singing on stage.

You could do it.

It's a lot easier to scream with 50,000 watts behind your voice than tell a joke and bomb. Is it, though?

And bomb.

Because you could suck at that, and then it's terrifying, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's all hard to do.

Anything at the highest level, it's hard to do.

That's true.

You're doing arena shows.

I've watched a lot of people perform in front of arenas singing.

It's hard.

It's a hard thing to do.

Most people freak the fuck out.

Yeah, I don't know. That part doesn't bother me, strangely.
Well, that's why hard thing to do most people freak the fuck out yeah I don't know if some that that part doesn't bother me strangely well that's why you get it I feel like I'm I kind of know what I'm doing up there for some reason well so I think it's like there's a build-up right you start working in small clubs you make your way to larger places and eventually you sell more and more records like smashing pumpkins is like they burst on the scene and sort of keep yeah you guys kept getting more and more popular so you kind of got accustomed to it yeah you do normalize to the yeah insanity of standing in front of 10 000 people it's comedy you normalize what's the biggest uh show you've ever done comedy 25 000 that's a lot of people yeah me and chappelle we sold out the coma dome and we were we're standing backstage I'll never forget it he looked at me like right before he goes on stage goes not a lot of motherfuckers get to do this just laughing how fun much fun we were having 25,000 people was crazy in the round too in the round yeah it was very fun though it was very fun I actually know dave from way back in the day he's the best when he first first kind of burst on the scene we used to hang out a little bit so i feel like it's cool that i knew him like what year is this like er like remember he did like a couple things on snl like really early on or he was kind of around tv it was like when he the first year he was on television i don't remember i'd see him in new york he was hanging out with some other, maybe it was because he was hanging out with SNL people. And I'd see him out in New York back as, I guess, with like late nineties, early two thousands.
And so I knew him when, I don't want to say he was a nobody, but I, he wasn't famous. He wasn't a known, I'd seen him on TV, but he wasn't like a household name like he is now.
Right, right. And so it's, so there was this one night where I was out i did a benefit for roger waters and uh and military vets it was amazing in new york it was all these guys who were like single double and triple amputees playing pink floyd music and so i did this concert with the with um roger so afterwards somebody came said oh chapelle's in this hotel you know and i hadn't seen him for a few years and i said i know him and you could see people think like you don't know you know what i mean so when he came by it's like oh you know it's like that moment like see motherfuckers i do know so what a great guy though such a he's a genuine person whatever yeah he's another sweetheart just a sweet sweet guy easy to hang out with very fun oh yeah i mean the guy like guys with that kind of mind is just it's just it blows my mind because they just i mean you could i i just i could sit listen to for hours he's also he's kind of a legend for what he did you know walked away left comedy central in the height of chappelle show passed up on a 50 million dollar deal went to africa hung out there and then came back and didn't do stand-up for 10 years didn't know stand-up I didn't know that He didn't do stand-up for 10 years He would do stand-up occasionally For free Okay So what he would do Is he'd bring like a speaker To the park And like set up a mic In the park in Seattle And just start doing stand-up And everybody would be like Holy shit Was he making any money Or was he just Nope Just living off of his Chapelle show money.
He had a ton of money. I didn't know that part.

He made millions of dollars from the show, passed up on 50, but probably made it.

I remember that.

And, you know.

Remember it became a big conspiracy thing?

Yes.

It became a conspiracy why he left.

He was saying no to the Illuminati.

Right.

All that stuff.

Right, right, right.

Those are always fun.

That's some Alex stuff, right?

You know what I mean?

It's like, you're like, what?

Are you sure that's what happened?

I kind of know what happened because the people that were running Comedy Central back then, I had dealt with. There were – it was nice folks.
Shouldn't have been running comedy. They shouldn't have been telling comedians what to do.
And they wanted to kind of – They were back to telling comedians what to do? It was a situation where a bunch of non-creatives had gotten involved in the process. I'm sure you're familiar with that.
This is so dear to my heart. It's disgusting.
It's the worst aspect of show business. You start dealing with money people and they start doing something that they're not supposed to be doing, which is like adding, changing, directing, moving ideas.
And then you're dealing with literal morons that somehow or another got this job. and they're telling you how to do what you're doing, which is what is the best sketch show in the world.
And still popular. It's as good as any sketch show that's ever existed and they only did two seasons.
So he just decides, I'm just going to be an artist. I'm just going to hang out.
I'm not going to make any money. He would do like show up at open mic nights, so they'd have open mic nights for, like, musicians, play folk songs, and at the end of that, like, midnight, he would pull up and start talking, and by 15 minutes into his set, everybody had told everybody that Dave Chappelle's there, so then the place was packed.
Yeah. And he did this for, like, 10 years, man.
I didn't know that part. Yeah, he just fucked around.
He'd hear about him just showing up places and fucking around. I love that.
And then somewhere, I think it was like 2013, 14, starts doing stand-up again. Yeah.
And then boom. Yeah, that's really how it all went down.
It's really a testament to the power of his talent because my wife, who's 32, she loves him. And it's so cool because we like, we went to see him, I think, at Radio City Music Hall.
And it's so cool because it's like, you know, I'm 57, she's 32. It's like that he can speak to both of us.
Right. So, like, right to the heart.
It's really a rare gift. I mean, you know, you got a picture out there, Richard Pryor, who was, you know, from Illinois, like myself.
And my father loved Richard Pryor Pryor and so because of my father's love Richard Pryor I paid a lot of attention to Richard when I was when I was a kid and he strikes me he's got that that transcendent ability to somehow almost heal the country right with his messaging yes Murphy had that too in his own way but to me Chappelle's more in the the prior mode of like somehow he can address issues that are uncomfortable. Yeah.
And I know a lot of people have issues with what he says, but I ultimately see what he's trying to do is heal things. Yeah.
Very much like prior. Whereas Eddie Murphy was just really, really funny.
You know, just really, really funny. And still to this day, I'm like like why doesn't that guy come back he he did this one thing when he got the Mark Twain award where he did this whole impression of Bill Cosby finding out they had to give away one of his awards because of he was caught up in the scandal and so he's doing a Cosby impression it's fucking genius it's dead-on he's doing like brilliant stand-up and he hasn't touched standup in 25, 30 years.

Yeah. I mean, you would think he would just do one victory lap tour.
I mean, if he wanted to, it would be sold out. Oh my God.
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The offer is for new customers only. I guarantee you that guy would be the best.
He was so fucking talented, but just decided it was just too much. I'd rather just do movies.
Yeah. Which is kind of crazy.
But Pryor never did, obviously. Pryor kept doing stand-up the entire time.
Has anyone ever tried to pull you in the movie orbit? Yeah. Yeah, I'm not.
Like action hero? Yeah, I'm not interested. I'm not interested.
They only offer me parts like a serial killer, so I always turn it down. Yeah, there's been a few tempting ones.
But no, I don't have that kind of time. And I also don't have the desire to do it.
It's not something I enjoyed. Sitting on that set all day seems like a...
It's a lot of work. It's hard.
And to be a real good actor, like a really good actor, you know, the rehearsing and the practicing and the going over the character. It's like I couldn't do it because I don't have the time.
It would require everything I have. Yeah.
If you really wanted to do it right, if I really wanted to do a role in a movie where I played somebody, I would have to fucking really spend time not doing anything but that. You know? Yeah.
It's just not. That's not my jam.
There's people out there that do it. I'm glad they do it because I love movies.
Yeah. But I don't want to do it.
Did you watch the Oscars? I did not. I never watch award shows.
I don't think you should give away awards for art. I think it's silly.
I don't get it. I think it's dumb.
I think it's all really who's making money is the people that are putting it on television. I mean, that's really what it is.
It's just a big money grab. They're all just selling advertising and everybody's wearing a tux.

And it's like.

Well, certainly the public's growing disinterest in awards shows is some indication that people no longer believe in either the integrity of the process or the or the maybe the intent of the process.

Right.

Well, the integrity of the process and the intent are both compromised.

Right.

Because there's there's people that like you could kind of guess just by the subject of some movies whether or not they're going to win an award. Yeah.
Because, you know, people feel obligated to address this very important message. The guy who won Best Picture, I was actually in talks with about five years ago because he had made some really cool movies.
He made one on cell phones called, I think it was called Tangerine, about prostitutes working the streets in LA. And he got two street workers, I believe, and then he cast them.
So it was a movie. It wasn't a documentary.
It was a really beautiful movie. And then he did that movie called The Florida Project, where he, at the end of the movie, they actually snuck into Disney World and shot stuff, and somehow Disney let it go.
Really? Yeah.

But it was kind of about the social milieu

around a place like Disney World.

Like what goes on outside the gates.

People living in motels and kind of perpetual

tourist economy.

Kind of living hand to mouth and kind of using

the white whale of tourism to just

get enough money.

Because there's always some turnover. You know, whether it's running

scams and stuff. So he made a really beautiful movie

about that as well. So I was in talks with him

for a while about doing something and then it just didn't go

I'm going to go. get enough money because there's always some turnover you know whether it's running scams and stuff so he made a really beautiful movie about that as well so i was in talks with him for a while about doing something and then it just didn't go anywhere like what kind of scams i can't remember because it's been a few years since it's just the idea that anywhere there's a tourist economy there's money to be made right you know there's the guy standing on the corner selling brochures or hustling you into a van to see where the stars live it was was kind of about that.
Right, right, right. It was about a cast of characters living in the shadow of this idealistic place.
Right, just like those Hollywood tour people that you would get in L.A. Yeah.
Yeah. Those were the weirdest fucking people.
Well, I always get offended when I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and they think I want to go on it. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't know what it is.

I feel like, I don't want to go on your tour.

You look like a guy.

Totally.

You would get on the tour.

Just got off the boat.

Yeah.

Just came here from Nebraska.

Totally, yeah.

Like, gee, I wonder where the stars live, you know.

That's such a creepy thing to do.

Just drive around and point.

That's where Ben Affleck sleeps.

But they've been doing it since the 30s.

Yeah, forever.

Yeah. I mean, I have some of the old brochures, you know, see where Greta Garba lives and all that stuff.
It's just always been weird. Well, back then it was even weirder because those were the first stars.
Well, back then, I mean, they went way out of their way to turn them into gods, you know. They airbrushed the shit out of every photo and they cover up scandals.
There's that one famous scandal where one of the top male stars, maybe it was Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, ran somebody over in a car. Really? You know about that? No.
You might want to look that one up. I know the fatty arbor.
No, it was a top A-level star. I think he was drunk, ran over somebody in a car and somebody from the studio went to jail for like seven years and took the rap.
Whoa. So that the star could stay out, and the studio paid the guy like a stipend to go to jail.
Wow. It's a very famous story.
Wow. So some guy did seven years or something.
That's crazy. You know, there's a similar story about that in China with the bodies exhibit.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a woman who was married to a mayor of one of the cities in China and this woman who is married to this mayor the the mayor was having an affair with a TV newscaster and she got the TV he got the TV newscaster pregnant and apparently there was a confrontation between the woman and the wife and the lady winds up missing she gets scrubbed from the internet i mean she's scrubbed there's only like a photo of her on the internet and then all of a sudden in the body works exhibit there's an eight month pregnant woman oh no who they believe is this newscaster here's the other part the The woman who's the mayor's wife is also the manager of the local plastination factory where they take the bodies and they immerse them in these solvents and turn them into statues.
This woman was the manager of the place that produced the woman with the eight-month fetus in her body. And you can still see it.
Like, it's on tour. You can go see this lady who was most likely murdered.
So then she didn't just kill that lady. She poisoned some British businessman.
So she poisons this guy, and she has to go to trial. Well, she doesn't go to trial.
Some other woman goes to trial who doesn't look anything like her. Raises her right hand, the whole thing, goes to jail.
So she probably paid some family off, some poor family. I'll give you a million dollars.
Give up your daughter. She goes to jail.
Everybody's writ. It's not a bad jail.
She's going to do gonna do yoga play checkers have you heard the ones where like uh because there's so much plastic surgery in asia where guys are suing their wives because they marry some women that they get hot and then the kid comes out and the kid's not very good jawline's totally different different nose yeah there's a lot of plastic surgery over there in korea it's nuts they do their eyes in this like strange somebody told me as much as 75 of the women in south korea have surgery yeah is it really somebody who's korean told me that i don't know who that jamie we need to find this out this is important information because last time i was in korea i was like wow these women here are really hot like this was like woman after woman after woman and somebody pulled me aside said bro that's like that's just all plastic surgery that's not. One-third as up to 50% or higher, maybe some people have said.
A lot of liars. A lot of them ladies are lying about it.
Up to 50% or higher. Well, higher could be like 75%.
I like this whole new business of plastic surgery tourism, where it's cheaper to get on a plane and go somewhere. Oh, like go to Turkey and get your hair transplanted? Yeah, somebody was recently trying to talk me to go to South Korea to get some work done on my face.
It's like, so like, what? I guess the idea would be you could go and recover over there. Your neighbors don't have to see you with bandages over your head.
No, I think it's the idea. It's cheaper.
Yeah, cheaper. Cheaper and better because they can do stuff there that we can't do here yet.
Oh, really they do there that if we can't do apparently they have some new thing that's unbelievable what is it something it's they tried to explain it to me doesn't make any sense some kind of new facelift that's not a facelift or something a face not like a non-invasive facelift oh the guy it's a relative of mine through marriage a chinese relative. He's in that business and knows the Koreans over there in LA and all this.
He was saying in five years, this will be the number one thing, so you might as well get to Korea now. This is the stuff I hear when I'm sitting around the hot pot dinner.
Non-invasive facelift. Isn't that weird that one of our biggest fears is that your face sags? Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know how I would feel if I wasn't in the entertainment business, right? I mean, I mean, you're in a cosmetic business on some level, you know what I mean? On some level, I guess. I know it's not just your brand.
It kind of helps you a little being uglier. I never thought of you as ugly.
I'm not, I'm not attracted to men per se, but I never thought you were unattractive. Definitely less attractive than I used to be.
That's just time and booze and not so much sleep. Success creates a glow around a man.
It does a little bit of a glow, right? Yeah, it can. A little bit of a swagger.
Well, just age beats us all. You don't win.
Nobody wins. Everybody looks worse at 80 than they do at 20.
Yeah.

Just how it goes.

Yeah. I'm 57, so you kind of look down.
I'm 57 too.

Oh, are you?

Yeah.

When's your birthday?

August.

Okay, I'm older than you. I'm March.

Nice.

But you look down that road and you're like, am I going to be all right when I get to 80?

Very few people are. There's a few people at 80.

When you're calling UFC 972, I don't know what the number would be but i'm worried about bruce buffer because bruce bruce buffer he puts out so much energy well i was telling the guys the other day one day he's just gonna be in the middle screaming someone's name and he's just gonna fucking check out like right in the middle it's time boom his eyes will roll back but that's for any performer that that's the way you go out. You go out on your shield, right? That would be amazing.
I don't want him to die. I love him.
But if he did die that way, I'd be like, what a legend. What a legend.
The buffers, right? Both of them. Oh, yeah.
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I only have one Michael Buffer story if you want to hear it. Sure.
So I went to see Holyfield Lennox Lewis at Madison Square Garden. Oh, wow.
And I was hanging out with all the cool people at the time. So I'm in the fourth row, and it was infamously a draw.
It was almost all English tourists that had come in for the fight. They were booing the national anthem.
I mean, it was a pretty riotous atmosphere. And I don't know anything about fights, but it was a pretty boring fight and Lewis seemed to be a little bit more agile because of youth and all that.
Anyway, so right when I, you know, whatever they're doing, HBO, they're over there in the corner, they're doing their bit.

You know what I mean?

They're talking before they go to the scorecards.

And a guy leans forward, the ref, to tell someone in the second row, might have been Don King.

And I heard him go, it's a draw.

Right?

