#2232 - Josh Brolin

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!

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

Speaker 1 Hey, oh, little boat peep.

Speaker 2 She needed the money.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh,

Speaker 1 remember how great that was, man? Oh, yeah. When I first met him, it was like one of those weird things where, you know, you know, I mean, you've met a lot of famous people.

Speaker 1 Some of them, you meet them, you're like, fucking really. Bummer.
It's It's weird. Oh, this bummer, too.
Yeah, the bummer ones. That sucks.
When you meet someone, they suck.

Speaker 1 You're like, oh, no, you suck. I know, exactly.
Some people just not talk. They should only do what they do.
Act and sing.

Speaker 2 But then you get to know them. Like, I don't know, like, I'm pretty good at this now where you don't, where you see people that you, like, looked up to.

Speaker 1 Like, Eddie Vetter, I had a pretty close relationship with Eddie Vetter.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I was drinking and then I would grab his balls and I would do shit like that. And then it was like, I don't want him around.

Speaker 1 I don't want Josh around.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I don't like that anymore.
I don't want my, you know, and I think Sean Penn appreciated shit like that. Like, wow, somebody has the balls.

Speaker 2 It's not even a little chaos. It's like somebody has the balls to like call me on my shit.
Like, not everybody's afraid of me.

Speaker 1 Oh, right. Yeah, he's probably used to people constantly being afraid of me.
Yeah. Like, oh, I can't fuck with him.
Right. Well, he does wild shit.

Speaker 1 Like, when he went down to fucking Mexico and met with El Chapo, like, Jesus Christ, dude that's fucking wild and I do think that that's organic but I think that that's also

Speaker 2 you just have that thing where you just go you know what shit's getting boring right the weather's just too fucking nice here weather's too nice I'm too famous let's go meet a mobster yeah

Speaker 1 let's go fuck some shit up let's do something let's do something let's do something really rare resonate for at least a year yeah that whole El Chapo thing was so crazy though because that kind of is one of the things that got him caught it it was right Yeah, yeah, because they, you know, they track your cell phone data.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They know where you go.
And if you're bringing your fucking cell phone, you're basically bringing a tracking device to go find one of the most notorious gangsters alive today.

Speaker 2 The most notorious. I mean,

Speaker 2 who was the guy with the football team back in the day?

Speaker 1 Pablo Escobar? Think about it.

Speaker 2 It's our days. This time's Pablo Escobar.
Yeah. And Sean Penn.

Speaker 1 Golden Hangs Out.

Speaker 2 Spicoli.

Speaker 2 Because, you know what, man?

Speaker 2 Hey, who wants to come with me and find this motherfucker?

Speaker 1 Did he go solo?

Speaker 1 I think so. I think he went solo.
Well, he knew that lady who was like a reporter. You know, there was like this really hot Mexican reporter.
Mexican girl. Yeah.
Yeah, he knew her. Was he dating her?

Speaker 1 I don't know. But I think she had a thing with El Chapo.

Speaker 2 After that? No. Did Sean introduce them properly?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I think he knew her and she knew him.
She knew El Chapo. Oh, right.
That's how he got.

Speaker 1 And El Chapo's like, I like the meat. It's piccoli.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I really enjoyed you in colors. And then the next thing you know.

Speaker 2 What's the most dangerous thing that you do now? What do you think?

Speaker 1 Dangerous thing?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like we're talking about Sean going out on a limb. Do you find it necessary to go out and do things that like challenge you in a way? Yes.
Challenge your psyche?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 In what way?

Speaker 1 Elk hunting is probably the most exciting.

Speaker 2 What is? Elk hunting. Elk hunting.
Elk hunting. Why? Because it puts you in danger?

Speaker 1 Well, no, it's just really difficult. You know, you're bow hunting in the mountains.
Right. And it's just you in the mountains and just fucking mountains.

Speaker 2 Do you stay up there for days and days and days? And do you quarter your

Speaker 1 kill? Pack it out, yeah.

Speaker 2 See, that's a different thing.

Speaker 2 You know, people say, I don't like hunt. Personally, I grew up in a very red part of California.
Everybody hunts that I grew up with.

Speaker 2 And I would shoot and I would hunt with my dad and I would like fucking think about it and dream about it for three weeks.

Speaker 1 Oh yeah, I love it. I love it.
I love eating.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. I'm saying that I would like

Speaker 1 to spiral. Oh, you get negative with it.

Speaker 2 Not even, it was negative. Yeah, I guess it would be negative, but it would like made me think of like the kids that were going like, mom,

Speaker 2 mom, are you there? And I just killed the mother. It's like the Bambi kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 But I eat meat.

Speaker 2 So that hypocritical thing of like, I don't want to kill anything, but I want you to kill it for me so I can eat it because I really like the way it tastes.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the anthropomorphization of animals that Disney has kind of done a number on people with. You know, like Bambi and Yogi Bear and all that kind of shit.
Cartoons and teddy bears.

Speaker 1 And we have a very, you know, living in

Speaker 1 when you live in urban areas and cities and people, you know, streets and concrete and people just get a very distorted idea of nature and our relationship with nature.

Speaker 1 And when you're a kid and you're just, these are sweet, cute things, and then all of a sudden you're supposed to go murder one. Like it's all fucked up.

Speaker 1 But it's what's fucked up is the cartoons. I mean, they're cute and everything.

Speaker 2 Because they depict it in a way, how?

Speaker 1 Well, it's just completely distorted. You have these animals that are talking to each other and the hunters are always assholes.
And like

Speaker 1 if it wasn't for hunters, there would be no humans. We'd have never made it this far.
If we were all just eating fucking tubers and grapes and shit, we would have never made it.

Speaker 2 Do you like garbanzo beans?

Speaker 1 They're not bad.

Speaker 2 I don't prefer them. Have you ever hunted one? No.

Speaker 1 It's fucking wild. How do you do that?

Speaker 2 You take a bunch of acid.

Speaker 1 You go to an Italian restaurant. You take a bunch of acid.

Speaker 1 It's possible.

Speaker 2 Yeah, what about the sexual connotations of Disney? Like, you know, did you ever hear that thing that Disney, Walt Disney had, like, the biggest porn collection of all time?

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 That's what I heard. I don't know how much of it is true.

Speaker 1 Have you ever seen how?

Speaker 2 There's like the Rod Stewart thing and there's the

Speaker 1 thing? Right.

Speaker 2 I don't know how much true.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of people that are like really into kids' stuff and like sweet, wholesome stuff,

Speaker 1 have that other kind of slant. Yeah, they need something

Speaker 1 flip. Maybe.
Maybe it's a cover. Or maybe it's like they're so cutesy with the fucking completely wholesome stuff that they have to balance it out with some bonded shit.
Some fucked up shit.

Speaker 1 Some guys getting kicked in the nuts and balls.

Speaker 2 Why is it that people feel that people in Hollywood and Texans are like that? Like, I know people that have moved to Texas and they've called me.

Speaker 2 There was one guy that I used to work out with in Venice.

Speaker 2 And he started, he moved here and he called me and he'd be like, hey, man, you know, the list is coming out. And I'd go, what list?

Speaker 1 And he goes, you know, the list.

Speaker 2 The list. And I go, am I on the list?

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 2 And he goes, no.

Speaker 2 You're clean.

Speaker 1 You're good.

Speaker 2 But I know you know who's on the list.

Speaker 2 I'm glad I know I didn't do anything wrong, even though I didn't do anything wrong. And I said, but why are you,

Speaker 2 like a two-fold thing. Why are you under the impression that everybody in Hollywood lives under the same roof? Like we all live in the same apartment complex.
It's they.

Speaker 1 It's they. Yeah, they.
It's they. They are out there.

Speaker 2 They're out there doing that thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then what would why how could you possibly think that that a guy who's a trainer at Gold's and this episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog i think we can all agree that eating highly processed food for every meal isn't optimal so why is processed food the status quo for dog food because that's what kibble is an ultra processed food but a healthy alternative exists the farmer's dog they make fresh food for dogs and what does it look like real meat and vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients and help avoid any of the bad stuff that comes with ultra processing and it's not just random ingredients thrown together.

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Rated M for mature. Ennis would have the list.

Speaker 1 Why was he chosen? Well, he goes on Reddit.

Speaker 1 That's how you get the list.

Speaker 1 That's how you get the list.

Speaker 2 I still am waiting for the list. Yeah.
Well, I think I'm going to see him when I'm here. We started communicating again.

Speaker 1 Well, when you have things like the Epstein client list that doesn't get released, then it fuels these kind of conspiracy theories about there being a list.

Speaker 2 So why is that list not released?

Speaker 1 That's a very good question. Who has that list?

Speaker 1 Well, for sure, someone has the list. Elaine Maxwell's in jail, right? So she must have talked.
Like, there must have been conversations. Right.

Speaker 1 And there must be a bunch of very powerful people that are on that list. And, you know.

Speaker 2 Are all the powerful people in cahoots?

Speaker 2 Something that I learned, like,

Speaker 2 when I played W,

Speaker 2 I played a senator who played W.

Speaker 1 What is it like playing a guy who's still alive? Did you meet with him or

Speaker 2 scary? I mean, no, I wanted to.

Speaker 1 Did you ever meet him?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 God, that's weird, right?

Speaker 2 I had the opportunity to meet him afterwards, and there was something about him that was more. I remember when he was like giving candy to Michelle Obama and all that?

Speaker 2 And it was like a really friendly, kind of a mischievous thing. And I was like, I would like to meet him.
And then I saw his paintings of his dogs, and I said, I don't. want to meet him.

Speaker 2 I just don't. Like, it was something attractive for a moment.

Speaker 1 But for the first time, paintings that got you?

Speaker 2 I don't know, and I love paintings. I don't know what it was, but you didn't like the paintings? No, it's not that I didn't like the paintings.

Speaker 1 There's something in the paintings.

Speaker 2 I don't know what it was.

Speaker 1 You know what? Something in the paintings is I killed a million people with fake weapons of mass destruction.

Speaker 1 You know, we had a fake story, and I used that story to justify an invasion of a country, and now a million people are dead. So that's the question.

Speaker 1 And I'm haunted every night to paint dogs that are staring like that.

Speaker 2 Like your face right now is exactly how every eye is in his dog's paintings. It's so funny.

Speaker 1 That guy must be medicated. They must put him on some things so he could sleep.

Speaker 2 Is that that look?

Speaker 2 Does he put into his dog's eyes the look that he has always, or at least that he feels that he has?

Speaker 1 Like there's a haunted

Speaker 2 real look.

Speaker 1 It's behind his eyes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 How he sees the world, how he's experiencing it.

Speaker 1 What is it like running around knowing that you did that? Not just that you did that, but that there's no culpability. Like no one went to jail for that.
No one even got brought up on charges.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what I was bringing up because when I would meet these people, I would, you know, I went to the Senate floor and I met a lot of these people and then I met a lot of rich people, which is when I met Trump actually, the 21 Club, back when I knew a lot about him, I was fascinated by the whole thing.

Speaker 1 What's the 21 Club?

Speaker 2 21 Club is a place that he used to go a lot. And it was like, you know, yeah, you have a chance to meet this billionaire, this billionaire, and then Trump and the target.

Speaker 1 Eyes wide shut type shit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So he,

Speaker 2 what was I going to say? Is he, oh, meeting these people, especially getting them drunk, you know, where people get super honest. Right.
You know, where they go,

Speaker 2 you know what, man, I trust you.

Speaker 1 I trust you. And you're like, here it comes.
Here it comes.

Speaker 2 Whereas before that, they were like, you know, I'm not sure. And I just, what I think is, you know, and then they finally go, I just fucked her.
I fucked her.

Speaker 1 You know, and you're like, oh, or they tell you what's going on.

Speaker 2 But the thing that I learned, and I'm really curious about, like what we were talking about, Hollywood and the perception of them all being in it together, is don't you think the rivalries and all that, not entirely, but that all politicians are basically under the same roof, they all know what each other's doing, and that there's more of an agenda of power to keep the public

Speaker 2 thinking a certain way?

Speaker 2 Well, there's

Speaker 1 certainly a benefit to that. Of course there is.
Yeah, there's a benefit to that. And then there's also

Speaker 1 the underlying factor is money, of course. Like, there's so much money and influence.
There's so many special interest groups. There's so many lobbyists.
That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 So many massive corporations that are donating to campaigns.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So there's always going to be this desire to sort of

Speaker 1 color

Speaker 1 a certain life. Pacify.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then treat you like you're a baby so they can continue making insane amounts of money.

Speaker 1 Like if you're someone like Nancy Pelosi. And you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars and you make $170,000 a year and there's no fucking explanation.
Yeah. Like just that alone.

Speaker 1 Like you have to kind of keep people in the dark. You have to kind of like keep dancing and otherwise you're going to jail.

Speaker 1 Like someone's going to start investigating and they got to go, hey, what you did is not legal and you're going to be in real trouble.

Speaker 2 What's your relationship like with money?

Speaker 1 In what way?

Speaker 2 Just in what you've made a certain amount of money for a long time. I don't think about it.

Speaker 1 You don't think about it? No, no. What I like about money is to not think about it.

Speaker 2 That's what I like. Do you like spending it?

Speaker 1 I like buying stuff. Me too.

Speaker 2 I have a nice car.

Speaker 1 Drove here. I drove a 69 Camaro.
See, but that's different.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I like that. That's fucking different.
That's character.

Speaker 1 I like fun stuff, but

Speaker 1 for the most part, I'm not interested in it as a goal.

Speaker 1 What I like about money is not having to think about it. My friend Brian Callen said this to me once.

Speaker 1 He said, he goes, real freedom is when you can go to a restaurant and not worry about what anything costs. He's like, everything else is bullshit.
It is. And it really is.
Everything else is bullshit.

Speaker 1 When you can just go to a restaurant, get a nice steak, you know, order a bottle of wine, have a good time, and not think about the bill.

Speaker 2 What I think happens is, and be grateful for it.

Speaker 2 And to remind yourself that that exists to be grateful for and not be taken advantage of.

Speaker 2 And I think that's one of the hardest things about money slash power is you start treating things as if they're underneath you.

Speaker 1 Ooh. You know?

Speaker 2 Where you go, God, I'm so glad I can go anywhere in the world right now and get a meal, and I don't have to think about how am I going to pay for this.

Speaker 2 Am I going to be in debt on my credit card? But when you start saying, excuse me,

Speaker 2 I said 204 degrees, not 190.

Speaker 2 Read my lip.

Speaker 1 That's just gross.

Speaker 2 It is gross, but it happens.

Speaker 1 That's just taking advantage of this relationship that everyone knows where service people have to be nicer than they really would be normally, like a regular person. So people don't.

Speaker 2 Hoping for a tip, hoping for one of your many hundreds

Speaker 2 of thousands or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 1 It's disgusting. It's a gross way to treat people.
But some people want to get rich so they could do that to people.

Speaker 1 Maybe someone did it to them when they were younger and they're like, I can't wait to do this to other people.

Speaker 2 I mean, when you said nice car, and you were like, I thought you were going to say, I was like, oh, please, no. Like Lamborghini or something.

Speaker 1 No, I don't have any of those.

Speaker 1 No, I like muscle cars. I like old muscle cars.
That's my favorite.

Speaker 2 That's like me at 37 Knucklehead. And people say, oh, is that an affectation? I know you're friends with Mamoa or whatever.

Speaker 2 I go, no, man, I've been riding motorcycles since I was three and a half years old.

Speaker 1 They're fun.

Speaker 2 They're not only fun, there's something on us, if you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is the only book that's ever been written that kind of gets close to the kind of spiritual place.

Speaker 2 If you're a true motorcyclist, whether you're riding with your son or whether you're riding with a grid of guys or whatever, that beautiful,

Speaker 2 thunderous hum when you're in it, when you're in a group of guys who really know what they're doing and you're an absolute fucking sink.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yes, your arms are up here and your arms are pretty numb at that point, but you're fucking soaring. You're an eagle on a fucking jet stream.

Speaker 1 You ever heard Hunter S. Thompson,

Speaker 1 you know that documentary they did, Gonzo? Yeah.

Speaker 1 In the documentary, the very beginning, he talks about riding a motorcycle. Oh, I don't remember that.

Speaker 1 I don't remember that. Oh, it's fucking great.
See if you can find that. He talks about riding a motorcycle, about like that the lines begin to blur,

Speaker 1 and you just you're just on the edge and how alive you are.

Speaker 2 It's a fucking we don't have to get into this book right away, but there was I wrote, they came to me, it's the only story that I wrote that somebody asked me to write for the book.

Speaker 2 And they were like, well, you're really into motorcycles. Why don't you write a story about motorcycles?

Speaker 2 And I tried, and it was just bad and bad, and everything I wrote was like so forced and bullshit. And finally, I said, I can't do it.
I'm not going to write it.

Speaker 2 And the minute I said, I'm not going to do this, I started writing.

Speaker 1 It just kind of started to come out, and it's good do you write by hand I do yeah mostly do you feel more of a connection when you write by hand

Speaker 2 any which way whether it's on the phone whether you know I remember people saying like I write you know by hand I handwrite because it's it's the way it used to be and I was like yeah it also used to be under candlelight which fucked your eyes out

Speaker 2 also be used to be people had slaves yeah polished and also you can only get around by painting on caves and shit why don't you go paint on a cave tell me a story try to get it published yeah get a witch doctor I don't

Speaker 2 know. How it comes out.
I think real writing is anywhere, anytime, however you can get it out. I don't think there's a muse that's needed.
I think it's work, man.

Speaker 1 It is work.

Speaker 1 I think the muse is like

Speaker 1 a concept, right? Have you ever read Pressfield's The War of Art? Yeah, of course. Great book.
Great book.

Speaker 1 I think he's right, though, when he says you summon the muse when you sit down to work, but that's also just like an intention thing.

Speaker 1 Like you have so much time and effort put on a thing, and when you do that, your your mind gets more in sync with creativity yeah but if you treat it like it's a muse it actually does work like if you show up every day and like say click into that and pay respect to the muse i'm sitting here and i'm ready to write and i'm a professional and i'm ready to go and treat it like you're summoning the moon the muse it actually works it there actually is

Speaker 1 an effect that happens i don't know if there's an actual muse, but you can understand why someone would think that there's a muse because

Speaker 2 why do people chant? Why do people meditate? Why do people that? That's the muse. Whatever the muse is, it's like talking about God.
What's God? I don't know. It depends on who you're talking to.

Speaker 2 God is a feeling.

Speaker 2 God is something that

Speaker 2 fucking thing that keeps you inspired, that keeps the gasoline at a high octane.

Speaker 1 Well, it's something that's how I see it.

Speaker 1 It's something that gets you away from your ego, like with writing, something that gets you away from your ego and into your mind, into your consciousness, into like your perceptions of things, your ability to express it.

