#2283 - Billy Corgan

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

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

Speaker 2 What's happening, man? Good to see you.

Speaker 1 Thank you for having me back.

Speaker 2 My pleasure. Um, how many times a day do you get bombarded by the whole Bill Burr thing?

Speaker 1 When it gets into the family and people I haven't talked to for 20 years,

Speaker 2 then you have to break character and tell the truth.

Speaker 1 No, you know, the thing is,

Speaker 1 this is what's crazy. Okay.

Speaker 1 You want the whole setup story or

Speaker 1 so where I take my podcast is in one of Howie Mandel's buildings, and he has another building in this area.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I was working on something and I was supposed to go on Howie's show that day. And they said, Howie, you'll meet you out in the street or something for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I go,

Speaker 1 you too? Like, do you know this story? And he said, no, I don't know about it. And I said, you know what?

Speaker 1 Heck with it. I'm just going to tell it on your show.
So don't ask me anymore.

Speaker 1 And I want to 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 First thing I saw was like, oh my God, he looks just like daddy.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So suddenly these facts come together and my mother telling me these stories. I talked to my dad subsequently about it and he was very cagey about it.

Speaker 1 And when I said, why won't you tell me where this person is or who this person is, he said,

Speaker 1 I'm trying to protect you.

Speaker 1 So when my stepmother had told me, it kind of made sense, like, well, if my half-brother is the super famous comedian,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And 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 know.
2018.

Speaker 1 2018, somebody said to me today.

Speaker 1 So anyway, sorry to talk over you. But the point is, is, so here I am fast forward.
I'm just sick of seeing memes of my face with Bill's. And so I just decide on a spur of the moment, you know.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I don't think there's anything there other than an uncanny resemblance.

Speaker 1 Fast forward, the the thing comes out, it gets a little bit of social media, and then it goes away. And I think, good.
And Bill didn't say anything, so I figured Bill was kind of like, whatever.

Speaker 1 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 LA working recently, and Howie's like, Will you come on the show?

Speaker 1 Bill's going to be on.

Speaker 1 And I said, Is Bill cool with it? Oh, yeah, no problem.

Speaker 1 So then I go there, and it's like, it turns into this thing that you see happening on camera. It's like, it's weirdness times.
It's like

Speaker 1 a skit, but it's real.

Speaker 1 And Bill's on me, then Bill's on Howie, and it gets just, okay. So I just told you basically everything I know.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I have people I've known for 20, 30 years coming up to me and going, what do you think? And I said,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And I'm like, no, I don't. There's nothing to get a DNA test for.
Well, I think he's your brother.

Speaker 1 So people that know me, and I'm telling them 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.

Speaker 2 Do you think it's just because they want a DNA test because it's fun if he's your brother?

Speaker 1 No, no. They're convinced.

Speaker 2 For real, for real.

Speaker 1 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're like, no, you need a DNA test.

Speaker 2 Did Bill's dad know, well, did your dad know Bill's mom?

Speaker 1 No, my father wouldn't talk to me about it at all.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 this guy don't know, right? I mean, just imagine if I tell you, hey, do you know Joe Polonsky? Right. And you look up and it's a famous comedian.
That's, you know, I mean, that's right, right, right.

Speaker 1 So in that same thing with my stepmother, she told me that she thought my father had sired 12 children. Whoa.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 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'd slept with a thousand women. So 12 out of 1,000.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Normal odds. Yeah, the math is actually pretty good.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so when I went to my father and I told him what my stepmother had said, he got really cagey and wouldn't tell me anything.

Speaker 1 He promised me that he would write down the names of the illegitimate children on a piece of paper so I could find them after he died. Oh my god.
And he died. He's died, and there's no paper.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 So now I got people wanting DNA tests because they're convinced that Bill is my half-brother.

Speaker 2 Is Bill willing to do a DNA test?

Speaker 1 I think that's ridiculous. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 It's like, no, you have to do it. No, no,

Speaker 1 that's what I'm saying. I mean, first of all, to Bill's credit, he's been...

Speaker 1 Everything you saw on camera was his, I think, his general irritation on the thing, but he also kind of finds it funny because he's a comedian.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You like pro wrestling. I thought you guys just decided to fuck troll the world.

Speaker 1 Let me put it to you this way. Have you ever seen it, and I well, I'm assuming, but you tell me if I'm wrong.
Two guys get in a ring to roll around a bit, right? Okay. They're bros.

Speaker 1 They're going to roll around a bit.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We're like, we're suddenly in the middle of a situation. It's like a meta situation.
Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then Billy Bush is in there and it just, it took on a life of its own. So what I'm saying is, is there's enough there that people are all over me to come up with more answers.

Speaker 1 But you see what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I don't think Bill's my half-brother, but

Speaker 1 he looks.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It can't be that much money. It's 2025.

Speaker 1 We'll get it sponsored.

Speaker 2 Yes, maybe 23andMe, but didn't they get sell out to somebody? Somebody buy them?

Speaker 1 200 bucks? 200 bucks? There you go.

Speaker 2 I'll pay 200 bucks to find out. Why wouldn't you want to know?

Speaker 2 If I thought somebody was my half-brother, I'd be like,

Speaker 2 I don't think it's necessary. If I found out Sebastian Manasalco was my half-brother, I'd be like,

Speaker 2 I could kind of see that.

Speaker 1 Maybe.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I don't know how to, you would know if somebody looked like your children.

Speaker 1 So that's where it's freaky for me. Yeah.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, if you want to play the game one step further, you've got two world-class communicators.

Speaker 1 People might argue against me calling myself world-class communicator, but I've been doing it for over 30 years.

Speaker 2 You're world-class communicator.

Speaker 1 God bless. So

Speaker 1 it's not too crazy that you'd have one guy go this way and one guy, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Not at all.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 especially when you consider how many different ways you've gone. Like not just smashing pumpkins, but pro wrestling.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like and now and now I'm enter your game, which is podcasting.

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Speaker 2 And you easily could have been a comedian as well.

Speaker 1 I don't think I'm that funny, but you're funny.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of people that are professional comedians that aren't as funny as me. Okay.

Speaker 1 I assume you know Carrot Top. Sure, very well.
Okay, so Carrot Top and I become friends recently. He's great.
Love him. This is a total sweetheart.
Sweetheart of a guy. And really mouse.
Genuine.

Speaker 1 Just a great guy to know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But as you know, because you do this for a living, suddenly everybody wants to start pitching you bits.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And then I texted him like an hour later and I said, hey, did you get that bit I sent? He goes, yeah, that's why I didn't respond.

Speaker 2 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 world for my size.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like somebody telling me how to write a song. I I get that.
Right.

Speaker 2 It's one thing for another, like comics give each, we give each other tags. Like if someone says something, I said, you know what else you can add to that? Add this.

Speaker 1 Oh, I see.

Speaker 2 A buddy of mine was doing this bit on the guy who tried to shoot Trump, and we were bantering back and forth, and we came up with like the perfect line.

Speaker 1 Like, oh,

Speaker 2 but it was already his premise and his bit. Comics add to stuff for each other for fun.

Speaker 2 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. And we'll do that.

Speaker 2 But no one ever says, hey, you should go on stage to talk about this.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So that's, so

Speaker 1 I've had a couple professional comedians, carrot top,

Speaker 1 preeminent among them, kind of let me know you're not that funny.

Speaker 2 It's probably not that you're not that funny. It's, first of all, you send a text.
Premises and texts are terrible.

Speaker 1 Oh, right. Okay.
You really have to be. It's tone, tone is funny.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's everything. And you really have to be there with the person, and you really have to say it the way you thought it, and then they get it because then

Speaker 2 Texas just unless it's just genius, unless it's just like rock-solid structure, like oh my god, this joke can't fail.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 know, nice that he likes, okay. He likes my movie idea, yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm telling you, a lot of it is that comics don't like people coming to them with a premise, they don't, they, they, they only want,

Speaker 2 and they only want want help from other comics generally.

Speaker 1 Okay, I get that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's just one of those things. And even then, it's touchy.
Like, I would never help somebody I don't know. I would never go up to them, hey, you should say this.

Speaker 2 Like, never, never, never, never, never. It's got to be like your friend.
They know you love them.

Speaker 2 You're fucking around. Yeah.
You talk. You can say, did you ever try to say that? You know, you know what, you left out.
Like, you forgot.

Speaker 1 And they're like, oh, I forgot about that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's a big part of the bit.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I never tried stand-ups, so that's you could do it.
It seems terrifying to me, but so singing on stage.

Speaker 1 you could do it it's a lot easier to scream with you know 50 000 watts behind your voice you know than tell a joke and

Speaker 2 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 if some that that part doesn't bother me strangely well that's why you're good at it right I feel like I kind of know what I'm doing up there for some reason.

Speaker 2 Well, also, 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 then eventually you sell more and more records.

Speaker 2 Like Smashing Pumpkins is like they burst on the scene and sort of keep get you guys kept getting more and more popular, so you kind of got accustomed to it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you do normalize to the insanity of standing in front of 10,000 people. Same as comedy.

Speaker 2 You normalize.

Speaker 1 What's the biggest

Speaker 1 show you've ever done? Comedy.

Speaker 2 25,000. That's a lot of people.
Yeah, me and Chappelle, we sold out the Tacoma Dome.

Speaker 2 And we were standing backstage. I'll never forget it.
He looked at me right before he goes on stage. He goes, not a lot of motherfuckers get to do this.

Speaker 2 We were just laughing how much fun we were having. 25,000 people.
It was crazy. In the round, too.
In the round. It was very fun, though.
It was very fun.

Speaker 1 I actually know Dave from way back in the day. He's the best.
When he 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.

Speaker 2 Like, what year is this? Like,

Speaker 1 remember he did 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.

Speaker 1 I'd see him in New York, and he was hanging out with some other. Maybe it was because he was hanging out with SNL people.

Speaker 1 And I'd see him out in New York back, guys, with like late 90s,

Speaker 1 early 2000s. And so I knew him when, I don't want to say he was a nobody, but I like

Speaker 1 it. He wasn't a known.

Speaker 1 I'd seen him on TV, but he wasn't like a household name like he is now. Right, right.

Speaker 1 So there was this one night where I was out. I did a benefit for Roger Waters

Speaker 1 and military events. 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

Speaker 1 Roger. And so afterwards, somebody came and said, oh, Chappelle's in this hotel, you know? And I hadn't seen him for a few years.
And I said, oh, I know him.

Speaker 1 And you can see people think like, you don't know him. You know what I mean? So when he came by, it's like, oh, you know, it was like that moment.
Like, see, motherfuckers, I do know him.

Speaker 1 So what a great guy, though. Such a.

Speaker 2 He's a genuine person.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He's another sweetheart.
Just a sweet, sweet guy. Easy to hang out with.
Very fun. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 guys with that kind of mind,

Speaker 1 it blows my mind because they just.

Speaker 1 I mean, you could, I just, I don't know. I could sit listen to him for hours.

Speaker 2 He's also, he's kind of a legend for what he did. You know,

Speaker 2 left Comedy Central in the height of Chappelle show, passed up on a $50 million deal, went to Africa, hung out there, and then came back and didn't do stand-up for 10 years.

Speaker 1 Didn't do that.

Speaker 1 I didn't know that he didn't do stand-up for 10 years, probably.

Speaker 2 He would do stand-up occasionally for free. Okay.
So, what he would do is he'd bring a speaker to the park and set up a mic in the park in Seattle and just start doing stand-up.

Speaker 2 And everybody, holy shit, was he making any money or was he

Speaker 2 just living off of his Chappelle 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

Speaker 1 know, it became a big conspiracy thing.

Speaker 2 Yes, it became a conspiracy thing.

Speaker 1 While he was saying no to the Illuminati, right, right, right, right.

Speaker 2 Those are always funny. That's some Alex stuff, right?

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like, what?

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 it was nice folks, shouldn't have been running comedy. They shouldn't have been telling comedians what to do.
And they wanted to

Speaker 1 keep telling comedians what to do.

Speaker 2 It was was a situation where a bunch of non-creatives had gotten involved in the process i'm sure you're familiar that happens this is so so dear to my heart it's disgusting it's the worst the worst aspect of show business you you start dealing with money people and then they start doing something that they're not supposed to be doing which was 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.

Speaker 1 And still popular.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And by 15 minutes in his set, everybody had told everybody that Dave Chappelle's there. So then the place is packed.

Speaker 2 And he did this for like 10 years.

Speaker 1 I didn't know that part.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he just fucked around. You'd hear about him just showing up places and fucking around.

Speaker 1 I love that.

Speaker 2 And then somewhere, I think it was like 2013, 14, starts doing stand-up again. Yeah.
And then, boom.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's that's really how it all went down.

Speaker 1 It's it's really a testament to his power, the power of his talent because my wife, who's 32, she loves him. And it's so cool because, like, we went to see him, I think, at Radio City Music Hall.

Speaker 1 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 so

Speaker 1 right to the heart. It's really a rare gift.
I mean, he, you know, you got a picture out there, Richard Pryor, who was, you know, from Illinois like myself. And my father loved Richard Pryor.

Speaker 1 And so because of my father's love of Richard Pryor, I paid a lot of attention to Richard when I was a kid. And he strikes me, he's got that transcendent ability to somehow almost heal the country

Speaker 1 with his messaging. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Murphy had that too in his own way, but to me, Chappelle's more in the prior mode of like somehow he can address issues that are uncomfortable. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Very much like prior. Whereas Eddie Murphy was just really, really funny.
You know, just really, really funny. And still to this day, I always, to this day, I'm like, why doesn't that guy come back?

Speaker 2 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 he was caught up in the scandal.

Speaker 2 And so he's doing a Cosby impression and it's fucking genius. It's dead on.
He's doing like brilliant stand-up and he hasn't touched stand-up in 25, 30 years.

Speaker 1 I mean, you would think he would just do one victory lap tour.

Speaker 2 If he wanted to, it would be sold out.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. And I get...
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I guarantee you that guy would be the best.

Speaker 2 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 stuff.

Speaker 1 Has anyone ever tried to pull you in the movie orbit? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Action hero or? Yeah, I'm not interested. I'm not interested.

Speaker 1 They only offer me parts like a serial killer. So I always turn it down.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Sitting on that set all day seems like it's a lot of work.

Speaker 2 It's hard.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It would require everything I have.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's just not.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Did you watch the Oscars?

Speaker 2 I did not. Me neither.
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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They're all just selling advertising, and everybody's wearing a tux.