So I knew it was a draw like 60 seconds before they announced it. And I was with a lot of well-known people.
And I said, run. And they're like, what do you mean? I said, we got to run.
And I started grabbing people and we ran out of Madison Square Garden. And we're almost totally out the building, you know, kind of where you get to the concourse part and you hear the decision and it's like, and people start, like, here comes the riot vibe.
Really? So somehow we ended up because it got so... Was it because the decision was bad? Well, the English people didn't like that it was a draw.
Oh. Because Holyfield was on the older side and...
Right. It's not a well-renowned fight.
I can't remember it. It was just a draw.
was just a draw it was a stone cold boring fight but because it was a draw and all these english people were mad don king was involved so it was like all that typical brouhaha that was going on boxing at time anyway so because of the suddenly the riotous or potentially riotous situation the police started like making people go different ways like funneling traffic or something you know it's almost like they got like code red or something because like suddenly got really weird so then we couldn't get out of the building so somebody was like somebody recognized somebody in our party follow me and so then next thing we know you know we get we end up like in the vip backstage part where it's safe and and there's and there's you know uh michael buffer on a chair and he wasn't talking to me, but he's talking to somebody. And all I heard was going, that's bullshit! Like in that voice.
That's all I remember. That's bullshit! So was he talking about the decision? He thought the decision was bullshit.
Letterman's card was heavy for Lewis. Wow! 117-111.
Harold Letterman, who's always dead on the money. Harold Letterman was always right.

Yeah, so they were saying as it got called, they're like, this is a travesty.

Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not a fight aficionado, but I thought Lewis was slightly better.

Wow, I forgot about this fight.

I completely forgot about this fight.

There's so many fights from this era that were incredible.

That was an amazing era for heavyweights. And this is when Don King was still running everything.
Did they have a rematch? I honestly don't remember. You don't think so? No, I think so.
I want to type it in. It said two.
That's bullshit. With that great voice.
He's still trucking. He's still trucking.
He still announces huge boxing fights. Because you ever get that, like somebody wants you to do their bar mitzvah or anything, you ever get those requests? No.
I get those requests? Those make it to me. Will you come do my bar mitzvah? Who won this one? Is that the rematch? Had to be Lewis, right? I would imagine.
Well, similar Letterman card. card similar card let's see if they robbed him twice they gave it to him yeah yeah well they got their got their rematch um no you get this thing like hey will you come do my right right right i wonder what michael buffer gets to show up somewhere you know yeah it's probably like saudi arabia they have him come over there and introduce someone's birthday Half a million half a million probably more Depends you know, I mean like You know in my business we couldn't become privates, right? I saw Stone Temple Pilots They played Dana White's 40th birthday party.
Yeah, and there was no one in the room other than UFC employees And they put on a show like it was a fucking sold-out arena. I mean, full blast.
They didn't go through the motions at all. It was a phenomenal show.
That means Dana paid them. Yeah.
It was a lot of money. I mean, totally.
I love those guys. But they were so professional.
It was so impressive. And because they were so powerful on stage, everybody just started paying attention.
Oh it kind of broke out in the middle of this party. Where it's a birthday party, we're all standing around tables, eating food, having fun.
I've done a few things and it's always a bit awkward. Yeah.
Which is weird because they're all paid gigs. Right.
But something about a paid, paid gig feels different. Yeah.
There's a lot of entitlement that's attached to someone paying you to's paying you to come perform at their birthday party. Well, and then you see the guy's wife going, who's this? Right.
There's that, too. The people that aren't fans are like, oh, no.
Yeah. Yeah, those are weird gigs.
Because then you go, how much? I could have one shitty night for a million dollars I mean I'd like to tell you I haven't been there but I've been there Ron White did one last year in Vegas and he was talking about it I didn't want to do it I kept saying no and they kept going higher and higher and eventually got to a point where I go oh fuck it I'll do it and he goes it wasn't worth it he goes it was one of the worst fucking nights of my life he goes all the time i'm doing it i'm thinking i shouldn't have fucking done this he said they didn't laugh they barely paid attention it's like why am i here but if like you're a giant fan like say if you're a giant ron white fan and you hire ron white but you're like office doesn't give a shit about comedy comedy and they just want to have fun and drink and eat hot dogs. Yeah, I went to a billionaire thing once where the guy had hired Diana Ross.
Whoa. It had to at least be a million dollar gig for her.
And maybe 700, 800 people. Wow.
You know? And you're like, wow. I mean, basically a private concert with Diana Ross.
That's pretty dope dope if you were really into it and people paid attention it'd probably be fun small intimate concert I've done them where they're fun yeah what percentage less than 50 we don't get at to be fair or not fair we don't get asked to do it a lot I don't think we're on most people's bingo's card for a private event yeah i think i think my my rep precedes me you know it's like a beyonce thing although i mean she does have you ever heard some of the numbers that some of those pop people get coming out of saudi arabia yeah 14 mil and yeah for nobody calling us for you know i mean like yeah i take that phone call well that's one of those things if like who is that um the richest man in India? His son had a birthday, and it was, like, the most extravagant birthday of all time. Like, they spent 50-50 mil on entertainment alone.
Something crazy like that. God, that's so crazy.
That's so much money. Yeah.
I mean, I wish there was a perfect formula for it, but there isn't. Because that's what I mean.
I mean, every time we play, we basically get paid. I think there was a perfect formula before it but there isn't because that's what I mean I mean we play every time we play we basically get paid I think it was a wedding not a birthday party right it was a wedding yeah you got like Lennox Lewis was the announcer yeah it's just that's the weird world of extravagant amounts of money like unbelievable amounts of of money, where you want to hire Kanye to come to your house.
The wedding was $100 million. That's where Beyonce was.
They probably spent over $100 million for Anand's sister, Isha's wedding, in 2018. The ceremony featured a performance by Beyonce.
I mean, if I'm Beyonce's manager, she's not going over there for less than 2025. Yeah, why not? They have so much money.

They won't even notice it.

They'll make it back tomorrow in the stock market.

I don't know if I'm saying that.

Once you get to that goofy, that was $100 and how many million?

$190?

How much did that cost?

No, I'm sorry.

Billion.

How much is he worth?

$116 billion.

$116.

Yeah.

You're making $20 million every day probably.

It's like rolling in constantly.

I mean, you just had a billionaire in here. A couple days ago.
Yeah. I mean, you've met your share of billionaires.
It's always an interesting thing how they spend or don't spend their money. There's no consistent guide for billionaires.
No. I like the Jeff Bezos way.
Wear tight shirts, get a yacht, have a hot girlfriend. Let's fucking go.
That's what you're supposed to do when you've got $250 billion. You're not supposed to be a fucking weirdo and wear a sweater and go visit Haiti.
No, you're supposed to be balling. Go to the Mediterranean.
Popping corks with models. Let's go.
Get a million dollar watch. I like to have a billion dollars to make that decision.
Right. I'm not there yet.
Well, the weirdest one is billionaires that compare themselves to super billionaires and they feel poor. Like Brian Callen was telling me about his buddy who's worth, I think, $3 billion.
And he's like, I really need to fucking up my game because he's friends with a guy who's worth 80 billion dollars so he feels poor compared to his 80 billion dollar friend boy i'd like to be poor like that the forest for the trees yeah i don't know yeah not not this lifetime i don't think it doesn't seem like fun it seems like the amount of stress and energy that must be required to acquire that much fucking money yeah um uh jimmy chamberlain of the pumpkins the drummer uh is friends with jimmy john the sub the sub king okay so i know jimmy john a little bit and we were at dinner one night in nashville at a place he owns or with other people. And one of my buddies started pitching him on some kind of money thing.
And I just saw his face change because everybody in the world wants to pitch. We're back to pitching ideas, right? Of course.
And Jimmy John knows this mutual friend. So it's not as rude as it might sound coming out of my mouth.
But at point he looks at me goes tommy you know how i got that money i made a lot of fucking sandwiches that was the way you shut him down the like like yeah i know how i know what i had to go through to make that money like you just you just see me as ain ATM. Well, it just changes the dynamic of the friendship now, too.
Now he's not going to be able to trust your friend. Nobody trusts Tommy.
Tommy's a mess? Tommy's infamous, actually. Infamous? Infa-mess.
I've literally been walking down the street in foreign countries and strangers will come up to me and say, oh, you know Tommy? He's like, he's just a legendary character in the entertainment business. What was he trying to pitch Jimmy John on? Some kind of investment scheme or something.
Because my friend Tommy collects billionaires. Oh, boy.
I call it, he plays billionaire lotto. He's hoping that when one of them knocks over, they'll leave him a taste.
How bizarre. He's like a vampire familiar.
Well, what's interesting about Tommy is his uncle was the founder of Hard Rock Cafe. So he grew up in a family with money.
So instead of somebody who we figure was poor and aspirational and want to hang out with billionaires, he actually came from money. Right.
So he knows how to speak the language of wealthy people. And so he's kind of generally welcome in those circles where I grew up in the suburbs.
I don't know how to roll in that world. And so, yeah.
But, yeah, Tommy, I think he's probably up to about seven or eight billionaires that he counts as friends. And what does he do for a living? No one knows.
No one knows? That's the legend of Tommy. Really really yeah and in fact i pitched tommy once i'm making a documentary called who the fuck is tommy litnik that's his name tommy litnik and uh and he doesn't like the idea yeah i wonder why it just outed him but i mean we don't have time for but i could make you a list of 50 people that are super famous like bonoo on down, who have pulled me aside and go, what's the deal with Tommy? Right? And just the fact that we're talking about Tommy will really please Tommy, but he'll take umbrage.
In fact, I have to tell you a story about my father, too, but he'll take umbrage with the way I'm portraying him. I'm sure he will.
The story I want to tell you about my father was when I was on your show, I told you a story about how I found a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun under my father's bed. It was in a guitar case.
Right. Well, my father heard the show about a month after I told the story on your show.
And so I get this text from my father's when he's still alive, obviously. And he goes, yeah, I heard what you said on Joe's show.
And I'm like, you know, you're looking at your phone like, here it comes phone like here it comes you know because i thought he's gonna be pissed at me he goes there's one thing you left out of the story waiting text the shotgun wasn't loaded that's all he wanted me to know like somehow it made it better how bizarre your father sounds like a fucking character he was unbelievable unbelievable what what. What did he play? Guitar.
Wow. Great, great musician.
Really, truly great musician. He's the classic guy that should have made it and didn't.
So when I made it, it made the whole thing really weird. Oh.
Because he looked at me and said, how did my schlubby kid make it? And I didn't. Wow.
He must have gotten lucky. He must must have done something because if it didn't work for me how could it work for him so that was a weird a weird thing but he was talented i mean he really was talented that's great did he did you get a did you feel resentment did you get along with him after that it was my father had a lot of issues with drugs it was always kind of like it can be with.
It was like depending on the day. One day he would tell me I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him and I was the number one son and da-da-da.
And two weeks later, he's telling me he wished I'd never been born and I should have been aborted. So it was a weird, it was weird.
It was a weird thing. So that's why that story is funny to me because he didn't mind that I told you about finding a sawed-off shotgun He minded that I implied it was dangerous when he made sure that it wasn't loaded.
So it was okay. That's the way his brain worked.
Do you believe him that it wasn't loaded? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. He was, um, he should have been an arch criminal or something, but he didn't have the nerve.
So he just became a guitarist. No, he was, he was a drug dealer and, uh, he, he, he used to run drugs and guns for the mob.
Really? Oh, he would do stuff like Melrose Park is kind of an infamous city just outside the Chicago city limits where a lot of the mob wise guys lived. And he was friends with the kid of a wise guy, and the kid would dabble because he was protected because his father was a made man so we go over that guy's house for hours and just hear these crazy stories about the mob and my dad would pick up something in the satchel and deliver it you know like it was that's that's i was eight years old going through all this shit wow yeah what a crazy environment yeah so you're eight years old he's running drugs and guns oh yeah wow yeah did you see like a lot of shit i saw a lot of stuff but it was like you know when when adults are trying to hide stuff from you but not really uh-huh you know so like for example they would stay in the basement all night and party whoever he was with musicians whatever right so come down at night and it'd be coke everywhere and rolled up 20s on black sabbath mirrors i was like 7 10 oh my god so i had a feeling call it intuition i had a feeling that he he wanted me to clean up but not the mirrors and he was and i was like what's on the mirror that you know that you left behind he was like oh that's uh have a cold or something but yeah it's good you didn't get rid of it.
And you're like, why do you need the rolled up 20? Oh, it's just easier to, you know, it was like, so you knew it was bullshit, but you're 10. You don't know what Coke is.
Right, right, right. You don't have any concept of what they're doing, but you know something's going on.
And this was constant. This was normal.
Yeah, and my dad would do stuff like he'd take me to lunch with his mistresses and stuff and introduce them as his friends. Wow.
So it was all kind of in plain sight weirdness. But, you know, you'd be driving down the street and suddenly you were in a drug deal and it was...
Whoa. He told me he was shot at nine times and stabbed three times.
Holy shit. Yeah.
You want to hear, it was one of my favorite stories.

Yeah.

So the band had a van.

He had a van and we bought it off him.

It was our band van for a while.

And then after we didn't need it anymore because we got too big, he wanted to buy it back.

So we sold it to him.

So one day I went over to his house.

And if, you know, if this is the driver's thing, right behind the driver's, where the driver's head would be, but in the metal of the car was a bullet hole. So I said, did somebody shoot at you? He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, what happened? Exactly. He's like, yeah, I was stopped over there on Narragansett, and some guy came up, and I thought he needed something like a dollar or something.
So I rolled down the window. As soon as I did, he put a gun through the window at my head.
And then, you know, I hit the gas and sped off. And so as I went to try to shoot me, but then he missed and the bullet went in behind my head and I got away.
That's the story he told me at the time. So years later, the story came back up somehow.
He goes, oh, that wasn't the real story. Here's the real story.
So same setup. He's sitting somewhere, but it was a drug deal.
He rolls down the window to make the drug deal. Guy puts a gun at his head.
He does hit the gas. The guy does try to shoot him.
But because my father's mad now, he spins the van around. He tries to run the guy over.
And the guy's trucking down the street. And the guy ran into a gas station.
So my dad came barreling at the gas station at full speed in this van. And he was going to run the guy over.
And he said he reached a point where the guy was going to, if the guy stopped, he would run him over. But the guy leapt a fence.
And the only way to kill the guy was to have to run the fence and ram into a house that was next to the gas station so he hit the hit the brakes and didn't run the guy over so that was the real story so back to the kid thing excuse me that's why it's so hard to pin this whole thing down because there's so much smoke you know right like he did tell me there was another kid named bill that's a real thing and and when he told me when i was 18 he lied and said he didn't know where the kid was well when my stepmother brought up the whole bill birth thing later and i asked him he admitted that he did know where the kid was but he didn't want to tell me what did bill think about this like the possibility that his mother had an affair with your dad i don't i don't think bill gives it any credence i mean that's my sense of it okay he just thinks it's bullshit I don't know I don't honestly I don't think Bill gives it any credence. That's my sense of it.
Okay.

He just thinks it's bullshit.

I don't know. Honestly, I don't know

what Bill thinks, you know what I mean?

I can see how you would think it'd be possible

because your dad was insane. Your dad sounds

like a fucking maniac. I mean, the only

way... Like a Scorsese movie

maniac. Well, put it this way.

If a person doesn't believe...

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Get an expert now at TurboTax.com. That somebody is their father, not their real father that they grew up with.
And I do know people who had that they grew up with somebody and they in fact it just happened in my family right that a cousin of mine found out that her father was not her father and she's in her 60s because of a dna test oh my god so uh it is possible that people can find out later in life oh by the way that guy that you thought was your dad he ain't your your dad. Here's your real dad, right? Right.
So it does happen.