Speaker 1 And just a it's a focus thing and the more you focus on it the more that muscle grows the more you get adapted to it because your ego is worried about how people are going to perceive you right and that's not right yeah

Speaker 1 you want to look cool you want to look cool people are like fuck yeah yeah yeah I read that book that you wrote man holy shit I had no idea you're amazing that's the grossest conversation ever

Speaker 1 cocktail party in Hollywood some guy comes up to you and tells you you're amazing

Speaker 1 you are a genius I had and it's always with those

Speaker 1 I had no idea meanwhile that guy's trying to sell you on some multi-level marketing scheme or something there's something he's trying to tap into you with

Speaker 2 i want to buy that book i want to option your book

Speaker 1 i also have a script i'd love you to see yeah

Speaker 1 what's it is it a disney

Speaker 1 is it about

Speaker 1 animals talking i really love about living in texas is there's no hollywood there's no show business i don't have to deal with any of these people with like alternative agendas

Speaker 2 we just moved to sit we just i want to go back to that but we just moved to Santa Barbara.

Speaker 1 Santa Barbara is awesome.

Speaker 2 Santa Barbara.

Speaker 1 It's funny. I love it.

Speaker 2 Why does everybody fucking think that? It is.

Speaker 1 It's Montecito. I love it out there.
So it's pretty. Because it's beautiful.

Speaker 2 Because it's beautiful. What about the people?

Speaker 1 I'm a little elitist. There's a lot of elitists.

Speaker 1 So this is a perfect place for me.

Speaker 2 So I grew up in Santa Barbara.

Speaker 2 I was in Pasarobles, which is ranch country, about two hours above Santa Barbara. And then we moved to Santa Barbara when I was 11, and it was Montecito, but it was a very different Montecito.

Speaker 2 Like, yes, there were a couple of rich people. Yes, my dad was doing okay by then.
He had done Marcus Welby. He did,

Speaker 2 at that time, he did Amityville Horror. So he had a little bit of money, but we bought, you know, what would now be a $35 million home in Montecito.
Right. He bought for $600,000.

Speaker 2 Same fucking house. Right, right.
Do you know what I mean? So it was a different Montecito. And then whatever, you know, group I grew up with.
But I went to, the point is, I went to jail there a lot.

Speaker 1 I just did.

Speaker 2 I just liked it.

Speaker 2 Instead of the museum, I went to jail. I was like, no, mom, I'm going to go to jail today.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 so in LA, Venice Beach, I love Venice Beach, but Venice Beach has even changed. You know, used to know everybody, and everybody kind of coexisted beautifully.

Speaker 2 And then Venice Beach changed. It got totally randomly violent.

Speaker 2 Little kids, very dangerous. Little kids.
Okay, so we moved to Malibu. We're close to Laird.
I know Laird and Gabby and all that thing.

Speaker 1 thing.

Speaker 2 But it never landed. So we were always talking about moving, even though we were kind of building a house and we were finalizing everything.
We're always talking. We talk about Texas.

Speaker 2 My mom's from Texas. We were talking about East Coast.
We were talking about Europe, all these places, but never Santa Barbara. I would never move back to Santa Barbara.

Speaker 2 Because by the way, honey, if we move to Santa Barbara, which you love so much and you think is so beautiful, our little girls will eventually for sure go to prison.

Speaker 2 That was in my mind.

Speaker 1 Why? Because in my mind, I had built totally. Huh.

Speaker 2 Most of my friends that grew up in Montecedo are dead. Like 36 out of 50.

Speaker 1 Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they all died.
From what?

Speaker 2 Heroin epidemic, punk rock. Oh, God.
Driving accidents. 36 out of 50.
Out of 50.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Best friend Jason Sears, who was the lead singer of Rich Kids on LSD, RKL, which was a big punk band that influenced a bunch of people. Nirvana,

Speaker 2 you know, Pearl Jam, all these people.

Speaker 1 Rich Kids on LSD is a great name for a a LSD. You should look it up.
Can you look it up?

Speaker 2 Jason Sears, Rich Kids on LSD. We got a tattoo at the same time.
I got a tattoo from Freddie Negretti that's gone now because I removed it.

Speaker 2 But it was a big Jesus with blood coming out of the hands. And Jason that same night,

Speaker 2 got the same night, got eat shit on his ass.

Speaker 2 See if you can find Jason's ass that says eat shit on it.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 You're going to put that in? Jason Sears, eat shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Where is it? Oh, you got to just keep looking. Yeah, it'll be there.

Speaker 2 So why was I? Oh, so eventually,

Speaker 2 when we finally said, look, we're not moving. We should be grateful.
We're not grateful enough. That's the problem.
We're not grateful enough. But Malibu just didn't kind of sit.

Speaker 2 And then one day I'm like, what didn't you like about Malibu? I love Malibu. It's just remote.
You know, like, we already are remote in Pasarobles.

Speaker 2 We have a place in Pasarobles, a place where I grew up. Not the ranch I grew up, it's about three miles down the road, but that's remote and a remote that I love.
I love remote, but I love extremes.

Speaker 2 I don't want to be sort of next to Santa Monica, and it's 20 miles away, and it takes two and a half hours to get there. Right.
You and I were talking about that.

Speaker 2 I don't want to sit in traffic for half my life. Right.
I just don't want to.

Speaker 2 If I'm going to be somewhere, I want to be somewhere. So Santa Barbara represented a place where you kind of had your own piece of property, but everything was 10 minutes away.

Speaker 2 You got dance class for the girls. You got soccer.
You got this. Right.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So that was the thing.

Speaker 2 But never, never was I going to go back to Santa Barbara. I finally put on Zillow Santa Barbara.
One house came up, and that's the house that we bought, and it was Joe Walsh's old house.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Which is amazing.
That's incredible. Incredible.
That's amazing. Which I was stoked.

Speaker 2 And I asked him,

Speaker 2 anyway, I have to finish the story is that I was so freaked out.

Speaker 2 About moving up to Santa Barbara. I still hadn't made the kind of transition that I contracted a mild case of Bell's palsy.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 like literally was stressing out. My wife was like, You gotta, and I'm not a stress guy.
And she was like, You gotta mellow the fuck out.

Speaker 2 I'm like, Yeah, but you don't know what's gonna happen when we move up here.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's gonna be a face darling.

Speaker 2 So, literally, I'm washing my face and I'm doing this, and it just started going

Speaker 1 when was this

Speaker 2 four months ago?

Speaker 1 Okay, that's a side effect of the vaccine, too. That's one of the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've also heard that speech impediments have also heard a lot of things: kids taking vaccines yeah things happening

Speaker 1 yeah yeah

Speaker 1 that vaccine in particular that one the mRNA one yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I know quite a few people that develop bells palsy from them well whatever you want to call are you serious yeah facial paralysis yeah I know two people specifically one developed facial like droopy face because when my older kids went away when my older kids were young there were what 17 vaccinations and now that my younger kids are young there's 50 72 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a series of them, but it's ultimately 72 shots. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a scary prospect, man.

Speaker 1 Well, the fucked up thing is, if you talk about it, you're an anti-vaxxer and you're a curious person. You can talk about anything.

Speaker 1 But that's a big one because they've done a really good job of demonizing anyone who questions a medicine that might be correlated with a bunch of fucking serious diseases. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And for whatever reason,

Speaker 1 they've just done a great job of gaslighting people and scaring the shit out of people by labeling anybody who did it. Like, look what they did to Jenny McCarthy.

Speaker 1 Do you remember when Jenny McCarthy had a kid and her kid had autism, and she thought that autism had possibly come from vaccines? And they basically ran her out of Hollywood.

Speaker 2 But why would they do that? What's the reason? Money. What do they benefit money from?

Speaker 1 Well, the thing is,

Speaker 1 during the Reagan administration,

Speaker 1 the vaccine companies, pharmaceutical drug companies that are making vaccines, they said, we are unable to make these vaccines if we're liable.

Speaker 1 Because if we're liable, there's too many lawsuits that are going to come our way because vaccines cannot be completely safe and effective just by virtue of the mechanism in which they work.

Speaker 1 You know, you have an irritant, you have this

Speaker 1 virus, this dead virus. Your body sees the aluminum or whatever it is.
It reacts to that in a negative way and it finds the dead virus. It develops antibodies just by the way they work.

Speaker 1 When you vaccinate an enormous amount of people, you're going to have a certain amount of people that have a negative reaction.

Speaker 1 If we have lawsuits for every person that has a negative reaction, we're going to go out of business.

Speaker 1 So they made them immune. They made them immune.
And you know what happened? Immediately they're like, well, you need a vaccine for this and you need to go vaccine for that.

Speaker 1 And they knowing that there was no drawback. Hepatitis B vaccines.
Right. Babies.
Right when you're born. Right when you're born.
Right when you're born.

Speaker 1 You know, there's also doctors that say it doesn't even really work for babies, but what you're doing is

Speaker 1 you're conditioning the parents to accept the fact that your child is going to get regularly vaccinated.

Speaker 1 My doctor, fortunately, our pediatrician wanted to put the kids on

Speaker 1 a different schedule, a slower schedule, and he didn't want them to have any vaccines until they were two.

Speaker 2 Your doctor in California? Yes.

Speaker 1 And he, but it was not like a quack. He was like, I think the way to do it, I mean, there's a schedule of vaccines your kids have to get unless you have religious exemption.

Speaker 2 But let's not assault your children with a potential poison because everybody is different. If I take a bong hit, I might end up under the table.

Speaker 2 If you take a bong hit, you actually may feel smarter and clearer. I remember Dean Potter, who was a climber, and he was like, I stopped smoking pot for four months.

Speaker 2 But when I started smoking pot, I could feel the hold at 2,000 feet. Oh, yeah.
Sheer cliff, nothing underneath, no ropes, but I felt more confident.

Speaker 2 And for me, I go, if I took a bong hit up there, I could be four feet up and be freaking out.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 It's different for everybody.

Speaker 2 Because everybody has different brains. It's like psychopharmaceuticals.
Let's just give them all lithium or let's give them all that. You have to experiment.

Speaker 2 And the idea of experimenting with that shit is super scary. It is.

Speaker 1 It is super scary. And it's also super scary when you're not liable for any of the repercussions.
And you're just pushing it on people because you're a corporation.

Speaker 1 And corporations just want to make money. Their thing is just unlimited growth.
They just They have an obligation to their shareholders.

Speaker 1 Every quarter, they want to make more money, and they just keep ramping it up.

Speaker 1 I remember

Speaker 2 Seinfeld talking about that. He was like, I remember back in the 70s and comedy, you know, green rooms and all that, and we'd all be fucking with each other.

Speaker 2 And it had never had anything to do with money because nobody was really making money. Like, money, money.

Speaker 2 Like, tons of money. It was just about what set are you going to do? What are you trying out? Right.
Are you going to fail? Are you not going to fail?

Speaker 2 But it was this community again. And I think that things have grown into, not that I wanted to talk about this or I even thought about it before, but the money thing is a very interesting thing to me.

Speaker 2 And if you want to take it back to the book, which we can talk about later,

Speaker 2 it's like the anti-celebrity. It's like, how do you stay grounded? How do you stay accountable? And why would you stay accountable?

Speaker 2 Because I actually give a fuck about people instead of just being in it for myself.

Speaker 1 And I think that's the difference. Well, I think one of the things that happens to people with money is you didn't have money when you were young.

Speaker 1 Now all of a sudden you have money and you get really scared about losing that money.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you get scared it's going to go away because now you realize, oh my god, it's so much better to not have to worry about your bills and so much better to have some money to buy things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, totally. And then you start thinking only about money and you start making decisions only for money.

Speaker 1 And then you go down the weird road. And it, you know, really distorts artists.

Speaker 1 It fucks a lot of people up. You know, you see it in a lot of bands.
They start making like poppy songs when they used to be like raw and gritty when they were younger.

Speaker 1 They used to be, it used to be like authentic. And then all of a sudden they're making like theme songs for films.

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Speaker 1 It's like weird fucking romance songs.

Speaker 2 For Bronx.

Speaker 1 Like Aerosmith went through a bunch of that shit. Totally.
Where to me, as an Aerosmith, you know, lover as a kid, to see them, you know, go from like dream on to like the shit they were

Speaker 2 with like drug addiction and all that, I wonder if that's like if the parallel is i went back to heroin at that point because i just couldn't fucking deal do you know what i mean i think it's when they get off heroin and they start wanting to make money in order to have

Speaker 2 i need to make some money i spent all my fucking money but look at i wonder if there's any connection like with remember philip seymour hoffman like one of the greatest actors that ever lived and i've known his mother since i was doing theater in rochester new york it was like a 20 year old 21 year old and she would come up to me she'd say i think you're a fine actor and i go oh thank you very much And

Speaker 2 she goes, you know, my son just moved to New York. He like, he's, he wants to be an actor.

Speaker 1 And I said, oh, what's his name? Phil. Phil's his name.
Oh, well, tell Phil good luck.

Speaker 2 Good luck to Phil. And, you know, it's like anybody who wants to be an actor just the odds of it happening.
It's just not going to happen. And then Phil became this guy,

Speaker 2 22 years of sobriety, who had an inkling in the beginning and said, you know what? I don't want this to control like my thing, so I'm not going to do do it.

Speaker 2 I'm going to give everything I am to acting and I'm going to try to make the best career, theater career, movie career, whatever.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, and I, again, I have it in the book where I see him on the street and I'm crazy and I've gotten into a fight with my wife and I'm walking down Columbus Avenue and I have cords on.

Speaker 2 I have no shoes. I have no shirt.
On my way, I'm out of my fucking head. And I look to my left and I see Nick Nolte at a cafe and we lock eyes and I've never met Nick Nolte.

Speaker 2 I've never seen him and it will happen that I actually will have a relationship with him later on but we lock eyes and the moment is he's seeing in me what he used to be or seeing in me what I'm to become I'm seeing in him what I'm to become later right right then I see Philip Seymour Hoffman who's standing there talking I go hey Phil it's Josh

Speaker 1 What's up?

Speaker 1 You're doing so well, man. Fuck.
Good for you, dude.

Speaker 2 No shirt.

Speaker 2 No shirt, no shoes.

Speaker 2 And he's standing there with one foot pointed toward me and another foot pointed in the direction that he wants to go. You know how people stand there and they're like, could you see you, man?

Speaker 1 Yeah, good.

Speaker 1 Good. Oh, no.

Speaker 2 Now, how is that the guy that died of a heroin overdose?

Speaker 1 Did he get injured?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 No, he just got back on it. Because sometimes what happens is people get injured.

Speaker 2 I know, and they have surgery and then they have back and then they get on

Speaker 1 oxycotton. Me too.

Speaker 2 I know a lot of people that that's kind of been the trajectory of that.

Speaker 1 No back pain, nothing.

Speaker 2 To me, there's another parallel, and the parallel is I just want to make money finally. I'm sick of doing independence.
I'm sick of doing this and not making any money.

Speaker 2 And then you start doing, you know, whatever he was, hunger games.

Speaker 1 And then you feel hollow. And then you want to feel like.

Speaker 1 You want to numb yourself up because you feel like a whore. You feel like a whore.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like there's one thing about actually finding solace and saying, hey, man, I'm older. I'm going to do this movie.
I get it.

Speaker 2 I would like, you know, I got college coming up for my kids, and you justify it in a way that's okay.

Speaker 2 And then there's one thing about you've identified yourself so much as an artist that to release yourself from that identity in other people's minds, again, going back to the ego, that you just fucks you up.

Speaker 1 Right. You just can't deal with it.
And then you want to escape from your reality. Exactly.
Yeah, you want to numb yourself. Yeah.
Well, that is a real fucking thing, man.

Speaker 1 And if you've ever done a project where it's like really, I did a really bad sitcom once and uh I remember you acted it oh yeah yeah it was terrible and I remember while I was doing it I was just imagining like what if this is my life what if this stupid piece of shit sitcom goes for like 10 years

Speaker 1 and I have to keep you because there's sitcoms that inexplicably are very successful or were in the 90s yeah and very successful and they were terrible terrible they were terrible people love them well people want to be numbing ice cream they just want to slack jaw sit in front of the computer or whatever the TV and eat spaghetti's just fucking numb themselves to some mundane bullshit.

Speaker 1 And if you're doing that kind of a thing, you live in hell. And a lot of those people that do those things, they wind up doing drugs because they just feel very lost.

Speaker 2 If you do that and you're doing, you live in hell.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you live in hell.

Speaker 2 Which it is to me.

Speaker 1 It sounds crazy to a person listening. Oh, you're making $50,000 a week.
How are you living? You're living in hell. Like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 Most people would be like, that's great. That would be amazing.

Speaker 1 But if you want to do a thing, if like you want to be a great comic or you want to be a great actor and you're doing-you have to have incentives.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 You have to have, you want to, you have to want to create something really good.

Speaker 1 And when you can't create something really good and you're just doing it for money, you feel trapped and you feel like shit. And then you have to reward yourself for this stupid fucking thing you do.

Speaker 1 So what do you do? You go out and buy a nice Mercedes. You get a fucking house in Malibu.
Now you have a large monthly nut that you have to cover.

Speaker 1 But when you take people over your house, like, look how long I'm living. Look at this ocean view.

Speaker 2 Come on. How much of this house do you use? Nothing.

Speaker 1 Almost nothing.

Speaker 1 I always say to my friends, my young comic friends that are coming up, your house is just your house.

Speaker 1 I remember when I first got a nice apartment or moved to North Hollywood in 1994, I got a loft apartment and a pool table in it and a nice stereo. And I was like, this is incredible.

Speaker 1 I have a nice apartment. This is amazing.
And then after a while, it just became my house. It became where I live.
And I realized at that moment, I'm like, oh.

Speaker 1 This is all it's all the same feeling. Like, all you need in a house is it to be comfortable.
Yeah. You need a a TV in a kitchen.

Speaker 1 It's not supposed to.

Speaker 2 It's the place that you sleep.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's a place where you relax.

Speaker 2 It's a place where you live the entirety of your life.

Speaker 1 You can relax almost anywhere that's comfortable and safe. That's all you need.
And then everything else is kind of bullshit.

Speaker 1 It's kind of the things that you get for your money. It's like there's a lot of things that people spend a lot of money on, and they're not really worth it.
You don't really get anything out of it.

Speaker 2 That's why it was interesting walking in here and, you know, man cave, I hate that fucking term, man cave, man cave

Speaker 1 you know it's a gay cave you know well it's a man cave because no woman would ever let me decorate this place this way but it's not that no woman wouldn't like it I think there's there's some well my wife likes it when she comes here she just doesn't want to live in it she doesn't want to live do you want to live in it No, I wouldn't want to live here.

Speaker 1 But I might, if I was like a single guy, I might decorate my house like this.

Speaker 2 But it's things, the point is, is that there's things when I walked in here, it made me smile because I started seeing things that inspire.

Speaker 2 And you like to surround yourself like if somebody comes in and does an interior design of your office,

Speaker 1 ugh. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Ugh. And they go, we brought in this amazing fabric from Paris.

Speaker 2 And you go, but I don't like it. And I remember when we were doing our house, we were like, I said, look, man, you can get things from Target.

Speaker 2 I don't want to feel that people have to take, I don't want anybody to feel that they have to take their shoes off. That's what I don't.
I want them to feel that they can scuff up the floor

Speaker 2 because that's the mark that they made when they walked in my house. And maybe I don't even like the scuff.
I don't like that they walked so heavy. Yeah.
But it's their mark. We are leaving our mark.

Speaker 2 So I said, that's how I filmed this table.

Speaker 1 That's why this table has all these stains on it. Seriously, it's good.
It has character.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a lot. And that's the thing is like when we built the ranch, I said, there were shelves.
I said, I want linoleum, or what is it, Famica? Linoleum on the shelves.