Speaker 1 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 end maybe the intent of the process right which the integrity of the process and the intent are both compromised, right?

Speaker 2 Because there's people that

Speaker 2 like you could kind of guess just by the subject of some movies whether or not they're going to win an award. Because you know, people feel obligated to address this very important message.

Speaker 1 The guy who won Best Picture, I was actually in talks with about five years ago because he had made some really cool movies.

Speaker 1 He made one on cell phones called, I think it was called Tangerine, about prostitutes working the streets in L.A. And he got two street workers, I believe, and then he cast them.
So it was a movie.

Speaker 1 It wasn't a documentary. It was a really beautiful movie.
And then he did that movie called The Florida Project,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 tourism, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Like what kind of scams?

Speaker 1 I can't remember because it's been a few years since the movie. But it's just the idea that anywhere there's a tourist economy, there's money to be made.
Right.

Speaker 1 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 kind of about that.
Right, right, right.

Speaker 1 About a cast of characters living in the shadow of this idealistic place.

Speaker 2 Right, just like those Hollywood tour people that you would get in L.A.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Those were the weirdest fucking people.

Speaker 1 Well, I always get offended when I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and they think I want to go on it. You know, it's like, I don't know what it is.
I feel like, I don't want to go on your tour.

Speaker 2 You look like a guy. Totally.

Speaker 2 Get on the tour.

Speaker 2 Just got off the boat. Yeah.
Just came here from Nebraska.

Speaker 1 Totally, yeah. Like, gee, I wonder where the stars live.
you know.

Speaker 2 That's such a creepy thing to do. Just drive around and point.
That's where Ben Affleck sleeps.

Speaker 1 But they've been doing it since the 30s.

Speaker 2 Yeah, forever. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I have some of the old brochures, you know, see where Greta Garba lives and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 It's just always been weird. Well, back then it was even weirder because those were the first stars.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's that one famous scandal where one of the top male stars, maybe it was Gary Cooper, Carrie Grant, ran somebody over in a car. Really? You know about that? No.

Speaker 1 You might want to look that one up.

Speaker 2 I know the fatty.

Speaker 1 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 wrap

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So some guy did seven years or something.

Speaker 2 That's crazy. You know, there's a similar story about that in China with the bodies exhibit.
You know, the... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 There was a woman who was married to a mayor of one of the cities in China. And this woman who was married to this mayor, the mayor was having an affair with a TV newscaster.
And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's only like a photo of her on the internet. Wow.
And then all of a sudden, in the bodyworks exhibit, there's an eight-month pregnant woman

Speaker 2 who they believe is this newscaster. Here's the other part.
The woman who's the mayor's wife is also the manager of the local plastination factory where they take the bodies and they emerge them.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So she poisons this guy and she has to go to trial. Well, she doesn't go go to trial.

Speaker 2 Some other woman goes to trial who doesn't look anything like her, raised her right hand, the whole thing, goes to jail. So she probably paid some family off, some poor family.

Speaker 2 I'll give you a million dollars. Give up your daughter.
She goes to jail. Everybody who's rich, it's not a bad jail.
She's going to do yoga, play checkers.

Speaker 1 Have you heard the ones where like because there's so much plastic surgery in Asia where guys are suing their wives because they marry some woman that they kiss hot, and then the kid comes out and the kid's not really good at it.

Speaker 2 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 strange way.

Speaker 1 Somebody told me as much as 75% of the women in South Korea have surgery. Is it real? Somebody who's Korean told me that.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's. I'll tell you that, Jamie.
We need to find this out. This is important information.

Speaker 1 Because last time I was in Korea, I was like, wow, these women here are really hot. Like this, it was like woman after woman after woman.

Speaker 1 And somebody pulled me aside, saying, bro, that's just all plastic surgery. That's not real.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 One-third as many 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

Speaker 1 i like i like this whole new business of um like plastic surgery tourism where it's like cheaper to get on a plane and go like go to turkey and get yeah somebody was recently trying to talk me to go to south korea to get some work done on my face

Speaker 1 it's like so like what

Speaker 1 i guess the idea would be you could go recover over there your neighbors don't have to see you with bandages over your head no i think think it's the idea it's cheaper it's cheaper yeah cheaper cheaper and better because they can do stuff there that we can't do here yet oh really what can they do there that will if

Speaker 1 apparently they have some new thing that's unbelievable

Speaker 2 what is it

Speaker 1 something it's

Speaker 1 they tried to explain it to me it doesn't make any sense some kind of new facelift that's not a facelift or something a facelift a non like a non-invasive facelift oh the guy it's a relative of mine through marriage a chinese relative and uh he's in that business and knows the Koreans over there in LA and all this.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he was saying in five years, this will be the number one thing. So you might as well get to Korea now.

Speaker 1 This is the stuff I hear when I'm sitting around the hot pot dinner, you know?

Speaker 2 Non-invasive face level. Isn't that weird that one of our biggest fears is that your face sags?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 At some level.

Speaker 1 I know it's not necessarily It kind of helps you.

Speaker 2 Being ugly.

Speaker 1 I never thought of you as ugly. I'm not attracted to men per se.
But

Speaker 1 I never thought you were unattractive.

Speaker 2 I'm definitely less attractive than I used to be. That's just time and

Speaker 1 booze and

Speaker 1 success creates a glow around a man.

Speaker 2 It has a little bit of a glow, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it can. A little bit of a

Speaker 1 little swagger.

Speaker 2 Well, just age beats us all. You don't win.
Nobody wins. Everybody looks worse at 80 than they do at 20.
Yeah. It's just how it goes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'm 57, so you kind of look.
I'm 57 too. Oh, are you? Yeah.
When's your birthday? August. Okay, I'm older than you.
I'm March. But you know, you look down that road and you're like, like,

Speaker 1 like, am I going to be all right when I get to 80? You know?

Speaker 2 Very few people are. You know, there's a few people at 80.

Speaker 1 You're calling UFC like 972.

Speaker 1 I don't know what the number would be.

Speaker 2 I'm worried about Bruce Buffer because Bruce Buffer, he puts out so much energy.

Speaker 2 I was telling the guys the other day, one day he's just going to be in the middle screaming someone's name and he's just going to fucking check out. Like right in the middle.

Speaker 1 It's time.

Speaker 1 Boom.

Speaker 2 His eyes will roll back.

Speaker 1 But that's for any performer, that's the way you go out. You go out on your shield, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 The Buffers, right? Both of them.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Isn't it crazy that they didn't know each other until they were like 30? I only have even

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I only have one Michael Buffer story if you want to hear it. Sure.

Speaker 1 So I went to see

Speaker 1 Holy Feel Lennox Lewis at Madison Square Gardens. 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And, you know,

Speaker 1 I don't know anything about fights, but it was a pretty boring fight. And

Speaker 1 Lewis seemed to be a little bit more agile because of youth and all that. Anyway, so right when I,

Speaker 1 you know they're they're in 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.

Speaker 1 And a guy leans forward, the ref,

Speaker 1 to tell someone in the second row, might have been Don King. And I heard him go, it's a draw,

Speaker 1 right? So I knew it was a draw like 60 seconds before they announced it.

Speaker 1 And I was with a lot of

Speaker 1 well-known people and I said, run.

Speaker 1 And they're like, what do you mean? I said, we got to run.

Speaker 1 Like, 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,

Speaker 1 and people start like, here comes the riot vibe. Really? So, somehow we ended up because it got.

Speaker 2 Was it because the decision was bad?

Speaker 1 Well, the English people didn't like that. It was a draw.
Oh.

Speaker 1 Because Holyfield was on the older side.

Speaker 1 Right. I don't know.
It's not a well-renowned fight.

Speaker 2 I can't remember it.

Speaker 1 It was just a draw. It was a stone-cold, boring fight, but because it was a draw and all these English people were mad, and Don King was involved.

Speaker 1 So it was like all that typical brouhaha that was going on in boxing at the time.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so because of suddenly the riotous or potentially riotist situation, the police started like making people go different ways, like funneling traffic or something.

Speaker 1 You know, it was almost like they got like code red or something because suddenly it got really weird. So then we couldn't get out of the building.

Speaker 1 So somebody was like, somebody recognized somebody in our party and said, follow me. And so then next thing we know, you know, we get, we're in like in the VIP backstage part where it's safe.

Speaker 1 And there's, and there's, you know, Michael Buffer on a chair. And he wasn't talking to me, but he's talking to somebody.
And I heard him was going, that's bullshit. Like in that voice.

Speaker 1 That's all I remember. That's bullshit.

Speaker 2 So was he talking about the decision?

Speaker 1 He thought the decision was bullshit, you know?

Speaker 2 Letterman's card was heavy for Lewis. Wow, 117, 111, Harold Letterman, who's always dead on the money.
Harold Letterman was always right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so they were saying, as it got called, they're like, this is a travesty. Yeah, I mean, again,

Speaker 1 I'm not a fight aficionado, but I thought Lewis

Speaker 1 was slightly better.

Speaker 2 Wow, I forgot about this fight.

Speaker 2 I completely forgot about this fight.

Speaker 1 There's so many fights from this era that were incredible.

Speaker 2 That was an amazing era for heavyweights.

Speaker 1 And this is when Don King was still running everything.

Speaker 2 Did they ever rematch?

Speaker 1 I honestly don't remember. You don't think so? No, I think so.
I want to type it in and it said two. Let me see.

Speaker 1 That's bullshit. There's a lot.

Speaker 2 With that great voice.

Speaker 2 He's still trucking. He's still trucking.
He still announces huge voice.

Speaker 1 I wonder what he's doing.

Speaker 1 Do you ever get that?

Speaker 1 Like, somebody wants you to do their bar mitzvah or anything. You ever get those requests?

Speaker 2 No, those are the requests. I get those requests.

Speaker 1 Will you come do my bar mitzvah?

Speaker 2 Who won this one?

Speaker 1 Is that the rematch? Had to be Lewis, right?

Speaker 2 I would imagine.

Speaker 1 Oh, similar Letterman card.

Speaker 2 Similar card. Let's see if they robbed him twice.
They gave it to him. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, they got their rematch.

Speaker 1 No, you get this thing like, hey, will you come do my

Speaker 1 I wonder what Michael Buffer gets to show up somewhere.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Yeah, it's probably like Saudi Arabia. They have him come over there and introduce someone's birthday.

Speaker 1 Is it

Speaker 1 half a million, I think? Probably more.

Speaker 2 Depends. You know, I mean, like.

Speaker 1 You know, in my business, we could become privates.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they put on a show like it was a fucking sold-out arena. I mean, full blast.

Speaker 2 They didn't go through the motions at all. It was a phenomenal show.

Speaker 1 That means Dana paid them. Yeah.
Yeah. It was a lot of money.
I mean, totally.

Speaker 2 I love those guys. But they were so professional.

Speaker 2 It was so impressive. And because they were so powerful on stage, everybody just started paying attention because it kind of broke out in the middle of this party.

Speaker 2 We're at this birthday party, we're all standing around tables, eating food.

Speaker 1 I've done a few things that 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a lot of entitlement that's attached to someone's paying you to come performance.

Speaker 1 Well, and then you see the guy's wife going, who's this?

Speaker 2 Right. There's that to the people that aren't fans.
You're like, oh, no.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, those are weird gigs because then you go, how much?

Speaker 2 I could have one shitty night for a million dollars.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'd like to tell you, I haven't been there, but I've been there.

Speaker 2 Ron White did one last year in Vegas, and he was talking about it. He's like, I didn't want to do it.
I kept saying no, and they kept going higher and higher.

Speaker 2 And eventually got to a point where I 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.

Speaker 2 He goes, All the time I'm doing it, I'm thinking, I shouldn't have fucking done this.

Speaker 2 He said, They didn't laugh, they barely paid attention. It's like, why am I here?

Speaker 2 But if, like, you're a giant fan, like, say, if you're a giant Ron White fan and you hire Ron White, but your office doesn't give a shit about comedy and they just want to have fun and drink and eat hot dogs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I went to a billionaire thing once with a guy who had hired Diana Ross. Whoa.
It had at least be a million-dollar gig for her.

Speaker 1 And maybe 700-800 people. Wow.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 1 And you're like, wow. I mean, basically a private concert with Diana Ross.
I mean, that's pretty dope.

Speaker 2 If you were really into it and people paid attention, it'd probably be fun. Small, intimate concerts.

Speaker 1 I've got them where they're fun. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 What percentage?

Speaker 1 Less than 50.

Speaker 1 We don't get 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 bingos card for a private event. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think my rep precedes me, you know.

Speaker 2 It's like a Beyoncé thing.

Speaker 1 Although, I mean, she does.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard some of the numbers that some of those pop people get coming out of Saudi Arabia? Yeah. 14 mil and

Speaker 1 nobody calling us for the fact. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I take that phone call.

Speaker 2 Well, that's one of those things. If, like, who was that the richest man in India, his son had a birthday, and it was like the most extravagant birthday?

Speaker 1 I think he spent 50, 50 mil on entertainment alone. Something crazy like that.

Speaker 2 God, it's so crazy. That's so much money.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I wish 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.

Speaker 2 I think it was a wedding, not a birthday party, right?

Speaker 2 It was a wedding.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you got like a wedding. And Lennox Lewis was there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Lennox Lewis was the announcer. Yeah, it's just

Speaker 2 that's the weird world of

Speaker 2 extravagant amounts of money, like unbelievable amounts of money, where you want to hire Kanye to come to your house.

Speaker 2 They reported spent over $100 million for Anant's sister Isha's wedding in 2018. The ceremony featured a performance by Beyoncé.

Speaker 1 If I'm Beyonce's manager, she's not going over there for less than 2025. Yeah,

Speaker 1 why not?

Speaker 2 They have so much money.

Speaker 2 They won't even notice it. They'll make it back tomorrow in the stock market.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I'm saying that.

Speaker 2 Once you get to that goofy, that was $100 and how many million? $190?

Speaker 1 Well, that was worth it. How much did that go?

Speaker 2 No, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 Billion.

Speaker 1 How much is he worth? $116 billion.

Speaker 2 $116. Yeah.
You're making $20 million every day, probably. It's like rolling in constantly.

Speaker 1 I mean, you've met. 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

Speaker 1 how they spend or don't spend their money.

Speaker 1 There's no consistent guide for billionaires. No.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 2 Get a million-dollar watch.

Speaker 1 I'd like to have a billion dollars to make that decision.

Speaker 1 Right. I'm not there yet.