But I don't get any sense from Bill that he believes that's possible. Got it.
So the only way would be possible if Bill grew up in some kind of weird lie. You see what I'm saying? Right.
And I don't believe that. Right, right.
Well, I don't know how much he's talked about his family. but that's I just can't imagine a kid

coming downstairs and seeing Coco

over the mirrors

and Black Sabbath albums and people blacked out and empty booze everywhere.

Like this is a normal thing at your house to have these wild parties.

Yeah.

And you're a little kid.

To be fair, I think a lot of people grew up in that atmosphere.

I think we just don't hear about it.

Yeah, but not a lot of people grew up with a dad that's running guns and drugs for the mob.

That's true.

That's true.

That is true.

That's so insane.

That's such a crazy way to grow up.

Like, we would have conversations.

Like, we would have conversations.

Because, you know, as you get older, you start to ask questions, right?

Yeah.

So I'd say, Dad, aren't you worried, like, if you get pulled over?

You know, because he would carry, like, a lot of fucking weed in the car just for his own personal use he smoked constantly like my whole childhood like i mean i just remember joint after joint all day at the dinner table in the car i'd contact high and so finally at some point i said daddy aren't you worried about if you get pulled over and he he like popped the the, you know, old cars, you know, when you pop the trunk. What is it called? The hood.
The hood. He had figured out some system where if you put weed in a thing full of whiskey, he said dogs couldn't pick up on the scent.
so there was like a compartment in the engine compartment, like a thing that was full of whiskey. And then he would put a waterproof baggie with the weed in the whiskey.
And so if a dog came around the car, it would never, never smell it. That's hilarious.
So it was like life lessons, you know, from pop. How many, but dogs can only smell one thing.
They're only looking for one thing. When you train a dog, you train a dog either for a bomb or you train them for heroin.

You don't train a dog for everything.

Like, what do you got? Three barks for coke.

The way they train dogs

is it's one thing that they're trained to smell.

Oh, right. They have one.
Yeah.

If they're looking for bombs, they're only looking for bombs.

They're not going to stop you for weed.

Yeah, I don't know. Which is like the

dumbest thing to train a dog for. If you train a dog

for weed. Well, now, yeah.
Now, it's the dumbest. But they still do.
Really? They still have weed dogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If they smell weed, they'll call the weed dog. Is weed legal in Texas? I don't know.
It's not. It's weird.
It's decriminalized. There was actually a lawsuit that Ken Paxton tried to stop Dallas from decriminalizing weed, and they just lost in court.
So Dallas now, marijuana is decriminalized for personal use. It's stupid.
It should be the whole country. It should be just like whiskey is.
Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But you should probably know what the effects are.
And we should probably study what the actual correct dose is per person. We know what drinks.
One drink is one drink, right? You know what it is. You go to the bar, you get a shot of tequila.
That's what it is. It's one shot of tequila.
Everybody's pretty much, it's standard. With weed, you don't know what.
Oh, I see, yeah. You don't know what's the right amount.
Like should I take two hits or three hits? You can build up a tolerance. Like your dad, you're smoking weed.
Like if I smoked weed all day long, it'd be a fucking mess. I'd be paranoid and freaked out.
I'd be like, everyone's out to get me. But he was.
And he just kept doing it. That's what's even crazier.
And weed back then was not weed today. You probably could get some weed that's commensurate with weed today.
Like Acapulco gold or something wacky. But generally- They have all these crazy strains now, right? Isn't that the- Now they have scientists.
The botanists got involved in the game. And they're making super weed.
I noticed one thing, because I was in LA for a couple months this winter. And when they first, whatever, decriminalized in LA, it seemed like everywhere you went, everybody was smoking weed.
It like a thing you couldn't go anywhere without smelling you know the telltale smoke and now it seems to have calmed down and I think it's almost like now it's like Holland back in the day where it's like it's so normal it's no longer a thing to like openly smoke weed like yeah so I think it's gone back to a oh it's not that big a deal which I think is probably best because there was a year there where you would go there and everybody was stoned. You couldn't get service at a restaurant.
I mean, it was like people were staring off into space. Edibles.
Yeah. Well, for sure, you're going to have like a normalization period after a while.
Where it's like weed's normal. It's just like everyone's not drunk all the time, even though you can get liquor everywhere.
You choose when to imbibe and when not to or not to at all. You're supposed to have choices.
You're an adult. You're an adult human being.
The analogy I always make is imagine if it was the three of us in a room, just us three, and we were the only people on earth. We lived on an island, and Jamie just decided he doesn't want us smoking weed.
And so Jamie passed the law, and he wants to lock us up if we smoke weed. Oh, I see.
That's just as ridiculous as 300 million people and one adult decides that the other 300 million people shouldn't be allowed to smoke weed. Like, do it if you want to do it.
Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But you can't.
Putting people in a fucking cage for doing something that they want to do that harms no one but you don't want them to do is fucking insane it's just insane i i grew up because of my my father's life i mean i don't know what age i became conscious of my dot my father doing drugs constantly but let's say was five years old so that's 1972 so i've been in weed culture since 1972 jesus so i I always thought it was like- Vietnam War days. Yeah, yeah.
And I met all those guys too, you know, these guys with PTSD and all that stuff. Wow.
So I guess what I'm after is I never understood what the big deal was. And the only thing that freaks me out are people that are really into weed.
Like, you know what I mean? Like the 420 credit. Like that's their identity.
That freaks me out. Yeah.
It's a crutch for some. It's a tool for others.
You know, it's a creativity tool for a lot of people. You know, Carl Sagan was one of them.
Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a stoner? Oh yeah.
Huge stoner. He's got one of the best quotes on states of consciousness that are available to people under cannabis that are not available any other time.
See if you can find that quote. It's a brilliant quote.
Yeah, Carl Sagan, I mean, he kind of had to keep it under wraps a little bit because marijuana was really illegal back then, but he still wanted to talk about it sometimes. It depends on the person.
It's like everything else. There's some people that should not drink.
They drink and then their eyes turn to shark eyes. They're gone and they go away.
That's it. The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug, which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world that's not the quote that's a quote but the the other one had to do with states of consciousness that were that you could achieve it's a very stoner like thing to say yeah well i'm sure he talked about it a bunch.
But either way, he was a regular cannabis user. It's supposed to be like everything else.
You know, like you could have wine in your house. It doesn't mean you're going to drink wine all day every day.
You know, just you should not be high all the time. I just don't want the 420 people to hear me.
Well, it's like those people like the MAGA people or like the fucking insane clown posse people. It's just like it becomes their whole thing.
There's nothing wrong with going to an insane clown posse show. But if you want to be a juggalo and that's your whole identity is being a juggalo.
Juggalo is a whole thing. We've done business because of the NWA.
We've done business with the juggalosos they seem like fun guys they're great no problem with them um you know violent jay as he's known well i was in the nwa for a hot second oh really and he's kind of refired uh his his promotion now juggalo i guess jcw juggalo clown promotions or something i'd love my wrestlers wrestle for him too so oh okay i didn't even know you had a wrestling promotion they did back in the day they used to wrestle I know they wrestle for WCW and TNA so they were wrestling at the highest level for a while when they were sort of in the 90s times when they were on MTV and all that stuff I just love that they have like a carnival of outcasts you know they like all the outcasts have a home

in the juggalos and they're all like they have these gatherings of the juggalos they look like they're having the best fucking time like they're all like-minded people all partying together yeah but it's freaky when people admit secretly being juggalos have you ever had that experience they pull you aside

a friend of mine

former

former porn star

Sasha Gray secretly being juggalos have you ever had that experience they pull you aside a friend of mine former former porn star sasha gray like sent me a picture of her at like 17 in the juggalo makeup oh wow 17 and you're like this is so out there juggalo makeup do they dress they do that it's a very specific they do they do very specific makeup oh for the juggles do they have different makeup than the Posse? Or is it the same kind of makeup? It seems to me there's a kind of a particular way they do the Juggalo makeup. Jamie, can you please Google Juggalo makeup? Yeah, I think it's a black and white.
I don't know if there's rules, but it's clown makeup. What does it look like? Like that guy right there.
Yes, but that's Violent J on the top there. That's Violent J there.

But like they'll do their makeup kind of like how J is.

Okay.

So some of the people in the audience choose to make their face up.

I don't see anybody there with face makeup, though, in that picture.

It's hot.

It's the summer.

Oh, yeah.

There you go.

Sweating.

I'm going to wash it off.

Sweating off your makeup.

See like the girl there?

That split tongue, that dude in the middle, that's a fucking commitment. That's a commitment to never having a real job up top.
That's a lot. You got to really hate your parents to split your tongue like that.
How about the guys who split their cock? Have you ever seen that? Yes. Who does that? Do you remember the early days of the internet?

I don't know how much you were on the internet in the 90s, but there was a page called The Style Project.

Do you remember that?

Don't remember that.

It was all like some of the most fucked up things that this dude could find on the internet.

And he had a whole website.

And you'd go to The Style Project and you'd get like just insane fucked up stories about people. And one of them was Body Modification Extreme.
And I became friends with the guy who ran the site, who's actually that arm wrestler, Devin Laureate. I think that was his brother or someone he's related to.
Shannon Laureateannon laureate i became friends with him and he gave me access to his website and it was like a members only access where you could like so you got the the vip tier of split cocks oh my god it wasn't just split cocks it was crazy stuff like some people they decided that they wanted to get their arm chopped off or their hand chopped off so they devised a guillotine it was body modification extreme so it was all different people doing different things like putting like horns in their head and splitting their cock and and putting and one of them was this horrible story about this guy whose boyfriend turned him into a eunuch, wanted him to cut his dick off for him and be a slave. And like, oh, my God.
It's like detailing how this guy cut his cock off. Yeah.
Donnie Fargo, who was a famous wrestler, he was famous for him. As a party trick, he would put a nail through his cock.
Ah! That's not nice.

Yeah.

I had David Blaine

on and he made me stick an ice pick through his arm.

Yeah,

he's got this trick that he does. It's not a trick

though. I really stuck an ice pick through his arm.

It's like you can call it

a trick, but a lot of things David does

is just it freaks you out because like you should

but you know, you can survive

an ice pick through your arm

but I had to back it out because

I think that's a good one. a trick but a lot of things david does is just it freaks you out because like you should but you know you can survive an ice pick through your arm but i had to back it out because i hit a nerve and uh he made me reinsert it and so i reinserted it and uh then the original one just started bleeding and it got like a little bit of a hematoma started swelling up we had to get the medics and we had seals working they checked it out.
Because of all this body talk, my wife loves all sorts of weird body talk. And she wanted me to send you a message because she's literally about to have a baby like right now.

Oh, congratulations.

So we were somewhat concerned coming in because it was possible I may not be able to come

because of her about to have this baby. So when we were talking last night, I said, please don't have the baby today.
You know, I want to be on Joe's show. And she said, you tell Joe that if I start to have the baby, I expect him to give you some of his net jet points so you can get home.
It's a very, very rich person joke. That's hilarious.
What does that have to do with body modification? Nothing? Because she loves talking about this type of shit. Why does she like talking about that stuff? I don't know.
It's like's like but in my family we didn't talk about anything sex you know it's all just kind of implied oh i see i'm saying i grew up in a family where nobody hugged nobody kissed everyone hated each other and and nobody talked about the secrets of life you know good or bad was all kind of in the shadows you know i mean and grew up in a family where it's like, because she has five brothers and a sister. So they talk about everything, like to the point where just like at dinner, like you're talking about all this like weird body stuff.
I don't want to be graphic because it turns me off, you know, but they seem to think it's funny. When did you learn to hug people and be like outwardly nice? It's funny you asked me that.
I didn't grow up with my mother. My mother went crazy when I was four and I never lived with her again.
And we started to become close again when I was in my 20s. And I remember this one time where I walked through her door and it was that thing where I wanted to hug her because I never really hugged her my whole life.
And I just made this decision at 24, like I was going to hug my mother and give her a kiss on the cheek. And it was like that was the opening of this other life where people hug and kiss each other.
You know what I mean? I mean, obviously I had fool around with girls, but it was only within the context of being romantic. I had no physical affection in my life outside of that.
Now my kids are all over me. And I got nine and six-year-olds.
So it's like I'm used to kids like rugrats climbing all over you. But I didn't grow up in that at all.
Like I had no – the idea of affection was alien. In fact, when I first started chasing girls at 17, 18, you know, girls want to hold your hand or hug you in the car.
And I was like – it was so freaky to me. When did you relax? I'm not sure I ever did.
Well, I gave you a hug when I saw you today. It seemed pretty normal.
No, I'm actually very naturally affectionate person. And it's nice to give you a hug and it's nice to see you.
And it's nice to love on people that you admire and are your friends. And that's the great stuff of life.
But I came very late to life. You could even see I'm just uncomfortable.
And then, you know, I'm sure you know Howie Mandel. You must.
I mean, Howie with his... I made the mistake of hugging Howie once.
And I mean, you know, I killed his cat, you know? Yeah, it's like you executed him, like you tased him. That poor bastard.
It used to be you could touch knuckles with him. He'll touch knuckles.
He will. I'm close enough.
Touching knuckles again. I'm close enough to Howie to touch knuckles.
He stopped touching knuckles. And then he would do elbows.
He would touch elbows. And then he got to air elbows.
He would just kind of like do that and then put it down. I am a lead singer, so I do some of these things.
He's hanging out's hanging out with us in the green room at the Comedy Mothership, and then he's going on stage and there's a comic before him has the same microphone. They're spitting into it.
He's holding onto it. See, I'm I think I'm secretly a germaphobe, but...
Really? Secretly. We just talked about it.
Can we cut this out? That's another level. He talks about it, though.
He knows it's a problem. He just can't overcome it for whatever reason.
And he manages to sort of like have it and still work his way through life. Like he was fun to hang out with.
It's not like he's freaking out about other stuff. Like he was cool hanging out with, just talking.
I had him on my, and we did talk about it. It hasn't aired yet, but we talked about all his, I guess, phobias would be the word.
Yeah. Conditions.
I mean, there's all these letters, you know, ADHD, OCD, this and that. But he's very open about it, to his credit.
Yeah. No, he is.
Yeah, he talks about it, and it's been a battle for him. But it's just like, it's so odd because he's so personable.
Like you expect that someone like that would be like a recluse, wouldn't like people, like get away from me, everybody. But he's not.
He's like super friendly. Super friendly.
Except when he puts you in front of a professional comedian who's kind of irritated that you're there and claiming you're his half-brother. Oh, yeah.
That was probably a bad pairing. I feel like both of you are kind of a lot in a good way.
I would have one of you on by themselves. I wouldn't want you and Burr together on a show.
Well, he's such an alpha. I mean, he's just one of those guys.
He just can't help it. Yeah, well, he has to make fun of everything, too.
Oh, yeah, that's a fucking great idea. What about this? Right.
He can't help himself. Yeah, at one point he looked at me.
Actually, I was wearing this coat. He goes, where'd you get that? In like a Moroccan bazaar? It's like a regular coat.
It's like, oh, this is a very expensive coat. It's like a normal coat.
I understand. That seems normal.
I looked at North Face or something. But I'm asking you this in an empathetic way.
But because you're a professional comedian, so maybe it's different. But when a professional comedian puts their death ray on you and wants to make fun of you, it's a very particular feeling.

It's like getting carved up by a chef.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Because they're so good at Zorro.

It's kind of cool.

It's like, wow, I'm being insulted by Bill Burr.

You know what I mean?

It's kind of an honor.

Yeah.