Speaker 2 And we have 150-year-old barnwood, but along with linoleum, because

Speaker 2 linoleum reminds me of like trailer parks and shit. it just makes me fucking smile so i saw this thing when i walked in because i have one

Speaker 2 and that is ralph stedman's print that you oh okay and here's the story so so ralph steadman johnny depp gave me ralph steadman's number because he was close with hunter and my son was graduating my son's an artist and he was obsessed with stedman right and i called ralph steadman he says hello and i said hey i said listen uh you don't know me i'm a friend of johnny's and this i said you know, my son's graduating.

Speaker 2 And like the greatest gift I could ever get him, and this is not just to throw Stedman under the bus because it comes full circle. But he says, I said, my son's graduating.

Speaker 2 Can you do like a little thing? I'll pay you for it. Can you do, just draw a little thing for him for his graduation?

Speaker 1 There was a long, long pause, and he goes, Why the fuck would I do that?

Speaker 2 And so that conversation went nowhere.

Speaker 1 I was like, what the fuck? You're an asshole.

Speaker 2 And then 20 years went went past, and my book is designed by one of his proteges.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 And then, so Joey Feldman, he called me one day, and he said,

Speaker 2 he said, Ralph wants to send you a print. And I said, no way.
Does he know that we have like a history? And he said, no, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 So I sent him a voice memo of the history, and I said, I never held it against you. I totally understand it, especially to somebody.
So he sent me one for my son and one for me.

Speaker 1 And I have it hanging up in my house. That's cool.

Speaker 2 I love having that thing, man.

Speaker 1 He was an interesting artist. He is an interesting artist.
Yeah, I should say. He is.

Speaker 1 But I mean, the stuff that he did, it's like that's also in that Gonzo documentary where it talks about how Hunter gave him acid and mushrooms and he just started fucking writing drawings like really crazy shit.

Speaker 1 And like

Speaker 1 the thing for, do you remember the thing he did for

Speaker 1 the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved.

Speaker 2 It was like the first thing, wasn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think that was how they they got together. You can find that.
The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a really good article, actually. Whoa, that was fast, dude.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But look at that. That article is fucking amazing.

Speaker 2 It's an amazing article.

Speaker 2 And I don't think that they spent a lot of time together, but I think... Honoring him? No, I don't.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of it in the documentary where they're hanging out together. Really? Yeah, he picks him up at the airport and his VW bug.

Speaker 2 No, I know it exists, but I don't think that they spent the amount of time that you would think, given that they collaborated so much.

Speaker 2 I think Ralph was back in Britain, and Hunter was.

Speaker 2 I know, look at that.

Speaker 1 Look at that.

Speaker 2 See, that's the kind of shit. Do you miss that? Like, it's part of driving your car and all that.

Speaker 1 That's the thing from the put your headphones off for a second. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Take the thing out for an honest run down the coast.

Speaker 2 I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head.

Speaker 2 It's so good.

Speaker 2 A wavering alcoholic off the wagon, but in a matter of minutes, I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, surf booming up on the seawall, and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz.

Speaker 2 There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down around the curves.

Speaker 2 I love seeing the sand and the road.

Speaker 2 Then into second gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. 35, 45.

Speaker 2 Then into third, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loading.

Speaker 2 Now there's no sound except the wind.

Speaker 2 The needle leans down on a hundred. The wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the center line.
No room at all for mistakes.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 2 That's when the strange music starts.

Speaker 1 That's great.

Speaker 2 The edge.

Speaker 2 There is no honest way to explain it, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Speaker 2 The others, the living, are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it and then pulled back or slowed down.

Speaker 2 But the edge is still out there

Speaker 1 that guy was fucking amazing it's great it was great it's fucking amazing what do you love about his writing and what type like fear and loathing well I was just reading Hell's Angels recently actually that's the book that I go back to most well that's really him when he was starting right that was the beginning of the sort of gonzo journalism stuff because he was kind of mixing in fiction with reality.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the things that pissed off the Hells Angels is that he took a lot of liberties with the truth to try to like paint a picture. Right.

Speaker 2 Which was his deal, which was his style later on, is like exaggerating and kind of romancing his own life.

Speaker 1 Oh, he was out of his fucking mind.

Speaker 2 Out of his mind, but he was also one of the most brilliant technical writers that ever was. And that's what's forgotten.

Speaker 2 Like, even people talk about Kerouac, and Kerouac was like, you know, he wrote on the road, and he was on the road, and it was the Hunter S. Thompson type of thing.

Speaker 2 And you're like, you know, he edited on the road for seven years.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 And nobody knows that because Kerouac kind of like, you know, he put forth this thing of like first thought, best thought, don't edit, don't. It was, again, a whole like, it's total horseshit.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 That's why I say it goes back to writers. It's a labor.
Yeah. You sit down and you write all the fucking time.

Speaker 1 My friend Ari on his laptop, he's got a little piece of paper above the keyboard that says the first draft of everything is shit.

Speaker 1 It's true.

Speaker 1 It's Hemingway. Yeah, Hemingway wrote that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, his first book, Hemingway's first book, was lost by his wife.

Speaker 1 What? Yeah. She lost it? Yeah,

Speaker 2 she had grabbed it for him and was on a train, and then she went to the bathroom and actually left the satchel on the seat. And when she came out of the bathroom, it was gone.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 Never to be found again.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know. Can you imagine?

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. All that work.
Did Did that marriage work out? I don't think so. I bet she did it on purpose, that bitch.

Speaker 1 I bet she did it on purpose, that bitch. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I love writing. I love when someone's a really good writer because you just get these like moments where you're like, yes.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Oh, that's it.
You know, these moments, and Hunter had a lot of those moments where you're like, God damn it, that's good.

Speaker 2 You have so many people who were great young, and I know that there's a danger and a chaos within like the vortex within which they lived, but it couldn't survive. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 When Hunter got, he was just too fucking alcoholic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And Dylan Thomas became too fucking alcoholic.

Speaker 2 And it's one of those things that you go, you were literally writing.

Speaker 2 things that aren't possible. You were putting together like wordsmithing things that are

Speaker 2 magic. Magic.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Man.

Speaker 2 How he was describing it.

Speaker 1 It's that thing.

Speaker 2 Whatever it is you're doing, how do you get to that place which most people can't touch?

Speaker 1 Well, you can't neglect your physical health. That's the problem: is that in this chase for the muse, in this dance you do with the drugs and the alcohol and the wild writing.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I'm sure you've seen Hunter S. Thompson's.
There's a thing that a reporter hung out with Hunter S. Thompson and detailed what a day in the life of Hunter S.
Thompson is. Who was it?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 there's a band called Beardy Man, and Beardy Man took me and Greg Fitzsimmons reading off Hunter S. Thompson's routine, his daily routine before he writes, and made a song out of it.

Speaker 1 It's fucking incredible. See if you can find that.
Because the routine was so insane. And this was like really what he would do.
He'd wake up

Speaker 1 at two in the afternoon. No.
No. Chaos.
Okay, great. Full-on chaos.
Here, let's

Speaker 1 put the headphones back.

Speaker 1 Started from the beginning.

Speaker 2 Beardy Man.

Speaker 1 3 p.m. Rise.
Shiva's Regal with morning papers.

Speaker 1 3:45, cocaine.

Speaker 1 Another glass of Shivas. Another Dunhill.
4.05 PM. By the way, first cup of coffee and a Dunhill.
4.15. Cocaine.

Speaker 1 Another Dunhill. 4.30.
Cocaine. Cocaine.

Speaker 1 Coffee, Dunhills.

Speaker 1 545.

Speaker 1 6 o'clock. Smoking grass.
Take the edge off the day.

Speaker 1 7 p.m.

Speaker 1 Three hours into it. Three hours in.
Lit.

Speaker 1 7 p.m.

Speaker 1 Lunch. Margaritas.
Lorge.

Speaker 1 Getting cocaine.

Speaker 1 Okay. 9 p.m.
Start starting cocaine seriously.

Speaker 1 7 p.m. Drops acid.

Speaker 1 11 p.m.

Speaker 1 I don't know what that is. Cocaine and grass.

Speaker 1 Cocaine, etc., etc. 12 midnight.

Speaker 1 Hunter S. Thompson is ready to rise.

Speaker 1 6 a.m.

Speaker 1 In the hot tub with champagne.

Speaker 1 6 a.m.

Speaker 1 In the hot tub with champagne.

Speaker 1 6 a.m.

Speaker 1 In the hot tub with champagne.

Speaker 1 So this is like a electronic dance music song that plays in clubs sometimes.

Speaker 2 Super funny. When did you do that?

Speaker 1 Oh, it was a long time ago. Many years ago.
Did you ever live like that? No, no. I've never even done Coke.
Wow. Yeah, I've never fucked around with Coke.
I like psychedelics. I like weed.

Speaker 1 I like a little alcohol every now and then, but I don't fuck around with anything that's going to kill me. I'm not interested.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I'm not interested in anything that helps my ego, that boosts it up, makes me fearless.

Speaker 1 I'm not interested in any of that.

Speaker 1 I like things that make me scared. I like things that make me nervous.

Speaker 1 That's what I was talking about early on.

Speaker 1 I like to feel vulnerable. I like it.

Speaker 2 You like to challenge yourself.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And your perception and how you perceive certain things.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 I like voluntary adversity,

Speaker 1 physical voluntary adversity, but also I think mental voluntary adversity. And I think that's what I like about psychedelics.

Speaker 1 I think there's like a, you have to go on like a journey and you can't control it.

Speaker 1 It takes you somewhere. And then when you're back, you realize like, you ain't shit.

Speaker 1 Just get all that ego stuff out of your system, relax, and just be appreciative and enjoy life and try to spread as much positivity as you can. That's what you're here for.

Speaker 1 Do your best at everything you do. That's what you're here for.

Speaker 2 And how do you find yourself doing that once you're not on it?

Speaker 2 The incorporation of it into your life. Just remember.

Speaker 1 You know, I just,

Speaker 1 there's profound moments where I think it'll change you forever. And those, if you can hold on to them, some people don't hold on to them, but it's a matter of intention, right?

Speaker 1 It's a matter of like, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to be better at life? Well, if you're trying to be better at life, you can hold on to it.

Speaker 1 If you're not, if you're just trying to like be the man or, you know, exactly, you know, and get all the accolades or, you know, win a fucking Grammy or whatever you're trying to do.

Speaker 1 Like, if that's your real goal, like, you're going to get lost because it's a shitty goal.

Speaker 2 How old were you when you took a a hallucinator for the first time? 30. I was 13.

Speaker 1 Whoa, so that's a little too early. I wouldn't recommend that.
I wouldn't recommend it either, but it changed my life.

Speaker 2 And I had, by the way, I took it twice in a 24-hour period. Whoa.
So I took it 13, had the greatest trip ever, like still affected by it. Wow.
And then I took it again that night and went to hell.

Speaker 1 Oh, no. I don't know.
You got a cocky?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 Psychedelics want to bring you down a notch. It just did what it did.
It did.

Speaker 2 It did. And I truly believe that psychedelics, I don't do psychedelics anymore, but I think I did.
But I do breath work. I do shit like that.
And you go, can you get there?

Speaker 2 And I go, yeah, I've had some of the most amazing hallucinations I've ever had, most profound hallucinations I've ever had. Holotropic breathing,

Speaker 2 breath work with Laird going off. And if you do it long enough, you just reach a place.
Or if you're in a sauna at 240 degrees for an hour doing breath work,

Speaker 2 you're going to go places. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No doubt.

Speaker 1 Sensory deprivation tank, you don't need anything.

Speaker 1 You trip balls.

Speaker 2 If they could give you in a pill form what the experience you get from a psych from a sensory deprivation tank it would be a very popular drug yeah and it's completely safe and a productive drug yes very productive so there's sensory you say the sensory deprivation tank but i just saw you can see it online or whatever where people literally put a thing they go into a room and there's silence it's not like a um you know where they don't talk a meditation retreat or whatever but they literally go into a room by themselves they don't see anybody else they put a thick mask on and they're in for four days

Speaker 2 Five days. Have you seen that?

Speaker 1 I have heard of people doing stuff like that. Yeah.
What about that? Well, I think being alone with your thoughts is uncomfortable for people, and I think a lot of people avoid that.

Speaker 1 They avoid really thinking, and you're forced to really think

Speaker 1 when you're in those sort of situations.

Speaker 1 You're forced to be alone with your thoughts.

Speaker 1 Scary. Well, we're always distracted.
We're distracted.

Speaker 1 People and devices and input and news and social media. And there's like constantly stuff coming in.

Speaker 1 and sometimes you don't like how do I feel about everything like what do I even know have I ever really considered things like you need time alone you need time to think you know that's what I really like about that's why I work out by myself that's why I like you work out by yourself yeah yeah unless it's like having a trainer I mean, I've had a lot of trainers.

Speaker 1 I appreciate them for technical advice and stuff like that, but this is a meditative aspect of working out by myself that I think is very important. It's also discipline.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't, it's easy to go somewhere and a guy tells you, okay, 10 reps, but I write my own workouts out.

Speaker 2 Based on that day.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I know what I want to do.

Speaker 1 I'm pretty good at it.

Speaker 2 It's funny. I haven't heard many people say that, but

Speaker 2 I feel, and it's not just some bullshit, like affectation, rebellious thing.

Speaker 2 When I'm with it, and I appreciate trainers too, and I've had, I've worked with some great trainers, but they make me want to do less.

Speaker 2 Why? You know, they go, do 10. And I go, but why?

Speaker 1 Oh, no, you're one of those guys.

Speaker 2 I'm one of those assholes.

Speaker 1 I'm one of those assholes. Why?

Speaker 2 But I will actually push myself and say 12, just for a random word, a random number, 12 is my limit. I'm good at pushing myself to 15.
Or Jeff Cavallari, do you know who that is? No. Athlete X.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard of that guy.

Speaker 2 Super smart guy. And we would go back and forth, and I'd be like, look, if I'm in, if I'm, you know, if I'm at my last three reps, why do we have to rest for two minutes? Like, who said that?

Speaker 2 Who made that up? Is it really a recovery thing, two minutes before you can go back into 12 more reps?

Speaker 2 What if we just rest 30 seconds and then you're right back into that thing almost immediately and those are the things that are tearing the tissues and growing the muscle and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 So just experimenting with it all. Again, this all goes back down to what we watched of like, what are we doing to just live a little more vividly?

Speaker 2 How are we pushing ourselves? How are we changing our perception? How are we pushing our perception?

Speaker 1 Well, it depends on what you're trying to do, right?

Speaker 1 If you're just trying to get like conditioned, yeah, give yourself the minimal amount of rest and do it for as long as possible and then take time off afterwards for your body to heal and then

Speaker 1 back after it.

Speaker 2 That's just a bet.

Speaker 1 But it depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to get strong, I always recommend taking out like long,

Speaker 1 long periods of time in between sets. I take like five minutes, maybe even more in between sets.

Speaker 2 To come back in at your strongest.

Speaker 1 To tell your body.

Speaker 1 My workouts like two hours sometimes, two and a half hours because I have these long breaks in between. But because of that, you know Pavel Tazzolini is?

Speaker 1 He's one of the godfathers of kettlebells. He's one of the first people that introduced kettlebells to America from Russia.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 their philosophy, his strong first philosophy is that strength is a skill. And you don't work on a skill when you're tired.

Speaker 1 So it's all about how many repetitions you do, and that's what builds strength.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean you have to do 10 in a row. Like, say if 10 is your max, say if you pick up a weight and you can do do 10 cleans and presses and on the 10th one you're like

Speaker 1 his philosophy is do five do five wait a long time do another five so you've got the ten in but you've got the ten in with perfect form right and then you're still getting the same amount of repetitions but you're not breaking yourself down to the point where you might get hurt or where you're doing it incorrectly or poor form so that's how i talked i talked to my me too i talked to my wife a lot about that my wife would say because i i go i'm all about form yes because otherwise you just get hurt, and what's the fucking point?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I rarely get hurt from lifting weights.

Speaker 2 Have you ever gotten hurt in jiu-jitsu? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 A lot. Everybody tears and

Speaker 1 viscous.

Speaker 1 Surgeries and fucking bulging discs and torn this and torn that. Yeah.
You have to. It's

Speaker 1 like we're trying to kill each other.

Speaker 1 It's true. You try to get really into killing people with your body.
So other people are doing that to you.

Speaker 2 I had sciatica for a year and a half.

Speaker 2 Bad sciatica, a nine millimeter slip between S5, no, L5 and S1. How'd you get rid of it?

Speaker 2 And they wanted to do surgery. And I had had surgery when I was really young because I had a slip disc between C5 and C6.
And they took out part of my hip and they went in through my neck.

Speaker 2 They moved everything over and they replaced my

Speaker 2 disc with part of my hip back when they used to do that.

Speaker 1 They used to replace your disc with part of your hip?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they would chisel out a part of your hip.

Speaker 1 A bone? Yeah. and that's what your disc was now a piece of bone

Speaker 1 that doesn't even make sense your disc is supposed to be spongy i know i don't understand why they put a piece of bone in there yeah and it worked it actually worked yeah dr demorty i never forget his name jesus

Speaker 2 so yeah and then they used cadaver bone for a while and now they use what

Speaker 1 well it depends there's uh artificial discs i know uh a couple people that have artificial discs and it worked yeah my friend eddie got it done in his lower back he He was basically bone on bone, constant inflammation.

Speaker 1 So he got a titanium articulating disc that's in his back. What is this?

Speaker 1 Surgeon may take a small piece of bone from the hip called an autograft to use in a neck surgery called interior cervical dissectomy and fusion.

Speaker 1 The bone is placed between the space between the vertebrae to stimulate bone healing and promote fusion. Oh, so you got your neck fused?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they call it a Broling graft.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? No.

Speaker 1 Wow. So

Speaker 1 that's different.

Speaker 1 That's you got your hip, your neck fused.

Speaker 2 Fused. Which they probably don't even do fusion.

Speaker 1 They do. They solve it.

Speaker 2 If it's a massive break or something like that, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't recommend it. There's other ways you can heal bulging discs.
And one of them is there's a process called regenokine. And regenokine is, I had that done in LA in Santa Monica.

Speaker 1 They used to do it in Germany. You used to have to go to Germany to do it.
And like Kobe Bryant went over there, and Peyton Manning went over there. And what they do is they take your blood out.

Speaker 1 It's like platelet-rich plasma, but it's a more advanced

Speaker 1 version of it. And they spin your blood in the centrifuge, and they add some stuff to it, and it turns it into like one of the most potent anti-inflammatories.

Speaker 1 And then what they do is you lie down there and they inject it in your back. They have like these little needles.
I think there's an Instagram post of me getting it done on my lower back.

Speaker 2 Did you have a slip disc in your lower back?

Speaker 1 Bulging. Bulging.
You know, it's essentially a bulging disc, but it can go back. Bulging disc can go back.

Speaker 2 But that was my experience.

Speaker 1 You also have to have traction, like decompression. So there's a bunch of, there it is.
So that's my back.

Speaker 2 I had that done.

Speaker 1 So they take that and they stick all that shit. But all the stuff.

Speaker 2 And they drill that, don't they?