Speaker 2 Well, the weirdest one is billionaires that compare themselves to super billionaires, and they feel poor.

Speaker 2 Like Brian Callan 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.

Speaker 2 So he feels poor compared to his $80 billion friend.

Speaker 1 Boy. I'd like to be poor like that.

Speaker 2 The forest for the trees.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Not this lifetime, I don't think.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 yeah um uh jimmy chamberlain of the pumpkins the drummer uh is friends with jimmy john the sub the sub-keeper oh 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 on like some kind of money thing And I just saw his face change because everybody in the world wants to pitch.

Speaker 1 We're back to pitching ideas, right?

Speaker 2 Of course.

Speaker 1 And Jimmy John knows this mutual friend, so it's not as rude as it might sound coming out of my mouth. But at some point, he looks at me and he goes, Tommy, you know how I got that money?

Speaker 1 I made a lot of fucking sandwiches.

Speaker 1 That was the way you shut him down.

Speaker 1 Like, like,

Speaker 1 I know what I had to go through to make that money. Like, you just, you just see me as a walking ATM.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, it just changes the dynamic of the friendship now, too. Now he's not going to be able to trust your friend.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 nobody trusts Tommy then.

Speaker 2 Tommy's a mess?

Speaker 1 Tommy's infamous, actually. Infamous.
Yes, everybody.

Speaker 2 Infa-Mess.

Speaker 1 I've literally been walking down the street in foreign countries, and strangers will come up to me and say, oh, you know Tommy?

Speaker 1 He's just a legendary character in the internet.

Speaker 2 What was he trying to pitch Jimmy John on?

Speaker 1 Some kind of investment scheme or something. Because

Speaker 1 my friend Tommy Tommy collects billionaires. Oh, billionaires.

Speaker 1 I call it he plays billionaire lotto.

Speaker 1 He's hoping that when one of them knocks over, they'll leave him, you know, a taste.

Speaker 2 How bizarre. He's like a vampire familiar.

Speaker 1 Well, what's interesting about Tommy is his uncle was the the founder of Hard Rock Cafe.

Speaker 1 So he grew up in a family with money. So i in instead of somebody who you figure was poor and aspirational and want to hang out with billionaires, he actually came from money.
Right.

Speaker 1 So he knows how to speak the language of wealthy people. And so he's kind of generally welcome in those circles where I, you know, I grew up in the poor in the suburbs.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 And what does he do for a living?

Speaker 1 No one knows. No one knows.
That's the legend of Tommy. Really? Yeah.
And in fact, I pitched Tommy once I'm making a documentary called Who the Fuck is Tommy Lipnick.

Speaker 1 That's his name, Tommy Lipnick.

Speaker 1 And he doesn't like the idea.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wonder why. It just outed him.

Speaker 1 But I mean,

Speaker 1 we don't have time for it, but I could make you a list of 50 people that are super famous, like Bono on down, who have pulled me aside and go, what's the deal with Tommy?

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the way I'm portraying him.

Speaker 2 I'm sure he will.

Speaker 1 The story I wanted to tell you about my father was when I was on your show, I told you a story about how I found

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, you know, you're looking at your phone, like, here it comes, you know, because I thought he was going to be pissed at me. He goes, there's one thing you left out of the story.

Speaker 1 Waiting, text.

Speaker 1 The shotgun wasn't loaded. That's all he wanted me to know.
Like, somehow he made it better.

Speaker 1 How bizarre.

Speaker 2 Your father sounds like a fucking character.

Speaker 1 He was unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 What did he play?

Speaker 1 Guitar.

Speaker 1 Great, great, great musician. Really, truly a great musician.
He's the classic guy that should have made it, it didn't. So when I made it, it made the whole thing really weird.
Oh.

Speaker 1 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 have done something.

Speaker 1 Because if it didn't work for me, how could it work for him? So that was a weird,

Speaker 1 a weird thing. But he was talented.
I mean, he really was talented.

Speaker 2 That's great. Did he, did you get a, did you feel resentment? Did you get along with him after that?

Speaker 1 My father had a lot of issues with drugs. So it was always kind of like it can be with addicts.
It was like depending on the day.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that's why that story is funny to me because he didn't mind that I told you about finding a sought-off shotgun.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Do you believe in that it wasn't loaded? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He was, um, he should have been an arch criminal or something, but he didn't have the nerve.

Speaker 2 So he just became a guitarist.

Speaker 1 No, he was, he was a drug dealer, and uh, he used to run drug drugs and guns for the mob.

Speaker 1 Really? Oh, he would do stuff like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the kid would dabble because he was protected because his father was a made man.

Speaker 1 So we'd go over to that guy's house for hours and just hear these crazy stories about the mob. And my dad would pick up something in a satchel and deliver it.
You know, like it was all, that's the,

Speaker 1 I was eight years old going through all this shit. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 What a crazy environment. Yeah.
So you're eight years old. He's running drugs and guns.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Did you see like a lot of shit?

Speaker 1 I saw a lot of stuff, but it was like, you know, when adults are trying to hide stuff from you, but not really. Uh-huh.
You know?

Speaker 1 So, like, for example, they would stay in the basement all night and party whoever he was with, musicians, whatever. Right.

Speaker 1 So I'd come down at night and it'd be coke everywhere and rolled up 20s on Black Sabbath mirrors. I was like seven, ten.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 So I had a feeling, call it intuition, I had a feeling that 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?

Speaker 1 He was like, oh, that's, we have a cold or something. But yeah, it's good you didn't get rid of it.
And they're like, why do you need the rolled-up 20? Oh, it's just easier to, you know.

Speaker 1 It was like, so you knew it was bullshit, but you're 10. You don't know what Coke is.
Right, right. So you don't have any concept of what they're doing, but you know something's going on.

Speaker 2 This was constant.

Speaker 1 This was 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. And wow, so it was all kind of in plain sight weirdness.

Speaker 1 But you know, you'd be driving down the street and suddenly you were in a drug deal, and it was just whoa.

Speaker 1 He told me, he told me he was shot at

Speaker 1 nine times and stabbed three times. Holy shit!

Speaker 1 Yeah, you want to hear it was one of my favorite stories. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 the band had a van.

Speaker 1 He had a van and we bought it off him. It was our band van for a while.
And then after we were, we didn't need it anymore because we got too big, he wanted to buy it back. So we sold it to him.

Speaker 1 So one day I went over to his house and if you know, if this is the driver's thing, well, right behind the driver's, where the driver's head would be, but in the middle of the car was a bullet hole.

Speaker 1 So I said, did somebody shoot at you? He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what happened? Exactly.
He's like, yeah,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 put a gun through the window at my head.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, I hit the gas and sped off. And so was I went to try to shoot me, but then he missed, and the bullet went in behind my head, and I got away.

Speaker 1 That's the story he told me at the time.

Speaker 1 So years later, the story came back up somehow. He goes, oh, that wasn't the real story.
Here's the real story.

Speaker 1 So the 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.

Speaker 1 But because my father's mad now, he spins the van around and he tries to run the guy over. And the guy's trucking down the street.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And he said he reached a point where the guy was going to,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So he hit the brakes and didn't run the guy over.

Speaker 1 So that was the real story.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's a real thing.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 and I asked him, he admitted that he did know where the kid was, but he didn't want to tell me.

Speaker 2 What did Bill think about this? Like the possibility that his mother had an affair with your dad?

Speaker 1 I don't think Bill gives it any credence. I mean, that's my sense of it.
Okay.

Speaker 2 He just thinks it's bullshit.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Honestly, I don't know what Bill thinks, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 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, the only way, the only way it would be a Corsaze movie maniac.

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Speaker 2 Rated M for mature.

Speaker 1 That somebody is their father, not their real father that they grew up with. And I do know people who've had that.

Speaker 1 They grew up with somebody and they, in fact, it just happened in my family 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 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 dad. Here's your real dad, right? So it does happen.

Speaker 1 But I don't get any sense from Bill that he believes that's possible.

Speaker 1 So the only way it would be possible if Bill grew up in some kind of weird lie.

Speaker 1 You see what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 And I don't believe that.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't know how much he's talked about his family.

Speaker 1 But that's...

Speaker 2 I just can't imagine a kid coming downstairs and seeing cocoa over the mirrors and black Sabbath albums and people blacked out and empty booze everywhere.

Speaker 2 Like this is a normal thing at your house to have these wild parties. Yeah.
And you're a little bit more.

Speaker 1 But I think to be fair, I think a lot of people grew up in that atmosphere. I think we just don't hear about it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but not a lot of people grew up with a dad that was running guns and drugs for the mob.

Speaker 1 That's true. That's true.
That is true. That's so insane.

Speaker 2 That's such a crazy way.

Speaker 1 Like we would have conversations, like we would have conversations because, you know, as you get older, you start to ask questions, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 the whole thing.

Speaker 1 So finally, at some point, I said, Daddy, aren't you worried about if you get pulled over?

Speaker 1 And he like popped the

Speaker 1 engine, you know, old cars, you know, when you pop the trunk. What is it called? The hood.
The hood.

Speaker 1 He had figured out some system where

Speaker 1 if you put weed

Speaker 1 in a thing full of whiskey, he said that dogs couldn't pick up on the scent.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so that if a dog came around the car, it would never, never smell it.

Speaker 2 That's hilarious.

Speaker 1 So it was like life lessons, you know, from pop.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You don't train a dog for everything. Like, what do you got?

Speaker 1 Three barks for Coke.

Speaker 2 The way they train dogs is it's one thing that they're trained for.

Speaker 1 Oh, right. They have one.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 If they're looking for bombs, they're only looking for bombs. They're not going to stop you for weed.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Which is like the dumbest thing to train a dog for.
If you train a dog for weed.

Speaker 1 Well, now, yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, it's the dumbest. But they still do.
They still have weed dogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If they smell weed, they'll call the weed dog.

Speaker 1 Is weed legal in Texas?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So Dallas now, marijuana is decriminalized for personal use. It's stupid.
It should be the whole country. It should be legal, just like whiskey is.
Don't do it if you don't want to do it.

Speaker 2 But, you know, you should probably know what the effects are, and we should probably study what the actual correct dose is per person. Like we know what drinks, like one drink is one drink, right?

Speaker 2 You know what it is.

Speaker 2 You go to the bar, you get a shot of tequila.

Speaker 1 That's what it is.

Speaker 2 It's one shot of tequila. Everybody's pretty much, it's standard.
With weed, you don't know what the

Speaker 2 you don't know what's the right amount. Like, should I take two hits or three hits? What

Speaker 2 you can build up a tolerance like your dad, you're just smoking wheat. Like, if I smoked weed all day long, I'd be a fucking mess.
I'd be paranoid and freaked out.

Speaker 2 I'd be like, whoever you want to get me.

Speaker 1 But he was.

Speaker 2 And he just kept doing it.

Speaker 2 That's it's even crazier and weed back then was not weed today it's you probably could get some weed that's commensurate with weed today like acapoco gold or something wacky but generally they have all these crazy strains now right isn't that though now they have scientists botanists got involved in the game and they they're making super weed i noticed one thing because i was in lay for a couple months this winter and When they first, whatever, decriminalized in L.A., it seemed like everywhere you went, everybody was smoking weed.

Speaker 1 It became like a thing.

Speaker 1 You couldn't go anywhere without smelling, you know, the telltale smoke. And now it seems to have calmed down.

Speaker 1 And I think it's almost like now it's like Holland and back in the day, where it's like so normal that it's no longer a thing to openly smoke weed.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You couldn't get service at a restaurant. I mean, it was like people were staring off into space.

Speaker 2 Edibles.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, for sure, you're going to have like a normalization period after a while where it's like weed's normal.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You're supposed to have choices. You're an adult.
You're an adult human being.

Speaker 2 The analogy I always make is imagine if it was the three of us in a room,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so Jamie passed a law, and he wants to lock us up if we smoke weed. Oh, I see.
That's just as ridiculous as

Speaker 2 300 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I grew up because of my father's life. I mean, I don't know what age I became conscious of my father doing drugs constantly, but let's say it was five years old.
So that's 1972.

Speaker 1 So I've been in weed culture since 1972. Jesus.

Speaker 2 So I always thought it was... Vietnam War days.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And I met all those guys too, you know, these guys with PTSD and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 So I guess what I'm after is

Speaker 1 I never understood what the big deal was. And the only thing that freaks me out are people that are really into weed.

Speaker 1 Like, you know what I mean? Like the 420 crowd. criminality.
Yeah. Like, that's their identity.
That freaks me out.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a stoner?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, a huge stoner. He's got one of the best quotes on states of consciousness that

Speaker 2 are available to people under cannabis that are not available any other time. See if you can find that quote.

Speaker 1 It's a brilliant quote.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Carl Sagan, I mean, he kind of had to keep it under wraps a little bit because marijuana was really illegal back then,

Speaker 2 but he still wanted to talk about it sometimes.

Speaker 2 It depends on the person.

Speaker 2 It's like everything else. There's some people that should not drink.
They drink and then their eyes turn to shark eyes.

Speaker 2 They're gone and they go away.

Speaker 2 That's it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's not the quote. That's a quote.
But the other one had to do with states of consciousness that you could achieve.

Speaker 1 It's a very stoner-like thing to say. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm sure he talked about it a bunch. But either way, he was

Speaker 2 a regular cannabis user. It's supposed to be like everything else.
You know, like, you can have wine in your house. It doesn't mean you're going to drink wine all day, every day.

Speaker 2 You know, just you should not be high all the time.

Speaker 1 I just don't want the 420 people to hear me up.

Speaker 2 Well, it's like those, those people, like the MAGA people or like the fucking insane clown posse people. Like, it's just like it becomes their whole thing.
That's the thing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Juggalo is a whole, you know, it's a whole thing. We've done business because of the NWA, we've done business with

Speaker 1 the juggalos.

Speaker 2 They seem like fun guys. They're great.

Speaker 1 No problem with them.

Speaker 1 You know, Violent Jay, as he's known, was in the NWA for a hot second. Oh, really? And he's kind of refired his promotion now, Juggalo, I guess JCW, Juggalo Clown Promotions or something.

Speaker 1 So a lot of my wrestlers wrestle for him, too. Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 I didn't even know he had a wrestling promotion.

Speaker 1 They did back in the day. They used to wrestle.
I know they wrestled for WCW and TNA. So they were wrestling at the highest level for a while when they were sort of in the 90s times

Speaker 1 when they were on MTV and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They look like they're having the best fucking time. Like they're all like-minded people, all partying together.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's freaky when people admit to secretly being juggalos. Have you ever had that experience?