But at the same time, it's really fucked up because they know exactly where to poke you. Also, you can't fire back.
You'll get killed. Right? If you fire back.
That's what I'm saying. He's going to chew you apart.
Yeah. What am I going to tell him? Like make a little joke? Yeah.
There's not much you can do other than laugh along with it. It's just have fun with it.
Just let, let him make fun of you. Have fun.
Yeah. That's all you feels like a deathbed yeah that's what that it's like yeah especially a guy like bill who's like the meanest comedian you ever kind of locked horns on you the meanest at that kind of stuff but he's one of my best friends is tony hinchcliffe he best at it.
He's the fucking best. I just found out, I just found one the other day from quite a while ago.
I'm going to send you this because this is like young, fresh-faced Tony Hinchcliffe. It's fucking hilarious.
And this is just like off the cuff. They bring in these dudes and he starts roasting them.
Just random dudes? Yeah, there's they're there they team up and they start talking shit to him and he just eats them alive

Put your headphones on this one's hilarious. All right, here we go

He's the best roaster on planet Earth. Nobody's better than Tony Hinchcliffe.
That's why I kill Tony so funny part of the reason

He's so fast

Did you get it Jamie okay

you guys look like a before and after for a product that doesn't work what is ADD stand for a dose of diabetes okay I wasn't ready for any of this yeah you guys are wearing sweatpants and sweat skin.

Have you guys just completely given up on pussy?

Is that right?

You guys are right?

All right, baby, don't worry.

Not me.

I'm out here now. Doughboy? Wait, what? His name is Doughboy.
Doughboy? Yeah. I spelled it D-O-B-O-Y.
Yeah, I had a feeling you'd misspell it. You guys are my favorites.
Two Chins and A$AP Rocky Road. Wow.
Wow. Just off the cuff, out of nowhere.
And he does that all day long. So he'll do that in the green room.
He just turns on people in the green room. It's fucking amazing.
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We have, like, when we do these shows, like, Tuesday and Wednesday night or whenever we're there, where everyone's in the room. Tuesday and Wednesday nights are a really good night at the club

because all the comics that are traveling on the road on the weekend,

they come into the club to hang out during the weekday.

And so there'll be like eight or nine of us in the green room

just talking shit about each other.

And Tony's just cutting up left and right, this one, that one.

It's so much fun.

He's the best at it, though.

You do not want to fuck with Tony Hinchcliffe. I'm i'm gonna say right now i don't think he's my brother he's definitely not your brother he don't look anything like you it's a completely different gene line now he'll make fun of me for saying i'm not his brother so did bill know that you're going to be there with him or was it just like how he just decided to put two of you together i got the feeling feeling that Bill wasn't really given the heads up.

Yeah, probably.

It was a little bit irritating to him.

Bill gets easily irritated.

But that's also why he's so funny.

He gets mad.

He gets mad at everything.

You know?

Yes, and my mind doesn't work like that, so it's hard.

I would have a better time understanding a rocket scientist than a professional comedian, I think. Really? Because the professional comedians I've known personally a little bit, like Bobcat Goldthwait and Carrot Top, their minds are so different than the average human mind.
I think the way they process information and they're looking for something that, almost like a meme, like coalesces a whole set of ideas. That's what makes it funny, right? You can – it works on all these different levels at one time.
The great comedians – like Dice to me is the greatest. And Dice will tell a joke.
It works on like eight different levels. You know, it's like high, low, middle.
Do you know what Dice's stuff is you want like people don't understand that dice is literally one of the best live performance artists just random street artists i watch him you mean when he just goes up to people oh it's unbelievable that these people wanted a photo with him and they don't know who he is it's the face you want the face you want the picture and he just goes he's fucking and it's so it's so uncomfortable to watch you start pulling your fucking clothes off like no don't do this like what are you doing he's the best and he he does that for zero money this is he's there's he's only doing that for fun that's it he's just being an artist like there's no money in it at all and he spends all this time wandering around the streets going to bars and restaurants and just bothering people wandering people up to people on the street in new york city they're waiting for the light to turn green you want the picture i just love that he'll he'll just double and triple and quadruple down on oh yeah on the on the bit yeah't give it up. He won't give it up.
Zamuda's the same thing with Tony Clifton. Yeah.
Just the discomfort of it all. Yeah.
Well, Dice is the only guy ever in the peak of his fame to try to bomb on purpose and then release it as a two CD set. Is that the night comedy died yeah unbelievable that that is so the day the laughter died the day laughter died rick rubin produced yeah yeah and rick who's a fucking maniac loved the idea he loved it of course he's like what a great idea this is gonna be amazing dice is selling out madison square garden like more than anybody alive like he's just selling out everything in the height of this he decides to record on a night where no one knows he's going to be there and bomb no material there's talk off the top of his head sometimes don't even try to be funny i've i've listened to it multiple times and it's one of the funniest things i've ever heard it's performance art it's like him on the street going you want the picture you and if look, if he couldn't kill regular way, I wouldn't respect it.
Because there's people that do comedy that pretend they're doing like anti-comedy because regular comedy is too easy. The problem is they're not good at regular comedy.
If you're like hilarious at regular comedy and then you say, I'm going to freak these people out by hitting them with some. He would do this thing at the comedy store where he would go on stage and see how long he could not talk yeah i saw him do it once he'll go like five minutes five minutes he's gonna and no one knows what to do and people are like nervously laughing but he also could fucking kill like in the rodney dangerfield special you know when he did dice rules like he could destroy an arena filled with people so it was a choice who's your favorite all-time comedian i'm just curious god i don't think i have an all-time favorite i think prior probably is the greatest of all time not living with chapelle being the greatest living i think that you have to you have to give credit to Lenny Bruce though because he really started the art form because before Lenny Bruce comedy was just a series of jokes it was just jokes and Lenny Bruce came along and all of a sudden he had social commentary had cultural commentary that he turned into humor the way he described relationships, the way he described marriage, the way he described, it was like completely different.
It's like, what is this guy doing? And then I think Pryor took that and made it funnier. Pryor took that and that honesty.
I never connected that dot, but it makes sense when you say it. Yeah, because he was just funnier.
Pryor was just better at it. But the door was opened up by Lenny.
It didn't exist before Lenny. So Lenny comes along in the 50s and he's getting arrested all the time in the 60s.
He was getting arrested. Remember that whole thing where he would just go on and read his court transcripts? Yeah, that was the end.
That. That must have been really out there.
I mean. I watched the videos of that.
I watched it. You've seen actual.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I bought it.
I bought a VHS tape that was Lenny Bruce on stage. I forget what place it was.
I think it was somewhere in San Francisco. And he was just talking.
He was reading his court transcripts and talking about the case. And some of the audiences go, we want dirty Lenny..
And he's like, man, it's not about that, man. It's about – you've got to understand what they're doing here, man.
And he would go back into the court case. But it wasn't funny at all.
It was just him on stage for a long time just talking about his court cases. But you have to – the thing about comedy is a lot of comedy, like even from the 80s, it doesn't hold up.
It doesn't mean that it wasn't funny at the time. It just means the concepts and the culture has shifted so much and they've become so commonplace that it's not shocking or funny anymore.
But it was maybe in the 70s or maybe in the 80s and much more so with Lenny Bruce because you go back and listen to his stuff and people are dying laughing

And you don't even find it funny like it doesn't even make you chuck

It's hard to laugh at Lenny Bruce's stuff, but

It's because we can't put ourselves in the context of being alive

Watching this guy perform in 1962. He read Fox to me still funny though still funny

But like his stuff holds yes his stuff holds. Yes, his stuff holds.
Moms Maybelie, even? Yep. Some people still hold up.
You know, Robin Harris still holds up. There's some old school comedians, like from the 70s and the 80s, that are just still, like, just, you could tell.
Eddie Murphy, he was special. He was like like a special talent like his that still holds up today but some of the stuff doesn't um and then i think like the next big shift a big change was kinnison kinnison was a giant change did you know kinnison no i saw him live a few times i was gonna say i think age-wise it probably does yeah no i was about 21 when i saw live.
I saw him live once when I was 19 when I was a security guard at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts. So I got to see him live there.
And then I got to see him live at some – I think it was like some weird place in the middle of nowhere. And it was like half empty.
was this was like 88 89 so by 89 he was kind of falling off because he had just done so much drugs and partied so hard that he was fucking huge in like 86 and then by the time 88 came around the material kind of dropped off and then by the time time I saw him, it was like 89 or 90, it wasn't so good anymore. And then he died in like, did he die in like 92? I think he died in 92.
Car crash, right? Yeah, drunk driver, ironically, because he had jokes about drunk driving. But he just, I was always hoping he was going to come out with a new album and he would be back would be back you know he'd be back to the kinesin of 86 but just the party and the coke and the women and the fucking no time to write his brother wrote about it there's a great book called brother sam okay by his brother bill his bill wrote bill wrote about the childhood about him getting hit by a car and becoming this maniac he's like the victim of a head injury okay and that's what turned him into that fucking maniac the childhood preaching yes part of the childhood preaching tent revival preaching and he brought that kind of energy to comedy you know he was a different thing i remember the first time i saw him like oh wow that's comedy too like this is crazy i remember like, well, this is a completely different thing.

I never thought this was standup comedy.

Yeah.

He felt,

he was like,

to me at the time,

it was like,

he was the rock and roll equivalent of comedy or something.

Yes.

And didn't Guns N' Roses take him on tour or something?

There was some,

I seem to remember like.

Something like that.

Took him on tour.

I think Bon Jovi too.

I think he was hanging out with those guys too.

He was just,

I think Bon Jovi was one of,

in one of his, because he had a music video called Wild Thing. Yeah, I remember he was singing.
He made a song. Yeah.
He's kind of trying to be a rock star for a while. But it's a quick fall from grace, man, because in 86, he's one of the best comics that's ever walked the face of the earth.
And by 89, he's like a caricature of the guy he was three years ago yeah and i think it's just it's really hard to maintain especially in the 80s when no one was famous like how many famous comedians were there they're like five ten at the most now there's hundreds but back then like nobody was famous so it was all about getting on carson that was that was the thing right was about getting hbo special okay okay that was the big thing Carson was big in the 80s but for a guy like Kinnison even though he got on Letterman and he had one of the most brilliant sets ever on his Letterman sets fantastic we played it on the show once it's really good but I think with Kinnison it was really the HBO special was Rodney's um Rodney Dangerfield's young comedian special first and people got got to see him on that. And then he did his own hour special.
You're right. Cause when Eddie Murphy did his HBO special, that was when he just like, yeah, he had that, that leather suit.
I remember high school, everybody was like, it was all Norton. I've been looking at you and I know you've been looking at me.
Yeah. He was, uh, yeah.
I mean, it's like there was only a few back then, though, you know, and then Dice came along and Dice had a completely different element to it because people wanted to repeat the lines.

What's in the bowl, bitch?

Oh, the whole crowd would go crazy.

It was like they it was rock and roll.

Like they sang along, you know, shot through through the heart it was like it was like rock

and roll like everybody was singing along you give love a bad name they the crowd wanted to say that and the crowd wanted to say little boy blue oh he needed the money oh i tried to talk my wife into seeing if we could hire Dice to do our wedding.

She wasn't having it.

Who knows what he would have done.

The vision I had, my wife wanted to do kind of an after party of the wedding.

We had it at my house.

So the idea was, you know, when half the crowd bangs off because it's been a long day, there's still be a crowd that want to hang out and just party.

And then Dice shows up?

And then Dice shows up.

At 1 a.m. And then puts the death ray on me.
Right? He just was not having it. We used to say Dice had two Dices, but my favorite Dice was Mean Dice.
Because Mean Dice would find a guy in the audience. He knew who could take it, who couldn't, who's smiling and laughing along.
He'd be like, look look at you and just start tearing this fucking poor fool apart uh fun in back then the beautiful thing was the comedy store had no audience so he could go on unannounced he would show up at like you know midnight on a fucking monday night or something like that and just torture people for fun just for fun he was only fucking around he was i'm having bill burr t ptsd because that that feeling when they put the death ray on you did it really bothered you no it didn't bother me it's just i it's uncomfortable well i i'm not i'm not gonna what do they always say don't uh don't bring a knife to a gunfight right what am i gonna say you know what i mean what was it why was he picking on you i think because he was uncomfortable about the whole setup. Because at the end of the day, it's my fault.
I'm the one who said something in public. Right.
So at the end of the day, I do bear the responsibility for initiating this insanity. It's taken a life of its own.
Because, I mean, I walk through public now and people are like, hey, it's Bill Burr's brother. So he's got to be getting it the other way that's you're the brother of that that that weirdo from the pumpkins you know like i got you know i don't know we were talking about the other night at the club in the green room we were convinced it was a bit that you guys were doing together we were convinced well no one disagreed every no one was like i think it's real most people were like i think they were fucking around it seemed like they made an agreement it's somewhere between a bit and reality and I think that's where it gets confusing that's why I would use the word meta there's this moment if you watch it back where Howie splits and just leaves me and Bill alone and Howie's Howie has a band that plays when he does a show so so the the gentleman who runs the band starts playing a really sad piano and bill just starts riffing it's just me and him in this room alone i mean i don't know bill at all and he's and he starts talking about our shared dad and it gets really weird because on some level it's like it's possible right right even if it's one percent it's not a zero right so that's where it gets kind of that's why i say meta it's like you're you're you're you're looking down a hall of mirrors and you start almost playing with your mind you're thinking like well i could it could be possible it's also the two of you guys doing this publicly is very pro wrestling which is what you love there's something about i i i i brought a wrestler with me today who runs the promotions for the nwa uh but you know i'm saying it's like there's something about it it's like is this kayfabe you know is this real is this a shoot or is this a work like what is this well tommy you know tommy dreamer i know the name tommy dreamer famous ecw wrestler went on to work for wwe and now works for tna um tommy's the classic salty veteran you know seen it all done it all you know been split in half and the whole thing so there's nothing tommy hasn't seen and and you know tommy will say something like uh it's all a work it's a work.
Like, basically, it's the cynical view that everything you see in the world is fake. The president is fake.
The news is fake. It's all a work.
So once you go there cynically, it's hard to back out of that. Yeah.
So I like the – the artist in me likes the discomfort. Yes, that's what I'm getting at.
Yeah. I really do like the discomfort.
I remember watching Andy Kaufman on Saturday Night Live circa 78 or whatever. And it's that idea that you can create a vibration in the room between what's expected and where you're willing to go.
Yeah. I have this one friend who was a performance artist, and she would do stuff like when she was in college, she would just walk in the cafeteria and take off all her clothes.
And she would stick a camera in the corner and just film people's reactions. And it was interesting to watch because one guy would just keep eating his food and no salad.
Like, I'm just going to eat my salad and just pretend this isn't happening. Like, every human being goes in a different direction with the weirdness.
Right. So, as an artist, you know, on a stage, you know, there is this kind of crazy power that you have because depending on what comes out of your mouth next or what you do can affect thousands of people and then obviously through a digital medium even more so there's something about flirting with the the uh the uncomfortable but the the what makes it uncomfortable is there's always it always has a foundation of truth you know i'm saying yes i do know what you're saying yeah if it didn't have it would just be silly.
Right, right, right. The discomfort comes from like, oh, there's something you're doing that I recognize in myself, or I know somebody that's like this.
Yeah, well, it makes it much more interesting if there's a 1% chance that it's true. If I just think you guys are running a sketch, it's kind of funny, but if it might be true, then it gets to that weird place.
Right. Where it's like, this is uncomfortable.
so if I walked out of that room that day after meeting Bill for the first time, and it was a 1% chance, now that I walk through life, we're up into like the 10 percentile in the public's mind. Yes.
10% of the public is convinced we're brothers. Even if I sat there and told them, no, it's not true.
More now. That's okay.
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When you say it's a bit, yeah, it's a bit to the extent that you're playing with the idea. Yes.
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It would be like if I sat down and say, you know, I'm sure you remember the last time it was on your show, but, you know, I met you when I was 12.
And I told you this whole story about how I met you. Like Carrot Top in his show tells this whole story about meeting Gallagher when he's a kid.
Have you ever heard that? No. Gallagher is Carrot Top's hero.
Sure. And he even does a thing at the end of his show in tribute to Gallagher.
He kind of does a watermelon bit or something like that. But he tells this thing in the show about how meeting Gallagher when he was like 14 years old and Gallagher actually gave him some advice that inspired him to be who he became.
But I mean, for all I know, it's a bit.