Speaker 1 They just put it.

Speaker 1 No, it's just

Speaker 2 needles.

Speaker 2 I know it's needles, but it's not like acupuncture. They actually drill that, then they put the needle in, don't they? No.

Speaker 1 No, they just shove that needle in place.

Speaker 1 It's just like a syringe.

Speaker 2 On each side of your spinal column, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like a syringe, and then inside the syringe, they pump in the regenocine stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then it uh it fills your those those areas up with this platelet rich plasma that's been enhanced and it just heals everything and did you feel like it helped oh yeah absolutely

Speaker 1 it helped my neck so much my neck was so fucked

Speaker 1 my neck was so fucked I was getting numb fingers and pain in my elbows

Speaker 1 do you really yeah

Speaker 1 You should go to that place.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and when I ride motorcycles also, I have my hands up like, I mean, I have shoulder issues, but I have a, that slip disc was a nine-millimeter slip.

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Speaker 1 Why not do this?

Speaker 2 Why this? Because that looks cooler.

Speaker 1 Does it? Not to me.

Speaker 2 It looks super cool when you're doing it right now.

Speaker 1 This looks retarded. This looks retarded.
This looks good. This looks like you can

Speaker 1 super high. You can move it.
Put it up super high. This is like

Speaker 2 a hard to turn.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, how are you going to turn like that? You're not going to do a good job.
You look like a girl. This is better.
This is better. What about that? This is better.
What about this?

Speaker 1 Well, with Ducati's, I mean, that's like you're down like that.

Speaker 2 That's when I finally crashed, was a Ducati.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? You went crazy?

Speaker 2 No, I didn't go crazy. I didn't do anything differently.
With parlies, you'd go slower.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 You ride. It's about.
And it's loud even though you're there.

Speaker 1 Thank you. That's about it.

Speaker 1 It's huge. They have electric bikes now.
I'm like, do you want to die? They're fast. They're so fast.
But do you want to die?

Speaker 1 Nobody can hear you.

Speaker 2 I'm riding in a grid of 16 guys

Speaker 2 because everybody thinks Hell's Angels. I go, there's nothing about it that's trying to emulate Hell's Angels, Mongols, any of that 1% or thing.

Speaker 2 But when you hear that rumble coming down the road, you can't wait to get the fuck out of the way.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
And that helps. That's true.
That definitely helps you stay alive.

Speaker 1 Yeah, loud pipes save lives. I've heard that many times.

Speaker 2 So to finish that thought, what I did was, is I went to, I started,

Speaker 2 instead of resting, which is what doctors normally say, they say, do surgery, do surgery, rest, sleep, see if that helps. If it doesn't help, do surgery.

Speaker 2 And I did the opposite, which later, you know, Laird was like, anytime you get hurt, Laird will be like, movement, movement, movement, movement. But this was before all that.

Speaker 2 But I started working out. And it got worse and it got worse and it got worse.
But I continued to work out and I started running and I started doing pistol squats and all this kind of shit.

Speaker 2 And then one day it was gone. And it never came back.

Speaker 1 Really? Never came back.

Speaker 2 So you just beat it out of you? I beat it out of me.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.
Yeah, movement is everything. You need circulation.

Speaker 2 You need blood in there, which is why they do PRP, which is why they do stem cell work or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And if you're just sitting there, the problem is you're also going to, your body's going to atrophy. You're going to lose strength.

Speaker 1 And then it's going to make whatever injured that area in the first place. That was always promoted by doctors.

Speaker 2 Why would that always be promoted by doctors?

Speaker 1 Again, whether it's politicians or whether it's doctors or whether it's, they're telling you, this is, you got to eat from the four food groups man you're gonna die otherwise and you're like well you know that there's a lot to that stuff but the the you know the ford group four food group shit is a lot of it's people just not knowing what the fuck they're talking about that's what i mean and also

Speaker 1 different perception back then of like what was healthy versus now but it's also a lot of these doctors they're not athletes and they don't really understand like what's possible with the body they just know how to fix things when they break right and then for the average person they say just rest Because the average person is not going to fucking do what you're doing anyway.

Speaker 1 So it's like, why, why tell them? Like, what you really need to do is movement, constant movement, and just beat that injury into submission. That's right.
And no one's going to tell you that.

Speaker 2 How do I feel better? Lose some weight.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, go do that uncomfortable thing. Start walking.
Start slow. Maybe jog a little bit.
Maybe lift a little something. That's why when you see those videos of these guys that just...

Speaker 2 for whatever is in their personality, they've had fucking enough. They're 400 pounds and they go, that's it.

Speaker 2 Buck stops here. Yep.
I'm going to start doing my shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they hit rock bottom.

Speaker 2 They hit rock bottom. Yeah.
And then you see this, again, what we were talking about before, incentive, where they just go, I don't give a shit.

Speaker 1 Well, isn't that the same with everything? Like, isn't that how you quit drinking? You just hit rock bottom. I was just about to say that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but you don't. I don't, I hit rock bottom when I was 15.
You know, shooting Coke at 15.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, that thing that you didn't want to try. I did want to try.
But that was that group. That's why so many of those guys died.
Yeah. You know what I mean? So

Speaker 2 when I look at Hunter S. Thompson, who I love as a writer, when I look at Dylan Thomas, who I love as a writer, and all these guys that had this kind of amazing life, and I feel too paralleled.

Speaker 2 I had an amazing life, except nobody cared about mine. People really cared about theirs.
I was just Josh that you wanted to stay the fuck away from.

Speaker 2 We're like, that motherfucker's great to spend like an hour with. And then once it hits 10 o'clock and the moon comes out and the clouds part, you don't want to be anywhere around.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But then you get to that point where you go, when did Hunter ask Thompson, when did these guys just become like

Speaker 2 some kind of clown mask of themselves? Right. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Well, in the end, Hunter was definitely that. Did you ever see when Hunter was on Conan O'Brien's show?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 It was horrible. He could barely talk.
He barely could understand him.

Speaker 1 Everything was mumbling. It was mumbling.

Speaker 1 It was real weird, and

Speaker 1 he got in a gunfight with his fucking neighbors. He's like shooting at his neighbors.

Speaker 2 That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 At what point does he have to do that?

Speaker 1 He was full-on drunk but it wasn't just that his body was like rapidly deteriorating he had hip replacement surgery and and he was only 67 i think that's not old no no not that old that's young for what how old are you 57.

Speaker 1 i'm 56.

Speaker 2 yeah like my mom died at 55 the whole thing this book became was my mom dying at 55 and me thinking back then

Speaker 2 she lived a nice long life isn't that crazy it's fucking crazy and then it turned out that i was 55 when i wrote the book which had never even,

Speaker 2 the book kind of dictated itself. And then I went, holy fuck, I'm 55.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 I'm super young.

Speaker 1 Fucking super young.

Speaker 2 Like, yes, I have some joint issues, but I'm young for the most part.

Speaker 1 For the most part. Yeah, you're physically healthy.
You're not falling apart. You just have a few issues,

Speaker 1 which is just wear and tear of life. That's it.
Yeah, but there's some people that

Speaker 1 if you don't take care of yourself and you don't eat well, and there's also a lot of other factors, genetic factors, but you could fall apart pretty quick.

Speaker 1 But if you're a guy like Hunter that's doing Coke and drinking every night, you can't do that. No, you can't.
It just won't. And the writing was bad.
Like his writing.

Speaker 1 The only time he wrote anything good in later years was 2001, right after 9-11. Right after 9-11, he wrote this great piece.
I want to say it was like for Sports Illustrated.

Speaker 1 I forget who he wrote it for, but he wrote this really great piece talking about what happens next after the Twin Towers fall.

Speaker 1 It's like he wrote this thing about waking up in the morning, seeing the Twin Towers fall, and then realizing

Speaker 1 what's ahead for us.

Speaker 1 It was very prescient. It was very good.
It was very, it was. Was it accurate? I mean, now that it's on it.
It was dead on. It was dead on.
And it was Vintage Hunter.

Speaker 1 It's like he tapped back into it again.

Speaker 1 It's on ESPN. ESPN.
That's it.

Speaker 2 ESPN. This is the article? Yeah, this is the article.
Would you send me this article if it's an article article?

Speaker 1 I would love to. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is, you know, this is the whole thing.

Speaker 2 I mean, what's so great is when you go, I mean, this is kind of popping all over the place, but when you go back and you look at all the politicians, whatever side,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 whatever red, blue they lean toward, it didn't matter because Hunter was there kind of looking for something different and it wasn't all about him.

Speaker 2 When it came down, they all describe Hunter as just like crazy. It was so much fun to hang out with him, but there was never a lack of he was super intelligent

Speaker 2 and wanted the best for everybody.

Speaker 1 He was a real patriot.

Speaker 2 He was a true patriot. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, did you ever read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail? Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's one of the more interesting pieces because you got this guy who's following around the campaign trail and he knows he's only in it for this one time.

Speaker 1 So he's not like any of these other reporters. He's just writing a book.
Yeah, which is...

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, exactly. And not only that, you can't, because he's going to write a book.
Like, he's writing a book.

Speaker 1 Campfire. Whether you like it or not.
Yeah, whether he like it or not, he's writing that book. But, you know, he's dropping acid.
He's talking to these guys into drinking.

Speaker 1 He's taking all these fucking nerdy political reporters and he's introducing them to a perspective that they're not aware of. They don't know anybody like that.

Speaker 1 And the book is fucking incredible.

Speaker 2 But when you see Gonzo, when you see, it's funny how much we're talking about.

Speaker 2 But when you see Gonzo, I don't know if it was in Gonzo or another documentary, you see how they're affected by it. You see a humanity in them because of him that you don't normally get to see.

Speaker 1 Don't you agree? Yes, yeah. He made you question a lot of things.
Yeah. And when people question things, they're like, What am I doing? Like, what?

Speaker 2 Yeah, why am I here? What is my purpose? Or did I have a purpose when I was young and I just fell into this political status quo?

Speaker 1 And he even was questioning, like in the documentary, he was like, I don't even know what people want anymore. Do they want Hunter S.
Thompson or do they want Gonzo? Like, it's not even me anymore.

Speaker 1 It's like I'm a prisoner of this thing that I've created.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing that happens to people where they develop this sort of image and persona. Yeah.
And then you feel like you're trapped by it.

Speaker 1 People have expectations and they meet you. Exactly right.
Kinnison talked about that. Did you know Kinnison? No, unfortunately.
Did you? I did. No shit.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And not because of drugs, just because I was around.

Speaker 1 What year was this?

Speaker 2 When did he die?

Speaker 1 90-ish to 92, maybe? I was in New York, so it had to be pre-94.

Speaker 2 Probably 90.

Speaker 1 Somewhere around then.

Speaker 2 I would say 90. I knew him.

Speaker 1 90, 91.

Speaker 2 It was through a friend that I met him, and then he liked me.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And sweet, incredibly sweet guy.

Speaker 1 He was a motherfucker, dude. Mother.
We just got a, this guy does bottle cap art. Go to my Instagram, Jamie, and see that photo.

Speaker 1 This guy just made this insane bottle cap art piece of Kinnison for my comedy club, and we put it up last night.

Speaker 2 Is he a hero of yours?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. He was one of the first.
There it is.

Speaker 1 That's all bottle caps. That guy.

Speaker 2 Oh, no shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, those are bottle caps.

Speaker 2 Have you seen that? Oh, man. Yeah.
That's like in prison when

Speaker 2 they use cigarette packs.

Speaker 2 Patricia Arquette gave me a piece of art with a bunch of cigarette packs. Oh, really? Yeah, they make frames.
That was a thing.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Same kind of thing.
Yeah, this guy, his name is Jam Bottle Cap Art, J-A-M Bottle Cap Art. He does a bunch of different pieces of bottle cap art.
Yeah, he's really good.

Speaker 1 It's really, really cool stuff.

Speaker 2 You need my picture outside. I saw all your mug shots?

Speaker 1 I'd love to have a mug shot of you. I'll send you.
Is it good?

Speaker 1 How fucked up do you look? I look pretty fucked up.

Speaker 2 I got a smile on my face. When somebody smiles during a mug shot, I always find that really funny.

Speaker 1 So when you met Kinnison, was it at a show? Was it just... No.

Speaker 2 Oh, it might have been the comedy club.

Speaker 1 Okay. I'd only been to

Speaker 1 the house.

Speaker 2 Sorry, comedy store.

Speaker 1 Well, he was out of there by then. He was out of there by 90.

Speaker 2 Well, what's the one down the road by where Greenblatts used to be?

Speaker 1 The Laugh Factory. Yeah.
Yeah, you like those? I do.

Speaker 2 I love those things.

Speaker 1 Very much.

Speaker 1 The Laugh Factory. The Laugh Factory.

Speaker 2 It might have been that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he got kicked out of the comedy store, I think, in like 87.

Speaker 1 No, it would have been.

Speaker 2 Then it wasn't there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was probably The Laugh Factory.

Speaker 2 But that's not where I met him. I met him at a house.
Okay. I met him at a house, and I never went to a lot of those parties.
I was just not part of that. I wasn't invited.

Speaker 2 But I met him, and he just, he was really sweet, man. He would like mellow out.
It wasn't like a thing. It wasn't an act all the time.
Right. You know?

Speaker 1 But he was a prisoner to that thing that he became. For sure.
Yeah. His brother wrote a great book.
It's called Brother Sam.

Speaker 1 It's a really, really good book describing the ascent of his career and how it fucked him up and what happened to him.

Speaker 2 And what do you think it was? I mean, was it drugs?

Speaker 1 Drugs and partying and just stratospheric fear. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Wasn't it instantaneous? For him?

Speaker 1 Pretty quick. So in 1986, he's on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedian Special, and then he does an insane,

Speaker 1 to this day, holds up HBO Hour. And then those two things, and then an album that he made called Louder Than Hell.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 those things are the best things he ever does. Everything after that becomes like a significant drop-off.
And in the end, he was basically like a caricature of who he used to be.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a caricature of himself, exactly.

Speaker 1 And he just was captured.

Speaker 1 But it's also imprisoned. There wasn't anybody to tell you how to do it back then.
Because there was only a few massively famous comedians back then. There wasn't a lot of us.

Speaker 1 It wasn't like today.

Speaker 1 Today, there's like a giant community of comedians. We all talk to each other and figure it out together.
And everybody's just about making better stuff.

Speaker 1 It's not about getting hugely famous. The ones that just want to get hugely famous, they're all mentally ill.
And usually their... their career drops off, their comedy starts to suck.

Speaker 1 They're trying to do the wrong thing. So in Kinison, in the beginning, he just wanted to be the best he could be.
He just wanted to be really fucking good at comedy.

Speaker 1 And coming from this, you know, tent preacher. So he's like this revival tent preacher.

Speaker 1 And then he gets into stand-up comedy and he has this charisma and this ability to deliver that's so different than everybody else. And he's this short, fat guy.

Speaker 1 So when he talks about being married and living in hell, like you kind of like empathize with it, like this fucking guy's amazing.

Speaker 1 And revolutionized comedy. Changed comedy.
He was the the first guy that I ever saw that made me think I could do comedy. Because before then, I loved comedy.

Speaker 1 I always loved stand-up, but I loved it because it was funny. I would just like to watch, you know, Jerry Seinfeld on TV.
Oh, these guys are so funny.

Speaker 2 Isn't that funny because you're so different than he is? And yet he was the one that you paralleled with that, like, liberated you?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, he was wild. That was the thing.
I never felt like I fit in. I always felt like I didn't want to be around polite people.

Speaker 1 I didn't want like, you know, if a girl wanted me to go over her house and have dinner with her parents, I was like, oh, Jesus,

Speaker 1 they're going to think I'm fucking crazy. But I was a kickboxer.
You know, I was a kid who had, I went from, you know, when I was 15 years old, I got like deeply involved in martial arts.

Speaker 1 My entire social life up until like 21, 22 was just traveling around the country fighting. And so I was feral.

Speaker 1 My mindset was just, I just didn't fit in. I couldn't wear a suit jacket and pretend to be the guy.
Did you ever notice? I wasn't that guy. Hello.

Speaker 2 It's great to meet you.

Speaker 1 Things that I thought were funny, other people would think were fucked up. But my fucked up friends would think were funny.
And those are the ones who talked me into doing stand-up.

Speaker 1 But they were equally fucked up.

Speaker 2 Did you start stand-up back then?

Speaker 1 In Boston, in 88. In 88.
Yeah. Right on.
Yeah. And I went to see Kinnison in 89.
I got to see him live in 89. I got to see him.
Three times. One time when I was working.

Speaker 1 I was working at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts, and he was performing there. Wow.
And I got to see him live. I was a security guard.
It was this place in Mansfield.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the whole Taekwondo team that I was a part of. Is that what you did? Taekwondo? Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's what I used to compete in.

Speaker 1 Oh, no kidding.

Speaker 2 Where did you compete out of? Junchong.

Speaker 1 Where was that? L.A. Okay.
Taekwondo. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I fought in L.A. when I lived in Boston.
I fought in Anaheim and the Nationals. Right on.

Speaker 1 I traveled all over the country competing. That's all I did.
And one of the guys who worked with us, one of the guys who trained with us, got a job as a security guard.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the guy was like, hey, do you know any more guys who know how to fight? Like, we need more guys like that to work for us. They just hired a bunch of us.

Speaker 1 And so we got to see all these crazy concerts. Like, I got to see Bon Jovi.
I got to see Bill Cosby, which was kind of crazy in retrospect. Yeah.
I saw Rodney Dangerfield.

Speaker 1 And Rodney Dangerfield was, there was this backstage area.

Speaker 1 And Rodney Dangerfield was naked with a bathrobe on. And that's how he would go on stage.
And the end of his career, like Rodney would go and by the way murdered I mean I was fucking

Speaker 1 crying laughing yeah he was probably I don't know how old he was in 89 but he was old yeah and this fucking guy was just on stage with a bathrobe on naked and a giant hog like hanging out of his fucking pants and he was just just hanging out smoking pot and then he would go on stage with a bathrobe on yeah and just kill but he because he wanted to be comfortable how did other how did other comedians feel about him oh they loved him they loved him everybody everybody loved him rodney was one of the most universally loved comedians ever because he helped other comedians yeah like Rodney Dangerfield he did these things the Rodney Dangerfield specials like Rodney and Friends and so he would have he introduced the world to Dice Clay Sam Kinnison Robert Schimmel Lenny Clark

Speaker 1 Dom Irera like some of the greats and they all came out of his Rodney Dangerfield and Friends specials.

Speaker 1 They were some of the greatest specials ever because he would have all these guys that he thought were worth seeing. And he would put them out there to the world, and they all became superstars.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's how Sam Kinnison launched. He launched from Rodney.
From Rodney. And so Bill Hicks, a lot of people launched from Rodney.
And

Speaker 1 so everybody loved Rodney.

Speaker 2 He was just loved. I know he's your buddy.
And I, you know, because comedians, I used to listen, I used to have six albums, and one was a bloody red vinyl. Remember the red albums?

Speaker 2 You'd see the red albums?

Speaker 1 Sure, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And it was sick, and I don't know where I got them. I think I got them from like a flea market or something, but they were Lenny Bruce.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And that was the beginning. He was the first.