Speaker 2 They pull you aside.

Speaker 1 A friend of mine, former porn star, Sasha Gray, like sent me a picture of her at 17 in the Juggalo makeup. Oh, wow.
17. And you're like, this is so out there.

Speaker 2 Juggalo makeup. Do they dress?

Speaker 1 It's a very clown. They just jumped posse.
They do very specific makeup.

Speaker 2 Are the juggles, do they have different makeup than the insane clown posse, or is it the same kind of makeup?

Speaker 1 It seems to me there's this kind of a particular way they do the juggalo makeup.

Speaker 2 Jamie, can you please Google Juggalo makeup? Yeah, I think it's a black and white.

Speaker 1 I don't know if there's rules, but it's yeah, clown makeup.

Speaker 2 What does it look like?

Speaker 2 Like that guy right there.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 But that's Violet Jay on the top there. Yeah, that's Violet Jay there.

Speaker 1 But like they'll do their makeup kind of like how Jay is.

Speaker 2 Okay, so some of the people in the audience choose to g 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, there you go. He's sweating.
Kind of washed off. Sweating off his makeup.

Speaker 1 See, like the girl there?

Speaker 2 That split tongue, that dude in the middle, that's a fucking commitment that's a commitment for to never having a real job up top

Speaker 1 that's a lot

Speaker 2 you gotta really hate your parents to split your tongue like that

Speaker 1 how about the guys who split their cock have you ever seen that yes who does that

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It was all like some of the most fucked up

Speaker 2 things that this dude could find on the internet.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And one of them was Body Modification Extreme.

Speaker 2 And I became friends with the guy who ran the site, who's actually

Speaker 1 that arm wrestler, Devin Laurier.

Speaker 2 I think that was his brother or someone he's related to,

Speaker 2 Shannon 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.

Speaker 1 So you got the VIP tier of split cocks?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It was body modification extreme. So it was all different people doing different things like putting like

Speaker 2 horns in their head and splitting their cock.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 And like, oh my God.

Speaker 2 And this it's like detailing how this guy cut his cock off.

Speaker 1 You

Speaker 1 Donnie Fargo, who was a famous wrestler, he was famous for

Speaker 1 as a party trick, he would put a nail through his cock. Ah,

Speaker 1 that's not nice

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 I had David Blaine on and he made me stick an ice pick through his arm

Speaker 2 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 could call it a trick but a lot of things David does it's 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 he made me reinsert it and so I reinserted it and then the original one just started bleeding and it got like a little bit of a hematoma, started swelling up.

Speaker 2 We had to get the medics.

Speaker 2 We had SEALs working for us. They checked it out.

Speaker 1 Because of all this body talk, my wife loves all sorts of weird body talk.

Speaker 1 And she wanted me to send you a message because she's literally about to have a baby like right now. Oh, congratulations.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 last night, I said, please don't have the baby today. You know, I want to be on Joe's show.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's a very, very rich person joke.

Speaker 2 That's hilarious. What does that have to do with body modification? Nothing?

Speaker 1 Because she loves talking about this type of stuff.

Speaker 2 Why does she like talking about that stuff? I don't know.

Speaker 1 In my family, we didn't talk about anything. Sex.

Speaker 1 you know, it's all just kind of implied. Oh, I see.
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 I grew up in a family where nobody hugged, nobody kissed, everyone hated each other, and nobody talked about the secrets of life,

Speaker 1 you know, good or bad. It was all kind of in the shadows, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And she 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.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be graphic because it turns me off, you know, but they seem to think it's funny.

Speaker 2 When did you learn to hug people and be like outwardly nice?

Speaker 1 It's funny you asked me that. I didn't grow up with my mother.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I just made this decision at 24, like I was going to hug my mother and give her a kiss on the cheek.

Speaker 1 And it was like... That was the opening of this other life where people hug and kiss each other.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously I had to 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.

Speaker 1 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, you know, rug rats climbing all over you, but I didn't grow up in that at all. Like, I had no,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 When did you relax?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure I ever did.

Speaker 2 Well, I gave you a hug when I saw you today. It seemed pretty long.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I'm actually a 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.

Speaker 1 But I came very late to life. You could even see I'm just uncomfortable.
And then, you know,

Speaker 1 I'm sure you know Howie Mandel. You must.
I mean, Howie with his,

Speaker 1 I made the mistake of hugging Howie once, and I mean, you know, I was like, kill this cat, you know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like you chewed him. Like, you tased him.

Speaker 2 That poor bastard. It used to be you could touch knuckles with him.

Speaker 1 He'll touch knuckles. He will.

Speaker 1 I'm close enough. Touching knuckles again.
I'm close enough to Howie to touch knuckles.

Speaker 2 He stopped touching knuckles, and then he would do elbows. You would touch elbows, and then he got to air elbows.

Speaker 2 He would just kind of like do that and then put it down.

Speaker 1 I am a lead singer, so I do some of these things.

Speaker 2 He's hanging out with us in the the green room at the Comedy Mothership, and then he's going on stage, and there's

Speaker 2 a comic before him, has the same microphone. They're spitting into it.
He's holding on to it.

Speaker 1 See,

Speaker 1 I think I'm secretly a germaphobe, but really? Yeah. Secretly.

Speaker 1 We just talked about it.

Speaker 1 You know, like

Speaker 2 how he's like...

Speaker 1 Oh, that's another level.

Speaker 2 He talks about it, though. He knows it's a problem.
He just can't overcome it for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 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 i had him on my podcast and we did talk about it hasn't aired yet but we we talked about all his i guess phobias would be the word yeah conditions i mean there's all these letters you know A D H D O C D

Speaker 1 this and that. But he's very open about it to his credit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, he is. Yeah, he talks about it and it's, you know, it's been a battle for him.
But it's just like, it's so odd because he's he's so personable.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, he's such an alpha. I mean, he's just one of those guys.
He just can't help it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, he has to make fun of everything, too. No matter what you say, oh, yeah, that's a fucking great idea.
What about this?

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 2 He can't help himself.

Speaker 1 Yeah, at one point, he looked at me. Actually, I was wearing this coat.
He goes, where'd you get that? Like a Moroccan bazaar?

Speaker 1 It's like a regular coat. It's like, oh, this is a very expensive coat.
It's like a normal coat. I understand.

Speaker 2 That seems normal.

Speaker 1 North face or something.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I'm asking you this in an empathetic way, but

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like getting carved up by a chef.

Speaker 2 Right. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Because they're so good at

Speaker 1 Zoro.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 it's kind of cool. It's like, wow, I'm being insulted by Bill Burr.
You know what I mean? It's like, it's kind of an honor. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, but at the same time, it's like, it's really fucked up because they know exactly where to poke you.

Speaker 2 Also, you can't fire back. You'll get killed.

Speaker 1 Right? Have you fired back? That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 He's going to chew you apart.

Speaker 1 What am I going to tell him? Like, make a little joke?

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's not much you can do other than laugh along with it.

Speaker 2 It's just have fun with it. Just let him make fun of you.
Have fun. Yeah.
That's all you can do.

Speaker 1 But it feels like a deaf body. That's it.

Speaker 1 It's like,

Speaker 2 especially a guy like Bill who's a really good guy.

Speaker 1 Who's like the meanest comedian you ever kind of locked horns on you?

Speaker 2 The meanest at that kind of stuff, but he's one of my best friends, is Tony Hinchcliffe.

Speaker 2 He's the best at at it he's the fucking but I just found out I just found one the other day from quite a while ago I'm gonna 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 these two guys and they're they're 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 kill tony so funny part of the reason is he's so fast

Speaker 2 did you get it jamie

Speaker 1 okay

Speaker 1 wrestler what the you got on wrestler shoes for you guys are mean

Speaker 2 jimmy neutron granddaddy right here you guys look like a before and after for a product that doesn't work what does add stand for a dose of diabetes okay okay

Speaker 1 you guys are wearing sweatpants and sweat skin have you guys just completely given up on C? Is that?

Speaker 1 Baby, Doughboy, not me. I'm out here.

Speaker 1 Doughboy? Wait, what?

Speaker 1 His name is Doughboy. Doughboy? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I spell it D-O-B-O-Y.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I had a feeling you'd misspell it.

Speaker 1 You guys are two of my favorites. Two chins and ASAP Rocky Road.

Speaker 1 Wow. Wow.

Speaker 2 Just off the cuff. Out of nowhere.
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Speaker 2 We have like, when we do these shows, like Tuesday or Wednesday night, or whenever we're there, where everyone's in the room, like 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.

Speaker 2 And so there'd be like eight or nine of us in the green room just talking shit about each other. And Tony's just cutting up left to right, this one, that one.
It's, oh, it's so much fun.

Speaker 2 He's the best at it, though. You do not want to fuck with

Speaker 1 blow with Tony. Tony, I'm going to say right now, I don't think he's my brother.

Speaker 2 He's definitely not your brother. He doesn't look anything like you.
It's a completely different gene line.

Speaker 1 Now he'll make fun of me for saying I'm not his brother.

Speaker 2 So did Bill know that you were going to be there with him, or was it just like how he just decided to put the two of you together?

Speaker 1 I got the feeling that

Speaker 1 Bill wasn't really given the heads up. Yeah, probably.
It was a little bit irritating to him.

Speaker 2 Bill gets easily irritated. But that's also why he's so funny.
Like he gets mad.

Speaker 1 He gets mad at everything.

Speaker 2 You know?

Speaker 1 Yes, and my mind doesn't work like that, so it's hard.

Speaker 1 Like, I would have a better time understanding like a, like a rocket scientist than a professional comedian, I think. Really? Because

Speaker 1 the professional comedians I've known personally a little bit, like Bobcat Goldthwaite and Carrot Top, their minds are so different than the average human mind.

Speaker 1 I think the way they process information and

Speaker 1 They're looking for something that you know almost like a meme it like coalesces a whole set of ideas That's what makes it funny, right?

Speaker 1 you can it works on all these different levels at one time the great comedians like dice to me is the greatest and

Speaker 1 and and dice will tell a joke it works on like eight different levels you know it's like high low middle

Speaker 2 do you know what dice's best stuff is you want like people don't understand that dice is literally one of the best live performance artists just random street artists oh i watch him you mean when he just goes up to people and pretends that these people wanted a photo with him and they don't know who he is?

Speaker 2 It's the face.

Speaker 1 You want the face?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Like, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 He's the best at that. And he does that for zero money.
This is,

Speaker 2 he's only doing that for fun. That's it.
He's just being an artist.

Speaker 2 Like, there's no money in it at all.

Speaker 2 And he spends all this time wandering around the streets, going to bars at restaurants, and just bothering people, wandering up to people on the street in New York City.

Speaker 2 They're waiting for the light to turn green. You want the picture?

Speaker 1 I just love that he'll just double and triple and quadruple down on

Speaker 1 the bit. Yeah.
Like he just won't give it up.

Speaker 2 He won't give it up.

Speaker 1 Zamou does the same thing with the

Speaker 1 Tony Clifton. Yeah.
Just the discomfort of it all.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Is that their night comedy died? Yeah. Unbelievable.
That is so

Speaker 2 the Day the Laughter Died.

Speaker 1 The Day the Laughter Died. Rick Rubin produced it.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And Rick, who's a fucking maniac, loved the idea. He loved it.
Of course. He's like, what a great idea.
This is going to be amazing. Dice is selling out Madison Square Garden

Speaker 2 more than anybody alive. 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 and bomb no material.

Speaker 2 There's talk off the top of his head. Sometimes don't even try to be funny.

Speaker 1 I've listened to it multiple times and it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 It's performance art. It's like him on the street going, you want the picture? You know, and if, look, if he couldn't kill regular way, I wouldn't respect it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If you're like hilarious at regular comedy, and then you say, I'm going to freak these people out by hitting them with something, he would do this thing at the comedy store where he would go on stage and see how long he could not talk.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I saw him do it once.
He'll go like five minutes. Five minutes.

Speaker 2 Five minutes. He's doing that.

Speaker 2 And no one knows what to do. And people are like nervously laughing.

Speaker 1 Laughing.

Speaker 2 But he also could fucking kill. Like in the Roddy Dangerfield special, you know, when he did dice rules, like he could destroy an arena filled with people.
So it was a choice to do this with.

Speaker 1 Who's your favorite all-time comedian? I'm just curious.

Speaker 2 God, I don't think I have an all-time favorite. I think Pryor probably

Speaker 2 is the greatest of all time, not living, with Chappelle being the greatest living. I think that

Speaker 2 you have to give credit to Lenny Bruce, though, because he really started the art for him. Because before Lenny Bruce, comedy was just a series of jokes.
It was just jokes.

Speaker 2 And Lenny Bruce came along and all of a sudden he had social commentary,

Speaker 2 cultural commentary that he turned into humor.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And then I think Pryor took that and made it funnier. Pryor took that and that honesty.

Speaker 1 I never connected that dot, but it makes sense when you say it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because he was just funnier. Pryor was just better at it.

Speaker 2 But the door was opened up by Lenny. It didn't exist before Lenny.
Yeah. So Lenny comes along in the 50s and he's getting arrested all the time in the 60s.
Like he was getting arrested.

Speaker 1 Remember that whole thing where he would just go on and read his court transcripts?

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, that was the end.

Speaker 1 That must have been really out there.

Speaker 2 I watched the videos of that.

Speaker 1 I watched it. I've seen actual actions.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he was just talking, he was reading his court transcripts and talking about the case. And someone in the audience is going, we want dirty Lenny.
And he's like, come in, man.

Speaker 2 It's not about that, man.

Speaker 2 It's about this. You got to understand

Speaker 2 what they're doing here, man. And he would

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 the thing about comedy is a lot of comedy, like even from the 80s, it doesn't hold up.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, it doesn't even make you chuckle.

Speaker 2 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 see red fox to me still funny though still funny but like his stuff holds yes his stuff holds moms maybe

Speaker 2 yep some people some people still hold up you know um robin harris still holds up there's some some old school comedians like from the 70s and the 80s that are just still like just you could tell they were eddie murphy he was special he was like a special talent like his that still holds up today but some of this stuff doesn't.

Speaker 2 And then I think like the next big shift, a big change was Kinnison. Kinnison was a giant change.

Speaker 1 Did you know Kinnison?

Speaker 2 No, I saw him live a few times.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, I think age-wise, it probably does.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I was about 21 when I saw him 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.