Right, right, right. But he says it with such earnestness,

and it does have some, it feels right,

but for all I know, it's just another bit.

Everything's a work.

That's what I'm saying.

So if I came here, oh, Joe, I met you when I was 12.

You were at an airport.

You were so nice.

You signed an autograph, you know.

There's a part of you that would be like,

well, it's possible.

I mean, you know what I mean?

I got a pretty good memory. I'd be like, what happened? Where were we? I never been there.
Sorry. I have this plague that I can't get rid of.
But if you have that Tommy's perception that everything's at work, the whole world gets really weird. Well, I think we're there.
Yeah. We definitely are when it comes to politics and the news.
I think our whole culture has been turned into, like, where are we? Right. Like, you know, that's why I started calling it, like, five, seven years ago, a post-truth era.
Right. I mean, we've all been in that situation where somebody in our inner circle will bring up something that we know from a factually presented basis isn't true.
I heard so-and-so did so-and-so, and you go, no, that's not true. Let me show you the YouTube clip.
You know what I mean? This didn't happen. Or, no, so-and-so made a left, not a right.

But because of what they've heard, they believe it.

And you can literally show them something and say, no, no, look. And they're like, well, that must be AI or edited.
It's like once somebody becomes convinced of this culture, it's really hard to unconvince them. Right.
And so from a performing point of view and somebody who's now also in the podcasting sphere, it's like, is it better to play into what people want? Like I really appreciate it in Bruce Springsteen's Broadway special when in the first five minutes, the thing he basically says, I'm not really Bruce Springsteen. Have you ever seen it? No.
It's really worth watching. In the first five, it's when he did his long Broadway runway run you know about that he did this thing where it was like he would talk and then play songs no i didn't even oh yeah it was huge it was he went on this massive broadway run huh um and the hbo did it and put it on as a special um but he literally in the first five minutes of talking and it's you know it's about 1200 people a night so it's a live audience and he says in the first five minutes by the way i'm not bruce springsteen like i'm i mean that's my name but the bruce springsteen you think he's like i don't know how to fix a car i've never been a factory in my life he's serious yeah now i knew that as a performer i could i knew that what i was watching wasn't real but people want him to play john wayne so bad that he puts his finger in there and says, okay, you want me to be John Wayne? I'll be John Wayne.
Right. But that's audience capture, right? Yes, but now we're in the business of it.
I mean, there's obviously examples, historical antecedents over the last hundred years of media where people would figure it out. Right.
Charlie Chaplin or something, you know what I mean?

Like they wanted him to be the tramp, so he became the tramp.

Right.

He wasn't that guy at all.

Right.

He fed into it and obviously connected to something real in him, but he wasn't really a tramp.

He was a complete rich Lothario.

Well, you really see it in The Dictator, that movie The Dictator.

Yeah.

Where he has that insane speech at the end.

Oh, yeah.

Uniting the world.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, he was an out-and-out out now socialist basically and a brilliant guy oh yeah which is really crazy when you think about how silly his character was his character was just like bumbling stumbling goof so that's what I'm saying what is more what is more valuable what the public wants from you or what is true in the air in the entertainment world we're used to it right yeah you could play joe rogan the comedian at the drop of a hat because you've done it and joe rogan the ufc announcer you know just i'm not saying it's not who you are but it's it's an extenuation we say in wrestling you turn the volume up to 11 right it's still joe rogan i don't see you as being disingenuous i can't i can't even think of one time i've ever seen you in any media where I thought that he's not playing.
He's not Joe Rogan. You know what I'm saying? Right.
I've done it. I've played other people.
So what I'm trying to say is now we're in this thing where, like, everybody's doing it. I mean, everybody.
We've all looked at some girl on the Internet and said, that's not how she really looks. And you got to go through the Instagram and like you find the real picture.
Right. Like everybody's kind of become comfortable with like a filter over everything.
So that's what I mean. We're in a post-truth world where the impression is becoming more valuable than the reality.
That's really, I think, unprecedented. Yeah, I think so too.
But I also think that authenticity is more valuable now than ever before because it's hard to find. Well, that would be my argument for why my band has risen back up.
Because we're one of the only bands left that sort of represents some ideal that's long abandoned. Right, right, right.
You're not a corporate creation. No, we never were.
Right. And there's so many of them now, you feel like, you know, like, you seen uh kinnison's bit about the monkeys the band the monkeys yeah i don't give me the well it's a bit about manson it was uh and then you know he he does this bit about the monkeys about they weren't a real fucking band like because you know they were pieced together by a corporation the the monkeys like one of the which were great the monkeys are were great.
The Monkees are great. I'm a believer.
They have some great songs. But they were kind of one of the first corporate creations.
But I actually, on my podcast recently, interviewed Mickey Dolenz. Oh, wow.
And we talk a lot about this very subject. It hasn't aired yet.
But he was less interested in the discussion than I was because my argument would be is that the monkeys are actually the template that came. Our whole lives, the monkeys were dismissed as an anachronistic thing that went against the integrity of the Beatles.
Right. But if you actually look now, Beatles versus monkeys, the monkeys are more accurate of what came than the Beatles.
In what way? Because authenticity is less and less and less important. Oh.
Those who establish authenticity, and I would include myself amongst that,

and I would include you in that, they're very valuable. But you also know because of your public things that have gone on,

you've had to stand there and take a lot of shit

because just even speaking your own truth is inconvenient in a post-truth world.

Yeah.

Right?

So it's actually more politically expedient to create a character that can navigate this new world. And by the way, change on a dime.
Right. Does it make sense the way I'm positive? Yeah, no, it does make sense.
So my argument would be from a rock and roll historical point of view is that the monkeys are actually more relevant now in a particular way. The Beatles are this preeminent band.
That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying is the model of the monkeys which was always held up as for a form of mockery right see this is what you get when you make plastic music no no we live in the age of plastic music now right the monkeys are the are the four are the grandfathers of this thing right it wouldn't even be shocking today if the corporation put together a band what no one would dismiss the band because a bunch of people they cast it together with a bunch of good musicians and created a band.
No, I mean, I... We used to want Aerosmith.
We used to want Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Young, coming up together, playing music. That's what we used to want.
We used to want the Beatles. They all got together.
They formed a band. They played it in Hamburg until they tightened it up.
I used to work with a musician, and I was in therapy at the time, and I was having a lot of problems with the musician.

And the musician was from a wealthy family, but he didn't bathe, and he wore junky clothes.

He wanted people to believe he was somebody that he wasn't.

Right.

I was actually from a poorish family. He was from a rich family pretending to be poor.

Yeah.

And my therapist had the great line about him.

He said, he looks like a junkie, he smells like a junkie, but he doesn't have the guts to be a junkie.

So if you can, if in this culture you can pick up anything you want and adapt it without the downside of actually becoming it.

Yeah.

Well, you can see why so many people without courage or chops, it puts them in a game. It puts them in this social me-you that we all sort of have to navigate.
So now we're into this place where we're talking to a lot of people who believe that they're furry number 463 because that's all their status comes from their digital online group. Yeah.
You know, I'm 57.

I got two kids, another one on the way.

I work with animal charities, and I have a tea house and a wrestling company, and I'm

still fighting at 57 with people who want me to be this guy that they believe I am from

30 years ago.

Right.

And no amount of empirical evidence will change their minds.

Right.

They're upset with you because you're connected to something that's different than what they

want you to be connected to. Like, they don't care what you really are.
They don't want you to like pro wrestling. Sam Kennison's second act should have been, get sober, get straight, and go on another hellacious run.
Yeah, I suspect Sam was very mentally ill. I never met him, but I think one of the reasons why he was self- medicicating so hard was probably that head injury that he got when he was a young kid probably really fucked him up because I know quite a few people with some pretty significant head injuries and they're wild and impulsive and aggressive and they do crazy things.
Like some of them, like they just go off on benders, they disappear for days. Like I think it's common with people with severe CTE.
Because I'm on the board, I'm on an honorary on the board of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, which I'm sure, you know, has some tie to UFC too, because, you know, Chris Nowinski, who runs it, is my friend. One of the main things that happens with people who start to get CTE early in life is lack of impulse control.
Yeah. So suddenly you have a 40-year-old retired professional athlete who's faster and stronger than 99% of the population who can't control his temper.
Right, right, right. That's what makes that situation so frightening for the families because they lose the ability to kind of keep it all reined in.
Right, right. That happens a lot with fighters, football players.
I'm sure it happens with pro wrestlers. Probably happens with a lot of...
It's getting better, I think, with wrestling. The awareness is helping.
In our organization, we forbid headshots. That's good.
You know, the classic chair to the head does none of that in my world. Good, good.
You don't need it. Well, for what? Yeah, the pain of watching people deteriorate is so awful.
The pain in their eyes where they just can't navigate life anymore and every day they have a fucking headache and they're just in hell and they just want to kill themselves. They just can't take it anymore.
And it gets to a certain point where it sort of accumulates over time where it doesn't get better. It gets worse.
Well, I think also and I'm not speaking from experiences, but I've heard the stories you take people who are held up as as almost like masculine ideals that fall isn't just the fall physically it's the fall of like i'm not the person i'm not the hero that you've made me out to be anymore i'm right i'm broken right and i i there's nothing i can do to put the pieces back together that's a very hard journey for championship fighters when they are they are the fucking man, they're on top of the world, and then they have to just integrate society and be one of us. When they used to be the dominant, and then they go to the fights, they sit there with a paunch and a little bit of a belly, sit there and watch people doing what they used to do.
And they don't know how to make a living outside of fighting. They don't know what to it's very few of them figure out how to transition into some other stage of life the thing about athletics is by the time you're 40 you're essentially done unless you're a rare tom brady type character randy couture who can compete into their 40s yeah bernard hopkins great example but at a certain point in time it's over and you have to know when it's over and then what you put all your eggs in this one basket where to be a championship fighter like a lennox lewis or vander holyfield you have to be all in you can't have like a side gig in a blues band there's no room for you writing books yeah there's no room for you uh you know fucking selling things on etsy like well that's it's a it's i know this a leap of discussion, but that's one of the discussions that's going on internally in my band is I'm 57 and one guy's 56 and one guy's, I think, 61.
It's like at what point do you start to dial the thing down? My brain is wired. I'm going to go until I run into a brick wall.
And they're more like, well, pretty good you know i mean like do we have to keep throwing ourselves into the maw of the public you know and my argument is like it'd be like going into a ufc fight and not fighting to win right fighting not to lose right that seems to me far more dangerous and that's kind of my argument is like in order to be in the arts you've got it it's a pell-mell all all all in yeah all in or all out that's the only gear i know yeah there's the thing that happens to bands when they get to a point where they never make any new music right and they just tour on the old music you're you're you're touching on on the on the nerve of my life yeah how do you navigate that i just keep working i refuse that's it in my case back to my daddy for a second i watched my dad play songs he didn't want to play i watched him doing drug deals rather than make money from music i watched him give up on his talent his dream all of it i watched it destroy my father and, if you want to even go further in a kind of a mythical way, my success destroyed him again. So, if you've watched that, well, then I was lucky enough to have kids late in life.
My first kid came when I was 48, and we're about to have one again, 57. Once my kid came kid came i was like this kid is not going to look at me how i looked at my father like shoulda woulda coulda yeah so i had to get myself up off the couch and like get serious again and again that's that mentality that killer mentality like i can still go i'm gonna go so until I'm going to go.
Well, that's what got you to the dance, right?

Well, even doing the podcast.

You know, it looks easy to just sit and talk, but it requires prep and mental focus.

And it's a lot harder than I would have thought, you know.

And, you know, I got money.

I mean, I could sit home.

I like being in the game.

I like the hustle.

I like having to learn things. I like the hustle.
I

like having to learn things. I like having to...
What do you enjoy about podcasting and why did you decide to get into it? A quick story was I did a podcast based on an album that we put out that was 33 songs. And I did it for iHeartRadio and they were fine and everything.
But when it all finished, I started to kind of enjoy it a bit. And I poked around as you do to see if anybody was interested and there was it was like crickets nobody gave a shit about me

being a podcaster, like at all. And if any kind of response came back, it'd be like, well, if you want to tell stories about the 90s and get other 90s artists on to talk about the 90s, we'd be cool with that.
But other than that, we have no use for you. So I just thought, okay, not for me.
Not meant to be. And then I did Club Random with Bill Maher.
And as soon as I was done with the episode and shaking everybody's hands, they said, Bill's starting a podcast network. Would you be interested in doing this? And I said, only if I could do whatever I want to do.
And they said, tell us what it is. And I pitched them the idea that is the show called Magnificent Others Now.
I said, I want to talk to whoever I want to talk to about whatever I want to talk about. But here here's the reason and the reason to the heart of your question is i feel there's a lot of people in this culture that don't get celebrated in the way that i would celebrate them because our we because we've become so skewed with influencers and people who are famous that don't do shit yeah and i think there's a lot of value in american culture that can be celebrated so you're're talking about, like, say, a retired fighter or something.
There's a lot we can learn from a retired fighter. Yeah.
You know, you have a shogun armor out here. You know what I mean? To me, a retired fighter is like, you think I don't want to sit down with a retired shogun? Right.
And ask them about what it's like to be in there alone? Right. Recently interviewed Steve Vai, a great great guitar player and i for some reason i had this idea of of uh you know like the classic sergio leone two guys at the end of the street with the gun yeah so i said to steve vai who do you fear at the end of like who's the faster gun you know i mean that's his right not i'm projecting I'm saying we all have that moment like, who do we not want to be in the octagon with?

Is it Eddie Van Halen?

Who was it?

For me?

Yeah.

Or for him?

For Steve Vai.

He didn't want to say.

Really?

Well, I think he's a top guy.

Right, right, right.

Why would you want to create heat where there's no need to create heat?

I mean, he's at an elite level.

Right.

I'll tell you what.

I wouldn't want to be at the end of the street with him, Steve Vai at the other end of the street. Yeah.
Or Yngwie. Yeah, right, right, right.
Those guys are like insane. Shredders.
I mean, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I'm an amateur, you know, compared to those guys, so I wouldn't want the whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. There's something about that kind of shredding, too, that's just like so stunning.
Freakish. Yeah.
I mean, do you still train MMA or do I- I arts. Okay.
I don't spar, though. I don't get hit in the head anymore.
But there's got to be those times where you see a fighter that just, they just get it. Yeah.
And it looks easy for them, and you're like, how is that? Autism. Okay, God bless, but I'm saying, that's the way it is for me with other musicians sometimes.
Right. I look at a guy like Steve Veyer and Eddie Van Halen and Ring Van like, how do you do that? Right.
Like what it must have been like when Hendrix burst onto the scene. My dad had a story, actually.
Yeah. He was playing a club in Wisconsin.
He never heard of Jimi Hendrix. And Jimi Hendrix was playing the night before they were playing the same club.
So one of his boys said, why don't we go up, watch this new guy, Jimi Hendrix. we'll hang out, we'll play the gig the next night, we'll drive back to Chicago.
So imagine my dad's in a club in Wisconsin with like a thousand people in 1966 or 67, and out walks Jimi Hendrix. My dad said he'd never even heard his music, so it split his mind.
And he said it was so shocking the way he played and how masterful he was at it. He said when he got on stage the next night, he felt like he couldn't play the guitar at all.
Wow. It was like an alien instrument.
And Clapton talks about it. Yeah.
Jimi Hendrix blew Clapton's mind. Yeah.
Roy Albert Hall, whatever it was, it was like, oh, my God, what the hell is happening? Yeah. I think it was Bag of Nails or something was called.
He was like, what am I doing? And this is when people were spray painting on the walls in London, Clapton is God. And here comes, here shows up this guy who was on the Chitlin circuit is what they used to call playing for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers.
I mean, he was just in the backup band. Yeah.
And he shows up in England. Chaz Chandler, the bassist from the Animals, goes, this guy could be a star.
Gets him a record deal. He shows up in England, and next thing you know, he's like, Hey Joe is a number one hit, and he's on TV.
And it's like, I mean, imagine that. Wow.
So, yeah, there are those people that's like, it's so shocking. Van Halen was the same way.
I got to interview him once and sit in his studio for four hours. He would just play the guitar, and you'd just be like, I don't understand how this is possible you're doing inhuman things and i know i know how to do what you do yeah and i can't even come close to doing what you're doing shocking is it's always interesting too that people have a specific sound like you can hear them and you know who's playing the guitar like steve ray vaughn had a sound like you can hear him like when he was doing voodoo child you're like oh that's a stevie version like he played do you play guitar at all no so the one thing i'll tell you guitar player to non-guitar players the thing you learned about the great guitar players it's it's it's it's all in their hands everybody focuses on what amp what what guitar, the gear.