Speaker 1 He was the first. He was the first real modern stand-up comedian.
Everybody else just told jokes. Like two guys walk into a bar, like that kind of shit.
Totally.

Speaker 1 He was the first guy that was like, why do we do this? And why is that? And like, what is this?

Speaker 2 Where he questioned it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Questioned authority. And people would come to see him because in the 60s, everybody was so confused as how to think.
Like, what, yeah, what are we doing? And this guy was like this guy.

Speaker 2 And how do we treat each other?

Speaker 1 And then you'd literally point people out and he'd go, Eve and Kike. And there's a mick.

Speaker 2 And people would go, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 Right, right, right, right, right.

Speaker 2 At the most tense time.

Speaker 2 And then he'd bring it around. And that's why it reminds me of Chappelle.
Because Chappelle would get so seemingly or ostensibly inappropriate

Speaker 2 and then somehow bring it around.

Speaker 1 And you go, fucking geez. Dave's a master.
Master. And he's a real artist.
That's a guy. Like, you know, I talk about people that only start thinking about money.
Yeah. That's not him.

Speaker 1 That dude lives in fucking Springfield, Ohio, and just travels around and just does a lot of shows for no money. He does a lot of shows for no money.
He just shows up and performs.

Speaker 1 One time I was in Denver and I get off stage. It's

Speaker 1 second show Friday night. So it's 10 o'clock show.
Show's over. I get off stage.
I go into the green room. Dave's there.
I go, Dave, what are you doing here, man?

Speaker 1 He goes, oh, I thought I'd come out and visit you. Just hops on a fucking private jet and flies to Denver because he knew I was there.
Didn't even tell me. Just shows up.

Speaker 1 And then I go, do you want to go on stage? He goes, oh, should I? I go, fuck yeah. So I ran out while the people were leaving.
The show was already over. I go,

Speaker 1 tell everybody on the stairs, come back. Dave Chappelle's here.
So they all come back in and sit down again. And he does like 45 minutes.

Speaker 1 And it was right around when Trump was doing when he got caught saying, grab him by the pussy. Yeah, yeah.
So he had like 10 minutes about grab him by the pussy. Like, it was fucking genius.

Speaker 1 It was was so good.

Speaker 2 Off the top of his head, though.

Speaker 1 Oh, no. He, I mean, I don't know exactly how

Speaker 1 designed it is.

Speaker 1 I think what Dave does is spends a lot of time thinking and listening to music and coming up with ideas. Yeah.
And he writes some stuff down, but a lot of what he does is just performs constantly.

Speaker 1 He's constantly on stage working these years. You said it earlier, artist.

Speaker 2 He's the difference.

Speaker 2 That's the difference between somebody who's just good at what they do and somebody who is an innate artist?

Speaker 1 He's a real artist. He's a hero.

Speaker 1 He's a hero of mine, too. He's a good friend.
But he gets these giant deals with Netflix where he makes a lot of money, which is great. But he doesn't do it for money.

Speaker 1 He's doing it.

Speaker 2 No, but what you can tell is he gets these, like, oh, he turned down $50 million. He went crazy, moved to Ohio, or whatever the fucking story is that you want to make up.

Speaker 2 But then he comes back, he makes these $20 million deals with Netflix, but it's never

Speaker 2 in place

Speaker 2 of his agenda.

Speaker 1 No, it's all about the art. It's all about

Speaker 2 this wins, this wins. This is the priority.

Speaker 1 That's why he left his show because they were twisting it

Speaker 1 distorting it.

Speaker 2 I know why he left his show because I've been in that position where you go, this is turning into some corporate version of what you like. You love what I do.

Speaker 2 Now you can't wait to put your fingerprint on it.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's it.
That's exactly what it was.

Speaker 2 So you can take, so you can go, you know, that was me. And he gave me

Speaker 1 $30 million when no one was giving

Speaker 1 and then he quit doing comedy for 10 years and you know what he would do he would occasionally show up in a park with like a fucking speaker and just show up and do stand-up yes he did he did in Seattle I know he did in Seattle because a friend of mine was at the show he shows up he said he goes Dave Chappelle just shows up in this fucking park and he gets a speaker with a microphone and he just starts talking and people just gather around

Speaker 1 he was just doing these like shows these impromptu shows he would show up in a bar can I go on stage And they would go,

Speaker 1 okay. And he would just.

Speaker 2 Knowing in his mind that he would eventually come back. No, that was just the present moment.

Speaker 1 I think he's just being an artist. Just being an artist for the pure sake of being an artist.

Speaker 1 So he had the money that he did make off Chappelle's show, and he decided to live frugally and take that money. And he didn't do anything for money for like 10 fucking years.

Speaker 1 He just raised his and then he started coming back. And then when he started coming back, I remember him coming around the comedy store again, and we had some conversations about it.
And he just,

Speaker 1 you know, he just just decided to start doing comedy again. And then he's.

Speaker 2 You see people getting canceled now, and it's devastating to them, and yet that's what that was. He just did it himself.
Right.

Speaker 1 He canceled himself. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He canceled the greatest sketch show of all time. Of all time.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it only did two seasons. It's still the greatest.

Speaker 2 But that's not something that you see very often. It's somebody who just fucking can't help but beat to their own drum.
Right. But the art wins in the end.

Speaker 1 The art wins. For him.
Well, it's obviously when you see him. He's so good.

Speaker 2 He's not malicious. He seems to.
There are moments where you think he's malicious. And again, he brings it around.

Speaker 1 Well, the maliciousness is just to heighten the humor. It all just brings it in.
It also accentuates some thoughts that you might have about whatever he's talking about.

Speaker 2 But it's what everybody's thinking. Yep.
And so fucking terrified to say that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Even me.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I'm watching it and I'm the inappropriate guy.
You know, and my dad goes, How the fuck do you say what you say? And I don't understand. I go, you know, I said, honestly, do you want to know?

Speaker 2 Because I'm not ultimately mean.

Speaker 2 I don't want, I don't want to fucking hurt. I don't want people to feel less than I do.
Right. But I watch Chappelle.

Speaker 1 And even me, I'm like, oh, fuck.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.
He watched that line. He gets out there and walks that line, but he dances around it and he makes it beautiful comedy.

Speaker 2 I appreciate it so much because without him, we're all fucked.

Speaker 1 And he's a way to find out if a comedian's a cunt. Like, if a comedian doesn't like Chappelle, they start shitting on Chappelle.
Like, oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Then you know he's a cunt. You're a piece of shit.

Speaker 1 You're a piece of shit. You're just a garbage human.

Speaker 2 Have you ever met anybody? Oh, like that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of these.

Speaker 2 He's not a real comedian.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of. He's an asshole.
Yeah, there's a lot of like

Speaker 1 activist comedians. And what they are is really not talented.
So they've glommed on to this idea of like being socially conscious, and that's more important than the humor itself.

Speaker 1 But nobody wants to hear you preach.

Speaker 1 Nobody thinks that your opinion is better than theirs. This is what I always say.
Like, if you go on stage and you have an opinion, like, other people have an opinion too.

Speaker 1 Like, if you go on stage and say, you know, I think Kamala Harris would be the greatest president of all time. A lot of people are like, well, I don't agree.

Speaker 1 But you have to have a way to make it funny so that they laugh. The people that disagree with you laugh.
I don't even think this guy's correct. Well, goddamn, that's funny.

Speaker 1 And that's a way you can introduce an idea into someone's head that maybe would never accept that.

Speaker 1 idea it was just opinions so if someone's on stage and they're just saying opinions like you could you could disagree with that opinion it'll frustrate you and you you can't talk and you don't have but if that guy can take that opinion and that perspective and make it funny, then you're forced to acknowledge that he has a point.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like there's something in there, like I agree with that, but fucking goddamn, that was good. God damn, that was good.
And that's the real thing. It liberates, man.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's the real Chappelle art. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 I mean, not that we'll stay on this forever, but remember Eddie Murphy when he did what, not the first, not Raw, but delirious.

Speaker 1 Delirious. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Well, he was a fucking powerhouse, man.

Speaker 1 To this day, that is the guy that I just wish I was friends with. I was friends with his brother,

Speaker 1 Charlie.

Speaker 1 But I wish that guy, I wish he would come back. You know, I know he got some weird stuff where he got arrested with transsexuals in his car.

Speaker 1 Whatever.

Speaker 1 So did other people. Whatever.

Speaker 1 He's just too good. He's too good.
He's too good. Do you ever see when he gave a speech, he got like, I think it was like one of those Mark Twain awards or something like that.

Speaker 1 And he did stand-up, like, where he hasn't done stand-up in forever, forever but he was talking about bill cosby having to give his awards back and no

Speaker 1 because you know he does an amazing bill cosby impression

Speaker 1 and so he he he did stand up and it was as sharp as ever and like god damn if this guy came back he was and it was just off the cuff it was something i'm sure he prepared no i'm sure he prepared but nobody really knew he was going to do it right well they knew he was going to give a speech right and his speech was essentially stand-up you know his acceptance speech like 20 minutes or 15 minutes yeah and it was fucking great and there was all these rumors that he was going to start doing it again.

Speaker 1 I remember Charlie told me that Dave was thinking about doing it again, or that Eddie was thinking about doing it again, but he never did it. He never did it.

Speaker 1 I think it's just too heavy.

Speaker 2 We need comedians.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's like the theme of this whole thing: whether you're talking about Hunter, whether you're talking about this, it's just too bad that they self-destruct, whether it be from drugs or fame or whatever.

Speaker 2 And you know what I mean? It's hard, man.

Speaker 1 It's hard to maintain. And then once you make it, there's these weird pressures.

Speaker 2 But it breaks up the status quo of this contraction, especially that we're feeling. I know that's why people move to Austin.
It's just like, I'm fucking sick of being told to think a certain way.

Speaker 1 Well, that's why comedy in Austin works so well. Yeah.
Because we all moved here at the same time. We all moved here in 2020.
Like, I was here because, well, Ron White moved here first.

Speaker 1 And Ron White is a dear friend of mine. And he moved here before the pandemic.
And Ron was like, I don't want to live in L.A. anymore.
I fucking love it here. There's no traffic.
Fucking food's great.

Speaker 1 Fucking people are nice. I can travel.
I fly. I'm in the center of the country.
I can fly anywhere real quick.

Speaker 1 And I was like, damn, could I live in Texas? I'm like, I don't know about that. And then COVID came.

Speaker 1 And right away, like, my wife was kind of interested a little bit, but then when the riots started happening in LA, then she got really scared. She got very, like, it was a lot of like home invasions.

Speaker 1 It was a lot of crazy shit that was happening.

Speaker 2 Where is she from originally?

Speaker 1 She was from Colorado.

Speaker 2 Okay, yeah, so not an LA born.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. And so she lived in LA with me for a while, and we were happy.
You know, we lived in Bell Canyon, which was like outside of LA.

Speaker 1 It's nice, peaceful, had a little land, coyotes, and some hawks and shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, for me, it was okay because I had quiet where I lived, and then I could drive into the comedy store. And I loved it.

Speaker 1 But then when they shut the comedy store down, they shut everything down, and then the rise. And I was like, baby, they're not going to let us go back.

Speaker 1 This is like these fucking cocksuckers have control now, and that's what they like. That's why they became politicians in the first first place.
They like telling people they can't work.

Speaker 1 They have a grip on society, and they're going to fucking keep this grip. We got to get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 2 So did you move sight unseen? Did you move just... Did you just come?

Speaker 1 Did you find a place?

Speaker 2 You came and you hung out for a while.

Speaker 1 I came looking to see if I could deal with it. We took like a few days off and we flew to Austin with some friends who were also thinking about doing it.
None of them wound up moving here.

Speaker 1 A couple of them moved to Dallas.

Speaker 1 But we came here and then

Speaker 1 one of the things that helped, my daughters were 10 10 and 12 at the time. They were real young, and they were real confused about what was going on in L.A.
It was spooky.

Speaker 1 You know, you had to wear a mask everywhere, and that freaks kids out. Like, it's just, it was freaky.

Speaker 1 We came to Texas, no masks.

Speaker 1 You go to restaurants, and we had this great real estate lady, and this great, she's a good friend now, and she took us to see, we wanted to see this house, and she took us on a ride on a boat.

Speaker 1 She had a friend to take us on the lake. We go on the lake, people are playing Leonard Skinner, they're jumping in the water, they're laughing and singing.

Speaker 1 And in L.A., everybody's thinking like the world's going to end. There's DC.

Speaker 2 I was in New Mexico, and I was out on a 100,000-acre ranch. Whoa.

Speaker 2 Right? And we were doing outer range. We were doing the first season of our show, and we were tested every morning.

Speaker 2 And when I was out in the middle of nowhere, I mean, with like good 15-mile-an-hour winds, you'd have somebody come up. If I put my mask down to talk, you'd have somebody go,

Speaker 1 Yeah.

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Speaker 2 Yeah, and I'd be like, there's not, we're in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 1 Also, it doesn't even work. It doesn't work.

Speaker 2 It's stupid. The mass, I'm not even saying that I have a certain belief system or anything, but in that moment.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Provable that they don't work. Provable.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And people lost their fucking minds. And it was a stress test.
And so we came out here. I bought a house like quick.

Speaker 2 And I was. Is it still the same house you have now?

Speaker 1 Really? That's cool.

Speaker 1 We looked at the house in May. I was living in it in August.

Speaker 1 And we were here. And then my kids started going to school out here.
They loved it. I loved it right away.
We were performing.

Speaker 1 And then we were doing shows inside where everybody's like this is crazy you guys are doing shows indoors because texas didn't give a fuck they're like do shows like like a couple months after covet they're like eh open it up and so what are the numbers of people who got covet you know i've never had covet you never got it at all no that's crazy i never got it i don't know if that's a blood type i don't know what is that maybe you're healthy maybe i have it right now i have a cold right now maybe i have it the new covet is a joke it's like i i we used to test every day we used to like everybody that came in because i wanted to be compliant.

Speaker 1 I wanted people to feel safe. People were flying out here to do podcasts.
I wanted to make sure they're not.

Speaker 1 And so we tested everybody before every show. And one time I came in and I had the sniffles.
And I was like, maybe it's COVID. Maybe it's COVID.
And the nurse was like, actually, you have COVID.

Speaker 1 I was like, no way. I'm like, this is the new COVID.
But I had it once and it famously got in trouble for saying that I didn't get vaccinated, but I got healthy.

Speaker 1 And it was the CNN attacks and all that shit. And then the second time I got COVID, it was literally sniffles.
And it was gone in like a day or two.

Speaker 2 So were the numbers different in Texas than anywhere else?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I'm curious.
I mean the numbers were all like

Speaker 1 the real people that got sick are the people with comorbidities. That was the real issue.
What it exposed

Speaker 2 it did because I have a brother-in-law who was in New Orleans in the epicenter of it and it was the beginning of his residency and all that and he was like oh bro.

Speaker 1 Oh it fucking existed.

Speaker 2 I mean it was fucking gnarly.

Speaker 1 Yeah if you're really unhealthy COVID fucked you up.

Speaker 1 If you were really fat in particular there was something about the way it reacted to you. fat people.

Speaker 1 He said, that's a vitamin D thing.

Speaker 2 That's a vitamin D thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you know, African Americans, the reason why they're so dark, the melanin is to protect them from the sun.

Speaker 1 And melanin in white people, the reason why they're so pale is because it acts as like a fucking solar panel for vitamin D. Right, so

Speaker 1 the melanin actually protects them from the sun's damage,

Speaker 1 but it also makes it more difficult for them to get vitamin D.

Speaker 1 So my friend did his residency in New York, and he said during the wintertime, we would do blood panels on people, and they would have undetectable levels of vitamin D. Wow.

Speaker 1 And this is the reason why people get sick in the winter. You're covering up, you're indoors most of the time, you're not getting any vitamin D.
You're not getting any sun.

Speaker 1 If you're not supplementing, and not just with vitamin D, by the way, you have to mix vitamin D with K2 and magnesium. That's the most effective way for your body to process it.

Speaker 1 If you're not doing that, your immune system is shit.

Speaker 2 It's not that you're giving, you're not a living Petri dish and you're giving each other the thing because you would do that in the summer too, but the minute you go outside and you get that vitamin D and you get that sun, it's burning it away.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you're out in the sun. You're healthier.
You're supposed to be outside.

Speaker 1 We're not designed to be locked up in fucking cubicles and

Speaker 1 fluorescent lights all day. It's not normal.

Speaker 1 So it's not healthy. And if you don't do something to mitigate that and to counteract that, your metabolic health is going to suffer.

Speaker 1 If you're not fit, if you're not healthy, if you're overweight, if you're not eating well, if you're not taking vitamins, all those things are a huge factor that was completely ignored.

Speaker 1 And the narrative was like, no, you need this novel injection that we haven't tested on anybody. We're going to fucking shoot it in every baby, every kid, every pregnant woman.
Did you ever take one?

Speaker 1 No. I almost did.
I didn't think it was a bad thing.

Speaker 1 This whole pandemic is,

Speaker 1 through education and talking to doctors and also through my experiences, it completely changed my concept and my thought about the medical system.

Speaker 1 When the vaccine was first available, I was more than willing to get it.

Speaker 1 In fact, the UFC allocated like 150 150 vaccines for all their employees, and we were doing these COVID shows where there was no audience.

Speaker 1 So, we would do it at the Apex in Vegas, where the UFC has their own small arena, and we'd have the fights there, and you'd go and get tested.

Speaker 1 I would get tested in Austin, I'd fly to Vegas, and then they'd test me again, and you weren't supposed to go anywhere, you just stayed in your hotel, and then you showed up and did the fights.

Speaker 1 And then they got the allocations to the vaccine, and I called up the doctor, and I said, Hey, I'm here for the fights. Can I get vaccinated? They said, sure, come on in.

Speaker 1 And then when I got there, I called the doctor and said, actually, you have to go to the clinic. We have to do it at the clinic.
Can you go on Monday? And I said, I can't.

Speaker 1 I have to go back to Austin, but I'll be back in two weeks for the next fights and we'll do it then. And he said, great.

Speaker 1 In that two weeks, they pulled the vaccine because people were getting blood clots. And then also during that two weeks, two people that I knew had strokes.

Speaker 1 Like one guy was in his 50s and one guy was in his 40s.

Speaker 2 Immediately following the vaccination.

Speaker 1 Within days of the vaccine.

Speaker 1 Got strokes. And I had a bunch of friends that had complications.
One friend who has a pacemaker. I have a second friend now that has a pacemaker.

Speaker 1 And there was all these things that just kept a pacemaker that they'll have for the rest of their lives. I don't know.
It depends on whether or not your heart heals, like how bad the damage is,

Speaker 1 but his heart would stop. It would stop beating for like nine seconds at a time.
Wow. And he would just faint and he was falling down.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Dr. Drews talked about this.

Speaker 1 He believes that's what happened to a lot of people that got boosted.

Speaker 1 A lot of people, like, after the booster, like, there's something that would happen where your heart would just stop beating for a while and you'd black out and it would start up again.

Speaker 2 Because it wasn't proven. It wasn't a proven thing.

Speaker 1 But then again, how many of them are proven?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 you said, what, 72, 73 shots?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, that's a different kind of vaccine.

Speaker 2 No, but I understand that, but there's still vaccines. And you go, why so much more now? Is there that much more disease?