Speaker 2 So I got to see him live there, and then I got to see him live at some,

Speaker 2 I think it was like

Speaker 2 some weird place in the middle of nowhere and it was like half empty and it was this was like 88 89 so by 89 he was kind of falling off because

Speaker 2 he had just done so much drugs and partied so hard that he was fucking huge in like 86

Speaker 2 and then by the time 88 came around the material kind of dropped off and then by the time I saw him was like 89 or 90 it wasn't so good anymore and then he died in like, did he die in like 92?

Speaker 2 I think he died in 92.

Speaker 1 Car crasher.

Speaker 2 Yeah, drunk driver, ironically, because he had jokes about drunk driving.

Speaker 2 But he just,

Speaker 2 I was always hoping he was going to come out with a new album and he would be back. You know, he'd be back to the Kinnis Inn of 86.
But just the party and the Coke and the women and the...

Speaker 2 Fucking no time to write. His brother wrote about it.
There's a great book called Brother Sam by his brother Bill.

Speaker 2 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 maniac the childhood preaching as yeah 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

Speaker 2 I remember like thinking like, well, this is a completely different thing. I never thought this was stand-up comedy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he felt, it 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?

Speaker 1 There was some, I seemed to remember like something like that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 He made

Speaker 1 a song. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And by 89, he's like a caricature of the guy he was three years ago.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But back then, like, nobody was famous.

Speaker 1 It was all about getting on Carson. That was the thing, right?

Speaker 2 It was about getting HBO special. That was the big thing.

Speaker 2 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, his Letterman sets fantastic. We played it on the show once.

Speaker 1 It's really good.

Speaker 2 But I think with Kinnison, it was really the HBO special. It was

Speaker 2 Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedian special first, and people got to see him on that. And then he did his own hour special.

Speaker 1 You're right, because when Eddie Murphy did his HBO special, that was when he just like delirious. You know, he had that

Speaker 1 leather suit. Yep.
I remember high school, everybody was like, it was all. Norton, I've been looking at you.

Speaker 2 And I know you've been looking at me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was,

Speaker 2 yeah, I mean, it's like there was only a few back then, though.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Oh, the whole crowd would go crazy.

Speaker 2 It was like they, it was rock and roll. Like, they sang along.

Speaker 2 You know, shot through the heart. It was like, it was like rock and roll.
Like, everybody was singing along.

Speaker 1 You give love a bad name.

Speaker 2 The crowd wanted to say that, and the crowd wanted to say, little boy blue.

Speaker 1 Oh, he needed the money. Oh!

Speaker 1 I tried to talk my wife into seeing if we could hire Dice to do our wedding.

Speaker 1 She wasn't having it.

Speaker 2 Who knows what he would have done?

Speaker 1 The vision I had, my wife wanted to do kind of an after-party of the wedding. We had it at my house.

Speaker 1 So the idea was, you know, when half the crowd bangs off because it's been a long day, there'll still be a crowd that want to hang out and just party.

Speaker 2 And then Dice shows up.

Speaker 1 And then Dice shows up at 1 a.m. And then takes the ghost, puts the death ray on me.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 She just was not having it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He'd be like, look at you, and just start tearing this fucking poor fool apart.

Speaker 2 Fun.

Speaker 2 Back then, the beautiful thing was the comedy store had no audience. So he could go on unannounced.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I'm having Bill Burke PTSD because that feeling when they put the death ray on you.

Speaker 2 Did you, it really bothered you?

Speaker 1 No, it didn't bother me. It's just

Speaker 1 uncomfortable. Well,

Speaker 1 I'm not going to. What do they always say?

Speaker 1 Don't bring a knife to a gunfight, right?

Speaker 1 What am I going to say? You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Why was he picking on you?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 So at the end of the day, I do bear the responsibility for initiating this insanity.

Speaker 2 It's taken a life of its own. Because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's a little bit of a double. You're the brother of that weird from the Puckett, you know?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 We were talking about the other night at the club in the green room, and we were convinced it was a bit that you guys were doing together. We were convinced.

Speaker 2 No one disagreed.

Speaker 2 No one was like, yeah, I think it's real. Most people were like, nah, I think they were fucking around.
I think it seemed like they made an agreement.

Speaker 1 It's somewhere between a bit and reality, and I think that's where it gets confusing. And that's why I would use the word meta.

Speaker 1 There's this moment, if you watch it back, where Howie splits and just leaves me and Bill alone.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 how he has a band that plays when he does a show. So 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't know Bill at all.

Speaker 1 And he starts talking about our shared dad. And it gets really weird because on some level, it's like it's possible, right?

Speaker 1 Even if it's 1%, it's not a zero.

Speaker 1 So that's where it gets kind of, that's why I say meta. It's like

Speaker 1 you're looking down a hall of mirrors and you start almost playing with your mind. You're thinking, like, well, it could it could be possible.

Speaker 2 It's also the two of you guys doing this publicly is very pro-wrestling, which is what you love.

Speaker 2 There's something about it.

Speaker 1 I brought a wrestler with me today who runs the promotions for the NWA.

Speaker 2 But you know what I'm saying? It's like there's something about it. It's like, is this Kfabe? You know, is this real? Is this a shoot? Or is this a work? Like, what is this?

Speaker 1 Well, Tommy, you know, Tommy Dreamer?

Speaker 2 I know the name.

Speaker 1 Tommy Dreamer, famous ECW wrestler, went on to work for WWE and now works for TNA.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you know, Tommy will say something like, it's all a work.

Speaker 1 It's all a work. Like, basically, it's the cynical view that everything you see in the world is fake.
Well, if you're a president, the president is fake.

Speaker 1 The news is fake. It's all the work.
So, once you go there cynically,

Speaker 1 it's hard to back out of that. Yeah.
So, I like the discomfort. The artist in me likes the discomfort.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's what I'm getting at. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I really do like the discomfort. I remember watching Andy Kaufman on Saturday Live, circa 78, or whatever.

Speaker 1 And it's that idea that you can create

Speaker 1 a vibration in the room between what's expected and where you're willing to go. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And she would stick a camera in the corner and just film people's reaction. And it was interesting to watch because one guy would just keep eating his food and no sell it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 as an artist, you know, on a stage, you know, there is this kind of

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, there's something about flirting with the

Speaker 1 the uncomfortable, but

Speaker 1 what makes it uncomfortable is there's always, it always has a foundation of truth.

Speaker 2 You know what I'm saying? Yes, I do know what you're saying.

Speaker 1 If it didn't have a foundation of truth, it would just be silly. Right, right, right.
The discomfort comes from like, oh,

Speaker 1 there's something you're doing that I recognize in myself, or I know somebody that's like this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But if it might be true, then it gets to that weird place. Right.
So it's like this is all.

Speaker 1 Okay, 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.

Speaker 1 Yes. 10% of the public is convinced we're brothers.

Speaker 1 Even if I sat there and told them, no, it's not true.

Speaker 2 More now.

Speaker 1 That's okay. But that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 But that's why it's like when you...

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Speaker 1 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? It would be like if I sat down and said,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 it feels right, but for all I know, it's just another bit.

Speaker 2 Everything's a work.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's a part of you that would be like, well,

Speaker 1 it's possible. I mean, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 I got a pretty good memory. I'd be like, what happened?

Speaker 2 Where were we?

Speaker 2 I've never been there.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 1 I have this plague that I can't get rid of.

Speaker 2 But if you have that Tommy's perception that everything's a work,

Speaker 2 the whole world gets really weird.

Speaker 1 Well, I think we're there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We definitely are when it comes to politics and the news.

Speaker 1 I think our whole culture has been turned into like,

Speaker 1 where are we? Right. Like, you know, that's why I started calling it like five, seven years ago a post-truth era.
Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 This didn't happen. Or, no,

Speaker 1 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 like, well, that must be AI or edited.

Speaker 1 It's like

Speaker 1 once somebody becomes convinced of this culture, it's really hard to unconvince them. Right.

Speaker 1 And so, from a performing point of view, and somebody who's now also in the podcasting sphere, it's like, it's like,

Speaker 1 is it better to play into what people want?

Speaker 1 Like, I really appreciated 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.

Speaker 1 It's really worth watching.

Speaker 1 In the first five, it's when he did his long Broadway run. You know about that? He did this thing where it was like he would talk and then play songs.
No, it didn't even. Oh, yeah, it was huge.

Speaker 1 He went on this massive Broadway run.

Speaker 1 And the HBO did it and put it on as a special.

Speaker 1 But he literally, in the first five minutes minutes of talking, and it's, you know, it's about 1,200 people night, so it's a live audience, and he says in the first five minutes, by the way, I'm not Bruce Springsteen.

Speaker 1 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 to a factory in my life.

Speaker 1 Serious.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, I knew that as a performer,

Speaker 1 I knew that what I was watching wasn't real, but people want him to play John Wayne so bad that he

Speaker 1 puts his finger in there and says, okay, you want me to be John Wayne? I'll be John Wayne. Right.

Speaker 2 But that's audience capture, right?

Speaker 1 Yes, but now we're in the business of it. I mean, there's obviously examples, historical antecedents over the last hundred years in media where people would figure it out.
Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He fed into it, and obviously connected to something real in him, but he wasn't really a tramp. He was a complete rich Lithario.

Speaker 2 Well, you really see it in The Dictator, that movie The Dictator. where he has that insane speech at the end

Speaker 2 uniting the world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, he was an out-and-out socialist, basically. And a brilliant guy.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Which is really crazy when you think about how silly his character was. His character was this like bumbling, stumbling goof.

Speaker 1 So that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 What is more valuable, what the public wants from you or what is true?

Speaker 1 In the entertainment world, we're used to it, right? Yeah. Like you could play Joe Rogan, the comedian, at the drop of a hat, because you've done it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I don't see you as being disingenuous. 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.

Speaker 1 I've done it. I've played other people.

Speaker 1 But what I'm trying to say is.

Speaker 1 Now we're in this thing where like everybody's doing it.

Speaker 1 I mean everybody

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, everybody's kind of become comfortable with 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.

Speaker 1 That's really, I think, unprecedented.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think so too. But I also think that authenticity is more valuable now than ever before because it's hard to find.

Speaker 1 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 is long abandoned.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right. You're not a corporate creation.

Speaker 1 No, we never were. Right.

Speaker 2 And we were. And there's so many of them now, you feel like, you know, like, you ever seen Kinison's bit about the monkeys?

Speaker 1 The band, the monkeys? Yeah. I don't, but give me the.

Speaker 2 Well, it's a bit about Manson. It was, and then, you know,

Speaker 2 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 a corporation.

Speaker 2 The monkeys, like, one of the, which were great. The monkeys are great.
I'm a believer. They have some great songs, but they were kind of one of the first corporate creations.

Speaker 1 But I actually, on my podcast recently, interviewed

Speaker 1 Mickey Dolans. Oh, wow.
And we talk a lot about this very subject. It hasn't aired yet.
But

Speaker 1 he was less interested in the discussion than I was because my argument would be that the monkeys are actually the template that came.

Speaker 1 Our whole lives, the monkeys were dismissed as an anachronistic thing that went against the integrity of the Beatles. Right.

Speaker 1 But if you actually look now, Beatles versus monkeys, the monkeys are more accurate of what came than the Beatles. In what way?

Speaker 1 Because authenticity is less and less and less important.

Speaker 1 Those who establish authenticity, and I would include myself amongst that, and I would include you in that, they're very valuable.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 just even speaking your own truth is inconvenient in a post-truth world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's actually more politically expedient to create a character that can navigate this new world. And by the way, change on a dime.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Does it make sense the way I'm talking about that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, it does make sense.

Speaker 1 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 the preeminent band.

Speaker 1 That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying is the model of the monkeys, which was always held up for a form of mockery.
Right. See, this is what you get when you make plastic music.

Speaker 1 No, no, we live in the age of plastic music now. Right.
The monkeys

Speaker 1 are the grandfathers of this thing.

Speaker 2 Right, it wouldn't even be shocking today if the corporation put together a band.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, I've done it.

Speaker 2 We used to want Aerosmith. We used to want Stephen Tyler and Joe Perry, Young, coming up together, playing music.
That's what we used to want. We used to want the Beatles.

Speaker 2 They all got together, they formed the band, they played in Hamburg until they tightened it up.

Speaker 1 I used to work with the 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 always

Speaker 1 didn't bathe, and he wore junky clothes. He wanted people to believe he was somebody that he wasn't.
Right. You know, I was actually from a poorish family.

Speaker 1 He was from a rich family pretending to be poor. Yeah.
And my therapist had the great line about him.

Speaker 1 He said he looks like a junkie, he smells like a junkie, but he doesn't have the guts to be a junkie.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 well, you can see why so many people without courage or chops, it puts them in a game. It puts them in this social mi that we all sort of have to navigate.

Speaker 1 So now we're into this place where we're talking to a lot of people who believe that

Speaker 1 their furry number 463 because that's all their status comes from their digital online group.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They don't want you like pro wrestling.

Speaker 1 Sam Kinnison's second act should have been get sober, get straight, and go on another hellacious run.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I suspect Sam was very mentally ill. I never met him, but I think one of the reasons why he was self-medicating so hard was probably that head injury that he got when he was a young kid.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 CTE.

Speaker 1 Because I'm on the board, I'm on honorary on the board of the Concussion Legacy Foundation,

Speaker 1 which I'm sure has some tie to UFC too, because Chris Nowinski, who runs it, is my friend.

Speaker 1 One of the main things that happens with people who start to get CTE early in life is lack of impulse control.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 That happens a lot with fighters, football players. I'm sure it happens with pro wrestlers.
Probably happens with a lot of...

Speaker 1 It's getting better, I think, with wrestling. The awareness is helping.

Speaker 1 In our organization, we forbid headshots.

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 1 You know, the classic chair to the head does none of that in my world.

Speaker 2 Good. You don't need it.

Speaker 1 Well, for what?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the pain of watching people deteriorate is so awful.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They just can't take it anymore. And it gets to a certain point where it sort of accumulates over time, or it doesn't get better, it gets worse.

Speaker 1 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 almost like masculine ideals.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I'm broken.

Speaker 1 And there's nothing I can do to put the pieces back together.

Speaker 2 That's a very hard journey for championship fighters when 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.

Speaker 2 When they used to be the dominant, and then they go to the fights, they sit there with a paunch and a you know a little bit of a belly, sit there and watch people doing what they used to do.