Somehow it's the way they hit the strings. I couldn't even explain it to you.
We call it attack. I have no idea.
Steve Ray Vaughan, for example, he played his strings purposely high. He made it harder to play the guitar and still played at that level.
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We have a photo of him in the tunnel leading up to the stage in my comedy club of him on stage at that club in 1980. Oh, at the same place? Yeah.
I think it's 88 or 86. Somewhere in the 80s.
He's on that. Maybe it's 83.
But sometime in the 80s and it's like steve ray vaughn on stage at that club and it's wild it's just wild to think that he was in this room you know because austin where he's from and think about this because he talked about it there was a point in his life where he was dropping rocks of coke i think in whiskey and drinking it and rotting his stomach out and he got sober the last year or so of his life, and he played even better. Right.
If you listen to the recordings that he made live, particularly in the last year or so of his life, he's playing even better. So that's what I say about Sam Kinison.
Imagine if he was able to make that left. Like I said, though, I think Sam was dealing with something.
I think his demons think his demons were internal the Steve Ray Vaughn thing what's fascinating to me is well first of all he's the only guy that can play Voodoo Child other than Hendrix like if you're like some upstart and you want to release Voodoo Child today like Jesus Christ like like what are you doing you're trading you're trading on hallowed ground you know like maybe you can do all along the watchtower because that was actually a dylan song right maybe but you know why he you know this is my opinion but you know why he he plays voodoo child so well why because he had studied the same guys that hendrix had studied so he's not imitating Hendrix. He's coming from the same wellspring of information.
Like who were the guys? Albert King. Oh.
B.B. King, Albert King.
You know, it's Muddy Waters. It's understanding the way those guys played.
So he's not imitating Jimi Hendrix. He's playing from the same spot.
Have you ever heard of Johnny Thunder? You mean talking about from the New York Dolls no Johnny Thunder was an artist in the 1960s and he put out a song called I'm Alive and I think it was 1969 and it was also covered by another band but his version is fucking insane it's so good you't believe he didn't make it. Can I play it for you? Please, yeah.
Right, that's right. His version is the cover.
What was the other version of it? It's Tommy James and the Shondells. Tommy James and the Shondells.
Their version, but Johnny Thunder, put the headphones on. It's in another new commercial I've heard recently.
Yeah, well, we started talking about it like a year or so ago. My friend Brian Simpson played it for me.
And he goes, you're going to fucking love this. And he goes, this is a one-hit wonder from 1969.
Woo! Never heard of him. I usually know all this stuff.
Fucking fantastic, right? Yeah. I don't even know where he's from.
I can't even identify where he's from. The fucking song is fantastic.
It's so good. It just, it stuns you because you hear something like that and you go, how did he not make it? What hope is there? Imagine if you were around in 1969 and you see that guy up at the Whiskey A Go Go.
He gets on stage and plays that song. You're like, holy shit.
But to be fair, I saw those people in the 80s and I saw those people in the 90s. And I couldn't imagine that they weren't going to make it and they didn't.
Yeah. Isn't that weird? And that was part of the vibe that my father put on me, which was like, well, how the hell did you get out? Right.
Of course. Well, the fucking resentment must have been astounding you know when you're you know trying and kind of half-assing it and your son comes along and all of a sudden he's doing arenas you're like what the fuck this interview from uh rolling stone by bob dylan literally almost has what you guys just quoted like never heard of it i can't't believe it.
Right. We talked about this.
Yeah. What year was this? 1969.
Yeah. Isn't that crazy? That's right.
We talked about this. Bob Dylan...
So he discovered it and was asking Jan Wenner if he'd heard of it. That's so crazy that even Bob Dylan couldn't make it huge.
So 1968. Okay.
Yeah, Bob Dylan heard it on the radio. Wow.
And then disappeared. That's fucking incredible, man.
Incredible. Because you feel like a guy who makes a song that's that good, oh my God, all you need is good songwriters, and that guy's going to be huge.
There's a fucking billion dollars in there waiting for you. Dig it out.
But that's kind of what I was saying before is like it's it's it's a curious thing why certain people make it and certain people don't my father before he passed away he told me you had the one thing that i didn't have which was the ambition like he wanted it he said i didn't really want it i just wanted it to come come to me well also i think if you're involved in a life of crime like that, a lot of cocaine, and first of all, there's a lot of bad karma that you have. But also, it's like you're too distracted.
Like you're too in that life. You're never going to really be able to go all in on music as an artist.
So you're never going to really be able to reach your full potential, right? Yeah, that's what he was saying. He was admitting to me that he had made some sort of internal decision that he didn't want to do whatever he had to do to do it.
He made certain excuses involving the mob. He did say that back then, and it is a known thing in Chicago, that in order to be successful in Chicago, you had to basically sign contracts with the mob.
Right. There's always been rumors about the band Chicago that there were mob ties with their world.
I'm sure there was a lot of that going on. Yeah, it was.
Wasn't that the whole Hendrix thing? You ever know that conspiracy? Well, yeah, I've read about that. That gets into other types of complications.
And I don't have an opinion on it. on it it's just it's like saying there's no way to separate the two things at the time right anybody back then you know any clubs at the time particularly in chicago they were all mob right connected and los angeles as well sure so if you were a comedian or you know what i mean an emcee or whatever you were doing, like, here's Lola the dancer, you know.
You were connected. There was a wise guy standing there and everybody knew who they were because that's how they did their business.
Because if you didn't like what Johnny Rocco was doing, you were going to get in trouble and you didn't want to get in trouble. Yeah.
And I went to school with a bunch of the mob wise guys' kids and grandkids. I worked at a mob club in Connecticut.
I did stand-up. And another one in Long Island.
There was where the guys were connected by the mob. And in Boston as well.
In Boston, Nick's Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or money. We played a club on Long Island once where the crowd was moshing.
And in the middle of the four-song, the guy on the side of the stage that worked for me was waving, like, stop playing in the middle of the song. And I thought, fucking stop playing.
Got a thousand people out in front of me. And he kind of did one of these.
And there were two wise guys standing there with suits on. Kind of like, you're going to get in trouble with these guys if you don't stop.
And I said, I don't give a fuck. And fuck and i kept going so they waited one more song and then they came out between songs on stage with their backs to the audience and they pulled their coats open and showed me a gun said you better calm the fuck down whoa because of the washing yeah because it was one of we used to call them brass and fern bars you know like the brass bar and the ferns right right right you know that bar right yeah you've all been there and we were playing one of those places for some reason and the crowd was going apeshit they were bouncing off the wall so they were blaming us for the reaction of the crowd so they wanted us to bring the crowd down but how do you bring the crowd down so they literally they literally showed me a gun and said you better calm the fuck down so what did you do i just kept going were they gonna kill me on stage jesus christ what happened when you got off stage they weren't gone really i i mean i may there might have been a problem if somebody had done some real damage or something but i there was no problem but they they definitely threatened me on stage how do they not know this is me like this me at like 180 pounds and like long hair and bad attitude.

That's hilarious. I don't think they'd ever seen anything like moshing.
You know, this is like 92. This is a very new phenomenon to the outside world.
But moshing was going on before that, right? Oh, yeah, but it's only in the underground clubs is what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.
You're in a wise guy's club on Long Island with brass rails and ferns. I dated a girl in the 80s who went to see the Cramps and came home with a concussion.

Yeah.

From the mosh pit.

Ever Poison Ivy?

She was the guitar player for the Cramps.

Oh, right.

So great.

Yeah.

Bad music for bad people. Did you ever kind of encounter the alternative scene when you were a kid? Not really, no.
Not for you, the freaks? I didn't go to very many, I mean, I went to a few concerts when I was a kid, but not, like, I went to Jay Giles' band. I saw George Thorogood.
Not exactly the alternative there. Yeah, no, I never really saw a lot.
And then once I started really getting into comedy, I didn't really go to see anybody perform. I was mostly just performing myself, so I never got to see anybody.
And I didn't really become friends with band people until I moved to Hollywood. And then in the late 90s and 2000s, I met a bunch of band people.
And it was always weird, you know, hanging out with them. It was always odd.
It was like, oh, that's that guy from that band. Yeah.
It's a lot of, like, what do you call it? When the brains don't connect, the brain hemispheres. Bipolar.
A lot of bipolarity in musicians. Oh, yeah.
Particularly high levels? My theory is the reason they become musicians is they overdevelop one side of their brain. Oh.
You know, you probably get on somebody who knows what they're talking about. But the idea is that if people's – their brain hemisphere – and that's why a lot of musicians do coke is it helps the polarities work.
It helps the communicate left to right really oh yeah it's a known thing that coke really helps that if you have that by polarity huh do people is that a medication for people that are bipolar they give them Adderall or anything like that is I don't know I mean I've worked with people are bipolar and they've talked about their medications and stuff, you know?

Huh.

And it's still kind of an inexact science, bipolarity.

It's crazy to think that Coke helps fix some things.

I think it helps.

I think it helps.

What I've heard is it helps the brain communications.

Anybody I've known that's bipolar as a musician that did Coke told me they felt normal.

It's the first time in their life they felt normal, that their brain worked normally.

What a terrible thing. Yeah, it doesn't work.
Imagine if that's the thing that keeps you together it's cocaine um i wonder if what coca leaves would do because there's a lot of people like the high altitude herding populations and you know like people in peru they chew coca leaves just for energy and apparently it's a very different thing like the chewing of the coca leaves Or you can get tea coca tea yeah i was just in south america i've had that i've made a coca yeah yeah i like to get a little bit of a clarity but the chewing of the leaves is like it's so uh normal for them and it's illegal over here yeah but but back to the theory the idea is if you have side of your brain overdevelop, it makes you good at something that you wouldn't necessarily be good at. And then bad at life.
Yeah, probably. Right.
So you need a handler like Elvis. You need a colonel.
If you're meeting a successful musician, they're the graduating class of the bipolarity. Oh, okay.
That makes sense. So there's some functional level of acumen.
That makes sense. That makes sense.
That's why through the years as I've heard people give rumor to any number of famous rock stars, it's like I recognize all the behaviors. Most people treat it like, oh, can you believe so-and-so did this and made this erratic decision? It's like, no, that's a musician.
That's how most of their brains work. Yeah.
I don't know what it is and maybe there's a comedic parallel, but it just strikes me that the reason there's such consistent bad behavior with musicians is because their brains don't work right. And I'm sure somebody's going to get mad at me for saying that, but I mean it as a compliment.
It makes them good at something that they maybe wouldn't necessarily be good at. And maybe, I don't know, I've never been tested.
I don't think I'm bipolar. Yeah, I probably, I would imagine that a lot of motivational speakers would not be awesome band members.

You know what I mean?

Like people who are completely dialed in with their life.

Tony Robbins, my new bass player, you know.

They get up in the morning and they do their exercise and yoga and they eat well. They stare at the sun as it rises and they get their fucking whole life dialed in.

They probably wouldn't be the best band members. Especially like a lead no there's no good band members that's the problem well how do you guys did how do you keep it together for all these years like what's the key to a harmonious that's that's the thing i mean we broke up in 2000 and then the drummer and i brought the band back in 2007 and it only lasted two years.
And then I soldiered on alone as the only original

member from 2009 to

2015. And then the drummer came

back and then the guitar player who I didn't talk to for

16, 17 years came back in

2018. So we've been

an intact three quarter unit since 2018.

How come you guys didn't talk for so long?

It's real heat.

It was real heat. Yeah?

That sucks. No, it's all

resolved now. I mean, it's all good.
I mean,

I think if you don't talk to somebody for

Thank you. long uh it's real heat it's real heat yeah that sucks no it's all it's all resolved now i mean it's all good i mean i mean i think if you don't talk to somebody for 16 17 years there's a beef there that you know what i mean it lasts a real one yeah but it's interesting to me how um people can manage like that it's always like as comics we always look at band members going imagine if all of your fucking success depended on this guy showing up that guy showing up this guy's girlfriend not getting in the way this guy's fucking uncle not trying to manage you guys like you have all these fucking people and you're trying to put together songs and you're trying to like get out come on we got a tour i don't want a tour my mom needs me to help her with the fucking business and what are you talking about man we're in a band we gotta we have a record deal i'm nodding my head because this is every this is my life experience for 35 years we as comics we always talk about thank god we're like a one-man show thank god all we need is other comics to work with us the problem with the band is is the band members have no idea why it works we're we're we're cluel as to the mystery of why people are attracted to us as a unit.
We can certainly conceptualize, like I write good songs and I play good guitar, but there's something about bands that creates a kind of a magical, Pete Townshend referred to it as a gang, a gang that you want to be in. That's what makes bands attractive to people.
That was his opinion. I don't disagree.
There's something that goes on in those relationships that's kinetic enough that it sustains past whether or not you have a good song or two. Right, right, right.
Yeah, it's all the pieces make the puzzle together. It's not one piece as an individual.
It's all of them together make led zeppelin yes all together so if you're lucky and in this new world you know you got the stones playing into their 80s yeah so the economy of music has changed where it's like you're in an elongated state of success it's just totally unprecedented by the way there's no there's no what's going on with rock bands in their 50s and beyond is there's no prior parallel in a hundred plus years of recorded music there's not even one instance you can point to and say it worked that way then so we're all in uncharted territory and there's nobody that can even really advise you there's always the material thing of like well you're going to make a lot of money and you know you got this ip and the band and but it's like the actual sort of the nuts and bolts of how to hang together so for us it's been really it's the i call it the family of the band there's some sort of pride that's emerged with like we've all survived our relationships are intact enough for us to get on a stage and somehow it benefits our families individually so it's allowed us a sort of pride you know that it's because it's less about our relationship and more about our relationship with our families.

That's allowed us to have a sweetness between the three of us

that we didn't have when we were young.

Oh, that's cool.

Well, also probably just growing up and being more mature and appreciative.

You're really going out on a limb there with the growing up shit.

A little bit of gratitude.

Perpetual adolescence over here.

Well, that is part of the fun, though.

I mean, you do wait.

You don't actually have to really.

I don't know. blowing up shit.
A little bit of gratitude. Perpetual adolescence over here.

Well, that is part of the fun, though.

I mean, you do wait.

You don't actually have to really grow up. And you know, it's funny,

even when I say something like this,

there's already some guy getting ready to go on Reddit,

but there is a day you wake up

and you look in the mirror,

you're like, I'm a rock star.

This is fucking cool.

Yeah.

And there's another day that you wake up and go,

you know, I don't have to get off this rock star train

if I don't want to.

Well, look at the stones.