Speaker 1 It's money. I think it's money.
It's waste I mean, I'm not an anti-vaccine person, but I subscribe to Robert F. Kennedy's perspective.
They should all be tested.

Speaker 1 They should be safety tested, and they're not.

Speaker 2 But it comes down to this thing, like we were talking about working out. It comes down to this thing where you go, listen, the medical community I can use for certain things.

Speaker 2 The holistic community I can use for certain things. Why do I have to deny

Speaker 2 one just to be full in on the other? Right.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Well, it's just a narrative that they put out there that medicine and pharmaceutical drugs are the most important thing and everything else is bullshit.

Speaker 2 Everybody should take OxyContin.

Speaker 1 Everybody should be on

Speaker 1 Oxycontin. Yeah, help you feel better.
You'll feel better. Just like, oh, I feel better.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you don't have to do anything.

Speaker 1 You feel bad about it. So when we came here,

Speaker 1 that was the thing was like everybody who came here was kind of like, fuck this.

Speaker 1 And then there were so many of us that Ron talked me into opening up a comedy club. I remember Ron.
You opened your own.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Ron went on stage like for the first time in like months, like I think it was eight months.

Speaker 1 And he grabbed me by the shoulders like right after I got, I mean, he fucking crushed. He goes on stage.
He says giant standing ovation. He crushes and he comes off stage.
He grabs me by my shoulder.

Speaker 1 He goes, whatever the fuck we have to do, we're going to keep doing this. He goes, you got to open up a club.
I go, okay, I'm going to open up a club.

Speaker 1 Yes, sir. And then I just started looking at club spots.
How often do you do it? Almost, I mean, every week.

Speaker 1 Every week, you went on last night three times. They did three sets last night.
Wow. Yeah.
It's constantly working. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you know Robert Rodriguez? No.

Speaker 1 The director? Yeah. No, I don't know him personally.
That's

Speaker 1 what surprises me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's who I'm doing. I'm at the Paramount Theater tonight.

Speaker 1 I love that guy. Yeah, I love him.

Speaker 2 I've known him for 30 years.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'd love to meet him. Yeah.
But no, I love his work, though.

Speaker 2 Yeah, super good guy. Yeah.
And he plays at Antoine's a lot.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Anton's.

Speaker 2 Anton's.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Gary.
That's the called Jewish place. Is it? Yes, my friend Gary.
I didn't know it.

Speaker 2 So my wife knows Gary's wife really well.

Speaker 1 Oh, my wife knows Gary's wife really well.

Speaker 2 Oh, shit, dude. I met somebody on the plane who sat next to me, so I flew to New York.

Speaker 1 They sent a picture to my wife of me. Yes, yes.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Bentley?

Speaker 1 I don't know the guy's name. I don't know the guy.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no, no. The guy that I met on the plane today, he said, what are you here doing? I said, oh, I'm going to see Brogan this afternoon.
I'm doing Paramount Theater tonight.

Speaker 2 And he said, Oh, that's so funny. And he didn't talk to me the whole flight.
And he said, My son Bentley went out with Rosie.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's what it is. For a year.
Yes, that's what it is. So he sent a photograph to my wife.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Because I took a photograph with him.

Speaker 1 So I saw it today, right when I was leaving. My wife shows me the photograph.

Speaker 2 That's fucking funny.

Speaker 1 It's crazy. That's crazy.
Small world. Some really small world.
Super, super small world. Yeah.
But yeah. So

Speaker 1 Gary's wife and my wife are good friends. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I've never met Gary. Oh, he's the best.
Man, I love him.

Speaker 1 He's the best.

Speaker 1 That's another artist. That's a true artist.
That's an artist. I mean, he's an artist.

Speaker 2 Another true artist. I was just with him.
I did his video. I was asked to do a lot of videos, and I've never done a video because I've never wanted to do a video.

Speaker 2 The idea of doing video seems weird to me. You're like, you know, singing somebody else's song or something like that.

Speaker 2 But Chris Stapleton, who's been a friend for a long time.

Speaker 1 So we were in Marfa together. Has he? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love that.

Speaker 2 One of the greatest fucking guys. He and Morgan.
One of the greatest people. So yeah, we were together over the weekend in Marfa, Texas.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's fucking cool. Yeah, it was awesome.
Yeah. There's, I mean, and Gary's another guy that I knew back in L.A.
I met Gary at the comedy store.

Speaker 2 Doesn't he still live in L.A.?

Speaker 1 No, he lives here. Oh, he does full-time.
Yep. And that's the same thing.
Like, when I talked to Gary about it, I go, why'd you move to Texas? And this was back when I was still living in L.A.

Speaker 1 He goes, man, fuck that.

Speaker 1 Fuck that place. Fuck everything about that place.
I don't like that. I told you.
We just moved out of, we haven't moved to Austin.

Speaker 2 I've spent a lot of time here. I love it here.
My mom's from Corpus Christi. I've spent a lot of time in Texas.
I'm going to eat Whataburger while I'm here.

Speaker 2 And but I, you know, we moved to Santa Barbara recently and it's one of those things.

Speaker 2 It's just like there's the thing about LA when you don't need, because you can do so many things remotely and you go, why am I here? Right.

Speaker 1 Right. Why am I here?

Speaker 2 Like I embrace this staunch thing of I'm a Californian and I loved going to New York and seeing how proud people were in New York and I'd go back to California and I'd say, I want to be the one proud person that's in California.

Speaker 1 There were proud people in LA for a while. There were.
We were all proud that we were LA comics. Yeah.
LA comics were like a different thing than New York comics. Right.

Speaker 1 Because New York comics were all like for themselves. They were all kind of shitty and backstabby.
And at the comedy store, we had a real community.

Speaker 1 There was like... And that's the best thing.

Speaker 2 And what you've done is recreate it. Like, even when I talk about a chopper community, that's what it is.
It's a community that you can rely on. Yes.

Speaker 2 Regardless of belief system or anything like that, you go, but that guy has my back. Yes.
That guy will walk through fire for me. Yes.
That guy wants me to do well.

Speaker 1 That's your people. That's my people.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's the same thing with people.

Speaker 1 All my people moved out here. They moved out here with me.
So we had like 16 top-shelf comedians move out here in the first two years.

Speaker 2 That many?

Speaker 1 There's so many clubs out here. There's five clubs on the street where my club's off.
That's crazy. I bought the old Ritz Theater.
Yeah. So that's the Comedy Mothership now.

Speaker 1 And down the street, there's a Sunset Club that my friend Brian owns. And that's a club that's like five doors down from me.

Speaker 2 So all these are new clubs that's happened in the last four years.

Speaker 1 The Vulcan was already there. That was the club that we started working at when we came here.
That's down the street from me. That's only like a block away.

Speaker 1 And then there's the Creek in the Cave, another comedy club that's only like two blocks away. There's a bunch of them just on this one street.

Speaker 2 What if I move here and open a club and just do monologues? Do you think people will come?

Speaker 1 Sure. Different people.
If it's good.

Speaker 2 Ladies and gentlemen, this one's from Sicaria.

Speaker 1 If it's good, people would go. They might.
They might.

Speaker 1 Look, man, you fucking really have a

Speaker 2 weird artsy city.

Speaker 1 It's a great artsy city. It is.
It is. There's a lot of fake artists around the world.

Speaker 2 I know there, but there is everywhere.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a lot of posers, but that's all people that just like the idea of them being the one who decides what's real and what's not real.

Speaker 1 Just goofs. You're always going to have that.
There's a lot of that that they hated us when we came here.

Speaker 1 But really, what they didn't like is that you couldn't just fuck around anymore. The real killers were here now.

Speaker 1 The real top-shelf, like, national headliners, guys like Tom Segura and Tim Dylan, and these animals moved into town.

Speaker 2 So, this is like a new hub.

Speaker 1 It's the hub of the world for comedy. The Comedy Mothership is the hub of comedy in the world.

Speaker 1 That's wild. Yeah.
And it just opened two years ago. That's cool.
It's packed every night. It's awesome.
Like, Dave came down opening week. It was incredible.
And no one knew he was there.

Speaker 1 So I did a set, and then after I did a set, I introduced him, and everybody just went fucking ape shit.

Speaker 1 And we're like, it's up, like, the club's rolling now. Now, now it's really happening.
And then, all these people were coming in from all over the country, and a bunch of people moved here.

Speaker 1 And there's people moving here constantly. Shane Gillis moved here, and all these guys moved here.
So, it's still happening. Oh, yeah, it's still growing.
Migrating and

Speaker 1 we're talking about opening up another club because we're so packed every night, and we have so many comics. We almost have too many comics and not enough room.

Speaker 2 Has the place grown a lot in the last four years?

Speaker 1 I I mean other than people yeah but you see a gentrification of it or just like things that you go no you see a lot of tech bros have moved here because you know Google moved here and Facebook and I remember when Jesse James moved here which was a while ago he moved here a long time ago long time ago I remember when he moved from Long Beach yeah and he called me and he was like it's fucking great it's fucking great it's better yeah I just never will live in a place that has traffic ever again I'll never live in a big city Austin's like a million people it's a million on the outside and a million in the city It's nothing.

Speaker 1 It's easy. It's easy to get around.
People are friendly.

Speaker 1 They're just like real people.

Speaker 1 There's no one here that's like connected to that machine

Speaker 1 that forced compliance.

Speaker 2 Why do you think that feeds into your art? Like to me, being in LA when everybody's talking about what's your status right now?

Speaker 1 What's your status?

Speaker 1 All people care about is are you killing? Are you going on stage and fucking killing? Are you doing your best work?

Speaker 2 Are you doing it, period? Are you doing your best work?

Speaker 1 Like, do you care? Yes. Do you give a shit? Do you really care? Are you really working on it? Are you really?

Speaker 2 Is it just another affectation?

Speaker 1 And if you're at that club, you have to be working on it because there's too many people that are working on it. There's too many kills.
You can't just be lazy.

Speaker 1 You won't survive. There's too many killers.

Speaker 2 I want to go to this club. Anytime.

Speaker 1 Go tonight. Cool.
If you want to come tonight? Well, I got this thing.

Speaker 1 When's your thing? What time is it? I don't know.

Speaker 2 Eight?

Speaker 1 Seven? We have a seven o'clock show and a 10 o'clock show. Really, Nick? I'll come after.
Come after. Come hang out.
Jelly Roll was there last night. Really? Was he really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's cool. Jelly Roll's the man.
He's here all the time. He's always hanging out here.

Speaker 2 Do you have my book?

Speaker 1 I do not. You don't? No, I do not.
No one sent it to me. If they did, it probably went to a publicist or someone.

Speaker 2 I was going to bring a book for you.

Speaker 1 I'll buy it. Josh Brolin from under the truck.

Speaker 1 Hire wife from under the truck. What do you think? Is that where you were drunk, passed out?

Speaker 2 That's where my mom's boyfriend was drunk and passed out.

Speaker 2 But it has this, to me, I chose it because it has a double entendre that when you're under a truck, you're either fixing it or getting run over by it. Hence, my life.

Speaker 2 I'm either getting run over by it or fixing it.

Speaker 1 How did you sort it out? Because you're so together now.

Speaker 1 Am I? Yeah, I think you are. Thank you.
You're fun. Thanks, man.
Fun people are together. If you can be fun, you're together.

Speaker 2 I think I'm at that place. I found a place that you have always been at that I didn't have.
I had the opposite. Where you go, no, I didn't do cocaine because, and forget the drugs, it's the mentality.

Speaker 2 I didn't do cocaine because it would kill me. And I would go, oh, that stuff will kill you.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let's just walk that line. I always wanted to walk that line.
And I had a mother that walked that line. The book is very mother-heavy.

Speaker 2 Very, very mother-heavy. And it wasn't intended to be.
It just turned out that be.

Speaker 2 That's why I wanted to. Fuck, I wish I had a book.

Speaker 1 No worries.

Speaker 2 I wanted to read you

Speaker 2 a section of the LSD, 13-year-old LSD thing, because it's fun. Yeah, it's juicy.
Yeah. You like juicy stuff.
I do. And I want to read you juicy stuff.

Speaker 1 13 LSD is so wild. That's such a crazy, mind-blowing experience for a 13-year-old to have.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Can you imagine? Because you look at, I mean, I had kids. When I had my first kid, I was 20 years old.
And I was looking at 14 years in prison.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 So that's why I didn't, I missed my shot out there.

Speaker 1 I was surprised. It's Johnny Carrick.

Speaker 1 There's

Speaker 1 Brolin. Find Josh Brolin's.
Oh, yeah. See if it's in there.

Speaker 2 I think there's a couple.

Speaker 1 Get a big mental print of it.

Speaker 2 Mental print of it.

Speaker 1 Well, it's part of your life and it's why you're you today because you've gone through shitty experiences.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I don't know if they're shitty. That's what I haven't, I haven't decided whether they're shitty or whether they're necessary for this person to get to this place.

Speaker 2 And not everybody gets to that place. So we're talking about all these people like Hunter S.
Thompson. Hunter Hunter S.
Thompson is my mother, man.

Speaker 2 Just did she wasn't a good writer.

Speaker 2 But everything that you, the song,

Speaker 2 that was my mom. My mom had a loaded 9mm at her bedside table all the time.
She was part of the, what was the scam that went on in the 80s, the pyramid scam?

Speaker 1 Oh. Remember that?

Speaker 2 She was one of the top five winners of the pyramid scam.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy.

Speaker 2 She could talk anybody into anything.

Speaker 2 So she would come home literally, man, with bags, with grocery bags full of cash. Wow.
And she'd dump it out and she'd say, count.

Speaker 2 Jesus. So I would sit there and

Speaker 2 wow. You know what I mean? And she'd put them.
And I finally found, I think she had hidden some in her dresser and that there was like a loose board that she took away and put money in there.

Speaker 2 And I found it and bought some drums.

Speaker 1 When my grandmother died, we found stuff like that in her house because my grandmother went through the depression. Oh, yeah.
And so everybody wanted it. They all like stockpiled money.

Speaker 1 So she had coffee cans filled with money that she had like tucked away in like different areas of the house that were found after she died. Right, right.
That's kind of great. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The mentality of like, yeah, well, the mentality you grow up where you literally might starve to death. There's no way that.

Speaker 2 And you become, there's no way that can't affect you, and that's the whole point.

Speaker 2 There's no way that somebody can have that mentality of every cent means something. Right.
And we have to hide it unless

Speaker 2 somebody else takes it or whatever. With my mother, it was always looking for the most vivid experience.
And I don't know why that was. Her parents weren't like that.
It's just how she was.

Speaker 1 How she was.

Speaker 2 And then you either have my brother. I don't know if you have siblings or not, but my brother dealt with it totally differently.
My brother imploded.

Speaker 2 So he lives his life as simply as you can possibly live it.

Speaker 2 Whereas me, it was my reaction was the other way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, so how now and why? I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 2 45 years old, it feels like a good age to go, okay, do I want to do I want to go Nick Nolte or do I want to go to go?

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 And I can do that easy.

Speaker 1 Nick used to date Vicki Lewis, who was on Vicky's radio with me. No way.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I didn't know that. Yeah.
I remember Vicki. Wow.
Super talented.

Speaker 2 Super talented. Yeah, sing, could act.

Speaker 1 She was a firebrand.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Nick, we used to hang around the set, and it was always so weird to me to be talking to Nick Nulty. It was so strange.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 i remember one time i went to fries electronics because i was going to buy some computers i used to make my own computers yeah because i was like really into like computer games so i like build my own computers yeah and so i'm there like looking at motherships and i see this fucking old guy with his glasses on and i go I go, Nick goes, oh, hey, Joe, how are you, man?

Speaker 1 Do you know anything about these things? And like, I was talking to him about computer stuff, but I just couldn't believe he knows my name. And he remembered me.

Speaker 2 He saved my life, man.

Speaker 2 He saved my life at 25.

Speaker 1 Bro, there's a terrible movie called Warrior. It's a terrible movie.
Terrible movie.

Speaker 2 You mean the UFC movie with Tom

Speaker 2 Hardy? That movie sucks.

Speaker 1 But he's fucking incredible in it. He's amazing.
His one scene, this one scene where he breaks down, you know, he's the dad.

Speaker 1 It's so

Speaker 1 fucking good.

Speaker 1 It's so good. That one scene is worth sitting through the entire preposterous movie.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Why do you hate that movie so much?

Speaker 1 Because it's fake.

Speaker 1 You can't fight

Speaker 1 two days in a row.

Speaker 2 Wasn't the Tyson Jake fight, wasn't that amazing?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's amazing they got paid so much money for that.

Speaker 2 25 million and 40 million?

Speaker 1 I think 20 and 40. Yeah.
I think that's what I'd heard. You know, which I'm happy Mike got the money, and I'm happy that he didn't get hurt.

Speaker 1 That was my fear that it was going to be a real fight, and he was going to get hurt.

Speaker 2 You've known him for a long time. I've known him for a long time.

Speaker 1 I love that dude. Me too.
And he was a

Speaker 1 larger-than-life figure in my childhood. Truly.
When I was a kid, when he was a champ, it was like people don't understand what a champ he was. Like,

Speaker 1 he wasn't just the heavyweight champ of the world. He was an executioner.
Like, you

Speaker 1 every fight was just a matter of how long was it going to last.

Speaker 2 Which fight it was that I went to go see a couple of fights, and I actually went to go see Julio Cesar Chavez fight.

Speaker 2 And that's when I met Tyson in the green room, and I met at the same time Muhammad Ali in the green room.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. That was a moment.
Wow. As a boxing fan, that was a real moment.

Speaker 2 But I remember, and I don't know who it was, and I think it was a 90-second fight, and I went to go see this fight, and Tyson was fighting, and this guy was doing this stuff before, and he had this cut.

Speaker 2 He had built himself into confidence. And Mike came out afterwards.
He was the first one, obviously. And Mike came out afterwards, and I watched his face.
I didn't watch Mike.

Speaker 2 You would normally watch Mike because he's so charismatic and he's coming.

Speaker 1 You want to see what he's going to do.

Speaker 2 And I watched the guy's face, and I watched that confidence bleed from his face

Speaker 2 instantaneously. Yeah, he had absolutely lost the fight long before Mike had ever gotten in the ring.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I maintained that in the time where he was champion, like the two or three years where he was at his best, he's the greatest fighter of all time. Of all time, of all time.

Speaker 2 I don't think anything. That's why it was so interesting to me as I was watching it, and I'm very verbal when it comes to that shit.
Come on, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And he was, he's still quick. Oh, yeah.
He's still quick. He's still very quick.

Speaker 1 But you know, Mike had, like, he was walking with a cane just like a year and a half ago.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but he was really out of shape.

Speaker 1 Bad sciatica.

Speaker 2 Bad sciatica. Yeah.
I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, real bad.

Speaker 1 It wasn't that long ago that he was, you know, I mean, when I first met him, he was very, very heavy. He was not working out at all.
And I asked him, how come you don't work out?

Speaker 1 He goes, I don't want to ignite my ego.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm saying. He goes, I don't want to ignite the gods of war.

Speaker 2 The gods of war.

Speaker 1 And then the second time he came in was when he was preparing for the Roy Jones Jr. He came in here? Yeah.
And he was a totally different human being.