Speaker 2 And they don't know how to make a living outside of fighting. They don't know what to do.
Very few of them figure out how to transition into some other stage of life.

Speaker 2 The thing about athletics is by the time you're 40, you're essentially done. Unless you're a rare Tom Brady type character or Randy Couture who can compete into their 40s.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Where to be a championship fighter like a a Lennox Lewis or a Vander Holyfield, you have to be all in. You can't have like a side gig and a blues band.
There's no room for you writing books.

Speaker 2 There's no room for you

Speaker 2 fucking selling things on Etsy.

Speaker 1 Well, that's it's a it's I know this is 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.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like at what point do you start to dial the thing down? My brain is wired, I'm gonna go until I run into a brick wall. Right.
And they're more like, well, things are pretty good.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? Like, do we have to keep throwing ourselves into the maw of the public?

Speaker 1 And my argument is, like, it'd be like going into a UFC fight and not fighting to win. Right, right.
Fighting not to lose. Right.
That seems to me far more dangerous.

Speaker 1 And that's kind of my argument is like, in order to be in the arts, you've got to, it's pell-mell, all, all, all in.

Speaker 1 All in or all out. That's the only gear I know.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is the thing that happens to bands when they get to a point where they never make any new music, right? And they just tour in the old music.

Speaker 1 You're touching on the nerve of my life. Yeah.

Speaker 2 How do you navigate that?

Speaker 1 I just keep working. I refuse.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 1 In my case, back to my daddy for a second. I watched my dad play songs he didn't want to play.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then, if you want to even go further in a kind of a mythical way, my success destroyed him again.

Speaker 1 So, if you've watched that, well,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Once my kid came, I was like, this kid is not going to look at me how I looked at my father.

Speaker 1 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 going to go.

Speaker 1 So until somebody stops me, I'm going to go.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what got you to the dance, right?

Speaker 1 Well, even doing the podcast, you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, I got money. I'm a kid sit home.
I like being in the game. I like the hustle.
I like having to learn things. I like having to.

Speaker 2 What do you enjoy about podcasting and why did you decide to get into it?

Speaker 1 A quick story was

Speaker 1 I did a podcast based on an album that we put out. It 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.

Speaker 1 And I poked around as you do to see if anybody was interested. And it was like crickets.
Nobody gave a shit about me being a podcaster, like at all.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But other than that, we have no use for you.

Speaker 1 So I just thought, okay, not for me, not meant to be. And then I did Club Random with Bill Maher.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I said, I want to talk to whoever I want to talk to about, whatever I want to talk about. But here's the reason.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 we become so skewed with influencers and people who are famous that don't do shit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think there's a lot of value in American culture that can be celebrated. So you're talking about, like, say, a retired fighter or something.
There's a lot we can learn from a retired fighter.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, you have a showgun 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 showgun? Right.

Speaker 1 And ask them about what it's like to be in there alone?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 I recently interviewed Steve Vai, great guitar player.

Speaker 1 And for some reason, I had this idea of

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? That's his. Right.
Not I'm projecting, but I'm saying we all have that moment, like, who do we not want to be in the octagon with?

Speaker 2 Is it Eddie Van Halen? Who was it?

Speaker 1 For me?

Speaker 1 Or for him? Steve Vai.

Speaker 1 He didn't want to say. Really?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
No. Or Ingve.
Yeah, right. Those guys are like insane.

Speaker 2 Shredders. I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm an amateur, you know, compared to those guys. So I wouldn't want the

Speaker 2 there's something about that kind of shredding, too, that's just like so stunning.

Speaker 1 Freakish. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, you do you still train MMA or do I

Speaker 2 still do martial arts?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 So I don't spar though. I don't get hit in the head anymore.

Speaker 1 But 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?

Speaker 2 Autism.

Speaker 1 Okay, God bless. But I'm saying that's the way it is for me with other musicians sometimes.
Right. I'll look at a guy like Steve Iron, Eddie Van Halen, and Ring Van, like, how do you do that?

Speaker 2 Right. Like, what it must have been like when Hendrix burst onto the scene.

Speaker 1 My dad had a story, actually. Yeah.
He's he was playing a club in Wisconsin. He never heard of Jimi Hendrix.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. Whoa.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He said when he got on stage the next night he felt like he couldn't play the guitar at all. Wow.

Speaker 1 It was like an alien instrument.

Speaker 1 And Clapton talks about it. Other

Speaker 1 like Jimi Hendrix blew Clapton's mind and whatever when he Roy Albert Hall, whatever it was, where he was like, oh my God, what the hell is happening?

Speaker 1 He was bagging nails or something. It was called.

Speaker 2 He's like, what am I doing?

Speaker 1 And this is when people were spray painting on the walls in London. Clapton is God.

Speaker 1 And here shows up this guy who was on the Chitlin circuit as what they used to call playing for Little Richard and the Isley brothers. He was just in the backup band.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 how to do what you do.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I can't even come close to doing what you're doing.

Speaker 2 Shocking.

Speaker 2 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 Vaughan had a sound.

Speaker 2 Like you could hear him, like when he was doing Voodoo Child, you're like, oh, that's a Stevie version.

Speaker 1 Like he played music.

Speaker 2 Do you play guitar at all? No.

Speaker 1 So the one thing I'll tell you, guitar player, to non-guitar players,

Speaker 1 the thing you learned about the great guitar players,

Speaker 1 it's all in their hands. Everybody focuses on what amp, what guitar,

Speaker 1 the gear.

Speaker 1 It's somehow it's the way they hit the strings. I couldn't even explain it to you.

Speaker 2 They just have a different structure.

Speaker 1 We call it a track. I have no idea.
Steve Ray Vaughan, for example, he played his strings purposely high.

Speaker 1 He made it harder to play the guitar. Really? And still played at that level.

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Speaker 1 Now, there's a belief with certain guitar players that the higher you put the strings, the more you have to dig out the notes, and that's what it becomes more emotive.

Speaker 1 So, imagine he's doing it at that level, even harder. He's making it harder to do what he's doing, and he's doing it at that level.
Wow. Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 Incredible talent. I mean, shocking.
Again, shocking. It's like, where does that come from? Just has it.

Speaker 2 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 or in the same place yeah i think it's 88 or 86 somewhere somewhere in the 80s he's on that maybe it's 83 but it early in the 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

Speaker 2 You know, because Austin where he's from.

Speaker 1 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 it had whiskey and drink in it.

Speaker 1 And rotting his stomach out.

Speaker 1 And he got sober in the last year or so of his life, and he played even better. Right.

Speaker 1 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 Kinnison.
Imagine if he cleaned up.

Speaker 1 He was able to make that left.

Speaker 2 Like I said, though, I think Sam was dealing with something. I think his demons were internal.

Speaker 2 The Steve Ray Vaughan thing,

Speaker 2 what's fascinating to me is, well, first of all, he's the only guy that can play Voodoo Child other than Hendrix.

Speaker 2 Like, if you're like some upstart and you want to release Voodoo Child today, like, Jesus Christ, like, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 You're trading on hollowed ground, you know? Like, maybe you can do All Along the Watchtower, because that was actually a Dylan song, right?

Speaker 1 Maybe. But you know why he, you know, this is my opinion, but you know why he plays Voodoo Child so well? Why? Because he had studied the same guys that Hendrix had studied.

Speaker 1 So he's not imitating Hendrix.

Speaker 1 He's coming from the same wellspring of information. Like, who were the guys? Albert King.

Speaker 1 B.B. King, Albert King.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Have you ever heard of Johnny Thunder?

Speaker 1 You mean talking about from the New York Dolls? No.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 but his version is fucking insane. It's so good, you can't believe he didn't make it.

Speaker 1 Can I play it for you? Please, yeah.

Speaker 2 Right, that's right. His version is the cover.
What was the other version of it?

Speaker 2 Tommy James and the Shondells. Tommy James and the Shondells.

Speaker 2 Their version.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 Johnny Thunder, put the the head fuck on.

Speaker 1 It's in another new commercial I've heard recently.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, we started talking about it like a year or so ago. My friend Brian Simpson

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Never heard of him.

Speaker 1 I'm usually no all of this. It's fucking fantastic, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't even know where he's from. I can't even identify where he's from by the.

Speaker 2 The fucking song is fantastic. It's so good.
It just

Speaker 2 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, you see that guy up at the Whiskey Ago Go.

Speaker 2 He gets on stage and plays that song. You're like, holy shit.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Isn't that weird?

Speaker 1 And that was part of the vibe that my father put on me, which was like, well, how the hell did you get out?

Speaker 2 Right, of course. Well, the fucking resentment must have been astounding.
You know, when you're,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 This interview from Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan literally almost has what you guys just quoted, like, never heard of it?

Speaker 1 I can't believe it.

Speaker 2 Right. We talked about this.
Yeah. Bob, what year was this?

Speaker 1 1969.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Isn't that crazy? That's right.
We talked about this. Bob Dylan.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 So 1968, okay. Yeah, Bob Dylan appeared on the radio.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And then disappeared.

Speaker 2 That's fucking incredible, man.

Speaker 2 Incredible. Because you feel like a guy who make a song that's that good, oh my God, all you need is good songwriters, and that guy's going to be huge.

Speaker 2 There's a fucking billion dollars in there waiting for you. Dig it out.

Speaker 1 But that's kind of what I was saying before is like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, he wanted it. He said, I didn't really want it.
I just wanted it to come to me.

Speaker 2 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 it's like

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, you're never going to really be able to reach your full potential, right?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 You know, there's always been rumors about the band Chicago that there were mob ties with their with their world.

Speaker 2 I'm sure there was a lot of that going on. Yeah, it wasn't.
Wasn't that the whole Hendrix thing? You ever know that conspiracy?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I've read about that.

Speaker 1 That gets into other types of complications. And I'm not, I don't have

Speaker 1 an opinion on it. It's just

Speaker 1 it's like saying there's no way to separate the two things at the time. Right.
Like anybody back then, you know, any clubs at the time, particularly in Chicago, they were all mob

Speaker 1 connected.

Speaker 2 And Los Angeles as well.

Speaker 1 Sure. So if you were a comedian or, you know what I mean, an MC or whatever you were doing, like, here's Lola the dancer, you know.
You were connected.

Speaker 1 There was a wise guy standing there and everybody knew they were because that's how they did their did their business.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I went to school with a bunch of the mob wise guys' kids and and grandkids.

Speaker 2 I worked at a mob club in Connecticut.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 In Boston, Knicks Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or money.

Speaker 1 We played a club on Long Island once where the crowd was moshing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 in the middle of the fourth 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.

Speaker 1 Got a thousand people out in front of me. And he kind of did one of these, and there were two

Speaker 1 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 I kept going.

Speaker 1 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 and said, You better calm the fuck down.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 Because of washing? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because it was one of, we used to call them brass and fern bars, you know, like the brass bar and the ferns.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right. You know that bar, right? Yeah, yeah.
You've all been there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So they wanted us to bring the crowd down. But how do you bring the crowd down? So

Speaker 1 they literally showed me a gun and said, you better calm the fuck down.

Speaker 2 So what did you do?

Speaker 1 I just kept going. Were they going to kill me on stage?

Speaker 2 Jesus Christ, what happened when you got off stage?

Speaker 1 They weren't gone. Really?

Speaker 1 I mean, there might have been a problem if somebody had done some real damage or something, but there was no problem. But they definitely threatened me on stage.
How did they know about it?

Speaker 1 This is me at like 180 pounds and long hair and bad attitude. That's hilarious.
No, I don't think they'd ever seen anything like moshing.

Speaker 1 You know, this is like 92. This is a very, very new phenomenon to the outside world.

Speaker 2 But moshing was going on before that.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, but it's only in the underground clubs, is what I'm saying. He's like, that's what I'm saying.
You're in a wise guy's club on Long Island with brass rails and ferns.

Speaker 2 I dated a girl in the 80s who went to see

Speaker 2 the cramps and came home with a concussion.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Poison Ivy. From the mosh bit.

Speaker 1 Remember Poison Ivy? She was the guitar player for the Cramps. Oh, right.
So great.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Bad music for bad people.

Speaker 1 Did you ever kind of encounter the alternative scene when you were a kid?

Speaker 2 Not really. No.

Speaker 1 Just not for you, the freaks.

Speaker 2 I didn't go to very many. com I mean I went to a few concerts when I was a kid, but not a lot.
Like I went to Jay Giles band. I saw George Thoroughgood.

Speaker 1 Not exactly alternative there.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I didn't really become friends with band people until I moved to Hollywood.

Speaker 2 And, you know, then like 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.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, that's that guy from that band.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's a lot of, a lot of,

Speaker 1 like, what do you call it? When the brain, when the brains don't connect the brain hemispheres. Bipolar.
A lot of bipolarity in music. Musicians.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Particularly high levels?

Speaker 1 My theory is the reason they become musicians is they overdevelop one side of their brain. Oh.

Speaker 1 You You know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It helps the brain communicate left to right.

Speaker 1 Really? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a known thing that Coke really helps that if you have that bipolarity. Huh.

Speaker 2 Do people, is that a medication for people that are bipolar? Do they give them Adderall or anything like that?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I mean,

Speaker 1 I've worked with people who are bipolar and they've talked about their medications and stuff, you know? Huh.

Speaker 1 And it's still kind of an inexact science, bipolarity.

Speaker 2 It's crazy to think that Coke helps fix some things.

Speaker 1 I think it helps the, 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.

Speaker 1 It's the first time in their life they felt normal, that their brain worked normally.

Speaker 2 What a terrible thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it doesn't work, right?

Speaker 2 Imagine if that's the thing that keeps you together.

Speaker 1 It's cocaine.

Speaker 2 I wonder if what coca leaves would do because there's a lot of people like the high-altitude herding populations and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Or you can get tea, coca tea. Yeah.
I was just in South America. I've had that.

Speaker 2 I've had mate de coca.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Something like to get a little bit of a clarity.

Speaker 2 But the chewing of the leaves is like, it's so normal for them, and it's illegal over here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But back to the theory, the idea is if you have one side of your brain overdevelop, it makes you good at something that you wouldn't necessarily be good at.

Speaker 2 And then bad at life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, probably. Right.

Speaker 2 So you need a handler like Elizabeth.

Speaker 1 If you're meeting a successful musician, they're the graduating class of the bipolarity.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 So there's some functional level of acumen.

Speaker 2 That makes sense.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it is, and maybe there's a comedic

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure somebody's going to get mad at me for saying that, but I mean, it's a compliment.