I saw the stones at CODA, the Circuit of the Americas here in Austin a couple of years ago. It was fucking insane.
It's insane. I was almost like having an out-of-body experience because you can't believe you're really seeing Mick Jagger.
Like when he's out there dancing, I swear to God, I felt like I was on a drug. I was like, my friend Bobby and I were hanging.
He's the one, he owns that place, Circuit of the Americas. And I was standing next to him like, I can't believe they're really here.
Like, there's certain people that you just get weirded out by being like, Bill Murray was here the other day. Yeah.
And I even told him, I'm like, I'm weirded out. I'm weirded out that you're here.
Like, it's just, there's a lot of people that I don't freak. I mean, I've met a lot of people.
I don't freak out about too many of them, but Bill Murray I freaked out about. But seeing Mick Jagger, I didn't even get to meet him, but seeing him on the stage, I was like, that is nuts.
That's really Mick Jagger. Yeah, well, the mythical part.
See, in his case, the mythical part of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is integrated. They become the avatar.
They're the living example of where it actually works. My argument is against those people where it doesn't work.
You know, Larry 465 on the internet, who thinks he's lord of like, you know, D&D or something. I mean, that's where I get kind of like, what is that? I get the other thing, you know, because, you know, whether it's, you know.
What do you mean by Larry Ford? I'm joking about the guy on the internet whose entire status is based on being in a subculture and achieving some status within the subculture, which doesn't really apply into the outside world. Oh, like a Reddit forum or something.
Yeah, whatever. Whatever it is.
Mick Jagger walks into a stadium full of people. They're there to see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.
Right. Even though they're 80.
And you, who's been around everybody, goes, holy shit, there it is. Yeah, just the fact that he was alive.
Okay, but it's the myth made real. Yes.
Have you ever watched those YouTube videos like, what was Caesar really like? You know what I mean? Right, right, right. That type of stuff.
Right. Like, what was it like to live in those times? Because there's the myth and then there's the reality.
Right. And then sometimes if you learn about the reality, you're like, wow, that guy was really a badass or she was really a badass because the thing is real.
The mythology is real. It's like it has truth or resonance in it.
It's all this other culture that's risen up where we're supposed to pay tribute. And that goes back to the podcast.
It's like we're paying tribute to people who haven't done shit.

Right.

I want to pay tribute to people who have actually done something.

Yes.

Well, that's what you like about doing your podcast then.

You just like finding people that resonate with you that really like strike a chord.

The other day I interviewed Susan Olson who was Cindy Brady.

Okay.

The Brady Bunch.

Oh, wow. Okay.

The Brady Bunch is, you know, as far as the original show, I think it's been over for 50 years. Right? I think so.
Right? Yeah. Okay.
Every interview you look up on YouTube on Susan Olsen, it's like, it's just getting her to regurgitate the same stories. And she did the Brady Bunch when she was like seven to 12 years old or something.
Wow. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
You're Gilligan for life. Okay.
My thing is, no, you're not Gilligan for life. And we had a great chat because I think there's a lot to learn from somebody who went through a zeitgeist moment at such a young age.
Like, how do you navigate past that? What do you do with yourself? Like, how do you pick yourself up off the ground? Right. How do you deal with typecasting? How do you navigate the fact that as you walk through the airport, you navigate past that? What do you do with yourself? How do you pick yourself up off the ground?

How do you deal with typecasting?

How do you navigate the fact that as you walk through the airport, you're not Susan Olsen, you're Cindy Brady?

Do people still recognize her?

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

Well, there's Barbara Eden, I Dream of Jeannie.

That was another one.

Yeah.

People get locked into who they are, Al Bundy.

I'm still the rat in the cage guy.

I deal with that, too. Yeah, but it's such a good jam.
It's such a good jam. That's a fucking great song.
Thank you. That's on the Green Room playlist.
That fucking song rules, dude. That was a good one.
Oh, my God. All-time classic.
I didn't get it at the time. I actually had to be talked into it.
Really? Yeah. We were putting out our double album, and it was this big pressure moment, 95.

And I wanted a different song to be the first song.

And the guy from the record company called, who's now passed away.

His name was Phil Cordero.

Lovely guy.

And he literally did the thing on the phone.

Kid, it's a smash.

You got to trust me.

And I trusted him.

Wow.

I thought he was crazy.

Didn't you think that that's sometimes because you're too close to your own creation?

Yeah. Like, you're never going to get to see how your songs impacted other people, the way it impacted them.
You're not going to feel that the way they feel it. Like, hearing that song for the first time, completed.
They've never seen you rehearse it. They don't know how you wrote it.
They don't know how you guys practiced it, how you fucked around with the lyrics. You did it different way.
They just get the first, they get the full version of it done they're like holy shit and then it's it's kind of awful that you don't get to experience that like you created it the only time i've been able to experience that is when i was really high oh wow like getting so high that i could hear it for the first time it was somebody else singing what really tripped me out about doing a lot of drugs back in the day was I would hear messages in my music that I didn't even know I was putting in there. And at some point I became conscious of my unconscious ability to put messages inside.
I'm sorry, you look at me like I'm crazy. No, no, no.
It's fascinating. So imagine, I'll try to reset up the scenario.
Okay. You write a song, you think it's about something.
You're sure of it. In fact, you would tell people, sorry, this horrible plague I got.
No worries. You're convinced that the song that you've written is about your ex-girlfriend.
And then when you're super high, you listen and you can hear yourself actually singing about something else. So now you have a conscious understanding of something your unconscious is implanted in the art.
And once I became conscious of the process, I became more aware of how to consciously plant messages in my music. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You just operate on layers. You put stuff in there.
Yes, but I didn't know that i was doing it until i did a lot of drugs that there was this other voice at work this subliminal voice like can you give me an example um the conscious mind wants to believe the song is about your ex-girlfriend but what it's really about is about being abandoned by your mother if you if you came up to me and said what's that song about and i trust you and i go oh it's about my ex-girlfriend, but what it's really about is about being abandoned by your mother. If you came up to me and said, what's that song about? And I trust you and I go, oh, it's just about my ex.
I believed it. I would believe it.
Like 100%. And then I listened to it high on drugs and I'm like, oh my God, I'm singing about my mother and I'm weeping.
And I had no conscious mind when I wrote the song that was about my mother. Wow.
And then once I have that kind of agape moment of like, holy shit, then I go back and listen to music sober and I can totally hear it. And then where it gets really weird is people would come up to me and say, that song, that reminded me of my relationship with my mother.
Thank you. People would come up and respond to me on the unconscious recognition, not what I thought I wrote the song about.
That blew my mind. That there was this other person in their layer at work.
And I gained a lot more respect for, like, I guess you would call it the shamanic aspects of art. I don't know if you've ever read Castanedus, but, you know, do you ever read Castanedus? Maybe I did in high school, I think.

Yeah.

It was kind of a thing for our generation.

Everybody kind of read Castanedus.

Yeah.

And it's still to this day debated about whether Castanedus was a real thing.

It was a documentary.

It was true stories or made up.

And did Don Juan, the shaman, was he a real person?

Is there really a Don Juan?

There's a lot of debate.

I think there's even been New York Times articles written about it.

Right.

About whether Castanedus, this whole thing is a fraud and all this stuff and i think castanatus may even still be alive um that might be one to look up sometime but um anyway i gained a lot more respect that that artists have the ability to communicate at subconscious levels that they're not even aware of i don't know if that resonates the way i'm explaining explaining it, but it moved something to me and allowed me to be a better artist. That's fascinating.
And it also, like, you can never guess, like, what kind of an impact, especially if you're too close to it, what kind of an impact your work is going to have on someone who's seeing it for the first time. And if there's, like, multiple layers that you're operating on that you're not even totally aware of and then you put out this thing that has this like very complex layered message in it and it just makes people go oh my god that's like one of the ultimate expressions of art right like something that just it music does something very strange that no other art form does it operates like a drug like music gives you more energy when you're on the treadmill like if a great song comes on you're working out you're like yeah like you feel it you know yeah there's riffs there's guitar riffs i swear to god make you stronger.
Like Tool Prison Sex.

Yeah, cool, right?

That song makes you just fucking rawr.

You know, there's like something to it.

It gives you energy.

It's like a drug.

It's an audio drug.

It fires up your synapses in this very strange way.

The best explanation I ever heard that resonated with me was was you know uh the entire universe is constructed on waves light everything has to do with waves so music is the closest thing to the foundational aspects of the universe that's okay i know what you're saying yeah well that makes sense because it penetrates the. Right.
Well, people that go on these shamanic journeys, the ayahuasca journeys, they play these songs that accompany the ayahuasca journey. They're called Icaros.
Are they traditional ayahuasca songs? Yes. And they have like this weird beat to them.

When you listen to them by themselves, you're like, I don't get it. But if you listen to them under the influence, the psychedelic experience dances to those songs.

And it gets guided by those songs.

And it's really wild.

Like really wild.

And then you go, oh, this is like a technology to interface with the psychedelic experience.

Okay, but you're hitting on exactly what I'm saying.

I think artists, and I'll exclude myself from the discussion so I don't make somebody mad.

Artists have a way of knowing how to do that without anybody teaching them.

Right.

They just know what music, beats, chords, melodies, lyrics to use to penetrate. And the successful artists, think of it, they do it at scale.
Yeah. Well, there's this thing that happens when someone's really in it, where you feel it from them while they're performing.
And you just get drawn into it like, wow. I remember the first time I saw Mr.
Jones and Me me first time i saw uh counting crows play that song the way he was like dancing around in the living i'm like that guy is so free like i want to be free like that you know i really remember thinking that because it was so real he was so in the moment while he's singing that song and i had adam in here and i asked him about it. I'm like, what is that? You are fucking locked in, man.
I remember being a kid. I was probably like 23 or something like that when that song came out.
And I was in my apartment in New York watching it going, fuck, watching it on MTV going, this guy's just so loose, man. He's so free.
And I remember thinking, I want to be able to perform like that. Whatever I do, I want to feel like, what's that zone that he's in? Well, part of that is a lot of shamanic work involves the breath.
So think a singer is rhythmically breathing and rhythmically chanting. So that's one thing that most people would not pick up on.
There's a ton of expiration of breath. You know, like what's the Wim Hof? I do that for two hours.
I mean, I'm totally asphyxiated the entire time. It's not natural to scream your head off for two hours.
It just isn't. Do you have to get in shape to do it? Do you have to get your lungs in shape? I do.
I do to a certain extent, yeah. Do you build up to a concert performance? You have to to a certain extent.
Yeah? I don't know how to explain it. I'm off cycle right now.
So if you came to see me play an hour and a half show tomorrow, I could do it, but I probably couldn't talk the next day. But if I do a week of rehearsals and prep up, then I can do it.
So it's like a muscle.

Something, yeah.

I don't understand it.

It's almost like a trained fury.

Like you learn to not go too far.

People say you blow your voice out.

You have to really know where the line is.

By the way, when you're dealing with a ton of adrenaline, like the thing with fighters comes to mind. Like they'll come in, they'll gas in a minute because they're so jacked.
Right. Sometimes you see a guy get in the rain, they're just like, and they gas in a minute.
I know how to see that because of watching wrestlers gas. You learn the body language of somebody getting gassed.
They kind of start to lose their posture and get a little goose? They get loose. Okay.
Same thing for a, for a singer. I mean, you can gas in the first three minutes and you're dead and you're dead.
Oh no. What are you going to do? Yeah.
So you have to almost like have a controlled fury. Like imagine screaming at the top of your lungs, but not totally at the top of your lungs.
Right. 87%.
Like there's the magical line. Well, that's what fighting.
It's the same kind of thing you don't go 100 and the zen of that yeah some of the best fighters they'll they'll punch like 50 60 and that way they could put volume on you so i can't imagine being in there somebody's on the other side want to kill you and be able to be like i'm gonna just gonna work my way through these well you have to have serious experience to be able to manage the storm that way. Did you ever have to take vocal lessons to learn how to not blow your throat out? I did, yeah.
I work with a lady. It's a funny story.
I work with a lady at one point. They hooked me up with somebody from the opera.
Oh, perfect. And she came to my house.
Well, no, it's actually, she was great. But she came to my house and she said, oh, you sing totally wrong.

But here's how to sing right and you won't blow your voice out.

And it was all about the right posture and all this stuff.

And the first time I tried to do it, a concert with 4,000 kids going nuts, I tried to do what she taught me and it didn't work because I just – I was in the deep end of the pool and I ended up having to go back to all my old bad habits.

So eventually I found a woman who was used to working with rock singers and she explained explained to me a bunch of theories about, I think, per memory, I think she said, the human body has 11 folds of tissue in the throat. And if rock singers don't warm up all that tissue, that's how they damage their singing.
And she'd also worked with Steven Tyler. And she said, the thing about rock singers is you guys sing wrong because that's the way you want to sound.
It's part of your gimmick, you know. Right, right.
I'm sure Steven Tyler and myself, we could sing like choir boys if we wanted to, but that's not what attracts people to us. It's the razor's edge in the voice or something.
So you have to learn how to warm up to sing like an idiot, basically. And that's the sound that people are attracted to with rock singers and even the gentleman you played before i mean he's totally abusing his voice that is not proper singing right right right right right and there's there's there's there's physical techniques to create that sound like there's there's uh axel rose for example like you know he sings a very particular way the way he he uses his throat in a particular way that makes it, you would say that's the Axl sound or whatever.
It's not natural, but it's awesome when he does it. It's kind of the thing.
Yeah, that has got to be really hard to maintain. I saw them play in Athens, Greece, and they did a three-hour show like two years ago.
Yeah. At like, how old is he? 60? 60-something? I think Axl's about seven years older than me.
Yeah, because I remember Welcome to the Jungle was huge when I was in high school or just out of high school. Yeah, 89.
Yeah. 88? 89? Was it? Okay, so I graduated in 85.
So it was like a couple years after high school. Welcome to the Jungle.
I was like, oh my God. This song, like, I remember watching the music video.
Remember when he had that teased up hair back then? Yeah, the big hair, yeah. He had the huge hair.
That was the poison hair era. Yeah.
Yeah, so singing like that is, it's wrong, but that's what makes it right. Right.
But you can't say what's wrong or what's right. It's just like what's sustainable.
Trust me, no one can tell you. You're surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of opinions.
I was told when I was very young, that voice you sing with will never sell records, ever. And most people that don't like my music will often cite my voice as the reason they don't like my music.
But that's why my voice is the reason that people who do like my music like my music right it's a weird it's like a like what do you do with that well you can't do it for other people no no but i'm saying i sing the way i sing and it's like it's like don't sing that way well i don't wait that's the whole idea of like you can't do it for other people you can't do it for them you can't do way they want it to. No, there's going to be people who like it the way you like it.
Yeah. You just have to find out what that thing is.
And you have to – whatever your internal compass is that guides you towards this particular style, this particular way of expressing yourself, it has to be authentic. Well, singing against a wall of guitars is a a particular skill set It's like singing against three airline Jets at the same right right right we have to we have three guitars in our band playing at the same time So my voice has to cut like a razor through that mm all of them Voices are there some voices are so fucking compelling like you listen to them like amy weinhaus perfect example you hear her sing once and you're just like whoa like what there's something about it okay so back to my argument about the unconscious thing certain voices convey an unconscious information yeah tonally it registers in the public as a certain authority or wisdom or sorrow yeah like some base some voices just have so much sorrow in them yeah like for our generation uh when kurt would sing and i saw kurt many times live it sounded like it was like the literal howl of our generation it had this great connectivity to what we were experiencing as latchkey kids.
Yes. You know? Yes.
I don't want to say tantrum-ish, but it had a certain kind of- Anger. Anger.
But it was the anger of disaffection. It wasn't the anger of a hardcore band like, you know, screw capitalism.
Right, right, right, right. It had a sorrow somehow in it.
Yeah yeah, and Authenticity like Kurt was the master of authenticity. He was changed.
He killed hair bands He really did he killed hair bands I remember when I was a kid nevermind came out and I was with a couple of friends of mine and This guy goes have you seen this and he shows me this fucking cassette with a baby on the cover I go what is it he's like this is Nirvana yeah and he plays to me Nirvana for the first time over his house I was like holy shit like this is crazy yeah it was for for our generation it was the it was the the door getting kicked open. Yes.
Everything after just got easier.

But that's the thing.