Speaker 1 He was fucking jacked and in shape, and he looked super intense.

Speaker 1 And he was just like ready to go. And it was terrifying.
It was like a completely, and Jamie.

Speaker 2 Wait, when was this?

Speaker 1 A few years ago. Four years ago? Four years ago.
And so when he came in the second time, I was like, this is, Jamie said it afterwards.

Speaker 1 He's like, this is a totally different human being than the first time we saw him. He was one of the first guys, like I said, with Nick Nolte.
He was like, like, is that really Nick Nolte?

Speaker 1 This is crazy. I can't believe he's right there.

Speaker 1 Mike Tyson was one of the first people that I met. I can't believe he's really here.

Speaker 1 Because just like he was so

Speaker 1 iconic.

Speaker 1 Like you had to be alive and be a kid during the time where he was the champion to understand what he was.

Speaker 1 After Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes was a great fighter, but no one liked him because he beat up Muhammad Ali. So people always just wanted him to be a fighter.
Yeah, but is that the only reason?

Speaker 2 There's just a certain air of somebody, and they come along once in a great while.

Speaker 1 Yes, but Larry Holmes never got his due. He was an amazing fighter.
Amazing fighter, but

Speaker 1 when he retired, then there was just like a series of boring champions. Like, no one cared about the heavyweight division at all.

Speaker 1 No one cared.

Speaker 1 And then the cover of Sports Illustrated, I have it framed in my office at home. It said Kid Dynamite on it, and he was 19 years old.
And I was like, who is this guy?

Speaker 1 And then I started watching him fight, and then he was fight on like ABC Wired World of Sports. You're like, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 Do you find yourself going back and watching highlights just to do it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I watch Tyson fights all the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I just watched this fight with Frank Bruno just a couple of days ago.
Frank Bruno. Oh my God.
Tyson was something just, I just don't think you can maintain that.

Speaker 1 You can only do that for a few years.

Speaker 2 He never worked out.

Speaker 2 Do you remember the fight with him and Bone Crusher Smith?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Not a great fight.

Speaker 1 No, it wasn't the best fight.

Speaker 2 Because Bone Crusher Smith was not a great fighter.

Speaker 1 Well, he was a good fighter. He's not a great fighter.
Tough guy. Yeah.
But, you know, brutal knockout puncher. It just wasn't at Mike's level.

Speaker 1 Mike was at a level that no one was at. It was just, it was an insane combination of discipline, talent, incredible coaching, psychology.
You know, when he was 13 years old, he was adopted by a guy.

Speaker 1 He was a hypothetical. He hypnotized him.
I know. Cuss used to hypnotize him.
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, he hypnotized him at the time he was 13.

Speaker 2 And he into being the greatest fighter.

Speaker 1 Into being the greatest fighter. Wow.
And he told him, you don't exist. Only the task exists.
And the task was just a trend.

Speaker 2 Did Mike tell you that?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I've never heard him say that. Does he say that to other people?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, he said it publicly. He talked about it.
Yeah, he talked about

Speaker 1 the hypnosis. He started doing it when he was 13 years old.

Speaker 2 So what's the parallel between, and this is the last thing I'll interview you about,

Speaker 2 what's the thing between Tyson and John Jones? Who I met once, and I looked at him when I met him on a plane, and he didn't give me really the time of day. But I was like, I'm a huge fan.

Speaker 2 And I don't say that often to a lot of people.

Speaker 1 He probably gets that all day long.

Speaker 2 I'm sure he does, man. There's no doubt.
Special fighter.

Speaker 1 It's conquerors. That's what it is.
Like, they're both conquerors. Like, I had this thing that I put up on my Instagram the other day that somebody made.
It was

Speaker 1 me talking about trying to explain why John exists. That there's people that are just different.
They're wired different. And they

Speaker 1 are uncommon amongst uncommon men. They just rise to the top of the top They're on the top of their pop.
Dominate. They just dominate.
And that's John. He's just the greatest of all time.

Speaker 1 He's 37 years old and he's still the greatest.

Speaker 2 I mean, watching that fight,

Speaker 2 watching Tyson or Jake Paul or whatever. Jake Paul.
I want anyone to say Tyson. And then going the next day and watching that fight.
Watching those fights. It wasn't the only fight.
The one before was

Speaker 2 what was his name? The fight before John Jones. Oh, Charles Oliveira and Michael Jones.

Speaker 1 Olivera. Yeah, incredible fight.

Speaker 1 Incredible fight. Amazing fight.
Yeah. Yeah, John is a special dude.
When he's gone, we're all going to miss him. It's a different kind of guy.
I mean, he's been at the top for 14 fucking years.

Speaker 1 He won the title as the youngest guy to ever win an UFC title, 23.

Speaker 2 23.

Speaker 1 And Mike was the youngest heavyweight champion of all time at 20, which is really crazy. Crazy.
But when John Jones won that title at 23, it's just been destruction of everyone ever since.

Speaker 1 Every never ducked anybody, fought all the best, destroyed everybody, dominated his division, went up to heavyweight, dominates at heavyweight.

Speaker 2 So why does somebody like that self-destruct? Is that a self-destruction?

Speaker 1 He's a wild motherfucker. That's how you get to be that good.

Speaker 2 Isn't that what we're talking about the whole time?

Speaker 2 Like, whether it's Hylas Thompson and this, and how you walk that line. Mike Tyson spending whatever, $350,000, $400 million,

Speaker 1 going to jail, whatever that is. Wild.
But that's also what makes you so good, that wildness.

Speaker 1 John Jones, when he he fought Mauricio Shogun Hua for the light heavyweight title when he was 23 years old, he opens up the fight with a flying knee. Nobody does that.
You're fighting a legend.

Speaker 1 Shogun at that time, when he was the light heavyweight champion, he was a legend.

Speaker 1 And not just a legend from the UFC, but a legend from Pride. Pride was this gigantic organization in Japan that Shogun really became.

Speaker 1 So he was like a mythical creature almost in MMA circles. That was Shogun Hua.

Speaker 2 He was a Connor McGregor and John Jones.

Speaker 1 John's in a different category.

Speaker 2 It's a different thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Connor self-destructed, you know,

Speaker 1 in a lot of ways because of money.

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, he took that fight with Floyd Mayweather, made a ton of money off that, and then took a long time before he came back to MMA, and it's just not been the same guy since.

Speaker 1 And I think that's just...

Speaker 1 It's money. It's a lot of partying, but it's the same kind of thing.
It's just a wild. But in his prime, when Connor was in his prime, he was fucking.
He was fucking amazing.

Speaker 1 He was a fucking assistant.

Speaker 2 But it's that thing, that through line of not being able to let go. It's like what you were talking about, Chappelle.
Chappelle leaves for 10 years, but then he goes to the park and he does a thing.

Speaker 2 There's a thing that's insatiable, that warrior mentality.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but there's a difference because physically you can only fight for so long. That's true.
Comedy, you get better every year.

Speaker 1 You keep doing... Dave's better now than he was a year ago.
He'd be better two years ago.

Speaker 2 You can still be Rodney Dangerfield eventually.

Speaker 1 Rodney Danger, when I saw him, I was probably 70 years years old, and he was murdering in his fucking bathrobe, naked.

Speaker 2 With this schlong hanging out. Yeah,

Speaker 1 he was still amazing because

Speaker 1 it's not a physical thing. You don't have like your body can only compete at the highest levels for so long, which is one of the things that's so extraordinary about John.
Yeah. Because he's 37.

Speaker 1 He still competes at the highest level.

Speaker 2 It blew my mind the other night. Well, it was exciting.

Speaker 2 It was nice to be excited about something.

Speaker 1 Steve A's past his prime, unfortunately, and he's got a lot of wear on the tires, and it was kind of rough watching him get beat up like that.

Speaker 1 But that's the game they play. That's the sport.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and what's great about UFC that I never thought would last in the beginning, the great thing is anything can happen. Anything

Speaker 2 happen.

Speaker 1 Anytime. Frank Fertita and Lorenzo Fertita always said that every fight, every UFC, we sell holy shit moments.

Speaker 1 That's what he said.

Speaker 1 Like there's moments in a fight where you're like, holy shit. You look around at each other and everybody.

Speaker 2 Dude, nobody does it better than you. When you do this, you go back and you think, you go, oh, and your eyes are shit.

Speaker 1 We always did that, but then they started putting cameras on us. Right.
And I don't know why, when they started correcting it, we always did that.

Speaker 1 Every time something would happen, we would because it's organic.

Speaker 2 It's like you can't help it. That's what I'm doing at home.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Holy fuck. Holy shit.
Yeah. Holy shit.
Holy shit. Yeah.
There's moments where you just like, you can't believe it's really happening. Yeah.
That's the sport. The sport is, it's the craziest sport.

Speaker 1 It's the highest consequences of any sport. It's just, it's so raw and dangerous, and you can't look away.
It's so crazy. And when someone can dominate it, like John Jones or George St.

Speaker 1 Pierre or Mighty Mouse or any of the greats.

Speaker 2 George St. Pierre, another great one.

Speaker 1 Greats.

Speaker 1 When they can do that, it's like, that's a different kind of human being.

Speaker 1 I mean, to be the best of the best people, the best people in the world are fighting, and he's the best of the best people.

Speaker 1 And when George was in his prime, it was that same sort of thing. You would see him standing there, like this intense look in his eyes, just couldn't wait to get his fucking hands on that guy.

Speaker 1 You're like, God damn.

Speaker 1 I feel very, very, very, very fortunate that I've been able to witness personally so many of those moments

Speaker 1 and be there and to watch greatness so many times.

Speaker 2 I think it's great that you've continued. It's surprising to me.

Speaker 2 I know you do, and that's why you continue to do it.

Speaker 1 Well, I did the first, like, 13 of them for free.

Speaker 2 First 13 ever?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the first thing I did.

Speaker 1 No, they was already, it was like UFC 37.

Speaker 2 Oh, oh, when you got into it.

Speaker 1 I started working at UFC 12.

Speaker 1 UFC 12 was the first event that I did in 1997. I was the post-fight interview guy.
Wow. And so I did that for a couple of years, but

Speaker 1 it was banned from cable. It was basically like...

Speaker 2 That's why I said it was going, it kind of went like this, and then it was going down.

Speaker 1 Boxing did it to them. Boxing in cahoots with Budweiser, which is funny because now Bud White sponsors the UFC.

Speaker 1 But they all wanted... the MMA thing to go away because it was so exciting and crazy.
They thought of it as a threat.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they essentially banished it. It also just had this unsavory look to it.
You're fighting in a cage.

Speaker 1 Back in those days, it was bare knuckle. Bare knuckle.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 it was just crazy.

Speaker 1 They would call it human cockfighting.

Speaker 1 Which I always found was just disgusting. But me, as a martial artist, the question was always: what would happen if you got a judo guy and you fought a wrestler?

Speaker 1 What would happen if you got a boxer and you fought a karate guy? And the UFC was like, let's find out.

Speaker 1 So Hori and Gracie came up with this concept.

Speaker 2 That's what I was going to say. Gracie was one of the first judo versus jiu-jitsu, right?

Speaker 1 Well, Hoyce, you know, and Hoyce was the first champion of the UFC, and he was the first guy that introduced that, like, technique is more important than everything.

Speaker 1 Technique is more important than being big, more important than being strong. Because Hoyce was like 175 pounds.
He was very slight and long.

Speaker 1 Remember the fight? Just a jiu-jitsu wizard. And he would get guys on the ground, strangle the fuck out of them.
We were like, what happened? This is crazy.

Speaker 2 Another bullshit moment.

Speaker 1 And the big jack guys tapping. You're like, What?

Speaker 1 What happened? And Hoyce just opened up the world to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and it made Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu like the most popular martial art on earth.

Speaker 1 Like, his appearances in the UFC changed the entire course of martial arts.

Speaker 1 His family, the Gracie family, particularly his father Elio, his brother Hickson, his brother Hoyler, and Horian, of course, because he created the UFC. They changed martial arts forever.

Speaker 1 More development and evolution of martial arts has taken place over the last 30 years than over the last 30,000 years. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like really that's accurate. Like fighting is different.
People really understand what works and what doesn't work now.

Speaker 2 And watching him was balletic. It was like a ballet.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 It was art.

Speaker 1 It's real martial arts. No.

Speaker 2 It wasn't that.

Speaker 1 His dad told him, don't hurt these people.

Speaker 1 Don't hurt them. You don't have to hurt them.
Show them the art.

Speaker 2 Just submit them. Show them the art.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So like Hoyce, when he got on top of people, he wasn't like elbowing them the eyeballs.
Yeah, yeah. He was just strangling folks, just arm barring folks, making them tap, making them quit.

Speaker 1 And he did it to everybody. And they were all like, what the fuck just happened? And then everybody had to learn jiu-jitsu.
It changed martial arts forever. Do your kids do jiu-jitsu?

Speaker 1 Yeah, my kids have done it. Have done it.
Yeah, they don't do it anymore. They do other stuff.
I don't push them. No.
Whatever they're in.

Speaker 1 If they wanted to do it tomorrow, they said, I'm thinking about... doing some kickboxing.
Let's go. Where do you want to go? But I don't believe in, everybody's different.

Speaker 1 I don't want them to follow my footsteps or anything stupid like that.

Speaker 1 I want you to be your own human being.

Speaker 1 What are you interested in? They're both interested in different things. My youngest is an artist.

Speaker 1 My other one is a phenomenal athlete. It's like, I think that you should do what you want to do.
And if you want to do that, I'll bring you. I'll show you.
I'll teach you. I'll help you.

Speaker 1 But if you don't want to do that, I don't want to push you.

Speaker 2 Let me be a good parent and celebrate what my kid is, not what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 There's so many different kinds of things you could be interested in life. And everyone has a different psychology.
So everyone has different things they gravitate towards.

Speaker 1 It's just like, what is the thing? Is it music? Is it art? Is it writing? What do you like to do? Find that thing, chase it down.

Speaker 2 How many kids do you have?

Speaker 1 I have three. I have a grown, she's 28, and I have a 16 and a 14.
Yeah, I feel like you've got to do what

Speaker 1 what compels you, what drives you.

Speaker 1 And part of it as a parent is like, there's so many stories of parents, particularly with like talented athletes, that were too hard on the kid and put too much discipline on the kid and the kids burned out.

Speaker 1 I've seen so many cases of that. You know, where these sideline parents are that Asian mentality.

Speaker 2 Not here, but there.

Speaker 1 Chill the joy.

Speaker 1 You know what Hoyce Gracie's dad used to do? If he lost a competition, he would buy him a present.

Speaker 2 Because, what was the psychology?

Speaker 1 Because they're always going to want to win.

Speaker 2 Meaning the effort. He bought the effort.
He bought the present for the effort.

Speaker 1 No, it's like it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 It doesn't matter. Like, here, you have a toy.
Here's a gift. Here's a thing.
Like, it's like, this is just growth. It's just development.

Speaker 1 Hoyce's dad, Ilio, felt like you live the same life over and over and over again until you get it right. He subscribed to that, like, ancient Eastern philosophy of reincarnation.

Speaker 1 Like, he really believed you live the same life

Speaker 1 over and over until you get it right.

Speaker 1 And so his philosophy on. Just do 1% better a day.

Speaker 2 Just do 1%.

Speaker 2 It's not about going from from here to here. It's not living at 100% all the time.
It's the process.

Speaker 2 It's the process.

Speaker 1 It's the process, the constant process of growth.

Speaker 1 And through that constant process, I mean, what they did was even more crazy because Ilio, along with Carlos Gracie, they revolutionized a martial art. Like,

Speaker 1 jiu-jitsu was brought over by these judokas from Japan, Maeda and

Speaker 1 Kimura, who came over to America, or came over to Brazil, rather, and trained with the Gracies.

Speaker 1 And then they took those those techniques and made them applicable to smaller people made them applicable to like because Ilyo was only 145 pounds but he would have these no rules fights in Brazil these fucking huge fights that would go for like an hour and a half wow yeah and he would just beat these guys with technique so they developed leverage and tech they they figured out a way to highlight the submissions and make things super technical and they would analyze moves and break them down and it became the philosophy of the entire family.

Speaker 1 That one family created more fucking assassins than any other family in the history of Marshall.

Speaker 2 They're the nicest people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I hoisted in here a couple months ago. He was awesome.
He's so funny.

Speaker 2 Do you know Sassy?

Speaker 1 No. She's a girl.

Speaker 2 She's with Laird a lot. She's at Laird's place a lot.

Speaker 1 I mean, they have a clan, bro.

Speaker 2 It's a clan, but it's a close clan. Yes.
And it's a friendly, familial clan. Yep.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're very nice people. But that's the thing about jiu-jitsu.
It's like you get out all your aggression in the gym, and it kills your ego.

Speaker 2 And you can go be kind you just be a nice person

Speaker 1 like jiu-jitsu people are some of the nicest people i've ever met me too they're super friendly and warm and normal people yeah they just are obsessed with this one thing yeah you know and through that thing it's like a vehicle for developing your human potential because it's so difficult and when you do a difficult thing it makes the rest of life a lot easier because there's no way whatever you're experiencing during the day is going to be as difficult as someone on your back trying to strangle the blood out of your brain like literally trying to fucking choke the blood out of your head.

Speaker 1 Like there's no way. There's no way life could be harder.

Speaker 2 But that's the thing is the wildness. You have to have something.

Speaker 1 To be a champion.

Speaker 2 To be a champion or to be a good person, I think. You have wildness, which we've talked about throughout this whole thing.

Speaker 2 If you don't have wildness, which if you bring it back, honestly, because I have to bring it back to the book. That's what the book is about.
Yeah. Wildness unmitigated.

Speaker 1 Right. But you eventually figured out a way to get it.

Speaker 2 It eventually turns out on you. No, but most people, it turns around and it bites you in the ass.
It's a sad ending.

Speaker 1 But I think those sad endings are a valuable lesson for the other people.

Speaker 2 Power of example.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You learn from a lot of,

Speaker 1 one of the reasons why I never did Coke is when I was in high school, my friend's cousin became a Cokehead. He was a Coke dealer and became a Cokehead.

Speaker 1 And him and his girlfriend would just do Coke and hide. They were just like, they had an attic apartment.
They were in this fucking apartment and just like doing Coke and selling Coke and watching TV.

Speaker 1 And he withered away. He lost all this weight.
Like he got bit by a vampire. Yeah.
And I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, stay the fuck away from Coke.

Speaker 2 Why would you want to do that? What would be attractive about that? Nothing.

Speaker 1 I guess it's the, I mean, you've done it. I haven't done it.
I guess it's the euphoria when you get that hit, that feeling,

Speaker 1 that feeling of elevation, you know, that feeling of like, you know, you just know fear and you feel excited. You want to start a business with people.

Speaker 1 You got plans.

Speaker 1 We're going to fucking take over.

Speaker 2 Like Like in the description of it, the eyes kind of get like this and the craziness.

Speaker 2 And you go, yeah, it's bad for everybody else. It may be good for you for like 15 minutes, but everybody else is fucking miserable around it.

Speaker 1 The worst thing to me was when I would be high, like smoking weed, and I'd be like, just chilled and silly, and I'd run into a cokehead. And you're like, oh, no.

Speaker 2 Who's trying to talk to you like this?