Speaker 1 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, but.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I probably, I would imagine then a lot of like motivational speakers would not be awesome band members.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Like people who are completely dialed in with their life.

Speaker 1 Tony Robbins, my new bass player, you know.

Speaker 2 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 got their fucking whole life dialed in.

Speaker 2 They probably wouldn't be the best band members.

Speaker 1 Well, especially like a lead story. There's no good band members.
That's the problem.

Speaker 2 Well, how do you guys stay? How do you keep it together for all these years? Like, what's the key to a bunch of people? Oh, remote.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 2018. So we've been an intact three-quarter unit since 2018.

Speaker 2 How come you guys didn't talk for so long?

Speaker 1 It's real heat.

Speaker 2 It was real heat. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That sucks. No, 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.

Speaker 2 A real one. Yeah.
But it's interesting to me how

Speaker 2 people can manage.

Speaker 2 It's always...

Speaker 2 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 not trying to manage you guys.

Speaker 2 Like, you have all these fucking people,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And what are you talking about, man? We're in a band.

Speaker 2 We have a record deal.

Speaker 1 I'm nodding my head because this is every

Speaker 1 life experience for 35 years.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 The problem with the band is

Speaker 1 the band members have no idea why it it works.

Speaker 1 We're clueless as to the mystery of why people are attracted to us as a unit.

Speaker 1 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 Townsend referred to it as a gang, a gang that you want to be in.

Speaker 1 That's what makes bands attractive to people. That was his opinion.
And I don't totally, I don't disagree.

Speaker 1 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. Right, right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's

Speaker 2 all the pieces make the puzzle together. It's not one piece as an individual.
It's all of them together

Speaker 2 make Led Zeppelin. Yes.

Speaker 1 All of them together. So if you're lucky, and in this new world, you know, you got the stones playing into their 80s.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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 pair.

Speaker 1 What's going on with rock bands in their 50s and beyond is there's no prior parallel in 100 plus years of recorded music.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
But it's like.

Speaker 1 the actual sort of the nuts and bolts of how to hang together. So for us, it's been really,

Speaker 1 I call it the family of the band.

Speaker 1 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 has 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 well that's cool well also probably just growing up and being more mature and appreciative you're really going on a limb there with the growing up

Speaker 1 A little bit of gratitude. Perpetual adolescence over here.

Speaker 2 Well, that is part of the fun, though.

Speaker 1 I mean, you do wake up. You actually have to really.
And you know, it's funny, even when I say something like this, there's already some guy getting ready to go on Reddit.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, look at the stones. I saw the stones at Coda at the Circuit of the Americas here in Austin a couple of years ago.
It was fucking insane. It's insane.

Speaker 2 It 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, it felt like I was on a drug.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, it's just, there's a lot of people that I don't freak out. 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.

Speaker 2 But seeing Mick Jagger, I didn't even get to meet him. But seeing him on the stage, I'm like, this is nuts.
That's really Mick Jagger.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, the mythical part. See, in his case, the mythical part of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is integrated.

Speaker 1 They become the avatar. Right.
They're the living example of where it actually works. My argument is against those people where it doesn't work.

Speaker 1 You know, Larry 465 on the internet, who thinks he's lord of like, you know, DD or something. You know what I mean? That's where I get kind of like, what is that?

Speaker 1 I get the other thing, you know, because

Speaker 1 whether it's,

Speaker 1 you know, what do you mean by Larry 4?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Or like a Reddit forum or something.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Even though they're 80 and you, who's been around everybody, goes, holy shit, there it is.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just the fact that he was alive.

Speaker 1 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. That type of stuff.

Speaker 1 Like, what was it like to live in those times? Because there's the myth and then there's the reality. Right.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the thing is real. The mythology is real.
It's like,

Speaker 1 it has truth or resonance in it.

Speaker 1 It's all this other culture that's risen up where we're supposed to pay tribute, and that goes back to the podcast, is like we're paying tribute to people who haven't done shit. Right.

Speaker 1 I want to pay tribute to people who've actually done something. Yes.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I just, the other day, I interviewed Susan Olson, who was Cindy Brady. Okay.
The Brady Bunch. Wow.
Okay. The Brady Bunch is, you know, as far as the original show, I think, has been over for 50 years.

Speaker 1 Right. I think so.
Right? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 Every interview you look up on YouTube on Susan Olson, it's like it's just getting her to regurgitate the same stories.

Speaker 1 And she did the Brady Bunch when she was like seven to twelve years old or something. Wow.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Speaker 2 You're Gilligan for life.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 My thing is, no, you're not Gilligan for life.

Speaker 1 So that's that's what and then 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?

Speaker 1 What do you do with yourself? Like, how do you pick yourself up off the ground? Right. How do you deal with typecasting?

Speaker 1 How do you navigate the fact that as you walk through the airport, you're not Susan Olson, you're Cindy Brady?

Speaker 2 Do people still recognize her?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Wow.

Speaker 2 It was Barbara Eden, I Dream of Jeannie. That was another one.
Yeah. People get locked into who they are.
Al Bundy.

Speaker 1 I'm still the rat in the cage guy.

Speaker 1 I deal with that too, you know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it's such a good jam. It's such a good jam.

Speaker 2 That's a fucking great song. Thank you.
That's on the Green Room playlist. That fucking song rules, dude.

Speaker 1 That was a good one.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 All-time. 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.

Speaker 1 And I wanted a different song to be the first song. And the guy from the record company called, who's now passed away.

Speaker 1 His name was Phil Cordrer, a lovely guy and he 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 creations

Speaker 2 yeah like you you're never going to get to see how your songs impacted other people the way it impacted them you know 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 a different way.

Speaker 2 They just get the first, they get the full version done. They're like, holy shit.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Like getting so high that I could hear it.

Speaker 2 As if it was somebody else singing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And at some point I became conscious of my unconscious ability to put messages inside. Sorry, you look at me like I'm crazy.

Speaker 2 No, no, no.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating. So imagine, I'll try to reset up the scenario.
Okay.

Speaker 1 You write a song, you think it's about something.

Speaker 1 You're sure of it. In fact, you would tell people, sorry, this horrible plague I got.

Speaker 2 No worries.

Speaker 1 You're convinced that this song that you've written is about... your ex-girlfriend.

Speaker 1 And then when you're super high, you listen and you can hear yourself actually singing about something else.

Speaker 1 So now

Speaker 1 you have a conscious understanding of something your unconscious has implanted in the art.

Speaker 1 And once I became conscious of the process, I became more aware of how to consciously implant messages in my music.

Speaker 2 Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just operate on layers.
You put stuff in there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Can you give me an example?

Speaker 1 The conscious mind wants to believe the songs about your ex-girlfriend, but what it's really about is about being abandoned by your mother.

Speaker 1 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%.

Speaker 1 And then I listen 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 it was about my mother.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And then once I have that kind of agape moment of like, holy shit, then I go back and listen to the music sober and I can totally hear it.

Speaker 1 And then where it gets really weird is people would come up to me and say, that song,

Speaker 1 that reminded me of my relationship with my mother. Thank you.
That healed, like people would come up and respond to me on the unconscious recognition, not what I thought I wrote the song about.

Speaker 1 That blew my mind. That there was this other person in there layer at

Speaker 1 and i and i gained a lot more respect for for like i guess you would call it the shamanic aspects of art

Speaker 1 i don't know if you ever read castinatus but you know do you read castanatus maybe i did in high school yeah

Speaker 1 it was kind of a thing for our generation everybody kind of read castanatus yeah and it's still to this day debated about whether castanatus

Speaker 1 was a real thing it was a documentary it was true stories or made up and did don juan the the shaman was he a real person is there really a don juan there's a lot of debate even i think there's even been new York Times articles written about it

Speaker 1 about whether Castanatis' whole thing is a fraud and all this stuff. And I think Castanatis may even still be alive.

Speaker 1 Really? That might be one to look up sometime. But

Speaker 1 anyway, I gained a lot more respect that artists have the ability to communicate at subconscious levels that they're not even aware of.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that resonates the way I'm explaining it, but

Speaker 1 it moved something to me, allowed me to be a better artist.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating.

Speaker 2 And it also, like, you can never guess what kind of an impact your work, 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 very complex layered message in it, and it just makes people go, oh my God.

Speaker 2 That's like one of the ultimate expressions of art, right? Like something that just

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, if a great song comes on, you're working out, you're like, fuck yeah, like, you feel it, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's riffs. There's guitar riffs, I swear to God, make you stronger.
Like, Tool, Prison Sex.

Speaker 1 Bono, damn.

Speaker 2 That song makes you just fucking raw. You know, there's like something to it.
It gives you energy. It's like a drug.

Speaker 2 It's an audio drug. It fires up your synapses in this very strange way.

Speaker 1 The best explanation I ever heard that resonated with me was, you know,

Speaker 1 the entire universe is constructed on waves.

Speaker 1 Light, everything has to do with waves. So music is the closest thing to the foundational aspects of the universe.

Speaker 2 That's okay. I know what you're saying.
Yeah, well, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 Because it penetrates the cellular.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Well, people that, you know, go on these shamanic journeys, the ayahuasca journeys, they play these songs that accompany the ayahuasca journey. They're called Icaros.

Speaker 2 And when you...

Speaker 1 Are they traditional ayahuasca songs? Yes.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 the psychedelic experience dances to those songs and it gets guided by those songs and it's really wild.

Speaker 2 Like really wild.

Speaker 2 And then you go, oh, this is like a technology to interface with the psychedelic experience.

Speaker 1 Okay, but you're hitting on exactly what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 get drawn into it.

Speaker 1 Like, wow.

Speaker 2 I remember the first time I saw Mr. Jones and me.

Speaker 2 First time I saw County Crows play that song. The way he was like dancing around in the living room.
I'm like, that guy is so free. Like, I want to be free like that.

Speaker 2 You know, I really remember thinking that because it was so real. He was so in the moment while he was singing that song.
And I had Adam in here and I asked him about it. I'm like, what, what is that?

Speaker 2 Like, you are fucking locked in, man. Like, I remember being a kid.
I was probably like 23 or something like that when that song came out.

Speaker 2 And I was in my apartment in New York watching it, going, fuck, watching on MTV, going, this guy's just so loose, man. He's so free.

Speaker 2 I remember thinking, I want to be able to perform like that, whatever I do. I want to feel like, how's that, what's that zone that he's in?

Speaker 1 Well, part of that is,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 a lot of shamanic work involves the breath.

Speaker 1 So think a singer is rhythmically breathing and rhythmically chanting.

Speaker 1 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 win-hoff, wim-hoff? You know, that, yeah, I do that for two hours.

Speaker 1 right i mean i'm totally asphyxiated the entire time right 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 i do

Speaker 1 i do i do to a certain extent yeah do you build up to like a concert performance like how do you have to it to a certain extent yeah i don't know uh i don't know how to explain it like i if if you if like I'm off cycle right now.

Speaker 1 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 and prep up, then I can

Speaker 2 so it's like a muscle, like something, yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't understand, I don't understand it. It's almost like a trained fury.

Speaker 1 Like you learn to not go too far.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like they'll come in, they'll gas in a minute because they're so jacked. Right.
Sometimes you see a guy getting a rain and they're just like, like,

Speaker 1 and they gas in a minute. And I know how to see that because of watching wrestlers gas.
You know,

Speaker 1 you learn the body language of somebody getting gassed. You know, they kind of start to lose their posture and a little goosey, right?

Speaker 2 They get loose.

Speaker 1 Okay, same thing for a singer. I mean, you can gas in the first three minutes

Speaker 1 and you're dead. Oh, no.
What are you going to do?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 87%. Like there's the magical line.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what fighting. It's the same kind of thing.
You don't go 100%.

Speaker 1 On the zen of that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Some of the best fighters, they'll punch like 50, 60%.

Speaker 2 And that way they could put volume on you.

Speaker 1 See, I can't imagine being in there and somebody's on the other side wanting to kill you and be able to be like, I'm going to just going to work my way through these.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 I did, yeah. I worked with a lady.
It's a funny story. I worked with a lady at one point.
They hooked me up with somebody from the opera. Oh, perfect.
And she came to my house.

Speaker 1 Well, no, it's actually, she was great, but she came to my house and she said, oh, you sing totally wrong.

Speaker 1 And, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So eventually I found a woman who was used to working with rock singers and she explained to me a bunch of theories about, I think her memory, I think she said the human body has 11 folds of tissue in the throat.

Speaker 1 And if rock singers don't warm up all that tissue, that's how they damage their singing. And she'd also worked with Stephen Tyler.

Speaker 1 And she said, the thing about rock singers is you guys sing wrong because that's the way you want to sound.

Speaker 1 It's part of your gimmick, you know? Right, right. I'm sure Stephen Tyler and myself, we could sing like choir boys if we wanted to, but that's not what attracts people to us.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's the sound that people are attracted to with rock singers, and even the gentleman you play before. I mean, he's totally abusing his voice.
That is not proper singing.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right, right, right. And there's, there's, there's, there's physical techniques to create that sound.

Speaker 1 Like, there's, there's

Speaker 1 Axel Rose, for example, like, you know, he sings a very particular way, the way he uses his throat in a particular way that makes it, you would say that's the axle sound or whatever.

Speaker 1 It's not natural, but it's awesome when he does it. It's kind of the thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that has got to be really hard to maintain. I saw them play in Athens, Greece,

Speaker 2 and they did a three-hour show like two years ago. Yeah.
At like, how old is he, 60?

Speaker 1 60-something? I think Axel's about seven years older than me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because I remember

Speaker 2 Welcome to the Jungle Jungle was huge when I was in high school or just out of high school.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 89.

Speaker 1 88? 89?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I remember watching the music video. Remember when he had that teased up hair back in the back area? Oh, yeah, the huge hair.
That was the poison hair era.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so singing like that is

Speaker 1 it's it's it's wrong, but that's what makes it right. Right.

Speaker 2 Well, you can't say what's wrong or what's right. It's just like what's sustaining.

Speaker 1 Trust me, no one can tell you.

Speaker 1 You're surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of opinions.

Speaker 1 I was told when I was very young, that voice you sing with will never sell records. Ever.

Speaker 1 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 the way that my voice is the reason the people who do like my music.
Like my music.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 It's a weird, it's like a

Speaker 1 like, what do you do with that?

Speaker 2 Well, you can't do it for other people.

Speaker 1 No, no, but

Speaker 1 I sing the way I sing, and it's like, it's like, don't sing that way. Well, I don't.