These unique artists that come along and transform the medium.

Like I said, Lenny Bruce, Pryor, then Kinison.

There's a few examples of that in music where someone comes along like Hendrix or Kurt or even Elvis.

Someone comes along and everybody's like, what the fuck is going on?

The Beatles.

What is happening?

This is crazy.

What strikes me, and this is a business point but that's where all the money is and and and yet the music business is not to nurture those talents in fact the music business works against those talents it's almost like they blow up their business model so it becomes inconvenient well what do you think the music business nurtures control they want control they want they they want the the biggest problem i've seen in the music business is they don't understand why musicians can't be as supple in in the in the business part of the equation as as a guy who makes cookies or something like this is what it costs here's your quality control the public wants more chocolate chips can't you just put more chocolate chips in there and that's and none of that is what attracts the public to great artists right it's it's it's like completely counterintuitive so they sit there and they you just end up as a name on a piece of paper or an inconvenient problem i mean i've i've said this a few times publicly but it bears repeating here is i've been in meetings where they're complaint they're complaining to me about me like how so like what do they say that basically the way the person that i am in the world is inconvenient to their business the things i'm saying the things i'm doing the music i'm making is inconvenient to the business and could I temper those things more in the direction that they want? Like what particularly were they talking about? You name it. Like give me one example.
It could be anything from, you know, you're too negative to your songs are too weird to your voice is too weird to your guitars are too loud. They just want to sell more albums.
Yes. So to them, it's an intellectual intellectual thing oh wow you'd be like joe yeah if you could just make more jokes about the economy you'd sell two stadiums not just one this is what happened with dave chapelle while he left the chapelle show same exact kind of thing you know a different version of it yeah yeah so it's this weird thing where you're sitting there and then you're like, and what I always try to tell them is, I didn't get here with that type of thinking.
And I do think, and I don't want to name names, but you can, I would say this to your great audience, you can pretty much tell who got to the dance on their own. And somewhere along the way, between and the fourth album decided that the compromise had a bigger yield and off goes the organic switch and on goes the oh you want me to be the next door neighbor right or you know uh romantic movie ballads whatever yeah aerosmith went through that for a while but to their credit and i didn't understand at the time it was it was a brilliant move because they'd gone about as far as they could go in the one thing and they're super influential and and including on alternative music and it ended up being a really smart watershed moment for them to do what they did at the time they were doing snl skits you remember adam sandler used to come out and he would do that he would do like think it was Adam Sandler, where he'd do the seven Aerosmith ballads in a row.
And it was like, I'm crying. I'm really crying.
They would just play and he'd just sing all those songs like Steven Tyler. But I think looking back, it was really smart what they did.
Well, also, maybe they're allowed to do whatever they want to do do like artists changed their whole thing like they went from mama kin to you know some of those ballads as far as i know same band and your your your uh herstute um assistant over there would probably check but i think aerosmith is the biggest selling american rock band of all time whoa so if you're aerosmith did they make a wrong turn? My argument would be no. No, it's not a wrong turn.
I mean, obviously you're allowed to change what you're interested in too. Yeah.
You know, like there's a lot of bands that sort of reinvent themselves with almost every album. Like my friend Sturgill Simpson, he sort of reinvents himself with every album.
Every album's different. Yeah.
Like he with stuff Aerosmith the best-selling American hard-rock band of all time having sold more than 150 million records worldwide including over 85 million records in the United States whoo so yeah that's pretty good yeah so that's what I'm saying is saying is only the bands can really know what the right direction to go in is.

Because at some point, you know, what seems so obvious to the audience or some guy in an office isn't necessarily what drives the band forward.

Well, then there's weird cases like David Lee Roth leaves Van Halen.

Sammy Hagar takes over.

And it becomes bigger in a totally different way. But if you talk to the average Van Halen fan, they want to hear the David Lee Roth Van Halen.
Well, especially if you grew up with that. The thing is, what you started out with is always what you want to see.
Right, but I'm saying there's no obvious argument of which is superior. You know what I'm saying? One sold more records, one is sort of held more in people's hearts because of a particular generational thing, which would be our generation.
But some people love the Sammy Hagar version better. You know, it's OK.
You're allowed to. Like Taylor Swift sells a lot of fucking tickets.
Like it doesn't – if you're not into it, there's nothing – it doesn't mean it's wrong. I mean everybody has a weird – the way they interface with the world and some things get in there and really lock on you and like wow this is amazing and you could take the same concert and another person that you like goes to it they say this sucks and you're like this is a fucking amazing how can you say this sucks well i think you're about to see that nickelback and creed are about to go on a huge run of business.
Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Nick, go back to it. How can you say this sucks? Well, I think you're about to see that Nickelback and Creed are about to go on a huge run of business.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Nickelback took a lot of shit.

That's kind of my point is they've survived it.

And now here comes the inevitable moment of like, oh, yeah, it was really good.

And they wrote a lot of great songs. They had some fucking great songs.

That rock star song.

That's a great song. But it was one of those weird things where they had become like a punchline.
And for whatever reason, everybody thought that it was okay to shit on Nickelback and comics would shit on him. It was like a thing that people would mock the success of Nickelback.
Meanwhile, they're selling out arenas every fucking night of the week. So, yeah, I think history has a way of sorting out the bodies is the way I look at it.
Yeah. That's kind of how I feel.
I mean, this is selfish for me to say this, but it's kind of how I feel about my musical life. I think time will tell my story much better than I did.
Well, you seem at peace with that. I am.
It doesn't seem to bother you at all. I made my peace with it.
I mean, it bothered me when it bothered me because it felt unfair or, yeah, it felt like I was being sort of made to pay for the sins of the people who are no longer here. Because particularly in Gen X, we've had so many great talents die.
Oh, so you felt like you weren't getting the credit you deserve because you survived? There was part of that. That's the, let's call it the simpler version.
The more complicated version is generations move with a collective energy. And by the mid-2000s, the collective energy of Generation X had mostly dissipated in the musical thing.
There were bands out playing, but a lot of the lead singers had died. So it's hard to sort of stand and carry a flag for something that people feel very sentimental about if there isn't an army around you carrying the same flag.
So you start to, people start to put on you this, like a set of cultural and generational expectations that you don't want. You become, you become the emblem of like the living version of what doesn't work.
But the other guys or girls aren't there to grow old with you and receive the same discernment or criticism. Oh, wow.
Like one time a guy tried to goad me into an argument of comparing myself to one of the top people and musical people in my generation. I don't want to say who, but you'll understand the flow on this.
And they said, can you compare, you know, who do you think's better? So it was like a real cheese setup. And I said, well, I think they were more talented.
But I said, I feel I'm in the conversation. And they said, why are you in the conversation? I said, because I'm alive.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I'm here.
Well, it's also like you can't deny that Smashing Pumpkins didn't have some fucking bangers. Like anybody who denies that.
Well, Joe, that's a whole other episode. Because the band is probably one of the most misunderstood.
I mean, we're probably one of the most misunderstood bands in the history of rock and roll. I mean, that sounds like a wrestling statement, but it's fairly accurate.
What do you think that's from? I think it has a lot to do with the issues of Gen X, and it has a lot to do with a relationship that I set into motion with the media when I was a very young person playing kind of a funny game, like doing my own version of Andy Kaufman or Bob Zamuda. You understand? Because I thought it was all shitty.
So I was just like, I'm just going to play with this like a toy because I think it's kind of funny. I didn't realize that the coming culture was going to kind of almost be attracted to people who are willing to immolate themselves on the public stage.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Most people who are attracted to fame, they want to run towards the shiny part of it.

Right.

I was attracted to the non-shiny part, which is, okay, I'll light myself on fire and let's see what happens.

Or I'll light you on fire and let's see what happens.

So it kind of worked in the 90s when everybody was rolling and moving along. Well, here comes Napster, the music business Craters.
Then a bunch of people die. And there you are standing, you know, now at 40 years old, you're supposed to carry some flag for a generation that doesn't even know who it is anymore.
How do you navigate that? Like, did that trouble you at the time? was it difficult to work as an artist yeah it's very difficult the simple version is and i had some of the top top people in the music business sit me down one-on-one in a room and say just give them what they want jesus your life will be a lot better you'll make a lot more money and you could put your head on your pillow at night and not have to think about all these things. And my response every time was that I don't give a fuck.
And I used to quote Popeye, I am what I am. I'm here.
I'm here because I'm a freak. Okay.
And I ain't changing for anything. Good for you.
And part of that goes back to my daddy.

Okay?

I watched a man literally broken by the business.

So I'm the last person that's going to fucking bow down for that shit.

Fuck off.

Well, the beautiful thing is, too, you always had an audience.

So you didn't have to.

Well, there is that.

But at the end of the day, how can I explain it?

Everybody in the music business will tell you your value is is exponentially related to your success so your biggest song is here and your next biggest song is here and there's like a pyramid and as you go down you lose value your aging becomes part of that loss of value how do you maintain value relevancy um you no longer have the record business that used to exist you no no longer have the structure. I mean, the music business is basically a touring business first now.
And everything else is in support of the touring business. We're lucky in that we continue to be a very large touring band.
So you're told over and over again, almost in a propagandistic way, that your value is related to what's on a piece of paper. And then somehow I woke up in the middle of it and I thought, no, no, that's actually not my value.
And so the minute I started saying, no, I know what my real value is. It's that I'm an independent artist who, like a voice in the wilderness, represents something.
And I know it's not for everybody. Trust me, I've been getting that message since I was a little kid, including from my own family.
But I know what I represent represents something that's valuable. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I see the consistency of the kind of let's call it the communication between myself and somebody who's interested in what I do.
And once I started doubling and tripling down the value, my business started going back up. Wow.
The way I would say it in a crass way is I reasserted my brand, not the brand I was being handed in 40 plus brand. You know, you're an oldies band.
You're an oldies artist. You play these songs.
Well, you just kept and reinforced your true voice. Yeah.
But I had to live it. Which brought you to the dance in the first place.
It seems silly, but that's what I had to figure out. I had to figure that out on my own because there was nobody telling me that.
I mean, you gotta understand, and you're a man of the world, so you know what I'm saying. When you're in a room with somebody who runs the fucking world, in my case, runs the music business.
The guy who can get shit done, the guy who can get you canceled, the guy who can fucking make stuff happen. And that guy tells you, here's your value.
It's awfully hard to go back to Chicago, Illinois, and convince yourself that he's wrong. Right.
Right. There's nobody.
And who do you talk to about it? Especially if fame is fleeting. It comes and goes.
Album sales come and go. And there's a new big thing right now.
There's the new thing. Oh, yeah.
And you're not the new thing anymore. There's always the new thing.
Yeah. And then someone's coming along.
Listen, you've got to listen to us. We know how you can be back on top.
I don't read comments, but I have a social media person who occasionally relays what she sees. Oh, boy.
Well, we kind of keep it on the positive. But my favorite comment of the last few years was she started poking around with young fans, 16, 18-year-olds, who were suddenly seeming to come out of the woodwork and liking the band and me.

Almost like a cuddly bear or something.

They suddenly were attracted to me in a way that the 16 and 18-year-olds of the previous generation weren't.

So I asked her, I said, why don't you poke around with these people and ask them what's interesting?

And my favorite comment, and it became kind of common amongst the feedback that she got,

was I like him because other people told me not to like him but what but what that says to me anybody can interpret the way they want but what it said to me is we need people in in the zeitgeist of the culture who don't represent the collective yes there's always room for somebody on the corner saying no. Right.
And that goes back to Lenny Bruce. As crazy as all that was, you still need that guy going, no, no, no, no, no.
You know what I'm saying? And you can call them whatever, disruptors or whatever. Well, authentic voices.
That sounds nicer than disruptor. I like disruptor because that's what I do.
Well, it does disrupt, but it disrupts because it's an authentic voice, because it bucks the idea of creating some manufactured thing for the market. I've told many people in the music business, I know that you don't want me in this business, but I'm here.
And I've made a lot of money, and I've made a lot of people a lot of money. Like, what's the problem? Also, you made great songs.
But most people are in the business for the music. But the idea that somebody wouldn't want you in the business when you've been very successful in the business is just insane.
It doesn't even make any sense. It doesn't make sense to me.
Well, that's the weird thing that you guys have to deal with. You deal with like this whole layer of non-artistic people that have influence over art.
Having heard you many times do commentary for UFC, what I love about you as a commentator is you take me into the passion of the moment, the feeling of like two warriors are going to enter this thing and only one can emerge. There's a feeling there that's like, and I've been to some of the events, it's like it has that like, it's sort of a life affirming like here we are, you know, and you know because you're behind the scenes, the training that went in, the injuries the guy had overcome or the girl or whatever, or the crazy girlfriend and they got, you know, the training camp and all of it.
and there it is the clash it's it's no different for the musician it's like you know i sit in a room for a year and make songs with only three four people hearing them right i have to believe that i'm going to walk into that my version of that octagon and what i'm going to offer is not going to get me killed what is it like when you release an album what is What is that feeling like? I just want to curl up in a ball and just die. Because here it comes.
Here it comes. And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.
But I've had more negative experiences than positive ones. But positive from the fans.
Is it non-fans that are the problem? It's like the people on the outside peering in. 20 years ago ago i would have given you a different answer now it's nobody's the problem i it's ultimately the game is you versus yourself i don't know if there's any commonality in the fighting world but or the comedic world yes it's you versus yourself it's not the audience's fault it's not the guy at the radio station or the girl at the at the at the arena it arena it's not nothing to do with them because the one thing you do know is if you find that value that that makes a wheel turn that prints cash they don't care who you are they'll push you right back under the spotlight so once you can figure that game out that's the game the game is you versus you it's not you versus them in fact that's the that's the suckers game so it's you just trying to create the best

version of what you have inside your head let's do a simple math and anybody wants to take a

have a problem with it i don't care okay uh my band in in in in over 30 years has been in the top

Thank you. wants to take a have a problem with it i don't care okay uh my band in in in in over 30 years has been in the top 0.1 percentile of touring artists in the world period you would think that if you were in that business and you were at that that elite level you would think the whole business would rally around you and try to get you to do more and make more.
Not even close to that. There is no system by which you get that kind of support.
You are completely on your own. But is that universal with successful artists? I think so.
I hear different stories about the top pop artists, but I think that's because they're making so much money. It's like they're like a multinational corporation.
Most bands, their experiences are similar to ours. You're kind of on your own.
You have your team of people, and then you walk into the arena with what you got, what you think is going to work. But I hear about the modern pop stars.
I mean, I hear stuff that sounds like they're running a Fortune 500 company because they're there. They are literally printing cash.
Also, the percentage that the actual artists get versus what they should be getting. It hurts.
It's crazy. It hurts.
It's crazy because they do everything. They create the music.
They perform the music. And yet they're not making the money.
People are coming to see them perform the music. Yet they're not making the money people are coming to see them perform the music yet they're not making the money there's some bizarre vampires that have attached themselves to the veins that's changing i think in the next 20 years you're going to see a very music a very different music business in what way peer-to-peer ability to create commerce.
Right.

And then also the fact that you could release things.

So like Oliver Anthony, he put out that Richman North of Richmond and then it's fucking gigantic.

100 million views on YouTube. It's like, it's crazy.

But like 20 years ago, your success and who you work with would have been unthinkable.

Right.

Right.

And you're an independent voice. You've built it.
I mean, it's yours, right? So that's what I'm saying. That's coming for music.
This is coming for music. Well, that's good.
Yes, I think ultimately will benefit the fans of the artists and they'll get more of what they want and less of what they don't want. Hear, hear.
All right. Let's wrap it up.

Thank you, sir.

Appreciate you very much.

Always fun to talk to you.

Thank you, Jim.

Tell everybody what your podcast call,

where they can get it.

The Magnificent Others.

You can get it on YouTube or Instagram.

Thank you, sir.

Appreciate you.

Thanks so much.

All right.