Speaker 1 You just get battered with like talk. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You're like, man, get out of here.

Speaker 2 It's disgusting.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's a weird drug.
It's a weird drug, but it's obviously very popular. Yeah.
And it causes a lot of problems.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no thanks anymore. Yeah.
No thanks.

Speaker 1 I'm just not interested in that one.

Speaker 2 You smoke your butt. I'll smoke my cigar.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I like cigars too. Cigars are conversational.

Speaker 1 They're tools for conversation. Yeah.
They relax you, light your brain up a little bit, get you a little fired up.

Speaker 2 Read this book when you can.

Speaker 1 I will.

Speaker 2 Seriously, I think you'll like it.

Speaker 1 I know I'll like it. I like talking to you.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 1 yeah, you'll laugh. You'll laugh.

Speaker 2 Not everybody will laugh when they read the book.

Speaker 1 You will laugh.

Speaker 2 Because I think you understand absurdity.

Speaker 1 How long did it take you to put it together? Two years.

Speaker 2 It's non-linear. It goes all over the place in all these years.

Speaker 1 Did you have, when you sat down, did you have like a framework in mind of how you wanted to pursue it? No. No?

Speaker 2 No, because I've written probably 90 journals in my life. 90 full journals.

Speaker 2 And I would go back and I kind of started to put some of those together and I'd go, oh, that happened in 1988 or that happened in 76.

Speaker 2 And you know, that kind of stands out as being a milestone moment or whatever. And I'd start to write those down.

Speaker 2 They were really poorly written and then that started to instigate one thing and another thing and it kind of wrote itself.

Speaker 2 I think it was 450 pages when I finished and then I knocked it down to like 240.

Speaker 1 What is that process like? The editing

Speaker 2 is a good process. That's the hardest process I've ever gone through.
But you become a better writer. It's a good thing.

Speaker 1 Do you do it with an editor or do you do it by yourself?

Speaker 2 No, I did it with an editor because I didn't sell the book right away. You know how memoirs, first of all, most memoirs are not written by the people who they're about, which makes no sense to me.

Speaker 2 Right. Because you're writing about yourself, but you're hiring somebody else to do it, but you're taking the money.
I don't get it.

Speaker 1 So I wrote it.

Speaker 2 I wrote the entire book. Then I sold it.
So I didn't sell it based on a celebrity. I sold it based on the book because you could read the book.
And some people hated it.

Speaker 2 Some people read it and they go, I don't get it. It's too wild.
It's too whatever.

Speaker 1 Well, everything is not for everybody.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And that's okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's more than okay.

Speaker 2 What's wild is

Speaker 2 when I was in the middle, which I think you would like, when I was in the middle of doing the audible for the book, about halfway through stumbling through the audible, I go, what the fuck did I do?

Speaker 2 I should burn any evidence that this fucking was ever even thought about.

Speaker 2 And then I spiraled for about a month, and I don't spiral. I just don't spiral about anything.
I just, I'm pretty cool with anything that comes along. And then people started reading the book.

Speaker 2 And then I got this varied response that was always visceral. It was never like, I really liked your book a lot.
I thought it was well written and all that. Somebody would go, fuck.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's nice.

Speaker 1 That means you nailed it. I don't know.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know. But I do know that the responses are good.

Speaker 1 Well, that's what's important. Yeah.
It's working.

Speaker 1 It had a desired effect. You got out your thoughts.
You got out your experiences. But

Speaker 2 that editing process is a good process because you you refine and you clarify and you simplify and yeah that's cool you get to look at it with fresh eyes with fresh eyes yeah you know it's the arm bar you could just grab an arm and then try to bend it as much as you can or you can fucking figure out how to get in there every time did you and tap the guy out did you always know that you were going to do this you're going to write this book no i'd written two or three books and put them in the corner in a dark corner and let them accumulate dust you know i've never i never thought i would do it publicly because I was always into that thing of like, oh, you're an actor and like get over it.

Speaker 2 You want to be a writer. You want to be a writer, you want to be a musician.

Speaker 1 Every actor wants to be a rock star star star star star. Every actor wants to be a rock star.

Speaker 1 And I was like, nah.

Speaker 2 And then this lady read this book, this lit agent, and she said, I said it the third time, and she said, you need to fucking stop saying,

Speaker 2 referencing yourself as an actor who's a writer. You're a fucking writer and a really good writer.
Just write.

Speaker 2 And she was tough on me.

Speaker 1 So you feel like you had like almost like a disclaimer? Like I'm an actor. Oh, yeah, I did.
That's what you're doing, giving yourself like an escape.

Speaker 2 I did because there was something about that profession anyway that I always looked at and I was like,

Speaker 1 why do I do this?

Speaker 1 This is dumb.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 And where does the self-importance come from? Like what happened to the wagon that just went down and like people tried to shoot you?

Speaker 1 Doesn't the self-importance just come from attention?

Speaker 1 You get extraordinary amounts of attention and people develop self-importance because of that because they think they deserve that attention.

Speaker 2 Because it's a false thing. Yeah.
And then you start seeing people manifest it like, excuse me, I said hot coffee.

Speaker 1 I didn't say warm coffee.

Speaker 2 I said, you know, and you go,

Speaker 2 I don't understand the mentality.

Speaker 2 So for me, it's probably another attempt, which I think I've manifested in a bunch of different ways of right-sizing. And there's nothing like that will right-size you like a fucking book.

Speaker 2 Put you right back into why are you doing what you are doing? Where do you come from? How do you feel about your kids?

Speaker 2 Where's your sensitivity?

Speaker 2 Where's your, where are things that have become concrete that you need to break in order to feel again? You know, where are you limiting yourself?

Speaker 2 And I don't like the idea of limiting myself. Like what I love to, did I love drinking?

Speaker 1 Fuck yeah.

Speaker 2 I had so much fun, dude.

Speaker 1 And so did a lot of other people.

Speaker 2 But I go, this is now limiting. Well, don't you want to go out and take a drink? I go, fuck no.

Speaker 2 When you're out with a bunch of people having fun, no, because I'm having fun. Right.

Speaker 1 You don't need to drink to have fun, but there's a thing when you're drinking a lot and having fun, you think this is the reason why I'm having fun.

Speaker 2 This is the reason why I'm having fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a trap.

Speaker 2 That's the trap.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's the trap.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, you can have a drink or two and really enjoy yourself, or you could think that the only reason why you're enjoying yourself is because you're having a drink or two.

Speaker 2 And that's usually why you have more drinks, Because you think, this is the reason people are liking me right now. This is the reason people think I'm funny.

Speaker 1 And you keep chasing that drug.

Speaker 2 Imagine if you went on stage, and every time you went on stage, you had to have at least six drinks.

Speaker 2 Because you go, this is what they want. And then you'd wake up in the morning and your kid goes and wakes you up and you're like, oh, fuck.

Speaker 2 And you go, wow, that's not worth it.

Speaker 1 What's the fucking dude's name from Knight Rider? You know what I'm talking about. Oh, David Harris.

Speaker 1 You ever see that video?

Speaker 2 Of course I did. The kids.
The burger video. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's the saddest fucking thing ever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it didn't look like a good burger.

Speaker 1 Well, he's just hammered and his kid filmed it. It's awful.
Oh, it's so awful.

Speaker 2 It's so cringy.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's what everybody's afraid of. Yeah.
Becoming that pathetic example.

Speaker 2 And you wonder how much that exists and the video's not going.

Speaker 2 That daughter videoed that. Right.
Like, I want you to see what this looks like.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And supposedly that kind of threw him into sobriety or whatever. I don't know if he saw it or not.

Speaker 1 not did he if i don't know i will hope he is if anything would throw you into sobriety your children filming you that's it the lowest moment possible would do it for you yeah i didn't want to be filmed so i stopped early you got off i did get

Speaker 2 the last time yeah i drank yeah it was super lame i was at a what do you call it a del taco and I tapped the cab in front of me accidentally when I was moving forward. And he got out and

Speaker 2 created a thing and somebody filmed it from the back of the cab oh wow yeah and I look stupid

Speaker 2 you can't fucking you can't fucking drive

Speaker 1 you

Speaker 1 drive you're like oh dear

Speaker 1 quiet don't speak no don't speak there's nothing worse than being sober and seeing something

Speaker 2 nothing oh no I'm so grateful because your perception of it while you were going you were like no man this is an honorable moment you're saying I did something that I didn't do right and we need to hash this out.

Speaker 2 When the reality is, is you're just kind of regurgitating bullshit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Also, you know how to like affect people with your words. Yeah.
You know how to express yourself in a dramatic way and you think you're going to fucking get through this on top.

Speaker 1 I'm an actor, motherfucker. Yeah, motherfucker.

Speaker 2 I'm going Shakespeare on you.

Speaker 1 You know my favorite movie of yours is? What? No Country for Old Men.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 1 Because it's so fucked up.

Speaker 1 Because it's so fucked up. It's such a fucked up movie.

Speaker 1 And even in the end, the end, when it ends, you're like, what happened? That's the end? Yeah. It's like that guy, what's his name, Javier? What's his name? Right M.

Speaker 1 God damn, that guy was a good psycho.

Speaker 2 He was so good.

Speaker 1 God damn. That movie was so, it was just so unusual and intense.

Speaker 2 And there was no feeling, and people ask this all the time, there was no feeling that it was a special movie.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I told you I went back to Marfa, Texas for the first time in 18 years with Stapleton, and the guy running the bank is the first guy that Javier kills in the movie.

Speaker 2 This is the guy running the bank right now, Chip. Wow.

Speaker 2 And I talked to Chip. I have a picture of me and Chip.
And I talked to Chip, and I said, Walk, you're the first guy. You know, did you think that?

Speaker 2 And he said, no, that was a friend of a friend who said that they were auditioning people. And the reason I did it is because I figured nobody would ever see it.
It seemed like a small.

Speaker 2 no, that's the proprietor.

Speaker 2 It's the first guy that Javier killed outside.

Speaker 2 That was a good scene, though.

Speaker 1 What is that dude like in person, Javier?

Speaker 2 The best, the sweetest human being, one of my best friends.

Speaker 1 Crazy. Yeah.
That that's inside of him, that he can.

Speaker 2 Well, that's the thing. That's what's what makes him an artist.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 Because he's one of these guys that literally, he was so depressed during that thing. Really? Oh, my God, dude.

Speaker 1 Because he didn't like doing it? No, he was like, look at my hair. What the fuck?

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? That's depressed him.

Speaker 2 Look at him.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 He played so much. I mean, he's genius.

Speaker 1 He's a good psychopath.

Speaker 2 He wore SPF 100. He had an umbrella all the time to keep the sun off him.

Speaker 2 See how pale he looks? Yeah. But yeah, that's the guy.
The guy to the left. That's Chip.
Can you stand there for a second, please?

Speaker 1 So he was really depressed because of his hair?

Speaker 2 Yeah, and me and Woody would take him out. We would take him out to the cowgirl, what was it called? Cowgirl Cafe.

Speaker 2 And we would have drinks with him. We would make him, because he would stay in his apartment with

Speaker 2 the drapes drawn and all this kind of shit. He just didn't want to go out.
He said,

Speaker 2 I don't like violence. I don't drive.
I don't know why they hired me. Why the fuck did they hire me? Like, why am I here?

Speaker 1 Well, how did he pull that out though?

Speaker 2 And I'm from Spain. Like, this guy's not from Spain.

Speaker 2 I remember when we worked, we sat in a trailer and he said, in that, that proprietor scene, he has this great line. He goes, Call it.

Speaker 2 He takes the coin and goes like that. And he says, Call it.
And the guy says, I don't want to call it. He says, You have to call it.
It's destiny calling for you.

Speaker 2 And we were in his trailer, and Javier says, How do you say it? And I said, Call it. And Javier kept saying, Call it.
And I said, No, dude, call.

Speaker 1 Can you hear it?

Speaker 1 Play it for a whole. I'll put the heavy on the

Speaker 1 most you ever lost on the coin toss,

Speaker 1 sir. The most you ever lost on a coin toss?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I couldn't say.

Speaker 1 Call it?

Speaker 1 Call it, yes.

Speaker 1 For what? Just call it.

Speaker 1 Well, we need to know what we're calling it for here. You need to call it.
I can't call it for you.

Speaker 1 It wouldn't be fair. I didn't put nothing up.
Yes, you did.

Speaker 1 You've been putting it up your whole life. You just didn't know it.

Speaker 1 You know what date is on this coin? No. 1958.

Speaker 1 It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it's here.
And it's either heads or tails.

Speaker 1 And you have to say, call it. Well, look, I need to know what I stand to win.
Everything.

Speaker 1 How's that? You stand to win everything, call it.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Heads then.

Speaker 1 Well done.

Speaker 1 Don't put it in your pocket, sir. Don't put it in your pocket.
It's your luggage water.

Speaker 1 Where do you want me to put it? Anywhere not in your pocket.

Speaker 1 What a little bit mixed in with the others and becoming just a coin.

Speaker 1 Which it is.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you look at that from a different perspective, you say that scene could have been the worst scene ever.

Speaker 2 It's because of the simplicity of the scene.

Speaker 2 It just

Speaker 1 consequences.

Speaker 1 It just happens. And you know that this guy has some sort of weird morals.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's got some code that he lives by, and he's about to impose this code on this guy. And there's no problem putting that bolt through his brain.

Speaker 2 No problem. And the guy knows it, and he doesn't even know why.

Speaker 1 Why he knows it. It's just

Speaker 1 knows it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And you sit there and you just kind of fucking.

Speaker 1 How did you not know that movie was great while you were doing it? Because it was so...

Speaker 2 We were just...

Speaker 1 The Cohen brothers are fucking amazing.

Speaker 2 They're amazing, but you were just having... They had done two movies that were sort of bigger than what they normally do.
One was with Clooney and one was with Tom Hanks, and it didn't work.

Speaker 1 Oh, Oh Brother Horatal? No, the fucking O Brother Horatio was amazing. It was amazing.

Speaker 2 Was Lady Killers and what was the one with Clooney?

Speaker 1 Well there you go. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so I

Speaker 2 they just went back to this simple like

Speaker 2 burnout. No, Burn After Reading was After No Country, which was also really good.
Super good.

Speaker 2 But yeah, they just kind of went back to this very kind of feral,

Speaker 2 you know, base place and just said, let's just tell this simple story and let's let it happen. Let's maybe, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't think they're like, how did you not know why you were doing it, though?

Speaker 1 It just didn't have

Speaker 1 scenes.

Speaker 2 It didn't have that vibe.

Speaker 1 It was so simple. Wild.

Speaker 2 It was so simple. And then

Speaker 1 I saw it, though. Into the what.

Speaker 2 Dude, when I saw it, I saw it with my kid. which was probably super irresponsible.

Speaker 1 How old was your kid? He was 16. He was like,

Speaker 1 that's on the

Speaker 2 cusp. But I saw it with him in an editing room on a big screen,

Speaker 2 and we left, and we got in the car, and we didn't talk for 15 minutes. And that's never happened.
Wow. Like, literally, not one word.
Wow. And then I said, what do you think? And he goes, fuck.

Speaker 1 Which is a great research. That's that movie.
That's that movie. That is that movie.
That movie is fun.

Speaker 2 You know, you want to tie it together too in the end and like a typical Hollywood ending and Javier and my character go head to head at the end and that doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 So you do something, which is how it was written in the book, Cormac. And I got to know Cormac really well.
I was with Cormac the night before he died.

Speaker 1 Oh, no kidding. Wow.

Speaker 2 So, and I asked him. That guy could fucking write.

Speaker 1 Fuck, dude.

Speaker 2 Some of the greatest writing.

Speaker 1 I thought I could write it. American writing ever.
Yeah. In the history of

Speaker 1 this country. There was something about his writing.
It was like, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 That's another one of those guys, artists, where you go,

Speaker 2 I would ask him about his writing. He didn't want to talk about it ever.
And then finally, he got mad at me me one day and he was,

Speaker 2 I don't fucking know, man. I just sit down at the typewriter and it comes.
Like, what do you want me to tell you?

Speaker 1 Wow. And I was like, all right, man.

Speaker 2 Fucking 87 years old.

Speaker 1 Relax.

Speaker 2 But he could write. I mean, he had some, he was tapped into.
And talk about a guy who just like, you were like the muse. And do you have a special place? And do you have this thing that, no,

Speaker 1 just sits down and writes?

Speaker 2 The bed that he was on, it was me, his ex-wife, his son, and Cormack

Speaker 2 that last night. Wow.
Always at the edge of his bed was that typewriter that he used for 25, 30 years to write all those novels. And then he had one before that that was exactly the same.

Speaker 2 But that typewriter was on an old piece of wood at the foot of his bed.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And even at the end, he would just grab that thing and

Speaker 2 get it out. It was cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's rare humans like that that have that thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. They just tap into it.

Speaker 1 And they tap into it and then they just keep going they get on that path and they just keep going it just keeps getting better they just get better at it we've talked about a series of very special

Speaker 2 people

Speaker 2 you know what makes the what's the difference of what makes somebody that

Speaker 1 special that iconic are they crazy are they different definitely different they're different Yeah, I mean, it's a resistance to the norm.

Speaker 1 It's acceptance of reality. It's a poetic understanding of our place in the universe.
There's so many different things that are all sort of coalescing into this.

Speaker 2 But they see through a different lens, though. They're just made of a, they're made up of a different.

Speaker 1 Well, that's probably why he didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to fuck it up.

Speaker 2 He didn't want to fuck it up. Yeah.
He didn't want to mitigate.

Speaker 2 He didn't want to lessen it. He didn't want to, what's the word?

Speaker 2 Make it pedestrian. Yes.
You know what I mean? Yes.

Speaker 1 He didn't want to try. You know, sometimes magic is just magic.
You don't want to figure out

Speaker 1 how it's happening. Yeah.
Just know that you can do it and just keep doing it. Exactly.
You know, just be

Speaker 1 a craftsman. Be a person who's dedicated to this thing.
Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 He has to know. He had to know it was really good.
I mean, enough people told him it was really good.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but if you have even a guy like that who wrote the first up until all the pretty horses, none of his books sold. That's pretty crazy.

Speaker 2 Like a thousand people bought it fifteen hundred people bought it and then it was made into a movie and then and then you go back and you're like all these banned books that we know back in the day 1984 George Orwell you know Henry Miller all these fucking people you know people are like ew

Speaker 2 and then how many you know Van Gogh painting a painting and all those paintings being outside getting rained on and now they're selling for a hundred million dollars yeah all after he's dead all after he's dead yeah he never knew.

Speaker 2 He sold one painting in his lifetime, so he never got to,

Speaker 2 not even a little bit, experience what, oh, look at what you did.

Speaker 1 Right. Wow, man.
Well, maybe that's why they're so good. Because

Speaker 1 they're the purity of expression. Yeah, he's just a bad person.

Speaker 2 People paid attention or not to who they were, and they gave themselves to it. Yes.
A thousand percent. He's an artist.
An artist. A real artist.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Thanks, dude.

Speaker 1 Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 Really appreciate it. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 I'm going to read your book immediately. I would like you to.
I will definitely.

Speaker 2 You're one guy I would really like for you to read.

Speaker 1 I'll get on it. Okay.
All right. Thank you, man.
Thank you very much. Bye, everybody.
Bye.