Speaker 2 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 it the way they want it to. No, there's going to be people who like it the way

Speaker 1 you like it.

Speaker 2 You just have to find out what that thing is. And you have to figure, like, you have to,

Speaker 2 whatever your internal compass is that guides you towards this particular style, this particular way of expressing yourself, it has to be authentic.

Speaker 1 Well, singing against a wall of of guitars is a particular skill set.

Speaker 1 It's like singing against three airline jets at the same time. Right, right, right.

Speaker 1 We have three guitars in our band playing at the same time.

Speaker 1 So my voice has to cut like a razor through that wall of noise.

Speaker 2 Voices are...

Speaker 2 Some voices are so fucking compelling. Like you listen to them, like Amy Winehouse, perfect example.
You hear her sing once, and you're just like, whoa.

Speaker 2 Like, whoa, there's something about it.

Speaker 1 Okay, so back to my argument about the unconscious thing. Certain voices convey an unconscious information.
Yeah. Tonally,

Speaker 1 it registers in the public as a certain authority or wisdom or

Speaker 1 sorrow. Yeah.
Like

Speaker 1 some voices just have so much sorrow in them. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like for our generation, 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

Speaker 1 great connectivity to what we were experiencing as latchkey kids. Yes.

Speaker 1 You know? Yeah. I don't want to say tantrum-ish, but it had a certain kind of

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It had a sorrow somehow in it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And authenticity. Like Kurt was the master of authenticity.
He was. He changed.
he killed hairbands.

Speaker 1 He really did. He really did.

Speaker 2 He killed hairbands.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I go, what is it?

Speaker 2 He's like, this is Nirvana. And he plays me Nirvana for the first time over his house.

Speaker 1 I was like, holy shit. Like, this is crazy.
Yeah. It was for our generation,

Speaker 1 it was

Speaker 1 the door getting kicked open. Yes.
Everything after it just got easier.

Speaker 2 But that's the thing, these unique artists that come along and transform the medium. You know, like I said, Lenny Bruce, Pryor, then Kinnison.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What is happening? This is crazy.

Speaker 1 What strikes me, and this is a business point, but that's where all the money is.

Speaker 1 And yet the music business is not to nurture those talents. In fact, the music business works against those talents.
It's almost like if they blow up their business model, so it becomes inconvenient.

Speaker 2 Well, what do you think the music business nurtures?

Speaker 1 Control.

Speaker 1 They want control.

Speaker 1 The biggest problem I've seen in the music business is they don't understand why musicians can't be as supple in the business part of the equation as a guy who makes cookies or something.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And that's, and none of that is what attracts the public to great artists. Right.

Speaker 1 It's like completely counterintuitive. So they sit there and you just end up as a name on a piece of paper or an inconvenient problem.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I've said this a few times publicly, but it bears repeating here: I've been in meetings where

Speaker 1 they're complaining to me about me.

Speaker 2 Like, how so? Like, what do they say?

Speaker 1 That basically 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 their business.

Speaker 1 And could I temper those things more in the direction that they want?

Speaker 2 Like, what particularly were they talking about?

Speaker 1 You name it.

Speaker 2 Like, give me one example.

Speaker 1 It could be anything from,

Speaker 1 you know, you're too negative to your songs are too weird to your voice is too weird to your guitars are too loud.

Speaker 2 They just want to sell more algorithms.

Speaker 1 Yes. So to them, it's an intellectual thing.
Oh, wow. You'd be like, Joe, if you could just make more jokes about the economy,

Speaker 1 you'd sell two stadiums, not just one.

Speaker 2 This is what happened with Dave Chappelle while he left the Chappelle show. Same exact kind of thing.

Speaker 2 You know, a different version of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's this weird thing where you're sitting there and then you're like,

Speaker 1 And what I always try to tell them is, I didn't get here with that type of thinking.

Speaker 1 And I do think, and I, 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.

Speaker 1 And somewhere along the way, between the second and the fourth album, decided that the compromise had a bigger yield.

Speaker 1 And off goes the organic switch, and on goes the, oh, you want me to be the next-door neighbor. Right.
Or, you know,

Speaker 2 romantic movie ballads.

Speaker 1 Whatever.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Aerosmith went through that for a while.

Speaker 1 But to their credit, and I didn't understand at the time, 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You remember Adam Sandler used to come out and he would do that, he would do like, I think it was Adam Sandler. We could do like the seven Aerosmith ballads in a row.

Speaker 1 And it was like, I'm crying, I'm really crying.

Speaker 1 You know, they would just play, and he'd just sing all those songs like Stephen Tyler.

Speaker 1 But I think looking back,

Speaker 1 it was really smart what they did.

Speaker 2 Well, also, maybe they're allowed to do whatever they want to do. Like, artists changed their whole thing.
Like, they went from Mama Kin to, you know, some of those ballads.

Speaker 1 As far as I know,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 your herstute

Speaker 1 assistant over there could probably check, but I think Aerosmith is the biggest selling American rock band of all time. Whoa.

Speaker 1 So, if you're Aerosmith, did they make a wrong turn? My argument would be no.

Speaker 2 No, it's not a wrong turn. I mean, obviously, you're allowed to change what you're interested in, too.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, like there's a lot of bands that sort of reinvent themselves with almost every album. Like my friend Sturgil Simpson, he sort of reinvents himself with every album.
Every album is different.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Like, he just gets bored with stuff.

Speaker 2 Aerosmith is 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.

Speaker 1 Whew.

Speaker 1 So, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's pretty good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's what I'm saying is

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, then there's weird cases like David Lee Roth leaves Van Halen, Sammy Hagar takes over, and it becomes

Speaker 2 bigger in a totally different way.

Speaker 1 But if you talk to the average Van Halen fan, they want to hear the David Lee Roth Van Halen.

Speaker 2 Well, especially if you grew up with that. The thing is, like, what you started out with is always what you want to see.

Speaker 1 Right, but I'm saying

Speaker 1 there's no obvious argument of which is superior. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 But some people love the Sammy Hagar version better.

Speaker 1 You know, it's okay. You're allowed to.

Speaker 2 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 for the

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They say, this sucks. And you're like, this is fucking amazing.
How can you say this sucks?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Nickelback took a lot of shit.

Speaker 1 That's kind of my point,

Speaker 1 is they've survived it, and now here comes

Speaker 1 the inevitable moment of like, oh, yeah, it was really good, and they wrote a lot of things. They had some fucking great songs.

Speaker 2 That rock star song, that's a great song.

Speaker 2 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 them. And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 You seem at peace with that. I am.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I felt like I was being sort of made to pay for the sins of the people who were no longer here. Because particularly in Gen X, we've had so many great talents die.

Speaker 2 Oh, so you felt like you weren't getting the credit you deserve because you survived?

Speaker 1 There was part of that.

Speaker 1 That's the, let's call it the simpler version. The more complicated version is,

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 generations move with a collective energy. And by the mid-2000s,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 people start to put on you a set of cultural and generational expectations that you don't want.

Speaker 1 You become the emblem of like the living version of what doesn't work.

Speaker 1 But the other guys or girls aren't there

Speaker 1 to grow old with you and

Speaker 1 receive the same discernment or criticism. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Like one time a guy tried to goad me into an argument of comparing myself to one of the top people and of musical people in my generation.

Speaker 1 I don't want to say who, but you'll understand the flow on this.

Speaker 1 And they said, can you compare, you know, who do do you think is better? So, it was like a real cheese setup. And

Speaker 1 I said, well, I think they were more talented.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I'm here.

Speaker 2 Well, it's also like you can't deny that Smashing Pumpkins didn't have some fucking bangers.

Speaker 2 Like, anybody who denies that.

Speaker 1 Well, Joe, that's a whole other episode because the band is probably one of the most misunderstood.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 What do you think that's from?

Speaker 1 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 Samuda.

Speaker 1 You understand?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Does that make sense? Yeah. Most people who are attracted to fame, they want to run towards the shiny part of it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So it kind of worked in the 90s when everybody was rolling and moving along. Well, here comes Napster.
The music business craters.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 How do you navigate that? Like, does that... Did that trouble you at the time? Was it difficult

Speaker 2 as an artist?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Jesus.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And my response every time was that, I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 And I used to quote Popeye, I am what I am.

Speaker 1 I'm here. I'm here because I'm a freak.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I'm the last person that's going to fucking bow down for that shit.

Speaker 2 Fuck off. Well, the beautiful thing is, too, you always had an audience.

Speaker 1 So you didn't have to. Well, there is that.

Speaker 1 But at the end of the day, how can I explain it?

Speaker 1 Everybody in the music business will tell you your value is exponentially related to your success.

Speaker 1 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 you lose value.

Speaker 1 Your aging becomes part of that loss of value. How do you maintain value, relevancy? You no longer have the record business that used to exist.
You no longer have the structure.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then somehow I woke up in the middle of it and I thought, no, no, that's actually not my value.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Trust me, I've been getting that message since I was a little kid, including for my own family. But I know what I represent represents something that's valuable.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 The way I would say it in a crass way is I reasserted my brand Not the brand I was being handed in in 40 plus brand You know, you're an oldies band. You're an oldies artist.
You play these songs.

Speaker 2 Well, you just kept and reinforced your true voice.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But I had to live it.

Speaker 2 What had brought you to the dance in the first place?

Speaker 1 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 got to understand.

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The guy who can get shit done, the guy who can get you canceled, the guy who can fucking make stuff happen. Yeah.
And that guy tells you, here's your value.

Speaker 1 It's awfully hard to go back to Chicago, Illinois, and convince yourself that he's wrong. Right.

Speaker 1 Right. There's nobody, nobody, and who do you talk to about it?

Speaker 2 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, and you're not the new thing anymore.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then someone's coming along. Listen, you've got to listen to us.

Speaker 2 We know how you can be back on top.

Speaker 1 I don't read comments, but I have a social media person who occasionally relays what she sees. Oh, boy.

Speaker 1 Well, we kind of keep it on the positive.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I asked her, I said, why don't you poke around with these people and ask them what's interesting?

Speaker 1 And my favorite comment, and it became kind of common amongst the feedback that she got, was, I like him because

Speaker 1 other people told me not to like him.

Speaker 1 But what that says to me, anybody can interpret the way they want, but what it said to me is we need people in the zeitgeist of the culture who don't represent the collective yes.

Speaker 1 There's always room for somebody on the corner saying no.

Speaker 1 And that goes back to Lenny Bruce. As crazy as all that was, you still need that guy going, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm saying? And you can call him whatever, disruptors or whatever.

Speaker 2 Authentic voices.

Speaker 1 That sounds nicer than disruptor. I like disruptor because

Speaker 1 that's what I do.

Speaker 2 Well, it does disrupt, but it disrupts because it's an authentic voice and because it bucks the idea of creating some manufactured thing for the market.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, what's the problem?

Speaker 2 Also, you made great songs.

Speaker 1 But the idea that most people are in the business for the music.

Speaker 2 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 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

Speaker 1 um having heard you many times do commentary for ufc

Speaker 1 What I love about you as a commentator is you take me into the passion passion of the moment, the feeling of like two warriors are going to enter this thing and only one can emerge.

Speaker 1 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 a, it's sort of a life-affirming, like, here we are, you know, and you, you know, because you're behind the scenes, the training that went in, the injuries the guy had to overcome, or the girl or whatever, or the crazy girlfriend, and they got, you know, the training camp and all of it.

Speaker 1 And there it is, the clash. It's no different for the musician.
It's like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 I sit in a room for a year and make songs with only three, four people hearing them.

Speaker 1 And I have to believe that I'm going to walk into my version of that octagon, and what I'm going to offer is not going to get me killed.

Speaker 2 What is it like when you release an album? What is that feeling like?

Speaker 1 I just, I just, I want to curl up in a ball and just die because here it comes.

Speaker 1 Here it comes. And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.
But I've had more negative experiences than positive ones.

Speaker 2 But positive from the fans,

Speaker 2 is it non-fans

Speaker 2 that are the problem? It's like the people who are on the outside peering in.

Speaker 1 20 years ago, I would have given you a different answer. Now nobody's the problem.
It's ultimately the game is you versus yourself.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 at the arena. It's

Speaker 1 nothing to do with them. Because the one thing you do know is if you find that value that makes a wheel turn, that prints cash,

Speaker 1 they don't care who you are. They'll push you right back under the spotlight.

Speaker 1 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 sucker's game.

Speaker 2 So it's you just trying to create the best version of what you have inside your head.

Speaker 1 Let's do a simple math. And anybody wants to have a problem with it, I don't care.

Speaker 1 My band,

Speaker 1 in over 30 years, has been in the top 0.1

Speaker 1 percentile of touring artists in the world.

Speaker 1 Period.

Speaker 1 You would think that if you were in that business and you were at that elite level, you would think the whole business would rally around you and try to get you to do more and make more.

Speaker 1 Not even close to that. There is no system by which you get that kind of support.
You are completely on your own.

Speaker 2 But is that universal with success?

Speaker 1 I think so.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Most bands are, 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 or what you think is going to work.

Speaker 1 But I hear about the modern pop stars, I mean, I hear stuff that sounds, it sounds like they're running a a Fortune 500 company because

Speaker 1 they are literally printing cash.

Speaker 2 Also, the percentage that the actual artists get versus what they should be getting.

Speaker 1 It hurts.

Speaker 2 It's crazy. It hurts.
It's crazy because they do everything.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's some bizarre vampires that have attached themselves to the veins.

Speaker 1 It's changing. I think in the next 20 years, you're going to see

Speaker 1 a very different music business.

Speaker 1 In what way? Peer-to-peer

Speaker 1 ability to create commerce.

Speaker 2 Right. And then also the fact that you could release things so like Oliver Anthony, he put out that Rich Man North of Richmond, and then it's fucking gigantic.
100 million views on YouTube.

Speaker 2 It's like, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 right? So that's what I'm saying. That's coming for music.

Speaker 1 This is coming for music.

Speaker 2 Right. Well, that's good.

Speaker 1 Yes, I think ultimately will benefit the fans of the artist, and they'll get more of what they want and less of what they don't want.

Speaker 1 Hear, here.

Speaker 1 All right. Let's wrap it up.

Speaker 2 Thank you, sir. Appreciate you very much.
Always fun to talk to you. Thank you, Jesus.
Tell everybody what your podcast is called, where they can get it.

Speaker 1 The Magnificent Others, you can get it on YouTube for

Speaker 2 you, sir. Appreciate it.
Thanks so much. Bye, everybody.